PFF33 Day Six: A Cute Addition to Age Gap Cinema Leads Off A Grabbag

You know what they say about best laid plans.

Ok so I lied a little on the last one. Pedro got pushed to the next showing on Saturday because I didn’t want to have gap with another one today, and because I didn’t feel like seeing Vermiglio. As much as I do try to plan things out, scheduling is an ever-changing thing since I have no one but myself to be held accountable. I promise to do better, it will happen again.

My first movie of the day was one I’d wavered a bit back and forth on. The thing about LGBT films is that – for obvious reasons dramatical, sociological, and historical – they can tend towards the bleaker side if they’re not diabetically saccharine or pitched at that one straight person trying way too hard. Seeing a log-line about a gay teen taking up sex work after a prison stint raises the warning signs of “coming out story” (overdone, boring) and worse “trauma dump” (lazy). Baby (Grade: B+) doesn’t entirely shy away from the dangers of sex work, and generally being gay in Brazil. Thankfully, this Brazillian drama from Marcelo Caetano is much more clear eyed and open to the nuances of gay life and sex work writ large.

The baby of the title is Wellington (João Pedro Mariano) a strikingly beautiful 18-year-old on the streets. A brief miscommunication in a porno theater leads him to Ronaldo (Ricardo Teodoro), a much older man working as an escort who decides to take him under his wing. It’s a sexually explicit kind of love affair in multiple senses and my what senses they are. Caetano depicts their relationship as something beautiful and yes, sexy, with dashes of a mentor-mentee power dynamic ever so precarious. I don’t know that it does anything particularly ground-breaking besides show a younger man in love with an older man that isn’t predatory (though some flashes of jealousy threaten to take it there) but I appreciate something so vibrant and almost cute. If nothing else, the men are very beautiful to look at. God Bless Brazil.

While I find myself a little more on the forgiving side generally, I’ve started to consider something critic Mike D’Angelo (inspiration/rip-off source for this series structurally, if not occasionally stylistically) often cites of documentaries: could this film have been an article ? Men Of War (Grade: C+) is a perfect example of this to the point where I was surprised it had been picked up by NEON. Directors Billy Corben and Jen Gatien utilize the typical reenactments, stock footage, and talking head techniques to reconstruct the 2020 Venezuelan coup attempt. Their main subject and source is ex-Green Beret and mercenary leader Jordan Goudreau; he’s given quite a bit of screen time to argue that he was fully under the impression it was a US government sanctioned operation along with opposition leader Juan Guaidó.

I suppose the first problem comes there: he – and multiple Trump White House staff – refer to Guaidó as the legitimate ruler of Venezuela, and at least from context one would assume the directors do not – in fact – believe this, and that current president Nicholas Maduro is the rightful ruler. Almost zero context is given to the political situation in the country or even what interests the US might have in staging a coup beyond oil and money. It’s not even clear whether they believe Goudreau or think he’s some mixture of stupid and delusional. By the end they work their way towards pointing out how the government builds people into killing machines and then mostly sets them loose to fend for themselves. Don’t get me wrong, the way we treat veterans in this country is one of our many failings (and the bare minimum). But when the people you’re trying to rescue are in jail because they tried to overthrow the sovereign government of a foreign country, you’re going to have to work a lot harder to get me feeling sympathy for you and your own bad decisions. There’s a thread of the networks of power working overtime to help fascist interests here; the Behind The Bastards episode on Goudreau would be excellent.

Small Things Like These. Credit: Lionsgate

Small Things Like These (Grade: B-) covers the different and more upsetting strain of Behind The Bastards subject matter that is the Magdalene Laundries. To summarize: for nearly 2 centuries in Ireland, women and girls thought to be “fallen” or otherwise unsupported were sent to convents and workhouses where they suffered horrific abuse. I don’t know how the movie would play if you didn’t know that; to me, I saw a movie set in Ireland about secrets at a convent and immediately went there. It’s among the most infamous scandals of the Catholic Church in Ireland (though a quick Wikipedia scan tells me that there were some Protestant ones as well).

Perhaps it plays better for someone from there. I confess the whole thing sort of went over my head in rather abrupt fashion. Cillian Murphy – in his first role post Oppenheimer – plays coal worker Bill Furlong in New Ross, Ireland. You can tell he’s haunted by his general aire, and the way he scrubs his hands vigorously when he comes home (metaphor!). Ostensibly the plot unfolds when he discovers a woman in the convents shed during a delivery, furthered by the sinister behavior of the Mother Superior (Emily Watson). Interspersed are memories of his childhood with what I presume is his single mother. This is a movie in a lot of ways about national guilt; the way Bill’s wife seems to know bad things happen there, a girl fighting as she’s brought in the first time, the mentions of how much power the convent wields in town. All of this is primed for a truly excellent movie. And then I checked my phone thinking there was at least an hour left only to discover it was more like 7 minutes. I haven’t read the book by Claire Keegan so it’s possible this all plays better on the page, or that the third act was cut down significantly. It certainly has all the ingredients to be a solid drama; if only it drew the connections between the past and the present stronger.

I’ve mentioned it a bit before but as good as it is to catch movies months before they’re released, one of the best parts of a Film Festival are the hidden gems. I’d agonized for weeks over whether to pass over The Seed of the Sacred Fig – one of the most acclaimed films at Cannes – for one such film, ultimately deciding that since NEON was handling it I’d eventually see it in Philly at some point. My choice was for Night Call (Grade: B+), a lean and nasty Belgian thriller with impressive chops that for some reason I’d gone into thinking it was about a firefighter. Michiel Blanchart’s debut is an entry into the subgenre of “Person Has The Worst Night of Their Life”. That person is locksmith and student Mady (Jonathan Feltre), on call during a night when Black Lives Matter protests are roiling Brussels. A simple call for a woman named Claire (Natacha Krief) escalates into a fight that ends in a dead man and a mob boss on his tail.

