The Thing is Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None as a creature feature in an Antarctic research station, and I had such a blast. I’d never seen a John Carpenter movie before and have no idea what had given me the impression that this one would not traumatize me in the least, but whatever it was was right! This is not the sort of horror movie that frightens Tarras. The scariness takes two forms: ice-bound existential dread (my ideal environment, zero scared), and mesmerizingly intricate practical effects (candy apple red and animatronic, zero scared). Even after things got gloppy, I was still thinking about how much I would like to be at a polar research station, chipping off chunks of ancient ice to put in my whiskey and riding the wave of societal breakdown as everyone starts to get way weird out in frozen isolation.

Honestly, minus the part where a mutating alien life form is wreaking havoc among them, The Thing makes this environment look pretty darn chill, no pun intended. Incidentally, no one behaves as if they’re actually in painfully freezing temperatures. After one truly outrageous cowboy hat situation he wears for a flying scene, Kurt Russell absolutely REFUSES to cover his lush billowing hair with a hat, even in temperatures he’ll later claim will soon be at 100 degrees below zero. Early on another character opts to just break a window in their South Pole rec room in order to shoot out of it. It’s really all of it rather dumb I think we can admit, a Prometheus situation in which a bunch of supposed scientists behave as if they have never heard of a safety precaution, ever, in their lives.

But because this is a movie where such kind of concerns just do not matter, I find it lowers the stress level completely. Only one thing is going to kill them and it is the plot. The Thing isn’t interested in how to survive this, it’s interested in how it will dole out the deaths. Which is not to say this march of doom is disinterested in drama, it is 100% about drama: the drama of trying to guess which of these 12 men you know nothing about might secretly be the Thing.

It’s also about 1982. It’s about the neon pink glow of flares on snow, the skinny young cook rollerskating down the concrete halls, Kurt Russell’s hair, which I already mentioned because that’s how much this movie is about Kurt Russell’s glorious hair. It’s about brainstorming who would inevitably be cast today in a big budget remake (the man with the dogs: David Harbour). It’s about delighting over elements from this movie that you now recognize were being referenced in other things you’ve watched: the Changeling blood test scene on the Defiant in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a bit of that Davies era Doctor Who episode where David Tennant gets trapped on a shuttle with people who are getting possessed, a whole ass homage on the first season of The X-Files when Mulder & Scully go to that Alaskan research base.

And I love that this iconic schlocky polar horror movie ended the way it did. I have enough goodwill at this point to even believe that the Thing functions as a metaphor for whatever “monstrous” societal element you want to argue for. Why not! Woohoo!

★★★★★

Contains discussion of the ending of the movie, and references to the plot of Call Me By Your Name too

There is a considerable stretch in the middle of this movie that is just three women living companionably in a big grand creaky manor house on an island off the northern coast of France, and during the day they paint and embroider and go on walks along the coast, and at night they prepare dinner together and drink wine and play cards and read Greek myths aloud in front of the fire, and it is, quite possibly, THE dream. It is transporting. Every shot is almost soothing it is so beautiful, the rich colors of their dresses and hair against the light walls and furniture and the blue blue blue of the sea, all composed with a breathtaking, painterly grace by my new favorite cinematographer, the boldly elegant eye of Claire Mathon. Her images are how the film draws you in to its embrace, where you then hear, feel its heartbeat against your own: the rustle and weight of cloth, the smooth rasp of paint brushes on canvas, the wind blowing from the sea, the crackling of the fires—all with no score, because this haptic atmosphere is a soundtrack. And Céline Sciamma’s choice to forgo traditional musical accompaniment reserves an overwhelming beauty for the three moments, all diegetic, where music does occur, mounting in power until the crashingly emotional final shot, a long unbroken take of Adèle Haenel crying at a Vivaldi concert.

