Athena (Romain Gavras)

I feel on the other side for once of the style vs. substance debate, though just as much is probably attributable to just how off-putting its grandstanding seemed to me. Even the lauded opening shot that lasts something like ten minutes and moves from a police station to the sprawling housing complex where the rest of the film takes place acts more as a demonstration of literal fireworks than anything else. I’ve thought before about why two distinct styles of long takes — let’s call them the Cuarón and Bi Gan schools as shorthand — work on me while this one — or, to invoke a much more common and much less technically skilled variant, the kind seen in the likes of Hustlers — don’t, and it has a lot to do with they way they do or don’t support their stories. Both of the really long takes in Children of Men encourage chaos while Bi’s go for maximum dreaminess, but each feel closely tied to the mindset of the character (or characters) they are following. Without such a compelling anchor, there’s nothing to justify (for me) the swooping drones.

It definitely doesn’t help that I found the substance so reprehensible and unbelievable: the zealot’s vehemence overriding any sort of common sense whatsoever, the sneering portrayal of the criminals, the total about-face of the cop on the death of his brother. No one here is given any sort of depth, least of all Athena itself; I have no clue whether it’s a massive set or an actual place where people live, but it’s little more than a playground for Gavras to move his camera and hordes of people; the only thing worse than the nigh-nihilistic ending is the coda which more or less lets the police off the hook entirely.

TÁR (Todd Field)

Note: All other capsules were written today except for this one, which was originally intended as the beginning to a standalone standard-length review.

For all the fascinating and deserved discourse that has sprung up around TÁR, I still think it holds one of the year’s loveliest gestures: the reverse end credits. All except the actors and music credits are featured, playing out over a black screen for about five minutes, accompanied by the sounds of what, according to information only divulged later, is presumably an ethnographic audio recording gathered by Tár in South America. The music being sung, a series of identical lyrics in the round, is as seemingly repetitive as the list of crew members; one wonders whether the first image was included as a reassurance to the viewer that there wasn’t a technical issue that skipped to the end of the film. But the function that these credits serve speaks as loudly as anything in the film; it can be read as almost a rebuke to the now standardized practice of post-credits screens, where people are actually expected to look at the names on screen, instead of scrolling through their phones or chatting while waiting to get to what’s “actually” important. It also serves as a truly noble intent: by the nature of extended repetition, the viewer’s ear is trained to listen to the music, as spare and shaky as it might be, to become attuned to the minute differences and the emotion poured into each note. In essence, before she even speaks one of her many words, the viewer comes to inhabit the mind of the brilliant, mercurial conductor at its core.

I also love, if not the full intent of the final act, then specifically the almost speculative, contemplative mood that it adopts; the boat ride and swim under the waterfall that Tár takes opens up the film to new possibilities, shedding Field’s cloistered halls of culture for something less burdened.

Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino)

I generally like Guadagnino, so it’s difficult for me to express exactly why I found this so anemic and so immediately; something about the recurring use of voiceover to explain the history of cannibalism over the bus travels felt prefab, lazy work that extended to the many feeble attempts to impose an atmosphere of spooky tension. The Stuhlbarg scene was a bust for me, but strangely I do actually like the already legendarily decried work of Rylance in it, if only because it does come across as so inexplicable and in poor Southern dandy mimicry that it lent an air of perversity of proceedings that it desperately needed.

The central relationship lies limp like much of the film, even though Russell and Timothée Chalamet are decent in it; it always feels tentative, on the edge of committing but never becoming either erotic or passionate. I also found the scene with the gay young man egregious, lengthened and winking at matters of sexuality in thoroughly unproductive ways, and the “twist” of the ending is as much of a put-on of bleakness as the rest of the film.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras)

This really is an example of great structuring more than anything else, of trusting the decision to interweave artistry and activism into a portrait of a life well-lived many times over, but it did a number on me. I hadn’t really experienced any of Goldin’s work (also true of Poitras) and so I really appreciated their skillful layering here: combining The Ballad of Sexual Dependency slideshow with her contemplative interviews with Poitras (presented without the questions to heighten the mood) in voiceover creates an air of intimacy that only increases the investments, the personal connections that make the stakes of the film’s strident nature all the more vital. It’s difficult for me to point to specifics much more than that, but the decision to title the film after something Goldin’s sister said says volumes about the sensitivity to the most important details that pervades this.

