Friday's Old Fashioned: Walker (1987)

Alex Cox’s fifth feature film “Walker” was beset by a rash of bad reviews, including two thumbs down from Siskel and Ebert with extreme prejudice. Even among the contemporary notices, though, there were occasional positive ones, like Vincent Canby of The New York Times complimenting Cox’s “nerve.” That’s a good way to put it. If hope is a dangerous thing to have in real life, then nerve is a dangerous thing to have in Hollywood, and after “Walker” was written off, so, too, was Cox, effectively blacklisted in La La Land for the rest of his career. He has intimated that it was a blessing in disguise, and I hope that was true, but boy, watching “Walker” for the first time almost 40 years later could not help but make me wonder what he might have been capable of had financial backing been easier to acquire. In telling the true story of one-time Nicaraguan president William Walker, Cox creates a truly hyper-surreal sort of aesthetic by not merely fudging the truth but often outright ignoring it, honoring the mid-19th century setting and not honoring it at all, commenting indirectly and unequivocally on President Reagan’s own Nicaraguan adventures, creating something that feels of its time, not of its time, and out of time, a Monte Hellman acid western reimagined as a historical biopic. Nerve is a good word but there’s another one: awesome. “Walker” is awesome.

“Walker” begins with its eponymous filibuster (Ed Harris), at least according to the 1850s version of the term, failing in his invasion attempt of Mexico, warning his men that they have no chance at an escape short of an act of God. At that, the wind picks up and a dust storm settles, allowing an avenue for escape, the very act of God Walker is hoping for, so funny as to be farcical even as it simultaneously invests in Walker a misplaced belief that God is on his side. In subsequent Sam Peckinpah-like scenes of gruesome violence, Walker walks through the bullets like someone walking between the raindrops, his imperviousness implying such ostensible divine favor. At the same time, Cox cuts that belief down to size in the most acerbic of manners. When Walker lectures his men on how to conduct themselves, he declares that cursing in public is forbidden, to which one of his men wonders in a deadpan line heard off camera, “Can we curse in private?” That’s how a lot of dialogue goes in “Walker”: so unexpectedly funny you take a beat to confirm in your mind what you just heard and then you laugh. 

Walker might seek to spread his ideology abroad but his financial backer, Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle), has other ideas on his mind. He enlists Walker to invade Nicaragua to open a land route between oceans to spur trade and, of course, line his own coffers. Boyle plays Vanderbilt not as a captain of industry, nor even quite as a robber baron, but something else, like, say, a backwater version of Dom DeLuise as Emperor Nero in “History of the World, Part One,” evinced in what is undoubtedly among cinema’s greatest fart jokes. In another way, Boyle’s portrayal feels almost modern, like a 1980s tycoon has slipped the surly bonds of time, an anachronistic sensation that Cox makes more explicit with amusing little touches like the glimpse of a People Magazine where Walker is billed as Nicaragua’s “Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny” or the saxophone that sounds cut from “Jewel of the Nile” occasionally appearing on the soundtrack. History is not repeating itself, Cox seems to be saying, so much as such ideological urges are simply in our blood, brought home in a climactic speech in which Walker may as well be laying out the United States of America’s foreign policy for the next 200 years. 

If Walker has any kind of moral counterweight, it’s his deaf fiancé Ellen Martin (Marlee Matlin), who in keeping with the rest of the movie’s tone is not some patient saint but palpably repulsed by the company her husband to-be keeps. In one hysterical sequence, Walker translates her radical opinions for those who don’t know sign language by softening their tone, nothing less, really, than a literal evocation of the mealy-mouthed kind of centrism. She dies, though, not long after from cholera, leaving Walker with no one to temper his certitude, and as he invades Nicaragua and installs himself as President, it all goes to his head, eventually referring to himself in the third person just as he does in the recurring voiceovers that in Harris’s plainspoken tone juxtaposed against often blackly comic scenes suggest, I swear, Ted Striker’s narration in “Airplane!” Indeed, Ebert might have hated “Walker,” but his old adage about a performer being funniest when they don’t know they are wearing a funny hate proves true here – Harris plays Walker as someone wearing a funny hat who doesn’t realize it. He also plays him with little dimension or nuance, reducing the character to utter zealotry, in himself and his mission so that they are virtually one and the same, a terrifying living embodiment of manifest destiny.

The Mastermind

“The Mastermind” begins with a point-of-view shot looking out from a painting at an art gallery in Framingham, Massachusetts that is being inspected by J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor). If it would seem to embody the whole point of the visual arts in the first place, to seek wonder and a deeper meaning of life by seeing something from a different perspective, well, that is not quite what’s happening with art school dropout J.B. As he peruses the paintings, writer/director Kelly Reichardt gradually reveals him not to be a connoisseur of art, so much, as a thief. With a conspicuously snoozing security guard in one gallery, J.B. opens a case and pilfers a toy soldier figurine, using his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and two young sons as cover in an easygoing getaway. This is not a one-off, however, but a test run as we see when he gathers “the guys” in his basement and to break down his quasi-masterplan for a much bigger heist of four works by the abstract painter Arthur Dove.

J.B. emits as supercilious air in this planning session as he does in a deft dinner table scene with his wife, mother Sarah (Hope Davis), and father (Bill Camp), the latter referencing an old acquaintance of his son who has done well by owning a company, wondering what he knows that J.B. doesn’t. J.B. responds that balancing books is an idiotic use of one’s time. Set in 1970, “The Mastermind” is perched on that precipice of 60s counterculture burning out, and that is how O’Connor plays this moment and all the others too, depleted of spirit, just sort of wearily existing within the confines of a mainstream culture. In just a few flourishes, Reichardt evokes Terri as the family glue, making dinner, paying the bills, ferrying the kids to school, the latter conveyed in a shot that strands J.B. watching them in the garage with the morning paper, standing there like an alien in his own life. In one profound moment of anti-profundity, after he has stolen the paintings, J.B. hangs one of them on his own wall, momentarily turning his home into an art gallery, observing it, as if attempting to interpret his own reason for this illegal act and coming up empty.

Like most of “The Mastermind,” the heist itself is overlaid with a cool, jazzy score functioning as dissonant mockery of the events onscreen. Nothing with the heist quite goes the way that J.B. has planned, from his kids unexpectedly having the day off from school to the latch on the back window of the car that takes way too long to undo, though the funniest detail, in fact, is that despite so much going wrong, the small crew still pulls it off, and that it only falls apart due to an event that takes place offscreen, drolly underscoring J.B.’s inability to account for everything. Indeed, when the local news files a report on the robbery, J.B.’s unsuspecting father notes that he’s not sure this heist was completely thought through, an unwitting admonishment of his son that stings more than the detectives who show up to finger J.B. as the quote-unquote mastermind.  

Christopher Blauvel’s cinematography evokes the faded, under-saturated look of the movies of the 70s, though is not in service of cheap nostalgia but to remind us of the era’s mood and to reflect the main character’s wan headspace. Indeed, as J.B. becomes fugitive, rather than the energy or pace picking up, the already leisurely “The Mastermind” slows down even more, and rather than effusing regret or even resignation, O’Connor effuses, well, nothing much at all, as if the world itself were an abstract concept. Throughout, Reichardt infuses news reports of the Vietnam War and shows protests in response to it, none of which leave an impression on J.B., and essentially cast his slow motion flee from justice not quite as dropping out of society, like the two friends (Gaby Hoffmann and John Magaro) with whom he briefly hides out have, but quiet quitting society instead. Yet society gets the last laugh with a denouement that would have worked as a silent comedy, ensnaring an unsuspecting J.B., punctuated by one last shot that is like the bleakest Looney Tune you have ever seen. Th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks!  

