Review: The Favourite (2018)

* * * *
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring: Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone

Most movies are lucky if they feature one really great role for an actress. Yorgos Lantimos' latest, The Favourite, can boast of having three. It's a delight that is nearly unheard of. Setting its action at the court of Queen Anne (played with entertaining petulance by Olivia Colman), The Favorite is all about the dangerous game of social dominance and power, of how leverage can be useful only insofar as someone knows how to use it properly, of how one might not even realize that they were gambling until they see how badly they've overplayed their hand. It's a dark comedy about two ruthless women, one of whom tells the other, "We'll make a killer of you yet" and lives to regret it when she sees just how good the other is at the game. It's fantastic.

Review: Roma (2018)

* * * *
Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Starring: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira

Alfonso Cuaron's last film, 2013's Gravity, was a cinematic experience that captured the vastness of space while telling what is, ultimately, an intimate story about a woman working through her grief. His latest film, Roma, is a story told on a small scale that suggests the great, wide world going on around it (and, while Gravity was a film that practically demanded to be seen on as big a screen as possible, Roma, which has been released in theaters and Netflix simultaneously, is intimate enough that it's impact isn't lessened by watching in on a smaller screen). Though he's made only five films in the last seventeen years including this one (the others being Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Children of Men, and Gravity), Cuaron is one of the most reliably great filmmakers working today and Roma makes a strong case for being his best film to date.

Review: BlacKkKlansman (2018)

* * * *
Director: Spike Lee
Starring: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Topher Grace

I have something of a love/hate relationship with Spike Lee. I think that he's made two of the greatest feature films to come out in the last thirty years (Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X) and one (25th Hour) that deserves, at least, to be in any conversation of the greatest films to come out in the last thirty years. He's a gifted filmmaker and one who is unafraid to take a clear political stance in his work - a rare virtue in an industry that, more often than not, demands a certain amount of watering down in order to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. My problem with Lee is that, despite his extensive filmmography and 32 years of trying, he has yet to create a decent female character (don't even bring up She's Gotta Have It, which is sometimes cited as Lee's "feminist" film, even though it's anything but). His latest film, BlacKkKlansman, doesn't change that - on reflection I'm pretty sure that there are only 4 women in the entire film with speaking lines and one is just a disembodied voice coming from off-screen - but the rest of it is so good that I can get past that.

Review: You Were Never Really Here (2018)

* * * *
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix

If you have any doubt that Joaquin Phoenix is one of the greatest actors of his generation, it should be put to rest by You Were Never Really Here, Lynne Ramsay's lean and brutal adaptation of the novel of the same name by Jonathan Ames. He is at once savage and fragile here, his character broken and haunted and willing to perform incredible acts of violence. He finds no catharsis in these acts and neither does the film, which offers the least glamorized depiction of violence in recent memory, replacing the stylized trappings that can make violence on film seem like something celebratory and replacing them with a sense of disorientation. Running at a breathless 90 minutes and never pausing to let you find your footing, forcing you to just let yourself be pulled into its narrative riptide, You Were Never Really Here is one of the most stunning viewing experiences of the year.

Review: Phantom Thread (2017)

* * * *
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville

Generally speaking, I'm not a person who thinks that spoilers matter. What happens is much less interesting to me than how it happens, particularly since plot twists tend to be so telegraphed anyway. I knew that there was some sort of twist to Phantom Thread but I didn't know what it was (and not for lack of trying, as the giddiness with which some reviews talked around the twist piqued my interest, but Movie Spoiler didn't have a write up for the film yet and Wikipedia's entry for it was still just a couple of sentences that only gave the basic premise). I'm glad that I didn't because in a million years I don't think I would have guessed that the plot would take the turn that it does until it was already veering into that other lane, and that realization that it was taking that turn (and then the turns that flowed out of that one) was one of the great pleasures of watching the movie. I think that Phantom Thread, a meticulously put together movie in every respect, is a film that can be enjoyed even if you go into it knowing where it's headed, but it's a lot more fun if you go into it cold. So if you're planning to see it, stop reading here, because spoilers lie ahead.

