I liked this so much. I loved this. I think about it today and something feels warm and happy in my chest. It felt new and different and also pleasantly classic—something young and old both, like the vampire girl at its center.

Every year there are a number of modern black & white movies that are very beautiful and well-formed in their black & white clothing, but I wouldn’t say are made in a way that feels tied to movies of the past. Which of course they do not have to be, it’s an aesthetic choice that makes sense for their stories. But if A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night was filmed in color, I believe there would still be something inherent in its pacing and atmosphere that would call to mind old movies.

I’d never thought about this before, but night-drawn streets in classic films are so quiet. Probably just a product of the frequent use of sound stages,  and that decades ago streets simply were quieter. People went to sleep. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (دختری در شب تنها به خانه می‌رود‎) takes place in the fictional Bad City, described in the movie’s log-line that follows it across platforms as an “Iranian ghost-town.” It is. People live there, but they feel sparse, lots of lonely stretches were no one else walks—or there is one other person walking, just one, in a long black veil. On the edge of town is a dry ravine under a bridge where the dead are tumbled, unremarked.

And when the vampire girl walks through the town, the sound carrying softly in the empty air, it felt comforting to me. Old movie stars walking slowly along a street set under the lamps. This movie isn’t slow, but it’s unhurried, the pacing dream-like, black shadows on street corners that you could wrap yourself up in. Something like the still, bombed-out Vienna of The Third Man, or more thematically, maybe Brief Encounter meeting Only Lovers Left Alive.

Our haunted eyed vampire very much kills people, with a sudden preternatural swiftness and hungry snarl, but mostly this movie is about sad-tinged, innocent tenderness, between her and the boy, and her and the woman. It’s an airy story—I don’t mean shallow, but like one of those lovely loose-weave shawls. It has its own shape, there’s just lots of space—just enough material to give texture, but it still holds warmth when you lay it around your shoulders. My heart filled watching the final scene, simply long thoughtful shots without any dialogue, for me to have. A gift of openness.

End here for anyone who wants to avoid more specific, spoilery plot details; for the rest of you:

Because for a movie shot in black & white, it is not very. Arash and his father’s lives have been dragged down by the drug dealer, and then when he’s gone Arash simply inherits his trade to become a drug dealer himself. The vampire wears a black chador on the streets, covering her hair and throat, but indoors she always wears a striped boat-neck top that exposes her long beautiful neck and collarbones, making her feel strangely vulnerable to herself. Or maybe to her fangless Dracula—when Arash properly meets her, charmingly high and lost on ecstasy after the costume party, he pulls her in and sweeps his own vampire cloak around her after discovering that she’s cold to the touch. And of course, there’s the ending itself, with all that is known or simply understood, and all that is not. But somehow after all the matters of life & death, it is just about two creatures in the quiet night, looking at each other, as the radio plays.

★★★★★

Watched this again for the first time since initially seeing it five years ago; still into it. The strange gel-lit stageworld this movie creates is still so fascinating—I’ve yet to see another movie feel so much like it takes place in some sort of contained system, not even a Wes Anderson. This is Dostoevsky, but it’s a BECKETT play, super much, a production of Endgame I once saw the only thing that comes to mind for bleakly existential tragicomic comparison.

I was surprised this wasn’t tagged as horror on Letterboxd, what with the constant dread, the dark & sharp violin score, the fact that the whole thing takes place in a seeming perpetual night without an ounce of daylight ever lightening the chiaroscuro shadows. And there’s blood and death and knives and jump-scares, even, though of the gasp kind not the scream kind. And that colored light…I know I’m always talking about The Double’s colored light, but that colored light! Goldenrod and teal! The neon cross glowing on the church! Interiors like Terry Gilliam gone Brutalist! I just love looking at this thing a lot!

This time around I was elated to discover that Sally Hawkins has a brief cameo in this (Richard Ayoade’s IT Crowd costar Chris O’Dowd I’d clocked back in 2014). Wallace Shawn and Mia Wasikowska are both as terrific as you’d expect, but the masterstroke is Jesse Eisenberg, impeccably cast to play the extremity of his two poles against each other. Because there are two types of Jesse Eisenberg characters: the hapless awkward doormat, or the smug superior sociopath. And here he gets to be both, at each other.

There is a stretch maybe midway through this where I wonder if it’s a touch too maddening and punishing for me to keep watching someone so thoroughly caught in a hopeless trap. But then as the movie turns the screws tighter and things spring out a bit more vicious and outrageous, some of the wheels skipping tracks and knocking into each other, the score vaulting—I’m on the bitter edge of my seat.