The Secret Agent

Set predominantly in 1977 Brazil, “The Secret Agent” begins with Armando (Wagner Moura), a fugitive from the country’s military dictatorship and going by the name Marcel, stopping at a rural gas station. He can’t help but notice a dead body lying beneath a piece of cardboard, flies buzzing overhead. The station attendant explains the person was shot dead by his colleague for attempting to steal some motor oil, and though he called the cops days ago, they have yet to arrive. Finally, they do, though not to deal with the dead body, to which they pay little attention, but to shake down Armando. It’s a sequence in which writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho effectively introduces both his movie’s world and tone, at once deadly serious and darkly comic. And though the corpse bearing witness, so to speak, to this squeeze put me in mind of noted philosopher Harry Lime’s observation that the dead are happier dead, “The Secret Agent” hardly proves a grim slog in fatalism. It’s a historical political thriller but more than that, it’s an absolute thrill to watch, utterly alive and willing to meander its own narrative nooks and crannies rather than just stick to the main path, finding light in the darkest places, like the human leg inside the tiger shark that washes ashore. I’m not even going to tell you what happens with that human leg, you’ll never guess, unless you already know Brazilian folklore. 

Armando is a one-time university technology researcher from the northeastern Brazil city of Recife who ran afoul of a corrupt, powerful industrialist. We see this happen in flashback, a contentious meeting turned physical confrontation, stemming not even so much from Armando’s refusal to play the game as his standing by while his wife Fátima (Alice Carvalho) talks back, such a flouting of society’s hierarchies that it’s a death sentence. Indeed, Fátima winds up dead under mysterious circumstances, and in a present-day scene, when Armando and Fátima’s son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), expresses how much he misses his mother, his dad explains that when they call up a memory of her, it’s like she’s alive again, right there with them. This observation is crucial, transforming that lone glimpse of Fátima in flashback into something so much more than mere backstory: an embodiment of the power of memory. And so, as “The Secret Agent” begins with Armando returning to Recife, it is in part to search for the birth certificate of his own mother, one of whom he has almost no memory, seeking to literally and figuratively reclaim it before it is lost forever.

That is not the only reason he has returned to Recife, summoned by revolutionaries who warn his life is in danger, hunted by assassins dispatched by the industrialist to settle their score once and for all, and helping him prepare to flee the country. He stays in an apartment complex run by the charismatic Dona Sebastien (Tânia Maria), a sympathizer to the cause, running an underground network of political refugees seeking the necessary papers to flee. She’s a landlord but she also briefly plays matchmaker, immediately seeking to pair Armando with Cláudia (Hermila Guedes), improbably and joyfully crossing “Casablanca” with “Melrose Place.” It underlines a sense of community in defiance of displacement and in one scene, all of Dona’s residents gather in the same room to tell their stories. Moura is magnificent here, as he is throughout, his air guarded but soulful, bringing to life the arduous nature of leading a double life, of suppressing who you are to stay alive. 

Armando’s intent, however, is not just to escape Brazil but to bring along Fernando, currently living with his grandfather, a movie theater projectionist. That occupation is not mere window dressing. “The Secret Agent” functions as a love letter to 70s cinema, not merely in the vintage camera equipment Filho has employed but in how movies themselves shrewdly intertwine with the larger narrative, moving pictures of a piece with the famed Carnival running concurrent with the movie’s present-day action, relief in the ritual. Indeed, some movies like to hammer home saccharine notions of the magic of the movies, but rarely have I seen a movie so intrinsically and spiritedly evince that old chestnut. Filho uses “Jaws,” which has only just come to Recife, to unify his themes of fear and memory, and via the tawdry exploits captured through a projection window during a screening of “The Omen,” he flippantly evokes the, uh, pleasure of moviegoing in the first place.

The neatest filmmaking trick that Filho pulls, however, is one that I am almost hesitant to divulge, so extraordinary is the recontextualization of everything when it happens, even if it is also simultaneously essential to making complete sense of “The Secret Agent.” If it mostly takes place in 1977, and occasionally flashes back, it also flashes forward to our current era in which we see university students unearth and listen to archived recordings of Armando recounting his saga for those old Recife revolutionaries. When the first flash-forward happens, it’s jarring in the best way possible, suddenly making you realized that what you have been watching up to that point is not, in fact, the present but the past. And if the intent of dictatorships, authoritarians, and any other aspirant oppressive regimes the world over is to erase and rewrite the past, this device evokes history and memory as the ultimate form of resistance, an idea punctuated by Moura’s unexpected dual role wrapping up the two-hours-and-forty-minutes with witty flair. The revolution lives on. 

The Baltimorons

The Christmas season is defined by the contrast between light and dark and so, too, is “The Baltimorons,” the exceptional new indie comedy directed and co-written by Jay Duplass. It begins with Cliff (Michael Strassner) attempting to hang himself. Duplass, though, recounts this in long shot, an angle typically denoting comedy, and sure enough, Cliff winds up sprawled on the floor when the rope breaks, as startling as it is side-splitting, light and dark in equal measure. Indeed, later Cliff will explain the rope snapping was on account of his “holiday weight.” Flash ahead six months and Cliff is sober, engaged to Brittany (Olivia Luccardi), and has quit the improv comedy scene that exacerbated his tendency toward depression. He’s studying to be a mortgage broker, he says, always adding that he’s not joking, which can’t help but make you wonder if he is joking, hinting at dissatisfaction with his new life. As if manifesting that dissatisfaction, he bumps his face against the door of Brittany’s family house on his way in for Christmas Eve festivities, necessitating emergency dental surgery, performed by the only dentist available, workaholic Didi (Liz Larsen) who has been abandoned by her family for Christmas Eve festivities of her own, and triggering an unexpected comic adventure between the unlikely duo traversing Charm City on the holiest of nights.

“The Baltimorons” takes its title from the name of Cliff’s improv troupe before it went haywire, and rather than merely functioning as a character detail, Duplass’s entire movie is sculpted in the spirit of improvisational comedy. Cliff’s sudden tooth problem might as well be the audience shouting, “Dentist office!” when asked to provide a location. And though all the complications and incidents that follow, from Cliff’s car being towed, to the duo crashing Didi’s ex-husband’s wedding reception, to them going crabbing in the middle of night, might sound as if they strain credulity, “The Baltimorons” is not operating on traditional screenwriting terms. Even before Cliff and Didi wind up at an unlikely Christmas Eve improv pop-up and wind up onstage together, they are already caught up in the moment, egging one another on, spiritually saying, “Yes, and” to whatever this is. And whatever it is, thankfully, is not something that is ever truly decided or summarized, ultimately left up in the air, refusing to provide one big pat answer just as it refuses to minimize Cliff’s very real problems or reduce Brittany to a mere complication or impediment; she cares about him. 

Strassner also holds the light and dark in equal measure in his performance, as hilarious to watch as it is hard, suggesting something like a modern John Candy had he received the kind of roles he deserved. At an AA meeting near the end, when Cliff says the standard opening line about being an alcoholic, it resonates with fullness hard to believe until you hear it. As good as Strassner is, though, it’s Larsen who truly shines in bringing “The Baltimorons” home. There’s more than a little of “Harold and Maude” here and the way she calls him “kid” continually keeps cutting the whole relationship down to size. Her big husky laugh at the absurd things he tends to say and do conveys both disbelief at herself going along at this situation and implicit understanding of why she would. She evokes no sense of narrative programming, just someone stepping on the stage of alive and letting herself be carried along. “Where are we going with this, kid?” she asks as the movie ends, unsure but curious, utterly alive to the possibility.

One Battle After Another

“One Battle After Another” has frequently been described as writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s first action movie, and that proves true in more ways than one. It is an action movie in the genre sense, packed with car chases and cartoon-like stunts, even a Tom Cruise name-drop, while being propelled with such a dynamic camera and kinetic pace that its two-hours-and-fifty-minutes seem to last an hour, tops, a movie as one virtual headlong rush. But this breakneck tempo also innately feeds into “One Battle After Another’s” larger idea as a movie about the desperation, folly, necessity, recklessness, hopelessness, and hope of taking action. “If it does not seem that those words should be strung together,” Roger Ebert once wrote of another instant classic, “perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life.”