Review: The Shape of Water (2017)

* * * *
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, Michael Stuhlbarg

Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme, beauty and the beast. There's nothing new about stories of women seeing past the beastly exterior of a monster and falling in love with the soul that exists beneath the surface - movies called "Beauty and the Beast" are, at this point, a subgenre in and of themselves - but a filmmaker as creative as Guillermo del Toro, who is dedicated to mixing the sinister with the beautiful, leaving you at once enchanted and unsettled, is able to make an old formula feel fresh. The Shape of Water is a wonderful fairy tale for adults, impeccably put together on a visual level, masterfully unfolded on a narrative level, and built around one great leading performance and four great supporting performances. If you only see one movie this year about a woman falling in love with a fish man, make it The Shape of Water.

Review: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

* * * *
Director: Martin McDonagh
Starring: Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson

We are living in an extraordinarily angry time (or maybe it just seems that way because the internet makes that anger inescapable) and Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri functions like a snapshot of that overriding cultural emotion. It's a film about people who are angry about circumstances they cannot change and who, without any productive outlet for that emotion, have nothing but the violence and pain they're capable of inflicting so that the outside world is as chaotic as they feel inside. If you're familiar with McDonagh's previous features In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, you'll be prepared for the violence of Three Billboards and for the fact that the film often finds a comedic beat or two in the midst of that violence, but what sets this film slightly apart from those previous two is how deeply felt it is on an emotional level. It's angry and then that anger begins to fade into despair and it just leaves you feeling wrecked in the best possible way.

Review: Lady Bird (2017)

* * * *
Director: Greta Gerwig
Starring: Saoirse Ronan

Lady Bird is the movie that most coming of age movies wish they were. It's funny and sharp and sweet, its characters are so well-realized that you want to both hug them and smack them, and its performances are so great that it's hard to pick which one is best, though Saoirse Ronan might get the edge by virtue of being the film's star and the focus of nearly every scene. As an actress, Greta Gerwig has long-since established herself as a darling of indie film, and as a writer she has established herself as a keen comedic observer of Millennial anxiety. Now she begins to make the case for herself as a director to be reckoned with, one capable of making the absolutely ordinary into something exceptionally compelling. Lady Bird is easily one of the best movies of the year and one of the best films of its type.

Review: Lady Macbeth (2017)

* * * *
Director: William Oldroyd
Starring: Florence Pugh, Cosmo Jarvis, Naomi Ackie

"Aren't you bored, Katherine?" Man, is he ever going to regret asking that question, because yes she is and her quest to not be bored is going to ruin everyone. Loosely adapted from Nikolai Leskov's novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the film transports the action to Victorian era England, but approaches it with a sensibility that is not only thoroughly modern, but intensely relevant. Built around a stunning and sharp-edged performance by Florence Pugh, Lady Macbeth is a film that upends expectations and becomes increasingly enthralling as it winds its way towards a conclusion that is perhaps inevitable, but savage nevertheless. The feature debut of director William Oldroyd, Lady Macbeth is a wonderfully confident debut that succeeds thematically where many films have failed.

Review: Dunkirk (2017)

* * * *
Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Brannagh

I cannot imagine seeing Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk in IMAX. I'm sure it's an incredible viewing experience, I have no doubt that certain elements of the film would actually be enhanced by being seen in that format, but I don't think I'd be able to handle the intensity of it. I had to stress eat my way through the regular theatrical format as it is. That's how immersive an experience Dunkirk is; it leaves you feeling breathless and worn-out, but also exhilarated and, despite the deep wells of despair open just beneath the surface of many scenes, hopeful. The story of the evacuation of Dunkirk is one of disaster, destruction, and death, on the one hand, and the miracle of ordinary people stepping forward to do an extraordinary thing on the other. It's an epic tale told here in intimate, searing detail, minimalist in its scope but maximized in its power. Dunkirk is a triumph of filmmaking destined to join the ranks of the all-time great war movies as a standard bearer of the genre.

