35 Shots of Rum (2008)

35 rhums, France / Germany, 100 minutes

Director: Claire Denis

Writers: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau

Photography: Agnes Godard

Music: Tindersticks

Editor: Guy Lecorne

Cast: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue, Gregoire Colin, Julieth Mars Toussaint, Adele Ado, Jean-Christophe Folly

I’ve seen a handful or so of pictures by director and cowriter Claire Denis and have to admit they often leave me mystified. That is notably the case with Beau Travail, a much-acclaimed picture I see turning up on all kinds of best-ever lists, though it left me cold. For all its allusive beauty it is ultimately a French Foreign Legion picture with most of the cliches intact, just more gritty and beautiful. Trouble Every Day was an oddly unpleasant vampire show that did not live up to advance billing. On the other hand, I love White Material and its examination of postcolonial Africa, playing it like tense horror. 35 Shots of Rum, by contrast to all the foregoing (she gets around), is set in suburban Paris and far more domestic and meditative, observing bonds of a fractured family and work group and apartment building community as things inevitably shift and change. Time, life, all that.

Lionel (Alex Descas) is a widower in his 50s who works the commuter trains, riding the complexities of the rail lines which we see in hypnotic shots from his view, tangling and disentangling. He lives with his grown daughter, Josephine (Mati Diop), who has an advanced degree in anthropology. It’s unclear when or how her mother, his wife, died but it feels like it’s many years in the past. They still feel her loss, as a road trip to visit her grave late in the picture shows. Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) is a neighbor who drives a cab for a living. She and Lionel have a history and she still has feelings for him, and motherly feelings for Josephine too. Tensions exist between them, but a good deal of sincere affection too. Rounding out the main four in 35 Shots is the brooding, somewhat standoffish and self-mysterious young man Noe (Gregoire Colin), who also lives in the building.

The Great Beauty (2013)

La grande bellezza, Italy / France, 141 minutes

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Writers: Paulo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello

Photography: Luca Bigazzi

Music: Lele Marchitelli

Editor: Cristiano Travaglioli

Cast: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, Giovanna Vignola, Galatea Ranzi, Sonia Gessner, Anna Della Rosa, Luca Marinelli, Giusi Merli, Roberto Herlitzka

Purely by coincidence I was looking at Italian director and cowriter Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte a week or two before looking at Italian director and cowriter Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. The Great Beauty came out over 50 years later but I thought I saw a good deal of basic similarities as I was watching: a main character who is an Italian novelist wandering his city (Rome or Milan), an unfocused rolling gait to events, music, parties, carousing, philosophizing, evading. Wikipedia affirms critics have seen homages in The Great Beauty to La Notte, as well as to Italian director Federico Fellini’s Roma and 8½ and Italian director Ettore Scola’s The Terrace and Splendor.

I still need to catch up on the Scolas myself but certainly can see The Great Beauty locating itself within Italian cinematic traditions. It admirably lives up to them too. I don’t know Sorrentino beyond this one—his IMDb known-fors also include This Must Be the Place (2011), Youth (2015), and The Hand of God (2021)—and I only came to this one recently. The Great Beauty focuses on the peregrinations about his home city of Rome that Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) makes as he turns 65. Jep published a novel when he was 25, highly regarded and widely read and known, but has not written another one since. He is able to live on its proceeds and also works now as a culture journalist at an arts magazine published and edited by a charismatic dwarf, Dadina (Giovanna Vignola). He is pursued constantly by people who love his novel and want to know why he never wrote another, to which he has shifting answers. He has reached an age when it is natural to look back and reflect. Not that that is what he is doing.

Millennium Mambo (2001)

Qian xi man bo, Taiwan / France, 106 minutes

Director: Hsiao-Hsien Hou

Writer: T'ien-wen Chu

Photography: Ping Bin Lee

Music: Yoshihiro Hanno, Kai-yu Huang, Giong Lim

Editors: Ju-kuan Hsiao, Ching-Sung Liao

Cast: Shu Qi, Chun-hao Tuan, Jack Kao, Jun Takeuchi, Ko Takeuchi, Doze Niu, Pauline Chan, Rio Peng

This confusing but beautiful and often striking picture is the first I’ve seen by Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou. My points to follow may thus (actually, as always) say more about me than the movie or any of its principals. It was released in 2001, and it is set in 2001 (perhaps to avoid arguments about which millennium the year 2000 belongs to), but the premise is that the events are memories of the main character, Vicky (Shu Qi), 10 years later, in 2011. It dwells in the Taipei rave scene, rife with drugs and lowlifes, crime, bad relationships. Vicky and her boyfriend, the overbearingly abusive Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan), live together in a dump. They do drugs and try to get by. She works as a hostess in a popular night spot. They circle one another warily. They are never at ease together.

