Mini Reviews for November 19-25, 2018

Holiday week, hence short post. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Movies

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
The Coen Brothers doing a western anthology film fills a lot of holes in my heart I didn't realize I had. Being an anthology film, it has its ups and downs, of course, but even the downs aren't so much "down" as they are just inevitably not as good as the film's first and best segment, the utterly delightful and demented musical sequence starring Tim Blake Nelson from which the film gets its title. Elsewhere, we have the Coens as naturalists, adapting a Jack London story with a grizzled Tom Waits (is there any other kind?) in the lead role as a gold prospector, the Coens as existentialists (by way of Sergio Leone) in the nearly wordless James-Franco-as-fate-addled-outlaw segment, and the Coens in full-on mythical mode in the final segment, which brings the film's far-flung fascination with death into a culminating carriage ride into literal hell. In this way, it's sort of in the same vein as Hail, Caesar!, an experiment in bringing all their various genre proclivities under one roof; Buster Scruggs goes the extra mile by making the film something of a survey of the full breadth of the Coens' worldview, too, a treatise on all the various ideas that have animated their filmography from Blood Simple onward: that of absurd fate, that of the essential foolishness of humanity's pretensions of rationality, humanity's finitude, that of the crucial empathy in the face of all this. That's to say nothing of the purely aesthetic pleasures of the film: the storybook framing devices (with wax-papered "color plates"), the typically florid, hilarious Coen dialogue, the stark, vibrant digital cinematography. If nothing else, it's an extraordinarily beautiful film with a keen attention to detail. But thankfully, it is something else, and a very good something at that. Grade: A-

Private Life (2018)
It's incredibly easy to chart this movie as the intersection of Nicole Holofcener, Woody Allen, Whit Stillman, and Noah Baumbach's collective careers—which, unless you are one of those people who (understandably) has an allergy to that brand of cinema comprised almost entirely of upper-middle-class white New Yorkers walking and talking and bickering, is more description than critique. As an iteration of that genre, Private Life is minutely observed and acutely felt. The central struggle of a couple who are struggling to conceive feels lived-in to an extent that fertility plots rarely are in media—lived-in to the point of chaffing, an at-once breezy dramedy hinged on verbal quips and a bracing domestic struggle that rubs you raw with its slowly dawning but deeply insistent sense of tragedy. I know I compared this film to Baumbach et al a second ago, but the extent to which this film wears its heart on its sleeve and to which that heart is lacerated feels entirely its own, and it's great. Grade: A-

Maleficent (2014)
That this is sort of a stealth playtest for Disney's reprehensible new thing of doing heavily CGI'd "live-action" remakes of their animated properties is just icing on the whole nasty cake of this movie. I suppose I should give the movie credit for at least trying something new with the original story, given that I tend to like revisionist fairy tales. But it's just so lousily put together. The CG is trash, and, more importantly, the revisionist elements feel entirely haphazard, as if they never got past the pitch stage—what if Maleficent's arc is a rape-revenge story? What if we dealt with the whole icky thing of Aurora's "true love" being some rando she met in the woods twelve hours prior? What if fairies and humans are at war, and the humans are the bad guys, because COLONIALISM? What if Maleficent's arc was about surrogate motherhood? Wait, didn't we already have an arc for Maleficent's character? I can't remember, just go with it—hey, I have an idea: what if Maleficent is a scorned lover and is taking revenge on the king? What if they have a cage match at the end of the movie? Is this too much to put into a 97-minute cash-in on one of Disney's most revered properties? What if none of this fits together? Do you think our CG is good enough to stitch it all together in post? Grade: C-

