Courtesy of NEON.

Ferrari

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Michael Mann

Ferrari, Michael Mann’s first film in eight years, begins with a sequence that I’m fairly sure is without precedent in his oeuvre. It is a prologue that captures Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver)’s lesser-known beginnings as a racecar driver, made to look akin to a silent film (within the confines of Mann’s usual Scope frames). At least some of these images appear to be archival from the early 1920s, as cars barrel down at great speed and sometimes smash into each other as spectators eagerly look on. But a few images stick out: those that distinctively have Driver within the frame. It isn’t just his status as the star of the film or the oft-commented-upon odd (and very modern) appearance of his visage that “take” the viewer out of the action of the film: it is the introduction of what may be green-screen or some other form of visual effects to emulate images taken likely a full century before. The result is something thoroughly uncanny, not unlike the emulated photographs of the era in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, but Mann’s heightened artifice (and lower budget) take things a step further: it becomes difficult to establish what belongs to then and what is inextricable from now.

Mann’s period films since the turn of the century and his switch to digital have often flirted with such concepts, from the startling insertions of digital footage of Will Smith as Ali jogging at night to the full-on, never not galvanizing HD cinematography in Public Enemies right at the cusp of its widespread adoption. But it’s worth enumerating the many ways Ferrari differs from virtually all of his past works, even as it remains to be seen whether this is a full-on creative reset for the octogenarian or simply a one-off moment of exploration. For one, this is the first film of his (with the exception of The Keep) that doesn’t take more than a quick stop in a major city. Set almost entirely within the city of Modena, Italy (population ~185,000), where Ferrari lived and made his work, it feels like a provincial town when stacked up against Chicago, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and the other metropolises that have populated his work, especially since Ferrari is such a dominant figure, either employing or begrudgingly enjoying notoriety from seemingly every person on screen.

For another, this is the first Mann film where the protagonist is not the main participant in the “action” of the film. Ferrari’s frequent moniker Il Commendatore (“The Commander”) cuts both ways: he wields an enormous amount of influence over how his men and cars behave, who’s in contention, and so on and so forth, but after the prologue—which pointedly comes before both the title card and intertitles explaining his situation at the beginning of the film—his driving is confined to the strictly quotidian, including most prominently his covert shuttling between his residences housing his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz) and his mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and son out of wedlock. For a Mann protagonist to no longer have access to the juice is a strange sensation, but one that is a) leavened by Driver and Mann’s customarily dynamic engagement with their material and b) in keeping with the different perspective that Mann adopts from his past work.

As scripted posthumously by Troy Kennedy Martin, Ferrari‘s narrative compression into a couple of weeks in 1957, as opposed to the grand sweep of past Mann biopics, applies doubly towards the juggling of his two home lives and his work stresses. As illustrated most vividly in an early scene where Ferrari and his employees time rival Maserati’s attempt at a record while across town at morning mass, the private and public things that must be done all flow into one continuous sense of drive, something which applies just as much to the commander as it does to his underlings. Ferrari, in explaining the competitive will to beat the other driver, utters the key quote of the film that “two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment of the time,” and indeed Mann’s films have always been a question of focus, of shutting out other considerations in any given moment to focus on the task at hand. Whether Ferrari is facing off against his wife for control of the company built together, or wrestling with Lina’s request for public acknowledgment of their child, he (and Mann) approaches it with the same level of hard-nosed negotiation and unerring pragmatism that he does a neck-and-neck race.

Ferrari ultimately builds to a cataclysmic bloodshed, putting a capstone on the death drive encapsulated by the media’s characterization of our Man as a “Saturn devouring his children,” and it’s oddly fitting that this film of constant motion just stops, recalling the deliberately incomplete All the President’s Men as strangely as its cemetery-set final scene is reminiscent of Elle. Other Mann films, most of all his most recent Blackhat, culminate with a certain transcendence, a triumphal act of physical and emotional boundary-pushing (Ali, Collateral) or an escape in life or death for at least one part of a coupling (Miami Vice, Heat, Public Enemies). But here, in a society and culture where everybody knows his name, Ferrari has no choice but to press on.

Courtesy of NEON.

Courtesy of A24.