In a way it did not surprise me to learn that Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai were first offered the roles. Millennium Mambo reminded me a lot of the pictures of Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express) and even more of Hou’s countrymen Edward Yang (Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day) and Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?). The camera is liquid, often in motion, images may be out of focus, amounting only to blotches of color, though often vivid and always expressive. The pace is slow, studied, deliberate. Hao-Hao is some kind of DJ, and EDM is a pulsing constant, even in the background as if from the next apartment. In Millennium Mambo—in many of these pictures—the style is in direct opposition to the terms of the narrative, which is explicitly, even wantonly, focused on squalor. As cognitive dissonance it is exquisite.

Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019)

[2020 review here]

USA / UK / China, 161 minutes

Director/writer: Quentin Tarantino

Photography: Robert Richardson

Music: Quentin Tarantino’s streaming playlists

Editor: Fred Raskin

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Margaret Qualley, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Mike Moh, Al Pacino, Lena Dunham, Sydney Sweeney, Kurt Russell, Julia Butters, Rafal Zawierucha, Damian Lewis, Emile Hirsch

I admit I was hard on Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood a few years ago, director and writer Quentin Tarantino’s last feature to date. That’s now going on seven years, his longest gap between features. Previously it was the six years between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. He turned 60 in 2023 and the drift seems to be that he’s thinking of hanging it up, with possibly one more big one to go. Something about movie critics, the way I’ve heard it. Meanwhile, my write-up did nothing to warn people away. I have since seen Hollywood as high as #2 (after Pulp Fiction) on ranked lists of Tarantino’s pictures. For me, with perspective, the last picture he made that was close to exceeding its flaws was Death Proof. Everything from Inglourious Basterds on has represented increasingly diminishing rewards.

I suspect these are unpopular opinions, but I do think Death Proof is underrated. And that Hollywood is one of his worst, which was unfortunately confirmed for me with a recent second look. It’s better than I gave it credit for in 2020, sure—I was notably in a bad mood then for some reason—but that’s not saying much. It belongs with the second-half messes of Basterds, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight, as good, admittedly, as some of their parts can be. Hollywood wallows in a place familiar to Tarantino buffs, nostalgia for the bad movies pumped out then, circa 1969, which showed at B-movie palaces, drive-in theaters, and on TV. Hollywood is so full of clips it sometimes feels like we’re sitting around watching TV and mocking it in some dimly lit stoned haze with Tarantino himself.

Roma (2018)

Mexico / USA, 135 minutes

Director/writer/photography: Alfonso Cuarón

Editors: Alfonso Cuarón, Adam Gough

Cast: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Jorge Antonio Guerrero, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta, Marco Graf, Veronica Garcia, Fernando Grediaga

Alfonso Cuarón takes a page from the playbook of Steven Soderbergh (and a few others), making his award-winning, much-celebrated picture for Netflix practically a one-man-band show, directing, writing, shooting, and editing this period piece set in early 1970s Mexico City. It starts slow, it’s a little long, and it can teeter dangerously close to pretentious, with a black & white color scheme and diegetic soundtrack (available commercially) that is composed entirely of music playing in the background on radios and TVs or at the movies. The parts of Roma that feel most obviously autobiographical are about a family plunged into media: radios, TVs, movies, full of audio strains and visual clips. In fact, Cuarón makes the most out of incidentals like what’s playing on the radio. My favorites are the jets floating complacently through the clouds of some of these scenes, aircraft noise and all. Some must have been shot near an airport because they seem to be flying relatively low, drawing perfect lines across their scenes. They are somehow fearsome and beautiful.

Roma survives any and all concerns about its intentions (except the one about Netflix, which I’ll get to below) as it patiently mounts a powerful slice-of-life tale with mild upstairs / downstairs notes, juggling the life of a middle-class family in breakdown with the life of their maid in similarly dire straits. Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) is the maid and de facto nanny for the family headed up by Sofia (Marina de Tavira), her mostly absent husband Antonio, and their four kids, three boys and a girl. The youngest boy, Pepe (Marco Graf), might be 7. He is always talking about memories of his past lives.

A Prophet (2009)

Un prophete, France / Italy, 155 minutes

Director: Jacques Audiard

Writers: Thomas Bidegain, Jacques Audiard, Abdel Raouf Dafri, Nicolas Peufaillit

Photography: Stephane Fontaine

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Editor: Juliette Welfling

Cast: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Hichem Yacoubi, Reda Kateb, Slimane Dazi, Jean-Philippe Ricci, Gilles Cohen, Leïla Bekhti, Jean-Emmanuel Pagni, Frédéric Graziani, Alaa Oumouzoune

I must admit I originally took the title of this epic prison movie a little too literally. I knew it involved an Arab in a European prison and I worried it was about some bearded chin-stroking holy man enlightening other inmates (or failing to), heading down some solemn religious line. The running time was the final detail that put me off it. But it turns out A Prophet is one of those long movies I’m happy to see, immersive, intense and kinetic, sending us to places where time does not exist. The camera is restless, roving, often handheld in these tight claustrophobic prison spaces. Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebena serves up a performance that is masterful and unforgettable, inhabiting a majority of these scenes and virtually carrying the picture by himself, though he is amply supported, notably by Niels Arestrup as Cesar Luciano, the Corsican center of power in the suffocating French prison setting.

