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Los Angeles Festival of Movies (2025, 2024) New York Film Festival (2024) Sundance Film Festival (2025, 2024, 2023)
2025 April 9
Will
screened at Los Angeles Festival of Movies 2025an afterschool special without the happy ending and neat lesson. the first known film written, directed, and produced by a Black woman, it’s brimming with love for Harlem, full of little mentions and glimpses of life in the neighborhood, good and bad, public and private. we see parks, gyms, homes, overgrown paths, deteriorating blocks. in one particular scene, Will attempts to distract Little Brother and veer him away from his fixation on getting a fix, leading him to the top of Marcus Garvey Park. he offers up a small history lesson, telling Little Brother about the park’s tactical use during the Revolutionary War. these small moments paint something much wider than this story.
2025 April 5
100,000,000,000,000
screened at Los Angeles Festival of Movies 2025a light character study of different class archetypes—sex workers who often experience the upper class without the privilege of being in it, benefactors of rich families who cannot help but yearn for the struggle of lower classes, and so on. not much truly said is all. two very interesting moments stand out that breeze by: the young, rich girl who “knows” her family’s island will be the Noah’s Ark of the future, and the corresponding final shot of the movie. plenty of beautiful shots of Monaco, perpetually with purple or orange skies with dissonant, manmade structures; consider if Miami was like Glendale.
2025 February 2
Bubble & Squeak
screened at Sundance 2025my favorite Sundance watch. the offbeat premise isn’t treated as a feature-length joke, launching from the cold open to set the scene and quickly using the foundation to find pathos. told, shot, and presented like a fairytale, Twohy provides a genuinely touching lesson about how love isn’t contingent on the conditions at hand. two people in two different places in space and time can still be intertwined. for every time they might let the other down, there’s another chance to make the right gesture. for every dream they don’t share, there’s an opportunity to be excited for each other. when the sky lights up in wonder, they can still share it together.
featuring the utter beauty of Estonia, some of the best wide-angles you’ll see this decade care of DP Anna Smoroňová, and Matt Berry doing a Werner Herzog lilt in an inspired bit of casting and direction. Himesh Patel is so funny as always, but Sarah Goldberg is the one that lands the plane.
2025 February 1
Bunnylovr
screened at Sundance 2025a fine film otherwise hampered by the director—in her debut—on double duty as actor in the lead role, severely underwritten side characters who say the exact things that engender motivations and story movements, and a camera that seems unsure. there are at least some genuine moments in here, along with a wise choice not to linger too much on the bad decisions the young protagonist makes. it’s about how an overwhelmed young woman finds her footing.
2025 February 1
Sorry, Baby
screened at Sundance 2025published in Los Angeles Review of the Moving Image, Issue 0
an extremely earnest portrayal of the traumatic lifecycle that only a comedian could write. it often flitters too far into one-person show territory, until it decides to double down in the final sequence to end on somewhat weightless rumination.
2024 October 26
All We Imagine as Light
screened at AFI Fest 2024it’s a labyrinthine task to tell a story that crosses the tracks between gender, class, race, and religion in an elegant way. the constraints of a runtime can make thematic juggling feel out-of-rhythm, whereas something like a novel has more room to explore at its own pace. Payal Kapadia certainly goes at her own pace in All We Imagine as Light, but uses the setting in Mumbai, one of the most populous cities in the world, to make the case that constantly confronting the four pillars of identity is inevitable.
here, Mumbai is a “city of illusions.” we start from the very seed of love stories, where our protagonists, Prabha and Anu, feel the sweetness of being courted and cared for in otherwise restrictive circumstances: their demanding jobs as nurses, the social taboo of dating outside of your religion, and the trappings of a marriage where the partner has almost never been around. immediately, those two stories collide with womanhood and religion in India, merging down the line with the question of what we can allow ourselves to have as part of the big picture. Prabha and Anu are not just women—they’re Indian women, they’re Mumbai residents, they’re nurses, they’re union members, they’re neighbors, they’re spouses and lovers. they’re of a different age too, and they misunderstand and eventually learn from each other.
their elderly coworker, Parvaty, faces harassment and potential eviction as her building is eyed for redevelopment, and despite fighting back as much as she can with the help of Prabha, Anu, and her family, she resigns to the fact that she is just an aberration in a city that’s built as a promise to its country. Mumbai is India’s biggest city, drawing in everyone from small villages to faraway cities with the hopes of a good living. that also means it’s supposed to attract people outside of India and those with a lot more money than most of its residents. Parvaty recognizes this, finding herself needing papers to exist here. the city, as it turns out, is a promise meant to be broken. with a bitter taste in her mouth, she chooses to let it go, and Prabha and Anu help her move back to her village. there, they all unwittingly find time for themselves to figure out what they want, instead of what they need.
a scene in the third act is as magical and breathtaking as Weerasethakul or Rohrwacher would make it. Prabha does what she’s trained to do and revives a man who’s washed ashore unresponsive. as he wakes up and converses with her, Prabha, in the intimacy of care, decides what she wants has been brushed aside for too long. eventually, after such a wait, a want becomes a need. in this quiet beach town, she digs her feet into the sand and stands up for herself. by the end, three women across generations enjoy the moonlight, having chosen for themselves.
2024 October 10
Oh, Canada
screened at New York Film Festival 2024a tender depiction of approaching death with something to live for. Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a leftwing writer, documentarian, and scholar known for moral conviction who makes all the wrong choices in his own life. as his last testament, he agrees to be interviewed on camera for a Canadian documentary retrospective of his life. despising his former students who are producing it (emulating his own manipulative interviewing techniques, no less), he instead takes the opportunity to make it a confessional to his wife, who he undeniably loves, on the memories he’s buried away and a life he’s denied. his dry conviction makes us trust him as someone who’s finally willing to tell the truth at first, despite his scattered storytelling and frequent halts. once we see the wider view of his deteriorating health, it becomes clear we’re racking through the mind of a man seeing his life flash before his eyes.
Schrader’s films frequently deal with the suppressed sins of men; they never ask of us to find forgiveness in these characters but instead whether to trust their penances. after a life long lived in silence, is it on us to accept a dying man’s late penitence as real? even sufficient? when someone eventually tells Leonard Fife’s story for him, after he can’t any longer, what place does absolution have for him in the land of the living?
in one scene, a young Leonard Fife (Jacob Elordi) sits at the counter of a diner he used to frequent. the man taking his order remembers his usual—but Fife doesn’t, nor does he seem to remember much of the man. later, the older Fife sits at the same counter, looking towards the sunlight flowing through the opening door. a cast of characters in his life waltz, hop, and skip in, taking up the rest of the seats. he looks around. he’s abandoned them all. all of them have left him behind.