★★★★★

There’s that phrase “the past is a foreign country,” that’s been taken to mean all sorts of things, agreed with and disagreed with back and forth. I guess a lot of it comes down to what extent you think foreign countries do things differently than your own, as the original quote goes on say. Do you think other countries differ from yours in fundamental ways, or more superficial ones? What about the past?

I think perhaps the most powerful sense of creeping captivated unease engendered by The VVitch: A New England Folktale, is the sense that these 17th-century settlers do things so differently than we do, but are also us. This nearly 400 years past Calvinist family are a pack of weirdos by my modern standards, but they’re just people out there living their lives, out there saying “thee” and “hither” but real as hell. And incidentally, hell is real too? Because there’s a real ass witch living in the woods, as we are shown before we’re even out of act one, as if the movie wants to go ahead and answer your first question up front so that it can delve into different ones.

That’s the mode I think the horror in The Witch takes, this uncanny duality of the conceptual and the real, the past and the present. It’s uncanny like time travel, uncanny like the old school sense of liminal, of being in two places at once, Nabokov’s “shimmering go-between” of literature. I’ve been reading and it seems a lot of viewers, particularly women, like to interpret this movie as a feminist allegory, but I don’t feel it’s that direct or simple at all, and honestly find it WAY more interesting as a complicated thing, as something that can exist in that foggy valley between an Angela Carter-esque progressive interpretation of a folktale, and a deeply period-appropriate rendering of a composite cautionary tale built out of years of Robert Eggers’s research, large amounts of the dialogue pulled verbatim from diaries and letters and court documents of the time. I think the reason this movie can feel so uncannily real-unreal is that Eggers approached this family on their own terms. So the evil here is draconian patriarchal Puritan strictures that were very real indeed, and it’s also that there’s a naked woman in the woods who does very much murder children for the Devil. I think they’re both there because a young woman like Thomasin in the near-far past believed both. Knew enough to decry her father for his hypocrisy, but also doesn’t know how to write her own name.

The horror movie this reminded me of most is Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now from 1973. The Witch and Don’t Look Now are both my kind of horror: creepy and atmospheric and more interested in formal aspects of filmmaking and Topics than jump scares or gore. And both movies are about the occult as a source of fear as well as intrigue, and how people in strained situations and strange environments might be more susceptible to its pull. There are also dead children and grieving parents in both, and little Samuel is snatched away by a figure in a red cloak—homage! The Witch also made me think of last year’s First Reformed from Paul Schrader, another movie concerned with religious asceticism shot with this direct, head-on sort of framing. Listen it works well.

Alright, now we talk Black Phillip and also spoilers. The first scene of Black Phillip bounding around the grey yard while the twins sing him songs….that was the most preternatural fucking creature I have ever seen. And like, that wasn’t CGI, was it? That was a real goat? Because this is what I’m talking about!! The spookiest parts of this movie are the things that feel super real!! Anyway I fully understand why Black Phillip took off the way he did among the online film fans, due to the one-two punch of very eerie goat dance + the most quotable scene in the movie. Which, if you’ve seen it, you know I would end up waiting for that scene for the entire runtime (thankfully a cleanly cut hour thirty). But it did not disappoint, not least because, despite seeing “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” everywhere, I had no idea that Black Phillip transforms into a shadowed man dressed all in black with a hat and spurs like some sort of sexy highwayman? Thought this was really well done actually, because there’s no way to show a goat talking that’s not a bit hokey, and Eggers wisely doesn’t dwell on the transformation either—save a hoof clipping into a heeled boot just beyond the table, mostly staying on Anya Taylor-Joy’s fascinating wide-eyed face as she contemplates what she wants and what she’s willing to do.

★★★★

Tried to make effective use of a week’s trial of the IFC channel, spoiler-free capsule reviews below….

WHITE MATERIAL

A brutal, sun-scorched, hypnotically distressing look at white feminists and French colonialists and mad sons in the midst of an erupting civil war in an unspecified African country that Does Not Want Them There. You have to leave, the retreating French army tells Maria, you need to get out, her own plantation workers tell her, but Maria just wants to finish harvesting her coffee beans, and I want to tear my hair out!!

Isabelle Huppert is astonishing in this, in a role that reminded me a lot of Florence Pugh’s in Lady Macbeth. She is intractable and naive and strong and insane. The steady, dread-filled pacing made me feel like *I* was going insane. White Material was like one of those bad dreams where I realize that oh, this is so nightmarishly bad because it actually is a nightmare, and then with relief I can just find something to throw myself off of and end the dream. Only it was a movie not a dream, and if I hadn’t finished it I wouldn’t have had a moment of such sudden pure shock and horror that I sat straight up with a yell. Claire Denis is a Filmmaker.

★★★

CERTAIN WOMEN

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything that felt more like the phrase “a collection of short stories” than Certain Woman. It is adapted from three by Maile Meloy (sister to Colin), all set among small towns in Montana in winter, strung together in a simple triptych.

