Fear Itself: THE BEAST

Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is a nesting doll narrative full of resonances fit for an age of anxiety. He’s done this playfully serious structuring around free-floating modern fears before. His Nocturama is a tensely shaggy hangout with a group of disaffected young bombers hiding out in an abandoned mall after a violent protest—captured by capitalism even in rebellion. His Zombi Child is a boarding school drama wrapped around voodoo flashbacks that tie together into a double-knotted story of immigration and isolation—twice over lost to oneself even as one is drawn even deeper into oneself. The Beast is hooked into a modern sense of foreboding and unease manifesting as eerie stasis and passivity that makes dangers, real or imagined, no less possible. It’s wrapped in a bevy of sci-fi conceits. It’s 2044. Some undefined apocalypse has left the streets of Paris largely abandoned, with stray animals wandering about, and passerby wearing clear air-filtering masks. Léa Seydoux stars as a woman who submits a request for promotion to her Artificial Intelligence overlord (Xavier Dolan’s voice) and is told she must undergo an emotional purging. Hooked up to a pseudo-spiritual machine—a vat of goo and wires that’s one part Minority Report and one part Cronenberg—that’ll prompt her to relive past lives and purge her centuries acquiring human softness.

As it begins, the movie quickly settles into a romantic tragedy straight out of Henry James. It’s a flooded Paris of 1910 where a the owner of a doll factory sneaks up to the edge of an affair with a dashing stranger (George MacKay) she meets at an art show. From the near-future interludes to the birth of Modernism—she sees avant garde paintings and is overseeing her product’s transition from porcelain to plastic—she’s stuck in a period of technological and emotional transition. (It also cues ideas about the creation of art as reflection and population of interior spaces, matched in time with an embodied A.I. “doll” played with impressive impassivity by Saint Omer's Guslagie Malanda.) Seydoux navigates serenely yet quiveringly across times with a slippery double role, playing the subterranean romantic yearnings and curiosities as her stuffed-shirt husband drifts away in favor of a pretty and serious flirt. The movie kicks into even higher tension in its second half as the double role adds a third. Now we’re in 2014 Los Angeles where the period piece stylings are rawer within our modern memory. This section deals with the burbling impending violence of MacKay as a vlogging incel stalker (a sadly familiar type) while Seydoux is now an aspiring actress disaffectedly ensorcelled in the labyrinthine gig economy of bad commercials and empty housesitting, only freed from routine by lonely websites, lonelier pills, and somehow loneliest crowded nightclubs. If the Jamesian story is about the pain of denial and the dangerous sparks of new possible connection, the Hollywood one is about the creeping dangers of the lack of connection.

In each time period, Seydoux and MacKay are on a collision course, sometimes romantic, but always fraught with contemporaneous fears and foibles. What form does society give to its unanswerable conflicts, its grinding prejudices and self-fulfilling prophecies? What, after all, is the beast? (A key line has to be an advertising director on a green screen set asking his actress: “Can you be scared of something that isn’t there?”) Here are two parallel plots that play out back to back, with the futurist frame dance between. Their implications and tensions and uncertainties circle, echo, and collapse. Bonello plays each genre almost entirely straight, but their juxtapositions accumulate and resonate. At times fleeting glitches filter in, lingering oddness even before Josée Deshaies’ cool digital frames might suddenly be pixellating, or skipping, or repeating, but just rarely enough to surprise each time. (Pity anyone seeing it streaming instead of theatrically or on a disc for the doubt they’ll have about whether these intentional choices are wi-fi troubles.) Here, in triplicate, is a woman and a man on a doomed loop of trauma reincarnated. Here, human fears feed human foibles and the inevitable dooms of our own, or others’, making. All one can do is scream as old anxieties are reborn anew and expressed afresh—familiar faces in new forms, every beginning fraught with the knowledge that this, too, shall end.

Point and Shoot: CIVIL WAR

A tense provocation, writer-director Alex Garland’s Civil War has sequences of frightening violence wherein the logic of action movies is turned inside out to make us root for the shooting to stop. Our lead characters are photojournalists courageously and recklessly charging after the action. The bullets fly and we flinch with them as the action charges ahead. We see bloodshed as intimate, personal—bodies hanging in an abandoned car wash, piled in mass graves behind farm houses, pulled apart by machine guns. The movie imagines a near-future America devolved into sectarian warfare, rebel troops amassing outside Washington to take on a fascistic president who has, in his third term, disbanded the FBI and shoots protestors. This isn’t the queasy-making romance of a lost cause, or a wishful thinking, that’s been burbling up with Civil War nostalgia for 150 years. If the United States were actually to fall into an all-out second Civil War it would look like this—balkanized, radicalized, individuated, dangerous and unpredictable. It’d be three backwoods guys with AR-15s guarding their local gas station. It’d be a random militia holed up trying to overpower and execute soldiers. It’d be insurgents storming the capitol.