Anatomy of a Fall/Anatomie d’une chute

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Justine Triet

The Zone of Interest

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Jonathan Glazer

Few actors in recent memory have had as vivid a year to showcase their particular strengths as Sandra Hüller in 2023. Aside from perhaps Léa Seydoux in both of the past two years, whose roles (for the better) generally resided in films with too divergent receptions/profiles to totally register as a unified statement, the last true occurrence of this was with Isabelle Huppert in 2016, with the perfectly contrasting Elle and Things to Come, and even she didn’t have her films taking the two top prizes at Cannes and getting big theatrical releases from the two most overtly influential US distributors right now.

If Elle acted as the archetypal ice queen role for Huppert and Things to Come as a relatively uncommon display of quotidian warmth for an actor decades into one of the most formidable oeuvres that a performer has ever assembled, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest operate less as tonal opposites than as distinctly different views of what it means to center a performance. Hüller, for her part, has less of a track record than either Huppert or the younger Seydoux — her hitherto most prominent performance in Maren Ade’s comic masterpiece Toni Erdmann — which makes her sudden return to the spotlight all the more gratifying.

Triet has been a director of great interest to me for a number of years, with both of her Virginie Efira vehicles — Victoria (2016) and Sibyl (2019), with the latter featuring Hüller in one of the great unsung supporting performances of the past five years — demonstrating a canny understanding of romantic woes and the way they can become enmeshed in the courtroom (in the former) and the film set (in the latter). For his part, Glazer is a filmmaker I’ve appreciated without ever truly embracing; my memories of Sexy Beast are mostly limited to its flashy style and flashier performances, while Under the Skin struck me as unnerving and confident without coming close to its consensus status as a transcendent journey into the unknown.

So my love for these films, likely the strongest of their respective director’s careers thus far, can’t (and shouldn’t) be entirely separated from Hüller and the disparate means by which she grounds them. But this isn’t to take away from each film’s considerable merits, and the sizable breaks from my previous conception of what their auteurs are capable of. Anatomy of a Fall lies closer to that view: like Victoria, it is principally a courtroom drama, with Hüller as an autofiction writer (suggestively also named Sandra) on trial for the murder by defenestration of her novelist husband at their chalet in the French Alps. The Zone of Interest, meanwhile, is Glazer’s first period piece, tackling a time and space which at first glance feels more well-trod than any from his past films: Auschwitz, or rather, the manicured estate of camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Hüller), and their many children, with the Jewish victims out of sight and (to the residents) mostly out of mind.

One of the under-discussed aspects thus far of Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest lies in their structures, which when paired together almost form mirror images. The former shifts from the couple’s beautiful snowy mountain dwelling to a bland courtroom a third of the way through and rarely departs — not unlike Alice Diop’s more overtly rigorous Saint Omer, another French courtroom film about motivation, extended testimony, and cultural mores — while the latter somewhat unexpectedly moves from bucolic green Polish riversides to harsh wintry Berlin at roughly the three-quarters point, placing the barely glimpsed, often-heard genocide on the other side of Höss’s wall at a much greater, more blatantly statistical distance. This twinned series of departures alone complicates what might seem (and already has been construed) to be films easily reduced to their loglines, carrying little variation or depth after said premises are established. I bring up this last point not to criticize any of my fellow peers — indeed, while I love it considerably more than Triet’s film, Anatomy of a Fall strikes me in a good way as the greatest achievement in middlebrow filmmaking since Drive My Car, with all the possible attendant criticisms that such a filmmaking categorization attracts — but to convey something of the slipperiness of both films in both the execution and in any attempt to nail down exactly what each is doing. For both films are, at their core, about the fallout from committing to (and/or deluding oneself into believing) a narrative.

Like Triet’s most obvious antecedents, Basic Instinct and Anatomy of a Murder — though Luc Moullet and Antonietta Pizzorno’s Anatomy of a Relationship might be an even more fitting predecessor/title inspiration — Anatomy of a Fall courts this literary inclination explicitly. One of the chief points of contention in the battle that develops between Sandra’s friend and defense attorney Vincent (a terrifically blithe Swann Arlaud) and the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz, as captivatingly needling as he was in 120 BPM with none of the earnestness) lies in the interpretation of various texts, given that the only beings in the vicinity of the chalet were the couple’s son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), blind from an accident that happened under his father Samuel’s (Samuel Theis) watch, and their adorable dog Snoop. Such texts run along a spectrum between personal and impersonal: a passage from one of Sandra’s novels which found its consensual genesis in one of Samuel’s many abandoned projects; the astonishingly catchy instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” that Samuel blasted to disrupt an impromptu interview Sandra was giving shortly before his demise, where the original’s “misogynistic” lyrics are dismissed as too remote from the recording that was actually deployed; and most crucially of all the surreptitious recording of Sandra and Samuel’s final fight, made by the latter a day before he plunged from his domicile, which is only partially visually dramatized before moving back to the “objectivity” of the courtroom, a process that Sandra characterizes as honing in on one isolated incident and using it to inaccurately characterize a much more complex relationship.