A Prophet also counts as both a coming-of-age and an immigrant picture, as the Muslim El Djebena is 19 when he is convicted of unspecified crimes and sentenced to six years in an adult prison, after spending what sounds like much of his adolescence in juvenile facilities. El Djebena, arriving at prison, has obviously been beaten recently. One wound on his face is recent and ultimately leaves a scar. He is self-possessed and wary, stalking through his days as a loner. Prison life is hard. Early on he is a victim when he is pushed around for his shoes, which are taken off his feet. When the prisoner Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi) attempts to pick him up, offering hash for oral sex, the outline of El Djebena’s new life starts to come into focus.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

New Zealand / USA / UK, 228 minutes

Director: Peter Jackson

Writers: J.R.R. Tolkien, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson

Photography: Andrew Lesnie

Music: Howard Shore

Editor: John Gilbert

Cast: Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Cate Blanchett, John Rhys-Davies, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Sean Bean, Ian Holm, Andy Serkis, Peter Jackson

A friend once told me he thought director and cowriter Peter Jackson seemed intent and focused on “going after the whales,” by which I think he meant the biggest and most popular film subjects available: eight or nine hours on one part of the Beatles’ career ... a complex restoration of World War I footage ... the Nth King Kong picture. And, of course, arguably the greatest fantasy property of the 20th century, J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings (Jackson would unfortunately later show his predilections for bloat in his adaptation of The Hobbit, which ran about as long as his treatment of the trilogy, though it’s by far the shortest of the four novels).

Until The Lord of the Rings Jackson was something of a schlockmeister, tucked away Down Under in New Zealand and Australia, lobbing gore and chuckles in the spectacles of 1987’s Bad Taste and 1992’s Dead Alive. He had transition movies in the ‘90s, notably the exquisite and disturbing Heavenly Creatures along with the mockumentary Forgotten Silver. We can see better now that everything before The Lord of the Rings was the work of a craftsman who was very good and getting better at making movies—and had the making of this movie specifically in mind. But was anyone prepared for Jackson taking on something of the scope and ambition of adapting Tolkien’s classic quest tale, complete with Middle Earth elves, dwarves, orcs, hobbits, and other creatures of the ancient Anglo-Saxon imagination? It is something Jackson wanted to do all his life and I, for one, was frankly amazed to see him get the opportunity. But he did and he made the most of it.

The Piano Teacher (2001)

La pianiste, France / Austria / Germany, 131 minutes

Director: Michael Haneke

Writers: Michael Haneke, Elfriede Jelinek

Photography: Christian Berger

Music: Franz Schubert

Editors: Nadine Muse, Monika Willi

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, Benoit Magimel, Anna Sigalevitch, Susanne Lothar, Udo Samel

The Piano Teacher was something of a sensation at the time of its release. It won awards from Cannes and elsewhere, often highlighting the performances of Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut, the sexualized, delusional piano teacher, and Benoit Magimel as Walter Klemmer, her talented student and lover (if that’s the right word). Erika is nearing middle age and lives a kind of bohemian life, a gifted pianist in her own right, who particularly loves Schubert and gives lessons to get by, but with an unusual way of life. She still lives with her mother, but she has a compulsive, adventurous private life, where fantasy and reality bleed into one another. We see her visiting some kind of discreet, semi-classy porn store, where she gets a private stall to watch a selection of videos. She finds a used tissue in the trash and holds it to her nose while she watches. Presumably some previous patron shot his load into it.

There’s more. We see her cutting herself in the bathroom, hanging out at a drive-in theater to peep people having sex in their cars—she squats down to masturbate, is caught, and must hurry away. She puts broken glass into the coat pocket of a student who suffers intense anxiety. Why is she doing these things? It’s possible they are in the original novel by Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, also called The Piano Teacher in translation—I don’t know it. But they also fit with various extremities by director and cowriter Michael Haneke, who seems prone to them, or certainly did in about this period, bracketed by the two virtually identical versions of his curious creep show Funny Games, one from 1997 and the second from 2007. Enter Walter Klemmer, an exceptional young pianist but an arrogant, immature young man, who represents much that Erika thinks she wants.

