(Edit: While I do not love this movie, it is lodged in my mind far deeper than many passing, more immediately pleasurable 8/10’s. Silence does not go down smoothly, but it lingers and stings, and I’m inclined, if not to disregard this review, at least to accentuate the film’s strengths and to suggest that its weaknesses are part and parcel with Scorsese’s lone film of the past 15 years to genuinely explore the darkest recesses of this man’s mind as well as the sublime, intimate heights of his vision rather than simply the length of his films or the girth of their visuals)
Like many long-term passion projects, Martin Scorsese’s Silence has the exceedingly pained-over, cloistered, professional vibe of a film where every decision has been manipulated to death and planned to oblivion. It’s extraordinarily perfectionist, a formalist’s dream, yet it has the grinding vibe of a work that thinks it’s an art film but doesn’t realize that all true art cinema thinks of calcified compositions as a perennial plague. Even the most notionally static images of an Antonioni film brim with the conflicted energy of contradiction and minute and unsettling disturbances of mood and attitude as well as a disfiguring sense of uncertainty and the impermanence of every image, every character, every life. Comparatively, Silence is too upright to reverberate with indecision and irresolution, and its bold stretches of stillness occasionally feel like moments of strained constipation rather than thoughtful instances of hesitancy. It could use a walk on the wild side. Continue reading
A decade out of play, everyone’s favorite one-man-circus of a filmmaker Mel Gibson remains a wily, spirited, and altogether untactful filmmaker bearing a murderous sensibility for lacquering his traditionalist moralities (not quite the same as American conservative moralities, mind you) in his almost unblinkingly erotic fetish for violence. Which is all well and good, and Hacksaw Ridge comes alive in fits and starts. But Gibson’s return from director jail has a perverse moral paradox at its core, and Gibson – probably assuming this is his only chance to return to the A-list – handles the material too cleanly, too respectably, and with too much pristine professionalism to unpack the eccentricities and thorns of the subject matter. There’s a philosophical battle at play deep down, but the old fashioned A-picture tone, while largely effective as a from-the-hip war picture, lacks the jagged edges and exploratory digressions to submerge into the knottier nooks and crannies of the film’s situation just begging to be torn into. 
A pall, an impenetrable haze of dejection, suffuses both Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester-by-the-Sea and its main character Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), a Boston-based apartment superintendent called back to his hometown of Manchester-by-the-Sea (about 30 minutes north of Boston) for the death of his brother. Set in the dead of winter, Lee’s trip is extended because the brother (Joe, played by Kyle Chandler) has a son (Patrick, played by Lucas Hedges) who needs temporary looking after and because the more-snow-stricken-than-snow-blanketed New England soil isn’t soft enough for a grave until Spring. Lee is a quiet, sensitive soul, but we quickly learn his attitude and personality are the casualties of his displaced worldview and clinical depression stemming from an initially unspoken past tragedy involving his ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams). 
Released as Netflix’s first blockbuster – a fact that bears some weight for scholars of the industry of cinema but less for the connoisseurs of films themselves – Okja is significantly more enticing as the new film from South Korean cinemagician Bong Joon-ho, marking his second Korean-American co-language film after 2014’s Snowpiercer. A leftist parable – although less brazenly radical than Snowpiercer – this lightly Miyazaki-esque eco-critique of American capitalistic practices is extremely broad, but like Snowpiercer, it treats its populist-front, excessive sense of caricature as a boon to its political ambitions rather than a restriction on them. Both of these films lack anything resembling the delectably sinuous pitch-black brio of Joon-ho’s two best films, Mother and Memories of Murder, but they do not erase his expert knack for Warner Bros-esque absurdism, nor do they stamp out the truest quality of all his films: the intoxicating commotion of conflicting energies. 
Baby Driver makes a palpable and committed bid to attain the action sublime. It is a work of testosterone-auteurism that falls short of the sheer aesthetic bravado and emancipatory charge of Mad Max: Fury Road but at least matches The Raid in the top tier of ‘10s action cinema. Its style spreads like a pandemic, sidewinding into the realm of avant-pop music video, turbo-charged but with flickers of whimsy where restive full-throttle motion is contraposed by plateaus of stillness and silence that reveal writer-director-mad-scientist Edgar Wright as a true summoner of the cinema. He conjures the long-dead spirits of style-as-substance ‘70s car thrillers that matched pedal-to-the-medal with moments of melancholy and pensive reflection about the nature of a life lived watching your rear-view-mirror, hurtling at a hundred miles an hour but never truly moving forward. 
A toxic swirl of competing and conflicting energies and moods, The Bad Batch relishes both a freakish, convulsing elan and a border-town’s sense of dispossessed, out-of-the-way melancholy. It definitely carries a streak of hot-tempered punk aggression and rambunctiousness. But the energy is tempered with the ethereal disposition of punk’s younger, more reptilian late-‘80s-alt cousin, Alt-Goth, which was the prevailing ethos of Amirpour’s first film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and which carries its own attitude of vaguely stoned, quasi-psychedelic, chilled-down depression. The Bad Batch has a feminist spirit – more riot grrl than Gloria Steinem – but also a lean, mean musculature, parts of which Sam Fuller or Anthony Mann might have directed. It defies reasonable meaning at almost all turns, but its dyspeptic drone is palpable and feels thematically united in its exploration of the pushed around, both the people and the films of the furthest corners of the world where rules are guidelines and communities are tenuous and volatile. It is flawed, deeply so, and, at times, its poetic brand of outsider melancholy can become less of a mood proper and more of an affectation or, at worst, a fixation Amirpour just can’t quit. But the film’s iconoclastic zest is undeniable. 
Jordan Peele’s Get Out is most appealing because it busts through the shackles of hopelessly milquetoast race-themed Oscarbait persistent to this day, and not only the old standbys like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?. Get Out also ousts and decentralizes more modern fare like Hidden Figures for their contentedness to coast on shuffling black historical figures into the relatively unchanged narrative structure gifted to white historical figures for decades: down-and-outs persist, struggle, and triumph. By thrusting African-Americans into this all-too-American success narrative thrumming with national mythologies of potency and virile capability, Hollywood only allows this agency-narrative to continue unabated as the dominant acceptable lexicon for black characters in film. If you are black and not a scathingly regressive stereotype in a film, essentially, you better be a success story, operationalized to validate America’s go-to narrative of assimilating all races into its fetishization of “opportunity” as an opiate keeping discussions of real equality at bay. 
Park Chan-wook’s endlessly, even mercilessly fastidious and picky aesthetic sensibilities – ornate and obsessive in equal measure – have never served him better than in The Handmaiden. His formalist techniques, often constricting and repressive of the emotional juices of his films, are wonderful mimetics for a screenplay which very much attends to questions of constriction and choking alienation. Set almost entirely in a Japanese-controlled mansion occupied by Koreans, not to mention in a male-dominated culture tenated by women, The Handmaiden’s mise-en-scene and blocking compound the pristine ritualistic motions of the characters who cannot break-out of their socially-structured, performative identities without incessant observation and admonishment.
The opening of James Mangold’s Logan bears the film’s fangs right from the get-go, brandishing the titular character’s unruly temperament in an early fight edited in schizophrenic shambles. The scene is treated not as a cleanly delineated pleasure-soaked fight-performance for our amusement but as a brutal, animalistic seizure of uncontrolled violence. Rather than a slow, mysterious secretion of innumerable details building to narrative proportions, Logan quite literally lets itself rip.
The Long Take 