Of course, that two movies are both gay romances doesn’t mean they’ll have anything else in common in the story they’re telling or how they’re telling it, but beyond the overlay of their ending moments, Call Me By Your Name is actually not an inapt comparison at all to Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu). They are both designed in every detail to bring the audience body & soul into this beautiful world, but a world with an endpoint known to both us and the characters. The brevity of the time the lovers will have together informs the shape of the story, down to both movies containing a scene of the two lying in bed apologizing for the time they wasted in the beginning. But in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, what endings do to both art and romances becomes a central discussion of the film, and renders its final shot of Héloïse into something much more complex than the poignant but simple sorrow of Elio mourning the loss of his first love.

Because Héloïse and Marianne’s relationship, like her portrait, like this piece of music, is a completed piece of art, and she can love it in this form forever. Their love will never grow old and different, just as the Héloïse in the portrait, the Héloïse of Marianne’s memory, will remain as she is forever. They will never become resentful of each other, the terrible thing Héloïse discovered was possible once they’d been together. She asked her Orpheus to turn around, and Marianne did. They made the poet’s choice. And Héloïse listens to the movement that Marianne had once tried to play for her when she found out how much she loved music, and sobs at the sorrow of it all, but also in joy, at this beauty she can feel coursing through her, and she breaks into a gasping smile through her tears.

I’m still recovering from a cold and I think with this I’ve tapped out my ability to be cohesive, so I’m just going to list in post-script further things I loved about this movie:

– That the women each wear just one dress for the whole movie, because that’s how people did back then. And they help each other get abortions and buy party drugs from a woman at a bonfire night because that’s also how people did back then!
– Speaking of: Sophie gently holding the hand of the sweetly babbling baby by her head as the midwife works, god the tenderness and nuance of that moment
– And then: Héloïse announcing “We are going to paint” later that night and posing herself and Sophie so can Marianne depict the scene, give it the worthiness of oil paint
– Those scarves for the wind that you tie around your hairstyle? What were those! They looked so stunning!
– The mother commenting how strange it was to arrive in this house and find her—the her in her portrait—already here
– How high the waves always were in the frame
– Marianne shivering out of her soaked dress to sit naked in front of the fire, smoking a pipe, between the two white panels of her wet canvases drying against the hearth
– The Janelle Monáe/A Fantastic Woman/Armen Susan Ordjanian mirror-in-the-lap image, beautifully deployed here in a new artist/muse context
– Oh and when it comes to references, the queer film that I actually suspect could have been a conscious allusion here would be in the echo of two memorably specific erotic gestures from My Beautiful Laundrette—if you know, you know

★★★★★

The skyscraper being built outside Dakar by underpaid construction workers is a thick spar tapered to a point, massive and looming over everything around it. The air hangs thick and hazy from the crashing Atlantic, and at night, with the winking light atop it, the tower looks like it is piercing the sky itself, a tooth or talon scratching the low dark blue clouds. During the day, everything is pale, a sky somewhere between dust and mist, the rolling sun-bleached sea the same color as Ada’s light chambray top—the top her boyfriend Souleimane would love to get inside of, but it is its sister blue sea that he will vanish into instead. 

Atlantics (Atlantique) is a movie about the impact of labor migration on the communities left behind, told through a love story, told in turn through a ghost story. It has a hypnotic pace, the cinematography and score and editing artful and cool—at one moment elliptical, the other looking right at you. It reminded me a bit of fellow French filmmaker Claire Denis (Beau Travail, High Life), whom director Mati Diop has worked with as an actress. I also found myself thinking of Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, which I feel held its own supernatural elements with a somewhat similar hand.

But Atlantics’ interests are also very much its own. Atlantics has waves, it has fever, and the sun going down. It has a quiet nightclub open to the sea with only women in it, and fires keep starting around town. There is both ambiance and economics here, an inherently modern core and outlook in a fable-like tale of a haunting. It’s mournful, passionate, eerie, vindictive, and dreamy. It’s a mood, and I was in it.

★★★★

I don’t think it’s so simple as me not being into the subject matter. I did like Wildlife last year, another movie about a heterosexual couple with a son who are getting divorced. Well, I liked it alright. Okay it probably partly is the subject matter. But I think more than anything it’s just that after three of his, I’ve still never managed to click with a Noah Baumbach movie. And at this point I’m going to propose we just peaceably go our separate ways. I certainly don’t think he’s like, bankrupt as an artist or anything, I don’t think he makes films that are objectively bad, just films that don’t have the key to unlock my stores of investment. Scenes that others find really moving, I am unmoved by. Whereas Joanna Hogg’s insufferable characters captivate me, his I merely find tiring. If your-mileage-may-vary, I’m just never getting up to speed with these.

