A.O. Scott

“It’s so metaphorical!” Kim Ki-woo exclaims early in “Parasite,” Bong Joon Ho’s new film. Ki-woo is the college-aged son of one of the two families — the impoverished Kims and the wealthy Parks — whose fates entwine with horrible and hilarious results. He uses the phrase a few times, most notably with reference to the large, decorative “landscape rock” that is a gift from a better-off friend. In the interpretation of “Parasite” that emphasizes the movie’s fairy-tale aspects, the stone brings good fortune to Ki-woo, his sister and their parents, even as, like so many magical objects, it also curses them. (Spoilers follow, for “Parasite” and other Bong movies.)

Before long, Ki-woo stops talking about metaphors. Maybe because things start getting real. He takes a job tutoring the Parks’ teenage daughter, Da-hye, and pretty soon his whole family is employed, under dubious premises and fake identities, in the Park household. His sister, pretending to be a highly trained art therapist, starts working with Da-hye’s younger brother, Da-song. The Kim patriarch, Ki-taek, replaces the chauffeur who drives Park to and from his fancy tech job. Kim Chung-sook, the mother of the clan (a former Olympic-level hammer thrower), takes over as housekeeper.

Or maybe — and it might amount to the same thing — the Kims’ reality has turned into an unsettling allegory of modern life, and Ki-woo doesn’t see metaphors in the way that a fish doesn’t notice water. What started out as a clever scam has turned into a fable.

In South Korea, where “Parasite” is already a blockbuster (having taken in more than $70 million at the box office), it has contributed to that country’s continuing debate about economic inequality. In the United States, where similar arguments are swirling, it has begun to turn Bong from an auteur with a passionate cult following into a top-tier international filmmaker. Fifty years old, with seven features to his name — most of them available on North American streaming platforms — he combines showmanship with social awareness in a way that reenergizes the faded but nonetheless durable democratic promise of movies.

The cramped, leaky “semi-basement” apartment the Kims call home is a metaphor of sorts, and so is the spacious, modern, architecturally significant mansion where they work. The Park home in particular comes with built-in symbols, including a deep subbasement where inconvenient secrets can be stashed away, like dead bodies or hidden meanings in an Edgar Allan Poe story.

And “Parasite,” which won the top prize in Cannes in May and has recently become the rare subtitled release to be mentioned as an Oscar contender beyond the foreign film category, plays out like a parable of contemporary social relations. It’s part horror film, part satire and part tragedy, conveying a sharp lesson about class struggle in South Korea and just about everywhere else.

But the houses in the film — like every office, alley, field, railroad car and precinct house in Bong’s expanding cinematic universe — are also actual physical places. And their inhabitants are anything but symbols or ciphers. Bong likes to choreograph wildly improbable chases and fights, but he doesn’t cheat at physics. A reason for the frequent comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg is the ruthless precision of his technique. But for all his love of whimsy and absurdity, he doesn’t play games with human psychology. The actions and reactions in his movies are often surprising, but they are never nonsensical. His characters have gravity, density, grace and a decent share of stupidity.

To call Bong a realist, though, would be crazy. The movie of his that first caught the attention of genre geeks on a global scale was his third feature, “The Host” (released here in 2007), about a giant, carnivorous mutant fish spreading terror along the Han River in Seoul. In 2014 came “Snowpiercer” (based on a French graphic novel), which confirmed Bong’s status as an international action auteur. A gaggle of movie stars from Hollywood and beyond (including Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton and Song Kang Ho, the solid South Korean Everyman who has appeared in four of Bong’s movies and who plays the Kim patriarch in “Parasite”) were packed into a high-speed train zooming around an apocalyptically frozen earth. The passengers were sorted into haves and have-nots, rebels and sellouts, and their struggles were both surprising and grimly familiar.

That was followed by “Okja” (2017), an antic updating of the basic “Charlotte’s Web” material (a young farm girl fights to save the life of her beloved piglet) for an age of genetic engineering, mass media and multinational capitalism. Swinton returned, playing twin moguls, but the real stars were Ahn Seo Hyun, as the young girl, and the digitally rendered shoat whose soul was at stake in the hectic battles among scientists, executives, animal-rights activists and other motley human specimens.

In obvious ways, “Parasite” is more realistic than those films. It returns Bong to the workaday Korean settings of his first two features, the grotesque comedy “Barking Dogs Never Bite” and the detective drama “Memories of Murder,” and also of “Mother,” his masterpiece (released here in 2010) about a woman whose mentally challenged adult son is accused of killing a schoolgirl. “Parasite” is more noir than science fiction, farcical until it turns melodramatic.

But to sort Bong’s work by genre or style is to miss both its originality and consistency. His movies are bold and bright, infused with rich colors and emphatic performances. They are funny, suspenseful and punctuated by kinetic sequences that can make even jaded multiplex-potatoes sit up and gasp. There are at least a half-dozen such moments in “Parasite,” perhaps the most thrilling of which involves three people hiding under a living-room coffee table while another camps out in a tent in the backyard.

At the same time, his movies are dark and subtle, burrowing deep into sticky ethical problems and hot zones of social dysfunction. You could say that he uses blockbuster means to advance art-house ends. You could also say the opposite. His real achievement, though, is to scramble such facile distinctions, and a host of others as well.

His stories are often tragic, but the mood tends to be more exuberant than somber, an emotional effect that can be hard to describe. The full awfulness of human beings and their circumstances is on vivid display: venality, vanity, deception and outright cruelty. But the aim isn’t mockery or glib sensationalism, or the routine fusion of the laughable and the grotesque that has been a staple of Hollywood cool since the mid-1990s. The most shocking thing about Bong’s films might be their sincerity, the warm humanism that flickers through the chronicles of spite, sloth and self-delusion.

The flickers are sometimes faint. In Bong’s debut feature, “Barking Dogs Never Bite” (2000), the humanism is all but buried in a gruesome, urban-legend-inflected conceit. A beleaguered graduate student, desperate to become a professor — an advancement that depends on his ability to come up with a large bribe for a senior figure in his field — is tormented by the barking of a neighbor’s dog. Since he lives in a vast, impersonal apartment block (the first of Bong’s metaphorical architectural spaces), he can’t identify the offending creature. The wrong dog ends up dying, more than once, and being eaten by a janitor with a taste for stewed canine flesh. Meanwhile the student’s marriage starts to crumble.

A measure of redemption — or at least a twinkle of mischief, innocence and decency — arrives via a subplot concerning a young woman in the building, and her friend, who works in a convenience store. They represent archetypal Bong characters: socially marginal, loyal to each other, but not necessarily heroic or noble by virtue of their poverty. Bong’s sense of class solidarity, which threads through every one of his movies, doesn’t involve romanticizing the people on the losing end of an increasingly ruthless economic competition.

The Kims in “Parasite” aren’t necessarily nicer, more loving or more honest than the bourgeois Parks. The small-town police officers in “Memories of Murder” are hardly pillars of virtue. The snack vendor played by Song in “The Host,” who enlists his father and his siblings in a valiant crusade to save his daughter from the monster, is a bit of an oaf. The mother in “Mother,” who sells herbs and practices acupuncture without a license, pushes maternal devotion to the point of homicide.

To sentimentalize or idealize any of these people would not only be a form of condescension. It would strip their stories of dramatic and moral interest, making them less disturbing and also a lot less fun. The pleasure and the discomfort can’t be separated.

We are watching players compete in a rigged game with potentially mortal stakes and unreliable referees. Institutions — schools, companies, governments — are comically and also lethally useless. There is no legitimate authority, only raw power. Family connections are the only bonds that count, but families are a mess. The only answer is a kind of wily resourcefulness, an on-the-fly problem-solving knack that can deliver at best small, local victories. That those can be satisfying is a tribute to Bong’s own wily resourcefulness and also to his radical compassion.

What makes “Parasite” the movie of the year — what might make Bong the filmmaker of the century — is the way it succeeds in being at once fantastical and true to life, intensely metaphorical and devastatingly concrete.

There doesn’t seem to be much distance, in other words, between the dire futures projected in “Snowpiercer” and “Okja” — nightmares of technology and greed run amok — and the class-specific domestic spaces of “Parasite,” “Mother” and “Memories of Murder.” A much-remarked-on feature of human existence at the moment is how dystopian it feels, as some of the most extreme and alarming fantasies of fiction reappear as newsfeed banalities. Fires and hurricanes feel less like symbols than signals, evidence of a disaster that’s already here rather than omens of impending catastrophe. Monsters walk among us. Corruption is normal. Trust, outside a narrow circle of friends or kin, is unthinkable. Whether we know it or not, it’s Bong’s world we’re living in. Literally.