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

USA, 124 minutes

Director/writer: Charlie Kaufman

Photography: Frederick Elmes

Music: Jon Brion, Deanna Storey

Editor: Robert Frazen

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Hope Davis, Tom Noonan, Sadie Goldstein, Robin Weigert

Movies are collaborative work practically by definition but those like me continually tempted to assign credit to a single person, or “auteur,” generally focus on directors. The director and writer of this picture, however—Charlie Kaufman—is something of an exception. Synecdoche, New York is only his first picture as a director, but he was already known for three screenplays: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. All won high praise and awards. Spike Jonze directed the first two, Michel Gondry the latter. They are weird and original with ingenious high concept, open neurosis, and inspired narrative surprises. And they are known basically as “Charlie Kaufman movies” in the same way that we hear about Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, or David Lynch movies. Or that’s the career brand hoped for.

In 2008, appearing in a Charlie Kaufman movie had great attractions for ambitious actors. Think of Woody Allen, or Terence Malick with The Thin Red Line. The A-list players flocked to them, and Synecdoche looks much the same, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and no fewer than seven of the most in-demand women actors at the time. I only wonder how Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton missed out. Yet, unfortunately, it all adds up to less than even Adaptation., which, until this point, had been Kaufman’s weakest picture. I’m not even sure how to summarize this quivering mess except by analogy: it might be worth pairing with a more recent quivering mess, director and writer (“auteur”) Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, for a long double feature journey into a night of head-spinning and bodies all over the street. Pie and coffee served with discussion until 4 a.m.

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)

USA, 288 minutes

Director/writer/photography/editor: Jonas Mekas

Music: Auguste Varkalis

With: Jonas Mekas, Hollis Melton, Oona Mekas, Sebastian Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Allen Ginsberg, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Robert Breer

Jonas Mekas’s lengthy “diary film” from the turn of the century lasts nearly five hours, gathering up the home movies of his life from about the late ‘60s on and splicing them together with no obvious method or strategy, accompanied by bursts of voiceover. He explains at the beginning of the picture that even the thought of trying to organize all the material was overwhelming. He started out trying to do so but quickly gave it up. He managed to divide it into 12 chapters, but only Chapter Three, about his wedding, honeymoon, birth of Oona, his daughter ... and more, coheres his themes even remotely. He reports to us from his “little editing room,” usually late at night. All of it is amateurish—these are home movies, after all—even if Mekas was known as an experimental filmmaker (and poet, and artist). The sound, if it is even there, is often terrible, with inconsistent audio levels. The images are not much better than that. The camera shakes a lot and there are many, many cuts.

“You must, by now,” he says at the beginning of Chapter Five, 91 minutes in, speaking in his gravelly, measured Lithuanian accent, “come to a realization that what you are seeing is a sort of masterpiece of nothing. Nothing.” I was thinking that myself but at the same time it occurred to me that just previously he showed Oona’s first steps (to the accompaniment of the Velvet Underground’s “Run Run Run”). It’s arguable that first steps are profound in terms of human development. He captured that, even dwelt on it. It’s a beautiful moment. Then Mekas, at the beginning of Chapter Five, catches himself on the point. He speaks of the importance of those images of Oona’s first steps, emphasizing the word “importance.” He calls them “little moments of paradise.” It’s not the first or last time he will use the phrase—and, indeed, many others.

Parasite (2019)

[2020 review here]

Gisaengchung, South Korea, 132 minutes

Director: Bong Joon Ho

Writers: Bong Joon Ho, Han Jin-won

Photography: Hong Kyung-pyo

Music: Jung Jae-il

Editor: Jinmo Yang

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-sik, Park So-dam, Lee Jeong-eun, Jang Hye-jin

(spoilers) Director and cowriter Bong Joon Ho’s best movie, or my favorite anyway, is a comical but only slightly exaggerated meditation on class conflicts between rich and poor. It’s a picture where all Bong’s crazy dirty themes and styles come together organically and just right. On the poor side we have the Kim family: father Taek (Song Kang-ho, you’d know him, a Bong regular, seen in The Host, Memories of Murder, and Snowpiercer), mother Chung Sook (Jang Hye-jin), young adult and criminal mastermind daughter Jung (Park So-dam), and son Woo (Choi Woo-sik, Okja). They live in a basement apartment whose picture window looks out on an alley where people often come to urinate and/or fight. And then we have the rich Park family: father Dong-ik (Lee Sun-Kyun), mother Choi Yeo-jeong (Cho Yeo-jeong, a perfect ninny), adolescent daughter Da Hye (Jung Ji-so), and young son Da Song (Jung Hyun-jun). And, importantly, not to be missed, the Park family’s housekeeper Moon Gwang (Lee Jeong-eun, another Bong semiregular, seen in Mother and Okja).