Garland doesn’t worry overmuch about how we get there. The movie starts years into the conflict as we get the sense the war is drawing close to a climactic point of desperation. Dialogue has some free-floating allusions to past massacres, controversies, and realignments. We get the gist. The screenplay never announces the policy positions of its combatants, although a reasonably intelligent viewer could pin down the overarching particulars of the state of play. Instead, it stirs up its political intensity with immediacy of intent. It communicates clearly and directly, and with great force, ideas about the hell war puts all people through, and of the complicated natures of the specific people who make their mission the witnessing of it. This is a bleak vision of how some people are just waiting for an excuse to revel in chaos, and the movie plays it off with a throughly muddled sense of rooting interests. Of course we want our main characters to survive; that’s movie logic. But by stripping out actual specific policy or parties, we see only the tension between chaos and order. Stopping for speeches or debates that lay out the stakes might serve to soften the walloping dread and loud gunfire of sectarian violence and its rippling collateral damage. It’s a portrait of society in free fall, a little nervous about how plausible it could be.

Garland has often been a filmmaker interested in the fragility of the human body. Look at the time-warping drugs of Dredd or zombified rage that can infect from merely a drop in 28 Days Later. Or see the blurry lines between man and nature in the haunting alien landscapes of Annihilation and between man and machine in Ex Machina. With Civil War, Garland takes that investment in how fragile people are and pushes further into how that fragility is inextricable form the systems and institutions we build. It finds that larger perspective in sticking small and personal amidst the national ramifications. It’s confined to a picture of photographers dutifully witnessing while getting a charge out of following along—and it makes them vulnerable, too. Some (Kirsten Dunst) are disillusioned about the value of their job; her slow bleeding-out of conviction is a marvelously controlled and subtle performance. Others (Wagner Moura) gets a sick thrill out of the danger. Still others (Stephen McKinley Henderson) are tired veterans of the business, while a young newbie (Cailee Spaeny) gets a shock to her system as she enters the fray. All of them are shaken and stretched, with their fragility drawn out to the movie’s sick, cold conclusion that’s as inevitable as its central dialectic: guns and cameras are both point and shoot. The power of a still image is juxtaposed with the moving image—weaponizing a grainy freeze frame silence in the flow of clinical digital filmmaking to feel the etching of history and the foreshortening of context in each stuck frame—as it creates a tension between its creation and the chaos that breeds it. We’re left with the empty pit-of-the-stomach worry, and the wonder at what’s more powerful than fragile people rushing into history with a gun and a camera shooting in tandem—revolution written with or driven by a photo op.

Master of Nun: IMMACULATE and THE FIRST OMEN

Immaculate is all about Sydney Sweeney. This Euphoria and White Lotus highlight has taken a whirlwind tour of genres on her way to movie-stardom in the last couple years, starring in the compelling true-crime transcript-play Reality, the amiably junky B-level superhero flop Madame Web, the charming sleeper-hit rom-com Anyone But You. She’s turning into something of a reliable leading lady. Now here she’s a novice nun from Detroit assigned to small-town Italy. And then she turns up pregnant—an immaculate conception whispered about in hushed tones. If you guess there’s some kind of gnarly Catholic conspiracy underway, with she the unwilling victim, you’d be right on the mark. This puts the entire film’s stress on her increasingly frightened face, framed in tight habits and tighter close-ups as she escalates a freak-out. It’s a neat little horror package that manipulates its religious iconography with sick twists and subtle jabs until it all spills out in quick splatters and some nasty, if conspicuously out-of-frame, implications. Sweeney holds the screen in every scene, stretching her big eyes and quivering lips, teasing out a fine compliment of hushed confusion, squeamish doubt, and burgeoning realizations. One believes she’s slowly awakening to the depths of danger in which she finds herself. Director Michael Mohan proves a steady genre hand on the reins, finding the slippery sinister angles, burbling choral echoes, and artful arrangements of blood and violence to keep the convent creepy. His previously collaboration with Sweeney was a similarly small-scale horror effort The Voyeurs, which similarly resuscitated an older mode—in that case the sexy thriller—with some red-blooded earnestness. It’s fun to see Mohan and Sweeney really going for it with some nunsploitation, and, though it misses opportunities to make the other characters pop more memorably or really ramp up the sleaze, they once again turn up some modestly enjoyable echoes of old thrills.