Where to Watch Bong’s Films

“Snowpiercer”: Stream it on Netflix; buy or rent it on iTunes, Vudu, Amazon and YouTube.

“Mother”: Buy or rent it on iTunes, Amazon and Vudu.

“The Host”: Buy or rent it on iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.

“Memories of Murder”: Buy or rent it on iTunes and YouTube.

“Barking Dogs Never Bite”: Buy or rent it on iTunes.

This article originally appeared in

It's Bong Joon Ho's Dystopia. We Just Live in It.

(Critic’s Notebook)

The usual way to begin writing about Agnès Varda is to take note of her status as the only woman director associated with the French Nouvelle Vague. I’ve done it again just now for what I hope is the last time. Not because it isn’t accurate to place Varda, who died at 90 on Friday, in the company of confrères like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, but because the habit reflects a distorted view of film history, one that obscures both the singularity of Varda’s career and her place in the pantheon.

We are accustomed — and by “we” I mean ordinary cinephiles, male and female, as well as critics, scholars and list-makers — to thinking about the movie past as a chronicle of boys’ clubs, one new wave of testosterone after another. Women who make their mark behind the camera, as agents rather than objects of its gaze, tend to be seen as anomalies and alibis, special cases rather than central figures. Their existence can be cited as an exception to the sexism that ensures their scarcity, and the master narratives that treat their stories as more than footnotes or sidebars have yet to be written.

Varda’s work might be the place to start. Not only because of her feminism — which was consistent and complicated, unmistakable and impossible to circumscribe — but also because of her individuality. Like her friend Chris Marker, she made movies that didn’t so much transcend genre categories as ignore them altogether, finding possibilities for expression outside the usual classifications. She alternated between fiction and nonfiction, and also frequently combined them. Her essay films are also memoirs; her personal reflections are also political; her saddest movies are also her liveliest, and vice versa. “Documenteur,” from 1981, combines the word documentary with the French word for “liar.” It’s the masculine version of that word, even though the protagonist (Sabine Mamou) is a woman and the movie incorporates images from a documentary directed by Varda herself.

Some of her best-known films concern the experiences of young women making their way, alone and together, through modern landscapes full of promise and peril: “Cléo From 5 to 7”; “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t”; “Vagabond.” Each of those movies — from 1962, 1977 and 1986 — is an essential document of its decade. But they don’t stand alone. They connect. With one another, with Varda’s other films, with the work of colleagues and friends, with the places and faces that inhabit them.

An introduction to Varda might lead to the discovery of Shirley Clarke and Chantal Akerman, as well as Marker and Godard. The point is not to just to explore the possibility of a counter-canon of women who made films alongside and often in the shadow of male contemporaries, but also to reopen the questions of how we pay attention to movies and what movies invite us to pay attention to.

In Varda’s later films, starting with “The Gleaners and I” (2000), she frequently turned the camera on herself. She was a wonderful presence— playful, candid, impatient and kind — but these movies were not all about her. In putting herself onscreen, turning each feature into its own making-of documentary, she made explicit something we know about movies but often suppress or forget. What we watch is always being shown to us by someone, a person whose authority, whose status as auteur is usually secured by his or her (but mostly his) invisibility.

By putting herself — body, voice and mind — in the frame as she made her way across beaches and marketplaces, Varda insisted that filmmaking could be a kind of companionship, a communal act of looking, wondering and feeling. What makes “The Gleaners and I” and her last feature, “Faces Places” (co-directed with the artist J.R.) so moving is that they create a bond between director and viewer that feels very much like friendship.

I don’t mean this to sound soft or sentimental, or to create a misleading impression of niceness. Friends can be difficult. Friendship is demanding. It is also transformative, and if Varda was among the most welcoming of directors, she was also among the most rigorous and radical. Her movies are intensely personal, which is another way of saying that they are profoundly democratic. That’s the history that needs to be written.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/movies/agns-varda-appreciation.html" id="953dd60a-bfd9-349d-a850-4fab2c3c0d9a">The New York Times</a>.

Agnès Varda: The Filmmaker as Rigorous Friend

Those two statements pretty much sum up what this movie, the latest from Harmony Korine, thinks of itself. Chronicling a hectic season in the life of its hero (a defiantly unkempt Matthew McConaughey), “The Beach Bum” is intoxicated by its own shaggy lyricism and committed to an ethic of unapologetic hedonism. Moondog is a genius. He will be the first to tell you so, but everyone else is quick to agree: his wife, Minnie (Isla Fisher); their daughter, Heather (Stefania LaVie Owen); Moondog’s agent (Jonah Hill, doing an accent somewhere between Truman Capote and Foghorn Leghorn); the judge (Jo Marie Payton) who sends the poet off to rehab.

Moondog quotes D.H. Lawrence and Charles Baudelaire from memory, so there’s nothing wrong with his taste. Twice he shares a verse of his own, a brief paean to his penis. He takes the stage at bars and parties in Key West and other parts of South Florida, reciting off-the-cuff odes that, if you were drunk enough, might put you in mind of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg or maybe Henry Miller. Even with all the tequila in Margaritaville, I will never be that drunk.

Speaking of which, Jimmy Buffett is in this movie, playing himself. Snoop Dogg is in it, too, as Moondog’s drug-dealer best friend, Ray (short for Lingerie), and the high point comes when the two musicians collaborate on an impromptu ballad in Moondog’s honor. There is some other fun stuff, too — beautiful shots of the evening sky over Miami; good-time music that takes you back to the ‘70s and ‘80s; Zac Efron and Martin Lawrence in manic cameos — but nobody sitting in the theater or on the couch will experience as much pleasure as the people on screen. Available evidence suggests that the movie was a total blast to make.

One of Korine’s distinctions as a filmmaker is his total commitment to his characters. He does not judge, scold or moralize, but follows the misfit children of his imagination as far beyond respectability as they will take him. Sometimes this is repellent, sometimes provocative, sometimes even — in “Spring Breakers,” at least — profound. “The Beach Bum” is none of these. Its soul is sentimental, conventional and timid despite its hero’s bravado. Moondog may seem like a fearless free spirit, but the movie he lives in is as risk averse and conflict avoidant as a toddler’s bedtime story.

Like a toddler, Moondog — whose Hawaiian-print suits look like pajamas accessorized with a diaper-like fanny pack — is a creature of pure narcissistic impulse. He will never say no to a drink, a joint, a line of cocaine or a sexually available woman, and nobody ever says no to him either.

Some things happen that might, in other circumstances, put a damper on the good times. Minnie is having an affair with Ray. Heather is getting married. Someone close to Moondog dies, and he is sent off to rehab. Also, an enormous inheritance is held in escrow until Moondog finishes his next masterpiece.

None of this changes anything. It’s not that Moondog overcomes adversity. Adversity doesn’t exist in his universe. Korine’s loyalty to the character — his protective impulse to shield Moondog from any criticism — is so intense that any hint that his behavior might have troubling implications is banished from consideration. The only person who doesn’t like Moondog is Heather’s fiancé (Joshua Ritter), who is given a demeaning nickname and branded as a hopeless square.

But without anyone or anything to rebel against, Moondog turns into a bore. McConaughey, for his part, tries to locate the limit of his charm and succeeds much too quickly. Wonderful though it is to see him with a white kitten, in homage to Anita Ekberg in “La Dolce Vita,” it is less enchanting to be subjected to his gales of forced laughter. At least we can’t smell Moondog’s breath, or see what he is composing on his portable typewriter.

But it’s hard to miss the stale air that surrounds him. What “The Beach Bum” celebrates as transgression is pure tedium. What it takes for divine lunacy is frat house doggerel. The booze flows freely. The women are topless and ornamental. The cars and boats are fast and expensive. There’s nothing much worth writing about.

Rated R. Florida, man. In English and Spanish, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/movies/the-beach-bum-review.html" id="576ac84f-8def-31c4-a556-22b4b9b5409c">The New York Times</a>.

“That’s great poetry,” Moondog says near the end of “The Beach Bum,” delivering a verdict on his own work. A bit later, after a literally explosive bacchanal during which bales of cash and a sailboat are set alight, he declares the evening “a blast,” inserting an expletive for emphasis.

