23 Best Movies To Watch After Copying Beethoven (2006)
Daddio
From Certified Copy to Mass to the Before trilogy, cinema is replete with examples of great movies that wring transfixing drama out of an intimate scope and a cast of characters you can count on one hand. Christy Hall’s feature-length directorial debut Daddio aims to follow in the footsteps of those features, but stumbles mightily in the process. Daddio begins at a New York airport, where Girlie (Dakota Johnson) plops into a taxi after a trip to her home state of Oklahoma. Driving this cab is Clark (Sean Penn), a grizzled man in his sixties who loves shooting his mouth off. Initially, the focus of his ramblings is typical old-man material. He gripes about the ubiquity of apps and credit cards in the modern world. Gradually, though, the duo gets trapped in traffic. Stuck on the road, Clark begins asking Girlie increasingly intimate questions. They started this car ride as strangers. But conversations ranging from the raw to the ribald will have Girlie discovering the listener she didn’t know she needed. Unsurprisingly, Daddio started as a concept for a stage play. What's surprising is how the final film's visual impulses seem determined to avoid comparisons to something you could watch on Broadway. Hall, cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, and editor Lisa Zeno Churgin act furiously to avoid lengthy single-take shots. Nobody will ever compare this to a Chantal Akerman or Chung Mong-Hong movie. Instead, images default to close-ups and medium shots. Hall and company continuously jostle viewers around the cab. Maybe this is out of concern that moviegoers will see a more staid visual style and immediately ask, “Why isn’t this a play?” Continue Reading →
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
What is Horizon? It's a question that plagues the sprawling cast of characters in Kevin Costner's new Western saga, his return to feature filmmaking after staking out a healthy retirement fund (and keeping himself in the public eye of America's dads) with five seasons on Paramount's popular neo-Western soap Yellowstone. Most of them, one way or another, have been drawn West with the promise of prosperity thanks to mysterious flyers published nationwide; settlers, homesteaders, and forty-niners all rush out there to find their future and their fortune. But, as with so many tales of the frontier, down this way lies danger: Apaches, privateers, the shadows of your past following you into the unknown seeking vengeance. Horizon, it seems, is the intangible dream of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, the romantic core of this nation's history (and the brutal underbelly of violence that created it). But it's also important to ask what Horizon is for Costner, especially in the context of this first chapter: Part 1, a three-hour prologue that sets up what could be up to three chapters to come but which gives audiences little to grab onto in that lengthy time period. Much like Dune: Part One before it, it's hard to gauge a film's merits when its story is incomplete by its very nature. Comparisons to "How the West Was Won" have been made, but it also evokes the epic miniseries events of the 1970s and 1980s like Lonesome Dove and The Blue and the Grey, multi-night appointment viewing that told novelistic stories with lavish production values. "Horizon" most echoes these in its structure, a TV-etic format that seems oddly fitting for Costner's return to film after so much time in the TV landscape himself. But Part 1's greatest asset (and hurdle) comes from its opening act, the inciting incident for much of the plot's primary thrust. 1859, the San Pedro Valley; a group of settlers put down stakes and form a small tent city, complete with loving families and even a bustling dance hall. Tragically, this bliss is interrupted by a raiding party of Apaches, angry at the "white-eyes" stealing their land, a forty-minute sequence as brutal as it is terrifying. This is the Costner of Dances With Wolves, in all its power and old-fashioned attitudes: scenes full of Western grandeur, yet suffused with an exoticism of Native peoples that hasn't quite updated to the modern day. Continue Reading →
Fancy Dance
One of Fancy Dance’s most tender moments takes place in a place one wouldn’t normally associate with personal epiphanies. After glancing at a swarm of convenience store bathroom graffiti, teenager Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) sees an opportunity. Taking out a marker, she scribbles “Roki was here” in her native Cayuga language on the wall. It’s one of many instances in Fancy Dance of characters finding little ways to reinforce their presence even when they’re not physically around. Roki clings to trinkets, including a ritzy jacket associated with her missing mother. Performers at a major Powwow event dance to commemorate dead or lost loved ones. This thematic motif is extra important given that Roki, like nearly all of Fancy Dance’s principal characters, hails from the Seneca–Cayuga Nation Reservation in Oklahoma. The norm in America is to erase Indigenous lives. Their children are stolen. Homes are wiped out. Cultures are suppressed. The figures on screen here find countless ways to refute that erasure. Such rebellion even manifests through something as small as convenience store bathroom graffiti. Before Roki writes that fateful piece of graffiti, she’s living a quiet life with her aunt Jax (Lily Gladstone). With Roki’s mom missing for weeks now, Jax is the only parent this teenager has. She seems the only one concerned about that vanished lady, given how little effort law enforcement has put into finding her. Unfortunately, Jax’s criminal record from years past leads to the state deeming her unsuitable to be Roki’s guardian. This surrogate mother/daughter duo is now destined to be separated. In the process, this adolescent would also leave behind her reservation's home and culture. Continue Reading →