The three protagonists very scantly cross paths, so minimally that none of them ever speak to each other. In fact I don’t think Michelle Williams’s character sees any of the others at all. I had kind of thought this movie would be about a handful of disparate women making a connection, but that’s not it at all, it’s much more about women as figures alone. Somehow I feel like saying it’s a portrait of female isolation is getting across the wrong tone—although all three of them do have a loneliness to them, by alone I mean that like…their existence is so defined within themselves. They be out there, as the memes go.

This is a quiet movie, with a lot of space to let the characters just carry out their tasks and think their thoughts. It’s spare in a nice way, the way poetry is spare.

★★★

THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY

This is maybe the only one we didn’t watch in the ‘Ireland In Film’ class I took in college, and as such I several times would think “oh boy we’re gonna get bogged down on this part,” before remembering that I am just my own class now, and am free to bog or not bog on Irish film at will. Appropriately.

Anyway, I found this surprisingly workmanlike for a Palme d’Or winner. Rather just, here’s a march of history! it was grim!, without really anything of artistic interest to set it apart, besides maybe the minor special effect that is the face of 29-year-old Cillian Murphy. While pretty run-of-the-mill war bleakness on the whole, the script does go quite in on idealogical debate in the latter portion, which is kind of interesting, though not exactly novel in the oeuvre of director Ken Loach, or, frankly, all Irish film. If at some point a character doesn’t start yelling in a heavy brogue about Michael Collins, is it even Irish?

★★

Spoiler warning: I’m going to talk about maybe half the needle drops in Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers, because they fucking rule, just like this movie!! I think what makes them work so well is that they are either exactly right on the money for what you would want for the stripper heist movie, so big and take-no-prisoners that you’re half stunned they managed to get the rights to these icons—Janet Jackson, Britney, Usher, Lorde. Or, they’re spectacularly left-field and weird and intelligent—Fiona Apple, Chopin, a fucking surreal morbid Jacques Brel song(!?). And that’s Hustlers. It’s a huge fun splashy riot of a good time, and also really strong and smart about the 2007 financial crisis, and the inherent corruption of wealth, and what control really means and looks like and feels like when you take it—and what it feels like when you start to lose it.

It’s also about Jennifer Lopez’s molecular control over her entire earthly body. How. How. The woman is 50 years old and a goddess. I mean the answer is partly money (again, Hustlers all over!) but I also don’t want to deny her innate…magic. She’s a gorgeous powerful star and I’m so glad we’ve been given good reason to remember it. J.Lo in this movie is giving off what I’m going to call big Cate Blanchett energy, in the sense of topping many critics’ current Best Supporting Actress lists, and also just topping. She’s constantly wearing these luxurious fur coats between towering heels and this warm smile, like the world’s sexiest mama bear. Early on she’s enthroned on a rooftop smoking when tiny adorable Constance Wu comes out of the door and nervously asks for a light, and Ramona takes one look at her in the cold night, lifts her coat and says “Come inside my fur,” beckoning her to the step between her knees. I mean. MAGNIFICENT.

I can only recall the name of one man in this movie, and even for him I only have half of it because they kept bleeping out his last name, in a hilarious and sharp move for this, a true crime story. Men are genuinely just marks here, we might as well just call all of them Mark, for all that it matters. Instead, we just have a whole lot of women, both in front and behind the camera, and it shows. The strip scenes are smoking hot and yet non-leering, I think because it’s always centered on what the women’s POV is on the scene? And hey sometimes their POV is just “wow that’s smoking hot!”—here’s looking at you, Constance Wu looking at Jennifer Lopez.

But Hustlers feels far less self-consciously Feminist than the convenient lady crime comparison point Ocean’s 8, which always had a whiff of marketing to it, probably inherent in being a genderbent rendition of an existing movie starring men. Several have been comparing Hustlers to Goodfellas, but I haven’t seen Goodfellas, so that’s as far as I can take you there. What I do know, and like very much, are funny, propulsive movies where charismatic thieves scam the wealthy while trying to avoid landing in hot water themselves. And while gender politics are inherently built in to this specific set-up, it’s the glamorous heist genre that is the primary blueprint here. This is a movie before it is a statement, which is what allows it to be such a successful, rich piece of entertainment. No pun intended.

I have to mention Keke Palmer and Lili Reinhart, who round out the criminal quartet at the center, and are both wonderfully funny and engaging, love an ensemble! Cardi B and Lizzo very much just have cameos, they are not in this movie very long at all, but if you’re gonna do it these two were entirely the correct choice and fun as hell. There is another cameo they’ve been keep semi-secret, you may already know, but just in case I’ll just say that I found it surprisingly poignant? I think something to do with the feeling I got when “2007” popped up over the opening scene and I thought half wistfully “oh, it’s a period piece.”