Review: Matthew McConaughey Waxes Poetic in 'The Beach Bum'

Back at the turn of the millennium, in the northern Chinese industrial city of Datong, Qiao and Bin are an underworld power couple. Not quite Bonnie and Clyde — too disciplined, too businesslike — but with more than a hint of old Hollywood gangster style. In the provincial dance halls and gambling parlors where Bin holds court in the first chapter of “Ash Is Purest White,” he and Qiao carry themselves with glamour and authority.

Bin (Liao Fan) gazes through a permanent haze of cigarette smoke, his handsome poker face occasionally betraying a hint of amusement or surprise. Qiao (Zhao Tao), from a more respectable background, amplifies her lover’s charisma with her own. They are the brightest stars in a constellation of hustlers, sycophants, tough guys and wannabes, whose admiration is streaked with envy and fear. Nobody is cooler.

Packets of money change hands, and eventually a gun is fired, but “Ash Is Purest White,” Jia Zhangke’s enthralling new feature, isn’t really a crime drama. The aura of romantic, outlaw chic that hovers around Bin and Qiao soon dissipates, replaced by the clearer, grimmer air of reality. Jia, an essential figure in China’s “sixth generation” of filmmakers and one the most inventive and engaged directors of the 21st century, has long concerned himself with the effect of enormous social and economic forces on the intimate experiences of individuals. His movies, fictional and nonfictional alike, document the transformation of cities, landscapes and ways of life as those upheavals affect families, couples and groups of friends.

Viewed from one angle — from the ground level of its plot — the scale of “Ash Is Purest White” can seem modest. It’s the story of two people whose love collapses under the weight of bad luck and betrayal but who can’t manage to quit each other. When Bin is attacked by members of a rival gang, Qiao saves his life. Rather than rat him out, she accepts a five-year prison sentence, after which she goes looking for Bin, who has left their home province, Shanxi. Earlier, he had told her about traditional criminal code of “righteousness and loyalty,” but she seems to be the only one committed to upholding it.

On her way to find him — it’s now 2006 — she takes a ferry down the Yangtze River, through the area soon to be inundated by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Later, she will find herself on a train heading west, striking up a friendship with a man bound for the province of Xinjiang. Even without a detailed knowledge of China’s geography or its recent history, a viewer feels the dislocation and momentum of accelerating change — and something of the country’s sheer vastness and density.

There is always something new. By the time “Ash Is Purest White” returns to Datong, in the present day, the city is almost unrecognizable. But Jia’s perspective is neither nostalgic nor optimistic. His movies don’t imagine a stable past to be mourned or longed for. (Since 2000, his non- or semidocumentary features, all essential, are “Platform,” “Unknown Pleasures,” “Still Life,” “The World,” “A Touch of Sin,” “24 City” and “Mountains May Depart.”) Nor do they project a happy future on the horizon. His world is in constant motion, and his refusal to hurry through it — the grace of his camera movements, the sometimes agonizing slowness of his scenes — can be understood as a kind of protest, a reminder of the ethical necessity of paying attention.

The most consistent focus of Jia’s attention is Zhao Tao, who has appeared in nearly all of his works since the 2000 film “Platform.” (They have been married since 2012.) At once delicate and indomitable, down to earth and otherworldly, she has come to figure in his filmography as both an Everywoman and a quasi-mythic being, a woman whose heroism resides in her refusal to disappear. From film to film, playing a variety of characters, she moves through industrial wastes and high-rise developments, night life and factory work, love and crime, wielding her individuality as a shield and a weapon.

Qiao’s resourcefulness in “Ash Is Purest White” is a source of both pathos and encouragement. She is a survivor, and perhaps because of that she endures more than her share of suffering. But the film as a whole is too rich with incident and surprise to be bleak. Jia has always had a sly sense of comedy, and an appreciation of spectacle. He lingers at drunken parties, appreciates the solemn ridiculousness of ballroom dancers performing at a funeral and revels in the full-throated emotion of a cheesy love song. The high point of Qiao and Bin’s relationship may be when they dance together to the Village People’s “YMCA” — a pop-culture cliché that Jia embraces even as he mocks it.

The strangest moment in “Ash Is Purest White” is surely the appearance of a UFO, an event that is all the more astonishing for being without any particular consequences. The lights streak through the night sky, and down below life keeps going. This may be a reminder of the vastness of the universe, a symbol of mysteries beyond reckoning, or a bit of mischief on the director’s part. It’s not the first time the possibility of extraterrestrial life has popped up in one of Jia’s movies, which are in every other respect the opposite of science fiction. Except, perhaps, insofar as the truest human feeling he recognizes is alienation.

Not rated. In Chinese and Mandarin, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/movies/ash-is-purest-white-review.html" id="872a6e34-6d40-3224-adcc-ff7ec65ac4eb">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

'Ash Is Purest White' Review: Love Smolders and Crime Pays in a Changing China

As Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow rampage across a half-dozen states, the governor of Texas, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (Kathy Bates), is persuaded by her head law enforcement honcho, Lee Simmons (John Carroll Lynch), to bring a couple of old Texas Rangers out of retirement. The governor has disbanded the Rangers and brags about raising taxes to replace them with a more up-to-date police force. J. Edgar Hoover is doing the same thing at the federal level, and while we never see Hoover’s face we do hear him called a “high-flying sissy” by one of our heroes.

Hoover’s men are smug, citified so-and-sos in trim suits who set great store by fancy crime-fighting techniques like fingerprint analysis, wiretaps, two-way radios and aerial surveillance. The ex-Rangers, reclassified as highway patrolmen for their new mission, prefer to rely on horse sense and cowboy folk wisdom. “Outlaws and mustangs always come home,” says Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner), the older, gruffer one. He reckons that Bonnie and Clyde will circle back to the Dallas neighborhood where they grew up. He’s mostly right, but the feds and other busybodies keep getting in the way.

The plan is not to take the fugitives alive. Before he sets out in pursuit — and before he’s joined by his erstwhile partner, Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson) — Frank purchases a small arsenal at a Lubbock gun shop. Even though he’s a bit rusty on the draw, Frank is a professional, and he takes the job personally. Barrow and Parker’s slaughter of police officers enrages him, and he’s disgusted by the aura of Robin Hood chic that has gathered around them. Graffiti on a rural water tower reads “Go Bonnie and Clyde!” Young women sport berets in imitation of Bonnie’s signature look. “Coldblooded killers who are more adored than movie stars” is Lee Simmons’ assessment.

Directed by John Lee Hancock (“The Blind Side”) from a script by John Fusco, “The Highwaymen” offers itself as a corrective to one of the most famous — and in its day controversial — products of 1960s Hollywood. “Bonnie and Clyde” magnified the mystique of ‘30s bank robbers by refracting it through the lens of counterculture revolt. This movie opposes that one with every fiber of its ornery being, including by its insistence on procedural tedium over cinematic excitement. It’s no less violent than “Bonnie and Clyde,” but it’s in a much worse mood.

“They aren’t human anymore,” Frank says, referring to the gun-crazy kids he’s determined to bring down. The filmmakers support this thesis by keeping Bonnie and Clyde’s faces off-screen until the very end. They’re meant to be monsters, but also ciphers and symbols of a world gone wrong.

Frank and Maney carry their own share of metaphorical baggage. American movies vacillate endlessly between the worship of lawmen and the romance of outlaws, but few are as dogmatically one-sided as this one. With all respect to Harrelson and Costner, they aren’t about to compete with 1967-vintage Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in the sex-appeal department. Hancock compensates by eliminating sex appeal altogether, replacing it with stubborn, grouchy belligerence.

This can be kind of touching — the spectacle of old guys muttering and wheezing can have that effect — and kind of fun, too. Frank, superfluously described as a “grump” by one of his wife’s genteel friends, lives in comfortable retirement with said wife (Kim Dickens, too briefly) and his pet javelina. Maney has it rougher, living in a shack on foreclosed land with his daughter and her family, with no job and a taste for liquor.

He’s the drinker. Frank, a crumpled pack of Luckies in his shirt pocket, is the smoker. Frank is the alpha: stern in his morality, steady in his judgment, slow to smile. Maney is the sidekick: jokey, annoying, troubled by his conscience and haunted by the memory of men he has killed. He doesn’t like the idea of shooting a woman, or gunning down a man without warning.

His sensitivity provides a foil for Frank’s unbending righteousness, and also an alibi for bleeding-heart viewers who might find themselves enjoying this tale of rough justice in spite of themselves. Costner and Harrelson generally give pretty good value. This isn’t an especially good movie — it’s too long, too drenched in Thomas Newman’s cloyingly eclectic score, too full of speechifying and self-regard — but it is a coherent one, with the courage of its vengeful, murderous, politically terrifying convictions.

