In full force for the first time since the pandemic, our return to the Toronto International Film Festival didn’t disappoint. There’s always a feeling of attempting to capture everything — every movie being discussed, the “big” picks, the smaller world cinema submissions that don’t garner as much spotlight and also explore the lush and vibrant city of Toronto.
This year was no different. It was helpful to have two other companions along the way from Cinematary so we three could experience the festival.
Here are our reviews of films viewed between myself, Andrew Swafford and Reid Ramsey at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival.
— Zach Dennis
Moonage Daydream by Brett Morgen
USA
Andrew: In a post-Walk Hard world, rock biopics have been exposed (and somewhat broadly understood) as a largely formulaic and disposable genre, and “the rock doc” can often feel just as artless. Out of this relative black hole in the cinematic universe comes Moonage Daydream, the rare movie about a musician that feels less like a rote recitation of facts and more like a sensory experience that the musician would have likely wanted his audience to have. Distributed by HBO, Brett Morgen’s found footage documentary about the late David Bowie is about as close as mass-distributed films come to being a full-on avant-garde freakout. Cobbled together with concert footage, Bowie’s own film experiments, and clips spanning the breadth of film history, much of Moonage Daydream is designed to feel like an intergalactic journey; Morgen superimposes disparate images, modulates color grading, and cuts like a madman in order to give his audience the feeling of following the trajectory of Bowie’s “man who fell to earth,” Ziggy Stardust.
Or at least, it is for a good long while. Eventually, the film switches gears as Bowie himself does – first into the “Berlin period” (wherein Bowie moved to a country where no one knew him in order to force a hard reset of his constructed identity) and then into a pop superstar finely tuned to give his audience the blast of serotonin he believed they needed in harsh world. Much like the celestial body it orbits, Moonage Daydream is an ever-mutating being, sliding into and out of different tones and rhythms as Bowie is reborn as a new person again and again.
Constant throughout, however, is his mind and worldview, which this documentary presents as fundamentally mystical. Through largely disembodied voiceover that narrates almost the entire film, Bowie describes himself as a person who (for reasons largely attributable to his sexuality) never felt quite at home on the supposedly solid ground of straight society, and who instead looked to religion and philosophy for answers as to humanity’s true place in the cosmos. Never quite satisfied with prepackaged answers, Bowie seems to have gradually developed his own sense of religious devotion oriented toward a vaguely defined energizing force that animates humans to embrace life and embodiment. Oppressive conservative social values limiting that embodiment – especially for queer folks – are implicitly framed as the opposing force motivating his music’s rebellious spirit.
At one point in this film’s runtime, Bowie talks about music as “another world” of abstraction and freedom that he enjoyed escaping into as a child, and in many ways, Moonage Daydream attempts to be just that – a portal into the universe of Bowie the mystic.
Zach: Rather than repeating Andrew’s very correct points above, I’d like to latch onto one aspect of Moonage Daydream that puts the Bowie documentary in communication with one of the year’s more commercial hits – Elvis.
Baz Luhrmann’s tour-de-force, imagery devouring epic from earlier this year is more astute than the normal rock biopic in how it handles the stardom of its central subject. A not entirely different pop figure than Bowie, Elvis also challenged sexuality early in his career, mainly in how audiences reacted so emphatically to his presence on the stage.
In Luhrmann’s film, he has a knack for allowing the audience to erupt in ecstasy whenever the young Presley takes the stage in the film’s early minutes. You find similar scenes in Moonage Daydream, including one relatively prolonged sequence where the television camera operator asks a young woman why she’s weeping outside of the venue –– “I wanted to see him (Bowie),” she replies.
Where Elvis and Moonage intersect is in capturing the weight of stardom on both of its icons but allows each to take that journey in different directions. For Elvis, he sinks more and more under the grip of Colonel Tom Parker, continuing to sacrifice his essence for a quick buck for Parker and family members. He experiences a late-career resurgence thanks to a prominent NBC Christmas special, but then withers back to obscurity as he’s chained to a weekly gig in Las Vegas, ending in his eventual demise.
Moonage, thanks to the found footage interviews with Bowie, allows the artist to speak for himself rather than the writer. Bowie speaks vividly about his take on life, his childhood, the people who impacted him and the hardships he’s been challenged with, something Elvis alludes to but lacks the candid spirit of Moonage.