Many such cases, but Blanchart proves an expert in orchestrating brutal action sequences and tense pacing. His script is also rather smart, keeping Mady constantly on his toes but active, dispensing easy ways out and even making great use of a sea of protestors and the tensions with police. For a while, I was thinking it was one of the best of the fest. The set pieces aren’t elaborate but they’re staged beautifully, always hinting at where it’s going to go, never making it too obvious. Unfortunately, Blanchart botches the landing in a way that ripples backwards. It’s not all that interested in politics – though it is keenly aware of how Mady being Black changes this situation for him, enough that Blanchart only has to cut to some distinct objects in an apartment to let us know Mady is about to be in deep shit. One might be able to argue to the ending on political grounds but it’s tricky given the optics at play. Still, man what a ride it is. Programming Director Trey Shields (shout-out) told us before that Blanchart is working on something with Sam Raimi (Evil Dead 2 even makes a cameo) and I think he could be going places. 80% out of 100 ain’t too bad after all.

Tomorrow: Bit of a lighter day for trivia league, but expect a creepy doll and Nigerian film.

PFF33 Day Five: “No Other Land” Is The Most Necessary Documentary of the Year

And some much lighter fare

Since the Philadelphia Film Society took over the theaters post COVID, the Festival has been conslidated at the three arthouse theaters owned by them: The Film Center on Chestnut, The East over in Old City, and The Bourse by Independence Hall. I get around everywhere nowadays by biking, and if you go straight down Market to get to the next Indego dock, you will inevitably have to walk by the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History where a giant Israel flag is plastered on the facade alongside the text “We Stand With Israel”.

This is the context to which I – and a fairly packed house – watched the documentary No Other Land (Grade: A-), described by festival programmer Michael Lerman as “the most important movie of the fest”. I’m inclined to agree. The film follows a period of 3 years of the annexation (or “forced displacement”, if you wanna get specific) of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, primarily documented by activist Basel Adra. At the start, he is visited and assisted by Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist staunchly opposed to the ongoing occupation, to the point that he refused to join the IDF once he learned he would be put into intelligence because of his knowledge of Arabic. Yuval is not simply a means to plead for unity; in fact, several of the subjects engage in debate over the cruelty his country has been enacting, while Basel makes a point of emphasizing the relative freedom he has to move with the land.

And the things Israel enacts are harrowing. No Other Land isn’t so much concerned about the war, so much as war is simply a part of the process of occupation (and that their land has been assigned an IDF training facility). Instead, it’s near singular focus is capturing the vibrancy of life the IDF is attempting to stamp out through wanton acts of spiteful cruelty. How else can you describe the bulldozing of a school, of a chicken coop? Seeing it in front of you eyes – and often enacted by people who are not even from the region – while a man on Israeli TV argues that they had it coming summarizes what it’s felt like to be online this past year. In a festival where one movie was sponsored by a Zionist organization – hell, in a city that mostly leans Zionist with a governor who served in the IDF – it’s bracing just to see the honest fight at stake (and a little bit heartwarming that so much of their tactics resemble BLM protests down to a “Palestinian Lives Matter” sign).

My one reservation mainly concerns the form. Although it features a lot of handheld and phone footage (people are constantly being filmed on both sides), a lot of it consists of scenes between Basel and Yuval talking, with each other, and with people around the village. These are often beautifully shot, but it does occaisinoally make one ponder “who’s filming all this?”, especially when they can’t possibly have scripted a lot of it. It’s not that I think they’re mainuplating per say; perhaps it would’ve served it better to be more a collection of footage, or at least acknowledge the fact of its own making rather than at times resembling a beautiful drama. Thankfully, they do hold back on the more extreme footage that’s been plastered all over social media (though there’s a couple moments where it feels like it could get ugly), a carefully presented and edited argument to one’s humanity. A man outside enthusiastically proclaimed that “the people who need to see this aren’t going to see it”. Unfortunately, given that no US – let alone Western – distributor appears to have picked it up, I think he’s right. I desperately hope that changes. More than the importance, this is an achievement in filmmaking itself that deserves to be seen by everyone and if it changes some minds, even better.

The Black Sea. Credit: Metrograph Pictures

As you can tell from these posts and past coverage, I’m a pretty self-selecting audience for a lot of movies. Generally my rule has been that unless I’m getting paid to cover something or there’s a substantial critical backing, I usually avoid things that look bad or not for me and thus have tended to skew pretty positive. Occasionally that does backfire; it can’t all be winners. This long-winded preamble is my way of saying I did not care for The Black Sea (Grade: C-) very much, and at least among my friends I seem to be a minority. It’s not like it couldn’t be my bag: I was down to follow the story of a black man (co-director and writer Derrick B. Harden) traveling to Bulgaria to meet an older woman only to be sidelined when she dies. Buried within is somethign that I could love quite a lot, especially in the tenative romance that forms between him and travel agent Ina (Irmena Chichikova).

Unfortunately I checked out rather early, when he gets his bag and passport stolen and appears to talk to one singularly unhelpful cop before giving up completely. It’s not that I victim-blame nor do I necessarily expect it to show us everything in backed up fashion, but that there’s a mechanical quality to the plot. Equally unhelpful is the way it spends time bringing him from one dead job to another, leaning on Ugly Americanisms and poorer comedy to the point that it seems lost until the last act. I overheard from someone who was at the Q&A with Harden and co-director Crystal Moselle (of The Wolfpack and Skate Kitchen) that film was apparently shot in 16 days and heavily improvised. I could see it. The Black Sea is not by any means unwatchable so much as unfocused to the point that it gets grating. If only they’d leaned into the rom-com aspect earlier.