2024 April 11
Los Angeles Plays Itself
screened at This is Not a Fiction 2024the definitive film about Los Angeles. in the tradition of Mike Davis, Thom Andersen’s video essay starts from simple observation into a sprawling, almost oppressive diatribe on how Los Angeles is portrayed in film and what Los Angeles really is in real life. it’s designed to provoke reaction, in between Andersen’s jabs against Woody Allen and New Yorkers (“the cinematic chronicler of New York’s middle-brow middle class, the people who believe what they read in the New York Times”) and the real historical context he provides to give lifelong residents pause about their own city. its sprawling construction mirrors the city itself, rewarding those who give it a chance and stirring apathy in the skeptical.
its limitation is the shallow focus as a film about films. mostly preoccupied with the appearance of Los Angeles for most of its runtime, it relegates its real and disheartening portrayal of the city to its latter half and as punctuation to its chapters. Andersen’s analysis of Chinatown ends with the brief mention that in real life, the public voted to approve the Aqueduct’s bond measure themselves, despite a local paper exposing the inside dealings between wealthy businessmen two weeks before the vote. it’s just as abrupt with the context provided for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with an offhand debunking that automobile companies were the sole death knell of public transportation—the public had complained of “overcrowding, slowness, discriminatory pricing, and poor service” for decades already. the film then ends up running credits in the same vein, unceremoniously, after a blunt coda contextualizing independent Black filmmaking in the ‘70s.
Andersen refuses to linger on the realities of our city—he recognizes the inherent original sin of Los Angeles, as did Mike Davis, that we are a city that shouldn’t exist, built on desert land and swiping water from elsewhere; and yet, we’re the ones that continue to forget our history just as fast as we make it. we’re the ones who frequently vote on the side of power, disregarding the water wars and corruption of yesteryear. we’re the ones who complain about the unhoused on buses and trains, until board members who drive to work vote to cut service and raise fares. we’re the ones who allow the world to see us as another city entirely, in minds or on screens. take these as a given and the question isn’t of complicity anymore—the city’s here and we live in it. what will we make of it?
2024 April 7
Good One
screened at Los Angeles Festival of Movies 2024a quiet, strong parallel to this year’s How to Have Sex. instead of a ritual holiday in Greece full of incessant partying, a girl ends up on a backpacking trip in upstate New York with her dad and his longtime friend. she comes to empathize with her dad’s recently divorced friend and interrogates her dad’s second marriage with a younger woman. she deftly interfaces with the forest and its streams, its trails, its dirt, and its life. she walks out of it with a reminder that girlhood is so often lonely and womanhood is so often burdensome; it’s the line between and when it should be crossed that she can’t seem to figure out. as a small bit of respite, she pranks her dad by filling his backpack with rocks. hopefully he’s felt some of that weight.
2024 April 4
I Saw the TV Glow
screened at Los Angeles Festival of Movies 2024a really visceral watch. it twists up all the genres of youth from the ‘90s and ‘00s—young adult television, melancholic indie rock, “get out of this town” yearning from pop punk—into a discomforting sinkhole.
Jane Schoenbrun isn’t shy about the trans allegory—one of the first shots of the film is of a young Owen entranced by the colors of the trans flag under an inflatable tent. they don’t need to be enigmatic about it. we watch Owen grow into a body over time, but remain the soft-spoken child he was when he first met Maddy and bonded over The Pink Opaque. as he settles into adulthood and his own circumstances, he’s presented with a choice to become who he’s meant to be. it feels like being buried alive… and it is. a larva ensconces itself in a chrysalis to transform, unseeing and unfeeling. at a certain point in life, after so much work to find something like “normalcy,” it’s difficult to choose another reset. so you continue down the path you were on, as fear festers in the body.
it’s great to see such an original film given a proper budget and plenty of work put in. Schoenbrun is both earnest and unforgiving, providing no false pretense of unearned hope. instead, they double down on their talent of depicting dread and the unbearable weight of wanting.
2023 October 27
Evil Does Not Exist
screened at AFI Fest 2023sometimes a director uses their stylistic choices against you. not as a cheap trick to surprise, but to directly challenge you as a viewer. along with Killers of the Flower Moon, this is the year’s other shining example.
Hamaguchi’s deliberate dialogue—paced like a play but naturalistic in its content—creates true tension between the protective villagers and the outsiders thrust into helping a predatory company set up shop in town. the townspeople speak bluntly and with resolve; the talent agents fittingly speak like performers, on guard for their jobs’ duties. the film confronts us when we’re allowed a glimpse into their earnest selves: are they telling the truth? either to the people they attempt to convince or to themselves?
through Hana, the child already filled with knowledge and wonder about the beautiful place she gets to live in, we’re allowed visual suggestions of why the villagers would be so tied to this little place: vast woods with diverse foliage, wildlife, and views you can hardly look away from. the camera lingers frequently, and the intents coalesce in a moment as one of the two outsiders stands in the cold and stares off into a sunset, unmoving and undeterred by distractions.
then the hints of natural selection taking place in the woods, carefully placed through the film, come to the forefront. is it tragedy? is it part of life? the film dares you to attach a feeling to it—a justification, a rejection; something past the shock. like how Eiko Ishibashi’s agitated score keeps cutting out in a jolt throughout the film, one moment you’re reacting and contemplating, and the next you’re forced to examine your reasonings. then the brief credits roll and Hamaguchi reminds you of the thesis: Evil Does Not Exist. make of it what you will.
highlights
2025 June 9
Caché
a proto-TÁR. Daniel Auteuil’s Georges is, in a very funny choice, not even that successful in the grand scheme of things as the host of a public literary panel show, but despite his very sad and weary eyes practically watering with guilt, he refuses to budge an inch on assuming culpability for his sins and his family’s. as he continuously faces the mirror into the banality of his life via a stalker’s videotapes, he begins a campaign of his own war on “terror.”
the film itself mimics the oppressive digital sheen of his day job, fluorescent lights and all, just minus the interlacing, and weaves in between the stalker’s videotapes and the story’s point-of-view frequently until it feels like you’re watching a snuff film. later works like Inland Empire and The Zone of Interest perfect this digital surreality, an effect inducing something like motion sickness.
it’d also make a great double-feature with Beau Travail, another French work depicting the ease as to which its countrymen swallow their colonial past. in both, memory becomes a curse, and young men are left to be husks of collateral damage, instinctually rebelling at behaviors outside of their understanding but doomed to repeat the violent cycle. Majid’s son tells Georges that though his father had the chance of a good education taken away, he made sure to teach his son the proper rules of participation in society. but what does it mean to be Algerian in France after half a century of denial of the massacre of Algerians in its capital?
an interesting cut for a rewatch would be the film essentially sequenced in reverse. the perverseness to which Georges and both his parents brush aside their roles in destroying three generations of an Algerian family front-and-center; the still feed of a peaceful home in a quiet neighborhood, recontextualized.
2024 December 11
Queer
for a year i've been trying to figure out the ways to say "i love you" without the words. screenwriting teachers will always tell you to show, not tell. i've mostly disagreed with the notion; they're not mutually exclusive acts. it's not until you can paint the full picture in the language you have, conveying the chorus of feelings—even if you need to repeat yourself a thousand, a million times—until all that you utter becomes obsolete. expression becomes gesture—a nod, a smile, a gift—and via a psychic connection others have been terming "trust" all along.