Rated R for killing. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes.

The movie arrives on Netflix on March 29.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/movies/the-highwaymen-review.html" id="327cb23c-7dd8-3ebb-a684-a4da25c33489">The New York Times</a>.

To call “The Highwaymen” revisionist — or even reactionary — would be an understatement. This retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde story is not content to posit that those two Depression-era outlaws got what they deserved when they died in a hail of bullets on a Louisiana back road. It has a sackful of bones to pick with the modern world as a whole. Violent criminals are a problem, yes, but so are movies, airplanes, car radios, women in politics, newspapers — you name it. If Grandpa Simpson coul...

'The Highwaymen' Review: Grumpy Old Men on the Trail of Glamorous Killers

There is a lot of love in “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” and quite a bit to enjoy. The screen is crowded with signs of Quentin Tarantino’s well-established ardor — for the movies and television shows of the decades after World War II; for the vernacular architecture, commercial signage and famous restaurants of Los Angeles; for the female foot and the male jawline; for vintage clothes and cars and cigarettes. But the mood in this, his ninth feature, is for the most part affectionate rather than obsessive.

Don’t get me wrong. Tarantino is still practicing a cinema of saturation, demanding the audience’s total attention and bombarding us with allusions, visual jokes, flights of profane eloquence, daubs of throwaway beauty and gobs of premeditated gore. And yet “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” whose title evokes bedtime stories as well as a pair of Sergio Leone masterpieces, is Tarantino’s most relaxed movie by far, both because of its ambling, shaggy-dog structure and the easygoing rhythm of its scenes.

Though trouble percolates on the horizon and mayhem arrives in the final act, this is fundamentally a hangout movie, a bad-guys-come-to-town Western more like “Rio Bravo” than “High Noon.” Above all, it’s a buddy picture about two middle-level entertainment industry workers doing their jobs and making the scene over a few hectic, sunny days in 1969.

The friendship between Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) functions for Tarantino as both keystone and key. It’s an organizing principle and a source of meaning, and a major reason that “Once Upon a Time” is more than a baby-boomer edition of Trivial Pursuit brought to life.

Unlike many of the people they share the screen with — the period-specific A-list characters include Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) and Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) — Rick and Cliff are made-up. Rick is an actor on the downward slope of a moderately successful career. A star in a handful of Westerns and combat pictures, and of a popular TV Western series, he is now mostly cast as a one-episode villain on other people’s shows. He’s considering an offer to make spaghetti Westerns in Italy. (Tarantino supplies perfect fake clips to annotate Rick’s filmography). Not a has-been, exactly, but not quite what he used to be or might have been.

Cliff is his longtime stunt double, but as Rick’s roles have shifted, his role has changed too. His duties include driving Rick (whose license has been suspended) to and from auditions and sets, performing minor household repairs and generally being available as a sounding board and drinking partner. You can’t really call Cliff a sidekick — we’re talking about Brad Pitt — and he’s not really a servant, either, even though Rick pays him for his time. An older vocabulary is needed: Cliff is a gentleman’s gentleman, a man Friday, a dogsbody, a squire. “More than a brother but less than a wife” is how the movie puts it.

The relationship isn’t defined by money or sex, but by a difference in rank accepted without comment or complaint by both parties. The inequality between the men — Rick lives in a spacious ranch house up in the hills, Cliff in a cluttered trailer down in the valley — is what dignifies their bond, just as the contrast of their temperaments sustain it.

Rick, a sloppy drinker and a furious smoker, wears his feelings close to the surface. He weeps aloud over the state of his career, throws an epic tantrum in his trailer when he messes up a scene and is moved to tears by the exquisiteness of his own acting. Cliff is a different kind of cat — lean, taciturn, self-effacing, slow to anger but capable of serious violence. Some say he’s a murderer; he himself occasionally alludes to a criminal past. Better not to ask. Apart from Rick, his main attachment is to his dog, Brandy, whose loyalty is the mirror of his own. (DiCaprio’s baroque, exuberant emotionalism perfectly complements Pitt’s down-to-the-bone minimalism. They’re both terrific.)

If the guys aren’t quite Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, their companionship nonetheless takes shape within a fundamentally aristocratic social order. Joan Didion, in an essay first published in 1973, described the Hollywood of that era as “the last extant stable society,” and Tarantino’s tableau confirms this view. Life isn’t perfect, but it is coherent. People know their place. They respect the rules and hierarchies. Rick’s neighbors, Sharon Tate and her husband, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), live higher up in the canyon (at the end of a gated driveway) and also on the status pyramid. They are regarded not with envy or resentment, but with awe.

The governing virtue in this world is courtesy. The things produced within it are ridiculous, but also beautiful. Residents take seriously things that are objectively silly, which lends a measure of charm to otherwise pedestrian moments. A series of on-set interactions between Rick and two other actors — a leading man played by Timothy Olyphant and a juvenile played by the phenomenal Julia Butters — demonstrate the workings of this code. What they’re collaborating on might look like disposable commercial trash, but making it involves craft and tradition, folk wisdom and spiritual discipline, trust and integrity.

Tarantino’s sense of the movie past is often described as nostalgic. He tends to be seen — by admirers and critics alike — as a film geek, a fanboy, a fanatic cinephile with an encyclopedic command of archaic styles and genres. True enough. But “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood” shows that he deserves a loftier, possibly more contentious label. It’s the expression of a sensibility that is profoundly and passionately conservative.

John Ford, one of old Hollywood’s greatest conservatives, ended one of his greatest movies with the exhortation to “print the legend.” Tarantino’s answer is to film the fairy tale.

Alongside the knight and his squire, there is a princess — Tate — who lives in something like a castle and is married to a man who looks a little like a frog. Tarantino has never been much interested in sex or romance — violence and vengeance are what makes his stories run — but he has a sentimental investment in marriage and a thing about wives.

Sharon, who is barefoot, pregnant or both in most of her scenes, is not so much a symbol of innocence or glamour as an emblem of normalcy. The best stretch of the movie follows her, Cliff and Rick through their separate routines on a single day.

Rick is at work, fighting off a hangover and his own self-doubt. Cliff picks up a hitchhiker — a girl he’s noticed before, played by Margaret Qualley — and drives her to the Spahn Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, where she lives with a bunch of other young people (and an old guy played by Bruce Dern, one of many memorable cameos). Sharon also gives a stranger a ride, buys her husband a gift and stops in at a theater in Westwood to watch herself in “The Wrecking Crew,” a spoofy action caper starring Dean Martin. That’s a real movie, as are most of the others whose titles appear on billboards and marquees.

In the real world, six months after that magically ordinary imaginary day, Tate was murdered in her home on Cielo Drive, along with four of her friends. The killers lived at the Spahn Ranch, and were disciples of a failed musician named Charles Manson.

That’s the opposite of a spoiler, by the way. If you don’t know about the Manson family, or if you’re vague on the details of their crimes, you may not feel the tingle of foreboding that is crucial to Tarantino’s revisionism. Didion, in “The White Album,” wrote that “many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on Aug. 9, 1969, ended at exactly the moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brush fire through the community.” But what if the ’60s never ended? Or rather, what if the ’60s, as a half-century of pop-culture habit has taught us to remember them, never really happened?

The political struggles of the decade are deep in the background, occasionally crackling through car radio static along with traffic and weather reports. The music we hear isn’t a soundtrack of rebellion, but an anthology of pleasure. Tarantino’s anti-ironic celebration of the mainstream popular culture of the time amounts to a sustained argument against the idea of a counterculture. Those who would disrupt, challenge or destroy the last stable society on earth are in the grip of an ideological, aesthetic and moral error. Hippies aren’t cool. Old-time he-men like Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth are cool.

You don’t have to agree. I don’t think I do. But I also don’t mind. There will be viewers who object to the movie’s literal and metaphorical hippie-punching on political grounds. There will be others who embrace it as a thumb in the eye of current sensitivities, and others who insist the movie has no politics at all.

To which I can only say: it’s a Western, for Pete’s sake. Politics are wound into its DNA, and Tarantino knows the genome better than anyone else. Which is just to say that like other classics of the genre, “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood” is not going anywhere. It will stand as a source of debate — and delight — for as long as we care about movies. And it wants us to care.

