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Much like David Cronenberg with Crimes of the Future, this too feels like my first dispatch in 8 years, although—as we’ll get into later—this will likely have much more rust than the Canadian Sicko Supreme’s (very good) comeback.
When I told a good friend of mine that I was sketching out my first newsletter in five months, she immediately called my first play: “An intro paragraph that gently implies we’ve lost time to depression since our last missive”. While that’s not quite the whole picture—the annual pre-birthday depression had to share space with the malaise of being in a new city for the summer and an uncharacteristically heavy travel and work schedule over the past few months—it’s more accurate than not. Long story short, it was a mountain, but we got back.
We saw some movies along the way too. Think of this as a quick recap before the new season. Tomorrow, I catch my first of 14(!) films for the Chicago International Film Festival, so before the airspace gets taken up by more immediate missives, here’s an ode to the weird, wonderful, and woefully under-sung movie highlights of my extended radio silence.
Honorable Mentions: The Girl and the Spider, Bros, Piggy, Pearl, Bodies^3
Arranged in the order I saw them.
Paris, 13th District
Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District is quintessential Deany-core: A beautifully shot slice-of-life dramedy about the intersecting lives of three horny not-so-young adults navigating professional upheaval and romantic turmoil in the parts of Paris they don’t show the tourists. Built around a crackerjack screenplay (co-written by the great Celine Sciamma) and a perfectly calibrated three-man weave between leads Lucie Zhang, Makita Samba, and Noemie Merlant, it’s a refreshingly grown-up film about how most of us aren’t as grown-up as we’d like to think.
Grade: B+/A-
Marcel the Shell with Shoes on
If I told you that this year’s most trenchant and moving treatise on the importance of connection and community in the COVID era would center on a 1-inch stop-motion anthropomorphic shell with shoes on, you’d have called me a madman, but here we are. Original creators (and ex-married couple, which colors a lot of this film) Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp revisit the titular star of their early-2010s viral shorts with soberer eyes, in a project that’s just as much a melancholy breakup film as it is a squee-inducing mockumentary. I would die for him. Need I say more?
Grade: B+
Emily the Criminal
A tense crime thriller about the absurdity of student debt and needing experience for an entry-level job, Emily the Criminal lives and dies by Aubrey Plaza’s career-best turn as the titular Emily, a struggling caterer who turns to running scams for money after she is gatekept from better work by a past DUI. As Emily digs herself deeper and deeper into this new and dangerous underworld, the film and Plaza’s performance reach a sweltering fever pitch that’s reminiscent of Uncut Gems in its grimy grapples with morality and desperation. More than anything, it is contemporary GoodFellas, where it’s not so much about not wanting to be a schnook but about understanding that to be a schnook in this economy is to be dead in the water.
Grade: B
Benediction
Few directors have been able to translate poetry to celluloid as adeptly as Terence Davies, whether directly (A Quiet Passion) or stylistically (Distant Voices, Still Lives). In Benediction, Davies’s biopic about queer WWI poet Siegfried Sassoon, he combines both of these modes to craft something thornier and more tactile than its prestige-picture trappings might suggest. It is one of the most remarkable films of the year, and the fact that its theatrical release came and went in a blink is a small tragedy.
Grade: A-
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
A charming and refreshingly sex-positive comedy about a middle-aged woman (Emma Thompson) who hires a male escort (Daryl McCormack) to guide her through a belated exploration of her own sexuality in four installments, Sophie Hynde’s Leo Grande is thoughtful and measured in its character study of these two individuals—separated by class, race, gender, and age—and how their lives have been shaped by their relationships with shame, pleasure, and their own bodies. While it does occasionally overdo it with Wikipedia-dumping on the sex-work debate, the film succeeds because it never falters in its boundless compassion for its leads.
Grade: B/B+
Top Gun: Maverick
WB’s misbegotten Dark Universe aside, Tom Cruise has had a pretty robust track record with resuscitating and refurbishing classic franchises, and Top Gun: Maverick is perhaps Exhibit A for his unique movie-star powers. 36 years since the original—a slight but oddly enduring feature-length Navy recruitment ad—this sequel reimagines the franchise in the image of Cruise’s enduring Mission: Impossible series: A slick but unmistakably human vehicle for both the actor’s penchant for death-defying derring-do and a cinematic acknowledgment of his own mortality. Top Gun: Maverick was marketed in part as the film that would bring cinema out of the COVID doldrums: A Herculean mandate if there ever was one. Mission accomplished, I’d say.