The opening sequence does not so much draw back a curtain on characters and events as remove a blindfold from our eyes after a long car ride to parts unknown and plunging us directly into an operation of the far-left revolutionary group known as the French 75. That was Rick Blaine’s drink in “Casablanca” as he often found himself in a grey are while weighing whether to remain neutral or get involved and a grey area is where “One Battle After Another” often finds itself too. Like the no holds barred beginning in which Anderson effectively, if not dangerously, animates not only the anarchic but kinky thrill of such fanaticism as the French 75 liberates a detention camp and sets off bombs built by the so-called Rocketman, Pat Calhoun (Leonard DiCaprio), who is in love with fellow extremist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). There’s a recurring joke about Pat’s failure to study the rebellion text, and though that might sound like Anderson isn’t taking their mission seriously, it’s more an evocation so many similar far-left groups and their sensationalist, sincere, sometimes incomprehensible motivations. We never hear the French 75 read their manifesto because this opening is the manifesto.

This revolutionary idyll is compromised, however, when Perfidia kills a security guard during a bank robbery and learns she’s pregnant. Pat wants to put their baby first, but Anderson suggests that the amount of skin in the game is different based on skin color. Perfidia is shown to hail from a line of Black revolutionaries, and to her, the cause supersedes any one person, even her own child. The thorniness of this decision underlines the multi-layered nature of Anderson’s screenplay, as intricate in its ideas as it is obvious. Look no further than Perfidia’s name, Latin for betrayal, foreshadowing how after committing murder, she names names and enters witness protection, never to be seen again, the deliberate sidelining of Taylor’s explosive presence mirroring the French 75’s implosion as Pat goes underground with their daughter, Charlene. That child, however, is not his. 

Enter: Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), overseeing the detention camp the French 75 liberates as the movie opens, who becomes tormented by and obsessed with Perfidia after she paradoxically deadens his sense of power by asking him in no uncertain terms to get it up and parading him around in just that manner. He gets the last word by extorting her for sex, and then forcing her to become a proverbial rat, only for her to vindictively ghost him while leaving Charlene behind. The child becomes paramount when Lockjaw is invited to join a white-only secret society whose name, The Christmas Adventurers Club, sardonically equates the War on Christmas with Gen. Jack D. Ripper’s battle to maintain purity of essence in “Dr. Strangelove.” (Their salutation of “Hail Saint Nick” sounds like the password at M*gyn K*lly’s Christmas party.) They explain to Lockjaw their belief of being the supreme race and therefore supreme beings and as they do, Penn does the most incredible thing with his face, as if the Colonel’s life flashes before his eyes, craving an honor he knows he does not deserve given the ostensible impurity of his precious bodily fluids. To ensure his qualifications for the club, he enlists a division of the armed forces for a search and destroy mission of his biracial heir. 

Time is nebulous in “One Battle After Another.” Based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, about a 70s revolutionary withering in the 80s, Anderson sets his movie in something approximating the present but never comes out and says it; I only realized it was a modern setting upon noticing someone taking a selfie. This can make the French 75 feel out of place, 70s counterculture oddly transplanted to the 21st century, but in this muddling of eras, Anderson inherently suggests both the perpetual futility in fighting the machine and the eternal need for it. That duality comes across in Pat, rechristened Bob Ferguson after he goes underground in the small California town of Baktan Cross with Charlene, rechristened Willa (Chase Infiniti). At one point, he is shown smoking dope and watching “The Battle of Algiers” on the couch, which is as uproariously pitiful as it is on the nose. Costumed to look less like Leo than Kevin Corrigan, DiCaprio fully inhabits the incongruous blend of both the perpetually baked protagonist of “The Big Lebowski” (Jeff Bridges) and that same movie’s reactionary Malibu police chief (Leon Russom), a spent counterculturist confronting modern political correctness, but never forgetting to let an almost fervent protective love for Willa seep through, a deft feat of zaniness and earnestness.

Under the guise of a drug and immigrant operation, Lockjaw and his men invade Baktan Cross, and when Bob and Willa become separated, the listless father is finally forced up and off the couch (though not necessarily out of his bathrobe) to re-enlist, in manner of speaking. He is aided in his rescue mission by his daughter’s sensei, Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), who in effect becomes Bob’s sensei, too. Even in a movie chock full of exemplary turns, del Toro’s is especially exquisite, echoing the movie’s wavelength by infusing philosophical lines with as much genuine humor as real weight (“Courage, Bob”), though he doesn’t even require dialogue to make an impression, embodying the whole person in his air, a cool, encouraging, patient countenance that is not just an impeccable juxtaposition to Bob’s manic air but an expression of someone leading by example. In these sequences, “One Battle After Another” essentially leads by example too. Baktan Cross, it turns out, is not merely a sanctuary for ex-radicals but also for Mexican immigrants, which Anderson intrinsically lays out side-by-side with Sergio fostering Bob’s escape, a community as an act of resistance itself, and one that might just be more effective than the French 75’s more lethal tactics. 

As Willa, Infiniti evinces both the singular impulsive honesty of a teenager but also a preciousness identifying her as a chip off her mother’s block. Indeed, Bob might be coming to her rescue, but ultimately, she rescues herself, putting into perspective how Anderson yokes Willa’s dawning political awareness to the age-old idea of a parent having to make peace with letting their child go. And if she has both Perfidia and Bob in her, she also carries the tutelage of Sergio, and the biology of her natural father, too, a complicated personification of an impossibly complicated country, one that is always so close to its potential and yet always so far away from it. And that’s why against all odds, “One Battle After Another” earns its concluding needle drop, a father passing the torch to his daughter, sending Willa out the door and on her way, gearing up for the next battle in the endless struggle. 

Black Bag

Though Black Bag is an intelligence term, and factors heavily into Steven Soderbergh’s new movie of the same name, I am nevertheless convinced it was called that simply because the title “Spy Game” was already taken. So much more than that dour and leaden two-hour plus 2001 thriller, the brisk ninety-minute “Black Bag” glows like so many glass pendant balls strategically strewn on the dinner table where a pair of married intelligence officers invite a few co-workers less for dinner than to ferret out information while dining, twice literalizing the notion of a spy game. Indeed, “Black Bag” is at once deadly serious and light on its feet; cold as ice and so fucking hot; stony-faced and so damn funny. It’s a little like Soderbergh’s equally masterful “Haywire” that way; you don’t even realize you’re watching a comedy until Soderbergh draws some supremely dry joke during some moment of supreme tension and a laugh you never even felt coming suddenly just erupts.

As “Black Bag” begins, SIS officer George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is summoned by his superior and ordered to utilize a list of five in-house suspects to determine who leaked top secret software. Known as a human lie detector, Woodhouse’s plan is to transform a traditional British Sunday roast into a kind of simultaneous five-person polygraph. The software, codenamed Severus, involves nuclear secrets that could leave the requisite millions of people dead, though the stakes of David Koepp’s sly screenplay are entirely personal rather than global. Indeed, one of the five suspects on George’s list is his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). In the words of the immortal Yello: Oh yeah.

As it happens, the quartet of the other intelligence operatives – Freddie (Tom Burke), Clarissa (Marisa Abela), Zoe (Naomie Harris), and Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) – who we meet for the first time pre-gaming, in a manner of speaking, at a pub before their interrogative feast, all have their own romantic entanglements with one another, illustrating what Clarissa explains at a later moment, how it’s virtually impossible to date anyone when you can’t be honest about anything and so you wind up becoming involved with people you work with and with whom you can’t really be honest either. It’s nothing short of awesome, really, with Vauxhall Cross reimagined, say, as one of those Bravo “House” shows – Summer or Winter, take your pick – in which some glam socialites are stuffed into some mod house in the Hamptons, or near the Rockies. Indeed, at dinner George initiates a game that sounds a lot like one culled from a Real Housewives show, nefariously designed to have his co-workers all turn on one another. This, to paraphrase George, is the rock, and the rest of “Black Bag” becomes the ripples.

Perhaps it strains credulity that all these operatives would willingly gather to be probed over dinner, but then again, the notion of nothing ever being believable is deftly embedded in the script. When a character has a coronary, the other characters seem to know straight away it wasn’t. Even therapy conversations with Zoe, that is, Dr. Zoe Vaughn, prove less about emotionally sharing than having through the looking glass conversations about why sharing could be detrimental. In an environment of surveillance, it’s as if they are always performing, or refusing to, embodied in the performances. Fassbender reduces George to something like a poker-faced stasis while Blanchett, always best when her patented air of theatricality is deployed with purpose, seems to treat all of SIS as a stage, every gesture and mannerism calculated for maximum effect. When George proffers an innocent explanation for how his work badge ended up in Kathryn’s purse, the way Blanchett has her slither up to him conveys that she doesn’t buy it for a second. Abela, meanwhile, in an A+ supporting performance manages to improbably skirt the middle ground between the two, coming across chaotically alive to the moment in a way those two are not.

