It’s quite endearing how clearly Venom turns the clock back 15 years to the 2003 class of superhero movies, feeling wholly and irrevocably at odds with the increasing homogeneity of comic book cinema in the Marvel Cinematic Universe age. That’s not to suggest the film is meaningfully good, but merely bad in its own idiom, spirited and simply valuable as an almost found object from another time when the genre was still figuring itself out. How else to explain turning a bizarre would-be two-man show with Tom Hardy unleashing his inner Abbott and Costello into a superhero (or anti-hero) film?

Hardy does bring a schizophrenic, screwball discombobulation to the proceedings as Eddie Brock and his symbiotic alter ego Venom, but the film around him badly, almost astonishingly mismanages all of the good-will he earns even before the titular figure shows up. Director Ruben Flesicher is at his best when winking at another Fleischer, the animation guru from the ‘30s. Or better yet the Marx Brothers, Venom as the cheerfully demented prankster to Hardy’s paranoid, delusory journalist on the tail of a corporate human-experimentation racket. All this should signal you to the closeted truth of Venom: it only really functions as a comedy, and although it’s kind and self-aware enough to imbibe in its pitch-black, sadistic tendencies, it’s not clever enough to truly rely on them. Continue reading →

Quite like Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2 traffics in inside-baseball references rather than genuine emotion. It simply treats the insider knowledge required to fully appreciate it as an indication of its impish wit rather than solemn, magisterial weight, but both are essentially, cynically, committed to walling themselves off from criticism with the defense that their critics just “don’t get it”. For Avengers, it’s that you aren’t sufficiently committed to the franchise to “get” its “developments on” (read: regurgitations of) earlier films in its cinematic universe. For Deadpool 2, it’s that you don’t “get” how self-parodic Deadpool 2 is; like any good ironic film, it treats every moment both as sincere narrative event and parody of the same, ensuring that no can capably attack it for fear of being accused of just missing the point.

That’s lame, as it always has been. The least that can be said in Deadpool 2’s favor, however, is that while it is no less self-absorbed than Infinity War, or any MCU film for that matter, it is also very self-amused. Its personal rubric for success is its dialectic of self-appreciation and self-flagellation (quite a fitting duality for the sado-masochistic title character). Of course, its amusement is limited to fairly obvious satire. I’ve heard it compared to the works of Paul Verhoeven (and the film clearly relishes these comparisons as superlatives) but Deadpool’s simultaneously comic and solemn fracas fails the Verhoeven poker-face test whereby the blankness of the expression (Verhoeven’s refusal to admit his satire explicitly) refracts many potential tonal and narrative realities based on the audience’s inclination. In comparison, Deadpool 2 is quite clear that it aspires to be both a serious superhero film and a satire of one, a Janus-face rather than Verhoeven’s delicious death-mask that obfuscates emotions rather than inviting them. Continue reading →

Now that we’re firmly in the decade of Pixar shoring up its status with sequels to best-in-show properties rather than adventurously casting off its lot in less-rehearsed, more invigorating directions, we can at least be pleased that this particular sequel is an excuse for Brad Bird to return to the world of Pixar. Which, apparently, is a generally commensurable company to house his relentlessly optimistic aesthetic indulgences in the widest-eyed corners of mid-century Americana and pulp sci-fi. And house it does! While Bird’s good-natured futurism felt awkward while navigating the confines and demands of live-action cinema in the sometimes-effervescent, sometimes-cloying, sometimes-unwieldy Tomorrowland, there’s a natural mutability to animation that fits Bird’s relatively (and gloriously) surface-bound style like a glove.