‘Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood’ is rated R (not the bloodiest Tarantino, but still Tarantino). Running time: 2 hours 41 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/movies/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-review.html" id="f300f81b-c396-3b67-a6e3-2667c37fd28e">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick)

'Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood' Review: We Lost It at the Movies

The opening minutes of “Honeyland” are as astonishing — as sublime and strange and full of human and natural beauty — as anything I’ve ever seen in a movie. A woman makes her way on foot across wild meadowlands and up a mountainside, carefully stepping along a narrow ledge to a rocky outcropping, where bees have made a hive. Without much protective gear, and apparently without being stung, she extracts several honeycombs and secures them in a sack.

Back home, in the valley — she is one of two permanent residents of a hamlet in what is now called the Republic of North Macedonia — she transplants the colony to a stone wall near her house. In the coming months, she sings to the bees and talks to them, explaining the terms of their relationship. When the time comes to take the honey, she’ll leave half of it for them. It’s not a bargain, exactly, since the bees have no real say in the matter, but it is a sustainable arrangement and one that has survived in this region for generations.

The woman, Hatidze Muratova, is an actual beekeeper, and “Honeyland,” directed by Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska, is a documentary about her life and labors. Originally commissioned to make a video about conservation efforts in North Macedonia, the filmmakers spent three years with Hatidze; her mother, Nazife; and the late-arriving people next door. (More about them shortly). As a result, Stefanov and Kotevska have done more than record the rhythms and textures of rural life. They have shaped their observations — more than 400 hours of footage — into a luminous neorealist fable, a sad and stirring tale of struggle, persistence and change.

Hatidze, born in 1964, lives with Nazife, who is bedridden and partly blind; a hound named Jackie; and those industrious bees. It’s an austere existence, but it has its satisfactions, and Hatidze isn’t entirely isolated from the rest of the world. Skopje, the Macedonian capital, is only a little more than 12 miles away, and she travels there, on foot and by train, to sell her honey. Because of its superior quality and her shrewdness, it fetches a good price. She uses the revenue to buy household goods, including dye for the graying hair she wears tucked into a kerchief.

Just as you are settling into Hatidze’s company, appreciating the edges and contours of her personality and savoring the deep pleasure of her work, the pastoral calm is shattered. A family rumbles into the village in a noisy trailer that turns out to be the quietest thing about it. The patriarch, Hussein, and his wife, Ljutvie, bring chickens, cows and a small army of children. At first, Hatidze welcomes these neighbors, who are Turkish speakers like her. She tutors one of the older boys in the mysteries of the apiary and tolerates periodic invasions of her privacy from the littler ones.

Though she is too courteous to say so, you have the feeling that Hatidze views Hussein as a man who may have overestimated his abilities. He has a habit of blaming other people — Ljutvie and their children, mostly — for his misfortunes and mistakes. His plan is to herd cows and keep bees, turning this empty patch of territory into a literal land of milk and honey, at a scale sufficient to feed his family and his ego.

Hussein is not exactly a villain. He’s doing his best. But his crude methods, his sandpapery personality and the sheer chaos that surrounds him conspire to disrupt Hatidze’s routines. As relations between them deteriorate, “Honeyland” touches on what may be a universal feature of modern experience, familiar to urban apartment dwellers and house-proud suburbanites, as well as to old-school agrarians. The Rolling Stones wrote a song about “groaning and straining with the trouble and strife.” Neighbors are a nightmare.

But the presence of Hussein and his unruly household is also serendipitous, a gift from the gods of film narrative. This isn’t to attribute the filmmakers’ remarkable achievement to luck. They draw comedy and pathos out of the conflict. They render the thick complexity of experience with poignant clarity. Their movie is quiet, intimate and intense, but touched with a breath of epic grandeur. It’s a poem including history.

And one that regards the future with both apprehension and hope. Hatidze seems to be the last of her kind. Hussein’s rapacious exploitation of scarce and fragile resources represents the norm, supported by a crude utilitarian argument. Their struggle feels like a microcosm of the human predicament at a time of environmental catastrophe, and Hatidze, precisely because of her modesty and patience, looks like a heroic figure, offering a warning and an example to the rest of us, her wasteful, wanton neighbors.

It may be a strange thing to say about a documentary, but “Honeyland” reminded me of “The Lorax,” Dr. Seuss’ great, prescient tale of ecological folly. Like the title character in that story, Hatidze is a kind of prophet. She speaks for the bees.

Not rated. In Turkish, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/movies/honeyland-review.html" id="3a749e09-41c9-333a-a99b-bb7224f7346b">The New York Times</a>.

'Honeyland' Review: The Sting and the Sweetness

Though trouble percolates on the horizon and mayhem arrives in the final act, this is fundamentally a hangout movie, a bad-guys-come-to-town western more like “Rio Bravo” than “High Noon.” Above all, it’s a buddy picture about two middle-level entertainment industry workers doing their jobs and making the scene over a few hectic, sunny days in 1969.

Unlike many of the people they share the screen with — the period-specific A-list characters include Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) and Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) — Rick and Cliff are made-up. Rick is an actor on the downward slope of a moderately successful career. A star in a handful of westerns and combat pictures, and of a popular TV western series, he is now mostly cast as a one-episode villain on other people’s shows. He’s considering an offer to make spaghetti westerns in Italy. (Tarantino supplies perfect fake clips to annotate Rick’s filmography). Not a has-been, exactly, but not quite what he used to be or might have been.

That’s the opposite of a spoiler, by the way. If you don’t know about the Manson family, or if you’re vague on the details of their crimes, you may not feel the tingle of foreboding that is crucial to Tarantino’s revisionism. Didion, in “The White Album,” wrote that “many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on Aug. 9, 1969, ended at exactly the moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brush fire through the community.” But what if the ’60s never ended? Or rather, what if the ’60s, as a half-century of pop-culture habit has taught us to remember them, never really happened.

To which I can only say: it’s a western, for Pete’s sake. Politics are wound into its DNA, and Tarantino knows the genome better than anyone else. Which is just to say that like other classics of the genre, “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood” is not going anywhere. It will stand as a source of debate — and delight — for as long as we care about movies. And it wants us to care.

There is a lot of love in “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” and quite a bit to enjoy. The screen is crowded with signs of Quentin Tarantino’s well-established ardor — for the movies and television shows of the decades after World War II; for the vernacular architecture, commercial signage and famous restaurants of Los Angeles; for the female foot and the male jawline; for vintage clothes and cars and cigarettes. But the mood in this, his ninth feature, is for the most part affectionate rat...

Dunne was pounding the pavement on the 20th Century Fox lot at a time of political tension and social fracture, when the Hollywood studios seemed to be facing an existential crisis. Pretty much like now, in other words, except that the money and ingenuity those studios used to spend on things like teaching chimps to make breakfast now go toward turning lines of code into fur and sinew. This is undoubtedly an ethical improvement, much as Chee Chee may have enjoyed hanging out with Rex Harrison. The hope behind this “Lion King,” opening July 19, is that advancing digital technology will also enhance the luster of the moviegoing experience.

It does and it doesn’t. There are a great many impressive moments in this film, and a few that might elicit a gasp of amazement or an appreciative burst of laughter from even a jaded viewer. For example: when Pumbaa, the flatulent warthog voiced by Seth Rogen, absent-mindedly scratches his left ear with his hind leg, I confess that I nearly wept. Not because the scene was especially touching or sad, but because of the sheer extravagant craft that had clearly gone into rendering those two seconds of reflexive animal behavior. I was nearly as moved by the efforts of a dung beetle to propel a ball of scat across a patch of desert. The digital artisans responsible for these images didn’t necessarily have to do it all with such fanatical care, and the fact that they did is surely worthy of admiration.

So if a movie could be judged solely on technique, “The Lion King” might qualify as a great one. And it kind of wants to be judged that way — for its technical skin rather than its dramatic soul. The opening sequence (it doesn’t seem right to call it a “shot”) fools the eye in subtle and brazen ways. You might think there are real creatures mixed into the computer-generated menagerie (there aren’t), but at the same time the flights of animal choreography lie beyond the skill of any trainer. Then the music starts, and it’s “The Circle of Life” and baby Simba is cute enough to make all the trolls on Twitter go awwwww.

The mixture of coziness and, well, awe in that opening number is as on-brand as anything Disney has done since — I guess since a few weeks ago, when it released “Toy Story 4.” Once the voices start up, we are in a comfortable and familiar pop-cultural space, even if the talking beasts don’t look much like cartoons. (A possible exception might be Zazu, the hornbill who sounds like John Oliver. Or maybe it’s just that John Oliver looks like a hornbill.) The antelopes lope. The elephants lumber. The graceful lions bask in their languorous power, lolling and growling and setting up the parameters of the story.