EO (Jerzy Skolimowski)

I still don’t know if I have much more to say about my favorite film in this round-up (and second of the year as a whole) than just listing the non-stop roundelay of dazzling images and moments: a massive crane presiding over a junk heap like the First Reformed floating sequence, the Night of the Hunter forest venture, the red hellscape of wind farms, the dance of hunters’ lasers at night, and so on and so forth. Despite the Balthazar inspiration, this played to me in many ways like the inverse of that film, whose constant return to recurring human figures struck me on rewatch as much deeper and more considered than I had remembered, less a monolithic story about a suffering donkey than I remembered. Skolimowski takes a different tack, focusing more on the amusing grotesquerie that humanity offers; in that reading the Huppert divergence makes much more sense to me, and it’s more instructive to see Eo as a vessel rather than a specific point of view; it’s notable also that the Wiazemsky analogue doesn’t reappear after all after she abandons him for her biker boyfriend. Skolimowski’s message is carried out to the hilt in that robot donkey, a method of showing a hurt Eo that eschews actually trying to simulate (or actually maim) in favor of a cost-effective method that registers as something human, furthering the beautifully alien nature of this film. Few things better sum up this film’s dizzying brilliance; like others have noted this is late style par excellence yet carried out with the energy of a young man. And the ending reminded me more than a little of A Hidden Life.

Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (Alejandro González Iñárritu)

It didn’t escape my attention that, in this film intended at least a little as González Iñárritu’s grand return to Mexico, his first film predominately in Spanish since his debut Amores perros, he once again adopted the credit Alejandro G. Iñárritu, in the process erasing part of his last name in some kind of attempt to Americanize himself and become even more palatable to the Academy’s tastes. Of course, Bardo is at least partly about this divide, with bookend scenes in its hero’s part-time city of residence of Los Angeles; it really did crack me up to see Giménez Cacho taking the Expo Line, literally riding past my church St. John’s Cathedral.

Calling this self-indulgent and all of the other traditional epithets thrown at González Iñárritu is maybe beside the point, and make no mistake Bardo is that, but the main things that really rankled me are, ironically, those less present than in the other two of his films I’ve seen, both of which I dislike more: political satire. There’s a terribly labored nature to many of his overt breaks with reality and their : a sudden conflict breaking out, Giménez Cacho climbing a pile of corpses to speak with Cortés in a sequence revealed to be some kind of commercial filming (this, like much of the film, is foreshadowed in a long and tedious single-take sequence in a Mexican television studio that’s probably a dream), and most egregious of all a confrontation with a non-White TSA agent at LAX that turned me against the film once and for all.

But Giménez Cacho (and to some degree the always confident lensing of Khondji) comes much closer to salvaging this than any person should, lending many of González Iñarritu’s more irritating tricks — a Woody Allen-esque muting of an irritating conversation partner, a conversation of his father literally rendered in Big Head Mode — a genuine pathos. And I actually do quite like the showy centerpiece where everyone gets down to a slow-motion “Let’s Dance”; as obvious as it is the simple sight of Zama leaping in the middle of a large crowd is pretty fun. Not a truly terrible time, but González Iñárritu never found an interaction he couldn’t turn into bad-faith rancor, and there’s way too much of that strewn through this.

The Whale (Darren Aronofsky)

This might be an even worse film than I already thought; Aronofsky somehow outdid his bating of my Christianity with mother! I don’t think it’s too much to say that this has one of the worst scripts, characters (the daughter), and scores I’ve ever seen. The fatphobia is certainly present, and Aronofsky clearly means for us to see his self-destructiveness as grotesque first and foremost, before such things as empathy and context can enter into the picture. But really everything with both the daughter and the fake missionary are just as if not worse, leaving zero nuance in showing how hateful the former is and squirrelly the latter is. Everything is either telegraphed (the days of the week, with everyone hammering in the point that Fraser won’t see another Monday) or completely arbitrary, like the use of Academy ratio; it is very funny to see Aronofsky decide to switch to digital with this film, a literal stage play (with thudding and obvious period dressing) that could maybe have used a little grain dancing. The less said about the absolutely abhorrent approach to teaching and notions of good critical writing better; I was even able to predict almost down to the second exactly when the film was going to cut outside of the apartment for the first time. Chau emerges from this largely unscathed, and it helps she’s given a nice showcase in her tough love conversation (I didn’t anticipate the full extent of her connection to Fraser), and Fraser does exactly what the script asks of him; it’s just so saccharine at times, and so inexplicably hateful at others.