In this and many other instances, Triet and co-writer Arthur Harari (her partner and director of the great, similarly conventional Onoda) do lean into a certain obviousness with respect to the calculated ambiguity of these and other objects, placeholders for lack of direct proof. But the decisive moment arrives early on: Sandra claims to Vincent shortly after the incident that she believes Samuel’s death was truly accidental, not the product of a despondent suicide or a heated quarrel; Vincent bluntly tells her that neither he nor the court will seriously consider such a possibility. From then on, the idea is completely dropped, but its conspicuous absence remains in the viewer’s mind, even as Sandra is forced for self-preservation’s sake to abandon it. All her actions from that point on — whether she did it or not, whether she ever actually believed what she said — are necessarily driven by a commitment to a certain path. In the face of all the rigors of the trial process, with its distortions and equivocations on both sides, and the media — largely represented with some wonderfully garish camera footage also used to capture segments of the police investigation/reenactment of the day, a particularly deft way to hammer home the performative, mediated roles for detective and reporter alike — Sandra must stand firm; it’s only fitting that, after the conclusion of the trial, the film does not climax so much as fade out, a long exhale as the emotional detritus of the past few years floods back into view once again.

For The Zone of Interest, the commitment to a delusion happened long before the first image of a family picnic, before the black-screen overture set to Mica Levi’s droning score. It is historical, embedded in ideas of Aryan supremacy instilled in Höss and his family via both interior and exterior forces, something that presumably every viewer of this film will be aware of before it starts. Glazer’s project, then, is to explore the ramifications of that mindset, to depict the perverse normalcy involved in a daily existence next to one of the most infernal machines ever devised; it’s certainly not for nothing that one of the few scenes of Höss actually working comes in a meeting he has with two engineers who have traveled to present their ingenious new design for an incinerator with multiple chambers, so that the process of burning corpses and dumping their ashes can proceed that much more efficiently.

Such a ghastly mental image and the professional compliments accompanying it come to sum up much of The Zone of Interest, whose title — the film is adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, which I haven’t read, though reports seem to indicate that this largely eschews much of that book’s narrative — itself gestures at both bureaucratic detachment and an ominous foreboding. In turn, that describes the general form of the film: captured on a multitude of hidden cameras that captured continuous action, the images feel ever-so-slightly off, whether by dint of their angle, the slightly lower resolution than the norm for digital cinematography in 2023, or the sometimes jagged editing patterns. Signal moments do develop out of this aesthetic: upon returning from work one day, Höss orders a servant to take and wash his boots; the cameras stay outside of the house, observing the servant hard at work at an outdoor spigot, before abruptly cutting to an overhead view of the blood flowing from the boot for less than a second.

But the deliberate limits of The Zone of Interest‘s areas of observation largely lead Glazer to operate by allusion, which becomes Hüller’s key function; while the “character development,” such as it is, belongs to Höss, Hedwig is just as vital a figure for understanding Glazer’s ultimate aims. The house includes a tastefully kept garden ringed by barbed wire, and it can be understood that, since the film never ventures inside the concentration camp itself, the viewer’s perception of Hedwig’s work — inside and outside, dreadfully mundane and aesthetically pleasing alike — overlaps the work that her husband is doing right next door. Her means of cultivation is abetted by his toil towards destruction, a self-sustaining loop as logical and sickening as the revolving incinerator. The journey round-and-round is only interrupted by Höss’s relocation to Berlin and a series of interludes, shot on thermal cameras, which show a young Polish girl furtively leaving food around the camp and retrieving a song written by an inmate. That ghostly image is all the resistance that can be found, at least until a coda that brings the weight of history down upon Höss, alone in the halls of power.