But Moonage shares the understanding of experience and audience, opening with a nearly 10 minute sequence of montage between performance, bits of media and crowds fawning over the British singer. Both films capture their artist wrestling with how to make sense of their new-found international interest while Elvis retreats into the past, setting up a break from “one dark fucking period,” Moonage allows Bowie to expound on his journeys into Berlin (as Andrew mentions, to rid himself of his previously known identity) and his initial rejection to moving to Los Angeles.
I think this delineation between the two makes Moonage the more interesting exploration into the artist (where Elvis explores what it means to be a pop culture icon). The introspection of Bowie provides a richer portrait of the man behind the character and is coupled with spirited iconography to provide an experience worthy of David Bowie.
Decision to Leave by Park Chan-wook
Korea
Zach: With America more engaged than ever in Korean cinema after the Oscar-winning success of Parasite, Park Chan-wook offers a reminder that he is as much the heavyweight as Bong Joon-ho with his latest, Decision to Leave.
Chan-wook falls a bit to the margins as the West looks at Korean movies, specifically with Joon-ho garnering a bit more mainstream attention with his recent output of Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite. Chan-wook has been mostly silent (save for a TV series, Little Drummer Girl) since his incredible last film, The Handmaiden, and while Decision to Leave doesn’t necessarily rise to that level, it is a reminder of how engaging of a filmmaker he is.
Detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il), joined by his partner Soo-wan (Go Kyung-Pyo), are investigating what initially looks like a suicide of a wealthy man who was rock climbing. The detective becomes more suspicious of the wife, Seo-rae (Tang Wei), when she comes in for questioning, but also becomes intoxicated by her.
A bit of a cat-and-mouse game begins between the wife, who they still suspect might have killed her husband, and the detective that is delightful, incredibly funny and Hitchcockian at times.
This was probably my favorite from the festival, but what did you think, Andrew?
Andrew: While it’s true that Decision to Leave doesn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of The Handmaiden (honestly, what does?), it’s still another triumph for Park Chan-wook’s most recent phase of filmmaking. While the early bulk of his filmography is littered with revenge films that traffic in maximalist ultraviolence, these last two films have been restrained and considered – not to mention beautiful to look at – without skimping on the genre pulp that makes his cinema so titillating.
And Decision to Leave is certainly a piece of pulp fiction: a police procedural about a detective who falls in love with his prime suspect sounds like the subject matter of a bad airport novel, but Park elevates it on a minute-by-minute basis with one inspired camera angle and scene transition after another. While some of the cinematic techniques on display here just feel cool for the sake of being cool (and I’m by no means opposed – Park can do “cool” like few other filmmakers), the vast majority of visual choices here feel like they’re either conveying crucial information about character psychology or injecting the narrative with a jab of visual humor. And the humor of this film shouldn’t be undersold: Decision to Leave is easily the funniest film in Park’s filmography, and is among the funniest films I’ve seen all year. The fact that this humor is so delicately balanced with the film’s creeping suspense and punctuating violence is quite the feat.
I’d also like to comment on the structure of the film, which is unique and surprising, even in the context of Park’s famously twisty filmography. While Park Chan-wook’s breakout film Oldboy relies on one big twist and his masterpiece The Handmaiden unfolds to reveal hidden depths again and again, Decision to Leave builds to one twist in the middle that Park is begging you to see coming – only to introduce an entirely new arc in the second half that few will expect. The existence of the second arc is its most impressive quality in my eyes, however, as it isn’t filmed with the same propulsive visual flair as the first half. Still, it’s a fantastic time at the movies, and one of the shortest-feeling 2.5-hour genre films I’ve ever seen.
One Fine Morning by Mia Hansen-Løve
France
Zach: I’m a bit fascinated with where Mia Hansen-Løve is at the moment.
She hasn’t been making anything outright awful, but I love the calm, endearing work that she has been producing over the past decade. I struggle to say something like One Fine Morning is lesser work compared to her late 2010s run with films such as Eden and Things to Come – especially because Lea Seydoux is very good in this – but it feels like she’s also operating on this mid-level of strong tales about relationships.
