It is essential to the success of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed that both his convictions and his doubts suffuse it to the core. Not only about religion, mind you, because the film is also positively tormented with dread and anxiety about Schrader’s personal God: cinema, the medium which he has studied, scrutinized, and analyzed for decades and bestowed with both the authority of holy writ and the uncertainty of a doubtful sinner, unsure of his abilities, begging for admittance into the ecclesiastical cinematic canon and fearing that he just doesn’t measure up. For decades, Schrader has not only been the sharpest and most penitent student of cinema but a truly sacrilegious, ill-tempered devotee to his own id, a man who, even to his film’s detriment, would sustain his outsider-art tempestuousness simply to remain in a wandering state of search, looking for something – maybe anything – which clarified, or stirred the waters of his soul, and which the cinema around him was not providing.

Yet in First Reformed, one finally senses a kind of acceptance, even a restfulness. But crucially and blessedly, not a sedimentation, or even a clarification. Schrader is still clearly on the hunt for an answer he doesn’t have; his search is merely less restless, albeit no less uneasy, no less apprehensive about the possibility of true existential comfort in a deeply inharmonious world. Crystallizing his internal agitation into something manageable for the first time in decades, probably since his screenplay for the truly antinomian Bringing Out the Dead, First Reformed still explores the brackish, murky waters of a man wracked by contradiction and simultaneously fascinated and tortured by paradox. First Reformed is a film gifted with and tormented by an ascetic’s restraint, a Baptist minister’s undying conviction, and a heretic’s anarchic disobedience, all while accruing the potency of a divine spirit, which in this case suggests both the film’s feverishness and its ghostly, diaphanous half-presence, like a film tenuously touching our own world but which might evaporate or erode on a moment’s notice. You can feel it simultaneously breathing its last breaths, writing its will and testament with all the wisdom it acquired over its life, and spontaneously bursting out into a new, uncertain existence with every moment. It’s both a lament and a provocation. Continue reading →

For a film that plays in the broad narrative strokes like a much-belated sequel to the adolescent fantasia that was 1981’s Heavy Metal, Panos Cosmatos’ gleefully irresponsible Mandy sure approaches the sheer, ravished psychic impact and meditative, enraptured gloom of another film from the same year, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. Sacrilegious though the comparison may be, Cosmatos’ clearly mystical aria of sensory impulses and untamed spirits radiates with a similarly occult energy, simultaneously soul-bearing and soul-occluding, and casts a similarly esoteric, mosaical shadow on the landscape of modern cinema. Thriving on contradictory ambition, Cosmatos’ film thins the membrane between Judas Priest and Joy Division, or Andrei Rublev and Conan the Barbarian (lest we forget that Tarkovsky himself was a huge fan of The Terminator’s ice-age tenor and melancholic urban nightmare). It’s wild, woolly, and truly psychotropic – demon-fed fuel for any rager and comfortable adorning the shelf of any man-cave – but its aesthetic ambitions and vision of a restful dream forestalled also draw us right to the existential enmirement of the human soul in unsettling forces beyond our comprehension. Cutting a conjurer’s figure, more than any film of 2018, Mandy casts a truly demiurgic spell on the viewer.

And, as violently untamed and cathartic, bordering on avant-garde, as the final half may be, the early portions of Cosmatos’ ethereal vision of Manichean loneliness cast a Romantic portrait of collective solitude that could have made Emerson blush. A couple, Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) and Mandy (Andrea Riseborough), live a solitudinous existence, wonderfully lonely but not emotionally stranded. As they go about their daily rhythms, the film suggests a slice of life picture lost in the void, fuzzy with intangibles, radiating the composure of a perfect relationship that is bound to collapse at a moment’s notice, a vision of perfection which seems plasticine, self-consciously affected, too crystalline to be as true as it lets on. Mandy is tinged with whiffs of sorcery throughout, but the most effective devilry Cosmatos concocts is the almost preternatural sense that happiness is a thin, chimerical fabric that only exists to be ripped to shreds. Continue reading →

Tracing the fault lines of familial trauma without any ostentatiously showy post-modern paranoia, Ari Aster’s Hereditary is extremely cunning, but more importantly, it’s never clever. For all Aster’s talents as both writer and director, his film is blissfully and unapologetically free of any desire to outfox us. For a horror film released in the waning years of the 2010s, Hereditary is almost singularly unhindered by any compulsion to ironize itself and foreground how much it is outpacing our intellects. There’s no sense it is running ahead of us, wagging its finger at us for not keeping up. While its moral architecture is deeply tangled, to say nothing of its truly dyspeptic emotional knots, the film’s style is resolutely classical, mining the depths of its characters’ austere mental insularity in order to depict a family without any exit, staging a drama of almost demonic predetermination.

