Terminator 2: Judgment Day ☕︎ d. James Cameron, 1991

Poster by Gabz

Whatever’s left to say about T2: Judgment Day, I hope that there’s room for a comment about how generations view it. For me, so many images, lines of dialogue, and musical cues are just part of my cinephilic DNA. Not having watched it in probably more than a decade, I was struck by some of the extremely 90s oddities about the film. For instance, the Connors’ bangs completely cover their eyes to a degree that must have resulted in visual impairment for the actors involved; I don’t know how Linda Hamilton got around the set without constantly smacking into key grips or set facades. Then there’s the needle drop for George Thorogood & the Destroyers. In a moment that should underline that the T-800 is still a terrifying, lethal weapon, all James Cameron wants us to feel is that he’s… cool. Is “Bad to the Bone” still considered cool? I’m incapable of judging that with any sense of objectivity, having been born too long ago. It’s still a funny moment, and I do think that Arnie looks cool wearing his sunglasses at night, riding his hog, nonchalantly sliding his lever-action shotgun into his ride.

Having grown up with this film, there’s a lot that I don’t think I could have seen in it when I was younger, even if I had been capable of watching for such things. In the early 90s, it’s tragic that Miles Dyson gets mortally wounded in his own lab, and it’s iconically heroic that he sacrifices himself to save his life’s work. Now? I see a bunch of L.A. cops gunning down a black man who is not given the opportunity to surrender or drop his weapon. In the early 90s, it’s super gross that the attendant licks Sarah Connor while she’s strapped to her bed in an apparently catatonic state. Now? I see a paunchy rapist-of-opportunity accustomed to abusing his institutional authority. In the early 90s, it sucks that John’s foster parents are neglectful dicks. Now? I see dysfunctional representatives of a dysfunctional social services system that crushes kids, turning creative, empathetic natural leaders like John Connor into juvenile delinquents. Of course, even in the 90s, I recognized the irony of the T-1000 cosplaying as a generic motorcycle cop. Now, though, it seems of a piece with Cameron’s more general distaste for the failures of institutional authorities to build a more equitable world (perhaps especially in the City of Angels).

Terminator 2 is one of the films that taught me to view our social systems with a jaundiced eye, and Cameron stridently insists that people have the power to control their destinies for the better. This critique isn’t new, but T2 in retrospect feels something like the culmination of the postwar era’s response to technocratic command and control. It’s a mass entertainment in the slickest of sleek genre packages, and though I wouldn’t go so far as to call Cameron an optimist, his idea of hope is that we, the people, can teach the Machine that the Machine may need to destroy itself so that humanity can have a fighting chance.

None of the other Terminator sequels has bested the Cameron’s distillation of this theme into Judgment Day, and it’s a testament to the generative power of the first two films that they keep trying. Terminator 2 certainly spoke to the future. But the battles that we fight today arose from the conflagrations I was too young to understand when they occurred. They have raged for decades, but, finally, these battles are never fought in the future. They’re fought here, in the present. Which is precisely where Cameron wants our focus to be.☕︎

Stromboli ☕︎ d. Roberto Rossellini, 1950

Poster via Arthipo

To be honest, I’m not sure I like a lot of this film: the juxtaposition of melodrama and neorealist background performers does Ingrid Bergman little more good than some of the lines she’s forced to deliver. (Some are as hoary as the chalk outline around a murder victim.) Yet there’s power here. Perhaps it’s a symptom of me not reading a lot about classic film or not spending enough time watching TCM, but I always got the feeling that Bergman has remained a bit underrated. Whatever led her to throw in her lot with Rossellini, she must have known that he could do something interesting with her, and he does. A lot of Stromboli feels like his neorealist style is rejecting her presence, much as many  of the provincial islandfolk greet her character as warmly as antibodies greet a new strain of influenza. Bergman’s glamour is just too obvious. 

But Rossellini is ultimately a stylist, and Bergman’s (seemingly?) oft-untapped reserves finally explode in the climax, which takes a huge swing for the nosebleed seats. Only once Bergman is alone with the elements, raging with and against God himself, like an operetta soloist, do the style of the film and her presence finally come into alignment. This is ambitious, transcendental stuff, and bumptious, but definitely grasping at starlight.☕︎

One More Time with Feeling ☕︎ d. Andrew Dominik, 2016

Not often do I regret not having a 3D television, but I do in this case. Half the impact of Dominik’s compositional choices is lost, and the space between the subjects in the documentary is, I suspect, an integral feature of the film. Before watching the film, it probably helps to do some poking around on Nick Cave’s biography and the nature of the trauma suffered within his family around the time of the filming. The sense of grasping, floating, searching, and listlessness is one that Dominik actively seeks to cultivate in the way he stages his interviews and musical performances. 

By the time we get to the final image, as Dominik pushes the audience through a wire fence over the side of a cliff, we are left with the vertigo of memories and grief that we have shared with these subjects (rather, the memories and grief that they have shared with us), but which do not belong to us. What we have is a montage of images, words, and music that delicately, circumspectly probes at the collision between two irreconcilable truths crashed together by the sudden apparition of death: the vacant senselessness of loss itself and the inescapable profundity of that loss, which fills one’s world to overflowing.☕︎

On the Basis of Sex ☕︎ d. Mimi Leder, 2018

Poster by Chungkong Art

Sometimes I want precisely what On the Basis of Sex has to offer: a down-the-middle, handsomely rendered, period drama with a solid ensemble cast. It’s kind of emblematic of warm bathos cinema, which is often relaxing and predictable when it should be infuriating or shocking or grappling with complex emotions. Do I enjoy the simple fact of Felicity Jones and Armie Hammer being likable, engaging, and marginally forgettable? Sure. Why fight it?

Do I agree with the legal arguments or their implications upon which the climax hinges? Well, given that RBG forgot more about constitutional law by the time she was my age than I shall ever learn makes my opinion on that matter moot; within the world of the film, which is practically an alternate reality to the one in which the United States and its legal system actually exist, everything about the film makes emotional sense. So, like, I kind of went with it. Again: why fight it?