Hüller is left out of that personal reckoning, just as the construction of Anatomy of a Fall‘s denouement forestalls the kind of catharsis that might be found in a different sort of courtroom drama. To return to the sterling linkage between these two films, Hüller in Anatomy is called upon to essentially carry the film; for all of the excellent performances and destabilizing, searching camera movements (sometimes appearing to emulate courtroom videography, crash zooms and quick pans included) and scene constructions, it likely could not hold together without her particular screen presence, a composure and confidence that always feels on the edge of breaking apart. The deft establishment of Sandra’s shaky command of French, frequently forcing her to switch to English (a lingua franca still removed from her native German), acts as yet another way in which she is situated as an outsider in this fight for her own life, and much of the pleasure of the film comes from watching a brilliant woman with everything to lose attempt to navigate the labyrinth of law and society, of judicious rejoinders and earnest appeals, constructed so that the underlying misgivings are never forgotten. Zone, on the other hand, takes all of that poise and removes the raw emotions undergirding them, leaving a surface without any depth, an automaton moving through her carefully practiced quotidian paces. Yet it is a surface that I am very familiar with; it’s potentially not too outlandish to call this a particularly odd form of a star vehicle, where seeing an actor I deeply admire cast “against type” as a thoroughly detestable character deepens the oddity and discomfort of the experience. Watching Hüller navigate a very different set of mazes — spatial and moral — making every right turn in the former and every wrong turn in the latter, lends its own strange charge to the proceedings. While one character’s judgment remains open and the other’s is hammered away, the lingering impacts of both, separately and together, still carry a tremendous force.

Asteroid City

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Wes Anderson

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Rating * Has redeeming facet

Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos & Kemp Powers & Justin K. Thompson

A few points of coincidence connecting these two films ruled in many ways by their creators’ tight, almost stifling grasps over the possibility of chance: both films opened in Taipei (where I’m staying for the next few months) on the same day and formed the first films I’ve seen overseas in many years over the course of a cross-town double feature, both films feature animation as a key component of their appeal, both films pinball between different aesthetic styles, and both films star Jason Schwartzman, though the one I saw at the SPOT cinema was *not* the one where he plays a character called The Spot.

The two films also find the particular “brands” to which they belong to at a certain point of crisis. On the one hand, Wes Anderson remains as alternatively beloved and derided as ever, seemingly having made a nigh-irrevocable advance/retreat into worlds of his own imagination, whether they be futuristic Tokyo, a provincial French town, or the eponymous Southwestern hamlet (population size: 87, filmed entirely on sets in the Spanish desert), piling on further structural and metafictional challenges for himself. In contrast to Anderson’s benevolent intractability, the forces on the other side are eager to cast their work as a superior, if not entirely separate entity from the sinking ship that appears to be the superhero mega-blockbusters that have very nearly swallowed Hollywood filmmaking whole. Where the MCU and DCEU appear to be faltering at last, Sony Pictures Animation, as marshaled by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, aims to pick up the slack. Not only does the studio run with the conceit of super-powered beings aiming to prevent the end of the world for the umpteenth time, but also with the concept of the multiverse that has paid dividends both financial — making for boffo box office of the otherwise middling grosses of the MCU Spider-Man and Doctor Strange sub-franchises — and critical, with the Russo Brother-co-produced Everything Everywhere All at Once earning Oscar glory off of its own gussied-up multiverse riff.

The trends have remained steady with these latest entries. Asteroid City was fairly tepidly received at its premiere at Cannes, only to get a rapturous near-unanimous reappraisal upon its stateside release. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has been even more beloved than its predecessor Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse — reports of abominable crunch-time overwork notwithstanding — almost wholly escaping the sharp critical downturn in the wake of Avengers: Endgame and its (for better and worse) summative cap on a certain era of superhero filmmaking; while everything else is accurately seen as desperate flailing, the further extended adventures of Miles Morales and company continue to attract acclaim, including from many who swore off superhero films close to a decade ago.

