Once in awhile I get asked what are my favorite films, or my top ten greatest movies, and so forth. My lists have changed over time, but there are certain films that have always been on it. One of these has an unusual title, and I often get puzzled looks because people aren’t familiar with it. From Germany in 1931, directed by Fritz Lang, its title consists of just one letter: M.
Lang had become the most prominent German film director of the silent era, specializing in films of crime and suspense, but most famous today for his 1927 epic science fiction film Metropolis. With the coming of sound, Lang dived right in with this, his first talkie, and it proved to be a sensation.
M stands for murder. Someone is killing little girls. Lang doesn’t show any of these murders, but the way he tells the story is chilling. We hear the killer whistling the Hall of the Mountain King theme from Grieg’s Peer Gynt but we can’t see his face clearly. In one scene, a child carrying a balloon looks up at a stranger in the street. We cut to the worried mother at her home waiting for the girl to return. Then we cut to a shot of the balloon floating along until it gets caught in telephone wires. The horror is conveyed indirectly, but unmistakably.
Lang seems completely at ease in the sound format. There is no musical score, but the dialogue, sound effects and design are brilliantly realized. The movie gradually expands and becomes more and more complex. The public are panicking, and the police respond by raiding every outlaw hideout they know of, and arresting people right and left in hope of flushing out the murderer. Eventually, the city’s criminal underworld gets fed up with all this. These killings are bad for business. Since the cops aren’t having any luck solving the case, the crooks—including burglars, extortionists, safe crackers, and pickpockets—decide to pull together and somehow catch the culprit themselves. What follows is an impeccable, intricate, and exciting series of episodes in which the criminals use their own extensive knowledge and contacts in the underworld in order to discover who the murderer is, capture him, and then put him on trial in their own makeshift court.
All the while, Lang is implying a kind of equivalence between the cops and the crooks. In case you haven’t got it yet, in one shot, the chief of thieves begins to make a gesture, and then Lang cuts to the chief of police completing the same gesture. This is a society on the brink of collapse into utter corruption, and the story of the child killer is in a way just a symbol of that deeper social malaise.
It’s not spoiling anything to tell you that the murderer gets caught, although I won’t reveal what happens next. The actor playing him is Peter Lorre. This is Peter Lorre before anyone had ever heard of him. He only had a couple of bit parts before this. And it will give you an idea of how great he is in M that he became instantly famous because of this film. Of cours

Martin McDonagh returns to Ireland for this tale of contagious madness between two friends falling out.
Martin McDonagh made his name as a playwright, with dramas set largely in rural west Ireland and featuring his own special brand of dark humor. The isolation and peculiar habits of his characters throw light on the conflicts and absurdities that motivate people to do crazy and destructive things. In the 2000s he started directing movies, and now his latest film returns to Ireland, powerfully reigniting the creative spark of his earlier plays. It’s called The Banshees of Inisherin.
Colin Farrell plays Pádraic, a small farmer on the fictional island of Inisherin, off the coast of County Galway in Ireland. The story, which takes places a hundred years ago, begins with him knocking on the door of his best friend Colm’s house to go to the pub together as they always do in the evening. But Colm, played by Brendan Gleeson, doesn’t answer. Pádraic can see him through the window, practicing on his fiddle, but banging on the window and speaking to him elicits no response. For some reason Colm is deliberately ignoring him.
As time goes on, and the silence continues, Pádraic demands to know why he is being treated this way. The blunt answer is rather shocking: Colm wants to spend more time composing music and developing his craft as a musician, and he thinks he’s been wasting his time talking and drinking with Pádraic instead. He says that Pádraic is a dull person whom he doesn’t like anymore.
This is a simple yet very unusual premise for a film. Pádraic doesn’t know how to deal with the rejection—it’s a small island, and losing his best friend confronts him with a loneliness he can’t accept. He refuses to take it as final, but continues to try to engage with Colm, even though Colm insists that he must stop talking to him. There’s a steadily escalating emotional pressure that begins with wry comedy and gradually becomes much more serious. We realize that although Pádraic can’t stop himself and is emotionally tone deaf, Colm himself is really rather disturbed. Almost accidentally, we also find out that in 1923 the bloody Irish civil war is going on. As a kind of echo of the personal turmoil on the island, the characters can sometimes hear gunfire on the shore, a deadly political turmoil in the distance.
Gleeson, with his burly presence and grumpy demeanor, is reliably intense as Colm, but the central focus is on Colin Farrell. I’ve seen him in lots of films over the years, and I’d say he has what you might call a movie star persona. But there’s none of that here. He plays a completely different kind of character than I’ve ever seen him do before, and it’s excellent. With a wide-eyed earnestness and vulnerable manner that reveals, against his will, a yearning insecurity, Pádraic is foolish, impulsive, yet unmistakably tender hearted. Farrell crafts this unusual man from the inside, and we see him to best effect in rela