That’s not to say, however, that George and Kathryn are not alive themselves. “Black Bag” builds to another dinner party in which George ferrets out the truth, as if George Smiley of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” had been plopped down in the climax of “The Thin Man.” The climax, though, is just as much about the foremost married couple. Throughout, there is an undercurrent of tension, a question of how much George and Kathryn really love one another, the air in which each one declares that they’d kill for the other seeming to leave the matter unresolved rather than settled. I won’t spoil it, and though I wished Soderbergh and Koepp might have concocted a concluding bit of visual innuendo a la “North by Northwest,” they still apply an amusingly blithe period by suggesting spy operations are as much about a roll in the hay as saving the world.

Sinners

There’s a moment early in “Sinners” when the delightfully named Smokestack twins, Smoke and Stack Moore, are leaning against their 1932-appropriate car and passing a cigarette back and forth. Having taken great pains to know nothing about Ryan Coogler’s fifth feature film before seeing it, in this moment I honestly thought to myself, “Where’d they get that other actor who looks so much like Michael B. Jordan?” The answer is that through some nimble feat of computer-generated sleight of hand, they are both played by Michael B. Jordan, as inherently sensational as symbolic (as evident of Jordan’s mighty talent given that he wholly embodies two different people without overdoing it). That’s how big “Sinners” is – just one Michael B. Jordan won’t do, just as the movie itself feels like two movies in one, or three, or four, or five, even, a blockbuster of brains, brawn, and sheer watchable bliss. There is so much that there is almost, perhaps, too much, and yet, even if there was, by the end, I did not feel overstuffed, just pleasantly full.

Smoke and Stack have returned home to Clarksdale, Mississippi after getting rich up north as part of Al Capone’s Outfit. When asked why they would return to their native state, one twin replies, “Chicago ain’t shit but Mississippi with tall buildings instead of plantations.” It’s a profanely poetic and revealing line, suggesting the promised land of the Great Migration was anything but. And by returning home, they cease seeking that promise somewhere else and decide to instill it where they’re from. They purchase a sawmill from a one-time Klan member, taking something from the white devil to transform into a black utopia as juke joint with their gifted guitar-playing cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) as the feature attraction. When Stack first hears him launch into a song, the way Jordan whips his head around speaks for all of us, epitomizing how the sound of Sammie seems to fill the limitless Mississippi sky above them.

Clarksdale, Mississippi, of course, is the location of the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to learn to play the blues. It’s one of our most durable and sizable American legends, infused with racial coding, and has been interpreted and retold in myriad ways. And just as Coogler drew from the considerable mythology of the “Rocky” series to make “Creed,” a movie that felt alive and fresh but in conversation with its predecessors, so too does he draw from the mythology of the blues to tell his own story with “Sinners.” And he tells it by fusing the folklore of the American Delta with folklore culled from the Carpathian Mountains of Europe, in a sense crossing “Lightning in a Bottle” (2004) with “From Dusk Till Dawn” (1996), which sounds impossible, and which is why despite familiar elements, “Sinners” feels brand new.

Though the back half of “Sinners” is frenzied, Coogler takes his time with the wind-up, a joyful riff on putting a crew together, following Smoke and Stack as they split up to gather cohorts to put on their juke joint’s opening night: a sharecropper to watch the door, Chinese grocers to tend bar, and Smoke’s estranged wife Annie, a hoodoo healer. There are so many characters, in fact, that there are too many, preventing some from truly developing as real personalities, or seeing their stories through in a satisfactory way. Then again, that’s not necessarily what Coogler intends, seeing them less as individuals, almost, than as individual ingredients flavoring a giant stew. In other words, the chief goal is to imbue a sense of community, one connected by the music, specifically Sammie’s, building to a stunning moment in which Sammie’s guitar-playing and singing opens a literal portal on screen to the past and present and future. Like so much of “Sinners,” this sequence exhilarates; throughout it, I had this rolling wave of goosebumps. It’s a moment where I wanted to stop the projector and lead the whole crowd in a chant: Mo-vies! Mo-vies! Mo-vies!

This is the pivotal aesthetic sequence but the pivotal narrative sequence too. Crucially, Sammie has not sold anything to play the blues. His skills belong to him alone, but those skills are so formidable, they are what draw the devil to the doorstep of the juke joint, or at least, a form of the devil. That brings us back to Carpathian folklore and Remmick (Jack O’Connell), conspicuously not seen in our tale until the sun sets. He shows up at Smoke and Stack’s place with two other instrument-carrying white folks, Bert and Joan (Peter Dreimanis and Lola Kirke), a makeshift folk trio asking to be invited in. Coogler might be rendering the appropriation of the blues literal, but by making Remmick an Irish immigrant, the other target of the also anti-Catholic Klan, and by making Bert and Joan white extremists, he cuts even deeper. Their version of the old folk song Will Ye Go, Lassie Go? is not haunting; it’s haunted; it’s inviting them to an undead Eden of false inclusivity where, they’ll tell you, color and creed don’t exist. 

Indeed, while the back half of “Sinners” is essentially just another supernatural chamber piece, albeit one conveyed by Coogler with maximum force, it is complicated by that ostensible invitation, a group digging in their heels in a world, nay, a country that does not necessarily want them, determined to stay and fight. That’s a difficult idea to resolve, especially when there is also so much to narratively resolve too and probably explains why “Sinners” feels as if it has multiple endings. Coogler, though, sticks the landing by drawing from his own Marvel history, spiritually tying everything together with a mid-credits sequence that reminded me of Spike Lee’s conclusion to “Malcolm X” by bringing the past into the present, while also transforming a real-life bluesman into something like a superhero. 

Hard Truths

“Hard Truths” begins as middle-aged mother and wife Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) wakes up with a scream, as if exiting a nightmare. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I thought that wasn’t right at all; she’s not exiting a nightmare, she’s entering a nightmare, a waking one that never seems to stop. The global COVID-19 pandemic is not explicitly mentioned in writer/director Mike Leigh’s movie, but it is felt, in the sanitizer on the kitchen counter, and the masks that Pansy wears for medical appointments, and the deliberately sterile nature of her home. More than that, though, it is felt in Pansy’s explosive, all-encompassing rage, and how no one is safe from it, whether it’s a doctor or a dental hygienist trying to help her, or an angry man berating her in a car park, epitomizing the decay of public behavior post-pandemic. On several occasions Pansy deems herself “a sick woman” though this sickness is ever explicated, making me think of a different version of Julianne Moore in “Safe,” lashing out rather than shutting down, a woman who is sick but does not know why, plagued by a deep-seated societal disease she cannot name. 

Pansy spends her days caring for and cleaning up after her husband Curtley (David Webber) and adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). At dinner, Leigh’s camera essentially sits in the fourth chair of their square table watching as Pansy, positioned between the two men, airs an unceasing list of grievances while the two men shovel food in their mouths, hardly even seeming to hear what she says, allowing us to feel the weight of a thousand dinners just like this one. Though Curtley owns his own business, he is neither helpful nor industrious around the home, and neither is Moses, though Leigh is shrewd to present them as both part of the problem and undeserving of such bile. Though Moses barely speaks, that does not feel like a mere character tic but an outgrowth of having been worn to the nub. Even his capping scene feels earned, seen in a wide shot that makes it seem like benevolent deity is giving him a nod by giving him a break. 