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
It's easy to dismiss this film as an exercise in cinematic sadism, and to be clear, it's not not an exercise in cinematic sadism—to watch this film is to be "treated" to 95 minutes of virtually uninterrupted tragedy, often of the most happenstancial kind, human society being cruel for the sake of cruelty. But the specific way that Bresson frames this misery feels subversively profound, too. The choice to make so many of the film's incidents perverse inversions of Biblical narratives is deeply rattling: Balaam's donkey, beaten but denied human speech; the Virgin Mary raped and abandoned. It calls attention to just how much of the Bible's depiction of the Divine is aspirational—how much of a grace note it is for God to intervene on the behalf of the oppressed and how often that feels far divorced from a world in which oppression marches forward unimpeded, not only undeterred by our parochial society raised on the Biblical narratives but in fact spurred on by it. Society, undergirded by our collective Christian morality selectively applied, is both cruel and a fount of misprioritized empathy. Balthazar the Donkey is an expressionless, perfectly blank vehicle for empathy, upon which it is easy for us audience members to wish Christian charity as we see him mistreated time and time again. But human beings: these are not tabula rasa targets for our empathy; they are dirty and grating and weak, and we hate them. This is the film's strongest indictment, evoking one of the most crucial Bible stories of them all: the often-overlooked ending of the Book of Jonah, in which Jonah mourns the death of the vine under which he found shade, while at the same time wishing for the entire city of Nineveh to be destroyed. It's the crux of the film's moral spine: we care about this donkey, for which we neither worked for nor helped grow—should we not care for our own teeming mass of humanity, who cannot tell their right from their left? Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for November 12-18, 2018

I guess it's awards season now? It doesn't feel like it. Anywhere, here are reviews.

Movies

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
It's, like, fine. I kind of dig that it treats "quantum" with the same sort of hand-wavy magical gobbledygook that sci-fi treated "radioactive" in the '50s and '60s. "Quick, we need some sort of vaguely sciencey rationale for telepathy! Uh... what about quantum entanglement?" It's fun in a very classically B-movie way. The rest is very much the kind of movie you got from the original Ant-Man, with maybe just a tad fewer inspired moments à la the cut from gigantic Thomas the Tank Engine to toy-sized Thomas the Tank Engine. A lot of the humor of the film feels a little too schematic, which was also true of the first one, and the mommy-daughter dynamics don't scan quite as well as the daddy-daughter emotional core of the first. But, like I said, it's fine. Nothing great; certainly nothing to justify why Marvel, after two movies, hasn't just jettisoned all this "ant-man" stuff and given the reigns entirely to Michael Peña's character, who remains the best thing about either of the films. But fine. Grade: B-

The Guilty (Den skyldige) (2018)
On a technical level, it's impressive the tension this film is able to wring out of its writers-workshop-prompt premise: it's a movie that takes place entirely in an emergency call center and whose action almost completely occurs via phone calls of which we only ever see the call-center side. It's not particularly showy in how it does it (though there's a bit with a red light near the end that is both obvious and beautiful), but The Guilty nearly perfectly balances shot length with editing in a way that's never ostentatious but always brutally effective in its drive toward a thriller intensity. On a thematic level, it's a remorseless little deconstruction of the hero impulse, showing at every turn how our protagonist's desire to be a hero in the traditional, individualist sense leaves crucial collateral damage—though impressively, manages that clear-eyed characterization without ever completely tipping its hand as to where the plot will go next. The movie isn't a revelation or anything, but it's a deftly executed experiment with just enough thematic edge to make it stick; it helps that it's a lot of fun to boot. Grade: B+

Cosmos (2015)
I'm not afraid to admit that I didn't really understand this. Maybe if I'd read more of the French existentialists I'd have been more on its wavelength, but as of right now, filtering Sartre through a slapstick comic lens with a dash of postmodern epistemology just didn't connect to my brain. I enjoy the sense of play (and the uber-cheesy score is reminiscent of what Twin Peaks did with the reappropriation of soap-opera-esque leitmotifs, which is cool); I would have enjoyed it more if I'd understood anything at all that the characters said. Uh huh, the universe is absurd; it's just a tad more absurd with this movie in it. Grade: C-