Even better is The First Omen. This is a strong work of horror iconography attuned to genuinely gripping and upsetting consequences. It takes the expected trajectory of a franchise play and uses its familiar trappings to actually dig down deep into the creepiest and most unsettling corners of its premise. It also might be one of the most Christian movies in recent memory, especially if you count how many times it made a squeamish audience member in my screening murmur, “Oh, Jesus.” This much-belated prequel to 1976’s blockbuster creepy-kid, childhood-of-an-antichrist horror picture takes its ideas as seriously as its genre, and therefore earns every shivery image. (Once you see from where a ghostly hand emerges, you won’t soon forget it.) Its images aren’t just free-floating fear, but add up to a movie awash in the implications of a young woman losing control over her mind and body, with many hands wanting to interfere in her reproductive potential for devilish purposes. 

Director Arkasha Stevenson’s feature debut creates a palpably paranoid setting, the austere Gothic architecture and winding cobblestone streets of Old World seriousness jangling with a period-appropriate flurry of student protestors and conspiratorial heretics and Catholic whistleblowers and nervy novitiates and troubled teens and cute Italian paramours and prickly priests. She pushes the camera into blocking and art direction posed with a casual sense of shivering suspense, the characters seemingly drawn inexorably into the terrible fates that await them. There’s a wooziness to the film, a nightmarish quality that sleepwalks into darkness from its extreme slow-motion opening violence to its eruptive finale. Between is pure, stylish unease. And that’s a hazy contrast infecting an otherwise precise eye for the procedures and rituals of the time and place—and then the fiery and bloody effluvia that spouts off in the most unsettling moments. It has a handsome, filmic look that makes the shadows stormy with danger, and the close-ups freckled with slow-dawning emotional confusions. The innocent nun at the center is Nell Tiger Free, whose severe stare betrays brewing doubts even as she draws closer to what she thinks is a kind of spiritual salvation, all-too-slowly aware of the hellish designs these evil clergy have in store. Though our knowledge of the franchise might keep us ahead of her, Free’s steady embodiment of her character’s emotional and spiritual state is so compelling, and the ensemble of expert character actors around her (Sonia Braga, Ralph Ineson, Bill Nighy) so commanding, that the inevitable somehow feels surprising anyway. If only all prequels played so vivid and pointed and involving.

Crash of the Titans: GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE

Each installment in the ongoing Hollywood Godzilla series is a little worse than the one before it. Ten years on, Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla looks all the better for its thundering portent and heavy sense of scale. He shoots with mystery and mass, letting the real terror of an enormous creature seep through each frame of its monster movie paces. Its direct sequel, Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, is a little less realistic in its dimensions, but the overstuffed apocalyptic mood gives a fine pulp jolt to its escalating cast of kaiju overshadowing an efficient cast of scientists and soldiers. Both are about families caught in the wake of these creatures’ paths, which gives just enough emotionality to hang on the shattering potential of such a monster mash. That’s the main inspiration that keeps writer-director Adam Wingard’s contributions connected—aside from the set dressing and proper nouns that knit the cinematic universe together—to the character strengths of its predecessors. Though finding some sentimentally in King Kong expert Rebecca Hall adopting an adorable deaf Skull Island orphan (Kaylee Hottle), his Godzilla v. Kong was generally cartoony. It’s drifting toward the outsized and preposterous, but enough of a colorful smash-em-up to be diverting. Give me a giant ape and a giant lizard fighting a giant robot and fill it up with a neon sci-fi light show and I’m reasonably satisfied, I guess. 