It’s probably already clear where my sympathies lie; Anderson has been and remains one of my favorite American directors, even as my ardor for any given one of his films can vary wildly, while I remember quite liking Into but have since cooled on it, the extravagance of some of its images slipping away while the bad aftertaste of the gobsmackingly formulaic narrative became less and less obscured. It’s certainly worth noting that none of the three directors of that film returned to this one, at least in the same role; I never saw the Jump Streets or Clone High and barely remember anything of The Lego Movie, so I can’t speak to exactly how strong Lord and Miller’s voices are apart from these very linked films (though I still suspect that I’d prefer Ron Howard’s version of Solo to theirs).

With all that being said, it’s worth examining in conjunction why one aestheticized unreality works (to me) and the other ultimately doesn’t. After all, Anderson could reasonably be said to be working in, if not the multiverse, then in alternate planes of fiction in a similar way. The central conceit of Asteroid City (completely hidden in the trailers) rests on parallel tracks: a play about a group of civilians, juvenile scientific geniuses, residents, and military personnel who are quarantined in a tiny town in the Southwestern United States when they come into contact with an alien in a meteorite crater, shot in rather lovely 2.39:1 pastel color; and a television recreation of scenes from the mounting of that play in 1.37:1 black-and-white (all shot on Anderson’s customary 35mm by Robert Yeoman). While the film largely stays in that former realm, the boundaries are porous, even moreso than the storytelling devices that Anderson’s previous film The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun used; where that film largely let the reminiscences of Swinton, McDormand, and Wright’s characters remain on that level (with Bill Murray’s editor one tier up and remaining at a slight remove from the action) and explicitly situate the “base” narrative as flashback, the inherent fictiveness of play and production alike — “Asteroid City is not real,” as Bryan Cranston’s Rod Serling-esque television host intones — displace the viewer, leaving them to reckon with the mystery of the relationships between play and production, which, if they do illuminate each other, often do so in oblique fashion.

Asteroid City, to a greater degree than any Anderson film, is about its filmmaker’s belief in the power of the performative gesture, of the ability of artifice to get at something contradictory and thus deeper in the heart of its character and setting. Perhaps it’s for this reason that I connected with it to a greater degree than any of his films since his 2014 masterpiece The Grand Budapest Hotel, whose situating of adventure and the beauty of personal storytelling against the sweep of history still feels leagues ahead of anything he has done before or since. The ambition of Asteroid City, necessarily, lies in smaller, more furtive gestures; Jason Schwartzman’s Augie Steenbeck is the closest thing to an anchoring presence like Hotel’s M. Gustave or Royal Tenenbaum, and the film (or at least the play) begins and ends with him, but it truly is, depending on how generous you want to be, a communal or an overstuffed film, and thus there is less room for the sort of reveries that Hotel was filled to bursting with.

Anderson’s directorial command can be taken for granted these days, such is the recognizability of his frames, albeit not just his frontal symmetrical close-ups: one look at the striking arrangement of faces at perpendicular angles in both Academy and Scope ratios reveals a still galvanizing eye that remains at all times his own while refusing to be pigeonholed. It’s not just enough that, in an emotional split-screen phone call, Schwartzman and (brilliant first-time Anderson player) Tom Hanks are placed as if they are looking at each other; little stripes at the top-left and the bottom-right (the former, if I’m remembering correctly, is from the edge of the phone booth) accentuate a visual symmetry that might be wholly unnecessary if it wasn’t immensely pleasurable to spot it and productive to speculate why it might be there. Similarly, the inclusion of a few shots of Academy ratio footage in the play scenes call attention to themselves; it can be easily surmised that these are meant to be from the camera on hand to film the ceremony during which these shots take place, but the perfect framing, at extreme angles that the camera couldn’t possibly find from its locked-down place in the back of the proceedings, emerges as artifice-within-artifice-within-artifice, with too many potential readings to explicate.

In a sense, such gestures, especially the second microphone that Jeffrey Wright’s military officer or Tilda Swinton’s scientist stride towards during their ceremonial speeches, demonstrate how much performance factors into all of these unfamiliar situations that the temporary denizens of Asteroid City find themselves in. The close encounter is more than anything a device, an Act 1 deus ex machina in the most existential of senses, where people locked into their routines suddenly find themselves confined with each other, having to confront how they relate to strangers in strange lands. This is not to say that the means by which this is achieved is at all secondary: the initial sighting, an extended, seemingly stop-motion UFO landing, is conducted with an awe that’s of a piece with the climax of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou or the wolf in Fantastic Mr. Fox. Redolent of Space Race/Cold War anxieties — the town is also periodically rocked by nuclear testing, with the distant mushroom clouds recalling the controversial atomic bomb invocations found in Isle of Dogs — the alien is a tangible representation of everything that is unknowable and ungraspable, love (familial and romantic) chief among them.