Queer is a work that reminds me that for years, plural, i've been trying to figure out the ways to say "i love you" without the words. Lee, our protagonist not very far removed from William S. Burroughs, is a writer who can't seem to muster the words for affection. it's not that he's stepped beyond the threshold to communicate it beyond words (more on that later); instead, he's frozen in space and time, unable to escape the confines of his body and mind. Luca Guadagnino uses him as a vessel for that very contemporary yearning, almost defined by American repression, that thinks of telepathy before ever considering communication. Lee finds a man that feels just out of reach, engendering obsession enough until he can only muster the words "I want to talk to you... without speaking" to him before collapsing. when the man, Drew Starkey's Allerton, sticks around enough to return peeks of mutual fondness, Lee decides to ask him to come find the telepathic drug ayahuasca with him.
Guadagnino has assembled an all-star crew here, creating a true masterpiece of his own while fulfilling a lifelong pursuit of adapting Burroughs's novel. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's camera carries his signature quality here, showing Mexico City's sweltering, wet heat through glistening sweat and a claustrophobic color grade, like the powerful sun has faded a layer off the buildings and the people alike. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score achieves the same, synths running so warm they feel like the air in an unfathomably hot sauna. Stefano Baisi, notably a first-time production designer for film but a longtime Guadagnino collaborator, provides an atmosphere that straddles toy-like visuals with stunning architectural details, thanks to a combination of miniature sets and an entire life-size city block. it forces a dreamlike setting within studio confines, using the limitations of set-building to get into the psyche of Lee, a white, drug-addled writer on the run in Mexico with his parents' money.
Daniel Craig's Lee plays like a depiction of body horror in this framing, consistently vibrating with unease (and eventually, heroin withdrawals), with veins popping out of him like the centipede hanging around Allerton's neck. Burroughs's story of repressed queerness certainly is a tale of body horror—one thing more terrifying than losing control of your own body is needing to embody another. Lee isn't shy about being gay, but the real life Burroughs would frequently refuse the label despite his wide body of writing depicting his desires and relationships. that wrestling within himself materializes in his heroin addiction and his obsession with Allerton.
Guadagnino provides a stunning sequence in the middle of the film with a one-shot of Lee preparing and injecting heroin after Allerton distances himself from him. it's silent and tense as he painstakingly goes through the steps to prep his dose. once he can let the band around his arm go, New Order's all-timer "Leave Me Alone" starts playing—in its entirety. the camera simply hangs on Lee, who doesn't predictably display a wave of euphoria and the pleasure of forgetting. instead, Craig portrays clarity across Lee's face, as if his feelings are washing over him in full for the first time. in the song, Bernard Sumner's voice laments, "You get these words wrong / Every time / I just smile." the irony is palpable: a writer has been reduced to speechlessness once again.
the Luca Guadagnino-Justin Kuritzkes combo proves itself to be explosive here again after early 2024's Challengers. Kuritzkes seems unparalleled in American cinema in depicting the potency of desire, emphasizing its necessity and its pitfalls altogether. Guadagnino, of course, is this generation's ultimate pop filmmaker, able to distill the psychological complex that makes up desire into evocative images that flash across the screen like subliminal messages. so if Challengers was the film that leads to two friends embracing each other again in unbridled joy, Queer is the film that ends with an old man who can only dream of the time his lover held him close as he lay close to dying.
2024's other towering queer work, I Saw the TV Glow, runs parallel to many of the threads woven here. both are exemplary for being the rare pieces of modern queer media that aren't simply an unlocking of the door—they follow the path of AIDS-era and pre-AIDS queer art that exudes death in the repression forced onto their artists. there isn't a simple and happy ending in either film; instead, they provide a glimpse of what's to come if you let the longing rot you from the inside rather than accepting it. Jane Schoenbrun literally writes it out for you on-screen in TV Glow: "there is still time." in Queer, Lee eventually can only hold onto a memory of affection; yet, it's equally as profound that it's a memory and not a dream. in a socially liberal world where coming out with anything other than private acknowledgment has become embarrassing, these are true reminders of why coming out was such a rite of passage in the first place. maybe a grand gesture’s required to extract the self to the surface.
Lee's core memory of Allerton's affection is during his heroin withdrawals, where he feels an embrace as he shakes in pain and fear. not long after, Lee and Allerton find and experience the ayahuasca, and in turn, its promise of telepathy. Allerton admits to Lee with his mouth shut, "I'm not queer. I'm disembodied." Lee seems to finally find the words, but for himself rather than for the object of his desire. they dance together, colliding and merging into a ball of skin and bones pushing desperately outwards. after coming down and waking up the next morning, both have realized something about themselves but not for each other. they've missed each other passing by—two planets had aligned for a moment and only left an eclipse in their trail. without each other, looking up at the stars and seeing only emptiness, they go on denying the truth they've found for themselves.
2024 March 18
The Last Year of Darkness
originally published on SubstackI’ve never really liked screen depictions of club culture. Too often, they’re overwrought and hold little substance beyond visual flair. Not that eye candy holds no value—Blade’s blood rave is quintessential to “hell yeah” culture—but club and rave scenes sit parallel to sex scenes: important tools to show bonds between characters and their own states of mind, but frequently made artless and left lacking. The Last Year of Darkness is the first raver film I truly love.
A psuedo-documentary set in Chengdu, director Ben Mullinkosson pulls in and out of Funky Town, a club that sits at the ground floor of a five-over-one, vaguely hidden by the walls and noise of a massive subway station construction project. It’s the only way this small place in China’s fourth biggest city can host drag performances and queer parties with regularity, and it’s here that a drag queen, a classical musician struggling with depression, a Russian expat house DJ, and a resident DJ and promoter of a queer night regularly congregate.
We follow this cast of real people in and out of their daytime lives and within the walls of Funky Town, watching both unscripted reality and pre-scripted scenarios with no clear thread. Yihao the drag queen flirts with Gena the bicurious expat (and co-cinematographer) in the chillout lounge after Gena suggests they go on a date. Gena swipes on everyone in the vicinity opening dating apps across two phones, then resigns to downloading Grindr after no success. Kimberly the classical musician discusses self-growth and meditation with a friend in the smoking area, when another friend in the foreground starts feeling sick and desperately tries holding her vomit in; the camera steps back to show her throwing up into a small cup as the conversation continues in the background. Kimberly later reflects on her loneliness over text to her co-promoter for Funky Town’s queer party, Darkle, and in another sequence gives her friends, boyfriend, and the filmmakers a scare on a tall rooftop trying to get close to the edge. The camera’s presence is felt throughout the film but uses a subtle hand, allowing situations to happen naturally across long shots with fluid discussions. In these later sequences, where we’ve become quite close to these characters, it quickly feels wrong to be watching them and knowing so much of these real people.
At a post-screening Q&A moderated by Steven Yeun at Brain Dead Studios, Mullinkosson maintained he had no intent to make a film during his time in Chengdu—he was there in vacation mode on the basis of a fat check from a Meta commercial, looking forward to skating, eating, and partying. It was at Funky Town that Yihao planted the seed with a half-joke, asking Mullinkosson when he was going to make a film about him. Three years of filming and two years of post-production followed; all the while, the subway station got closer and closer to completion.