Listen, time moves fast—get all your friends to Hustlers before it’s gone, like so many Wall Street guys’ expense accounts.

★★★★

I put off watching this for a long time because I heard it was really horrible—in a deliberate way, as in it’s intentionally supposed to be a trial to watch this very unpleasant person. And she IS a very unpleasant person, she’s the Worst, but this movie is not at all! It was horrible to watch and yet I totally enjoyed watching it? I’m still trying to figure out how that works.

Elisabeth Moss, rabid, spiraling, plays musician Becky Something, the chaotic and vicious lead of the fictional ’90s punk band Something She. The movie begins with the group starting to nose-dive toward the rocks, and I’ll just tell ya, it smashes right onto them, and it’s carnage. But the movie is told in five distinct acts over several years, and, wisely I think, it spends the last two looking at the debris and trying to figure out if there’s a way to put yourself back together again.

I love this five act structure, it’s really neat. Each act proceeds in basically real-time, pivotal 25 minute chunks of these people’s lives. The acts are separated in the timeline by anywhere from a few months to a few years, and in the movie by tiny, grainy, brief little home videos of the band sloppily incandescent at the very beginning of their rise to fame. But. But. I did say 25 minutes, and five of them. This movie is two hours and ten minutes long, and you very much do feel it, to the point that in the latter half it started to take me out of it. You don’t want that! Her Smell needs to cut 25 minutes—not one of the acts, I want all of those, but about five minutes from each of them, maybe a little more here a little less there, but get it down to one hour 45. Totally doable. The argument for why it should keep this length is probably so that you really feel these scenes, really suffer, but oho do not worry, you still will! The content is…that potent.

But that it’s overlong to its detriment is pretty much my sole ding here. Otherwise, I loved this. All the acting is killer, not only Elisabeth Moss, who is just….terrifying. I wasn’t familiar with Agyness Deyn but she was fantastically compelling as the band’s willowy British lesbian Marielle Hell (yess), and the third member is Gayle Rankin, Sheila the Wolf Girl from GLOW, whom I was so excited to see! She’s such a grounded performer, just love her. Her character Ali van der Wolff (aah! jokes) had a sweet relationship with Dan Stevens, Becky’s gloomy frustrated DJ ex (husband?) also named Danny, which just confused me right now when I was writing this. In all the horribleness it was nice to get few little moments of mutual support between two people who have bonded in adversity—the adversity being the deadly electrical storm that is Becky.

The movie might lean a little too hard on its use of Becky gently singing a song alone & acoustic to remind us that she is indeed a talented and magnetic artist, but Elisabeth Moss crushes these. Still I know I’d cut one of them from Act 4 first thing. NOT the song she sings for her daughter though, because that part is stunning, and also her little joke at the beginning of it made me laugh so hard and so long that I had to pause the movie. I’m pretty sure it was one of those moments where you’ve finally cracked from all the tension and it just all comes out in a rush of laughter. Cathartic.

Anyway yeah these scenes are agonizing but I think this is a really good movie.

★★★★

Contains spoilers and also mention of sexual assault

Talk To Her opens with two men watching a Pina Bausch performance and crying in the audience, and then the next thing you know the movie is introducing a lady matador who is terrified of snakes, and there is just so much going on here for me to be very interested in. There are slow orchestral scored bull fights filmed like dance sequences, silent film interludes which we will extremely be coming back to, a woman describing at length her vision for a ballet about the First World War where as each soldier dies a ballerina blooms out of him as his ghost…. I’m so in it, I’m loving it, enough that I’m so willing to see where it’s going to go even with the grim growing theme of men having no regard for women’s bodily autonomy—what d’ya got going on here, Pedro?

For Talk To Her (Hable con ella) would be a four-hander, but very soon half the quartet is mute and lifeless. The lady matador is gored and falls into a coma, joining the same Bummer Green hospital floor as a young ballerina who was hit by a car several years ago. The passionate Lydia we get to spend some time with at the beginning of the movie, following her blossoming relationship with sensitive Argentinian journalist Marco. But Alicia, the dancer, we only briefly meet in a shallow flashback much later, rendering her the perfect blank, silent, female-shaped vessel into which the sweet but addled nurse Benigno can pour all his care and loneliness. The two men are left to develop their only reciprocated relationship with each other, which they do readily.

The women are medically braindead, they are gone, they can no longer respond to them in any way, and yet the men cannot stop obsessing over them, tending to them, and in Benigno’s case, always talking to them. The men have basically nothing else in their lives that isn’t about their comatose sleeping beauties. They spend all their time at the hospital. They dress the women up in robes and bring them out on a terrace, position them like they’re whispering to each other about them. It’s fascinating.

