The Woman Who Left (2017) A Film by Lav Diaz

"Having demarcated his world cleanly into abject cruelty, haunted victimhood, and pure saintliness, Diaz eases into The Woman Who Left's primary plot around the two-hour mark when a trans woman, Hollanda (John Lloyd Cruz), on the brink of death after a brutal beating, collapses her way through Horacia's front door. The scenes that follow, which feature Horacia patiently fielding Hollanda's torrents of self-loathing, healing her open wounds, and talking her down from a cliff, represent the tender highpoint of the film, and yet they're also dramatically inert, functioning transparently as allegory for a wounded nation. That the eventual resolution of this thread implies transference of violence from one outlet to another hints at the director's pained and pessimistic assessment of the country's past and present."

Full review of Lav Diaz's latest film at Slant Magazine.

Woman of the Year (1942) A Film by George Stevens

"Harping on the politics of a 1942 romantic comedy is a dubious game, especially when one considers that the context for Woman of the Year's American exceptionalism was the pall of Nazism. But the film plays particularly poorly in 2017, and not only because its central narrative thrust involves the question of how to handle refugees, the relevance or lack thereof of the traditional blue-collar American male, and the place of feminism within American life. The film's conservative agenda also shortchanges Tracy and Hepburn's chemistry. The former's earthy restraint and the latter's electric sensuality are best collided in the early stages of the plot before Sam and Tess's differing worldviews stir conflict (one alcohol-lubricated back and forth in which the lovers hesitantly flesh out their respective backstories features a sizzling arrangement of intimate close-ups). But the screenplay's emphasis on Sam and Tess's disparities quickly fosters an environment that runs counter to Tracy and Hepburn's finest asset when sharing the screen together: the sense that the actors, and not just the characters they're playing, can barely contain their affection for one another."

Full review of The Criterion Collection's new Blu-ray release of Woman of the Year continues here.

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (2016) A Film by Juho Kuosmanen

"With its 16mm black-and-white cinematography and lack of musical score, however, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki reaches further back into history for its primary cinematic touchstones, specifically to the grayscale neorealism of Ermanno Olmi and the Czech New Wave films, works which unhurriedly examined the plights of working-class everymen jostled around by forces of class and economics. It's noted often in the dialogue that Mäki's humble background is as a baker, and Elis repeatedly reminds him of the pitiful 'backwoods' to which he will return if he fails to live up to the hype. Alas, Kuosmanen places his sympathies squarely with the rube who's hopelessly out of place in a globalized market."

Review continues at Slant Magazine.

The Death of Louis XIV (2016) A Film by Albert Serra

"In prior efforts, Serra has shown a penchant for degrading his iconic subjects and passing the result off as humanizing historical realism—dwelling on Casanova as he admires his own excrement or shovels heaps of animal meat in his face, for instance. That tendency isn't fully abolished in The Death of Louis XIV, but it's tamed. The emphasis is where it should be—which is to say, not on the Sun King's increasingly black, gangrenous left leg, but on the leader's face, and the faces of those around him, as he sluggishly succumbs to his undoing. The humanity of the situation, rather than the grotesquery, is Serra's focus here, which is already a promising recalibration of his sensibility."

Review continues at Slant.

Autumn, Autumn (2016) A Film by Jang Woo-jin

"If conventional narrative cinema grammar has trained us to understand scenes taking place prior to the broadcasting of a film’s title as build-up to the story proper, a whetting of the palette for the more significant events to come, then how do we negotiate the import of Ji-hyeon’s tale, remarkably slight as it seems? This is just one of the gentle perplexities of Autumn, Autumn, a deft realist miniature that operates as both a record of everyday spaces and a document of the emotionally charged, albeit ephemeral, human dramas that pass through them. When the film abandons Ji-hyeon after its delayed title card to resume a different narrative thread, it becomes apparent that Jang’s conception of storytelling isn’t linear but delicately cubist, and rooted less by human agency than by a fixed time and place."

Full review of Autumn, Autumn, now showing at New Directors/New Films, continues here.