It’s Yihao who confronts Mullinkosson’s filmmaking by the end. After a drag performance, he paces in his dressing room distraught and confused. He doesn’t even like drag. He hates looking like a girl. He feels exhausted after every performance. He winces at the camera with a crack that it’s drag that gave him AIDS. Suddenly, he directly addresses Mullinkosson: “Ben, I don’t think your documentary can record me or anyone’s real life. I think real life is something you need to feel for yourself.” It’s the only time someone addresses the filmmaker by name.
There’s been a recent line of self-indictment in cinema in the past few years. In Jordan Peele’s Nope, the fictionalized descendents of a real Black man who starred in the first “motion picture” exploit our human instinct to peer at spectacle—until they heroically choose to look away. Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun examines how the moving picture distorts our memory, inherently telling stories even if the camera feels objective; a still camera pointed at the world is still a point of view. In the last year, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Glazer’s Zone of Interest set the towering examples as critiques of their own medium, asking what the point of telling stories about real atrocities is if we avoid our gaze in the mirror.
Much like these films, despite an acknowledgment of the moral quandary, The Last Year of Darkness is a completed film that’s been released. You have either watched it or have the option to watch it. Mullinkosson admits to finding the moment with Yihao in the edit again and agreeing with him. He also connects it to the sinking feeling he got as he filmed Kimberly on that rooftop where it seemed like she might fall: as Kimberly and her boyfriend argued about their relationship sitting near the edge, Mullinkosson stood behind the tripod and couldn’t parse what was said, thanks to an audio glitch. He intently left the camera alone anyway. In the film, after a long shot over a few minutes (the film’s most extended) of the couple against a wistful sunrise, he finally picks up the tripod and tries to move closer. Suddenly, Kimberly stands up and her boyfriend immediately grabs her. She maintains she just wants to see a better view, protesting at the group surrounding her who insist they have to leave. According to him, Mullinkosson almost ceased work on the film after that morning. It was Kimberly who looked back at the footage and convinced him to leave it in by telling him one thing: “Yihao is the drag queen. I’m the drama queen.” She and her boyfriend later agreed to go into the studio and ADR their rooftop argument for the scene’s inclusion in the film.
This is what I ultimately find lacking in today’s depictions of club culture, and more broadly of youth culture in general: real personality. Characters stand in for cultural tropes or archetypes, speaking for both everyone and no one at all. Here, the film has the boldness to present the lives of these real people as matters of fact. It doesn’t matter that there are some pre-scripted scenarios, or that we naturally put up our guards when a camera is placed in front of us—these little performances are the point.
Post-2010s, real-life dance culture has become too self-aware and too self-important. Rebelliousness is culturally tied to a greater good, like punk before dance, erasing specific cause and in great irony becoming for the sake of it. Dancing’s release becomes amorphous suggestion, not something naturally felt or seen in the body. In a search for intention in what’s, at its face, a culture of partying, this sort of empty storytelling has become a ritual of justification: parties advertise themselves as potentially life-changing places of congregation, DJs write essays for Instagram captions after particularly gratifying sets, and dancers everywhere are left searching for the next and bigger high.
What makes The Last Year of Darkness ultimately fascinating is its honest acknowledgment of its own flaws and its insistence on following through regardless. It reflects its subjects in that way: these kids have all found solace in the performance of dancing, deejaying, doing drag with each other; they also know they love drinking, doing balloons, sucking and fucking, and regretting some of it the next day. They sometimes feel crushingly lonely despite seeing each other as community. They may not be saviors to each other in the end but they know things will feel better for now as long as they show up. Yihao continues in his camera confrontation to Mullinkosson: “It’s not political. Nothing. It’s a natural state of being.” These subjects are real people with their own problems that don’t stand in service of a greater story. It’s maybe even morally questionable to see yourself in these people as a viewer.
It helps that Mullinkosson wants you to see these people as real people. They’re his friends. The moral question is something bigger to contribute to, not to remove yourself from. Here is his contribution.
This is the importance of the illusion of objectivity here: Mullinkosson and his editor Bobby Moser mostly present these people and their stories without fluff in the hopes that you connect with them without bias. We meet them like we meet random people in the club, stumbling upon connection. Their natural humor and curiosity is allowed to bleed through—Darkle gets a potentially all-timer last line in “I’m grateful I’ve sucked a lot of dicks in my life.”
Instead of a film that could easily get lost in the darkness of a club, they wisely use much of what they’ve shot outside Funky Town to provide a snapshot of a city. Funky Town eventually closes, after all—the subway station was always going to open, taking down the construction walls and silencing the morning noise.
Once we’ve gotten to know these people, Mullinkosson allows the documentary to become a film. The climax holds the sole needle-drop heart-tugger: Yihao, in the back of a van and presumably on the way to a show in full makeup, starts practicing his lip-syncing to a live recording of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” playing off his phone. We start hearing the music cue in full clarity, but instead of the original recording with a band, it remains Yihao’s choice of the live performance, Bowie simply singing over a piano. Over it, we revisit the cast of subjects: a struggling delivery boy skater from the start of the film meets up again with his friends and talks about embracing his humanity; Gena continues learning Mandarin; Kimberly happily dances with her boyfriend and ends up back on that beautiful rooftop, joyously embracing Darkle and eating with Gena; Yihao picks up his medicine in the daylight. We see Yihao in drag one last time as he enraptures a crowd, trawling the stage to Bowie’s soaring voice, then falling to his knees as the last notes of the piano fade. Yihao’s crowd erupts in applause as Bowie’s audience does too. After 80 minutes of assorted stories, a thesis pokes its head here: is there a life to be had on the margins? Yes, as there always has. There always will be life to live, more to celebrate, someone to love, anywhere you may be.
The film starts on the subway and ends on the subway, approaching one place and following its subjects to another.
The Last Year of Darkness is out now on MUBI.
2024 January 08
Perfect Days
a film that reminded me of my father. men from a certain age get engrossed in their habits, seeking to be moved by the things they choose to be moved by and not by what others choose for them.