Pedro Almodóvar is an extraordinarily talented filmmaker, which I know because I really like and enjoy his movies and will be like, he’s the only male filmmaker I trust, and every one of them has involved sexual assault. Most of them also dive into some real thorny messiness with regard to gender and sexuality, often all three elements getting tangled up together, as they do in this one. His movies all very much ask to be UNPACKED, but Almodóvar is the exact sort of director I want making these movies, because he doesn’t shy away from wounds and difficulty, and yet he also isn’t being self-importantly ~dark~. There’s always something so colorful and approachable in his movies—melodramatic sure, but of the style of melodrama, where people cry a lot but the film doesn’t bog you down in it. Almodóvar films are never bogged down, their feet always light and unfettered, free to take a sudden, weird leap to land somewhere many projects could never reach.

And the weirdest leap here is not the terrible, obvious thing you hope isn’t coming, but something I didn’t expect at ALL. Which is that one time when Benigno is telling Alicia about a silent film he went to, and we get to see the fake silent film. Everything is perfect. The makeup, the costumes, the sets, the frame rate, the acting. It feels EXACTLY like a silent film you could watch, up until the point that it DOESN’T. Or you know, I should not say that—I have not actually watched any Spanish silent films. Perhaps the Spanish silent films are all dazzlingly psychosexual.

Anyway, in conclusion:

“One day, you and I should talk.”
“Yes, and it will be simpler than you think.”
“Nothing is simple. I am a ballet mistress, and nothing is simple.”

★★★★

I’ve read more than my usual amount of movie reviews for this one, because that is the shape my interest in The Goldfinch takes, and it’s been remarkable to me how many reviewers have referred to other reviews in their own. As if a whole Goldfinch review ecosystem has grown up around this movie. And I’m definitely going to fall into this too, so I’ll just start by saying that oh they’re all right, this movie is not good! But it also so nearly replicated my experience reading the book that I’m…impressed? In a grim way? But also a really joyous way? It is confusing! It is The Goldfinch!

I read this book this summer in a protracted state of bewilderment that it wasn’t a satirical fantasy, that it was dead serious, that it was Still. Going. On. And that in all these pages it wasn’t going to just let go and become an absurd picaresque—Candide with antisocial personality disorder. Or as a friend put it, Harry Potter with an Oxy problem. Or just closeted, we all know this would make more sense if Theo was just repressed into inanity. But to my amazement, the novel continued to insist that it wasn’t quite any of these things, sorry, but something else, something maddeningly inconsistent and fucking captivating because of it. Dickens by way of Highsmith, but with Charles Ryder as Tom Ripley, along with Brideshead Revisited’s infamous (affectionate) ability to spend the whole back half slowly lowering you into your grave because it just has to let you down one last time. As another friend once said when we were commenting on how we’d been talking continuously about The Goldfinch for over a month at that point, this book just so SPECTACULARLY fails to live up to its potential. Flawed things can have a remarkable power. And as a result, my fiend heart loved it all the way through, loved it at its most brilliant and its most unaware, loved it at its most sloggish and most deranged. This book got its claws in me, and sometimes I really can’t tell the difference between ironic and sincere enjoyment. Sometimes it all hits the same way.

I do not think The Goldfinch is a great novel, but I am greatly obsessed with it, and that is sure something. And I was so, so excited about this movie, which the gloriously, hilariously melodramatic trailers clearly indicated was going to just re-litigate all this for me on the big screen. I would look at what I knew about the production, and like an echo of how I feel about Donna Tartt, could not understand why John Crowley was making any of the decisions he was making! And then I finally saw the movie, opening night babey, and it was EVEN MORE THIS WAY.

Should we just start at the casting? We’re starting at the casting, and I’m going to block-quote something from Nate Jones’s Goldfinch piece because he really has a way of capturing exactly It:

“Ever since he broke out with The Fault in Our Stars, Ansel Elgort has been the subject of one frequent criticism: that he seems, in the immortal words of my former colleague Margaret Lyons, ‘like a chode.’ There are some young male stars you actually lose sympathy for the more you see of them, and no question, Elgort is one. (Shia LaBeouf circa 2010 was another.) However, I venture that this actually makes The Goldfinch work better! As an orphan with a tragic past who’s grown into a shady antiques dealer, Elgort’s Theo is supposed to be slightly smug and insufferable. Wanting to punch him in the face is the whole point.”

Nate, Nate yes.

And see this is where I get all mixed up, because if a movie perfectly renders a book in every way including its flaws, is that, in a way, good??? Like, god, I enjoyed mopey yet dead inside Ansel Elgort in this SO MUCH, but I was always, always laughing at him. “I wear designer suits,” he dully begins one stretch of voiceover, and I nearly choked and died right there in my seat.