Close (Lukas Dhont)

I certainly didn’t like this film, but I’m honestly a little surprised I didn’t hate it, given how thoroughly people castigated Girl. More than anything this really just struck me as a flat Dardennes knock-off, and the ostensible hinge on which the film operates, the sudden dispatching of one of its two young boys, failed for the very simple reason that the “other” boy is given absolutely nothing to work with. Nothing is expressed at all except his perhaps platonic, likely romantic interest in his friend, and consequently much of the first half was spent waiting for the other shoe to fall, as obliviousness on the main character’s part and catastrophic inability to communicate on the friend’s part get run through in successively enervating iterations. I don’t remember much of the second half, other than that moments that people praised (especially the scene in which the news is partly broken) seemed like entirely standard ways of dealing with such subject matter.

White Noise (Noah Baumbach)

It’s entirely possible that I might be overrating this, but few films gave me as much fun last year. For a while I counted White Noise as my favorite book, in the same sort of holding pattern that Blade Runner occupied before I started reading/watching for pleasure, but I haven’t read it since and haven’t explored DeLillo’s work at all. Baumbach remains a great American favorite for me though, and this really does function in part like a novelty film par excellence, seeing e.g. the shot of hundreds of cars stuck on the highway that probably cost as much as Baumbach’s first couple of films put together. The 35mm grain and color gels remain consistently captivating, and the overt goofiness of stuff like the car chase is well-balanced with, for instance, the overlapping lectures scene, one of my favorite things he’s ever done, a perfect match of actors with Driver (genuinely one of his best performances to date) and Cheadle; the cut to Driver in his black cloak perched like a bird is just choice.

In general that command of people talking over each other, each voice remaining crystal clear even as the cumulative effect is one of incoherence, is inherently funny to me, and I remember it waxing and waning in fascinating ways. The shot of the fog passing over the Shell sign is as memorable to me as almost anything from last year, the extended dialogue between Driver and a terrific Gerwig in their bedroom is blocked with that same deliberate care Baumbach captured in Marriage Story, and the reconfiguration of the ending into a black comedy of remarriage is wonderful. And my adoration of LCD Soundsystem only makes how distended the credits sequence is all the more delightful.

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh)

This was the first film I saw in my final day and night sprint before LAFCA voting, and it’s only worsened in my mind, so much so that I wonder if I was out of my mind for being mildly mixed-positive on this. For one, I only laughed once, at Farrell’s incredulity at being labeled dull; for another, there’s just such a poor grasp of character strewn throughout all of this. For a film supposedly so defined by its acute perception of the human condition, I didn’t feel like there was any thought given to what these characters are like outside of their admittedly decisive actions. McDonagh’s remedial at best grasp of how to craft a film certainly hurts things, aside from the nice picturesque setting of Ireland, though Farrell does very solid work. I’d have more nice to say about Gleeson if he didn’t feel so obviously second fiddle (Condon is something like fourth or fifth fiddle and even less remarkable), while Keoghan’s character is so blatantly misconceived, a caricature that feels like horrible dead weight, that it cancels anything good he might be doing. The ending is as much of a nothing-burger shrug as the film itself.

One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve)

I might just be in a particular mood to appreciate Hansen-Løve’s work, but after the relatively bland Bergman Island this really just hit the spot in waves of acute bittersweetness, almost immediately with that carefully measured interaction between Seydoux — rarely better even with the astounding hot streak she’s been on — and an absolutely heartbreaking Greggory. The balance between that, her delightful relationship with her daughter (her dismissing the film that her daughter loved is priceless), and the extraordinarily erotic and touching dalliance with Poupaud is exquisite, in no small part because the film is so willing to embrace both irresolution and the genuine depth of feeling that each moment can and does engender. The juggling act is carried with such ease, such luminosity courtesy of her typically strong use of 35mm; it certainly didn’t hurt that I carried Nick Newman’s quote (paraphrase) that it’s the kind of film that understands how the same street you walk down can feel totally different in a different month; even the obligatory mess-up in Seydoux’s job as translator (a perfect metaphor for her relationship with her father) comes not as a climactic moment but instead as the natural result of accumulation.

In general I love how, as I recall, there isn’t a trace of contempt for any person; even the proliferation of nursing homes that Greggory has to move through is regarded as more a complication of life and the difficulties of a system than any specific person’s failings. This becomes doubly clear in the amazing pair of closing scenes, where the residents of a nursing home and the distant buildings of Paris provide the perfect ballast for all that has been internalized.