It's a crowded ensemble cast which sorts out as the movie goes. First, Kim Woo finds an opportunity to tutor the Park’s daughter Da Hye, who is 14 or 15 and promptly develops a crush on him. With this inroad, the Kims scheme to take all the jobs in the Park household. Kim Jung sells herself as an art therapist for Da Song, who is an undisciplined 8 or 9 years old, going through an “American Indian” phase. He’s extremely hard to control, though Jung somehow manages it in about 15 minutes. We never see how, but Da Song is completely obedient to her. He probably has a crush on her too. From there Kim Taek gets the job as the family driver and, eventually, Chung Sook takes over as housekeeper. It’s all like a situation comedy, with a touch of slapstick and unlikely schemes to displace the original Park driver and housekeeper. Unlikely, but they work perfectly. They are often just funny, and the fast pace helps to hide the ridiculous plot holes.

The Dark Knight (2008)

USA / UK, 152 minutes

Director: Christopher Nolan

Writers: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer, Bob Kane

Photography: Wally Pfister

Music: James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer

Editor: Lee Smith

Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Ritchie Coster, Chin Han, Nestor Carbonell, Eric Roberts, Anthony Michael Hall, Patrick Leahy

I have no problem calling The Dark Knight the best Batman movie ever made—by miles, even. I just think we might need to call on Scott McCloud for some analysis of why no Batman movie has ever worked as well as most Batman comics—is it the space between the panels? (If McCloud has done so already, someone please point me there.) In command of a princely budget, shot on location in Chicago, Hong Kong, and London, The Dark Knight is committed to being a high-tech thriller like director Michael Mann makes. Lots of gadgets, stunts, special effects, chase scenes (involving a Lamborghini, fat-wheeled motorcycles, and semitrucks marked “SLaughter Is the Best Medicine”), fistfights, gunplay, and tedious orchestral music from Hans Zimmer, with a giant swirling story about Gotham City and the chaos the Joker (Heath Ledger) unleashes there with bank robberies, hospital demolitions, assassinations, so on so forth. The Dark Knight is also rich with movie stars: Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and the Democratic senator from Vermont, Patrick Leahy

I’m also happy to call Heath Ledger the best Joker of all and even to consider this performance possibly his greatest. But that’s more because his career was cut short in 2008, when he died at the age of 28. It’s hard to say where he would be now, still in his 40s. He rewrote the whole approach to the Joker but I’m pretty sure, given his willingness to take on a risky role and make it great like he did in Brokeback Mountain, that The Dark Knight and his Joker would be in competition with other performances by now. The big boffo attack of The Dark Knight continues to impress, but Ledger’s performance, embedded in it as the unsettling center of gravity, is one of a kind. The rest of the movie seemed kind of boring to me on my third time through. I’m still happy to call it one of the greatest superhero movies, but this might be a good place to wonder about the general utility of superhero movies.

Morvern Callar (2002)

UK / Canada, 97 minutes

Director: Lynne Ramsay

Writers: Lynne Ramsay, Liana Dognini, Alan Warner
Photography: Alwin H. Kuchler

Music: Can, Aphex Twin, Ween, Stereolab, Lee Hazlewood

Editor: Lucia Zucchetti

Cast: Samantha Morton, Kathleen McDermott, Raife Patrick Burchell, Dan Cadan, James Wilson, El Carrette, Linda McGuire

In the strange alienated Scottish setting of this picture Morvern Callar is the name of a person, a young woman. Morvern Callar is a character study. As it starts, Morvern (Samantha Morton) has come home on Christmas Eve or maybe the night of Christmas Day to find her husband dead of suicide, with a note he left her on the computer. We have reason to believe it’s her husband because they live together and she wears a ring. He was an aspiring writer and left her a manuscript and instructions for approaching publishers. Another character at one point refers to him affectionately as “our Dostoevsky.” We see that Morvern is wearing a ring, but as the movie goes along, and she spends most of her time with her best friend, Lanna (Kathleen McDermott, who is excellent), it seems more like it must have been a casual boyfriend / girlfriend relationship, and not of long duration. But it’s never certain.

In many ways Morvern Callar is a movie about grief and how differently people can experience it. Morvern seems to be a case of extreme denial and we keep waiting for it to break and bring her back to a reality we understand, but that’s not the way this movie goes. Much of it for us is about just watching—in amazement, in disbelief, in shock—and at that mesmerizing level it is very good in the expert hands of director and cowriter Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here, We Need to Talk About Kevin), who takes her time making movies or perhaps is delayed getting funding for pictures that are powerful and easy to admire but not a lot of fun to watch. Morvern Callar reminds me of Terence Malick’s Badlands, traveling the strange psychological pathways of underclass youth, who just don’t know any better. It’s kind of sickening but you can’t take your eyes off it.