I mean I’ll be the first to tell you that there were three lines in Marriage Story so funny I paused the Netflix player so I could write them down while laughing. Still, Baumbach’s sense of humor just doesn’t land quite right for me on the whole. I think I expect the people in the scene to also find these things funny, maybe? It’s like the jokes feel a bit more written than lived, I guess, but then again I don’t know if that’s it, can’t really put my finger on it. Two of the jokes were Scarlett Johannson’s, whom I thought delivered by far the best performance in this, she was really really great. When she starts crying as soon as she walks around the corner, that long monologue she has when she first meets her lawyer that she delivers in a delightfully weird way, her Acting we see in Charlie’s (terrible looking) New York plays and her (terrible looking) Hollywood sci-fi show. I thought Adam Driver was just fine; I always think Adam Driver is just fine. I know he really appeals to some, but whatever magic he holds for them misses me. Noah Baumbach loves him.

Oddly, I found the vaunted Laura Dern performance in this to be a pretty basic near-caricature of a glamorous type of LA divorce lawyer, a reaction that mildly surprised me. Wait, was that it? I thought after she delivered a short spiel about mothers, that’s the Oscar-winning speech? Same too with the big fight that Netflix unwisely released as a context-free clip of histrionics, same too with the Company song that was happily reported from the Toronto film festival and what I’d been honestly joking was my number one reason to watch this movie—each time, with mild surprise: that was it?

But you know how it is, sometimes people just aren’t the right fit, and it’s not really anyone’s fault more than the other. I believe Noah Baumbach and I can split amicably.

★★★

What I love about Joanna Hogg movies is that she makes these like, slow posh English mumblecore things with just enough of a weirdly brutal edge where I feel like at any moment it’s possible one of the characters might fully die in an accident. There were so many still wide shots of people climbing through landscapes in this, and they all had me screaming. Every meal conversation: screaming. By the time the characters in a Joanna Hogg piece finally scream themselves, it’s like smashing plates, violent and destructively satisfying. They are these very bloodless movies that make me feel very bloodthirsty and I’m into it!

Archipelago takes place on an actual archipelago, a cluster of really unplaceable islands off the tip of Cornwall called the Isles of Scilly. One moment the environment looks almost like Scotland, all windswept heather and rock, and the next moment there are tropical plants with birds twittering in them. Everyone is always wearing coats against the cold but the water is turquoise blue in places. I had no idea a place like this even existed. It feels like an English colony still within England. Incredible. And just a perfect setting for this, a story (“story”) of an upperclass young man spending an uncomfortable holiday with his mother and sister at their vacation home before leaving for an unnamed country in Africa to do AIDS awareness work for eleven months, and oh boy they hate this almost as much as him trying to befriend the cook they’ve hired for their stay! Basically everything he does to try to allay his privilege just makes everyone involved feel more uncomfortable about the class divide, and I was just watching all this drinking my tea, rapt, going out of my mind at scenes where Tom Hiddleston puts on his boots in a hallway for like five minutes while continuously apologizing to people trying to get around his long legs.

Honestly this movie would be valid just for acknowledging that Tom Hiddleston is too tall. Which it does, several times, passively yet pointedly, my favorite by far being its deployment in the delicious metaphor that is Edmund leaving the big bedrooms for the others and volunteering to take the little servants’ quarters upstairs alongside the cook, even though he physically does not fit in the space. 