Lest that sound like a trite summation, Anderson’s metafictional structure constantly destabilizes, not least because of the opportunity for alternate characterizations, surface non-sequiturs (an acting workshop led by Willem Dafoe’s Method-espousing Saltzburg Keitel chief among them), and appearance changes it provides. One of the signal moments in the film comes at the tail end of an early scene between the play director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) and his ex-wife Polly Green (Hong Chau), where, as she exits, she mentions that at the end of a specific scene in Act 3, Scarlett Johansson’s Midge Campbell should say a line after she leaves the room and not before; after Schubert takes that advice, Polly leaves the set where he currently resides and then says goodbye, a literal and figurative echoing across narrative levels. If that wasn’t enough, unless I’m forgetting, there is no moment when Campbell actually does that in the play; Act 3 is specified in the intertitles (heretofore regularly broken up into sections of scenes) to be played continuously without break, though at least one scene is likely omitted. One could even construe as this early “non-diegetic” scene as being essentially an airlifted substitute for the emotion of that scene, which is deliberately curtailed otherwise.

At the end of the day though, Anderson has never relied solely on his aesthetic to carry his films; it’s not for nothing that each of his films has had absolutely magnetic, screen-commanding performances, extending to the audio-only stylings of George Clooney in Fantastic Mr. Fox or Liev Schreiber in Isle of Dogs. Even amidst the parade of faces, plenty of people stand out, old and young, large roles and small; the shaken poise of Maya Hawke’s schoolteacher, the affability of Steve Carell’s motel manager, the ornery searching of Edward Norton’s Tennessee Williams-esque Conrad Earp, the playwright of Asteroid City. And Anderson’s greatest non-Murray or Wilson stalwart, Schwartzman, stands atop them all. His greatest moment comes during an already celebrated scene with Margot Robbie, his deceased wife in the play whose scene was cut. Heavily bearded in the play, he removes his fake facial hair and gets a close-up without encumbrance for the first time, and the effect is chilling: the defiance of Max Fisher is still there but wizened, even weathered, an almost wolfish, hollowed stare into the camera lens as his struggles with how to play his character reach across time. Not unlike Jean-Pierre Léaud with François Truffaut or even Lee Kang-sheng with Tsai Ming-liang, Schwartzman has been in roles small and large for Anderson, and the effect of that gaze as it has evolved over the years pierces the artifice.

It is true that Anderson’s films tend not to be tectonic shifts in style or in ultimate purpose, but that speaks to the enduring appeal of his concerns, and Asteroid City both makes that text and complicates it. The former comes in the play itself: after the quarantine is lifted, Augie and his family awake to find everyone, including Midge (who he had embarked on a tentative fling with), gone without another word. The nuclear tests resume, the charmingly absurd police-criminal gun-blazing car chases streak through town once more, and everyone picks up their routines which the span of a week did little to disrupt. The whole extraterrestrial event feels, if not completely hushed-up, then left on the backburner, something to marvel at for a few moments then abandoned in favor of more quotidian concerns. Asteroid City all but compares it to a fantasy: in the acting workshop, Earp wants the play to, among other things, get at the sensation of dreaming. In electrifying, unprecedented-for-Anderson canted angles, the actors spring up and begin reciting the line “You can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep.” It is stated that this experience helped shape the formulation of the play, yet no such equivalent utterance appears. Rather, it is the concatenation of sensations and invocations that predominates: obscure yet haunting; lullaby-like yet foreboding (as accentuated by an unnerving Jarvis Cocker end-credits song); unrelated yet defiantly — by dint of an almost Hongian play with two narratives clanging off each other in often successful, always daring ways — vital.

Would that such complexity were afforded to the film that actually made narrative, and in particular the fungibility of superhero storytelling itself, the explicit subject. To its credit, Across initially switches up its focus: the first fifteen minutes or so take place in the dimension where Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) resides, the single most visually bewitching realm in the film that seems to simulate watercolors dripping off the walls in deep blues and purples. These, like the rest of the film, can be inconsistent (some frames play much more with abstracted environments and people than others), but much of the charm of the Spider-Verse films, like Dash Shaw’s underrated My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, is their hodgepodge nature, giving different characters and environments a corresponding look that speaks to the mutability and creativity of the animated comic-book form.