Hirayama (Yakusho Kōji) is childless, content with his job as a public restroom cleaner, married to his weekly routines, and leaves his home smiling at the sky above him. he’s content to observe, smiling privately about the colors of the world, the dancing reflections of sunlight, the idiosyncrasies of others. when life inevitably interrupts his rhythm, he’s at a loss of what to do. a man of few words and a small collection of actions starts to show frustration, confusion, and fear in solitude. he becomes sleepless; he has no will to revisit sweet moments with his niece; he searches for peace via Peace-brand cigarettes.
in contrast, whenever he opens up to interact with others, a childlike wonder and innocence spills out. he happily cheers up his niece and a stranger alike; he haphazardly hugs his sister; he cries at his shortcomings. he smiles about the small bits of attention provided by women of all ages. he embraces a game of tic-tac-toe with a stranger he may never meet. without much trying, he brings joy to others. the idea of the pain they may bring him frequently stops him from searching for joy.
this is maybe one of the most beautiful digitally-shot movies i’ve ever laid eyes on. Wim Wenders brings his signature touch of color back to Tokyo, which may be the perfect city for him to film, for the first time in decades. using naturalistic lighting, he uses the sodium glow of the city, the glass reflections on sunny days, and the paradox of grow lights to paint his frames. the boxed-in 1.33:1 frame then makes for a narrow window in which to see the utter beauty of the world.
music remains strictly diegetic too—except for brief bits of sound design during dream sequences—which admittedly can feel a bit obvious but represent a universal truth. it ultimately fits with the themes of the old meeting the young, the conservative meeting the curious. (as an aside, it’s certainly refreshing to see a film about a relatively conservative old man approaching youth and the recursiveness of life with generous interest, not the usual reactionary grumpiness.)
as Wenders can also be, some ideas and interactions are a bit on the nose. but what makes them great are the simplicity and sincerity with which he brings them. very few words and small exchanges feel both universal and intimate, between just a couple of characters. it also allows for the small flashes of contradictions that come along to make your heart completely sink. one of the final moments exemplifies all of this in one extended, shattering sequence.
2024 January 30
How to Have Sex
i have a particular love for British coming-of-age stories because they frequently get it right: that coming of age is tragic, where the rite of passage is often feeling something so overwhelming and so new that you don’t yet have the language to even describe it. this gets it right.
this is Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut. during the Q&A at Vidiots (great place to view it by the way, thanks to the booming soundsystem), she mentioned she was a cinematographer by trade before tackling this film. it shows—wonderful close-ups that emphasize the subtleties of the performances and vibrant colors throughout.
Mia McKenna-Bruce is insanely good. it’s a great parallel to Cailee Spaeny’s performance in Priscilla, with everything unsaid and held in under the veneer cutting through the screen like a knife. as the movie goes on too, Tara seems to grow younger and smaller as her distress grows. it’s genuinely unnerving to watch, until one of the final sequences in a car where we watch her reflecting on what seems to be her entire life in real time—at which point it becomes simply heartbreaking. a girl not ready to be an adult being forced to cross the threshold anyway.
Walker also mentioned a particular stop of the press tour where she got to sit in on a class of young students who watched the film as part of a lesson on consent. two male students pushed back against the idea that anything wrong had happened in the film. but two other boys, otherwise appearing to be absolute lads, passionately disagreed, discussing what consent and care is supposed to be and what you’re supposed to look out for. it always helps for storytelling to provide that language for us in a revelatory way.
2023 December 25
20th Century Women
Mike Mills always makes novels as movies. their worlds feel so familiar—or you want them to be, where you hope these characters would be in your life. with that foundation, a coming-of-age story that collides with a reflection back on a life lived feels fleshed-out, intimate, but not grandiose. these characters aren’t discovering wide truths about life, even though they swear they are. they’re just living life and learning about each other.
but in a modern world, where the window of modernity is constantly shifting, can we truly learn about each other? the film starts off with a house full of characters at arms’ length from one another in what they know about and reveal to each other. Mills slowly frames their efforts to become closer and come into themselves as people around the books they read, the movies and television they watch, the speeches they hear—and as they keep reciting with confidence what others have observed before them, like Elle Fanning’s delightful Julie often does, they find they know less about each other than before. Lucas Jade Zumann’s Jamie flips through book after book to understand his mother Dorothea (Annette Bening at some of her best), but is shut down time after time.
in one scene, Jamie reads to his mother an essay from Zoe Moss on “The Aging Woman” and Dorothea looks to him, disheartened, asking him, “So… you think that’s me.” he responds no; she whispers, “I don’t need a book to know about me.” she’s right. she’s also stopped providing him with much of her own, let alone providing herself to much in life, asking the world to teach him instead. and perpetually, they yearn for each other’s knowing and understanding without the words in between.
at the very least, they’re trying. that’s the sweetest thing to watch a family do. the credits roll, and “As Time Goes By” (later adapted as the de facto theme song of Warner Bros.) plays over the names of those involved.
published
2024 October 10
Conclave
published in Los Angeles Review of the Moving Image, Issue 0A political satire of 21st century liberalism. A bunch of Democrats (or Starmerites, Macronites, Trudeau bros, or whichever of the global centrist fashion) and the descendants of fascismo italiano, all dressed in pristine red and white, vie for the papacy to set in stone what is to be Catholicism tomorrow. Too set on protecting the institution, a liberal faction of cardinals forget—or purposefully neglect—their duty to all of God’s children. The film could prove to be a defining ghostly impression of the Biden era: egoist do-gooders insisting on their progressive ideals, but too proud and traditionalist to make a real stand against bloodthirsty conservatives. If only it were more incisive; I’m not sure it’ll remain as memorable as it should.
A single, later moment stands out: the sequestered conclave, after several failed votes and rounds of gossip behind closed doors, can’t help but notice the sound of the outside—a white noise of wind, people gathered on the streets, and life upon holy ground. Like Biden in defense of Israel and Obama at war with terror, there’s no time to consider real life when lives are at stake. They resume their vote on a small piece of cardstock, of which is to be burned into a smokestack later on. Business as usual.
Caught by the Tides
screened at New York Film Festival 2024a visual collage about the loneliness that technology, hegemony, and labor without dignity inevitably brings. from the very beginning of the movie, Jia shows everyday, working people, real and fictionalized, watching their friends, neighbors, and community members sing to them and vice versa. in a nonfiction sequence, the owner of an empty, decrepit community center is shown next to a torn painting of Mao Zedong freestanding on the floor, speaking about the agreement he made to keep the place running for the laborers in the town. clearly, the promise had to be broken. then, throughout the film, Jia soundtracks the collection of B-roll, unused footage, and newly filmed sequences with a wide berth of music, from 2000s electronica to tongue-in-cheek folk songs—all impeccable choices that draw the exact emotion necessary for the moment.
this is the tragedy of not only China, but the world-at-large in the 21st century: everyone putting on a brave face for reasons lost in history. it’s a bold question—even if we had work to feel proud by, a nation to feel at home in, and someone to love, what then? does our labor still yield money to spend on things we can keep forever, homes we can stay in forever? do our nations protect our needs over the politically expedient? will the love we share with one another ever be free of the weight of laboring for survival?
spoilers ahead—Qiaoqiao and Bin eventually find each other again in the city they met, aged and much more tired. the real community center we see at the beginning is replaced by one with much more grandeur, now filled with the retired elderly ballroom dancing as a janitor disinfects the floors and voluminous columns with an industrial pesticide spray. a cartoonish sculpture depicting an astronaut orbiting a planet and launching away is still there, with the same unmoved and unfazed expression it always had.
Qiaoqiao and Bin are still working: Qiaoqiao is a cashier in a supermarket, and Bin, ever the hustler, is still trying to find a way to make more money. Bin now walks with a cane and a limp, but Qiaoqiao now runs, along with a swath of locals who need to stay healthy, present, and alive in a pandemic. they still find a moment to stop and watch the local performers sing about affection. when the flashing lights and lockstep of the local run club come washing behind them, Qiaoqiao disappears into the sea, the state, the never-ending journey. she shouts one last exclamation, like a general leading an army, before the cut to black. another brave face.
