The Green Knight: It’s Not Easy Being Guillotined

Dev Patel in The Green Knight

During one of the many ruminative exchanges in David Lowery’s The Green Knight, a common young woman scoffs at her paramour’s obsession with greatness. “Why is goodness not enough?” she wonders with a combination of selfishness and curiosity. Like most of its maker’s movies, The Green Knight operates—or attempts to operate—as both a sincere answer to the question and an emphatic rejection of its premise. In films like the Malick-infused crime drama Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and the austere metaphysical puzzler A Ghost Story, Lowery wasn’t aiming for passable entertainment; he wanted to make high art, true masterpieces that reshaped our attitude toward what cinema can be. (His Ghost Story follow-up, The Old Man & the Gun, was enjoyable in part for how atypically relaxed it was.) Judged against that impossible standard, he failed both times, and does so again here; The Green Knight is no masterpiece. But it is undeniably a mighty work, and its towering ambition—the way it takes an epic poem and updates it with its own combination of beauty, whimsy, and nonsense—is itself commendable.

The title of that poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (by Anonymous), briefly emerges on screen, in an Old-English font that’s nigh unreadable; over the course of the proceedings, other headings make similarly quick appearances, each harder to decipher than the last. In fact, illegibility is something of a precept for the movie, be it vocally, visually, or narratively. Actors often mumble lines, their “thees” and “thines” drowned out by the clangs of nature or Daniel Hart’s moody score. The image, especially in the opening scenes, is often dark, as though a fog of war has settled over the screen. And the trajectory of the story, which follows Gawain (Dev Patel) on a picaresque adventure, is regularly interrupted by strange sights and odd digressions. Read More

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