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
One of the main characters of M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass suffers from dissociative identity
disorder. That illness is not shared by its director. Shyamalan may have his
flaws, but he wields his camera with a confidence, a sense of self, that’s
unusual in the Hollywood studio system. Good thing, too, because when reduced
to its building blocks, Glass is a
ridiculous movie, a bizarrely plotted thriller that makes astonishingly little
sense. Yet it also flaunts a genuine personality, along with an exhilarating
degree of style, that elevate it comfortably above its stupidity. There’s a
school of critics who insist that Shyamalan should stop penning his own
screenplays, arguing that his shaky writing hampers his gifts as a director. Maybe
that’s true, but consider the flip side: How many other filmmakers could have
taken this script and turned it into something so effortlessly, indecently entertaining?
An ungainly, tantalizing hybrid of two superior genre
movies, Glass positions itself as the
climax of a suddenly uncovered cinematic universe. Way back in 2000, Unbreakable—still Shyamalan’s best
film—followed the uneasy partnership between David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and
Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), with the latter insistently tugging at the
former to accept his destiny as a real-life superhero. Separately, Split followed the murderous
exploits of Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a Sybil-like serial killer who
occasionally transformed into a savage, animal-like entity called The Beast.
Shyamalan is often accused of repeating himself, but these two movies weren’t
remotely alike in terms of either plot or tone; Unbreakable was a powerful study of obsession, confusion, and
self-discovery, whereas Split was a hammy,
razor-sharp, predator-versus-prey thriller. Yet the (admittedly delightful)
stinger of Split revealed that it in
fact occupied the same world as Unbreakable,
and from those still-glowing ashes, Glass
was born. Read More
A movie awash in potent contradictions—intimate vs.
operatic, reserved vs. vivacious, hopeful vs. disillusioned, wrongfully accused
vs. savagely victimized—If Beale Street
Could Talk opens with a quotation from James Baldwin, who wrote the novel upon
which the film is based. The selected passage, which discusses “the
impossibility and the possibility” (more contradictions!), directs “the reader”
to draw certain inferences from what follows. This is a curious instruction,
given that what follows is not a book but a movie; we aren’t readers, we’re
viewers. It also illuminates the challenge that Barry Jenkins has accepted in
choosing to adapt Baldwin’s novel, the tricky task of translating spiky words
on a page to the visual language of the screen. In making If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins is attempting both to pay
homage to one of the 20th century’s most important authors and to imbue that author’s
prose with his own distinctly cinematic voice.
Not having read the novel, I can’t speak to the veracity of
the on-screen result. What I can say is that, for the most part, this
moving-picture version of If Beale Street
Could Talk walks the line nicely, capturing Baldwin’s frustration and rage
while also functioning as an honest-to-God movie. There are times when Jenkins’
ambitions get the better of him, and when the sheer scope of his undertaking threatens
to overwhelm the particular plight of his characters. Yet even when he
struggles to corral his myriad ideas into a tidy package (and to be sure, the
film’s lack of tidiness is part of its point), Jenkins flaunts a vigorous
command of his medium, breathing bold and colorful life into a story that is,
in some ways, fairly black-and-white. Read More
Aquaman is a fun superhero movie. That is a significant achievement. To be clear, I don’t subscribe to the ideology that modern superheroes are too dark; I admire the solemn gravity of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films, the melancholic humanity of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man pictures, and even the interplanetary terrorism of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But it’s important to remember that Hollywood’s current (and seemingly inexhaustible) superhero franchise churn stemmed from kids geeking out over comics and playing with toys. Aquaman, directed with energy and vibrancy by James Wan, pays tribute to that spirit of youthful exuberance. It’s a movie about a big merman searching for a giant fork, and it’s a blast. Read More
Sure, Brexit is bonkers, but should we have expected anything else from England? As the movies of 2018 seem intent on reminding us, this is a nation with a thoroughly absurd history, a vast empire that routinely suffered internecine conflict and insurrection. After The Favourite showed us the ludicrous extravagances of Stuart England, now comes Mary Queen of Scots to take on the Tudors, when Catholics and Protestants were mortal enemies and Henry VIII cycled through queens like a hedge fund manager on Tinder. Of course, Henry died not long after Mary Stuart was born, but as this engrossing and enjoyable film relays, his spirit of monarchial chaos raged on. Read More