Further on the topic of self-selection are the Centerpieces. This year I’m seeing quite a few thanks to my all-access badge meaning I don’t have to buy separate tickets and thus am free to drop into the stuff usually programmed for big crowds of retirees and the Rittenhouse set. That was how I ended up at Conclave (Grade: B) and honestly, I’m kinda glad I did. Prime Oscar-bait in that it’s a perfectly well-made thriller of the sort that used to be a dime-a-dozen, but also Hot Nonsense in the best way possible. You don’t need to know much other than Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow are cardinals voting for a pope while Isabella Rossellini scurries along in the background. All Quiet On The Western Front director Edward Berger seems to know this is all not that serious, his portentous music and ominous framing staying just on the right side of being eye-rolly while loading it with lots of unexpected humor. He gets that deep down these are all Messy Bitches Who Love Drama and it sidelines pretty much any attempt at deeper themes or examinations of the Catholic Church beyond “boy we got some cleaning to do, huh?” and “can’t we all just get along?” A bonkers third act reveal had me and my friends turning to each other with full Pogface, yelling incredulously. That’s the best way to approach it, a silly airport thriller filled with cassocks and Latin.

Dead Talents Society. Credit: Sony International Pictures

One of my favorite things about film festival has always been the programming of lower budget or obscurer genre titles. Many of my favorite discoveries over the years have come from the After Hours or Graveyard Shift sections: Red Rooms, Cam, Knife + Heart. Dead Talents Society (Grade: A-) may not have as much substance as those, but it’s a blast nonetheless. Listen, I’m only a man. You make an extended Ghost in The Shell (complete with triangle!) joke or put not one, but several characters in the Mina get-up from Perfect Blue, I’m gonna laugh very hard. Thankfully, I was on the movie’s wavelength pretty much the entire time. John Hsu’s tale of a mediocre newbie ghost (Gingle Wang) recruited by a fading diva (Sandrine Pinna, mothering) and her manager (Chen Bolin) to become the next greatest scarer or literally fade away is pitched at the level of a cartoon, full of sound-effects and wacky violence. In between, he lovingly skewers decades of East Asian horror tropes, including a finale that’s essentially a slapstick Sadako vs. Kayako along with a bit of good ole “the magic of movie making”. Yeah, there’s mushy found family stuff, and it may not particularly care about the world-building beyond “hey, isn’t fame and social media arduous?” But damned if it doesn’t have a big ole pumping heart. The power of friendship making you feel seen is corny but who cares when you’re too busy rooting for the heroine to throw herself off the roof of a building?

Tomorrow: Pedro Almodóvar’s English-languge debut, a firefighter’s hellish night, and I continue the struggle to keep the reading time under 10 minutes.

PFF33 Day Four: Mike Leigh Delivers Some “Hard Truths”

Elsewhere, Real Pain in multiple senses

My goal for attending PFF has usually come down to shoving as much cinema in front of my eyeballs as humanly possible. The majority of the time, it’s the most acclaimed films I’ve been following throughout the year, and as you can imagine, that’s not always conducive to brain power. Sometimes, you do need something a little light, a little more normal, if only to reset the paradigm. A pallette cleanser, if you will.

Said cleanser came in the form of A Real Pain (Grade: B), the most quintessential sort of crowd-pleasing comedies festivals love to program. It’s got Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin playing on their most associated character types – anxious nerd and More Psychologically Stable Roman Roy – as the two of them go on a Jewish history tour of Poland in honor of their recently deceased grandmother. This is ostensibly inline with the recurring theme this year of Jewish identity and responses to the Holocaust, which to be fair the movie (written and directed by Eisenberg), does dive into. Specifically, it’s most interested in memory and remembrance, how much trauma a person should have to hold on to and live out. On top of that is a comedy that often veers towards cringe; Culkin is doing his quippy asshole schtick and for the most part it is pretty funny. For me, it passed a time early on from “oh you” Comedy Type to “ohhhhh you” Deeply Damaged, far sooner than the movie wants us to get there. Thankfully, the requisite emotional scenes carry the necessary power to forgive the somewhat standard journey. It’s the nicest movie you’ll see about generational Jewish trauma, no more no less.

Today was an unexpectedly trauma-filled day, though filtered through distance and abstraction of sorts. Perhaps the most thrillingly unexpected of these was Nickel Boys (Grade: A), a movie I didn’t know much about except Colson Whitehead book, the director of Hale County This Morning, This Evening, and reformatory school. Cue trepidation when the opening POV style shots didn’t shift over to regular camera style, leading me to write down “Is it going to be like this the whole time?” Yes, and no. RaMell Ross’ main “gimmick” here is shooting everything from first-person, sort of like the sitcom Peep Show (or Hardcore Henry, for those less cultured), observed totally through the eyes of the main character. Once it introduces the other lead – Turner (Brandon Wilson) – the gimmick becomes less blatant and more like a normal movie, easing whatever dissonance or annoyance may be wrought.

Still, nothing can quite prepare you for the sheer overwhelming power Ross accumulates. The story was inspired by the Dozier School For Boys, a reform school in Florida (shout-out Tallahassee) home to unimaginable horror; unmarked graves were still being found as late as 2019 (the school closed in 2011). While the great temptation is to show us in unflinching detail what happened to these boys that made them want to flee, Ross withholds but in no manner does he shy away. Cutting freely between time, across memories, filled with detours to old films, MLK speeches, and impressionistic montages, Nickel Boys has the feeling of reliving memories, the random bits that get imprinted and conflated, how those times get chopped up and covered up to avoid looking at it directly. Here’s a movie that only needs to show us a fragmented scene of a whipping room and give us hints at boys being disappeared to know that when a boxer accidentally wins a match he’s supposed to throw, whatever becomes of him is going to be terrible (that part, with the camera held close and just off-centered on his face and outstretched arm, his pleas of “I didn’t know!” are stomach churning). By the time it hits a scene later in a bar of a reunion between students, before a montage of such powerful emotional clarity that shines through any abstraction, I knew I was seeing something major. The fact that a major Hollywood studio is willing to fund something so bold and downright experimental is heartening, as is such a beautiful expression of Black art. It will definitely not be for everybody – especially with the POV shots – but it deserves to be seen (and I will be cracking open my Criterion of The Underground Railroad as soon as humanly possible).

