By the Grace of God (2018)

This is a very, very strange Ozon film, mostly because it’s a very conventional movie. I just don’t expect such things from Ozon. Anyway, Grâce à Dieu is fine. But I guess it was just all a little too much about Catholicism and the god for me. I don’t really care about those things. And it’s not a surprise to me in the year of our lord 2018 that the Catholic Church covered up child sexual abuse, that very few older people care about that at all and want to hold them accountable, and that the government is happy to allow all of this. But it sure is odd subject matter for Ozon. Still this film is buoyed by a truly remarkable performance by Swann Arlaud. He is so good in this.

Saltburn (2023)

There is much to love about Saltburn, like Emerald Fennell's previous feature, Promising Young Woman, this movie is glossy and bright, with witty barbs and humorous scenarios, but Saltburn is much better than PYW, primarily because it is having a lot more fun. Paradoxically – since Saltburn is about very, very wealthy people – this film is a good deal less smug than Fennell's first feature. Or rather, to be smug in Saltburn is to ask to be punished. The most smug person in the room is always Farleigh, and the film never, ever takes Farleigh's side.

I shouldn't spend a ton of time comparing Saltburn to PYW because it isn't really fair, but I will make one more point of comparison and then move on. One thing I loved about Saltburn is that it is always on the main character's side. We always follow Oliver, even when he's being very, very strange. This is not true of PYW, which often took the point of view of the men who were troubled by the main character's strange behavior. But Saltburn's central character is a very strange dude. In fact, the film begins with a question. Was I in love with him? Did I love him? It's a mystery the movie continues to play with. How does Oliver feel about Felix? Oliver does some truly baffling things, so much so that at times I was squealing and squirming in the theatre. Like oh my god the bathwater. And the cunnilingus. So much good, weird stuff. I loved every bit of this weirdness. But even when the camera watches Oliver watch Felix have sex with a girl in his dormitory, the camera is on Oliver's side. We watch with him. We never see Oliver from anyone else's perspective, except (very briefly) when Farleigh sees Oliver and Venetia from the window.

One of the great things about this tactic on Fennell's part is that Oliver himself remains a social mystery. How does everyone else feel about Oliver? It is actually very difficult to answer this question because the film doesn't care; Saltburn is interested in how Oliver feels about how everyone feels about Oliver, but the movie spends almost no time judging Oliver from the perspective of the family. Even when Ollie wears out his welcome with Sir James and we know that Sir James wants Oliver to leave, Saltburn doesn't take Sir James's side. We're on Ollie's side, stubbornly refusing to leave Saltburn until we get our payoff.

The next James Bond?

This movie is cast beautifully. Barry Keoghan is a perfect star. Carey Mulligan is pitch perfect in her small, weird, depressive part. Jacob Elordi is gorgeous (although to my mind slightly lacking in power – he's never, for example, quite as awesome as Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley), and Richard E. Grant is an utter delight. But for me the real revelation is Rosamund Pike. She tears into this fucking role and is unstoppably funny. She's just truly genius and deserves an Oscar nomination for this part. The movie is not Oscar stuff, I don't think, so I am not sure she can score a nomination. I will beat this drum, though. She definitely deserves it.

The other intriguing thing about Saltburn is the way it sort of riffs off of Pasolini's very sexy 1968 film Teorema. Saltburn doesn't have the intriguing spiritual elements of Pasolini's movie, but Oliver does seem to have a kind of pansexual power over the people in the house, and this definitely made me think of the way Terence Stamp worked through every family member, seducing each one in turn. 

Anyway, Saltburn is wacky and weird and a ton of fun. For me, when I try to think about Oliver and who he is I think the film does a great job of moving away from him as a sort of symbol or icon. One might see Ollie as a kind of symbol of ancient necessity or something (the way Keoghan's part worked in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, for example), but Fennell's characters are surprisingly rich and complex here. Even the film's villains – Farleigh and Elspeth and Sir James and Felix and Venetia – are interesting and complicated; they're not easy symbols or shallow figures created to make a point. Everyone feels full and fascinating. My explanation for all of Ollie's behavior is not that he loved him, so much as, perhaps, he needed to consume these people like a sort of ancient cannibalism or vampirism (he says that he is a vampire, after all), in order that he might be able to become them. He's a Tom Ripley for 2023, sexy and lonely and completely insane. In any case, I had a great time.

Priscilla (2023)

Sofia Coppola's Priscilla is insanely, almost disturbingly boring. It’s told in these tiny, tiny vignettes. Each scene is almost a minute or less, and one gets almost zero idea about the inner life of any of this film’s characters. I'm calling this disturbing because I found Coppola's approach to be troublingly shallow, as if every single thing that happens to this woman happens only in short bursts, with no analysis attached to it, as if the real people didn't live their lives in sequences longer than a minute. We get almost no moments with the two characters happy; one wonders why she loves this man at all. And I suppose this is supposed to pass off as critique in some way? If so, what is the film critiquing? This is a portrait of a couple falling in love and then falling out of it again. It's a portrait of a young woman who catches the eye of a very, very famous man and then falls in love with him and marries him. But we have no access to what's going on with these two at all. Only stolen minutes in their long lives. It’s baffling. 