On the Basis of Sex is a master class in crass manipulation of audience identification: whatever the protagonist (an underdog, to boot) feels must be right and must be just, except when she’s wrong, in which case we clearly know she’s in the wrong because the other people in the film who are right and just tell us so. (And the antagonists are repellently one-dimensional, albeit played with relish.) Let it never be said that good liberals don’t love their secular saints as much as the adherents of any world religions; if that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t ever see lovingly-crafted hagiographies like this one.☕︎

I’m All Right Jack ☕︎ d. John Boulting, 1959

Poster via Heritage Auctions

Happily tossing molotov cocktails through every front window along the thoroughfare of British class and labor politics, I’m All Right Jack is aggressively ambivalent toward every partisan except those corporate heads who seek to profit from dishonesty. As a satirical stance, it’s commendable, if perhaps a bit blinkered. Like any good satire, I’m All Right Jack liberally takes potshots at everyone in a target-rich environment, though most of the main characters also feel like people, even with the satirical exaggerations. Ian Carmichael and Peter Sellers, when they share scenes, always speak at total cross-purposes, but there is genuine humanity happening between them, which is not always the case in films of this type. That humanity only accentuates the bitterness of the comedy, and though the tone of the film is perhaps too blithe, it blithely bites.☕︎

Blow Out ☕︎ d. Brian De Palma, 1981

Poster by Jay Shaw

Last August and last March, I rewatched Blow-Up and The Conversation, respectively, and in May I finally finished the trilogy. Of course, it’s not really a “trilogy” in any meaningful sense; at best, it’s a triptych created by viewers and the discourse surrounding these three films whose filmmakers are very obviously intertwined interlocutors. The single biggest pleasure of watching these three films in succession (even if it did take several months) is bearing witness to three filmmakers at the peak of their powers playing variations on the same theme. While The Conversation follows from Blow-Up, Blow Out much more obviously follows from both of them; yet the three films are utterly distinct from each other. What’s more, each is distinctively of its own era’s—and each captures something about each era’s relationship to paranoid politics.

One of the other emergent themes from this triptych is each filmmaker’s comment on the insufficiency of the artist to rise to the demands of his (definitely his, since each film also interrogates masculinity) era. The failures of Thomas, Harry, and Jack to see and hear the machinations happening in front of them and to do anything meaningful with what they uncover is, in De Palma’s film, most bluntly and most sensationally, like a dismembered head bearing witness, stuck on a pike for the audience to contemplate. Like Harry Caul, Jack is destroyed by his prophetic glimpse at the truth. Like Harry, too, Jack is also an expert in his field whose past experiences should have prepared him for his trial.

Unlike Harry, who fruitlessly tears apart his life to thwart the prying eyes and ears directed at him, De Palma has Jack repurpose his failure into a trivial gag—in the service of his art as a film sound technician—that immortalizes it, and it serves in turn as his own private torment. (By the by, I don’t know if I’ve ever been as hollowed out by a John Travolta line delivery as I was in the final scene of this film.) As a valedictory summation of the theme played out by Antonioni and Coppola before him, De Palma simultaneously demonstrates the power of art to respond to the political evils of its time and laughs it off, angrily, as ultimately impotent, as little more than a politically-aware artist make his private self-flagellation into disposable public entertainment.

Any and all of these three films have plenty to say about our own moment, and the refreshing power of each of them indicates to me that we are far overdue for a contemporary master to present his—or her, or their—own variation on this theme.☕︎

Apollo 11 ☕︎ d. Todd Douglas Miller, 2019

Poster by GRAVILLIS via Imp Awards

How do you commemorate one of the most monumental achievements of the human species? For the most part, Miller focuses on images and sounds contemporaneous to the moon landing, bolstered by a propulsive score by Matt Morton (mostly using musical instruments available in 1969). Apart from some graphics, eschewing narration, interviews, and overt retrospection keeps the viewer in a headspace that’s probably best described as “archival.” The narrative is clearly shaped and finely-attuned to details, so it’s not quite essayistic or recursive; its scope is wide-ranging, taking in home movies filmed by tourists as well as footage filmed of NASA’s computers. In that respect, it feels almost third-person omniscient in its approach. 

But the careful montage technique also feels singular and focused. The sound mixing alone is incredibly layered to the point of being almost associative, pulling together the images in a way that feels stream-of-consciousness. In that respect, Apollo 11 feels like a collective memory defamiliarized and reframed. All the greatest hits images and soundbites are there (“That’s… one small step for man…”), but it’s mostly stuff you’ve never seen; at least, it’s stuff you’ve never seen all in one place, and the juxtaposition of images, sound, and music feels intimate as a result. It’s almost as if somebody asked the National Aeronautics and Space Administration itself—the institutional body—what it was like when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and Apollo 11 is the extended flashback.☕︎

The best films I saw in April 2021

via Amazon

Babette’s Feast (d. Gabriel Axel, 1987)

It’s a neat trick to present bracing observations in a gentle manner. The warmth suffusing Babette’s Feast accentuates rather than detracts from the disappointments and missteps made by the characters. Though justly famous for its climactic banquet, which is as sumptuous-looking as you may expect, the whole film is just as painterly, while also making deft use of sound and music. It’s a parable about art and self-abnegation. Babette’s Feast describes a world in which common people with mundane regrets and flaws may snatch a whiff of grace in the coming together at the same table. It’s enough to lift the spirits without transporting them entirely from this, our earthly cradle.

via Allposters

Ben-Hur (d. William Wyler, 1959)

See full review here.

via Notes on Film

Easter Parade (d. Charles Walters, 1948)

Pygmalion variations usually interest me, and this one is charming. Fred Astaire and Judy Garland are well-matched as actors; they’re both capable of a light touch and surprising depth. Like a lot of films where Astaire is punching below his weight class with dancing partners, some of the musical numbers drag ever so slightly. Garland is game, and she certainly is graceful, but she’s no Ginger Rogers or Rita Hayworth. Similarly, he can sing, but he’s not in her league. The arc of the film is about how much these two shape each other to be better than they ever could have been on their own. The storytelling pulls that off pretty well, but the musical numbers that really shine are the ones that keep them apart. It’s an enjoyable exercise, and Astaire’s opening bit in a toy shop is probably one of his best solo routines.

via Matt Taibot

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (d. Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

This is one of those movies that actively resists being written about, because the experience of its use of sound and image is so idiosyncratic and overwhelming that words feel like they’re just not going to get it done. I’m tempted to say it’s like a Bela Tarr film with Tarantino’s pop sensibility, or Sergio Leone’s attempt at filtering a vampire tale through the French New Wave. None of this is accurate, which is a testament to how sui generis Amirpour’s film is. As an exercise in mood and dark meditations on the wounds we inflict on ourselves in the context of abusive cultural masculinity, it’s a stunning exercise in austere compositions and groovy, lush soundtrack.

