A famous writer and socialite rings in his 65th birthday with a typically extravagant party, but a series of deaths makes him reexamine his hollow existence. Sorrentino has a knack for staging the most grotesquely opulent nightlife, but his obvious love for Rome and for his lead actor (the mesmerizing Toni Servillo) shines through any hints of cynicism.
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Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: ‘Give me leave to do my utmost.’ Two Lutheran sisters in a Danish village take in a French refugee in her hour of need. She repays them years later by preparing an authentic Parisian banquet for their small congregation. A gentle reminder to experience gratitude by fully enjoying the gifts we have, not letting piety or self-righteousness get in the way. And that presented with care and artistry, a meal can achieve sublime spiritual grace.
A squeamish undertaker gets dragged kicking and screaming into the execution business in order to keep his father-in-law’s state-funded apartment. Reveling in the absurd lengths a bureaucracy will go to in pursuit of the perfect, dignified murder, Berlanga condemns the ways we’re supposed to keep the gears moving smoothly so atrocities can be committed in our name.
What are we yearning for? Where does all this yearning come from? After this past week (and past four years), I wanted dance. The joy and pain and love and loss in Pina Bausch’s choreography, immortalized on film with deep care and ingenuity by Wim Wenders, felt like a purging.
Leading up to this Election Day, I looked to Barbara Kopple’s tribute to organizing for perspective. I’m in awe of the mobilization we’ve seen over the past four years. Whatever happens today, the fight will not be over. But thank you to everyone who worked and donated and fretted and raged because your neighbor deserves to live with dignity. This documentary reminded me how long and sisyphean that tradition is, but that there is no cause more urgent and worthy.
A French Mad Scientist movie to close out October. A plastic surgeon tries to steal the faces of young women to transplant onto his daughter, but his experiments break free of his control. Elegant and grisly in equal measure.
This vortex of torment will whirl for all eternity. A student and everyone he cares about are pulled down through eight realms of hell to answer for his sins, each level more gruesome than the last. Horror pioneer Nobuo Nakagawa created lakes of blood, wheels of fire, and fields of severed heads: a landscape of terrors spread out across a soundstage. It may be sixty years old, but his combination of graphic torture with unnervingly spare moments of reflection kept me off-balance and left me squirming. The sooner a person returns to dust, the sooner that person will be liberated, transformed, enlightened, reincarnated. A Czech man looking to drum up more traffic to his crematorium cozies up to the burgeoning Nazi movement, in a movie that’s one part pioneering horror film and one part blackest of black satires. Rudolf Hrušínský slithers along his character’s transformation from mere greedy businessman to unhinged zealot, dragging us queasily into the genesis of an unspeakably evil idea. 15 months and 65 movies ago, I picked a Kiarostami film to kick this off, so I thought I’d try another, and it completely blew my mind. A man drives around Tehran trying to pay someone to give him a proper burial after he ends his life, but the people he coaxes into his car are wary of committing a crime against God. These arguments are enthralling in their simplicity, but every frame tips the scales in favor of the ephemeral beauty of life.
I watched Ghatak’s A RIVER CALLED TITAS back in March, and I love how he underpins his melodramas with a deeply truthful central performance. Supriya Choudhury plays a daughter who gives up her studies in order to provide for her family. As she puts everyone’s needs ahead of her own, the Bengali intellectual class she was raised to join is left to flounder as refugees. One night, when she’s on the brink of losing everything, she asks her brother to teach her a song. Their tear-streaked faces barely lit, it’s one of the most beautiful scenes I’ve watched in ages.
Anyone who pays heed to the world is wounded I am weary of the scars Yesterday was better than today I am weary of tomorrows A man doesn’t stay the same forever And I am weary of empty song. Armenian director Sergei Parajanov fills the deceptively simple story of ashugh Sayat-Nova with imagery unlike anything I’ve seen, staging everyday activities to feel both sacred and sensuous, familiar and alien. By creating his own unique, self-described “film poem,” Parajanov lets his cultural heritage and identity shine through a period of Soviet homogeny. As seismic meteorological events in Sydney grow more and more bizarre, a barrister retained to defend four Aboriginal men from murder charges begins to suspect that the case, the inexplicable weather, and his ominous dreams may all be interconnected. Combining mysticism and political urgency with a mounting apocalyptic dread, Peter Weir hints at a planet turning on a society that refuses to reckon with its crimes.