Finally, speaking of studio funding: Mike Leigh! The great filmmaker has always had trouble finding funding thanks in part to his famous method (in short: assemble a group of actors, have them create characters, improvise a series of scenarios and backstory, then write a screenplay) but the situation has been a lot more dire in recent years. His latest got rejected from several big festivals despite having won the main prize at two of them, something that usually guarantees you an out-of-competition slot. Given that Hard Truths (Grade: B+/A-) centers around a black cast – including a reunion with Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste – it’s not hard to imagine majority white boards from passing on a character as venomous as Leigh’s most infamous creations (ie, Johnny).

Then again, Pansy is an extreme difference from even that Naked lead; at least Thewlis gave him a modicum of charm that suggested why people would put up with his shit. Jean-Baptiste does a near complete 180 from her previous character, draining any and all warmth and even joy to portray a woman so remarkably unpleasant she causes winces from everyone she comes into contact with. She lives in a sterile house, obsessively cleaning when she isn’t sleeping or berating her quiet son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) and put-upon husband Curtley (David Webber). One of the often celebrated aspects of the Leigh Method is how the actors can really make you feel that hidden backstory the years of these relationships; Barrett and Webber’s faces during an early dinner scene show the strain of having dealt with her all these years.

By contrast, her sister Chantelle (Michelle Austin, aka Hortense’s friend in Secrets & Lies) is much better adjusted – single, but with two daughters each dealing with their own unique strife. It’s enough to make you wonder why Pansy turned out the way she did; in a pivotal scene, Chantelle even asks and the only response is “I don’t know”. Jean-Baptiste’s outbursts are often very funny (when asked if she’s ok, she snaps back “I’m at the doctor’s office!”) but she unveils an awareness that something is wrong within her. Whether it’s a lack of control, some type of childhood trauma, deeper mental illness… Leigh resists giving deeper answers. I think I would’ve appreciated if it had been longer; at 97 minutes its shorter than both Naked and Secrets & Lies and though the former is similarly plotless, there’s a sense of greater development of all the characters. Specifically, I would’ve loved to see more of Moses – a small moment when a girl shares candy with him could’ve powered its own movie, frankly. Lower key Leigh is still masterful, or close to it at least. It’s criminal that no one seems to want to give him money – the hardest truth of all may be the current state of the film industry.

Tomorrow: Palestinian documentary No Other Land, and a thriller about the Pope(s)[?]

PFF33 Day Three: A Slew of Centerpieces (Including One of the Best of the Year)

And also Maria is here

All We Imagine As Light. Credit: Janus/Sideshow

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light (Grade: A) is a frontrunner for my favorite film I’ve seen all year. Don’t know how to start this off other than just to put it plainly. There may have been no other film I’ve been anticipating all year, at least since the reviews and the Grand Prix award started coming in and it’s clear we’ve got a major talent on our hands. At turns luscious, dreamy, and poetic, Kapadia’s crafted a thing of true beauty, a grand claim for the female voice in Indian cinema.

Her previous film – 2021’s controversial documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing – featured fictional love letters read in voice over between film students interspersed with footage of protests against the Modi government, something which I’m told has gotten the film banned in a few states (and probably had something to do with why the selection committee passed it over at the Oscars, all man board notwithstanding). Here the voiceover returns and paired with the evocative nighttime shots of Mumbai, it’s transcendent – beginning first with a survey of Mumbai’s many languages describing the city, and then featuring everything from poetic dialog to text conversations.

The former centers around nurse straight-laced Prabha (Kani Kusruti). Her husband is away in Germany for work, unseen, represented by a foreign rice cooker she receives one day in the mail. In the thorough of loneliness she starts to fall into some sort of connection with a doctor at the hospital (Azees Nedumangad), though it’s clear to both that as much as they may want it, this is an impossible thing.

She lives with Anu (Divya Prahba), the source of the aforementioned text conversations. Those are for Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), a handsome man who – more crucially – is Muslim; the forbidden nature of their romance would seem to point more towards her parents but given Modi’s current Hindu nationalist leanings, it’s not hard to read that as a comment on the country at large.

Kapadia’s political leanings don’t stop there either. The scene most reminiscent of A Night of Knowing Nothing features Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), an older woman being threatened with eviction from her home of 22 years to make way for luxury condos, as she gathers with a group of activists. Her trip back home to her seaside village provides the ostensible plot, and it’s where the film ends in a particularly stunning shot. It can’t be overstated how beautifully shot the film is, awash in the life of the city, capturing its essence. Kusruti’s radiant performance provides the biggest emotional hook, but it’s the interplay with the actresses that provides the film with its beating heart. Here’s one that knows better than to lean into trite female celebration, instead drawing out the much deeper connections between them all, and from us.

The same can’t really be said about Maria (Grade: C), Pablo Larraín’s capper to an impromptu trilogy about the fraught lives of famous divas. In this case, the diva is Maria Callas, a woman I admittedly know next to nothing about besides the Opera and that one clip of that old queen saying he’s never heard a bad performance from her. Unfortunately you’re not going to learn much of anything about who she was or her life from this.

I rather enjoyed Jackie a lot, Spencer a little less but I still think fondly of it and Kristin Stewart’s performance. Despite also being scripted by Steven Knight, this one is rather inert, almost boring. As La Callas, Angelina Jolie captures what I assume the mannerisms of her are (and looks the part in footage shown in the credits). She never gets into a big screaming match or throws things across the room which I suppose is a small blessing for this kind of biopic. But something about the dialog just kept rubbing me the wrong way; extremely blunt and sounding performative, but with no real insight as to whether she really believes any of that or not. It’s straining to be clever in a way that the last two never reached, with so much emphasis on the distinction between Maria and La Callas but without anything in the sense of differentiation. Larraín introduces a newer stylistic track here from Jackie‘s TV special shooting and Spencer‘s haunted house perfume ad, in this case sequences of a drug-induced hallucination (?) of Kodi-Smit Mc-Phee interviewing Callas and getting precisely zero out of her. There’s lots of clips of Jolie singing and if that’s really her voice she must be commended. At worst, Maria resembles a more traditional biopic, something that could never be said about the others. It’s as if it relies too much on the audience knowing anything about Callas’ past and expecting that to carry through. A late scene featuring her sister shows the better movie hiding in there, but it’s just not enough.