I probably spent an outsized amount of time in this movie just thinking about Tom Hiddleston. I mean he does play the main character, by a slim margin but a margin, but at this point ten years later, he’s a Person, and he wasn’t then, and I kept thinking about it. In 2009 he was still wearing his hair longish, in his natural blonde curls that preposterously don’t suit him at all. His costuming is in rich person clothes, but also ones that don’t particularly suit him, lots of these ill-fitting baggy trousers. He of course still has that striking, angular face that looks like it should be cut into a coin, but you’d have to be paying attention to much notice it, as the camera cares so little for close-ups of any of the characters, leaving them always held at a middle distance (#symbolical). It was just interesting to me to see how this movie uses him totally differently than films do now. And before he’d be washed in the veneer of fame that would make him “Tom Hiddleston”, pulled out of the bespoke suits both dress and supervillain, he’s just this tall British actor who’s actually pretty dang good at what he does.

This Joanna Hogg role isn’t gonna be my favorite performance of his (pretty sure that will always be the RAF pilot with narcissistic personality disorder—if you want to talk about things eminently suited for him), and Archipelago is not going to be my favorite of her movies either (there were other and stronger points to end it on—I love a good unresolved ending but this wasn’t it), yet I sure had a great time on this cold island.

★★★★

Pride is not a complex or challenging movie. It’s not telling a story that is new, or in a new way. But it is so affectionate and thoughtfully detailed—taking care to weave in a surprising number of threads about specific trials faced by the queer community into the movie’s central story, that of a real historical moment of solidarity between a London-based group of gays & lesbians and striking Welsh miners in 1984. But it never feels to me like the movie is simply running through a checklist of instances of Thatcher-era homophobia and labor oppression, because while what happens may be quite paint-by-numbers, it is painted with such tender attention. It is a work of love, quite truly: after watching it this time, I learned that the screenplay was written by Stephen Beresford, Andrew Scott’s partner of then nine years. I think that’s where so much of the film’s feeling of warmth comes from—it was made by family, about the family who came before.

In fact, one of my favorite elements of this movie is the way it depicts the brevity of gay generations, how queer folks just a bit older than you can seem like they come from a whole different era. Andrew Scott’s character Gethin and his boyfriend Jonathan (a delightful Dominic West), just by dint of being over 25, as Gethin wryly alludes to in an early scene, are very much the group’s elders. They would have come of age in the early ‘70s, during London’s glam scene—clear from everything Jonathan ever wears or does—and now quietly, on Gethin’s part at least, run a gay bookshop together. And it’s so tenderly observed how we see that now in the ‘80s, those barely ten years younger than them already view them as mildly out-of-touch and embarrassing in that way of parents, but also a source of domestic stability (again like parents), their place serving as a harbor for “orphans from the storm.” I love that we get their distinct generational outlook on the current events of the movie—“What ever happened to Gay Lib, Jonathan?”—that sense of a continuous queer history this lends, within a movie that is itself about a very specific period of it.

And, part of what it is that creates the brevity of gay generations, particularly at work in the 1980s, is certainly not ignored. Homophobic politics that kept queer people in danger, unprotected from violent attacks on their property and their bodies, and of course the deathly shadow of AIDS that begins to crawl across the film. Pride, again, approaches these familiar story beats with care and detail, depicting several different ways HIV can impact those who are diagnosed and those who love them. Sure, particularly in instances of illness and injury this movie is a tear-jerker, a heart-string-puller, and honestly what of it? Like we haven’t been telling for ages of human history these sorts of predictable, poignant stories of people experiencing both tragedies and triumphs, and ending in hope. They have a value for the heart, and for the community. I was trying to access why I find even the sadness in this movie somehow cozy to experience, and Emily had it: Pride is like a queer folk tale.

It is also one of those movies with the kind of deeply banked cast of talent where Russell Tovey can show up for just one scene. And special shout-out to supporting actor “aerial shots of the Welsh countryside,” one of the standouts. But truly, what tips this movie over the top is Andrew Scott. No matter what he’s doing he seems to be drawn in ink that’s bleeding right through the screen into your heart. Just an indelible performance. The way Gethin’s painful personal history in Wales gently plays out consistently reduced us to wails of our own. When he takes that phone call on Christmas from Imelda Staunton? It’s just this little moment and I’m like, this is better and more moving than most cinema. If you’ve seen him as the Priest in Fleabag, you know how impossibly endearing Andrew Scott can be, and he was perfecting that here, with Dominic West in his big scarves and pink pajama pants in tow. Those two are so lovingly married in this, and it’s…honestly one of the most comforting things to watch. A queer folk tale. Can we hear it again, in front of the fire?