Although presentiments of terror lurk in nearly every nook and cranny of Aster’s metaphysically brutal film, Hereditary essentially never cheats, but nor does it try to trick us with sleight of hand in the first place. It gives us all of itself, withholds none of its intent so as to stroke our egos by allowing us to “uncover” parlour tricks masquerading as emotional truths. The only twists here are the kind which tangle your stomach in knots. Each and every premonition of woe has the emotional texture of a forewarned intuition, not so much an inevitable, forthcoming tragedy as a clarification of the unstated, barely-sublimated traumas that have always lurked in its central family’s lives, stalking their every gaze and conversation. Continue reading →

Wrote this a while ago but someone never got around to posting it. With If Beale Street Could Talk, the first cinematic adaptation of a published James Baldwin story, currently gracing the screen, I decided now was as good a time as any to share. 

Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro is revelatory precisely because of how little it reveals, or at least how little it reveals through the traditional pathways of film documentary revelation. By this I mean two things: what it reveals about its subjects, race in America and James Baldwin (in that order), is polyphonic, and the pathways of revelation – the film’s way of revealing – are ever-elusive, fragmented, drawn as much to the fissures in documentary form as its capacity to crystallize interpretation. To explain by example, the most immediately striking aspect of Peck’s film is how it rescinds the offer to rely on institutionalized experts, arbiters of truth, synchronized appraisals of Baldwin’s value, and professorial orifices scrubbed relatively clean of the stench of action in the trenches. I Am Not Your Negro is disobedient to these edicts, more interested in Baldwin’s and its own diffuse uncertainties than in crystallizing a portrait of a man who the film appraises as more of a bricolage, even an exquisite corpse: a collection of restless energies and stylistic vulgarities pulled from many sources and idioms, a life as vigorously asymmetrical as the film’s presentation of that life.

Or, at times, its seeming willful refusal to present. Baldwin’s most disobedient gesture, and the film’s greatest consecration of Baldwin (by way of a refusal to consecrate), is how he seems to evaporate from his own picture, to resist whatever form the film might impose upon him, to retain his opacity even to the point of severe frustration. In its disownership of conventional documentary form, in fact, I Am Not Your Negro doesn’t even seem to be consciously presenting Baldwin as an enigma in the studied, now-all-too-common modernist-biography sense of willfully presenting a self-alienated human who doesn’t even know themselves or who has replaced their soul with a pictorial approximation of some concept, e.g. “celebrity”. No, the vaporous Baldwin disowns even that psychological solution for the problem of depicting character; it never sacrifices Baldwin’s prickliness to calcify him as a “concept,” nor does it necormance an image of a man who self-consciously transfigured himself into one. Sometimes even resisting edification entirely, the film fingers the subject of James Baldwin quite like Ralph Ellison’s proverbial “jagged grain”. Continue reading →

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 (25^th 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.

Frequently, this sense of disruption is to their detriment. But even at their worst, Lee’s films seldom want for inspiration, and we can certainly trust a Spike Lee joint to either light the building on fire, silently smolder with sustained intensity, or generally make you loopy, severing step A from B and hop-skipping to C in a gleefully personal, argumentative idiom that eschews reason for slantwise verve and often finds its own arrhythmic logic in the latter. Which is why BlacKkKlansman, the first universally appreciated Lee film in at least 15 years, is such a wonky, lopsided achievement, a truly peculiar success and failure in equal measure and often for all the same reasons. Continue reading →

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.

All of this is to say: at a deeply foundational level, Sorry to Bother You is obviously the work of a filmmaker who is not a schooled or learned but a born, intuitive filmmaker. Or rather, perhaps not a born filmmaker, or a man who knows a single thing about making a film. But if Sorry to Bother You is any indication, his education in the formal arts or in screenplay-structuring is an apocalypse we can all do without: Sorry to Bother You is idiomatic in the best sense, a truly undomesticated work that disfigures any Screenwriter’s Guide with the improvisational gusto and sketch-like ambition of a social-issue jukebox. It has one finger firmly on our social pulse, and another nine flying madly in many directions. I know not Riley’s career until this point, but if his music is as deliciously harebrained as his cinema, that will not remain true for long. His persona with a pen is a withering wit crossed with a sober observer, like a double helix of Jonathan Swift and Buster Keaton, but behind the camera, he’s a hair-raising hare with a mischievous smirk courtesy of Bugs Bunny. Stylistically, morally, and narratively promiscuous, and all with a gleeful indifference to logic, his film throws caution to the wind and twists any reality principle to oblivion even as he wrings dry a film which imaginatively attunes to everyday tensions and paradoxes that propagate in daily society. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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 21^st 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.  Continue reading →