“Too little” is not a word anyone would use to describe The Brutalist (Grade: A-) – all 215 minutes + intermission of it. Brady Corbet’s – erstwhile European arthouse actor turned cold, provocative director of The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux – film has been described as an attempt at the Great American Novel and there’s really no other way to describe it in its epic sweep. The brutalist of the title is one László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian architect fleeing the Holocaust to come to a little town called Doylestown in Pennsylvania (trust, that got a lot of reaction from the crowd).

Split into two acts covering roughly a couple decades, Corbet and co-writer Monica Fastvold have a lot on their mind: foreignness, Jewish people’s precarious place in society, the promise of America. Largely they mange to pull it off, and moving at quite a clip. By the time we hit the built in intermission I was certain we would be getting more chapters. Guy Pearce – as an industrialist who hires Tóth to construct a community center – injects a big dose of mid-century energy into the proceedings, pulling at threads of power and those who wield it over others. I’m not fully convinced the film has the necessary emotional power befitting of such an epic, and admittedly it does lag a bit in the interminable battle to get the center built. Still, the massive achievement of pacing itself cannot be denied, and I’m sure it will only rise in estimation once I get back around to it.

Finally, quick detour for some behind the scenes info: a big part of scheduling involves looking up US distributors, info that used to be on the program but for a few years now has not been there. If it’s from an A24, a Neon, a Mubi, etc. chances are that it will be coming to Philly, and so I feel much safer about skipping. This is part of how I found myself at the late night screening for Cloud (Grade: B+), a movie I likely would’ve seen eventually but frankly, did not want to take the chance that it would be coming a full year from now.

That aside: this is one of three or so Kiyoshi Kurosawa films in the pipeline this year (one of them, Chime, is on a Web3 platform or something) and Japan’s surprise choice for Best International. It follows Ryôsuke (Masaki Suda, the titular boy of The Boy and the Heron), a factory worker more concerned with his side hustle of reselling goods on the internet. What he’s not too concerned about is whether those goods are legitimate or whether the price he charges is fair. Naturally, this does not endear him to those he does business with, giving Kurosawa the chance to go back to the mode of Cure and Pulse that made him famous in the West. I don’t want to give away too much as to where it goes, other than to say it feels sort of like a Yakuza substory at times, perhaps one where Kiryu has to beat the shit out of someone scamming people. It may take a bit to get to the good parts, and the analysis of internet behavior may not be more than “anonymity (and money) breeds conflict”. But it’s a cracking thriller, uninterested in trying to garner sympathy for the lead but not too concerned with overly punishing him. If anything, it features a gunfight that suggests Kurosawa could make a pretty good action pivot.

Tomorrow: Mike Leigh reunites with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Jesse and Kieran Go To Europe, and I try to make these things shorter for my own sake.

PFF33 Day Two: Sean Baker’s Grand Return

Plus the first of many Indian films, and the craziest of the festival so far

That one screenshot from *Anora*. Credit: NEON

There was probably no film more anticipated this year than Sean Baker’s Anora (Grade: A), at least judging from the packed house I barely made it into. That would still be the case even if it hadn’t won the Palme D’Or this year (incidentally: pretty sure this is the first time the Palme winner has been in a Centerpiece slot and not in a side section in a hot minute); since breaking through with 2015’s madcap iPhone-shot Tangerine, Baker has only gained in prominence and in filmmaking prowess. The Florida Project and Red Rocket were both previous PFF entries, as well as movies I like to love a whole lot for both their sunbleached visuals and the uproarious laughs.

Anora is much of the same in some ways. For one, it’s the fourth in an unintentional series of films spotlighting sex workers, in this case the titular Ani (Mikey Madison), who works at a New York strip club. The shift to a relatively more dreary environment hasn’t stopped Baker from drenching the screen in color, awash in the neon lights as we follow Ani dance and hustle through a regular night of lapdances and parties. At first that seems like it’ll be the routine when Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) – or Vanya – walks in. Over a series of the quick-cut montages reminiscent of Red Rocket’s many sex scenes it moves into a private meet up, and then a girlfriend experience, until suddenly the two are married in a Vegas church (entirely sober, mind you). This is depicted less as a sort of romance than it is a bit that both decided to get into because why not? Ani scoffs at the initial proposal but we’ve seen her enchanted by Vanya’s luxurious lifestyle courtesy of his (potentially) oligarchical father and hey, they do seem to have fun together. That is not how Vanya’s family sees it and reality comes crashing in with the arrival of some Armenian associates (Karren Karagulian and Vache Tovmasyan, plus Yura Borisov), hellbent on annulling the marriage.

The film is by no means boring or lackluster in its first act. Eydelshteyn makes some particularly hilarious physical choices (ie, a backwards somersault on a bed) that – combined with his boyish charm – make you see what Ani might. But it’s once things all go to hell that Madison lights off the firecracker of her performance, turning into something of a hellcat. She’s effortlessly funny throughout, exasperated and confused, dropping off “fucks” like it’s her job. And yet there’s also some fear (of who these randos are and what she’s gotten herself into), and something like a desperation to hold onto the fairytale of a life with Vanya. Like all of Baker’s protagonists, she’s a real, flawed person, trying to make her way through this mess of a life, clawing her way out of desperation. I don’t know if I’d say it’s his best yet (I need to rewatch Tangerine and The Florida Project); what I can say is that Baker’s successfully controlled the chaos that’s often popped up into something more entertaining than stressful. He also lets the audience have a big cheer moment, before immediately undercutting it in truly devastating fashion. For whatever faults he may have – inside and outside filmmaking – here’s someone dedicated to showing the full spectrum of humanity, warts and all.