★★★★★

For me, 1917 made two big mistakes right at the start, from which it would never be able to recover. 

The first even before the start, the initial idea: a movie following two lance corporals on a one-shot styled overnight mission during the First World War. The main characters enlisted men who really look about 21? Love it, this is an excellent choice, this was a war of baby boys who only sparingly interacted with the there-and-gone officers on their sparrow-quick lives before they flew off or were shot down.

So the young lowly soldiers are good, relatively unknown actors playing them: good. But. A continuous take is chosen to generate tension through its restless, ever-hovering movement, this sense of always pressing on. This is so suited for a mission movie. But a mission movie is so not suited for World War I. This was a war literally entrenched. You went off to the Front, and proceeded to cower in a sopping ditch under shell fire until you either went mad or were blown up like the corpse-pocketed mud around you. This is a war known most for its endless bitter attrition, for its futile meaninglessness. Why were they fighting? No one knew. No resources were sought to be gained, no ideology opposed. You sat helpless and inactive in a trench as horror whined overhead, until you were told to go over the top and die. In the mental hospitals the wards were filled with men and officers paralyzed with psychosomatic limps and stammers, crushed by this sensation that they could not speak, they could not act. The lines held as the years dragged on and hope stagnated. In this war where if the bullets or the gas didn’t kill you the waiting would, there was no movement at all. And that is my problem with the very premise of this movie. A tracking shot heroic mission over enemy lines is a war movie idea pasted onto the one 20th-century European war where it makes no sense emotionally or historically. Why did you do this thing!

I’m frustrated and disappointed that this is what this movie was, because it would seem the filmmakers decided that depicting something more aligned with the reality of this disaster would not have been ~cinematic~ enough, a choice I feel both limited and dishonest. They clearly thought they had to come up with a way to generate action, get their leads out of the trenches, and this mission to reach another battalion would do the trick. So what they did is create WWI: The Video Game, and we just track along behind these two figures from set-piece adventure to set-piece adventure. An explosion, a plane crash, a side plot with a girl and a baby where you can conveniently use the object you’d picked up earlier, jumping into a rushing river and over a waterfall—“like an Indiana Jones adventure movie,” one of my friends described it later. Boo. Booo, I don’t like it! Instead of making a movie about World War I, they’ve just used it as an aesthetic backdrop for a simple rousing save-the-day story thematically disconnected from what was a long senseless bloody mess.

The thing is, it didn’t have to be this way. I know it, because I saw it, within this very same movie. This was 1917’s second irrecoverable mistake! To show me a glimpse of what I could have had! So early, in just the second scene, such as they are, was a sequence that felt true. First of all, it was far and away the best use of the tracking shot effect, both one of the most obviously technically impressive feats of camerawork in this, AND, actually aligned with the meaning of what was being shown! These combined to create such a powerful effect that another of my friends I was watching this with eventually just exclaimed softly next to me, overwhelmed at the sight we’d been watching: two young men weaving through the warren of a large British trench system on the Western Front in 1917. A continuous take here was in service to the story, its length capturing the incredible labyrinthian extent of these trenches full of doomed, muddy men, and its faintly dizzying, tiring movement conveying the grim surreality of this environment. We follow them until at last our corporals find not the person they were after, but the one who’s all they’ve got now. He’s all we’ll get, too. For this was when this movie made the enormous mistake, massive, of letting Andrew Scott play a WWI lieutenant. 