Blue Caprice (2013)
It's imbuing the perpetrators of the 2002 D.C. sniper attacks with a complicated humanity feels fairly radical, in the same vein (though obviously on a much less genocidal scale) as 2004's Downfall—refusing to relegate those who commit mass murder into the blanket, otherized category of "monster" or "criminal" means that the film refuses to engage in the flippant hand-washing that excuses society's greater forces from responsibility and that treats human depravity as a fluke event without cause or effect. "Terrorism" is the great absolver of American imperialism and American violence, and the film's rejection of the typical cinematic signifiers of this label dovetails nicely with the film's implication of American gun culture and conspiracy-prone mainstream-adjacent spaces. All that said, the film isn't nearly as complex as it wants to be—it's a remarkably static movie, sometimes by design but more often by failed attempts for lingering imagery and lyrical moments to carry thematic weight that they simply can't bear. As much as I admire some of the theoretical ambitions, the ideas are realized somewhat thinly, which is disappointing. Grade: B-

The Company of Wolves (1984)
Neil Jordan does his typical thing by bringing storybook material to lurid, lushly gothic life—impressive, considering that this is only his second feature, that he already had his "typical thing" down this pat. As screenwriter, Angela Carter does an admirable job of translating her excellent short story to film; the phantasmagoric Freudian imagery of the story's transgressive take on Little Red Riding Hood becomes literally nightmarish here, which is in concept a little too cute (the frame device clarifying that this is a dream is entirely unnecessary), but in practice, it's often stunning—and bonus points for the two incredible (and incredibly gory) werewolf transformations here. As the film's vignettes pile up, the movie does start to become a little muddled, both on a plot level (which was never really intended to come together with much precise sense anyway) and a thematic one. But taken as a broad generalization, it's a nice companion to the original story's refutation of coddling, misogynist norms. Grade: B+

In a Lonely Place (1950)
As distasteful as it can be, history repeatedly rewards cynicism, which has made film noir one of the most enduring of the classic studio genres. Its deep distrust in social institutions effortlessly waltzes itself into modern progressive politics, and so here you have In a Lonely Place, a film not only grounded by a pair of titanic performances (Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham both vying for their career-best performances, though I'll cop to only having seen Grahame in It's a Wonderful Life prior to this) but also in a bracing interrogation of how the Hollywood system enables violent men, which... uh, yeah, still working on that one, aren't we, Hollywood? That similarly industry-critiquing peers like Sunset Boulevard have lingered more strongly in the popular imagination is less a testament to Wilder's film being the superior one (though it is, by a teensy bit), but more that this tier of cynicism—that a man empowered by Hollywood's system might still be deeply dangerous even if he's not guilty of literal murder (the great scapegoat of morality)—is still a less comfortable fit with our broader social archetypes than the spectacle of a formerly glorious woman used by the industry flaming out in middle age via the throes of mental illness. In a Lonely Place is maybe a little more straightforward and obvious than it ideally should be: it's a megaphone of a film, sometimes to the muting of its non-Bogart, non-Grahame characters. But I guess nearly 70 years later, a megaphone is still the tool for the job. Grade: A-

