Friday's Old Fashioned: IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964

Shot using the German film stock Agfacolor, what stands out most about Theo Hormann’s official documentary of the 1964 IX Olympic Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria – given the utilitarian title of IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964 – is the photographic brilliance of its images. The Soviet Union and Czechoslovakian (!) jerseys in their ice hockey tilt pop off the screen like they just came out of the laundry in one of those vintage Tide commercials, bobsleighs come across like vibrant toboggans, and the snow looks the way you imagine a snowy day in your mind. Hormann’s movie must have been striking to contemporary viewers, what with the paucity of color television sets at the time, but it’s equally striking to a modern viewer given the omnipresent gunmetal grey of so much prestige TV. The color renders these Olympics as something like a living parade of nations.

IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964, alas, is not, itself, as striking as its images. Hormann recounts myriad events and athletes but tends to provide little context to put into perspective what all this agony and triumph means, citing results here and there like reading from a two-sentence Associated Press recap. The one time he does, with German Georg Thoma overcoming faulty skis to earn Bronze in the Nordic Combined, suggests what the whole film might have been. (I learned from Motoko Rich and Josephine de La Bruyère’s Athletic article about the residents of current Olympic host city Cortina that Gildo Siorpaes won Bronze for the Italian bobsled team at the 1964 Winter Olympics, but that he was an alpine skier at heart and was forced on to the bobsled team against his will and that all things considered, the medal was not that special to him. I mean, there is a story this movie could have told!) Nor is the visual poetry enough to sustain it. When the narrator mentions the rhythm slalom skiers must use to be successful, we are never made to understand just what that rhythm entails, or how it is accomplished. 

Oddly enough, IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964 works better away from the competition, like a brief interlude with athletes breaking bread by way of feasting on authentic Tyrolean Holzhackerschmarrn. There is also one heartening passage about Innsbruck itself, the narrator noting how “the mountains peek through the window of the house,” reinforcing what he says elsewhere, and that the images of Innsbruck homes, and businesses, and streets set down in the shadow of the Nordkette manifest, “that in this setting, the link between man and alpine sports seems to have come about on its own.” 

Souleymane’s Story

The title of Boris Lujkine’s French film is not a generic catch-call – as in, this is the story of Souleymane – but a specific reference to the asylum interview of the eponymous character (Abou Sangaré), a Guinean immigrant in Paris. The opening scene finds Souleymane waiting for that interview, harried in his air, a conspicuous wound on his forehead, and then flashes back 48 hours earlier to show us how he got here. That’s a thriller device, and though “Souleymane’s Story” is billed as a drama, like Eric Gravel’s sensational 2021 French thriller “Full Time,” Lujkine sculpts genuine suspense from nothing more than everyday details, the nightly bus that Souleymane must catch at a certain time back to a homeless shelter so he as a bed to sleep in, or else be resigned to the street, the orders he ferries as food delivery courier, and the precious state of the e-bike he uses to deliver them, all in the name of ginning up enough money to pay a so-called Fixer, Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow), to outfit him with a phony story of political persecution back home to increase his asylum odds. That last one is an evocative detail rendering Souleymane’s desperate plight as existential, bolstered by his job in which he must pay to use the app of another delivery driver, masquerading as that person while working. And it’s why even if the typical kind of character details that might humanize Souleymane are scant, it’s all for a broader purpose, of demonstrating the dehumanization of the immigration process. When his asylum interview finally comes back around, you might know what’s coming, but the rendering is so gently forceful that is works in spite of the predictability, embodied in Nina Meurisse’s performance as the government agent conducting the interview who tells him with straightforward patience that this is his opportunity to tell his story. And finally, after over a frenzied hour, the movie stops, sits back, and gives Souleymane the floor, a sustained unburdening of the overwhelming stress that comes with concealing your true self.  

Sirât

When the title card for “ Sirât” finally appears a half-hour in, you feel its full weight, laid out over an arresting image of a three-vehicle caravan racing through the Moroccan desert. Director Oliver Laxe takes the name of his phantasmagorical Spanish film from the metaphorical bridge in Islamic belief connecting Heaven and Hell, “one thinner than a strand of hair,” and in this shot, he essentially conjures that bridge to life, one his unlikely collection of characters traverses throughout, an ostensible cinematic thrill ride reimagined as a harrowing existential crossing. An unseen war looms just over the horizon in “Sirât,” hinted at in radio news reports and the occasional presence of companies of soldiers, and Laxe initially embeds with a free spirit collective traveling from place to place to hold massive desert raves. That might sound nihilistic, as if they are checking out as the world comes to an end, but rave culture has never been about checking out but plugging in to a sense of community and a larger spiritual pursuit. Laxe embodies this idea through opening shots of a massive sound system being plugged in; he is also asking us, the audience, to plug in too. 