Bong Joon-ho credits his mentor Kim Ki-young for inspiring PARASITE with this story of a young woman who infiltrates a piano teacher’s household and tears it apart from the inside. Both filmmakers lay bare the middle-class temptation to prioritize upward mobility over the humanity of others.
Raise ravens, and they'll gouge your eyes out. This movie feels like a haunted companion piece to THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, with both starring Ana Torrent as a young girl obsessed with the incomprehensibility of death. After she watches her mother die horribly of cancer, the adults around her stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the ghosts that fill the house, leaving her to navigate her trauma and rage alone. In his first feature, Lars von Trier creates a scorched metaphysical purgatory called Europe, where a policeman’s methodical system of retracing the steps of a killer slowly deteriorates his own sense of identity. MELANCHOLIA and BREAKING THE WAVES will continue to be the von Trier movies I return to for emotional heft, but his surreal take on noir is riveting.
This epic is bursting with such emotion the camera starts to shake. Solás portrays three periods of revolution in Cuba through three young women named Lucía. When each respective uprising fails to live up to its ideals, all three vibrantly spontaneous Lucías (Raquel Revuelta in 1895, Eslinda Núñez in 1932, and Adela Legrá in 196-?) have a powerfully different response to that injustice.
Nina Hoss brings churning depth to the role of a Holocaust survivor whose facial reconstructive surgery after the war leaves her unrecognizable to her own husband. Silently begging the man she loves to see her, while pushing down fears he may have been responsible for her capture, she represents a people unable to return to the moment before their country betrayed them.
In the time of Zoom Theatre, I have a special appreciation for the magic trick of taking a play set entirely in a kitchen and expanding it for the camera without letting the urgency dissipate. These caged animals still feel trapped but not stagebound, as Sjöberg’s lyrical direction allows their past traumas to seep through the walls, bringing their competing need to transcend their class and sex into stark relief.
Felipe Cazals recreates this true story with the cold lucidity of a documentary and the creeping dread of a horror movie, showing us how a small-town priest whipped up such anti-communist hysteria in his congregation that he could direct them to murder five young mountain climbers. A chilling example of how fearmongering and otherism can be exploited to drive a community to violence.
The earliest Mike Leigh piece I’ve seen is full of the vivid characterizations and sublimated feeling his process is known for. Ground down by Margaret Thatcher’s austerity, a family on the dole covers their resentment by tearing each other down instead, sabotaging each opportunity any of them have to change their circumstances. Gary Oldman’s manic skinhead is the showy performance, but I found Tim Roth’s debilitatingly shy “Muppet” of a little brother to be captivating.
We former, present and future colonized people have contributed greatly to the foundation of your industrial and economic capital. Should the interest on that capital not be our right? Please don’t say that we’re costing you dear. The help you’re giving to us is aimed above all at preserving your own markets and maintaining your economic privileges. Fifty years ago, Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo took on France’s exploitation of African immigrants in an “authentic act of rage and liberation” that cuts deep to this day. What shook me most about Salomon Perel’s account of the four years he lived among the Nazis by pretending to be an “Aryan German,” was how effective this teenager was at blending in. He not only survived but thrived, becoming beloved by those who would have killed him if they suspected he were Jewish. Agnieszka Holland's adaptation taps into the seductive urge to belong that fuels even the most repugnant ideologies, and she makes us feel for the boy's struggle to keep a tenuous hold of his identity.
Reasoning that the communal spring is on his land, a farmer claims it for himself, and cuts off his village’s water supply in order to tend to his own tobacco fields. Erksan and his lead Erol Taş nail both the savvy rationalizing and repellent gluttony of the powerful who brazenly hoard resources at the expense of their fellow men.
Rounded up into a detention center and brutalized by vicious guards and police, a young boy and his friends break out and make a life of crime for themselves in São Paulo. Every one of the kids is unforgettable, but especially Lilica, the trans girl who heads up the gang after the corrupt cops murder her lover.
These things make you gradually come to believe in fate. However meticulous and painstaking you are, the tiniest error can be fatal.
An executive assistant, cut loose when a competing firm absorbs her company, tries to scrape the money together to move to the States with her boyfriend, a former Little League star. Their irreconcilable priorities pit high-rises and Kenny Loggins against the undertow of family loyalty and nostalgia, subverting any hope of independence. |
The Bri-terion CollectionI’m loving the Criterion Channel streaming service, so every week I’m going to share my favorite new find. 
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