Music

St. Vincent - MassEducation (2018)
Last year's Masseduction was probably the most self-consciously "produced" album of St. Vincent's career, crafted by a whole team of sound engineers helmed by none other than pop heavyweight Jack Antonoff. With MassEducation, St. Vincent reworks the same songs into basically their polar opposites: quiet, acoustic, and mostly piano-based pieces. It's an interesting experiment in theory and one that pays off intermittently. The whole album was apparently recorded in an afternoon, which shows: none of this is particularly elaborate, and while that's the point, it sometimes leaves the songs more anemic and musically reductive than the clarifying simplicity that Annie Clark was likely going for. "Happy Birthday, Johnny," already one of the quieter Masseduction tracks, becomes practically a whisper here, and the lack of volume doesn't really do anything to enhance the song; "Pills" is even worse, highlighting just how much of that song was just intricate instrumentation propping up some truly facile lyrics. Other parts of MassEducation work tremendously, though. "Hang On Me" comes alive in its piano version here, a truly beautiful ballad lifted by one of Clark's best recorded vocal performances; "Sugarboy," the lone bit of intricate instrumentation on the reworked album, is a nervy, oppressive piece of chamber pop; and on the whole, the reworked songs do a good job accentuating the emotional core of Clark's lyrics (some of the best and most personal of her career, "Pills" excepted) that sometimes got washed out in Masseduction's loud production. It's a mixed bag, for sure, but curious fans (yours truly) will find gems. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for November 5-11, 2018

Hopefully y'all are more interested in these movies/shows than you were last week's.

Movies

The King (2018)
Any evaluations of his art aside, Elvis Presley is a figure of such titanic stature for two reasons: 1. His life is so richly metaphoric and fundamentally Americana that he can't help but resonate deeply as a secular icon, and 2. Any part of his life that didn't innately align with the broader institutions and iconography of America became coerced into alignment anyway via the mass-media commercial forces of the last half of the 20th century. And so, for better or for worse, Elvis represents Institutions in a way that very few pop stars do—not the Beatles, not Dylan, not Sinatra, certainly not the rock-and-rollers of color that Elvis surpassed: your Chuck Berrys and Bo Diddleys. It's that representationalism that made me, a white dude growing up in the Memphis area, roll my eyes so intensely at Elvis growing up: Elvis was the cranky white people fighting for noise ordinances and gated communities, and the slightly crankier old white people waxing nostalgic about Jim-Crow Memphis; he was The Man. It's also what makes The King, the second of the major essay docs getting distribution this year (after Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?), tick—the idea of making Elvis Presley's life a metaphor for America in general is practically baked into the artist's legacy. When it sticks to that, The King is frequently dazzling, using a bevvy of shockingly good celebrity interviews: Mike Myers? Ashton Kutcher?? Both good, somehow. I love Ethan Hawke, but could anyone have predicted he'd be the most perceptive Elvis critic in the film? I certainly didn't. And then you have Chuck D, who is unsurprisingly great, as well as the random people in Tupelo and South Memphis the doc runs across who have fascinating things to say about Elvis's legacy on their region. And this kind of gets to the documentary's critical flaw—none of these fantastic interviews—especially those of the people in Tupelo and Memphis—get anywhere close to the screentime they deserve. Someone (usually Chuck D) will say something fascinating, and then the movie will cut to a different scene rather than pulling on that thread. Part of this is the runtime, which is a far too short 107 minutes (if anything, this material deserved the O.J.: Made in America treatment—and how great would that have been? The privileged white other side of the coin??). More damnably, though, is how much time The King spends making an extremely labored and at least 50% bogus parallel between Elvis's life and the 2016 presidential election. Elvis as a symbol of America is richly symbolic; Elvis as a symbol for Hillary vs. Trump is tedious and perfunctory and yields exactly one good moment in the film: Alec Baldwin looking directly into the camera and stating, dead seriously, "Trump won't win." The film has nothing to say about 2016 that hasn't already been said in a thousand different ways, and put together with the existing Elvis metaphor and the wealth of often too-cute archival footage the movie crams in, it's Just Too Much. As great as some of the individual moments are, The King just can't bring it all together [insert hackneyed old, fat Elvis joke]. Grade: B-