Next Goal Wins

Next Goal Wins (not to be confused with the documentary film from 2014 about the same subject) is really fun. I also laughed a lot. Taika Waititi for some reason puts a strange frame around the story, but once we get past that (and it’s very quick) the movie is a delight. It has also has a fa'afafine central character; this was unexpected and exciting, and I thought the film was really smart about this very specific queer identity.

Le Mans

Le Mans is a classic for a reason. It’s unlike any car-racing movie I’ve ever seen… I think because it isn’t interested in the race itself so much as it is interested in the men doing the racing. Which is not to say that this isn’t a nail-biting race movie, because it still manages to be that. Lee H. Katzin's direction is brilliant.

Anatomie d'une Chute

Anatomy of a Fall is complex and fascinating and troubling. Justine Triet's movie is about entire worlds inside of each of us that those closest to us cannot understand, though they may try very hard. It’s a movie about deep complexities in our relationships, and the film is unsettling and nerve-wracking with some truly stellar acting. Sandra Hüller is wonderful, Swann Arlaud is excellent, and Milo Machado Graner blew me away.

The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes

The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes (夏へのトンネル、さよならの出口) is honestly sort of dumb. Well, I mean, the conceit is interesting: two people find a tunnel that grants wishes but you pay the price with time. The trouble is that the characters who find this very interesting tunnel are not that interesting, or to be more accurate: they’re kids. In any case, this wasn’t very well thought out, and (ok now I’m just being mean) the animation wasn’t that great either.

Ladies in Retirement (1941)

Ida Lupino is cheerless and intense in this. It’s rather odd. But Louis Hayward is very charming, and the whole thing manages to work despite not being able to transcend its theatrical roots. The trouble with Ladies in Retirement, though, is that it is neither mysterious nor scary. We know who is doing what at every point, and because the film is from neither Lupino's point of view nor Hayward's, we are never really confused or puzzling over anything. We know exactly what has happened and can easily predict what is going to happen. All of this made Ladies in Retirement rather boring, if I'm honest.

Pacifiction

Albert Serra's Pacifiction is mysterious and haunting. But in usual Serra mode I wasn’t always sure what the fuck we were doing. Pacifiction has some great stuff in it, but it also really tries the viewer’s patience. And at 2 hours and 45 minutes, this is a commitment.

Pilgrims (2021)

Whoa. Laurynas Bareiša's Piligrimai (Pilgrims) is chilling and fucked up and very tense and scary for much of its running time. It’s super slow-paced, so I understand the wide range of ratings here. What I liked so much about this is that I really didn’t know how these people were going to behave, and that goes for the two main characters and nearly everyone they meet on their pilgrimage. This is troubling. I was into it.

Mutt (2023)

Vuk Lunguluv-Klotz's Mutt is ok. I wish the central character were less of a jerk, though. It was hard for me to root for him; he was just so self-centered. That made him a very realistic character, I think, and he wasn’t hard to love. But I wouldn’t want to spend much time with someone this selfish: 85 minutes is plenty. 

However… how lovely to see Cole Doman in such a good part! Henry Gamble himself!

Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese's new movie Killers of the Flower Moon (𐓀𐒻͘𐓂͘𐓄𐒰 𐒹𐒿𐒰𐓆𐒼𐒰 𐓓𐒻͘𐒼𐒰 𐓊'𐒷𐓍𐒷) isn’t bad, of course, but it’s intensely frustrating. It’s a story told matter-of-factly, as if it’s information we need—almost clinical. As my companion said to me, it was like reading a book. All of this is sort of fine, although I think the movie takes a perverse pleasure in showing us violence: we didn’t need, for example, to see a sequence where Anna Brown was murdered after we had already heard her murder described to us in detail. That both of these sequences were given to us from the perspective of the men who murdered her is an odd choice indeed. 

The movie isn't emotionally engaging, because it continually refuses and frustrates our identification with the perspective of the Osage woman at the film's center. Here's an example of what I mean: When Molly's husband murder's Molly's sister in act two, we experience the murder through his eyes. He walks through the blown up house, he sees the dead bodies of the murdered people, and then he tells Molly that her sister has been killed. The camera looks down on her in the basement with her children. She hears the news and breaks down. It's devastating for her and it should be for us, too. But the camera? The camera stays up on the ground floor, looking down on Molly as she wails. It's as if it's all happening to someone else – which is exactly the point of view her husband has taken.

I also found the fire sequence very, very confusing. I didn’t understand what was supposed to be happening and I didn’t emotionally connect with what was going on. 

And then the film’s penultimate sequence, where we are for some reason in a radio play… there is nothing that could really explain this for me. I didn’t understand it either formally or thematically. (In fact, Killers of the Flower Moon up until this moment had been using silent film techniques to get across its exposition – the jump to radio-theatre is out of left field.) I just don’t get it. 

I quite liked the film’s final sequence with its return to the Osage nation. The film is at its best when it’s trying to tell the story from the Osage perspective, when it centers Molly and her sisters. If only Killers of the Flower Moon did that a bit more.