Janet Planet
Janet Planet captures a girl caught in her mother’s orbit in the summer of 1991 as she struggles with what to make of the people who enter her mother’s life (friends, boyfriends, strangers) and what to make of herself. It’s also a brutal and empathetic reminder that of all the possible ages to be, 11 might be the worst, and in Janet Planet, 11-year-old Lacy would be the first to agree. As desperate as adults are to regress to a world before endless Zoom meetings and the monotony of laundry, it’s easy for us to forget how utterly powerless you are at 11. It’s an age where adults still control nearly every facet of your life, and you bear constant witness to their bad decisions with no ability to either help or remove yourself from the situation. “Every moment of my life is hell,” Lacy tells her mom, Janet, and if you’re honest with yourself about what being 11 actually felt like, you know it’s the most acceptable of hyperboles. But Lacy, observant and thoughtful, shows the kind of understanding I never did at that age when she adds, “But I don’t think it’ll last, though.” Creating moments of clear-sighted vulnerability like that is what playwright and now first-time director Annie Baker does best. Continue Reading →
Tuesday
From the cosmic ether to the granular eye, Daina Oniunas-Pusić’s singular debut feature, Tuesday, migrates across space and scale with poignant ease. Fifteen-year-old Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) is terminally ill, which her mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) doesn’t want to accept. It’s not until Death visits them as an elder macaw (voiced by Arinzé Kene) that Tuesday and Zora can confront the terrifying mysteries of mortality and embrace an afterlife. It’s a soaring cinematic fairy tale about life and loss that touches our heartstrings with the tenderness of a feather. It starts with the simplicity of belief. Oniunas-Pusić’s writing feels so contemporary because it wholeheartedly embraces wonder as an axiom. This is not a late 20th-century magical comedy where half the movie is spent convincing someone (usually a parent/adult) that the magic is real. There is no dramatic irony. Instead, Pusić invites us to trust and believe in the magical reality she sets before us, just as Zora must learn to trust and believe her daughter when she says it’s time to let go. The appearance of the talking parrot sets off a chain of empathy in which everyone, including Death, wants to be understood. It’s easy to understand these characters when the performers make everything so legible. Petticrew shows Tuesday’s conflicted feelings about being a youth at the end of her life. She’s being pulled away yet has found much to appreciate and enjoy. Tuesday could be a tragic figure, but Pusić and Petticrew render her more human than mortal. It would be easy for Petticrew to remain at Louis-Dreyfus' feet (as Tuesday does) for most of the film, but they instead crafts a fortitude that holds its own. Continue Reading →
Napoleon
Ridley Scott’s surprisingly hollow biopic of the French military commander falters as a character piece and comes shy of victory as an epic. For a film with as many contradictions as Napoleon, it’s odd for it to be so straightforward. It covers 28 years, but it never feels like a lot of changes. It’s over two and a half hours, which, while not a herculean runtime, never entirely slows down. Perhaps it’s because it never really gets started. Ridley Scott’s latest opens with a public decapitation of Marie Antoinette (Catherine Walker), giving way to the 1793 Siege of Toulon. The violence is often unsparingly graphic, so why, then, does it feel so cosmetic? Shouldn’t a live horse eviscerated by a cannonball to the chest do something to the viewer? Maybe not when there’s such little context. If Napoleon is one thing, it’s episodic—ahistorical, even. David Scarpa’s script begins in the trenches and is content on staying there. Everyone and everything are simply window dressing. That includes Napoleon Bonaparte himself (Joaquin Phoenix), whom the film oversimplifies from intrinsically flawed leader to wholly externalized man-child. After the Siege, he wins the affections of Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby). The two soon marry. Continue Reading →
Priscilla
As daybreak bleeds from within the walls, Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) wakes up next to her husband, Elvis (Jacob Elordi). Her water’s broken and, as he calls for a car, she goes to the bathroom, where she applies the perfect fake eyelashes in silence. Continue Reading →
Saltburn
With her first film, Promising Young Woman, writer-director Emerald Fennell took a storyline that was essentially a cloddish-but-glossy retread of such female-driven revenge sagas as Ms .45 and I Spit on Your Grave, infused it with insights regarding gender issues that would barely have passed muster in a 100-level college class and somehow rode it to inexplicable praise and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Continue Reading →
Fair Play
Fair Play is all about the rules of engagement—in business, in bed, in relationships—and the chaos that ensues when someone who lives and dies by those rules suspects his partner is breaking them. However, it isn’t the fairness of the righteous or the just she’s violating. No, it is the unwritten rules he believes everyone should play the game by. Continue Reading →
Past Lives