Let the Sunshine In (Un beau soleil intérieur) (2017)
I am all for the idea of this film's exploration of middle-aged female sexuality—a refreshing change from the normal cinematic man's game of sexual conquest + ennui. And the film's methodical repetition as Juliette Binoche's character cycles from one man to the next allows for some precise attention to detail: a hand moving slightly over a leg, a winding conversation animated not by the participants' words but their stutters and silences. But... I dunno, the repetition also makes this movie a little tedious, too, and in practice, there's nothing in this movie that makes me feel anything too strongly, neither on a visceral level nor on an intellectual one. I've been thinking that maybe I need to give Claire Denis's filmography another chance after feeling the same way about Beau Travail a few years ago, but maybe the problem is just that Denis and I don't connect. This movie is fine, but fine isn't something I'm going to stand up and sing about. Grade: B-

Custody (Jusqu'à la garde) (2017)
There's not a lot to this movie besides it's viscerally intense depiction of domestic abuse, and honestly, it's somewhat frustrating that the film, for example, makes a dead end out of the daughter's plot. But the final thirty minutes are severely potent on a level that I wasn't at all ready for based on the relatively docile first hour of this film. And on an aesthetic note, I am overjoyed to report at least one European film with thoughtful compositions and a lack of dependence on handheld camera work. Grade: B

Take Me to the River (2015)
What an unbelievably tense movie, hoooooly cow. What gestures toward a somewhat typical "coming out" movie in its early goings (Ryder is going to visit "the Nebraska family," who doesn't know that he is gay) slowly morphs into something that's not not a coming out movie, exactly, but is also one of the most hair-pullingly uncomfortable thrillers I've seen in a long time. More so than most other movies that try to wring the "regressive backwoods" trope for tension, Take Me to the River understands the specific layers of social nuance that can make rural America so frightening to those who aren't part of it (or to those who can't fit in with it): the searing quiet, the disorientingly labyrinthine fields that stretch acres between the houses on a sprawling property, the intensely performative masculinity, the uncanny valley of feeling the difference in social mores without ever quite being able to pinpoint what exactly is different (and of course without anyone saying anything directly to you about it). More than anything, though, this movie understands the alien echo chamber of Family—the way that idioms and behaviors build upon one another until family becomes a world unto itself, and you don't realize it until you step out and then try to step back in and see everyone who's still inside, like tranquil frogs in a pot as the water creeps toward boiling. Grade: A-

The Wolfpack (2015)
The ethics of this documentary are dicey, to say the least; I'm not saying that director Crystal Moselle is taking advantage of the hyper-reclusive homeschooled family that she chronicles here, exactly, but seeing these kids—and most of them are kids, if not by age (I think at least two of the siblings here are legal adults) then definitely by temperament, talk frankly about the borderline-abusive upbringing they've experienced at the hands of their father while their father lumbers around in the back of the frame raises some real questions about the documentarian's role in a situation like this. But assuming you can put those questions on the back burner, there's something kind of profound—albeit rough-cut—going on in this documentary. There's the cynical way of looking at this, I suppose, that views these secluded folks become a walking IMDB forum in their film enthusiasm ("The best movie of all time is definitely Godfather: Part Two," says one of them, dressed in the black-tie attire of Reservoir Dogs) and thinks about the invasive power of toxic masculine film culture. But there's also the broader, much more idealistic idea of the transformative, even liberating power of film, the way that wide-eyed individuals use film to contrast the boundaries of their own homes with the wider, more wonderous world of cinema—the way we crave cinema as a way of modeling behavior, as a way of educating ourselves about the world as a whole because we are terrified that our own context is too small to do so on its own, so small that on its own, it will leave us hopelessly ignorant and helpless abroad. I wasn't brought up anything like the boys in this documentary, but I'd be lying if I didn't see at least a little of myself in them and the role of film in their lives; I suspect the same is true for a lot of us. Grade: B