The Banshees of Inisherin

Two films examine the plight of migrants, the first about seeking asylum, the second about the danger of going missing or getting killed.
Ours is an age of migrants, those martyred by the legal fictions we call borders. Two recent films explore this persistent, troubling experience.
Flee is from a very small genre, that of an animated documentary for adults. It presents the true account of an Afghan man, named Amin for the purposes of the film, whose family escaped from their war-torn country in the 1990s, ending up in Russia, where discrimination and poverty followed them. Since they were officially stateless, getting out of Russia was extremely difficult. We are shown their bitter ordeals, including being returned to Russia after trying to make it by ship to Finland. Always present was the risk of violence and exploitation.
Amin finally made it to Denmark as an unaccompanied minor with refugee status. But in order to achieve that status, he had to make up a story about his whole family being murdered, and from then on he didn’t dare reveal the truth for fear of being sent back. After decades, and after coming to terms with being a gay man, he needed to tell the truth in order to live honestly with his partner, and reunite if possible with his family. A good friend, Jonas Poher Rasmussen, is the man he tells all of this, and Rasmussen is the director of this film.
The animation is stark and somewhat abstract, the better to portray the constant tension and loneliness of the desperate migrant. Oddly, making the film in animated form creates an emotional experience more vivid for us than it might have been as an ordinary documentary. Flee has a very affecting, visceral impact.
Identifying Features, the film debut of Mexican director Fernanda Valadez, explores another aspect of this experience: the migrants who disappear or die. In the first scene we see a young man, in fact a teenager, approaching as if in a dream or memory, the house of his mother, and telling her that he is going to cross the border with a friend, who has an uncle in the States who will get them work. But after two months, with no word from her son, the mother, Magdalena, played with sorrowful dignity by Mercedes Hernández, is deeply troubled.
The mother of the other boy is told that her son’s body has been found, and when she travels to the place housing remains of missing migrants, she’s unable to identify the body because it’s been burned beyond recognition. Magdalena then travels to the border, and the rest of the film, using haunting and poetic imagery, at times evoking spiritual symbolism, weaves a story of desperate hope. Along the way, we discover the perils of navigating a border crossing, beset with predators who kill and steal from the powerless, along with a sinister alliance between police, military, and the cartels.
Halfway through, we meet another young man, Miguel, played by David Illescas, who has been detained trying to cross and is now deported back to

Flee / Identifying Features

Frank Capra’s parable about goodness versus the tyranny of profit bombed on its original release, but then gradually gained classic status with later audiences.
Among the handful of older films that are generally considered classic Christmas movies, It’s a Wonderful Life is quite different. Yes, the last fourth or so of the movie takes place during Christmas, and there’s a Christmas tree and some Christmas music, but other than that, the holiday is not an explicit theme of the picture. Frank Capra’s 1946 film, expanded from a magazine short story with help from the great screenwriting duo Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, is actually an attempt to explore one of the most difficult themes in literature: that of the genuinely good man.
What is true goodness, and how does it fare in the world? The good man in It’s a Wonderful Life is George Bailey, who runs a building and loan company in a small town called Bedford Falls. Capra picked the perfect actor to play this character, James Stewart, who I think played good men more convincingly than anyone else ever has.
As the film begins, we find ourselves in the realm of myth. We see blinking stars and hear heavenly voice-overs. There’s a man, George Bailey—he needs help right away, and a guardian angel named Clarence is assigned to the job. He is shown George’s life in flashback, which is how we the audience see the story. From the first scene, where George rescues his brother from falling through the ice, while losing the hearing in one ear as a consequence, we see how George—who has normal human aspirations—ends up selflessly sacrificing his own chances and opportunities to help others. For him, it means staying in Bedford Falls instead of going to college or traveling. He marries his childhood sweetheart, played by Donna Reed, and has four kids. But the selfish actions of the town’s wealthiest man, the bank president, Mr. Potter, played by Lionel Barrymore, continues to create hardship for George and the town, which leads to ruin and despair. And here we get back to the mythical element: when George says it would have been better not to be born, Clarence decides to show him what the town would be like without him.
I used to make fun of this movie because of its sentimentality, and also, well, because of angels and the supernatural. But what I see now is a splendidly crafted parable about what really counts in life. Capra saw that America was in the process of changing in fundamental ways after World War II. The film idealizes pre-war America as a world of small town decency, community, and family. But what we see on the horizon is the profit motive as the dominant social principle. In the alternate life without George, Bedford Falls has become Pottersville, named after the film’s villain, Mr. Potter. It is a soulless, lonely place where people live in anguish and fear. The film has great nostalgia for the past, and anxiety for the future: Capra saw the postwar future as loud

It's a Wonderful Life

Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s provocative 1985 novel satirizes the stressful chaos and insanity of American life. 
White Noise, the latest film from director Noah Baumbach, is so different than what we’re used to seeing, that I was delighted, and a little surprised, that the audience I saw it with was able to accept its surreal style and laugh at its offbeat humor. It’s a comedy about modern American life, which is about as general a description as you could get, but whereas we associate comedies normally with jokes, gags, and silliness, there’s hardly any of that here. The comedy is in the overall tone of the picture: the version of life that’s presented, reflecting the brilliant, peculiar world view of a single author.
Up until now, of all the theatrical features that Baumbach has directed in a career spanning over two decades, this is the first not based on a story by him. White Noise is adapted from the 1985 novel of that name by Don DeLillo, the book that made him famous, winning the National Book Award. DeLillo’s fiction, his dark, widely ranging satiric style, examining the different kinds of madness and catastrophe we see in American society, is so distinctive, that I think adapting it helped channel Baumbach’s energy in a direction that represents a new artistic advance for him.
Adam Driver, plays Jack Gladney, a professor at a Midwestern college who helped found “Hitler studies.” For someone whose subject involves great political upheaval, he seems a mild-mannered guy. On the outside, his life is close to perfect: he has a beautiful wife named Babette, played by Greta Gerwig, and four children, three from their previous marriages, and one from their own. The kids are all hyper-aware and intellectually curious, in general more in touch with what’s going on than their parents. Baumbach has retained the time period of the book, so we’re in the 1980s, with no cell phones and no internet. And this vantage point of the past, even though it was the present when DeLillo wrote the book, turns out to be amazingly predictive of problems and concerns that we’re facing now.
First we enter a free-wheeling satiric depiction of academic life, with the usual petty conflicts, and here we are gifted with an outstanding, hilarious performance by Don Cheadle as a professor of Elvis Presley studies. Now be prepared: none of the dialogue in this film is naturalistic. People are always making statements about life and society in a deadpan, almost abstract manner that mixes the most profound thoughts with absolutely trivial attention to detail. There are always surprising bits of chatter and turns of phrase that paint the story with a tinge of folly. There’s no topic: marriage, sex, politics, religion, that escapes untouched.
Eventually there’s a plot development involving a train accident in which a huge cloud of toxic fumes escapes into the atmosphere. Existential dread enters the picture, and permeates the rest of

