7 Women
It’s no secret that John Ford expended a life’s worth of energy both begrudgingly celebrating and categorically expunging the individualist violence of the American West while also quietly questioning the worth of the supposed righteous path to civilization proposed by so many Westerns in the American mind. The Searchers, his most famous film, and his most piercing commentary on the harshness of the path to American civilization, ends with a beacon of wild and wooly old West vigilantism, embodied in the bellicose John Wayne, leaving through the doorway of civilization. Many classic Westerns begin with a mythic hero ceremoniously wandering into a town to engage in the violence Ford felt was ultimately, if unfortunately, necessary on the path to peace; The Searchers doesn’t radically reject the notion of Western civilization, although it proposes that the white men who paved the way for this society don’t belong in it much at all. So Wayne entered the new world, and so too he must leave. Continue reading
Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight boasts the most memorable opening shot of any film released this year, and arguably the most beguiling, contrarian final one. The three hours of fervent, bellicose celluloid in between veer from passionate ax-grinding to lazy-day wheel-turning, from crystal cinematic clarity to dynamically befuddled, wanderingly confused filmic indulgence, and from great to merely passable. The Hateful Eight is very likely the least uniform film Tarantino has ever made, rising from clandestine peaks to overbearing valleys with split-second timing and not one ounce of diffidence.
Perfect isn’t everything. In the annals of the cinema of 2015, some of the most startling films – Mad Max: Fury Road, The Assassin, Anomalisa – defy and deny perfection by their very experimental nature. They construct cinema out of uncertain girders and alien cement, and (especially with Mad Max) the ferocity and ambition of their go-for-broke aesthetic playfulness necessarily entails a certain wait-and-see imperfection around the edges. They are films that, at some level, are simply figuring things out. Some of these films are more challenging and rewarding cinematic tapestries precisely because the tapestries feel unfinished (picture the way that the characters in Anomalisa wear the claymation seams in their faces like markers of artifice in their personality). Anyone who wants these tapestries completed, and thus strained of their unique ambitions, may suffer from a mundane case of cinematic milquetoast. 
Max Ophuls’ luxuriantly mordant elegy The Earrings of Madame de … is, above all, a deeply generous film to its audience. Admittedly, it’s something scathing screenplay might suggest otherwise, and some of the most carnivorously self-devouring mise en scene in the entire history of cinema adds insult to injury for an audience expecting the formal niceties of realism. But Ophuls’ film, as deliriously dense as it is, doesn’t ask us to guess. Ophuls was a fervent maximalist of an auteur, gripping the screen in his haughty, hyperbolic hand and refusing to let go, but he was not vicious to his audience. His 1953 film is a formal masterpiece of gleeful clockwork where every slice of the cinema, every ounce of the frame, is carefully calibrated and painstakingly repurposed for the audience to dance with, but he lets us have his purpose in a handbasket right from the opening scene. 
Return to Oz
Alexander Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth suggests a beguiling, fractured-mirror psychodrama on the surface, nearly begging to be misrepresented as reduction or mere pastiche of ’70s art house post-Hitchcock from an unnamed, presumably chilly, Middle European far off nether realm. Un-suture the cluttered hash-work of staples, though, and the metaphorical blood runs white-hot in this ostensibly cool-blue chamber piece of glistening neurosis belying fading friendship. There’s warmth and liveliness here, darkly comedic energy and even occasional buoyancy, enough to keep the tale from functioning as arid, manipulative still-water but only so much to ensure this emotional swampland never turns into a lightweight river raid. If this is Bergman, it’s flying for the left-of-center targets, the more unhinged ones like Hour of the Wolf. Don’t call it Persona 2.0.
Perhaps no canonical director rambunctiously, even violently, defies reputation and expectation like the young German enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Welles was the cocksure bon vivant who saw to it that Hollywood would crawl back to the primordial expressionism it stewed forth from. Tarkovsky was the impressionist shaman of grand cinematic spirituals. Dreyer the hallucinatory chronicler of personal spaces invaded and regained. Kubrick the possibly psychotic, probably anti-human mad scientist and arch-stylist. Kurosawa was a swaggering painter, Ozu gently serenaded the world into his dioramas of the soul, Mizoguchi bonded himself to ethereal, ghostly portals into the hazy nether realms of the human experience. Even Godard famously resorted to generalizations: There was theater (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray”, a bold declaration and a line in the sand for the B-movie bravado of the French New Wave. And if you criticize him for his over-simplications, you can’t but tacitly endorse a couple of them. 
Something plainly went wrong with What We Do in the Shadows: the film turned out great. The concept – a cadre of vampires from varying ages room together and struggle to adapt to the norms of modern life – is so high that it ought to lose oxygen in five minutes and induce rigor mortis. The also-concept is even worse: What We Do in the Shadows is a mockumentary, the hoariest cliché of the decade following television’s inability to put the format to rest post-The Office, a fact that allows the film to exploit the increasingly aesthetic-less handheld camera more common every year these days. I don’t know that Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, who co-direct and co-write, single-handedly save the whole trend from a way-past-due stake in the heart, but bless them for trying. What We Do in the Shadows ought to be a mere parlour trick, but in practice it is much closer to a satanically devious nocturnal charmer. 
The Long Take 