F for Fake (1973)
Probably the most delightful I've ever seen a hyper-meta, post-structuralist, experimental arthouse movie be. Aesthetically, you can practically see the birth of Errol Morris here in the film's use of re-enactment for documentary purposes and the loquacious, essayist impulse in the film's pileup of tangentially connected images and words (Fast, Cheap & Out of Control-style Morris in particular). But Orson Welles flips the Morris script—or, I suppose, Morris flips Welles's script, given the chronology: instead of an a faceless documentarian bending the magnetically showman and storytelling impulses of his subjects into profound philosophies, Welles steps in front of the camera himself, caped and hatted in a magnificently flamboyant black, to be his own documentary's showman and storyteller. In that regard, it feels a little bit like an experimental documentary iteration of vaudeville, with Welles as the extraordinarily camp and completely magnetic MC tying everything together with a winking, sonorous presence. It's of course a work of high ego (because it's Welles), and it's a thematic snake eating its tail (because hyper-meta post-structuralism). But it's entirely great, I promise. Grade: A

Television

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 1 (2017)
I've always wanted Amy Sherman-Palladino to just go full-on Howard Hawks and write a screwball comedy, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is probably as close as I'm ever going to get. I'll take it. Lead by an effervescent Rachel Brosnahan playing Midge Maisel, a woman in late-1950s Manhattan who, when her husband leaves her, decides to take up a career in standup comedy, the show is a cascade of barbed and frequently hilarious dialogue in the same rat-a-tat cadence that animated the best of Sherman-Palladino's Gilmore Girls—and miraculously, none of this is undercut by the involvement of Sherman-Palladino's husband, Daniel, whose contributions are somehow not irritating this time around. Even more miraculously, unlike so many shows centered around a fictionalized entertainment act, Brosnahan-as-Maisel-as-standup-comic is actually quite funny, and it requires little imagination to see how Mrs. Maisel could actually find success as a comic. On a writing level, all this is girded by a strong emotional core and mercifully nuanced depiction of class and family—those worried that Sherman-Palladino had lost her ability to pierce with her writing the subdivisions of the middle and upper classes after Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (me) need worry no longer. It helps that Marin Hinkle and Tony Shalhoub, who play Midge's wealthy, straight-laced parents, are superb in their roles as a jointly satiric and emotionally resonant presence. And on a cinematic level, this is all depicted through an unusually thoughtful attention to camera movement and lighting (even for our current "peak TV" moment), most notably in the dialogue-free musical interludes wherein the characters move in the naturalistically choreographed rhythms of their day-to-day lives as the camera glides around them as if on skates—put together with the dialogue, it's scratched my screwball comedy itch with aplomb. This is the most consistently good thing that Sherman-Palladino has done since maybe the third season of Gilmore Girls, and I'm retroactively calling this one of my favorite shows of last year. It's wonderful. Grade: A-

Music

Joni Mitchell - Song to a Seagull (1968)
Joni Mitchell was already an accomplished songwriter by the time her debut album dropped ("Both Sides Now" had been a hit for Judy Collins, for example, though Mitchell herself wouldn't record her own version until her sophomore album, Clouds), but Song to a Seagull is her entrance as a performer. In some regards, Song to a Seagull is a good establishment of who Joni Mitchell is: it's a sturdy collection of ethereal and literary-minded folk songs, sung with Mitchell's typically winding vocals. But this is still very clearly a debut, and Mitchell is either holding back on some of her more adventurous impulses or has not yet fully realized them—either way, not her best work and more than a little hippy-ish in a way that Mitchell would reject in the coming years. But to say that Mitchell has not yet achieved the heights that she would reach in the '70s (some of the greatest music of the 20th century) is not to say that she has failed, and Song to a Seagull is a fine sequence of late-'60s California folk with at least one great song (the closing track, "Cactus Tree"). Not essential, but certainly not a waste of time. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for October 29 - November 4, 2018

Alas, October has ended and thus horror season. See you again next year.