“Sirât” begins by lingering over a rave for a long time, the pulse of the music and the bodies swaying to it, so that when an older man named Luis (Sergi López) finally wanders into this throng of bodies, we can sense he is out of place. He and his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) are looking for his daughter, Mar, who has gone missing, handing out flyers with her likeness. No one recognizes her, but when one small group suggests she might be at the next rave on the other side of the desert, Luis and Esteban tag along with that same group in the hopes of finding her there. The journey is arduous, even deadly, and though questions are occasionally raised about gas and supplies, it never devolves into the kind of civil breakdown we are conditioned to expect just as the characters never deepen in ways we might anticipate. Narrative and character are sidelined in the name of the experience, and incredibly, through sound design and soundtrack, “Sirât” comes to embody the air of a rave itself, a subjugation of self for something higher, which can sometimes feel impossibly far away, and sometimes so close. When the ravers put on a song, Luis laments he can’t understand the lyrics, to which he is told, it’s not about listening but about dancing, reminding me of the timid clerk Kleinman in “Shadows and Fog” being asked for his thoughts on the nature of existence itself: “Maybe if I get a little drunk, I could dance it.”

Given that the opening moveable rave consists predominantly of Europeans, and that Europeans are ordered to evacuate given the unseen conflict, Laxe buries a wicked tables-turned joke in there. He might have been wise to more fully finesse the politics of this explosive situation; after all, war is the continuation of politics by other means, as the saying goes, and war seems to have brought the world of “Sirât” to this place. By relegating politics, however, Laxe emphasizes the metaphysical, suggesting that once the world has reached an apocalyptic precipice, the how, the why, and the what all become meaningless. All that remains is the world’s cruel indifference and humanity’s struggle not so much to find meaning and serenity in the middle of it as to push past it to find something better. That odd sense of hope ensures that “Sirât” is more than merely a theatre of cruelty. The climax improbably suggests a techno remix of the climax to “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” turning a leap of faith into a walk of faith, a desire to believe in something better to all evidence of the contrary. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Ski Patrol (1940)

As the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics get under way, the International Olympic Committee in conjunction with the United Nations called for a 52-day pause on all wars, a callback to the nominal truce of the Ancient Olympic Games, a futile, mostly symbolic gesture evoking an oversized sense of its own influence. Not to be confused with the 1990 comedy “Ski Patrol” about a wealthy developer seeking to sabotage a ski resort, 1940’s “Ski Patrol” is about the 1939-40 Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union. Yet, even if it is, and even if it is mostly set on the Finnish border where a reserve unit tries to fend off the enemy from tunneling beneath a mountain pass to attack, it is an American film, directed by Lew Landers, produced by Universal, and shot both on the Universal backlot and on location in California. Maybe that explains the various accents, incorrect Finnish uniforms, as IMDb has pointed out, and a screenplay that does not describe the reasons for the conflict in any detail whatsoever. No, this 1940 “Ski Patrol” feels conspicuously like an American war film pre-Pearl Harbor, wrestling between militancy and pacifism, with a gallery of wooden characters that are chiefly vessels for dialogue arguing one or the other. “In war, all friendships are forgotten. We must destroy those on top of the mountain.” 

That’s too bad because the set-up provides a chance at real drama between Finnish skier Viktor Ryder (Philip Dorn) and Russian skier Ivan Dubroski (Reed Hadley) competing in the 1936 Winter Olympics, the former helping the latter up when he falls as Ivan goes on to win gold and Viktor silver. That Olympic set-up, I confess, is why I watched in the first place and is what provides the one charged moment. After the race, when Viktor and Ivan receive their medals in a conference room, an Avery Brundage-like American gives a speech lionizing the glory of sportsmanship, and of sport itself, and how this will help bring an end to needless war…at which point we get a smash cut to a bomb exploding, the start of WWII and not so much a figurative snuffing of the Olympic spirit as an arch obliteration of it. Citius, Altius, Fortius, Extinctus. 

The Zodiac Killer Project

“The Zodiac Killer Project” is the ultimate test case of what whether the movie imagined is better than the movie made. Because when director Charlie Shackleton lost the rights to California Highway Patrol Officer Lyndon E. Lafferty’s 2012 true-crime book, “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up,” right before he was about to begin filming a documentary based on it, rather than call the whole project off, he improvised and made something else instead. What emerged is not all that interested in The Zodiac Killer himself, whoever that may or may not have been. When Shackleton’s producer impresses upon him from off screen the need to provide basic details about the serial killer terrorizing California in the seventies, Shackleton laughs and says he’d rather not. It’s not him evading pertinent details but rather demonstrating what he has decided in his new project will be deemed pertinent, and by shrugging off the constraints to which such movies are typically bound, “The Zodiac Killer Project” is one of the fortunate few that is in effect, set free.

