Here is my top five in alphabetical order. These are the five I would nominate if I were an academy of one.
Also loved:
Judd Hirsch, The Fabelmans
Joshua Odjick, Wildhood
Oh Kwang-rok, Retour à Séoul (Return to Seoul)
Related:
My Best Supporting Actor picks from past years (2004-2020)
My Best Actress picks from 2022
My Best Actor picks from 2022
My Best Supporting Actress picks from 2022
I caught Robert Siodmak's Cry of the City this morning, and it's an excellent crime film. It's not shot quite as a noir, really, but it has plenty of wonderful shadows and play with light and dark throughout. It also boasts some excellent performances – Hope Emerson appears in a great small role and there is also a long sequence with a fabulous Shelley Winters. The film's best performance might be by young Tommy Cook who had previously had roles in such inauspicious movies as Adventures of Red Ryder and Jungle Girl.
Even more interesting is the film's own deeply conflicted attitude toward law enforcement and the criminal justice system. It feels very simple, watching the movie from the perspective of 2023, to see that it is actually the police who cause most of the trouble in this movie. As Victor Mature (the cop) lists all of the harm that Richard Conte (the alleged perp) has caused in act three, it's quite clear that in fact that harm has all been caused by the police themselves. All of it! What's even more intriguing is that Conte's character solves a separate crime for the police that they weren't able to solve on their own - one in which a rich old lady was allegedly tortured and killed for her jewel collection. Worse of all, perhaps, is that the lead policeman, at the end of the film, shoots an unarmed man in the back. This Cry of the City seems to present to the audience as justice. It's deeply unsettling, although I'm not sure I understand if Siodmak is as conflicted as I am.
Perhaps the key to all of this is that, according to IMDb, Conte was originally slated to play the cop and Mature the criminal, but Mature had played too many bad guys lately and 20th Century Fox swapped the roles. The criminals and those nominally assigned to catch them produce one another in Cry of the City, and it is this, finally, which makes the film as rich as it is.
Here is my top five in alphabetical order. These are the five I would nominate if I were an academy of one.
In the first place, Holy Spider begins by following one of the killer's victims. After he brutally murders her (something we see in gruesome detail), then he begins to alternate between the killer trying to hide the fact that he's a murderer from his family and a journalist attempting to stop him. This is not a bad premise, though it has its pitfalls – chief among which is the way the audience will naturally begin to root for the killer to escape simply because of how suspense works.
But after about an hour, the whole thing loses steam completely. It is unclear to Abbasi why he's showing these murders in such scopophilic detail. It's unclear why he's trying to understand the psychopath at the story's center. And it's unclear why the movie continues even after the killer is caught. The whole thing is a muddled mess made no less muddled by the fact that Abbasi clearly has a "message" for us all to take home with us. This was quite disappointing, especially because I was crazy about his film Border.
What maybe is a tad surprising is that Good Luck to You is mostly sex-positive. This is a good thing all around. And Thompson does get naked for the part, which I found exciting and very body-positive as well as sex-positive.
Still... I was kinda bored. Sex-positivity is great and everything, but must it all be so predictable?
I don't understand The Whale. I didn't understand it as a play, and I didn't understand it any better as a Darren Aronofsky film. This is, by the way, a very Darren Aronofsky film. It hates people and hates the god just as much as Mother! and Noah. The Whale is, in many ways, a perfect companion to these two very religious films, because this film is also about religion and horrible, horrible human beings.
And of course one could say "I am large, I contain multitudes", as a poet the film cites once said, and one would be right. The film's protagonist can want to die while also believing in the inherent goodness of even the worst people in the world. But surely this is stretching things a bit.
For me, this film felt phony from start to finish. It doesn't strike a single true note. The situation that poses as a plot feels totally manufactured, and the backstories of the characters as they are revealed to us feel like theoretical feelings that people might have had rather than actual ideas thought by any real people.
As with the other two recent Aronofsky films, The Whale, although it's actually not a film about Jonah, is very, very angry at the god. But it also believes that the god is real. These two ideas can go together, and I understand their coexistence. Neither one, however, is at all interesting to me.
The best thing about this minor piece of anti-Nazi propaganda, though, is John Garfield. Despite the fact that The Fallen Sparrow was made as a vehicle for Maureen O’Hara, he’s just so good! The camera loves him, and he’s a completely dynamic performer, immediately lovable despite his tough exterior. This film gives him some beautiful material to work through, including an intense monologue about torture in act one (of all places)! The monologue needs to be in act one because it needs to set up the psychological tension of the plot's twists and turns as well as the traumatic residue for the character.
Anyway, this is great. It's on the Criterion Channel until January 31st as part of a series celebrating Garfield's mostly underappreciated work as a performer.