Pansy is juxtaposed against her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser who listens to her clients and trades jokes with them, and whose knickknack filled home functions itself as a juxtaposition to Pansy’s sterile one just as her buoyant daughters Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson) differ sharply from the morose Moses. It’s almost too sharp a difference, really, between the two, and though Leigh does try to muddy it up with a conversation between the daughters where neither divulges their own troubles in life, it is never followed up, feeling too much like a loose thread. Austin shades her performance with real depth, evincing a genuine patience of what it must take to share blood with someone like Pansy. A visit by the sisters to their mother’s grave becomes the linchpin of the movie, revealing the hardest truth. Though it’s hinted that Pansy has still not recovered from this death, neither is this presented as the ultimate answer as we are conditioned to expect.

Long before the image in which Leigh casts the shadows of venetian blinds across Pansy’s face, the familiar notion of being locked inside a metaphorical prison, Jean-Baptiste has already summoned this sensation in her performance. It’s honestly remarkable what she does throughout “Hard Truths,” and I feel like even now, weeks later, I’m still trying to digest and process it but that the feeling of it lingers. Pansy’s misanthropy evokes Larry David of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” honestly, the bracing humor almost sneaking up on your, and her myriad meltdowns suggest another Julianne Moore character, the one in “Magnolia,” but Jean-Baptiste is not deliberately exaggerated in the same way, neither comedically nor melodramatically. It’s something else entirely. It’s veracity in full roar. She opens a vein and bleeds onto the screen.

Between the Temples

If “The Holdovers” was merely a facsimile of a 1970s movie, right down to emulating the photographic look of a movie from that decade, “Between the Temples” innately evokes the true spirit of a 1970s movie despite being set in the present. It is character-driven, and those characters tend toward endearing oddballs who all feel like real people rather than mere projections of writer/director Nathan Silver, and rather than calibrating its aesthetic for optimal audience love, it gives zero fucks, determined to tell its story on its own terms. Its May-December romance evokes Hal Ashby’s 70s staple “Harold and Maude,” but despite its own character’s not-entirely-serious suicidal tendencies, it feels closer in spirit to one of Elaine May’s 70s comedies, as the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis pinpointed, not least because of its also-innate Jewishness. Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) might be in his 40s but he’s divorced and living at home with his mom Meira (Caroline Aaron), and her wife Judith (Dolly De Leon), meaning he is living in his moms’ [emphasis added] basement; it’s a Marvelous Mrs. Maisel joke written to the screen rather than told.

Recently divorced, Ben is a cantor who has lost his voice, evoked in the opening scene where he struggles to sing the music at worship, fleeing the synagogue instead, lying down in traffic in a comically pitiful suicide attempt that fails, and then repairing to a bar where he gets drunk on mudslides and then into a fight that winds up with him sprawled on a barroom floor where his grade school music teacher, of all people, Carla Kessler (Carol Kane), appears, looking down on him like an eccentric angel. That’s just a description of some plot, but it also conveys the headlong narrative rush of “Between the Temples,” which despite its conventional arc is rendered to feel as it’s all coming together on the fly. That’s underscored in the camerawork, which isn’t passive, willing to get in there with its characters and mix it up, never more than when Ben unwittingly combines meat and dairy with a cheeseburger in rendered in uncomfortable close-ups that seem to evoke the danger and delight of going non-kosher. 

In addition to his recent divorce, Ben is suffering a crisis of faith, even going so far as to visit a Catholic church and chatting with a priest (Jason Grisell). This scene is at once completely earnest and a little absurd, fitting the tone of the whole movie in which Carla wants to have an adult bat mitzvah and wants Ben as her tutor. Having been raised in a communist household without faith, Carla is seeking to embrace one for the first time. And that pursuit is what helps to bring Ben back around to his own faith, re-embracing his more youthful self, a time when he truly believed, underlined in how he might just be falling in love with his pupil, an adult-aged role reversal that Silver’s script simultaneously acknowledges is odd, if not out-of-bounds, but also earnest. It is all at once wrapped up and blown apart at a Shabbat dinner where tension and confusion and cringe comedy come together where nobody seems to believe quite what’s happening.

That’s what the performances of Kane and Schwartzman evoke too, making strong use of her patented eccentricity and his comic incredulousness. It’s as if their characters are being swept along by a mystifying current, and in the electricity and excitement of it, they are willing to go for the ride and see what’s on the other side. Of course, you can be sure that if Ben has lost his singing voice, he will reclaim it, and even if that’s technically a spoiler, it’s not, not really. Silver scores much of the action to unlikely 60s and 70s Hebrew rock songs, embodying Ben’s inner-tempest, but also going to show the music was in his heart all along. 

Ferrari

The life of Enzo Ferrari spanned 90 years, rich enough to fill an almost 500-page book by Brock Yates. But in bringing “Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine” to the big screen, director Michael Mann, working from a long-gestating script by the late Troy Kennedy Martin, eschews an overarching account of Italy’s most famous racing and sports car entrepreneur with big slabs of critical Life Details to instead convey one year in Enzo’s life, 1957, full of personal and professional tribulation and culminating in a tragic Mille Miglia, the once-famed open-road motorsport endurance race. Mann has always favored exerting extreme pressure on his characters to see how they respond, and by narrowing his focus in “Ferrari,” his aim is not to summarize Enzo’s life but more specific, to get under the man’s hood, so to speak, and see what makes him tick.

“Ferrari” is not a heist movie but sort of opens in the vein of one with Enzo lighting out from the Modena countryside home he keeps with his mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley) by giving his car a running start, hopping behind the wheel, letting it coast along, and then, finally, starting the engine. He needs to make it back to Bologna in time to have morning coffee with his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz), who knows of Lina, and who demands this ritual to maintain appearances. Putting up such fronts is essentially the crux of “Ferrari’s” drama. Bologna reveres Enzo, which is demonstrated in an early scene at a barbershop where he entertains the regulars with comic witticisms while literally maintaining his appearance by getting a shave. Indeed, Driver wears his suits, wears his hair, and like in a brief scene of his character on the road in which rapid-fire cuts capture him coolly shifting gears, he exudes an air of control at all times, indifferent to the swirling chaos, unaware it’s threatening to consume him.

“Two objects,” Enzo explains at one point, “cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time.” He’s referring to cars on a racetrack, but he may as well be highlighting the impossible dualities of his own life. Indeed, an early scene of Enzo attending Mass does not so much juxtapose the ovular communion wafers with the image of so many ovular stopwatches as Ferrari’s rival Maserati breaks a record on the track as link them together, racing inextricable from life itself. This idea is literalized in Enzo’s relationship with Laura given that she owns half his Ferrari business, and because the company is verging on bankruptcy, and Enzo is told he needs complete control for the necessary steps to keep it afloat, he must convince his relatively estranged wife to sign over her half to him, a volatile seesaw. In their frequent spats, and occasional eruptions of sex, they are at once made for each other and utterly incompatible, manifesting “a terrible joy and deadly passion.” That’s Enzo again, talking about his own life talking about racing. 

Their scenes together are as ferocious as any on the track, and on full display in their introductory quarrel when Laura pulls a pistol, takes deliberately bad aim at her exasperating man, and shoots, leaving a hole in the wall not far from Enzo’s head. It’s Chekov’s Gun, in other words, but going off already, in a manner of speaking, which not only immediately establishes the combustible nature of their relationship, but how death permeates “Ferrari” from the figurative waving of the flag. Mother and father still grieve for their son Dino, having died only a year earlier from muscular dystrophy, making daily visits to his grave. Dino’s presences hovers over everything and is complicated by Enzo’s son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese) with Lina, of whose existence Laura is unaware, though comes to suspect, as if the 12-year-old’s illegitimacy is preventing cauterization of the gaping emotional wound.  

The serene countryside scenes in Modena contrast against the more frenzied nature of Enzo’s life in Bologna, but too often, that’s all they are, symbols, not least because Woodley lacks the same pulse as Cruz. The latter seems to receive cues from the opera sequence midway through, virtually transmitting emotions directly to us as a soloist might with an aria. And though Lina is a calmer character, she is meant to instill a passion of her own, that she won’t just sit around in the shadows, and Woodley struggles to effuse the humanity and electricity of that struggle. I will not comment on the quality of the accent, because that’s out of my jurisdiction, but I was also left wondering if Woodley was mistakenly charged by Mann with focusing so much on the accent, she forgot to give a performance.

