11 Best Movies To Watch After The Wanderers (1979)
June Zero
So back in 1982, Harrison Ford was on Letterman promoting Blade Runner (this is gonna make sense, promise), and when Dave asked him to describe the movie's tone, Ford took a long pause and said, “It’s no musical comedy, David.” The most succinct way to describe June Zero, directed and co-written (along with Tom Shovel) by Jake Paltrow, is that it’s no musical comedy. What it is is a subtle, thoughtful, closely observed story about a small moment in history that explores the difficulty in distinguishing justice from vengeance, understanding your trauma versus defining yourself by it, and how hard it can be to find moral equilibrium in a world in constant turmoil. It’s not what you’d call a fun movie (see above re: Ford, Harrison, and Blade Runner), but it is quietly gripping and manages to find a fresh new perspective in one the most wrung-out of genres, the Holocaust Reckoning Movie. One of the most prominent Nazis to survive the war and escape Germany was Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking officer in the SS and one of the primary organizers and executors of the Holocaust. Eichmann managed to escape Allied imprisonment and avoid capture until he was apprehended in Argentina in 1960 by Israeli Mossad agents. He was taken to Israel, tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang, which he did on June 1st, 1962. June Zero is barely interested in any of that very well-trodden ground. What it focuses on instead are the dual problems of keeping Eichmann alive until the state can execute him and what to do with his body after he dies. Burying such a monster on Israeli soil was obviously out of the question, as was the prospect of returning the body to Eichmann’s family or anywhere else out of fear that it could be interred and become a pro-Nazi symbol. The only choice that makes any sense is cremation. And so Israel went about the business of building an oven to incinerate the corpse of a man who planned and oversaw the incineration of so many of their people. Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
Breakfast at Tiffany's
John Carney's new drama is just one of a diverse collection of features at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the works being covered here wouldn't exist. Irish filmmaker John Carney made his big breakthrough in 2007 with Once, a film focused on the redemptive power of music and its ability to bring people, whether they are strangers or family, together in the pursuit of creating something that allows them to give voice to their once-buried hopes and desires. This was followed by Begin Again (2013), a film focused on the redemptive power of music and its ability to bring people, whether they are strangers or family, together in the pursuit of creating something that allows them to give voice to their once-buried hopes and desires. After that came Sing Street (2016), a film focused on the redemptive power of music and its ability to bring people, whether they are strangers or family, together in the pursuit of creating something that allows them to give voice to their once-buried hopes and desires. Continue Reading →
Boston Strangler
Considering the lurid details of it (let alone that it was never solved), it’s curious that Netflix, America’s number one source for grisly true crime documentaries, has yet to cover the Boston Strangler. It’s a fascinating story largely because the man who was long believed to be the Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, almost certainly didn’t act alone, and may not have even killed all of the thirteen women whose deaths were originally attributed to him. DNA evidence years after the fact conclusively linked DeSalvo, convicted of rape and later murdered in prison, to just one victim. At the time of his arrest, both police and the media were so eager to bring the city-wide hysteria to an end that they pointed at him for all the murders, only quietly conceding after DeSalvo was in jail that there was likely more than one strangler, and that the case was still open. Nearly sixty years later, the other twelve murders remain unsolved. Continue Reading →
The Tender Bar
The Tender Bar, streaming on Amazon January 7th, is based on J. R. Moehringer’s memoir of the same name. In practice though, it could be anyone’s story, and not because there’s a universality to the tale it tells. George Clooney’s film is so generic that the film's Moehringer might as well be a human-shaped blank space. Boasting the archly-drawn relatives of the film version of August: Osage County, the subtle needle drops of a Robert Zemeckis film, and the emotional insight of a Snapple lid fun fact, the picture leaves one thirsty for something of substance. Continue Reading →
Italian Studies
Adam Leon's foggy mood piece is as endearingly formless as its amnesiac protagonist, a moody reflection on creativity and youth. This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. There's no explicit explanation given for why Alina Reynolds (Vanessa Kirby), a short story writer of some recent renown, finds herself aimlessly wandering the streets of New York City sans memory in Adam Leon's hypnotic Italian Studies. But if anyone was to thrive in the Big Apple in such a remarkable fugue state, it'd be someone so preternaturally attuned to listening and observing as Alina. And that she does for the vast majority of Italian Studies' runtime, creating a listless yet engrossing fever dream about the unexpected gifts of curiosity. Continue Reading →
花樣年華
If repression is the ultimate aphrodisiac, there are few films that make such a case for it than Wong Kar-wai’s sumptuous 2000 masterpiece In the Mood for Love, one of the most passionate, delicately rendered on-screen odes to yearning cinema has ever produced. Continue Reading →
John and the Hole
Pascual Sisto's debut feature is a surprisingly toothless psychological thriller with very little on its mind. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) In what will be sure to elicit an insurmountable amount of Home Alone jokes, John and the Hole is a textbook example of a simple premise with potential. There’s John (Charlie Shotwell), a 13-year-old boy whose demeanor straddles the line between budding psychopath and awkward middle school kid. His eyes are so glazed over that they might as well be taped onto his face, and for a while, it’s really quite effective. When it stops making an impact, it’s because it’s clear there’s nothing else behind the surface. One day while exploring the woods by his house, he finds a hole. More specifically, it’s a bunker that was never completed. Soon, he drugs his mother (Jennifer Ehle), father (Michael C. Hall), and older sister (Taissa Farmiga). Then he—you guessed it—drags their bodies into the bunker. He leaves them there for days on end while he lounges around the house, supplying his family with meager amounts of food and water. Whatever cause he has for doing this sits in the dark, and while it would be fine if Nicolás Giacobone’s script didn’t try to fill in the gaps, it kind of does. Worse yet, its attempts to tie fable into metatext are just overt enough to cement how toothless it all really is. Continue Reading →