But for the first of many, many times, the basic plot, always digging itself into holes then taking the easiest way out, comes to dominate the proceedings. While (at least initially) Across avoids the staid self-actualizing of Into, content to leave Miles and Gwen to deal with day-to-day life, the film quickly devolves into the ratcheting up of personal dramatic stakes between child and parent(s) that become numbing when played out for the umpteenth time. Across, across its numerous acts, withers amid its almost unceasing rising tension; fun and reasonably diverting when it allows itself little moments of Miles by himself or with Gwen, or his parents discussing their child together, but disastrous when it has to go through the motions of a teen unable to communicate with his parents. It certainly doesn’t help that Miles’s universe, and thus the dominant aesthetic of the film, is stultifyingly bland in comparison. Without engaging interpersonal relations, this large chunk of the film feels like a holding pattern until the multiverse hijinks ensue. Of course one could say this is meant to be the point, that, after experiencing universe-altering events, ordinary life must seem like even more of a slog than it already is, but it only partly ameliorates that issue.

This isn’t to say that Across isn’t pretty funny or engaging in this early section, which ends up being by default the post-opening highlight, not least because The Spot, one of the main villains of the film, is an inherently amusing idea whose ability to open inter-dimensional wormholes leads to some funny fight scenes, with limbs and bodies sprawled across a series of portals. The early glimpses at other worlds, encompassing, among other things, live-action and Lego stop-motion, are delightful in their media mixing. In general the Spider-Verses are best at bemused affability, at leaning into the comedy inherent in seeing people from different walks of life awkwardly interact, something which, for example, a scene where Miles-as-Spider-Man tries to talk with his father and convince him that Miles is a good son adroitly gets at. And the eagerness with which Miles and Gwen act upon reuniting, the ability to enjoy each other’s presences and feel like they have true companionship in the world, is quite touching.

But in the age of go-ahead hell-bent apocalyptic superhero filmmaking, nothing can “just” be frivolous, and a series of subterfuges ultimately lands Miles among the Spider-Society, a vast array of Spider-People dedicated to tracking down villains unstuck in spacetime and restoring them to their proper place, headed by Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac). From here, all pretense of complexity or flexibility basically goes out the window, with every character too locked into their ways of thinking to budge, with typically destructive results. It’s basically impossible to see Miguel as anything other than a misguided villain, someone so obsessed with doing the right thing that our hapless, headstrong protagonist gets caught in the crossfire.

The main contention is the head-slappingly literal term “canon events,” those moments which come to define any Spider-Person’s life, centered almost always on death: that of an Uncle Ben-like figure, a cop relative of a loved one, and so on and so forth. These are displayed in a hologram simulation, with an array of Spider-People crouched solemnly over a dying corpse, including the live-action MCU-precursor Spider-Men. I won’t go into further plot detail than this, except to note that the ludicrously distended film (140 minutes, the longest mainstream American animated feature ever) takes what feels like 20 minutes after the climax to get to its final, offensively reductive twist, a lugubrious stretch well after I had soured on the film.

That sudden downturn is linked more than anything to those images of death, which in a charitable reading would be an indictment of this whole multiverse concept that numerous films have attempted to make a viable device to no success. It speaks to a fundamental issue with the supposed ambition of this idea, of having putatively unlimited options only to arrive at the same characters and scenarios, only done up with a palette swap. Sure, it’s funny when it’s a Spider-Horse or baby Spider-Girl or whatever, but such changes run only skin-deep, and the lack of imagination becomes grotesque and moribund when there’s an insistence on retaining the same tropes, where the same great powers can only lead to the same great responsibilities.