Song to Song (2017) A Film by Terrence Malick

"In the end, Song to Song has next to nothing of consequence to say about the music scene in 2017, just as Knight of Cups's gloss on Hollywood deal-making and networking was nothing if not incidental. Though the film features dozens of musical cues from artists ranging from Bob Marley to Sharon Van Etten to Julianna Barwick, its snapshots of big-venue machinations and backstage antics comprise only a fraction of its content. Instead, the music industry—as a combustible, always-moving collaborative enterprise in which nothing's guaranteed—provides the textural backdrop for another long-form, free-associative investigation into the highs and low of romantic love, and one that arguably constitutes the most rewarding of Malick's recent output."

Full review of my favorite Malick film since The Tree of Life continues at Slant Magazine.

Brimstone (2017) A Film by Martin Koolhoven

"Running 148 minutes and encompassing four chapters (portentously titled along biblical lines, such as 'Exodus' and 'Retribution'), the film returns over and over to scenes of frontierswomen being ruthlessly degraded by vile men; in a recurring scenario, Koolhoven frames the agonized faces of victims being dealt blood-drawing belt whippings. That Brimstone ultimately postures as a feminist yarn is unsurprising given the current market demand for Strong Female Leads, but its bid for social correctness—manifested most plainly in a last-minute uplifting voiceover—does nothing to make the film’s juvenile and numbing fixation on brutality any more palatable."

Full review at Slant Magazine.

A Cure for Wellness (2017) A Film by Gore Verbinski

"Verbinski excels at such disorienting crosscuts (the film’s literally hell-raising climax juxtaposes ghastly happenings in the spa’s basement with jubilant festivities in the ballroom above), and in a larger sense, A Cure for Wellness thrives on a collision of tones. The immaculate cosmetics of the wellness retreat itself, from the prudently manicured foliage to everyone’s spotless white uniforms, contrast with an alarming emphasis on creepy-crawly body horror. There’s enough sickly exposed white flesh on display throughout the film—often submerged in water filled with man-eating eels—to make Ulrich Seidl blush, while one bit of dental treatment/torture administered to Lockhart produces a retina-searing image worthy of early Cronenberg."

Full review of this highly entertaining movie at Slant Magazine.

Anatahan (1953) A Film by Josef Von Sternberg

"The film's starting point is the real historical incident of a Japanese squadron found stranded alive on the titular island years after the defeat of their army. What Sternberg freely imagines are the seven years of toil and hardship endured by these men while separated from their homeland, which constitutes an act of speculative empathy that puts the project squarely in the realm of storytelling. Complicating this understanding, however, is the filmmaker's decision to narrate the tale himself in a droll tone that pinballs between Job-like questioning, poetic musing, and impartial reportage, including the use of such documentary-tinged phrases as 'we can only reconstruct the events' and 'we can only surmise what happened.'"

Full review of Anatahan, now playing in a Kino Lorber restoration at Metrograph in New York City, continues at Slant.

Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire (1974) A Film by Tony Palmer

"Like [D.A.] Pennebaker, [Tony] Palmer shoots in 16mm in anonymous green rooms and regal concert halls but plays looser with his aesthetic (mixing monochrome and color stock) and allows himself more fanciful editorial digressions. A live performance of 'Sisters of Mercy,' for instance, intercuts Cohen's on-stage act with both contemporaneous footage of him on tour and various flashback snippets of the singer reading and writing poetry, while a radiant rendition of 'So Long, Marianne' intermingles impressionistic home movies of Cohen as a young boy. In a more dubious example, Palmer sources graphic clips of suffering in Vietnam during the war to complement Cohen's musings on the political utility of his music—an intrusion which effectively sullies the suggestive vagueness of his lyrics on these subjects."

Full review here.