via Eric Gomez at Behance

The Night Comes for Us (d. Timo Tjahjanto, 2018)

By sheer coincidence, I finished watching this film the same week that Mortal Kombat dropped on HBO Max, and of the two films, this is obviously a much better showcase for Joe Taslim, who gets to face off against Iko Uwais. Besides having more opportunities to emote without a mask over most of his face, The Night Comes for Us is more violent and more intense than Mortal Kombat by orders of magnitude. It’s been a while since I watched a martial arts flicks with my jaw on the floor so for so much of the runtime. I genuinely have no idea how they pulled off some of the stunts in here; there’s at least one moment every fifteen minutes that taps into mind-blowing madness with its ingenuity. And by “ingenuity,” I mean shocking in its creative brutality. It’s one of the great expiation action dramas, where the protagonist unburdens himself of his sins by submitting himself to nigh-unimaginable savagery for the sake of saving one innocent. If you’re in the mood for bare-boned, bloody-knuckled street warfare, The Night Comes for Us is the real deal.

via Bronwen Everett on Pinterest

Wind Chill (d. Gregory Jacobs, 2008)

When you watch Wind Chill, take note of the opening and closing shots, which give you a real sense of one character’s emotional journey. Jacobs is a deft, thoughtful craftsman, and he is blessed with Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes as his leads. They play genuinely distasteful characters who are nonetheless given room to develop and grow and change. This film was never really on my radar when it came out, and catching up with it more than a decade later was a gratifying process of discovery. It’s spooky and sad and tense, and the less you know about it before diving in, the better. Not every horror film is a carefully-wrought two-hander, but this one is, and it’s worth your time. 

via IGN

Zack Snyder’s Justice League (d. Zack Snyder, 2021)

In the past, I’ve made little secret of my disdain for Snyder’s excesses, I’ve always liked his remake of Dawn of the Dead. None of his DCU work has particularly impressed me, and while I generally thought Batman v. Superman to be a failure, it was a failure that smacked as much of Warner Bros. impatience and haphazard planning as it did creative failure. Indeed, it’s hard to look back at BvS and not contemplate how well Snyder’s instincts have served the DCU more generally. His casting choices were all alarmingly spot-on, with Ben Affleck now in the conversation as one of the best big screen Batmen; Gal Gadot and Jason Mamoa got to headline really impressive spin-offs, with Wonder Woman in particular being maybe the best standalone superhero film of the decade. All three of his DCU films up to Justice League had their moments besides, with high points and cringes all being memorable because they were big swings.

Consider these comments a placeholder—a bookmark for retrospection a decade hence, once we’ve seen where else Snyder’s career has taken him. At present, I’m with those who consider this to be not only Snyder’s best DCU film, but maybe (maybe) his best movie to date. A big part of this, for me, is undoubtedly the discourse surrounding the film. I’ll acknowledge the toxicity endemic to fan culture, but I’m still blown away by the fact of this film’s existence. Everything had to fall into place exactly right in order for it to come to fruition, and I think it’s a testament to a combination of fan mobilization and Snyder’s commitment to his vision that a Snyder cut of Justice League got delivered, and that it’s good at all. 

In ten years, will this movie matter? I honestly don’t know. The circumstances surrounding it, which have calcified into competing narratives, make it tricky to evaluate it on its own merits. But its merits are considerable, and it seems to me to be just about the perfect kind of film to premiere on a streaming service. The runtime rewards either binging or piecemealing; the extremely odd choice of using Academy ratio plays well on the home screen; it feels more like a true ensemble piece, as opposed to a collection of set pieces. Most importantly, it feels like a truly alternative vision of superhero cinema: grandiose, self-serious, melodramatic; cosmic and propulsive. Shockingly, I suspect that it’s also probably rewatchable in a way that Man of Steel and BvS just aren’t. ☕️

Ben-Hur ☕️ d. William Wyler, 1959

via Parade

Just before the climactic chariot race for which Ben-Hur is justly remembered is a much more subtle bit of craft upon which the entire story hinges. As Judah Ben-Hur covers his head and turns away from the camera to ask God to forgive him for seeking bloody vengeance against, Messala, the Roman officer who tortured his family (and his people more generally), the camera racks focus ever so slightly from Charlton Heston in the foreground to the wall in the background. Embedded in that wall are three iron pegs, seemingly used for hanging things like bridles or whips and such. In this moment, though, they foreshadow the crucifixion to come later on. With a subtle shift of his lens, Wyler establishes a direct link between the sinful vengeance sought by Ben-Hur and Christ’s sacrifice that redeems him from it. In this moment, on the verge of his greatest earthly triumph, we are reminded through the use of mise-en-scene and camera perspective that Ben-Hur’s quest is misguided and for all that he has suffered, what he is about to do is the reason why the film ends the way that it does, on Calvary.

I’d never noticed that bit before, and for all the flack Ben-Hur has gotten (somewhat justly) over the decades for being such a bloated spectacle, it’s one of those moments that remind you what a craftsman Wyler was, and how attuned he was to his storytelling. Truthfully, I think the first four-fifths of Ben-Hur hold up pretty well. They grapple meaningfully with the vicissitudes of imperial politics, identity, institutional cruelty, class, and several other things. I’m not on board with all of Ben-Hur’s politics, and the undercooked love story has a particularly queasy dynamic, what with Esther being Judah’s slave. (“But he was a good master!” Yeah, okay.) But the story provides a wealth of thematic grist lot to chew on, and the sensational running time feels like a mostly earnest attempt to try to devote appropriate time to ruminating on all of it. 

The final fifth of the film is a disappointment, with the dialogue devolving almost entirely into stentorian pronouncements and Biblical evocations. It’s here that Wyler butts up against the unrepresentability of transcendence, and all the choices made up to his point—the elliptical orbit of Judah Ben-Hur’s odyssey around the life of Christ—draws attention to how… well, rushed and grandiose that final act feels. Part of me really appreciates that the entire film is dedicated to contextualizing the life of Christ with imperial contemporary politics; in that sense, I dig that Ben-Hur is in conversation with the Biblical stories, as opposed to telling them. At the same time, as a crucial portion of a standalone film, the final act feels inadequate to the task. I would buy the argument that the filmmakers deliberately mystify the Biblical elements so as to better represent how fragmentary and incomplete it would feel to experience them in the moment. Wonder is the strategy in that case, and Ben-Hur sort of pulls it off. But the approach is still overweening, which connotes a lack of confidence in the material, which serves to undercut the themes, too.