Memories of Murder (2003)

Salinui chueok, South Korea, 132 minutes

Director: Bong Joon Ho

Writers: Bong Joon Ho, Kwang-rim Kim, Sung-bo Shim

Photography: Hyung Koo Kim

Music: Taro Iwashiro

Editor: Sun-Min Kim

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Kim Sang-kyung, Kim Roe-ha, Song Jae-ho, Byun Hee-Bong, Ryu Tae-ho, Ko Seo-hie

I had a harder time than usual getting a look at director and cowriter Bong Joon Ho’s second full-length picture. It’s still, by all the markers I can find, his most popular after only Parasite. It was on Amazon last month—I know it was, because I kept checking. Maybe it rotated out with December. But the other day when I went to look at it it was no longer there, it wasn’t on the Criterion Channel (although Memories of Murder, Okja, and Parasite have all got the Criterion blu-ray/DVD treatment), it’s not on Kanopy either (a service worth checking out if you have a library card), and the youtube version seemed to be UHD only, which my system can’t handle. I finally found it on Tubi, whatever the heck that is—at least it was free and without commercial interruptions and didn’t appear to infect my computer. I got the sense—maybe it was the UHD-only avail—that Memories of Murder, a movie that has never much appealed to me, may be appreciated best for its cinematic qualities. I admit they are impressive, if you have the right setup or can take advantage of an opportunity to see it in a theater. Maybe you can luck into a double feature with something by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

“In his breakthrough second feature, Bong Joon Ho explodes the conventions of the policier with thrillingly subversive, genre-defying results,” raves the Criterion write-up. “Policier” is cineaste for “police procedural,” a favored sub-subgenre of mine; “thrillingly subversive, genre-defying” gives away that they’re doing it wrong. It’s arty to a fault—with many, many arresting and well-composed shots—and Bong’s jarring sense of humor intrudes everything. The coarse jokiness is easier to handle for me in Bong contexts that are more formally science fiction or fantasy, like The Host (still ruined for me by it, but I may owe that one another look), Snowpiercer, or, indeed, Parasite. I’ve been actively repulsed when Bong applies it to these two-thirds inept cops tracking a serial killer in a remote village. I don’t see it as anything like the right context for slapstick, however thrillingly subversive.

Nostalgia for the Light (2010)

Nostalgia de la luz, France / Germany / Chile / Spain, 90 minutes

Director/writer: Patricio Guzman

Photography: Katell Djian

Music: Miguel Miranda, Jose Miguel Tobar

Editors: Patricio Guzman, Emmanuelle Joly
With: Luis Henriquez, Gaspar Galaz, Lautaro Nunez, Miguel Lawner, Victor Gonzalez, Vicky Saaveda, Violeta Berrios

Nostalgia for the Light is a thoughtful documentary that teases us with wonders of the universe as seen from the sophisticated, internationally funded telescopes in Chile’s Atacama desert, conflating them with the atrocities of the Augusto Pinochet fascist regime. It attempts an elegiac exploration of the past on many levels, including explorations of exploration itself. Interviews with Chilean astronomers are included—perhaps because the conditions of the Atacama offer such opportunities, a fair number of Chileans take up the discipline. There’s a good deal of heady star-gaze cinematography too, suitable for dropping jaws. Then, later, there are also interviews with grieving relatives still looking for the remains of their disappeared loved ones. On the science side, archeologists and geologists are also heard from. A strong sense of the eerie, disquieting history of the desert grounds a sense of suspense.

But too often the two sides of this picture—the wonderful universe and the hideous humanity—struck me as strained, however sincere. The conceit is that everyone here, scientists and Pinochet victims alike, is looking into the past one way or another. Looking for the light, literal and metaphorical. And, indeed, the light from most of the stars we see at night is millions of years old by the time we see it. All those stars and galaxies might have burned out or got together and staged a musical before human beings even existed and we still wouldn’t know anything about it yet. One scientist here notes that, even between two people standing close the image they see of one another is in the past—millionths of a fraction of a second, but in the past. Moonlight takes a minute to reach us, sunlight eight minutes. So on so forth.

Twin Peaks (2017)

[Earlier review here.]

Twin Peaks: The Return, USA, 1,014 minutes

Director: David Lynch

Writers: Mark Frost, David Lynch

Photography: Peter Deming

Music: Angelo Badalamenti, Julee Cruise, Johnny Jewel, Chromatics, Cactus Blossoms, Au Revoir Simone, Paris Sisters, Trouble, Blunted Beatz, Sharon Van Etten, Nine Inch Nails, Rebekah Del Rio, James Marshall, Lissie, ZZ Top, Veils