I could talk about many other things that bothered me: the vagueness with which each person’s powers and fighting ability are treated, the muddled representation, the roteness of some of its humor. But I’d like to mention my favorite part of Across: brief editorial explanation text boxes that appear a few times in the film, which almost reminded me of the “(Historical)” notes on the intertitles for Abel Gance’s Napoléon. Those text boxes, enmeshed as they are within all the action, can sometimes be difficult to read and quick to go away, yet they epitomize a certain spirit of fun and innovation that much of the rest of the film sorely needs, a clear nod at a comic book art tradition that nevertheless challenges the viewer to think and slow down in a way that the general slapdash shock-and-awe of the rest of the shifting aesthetics rarely allows for. Meanwhile, in Asteroid City, where even the beginnings of a freeway built in the air inspires thought, that sense of searching, resonant ambiguity lies everywhere.

Showing Up

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Kelly Reichardt

Inherent in the process of artmaking is the imperfection, the unexpected detour that can radically change the overall trajectory of the artist’s intent and execution. Mark Toscano once wrote about an occurrence in his restoration of Stan Brakhage’s films, where the legendary avant-garde filmmaker stated that, for a particular short, he had initially failed to spot the hair in the camera gate; upon doing so, he decided to orient his entire visual conceit around that unintended intrusion. Such an approach can be found across media and along the entire continuum of resources and styles: whether it be classical or experimental, a mega-blockbuster or a no-budget picture, a piece of music or a film or a play, the essential humanity of art means that nothing “perfect” exists, which is something to be cherished and upheld as indicative of a personality, or a coterie of personalities, behind pieces both imposing and modest.

The best films about art accept this idea on its own terms and incorporate it into their forms; the miracle of Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up lies in its ability to do so while creating a vivid world of its own, filled with quotidian frustrations, mysteries, and liberations. In her portrait of Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a sculptor who does administrative work at a Portland art college for a living, Reichardt does this task almost literally: the film takes place at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, which closed just before the pandemic. Temporarily resurrected during filming, the space conjures an effect not so dissimilar from Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, though there is no looming closure that threatens to destroy an entire way of life.

Instead, Showing Up takes place over the course of a week, as Lizzy attempts to create enough pieces for her first solo show while dealing with sundry personal problems: her contentious relationship with her friend and landlord Jo (Hong Chau), who is dragging her heels on fixing her fellow artist’s hot water due to her own impending shows; her tedious days at the college under the watchful eye of her boss, who happens to be her mom (Maryann Plunkett); and her house calls to her eccentric father (Judd Hirsch) and troubled brother (John Magaro). An additional wrench is thrown into the proceedings when her cat mauls a pigeon, breaking its wing; almost by accident, she ends up taking care of it for large stretches of time, forcing her to alter her art-making routine. Crucially, however, Lizzy is not the sole protagonist. Jo takes center stage at numerous moments, with her relatively carefree nature — she is introduced excitedly rolling a tire down the street to a tree so she can swing from it — acting as a source of equal parts hilarity, resentment, and serenity, something which Chau inhabits with exquisite good grace. Even more importantly, the film is strewn with shots of students and teachers creating their own art in wildly different media — light installations, artifice-forward films, wool-work, dyeing, painting, and much more — usually without Lizzy or any named character in the shot, frequently featuring bold tracking shots to convey the scope of this institute.

While Showing Up is probably funnier than all of Reichardt’s previous films put together — the withering glares Williams flashes at certain points are especially choice — it generously refuses to look down on any of the art its characters make, not even a landscaping piece that Lizzy’s brother claims to be crafting near the climax of the film. Its view is humble yet expansive, often using uncharacteristic jerky small pans and zooms which could be called be called, not unlike the more apparent zooms of Hong Sang-soo — whose recent films, particularly The Novelist’s Film, feel like kindred spirits in their approach to the artist — amateurish.

Of course, the entire nature of what it means to be an amateur, especially in this milieu, where a relative star like Jo still has to deal with possibly not getting a catalogue for her work, has no bearing on the quality of art or its maker’s level of dedication. While plenty of artmaking is seen, including from Lizzy, the most extended view of her practice comes in a static long take, where she breaks off the arm of one of her sculptures so she can carefully attach a different, extended set of arms in its place. That concept, subtraction in the service of addition, can be found all over Showing Up, especially its climax at Lizzy’s opening, which evolves into a litany of anxiety and passive-aggression that then unspools into a fitting equanimity. The key in that modus operandi is the back-and-forth: the blindspots and irritation must exist alongside the camaraderie and rapprochement, often coming from the most unexpected of sources. In that balance, in her leads’ abilities to carry both emotions, Reichardt finds her brilliant muse.