When offering judgments like this, I’ve been trying to make more of an effort to ponder whether it’s the film that is inadequate to the task or myself. There’s so much that works, and the choices are all so deliberate that I question my adequacy as a viewer. After the chariot race, for instance, when Judah goes to visit Messala, everything takes on a charcoal cast, appropriately so. The somber tone and draining of color matches the emptiness of Judah’s consummation of his vengeance; the rest of the film also begins to slide slowly into muddled darkness in terms of the production design, lighting, and costuming. Could it be that the stiltedness of the final act is intentional? Is it an idiosyncratic aesthetic meant to convey how disruptive Christ’s presence and passion are to the lives of the characters? Or how inadequate we are to grappling with the meaning of the cross? I’d like to say so, I guess. But I think the truth is that the filmmakers made a miscalculation in how pious the film ought to seem when dealing with Biblical (or quasi-Biblical) material. For me, it doesn’t immolate the film as a whole, but I was surprised to find myself physically wincing at times for reasons that had nothing to do with literally painful stimuli and everything to do with the figurative thuds of hamfisted moments onscreen.

Even though I find the final portion of the film to be unconvincing, somewhat, it still vibrates with raw craft. In the thunderstorm that signifies Christ’s death and the cleansing of the world’s sin, Wyler and screenwriter Karl Tunberg choose to stay with the three women in Ben-Hur’s life. Judah himself?—nowhere to be seen. Instead, Wyler cuts between lightning flashes and the cross and brief illuminations of the three women. Just as Judah Ben-Hur has been in elliptical orbit around Christ throughout the film, in the most thematically significant moment, Wyler focuses our attention on the women who have been in Ben-Hur’s orbit. While Christ is dying for Ben-Hur’s sins and Ben-Hur’s sins are being washed away along with everyone else’s, Wyler validates the struggle of these women, whose advice and self-sacrifice have been neglected or ignored for 3+ hours by the main character; he cleaves their wonder at the apocalypse unfolding around them to the sacrifice of Christ. When we finally see Ben-Hur again in the closing scene, he’s a changed man; his transformation, like the transforming presence of Christ, is held mostly offscreen. But those who have been the domestic agents of his redemption—mother, sister, maiden/wife—are aesthetically united to Christ’s work in that scene. I can’t even begin to unpack the gender dynamics at play here, which would take a post by itself, but it’s obviously deliberate and it’s thoughtful, to whatever degree it works or doesn’t.

For the most part, the have-your-cake-and-eat-it approach works extremely well precisely because it is thoughtful, if ambivalent. The chariot race remains utterly thrilling, even though its purpose is to illustrate the ephemeral and potentially corrupting nature of worldly glory and justice. Stephen Boyd, horrifying and disgustingly charismatic, remains a singular and unredeemed villain, even though his purpose is to illustrate the corrupting influence of the Roman imperium, of which he, too, is a victim. So on on and so on. At its best, Ben-Hur showcases the Hollywood machine firing all cylinders on distilled rocket fuel, but it seems artistically committed to spiritual themes that undercut everything that make it structurally and aesthetically a prime example of blockbuster filmmaking. For all those reasons, I find it to be both incredibly troubling and incredibly rewarding. Maybe I’ll be better suited in a few years to push through my own ambivalence, even if ambivalence is precisely the bullseye the filmmakers wanted to hit and largely succeeded in doing so.☕️

The best films I saw in March 2021, Part 4

by Guillaume Morellec

Pacific Rim (Guillermo Del Toro, 2013)

Well beyond the measure of reason, I truly love this movie, which is one of the few films released in the past decade that I’ve rewatched more than once a year. Inspired by Netflix’s tense-but-emo animated series, Pacific Rim: The Black, I returned to the original once more to reflect on why this, more than probably any other film of its kind, holds up so damn well, and how a film that underperformed could sustain a sequel and spinoff.

The most obvious element is the quality of the CGI. Most computer animation in live-action films ages both poorly and rapidly. Del Toro very smartly chose to cloak his action sequences in water and darkness while maintaining utter consistency in the lighting schemes between his live-action scenes and the kaiju-v.-jaeger set pieces. One of the things that makes him one of the best genre directors in the business is that he pushes the limits of f/x technology while remaining cannily aware of its limitations.

Another element that probably serves as its own limitation on the film is how profoundly Del Toro and Travis Beacham imbibed the ethos of shonen stories. At its heart Pacific Rim is about flawed people pulling together and gutting out challenges that by any measure ought to squash them. Every single victory in this film is as hard won as possible. Unlike a shonen story, Del Toro paces the film with clockwork alacrity, with each scene serving to move forward at least one character’s arc or some plot element. The characterizations are broad, and the dialogue isn’t terribly clever. Pacific Rim often verges on camp, the way it leans into the potential silliness of its premise.

A third element is that Del Toro & Co. know how silly this all is, but they embrace and invest in it fully. Pacific Rim is never po-faced, but it’s totally sincere. This is one of the marked differences in tone between the film and the anime, which refuses to acknowledge any silliness in its premise. That approach can work, but that also makes it not quite so eminently rewatchable. Pacific Rim is comfort food, but it’s comfort food that still raps on my emotions like a reflex hammer every time.

via Movie Posters 2038

The Son (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2002)

One of the great films of the 2000s, I revisited Le fils as part of a suite of films programmed for Easter viewing. The last time I watched The Son, I wasn’t a father. Now that I’m a dad, I can register so much more about Olivier Gourmet’s carpenter, though his capacity to forgive remains unfathomable to me. Whenever I hear or read comments about the intolerance and bigotry baked into the bread Christianity, I always find myself wondering if the people making those comments truly understand the love-as-vocation that is commanded by Christ? I don’t doubt for a moment that a majority of self-proclaimed Christians—myself included—would fail the test presented in this film, on account of we fail so many smaller tests on a mundane basis. Then again, grace wouldn’t be grace if it didn’t manage to short-circuit our base human impulses in the breach. I love that Olivier does not know why he does what he does in this film; it’s a mystery to him, and a divine one. Speaking only for myself, I think Christianity in practice could stand to spend much more time cultivating inexplicable and unmerited mercy and less time nurturing resentment toward a fallen world. If it weren’t fallen, Christ’s love wouldn’t be necessary, and we wouldn’t have to struggle so hard to carry it with us.