Not many surprises there. Simba’s father, Mufasa (James Earl Jones), rules the savanna with a gentle paw and a loyal queen, Sarabi (Alfre Woodard). Mufasa’s brother, Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is the snake in this garden, scheming first to kill Simba, the rightful heir to the throne, and then to get rid of Mufasa. Scar has the help of Shenzi (Florence Kasumba) and her army of hyenas, whose closed-up, predatory faces are genuinely scary, especially when they appear for the first time.

Small children may have some trouble at that point, and also with Scar’s ruthless political machinations, which are pretty murdery for Disney. But it’s likely that much of the audience, young and old, will have some familiarity with the narrative, whether from the 1994 animated feature or from the long-running, much-loved Broadway show. “The Lion King” currently under review isn’t meant to replace or outdo either of those, but rather to multiply revenue streams and use a beloved property to show off some new tricks. A lot of people will go, expecting to like what they see, and for the most part they won’t be disappointed.

I said earlier that the movie, which was directed by Jon Favreau and written by Jeff Nathanson, looks like a nature documentary. But it plays more like an especially glitzy presentation reel at a trade convention, with popular songs and high-end talent pushing an exciting new product that nobody is sure quite how to use. Simba and his best friend, Nala, voiced as cubs by JD McCrary and Shahadi Wright Joseph, grow up into Donald Glover and Beyoncé, and when they get going on “Can You Feel the Love Tonight …”

It’s OK. When Pumbaa and his pal Timon the meerkat show up — I’m not going to stir up trouble by saying which one might be the other’s sidekick — we get a brisk vaudevillian double act from Rogen and Billy Eichner. That’s OK too. But of all the second-golden-age Disney animated features, the original “Lion King” is the most Shakespearean, as well as being the most ideologically coherent Hollywood defense of monarchy until “Black Panther.” The grandeur and intimacy, the earthy humor and heavenly songs have given it gravity and staying power.

Those are somehow missing here. The songs don’t have the pop or the splendor. The terror and wonder of the intra-pride battles are muted. There is a lot of professionalism but not much heart. It may be that the realism of the animals makes it hard to connect with them as characters, undermining the inspired anthropomorphism that has been the most enduring source of Disney magic.

Real lions don’t sing — not even like Beyoncé — and don’t actually govern other creatures. The closer the movie gets to nature in its look, the more blatant, intrusive and purposeless its artifice seems. It might have worked better without songs or dialogue: surely the Disney wizards could have figured out how to spin an epic tale of royal succession and self-discovery through purely visual means. Or else someone could have spent a few months teaching the digital Pumbaa to whip up a nice tofu scramble.

‘The Lion King’

Rated PG. Not too red in tooth and claw. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/movies/the-lion-king-review.html" id="b1d4ee6e-a1a4-3609-a0be-9832ce69fdf5">The New York Times</a>.

Watching the newest version of “The Lion King” — a big-screen celebrity-voiced musical trying its best to look like a television nature documentary — I recalled a line from John Gregory Dunne’s 1969 book “The Studio” that may be my all-time favorite sentence in the annals of movie writing. “Six months were devoted to teaching Chee Chee the Chimpanzee how to cook bacon and eggs,” Dunne wrote, referring to a character in “Doctor Dolittle,” one of many real animals cast in that big-budget, famil...

'The Lion King' Review: The Art of Herding Digital Cats

Mariana (Ioana Iacob), the heroine of this fictional, reality-saturated film, would agree. A theater artist who shares the name of a well-known poet, Mariana is planning an ambitious, provocative public pageant reconstructing a massacre that took place in Odessa in 1941. She envisions a show that will be more than just a dress-up opportunity for military buffs. She wants to confront spectators and participants with uncomfortable facts about Romanian complicity in the Holocaust, and to challenge deeply rooted myths of national innocence.

The slaughter — mostly of Jews from territories that are now part of Moldova and Ukraine — was overseen by Marshal Ion Antonescu, leader of Romania’s fascist government. Antonescu, executed in 1946 for war crimes, underwent a partial rehabilitation after the 1989 revolution, recalled by some as a staunch patriot whose fervent anti-communism led him into an unfortunate alliance with Nazi Germany. Both Mariana and Jude use their chosen art forms to push back against such revisionism. The movie and the theater piece within it insist that Antonescu (whose words are the source of the film’s title), was a ferocious anti-Semite and anti-Roma racist, and that his army’s killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other innocents can’t be blamed on Germany, the Soviet Union or the fog of war.

Until its devastating final scenes, the way “I Do Not Care” makes its points is discursive rather than dramatic. Its action consists mostly of a series of arguments between Mariana and others — all men — who think they know more (or at least show that they care less) about Romanian history than she does.

Cast members complain about her ideas and techniques, threatening to quit if she doesn’t cater to their sensitivities. Her lover, a married airline pilot, tunes out her passionate disquisitions on truth and justice. An official from the government agency funding her project subjects her to condescending lectures about other historical abominations. He pauses in these grandiloquent flights of whataboutism to threaten to cancel the performance, and also to ask her out for a drink.

Iacob is energetic and persuasive in her portrayal of an embattled intellectual, defending the integrity of her vision against doubters and peppering her conversation with references to Hannah Arendt, Ludwig Wittgenstein and various homegrown literary luminaries. Her distrust of authority also has a feminist dimension. As in other recent Romanian films, this one casts an exasperated eye on a society where power and male pomposity go hand in hand. Mariana’s personal, emotional and sexual struggles play out in the background, but they’re clearly connected to the critical spirit of her work.

There is an unmistakable idealism in her confrontational zeal, a faith in the power of art as a vehicle of moral enlightenment. If people see the truth about what happened in the past, their consciences will be awakened in a way that might help prevent history’s horrors from repeating. Jude honors this belief even as he views it with mordant, fatalistic irony. Mariana insists that empathy, reason and the acceptance of complexity can be powerful political forces, even as her work illustrates, in ways she can’t entirely control, that cruelty, ignorance and tribalism may be stronger still.

‘I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians’

Not rated. In Romanian, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/movies/i-do-not-care-we-go-down-history-barbarians-review.html" id="ceb29a61-cc58-335c-a7dc-087f833a99d8">The New York Times</a>.

One of the most interesting documentaries of 2018 was Robert Greene’s “Bisbee 17,” about a historical re-enactment in an Arizona town that exposed how past conflicts continue to fester. “I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” the latest feature from Romanian director Radu Jude (“Scarred Hearts,” “Aferim!”), takes up a similar theme, showing that history is never neutral and that present-day culture wars often carry out the violence of the past by other means.

Review: Making a Spectacle of History (and Herself)

“Boyz N the Hood” rests in American movie history like a boulder in a riverbed, altering the direction of the stream. After its release in the summer of 1991, everything looked different, including its precursors. “Mean Streets,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” the Blaxploitation spectacles of the 1970s, the socially conscious crime dramas of the 1930s, classic westerns and samurai epics — somehow John Singleton, a very recent graduate of the University of Southern California film school, synthesized all of those models even as he came up with something bracingly, thrillingly and frighteningly new.

“Boyz” made him the youngest person — and the first African-American — nominated for a best directing Academy Award. In the annals of cinema, there aren’t many first features to match it for ambition and impact (“Citizen Kane”? “Breathless”?), and its influence on what came after is hard to overstate. Singleton, who died Monday at 51, filled his characters’ lives with warmth and humor even as they were constantly menaced, and often destroyed, by violence. He infused familiar coming-of-age and gangster-movie tropes with a rare authenticity. This wasn’t just a matter of his intimate knowledge of the setting known then as South-Central Los Angeles, but also of his brave, even brazen confidence in himself and his audience.

A blazing debut can be a hard act to follow, and Singleton’s second film, “Poetic Justice” (1993), didn’t enjoy the same success, at least with critics, as its predecessor. But when I heard the news of Singleton’s passing, “Poetic Justice” was the movie I found myself thinking about. Partly because its earnest sentiments — its openheartedness about creativity, love and loss — seemed most apt for mourning an artist who left too soon. Grief, after all, has been part of the film’s legacy since its male star, Tupac Shakur, was murdered in 1996. And there may be no purer dose of early-’90s nostalgia than watching Shakur and Janet Jackson travel the romantic-comedy arc, their progress from conflict to harmony punctuated by the poems of Maya Angelou and breathtaking vistas of the California countryside.