Wingard leans into the dumb cartoon qualities even further for the new Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. We’ve lost whatever felt even tangentially real or threatening in the earlier entries. Now it’s CG animation for long stretches as Kong meanders through the Hollow Earth fighting big wolves and munching on enormous worms, and Godzilla plays the burly kaiju bouncer for the world’s major cities, cliff jumping off Gibraltar or curling up in the Coliseum. Hall and Hottle return to wander down in search of a distress call from deeper into the Earth’s core—taking comic relief conspiracy theorist Brian Tyree Henry and swaggering veterinarian Dan Stevens for the ride. And then, once everyone’s assembled amid the special effects of a Hollow Earth within the Hollow Earth, a rumbling wrestling tag-team erupts when an evil big monkey riding an evil big lizard take on our eponymous monsters. It’s basically an effects reel staged with reverse shots of actors reacting. That the movie is essentially passable nonetheless says something about the enduring appeal of these beasties. When Kong picks up a Mini Kong and uses it as a club to smash other monster apes, there’s a certain lizard-brained appeal. Ditto the appearances of Godzilla collecting radioactive power-ups to fuel his big finale fight. But there’s no suspense or intrigue or awe—or any believable thin genre characterization to care about—left when it’s all pitched at the most extremely broad Saturday Morning level, with nothing to provide us but cartoons collapsing through skyscrapers.

The Voracious Filmgoer's Top Ten Films of 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Asteroid City
2. Killers of the Flower Moon
3. Oppenheimer
4. The Holdovers
5. A Thousand and One
6. The Boy and the Heron
7. Past Lives
8. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
9. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
10. Magic Mike’s Last Dance

Honorable Mentions:
Afire; All of Us Strangers; Anatomy of a Fall; Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret; Barbie; Blackberry; The Creator; Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3; The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes; The Iron Claw; The Killer; Knock at the Cabin; May December; Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros; Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One; Napoleon; Our Body; Poor Things; Renaissance; Showing Up; Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour; The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (and Three More); You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah; The Zone of Interest

Other Bests of 2023

Other Bests of 2023

Best Cinematography (Film):
Asteroid City
The Iron Claw
Killers of the Flower Moon
Oppenheimer
Poor Things

Best Cinematography (Digital):
The Creator
The Holdovers
Magic Mike’s Last Dance
May December
John Wick Chapter 4

Best Sound:
John Wick Chapter 4
Killers of the Flower Moon
Oppenheimer
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The Zone of Interest

Best Stunts:
The Iron Claw
John Wick Chapter 4
The Killer
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One
Napoleon

Best Costumes:
Asteroid City
Barbie
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
Killers of the Flower Moon
Poor Things

Best Hair and Makeup:
Asteroid City
Barbie
Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3
Killers of the Flower Moon
Poor Things

Best Production Design:
Asteroid City
Barbie
Killers of the Flower Moon
Oppenheimer
Poor Things

Best Effects:
Asteroid City
Barbie
The Creator
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One
Oppenheimer

Best Original Song:
“Camp Isn’t Home” — Theater Camp
“Dear Alien (Who Art in Heaven)” — Asteroid City
“I’m Just Ken” — Barbie
“Live That Way Forever” — The Iron Claw

Best Score:
Asteroid City
Knock at the Cabin
Oppenheimer
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Best Editing:
Asteroid City
The Holdovers
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Killers of the Flower Moon
Oppenheimer

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Killers of the Flower Moon
Oppenheimer
The Zone of Interest

Best Original Screenplay:
Asteroid City
The Holdovers
May December
Past Lives
A Thousand and One

Best Non-English Language Film:
Afire
Anatomy of a Fall
The Boy and the Heron
Godzilla Minus One
Our Body

Best Documentary:
Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros
Our Body
Renaissance
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

Best Animated Feature:
The Boy and the Heron
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
Elemental
Robot Dreams
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Best Supporting Actor:
Dave Bautista — Knock at the Cabin
William Catlett — A Thousand and One
Robert De Niro — Killers of the Flower Moon
Robert Downey, Jr — Oppenheimer
Ryan Gosling — Barbie

Best Supporting Actress:
Emily Blunt — Oppenheimer
Hong Chau — Showing Up
Scarlett Johansson — Asteroid City
Rachel McAdams — Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret
Da’Vine Joy Randolph — The Holdovers

Best Actor:
Leonardo DiCaprio — Killers of the Flower Moon
Paul Giamatti — The Holdovers
Cillian Murphy — Oppenheimer
Joaquin Phoenix — Napoleon
Jason Schwartzman — Asteroid City

Best Actress:
Lily Gladstone — Killers of the Flower Moon
Margot Robbie — Barbie
Emma Stone — Poor Things
Teyana Taylor — A Thousand and One
Michelle Williams — Showing Up