via Discover African Cinema

Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973)

Adroitly channeling some French New Wave energy, Touki Bouki is laden with semantic weight. Some of it is a bit inaccessible to me at present, on account of how much I don’t know about the postcolonial history of Senegal, but the tone is a bracing mix of joie de vivre and lacerating anger. The performances are swaggering and enticing, and there’s no mistaking the satirical jabs Mambéty is taking at almost every level of modern society—most of which are fully legible, even I don’t catch the connotations in full context. Furthermore, Touki Bouki wastes no time: it’s a trim 95 minutes that manages to be lyrical and to-the-point in nearly every scene.

by Daniel Schooler

Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969)

After Jan. 6th, a movie like Z is bound to hit especially close to the heart with anyone concerned about the ability (or political will) of our institutions to hold seditious goons to account. Costa-Gavras wisely chooses to inject Z with the tone and urgency of a conspiracy thriller, even though the bones are those of a procedural drama. What he nails especially well is the smug entitlement and performative outrage of the reactionary thugs, absolutely indignant that they are being held at all to account for lawless violence and systemic subversion of justice. Also wisely, Z steers into the messiness of protest politics, with the heroes of the film rarely on the exact same page and sometimes compromised. (The cast is really stellar, by the way, doing a lot of heavy lifting with characterization in a script that’s laser-focused on the unfolding minutiae of facts, discoveries, and decisions made on an hour-by-hour basis.) The fact of the protagonists being merely human only serves to accentuate the inhumane thuggishness of the authoritarians. And then: after all the struggle, suffering, and sacrifice, Costa-Gavras delivers the coup de grace, an utterly merciless denouement that is simultaneously a jeremiadic lament over political impotence and a call to renewed action.☕️

The best films I saw in March 2021, Part 3

by Amir Mehran

About Elly (Asghar Farhadi, 2009)

If anyone stumbles across this blog post and wants to point me in the direction of a really smart take on About Elly written by someone with a deeper knowledge of Iranian culture, I would love you to post that in the comments. Just from the craft of the film itself, it’s clear that Farhadi is assailing a specific cross-section of Iranian culture, and the film is expressively constructed, so a lot of it lands for me. But I also suspect that there’s a lot that’s not quite legible to me because of my ignorance. When I Googled the opening shot, for instance, I discovered that the audience is placed inside an alms box. The idea, it seems, is that travelers about to go on a journey donate to the poor, which amounts to a kind of pay-for-play travel blessing. To me, it’s a masterfully ironic opening, because the vacation taken by our characters turns out to be utterly disastrous. The one person who is said to have given something goes missing, and the other characters — who are all bourgeoisie, and can thus afford to donate — may or may not have given their alms. If so, that doesn’t work out so well; if not, it redounds on the fact that they could afford it but chose not to do so. It’s a Schrodinger’s trap of an opening, and that sense of entrapment compounds throughout the film. It’s a truly thrilling missing person chamber drama that manages to focus coherently on a single story while speaking volumes about so much else.

by Tyler Wait

Captain Phillips (Paul Greengrass, 2013)

At a certain point, sometimes a movie short-circuits my ability to judge whether it’s actually good or not. For about the first half of Captain Phillips, I couldn’t decide from scene to scene whether it was working, but it certainly kept my attention. Tom Hanks always gives it his best, of course, and I thought the film was very well cast generally speaking; Barkhad Abdi is incredible as his antagonist. It wasn’t really until the climax, when Greengrass drops out the music and just lets Hanks scream into his own bloody hell that I really felt the hooks tighten in my flesh. After all the tension, where Greengrass ultimately lingers is in the trauma and grief of the adventure he’s unfolded before us. Not every denouement can sustain wallowing in the emotional destruction of its protagonist, and Hanks is just incredible in the final moments. Captain Phillips is ultimately a profoundly sad film, and the fact that it refuses to find joy in the resolution of its conflict moved me nearly to tears. What makes Capt. Phillips the hero of the story is that he is human enough to be genuinely shellshocked by what happens.

by Brandon Schaefer

The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

Several months ago, I rewatched Blow Up, and finally I got around rewatching The Conversation. As with Blow Up, it had been maybe 20 years since my last viewing. What an experience. Thematically and semiotically rich, it’s also a fairly straightforward story of a genius craftsman inadequate to the task of grappling with the diabolical world in which he works. Coppola taps into Gene Hackman’s brand of brittle masculinity in the best way here, juxtaposing Harry Caul’s quintessential vulnerability and his incapacity to protect himself with the fact that nobody is better than he is at piercing the protective shells of others. Like Blow Up, The Conversation feels like a morality tale very anchored in its place and time, but it’s a much more interiorized story. Unlike Thomas, David Hemmings’s hedonist photographer in Antonioni’s film, Harry inserts himself into the conspiracy he uncovers by choice, because it’s his profession to spy on people, whereas Thomas uncovers an assassination by happenstance. The moral rot that’s dug its roots into Harry is self-inflicted and intentional in a way that makes him less a product of his time, and thus is not as much a critique of the culture more broadly. It’s an invaluable counterweight to Blow Up, and a masterpiece in its own right.

via My Hot Posters

Dark Waters (Todd Haynes, 2019)

Not quite a legal thriller, but certainly rife with paranoia explosive speeches, I quite enjoyed how old-fashioned Dark Waters was. Though a bit tropey and conventional (Anne Hathaway tries so hard, bless her, but she’s still saddled with the totally underwritten Supportive-but-Harried Wife), the story really invests in the all-consuming process of the legal procedural. In this case, the story spans decades, during which a corporate lawyer learns that the law doesn’t quite even the playing field as much as he’d believed; not where billion-dollar corporations are concerned. By the end, the film strikes a populist note, with Mark Ruffalo bellowing about the system being rigged. Watching this in the direct aftermath of Jan. 6th, it was a stark reminder that populist conspiracism is a.) not the exclusive province of the political Right, b.) that sometimes the system is rigged, and c.) sorting out the truth about when the system really is rigged (and specifically how) sometimes takes decades and diligence not possessed by the vast swath of humanity. In the end, fighting one case at a time in a flawed system is the best one can do in an overwhelming situation. This is not always a welcome message in an age of agitation for sweeping reforms, but, even as it indicts the exploitable flaws in an inequitable system, Dark Waters honors the sacrifice and vocation of fighting the good fight in Capraesque spirit.

