Movies
We finally get a Jesus movie that's not from some weird Evangelical fringe of Hollywood, we finally get a Jesus movie that's directed with a gorgeous eye for landscape imagery, we finally get a Jesus movie that isn't just a traipse through the Gospel highlights but instead wants to wrestle with complex ideas about the nature of Christ—and... it's just kind of okay? Look, I want to love this movie as much as anyone, but there's honestly not a ton to Last Days in the Desert. The central allegorical tale (Jesus, while in his 40 days in the wilderness, encounters a family with lots of father-son issues that inform a lot of the theological thorniness of Jesus being God's Son) doesn't do a whole lot except develop a baseline cleverness surrounding the dramatic irony any time a non-Jesus character uses the word "father" or "son." And if you take away the stuff that other alt-Jesus works of art (primarily both the book and movie of Last Temptation of Christ) have already done with much more intricacy and heft, Last Days begins to look mighty thin. Credit where credit is due, though: the landscapes are legit beautiful, and Ewan McGregor is great as both Jesus and Satan (an inspired casting doubling to begin with). I just wish this actually left me with something beyond those things. Grade: B-
The monumental length of Claude "Shoah Dude" Lanzmann's The Last of the Unjust lends itself to the inevitable slow stretch every hour or so. Pretty much anything to do with the director himself wandering old Holocaust settings and reading directly to the camera off a sheet of printed notes is dead air. But those dragging moments are almost welcome as breathers after the bracing intensity of the main attraction: the lengthy and impassioned interviews with Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, a Jewish man put in charge of Theresienstadt's "model" concentration camp by the Nazis during WWII. Murmelstein's rambling, mesmerizing accounts of his memories as "Elder" of the camp present not just crushingly weighted philosophical questions of the limits of collaboration with unspeakable evil but also a piercing character study of a man forced to make debilitating trade-off after trade-off in the interest of helping his people as best he could. If the 15 percent of the film that doesn't center on those interviews doesn't feel as vital as the interview, well... I guess I don't blame it. Grade: A-
First things are best said first: I know so little of pre-20th-century Russian history as to make any sort of comment of mine about this film's relationship to actual history pretty close to useless. Even without a working knowledge of Russian history, though, I think it's pretty safe to say that the "set" (the real-life Saint Petersburg Winter Palace) and the costuming are both stunning in their immersive period detail on a level I haven't seen since Barry Lyndon. And then there's the fact that the movie was filmed in one take, which lends a cool, dreamlike quality, although it would be a lot more impressive if the film felt more choreographed. But alas, the film itself, while visual sumptuous, is meandering and improvised-feeling, to say nothing of the irritating bouts of fourth-wall-breaking. Grade: B
Music-video aesthetic, nonlinearity, primary-colored hair, squiggly animated segues, puffy pants, techno soundtrack—I'll have to wait for the buzz to subside to know for sure, but I think I just OD'd on the '90s. Energetic, captivating cinema, but maybe just a bit too much. Grade: B+
Leos Carax's is very festival-y, very debut-y, very French-y. Which is to say that its treatment of depression and love is both so heavily twee and so self-consciously dark that becomes its own kind of romanticism. Did I mention the protagonist is an aspiring filmmaker? Did I mention it's filmed in black and white? The movie is clearly trying, and when we get to the point where the titular boy and girl are actually interacting, there's a naturalistic sweetness to the scene that is resoundingly successful. So it's hard to outright dislike the film. But when everything about the movie is just so resolutely shaggy and when the ending practically breaks its own neck whipping toward ironic gestures, it's also hard not to feel that this is a noble, promising failure. Grade: C+
The premise—a bunch of Mexican upper crusts attend a dinner party and suddenly lose the ability to leave—feels tailor-made for the stage, particularly the stage of the mid-20th century's long waltz with the absurd, and for long stretches, the movie itself does feel uncinematic in a rather disappointing way. However, several edits toward the end of the film (including an all-timer linking certain characters to sheep) make it clear that director Luis Buñuel knows exactly how to use cinematic vocabulary when it counts, transforming a cheekily surreal commentary on the ruling class into something viscerally and specifically political. It's powerful, but you don't even need the subtext if you don't want it. Come for the fun surrealism; stay for the fun surrealism. Grade: A-
Music
That a tossed-off, victory-lap EP of songs that didn't make the cut of last year's superlative Emotion (or even the deluxe edition of Emotion, which, yes, I do own, thankyouverymuch) contains not one, not two, but three of 2016's best pop songs should be proof enough that Carly Rae Jepsen is one of the most vital figures in popular music, even if, by this point, using the term "popular" to describe her is an unfortunate inaccuracy relative to her less-talented Top 40 contemporaries. The three, in case you're wondering, are "First Time," "Higher," and "Cry," with "Higher" being the uncontested winner of even that elite crowd. The only dud on the EP is "Store," and even that's not really a "bad" song so much as a seeming retreat into Jepsen's slightly more bubble-gummy early work. Seriously, guys, why isn't everyone listening to CRJ? Grade: B+
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