Let me say that the small boy, Oakes Fegley, is genuinely good, the littlest pair of Warby Parker frames they cast does a really admirable job. I felt for this small boy! And yet it is still believable that he grows up to be an asshole, just as it is in the book. God, this exquisitely bitchy moment they gave him when he’s being questioned by the art cops and social workers and whomever after the explosion, when he says that his mom had wanted to go back to look at The Anatomy Lesson, and then deigns to supply to these plebeians: “It’s a Rembrandt.”

What we need in movie adaptations, I believe, is more of things like that, new material written for these characters that brings them to life in a different medium with its own toolbox. What we never needed was a whole moment devoted to Theo giving his mom’s earrings to Kitsey and her wavering about whether or not she’s going to wear them to the wedding. There were so, so many scenes like that just pulled right off the page, but to what end? To what point, what meaning? And because there is so much of this lugubrious plot they’re trying to get through, it feels like the movie is just dutifully marching from book moment to book moment, and I think you feel the moments they do skip even more this way. This dismal yet clipped energy also ends up stripping the story of so much of its feeling, as few scenes and characters are given time and breathing space to elevate anything above a rote recital.

For instance, Alex McLevy’s is probably my favorite Goldfinch review I’ve read, simply as the only one honest enough to declare that there was just not enough BORIS, the cheerful lunatic Russian saint who Pylades Theo through his godforsaken white collar train wreck of a life, and the fucking best part of this book. McLevy also proposes that Boris is, metaphorically, The Goldfinch of The Goldfinch, and I had also proposed that on a different blog in one of my more unhinged moments, so this was a really great moment for over-involved dumbasses everywhere.

However, due to the way this movie is structured (way more on that in a minute), they hold Boris back from us for over an hour into the runtime, which is nearly unconscionable for a character who has an entire section of the book named after him. Then at last Finn Wolfhard tromps in like a gangling ghost, with a boyish attempt at a Slavic accent that honestly I just found cute. He was trying. He was 14. Aneurin Barnard is also just faking his way through it, it is what it is, I don’t mind at all.

But something odd was up with the Borises, something that mattered to me far more. The cast has been going around repeating how the older and younger actors didn’t work together to develop a consistent character, instead embracing that people are different at different points in their life. So it’s gotta be Crowley’s direction then, that, belying this character’s immense importance in Theo’s life, emotionally as well as narratively, the Borises both come across as rather….broad? There’s something kinda broadly comic and very….side-charactery about both of their performances. As McLevy also alluded to, Boris here felt kinda like this quirky figure who just pops up periodically, which I’d say is a mishandling of one of the most meaningful characters in this story.

But, these two actors do something else really similar as well, moving in entirely a different direction, back toward something deeper. It’s their eyes. With matching contact lenses, their eyes are strikingly similar, both large and very black, sloe-eyed, and they both watch their Theos. As Boris quips in the book once, “Shall we stand here tenderly and gaze?” Oh these ones shall! There’s a scene of little Theo and Boris absolutely toasted on crushed Vicodin and vodka, lying on their backs by the pool, where Roger Deakins has framed Finn Wolfhard in focus just past Oakes Fegley’s face, and he just watches him the whole time he talks, his gaze near and open. And Aneurin Barnard does the same thing, from a new angle now as their height difference has fully swapped, but again, any scene he has his eyes trained up on Ansel Elgort, pausing in his lines sometimes, but always keeping his eyes on him, watchful and intent. These were glimmers of a movie that cared less about hitting a really astonishing number of the book’s march of plot beats, and more about building an emotional truth to it all.

One more small thing in praise of the Borises, who deserved better: there were just two moments where I genuinely laughed watching this, not an ironic or meta laugh, of which I had many, but pure surprised delight at a joke. One for each Boris: young Boris high off his ass on acid, getting caught stealing a glass of wine and responding, dazed: “I thought you couldn’t see me,” and grown Boris, when Gyuri greets Theo outside Schiphol with a cheery “Hello Potter!” and Theo goes “You know that’s not really my name?”, and Boris just staring Gyuri down like he’s the Fae about to steal Theo’s real name and swiftly barking: “So?”

Alright, moving on to: the time jumping. Gotta disagree with a lot of reviews saying this movie cut back and forth between the past and present too much, as I’d say it was a different problem: if you’re gonna cut around in time, you gotta cut around a lot MORE than this did. Go full Fosse/Verdon or don’t go for it at all. As is, the movie actually only moves one (1) chunk of the timeline out of book order, which I would not call reshuffling the chronology, but I would call weird as hell! All that really moved was that we got a long interlude of grown Theo in New York dealing in fraudulent antiquities & with Lucius Reeve and reconnecting with the Barbours, just wedged in right after little Theo was brought to Vegas, but before he meets Boris. Then after we see grown Theo meet grown Kitsey, we hop back to where we were and just proceed chronologically again there on out.