Movies

Suspiria (2018)

It's ostensibly an homage to Dario Argento's 1977 batshit opus. But in practice, what 2018's Suspiria feels like is less a brightly colored cult horror film than one of those epic post-war European movies about modernism and fragmentation and fascism and complicity and the nature of God and evil and stuff—if not a full-on Tarkovsky-style art film, it's at least of the school of early Bertolucci or a slightly less onanistic Fellini. So I guess your enjoyment of the movie kind of hinges on how you feel about that whole class of filmmakers—I dig them, and I mostly can get behind Suspiria, though it lacks the moments of brutal clarity that typically brings those filmmakers into such sharp focus. Your enjoyment of this film is also definitely dependent on how much you can get behind the sprawl of it all. It's a spacious 2.5 hours, which offends my sensibilities of preferring 90-minute features, but it's also this curious case of its bloated runtime not feeling quite long enough to contain what this movie wants to accomplish. There's a lot of movie here, from the fairly delicious ridiculousness of some of its choices (Tilda Swinton plays not one, not two, but THREE roles, praise heaven) to the totemic weight of its themes, which cover not just fascism and, ya know, the whole sweep of Western history but also gender and art and a bunch of other things—to say nothing of the complicated mythology of its literal plot of an ancient witch coven and the competing power dynamics therein. I've got a complaining tone here, but I do want to stress that a great deal of this is quite compelling or at least intriguing, and there's a perverse streak of dark humor throughout. And what better time to revisit the pernicious persistence of fascism than right now? The movie evokes that idea with a compelling collision of horror and elegy (a juxtaposition perfectly suited to Thom Yorke's score) in a way that feels profound on those occasions when the film allows its cluttered brush to thin out enough to see the landscape behind it all. This is most apparent in the movie's final twenty minutes or so, which luckily are hands-down the film's best. None of this fixes how the movie is entirely Too Much, but it at least makes it consistently commanding of attention, if not consistently breathtaking. Grade: B

Fort Maria (2018)

I complain a lot on here about improvisation and the hacks that directors often use to try to evoke an improvised vibe: riffing dialogue in 21st century American comedies, handheld camera in European arthouse, etc. So enter Fort Maria, a movie advertising itself as entirely improvised based off a small treatment—red flags, my friends, red flags. But co-directors S. Cagney Gentry and Thomas Southerland and their four principal actors (whom the directors call "co-creators," which is absolutely fair, given the heavy-lifting the actors had to do in creating their characters without a script) know what they are doing, and the end result is a perfect exhibit for the best-case scenario for controlled chaos of cinematic improvisation. The characters feel lived-in, the plot feels both organic and driven, and the dialogue is generous and discursive in a way that's similar to the naturalistic verbosity of Richard Linklater films. The film's story—a parallel study of identity and social connection, explored through the experience of a woman who is suffering from acute agoraphobia and her adopted daughter who has left to meet her birth family—is small but never insignificant, and the whole thing just crackles with life, animated by this great b&w cinematography. This movie's making the rounds (I saw it via Knoxville's Public Cinema group [welcome back! hope we get more of these again soon!], so keep your eyes peeled for it. Grade: B+

I Think We're Alone Now (2018)

Solid acting on Dinklage and Fanning's parts, and nice cinematography on Morano's part. But pretty tedious otherwise. "The last man on earth is wrong about being the last man on earth" is a decent (if familiar) premise, and the idea that the plot unfolds based on discovering the extent to which he is wrong is interesting. But the movie does next to nothing with that except unfurl its plot, at first slowly and then like really, really, shockingly rapidly, and neither mode (slow nor whiplash-inducing fast) serves these characters much, who are just the barest of "gruff man gettin' stuff done, maybe recovering from trauma" and "sarcastic but effervescent lady disrupts gruff man's routine, may also be recovering from trauma" archetypes that populate far too many post-apocalyptic media. There's this weird veneer of "cool" that's slapped over the movie, too, where Dinklage rocks out to Rush and stuff, and I want to like that, but it doesn't really add a lot to the movie and gets dropped after the opening act and the closing credits. Anyway, I can't remember how this got on my Netflix DVD queue, but I kind of wish I'd gotten Halloween II like I thought I was instead. Grade: C-

