The spaceship has a garden. Somewhere, amid the instrument
panels and the spartan bunks and the anti-gravity suits, there is a verdant room
full of plants, moss, and dirt. It’s as if the astronauts, saddened by the
prospect of leaving Earth behind, insisted on bringing a bit of earth along with
them.
This contrast—between the personal and the fantastical, between
presence and absence, between flowering life and merciless death—is emblematic
of High Life, Claire Denis’ strange,
frustrating, beguiling new film. Part sci-fi thriller, part philosophical
meditation, it is always challenging, often boring, and occasionally
mesmerizing. Read More
Some movies climb the walls, but in Climax, the walls blur into the ceiling and the floor. In this
ambitious and enervating whatsit from the French-Argentine provocateur Gaspar
Noé, the camera floats and swirls and glides, taking delirious flight through
the air as bodies writhe before it in blissed-out ecstasy and unhinged agony. At
one point, it becomes unclear whether the characters are vertical or
horizontal, and they’re surely tripping too hard to tell the difference. It’s a
dazzling visual achievement, which makes it all the more frustrating that Climax is, well, a Gaspar Noé film, which
means that its technical audacity is marshaled in the service of cardboard
characters, repugnant themes, and a story that is by turns skeletal and grotesque.
Few directors have labored so much, and with such evident skill, to produce art
that means so little.
Following the relentless banality of Love, a 135-minute borefest whose notion of boldness was to slather
a dozen explicit sex scenes on top of its monotonous chronicle of a doomed
relationship, Climax finds Noé
returning to the lurid violence and operatic camerawork of his prior two
features, Irreversible and Enter the Void. That’s for the best; despite
its surfeit of stimulated genitals and spurting fluids, Love found Noé out of his element, straining to tell a
character-driven story with a minimum of visual embellishment. (Well, relative minimum; as with Enter the Void, Love featured a POV shot of a penis ejaculating inside a vagina.) He’s
far more comfortable trafficking in ornate brutality, which he likes to turn
arty with pounding music and sweeping long takes. Working again with his
regular cinematographer, Benoît Debie, Noé takes the ostensibly flat setting of
Climax—an abandoned high school in
France—and, with unflinching verve, transforms it into a hellish landscape of quaking
terror, the Parisian equivalent of the Overlook Hotel. Read More
There may not have been a ton of great movies released in
2018, but 2018 was still a great year for movies. It was one of the most
fertile cinematic years that I can remember, full of challenging, fascinating
films that were far from perfect but were resolutely good and—more
important—interesting. Even as the industry continues to undergo seismic
change, the movies themselves remain a vibrant cultural center, a thriving
bazaar where viewers can converse, promote, argue, and discover.
It was also a year full of exciting and diverse voices,
varied not only in terms of race and gender, but also with respect to age,
style, and even mode of distribution. Black directors made themselves heard,
and loudly, from the stirring adventure of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther to the fiery agitprop
of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman to the scalding
satire of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You to the youthful anger
of George Tillman Jr.’s The Hate U Give to the piercing
melancholy of Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk. Women,
too, continued to assert themselves as equals in a marketplace that has treated
them as inferiors for far too long; Kay Cannon’s Blockers made us laugh, Chloé Zhao’s The Rider made us cry, and Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? made us do both, while Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here made us tremble
in fear and awe. Read More
Kayla, the heroine of the skin-crawling dramedy Eighth Grade, is a perfectly normal 14-year-old girl, which is another way of saying that her life is a complete disaster. She is anxious, awkward, and prone to extremities of emotion, mood swinging violently from euphoria to despair. As you watch this graceful and lovely movie, the directorial debut of the comedian Bo Burnham, you will feel compelled to envelop Kayla with affection, to promise her that everything will be OK. Of course, if you actually did that, she would likely shrink away from you and squeal in embarrassment. The only people more annoying than the kids who make Kayla miserable are the adults who try to make her feel better.
In a certain sense, Eighth Grade is a horror movie, given how it evokes memories of adolescence with ruthless clarity; you cannot experience Kayla’s tribulations without recalling the heightened agonies of your own youth. Yet one of Burnham’s smart storytelling choices is to avoid ladling on the trauma too heavily. This film is not an after-school special about bullying or self-esteem, nor is it a nauseating tale of social and sexual misadventure in the vein of Welcome to the Dollhouse. It is instead a measured, compassionate look at one teenager’s particular struggles as she suffers through one final week of middle school. Read More
She just had to be a miniaturist. Hereditary, the impressive and excessive and frequently electrifying debut feature from Ari Aster, would have been scary enough if its besieged heroine had worked as a lawyer or a teacher or a writer. But no, the recently orphaned Annie (Toni Collette) is a conceptual artist who specializes in designing tiny panoramas, and there’s something extra-creepy about the way she uses paint and glue to manufacture ornately detailed dollhouses. Maybe it’s the notion of a powerful creator exercising absolute dominion over her realm, not unlike a movie director domineering his helpless audience. It seems more than just a fancy flourish that Hereditary opens in an abandoned attic, the camera slowly rotating from a sunlit window to the shadowy interior, then gradually pushing in on one such minuscule dollhouse bedroom; one invisible special effect later, and that facsimile has become the film’s actual environment, with a man striding through the door to wake his son. It soon becomes clear that this movie, with its countless shrieks and shocks, is itself an artfully assembled prison. You cannot escape from it; you can only hold on for dear life, as Aster buffets you where he may.
That may not sound like your idea of a good time, but for cineastes, Hereditary is essential viewing purely as a matter of formal technique. The horror genre is so durable in part because of its mutability—any political point or allegorical tribute achieves more force when appearing in the guise of zombies or ghosts—but it also draws talented craftsmen with an innate command of cinematic grammar. And while Hereditary is not without its flaws—most notably a third-act tilt into absurdity—Aster’s abilities cannot be in dispute. He wields the camera with elegant precision rather than brute force, favoring silky and captivating long takes as opposed to vulgar jump cuts. His directing is always controlled, even when his writing is utterly bonkers. Read More