Shackleton’s approach is to show locations he had scouted and planned to use for dramatic re-creations of Lafferty’s book while the scenes that would-have-been in voiceover as he had conceived them by using the record of Lafferty’s private investigation as culled from other sources than his book to avoid legal entanglements. In doing so, he probes true crime clichés (deploying familiar sound effects of the genre so relentlessly that they assume a laugh-out-loud comical quality) and how those clichés are utilized to manipulate us, but more than that, by working through the film he wanted to make, he probes his own artistic intentions. And if “The Zodiac Killer Project” demonstrates the spell true crime holds over us, occasional moments when Shackleton wistfully mourns just how good a certain scene might have been, he can’t help but reveal himself as being under its spell too, so much so that I am not quite sure he knows the movie he made is probably better than the one he imagined. 

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

We live in a time where faith can feel hard to maintain and belief in the rational is under siege. So, perhaps it’s no surprise that in his third “Knives Out” whodunit, officially titled “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” writer/director Rian Johnson pits these opposing ideas against one another. He does so via Jed Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a one-time boxer turned Catholic priest who is assigned to a rural parish led by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Despite his pugilistic background, Jed views the church as a place of compassion and understanding whereas Wicks is the one who views faith as akin to an existential fight, circling the wagons of his dwindling but fervent flock against ostensible secular forces. Brolin cuts an intense fundamentalist presence, brought to life through frequent low angles that make it seem as if he is staring down on us from a pulpit, and betraying nothing in an unrelenting stern expression that might be full of the Holy Spirit or just full of it. That question will gradually be answered during a service when he repairs to his usual hiding place just off to the side of the sanctuary to gather himself and then drops dead.

Enter: Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the world’s greatest detective and the “Knives Out” series’ one recurring character. He does not really even get introduced, he just sort of appears, as if conjured by miracle, though he would be the first to tell you that miracles always have a logical explanation. If Jed is fingered as the suspect in Wicks’s apparent murder, Blanc is convinced of the young priest’s innocence and sets out to prove it, and more than Craig and Ana de Armas in the first “Knives Out” and Craig and Janelle Monae in the second, he and O’Connor make a dynamic team. That’s chiefly because Johnson has written them as investigatory allies but also philosophical opposites, evoked in dueling monologues inside Jed’s church where the priest effuses his belief and Blanc his skepticism. It’s a marvelous sequence of acting, writing, and visual composition, with Biblical lighting cues, walking the perfect line between entertaining melodrama and deeper meaning and leaving you as enthralled by the actors and as moved by the characters. 

It is also “Wake Up Dead Man’s” high point. Though Wicks’s flock is portrayed by some big names (Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, and Jeremy Renner), the characters are never really fleshed out, and aside from a few isolated moments involving Close, never really come to life, dragging the movie down so that you feel its two-and-a-half-hour length a little too much. You also feel the length on account of one too many expository monologues deployed to wrap up a mystery that grows increasingly convoluted and worse, ultimately only seeks to challenge Blanc’s skepticism in service of a fake out, making the whole thing feel cheap. It’s also that “Wake Up Dead Man’s” ostensible main mystery can’t help but spiritually come to feel like a subplot, small potatoes in the face of the bigger questions bouncing back and forth between Jed and Blanc, intrinsically if not inadvertently reminding us that the most interesting mysteries are always the ones that can’t really be solved.

Ranking Crimson Tide Supporting Performances

The Will Leitch Newsletter is one of the few Substacks I subscribe to, not least because his divergent interests tend to dovetail with mine, and I have appreciated how so far in 2026, he has not shied away from almost always prefacing whatever he wants to write about with addressing the present American outrages. These are extraordinary times in the worst way and acknowledging it does not feel redundant or sanctimonious but like a necessary refusal to normalize. This country has normalized way too damn much in the last decade and such normalization, I would argue, is a huge part of why we are where we are right now. Even so, such brutal preambles can wear a person out, and a few weeks ago, Leitch introduced his latest lament of the nation by writing, “Believe you me: I’d rather be…ranking Kelly Reichardt movies.” The ensuing week he noted that a reader from Saint Paul, Minnesota, epicenter of the current American crisis, wrote to say that he could really use Leitch ranking Kelly Reichardt movies right now. And so, as Leitch wrote, he scrapped his previously planned post about the American media’s coverage of the current President’s quote-unquote movement during the last ten years to instead rank Richard Linklater movies to clear his head.