Editor: Duwayne Dunham

Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee, Michael Horse, Miguel Ferrer, David Lynch, Chrysta Bell, Robert Forster, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern, Harry Dean Stanton, Tim Roth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Grace Zabriskie, Catherine E. Coulson, Russ Tamblyn, Sherilyn Fenn, Peggy Lipton, Everett McGill, Richard Beymer, Ashley Judd, Frank Silva, David Duchovny, Dana Ashbrook, Madchen Amick, Harry Goaz, Kimmy Robertson, Matthew Lillard, Melissa Jo Bailey, Patrick Fischler, Eamon Ferren, Walter Olkewicz, Michael Cera, George Griffith, Don Murray, David Patrick Kelly, Christophe Zajac-Denek, John Pirruccello, Jim Belushi, Robert Knepper, Clark Middleton, David Bowie, Jay Aaseng, Jake Wardle

I thought—and still think—that 18 episodes and 17 hours is on the long side for a TV season, let alone a feature movie on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? It’s long even for the 21st-century version of director and cowriter David Lynch. But as I geared down for the soporific pace of the third season of Twin Peaks it came back to me that at heart the franchise is a loving parody and embrace of TV’s soap opera style, latterly dignified as “daytime drama” shortly before ushered off the stage of US entertainment, along with network TV at large. At the moment we appear to be down to four: The Bold and the Beautiful, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, and The Young and the Restless. I recall hearing that some of these soaps got into wild storylines, with time travel, serial killers, and aliens from outer space and such, though I can’t find any evidence of that online at the moment. The point is: for daytime dramas, 17 hours is not that much, maybe a month’s work.

To be clear, I’m not complaining about what I found on a recent return to the epic third season (acknowledgments to the Showtime network for enabling this unlikely development even to happen). It’s just that it’s incredibly slow, one of the slowest things I’ve ever seen episode to episode. Even two in a row tended to set my mind wandering off-topic to things like grocery lists. It is ridiculous, often hilarious, and strangely meditative. Twin Peaks: The Return, as it was called on initial release, launches or picks up approximately 1 million narrative threads that are touched on in random turns. Most of the principals from the original run in the early ‘90s are on hand, 25 years older. Lots more stars of profile made it into the cast too. I often didn’t know what was going on (“didn’t know what was going on”). Some threads are resolved, some are only kind of resolved, and some are just dropped, including a highly indeterminate finish with a lot of screaming from Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee, then and now) and a wandering, unsettling version of an interdimensional Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie). Kyle MacLachlan gets top billing and he should, playing multiple roles.

In Vanda’s Room (2000)

No Quarto da Vanda, Portugal / Germany / Switzerland, 171 minutes

Director / photography: Pedro Casta

Editors: Dominique Auvray, Patricia Saramago

Cast: Vanda Duarte, Lena Duarte, Zita Duarte, Manuel Gomes Miranda, Diogo Pires Miranda, Evangeline Nelas, Miquelina Barros, Antonio Semedo Moreno, Paulo Nunes, Paulo Jorge Goncalves, Pedro Lanban

Vanda Duarte—a real person played by herself (everyone here plays themselves)—is a heroin addict who spends most of her time in her room smoking and coughing. Others inject the drug (and/or cocaine) but we don’t see much of that with Vanda. She runs a lighter under a piece of foil with the powder on it, sucking up the smoke through a glass tube. We see a lot of that. She also spends much of the movie intermittently rolling up a skein of yarn into a ball. Like many scenes in this movie it is relaxing and boring by seemingly random turns. The most unlikely scenes—such as ongoing demolition captured by director and cinematographer Pedro Costa wandering the slum streets filming what crosses his field of vision—reduce us to a kind of mesmerized, numb staring.

Vanda’s room is in Fontainhas, a slum district of Lisbon, Portugal. And, technically, it’s probably not her room. She and most of these people are squatting in buildings designated for demolition, in blocks and neighborhoods designated for urban revitalization projects. There didn’t seem to be as many scenes of demolition as there seemed to be the first time I looked at this. The movie casts a certain hypnotic pall as it wanders its desolations. The scenes of demolition can be whining, banging, and loud, as construction usually is, but they can also take on ASMR qualities somehow. They’re often long and there is something inherently soothing about watching a machine methodically carry out its appointed destruction. Other times the racket is unbearable and annoying, like the movie at large.

Songs From the Second Floor (2000)

Sånger från andra våningen, Sweden / Norway / Denmark / France / Germany, 98 minutes

Director/writer/editor: Roy Andersson

Photography: Istvan Borbas, Jesper Klevenas

Music: Benny Andersson

Cast: Lars Nordh, Sten Andersson, Stefan Larsson, Torbjorn Fahlstrom, Lucio Vucina, Hanna Eriksson, Peter Roth, Tommy Johansson, Sture Olsson

As I get deeper into the aggregated critical roundup list of best 21st-century movies over at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? I find more and more movies and filmmakers that are new to me. A lot of them are generally more difficult than my perhaps entertainment-oriented values would like (hi Holy Motors, hi Tabu, hi Colossal Youth). I know now that Ari Aster, for one (and his mother too), has very high regard for Swedish director, writer, and editor Roy Andersson. But I had never really heard of Andersson in any meaningful way until the last year or two, when Songs From the Second Floor made a chart leap, up from several years in the range of #57 to #73 to its present position of #41. A friend (Steven Rubio aka Mon-Sewer Paul Regret) posted a review last fall that allowed Songs might be for others, but it wasn’t for him. Based on that, I put off looking at it for a first time last year, hoping it would fall again out of my reach. But no.