Return to Seoul (Chou Davy)

It’s probably a fool’s errand for me to try to write “objectively” about this film, considering I went drinking with Chou and Park Ji-min and got the opportunity to observe their interactions (so loving yet prickly), but it really has risen greatly in my already appreciative esteem. Part of it is just in seeing how much of a genuine performance the first-timer Park gives; in person she’s incredibly sweet, which set the devil-may-care brusqueness of her role into relief. I still think that all of the scenes with her father a little bit rote for my taste, but there’s such an energy coursing through this film, beginning with that drum-based score and moving onto the genuine spontaneity that comes out of Freddie’s decision to begin drinking with others, to dance. It helps that there’s almost a daring nature to much of her actions throughout, something which gets pointedly counterbalanced by the stasis of her reunions with her parents. The time jumps too, slowly letting the viewer in on the amount of time that has passed, her growing facility with Korean, her new living situations, feel brazen in the best ways, necessary resets that also have the nice effect of continually reframing what the title actually means. And the ending opens up the film in fascinating ways; one of those films where any issues I have with it fade much faster than its delights.

Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)

Like with I assume many people, Aftersun has grown for me a good deal the further I’ve gotten away from it, even while its essential character has been preserved. I think I first read this maybe a bit more literally than it should be taken: the club flashbacks/present-day moments felt obvious at first but there’s an abstract quality to them, especially in the “Under Pressure” moment where they become explicitly symbolic, that registers more forcefully for me now, and I don’t know if I was totally on the wavelength of this film except in certain moments — the flurry of images during the first VHS play and some of the more durational shots — until Sophie’s new parent status has been revealed. It’s easy to accuse this of being too studiously lowkey for its own good, holding its cards close to the chest, but there’s enough fine detail, especially in how tacky the resort is, and strength of character in the performances that it makes me constantly question my thoughts anew. Definitely becoming fond of this one more and more, though how much remains an open question.

Saint Omer (Alice Diop)

Can’t remember the last time I talked myself into loving a film with quite the same force as I did with this. Of all things, I was reminded most of Straub-Huillet once the trial sequence started, where the extended manner of speech vividly imprinted on me the central emphasis on listening: I have to assume this is a vastly more convincing rendering of the same impulse behind, say, Women Talking. In some ways I do wish that the entire film was just the trial, or that there was a little bit less dedicated to the journalist, but there’s something potent in how willing Diop is to bring her perspective in. From the introduction of the shooting style in the courtroom, it was easy to predict that the two women would lock eyes at some moment, but there’s still a certain frisson, all the moreso since it’s the only instance in the entire film.

I also want to stridently defend the final speech, which I’ve been shocked to see so many people taking as gospel just because it’s being conveyed directly to the jury/camera/viewer. Throughout the film, the defense lawyer has been well-intentioned but largely uncomprehending of her client’s perspective, and there’s nothing to indicate that her speech isn’t just another attempt to understand that which fundamentally cannot be grasped. Diop, for her own part, seems to recognize that; it’s impossible to imagine a version of this film as strong that offered a conclusive verdict, and if that’s something that a documentary would have had to include, all the better for this to be its own brilliant hybrid.

Both Sides of the Blade (Claire Denis)

I watched this and its sister film much after the rest of these, the day of the LAFCA banquet, since I knew I’d feel weird if I met Claire Denis without watching the rest of her feature films. Perhaps most surprising to me was just how much of the film passes before an affair actually happens; instead there’s a great emphasis on the business relationship between Lindon and Colin that goes a ways in clarifying the more holistic interests of the film, as do Lindon’s relationship with his son and the cavalcade of Denis repertory actors (wish there was room for Descas somewhere in here). Both this and its successor handle the pandemic so well in particular because it becomes just another source of annoyance, another item thrown into the pressure cooker. This remains just constantly dynamic; if my memory’s failing me this deep into this compendium of films and thoughts it’s only because the succession of scenes felt oddly intuitive, a tentative dance between those just on the edge of communication that falls to pieces in a great, unexpected touch.

Stars at Noon (Claire Denis)

So compulsively gripping in its mood that I felt that I would love it as much as those who totally adore it; instead I merely loved it. I still can’t tell if it helped or hurt that I thought so much of my beloved Pacifiction while watching it, purple nightclub and white suit and all; while they communicate somewhat similar themes about the spectres of colonialism, this leaves much more room for disruptions, lots of which are funny and foreboding in equal measure (especially the recurring presence of Safdie).

I do think that Alwyn is ideally cast in this, a handsome and vaguely gruff image that Qualley can put all of her vain hopes into. The film doesn’t necessarily surprise — the internal logic of how its characters interact with their surroundings and a hostile environment feels coherent — but in particular how much Denis pares down the options left to her characters, corralling them into more and more dire straits, is extremely effective. Incredibly seductive score too, even more than its predecessor.