“Poetic Justice” is, in its way, as influential as “Boyz N the Hood” and as political as “Higher Learning” and “Rosewood,” Singleton’s subsequent confrontations with past and present-day manifestations of American racism. “Poetic Justice” begins with a sly and pointed critique of Hollywood representation. A note tells us we’re in South-Central, but the images are of high-rise, well-heeled Manhattan, where a white couple, played by Billy Zane and Lori Petty, are drinking wine in a penthouse.

The joke is that this is a movie-within-the-movie showing at a Los Angeles drive-in. (The marquee tells us that it’s called “Deadly Diva” and has an NC-17 rating.) The patrons, including Jackson’s Justice and her boyfriend (Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest), don’t look like the people on screen, but they’ve bought tickets anyway, as generations of black and Latinx moviegoers have before them. With a few exceptions, it’s always been that way.

“Poetic Justice” sets out to change that situation, by every means available. The stylized, consequence-free gunplay of “Deadly Diva” is soon drowned out by a shooting that pulls what seemed like an ’80s-vintage teen comedy into the brutal world of “Boyz N the Hood.” Within a few minutes, before the opening titles have even scrolled, we’ve swerved from satire to sex farce to tragedy, and Singleton is only getting started.

Eventually, Justice and Lucky (Shakur’s character) will set off for Oakland in a Postal Service truck with their friends Iesha (Regina King) and Chicago (Joe Torry), and “Poetic Justice” will turn into a road movie. Before their departure, Singleton lingers over the funny and painful details of their lives at home and at work, sketching a portrait of working-class black life that looks back to the radical neorealism of the LA Rebellion and forward to the businesslike striving of the “Barbershop” franchise. The casting of two stars of popular music as a hairdresser (Jackson) and a mailman (Shakur) doesn’t so much glamorize the characters as affirm the realness that the performers had already established as the cornerstone of their appeal.

Between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, the four travelers journey through a kind of utopian space. Not that everything is harmonious among them. Iesha and Chicago have some issues, and Lucky and Justice are barely on speaking terms. Harsh words are exchanged, followed by a few slaps and punches. But the movie’s close attention to this interpersonal friction might cause you to notice what isn’t in the picture. There are no police on the highway and almost no white people (except for a belligerent truck driver at a gas station). Justice and company crash a family reunion, where Maya Angelou herself dispenses wisdom and passes judgment on her temporary nieces and nephews. They stop at a cultural festival where revolutionary poets and drummers hold the stage.

This dream evaporates in Oakland, where a shooting has claimed the life of Lucky’s cousin and rap partner. The point of the film’s long, languorous middle was never to imagine an escape from violence and racism, but to show some of the richness and variety of life in their shadows, to free the characters from the obligation to behave like symbols or avatars of social problems.

Watching “Poetic Justice” now, I was put in mind of Barry Jenkins’ recent “If Beale Street Could Talk,” and not only because Regina King is (splendidly) in both films. Their visual and storytelling styles are very different, but Jenkins and Singleton are directors whose primary motivation is their unstinting love for the people they conjure into being.

They push aside the noise of plot to capture the quiet intensity of ordinary moments and the poetry of everyday experience. They notice beauty everywhere. “Beale Street” and “Poetic Justice” are stories of black artists falling in love in a world that tends to devalue both their creativity and their feelings, and each movie simultaneously illuminates those struggles and shares in them, in a spirit that is sorrowful but never grim or despairing.

My point isn’t to establish a lineage, but to identify a common spirit, and to measure the shape and size of the doorway that Singleton made, an opening wide enough for so many others to walk through.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/movies/john-singleton-poetic-justice.html" id="d26f5795-1a44-368e-a1d5-d2c0dcf6f379">The New York Times</a>.

(An Appraisal)

John Singleton Did Justice to a Poetic Vision of African-American Life

At the beginning of Pamela B. Green’s lively and informative new documentary, a bevy of movie people — directors, actors, scholars and others — are asked if they know anything about Alice Guy Blaché, who is the subject of the film. A few of them (Ava DuVernay, for one) do, but most admit they have no clue. Viewers who are similarly ignorant shouldn’t feel bad, and in the best pedagogical spirit Green turns blank looks and sheepishly shrugged shoulders into a teaching moment. “Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché” seeks both to help rescue Guy Blaché from oblivion and to explain how she got there in the first place.

Alice Guy was born into a bourgeois French family in 1873. An interview conducted more than 90 years later reveals a woman very much of her era and class, with crisp diction, faultless grammar and a mildly ironical way of talking about even painful and contentious matters. Trained in stenography, Alice was hired, at 22, as an assistant to Léon Gaumont, who would soon become one of the founders of the French film industry.

Guy (who married British cameraman Herbert Blaché in 1907) merits that description as much as her boss. Often referred to as a pioneer — one of a handful of important female filmmakers active in cinema’s earliest days — she was more than that. Present at an early, private Paris showing of one of Louis and Auguste Lumière’s first shorts, Guy was among the first to explore the storytelling potential of the new medium. At the Gaumont studio, where she worked until 1906, she directed hundreds of fantasies, comedies, melodramas and historical films. After moving to the United States, she set up her own company, Solax Studios, continuing her prolific output in the burgeoning proto-Hollywood of Fort Lee, New Jersey.

She was, in sum, a studio chief as well as a director and producer — a key figure in the emergence of two major national cinemas. The recovery of this reputation is central to Green’s project, and she builds on the work of historians and archivists, including Guy Blaché’s biographer, Alison McMahan. “Be Natural” is its own making-of documentary, following Green’s gumshoe efforts to track down letters and ledgers, artifacts and descendants. She enlists a specialist in facial recognition to determine whether a woman in an ancient moving picture is indeed Guy Blaché. She zigzags across Los Angeles in search of a lab that will digitize antique footage. She details her own cross-country and trans-Atlantic peregrinations as well as those undertaken by her heroine more than a century earlier.

The result is occasionally a little frantic — animated segments sometimes bring the past to life and sometimes get in the way — and often tremendously moving. The interviews with Guy Blaché and with her daughter, Simone, bring a tender, complicated dimension of personality and make it feel as if the dawn of movies is not so far away after all. The present-day celebrities, who seem to become instant experts after their initial confessions of cluelessness, add little beyond their own boldface names. (An exception is Jodie Foster, who provides voice-over narration and served as an executive producer.) The preservationists and film historians are the truly fascinating characters, and it would be good to learn even more about the work of rescue and recovery they do.

“Be Natural” is inspiring because it is also appalling. The near-forgetting of Guy Blaché wasn’t just an accident of film history, although the fact that most of her work belongs to the years before World War I made it especially vulnerable to loss. Green notes that she is less well-known than contemporaries like Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner, but those women were also written out of film history or pushed to its margins.

Guy Blaché found America a more welcoming working environment than France. But in both countries the record of her achievements was erased. Her early Gaumont pictures were attributed to her male assistants, and their originality and quality went unrecognized, despite evidence of her influence on later auteurs like Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock. When it was remembered at all, Solax Studios was thought of as Herbert Blaché’s company.

Green’s revision of that record is long overdue and just in time, given the present-day reckoning with Hollywood’s stubborn traditions of behind-the-scenes (and on-screen) sexism. Most intriguing are the clips the documentary gathers from Guy Blaché’s films. Many of them look less like old curiosities than lost classics, and their range — from the surreal slapstick of “The Drunken Mattress,” to the domestic melodrama of “Falling Leaves,” to the social satire of “Consequences of Feminism” — is astonishing. (Several have been issued by Kino Lorber in the indispensable “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers” collection). By the end of “Be Natural,” you won’t only have a clear idea of who this remarkable woman was, you may well have acquired a new taste in old movies.

‘Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché’

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/movies/be-natural-untold-story-alice-guy-blache-review.html" id="902a5ef9-042e-3f80-a968-373d232700d3">The New York Times</a>.

'Be Natural' Review: Rescuing Alice Guy Blaché, a Film Pioneer, From Oblivion

There are a few guys who are willing to hang out with him, one woman who is willing to have sex with him and a few more who might be, including a neighbor named Sarah with a fluffy little dog. There’s another neighbor who has a lot of birds and walks around topless on her porch, giving Sam an opportunity for a bit of voyeurism and the director, David Robert Mitchell, a chance to nod to “Rear Window.”

This is one of a great many nods, winks, rib-pokes, throat-clearings and other gestures in the direction of famous and less-famous movies, comic books, video games and songs. At one point, an issue of Spider-Man attaches itself to Sam’s hand by means of an errant wad of bubble gum, which is a funny coincidence — no coincidence at all, in other words — because Sam is played by Andrew Garfield, who used to be Spidey.