Bergman Island is still one I would need a second viewing to discover a bit more so I have to say that I enjoyed One Fine Morning much more. Seydoux, again, sparkles as a single mother who is spearheading the work to take care of her father, who is slowly falling into a deeper degree of dementia. At the same time, she begins an affair with an old friend.
Thinking more about it, the film is all about how we take care of others compared to ourselves as Seydoux’s character, Sandra, seems to go above and beyond for her child, her father and this new partner but doesn’t always find time for herself, which creates tension between the entire affair as she’s balancing many things at once.
Andrew: I completely agree with you, Zach, on Mia Hansen-Løve being a quietly fascinating filmmaker. One element of her work that you allude to is the way her storytelling engages with time: Eden charts the not-quite-rise-and-fall of a French electronic musician who happens to find himself in the same time-space as Daft Punk meteoric rise, Things to Come follows a middle-aged teacher as she lives through a transitional phase in her life, and this film, One Fine Morning, sees Lea Seydoux attempting to embrace her youth while she cares for her obviously dying father.
Seeing the juxtaposition of these different phases of life imbues the different ends of the human experience with added dimensionality. The story speaks to the way in which the joyful parts of life often overlap with the sad ones, making for a complex emotional resonance that most movies don’t concern themselves with.
Léa Seydoux brings a great deal of emotional authenticity to this role, capturing the sometimes nimble, somtimes clumsy hair-pin turns that a woman in her character’s position has to make when interfacing with people who have different needs and demands of her. She’s one of our great movie stars right now, and her range has perhaps never been more apparent than seeing her in both this and David Cronenberg’s masterfully grotesque Crimes of the Future earlier this year. I’m grateful that she remains willing to make such commercially risky work, even after being catapulted to both multiplex and art house success with her recent appearance in multiple James Bond entries and Wes Anderson films. I was really excited to see what a collaboration between her and Mia Hansen-Løve might look like, and One Fine Morning is a beautiful result of great chemistry between actor and director.
Theatre of Thought by Werner HerzoG
USA
Andrew: A new Werner Herzog documentary is simultaneously cause for celebration and a blip on the radar, as new work from such an obvious master of the form would be considered a major event if he weren’t so impossibly prolific. Once acclaimed for challenging fictional narratives like Aguirre, the Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, and Fitzcarraldo, old man Herzog has since settled into his status as a compulsively fascinating documentarian. In works such as Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and Into the Abyss, Herzog points his camera’s penetrating gaze and his stony, ponderous narration at concrete subjects that evoke big questions about life, death, and humanity’s place in the broader universe. Problem is: he makes so goddamn many of them that it can be hard to keep up or even notice their arrivals, especially considering these films don’t usually get much in the way of distribution. I am one cinephile among many who tends to overlook the arrival of new Herzog films, but getting to see Theater of Thought on a big, beautiful IMAX screen served as a powerful reminder to me that Herzog is deeply good at what he does.
This time, Herzog’s focus is the rapidly accelerating field of neuroscience, where biomedical engineers and big tech companies are quickly developing tools for studying and manipulating the fleshy tissue of the human mind that range from sorely needed to horrifyingly dystopian. On the one hand, this doc highlights the benevolent humanitarian work being done by medical scientists using neuroscience to develop prosthetic limbs and help people recover from physical trauma; on the other, Herzog casts his gaze on software engineers merely trying to program consumers into being more easily marketed to. There’s also plenty of case studies that fall in the murky gray area in between these extremes, giving Herzog plenty of opportunities to ask pontificating questions on the nature of human perception and the ways in which art can capture it differently from science. He’s never truly offering answers, crucially – just asking questions that seem to grow bigger and more urgent as technology gets exponentially more and more advanced.
All this is presented in a standard talking-head interview format that has become fairly routine for Herzog at this point, but there are strange idiosyncrasies to Herzog’s process that feel designed to set his interview subjects off-balance just a bit: for example, it seems like he asks all of his interview subjects to look directly in the camera for an indefinite amount of time before he asks them their first question (creating space in the footage for Herzog to narrate over), so his first question, usually a strange one, always takes them by surprise. He will also often employ the technique of therapeutic silence, with Herzog simply not responding whatsoever after an interview subject has just finished speaking – usually after they have said something that Herzog thinks they ought to reflect upon a bit more deeply.