Just as Enzo struggles to compartmentalize these separate lives, he struggles to compartmentalize the racetrack from his home life too. The opening images of a young Enzo in a race car inform the movie to come, one in which no longer fit to race, he is left to issue demands and instructions to his drivers, transforming them into avatars, an extension of his ego, and of his obsession. The racing scenes are themselves further extensions of that obsession. Thrilling isn’t the right word, they are more intense than that, no, more visceral, even elegiac, as conveyed in a sequence where Ferrari drivers compose letters to their loved ones before going off to the Mille Miglia. One of Enzo’s cars might win, but victory is compromised by death, a scene so unsentimentally gruesome as to take your breath away, a man at the wheel who is confident, and in control, until suddenly, he is not, wreckage strewn behind him.

Fallen Leaves

Running a mere 81 minutes with a plot that boils down to nothing more, really, than Boy Meets Girl, “Fallen Leaves” might sound slight. It is anything but. This is the fourth movie in what writer/director Aki Kaurismäki had intended as a trilogy, and though I have not seen the three other movies, a grievous oversight I intend to rectify in the new year, this fact suggests not merely something being left to say but a winnowing, a paring down of aesthetic and of theme. And that’s how “Fallen Leaves” feels, pared down to what I dare say feels like something close to perfection. In trimming so much narrative fat, Kaurismäki almost exclusively carves his movie out of details and gestures, and that trimming in tandem with so many static compositions essentially leaves nowhere for the emotion to hide, beaming it straight to us. “Fallen Leaves” is not telling a story, or even making a movie so much as transcribing the human condition to the screen.

Though there are all manner of anachronistic touches in “Fallen Leaves,” this is a movie of the present, with both Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), two lonely souls in Helsinki, repeatedly tuning their radios to reports of next-door neighbor Russia’s war with Ukraine. The bigger problems of the world are not muted, then, even if smaller problems are what define existence. Life itself is tantamount to nothing more than a series of grim, low wage jobs. One shot of Holappa watching a cement mixer pour concrete becomes a diabolical twist on sand in an hourglass. Ansa is virtually reduced to a prisoner on the clock in her position stocking supermarket shelves, evoked in a series of increasingly closer close-ups of a security guard watching her. And when she is dismissed for taking expired food, she takes a stand, though it tellingly doesn’t ferment any kind of “Norma Rae” moment. It’s about maintaining self-worth, and like so much of the movie, feels as profound as it does pointless. When she gets another job, it’s washing dishes at a bar called California, a straight-faced sick joke on seeking your fortune.

All this is enough to drive a person to drink, and Holappa does, to excess, getting the heave-ho for drinking on his industrial job. Many scenes are set in bars and in Kaurismäki’s penchant for droll eye-level shots, everyone here, Holappa included, come across like the undead, driven by an endless procession of pint glasses to numb the pain. It’s appropriate, I guess, that after meeting in a karaoke bar, when Ansa and Holappa go to catch a movie, it is Jim Jarmusch’s zombie flick “The Dead Don’t Die,” in which the humans hardly seem to have more of a pulse than the flesh-eating reanimated they’re pursuing, one of several moments in which “Fallen Leaves” works in concert with various cinematic predecessors. Indeed, when Ansa and Holappa leave the show, she remarks she’s never laughed so hard, even though we never once heard her laughing. It’s like the bleak Nordic version of Frank Drebin and Jane Spencer seeing in “Platoon” in the “The Naked Gun.”

This is typical of the film’s deadpan humor, which is frequent, and frequently and unexpectedly knocks you hilariously sideways by the way it just sort of drops out of the sky, like the camera suddenly catching sight of Ansa in her California job with a Finnish variation of empty mugs accrued so high in her left arm that she appears to be a King’s Guard with a beer snake as rifle. And while there is something equally humorous in how Ansa has inherited her miniscule one-room apartment, as if this is “Under the Tuscan Sun” recast as Under the Finnish Clouds, that home is also infused with light and color. When she and Holappa have dinner, their clothes match the flowers. These are not just touches meant for the movie to counteract its multitudinous miserabilist tendencies, but for Ansa to counteract the miserabilist tendencies of the surrounding world. When she turns the radio dial from news of the war to love songs, it becomes a manifestation of her own mood, a glimpse of her pulsing soul underneath.

It’s a hair’s breadth between bleak and beautiful, in other words, and which the title suggests, and which the parallel episodes of the conclusion suggest too. Such a contrast isn’t anything original in and of itself, but it’s rarely felt so vibrant, and Kaurismäki both honors that familiarity with an ending straight out of Hollywood’s Golden Age, noted in one ostensibly throwaway reference. And if so much of “Fallen Leaves” is characters seeming to look just past the camera, as if staring into the abyss, as it ends, the camera finally switches, stretching out toward boundless possibilities. 

Priscilla

“Priscilla” begins with its eponymous character, Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny), sitting at a diner counter, reading a magazine, and sipping a Coke, the camera moving in behind her. She’s at a US Air Force Base in Germany where her father is stationed, but it looks like Priscilla could be anywhere in America, and it looks like Priscilla could be any American girl. Indeed, aside from a few insert shots just before, all of which seem to occur later in the movie’s timeline, we never see the then-14-year-old Priscilla before this moment. She’s just a 14-year-old girl waiting to be molded, or perhaps groomed, evoked in an American military man asking Priscilla if she knows of Elvis, also stationed on the base, and if she’d like to come over to his where he’s living and meet the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. You know the rest of the story, though the way writer/director Sofia Coppola tells it, working from the real-life Priscilla’s book “Elvis & Me,” feels no less fresh and invigorating. It’s a movie seen specifically from Priscilla’s perspective while evoking how she, herself, was not allowed to have any perspective, a nifty trick only Sofia could so affectingly pull.

When Priscilla first meets Elvis (Jacob Elordi) at a party he’s hosting, he is costumed in sweater and slacks to make him look less like a not you-can’t-do-that-on-television rebel than an affable teen dream. And that’s how Coppola evinces it, at least at first, like a teenage fantasy, with images of Priscilla daydreaming at her school desk and walking through school hallways lost in love, or what she thinks is love. In one astonishing shot, Coppola takes advantage of Elordi’s exaggerated height compared to Spaeny by having him lean over her with one hand on the wall of his home, looking for all the world like a boyfriend and girlfriend at her locker. With accompanying pop hits of the era, it’s like Priscilla is swept up in one of those songs, though I kept thinking of a tune not featured, The Ronettes’ “Why Don’t They Let Us Fall in Love?,” alas mellifluous as it is horrifying, Ronnie made to make the eponymous plea on Phil Spector’s behalf.

If it’s no surprise that Presley’s estate refused to grant permission for Elvis’s music given his portrayal, “Priscilla” isn’t really about Elvis’s music, anyway, his ambition and career at once weirdly present but also distant, far away beyond Graceland’s gates where omnipresent screaming girls become a reflection of what Priscilla was, of a dream that came true all wrong. Indeed, “Priscilla” becomes a kind of companion piece to Coppola’s equally great “Marie Antoinette.” Celebrities are nothing if not American royalty, which Sofia’s own “Bling Ring” suggested, and so Priscilla becomes a kind of American queen, Graceland as her Versailles, held in captivity, illustrated in a shot seeing her through a window looking out.

“Marie Antoinette,” though, was an explosion of style and extravagance, mirroring its protagonist. “Priscilla” is the opposite, a stifling of style, and certainly of expression. “Keep the fires burnin’,” Elvis says over the phone to his child bride when he’s on the road, not so much oblivious as keenly aware he’s snuffing out her fire by keeping her locked in his castle. She graduates high school, though to no real effect, is not allowed to have a job, has her fashion tastes impressed upon her by Presley, eventually becomes addicted to pills right alongside him. She settles into a zombified state, evoked in how Coppola and her editor Sarah Flack compose the movie to make it feel as if nothing is happening even as life rushes by. 