White Noise

A drama of a woman unjustly ostracized reveals deeper meanings, in a breakthrough work of Mexican cinema. 
María Candelaria, a 1943 film by Emilio Fernandez, is a prime example from what is considered the “golden age” of Mexican cinema. The title character, María (played by Dolores del Rio), a young Indian peasant living in the river country of Xochimilco, has been ostracized by her village because of a scandal involving her deceased mother. She is loved by Lorenzo (played by Pedro Armendáriz), who hopes to marry her when they can get enough money, but they are in debt to a corrupt landowner who wants María for himself, and so tries to destroy them out of jealousy. Meanwhile an artist (Alberto Galan) from a nearby town who wishes to paint the beautiful María, tries to help the couple get out of danger.
The plot elements are pure melodrama, but the treatment raises the story to another level. The heroine represents a spirit of independence, freedom, and a love that is not cowed by custom or tradition. The villagers use ideas of honor and virtue to justify their own envy and hatred, and the film condemns hypocrisy in sexual matters as well, which was rather advanced for its time. Fernández and his co-screenwriter, Mauricio Magdaleno, cleverly wrap their social consciousness in the conventions of popular fiction—we instinctively identify with the downtrodden María and recognize the morality of the villagers as false. They also set up a dichotomy between the light-skinned ruling class and the Indian peasants, which must have struck a chord with Mexican audiences. The film was a major success at home, and won the top prize at Cannes, the first Latin American film to do so, and this helped foster a boom in Mexican cinema during the late 1940s.
Del Rio had been a Hollywood star for years—here she looks at least a decade younger than her actual age of 38. The part calls for sensitivity and nobility, and she comes through with flying colors. The acting in general is quite good, but the real reasons the film works as well as it does are Fernández’s fluid style and the photography of Gabriel Figueroa. The budget was miniscule by American standards, but Figueroa’s luminous black-and-white images lend the film a haunting, almost mythic grandeur. The camera movement has a calm, graceful rhythm. Fernandez also uses some striking point-of-view shots, as in a scene where we see Lorenzo from below as he rows down the river while María lies in the boat looking up at him. María Candelaria portrays the struggles and tragedies of the poor in a way that is affecting without becoming maudlin. The ending finally achieves something close to poetry.

María Candelaria

An 11-year-old girl spends vacation with her divorced dad, in a film about memory and love from Scottish director Charlotte Wells.
The painful struggles between parents and children are often a subject of drama, and no surprise, given the plentiful examples of this theme in human experience. What is rare and more difficult is the depiction of a strong emotional bond between a kid and a parent, and in the case of children, a love for one’s mother and father that goes beyond words, a kind of environment in the child’s mind that permeates life and leaves a lasting effect on the memory. Too often the artist, in a play or film, settles for a forced sense of sweetness, a sentimental, albeit often humorous, perspective on the young experience and point of view. Aftersun, the debut feature from Scottish writer and director Charlotte Wells, is that “one in a thousand” film that captures the essence of a fleeting time with devastating intensity and truth.
Sophie is an 11-year-old girl on a summer holiday with her divorced dad at a less than luxurious seaside resort in Turkey. To sum up the plot, the story of what happens, is pretty much exactly what I just said. There is really no story in the usual sense—the big events happen within the characters, and especially within Sophie, played by a luminous young newcomer named Frankie Corio. The film is more like a poem, and a very beautiful one. The one-word title Aftersun, sounds enigmatic like a poem—in fact, it’s a lotion that’s applied to cool off the skin after exposure to the sun. But even this mundane detail can double as metaphor.
Sophie loves her father Calum, played by Paul Mescal, and we soon realize that he’s quite remarkable in his way, a man in his 30’s who listens with steady attention to Sophie and treats her with tenderness and consideration. But of course we the audience can also see that he’s an ordinary man with flaws, and with a life largely unknown to her, who lives near London with her mother the rest of the year and doesn’t get to see him much.
Through various hints—music and other references—we gradually realize that this is happening in the 1990s, and we’re seeing all this as a memory of the adult Sophie today. This layer of memory, like the cooling aftersun of the title, evokes poignant feelings, a steady light of emotion in the heart of the future self looking on the experience through the eyes of the past self, so fleeting and so precious. Wells already shows a mastery of style that can visually explore the dawning awareness of this young girl’s own mind and feelings, relentlessly expanding with image and sound the richness of an inner life which sees everything in this world as if brand new.
There’s much Wells has decided not to tell us. Why did Sophie’s mother leave her father? Why Turkey, why are they vacationing there? What is the meaning of the father’s melancholy, the shadows that so often stay hidden? These are all meant to be just hints,

Aftersun

Howard Hawks’ classic 1946 crime film stars Humphrey Bogart as hard-boiled L.A. detective Philip Marlowe, trying to solve one of the most complicated mysteries ever made.
It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been doing this show for 17 years, and yet I haven’t talked about one of my favorite movies, The Big Sleep, until now. I’m referring to the 1946 Howard Hawks film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The Big Sleep was originally a crime novel by Raymond Chandler, featuring Chandler’s recurring hard-boiled detective character Philip Marlowe. Bogart plays Marlowe. He also played Dashiell Hammett’s detective Sam Spade five years earlier in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, making him the only actor to have played both these iconic characters. Actually he was always playing the most entertaining character of all, Humphrey Bogart. But I digress.
Marlowe gets hired by an old man, General Sternwood, who has received threatening letters concerning the payment of his youngest daughter’s gambling debts. The assignment is to find out what kind of trouble the daughter, named Carmen, is actually in, and help her out of it, if possible. What he soon finds is the blackmailer’s dead body, in a gangster’s deserted house, with a drugged Carmen there as, apparently, the fall girl. She is a wild seductive young socialite, played with sleazy zest by the 20-year-old Martha Vickers.
Back at the Sternwood’s, Marlowe encounters Carmen’s older sister, Vivian, played by Lauren Bacall, who doesn’t seem very happy to meet him, and as it turns out has her own secrets to protect. Marlowe’s relationship with Vivian becomes both romantic and dangerous.
To try to follow the plot any further would involve a dizzying array of killers, gamblers, kidnappers, cops, and blackmailers. Bogart strides through this incredibly complicated story with complete disregard for niceties and a humorous quip for every occasion. The film is often quite funny. Ultimately, though, the title The Big Sleep refers to death, and Marlowe’s smart aleck tough guy is surrounded by darkness and menace at all times. The constant sense of danger heightens the movie’s excitement, while the main character’s brass-knuckled self assurance puts a smile on our face. A lot of people call it film noir, and I suppose it is, but it’s directed by Howard Hawks, and that means, before anything else, that it’s fun.
Many critics and viewers complain that the plot is impossible to understand. Supposedly even the screenwriters—one of whom was William Faulkner—had some trouble figuring out exactly who killed whom. But the truth is, the picture was first shot in 1945, and that version, which some DVD or Blu Ray editions include as an extra, was understandable, although admittedly complicated. But the producers didn’t think that it was enough. Bogie and Bacall were an item at this point, and they wanted the romance between those two highlighted. So Hawks cut out a few scenes