And to the surprise of no one, aesthetically speaking, Incredibles 2 is a gas, the giddiest approximation yet of the gee-whiz mid-century spirit clearly percolating in Bird’s head since the halcyon days of The Iron Giant (to which, say, Adult Swim’s terrific cartoon The Venture Bros. is the cracked-mirror negative double). After a few mostly realist animated pictures, it’s deeply gratifying to see Pixar return to the deliberately frivolous, gleefully foolish cartoon style that dances so recklessly in Bird’s head, and which animated (excuse the pun) the spirit of many of their best films (Bird’s Ratatouille, most of all). It’s gloriously insignificant, as beholden aesthetically as narratively to mid-century pop serial storytelling and comic book absurdity, much more vigorously enlivened with comic book zest than any live-action comic book movie released in the past few years, save the Guardians duology. Continue reading →

Granting a movie its concept is, in general, as axiomatic a principle as a respectable film critic can hold, but boy does Susanne Bier’s Bird Box test that classical truth at every turn. Adapting a story about the perils of sight to a visual medium is both a grand folly and a delicious possibility, a dare to accept the task of playing around with cinema’s very form. To forget the foundational cinematic tradition of show-not-tell. To both advance to its logical conclusion terror’s tradition of visualizing the un-visualizable and, as importantly, to acknowledge what can’t be seen. So the “concept” of Bird Box isn’t actually rotten so much as a question mark, a quandary to be used for good or ill as the creators see fit. How do you use a visual medium to thematize the inability to see? Continue reading →

Noise kills, and that old trope of a horror film narrative device is given a sturdy work-out by director John Krasinski in A Quiet Place. Himself playing the male lead and casting his wife as his on-screen partner, it seems self-evident that A Quiet Place treats its horror as a distinctly personal affront, and his craft belies the care he put into this production. This, in other words, is personal for Krasinski. But, if this film relies on horror as personal threat, it is definitively not an existential threat here: the bestiary of A Quiet Place is a threat to an assumed normative domesticity rather than a question for it. Family-hood is pro forma here, a way to appeal to an audience’s basest fears rather than reconsider them. In a film like A Quiet Place, women give birth because, well, why would one ask? Continue reading →

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is wonderfully inelegant, a delirious scrawl of a film that at times seems to tilt completely off its rocker, an ungovernable pop manifesto sometimes truly on the brink, as though the film could shudder apart at any moment. While so many superhero pictures seem to fear for their lives that their essential superfluity will be discovered, Into the Spider-Verse rushes headfirst into ludicrousness, swinging deliriously and incredulously into its own harebrained lunacy and divining relevancy out of blissful irrelevancy. And, somehow, concurrently besting any other superhero film this year for dramatic earnestness and emotional seriousness anyway.

Written by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman (and bearing the distinct Lord/Miller touch every step of the way), Into the Spider-Verse also wears the inevitability of its storytelling on its sleeves. Which is to say, even if it does succumb to certain clichés of the genre, it not only ruefully mocks these conventions (the lesser path traversed by, say, the Deadpool films) but examines the tragic futility and heroic possibility of truly breaking from them. In other words, as it semi-transgressively disrupts the rules which it acknowledges it must adhere to, it motions toward a shared critique of the blinkered cultural production of anemic superhero storytelling and the social-material-systemic inequalities which constrain a mixed-race Brooklyn teenager in an oppressive, in-egalitarian, often hostile world. Continue reading →

At times, the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs feels like a mere Western jukebox: six variations on America’s central mythologies, a film content only to revisit cinema’s past glories rather than conjuring a tangled, intersubjective dialogue between various visions of the West and the imaginative clout it has held throughout time. But even at their most reverential – and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is ultimately more of a hat-tip to the West than a screed – the writer-directors never treat the mythos as pure chapter-and-verse. In moving between cruel, cutthroat, mordant, and elegiac ruminations on the most American of genres, they tackle various flavors of the American experiment, from the wonderfully impious to the truly haunted to the downright nihilistic. While each of this omnibus’ six short tales is more a sketch than a story, they each refine a moral perspective on the West that is more complicated, and far messier, than the Coens’ more literal Western thus far, 2010’s somewhat depressingly straight-laced True Grit. While that earlier film was a skilled retread, a taxidermy of Western tropes curated for our pleasure, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs actually seems to have a perspective – many, in fact – on the genre.