“Priscilla” also demonstrates just how much a director can – one might argue, should – sculpt a movie performance as much as the performer. That’s not to discount Spaeny. She comes across carried away in the early scenes by puppy love, evinces a haughtiness when she first moves into Graceland, and shows the emerging cracks, like coming unglued from her husband’s spiritual and philosophical ramblings. Mostly, though, she downplays to great effect, existing within Coppola’s frames, like a vacant fashion model in a vapid spread, hinted at in those brief opening shots of assorted makeup and hairstyle trinkets, costumed and posed just as the man in her life wants. That Priscilla never really has agency isn’t an oversight but the whole point, turning the end into an inversion of the end of “Marie Antoinette,” not escape but liberation, not the end but the beginning.

Reality

Named for its real-life subject, Reality Winner, the 25-year-old U.S. Air Force cadet turned NSA translator who in June 2017 leaked evidence of Russia interfering in the 2016 U.S. election, there is a delicious double meaning to this movie’s title, “Reality,” epitomized in how it lops off her surname, leaving just the semi-daffy yet no less revealing given one. Director and writer Tina Satter adapted this HBO original movie from her stage play in which she culled the dialogue strictly from the FBI’s recording of their agents interrogating Winner outside and inside her Augusta, Georgia home. This suggests a transcription of reality, though in adhering exactly to the record, Satter demonstrates how reality is anything but, mining the surface for various hidden meanings, a casual conversation so tinged with menace that a sunny summer evening turns threatening with nary a cloud in the sky. From what I have read, the play, which I have not seen, did that too, but Satter has foregone merely filming a play to make a full-fledged movie, deploying all the tools of the cinematic medium to render an extraordinary real-time dramatic thriller of reality slowly settling. 

The opening shot is a high-angled one of Reality (Sydney Sweeney) at her work desk with televisions turned to cable news suspended above, making it seem for all the world like she’s drowning in disinformation and foreshadowing many such shots of the camera tilted down on its main character. If in sticking to the real-life script Satter and her co-writer James Paul Dallas play coy with the precise politics of Winner, these recurring images arouse a distinct sense of powerlessness in concert with the FBI agents who knock on her car door and eventually enter her home. All the more so because all these government men are just that, men, the high angles painting Reality as a small tree virtually lost in a forest of tall, burly, unforgiving ones. 

The two agents in charge are Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Taylor (Marchánt Davis), both of whom repeatedly mention a warrant as a neighbor who has mostly stopped by to gossip might mention his or her offering of baked goods, conspicuously avoid reciting Miranda Rights before not so much grinding her down into confessing transmitting national security secrets as casually getting her to open up. The duo plays something less like good cop, bad cop than good cop, good cop, genially discussing her pets and workout regimen, regular conversation ultimately provoking a tense disconnection between their subtle probing for any signs of danger and assorted images of black SUVs pulling up and yellow crime tape being unspooled in the background. In this way, the stylistic device of redactions in the FBI script being accounted for through sudden skips in the film underlines the eerie sensation of reality becoming unmoored while occasional POV shots of Reality briefly focusing on various ephemera, like a kid’s toy truck or the leaves in the trees, become the snapshots of everyday life that just happen to stick in your mind at the moment your life is changing. 

Upon moving inside, the two agents and Reality occupy a little low-ceilinged unadorned room in the back of her home. It suggests Orson Welles’s “The Trial,” though its presentation is far less surreal, Satter eschewing shadowy mood lighting for natural light instead, the sun slowly setting outside underscoring the gallows sensation. The blocking and editing of the conversation, meanwhile, as Garrick and Taylor let Reality hem and haw while building toward the ultimate confrontation, is as dynamic as it is halting, cultivating a rhythm that is jarringly plainspoken. The camera looks down on her and up at them, but it goes much further than that, showing them far away and then up close, mirroring the rhythm of the questioning and its escalating intensity, the camera drifting closer and closer to Reality the longer it goes. You know how it ends, but the way the sequence is cut, it doesn’t feel like a surprise, exactly, just an invisible noose, tightening, and tightening.

As Garrick, Hamilton takes his cues from that Kohl’s Clearance Rack blue and yellow lilac short-sleeve button-down he sports, playing an FBI interrogator in the key of a dad, echoed in his kind voice, where when the character inquires after her school background really comes across intrigued. And even when Garrick seizes on an inconsistency in her responses, Hamilton might speed up his intonation to underline the trap he’s sprung, yet never quite hardens his voice, still curiously friendly, epitomizing a truly insidious performance that you almost don’t realize has tricked you until it’s too late. If Hamilton’s turn is measured in how he ropes you in, Sweeney’s performance is equally measured in how she both projects an inner panic and an outer calm, and how gradually the former overwhelms the latter, which Sweeney never evinces through any kind of traditional hysterics, just a quiet understanding of how a movie performance works in concert with the camera, a searing manifestation of someone screaming on the inside.

Showing Up

The key shot in “Showing Up” is essentially the first one as Portland artist Lizzy (Michelle Williams) sits at her desk, sculpting in clay, before the camera drifts away to the right, eventually settling on an image of her open garage door because that is what passes for her studio – a garage. Director Kelly Reichardt and her co-writer Jon Raymond might have been inspired by real-life Canadian artist Emily Carr, but unlike most Reichardt scripts, this one is an original rather than an adaptation, and though her movies have always been personal in so much as they have been about issues that matter to her personally, none have felt quite as personal “Showing Up.” Reichardt, after all, has frequently spoken of struggling to get movies made despite being own of America’s best moviemakers, and in the space of that garage, you can sense the artist’s struggle. Not that “Showing Up” is a fiery screed. If anything, this is the closest Reichardt has yet come to making what you might deem a comedy, if funny in her typically unhurried, observant, quiet way, like a Nicole Holofcener movie made from as many withering expressions as lines. 

If pigeons sometimes denote peace and prosperity, in “Showing Up” the appearance of one in Lizzy’s bathroom at night, mauled halfway to death by her cat, just seems like a harbinger of One More Thing. The movie takes place over the course of a single week as she readies for an upcoming art show, or tries to get ready, I should say, since the movie is sort of a semi-shaggy dog story of quietly amusing accruing aggravations. Her landlord Jo (Hong Chaug) rescues the discarded pigeon of whom Lizzy becomes reluctant caretaker while Lizzy is repeatedly promised by Jo that her lack of hot water will be fixed...soon-ish, anyway, causing Lizzy’s visage to grow more and more unclean and disheveled. Lizzy also has a nine-to-five as an administrative assistant at an Oregon art school where the way Williams has Lizzy glare at her boss only feels slightly more piercing because her boss doubles as her mom (Maryann Plunkett), evincing the stark contrasts between living to work and working to live.

It this kind of direct and comic clarity that demonstrates how Reichardt eschews a romanticized notion of a struggling artist, just as she inverts the stereotype of a tortured artist through Lizzy’s mentally ill brother Sean (John Magaro), who might have once had artistic promise himself, that their mother can’t help but cling to, even as he claims the hole he’s digging in his backyard is some sort of earthwork as artwork. It’s not an insensitive moment, just a harshly revealing one, that we don’t create because of what ails us but despite it.

If Sean is a contrast to Lizzy, so is Jo. She’s also an artist, albeit more successful, with two upcoming shows to Lizzy’s one. This character could have been annoying comic relief or simple antagonist, but not only does Chau provide her with a mellow human dimension, Jo is not conceived in such simpleminded terms. True, her introduction, putting up a tire swing as Lizzy wonders when the hot water will be fixed, evinces an obvious dichotomy, but Jo’s sunnier attitude is ultimately portrayed as a direct result of her more assured footing in the artistic landscape, how one can afford to me more blissfully unaware when struggles to finish your sculpture because you’re struggling to make rent are not intertwined.

Jo is not the only one with a sunny attitude. There is also Eric, kiln master at the art school, just a peripheral character, really, even though he is played by André 3000, and when he fires one of her ceramics, it comes up slightly burnt. He says it looks kinda cool, which in his André 3000 voice you kinda believe, though Lizzy clearly doesn’t believe it looks cool and never comes around to believing it either. Just as the character who mentions how impressed she is with Lizzy works never signals some upward swing for Lizzy, this moment with the kiln never suggests something kismet, just a ruining of her hard work, which is how “Showing Up” ultimately sees art – as hard work. 