The Big Sleep

A homicide detective becomes romantically obsessed with a woman suspected of killing her husband, in this stylish mystery from Park Chan-wook.
The cinematic world is abuzz with praise for the latest film from Korean director Park Chan-wook entitled Decision to Leave. Park is already well known for his daring movies treating themes of horror and violence, most famously The Handmaiden, and Oldboy. As it happens, Decision to Leave is something of a departure for him, a stylish murder mystery and intense romantic suspense film. Although the new picture has relatively less violence or horror, Park’s love of provocative experimentation remains.
The story concerns a homicide detective from Busan named Jang Hae-joon, and played by the very skillful Park Hae-il. He’s a dogged investigator in his 40s, with a lovely wife that lives in another town and whom he only sees on weekends. Currently assigned to a sensational murder case, he is called one night to what looks like a bad accident—a climber has fallen off a steep cliff to his death. But the dead man, an immigration officer, has DNA traces under his fingernails, which match the DNA of his wife, Song Seo-rae. Suspicion falls on her because she shows no surprise or sorrow when told of her husband’s death. Medical records, however, show that she had been physically abused many times by her husband, who beat her and scratched her, which would explain the DNA under the fingernails. So the evidence begins to point to suicide rather than foul play. But this mysterious woman, Seo-rae, begins to evoke an attraction in the cop investigating her. She’s Chinese, and her difficulty speaking Korean somehow adds to her strange charm. Seemingly against his will, Jang becomes gradually more obsessed with her, to the point that it becomes noticeable to his colleagues, who complain that he’s neglecting the high-profile murder case of which he’s in charge.
Park’s sense of screen composition is so smooth and assured that Decision to Leave can’t help but remind me of great Hollywood films from the classic era, and specifically of Alfred Hitchcock. The idea of a man’s overpowering obsession with an unknowable love object is of course paralleled in Hitchcock’s great 1958 film Vertigo. But this movie has a different emphasis and a more modernist technique. When the film reveals something from the past, instead of clearly demarcating the different time frames in some way, Park cuts suddenly to a similar shot and point of view, when we suddenly realize we’re in the past, without a transition. This creates a fluid subjective quality—we’re inside Jang’s head, where his experience and memory become interchangeable. And the film does the same thing with space as with time. At one point, Jang is doing surveillance of Seo-rae with binoculars, in his car outside her building. But then, as she picks up the telephone, he is suddenly in the room gazing at her, sniffing the air, and then she looks straight out

Decision to Leave

The endlessly cyclical nature of life is depicted as four different stories in a sleepy Italian village. 
Le Quattro Volte, a film from 2010 by Michelangelo Frammertino, is like a vision of an ancient world, although the story takes place in our century. I call it a story, but it has more of the quality of myth.
The slow rhythm of daily life for an old goat herder in Calabria is conveyed superbly and with precise meditative attention. It’s a life of routine, which the old man, who is in bad health, endures without regret. Calabria is the poorest region in Italy, the part in the south that looks like the toe of a boot on the map—rugged hilly, and mountainous. The goat herder’s village in the film is perched on top of a hill, with rustic architecture that looks like we’re still in the Middle Ages. The goats are in a pen at the town limits, as the road out snakes downward. Every day he walks steadily to the pen, rouses the herd, and then leads them out and into the surrounding hills and meadows. While they feed on grass and other plants, he sits quietly, sometimes dozing off. With him is a shepherd dog, a border collie, who knows exactly how to lead the goats where the herder wants them. As the film immerses us in the steady, repetitive life in this rural area, we notice the unspoken bond between the man and the dog, and in fact with the goats as well. All is expressed more in grunts and sighs than in words. I tried to find the subtitle function on the Blu Ray I was watching, and I realized that there were no subtitles, because so very little is said during the movie that you don’t need them. Silence itself is almost a major character. Outside of the credits, there’s no musical score. Instead, the outstanding sound design presents all the little sounds of the country—the wind and the animals—in all the complexity they reveal in nature.
The title of the film, Le Quattro Volte, means The Four Times. Why is that? We start to find out when our attention leaves the goatherd and focuses on a little newborn goat. Now, the story, if we can call it that, is all about this one tiny being and his daily actions and struggles living in the herd. The gentle beauty we’ve experienced shows another side: the harsh necessities of survival, depicted in the most elemental and heart-rending way when the baby goat gets separated from the others and wanders about crying for help, finally resting, all tired out, beneath a tall tree. The tree is now the main character, and we are shown its life and presence, the waving of branches and rustling of leaves, and once again an eternal quiet at the heart of life. Suddenly it’s winter. Snow covers the ground. Men chop down the tree, and take it to town. Now it’s an inanimate object, and they use it as part of a holiday celebration. After that, it’s burned, turned into charcoal, and becomes part of a large kiln carefully built and operated by the villagers.
The four times are four lives: human, animal, veget