Thus I came to Songs with rock-bottom expectations (and this won’t be the last time this year!). Terms like “absurdist” and “existential” associated with Songs and Andersson did not help. But low expectations can sometimes be your friend if you can still bring yourself to look at something. Songs From the Second Floor is a loosely connected series of vignettes made out of single shots of long scenes that are indeed absurd. A stage magician starts to saw a volunteer from the audience in half—wounds him, actually. A parade of performative self-flagellants playing in the background of scenes creates a traffic jam that lasts for eight hours and more. A passenger choir on the subway erupts in song, like flash mobs can do now. A man has a son he says was driven insane by writing poetry. At least these scenes often have the virtue of being funny.

Syndromes and a Century (2006)

Sang sattawat, Thailand / France / Austria, 105 minutes

Director/writer: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Photography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom

Music: Kantee Anantagant

Editor: Lee Chatametikool

Cast: Nantarat Sawaddikul, Jaruchai Iamaram, Arkanae Cherkam, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Jenjira Pongpas, Nu Nimsomboon, Sin Kaewpakpin

As a class, film critics seem inclined to line up and laud the movies of Thai director and writer Apichatpong Weerasethakul—this is the fourth of his pictures I’ve had occasion to write about by way of surveying the critical roundups at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT). Weerasethakul is a little bit Lynchy and a whole bunch Kubricky and don’t forget Antonioni. He likes to look at things. He’s Western in many ways and Asian in many others—practical, humorous, spiritual, inscrutable. Mostly his movies are quite beautiful—credit to cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Weerasethakul’s long-time collaborator—mostly they are slow, and mostly they are baffling. Syndromes and a Century, for example, appears to crack in half at the midpoint and go some other direction from the first half.

But it’s not really exactly so. Reading a synopsis helped me clarify that it’s more like a restart at the halfway point and pursuing other directions. It’s more a kind of memoir piece for Weerasethakul, presenting fragments of the lives of his parents, who were both doctors, amid sensory memories of his childhood. This simple explanation more or less put everything in order for me and, where I had been dreading looking at it again (I couldn’t make much of it the first time several years ago), I found it much more palatable and enjoyable this time. (Later I found that I might be entirely mistaken about what I saw.) Weerasethakul’s approach to narrative remains eccentric and opaque but that is offset somewhat by his pervasive, gentle humor. The result was one of my best times with his stuff.

The Headless Woman (2008)

La mujer sin cabeza, Argentina / France / Italy / Spain, 87 minutes

Director/writer: Lucrecia Martel

Photography: Barbara Alvarez

Music: Roberta Ainstein

Editor: Miguel Schverdfinger

Cast: Maria Onetto, Claudia Cantero, Ines Efron, Cesar Bordon, Daniel Genoud, Guillermo Arengo, Maria Vaner

According to internet sources such as Google Translate, the original Spanish title for this movie, La mujer sin cabeza, does indeed appear to translate directly to “the headless woman,” although results suspiciously include links to information about showings of this movie, which made me think the phrase may be specifically idiomatic in some way. My very first thought was that it might be some kind of pun on the part of the translator for “the heedless woman,” as that is an obvious quality of the woman in question at the center of this picture, Vero (Maria Onetto). She is bourgeois, a professional dentist, middle-aged, well-coiffed, married with children and a lover, and appears to have a busy, somewhat empty social life. She appears to be numb, in short.

Early in the movie, on her way home from an elegant afternoon gathering, Vero’s cell phone rings in the car, she is momentarily distracted, and she runs over something. She sits in her car gathering herself, obviously shaken by the incident. But she never gets out of the car to investigate, does not really look at anything, not even in her rearview mirror. She only composes herself, taking deep breaths, and then drives on, jaw clenched basically for the rest of the movie. As she leaves the scene, we see the corpse of a dog on the road. But she has not seen it. And now, for the rest of the movie, she quietly falls apart in a self-controlled way that makes it very difficult to see she is falling apart at all, except for a worsening case of disaffection, which could simply be the modern condition, yes? She seems to me to be more exactly heedless than someone who has lost her head, momentarily or otherwise, because of a crisis. In her deeply controlled panic she is still rational enough to act as if the rules don’t apply to her if she can get away with it