He made his eyes look glassy. I don’t even know how you do that, but those too bright, too slack eyes are the first thing that hits you when he swings his head up with a movement like a hinge. You know as soon as you look at him: this is someone who has been down here for too long. His captain is dead, he informs us bluntly. The lower British COs fell so quickly in this war. They would go over the top first with their men and be cut down immediately by the guns, and there is also the macabre historical curiosity that the officers, pulled from England’s better-fed upper classes, were on average considerably taller than the enlisted men, and the German snipers learned to pick them out. Andrew Scott’s lieutenant is slight, wearing a beanie and a jacket not fully buttoned—he is camouflaged, and surviving. Frankly this could absolutely be why he has made it as long as he has. Because it is so apparent that he’s been lasting, and his longevity has come at a cost. It’s in those thousand-yard-staring eyes, his abruptness that also still rambles, this faintly dissociative gone-ness that permeates all of his performance. He is, distinctly, the only character in this movie with a sense of humor, a perfectly toned pitch-black haunted whimsey of exactly the type of the British soldiers who printed The Wipers Times. He blesses the corporals with a splash of whatever is in his flask crossed over their packs, and then drinks the rest as he bids them a bleak Godspeed on their suicide run, and then this phantom of the war is gone.

The problem is that Andrew Scott is so fucking good, that everything else fell apart around him, leaving him standing alone on the broken ground of the First World War movie that could have been.

You know it’s interesting to compare 1917 to Dunkirk, another recent expensively produced, beautifully shot British film about a world war with a large cast of both un- and very-knowns, and a conceptual approach to the way time is presented. But I think that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Chris Nolan, who has built his entire career on ticking clocks, had a more meaningful and cohesive thought working throughout his film about the relationship between time and an individual’s experience of war. When 1917 begins and the corporals are told they have to reach the other trenches by dawn of the next day, when the attack is scheduled, I realized that Sam Mendes wasn’t going to follow the unity of time implied by a single take. And sure enough, he doesn’t: at one point our point-of-view character is knocked out, and wakes up in the dark maybe eight hours later in a sticky pool of blood that has oozed from the back of his head. In fact, this transition marks the beginning of such a divergence from physical reality (contrasted to the much more realist style of the beginning of the movie—and much more affecting, if my and the rest of the audience’s reactions are any indication—where things like barbed wire and decomposing bodies felt horribly real) that I briefly wondered if we were to understand that he had died, or was dying, and all the rest of the movie was taking place in his head. However, the ending would not seem to support this.

What maybe would though is that the first thing our young soldier sees when he improbably scrambles to his feet, is the most otherworldly sight in the movie. Roger Deakins will win the Oscar for cinematography for the night sequence in the bombed out town lit only by slow white flares arcing overhead and a burning church in the middle, because it is one of the most gorgeous and striking visuals committed to film this past year. The stark sliding quality of the light reminded me immediately of the stunning Valkyrie & Hela scenes in Thor: Ragnarok, which is a compliment to 1917. And this means that once again, film will be honored for making the atrocity of war look beautiful. I wish so much that this one had been thoughtful enough for me to feel there was much to it beyond that.

★★

I do not wish for the long holy poem A Hidden Life to have been kept out of reach of so many theaters, but it does mean that for me, I had to go out and meet it. I drove 45 miles outside of the city to a town I’d never seen, in order to have an experience. Because even if it had been playing just down the street, you have to go to A Hidden Life. You have to say, I have come to be here, and I will be for three hours of noble, shattering beauty. I have come to be dragged over the stones and the mountains. I have come to be here for three years. For three years I will stand swaying in the grass, and witness. I have come here, to hear a song that has been playing for three hundred years, and you can only hear it in bells, in cow bells and bells on woolly sheep and above churches for saints’ days. I have come to see a canonization, and I know that these things hurt. I have come to be here.

Franz Jägerstätter was a man with a hidden life, which has been made into a hidden film. He was a faithful farmer from a village in the Austrian Alps, and he would not swear loyalty to Adolf Hitler. He was jailed for conscientious objection to the war and its leader, and he was executed in 1943. He has been beatified twice, in 2007 by Pope Benedict XVI, and in 2019 by Harvard- and Oxford-educated philosophy scholar turned meditative American filmmaker Terrence Malick.