The Squid and the Whale (2005) A Film by Noah Baumbach

"The conventional wisdom around Noah Baumbach as a cranky misanthrope with a preemptive grudge against his fictional players—one of the hoariest ad-hominem characterizations in circulation—wasn’t yet in full swing when The Squid and the Whale bruised audiences with its lucidity and rawness. Equally hard-hearted and uncompromising in its mode of delivery as its coolly received follow-ups, Margot at the Wedding and Greenberg, the film executes its mercilessness in dart throws, with each offhand aggression piercing the cork around the bull’s-eye until the board is nearly filled up and a moment of release is granted. The cumulative impact validates Baumbach’s alleged cruelty as a natural, unshakeable route to emotional truth, not a temperament crudely applied to individual scripts. (It’s telling that his latest three efforts, the breeziness of which suggest a filmmaker reading his reviews and calibrating his tone accordingly, don’t hit as hard.)"

Full review of The Squid and the Whale, now out in a new Criterion edition, continues at Slant.

Always Shine (2016) A Film by Sophia Takal

"Shot in Southern California and set in a culture of fledgling film-industry types, Sophia Takal's Always Shine is also a film that feels acutely like it was manufactured in a development office on La Cienega Boulevard. It's Queen of Earth meets Mulholland Drive, Passion with a dash of Persona, The Neon Demon in the atmospheric key of Martha, Marcy, May Marlene. It won't take a cinephile to recognize these touch points, and that probably wouldn't bother Takal, who makes sure to signal on numerous occasions—through shots of camera lenses, glimpses of electronic slates, and direct-to-camera addresses—that Always Shine isn't just an entertainment product with echoes of other films, but a narrative about the deforming, cannibalistic project of Hollywood."

Full review continues at Slant.

The Illinois Parables (2016) A Film by Deborah Stratman

"The nature of Stratman’s decade-in-the-making project recalls the work of fellow Midwesterner David Gatten, particularly the monumental Secret History of the Dividing Line, a similarly long-brewing endeavor that burrows into the implications of an obscure bit of pre-colonial American history around the Virginia and North Carolina border. Stratman even has a likeminded fondness for bygone texts, whether in her embrace of the tactile qualities of the printing press (sundry newspaper clippings are Xeroxed and optical-printed for our viewing pleasure), or in her use of epistolary ephemera on the soundtrack, such as a Ralph Waldo Emerson letter narrated by Gatten himself."

Full review at Slant.

The Quiet Man (1952) A Film by John Ford

"This being a John Wayne role in a John Ford film, Sean never tips over fully to the dark side. But four years before The Searchers mined this very territory and became canonized for it, The Quiet Man derived much of its complexity from its flirtations with the murkier shades of its star's persona. Not only is Wayne's assimilated Yankee etched with a sense of privilege that touches on the nastier registers of American machismo, his shyness is pierced by a propensity for nonverbal bluntness, his initial social grace is later undermined by a pushiness in getting his way, and, most critically, his sterling physical form is recognized for its inclinations to violence. In a radically unorthodox gesture, Ford withholds any particulars regarding Sean's background as a boxer until a moment of tension with Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen), Mary Kate's brutish brother, that dislodges a fragmented sense memory detailing his accidental murder of an opponent in the ring."

Full review of the new Olive Films 4K blu-ray at Slant Magazine.

Portrait of a Garden (2016) A Film by Rosie Stapel

"Botanists, horticulturists, and groundskeepers won't be disappointed by Rosie Stapel's Portrait of a Garden, a comprehensive visual inventory of a fabulously maintained multi-acre 'kitchen garden' on a historic Dutch estate. Others, meanwhile, may walk away feeling as indifferent to the craft of landscaping as they were when they came in—a crippling Achilles' heel in a film whose chief concern is the transmission of out-of-fashion knowledge to new generations. Peppered with a near-constant barrage of footnotes on the lower third of the frame identifying whatever varietal of crop viewers happen to be observing at a given moment, the film is insistent in its efforts to stoke interest in gardening and pruning, yet it stops short of bridging the gap for those less inherently spellbound by soil, roots, and branches."

Full review at Slant.