via Original Film Art

The Name of the Rose (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986)

I’ll accept the argument, if anyone wants to make it, that The Name of the Rose is not even a particularly good film. Though stuffed with memorably eccentric performances, half the cast seems to be beaming in from an alternate reality’s version of the film that’s directed by Ken Russell, including F. Murray Abraham, who vaults over the top and just hovers there in the air, keeping himself aloft of sulfurous batwings. In terms of production design, the medieval setting is suitably grimy, and James Horner contributes a haunting, evocative score. Despite the broadness and excess that plagues the film at times, I was drawn in by the relationship between Sean Connery and super-young Christian Slater. The reason I’m mentioning the film here is because of the final five minutes. Unearned though it may be, I found the entire dreamlike sequence of the final interaction, coupled with a desolate, transcendent final shot, to be melancholy, wistful, and poignantly delivered. It was almost incongruous with the rest of the film, and my transport in those closing moments rather took me by surprise, but indicated to me that the film must have done a few things right along the way. I don’t know that I’ll ever rewatch this, but I felt that those final moments of transcendent feeling merited remembrance, and I commend the film to you for your own consideration, should you feel so inclined.☕️

The best films I saw in March 2021, Part 2

via Imdb

Archenemy (Adam Egypt Mortimer, 2020)

It’s been a while since I saw a grindhouse superhero flick, and this one definitely fits comfortably into the vein of deconstructionist takes on the tropes, leaning into the Travis Bickle of it all. In the end, Archenemy posits hope that a new generation can rescue the stories of gods and supermen from their navel-gazing toxicity. Casting Joe Mangianello as the possibly psychotic antihero is perfect casting, and I greatly enjoyed watching Skylan Brooks and Zolee Griggs play off of him and each other.

via The Commas

Happy Death Day 2U (Christopher Landon, 2019)

Like the first film, there are laughs and heart abounding here. It’s a bit more twee than the first one, too, if that’s possible. Capitalizing on the overt Groundhog Day appropriation of its premise, it explicitly invokes Back to the Future II as well. It’s not as tightly-scripted as a Zemeckis-Gale joint, but it packs a lot of great moments and riffs into its runtime. I felt a little let down that the opening act teases Phi Vu as the protagonist this time around after appearing as a bit part in the original. By the end of the first act, though, Jessica Rothe is back in the driver’s seat, and she’s simply outstanding. Landon and Rothe figure out how to develop Tree in a convincing and interesting direction without just replaying the same arc. Happy Death Day 2U doesn’t hold together quite as well as the first one, but it’s taking a bigger swing and the filmmaking is even better. Most importantly, it doesn’t feel like a victory lap or cash-cow inertia. It feels like a potential worlds-spanning series in the making, and it would delight me if the creators managed to evolve this franchise in the way that The Fast and the Furious improbably did.

by Neil Fraser

Host (Rob Savage, 2020)

I love it when a movie feels like it’s custom-built just for me. Here’s Paranormal Activity for Zoom. It’s only a little more than an hour long. It’s got a ton of inventive jump-scares, it milks the dread inherent in a movie set during Covidtime, and the cast of unknowns feels utterly real while still delivering the emotional beats that can only come from craft. Host smartly doesn’t try to allegorize the pandemic, either: it simply serves up a premise and delivers on the implications. However intentionally the film did it, I found it to be thematically rich that the nightmare turn int the story pivots on characters blithely making light of a potentially disastrous situation that could endanger all of them if they don’t follow some very simple rules of decorum. And it all depends on what the characters are willing to take seriously based on the temperament and beliefs they bring into the situation. If that’s not a parable for Covidtime, I don’t know what is.

by boyangz

Jason Bourne (Peter Greengrass, 2016)

This time, as it ever was, it’s personal. I enjoyed Jason Bourne. Greengrass is uniquely talented in that he crafts coherent action sequences using what appears to be verité coverage, while in reality being rigorously attuned to the minutiae of the beat-by-beat logic of his sequences. Here and there is a cheat, but it’s still thrilling stuff. Storywise, this feels like a retread(stone?) of the series highlights to date, including more backstory that shamelessly flaunts melodramatic tropes that simply reminded me of the Tim Burton’s Batman and Joker arguing about who created whom. If those tropes didn’t work, I suppose storytellers would cease returning to them, but this is a case where you can see the filmmakers circling round and round their trope trapline, the dust clouds visible from a great distance. 

by Haley Turnbull

Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020)

Just about every film podcast I listen to has discussed this movie in some depth, and though I haven’t read most of the coverage, I’m aware that it’s one of the hot topics du jour. Though I don’t think it’s a masterpiece, I do think it’s provocative in some really fruitful ways, and Fennell and her casting director assembled an absolutely incredible set of performers, with Carey Mulligan as the tip of the spear. Like a lot of the horror films I’ve been watching from the last decade, this one grapples with grief. It does so with a satirical tone that makes for a queasy viewing experience. And as with a lot of the better revenge flicks, despite the inventiveness of the (anti)heroine’s schemes, there’s no real catharsis here: just rage wrestling with despair. All revenge stories are about the protagonist attempting to take power back after a traumatic event has rendered him/her impotent, and I think one of the strengths of Promising Young Woman is that it remains ambivalent (in my view; others may disagree) about whether it’s even possible to reclaim power without social change on an almost-unimaginable scale—or the spectacular self-immolation of allies willing to make that change happen at whatever cost.

via Imdb

The Rental (Dave Franco, 2020)

Millennial yuppies who don’t realize they’re in an Ingmar Bergmanesque scenario manage to stumble into a slasher flick, too. Franco leans into the voyeuristic elements of the slasher and fleshes out his potential victims as complicated, deeply flawed people. Though Franco doesn’t display the effortless eye for indelible images that Hitchcock had mastered by 1960, this is only Franco’s first feature as director, and The Rental is very much in dialogue with Psycho; they’d make make a great double feature.

via Heaven of Horror

Sweetheart (J. D. Dillard, 2019)