Best Director:
Wes Anderson — Asteroid City
Christopher Nolan — Oppenheimer
Alexander Payne — The Holdovers
A.V. Rockwell — A Thousand and One
Martin Scorsese — Killers of the Flower Moon

Borne Back Ceaselessly: TENET (70mm Re-Release)

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is forever a present-tense movie where its now meets the past. Talk about a temporal pincer movement. Here I am, in late February 2024, having just stumbled out of an IMAX theater where I saw Tenet on 70mm in its limited re-release. I’d seen the movie only once before, when it was freshly on 4K Blu-ray in late December 2020. But I feel like I’ve now really seen it for the first time. For a movie about heists moving forwards and backwards in time simultaneously, that seems fitting.

After my initial viewing I wrote: In Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, backwards run sequences until the mind reels. It’s a time travel thriller, but not like you’re thinking. It’s about a magic box that can reverse the chronology of an item—or a person. Reverse entropy, they say. Inversion. The plot concerns a secret agent (John David Washington) recruited to stop a snarling Russian arms dealer (Kenneth Branagh) from reversing the flow of time for the entire universe. That’d destroy everything, one reluctant ally (Elizabeth Debicki) is told simply and slowly. She considers it for a moment and solemnly intones: “including my son.” 

Yeah, that line’s still a clunker. But on a second viewing—and one on such a massive scale—it gets swallowed up in the massive machinery of the thing. I almost felt it as a small pang of the personal in the middle of the impersonal grinding inevitabilities of societal collapse. 

When first reacting to Tenet I wrote that it’s “simultaneously one of Nolan’s most logistically jaw-dropping and emotionally flimsiest.” I don’t agree with my past self’s math there. If anything the logistically jaw-dropping elements are even more apparent, stark and enveloping. Here it’s…all go-go-go M.C. Escher timeline. Cause and effect are ruptured in boggling ways. There are stunts and combat and strategizing, with some elements of the action behaving unusually: a bullet hole filling up as the ordnance flies back into the barrel; tumbling fisticuffs that cartwheel with unnatural grace as one combatant flies backwards when they should be ahead; a car zipping the wrong way through traffic after rolling back over from a crash, windows reconstructing as tires squeal in reverse. 

This time, rather than straining against what I once took as the flimsy strains of emotionality within, I now found myself drug into the undertow of the sensation of all that dazzling craftsmanship and felt the animating melancholy under that surface chill. And the cool logic of its time travel convolutions are all the more compelling for the intuitive logic of it all. Why did I, along with the common critical refrain of late 2020, insist that the movie is convoluted or confusing? Maybe it just takes a second look to smooth out those wrinkles. The movie is nothing but logical, laid out on clear time travel tracks that need just a bit of mental energy to sort out—a bit of story problem graphing in the margins of your mind as the car chases and shoot outs rattle your senses. 

…there are agents rappelling up a building or spinning a sailboat or crashing a plane or maneuvering through a series or airtight vaults or hanging off the side of a moving firetruck to hop between cars. That’s all thrilling stuff. 

And within that logic, there’s that buried emotional core, contained in a glimpse of a future you’s freedom leaping into the ocean, or the hint of a beautiful friendship that may be ending with a violent abrupt foreshortening in the present, but the future will fill in the past. I found myself curiously moved by the movie’s consequences—rending cause and effect with regret, only to be joined again my the insistence of the montage, and its characters’ motivations. 

I came away from a first viewing with sheer admiration for its construction, its impressive scope, its grounding sense of tactile reality even as the effects slip sense away. This time, the sense was present. It’s perfect movie sense, one image and sound after the next building a persuasive fantasy vision of a twilight world, where time’s running out, and where the future grows dim but for the valiant efforts of those who hold out that dim distant flicker of hope. It’s strikingly photographed globetrotting, with the hero and his partner in spies (Robert Pattinson) dashing and capable in slick suits and big action beats. The pounding score and booming bass has a pavlovian effect—it’s exciting, and kicks up the energy of seeing a great Christopher Nolan movie… The me of 2020, with all the sociopolitical anxieties that assumes, and the lonely, isolated, individual TV viewing it implies, doubted it was a great Nolan film. The 2024 me, back in the world, in a crowded theater, before an enormous screen, and surrounded by massive sound, is sure it actually is. I felt like I met myself in the middle distance between then and now, on my way back to realize it then.