Grade: B+
Crimes of the Future
Despite its dystopian sci-fi trappings, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future might have more in common with more straightforward old-man dramas like Scorsese’s The Irishman or Almodovar’s Pain and Glory than the Canadian auteur’s previous excursions in squick. It’s not too difficult to build parallels between Cronenberg and his protagonist here, both body-horror geniuses who have lived to see what was once avant-garde pass into the mainstream. While there’s plenty of the usual Cronenberg-ian visceral pleasures to be had here, the film is as much about body heat and body politic (in both senses of the term) as it is about body horror. All that and Ear-man too.
Grade: B+
Elvis
I’ve repeatedly flip-flopped over the past few months on Baz Luhrmann’s very Baz (but arguably not Baz enough) biopic on the erstwhile King of Rock n’ Roll. On the one hand, it never coheres, as Luhrmann adds motif after motif until the entire enterprise seems to cave in spectacularly under the weight of its own ambition. However, to judge a Baz Luhrmann film for being incoherent is like complaining that your 7-11 Slurpee is too sugary. To approach it as a film that’s supposed to sense is to watch it wrong. In Elvis, Baz Luhrmann dares to tackle fame, race, and the American dream through the prism of a figure that’s polarizing when viewed through all of those lens. He doesn’t always succeed, but what a fantastic semi-wreck.
Grade: B/B-
Nope
With Nope, Jordan Peele finds a happy medium between the sterile engineering of Get Out and messy impressionism of Us to craft his most complete film thus far, where structure and improvisation exist alongside each other rather than are at odds. While his standard multitude of metaphors remain in play—a handful of reads for this film include an indictment of the modern Panopticon, an allegory for filmmaking, and a broader climate change interpretation—the film doesn’t cling so tightly to being About Something that it beats the audience over the head with it. Even at the surface level, it represents a promising change in register for one of our more exciting auteurs: One who knows how to use his cache to push his craft to weirder and more wonderful places.
Grade: B
Girl Picture
Finnish filmmaker Alli Haapasalo’s Girl Picture is one of those movies that I knew I would love based on the logline alone: Three high-school girls navigate the complexities of love, friendship, ambition, and good sex over the course of a particularly eventful month of senior year. If that reads like a Nordic spin on Booksmart, you’d be right on the money; the two films even share a Perfume Genius needle drop. However, Haapasalo employs a subtler, soberer register than Wilde here, both allowing her characters to wade into murkier emotional waters and offering them a greater measure of grace. There are plenty of bigger films than Girl Picture, both in this list and beyond it; few are mightier.
Grade: A-
Do Revenge
Despite its relatively low ambitions and glaring structural flaws (that third act…a mess!), it’s difficult to deny the charms of Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s gentle send-up of high school comedies by way of Strangers on a Train. Camila Mendes flexes someone genuine star muscles in her first leading role in a major movie (read: not Dangerous Lies), flanked by Maya Hawke and a cadre of excellent supporting turns both major (Talia Ryder Hive rise up) and simply delightful (Sophie “I don’t DO co-CAINE” Turner is as good as advertised in 5 minutes of screen time). Few things are as fun as watching hot people be petty, especially when it’s all set to arguably the year’s best (and certainly its queerest) soundtrack.
Grade: B/B-
The Woman King
While the historical veracity of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s war epic chronicling inter-kingdom conflict in 1600s Africa has been called into question, its bonafides as pure entertainment certainly shouldn’t be. An old-fashioned, rip-roaring swords-and-sandals epic transported into the African plains, The Woman King employs tried and true tropes and imbibes them with fresh spirit through Prince-Bythewood’s knack for depicting person-to-person dynamics, as well as stellar performances from Viola Davis, LaShana Lynch, Thuso Mbedu, Sheila Atim and John Boyega. Despite an inexplicable romance subplot and strategically vague exposition (to dull its, let’s call it “ambiguous” real-life basis in fact), it remains one of the finest entries in 2022’s bumper crop of blockbuster-scale cinema.
Grade: B+
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