My big mistake with Sweetheart was trying to watch it during the afternoon. No matter how much I tried to control for glare, any ambient light from a source other than my television rendered all of the nighttime scenes absolutely inscrutable. I watched the last third of it at night with all of the lights turned off, which was much better, but I still didn’t find all of the nighttime shots legible. That said, this is a tight, efficient monster thriller, and I really loved Kiersey Clemons in the lead role. Pacing is measured and deliberate but not flabby, and Dillard cleverly tosses in enough hints about other story threads to make the world feel big and lived-in (and creepier) without distracting from the development of the central heroine.☕️

The best films I saw in March 2021, Part 1

via Original Vintage Movie Posters

On the Town (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1949)

Mostly, this is an enjoyable farce about three couples falling in love during a wild 24 hours. By and large, this is a game ensemble, and you can see Kelly and Donen really stretching their well-toned wings with the choreography and modernist fantasy sequences. The songs themselves don’t do as much for me as some other musicals, but the energy here is palpable, and On the Town sustains a brazen charm throughout the runtime. The gamble here was clearly to try to recreate some of the highs of Take Me Out to the Ball Game (see below) with casting choices and the structure of the musical numbers. As I say, it works, mostly. (I probably could’ve done without the racism in “Prehistoric Man.”) It would probably be be a more standout achievement were it not for Donen/Kelly’s next collaboration in 1952.

via Film/Art Gallery

Purple Rain (Albert Magnoli, 1984)

Had I seen this any earlier in my life, I doubt I would have enjoyed it as much. To date, I don’t really have much of a relationship to Prince’s music or his mythology, so watching Purple Rain cold was something of a revelation. Prince isn’t a polished actor, but he’s got presence and he commits to every moment in the film. That’s the case with most of the cast with speaking parts for that matter—part of the pleasure of this film is how unaffected yet totally invested these performers are in their parts and their music. And as melodramatic as the story is, Magnoli matches the heightened emotions with breathtaking photography, opulent production and costume design, and utterly deft editing. Predictably, the soundtrack is pretty amazing, but this isn’t just an extended music video. It’s a sincere exploration of the fragile webs of connectivity that enable artists to make great art. This is a film that creates a world unto itself.

via Limited Runs

Take Me Out to the Ball Game (Busby Berkeley, 1949)

My favorite bits from this film, oddly, were not really the musical numbers, although there are some pips. What I really dug was the chemistry among the four main leads, and especially between Gene Kelly and Esther Williams. Whatever their relationship was off-camera, they are in top form here, as are Betty Garrett and Frank Sinatra, with Jules Munshin batting cleanup. It’s very much of a piece with later films like A League of Their Own and Major League, with some witty dialogue and star-wattage charm dialed all the way up. It worked better for me as a comedy than a musical, but the flair and athletic grace you’d expect from a Kelly/Donen collaboration are all here—just not as explosively as in the next two films they’d direct together.

via Cinematerial

You Were Never Lovelier (William A. Seiter, 1942)

The plot premise is a bit disturbing in retrospect: a father refuses to let his younger daughters marry until his eldest eligible daughter (Rita Hayworth) lands a proper suitor, so he writes her love letters from an imaginary lover to get her in the mood, only to have Fred Astaire stumble into the role. This is the stuff of Shakespearean comedy, and even with that ickiness drizzled all over it like chocolate syrup, this is a mostly enjoyable confection. Astaire and Hayworth really crackle when they’re onscreen together, which isn’t often nearly enough, and Adolphe Menjou is unforgivably delightful as the scheming patriarch. If this is a gem, it’s a sparkler set in a ring of asbestos.☕️

The best movies I saw in February 2021

by Chungkong Art

Chicken Run (d. Nick Park, Peter Lord, 2000)

Since my little boy has been on an Aardman kick lately (see my capsules of Farmageddon and Curse of the Were-Rabbit), we revisited Chicken Run as a family, which I haven’t seen in more than 15 years. A couple of quick takeaways: 1.) like everything else Aardman does, this is charming, inventive, and appropriately dark without being traumatic; 2.) a rewatch of The Great Escape and Stalag 17 is probably way overdue; 3.) I’ve been living without Mel Gibson for so long that it was simply weird to hear his voice for such an extended period. Apart from a Mad Max 2 rewatch that my wife and I did more than a year ago, I don’t think I’ve seen a Gibson movie in years. He’s delightful in Chicken Run, and it bummed me out that he was so delightful, because it’s always a bummer to reflect on how someone who is capable of generating so much joy can also generate so much malignity. In any event, the film really impressed my son, which was wonderful to witness.

by Sam Smith via Mubi

Elena (d. Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011)

Another parable by Zvyagintsev, this one in the vein of Parasite or Shoplifters, where family loyalties and class anxieties are dissected and blended to stunning effect. In this film in particular, each scene feels like it could be rendered as a single sentence in a precision-sculpted short story, but Zvyagintsev plays his scenes out—never digressively, either. The portrait Zvyagintsev paints of contemporary Russia feels of a piece to anywhere that disparities in space, socioeconomic status, privilege, and entitlement intersect in toxic ways. Which is to say, pretty much everywhere that people live together.

by izzbizz

Isn’t It Romantic (d. Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2019)

Since I enjoyed Final Girls so much, I checked out Isn’t It Romantic, which does for romantic comedies what Final Girls did for slasher flicks. Besides a fairly clever script and outstanding ensemble work from the cast, what I mostly appreciated about the film was that it earns the thematic throughline of the protagonist coming to terms with her own expectations and her own self-esteem. Though it definitely doesn’t neglect the romantic component of romantic comedies, this is much more of a comedy about a woman inundated with the impossible contradictions of what our pop culture fantasies teach us to desire.

by BossLogic via DarkSarcasm

Wonder Woman 1984 (d. Patty Jenkins, 2020)

No, it’s not as good as the first one. Yes, it’s a bit overstuffed narratively, with some genuinely unfortunate CG for Kristin Wiig’s Barbara Minerva thrown in at the climax. That said, I still enjoyed WW84 quite a bit. It’s fun, it’s aesthetically vibrant, and its theme—that we’re not entitled to what we want, and sometimes for good reason—really hits hard in the midst of a pandemic where people are asked to sacrifice so much for the greater good. Perhaps even more radically, it maintains an optimistic perspective on whether people generally make the right choice when it counts. This is a part of the movie that really fascinates me, because Wonder Woman 1984 simultaneously depicts the propensity of humankind toward selfish self-destruction and its potential for redemption. Jenkins places her chips on the latter, which I’m not as inclined to do. But I really dig that she finds heroism in the struggle against our own self-destructive desires, and I commend the commitment of the Wonder Woman films to the political and moral implications of living a life of love.

via Teresa Faye

Singin’ in the Rain (d. Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952)

This movie is my toddler’s latest obsession, and for good reason. Upon repeat viewings, Singin’ in the Rain unfolds manifold evidence of the mastery involved in its craft. Manufacturing pure delight is doubtlessly vastly more difficult than it seems, and this is a film that is, as much as anything else, a love letter to the process of creating joy. My son is particularly taken with performing “Make ‘Em Laugh” and the title song, and to witness him frolic with dedicated abandon testifies to the genius of this film which has captivated him. 