2024 October 5
Oh, Canada
screened at New York Film Festival 2024a tender depiction of approaching death with something to live for. Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a leftwing writer, documentarian, and scholar known for moral conviction who makes all the wrong choices in his own life. as his last testament, he agrees to be interviewed on camera for a Canadian documentary retrospective of his life. despising his former students who are producing it (emulating his own manipulative interviewing techniques, no less), he instead takes the opportunity to make it a confessional to his wife, who he undeniably loves, on the memories he’s buried away and a life he’s denied. his dry conviction makes us trust him as someone who’s finally willing to tell the truth at first, despite his scattered storytelling and frequent halts. once we see the wider view of his deteriorating health, it becomes clear we’re racking through the mind of a man seeing his life flash before his eyes.
Schrader’s films frequently deal with the suppressed sins of men; they never ask of us to find forgiveness in these characters but instead whether to trust their penances. after a life long lived in silence, is it on us to accept a dying man’s late penitence as real? even sufficient? when someone eventually tells Leonard Fife’s story for him, after he can’t any longer, what place does absolution have for him in the land of the living?
in one scene, a young Leonard Fife (Jacob Elordi) sits at the counter of a diner he used to frequent. the man taking his order remembers his usual—but Fife doesn’t, nor does he seem to remember much of the man. later, the older Fife sits at the same counter, looking towards the sunlight flowing through the opening door. a cast of characters in his life waltz, hop, and skip in, taking up the rest of the seats. he looks around. he’s abandoned them all. all of them have left him behind.
2024 April 11
Los Angeles Plays Itself
screened at This is Not a Fiction 2024the definitive film about Los Angeles. in the tradition of Mike Davis, Thom Andersen’s video essay starts from simple observation into a sprawling, almost oppressive diatribe on how Los Angeles is portrayed in film and what Los Angeles really is in real life. it’s designed to provoke reaction, in between Andersen’s jabs against Woody Allen and New Yorkers (“the cinematic chronicler of New York’s middle-brow middle class, the people who believe what they read in the New York Times”) and the real historical context he provides to give lifelong residents pause about their own city. its sprawling construction mirrors the city itself, rewarding those who give it a chance and stirring apathy in the skeptical.
its limitation is the shallow focus as a film about films. mostly preoccupied with the appearance of Los Angeles for most of its runtime, it relegates its real and disheartening portrayal of the city to its latter half and as punctuation to its chapters. Andersen’s analysis of Chinatown ends with the brief mention that in real life, the public voted to approve the Aqueduct’s bond measure themselves, despite a local paper exposing the inside dealings between wealthy businessmen two weeks before the vote. it’s just as abrupt with the context provided for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with an offhand debunking that automobile companies were the sole death knell of public transportation—the public had complained of “overcrowding, slowness, discriminatory pricing, and poor service” for decades already. the film then ends up running credits in the same vein, unceremoniously, after a blunt coda contextualizing independent Black filmmaking in the ‘70s.
Andersen refuses to linger on the realities of our city—he recognizes the inherent original sin of Los Angeles, as did Mike Davis, that we are a city that shouldn’t exist, built on desert land and swiping water from elsewhere; and yet, we’re the ones that continue to forget our history just as fast as we make it. we’re the ones who frequently vote on the side of power, disregarding the water wars and corruption of yesteryear. we’re the ones who complain about the unhoused on buses and trains, until board members who drive to work vote to cut service and raise fares. we’re the ones who allow the world to see us as another city entirely, in minds or on screens. take these as a given and the question isn’t of complicity anymore—the city’s here and we live in it. what will we make of it?
2024 April 7
Good One
screened at Los Angeles Festival of Movies 2024a quiet, strong parallel to this year’s How to Have Sex. instead of a ritual holiday in Greece full of incessant partying, a girl ends up on a backpacking trip in upstate New York with her dad and his longtime friend. she comes to empathize with her dad’s recently divorced friend and interrogates her dad’s second marriage with a younger woman. she deftly interfaces with the forest and its streams, its trails, its dirt, and its life. she walks out of it with a reminder that girlhood is so often lonely and womanhood is so often burdensome; it’s the line between and when it should be crossed that she can’t seem to figure out. as a small bit of respite, she pranks her dad by filling his backpack with rocks. hopefully he’s felt some of that weight.
2024 March 18
The Last Year of Darkness
originally published on SubstackI’ve never really liked screen depictions of club culture. Too often, they’re overwrought and hold little substance beyond visual flair. Not that eye candy holds no value—Blade’s blood rave is quintessential to “hell yeah” culture—but club and rave scenes sit parallel to sex scenes: important tools to show bonds between characters and their own states of mind, but frequently made artless and left lacking. The Last Year of Darkness is the first raver film I truly love.
A psuedo-documentary set in Chengdu, director Ben Mullinkosson pulls in and out of Funky Town, a club that sits at the ground floor of a five-over-one, vaguely hidden by the walls and noise of a massive subway station construction project. It’s the only way this small place in China’s fourth biggest city can host drag performances and queer parties with regularity, and it’s here that a drag queen, a classical musician struggling with depression, a Russian expat house DJ, and a resident DJ and promoter of a queer night regularly congregate.
We follow this cast of real people in and out of their daytime lives and within the walls of Funky Town, watching both unscripted reality and pre-scripted scenarios with no clear thread. Yihao the drag queen flirts with Gena the bicurious expat (and co-cinematographer) in the chillout lounge after Gena suggests they go on a date. Gena swipes on everyone in the vicinity opening dating apps across two phones, then resigns to downloading Grindr after no success. Kimberly the classical musician discusses self-growth and meditation with a friend in the smoking area, when another friend in the foreground starts feeling sick and desperately tries holding her vomit in; the camera steps back to show her throwing up into a small cup as the conversation continues in the background. Kimberly later reflects on her loneliness over text to her co-promoter for Funky Town’s queer party, Darkle, and in another sequence gives her friends, boyfriend, and the filmmakers a scare on a tall rooftop trying to get close to the edge. The camera’s presence is felt throughout the film but uses a subtle hand, allowing situations to happen naturally across long shots with fluid discussions. In these later sequences, where we’ve become quite close to these characters, it quickly feels wrong to be watching them and knowing so much of these real people.
At a post-screening Q&A moderated by Steven Yeun at Brain Dead Studios, Mullinkosson maintained he had no intent to make a film during his time in Chengdu—he was there in vacation mode on the basis of a fat check from a Meta commercial, looking forward to skating, eating, and partying. It was at Funky Town that Yihao planted the seed with a half-joke, asking Mullinkosson when he was going to make a film about him. Three years of filming and two years of post-production followed; all the while, the subway station got closer and closer to completion.
It’s Yihao who confronts Mullinkosson’s filmmaking by the end. After a drag performance, he paces in his dressing room distraught and confused. He doesn’t even like drag. He hates looking like a girl. He feels exhausted after every performance. He winces at the camera with a crack that it’s drag that gave him AIDS. Suddenly, he directly addresses Mullinkosson: “Ben, I don’t think your documentary can record me or anyone’s real life. I think real life is something you need to feel for yourself.” It’s the only time someone addresses the filmmaker by name.