I didn’t plan it but today was a pretty women-centric day, at least onscreen. One of those women was Renate Reinsve, most famous for her Cannes winning role in The Worst Person In The World (a PFF30 entry!). She’s had something of a productive year in both Handling The Undead (Sundance, unseen by me) and A Different Man (one of the year’s best). Her third – that’s made it to the U.S. at least – is Armand (Grade: B/B+), Camera D’Or winner at Cannes (aka: best debut). In a shift from the younger focus of some of her characters, she plays Elisabeth, a single mother and actress called to a meeting at her son’s school where she learns he’s been accused of committing a heinous act against another child.

The details of said act are sketchy; only one child’s side is known, and no one else appears to have actually seen what took place. Further complicating things is her relationship to the parents of the other child (Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Endre Hellestveit), as well as her own struggles and issues, most clearly seen when she uncontrollably breaks into laughter for several minutes before segueing into sobbing.

If Elisabeth’s name and occupation didn’t raise any eyebrows, then knowing that director and writer Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel is the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann certainly raises the spector of Persona (not unfounded, thanks to the focus on two women and encroaching psychological breakdown). Tøndel possesses some definite technical brilliance at least, contributing to very recent subgenre of “movies shot like horror that are not horror”. He wrings tension out of a malfunctioning fire alarm (ignored warning signs?) and deeply unnerving sound design that seems to emphasize every step that echoes in the empty school. Unfortunately, he decides to take it into a more surreal direction, not quite verging into explicit horror but diverging enough from the drama template to break the spell a little. At almost 2 hours, it’s maybe a bit too long, but Reinsve is an absorbing screen prescence, and there’s at least some meat on the bones for a good while.

This year, PFF is spotlighting Indian film through a whole section, and my goal is to try to catch all of them at the fest. The first of these is Girls Will Be Girls (Grade: B-/B), a coming-of-age story directed by Shuchi Talati. It follows Mira (Preeti Panigrahi), a girl who’s just been made head prefect at her boarding school in the Himalayan Hills, as she begins a tentative romance with Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), a new boy from overseas. The main conflict comes in the form of her more traditional mother Anila (Kani Kusruti, also from this year’s All We Imagine As Light) forbids the relationship but has no issue becoming close to Sri herself.

Talati’s camera makes good use of the landscapes, but I found the film itself rather slight. There’s the seedings of themes of womanhood, of the patriarchy in India, of the changing times (it appears to be set in the 90s) and a later scene makes a slight tonal twist that emphasizes what being a girl means for Mira, for the most part it’s rather understated. The plot as a whole is sort of meandering, unified mainly by the romance which is rather cute. It’s pleasant – which, there are worse things to be – but missing some kind of spark perhaps. Maybe I’m just being too harsh on it.

“Harsh” may as well be one of the words to describe Birdeater (Grade: B+/A-), so far the most “girl what the FUCK is happening????” film I’ve seen at the fest so far. “Unclassifiable” is another one. Jack Clark and Jim Weir’s debut has a simple enough premise – a man invites his fiancee to his bachelor party in the Australian wilderness – that gives one a certain impression of how things might go; Clark and Weir certainly do, judging from the prominence of a poster for Wake In Fright, perhaps the most famous “bad things happen in Australia” film next to Wolf Creek.

It’s not so much what happens, though a dinner scene features a revelation so out-there it sends the entire party into a tailspin. No, Birdeater is a truly demented construction of almost jazz-like editing – with score to match! – and a tone that occasionally feels like an Aunty Donna sketch. There’s some truly dread-inducing shots, like a truck driving off into the vast darkness, but it’s never quite “scary”. “Dread-inducing” feels proper, as it reveals itself to not so much be about toxic masculinity (though of course, that features in) so much as it appears to pull at the fragile stability of straight relationships. It’s telling that the one person who seems completely normal is the lone bisexual out of the cast. I may just be easily wowed by technical prowess and pretty images, of which there are plenty. Birdeater deserves marks for sheer audacity if anything else. You kind of have to respect something this destabilizing on a such a formal level, as fractured as the psychologies of the characters.

Tomorrow: One of my most anticipated movies of the year, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, plus Brady Corbet’s Great American Epic The Brutalist, Pablo Larraín’s Maria, and the latest from Kiyoshi Kurosawa

33rd Philadelphia Film Festival Coverage Starts Tomorrow

A slightly different tack for reporting on Da Movies™

A lot can change in the course of a year. For instance: last year at this time I was still employed, my uncle had just died, and my plans for that year’s Film Fest were scuttled both due to a small concert planning mishap and said death. Not to mention feeling a bit disappointed at the lineup that year – most of the high profile ones had either already released (Anatomy of a Fall, Killers of the Flower Moon) or were being held back for some unknown reason (The Zone of Interest, May/December).

Cut to this year: my job dissolves in November but wow, are the movies great. Which is all to say that today marks the official start of the 33rd Philadelphia Film Festival, aka the moment when my best of list gets filled out. This year is already an embarrassment of riches with the Philadelphia premieres of Anora and The Brutalist but factor in the new Mike Leigh, Payal Kapadia, Steve McQueen, Andrea Arnold, etc etc? Well… scheduling was a bit of a nightmare to say the least. I actually had to buy a badge for the first time this year thanks to demand which means I can now attempt to try every centerpiece plus opening and closing (a small blessing in disguise) and barring a few social events or exhaustion, my plan is once again to squeeze as many movies as I can in front of my eyeballs.

To that end, the purpose of this post. I’m gonna try something I wanted to do last year but couldn’t thanks to aforementioned personal issues, wherein I’ll do a daily recap/rundown of everything I saw in the style of The Dissolve and The AV Club‘s dispatches. The plan is to put up a post the next day with small(ish) reviews, ending with the usual top 10 or so when the festival ends. I will do my absolute best to put it up in a timely fashion – say, the morning of or afternoon – but I’m only human and, because I’m doing this on my vacation time, delays may occur.

All said, I’m pretty excited for this year. Some hard cuts may have had to happen but I’m confident those will come around sooner or later. If everything is as good as the hype has been, the year end list is going to be an absolute ordeal. I can’t wait. Hope you’ll follow along!