Another way of putting it is that, while True Grit was a sensible imitation – garbed in the finest spurs it could don – The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a meditation, frequently a grave one, that more self-consciously affects various Western guises and outfits only to unbutton them. Some of this is purely schematic – if you have six chances, you’re more likely to create a Western prism, a polyphonic impression of competing and sometimes contradictory visions rather than one more foundational notion of the “West”. But that doesn’t make it any less evocative. While the Coens have always been distinct American moralists, brandishing a mixture of godless heresy and fire-and-brimstone puritanism in the spirit of Mark Twain, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs practically wears its fictive, fabulistic qualities on its sleeve, conjuring a half-dozen parables of loners, cutthroats, and miscreants trying to survive within, and usually falling prey to, the American experience. Continue reading →

I wouldn’t be the first to compare The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos’ neurotic, deliciously acrid comedy of manners, to All About Eve, Joseph Mankiewicz’ indelible and nasty-minded unclothing of the entertainment industry. Such a comparison effectively stitches the connection between royalty and celebrity, a stitch which Lanthimos then unthreads (or shears to pieces) via his total and unmitigated assault on the prefabricated identities the women at the heart of this royal chess-match mock-up to hide their devious underbellies. But, although there may be some imaginative kinship between the films, even by those standards, Lanthimos’ brew of irony and sheer cinematographic morbidity constitute an act of cinematic sabotage that feels totally unique.

Although it has precedents – even among Lanthimos’ own films – the indeterminate coordinates of sexual deception in this choreographed pageant of political misdirection constitutes not only an image of personal identity interfered with by the machinations of others but a truly vicious darkening of the moral edges. Or a lowering of the lights into a depiction of cloistered Royalty that seems to be occurring in some particularly regal ring of hell.  And I mean darkening quite literally. Although Lanthimos turns his eye to the tight-lipped and equally predatory theater of the British aristocracy, he somehow one-ups Mankiewicz’ film at least cinematically speaking by corrosively throwing enough visual bile in Robbie Ryan’s gloriously gross cinematography to keep up with the vicious barbs hurled from every character in the film. The Favourite is a truly cynical, predatory film, a closed-door masquerade of fluid power dynamics and curdled souls to rival last year’s Phantom Thread. Continue reading →

Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma is a textural paradox, aiming for intimacy not in spite of but through Cuaron’s typically broad, sumptuously grand filmmaking sensibilities. While Gravity was deliberately essentialized, primordial, and mythical, Roma retains this largely mythopoetic caliber but diamond-cuts it against a more democratic, diffuse, heterogeneous portrait of quotidian existence, elevating the everyday to the almost elemental. Somewhere between Federico Fellini’s experimental memory-plays and the harsher, hoarser contours of Italian Neo-realism, Roma is a collective canvas of lives intimated, a fable-istic vision closer to the whimsical squalor of De Sica’s Miracle in Milan than his more famous Bicycle Thieves, despite the latter’s obvious clout as an influence here. It’s more immediately (perhaps superficially) satisfying and less philosophically dense, or mournfully longing, or emotionally haunted, than any of these inspirations, and certainly lacks the cackling, existential carousel ride feel of the Fellini film which shares its name (and even that isn’t the director at his most carnival-esque). But it’s a spellbindingly textured film nonetheless, a semi-autobiographical work that aims less for a realist canvas than a conjuration of strong, semi-arbitrary memories, a tapestry of impressions that are both crystalline and vague.

Which means that Roma doubles as both a singular, focused drawing of Cuaron’s childhood maid realized so empathetically in Yalitzia Aparicio’s Cleo, a Mixtec servant of an upper-middle-class Mexico City family, and a kind of impasto of ephemeralia: a film where each brush-stroke tells its own story, intimating another image, character, moment, or vision beyond Cleo’s immediate existence. Each moment simultaneously stands-apart, converses with one another, and sometimes contradicts each other, allowing the film to spread out beyond the confines of the perspective which is ostensibly galvanizing the screenplay. Roma isn’t exactly revelatory, and it certainly divorces itself from the hellion, wild child impulsiveness of Y Tu Mama Tambien and the bad seed divinations of Children of Men, still Cuaron’s masterpieces. But as a largely generous motion picture, Cuaron’s film is a wonderful vision of sheer empathy, even if its empathy doesn’t always extend to real solidarity. Continue reading →

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 →