A Hidden Life is about resistance, faith in God, and the strength needed to endure both. The evil that Franz objects to is actually rendered as more of an abstract concept of ‘war’ in general, perhaps oddly removed from the antisemitic specificity of the Third Reich. Hitler is shown on archival footage and mentioned specifically by name at several and key points, Heils are thrown, but in the three hours of this movie, Jews are never once mentioned. In fact, based on what we see of his life, Franz doesn’t even know that the Holocaust is taking place. We watch some undistinguished grainy black & white footage of battle alongside Franz at the military training camp he attends early on in the movie, and later he says that he believes the countries they are fighting did nothing wrong, that they are killing innocents. The mayor of Franz’s little town shouts transposition-ready xenophobic views about immigrants coming in to take their jobs, but nothing more precise. Concentration camps are mentioned once, but only as a possible fate for any priests who would publicly oppose the Führer.

It is probably a testament to how little seen A Hidden Life has been that I haven’t witnessed any discussion about the appropriateness of making a WWII movie about Christian martyrdom. But I think it’s possible, I think I do believe, that Franz’s moral resolve to oppose fascism so deeply and urgently, even in obscurity, is such a powerful and challenging thing to watch, that the value of this story overrides some oddness with the context in which it is situated. We feel with him the weight of his choice, as he gradually lifts it and takes it upon his shoulders, carries it through prisons and courts, even when they attempt to wrest it from him by cruelty and by force. You cannot help but confront whether you would have the conviction of soul to do what he does, to do what is good even when it will make no difference, as Franz is repeatedly reminded by others. That his sacrifice won’t stop the war. That all it will do in the only future he can know certainly, is leave his beloved family in misery and hardship. This movie makes you question why it is we actually do what is right. What does it matter versus what does it mean. I wrestled with this in my heart the entire time. I still am.

And Malick, damn him, makes the desire to simply stay alive so compelling, when Franz’s life before he is called up to the war is depicted with some of the most beautiful filmmaking I have ever seen. Their farm in the mountains is breathtaking, so green, soaring grey peaks, up above the wisps of clouds. Every scene there is a new adorable farm animal—a sweet brown cow, a furry donkey, a gaggle of ducks. Three little girls scramble over the fresh slopes like little mountain goats in their sweaters and boots. And Franz and his willowy wife Fani are deeply, completely in love. They both behave like they could press their heart into the other by clutching them close, frequently overcome by the need to just wrap each other in their arms under the open sky. There is such lyrical movement in this film—harmonious limbs working at tasks, hair blowing in Alpine winds, a bicycle messenger winding down a green path. The edit too is so fluid, long but dancerly. The story progresses chronologically but there’s often these little moments in conversations that are slightly ajar in time, a beat of a look on someone’s face that must be from just a bit earlier, or later, or just within. A lot of what is spoken is in voice-over, a Malick hallmark. Those parts are always in English. But sometimes, characters speak in the actors’ own German, particularly in scenes of casually chattering background talk, or shouting. This is never translated for the English-speaking audience, it just becomes part of the score, which could break your heart with its classical wind-blown beauty.

Mine did. Franz’s execution was laced with a faintly surreal fright and bracketed by sudden tenderness, that together cracked me in two. I broke down crying, tears falling down my cheeks as my chest was wracked with sobs I desperately kept silent in the dark of this theater I’d traveled to, like it was some sort of rite, that I must try, try not to make a sound. I don’t know why. It felt, in the moment, so important. I tried to hold so still.

★★★★★

I find documentaries like Honeyland difficult to really engage with. I can just never shake the macro view I’m always seeing in my head—that these people living in such remote poverty are doing so with people with film equipment watching them. It’s not that I think there’s an ethical or moral problem with this, the contrary: I think documentaries like Honeyland are important and valuable for the empathy they can inspire in people so far removed from this reality. That documenting these lives is itself an act of empathy.

What I find odd, in a contemporary documentary, is when the documentarians are never addressed (unlike the ones where the process of documenting is itself part of the document). Weirdly, presenting these stories as if pure, as if we’re just magically happening to witness it, unadulterated by the presence of storytellers with cameras, makes everything they show feel less real to me. I just constantly think about the practicalities of it. How did you get that shot from a distance, I’ll wonder, when it’s a continuation of the moment we were just in? Did you have to re-stage it? What sort of cajoling was necessary for this nomadic cattle farming family to agree to be filmed and pretend not to notice, when they, seemingly spontaneously and without plan, roll in to the abandoned village? Is it really true that this destitute, nearly hermit-like wild beekeeper was just already wearing a shirt in an unusual rich saffron-yellow, a color matched to the hues of her honey and beeswax? Did anyone help her dig that grave in the frozen ground. What was your thought process before your cameras followed her out into the night with a torch to chase off the wolves howling in the blackness.