Most of the other allusions in this shaggy-dog tale of wild conspiracism and male petulance are not quite so blatantly meta. Sam and the director are both steeped in classic Hollywood, ’90s indie rock and various kinds of vintage memorabilia. The mood borrows from Hitchcock (whose grave figures in one scene), and also from Nicholas Ray, David Lynch and the Southern California noir tradition more generally. Also Thomas Pynchon, Robert Altman and Raymond Chandler. These aren’t esoteric references yielding themselves up to a connoisseur’s prying. They are part of the movie’s surface, and part of its point.

Sam believes that there are clues everywhere, if only he could figure out what they were clues to. He finds hidden messages in comics, song lyrics and antique cereal boxes, and he connects this information with strange happenings around him. Dogs are being killed in the Silver Lake neighborhood. A billionaire dies in a fiery crash. Sarah (Riley Keough) goes missing. Mix-and-match trios of young women — 21st-century variations on a meme of Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe in “How to Marry a Millionaire” — float through the city. Our man gives chase, gets sprayed by a skunk and eventually discovers ...

Don’t worry. It doesn’t turn out to matter much. The sweet smarts of Mitchell’s first movie, “The Myth of the American Sleepover” (treated to a bit of auto-allusion in “Silver Lake”) aren’t much in evidence here. Nor are the slippery psychosexual scares of “It Follows,” his breakthrough horror movie from 2015. The ambitions this time are grander, but also vaguer and duller.

Which isn’t to say that “Under the Silver Lake” is without some diverting qualities. The light, for one thing. Mitchell and his director of photography, Mike Gioulakis, savor the gorgeousness that has seduced so many previous filmmakers. And there are some moments of humor and surprise embedded in the overwrought intricacies and long slack stretches of the plot. But beyond the coy nostalgia and the timid satire is a feeling of bottomless exhaustion.

At a crypt party in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, in the company of a balloon girl (identified as Balloon Girl in the credits and played by Grace Van Patten), Sam jumps to his feet to dance to “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” by R.E.M. It’s a song partly about the latent, mysterious meanings embedded in pop ephemera (“I’d studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines”), and as such a plausible anthem for Sam’s quest.

An equally apt, less pretentious choice might have been ZZ Top’s “Tush,” since that’s mostly what Sam is looking for and the camera is looking at. One of Sam’s prized possessions is an issue of Playboy from 1970 (it belonged to his dad), and “Under the Silver Lake” dwells in a hedged, half-guilty, self-conscious iteration of the magazine’s hedonist philosophy. There’s plenty of titillation and sexual opportunity, but no real lust, passion or liberatory energy.

Even Sam’s sense of belatedness feels secondhand. He’s a Gen-X sensibility trapped in a millennial body, with the tastes and obsessions to match. (Mitchell, it’s worth pointing out, is 44 years old). R.E.M. called irony “the shackles of youth,” and he drags it around like a Styrofoam ball and chain. Like other guys his age, Sam feels oppressed by an older generation of guys who lay claim to all the credit, the money, the art and the women, while he is left with a literal and spiritual pile of junk that may not mean what he hoped it would. The movie turns his resentment into a cosmic joke.

Look, I’ve been there. But I can’t say I sympathize, because there’s no basis for sympathy. “Under the Silver Lake” is less a cinematic folly than a category mistake, taking the sterility of its own imaginative conceits for a metaphysical condition. It isn’t a critique of aesthetic or romantic ennui, but an example of intellectual timidity. As a Los Angeles movie it lacks the rough, naturalistic edge of “La La Land,” and it thinks it’s so much cooler than “La La Land.”

Rated R. If your date tries to explain that it’s actually more of a commentary on how women are treated in movies, spray him with Mace. Running time: 2 hours, 19 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/movies/under-the-silver-lake-review.html" id="b7979ba8-4c96-3e69-acc0-a275fed08072">The New York Times</a>.

Sam is 33 years old, unemployed and counting down the days to eviction from his apartment near the Los Angeles reservoir that gives “Under the Silver Lake” its name. He doesn’t seem too upset about his situation, though he is kind of a mopey guy. His malaise looks like more of a temperamental or existential condition than the response to a crisis. And he doesn’t have it all that bad.

'Under the Silver Lake': Andrew Garfield Gets Lost in a Haze of Pop-Culture Allusions

All of that has perhaps created outsized expectations. Surely a movie so long in gestation, inspired by a doorstop-thick novel that has beguiled and baffled readers for several centuries, would turn out to be either a world-class catastrophe or a world-historical masterpiece.

With a mixture of relief and regret, I must report that the movie is neither. “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” has moments of slackness and chaos (the book does, too), but for the most part it’s a lively, charming excursion into a landscape claimed by Gilliam in the name of Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish gentleman who gave Don Quixote life back in the early 1600s. The filmmaker’s devotion to the novelist adds luster and vigor to the images, but this is more than just an act of literary-minded reverence. It’s a meeting of minds — a celebration of artistic kinship across the gulfs of history, culture and technology.

Gilliam, like Cervantes, is a wily inventor who also serves as an analyst and evangelist of the imagination. In his most successful movies — “Brazil,” “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” “The Fisher King,” “Twelve Monkeys,” — imagination is a mighty force and a fragile vessel. Art is a heroic expression of will even as it also stands as poor compensation for human frailty. The only hope is to dream, which is also a kind of doom.

The line between fantasy and reality isn’t crossed. It’s looped into knots, twists and tangles. “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” is most fantastical when it’s most literal, and vice versa, and like the novel (the second volume in particular) it enfolds layers of self-consciousness into its comic tale of epic adventure.

Driver is Toby, a filmmaker whose early promise has been frittered away in a series of compromises. We first meet him on set in Spain, shooting a commercial with a Don Quixote theme. He’s bullied by his boss (Stellan Skarsgard), hit on by the boss’ wife (Olga Kurylenko) and harassed by his agent, crew members and his own uneasy conscience. A decade earlier, we learn, Toby was in a nearby village working on the student film — an arty, black-and-white “Quixote” — that made his reputation. He cast local people in the roles of Quixote, Sancho Panza and Dulcinea, and he returns to discover that he ruined their lives.

A shoemaker named Javier (Pryce, dishing up the jamón) is now convinced that he really is Don Quixote. The original Don Quixote suffered from a similar affliction, traipsing through a Spain that was already, at the turn of the 17th century, too modern for his old-school chivalric personality. Not a lot has changed, and the measure of Gilliam’s ingenuity is his ability to suggest that Quixotism is a universal, transhistorical condition. The ratios of magic to meanness, of ugliness to beauty, of virtue to vice don’t really change. The world has always been an awful place with the potential to be made wonderful by the right kind of inspiration.

If Javier’s delusions supply the inspiration, some of the awfulness is suggested by the fate of Angelica (Joana Ribeiro), an innkeeper’s daughter who first encountered Toby and his camera when she was just a teenager. Dazzled by dreams of show-business glory, Angelica made her way to the big city, and is now the girlfriend of a vulgar and sadistic Russian billionaire (Jordi Mollà).

Javier and Toby become Don Quixote and Sancho, and their surroundings oblige them by supporting the illusion. It’s Holy Week, which means that the Spanish countryside is full of religious processions and people in costume. Hallucinations come to life, and real life takes on surreal qualities, leading up to a climactic fancy-dress ball.

The story doesn’t follow Cervantes in every detail, but there is no mistaking Gilliam’s deep appreciation of the book. “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” works best as an exuberant, not always disciplined work of critical appropriation. Like other recent Gilliam films, it often jumbles spectacle and sense, and fumbles some important emotions. Driver, a wondrously subtle and startlingly emphatic actor, is too often reduced to yelling and waving his arms, and the more delicate notes of longing, nostalgia and wonder that should drive the story are drowned out by clatter and huggermugger. The romanticism has a creepy side.

But “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” ultimately succeeds by failing to live up to its title. Instead, it testifies to the vitality of an archetype embodied in different ways by Toby, Gilliam and the Man of La Mancha himself: the fool who mistakes his blundering errand for a sacred quest.

“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”

The film is not rated. In English and Spanish, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 12 minutes.

At the beginning of “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” text on-screen proclaims that what we are about to see has been “25 years in the making.” It might be even longer than that. Terry Gilliam has been tilting at this particular windmill since its eventual star, Adam Driver, was in elementary school. (It’s not Driver who plays the Knight of Doleful Countenance, by the way, but Gilliam stalwart Jonathan Pryce.) The legends surrounding the project have made “Quixote” one of the great films maud...

A.O. Scott

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