Le Quattro Volte

Joanna Hogg continues her semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist, a young woman filmmaker in 1980s England exploring grief. 
The Souvenir: Part II is the name of the latest film from English director Joanna Hogg. When you release a Part II, the assumption is that we first need to see Part I. With The Godfather: Part II, to give a famous example, it was a pretty safe assumption given how successful and widely seen the first film was. The Souvenir, however, released in 2019, is not in that category. Hogg’s insistence on calling this movie The Souvenir: Part II shows the supreme self-confidence that can often accompany brilliance. In any case, the two films do form a continuous whole, and would be best watched in order.
The Souvenir ended with a tragic event in the life of the main character, Julie, a young student director in 1980s England, played by Honor Swinton Byrne. Part II opens with her struggling with grief for her boyfriend Anthony, who was a brilliant, charismatic, yet rather mysterious person. Julie tries to find out all she can about him from his parents and anyone else who knew him, but there’s always something elusive about her search.
Her mother, Rosalind, is played by the actress’s actual mother, Tilda Swinton. One of the results of this fortunate bit of casting is that scenes between the two have a special intimacy that you can sense. The closeness goes along with a gap in understanding, though: Rosalind worries about Julie, but doesn’t see how her daughter’s unusual questions and struggles contribute to her development as an artist.
At film school, the panel overseeing her proposed graduate film has a negative reaction to the script she submits. In The Souvenir she was working on a film with a realist technique, about a boy and his mother in a poor neighborhood in a northern city. But this feature-length screenplay is a personal story using more symbolic methods, based on her own recent life, which we’ve seen play out in the first film. Despite this discouraging reaction, Julie is committed to the project. Now we watch as her search for answers is incorporated into the making of her graduate film.
Hogg portrays the process of low-budget filmmaking with a sharp eye, including the work’s essential tedium. A fellow student, a French woman named Garance, suggests to Julie a young actor of talent whom she knows to play the boyfriend role. Julie then surprises Garance by asking her to play the lead part, basically Julie’s character, even though this disappoints another friend who has long been a supporter and who expected a part. Here we see how the evolution of an artistic project tends not to take the path of least resistance, but results from having to grapple with the material and discover what it demands, even if that upends expectations. The film is essentially a portrait of the artist—the story has many autobiographical elements, yet I’m referring to the wider sense of the artist in general. The director

The Souvenir: Part II

A portrait of a creative genius, a conductor and composer played by Cate Blanchett, explores the dark and unacknowledged heartlessness behind the vigor and prestige of a famous artist. 
Tár is the name of a new film written and directed by Todd Field. The main character, Lydia Tár, is a prominent American classical music conductor and composer, played by Cate Blanchett. We meet her at the height of her career, after heading several world-class orchestras, now the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, arguably the most prestigious position in the symphonic world. The film opens with her being interviewed at a New York film festival, where the brilliance of her intellect shines freely, discussing conducting in general, and her upcoming recording of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Behind Tár’s smooth and articulate presentation, there is a hint of something else, and I think it’s deliberate: smug condescension. Perhaps the supreme self-confidence of such a person will inevitably cast this shadow.
Lydia is a fictional character, of course, but Field has created an extraordinary and multifaceted personality for Blanchett to bring to life. It’s all very well to indicate that your heroine is in fact a genius. It’s quite another to write a character who makes you really believe it. Lydia’s talk is so sophisticated that we can truly admire, while at the same smile a little at the ironic touches the director adds to the portrait, the will of steel underneath the suave exterior, the strongly held convictions that drive every aesthetic statement, every literary allusion. The film presents us with a convincingly brilliant artist. But of course the writing depends on the performer for its realization. Field had in mind Cate Blanchett, one of our best living film actors, from the beginning.
Lydia has an extremely busy and complicated life. On the personal side, she is openly lesbian, living with her partner Sharon, the orchestra’s head violinist, played by the great Nina Hoss, with whom she has adopted a girl. We see her as a teacher, outspoken and even ruthless in her attitude towards what she sees as the timidity of some of her students. We see her as the super-efficient manager of her own career, so competent and controlling that she intimidates even those who work closest with her. The extraordinary thing is that in the midst of all this, we are made to suspect intuitively that there is a kind of emptiness at work, a big impressive show without a center.
Todd Field knows that classical tragedy portrays the fatal defects of larger-than-life figures. His screenplay and direction achieve a novelistic density, so that when events start to go wrong, it’s not really about hubris, but about a host of uncomfortable questions concerning artists and the needs that drive artistic creation, about the self-seeking that dominates people, about passion and its discontents.
Lydia has apparently had a habit of picking out female musicians to

Tár

Terence Davies dramatizes the remarkable life of the World War One poet Siegfried Sassoon, weaving back and forth in time to show how much he and others like him lost because of war. 
For many modern historians, the First World War, from 1914-18, has a special significance, as the point at which an older version of civilization fell apart. In British thought and memory it sometimes has the character of an unhealed wound. Almost 900 thousand young British soldiers died, about 6% of the adult male population. It was as if the flower of English youth had been cut off. In the writings of the poets who fought in that war we still read passionate urgency. Siegfried Sassoon was one of those poets. His father was of Iraqi Jewish descent, his mother a Christian. He was not of German ancestry; his mother chose the name Siegfried because of her love of the music of Richard Wagner.
English director Terence Davies has largely focused in his films on exploring and recovering personal and cultural legacies. In his latest film, Benediction, he tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon, not in a straightforward or linear fashion, but as a weaving back and forth in time, a recapturing of Sassoon’s experience that takes into account his loves and strengths, but also his mistakes and failures.
Incredibly courageous, loved and trusted by the men who served with him, Sassoon, played beautifully as a young man by Jack Lowden, was decorated for bravery and recommended for the Victoria Cross. But when we meet him in the film, he’s caused a sensation by publishing an open letter, what he called “a soldier’s declaration,” denouncing the conduct of the war and saying he would no longer fight. Instead of being court-martialed he was sent to a psychiatric hospital. In an early scene, he argues with a close friend, the prominent critic Robbie Ross, played by Simon Russell Beale, because Ross had pulled some strings to prevent Sassoon possibly being shot. Sassoon wanted to put his life on the line to oppose the war, but Ross simply wanted his friend to survive. In the hospital, Sassoon meets Wilfred Owen, another poet, and the impact Owen has on his life, both as a poet and as a gay man, is decisive. Wilfred Owen went back to his unit after being pronounced cured by psychiatrists, and he died only a week before the Armistice.
The film covers Sassoon’s tumultuous life after the war, as a member of the London artistic scene in the 1920s, intercut with scenes of him as an older man, now played by Peter Capaldi, still bitter about the war and about his personal failures, and ultimately turning to the Catholic Church in search of some kind of meaning.
In the 1920s, gay life in the London art scene was barely closeted—it was quite evident to anyone who could see, yet no one talked about it publicly. Davies presents us with the sometimes very funny, but also painful, episodes of backbiting and cutting wit on the part of Sassoon and his lovers, including the musician and actor