The whole film is peppered with the occasional brief PTSD-esque flashbacks to the bombing and immediate aftermath, in the classic style deployed by so many movies and shows, but as those flashes are there to depict the trauma points in the main character’s mind, not to move the plot forward, their being scattered throughout doesn’t function in the same way as moving that whole section. The only move that I would brook this ‘too much shuffling’ argument for is that due to cuts we never see Theo’s mom’s face or hear her speak until the very very end, in a little flashback to the two of them in the gallery looking at The Goldfinch, which I found a bizarre choice as it withholds from the whole preceding film the character Theo spends all of it missing, and the reason why this painting was so important to him. So the timeline is definitely not all cut up, but those 1.5 changes were SO nonsensical and destabilizing that I understand people watching this thinking, “this is chaos.”

As I did, I was watching this thinking it was chaos. And having a great time, I just gotta underline that again. I enjoy this story in every permutation precisely because it is somehow chaotic and yet low energy, and sometimes Boris is there. This is, apparently, how you trap me. And on the grandest meta-textual level, turning a book that pretentious into failed Oscar bait is so hearty I will savor it forever.

★★

I spent so much of Once Upon a Time In etc etc, and there was a LOT of time in which to think this, thinking that the only reason any of us are evening seeing this movie, much less seeing it blazoned proudly across every theater in the country like a once-in-a-lifetime Event Picture, is because it involves three very famous men. Not a fundamental problem, but it’s definitely fundamental to what this is. If the director was not “Quentin Tarantino”, if the leads were not “Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt”, would this have ever been made and received like this? Does this movie exist like it does made by people of their similar talent levels but not the reputations that they carried into this? I just do not envision a world in which anyone below their existing calibre of star power would get away with two hours and forty minutes of what is undeniably indulgence, but praised for being exactly that by an audience already primed to fondness for the ones doing the indulging.

This is the portion of this review where I’m trying to take an empathetic, magnanimous outlook on something that is well-liked by a large number of people. I am trying to understand. I do get, conceptually, someone being into all the things Quentin Tarantino is into, and so finding this to be a gift. The length would even work to favor this, as it’s even more time you would get to spend in this world. I watched OUATIH on a huge screen on 70mm film, and the pure visual look of it, the colors, the depth of focus, the costumes, the set decorating—it’s all very well, very lovingly done. I don’t think the editing or writing was well done, but that’s because I was turned off by nearly everything this movie actually depicted in way of content, and so was watching it with much more critical ill will than someone caught up in a certain movie magic they were feeling.

And listen I have nothing against movie magic for movie magic’s sake, not at all, because the very literal meta element of that was easily my favorite part of this whole thing. I loved Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, and I loved her going to see her own movie. It’s funny, because the fact that this film was going to involve an “angelic presence” of murdered Hollywood star Sharon Tate was the main thing that worried me when I first started hearing about Tarantino’s latest, and then I liked that part the best. Sometimes things work out that way! Margot Robbie is sunshine in this, and her performance is so sweet and engaging. Watching her watch herself in a dark theatre, wide starry eyes at seeing herself up there, giggling in joy and surprise and pride at the audience around her appreciating her comic performance—it genuinely brought happy little tears to my eyes!

But I hated everything besides her, so now we turn to the portion where I resentfully point out everything that bothered me about this movie. I’m gonna spoil the WHOLE thing, so turn back now if either of what I just warned you about is something that you don’t want to read.

Ten Things I Want To Complain About!!

1. Why would you do the Ron Howard in Arrested Development-style zippy narrator break once, in the beginning but oddly late in the beginning, late enough that I was taken aback that this was that kind of movie, and then zero of this for what had to be an hour and a half, before suddenly the narrator reappears, talks at length, and then vanishes again for the rest of it. This was so distractingly inconsistent!

2. Emile Hirsch makes me so bummed out, because I really like him on screen, but he has a history of physically attacking women, and that’s no good at all, and now when I look at him I can’t forget that. Surely this was not intentional casting, as he’s worked with Tarantino on other projects as well, but incidentally, RATHER ODD that he’s allowed to do a perfectly likable and even cute performance of Roman Polanski**, the director who is infamously no longer allowed to enter America because he raped a 13 year old girl. There was just…a lot of dissonance here! I can see one interpretation that perhaps without his pregnant wife getting murdered, this never would have happened, but a) bullshit, you don’t get to blame your trauma for you assaulting a child, b) when Damien Lewis appears to just explain characters to us for about a minute, he alludes to Sharon’s ex waiting in the wings for Polanski to do something bad, and like, how else are we to take that?!