Besides the unbelievable musical numbers and crackling script—all of which are justly heralded—I need to give special mention to Jean Hagen, who is one of the greatest mean girls ever to appear in film. Lina Lamont is a startling, wicked, and delightful creation. On paper, she’s a narcissistic, nearly talentless foil for our heroes. As played by Hagen, you understand the glimmer of greatness that she embodies on the silver screen, and every gesture and tic she manifests works to humanize a person whom the dream factory has throughly chewed up and is about to spit out. Just listening to her enunciations and cadences cracks me up, and I have to wonder how many hours she spent practicing her mangling of English. She doesn’t get to perform in a musical number like Kelly, Reynolds, and O’Connor (or Cyd Charisse), but the framework of the film, which holds all those set pieces together, simply would not be as supple without her as a counterbalance. Hagen’s Lina Lamont has to be one of the great comedic turns in cinema.

by PopCultArt

Tenet (d. Christopher Nolan, 2020)

I watched Tenet one and a half times. It’s good. A bit exhausting. Halfway through my second watch, I realized that I just wasn’t emotionally connected to the experience, so I walked away. Watching it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it is essentially Nolan’s most conspicuous palimpsest yet on his entire filmography. There’s simply no way that Nolan made a movie so obviously about his filmic obsessions without intending it to be, in part, an auteurist autocritique. My guess is that watching Memento and Tenet back to back would be an exercise in seeing the thematic conceit of the former literalized in the latter, with the key thematic difference being between comedy and tragedy. Memento takes the audience backward in time to empathize with a character incapable of comprehending the truth of cause-and-effect. Tenet shows the audience a man traveling both ways in time so that he may play his part in the cosmic truth of cause-and-effect. In Memento, the protagonist’s tragedy is never being able to achieve self-knowledge, and thus break the cycle. In Tenet, the Protagonist’s comedic resolution is being able to comprehend the fact of the cycle remaining unbroken. Though I did not particularly enjoy Tenet as much as I’ve enjoyed most of Nolan’s other films, I do think that it will find its audience in time, especially as an auteurist lodestone.☕️

Top Ten of the 2010s ☕︎ Action/Adventure: Mad Max: Fury Road (d. George Miller, 2015)

Poster designed by Kevin Saby

See the full list here.

In years to come, I’ll be mightily curious to see how the reputation of Fury Road fluctuates. My wager is that those who remember it will remember it as one of the great films; not only of this decade, but one of the great films, full stop. That is, if it’s remembered. To be sure, Fury Road is a stunning spectacle that blends live-action stuntwork, computer graphics, incredible production design, and propulsive sound and music in a melange of delightful madness; oh, and it boasts a marvelous ensemble. It’s got things to say about power and gender and ecology. Perhaps more intriguingly, it is the fourth film in a franchise dating back to 1979; every film has expanded the scope and tweaked the mythology. The very fact that Fury Road exists and was made by the same director as the first three films is incredible enough. The 30-year gap (!) between the third and fourth entries testifies to Miller’s gumption and vision as well as the public appetite for more of it. Miller seizes the opportunity to reckon with his own legacy, with the evolution of filmmaking technology, and with the ongoing social concerns that fueled the series from the beginning. Based on the durability of the world Miller created so far, I feel like my wager is pretty solid. But we’ll see. I’ll do my part to keep the fire burning. 

Honorable Mention: John Wick: Chapter 2 (d. Chad Stahelski, 2017)

Truthfully, I might enjoy Chapter 3 a bit more than Chapter 2, but there’s little doubt that John Wick is the most significant action franchise to emerge from English-language cinema in the 2010s, and it merits recognition as such. Kudos to Keanu Reeves for insisting on his continued vitality as both an actor and a star. Without him, we don’t get this franchise at all, nor do we get the rebranding of industry stalwarts Stahelski and David Leitch (uncredited as co-director for the first Wick) as major genre directors. With writer Derek Kolstad overseeing an expansion of the Wick universe into other media and Stahelski apparently committed to the films as long as they continue to make money, Leitch has branched into other properties. He’s delivered the best films in the Deadpool and Fast & Furious franchises so far, not to mention Atomic Blonde, which is maybe an even better showcase for Charlize Theron than Fury Road. My honorable mention here is a nod to all of those mentioned above for their collective contributions to action filmmaking. Also, Chapter 2 is immensely entertaining in its own right, and the rare sequel that tops its predecessor almost every way.

Categorical Reflections

No kidding, I think Mad Max: Fury Road is probably the best film of the decade, and there was no version of my top ten that didn’t include it at the top. That said, in an era when sequels and franchises based on IP are absolutely dominant, it does shock me a bit that some of the best raw filmmaking being done at the blockbuster studio level is often with sequels or spinoffs. Even a scrappy TV series like Daredevil featured at least one single-take showstopper in each of its three seasons. For most sequels, I get the sense that the makers are trying to top themselves or meet inflated audience expectations of scale. But I don’t get the sense that the challenge of topping the original is, in itself, the reward for most creators involved in sequels. With the Mad Max and John Wick films, there is a palpable sense of the filmmakers absolutely reveling in pushing the limits of what they are capable of—which is not the same thing as pushing the limits of what they can do. The latter is a technical challenge, and digital technology has rendered it largely moot. The former challenge, of creative people truly plumbing the depths of their ingenuity as technicians and storytellers and performers, that’s what I’m talking about. And that’s the joy of craft on display in these films; it’s infectious and awe-inspiring, and it’s the stuff that weathers generational scrutiny to stand boldly as an edifice, daring future artisans to surmount. ☕️