Reichardt presents the art school as a hub of energy, of people creating and coming and going, even as her framing of Lizzy and the performance of Williams deliberately render her as an afterthought, not unlike the dog sitting in the doorway that people are always stepping around or over. It is in her eyes, though, where you detect Lizzy’s imagination always at work, like in the scene where she sits outside eating lunch and watching people in the grass partake in a class called Thinking in Movement. It’s humorous, their motion compared to her severe stasis, but the way Williams has Lizzy watch belies someone taking in everything she is seeing. Indeed, in sculpting her statues, positioning the bodies and arms, she seems to be thinking in movement, and the way Reichardt positions the camera over Lizzy’s shoulder in these moments of Lizzy at work create nothing less than a visual symbiosis of the artist as her work.

Full Time

At several points in “Full Time,” Julie (Laurie Calamy) launches into a dead sprint. She looks for all the world like Tom Cruise in “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” or Franka Potente in “Run Lola Run.” Julie, though, is not chasing after the bad guy or running to and fro to try and save her boyfriend from a ruthless gangster. No, she is a single mother of two just trying to get to the train to carry her from the Parisian suburbs into Paris to her five-star hotel chambermaid job or get from the train to the job itself so she can clock in on time. It’s evocative of director Eric Gravel’s agile approach, utilizing the frenetic aesthetic of a high-octane thriller for a working-class drama. Kitchen sink indies and newspaper op-eds might suggest that getting to work on time or finding daycare for your kids are matters of life and death, but “Full Time” gloriously, thrillingly, frighteningly lives it out.

Gravel foreshadows his in-your-face style from the opening image of a sleeping Julie in hyper-close-up, her breath audible on the soundtrack, implicitly suggesting she hardly has room to breathe. And when the alarm clock goes off to summon her awake, she lingers for a moment on the edge of her bed, a recurring image throughout that fees like the Sonny & Cher bit from “Groundhog Day” retrofit for a Dardenne Brothers joint, one lone weary moment of reflection before she plunges into the relentless 24-hour chaos. As the title impies, “Full Time” never really stops, as one character (too) overtly says, plunging us into its story just as it plunges Julie into her day, into her whole life. The throbbing synth score is reminiscent of “Uncut Gems” and so is the overwhelming house of cards narrative sensation, how Julie’s childcare situation is threatening to give way, how she is trying to interview for another job but has to finagle ways to do it without clocking off from her current job that escalates to the point where her various solutions for getting out and keeping on all threaten to run out at once.

Given the movie’s propulsion, it would have been easy for Julie to fade from view as a character even though she’s in every scene, but both Calamy and the movie itself inject humanity throughout. You see it straight away in how Julie walks her daughter and son to the nanny, listening to them, smiling at them, present, and then, when the nanny closes the door, the smile dissolving as she almost instantaneously breaks into a run for the train, the demarcation line between mom and employee. The line between the dual roles of mom, meanwhile, are glimpsed throughout, in how Julie balances birthday party planning, even acquiring a trampoline, with the endless aspects of everything else, the moment in which she tries putting that trampoline together herself an emblem of home assembly as herculean struggle. The dad who helps Julie put the finishing touches on the trampoline set-up would have emerged as a love interest in another movie, but the way Julie inadvertently douses that seeming potential feels not just quietly embarrassing but a sign of something deeper, an overworked single mother who has lost the innate sense of how to be. Her chambermaid job, meanwhile, between her direct boss and a new employee she is tasked to train lays out an entire labor structure in which everyone is essentially hung out to dry and as such reduced to acting in their own best interest.

The transit strike remains conspicuously distant even as it nominally drives all the action. This is not a flaw. A significant shot finds Julie at the mirror, applying makeup, readying for another day as a news report in the background provides background and updates on the strike. In this moment, Calamy has Julie barely react, nay, not react all, more focused on applying makeup, not blocking out the news, because she has it on after all, but putting into perspective how the politics of labor so frequently becomes white noise to those laboring on the bottom rungs. Political power, government action, collective demand, when you’re up against it because your whole life is on the clock, these can be hard to imagine, making it seem, whether true or not, that some sort of supernatural occurrence is the only way out. Indeed, if the conclusion comes across a little miraculous, that’s precisely what it is: an earthly miracle. 

In Front of Your Face

On several occasions during Hong Sang-soo’s “In Front of Your Face,” the blog’s favorite movie of 2022, Sang-ok (Lee Hye-yeong) smokes a cigarette. This doesn’t sound like much. Used to be, after all, in those days when Camel ads graced the backs of magazines, that cigarettes were everywhere, including movie screens, where smoking them was often just something for actors to do. Smoking has been phased extensively out of movies, however, just as it has been extensively phased out of public life, particularly in Seoul, where “In Front of Your Face” is set, and so when Sang-ok sneaks a smoke, beneath a pedestrian bridge or outside a restaurant in the rain, it assumes added dimension. That’s part and parcel to Hong’s approach. The title refers to nothing less than heaven itself, which Sang suggests is hiding in front of our faces at all times if only we would let ourselves see it and that we see it by being present, living in the moment. Archaic platitudes, perhaps, but they have never mattered more than here, conveyed in images as mundane as they are monumental, like a painterly one of Sang sneaking a smoke beneath an umbrella in the rain. A cigarette is next to godliness.

A one-time well-known Korean actress who has since lived in the States for a long time, Sang-ok has returned to Seoul to stay with her sister Jeong-ok (Cho Yun-hee) ahead of a meeting with a movie director, Jae won (Kwon Hae-hyo) hoping to cast Sang in a part. Taking place over a single morning, afternoon, and evening, “In Front of Your Face” chronicles her conversations and interactions with these people, as well as a brief trip to her childhood home that has since been bought and transformed into a boutique. This is what passes for action, and though a secret Sang is keeping will eventually be spilled, when it is, it’s evocative of Hong’s intent is to capture his film’s truth in gestures, expressions, reactions, the essence of human behavior. He underlines this in his filmmaking approach, long takes of minimal fuss, typically two shots of people talking. If that sounds boring, or decided not revelatory, it could not be farther from, Hong allowing the deeper truths to quietly emerge on their own time. As Sang and Jeong’s breakfast on a scenic outdoor patio, the distance between them seems to metaphorically grow in the course of their lengthy conversation as we realize – they realize – how little they truly know one another. During her conversation over dinner and beer with the movie director, Hong so subtly pulls us into its rhythm, that when the camera suddenly tilts up and to the left to accommodate another character that just entered the room, he is acknowledging the spell being broken, for us and them.

That secret? Sang is dying, which I hope you won’t take as a spoiler, not least because of how Hong builds this eventual revelation into the movie’s myriad gestures and occurrences too, from the simple food stain that Sang gets on her blouse to the very opening images in which the way Sang briefly lies down on the couch in the dark has a decided funereal air. And though her confession arriving late would seem to retrofit the preceding narrative with a sudden sense of urgency, that urgency takes a different form, putting not so much an exclamation point or even a period as a kind of ellipsis on how life’s monotonous flow just kind of continues as is even when you’ve been sentenced to die. That’s what seems to propel Sang’s nigh mad laugh when she tells the director her fatal prognosis, not facing death with the nobility of some disease of the week weepie but as something more like the grim punchline to this silly thing called life. The return to her childhood home, meanwhile, suggests a more lyrically existential version of Martin Blank in “Grosse Pointe Blank” returning to his childhood home only to find it a convenience store. The shopkeeper allows Sang inside where she passes through various rooms, eventually meeting the shopkeeper’s daughter who Sang almost clutches as much as she embraces. If “In Front of Your Face” is all about concentrating on what’s right in front of you, here Sang allows herself to go down memory lane, just struggling to hang on.

Given her impending demise, when Jae won proposes resurrecting Sang’s career by sculpting a new movie in her image, it becomes less about resurrecting her career than an idea of legacy, and that the project dies as a drunken evening gives way once again to morning, suggests the impotence of legacy, no matter how much we might like to think otherwise. It’s a helluva thing Hong is doing here, making a movie to evince the limits of movies as myth-cementing agents even as his own movie’s images repeatedly personify the fleeting beauty of life.