Autumn Lights (2016) A Film by Angad Aulakh

"Anyone who’s spent some time on Vimeo in the last few years should be familiar with a certain surge in fawning Icelandic tourism videography, the tropes of which are immediately recognizable, from time-lapse footage of waterfalls to leisurely pans of glaciers, all accompanied by sub-Sigur Rós post-rock. If a mark of distinction can be conferred upon the Icelandic-American production Autumn Lights, it’s that writer-director Angad Aulakh more or less skirts these conventions. Save for the occasional pillow shot of a distantly viewed snowcapped mountain or a glassy lake surface, the filmmaker keeps most of his story’s action confined to interiors, and when his characters do venture into the great outdoors, they spend most of their time in dense pine groves that effectively block off Iceland’s picturesque vistas."

Full review at Slant.

The Girlfriend Experience: Season 1 (2016) A TV Series by Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan

"Seimetz and Kerrigan’s first stab at mainstream television proceeds with series producer Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 feature of the same name as its narrative and aesthetic model, and they’ve clearly studied up on his coolly anthropological late style. The show’s action occurs exclusively in office buildings, apartments, hotels, and restaurants of the most exquisite architectural modernism, with immaculately dusted reflective surfaces and symmetrically arranged décor implicitly demanding that anyone within these spaces hold themselves with a comparable degree of sharpness. And true to their overseer’s contempt for perfunctory shot-reverse-shot editing patterns, Seimetz and Kerrigan, who swap helming duties on a more or less episode-by-episode basis, exhibit a fondness for covering scenes in wide establishing shots that weigh principal and background talent equally, creating a sense of ambient surveillance only compounded when one master shot is followed with yet another spatially disorienting angle from some other distant corner."

I actually wrote about TV. My full review of the excellent first season of The Girlfriend Experience continues over at Slant.

Richard Linklater: Dream is Destiny (2016) A Film by Louis Black and Karen Bernstein

"'He kinda has to create another world to express how he feels about this one,' enthuses Boyhood star Ellar Coltrane of director Richard Linklater during the procession of admiring quotes that opens Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny, the third recent release to offer a peek into the life of the Texan filmmaker and the second to do so in the style of a conventional expository documentary. Such an awe-strikingly general statement (about what director could this not be said?) isn't exactly a surprise from a young actor, but it's also not really the kind of sound bite that primes a viewer to expect critical rigor, and in placing it right at the head of their film, directors Louis Black and Karen Bernstein set an unfortunate precedent that's seldom surpassed. In fact, Coltrane's quote isn't even the flimsiest inclusion: At one point, longtime Linklater editor Sandra Adair declares that “he knows his characters so well and he understands the kinds of films he's making.”

Full review at Slant.

Indignation (2016) A Film by James Schamus

"Schamus's debut feature is impressive for how its tamped-down style and the coming-of-age narrative work so confidently in tandem, with the filmmaking's sedate professionalism increasingly reflecting a milieu in which decorum is paramount, and any behavioral deviation stands out. Marcus's decision, egged on by his vigilantly cautious parents, to attend Winesburg College while his peers ship off to the Korean War is itself a deviation, and it sets into motion a slowly dawning realization for the young man to the limited pathways allowed by the conservative society he's been raised in. If Newark feels to him like a hermetically sealed mini-universe lorded over by his paranoid father (Danny Burstein) and orbiting around only the prospect of the small-time family butchering business, then Winesburg, with its mandatory sermons and rigidly compartmentalized campus social groups, is just another trap."

Full review here.

For the Plasma (2014) A Film by Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan

"Among the films to emerge in recent years to exhibit the influence of Jacques Rivette, Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan's For the Plasma wears its reverence for the French director most transparently. It gives us a coastal Maine setting vibrating with an air of the unreal; two female protagonists who, while tasked initially with one project, gradually become embroiled in other clandestine pursuits signifying some slippery conspiracy; a chain of scenarios involving mapping, tracing, and analyzing; and well-dressed businessmen with apparent connections to a larger, just-out-of-reach intrigue. The film's two leads resemble Rivette muses of yesteryear, with frizzy-haired, monotone Rosalie Lowe evoking Bulle Ogier and the boyish Anabelle LeMieux inviting comparisons to Juliet Berto circa Out 1. Eventually, one even goes boating."

Review continues here.