Benediction

A primal conflict between love and revenge is the theme of Mauritz Stiller’s great saga of Sweden from 1919.
The silent era in Europe is still a largely unexplored treasure house of film, and among the foremost nations in cinema was Sweden, where for a brief time innovations there rivaled those taking place in America. The brilliant young Mauritz Stiller brought sophistication and technical mastery to his movies, although today he’s better known, if at all, for having discovered Greta Garbo, with whom he went to Hollywood, ultimately failing to fit into the rigid hierarchy of the studio system and returning to Sweden, where he fell ill and died in 1928, at the much too early age of 45. Today I offer one of Stiller’s great Swedish films, from 1919, called Sir Arne’s Treasure.
Here’s the story: in 16th century Sweden, a rebellion of the King´s Scottish guards is put down. Three of the rebels make a daring escape from a prison tower, but on their way through the snow to a fishing village where they hope to find a ship, extreme cold and hunger drives them mad with desperation. When they come to the mansion of Sir Arne, a wealthy nobleman, they murder him and his family, steal the treasure, burn the castle down, and escape. But a girl named Elsalill (played by Mary Johnson) survives the carnage by hiding. Years later, adopted and living in a different town, Elsalill falls in love with the noble young lord Sir Archi, played by Richard Lund, unaware that he was one of the murderers.
Stiller was already a veteran director when he adapted this Selma Lagerlof story to the screen, and it is a masterful work, as advanced in technique as anything that had been seen at the time, albeit on a smaller scale than D.W. Griffith´s epics. He makes extensive use of the moving camera, which was rare, and his habit of cutting into the middle of an action creates an effect more modern than in most silent films. The scene in which neighbors rush to the burning castle brilliantly conveys chaos and terror. Over the entire film, in fact, there hangs a mood of ominous fatefulness and “the uncanny,” exemplified by marvelous sequences in which the young woman dreams of her dead sister. In addition, Stiller handles Elsalill´s love for the Scottish nobleman poignantly, yet with very little sentimentality. Unexpectedly, and quite movingly, these troubled characters do not behave as we would expect in a melodrama, but in a more convincing and ultimately more tragic manner.
Shot by Jules Jaenzon, Sweden´s preeminent cinematographer, Sir Arne´s Treasure is an uncommonly gorgeous motion picture. The ending scene with the procession across the ice is among the most haunting and beautiful in all of cinema. It’s both exciting and instructive to see how a pioneer could create fully realized visual poetry in those early days.
Sir Arne’s Treasure is available on DVD.

Sir Arne's Treasure

Inconsolable grief leads to resistance in a film from Lesotho combining mythic and political truth.
This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. Like a myth or a folktale, the third feature film of Mosoto writer and director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese announces its meaning beforehand with its title. But woven into that one sentence—this is not a burial, it’s a resurrection—are many other complex meanings concerning death, grief, ignorance, oppression, truth, courage, and more.
In a rural village in Lesotho, a small country in southern Africa, an 80-year old woman named Mantoa laments the death of her only son. Over the years she has experienced the death of her parents, her husband, her daughter and grandchild. But after all this, her son was there to still anchor her to the world. Now he is gone too. Eventually we piece together that he died in a mining accident, but we don’t know the full story behind any of these losses, only that Mantoa has survived her entire family. Now she no longer finds meaning in life.
Mantoa is played by an awe-inspiring veteran actress from South Africa, Mary Twala Mhlongo. She portrays overpowering grief with an intensity and conviction that is uncanny. And this was her final performance—Mary Twala died in 2020.
So…all Mantoa wants is to die and be buried in the graveyard with her family and the village ancestors. She assumes a grim silence, impervious to all efforts by the villagers to interact. The priest sits outside her door and tries to talk to her. He tells her about the death of his wife, and his long struggle to get through the grief. Mantoa hears him, she hears them all, but she’s immovable. Her face is like a mask of pain. Mosese seems to be presenting us with a modern day Book of Job. Religious teachings no longer make any sense to Mantoa. She has nothing but anger at God. She experiences all the attempts at consolation to be empty, and who could say that she is wrong in her point of view? Also like Job is her defiance, her refusal to look away from tragedy.
In this version of Job, however, there’s something more. When she complains about trash not being picked up in the graveyard, she finds out that the graveyard, and in fact the entire village, is going to be flooded, and everyone relocated because of a new dam that’s going to be built. The village head tells everyone that it’s all part of modern progress. The priest says they must accept the inevitable and trust God. But Mantoa sees that the unseen enemies, the businessmen and politicians who are planning this project, are taking away the very earth in which her family is buried, that is, the connection to ancestors, to shared history, and to the life that has been bound to this land for generations. What we’re not told, but what we can infer if we’ve studied colonialism, is that the practice of denying native ownership of the land has not ended with the country’s so-called independence. In this story, it’s the fate of a defian