Last Shift (2014)

A rookie cop has to stay the night in a haunted police station. There are some decent scares, usually the more patient ones (a long conversation that reveals a "Purloined Letter"-style horror-in-plain-sight at the end), but in general, this movie favors skittering, jumpy horror that I quickly grew tired of. Last Shift sort of wants to be this cross between Repulsion and Assault on Precinct 13, but it's up to neither movie's pedigree and instead falls back on some pretty uninteresting horror cliches. Grade: C

The Devils (1971)

This movie is notorious for its sacrilegious imagery and gross-out effects, and it delivers those in spades. I can now say I've seen a nun humping a crucifix, so cross that one off my bucket list, I guess. It's worth noting that this isn't just perversity for perversity's sake (though the film does seem gleeful in its almost masochistic journey toward church censorship)—there's a trenchant and passionate critique of the abuses of the Catholic Church motivating all of this, first in its depiction of the way that the power structures of the Church allows church leaders to sexually exploit their flock (uh...), and later in the film, how even when the higher-ups in the Church become aware of the sexual deviancy of their leadership, they are too concerned with the purging of metaphysical evils to address the clear and present moral crisis facilitated by their practices regarding priests and nuns (UH...). I'm not Catholic, so I can't speak to the nuances of this critique, but as your friendly neighborhood Protestant looking in from a distance, these seem like critiques that the Catholic Church is only just now coming to grips with (and honestly a lot of Protestant churches, too, if they are addressing them at all—not denying that). Still, I think the movie gets a little tedious when its back half pivots to become basically The Crucible, and its moral core is undercut a tad by the sheer tonal problem (that The Crucible also runs into) of making it hard not to sympathize with a dude unjustly accused by the Church's kangaroo court, even when the movie has previously gone out of its way to show this man an abusive, corrupt man not really deserving of sympathy. And I'm still not sure what I think of some of the enthusiasm for deviancy—there's a biting, punk-rock energy to it that's cool, but with that comes a juvenile button-pushing that feels less vital. Grade: B

Detour (1945)

As a piece of craft, Detour is pretty sloppy (understandably, given the shoestring budget and lighting-quick shooting schedule, but still), and the fact that the film's preservation looks like it's seen the butt-end of the public domain doesn't really help. Yet the movie's pitch-black heart is pure noir in the best way possible. The sheer bitterness with which Tom Neal's character/narrator spouts off the typical noir nihilisms about a perversely random universe elevates its philosophy far above the pack. It's not like noir in general is famous for its good cheer, but Detour is an exceptionally sour and nasty movie even for its genre, and the contempt for each of its characters that the film has is an acid bath. It helps that the movie's mean little story is a white-hot 68 minutes, making this feel something like an extended episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, complete with the punchy plotting and bleak smirk of dark comedy. And like that show, Detour manages to be both bracingly cynical and also a lot of fun. Grade: B

Music

Spiritualized - And Nothing Hurt (2018)

Spiritualized latest and reportedly last album finds Jason Pierce (aka J. Spaceman) in a better place than he's been in decades—which is great for him and a nice way for the band to bow out. Throughout their run, Spiritualized music has flowered from destructive tensions: between gospel and noise rock, between classic rock's hedonism and alt-rock's self-flagellation, between sobriety and intoxication, between heaven and hell. But with And Nothing Hurt, the music feels more at ease than anything the band has ever put out. That isn't to say that the music is conflict-free, and you still get plenty of spaced-out noise-rock jams ("The Morning After") and euphoric pop swells ("Here It Comes (The Road) Let's Go"). Musically, it's a slightly more adventurous fare than the band's previous effort, Sweet Heart Sweet Light (though nothing quite matches the neo-Brit-Pop death swagger of that album's "Sweet Jane"), but lyrically, Pierce has found peace. It's certainly a happier ending than we had any reason to expect after Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space. Grade: B+