Zola: All That Twitters, Newly Told

Riley Keough and Taylour Paige in Zola

Almost Famous may have immortalized the trope of passengers giddily belting out a classic pop song, but Zola, the indecently entertaining new film from Janicza Bravo, revives the conceit and reinvests it with a distinctly modern sensibility. In an early scene that finds four strivers cruising south from Detroit to Tampa, a young man cues up Migos’ “Hannah Montana” and starts enthusiastically bobbing along to the beat. At first he seems foolish (in no small part because he’s played by Nicholas Braun, aka Cousin Greg from Succession), but before long his gusto infects his fellow travelers, who join him in a rambunctious display of lip-synching and tongue-wagging. The mood is jubilant but also performative, the gesticulators constantly posing for pics and racking up the likes on Instagram. It’s a celebration that’s simultaneously authentic and synthetic.

This preoccupation with digital gratification—a mingling of heedless joy and self-conscious artistry—doesn’t belong exclusively to the characters; it’s embedded in the movie’s very DNA. Zola was born from Twitter, specifically a viral 148-tweet thread from A’Ziah “Zola” King, who in October 2015 tapped out on her phone an emoji-laced saga of vice, mayhem, and betrayal. (The reporter David Kushner quickly turned it into an article for Rolling Stone.) A sprawling collection of 140-character missives may seem like bare bones for a feature film, but one of the lessons of the technological age is that art can come from anywhere. And Zola, as brought to the screen by Bravo and co-writer Jeremy O. Harris, is a proudly contemporary picture that also draws from classic cinematic influences. As the saying goes, all you need to make a movie is a girl, a gun, and a smartphone to orchestrate your illicit prostitution scheme. Read More

New Streamers: Judas and the Black Messiah, Saint Maud, and The Little Things

Jared Leto in The Little Things; Morfydd Clark in Saint Maud; Daniel Kaluuya in Judas and the Black Messiah

Ordinarily, early February is a cinematic dumping ground. But among the million other things that the COVID-19 pandemic affected, it caused the Oscars to expand their eligibility window by two months, meaning that some high-profile titles just landed on your favorite streaming services. Let’s take a quick run through this past weekend’s newest releases.

Judas and the Black Messiah (HBO Max). The second feature from Shaka King, Judas and the Black Messiah is a contemporary political text that’s also a classical spy thriller. It tells the story of Bill O’Neal (a very fine Lakeith Stanfield), the small-time car thief who became a big-league FBI informant in the late ’60s and infiltrated the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers, led by Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya). It isn’t subtle about its allegiance; you don’t need a degree in Christian theology to discern which character corresponds to which half of the title. Read More

Streaming Roundup: Borat 2, His House, On the Rocks, Rebecca, and The Witches

Sope Dirisu in "His House"; Maria Bakalova in "Borat 2"; Anne Hathaway in "The Witches"; Lily James in "Rebecca"; and Bill Murray in "On the Rocks"

Not long ago, the United States was rocked by a seismic event—one that historians will be grappling with for generations, and one that threatens to further divide an already polarized nation. I’m talking, of course, about the new Sofia Coppola movie.

OK, OK, settle down. The 2020 presidential election may be unprecedented in a variety of ways—voter turnout, disinformation campaigns, whispered implications of an outright coup—but even it couldn’t derail the movies, which keep getting made and released. We here at the Manifesto have been a bit busy of late obsessively tracking every electoral development doing important confidential work, so let’s catch up with some capsule looks at five recent streaming titles. Read More

The Best Movies of 2019

Cinema is dead. Long live cinema.

I don’t mean to be glib. These are turbulent times in the film trade. The ever-fluctuating artistic topography that is the movies somehow felt even more precarious than usual in 2019, with industry-wide fault lines cracking into seismic shifts. You’ve heard the cries of panic: about a sequel-saturated marketplace, about a dearth of original screenplays, about viewers watching new films—or, really, digitized reproductions—on their couch (typically via Netflix) rather than in the theater. Sure, some formulas remain sacred; after all, we can still count on Hollywood churning out safe products of hagiography, particularly where musical legends are concerned. (After Bohemian Rhapsody claimed four Oscars in 2018, this past year gave us Rocketman.) Yet there is nevertheless an uncertainty gripping global cinema, a sense of shifting currents and irregular tides. Even if 2020 is set to see Timothée Chalamet play Bob Dylan, I’m compelled to note that the movies, they are a-changin’. Read More

Uncut Gems: Doubling Down, on Distress and Excess

Adam Sandler in the Safdie Brothers' "Uncut Gems"

Of course Uncut Gems opens with an extreme close-up of a colonoscopy. After all, this nasty, edgy, oddly exhilarating movie is the work of Josh and Benny Safdie, those sibling purveyors of stomach-churning New York City sleaze. Their prior film, Good Time, steeped itself in grimy brutality, featuring all manner of crimes, deaths, and maulings. Their new picture, as its initial footage of a man’s digestive tract suggests, in no way eases up on the throttle; it’s another portrait of a desperate man, and it’s uncompromising in its vulgarity and intensity. Yet there’s something strange about Uncut Gems, something shiny buried within its crusty shell of unfiltered savagery and heedless aggression. It is—and I can’t believe I’m writing this, given that the Safdies’ filmmaking ethos seems to involve making the viewing experience as nauseating as possible—fun to watch.

Whether it’s pleasant to look at is another matter. With each new feature—before Good Time, they made the low-budget addiction drama Heaven Knows What, starring mostly non-professional actors—the Safdies grow increasingly accomplished in refining their distinctive style. It is not an aesthetic I particularly care for. The camera is wobbly, the music (again by Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never) is invasive, and the lighting is, well, not very light; many scenes play out in dim interiors, with unflattering illumination that makes the actors look wan. Occasionally, they subvert their grungy approach in productive ways, such as when a musician activates a black light at a nightclub, suddenly brightening the screen with bolts of neon. The veteran cinematographer, Darius Khondji, has worked with David Fincher, Bong Joon-ho, and Michael Haneke, and he helps modulate the Safdies’ signature freneticism with a measure of discipline. Still, for the most part, this movie looks gritty, sickly, and ugly. Read More