This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection

A witty English drama from John Schlesinger about an unusual triangle: a man and a woman both in love with the same man. 
John Schlesinger was part of an exciting generation of young English directors that emerged in the 1960s. He established himself with several successful films, and this gave him the opportunity to break all the rules by making Midnight Cowboy, which became a huge hit. After this triumph, Schlesinger had earned the right to do his own thing—and next he created a more personal film, a story he’d been thinking about for years. Released in 1971, it’s called Sunday Bloody Sunday.
The title, by the way, doesn’t refer to the famous event in Northern Ireland, or the song by U2 about it, which all came later. Here it’s just from a common male expression in England at that time, a weary shrug on a Sunday about having to go back to work or school the next day. The story is infused with this ironic tone—the style of someone who observes people with a compassionate but honest eye.
In London, Daniel, a Jewish doctor (Peter Finch) and Alex, a divorced mother (Glenda Jackson), are both in love with the same man—a bisexual artist named Bob, played by Murray Head. The story covers ten days in these three people’s lives, in which their love for and patience with one another are sorely tried. Schlesinger deftly sidesteps the social drama angle, keeping the focus on private feelings and desires. The picture pays careful attention to the little incidents that make up a day—it has a refreshing natural rhythm.
Everything that happens is colored by the longings of Daniel and Alex. Bob is their happiness, and sometimes they are indeed happy when he’s with them, but he’s also an elusive object, a source of anxiety: Will he leave? Will he run to the other one? It’s written like a modern short story, where plot takes a back seat to permutations of feeling. There’s something remarkably clear-eyed about the movie—the emotions of the characters are real and moving, yet there’s a humorous bite and distance—nothing maudlin, very crisp and even a bit cold.
When Peter Finch and Murray Head do a full mouth kiss in close-up early in the film, I believe that was some sort of a cinematic first. I don’t doubt that it was intended to surprise—in plot terms alone, it’s a way to suddenly let us know that Daniel and Bob are lovers. But what I find admirable is that gay sexuality is not sensationalized, it’s simply an important element of Daniel’s character, and it is taken for granted as a fact in itself—which for 1971 was more than ahead of its time, it was beyond its time.
Finch is marvelous, conveying quiet dignity along with a childlike neediness and petulance—never pathetic, just a bit lost and sad. A sequence at a bar mitzvah is priceless, with all his pushy female relatives trying to hook him up with a woman. It says more about what Daniel’s growing up must have been like than any number of flashbacks could have done

Sunday Bloody Sunday

The true story of one of the women in Kosovo whose husbands went missing in the war, who decides to step outside the role conservative society expects of her so that she can support herself and her family.
For those who survive a war, the trauma never completely goes away. Hive, the debut feature of Kosovan writer and director Blerta Basholli, is set in a village in Kosovo in 2006, seven years after the end of the war with Serbia. Many of the women in the village are still waiting to learn the fate of their missing husbands. Serbian paramilitaries and regular troops murdered thousands of civilians in a campaign of terror during that war.
The main character in Hive is based on a real person, Fahrije Hoti and is played by a marvelous actress named Yllka Gashi. After much effort and struggle, Fahrije has realized that she can’t support her two kids or her disabled father-in-law with her absent husband’s failing honey business. We see her diligently tending the hives and extracting the honey, then straining and bottling it, but the volume is too small to bring in enough money. At local gatherings of the women whose men are missing, Fahrije proposes that they band together to make and sell ajvar, a popular condiment made from red peppers and eggplant. Anticipating the pressure from their conservative families, most of the women don’t want to take this chance, and only one of them agrees to work with Fahrije.
The older men of the village, patriarchal Muslims, hate when women act independently. Moreover, they assume all the women are widows and believe that it’s unseemly for widows to even appear in public. When Fahrije gets a driver’s license and starts driving a car in town, delivering jars of ajvar to the market, someone throws a rock through one of her car windows. As time goes on, the men continue to harass her with petty acts of vandalism and aggression. When other women eventually decide to take part in the business, the hostility escalates.
Basholli doesn’t shrink from revealing how the older traditional ways of rural Kosovo act as a chain around the necks of the women, even when the desperation of trying to make a living in this postwar environment justifies their enterprise. It’s just an unfortunate fact about this society, which the film shows us without even really commenting on it. Against this discouraging background we also get to witness the good things that happen when women work together—Basholli depicts the quiet joyfulness of self-sufficient women acting as a community.
As counterpoint to the main story about forming a business is the story of Fahrije’s daily struggle with grief, still unsure about the fate of her husband, and the tension this causes in the family. Her father-in-law is bitter about losing his son, and gets angry at Fahrije for stirring up controversy in the village. When Fahrije tries to sell her husband’s bench saw to help fund the business, her teenage daughter takes it as an insult to her fathe