There’s been a recent line of self-indictment in cinema in the past few years. In Jordan Peele’s Nope, the fictionalized descendents of a real Black man who starred in the first “motion picture” exploit our human instinct to peer at spectacle—until they heroically choose to look away. Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun examines how the moving picture distorts our memory, inherently telling stories even if the camera feels objective; a still camera pointed at the world is still a point of view. In the last year, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Glazer’s Zone of Interest set the towering examples as critiques of their own medium, asking what the point of telling stories about real atrocities is if we avoid our gaze in the mirror.
Much like these films, despite an acknowledgment of the moral quandary, The Last Year of Darkness is a completed film that’s been released. You have either watched it or have the option to watch it. Mullinkosson admits to finding the moment with Yihao in the edit again and agreeing with him. He also connects it to the sinking feeling he got as he filmed Kimberly on that rooftop where it seemed like she might fall: as Kimberly and her boyfriend argued about their relationship sitting near the edge, Mullinkosson stood behind the tripod and couldn’t parse what was said, thanks to an audio glitch. He intently left the camera alone anyway. In the film, after a long shot over a few minutes (the film’s most extended) of the couple against a wistful sunrise, he finally picks up the tripod and tries to move closer. Suddenly, Kimberly stands up and her boyfriend immediately grabs her. She maintains she just wants to see a better view, protesting at the group surrounding her who insist they have to leave. According to him, Mullinkosson almost ceased work on the film after that morning. It was Kimberly who looked back at the footage and convinced him to leave it in by telling him one thing: “Yihao is the drag queen. I’m the drama queen.” She and her boyfriend later agreed to go into the studio and ADR their rooftop argument for the scene’s inclusion in the film.
This is what I ultimately find lacking in today’s depictions of club culture, and more broadly of youth culture in general: real personality. Characters stand in for cultural tropes or archetypes, speaking for both everyone and no one at all. Here, the film has the boldness to present the lives of these real people as matters of fact. It doesn’t matter that there are some pre-scripted scenarios, or that we naturally put up our guards when a camera is placed in front of us—these little performances are the point.
Post-2010s, real-life dance culture has become too self-aware and too self-important. Rebelliousness is culturally tied to a greater good, like punk before dance, erasing specific cause and in great irony becoming for the sake of it. Dancing’s release becomes amorphous suggestion, not something naturally felt or seen in the body. In a search for intention in what’s, at its face, a culture of partying, this sort of empty storytelling has become a ritual of justification: parties advertise themselves as potentially life-changing places of congregation, DJs write essays for Instagram captions after particularly gratifying sets, and dancers everywhere are left searching for the next and bigger high.
What makes The Last Year of Darkness ultimately fascinating is its honest acknowledgment of its own flaws and its insistence on following through regardless. It reflects its subjects in that way: these kids have all found solace in the performance of dancing, deejaying, doing drag with each other; they also know they love drinking, doing balloons, sucking and fucking, and regretting some of it the next day. They sometimes feel crushingly lonely despite seeing each other as community. They may not be saviors to each other in the end but they know things will feel better for now as long as they show up. Yihao continues in his camera confrontation to Mullinkosson: “It’s not political. Nothing. It’s a natural state of being.” These subjects are real people with their own problems that don’t stand in service of a greater story. It’s maybe even morally questionable to see yourself in these people as a viewer.
It helps that Mullinkosson wants you to see these people as real people. They’re his friends. The moral question is something bigger to contribute to, not to remove yourself from. Here is his contribution.
This is the importance of the illusion of objectivity here: Mullinkosson and his editor Bobby Moser mostly present these people and their stories without fluff in the hopes that you connect with them without bias. We meet them like we meet random people in the club, stumbling upon connection. Their natural humor and curiosity is allowed to bleed through—Darkle gets a potentially all-timer last line in “I’m grateful I’ve sucked a lot of dicks in my life.”
Instead of a film that could easily get lost in the darkness of a club, they wisely use much of what they’ve shot outside Funky Town to provide a snapshot of a city. Funky Town eventually closes, after all—the subway station was always going to open, taking down the construction walls and silencing the morning noise.
Once we’ve gotten to know these people, Mullinkosson allows the documentary to become a film. The climax holds the sole needle-drop heart-tugger: Yihao, in the back of a van and presumably on the way to a show in full makeup, starts practicing his lip-syncing to a live recording of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” playing off his phone. We start hearing the music cue in full clarity, but instead of the original recording with a band, it remains Yihao’s choice of the live performance, Bowie simply singing over a piano. Over it, we revisit the cast of subjects: a struggling delivery boy skater from the start of the film meets up again with his friends and talks about embracing his humanity; Gena continues learning Mandarin; Kimberly happily dances with her boyfriend and ends up back on that beautiful rooftop, joyously embracing Darkle and eating with Gena; Yihao picks up his medicine in the daylight. We see Yihao in drag one last time as he enraptures a crowd, trawling the stage to Bowie’s soaring voice, then falling to his knees as the last notes of the piano fade. Yihao’s crowd erupts in applause as Bowie’s audience does too. After 80 minutes of assorted stories, a thesis pokes its head here: is there a life to be had on the margins? Yes, as there always has. There always will be life to live, more to celebrate, someone to love, anywhere you may be.
The film starts on the subway and ends on the subway, approaching one place and following its subjects to another.
The Last Year of Darkness is out now on MUBI.
2024 March 04
Dune: Part Two
originally published on LetterboxdSpoilers ahead!
a tale of jihad fueled on the basis of betrayal. potent to begin with, but falters with an unsure pacing in the latter half when Paul Atreides needs to become sure of himself as the Muad’Dib.
certainly thrilling to watch. watching on IMAX 70mm brings out a beautiful texture to the desert, despite being shot on digital to begin with and transferred to film. one of the rare modern movies that succeeds in excellent color work that brings the sort of awe that old films do. Villeneuve’s choices on which scenes are presented in full-frame are a bit confounding but plenty of them are wonderful to watch.
perhaps surprisingly relevant for the times—in one of the few strong moments in act three, a Fremen child, covered in blood and confused, walks out of a bombed holy site in search of safety. all the while, Paul Atreides and his mentor Gurney Halleck are away to collect their family’s nuclear weapon stockpile, hidden and intact. while Paul insists all this time he fears igniting the holy war in his visions, he has embraced war regardless, searching for revenge.
Chalamet and Ferguson are more than effective in portraying the menacing evil of their characters. it’s the script and direction that eventually lets them down, allowing no intimate moment of true transformation with Paul and Jessica, especially once Jessica becomes the Reverend Mother, after which she becomes one-note. we only see something truly substantive when we’re allowed to actually spend time with them one-on-one in the first half of the film. once the story beats take over, Paul’s ultimate embrace of his prophecy delivers strongly but isn’t as gutting as it should be. by extension, Chani’s heartbroken rebellion doesn’t land as well as it should for being at the heart of the movie (and isn’t helped by a flat performance from Zendaya).
in the end, Villeneuve seems to have lost track of whose lives are at stake here: the Fremen who call Arrakis home and have now given their lives to a bloodthirsty outsider. the holy war becomes the weakness of Part One once again, a general haunting vision of the future with no real substance.