Review: Eileen’s Psychosexual Drama Never Comes Together

The Anne Hathaway/Thomasin McKenzie two-hander doesn’t know who its’ title character is

Note: Expanded from Philadelphia Film Festival thoughts

Eileen is the sort of movie that promises a lot from the get-go. In its very first scene, we see the title character (Thomasin McKenzie) observing a couple getting frisky in the car next to her, appearing to get turned on herself before she shoves snow down her pants. The 60s setting and icy New England landscapes would point to some sort of repression on her end; at the very least, with an alcoholic father and dead-end job at a juvenile corrections facility in a remote town, her life doesn’t seem to going great.

All this is before Rebecca Saint John cruises into the parking lot in a Mustang and captures her attention. As embodied by Anne Hathaway (doing an accent, and doing it pretty good), Rebecca is the New Woman: unmarried, unwilling to take men’s shit, handling a cigarette in the way mysterious yet alluring women tend to do in movies like this. She’s arriving to take over for the prison psychologist and begins to take something of an interest in Eileen. Is it a crush? Simple mentorship? Something more sinister? The scene seems set for a dark sort of seduction.

Unfortunately, Eileen herself never seems to snap into focus. McKenzie also does an accent and it’s rather passible, but her character is too passive and internalized. The script is an adaptation of Otessa Mosfegh’s book – written by the author and her husband – and it feels as though large portions of an internal monologue were lopped out rather than integrated. Periodically, there are supremely jarring moments of fantasy where Eileen imagines herself having rough sex with a prison guard or shooting herself in the head, and they always come out of nowhere. It’s hard to even figure out if Eileen has some sort of repressed sexuality or obsessive desire since it’s not always clear what exactly she wants. Which means that Rebecca’s background story involving a prisoner who killed his father starts to become a lot more interesting, despite it being an ostensible side show.

The film takes a sudden swerve in the third act heightened by an impassioned monologue from Marin Ireland that also raises a boatload of interesting things to explore. For a moment, it seems to get into some thorny territory that itself could make a great story, but the movie ends before it has a chance to fully examine that. It’s not an issue of direction – William Oldroyd keeps a tidy pace and a clean visual style that makes great use of dark – but that aforementioned missing bits. It might’ve needed to be longer to fully unpack the impact of the massive twist. As it is, Eileen presents a titilating scenario but can’t make its protagonist shine through it. (C+)

Review: The Past Looks A Whole Lot Like The Present in Blue Jean

A stunner of a debut following a lesbian teacher in Thatcherite England

We like to think that we’re better than the past. It’s just the way of the world: as time goes on, we make progress. Things improve and we learn to be more tolerant. Films about minorities tend to fall under this a lot, and it’s understandable to want to show someone fighting for their rights, or there being one person who was on the right side of history, so that the viewers can walk out of the theater shaking their heads and chattering about how awful it was back then and isn’t it nice we’re not like that anymore?

What I’d like to suggest is… maybe we’re not?

Blue Jean, the debut film from Georgia Oakley, is set during the late 80’s in the midst of Thatcher’s England. Section 28 – which banned the promotion of homosexuality within schools – has just become law. Characters will talk about this but otherwise it hangs over the movie like a cloud, a warning. The titular character of Jean Newman (Rosy McEwan) is a high school PE teacher who also coaches a girls netball team. She is also a lesbian, and at nights she transforms into the proper attire and hangs out at a gay bar with her friends and especially lover/girlfriend Viv (Kerrie Hayes), a leather butch in contrast to Jean’s more androgynous appearance (it’s a wonder she doesn’t get more rumors behind her back).

There’s some suggestion that Jean’s sexuality is a somewhat new development for her; while she doesn’t have that self-loathing that so many queer films gravitate to whenever they take place pre-1995 or so, Jean is rather happy and seemingly carefree in her carefully regimented life. Despite this, there’s a sense she’s still a little bit afraid to embrace herself, hiding Viv from her sister when she makes an impromptu visit in an early scene, and shying away from bonding with co-workers (who chitter about the law during lunch).

All of it threatens to come crashing down when she gets outcast and loner Lois (Lucy Halliday) to join the team, then subsequently sees her in the same bar where she finds such freedom. It’s here that Oakley shifts the tone to something akin to a horror film, though it never fully tips over. A terrible dilemma begins to present itself: both student and teacher know about the other. One desperately wishes that Jean could be something of a mentor to Lois, perhaps even shield her more from the bullies. But as an earlier scene makes clear – in which Jean tells Viv how she pretended to be her boss when calling a parent about one of the girls – she can never show anything that could be construed as favoritism. Not only that, but anything that could even remotely suggest she might be forming a relationship with a student beyond what’s appropriate. What the film lays bare is that laws like Section 28 create a cycle of oppression and more fear in both the adults and the youth. These moral panics about groomers discourage teens from seeking help, and adults from standing up for them and themselves. Because it’s not just her job that’s at stake for Jean, it’s everything. But what tilts it into greatness is the ease at which Oakley also expresses Lois’ point of view, depicting an understandably angry youth caught in the worst sort of rock and hard place.

Blue Jean‘s final moments bring a note of grace and understanding for both characters, while doing its best not to put too neat a bow on things. There are perhaps moments when it feels a little too blunt, too tuned into what feels like contemporary moments. At its very best, Oakley reminds us that the struggle is forever ongoing and what seems like a new low has really always been here. Those in power do their best to stamp out queer history, to make mentorship a liability and keep us at each others throats. In balancing this joy with dread, it reminds us why the fight is worth it, and who it’s all for.

Rebecca Hall Self-Destructs in the Tense, Wild “Resurrection”

The second film from Andrew Semans, available on VOD

Hall gives one of the year’s best performances.

“Trauma” – alongside “grief” – has become something of a trend lately within culture. It comes up in interviews about Marvel properties, it’s the main theme “elevated” horror movies or a new reboot of an 80s property. None of this is new of course: horror is especially fruitful for examining loss or processing something that happened to you. But there is a sense that it’s a little sanitized. The victim is strong; they build defenses and ultimately overcome it.