Hive

The classic Harlem Renaissance novel by Ella Larsen about the American delusion of race is beautifully adapted by Rebecca Hall.
Passing is a remarkable film about what we used to call the color line, the distinction between races that has permeated American history. It is the debut of Rebecca Hall as director and writer, a gifted actress now going behind the camera. Passing is adapted by Hall from the famous 1929 novel of the same name by Nella Larsen, an important writer in what has come to be called The Harlem Renaissance.
In midtown Manhattan, sometime in the 1920s, Irene, a young woman played by Tessa Thompson, furtively enters a fancy hotel, lowering her hat to help conceal her face. Only later do we realize that she’s “passing,” on a small scale just in this part of town. “Passing” was when people of color who were light-skinned enough, managed to successfully pretend being white. Irene wouldn’t normally be allowed in this hotel. She lives in Harlem, married with two kids.
While enjoying a refreshment, she’s startled to see someone she knows from her younger days in Chicago—Clare, played by Ruth Negga, laughing and having casual conversations with some white friends. Clare sees Irene, approaches her with affection and invites her to her hotel room for some drinks. Clare has blonde hair and is a good deal lighter skinned than Irene, and after they go up to the room, she reveals that she’s totally passing for white in every part of her life, including having a white husband,, and a daughter. We can see that all this produces wonderment in the mind of Irene at her old friend’s audacity. Then Clare’s husband shows up, astonishingly addressing his wife as “Nig” which he explains is a joke because Clare seems to have gotten darker after the birth of their child. Actually, he says, he hates Negroes, and neither he nor Clare will go near them. Thus begins a suspenseful exploration of the complex structure of racism in the Jim Crow era, which by the way, affected black Americans throughout the country, not just in the South.
Nowadays it’s just part of life to see people, and actually be people, that look like Irene or Clare, and in general we use the word multiracial. But back then, even if the only person of color in your family tree was a great grandparent, you were to be legally considered a Negro. The racist beliefs of the time meant that one drop of so-called black blood took away your white privileges. I imagine that one of the reasons Rebecca Hall shot this film in black and white is that it makes it easier for a modern audience to believe that Thompson and Negga’s characters could pass. And besides the metaphorical angle of “black and white,” it’s an opportunity to depict a deeper character study, because black and white photography makes everything seem more subjective, and Hall is mainly interested in the inner drama of what the characters are feeling and thinking.
In fact, our point of view character i

Passing

Javier Bardem shines in this dark satire about a glad-handing business owner threatened with scandal and controversy.
We’ve all seen commercials, and we know how corporations and businesses promote not only their products but their image—stories that are basically about their own benevolence, with happy consumers served by happily dedicated workers making life better. And let’s face it, we all know it’s a pitch, a promotional angle, or if not we should know it, and yet we have been bombarded with it for so long that we don’t really question it. And so to break through that story with satire, with a sense of humor sharpened by awareness of the truth that is hidden behind the hype, is a rare thing to attempt in a film. But Spanish writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa has just pulled this off in his latest film, a clever dark comedy called The Good Boss.
Javier Bardem plays Julio Blanco, the owner of a company that manufactures industrial scales. He’s charming and charismatic, and supervises his company with a personal touch, often saying that he sees the employees as his family, and promising to take the time to listen to any problems they may have. Near the beginning of the movie he makes a speech to inspire the workers, informing them that an awards committee will soon visit the factory, and asking them to pull together to make a good impression so that they can win this prestigious award for excellence.
Bardem had me smiling and chuckling from the get-go. This guy Blanco is a smooth talker indeed, and a master of pleasant sounding B.S. On some level, of course, he believes his own story, and this is a big part of why Bardem is so funny here. As the film goes on, we see more and more how Blanco’s image as the good, caring boss is a calculated strategy for achieving his own ends.
There are obstacles in his way. A longtime employee who was recently fired comes in and makes a big fuss, accusing the company of betrayal and demanding his job back. After he’s escorted out of the building, he sets up a little camp across from the factory, on public land so he can’t be evicted, yelling slogans against Blanco all day, through a bullhorn. What if the awards committee sees this? Blanco has to find a way to make him leave. In addition to this, his director of operations is making lots of expensive mistakes, and the reason he gives is that he can’t focus on work because his wife, who also works at the company, is having an affair. The biggest obstacle of all, though, is really Blanco himself, who, while to all appearances happily married, has a roving eye for young attractive female employees. He’s gotten away with it so far, but a beautiful intern named Liliana, played by Almudena Amor, could spell trouble.
All of these plot threads (and there are more) weave themselves throughout the story to wryly amusing effect. Blanco uses his charm and friendliness, his aura as a good boss, to twist things around for his advantage. But everythi

The Good Boss

Alfred Hitchcock made this appeal to join the fight against Hitler a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now this film is valued for being one of the best thrillers of its time. 
There was a minor category of Hollywood films, made between Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in late ’41, that I’ve nicknamed “We Need to Enter the War” films. The American public was largely wary of joining in—the attitude being “let Europe solve its own problems”—but a significant portion of the filmmaking industry wanted people to know about the danger of isolationism. Possibly the best example of this kind of movie is Foreign Correspondent, from 1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, himself a recent arrival to Hollywood from England.
A brash young reporter (played by Joel McCrea) is sent to Europe on the eve of war to provide a fresh perspective for American readers. He hooks up with a peace organization in Holland, run by the urbane Mr. Fisher (Herbert Marshall), and falls in love with Fisher’s daughter (Laraine Day). When the reporter witnesses the assassination of a Dutch diplomat who was central to the cause of peace, he ends up on the trail of a mysterious organization of spies.
It’s easy to forget that the thriller genre didn’t get very much respect until Hitchcock came around. He brought style and dedication to the form, and this particular example is one of the smoothest and most entertaining films of the ‘40s. There are two great set pieces. The assassination scene, in which a man shoots the diplomat during a downpour, then escapes through a sea of umbrellas, is a complex masterwork of editing. It’s soon followed by a sequence in a windmill (Hitchcock had a fondness for staging scenes in such out of the ordinary places) where McCrea manages to slink through the building, escaping the spies’ notice while the inner machinery rotates the blades, the moving camera providing a perfect sense of the spatial relationships in the windmill. What was already a stock situation (good guy hides within earshot of bad guys) is transformed into pure visual pleasure and excitement.
One of the more curious aspects of the film is the character played by George Sanders, a suave and witty English reporter who happens to be a friend of Fisher’s daughter, and helps the American reporter solve the mystery. Sanders is great here—in fact, he’s so good that he becomes the film’s hero, playing the key role of daredevil rescuer in the film’s finale, rather than the star McCrea, as Hollywood convention would dictate. Did Hitchcock and his screenwriter Charles Bennett, both British, elevate the English character’s role as some kind of tribute to the mother country, which was under violent siege at the time of filming? I don’t know, but it’s certainly unusual—not that it spoils the fun in any way.
Foreign Correspondent ends with a bit of uplifting propaganda, McCrea broadcasting a warning to the rest of the

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