It doesn’t take much for someone who once meant a whole lot to you to creep into your thoughts every now and then. It’s not an everyday obsessive thing, where they’re a shadow lingering over you. It’s softer, more subtle: a snippet of a song, or something that reminds you of a private joke once shared. Even if the fire has long burned out, an ember or two will glow for an instant. Then it’s gone, and the life you’ve lived without them goes on. Continue Reading →
Reality
The immediate issue with Tina Slatter’s debut feature, Reality, is how disengaging it is as a movie. A direct adaptation from Slatter’s theatrical piece Is This a Room, the conceptual background is probably the more interesting part. That show took the recorded transcript of FBI agents and former veteran and NSA translator Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney) about Winner's leaking of classified information on Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election and used it as a verbatim dialogue. Everything uttered on the tape is replicated almost exactly in the play and, now, the film. The stutters, pauses, coughing, dog barking, doors opening. Everything. Recreated in minute detail. Continue Reading →
The Starling Girl
Jem Starling’s (Eliza Scanlen) wardrobe is too much for the Kentucky heat. Yet others say her bra is still too visible. She tries to praise the Lord through dance with attempts progressive yet accessible to her church. Still, her peers claim the music she picks is too aggressive. Her instructor, Misty (Jessamine Burgum), gently scolds her individuality in class. Meanwhile, at home, her family warns against not just sex but intimacy of any sort. Such is standard for a 17-year-old girl growing up a fundamentalist Christian. Body and soul are omnipresent in The Starling Girl, as much as they are mutually exclusive. Continue Reading →
Palm Trees and Power Lines
Among the increasingly insane and dangerous culture wars we’ve found ourselves thrust into in recent years is whether or not merely explaining to a child what it means to be queer or transgender is inappropriate. For the rational-minded, it teaches children empathy and acceptance. For those less so, it’s akin to showing them pornography, and corrupting their innocence. The word “grooming” is used, although no one seems to know exactly what that means, except that it’s inflammatory and effectively shuts down any hope of a productive conversation. Continue Reading →
Nanny
Nikyatu Jusu’s debut feature, Nanny is a story about the American Dream turned gothic nightmare. It’s a film whose horror lies in a deep-rooted sense of unease. It’s the feeling in your gut that something is wrong, even when you can’t name exactly what. Worse yet, knowing this creeping dread has nothing to do with everything so obviously wrong around you. It’s something else, something you can only assume (or fear) is so much worse than you imagine. Continue Reading →
Sharp Stick
Lena Dunham’s latest feature, Sharp Stick, combines her best and worst tendencies. It’s a coming-of-age dramedy about a young woman’s journey of sexual and self-discovery handled with refreshing tenderness and understanding. But it’s also a story that sees Dunham unwisely wading into waters out of her depth, drowning her characters in quirky affectation that distracts from her purpose. Where the film goes is somewhere surprising, affirming, and even beautiful. The issue is its route. Continue Reading →
Am I Ok?
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →
The Power of the Dog
Contains spoilers about The Power of the Dog (read our spoiler-free review here) Continue Reading →
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Even after the umpteenth re-watch, I feel I’m only starting to scratch the surface of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. Initial reviews and reactions gravitated towards the film’s relationship with Scientology and its co-founder L. Ron Hubbard. In the decade since, this fixation has dissipated, depriving confused viewers of an easy handhold while scaling this towering cinematic achievement. Make no mistake: Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd is a character clearly inspired by Hubbard. But labeling The Master “a movie about Scientology” is about as silly as thinking you can cure leukemia by accessing past lives. Continue Reading →
The Souvenir: Part II
With her abuser out of her life, one would think it’d be easier for Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) to move from day to day. In some ways, it is; she’s no longer directly in the clutches of Anthony’s (Tom Burke) patterns of insults, flattery, and disposal. He’s now dead as a result of his drug addiction. She, however, still lives with his memory. She discusses him with her psychologist (Gail Ferguson) just as often as others refer to his passing as a “loss.” But he’s still there: in her mind, in her health, in her art. Now, in The Souvenir Part II, Julie is finalizing her graduation film for school, repurposing and compartmentalizing her emotions into her work. Continue Reading →
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is an alternatively madcap and melancholic retelling of the artistic and personal life of the peculiar Louis Wain by making a lot of noise but not saying much. Biographical films have to tread a very difficult line. They must tell their central characters’ life and accomplishments while humanizing them through their rituals and quirks. And they must do this all without turning the movie idealization or fetishization of such things. Narratively, what Louis Wain gets right is that focusing on the man as a deeply troubled individual and melds his artistic work along with the afflictions that he suffered. What it gets wrong is its inability to dig deeper into Louis Wain beyond his whimsies and mannerisms and the surrounding greater Victorian English culture. Continue Reading →