I spend a lot of time thinking these questions, and it keeps me at a distance from the story the movie is actually trying to tell. And in this case, I also found the story itself difficult, due to being so bleak! Hatidze and her bees are betrayed and mistreated by this other family, and it hurts to watch. They are also quite cruel to their animals, and that was just as hard for me to get through as their interpersonal and ecological carelessness.

But, I am glad that I did. There was something rewarding in the completion of it.

★★

This was playing at my favorite farm-to-table movie theater on the lake for ages and I didn’t go see it and I cannot believe I did that to myself. Granted, if I had seen it on a big screen with surround sound I might have fully broke down, and I wouldn’t want Jordan to have to do something about this woman on the floor. As is, I cried four times, breathed a stunned “Oh my god” at twice as many moments, and spent maybe a quarter of the runtime with my knuckles pressed to my open mouth. By the end of it I had to consciously try to relax the muscles in my forehead from where they’d kept my eyebrows steepled in dazzled wonder for so long.

What is this that so emotionally tackled me? Just a very straightforward documentary of the moon landing! But I think it’s in the straightforwardness that it gets so much of its power. Apollo 11 is almost radically chronological and unadorned, zero modern framing or talking heads, composed entirely of period footage & audio from July 1969, only occasionally supplemented with very, very simple moving diagrams of the rocket’s trajectory in space. These are always black with thin white lines and the barest of labels, if any. What text appears on screen, to name people and places or check in on a countdown to an event, is invariably white, regardless of what it is superimposed on, in a san-serif font as small and lightweight as an aesthetic blog. This is something I am sure was optimized for big movie theater screens, but even though I could only read it half the time, I loved the choice. It was so minimal and unobtrusive and clean, befitting the calm, steady progression of the edit.

Every choice the filmmakers made works to create something that is almost serenely uncluttered, allowing the astonishing footage to just glow across time and outer-space, as we listen to NASA and the three astronauts talk to each other. They are scientists—what they say is frequently remarkably composed and orderly (the aesthetic again! befitting of the content!), with those occasional moments of strange, heart-clenching poetry that have since become famous. Neil Armstrong dubbing the spot on the Moon where they landed safely Tranquility Base. Aldrin’s line from the lunar surface describing its “Magnificent desolation.” A scientist quietly naming in a flow of directions to these travelers, “Mother Earth.”

This movie is a lesson in how great the impact can be of showing instead of telling. We don’t need to be told that they did all this without modern computing power, because we see the rows and rows and rows of men at desks in Houston. And we don’t need to be told that those men were indeed mostly men on the whole, mostly white, because again, there they are. We don’t need an historian or social scholar to explain to us the political importance of this mission, we can simply drop in on a news program on the radio taking a break from the Americans up in space to mention the Vietnam War still waging on that week, Senator Ted Kennedy’s vehicular homicide on Chappaquiddick… We don’t need to be told of Apollo 11’s mixed mission of discovery and propaganda, we hear it in the tone of President Kennedy’s call to space from the Oval Office, and his speech to the world after.

And we don’t need to be told that what that team achieved was, in every sense of the word, world-changing. Through the cerebral yet immediate way these events are composed onscreen, we experience ourselves the beauty of calculations so rigorously checked that the commands being executed feel like magic—as well as that freezing danger right before they go through, where it seems perhaps this gossamer thread of safety will at last snap and the astronauts be swallowed up. We feel a sense of the continuity of human exploration stretching back through the many types of ships we’ve sailed to new places, simply through nautical miles being called out to mark how many hundreds of thousands of them the astronauts are from their home port. And we feel the worry and hope and wonder of all the people gathered on the beaches, eyes trained up on the sky, just as we watch it play out again today.

★★★★★