3. Hey so incidentally, Sharon Tate doesn’t get murdered in this! I imagine this has to be what the big spoiler kerfuffle was about at Cannes, and I cannot FATHOM why. The minute I found out that the man who made Inglourious Basterds, Mr. Revisionist History himself, was doing a movie about the Manson murders, I knew he was going to have Brad and Leo save her. Of course he was. This isn’t actually an element I disliked, but I do dislike anyone, and very much Quentin himself, pretending that wasn’t obvious from the moment this movie was announced. We all knew, come on.

4. Brad Pitt’s character murdered his wife and we’re still supposed to like him, our stunt man hero who gets to murder even more women at the end! “No it’s an indictment of masculine violence”—why. Please tell me what in this movie made you think the movie thinks this, because this movie seemed totally in love with Cliff to me. He’s always framed as a hero! He’s doing a charming Brad Pitt performance!

5. I like messy bitch Leonardo DiCaprio (Gatsby springs to mind) but wow I am taxed these days watching grown men throw tantrums. One of my scribbled notes is just “bad men behaving badly.” Honestly this applies to Rick and Cliff both.

6. I thought for sure the scene of Rick nailing a scene (god everyone just loves his idea to throw an 8-year-old girl onto the floor too, what a….great…moment) would be revealed to be a daydream fantasy a la Cliff’s fantasy of beating up a shockingly mean and racist caricature of Bruce Lee (woW), but nope, apparently part of Rick’s storyline is that we’re supposed to love watching him eventually get his ego stroked.

7. The editing was weird. So many times I kept noticing people not in the same position from cut to cut of the same scene. There are sequences that are just a meaningless series of detail shots of their props like “hey look at our good 1969 props” and I’m like “….yeah? yeah I, I see them there.” This is technical nitpicking, but the occasional clunkiness was really surprising to me for a director who is considered such a film craftsman.

8. The women’s feet. The….feet. So much, the feet.

9. Margaret Qualley in a tiny crochet top plays a character named Pussy Cat, who spends half her screen time biting her lip at Brad Pitt and the other half lying in his lap and offering him blow jobs, and it’s so great that she’s so, so, so sexualized while they make sure that we know that she’s not even 18, ooooo~

10. And then at the end, three of the Manson kids show up to murder Sharon Tate, only Rick yells at them for idling with their loud muffler so they decide to murder him instead, and that’s how Cliff, tripping on acid, brutally murders them back. The scene is so, so long. It is so, so grisly. I had my fingers jammed in my ears because listening to that woman scream for minutes on end with her face broken open was setting all my nerves on edge. A pit bull literally tears people apart muscle and bone, Brad Pitt smashes multiple women’s heads in, and Leonardo DiCaprio burns one of them up with a flame thrower. I realize the Manson kids were going to murder Sharon and as expressed I loved her, but jesus christ. That was the embodiment of gratuitous and I really hated watching it so bad!

Anyway, I’m sure a lot of people will argue that this movie “means” something, that I just didn’t “get” it. I don’t care. I did not enjoy this film.

★

**UPDATE

Well all, I need to issue a CORRECTION: this past weekend on my travels, Jen pointed out that I had MIXED UP SOME MEN in this film, and it is with great relief that I can now say Emile Hirsch is *NOT* playing ~cute Roman Polanski~, something I had really hated when I thought that was happening!! No Emile Hirsch is playing an entirely different guy, and yes this is just now a new kind of bewildering, albeit WAY less upsetting than the alternative.

There was some mild critical chatter back in the summer about whether Quentin Tarantino should have been obligated to do more set-up of the real world events he’s riffing on here, for audiences who are unfamiliar with the Manson murders. I think no, he is not beholden to do that, people are perfectly allowed to make movies about history without giving people a primer up front. HOWEVER. You do have to make it clear which of two very similar-looking people is which, especially if one of them is Roman Polanski. If your introduction of two men who are described in dialogue as bearing quite a resemblance to one another is a wide angle dance scene shot from across a pool, obviously I’m not gonna have a great idea which is the ex and which is the husband. And when I’m then only ever seeing the Emile Hirsch one of them for the rest of the movie and he’s always with Sharon in the house as if he lives there, I’M GONNA ASSUME THAT’S THE POLANSKI. You gotta have some more dialogue about this or something. Like, presuming your audience is on the same page with you on historical context is fine, it’s whatever, but assuming your audience is coming in with your movie’s IMDb page committed to memory, that is presumptive filmmaking!

Anyway on that note I just looked up Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’s IMDb page and discovered that Damien Lewis was supposed to be Steve McQueen in that scene where he described Sharon and her men, and just. God.