In Andrew Semans’ Resurrection, the trauma of Rebecca Hall’s character manifests itself in a physical reaction. Her character – Margaret, a pharmaceutical executive – is attending a conference, looking bored. She fidgets, attempts to stay awake, turns her head and catches sight of a man sitting a few rows down. Suddenly, her eyes widen and as she stumbles out of the room, she takes off at a run that turns into a sprint. We don’t yet know who this man is but immediately we can tell he’s bad news.

As the movie starts, Margaret is the quintessential image of the high-powered executive. Steely, determined, there’s an intimidating air to her but with a hint of warmth shown as she gives an intern relationship advice. She has a daughter – Abbie (an excellent Grace Kaufman) -17, and about to head off to college. Her love life consists of calling up a married co-worker for no-strings sex that always happens at her place. Hall plays her as a woman in complete control over every aspect of her life, dominant but not domineering. Naturally, this brief moment of panic sends her spiraling as the man (Tim Roth) reappears around her, always from a distance. Something bad has clearly happened to Margaret in the past, but is it going to happen again?

Resurrection follows a similar path of woman-on-the-verge films like Repulsion or Possession by staying ambiguous about Roth’s character. In a stunning 7-minute monologue in which the background slowly fades to black, Hall details a shocking history of violence, gaslighting, and abuse that sounds too insane for anyone to make up. Her performance in this moment is a tour-de-force: completely absorbing and impossible to turn away. That she’s giving this to her intern who reacts in horrified confusion is what turns the movie on a dime. Semans puts us directly into Margaret’s increasingly paranoid headspace through some savvy camera work and an unnerving score from Jim Williams as Hall’s perfect composure crumbles throughout. It’s a gripping performance, matched perfectly by Roth. He plays David as chillingly polite, almost rational; we know he’s a madman but his reserved tone almost makes us fall for his gaslighting as Margaret regresses more and more.

Perhaps the most devastating plot point – and, in my mind, the key to the film – is through Abbie. Margaret exerts more and more control over her as a means of protection, going as far as to do whiskey shots with her to keep her from leaving their apartment. Logically, she should tell her daughter who this mysterious figure from her past is and explain herself, but she can’t. Her behavior manifests as irrational and frightening, for all intents and purposes looking like a complete mental breakdown. Semans doesn’t turn either side into a villain so much as portray how this unexamined trauma can manifest cyclically; it’s heartbreaking because Abbie clearly sees her mother is suffering but in the process is making her unsafe.

For some people, this movie may not hold together. The ending takes a gigantic leap that – although set up – shifts things into an entirely new direction that clashes with the tone of realism from before. Admittedly, there are some scenes I wish were slightly different, if only to keep it on a more symbolic or psychological level. But there’s something to be said about a movie that fully commits to its premise, logic and sense be damned. Hall is the stand-out, of course: it doesn’t work if we don’t believe her, and I believed her. This is a bold feature, a tightly coiled work of anxiety and tension up to its startling climax. When the filmmaking is this good, what do a few flaws matter?

Spooktober #4: Censor

For the good of the people?

I’ve always been bizarrely fascinated with censorship codes. Maybe it’s living in America, where we don’t have that sort of legal control over media unless it’s like, abuse material (historical examples notwithstanding). Of course, it’s not like America’s own censorship board doesn’t wield a large amount of control over theatrical releasing; think about how the NC-17 – supposedly for more “adult” movies that weren’t porn – ended up becoming near exclusively associated with sexual content to the point that it basically doesn’t exist. All this is done in the name of protection, but who is it really protecting? How does one even determine the right amount of vein slashing and rape that’s acceptable for a motion picture? It’s all very technical stuff.

As you can imagine, Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor was catnip for me, following – as it does – a censor for the BBFC during the 1980’s video nasty moral panic. In brief, “video nasties” were extremely violent (often sexual) exploitation films that burst in popularity when VHS became popular. The credits show that they included everything from more “classy” pictures like Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer to infamous faux-snuff film Cannibal Holocaust; it falls in part to Enid (Niamh Algar, in the titular role) to determine if the film is releasable, and what cuts could be made to allow it in. She takes her job extremely seriously; as she tells her parents, she’s not doing it for entertainment but to “protect people”, as much a product of Thatcherite conservatism as it is lingering guilt over the disappearance of her sister. That deeply repressed guilt starts to bubble back up after viewing a film that strongly resembles the circumstances of that disappearance, throwing her off kilter and beginning a descent into mental collapse.

Bailey-Bond’s film is first and foremost about “vibes”, specifically in capturing the specific era of 80’s Britain in the midst of a moral panic. The BBFC offices here are all drab washed out lighting betrayed by the recurring screams from the women in the films the censors watch. These films themselves are shot in a squarer aspect ration complete with VHS grain to recreate that exploitation aesthetic. Interspersed are hallucinatory sequences reflecting her own fractured state of mind, awash in neon lighting, consciously returning back to the scene of the crime. Although it’s critical of the idea that exploitation movies caused a rash of violent, Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher’s script doesn’t argue that they’re totally harmless. After all, the censors themselves have to expose themselves to some truly awful scenes day in and day out, fake though they might be. Enid professes to not be affected by them, treating it purely as a job, but the film suggests she’s internalized more than she wants to admit.

It all comes to a head in a brilliant final act, in which her two worlds collide and her denial comes spilling out. All this time, Algar has become convinced – without much in the way of evidence – that her sister is actually the actress in the film, and without spoiling, it becomes a cutting statement on conservative hypocrisy and the need to convince oneself that they’re the good guy here. Censor could’ve been a touch longer – I personally would’ve loved to see more of the censorship process itself – if only for Bailey-Bond and Fletcher to expand on their ideas more. Still, this is an audacious debut, one that establishes Bailey-Bond as a filmmaker to watch and Algar as candidate for Best Actress.