To my clear head, well, I’m not going to rank Richard Linklater movies or Kelly Reichardt movies. I love them both, but this blog’s brand is a bit more irregular. And because I’ve had the movie year 1995 on my mind recently because of a post I am planning to have coincide with the upcoming Academy Awards, I’m going to rank supporting actors in that year’s action-thriller “Crimson Tide” in which a submarine captain (Gene Hackman) and his XO (Denzel Washington) battle over whether to launch nuclear missiles with war imminent or to find a way to retrieve a half-finished message that might confirm war has been aborted. And though it is made in the image of its legendary two leads, “Crimson Tide” is in the (more than) middling thriller hall of fame because it is chock full of dudes (and one dog).

Ranking Crimson Tide Supporting Performances

10. Viggo Mortensen. If it seems odd that an actor as accomplished as Mortensen might be so low on this list, well, thing is, the supporting roles as conceived and written in “Crimson Tide” require the actors to infuse a sense of personality more than create a character and Mortensen is more a create-a-character kinda guy. So, he’s fine, he’s perfectly fine, and his laconic voice sounds fantastic aboard a submarine, and he really smokes those cigarettes, it’s just, in this context, I’m looking for something else. 

9. Eric Bruskotter. The role is a little obvious, a lunkhead on the wrong side of things, but boy, does Bruskotter bring that lunkhead to life.

8. Tommy Bush. At the end, there is a small but critical part requiring an actor with enough stature to make you believe he possesses more authority than Gene freaking Hackman which is why “Crimson Tide” fills it with Jason Robards. (It is also why Robards is ineligible for this list.) But there is another small, if less critical, role near the beginning that also requires someone to appear as if he has more stature than Gene freaking Hackman. So, what are you going to do? You don’t have enough in the budget for another Jason Robards. Credit, then, to casting director Victoria Thomas for choosing a seasoned character actor like Bush, and credit to costume designer George L. Little for putting him in some J.T. Walsh glasses, and for Bush just sort of allowing this broader framework to impress the necessary longstanding authority with doing much of anything at all. 

7. Happy Lab. The Jack Russell terrier that is the loyal companion of Hackman’s character gets all the pub, but it’s this dog, as Washington’s canine counterpart, that gets my vote as Best in Show. 

6. Danny Nucci. He was something of a going concern in the 90s, as his Wikipedia entry attests, the first sentence under the career tab noting, “During the 1990s, Nucci played characters who are unceremoniously killed off in three blockbuster films – ‘Eraser,’ ‘The Rock,’ and ‘Titanic.’” Ah, but in “Crimson Tide,” he sticks around to the end, and more than that, does a solid job in evincing the small arc of a petty officer who comes into his own.

5. Matt Craven. For a long time there, in the 90s and even into the aughts, any movie that needed an asshole, whatever the variety, Craven was near the front of the rolodex. I was recently rewatching parts of “A Few Good Men” for obvious reasons and there was Craven, called in for one scene to be the livid military lawyer who’s had it up to here with Tom Cruise and he nails it. And he nails the asshole in “Crimson Tide” too. At the end, right when nuclear war is averted, Craven has his character get this get look (see above) that is a little disappointed, like he would have gone to war to be right. That’s the stuff.

4. George Dzundza. More than the other supporting characters, Dzundza’s is written with a sense of ethical and moral complication, and he carries it with great anguish. 

3. Marcello Thedford. Yes, reader, you might notice Steve Zahn in the background of this shot, and he is not the only known quantity in a smaller role. There is also Ryan Phillippe, Scott Grimes, and Rick Schroder. None of them, though, leave as big an impression as Thedford. Not just in this pictured moment where he does a little dance-karaoke to Martha and the Vandellas, but in an earlier scene where he expresses true geniality toward the Gandolfini and Mortensen characters right before they have fun with him by dressing him down. There are precious few moments of levity in “Crimson Tide” and quite possibly the two best involve Thedford.  

2. James Gandolfini. As with virtually all his pre-“Sopranos” work, you could see Gandolfini already had “it” in “Crimson Tide,” clear as day, by which I mean both an electricity and an intensity. Whether it’s believable behavior for a naval supply officer or not, I don’t really care, but when the stuff hits the fan, I love how he plays the part as something like a sneering prizefighter trying to goad you into throwing a punch after the bell. His single best moment, though, comes before the stuff hits the fan during an officer meal when Hackman’s character superciliously asks Washington’s to summarize his thoughts on the nature of war and Gandolfini smirks (see above) in this way that implies “Ok, hotshot, show me whatcha got” with more animosity than most characters get when they are throwing a punch. 

1. Richard Valeriani. There are a thousand things I love about this movie, but one of the things I love most is that it frames its big introductory chunk of exposition as a faux CNN report filed from the deck of an aircraft carrier by the real-life reporter Richard Valeriani. That’s inspired. Valeriani was on Nixon’s enemies list, his wife Kathie Berlin told The New York Times when her husband died in 2018, and he kicked off one of the greatest (more than) middling thrillers ever made. What a career.