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
Late in The Devil All the Time, the relentlessly ugly and obdurately watchable new thriller from Antonio Campos, a young man insists that he isn’t a bad person. This may ring false, given that we’ve already seen him kill several people with a pistol and beat up several others with assorted car parts. But wickedness is a spectrum rather than a point, and the competition for the most despicable character in The Devil All the Time—which transpires in various backwaters of West Virginia and Ohio, including an aptly named town called Knockemstiff—is fierce.
There’s the World War II veteran who, in an attempt to convince God to eradicate his wife’s cancer, crucifies his son’s dog. That wasn’t very nice; maybe he’s the film’s biggest baddie. But is he really worse than the charismatic preacher who systematically grooms and rapes teenage girls? What about the other captivating preacher, the one who stabs his wife in the neck in order to hone his gift for resurrection, only to discover that, whoops, death isn’t reversible after all? And let’s not forget the smiling traveler whose hobby is to pick up hitchhikers, photograph them fucking his wife, and then murder them. These guys make David Fincher’s villains look cuddly. Read More
There’s virtually no dialogue in the first five minutes of The Invisible Man, but that doesn’t stop
the director Leigh Whannell from telling you everything you need to know. We
open in the dead of night, on a woman lying awake in bed, her partner’s arm
slung across her waist like a fleshy chain. Her eyes wide with anxiety, she
silently extricates herself from his grasp, then tiptoes through their opulent
beachside home, packing a bag and disabling the alarm. She also deactivates the
house’s many security cameras, except for one: the feed from the bedroom, which
she routes to her phone and keeps glancing at in panic, worried that her jailer
might have risen. As she quietly maneuvers toward the exit and her freedom, the
tension mounts, with various obstacles—a dog’s dish, a car’s sensor, a looming
enclosure—conspiring to impede her escape.
It’s the first of many gripping sequences in the movie, an
expertly orchestrated medley of image, sound, and music. Yet beyond highlighting
Whannell’s considerable craft, the opening is meaningful for the way it
telegraphs the film’s metaphorical intentions. The Invisible Man is, quite simply, a picture about domestic abuse.
It examines how powerful men feel entitled to possess beautiful women,
resulting in violence that’s both physical and emotional. And it contemplates how
such subjugation corrodes victims’ health and self-worth, how it can be toxic
and dehumanizing. Also, there’s an invisible man. Read More
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
There are a great many significant clues in Knives Out—a pair of blood-spattered
sneakers, a set of muddy footprints, a deadly syringe—but what may be its most meaningful
artifact has little to do with its labyrinthine plot. I’m speaking of the Panasonic
pop-up VCR, the ancient device whose grainy security footage may hold critical
information, if the investigators can just extract the damn tape from the
machine. A relic from an earlier era when Betamax was still a contender and
consumers had to select between EP and SP, the Panasonic’s presence would seem
to brand this film as a throwback, a nostalgic hymn to cinema’s halcyon days,
when mid-budget studio productions ruled the day and superheroes were relegated
to the pages of the comic book.
To be sure, Knives Out
is laden with analog pleasures: sudden rack focuses; portentous musical cues; dizzying
flashbacks; Chris Evans in knitted sweaters. (OK, that last one might not be
old-fashioned, but its appeal is certainly timeless.) Yet it would be a mistake
to pigeonhole this bracing new movie, which was written and directed with vigor
and wit by Rian Johnson, as an homage to the pictures of yesteryear or as a
critique of the contemporary multiplex. Knives
Out is too energetic, too entertaining, too celebratory—too much damn fun—to be scolding. And while it may
carry a certain classical sensibility, it is also distinctly modern, with an
impish tone that couldn’t possibly be deemed traditional. They say they don’t
make ’em like they used to, but I’m not sure they ever made them quite like
this. Read More