Review: 20th Century Women (2016)

* * * *
Director: Mike Mills
Starring: Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Elle Fanning, Lucas Jade Zumann

Annette, you were robbed. You too, Greta. 20th Century Women opened right at the very end of 2016 for an Oscar qualifying run (playing in just 4 theaters from December 28th to January 5th, and then expanding to a few hundred theaters in January) and I can't help but wish that instead of doing that, the distributor had held it back for a mid-year release this year. With a last minute qualifying run, 20th Century Women never really stood a chance (though it did manage to net one Oscar nomination, for writer/director Mike Mills for Best Original Screenplay). It's too small, too intimate, to be able to make an impact with that kind of release. It's the kind of film that needs a chance to marinate a bit and build an audience, not unlike Mills' previous film, Beginners, which received a June release and for which Christopher Plummer won an Oscar. But art is ultimately its own reward, and though it doesn't have a chance to walk away with the slew of awards it richly deserves, 20th Century Women will nevertheless go down as one of 2016's finest films.

Review: Jackie (2016)

* * * *
Director: Pablo Larrain
Starring: Natalie Portman

History isn't what happened, it's how what happened is remembered. That's why a phrase like "history is written by the victors" exists, because the legacy of an event is not a passive thing that simply occurs naturally, but something that is actively created and shaped for a specific purpose. Of course there are multiple versions of the legacy of John F. Kennedy, including the legacy of conspiracy created by his assassination, and the legacy of ambition tied to tragedy that hangs over the Kennedy family in popular imagination, but Jackie is specifically about the romantic legacy of Camelot, that enduring image of the Kennedy administration as being bathed in a golden, glamorous glow, as fragile and fleeting as it was beautiful. Jackie is about the creation of that idea, first given voice in an interview of Jackie Kennedy for Life magazine, and it's a raw, brutally intimate portrait of personal grief played out on a national stage. It's also a great movie that centers on what may prove to be the defining performance of Natalie Portman's career.

Review: Moonlight (2016)

* * * *
Director: Barry Jenkins
Starring: Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Trevante Rhodes

The protagonist of Moonlight exists in a space of silence. Told at one point that only he can decide who he's going to be, he faces the additional challenge of having to navigate the fraught terrain of identity without the assistance of a language with which to define it. He can only understand it in the negative: what he shouldn't be, what it's unacceptable to be, what it's dangerous to be. So he remains silent most of the time, searching for a space in which he can belong or for a way to belong in the space he's currently in, a desert of outward expression. Directed by Barry Jenkins, and adapted by him from Tarell Alvin McCraney's play "In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue," the film is a vision of restraint, and somehow the more restrained it is, the more compelling it is - right up until the end, that is, when the floodgates finally open and the film achieves a breathtaking level of catharsis. Moonlight is a film that's going to come up a lot in the coming weeks as the year-end awards and nominations are given out, and it deserves every bit of the adulation it's about to get.

Review: The Tribe (2014)

* * * *
Director: Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi
Starring: Grigoriy Fesenko

Movies started as a medium without voices. Not without sound, necessarily, as most films had at least a musical score to assist in setting the mood of the action on screen, and not without words, either, as intertitles were used to help move the stories along, but without the sound of the characters' voices. But even in the days of silent films there were filmmakers who used intertitles sparingly and were content to let the images do the talking for themselves. Once the movies started talking, we started to rely increasingly on dialogue to provide us with the sign posts to help guide us through a narrative, so the idea of a movie that doesn't use words at all may seem daunting, or even like an endurance test. Myroslav Slaboshptyskyi's The Tribe is a film set at a school for the deaf in which the dialogue occurs only through Ukrainian Sign Language, none of which is subtitled. To watch it requires that you fill in a certain amount of blanks in order to keep up with it, but Slaboshptyskyi is so good at conveying the story through images that The Tribe is a deeply rich and engrossing viewing experience even if you can't grasp everything that's happening down to its last nuance.

Review: 13th (2016)

* * * *
Director: Ava DuVernay

Words matter, which is part of the reason why the last several months have been so infuriating, as so many people with political power and media platforms have refused to call a spade a spade as a man who has built his campaign around racist policies and has explicitly encouraged racially charged violence at his rallies, and implicitly encouraged it at poling stations, runs for President. In an effort to avoid the accusation of "liberal bias," the media has helped cultivate the idea that the two major candidates are equally legitimate as candidates, even though one is basically just a politician - someone that you might agree with or might not, but who at least seems to understand and accept the limitations of power in a democracy - and the other is an insane megalomaniac who wants to curtail the freedom of the press, imprison his political rivals, outlaw a religion he doesn't like, and literally enclose his country inside a wall. Up until a week ago, when the tipping point was apparently reached, finally allowing all bets to be off, even the media outlets calling out the Republican nominee had largely avoided coming right out and calling this what it is, preferring to use terms like "dog whistle" rather than simply say he's racist. Well, he's racist. He's racist in a way that would have given Strom Thurmond pause, and that dude was fucking racist. In this bizarro world of pulling punches, Ava DuVernay's 13th is a breath of fresh air for saying exactly what it thinks. Bracing, thought provoking, and urgent, 13th isn't just one of the most important films of the year, it's one of the best.

