Although easy to theorize, to analyze as a thesis mounted and then proven over 90 minutes, David Lowery’s new film is more infernal, more rule-breaking, than any such academic beast. It’s a sensualist masterpiece best understood not in reference to its prescriptive logic, but to its descriptive tangibles (or intangibles): as a canvas of embryonic moods and free-floating shudders, improvised shivers and pregnant, primal feelings costumed as both a horror film and a poetically impenetrable work of high-art theory. And a film as sinister as it is sad, and often for the same reason. Like all of Lowery’s films – including Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and Pete’s Dragon – it cannot be solved or deciphered, its holes plugged up by meaning or answered with solutions that tie it down.
But any argument that this film is completely impenetrable is already unnecessarily enrobing itself in the itself-impregnable logic of theory. Although rife with mediations on circular time and existential belonging (a bookshelf provides key insights, and the film doesn’t always do itself favors in its more self-consciously intellectual back-half), A Ghost Story is primarily a tone-poem, not an argument to unpack but a gloriously beguiling, metaphysical menace that seems to exist in perpetual detour from its answer, yet finds truth in its own errancy. This ghost story is a liquid-solid work, slow-going but always in drift, hard-hitting but diaphanous, thematically united but essentially resistant to completion. Continue reading
As a rule, Spike Lee’s best films come in three registers: the fiery and rhapsodic poetry of a Baptist minister (Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Chi-Raq), a self-conscious, ostensibly oneiric cool (25th Hour) that sometimes belies a deep reservoir of anxiety about the weight of its own images for “blackness” (Da Sweet Blood of Jesus), and somewhere not so much in the middle as feverishly and flagrantly ricocheting between polar opposites, pinching the unpinchable and thinking of cinema not as a tonal spectrum but a whirligig that shuttles us along many often disagreeing moral and modal registers. Lee isn’t as irreconcilably wacky as John Boorman, for Heaven’s sakes. But his best films, and his worst, are somewhat freakishly committed to their own energies, curious about their own tangents, cinema-crazed and hyper-literate at once, and above all essentially (self and socially) disruptive.
Whatever else is true of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, it is above all flagrantly, abominably obvious that Boots Riley has never written a screenplay or directed a feature film in his life, and I for one hope that increased opportunity does not dull his wiliest and most flamboyantly idiosyncratic cinematic proclivities, vexations, and turnabouts. In this case at least, the refinement of cinematic diction so often sought within conventional education would only channel his wild mane of cinema into a too-coiffed package. Although his film Sorry to Bother You obviously travels in the wake of last year’s Get Out, inverting many of its metaphors, Sorry to Bother You replaces Jordan Peele’s conspicuously practiced and eminently skillful horror show, specifically sculpted for comparatively clear readings, with a spasm of wonderfully unpracticed cinematic bliss.
If the “set-piece” as a concept ultimately drives the latest in the surprisingly durable and, more surprisingly, quite malleable Mission Impossible genre, Mission Impossible: Fallout unfortunately is not quite as dexterous with its operatic set-pieces as its predecessor Rogue Nation, entry five in the franchise, nor as deliciously droll in its elastic, Looney Tunes momentum as Ghost Protocol, number four and two films before this new 2018 offering. That fourth film in the franchise legitimized the whole affair after fifteen years of mucking about in Cruise’s dimming star power and alternately playing sub-Bond and super-XXX, much as I do admire Brian De Palma’s truly egomaniacal, knotty inversions of Cold War memory lane in the franchise originator. If Brad Bird’s entry was a course-correct, allowing the franchise to finally stand tall only by turning its legs to string, asking it to wobble around in a spontaneous, comic fracas, the fifth entry, the first from Fallout director Christopher McQuarrie, gilded it in a peculiar mixture of avant-garde classicism. Each set-piece recalibrates the film, ricocheting it around to many alternate registers while simultaneously assimilating ballet, underwater dance, and pop-art alike into its combustible cocktail. 
Armando Iannucci achieves new heights (lows?) of disquieting nihilism in the murderously vicious The Death of Stalin, his much-delayed follow-up to his decade-defining, Bush-era-capping In The Loop. That earlier film was a trans-national, Pond-hopping comedy of (foul)manners, both exceedingly timely and essentially timeless in 2009. (Visualizing Western politics as a dangerously out-of-control carousel, it remains the quintessential Iraq War film, and, to my mind, the sharpest commentary on the Bush era). In 2018, The Death of Stalin may be no less timely in an era of sudden Russian ascension, even if the particular brand of relatively gun-on-its-sleeve totalitarianism depicted and mocked in The Death of Stalin is less than truly applicable to either modern Russia or America’s brand of oppression which compresses classical liberalism, neoliberalism, and totalitarianism into a 21st century stew. Still, while making fun of this relatively “explicit” brand of totalitarianism is not the most cutting in 2018, The Death of Stalin is obviously a scorching, bracing, extremely obstreperous film nonetheless. And for all its gravid, ghoulish potency, Iannucci’s film is also a sage refuge for cinematic comedy, not only almost unmanageably uproarious but piquant in its observations on the depths of human selfishness and the intercommunal pandemonium of the political sphere at its foulest. 
Steven Spielberg’s The Post, furiously filmed and edited while the director’s Ready Player One was in the waiting room, lives and dies on the dialectic tension between its directors’ childlike enthusiasm for the newspaper industry and his curiosity for the realpolitik which both deflates enlivens the dream of an easy or natural democracy. Spielberg, even the liberal, is essentially defensive about democracy’s ability to surpass itself. He introduces himself into the strand of Enlightenment thought which approaches democracy’s thought-project with tempered appreciation, exposing its limits and its strengths and ultimately emphasizing the social contest and progressivism which stems from within the democratic liberal tradition rather than outside it.
Perhaps the pop-cultural event of 2018, Marvel’s Black Panther depicts an insular African paradise that has become a moral limbo simply trying to stave off the murderous, colonialist purgatory of the world around it. Insofar as it is aware of these paradoxes, of the contradictory nation of Wakanda – indeed, the paradoxes of colonialism, the contradictions of modernity, and the ambiguities of the world – Ryan Coogler’s film is pop culture par excellence, inquisitive and exquisite in equal measure, enveloped in a brashness of spirit and mind that animates it. But Black Panther is equally enveloped in its own hubris, and finally, its own containment, its own conscription to a vision of modernity (to paraphrase David Scott) that it pretends to dismantle or, at least, disrupt. By film’s conclusion, it seems that the very paradoxes which infect Wakanda – its simultaneity of liberation and domestication, liquefying emancipation and stiffening respectability – also contaminate the film itself. The film’s elegance is both its grandest achievement and its central problematic, the encrypting idiom for a film which is hugely and depressingly invested in laundering its rebellious core in an aura of self-righteous reputability.