9 Best Movies To Watch After Closely Watched Trains (1966)
The Color Purple
Blitz Bazawule's adaptation of the Alice Walker classic (and the Broadway musical) is a more joyful, celebratory film than its predecessor. The Color Purple has taken on a musicality ever since Steven Spielberg and Quincy Jones adapted Alice Walker’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel for the screen. When the first film was released in 1985, Spielberg already referred to it as a “musical.” In a behind-the-scenes interview about the film's musicality included in Warner Bros’ sumptuous new 4K release, Walker, Spielberg, and Jones conduct us through the “diverse places” that music appears in the original film. There are rail work songs, African dance, juke joint blues, and revival gospel; all tonally matched together in a near seamless “immersion” of sound. In an age where nearly every popular and cult film gets a Broadway adaptation, The Color Purple is a particular no-brainer. Celie’s journey of self-discovery through systematic abuses and struggles at the turn of the twentieth century lends itself to the kind of emotional bigness a musical requires. With music by the legendary Brenda Russell and the late queer songwriting icon Allee Willis, The Color Purple: The Musical also showcases a diverse range of musical styles and modes, especially those well suited for the stage, like swing and Greek chorus. Continue Reading →
The Zone of Interest
Jonathan Glazer's first feature in 10 years is a near-unclassifiable work of patience and intentional distance from its historical horrors. What am I to say here? What can I say? I feel as if I’m to say nothing at all. My mind has gone and I feel sick, and while that’s due to the film in question, another degree of it comes from a deeper truth. I feel wrong in my reaction to it; it can’t help but feel inadequate. The Zone of Interest has leveled me like few things ever have, but that’s not the point. That’s not its point. Continue Reading →
Eileen
Thomasin McKenzie & Anne Hathaway burn up the screen in William Oldroyd’s unsettling thriller. Eileen will likely be lost in the holiday season shuffle among such spectacles as the upcoming Wonka and awards-friendly fare like Ferrari. On the other hand, it’s unclear under what circumstances Eileen would make a big splash. It’s an odd, occasionally off-putting little film that wouldn’t work as well as it does if not for the scorching chemistry between its two leads. Based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s (also odd and occasionally off-putting) novel of the same name, Eileen stars Thomasin McKenzie as the titular character, a lonely young woman stuck in a miserable rut. Living in the most depressing town in Massachusetts circa 1964, Eileen is forced to take care of her alcoholic, mean-spirited father (a chilling Shea Whigham, still somehow not one of Hollywood’s biggest stars), a former cop who’s taken to waving his gun at their neighbors. Working as a secretary at a juvenile detention center, though she’s in her twenties she comes off as someone much younger, a meek and awkward child merely dressing up as an adult. Eileen also has a child’s taste for doing things like ignoring her hygiene, stuffing herself with candy, and compulsively masturbating, while maintaining a rich fantasy life involving rough sex with a detention center guard, or murdering her father. Her boredom has reached pathological levels. Continue Reading →
Killers of the Flower Moon
To talk about The Killer is to strip away pretense. Well, one can try. Cold it may be, but David Fincher's latest is an incredibly open film. The houses are made of glass; the windows are ceiling-high; the voiceovers from the title character (Michael Fassbender) give infallible insight into his worldview. The film is his worldview, simple in its machinations and complex in its philosophy. In most other circumstances, this would unfold over time. And it does here, at least to an extent. Continue Reading →
Irena's Vow
This year's TIFF featured three tales of lost souls forging their own paths -- some of them bloodier than others. Tales of transformation are the order of the day at this year's TIFF, signposted by a trio of European films acutely concerned with the struggles women and AFAB people undertake to thrive -- or, in many cases, just survive. Take Héléna Klotz's spellbinding second feature, Spirit of Ecstasy, an icy but enthralling coming-of-age story centered around Jeanne Francoeur (Claire Pommet, best known under her French pop star alias Pomme) a non-binary child of a French gendarme who struggles to break through the glass ceiling of the French wealth management firm they work at as a quantitative analyst. Jeanne cuts a mysterious figure, with their black bob, turquoise suit that acts like armor ("the new proletarian uniform"), the bindings that cut into their skin and make them bleed. At all times, Klotz paints Jeanne as a figure constantly struggling to break free of their environment, whose abusive upbringing in the French gendarmerie barracks pushes them inexorably towards a cutthroat, ambitious business environment ready to chew them up and spit them out at a moment's notice. Continue Reading →
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
In cinema, water is a site of birth, rebirth, and drastic transformations. In movies ranging from Sansho the Bailiff to Moonlight to Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, characters walk into vast bodies of liquid one person and exit another (if, that is, they resurface). It tracks, then, that the romantic drama Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe kicks off its central relationship at a community pool. A conversation between the film’s titular leads, set against the blue, kicks off a life-changing connection. Continue Reading →
You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah
You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah has a simple premise. Stacy Friedman (Sunny Sandler) wants her bat mitzvah, only a few weeks away, to be perfect. Using that premise, the film takes off, exploring the growing pains of middle school. Continue Reading →
Rebecca
“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again…” So begins Daphne du Maurier’s gothic masterwork Rebecca, one of the most famous opening lines in fiction. Rebecca proved a hit upon release in 1938 and has remained in print ever since. Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation, coming just two years later, netted him his first Best Director nomination. That interpretation of the text has come to be considered a classic, and with good reason. Its misty black-and-white photography and mysteries hypnotize. Continue Reading →