Review: Son of Saul (2015)

* * * *
Director: Laszlo Nemes
Starring: Geza Rohrig

Son of Saul depicts a world of chaos and horror unfolding over the course of 107 fast-paced minutes. Although it really isn't graphic, its filmmaking strategy grabs you in an instant and leaves you feeling a bit sick and dizzy with its first-person immediacy; it's a film that is as much an experience as it is a narrative. A Holocaust drama and the winner of the most recent Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, a bare description of Son of Saul may make it sound like the sort of movie you "should" see, in the same way that you "should" go to the dentist, but that built-in feeling of necessity does it a disservice. Son of Saul is a difficult watch, but it's not a chore to watch; it's a totally engrossing artistic triumph.

Review: 45 Years (2015)

* * * *
Director: Andrew Haigh
Starring: Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay

45 years, undone in one week. If nothing else, Andrew Haigh's 45 Years is a searing examination of how fragile one's sense of security, and even one's sense of identity, can be in a long-term relationship. After 45 years, you might think that things really are the way that they are, but truth in this instance is a delicate thing, dependent on the other person being on the exact same page, dependent perhaps on the other person having no significant history before you. Not even love exists in a void - even after 45 years. Wonderfully, patiently directed by Andrew Haigh and exquisitely acted by Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, 45 Years is a small-scale tragedy and a pitch perfect character study.

Review: Weiner (2016)

* * * *
Director: Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg

Some documentaries require a bit of luck to achieve their potential for greatness. This was true of 2012's The Queen of Versailles, in which filmmaker Lauren Greenfield had the good fortune to already be filming David and Jackie Siegel to tell a different story when the housing market collapsed, turning their tale from a lifestyles of the rich and the famous type hagiography into an epic tragedy about greed and needless excess, and it's true of Weiner, Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg's film about disgraced politician Anthony Weiner. Conceived as a comeback story about a man putting his mistakes behind him and rescuing his legacy from the gutter, it instead plays witness to that man throwing his second chance away. Both documentaries were lucky to be in the right place at the right time with a camera, but they aren't great because they were lucky. They're great because their filmmakers know how to use what fortune has dropped into their laps to tell stories that are deeply compelling and fascinating.

Review: Mustang (2015)

* * * *
Director: Deniz Gamze Erguven
Starring: Güneş Şensoy, Doğa Doğuşlu, Elit İşcan, Tuğba Sunguroğlu, İlayda Akdoğan

The change, when it happens, is instant. One moment life is one way and in the next moment everything is different, never to be the same again. Such is the situation for the five sisters in Deniz Gamze Erguven's Mustang, one of last year's nominees for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and a powerful, deeply-felt film about young women growing up in circumstances designed to curtail any social power they might have and any sense of agency over themselves or their lives. It's an absolutely stellar film about how patriarchy works, about the hypocrisy and corruption that resides at the core of such a system, and about the minor and major ways that it can be rebelled against. It's a sad and maddening film in many ways, but in other ways it's also surprisingly funny and, ultimately, hopeful.

Review: High Fidelity (2000)

* * * *
Director: Stephen Frears
Starring: John Cusack

The saying goes that misery loves company, but that seems self-defeating. Misery loves solitude, loves the thought that the anguish one is experiencing is somehow unique, something no one else can possibly understand. Misery craves isolation, not companionship, because companionship might break the spell. High Fidelity, based on the novel by Nick Hornby, is about a man who is miserable, who is so entrenched in the notion that he's the sad sack who's always being rejected that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Sharp, funny, and incisive, High Fidelity is one of the rare films that manages to clearly express its protagonist's point of view without adopting it for itself. High Fidelity isn't often spoken of as one of the best films of the 2000's (perhaps because, in certain respects, it is very much a product of the 1990's), but it absolutely is one of the decade's best films.