2024 January 08
Perfect Days
originally published on Letterboxda film that reminded me of my father. men from a certain age get engrossed in their habits, seeking to be moved by the things they choose to be moved by and not by what others choose for them.
Hirayama (Yakusho Kōji) is childless, content with his job as a public restroom cleaner, married to his weekly routines, and leaves his home smiling at the sky above him. he’s content to observe, smiling privately about the colors of the world, the dancing reflections of sunlight, the idiosyncrasies of others. when life inevitably interrupts his rhythm, he’s at a loss of what to do. a man of few words and a small collection of actions starts to show frustration, confusion, and fear in solitude. he becomes sleepless; he has no will to revisit sweet moments with his niece; he searches for peace via Peace-brand cigarettes.
in contrast, whenever he opens up to interact with others, a childlike wonder and innocence spills out. he happily cheers up his niece and a stranger alike; he haphazardly hugs his sister; he cries at his shortcomings. he smiles about the small bits of attention provided by women of all ages. he embraces a game of tic-tac-toe with a stranger he may never meet. without much trying, he brings joy to others. the idea of the pain they may bring him frequently stops him from searching for joy.
this is maybe one of the most beautiful digitally-shot movies i’ve ever laid eyes on. Wim Wenders brings his signature touch of color back to Tokyo, which may be the perfect city for him to film, for the first time in decades. using naturalistic lighting, he uses the sodium glow of the city, the glass reflections on sunny days, and the paradox of grow lights to paint his frames. the boxed-in 1.33:1 frame then makes for a narrow window in which to see the utter beauty of the world.
music remains strictly diegetic too—except for brief bits of sound design during dream sequences—which admittedly can feel a bit obvious but represent a universal truth. it ultimately fits with the themes of the old meeting the young, the conservative meeting the curious. (as an aside, it’s certainly refreshing to see a film about a relatively conservative old man approaching youth and the recursiveness of life with generous interest, not the usual reactionary grumpiness.)
as Wenders can also be, some ideas and interactions are a bit on the nose. but what makes them great are the simplicity and sincerity with which he brings them. very few words and small exchanges feel both universal and intimate, between just a couple of characters. it also allows for the small flashes of contradictions that come along to make your heart completely sink. one of the final moments exemplifies all of this in one extended, shattering sequence.
2024 January 30
How to Have Sex
originally published on Letterboxdi have a particular love for British coming-of-age stories because they frequently get it right: that coming of age is tragic, where the rite of passage is often feeling something so overwhelming and so new that you don’t yet have the language to even describe it. this gets it right.
this is Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut. during the Q&A at Vidiots (great place to view it by the way, thanks to the booming soundsystem), she mentioned she was a cinematographer by trade before tackling this film. it shows—wonderful close-ups that emphasize the subtleties of the performances and vibrant colors throughout.
Mia McKenna-Bruce is insanely good. it’s a great parallel to Cailee Spaeny’s performance in Priscilla, with everything unsaid and held in under the veneer cutting through the screen like a knife. as the movie goes on too, Tara seems to grow younger and smaller as her distress grows. it’s genuinely unnerving to watch, until one of the final sequences in a car where we watch her reflecting on what seems to be her entire life in real time—at which point it becomes simply heartbreaking. a girl not ready to be an adult being forced to cross the threshold anyway.
Walker also mentioned a particular stop of the press tour where she got to sit in on a class of young students who watched the film as part of a lesson on consent. two male students pushed back against the idea that anything wrong had happened in the film. but two other boys, otherwise appearing to be absolute lads, passionately disagreed, discussing what consent and care is supposed to be and what you’re supposed to look out for. it always helps for storytelling to provide that language for us in a revelatory way.
2023 December 25
20th Century Women
originally published on LetterboxdMike Mills always makes novels as movies. their worlds feel so familiar—or you want them to be, where you hope these characters would be in your life. with that foundation, a coming-of-age story that collides with a reflection back on a life lived feels fleshed-out, intimate, but not grandiose. these characters aren’t discovering wide truths about life, even though they swear they are. they’re just living life and learning about each other.
but in a modern world, where the window of modernity is constantly shifting, can we truly learn about each other? the film starts off with a house full of characters at arms’ length from one another in what they know about and reveal to each other. Mills slowly frames their efforts to become closer and come into themselves as people around the books they read, the movies and television they watch, the speeches they hear—and as they keep reciting with confidence what others have observed before them, like Elle Fanning’s delightful Julie often does, they find they know less about each other than before. Lucas Jade Zumann’s Jamie flips through book after book to understand his mother Dorothea (Annette Bening at some of her best), but is shut down time after time.
in one scene, Jamie reads to his mother an essay from Zoe Moss on “The Aging Woman” and Dorothea looks to him, disheartened, asking him, “So… you think that’s me.” he responds no; she whispers, “I don’t need a book to know about me.” she’s right. she’s also stopped providing him with much of her own, let alone providing herself to much in life, asking the world to teach him instead. and perpetually, they yearn for each other’s knowing and understanding without the words in between.
at the very least, they’re trying. that’s the sweetest thing to watch a family do. the credits roll, and “As Time Goes By” (later adapted as the de facto theme song of Warner Bros.) plays over the names of those involved.
2023 October 27
Evil Does Not Exist
originally published on Letterboxdscreened at AFI Fest 2023
sometimes a director uses their stylistic choices against you. not as a cheap trick to surprise, but to directly challenge you as a viewer. along with Killers of the Flower Moon, this is the year’s other shining example.
Hamaguchi’s deliberate dialogue—paced like a play but naturalistic in its content—creates true tension between the protective villagers and the outsiders thrust into helping a predatory company set up shop in town. the townspeople speak bluntly and with resolve; the talent agents fittingly speak like performers, on guard for their jobs’ duties. the film confronts us when we’re allowed a glimpse into their earnest selves: are they telling the truth? either to the people they attempt to convince or to themselves?
through Hana, the child already filled with knowledge and wonder about the beautiful place she gets to live in, we’re allowed visual suggestions of why the villagers would be so tied to this little place: vast woods with diverse foliage, wildlife, and views you can hardly look away from. the camera lingers frequently, and the intents coalesce in a moment as one of the two outsiders stands in the cold and stares off into a sunset, unmoving and undeterred by distractions.
then the hints of natural selection taking place in the woods, carefully placed through the film, come to the forefront. is it tragedy? is it part of life? the film dares you to attach a feeling to it—a justification, a rejection; something past the shock. like how Eiko Ishibashi’s agitated score keeps cutting out in a jolt throughout the film, one moment you’re reacting and contemplating, and the next you’re forced to examine your reasonings. then the brief credits roll and Hamaguchi reminds you of the thesis: Evil Does Not Exist. make of it what you will.