Zach: Thinking back on the film, the point you bring up about the dichotomy between humanitarian achievements and, for lack of a better phrase, the eventual route to virtual reality porn, is what sticks with me about it.
As someone deeply embedded in the analog age, Herzog is maybe the best person to capture these waves of rapid advancements. It can feel a bit like we’re going from the horse to the car every other week in our current age and with that comes a lack of foresight. Channeling my best Jeff Goldblum here: they asked if they could create it, but never asked if we should.
Throughout Theater of Thought, to your point, Herzog is never saying to us whether he thinks this achievement is worthwhile or not. Instead, he leaves us to ponder that ourselves.
There’s always this struggle today between reality and the virtual world. Are we really achieving our function as humans if we, natural beings, are not engaging with the natural world? It reminds me a bit of another documentary from this year, We Met in Virtual Reality, which documents relationships amongst people participating in a virtual life game.
It’s easy to be dismissive and not put much thought into the virtual world carrying as much weight as being “true life” compared to the real world, but there’s also this beauty in the relationships that these people found in the virtual space. The same can be said about much of the developed technology in Theater of Thought where there are massive advancements for people who truly need the technology to function on what we’re dictated to view as a normal level. The downside is you have those who lack that need exploiting it for capitalism.
Herzog threads the line well here and it truly is refreshing to see such passionate, intelligent neuroscientists just trying to make the world a little bit better. In the end, it really does take the noise out of the clutter for a little bit.
Prisoner’s Daughter by Catherine Hardwicke
USA
Andrew: One might imagine that directing a film as craze-inducing as Twilight would grant its creator a certain degree of power and influence in the film industry, but Catherine Hardwicke has had a different experience. After being offered a supposedly unfathomable amount of money by Lionsgate Entertainment to direct the sequel, Hardwicke claims she chose to bow out of the series so as to not become a cog in a studio-micromanaged money machine – and she’s worked along the margins of the Hollywood system since then. Among film critics, though, there has been broad disinterest in Hardwicke’s filmography, perhaps influenced by the way in which Twilight has been reduced to a cultural punching bag, beloved only by young girls and middle-aged women (interesting that those types of things so often take on a similar status). However, I believe that Catherine Hardwicke is a consistently interesting filmmaker with a strong authorial voice who tells compelling stories about the ways in which young people seek power and agency in harsh and confusing worlds.
Twilight offers an interesting case study, as Kristen Stewart’s perfectly somnambulant Bella Swan navigates the hazy emotional space between choosing to pursue a beguiling and mysterious forbidden love and being trapped by that lover’s deeply manipulative and parasitic tendencies. However, it is Hardwicke’s energetic, shakycam-driven debut, Thirteen, that best captures this push-and-pull between adolescent power and powerlessness; it’s teen protagonists seek freedom from difficult home lives by way of shoplifting, sexual expression, and drug use, only for these forms of escape to become self-destructive cycles all their own.
In Prisoner’s Daughter, Hardwicke returns to the subject of parent-child relationships in new and interesting ways, this time focusing on a three-generation household, centering her film’s POV on a stressed-out mother living with her precocious, bullied teenage son and her formerly criminal father. Hardwicke spends a great deal of screen-time situating this family within a precarious economic milieu. Kate Beckinsale’s protagonist runs herself ragged between multiple service-industry jobs, still struggling to afford nourishing food and life-sustaining epilepsy medication for her son. She’s also thin on patience, the constant hum of stress and time-pressure makes it difficult to have relaxing, life-giving conversations with her son at home. This family is in many ways entirely ordinary, but focusing on this ordinary reality in the film’s exposition makes clear that to simply exist in our current era of late-capitalism is to be necessarily disempowered. How exactly to claim a semblance of power and dignity in such a world is the dilemma at the center of Prisoner’s Daughter.
One option is presented by Brian Cox’s father/grandfather character, who at the beginning of the film is released from prison on house arrest after living a violent life as a career criminal. In many ways, his past mirrors his daughter’s present: he devoted so much of his life to seeking financial security for his family that he found himself a neglectful and incompetent parent whose own child refuses to forgive him for his now-acknowledged shortcomings. Cox’s character embodies a faded ideal of masculinized power, one that takes what it wants and needs by force when the deck is too stacked to get those things fairly. And while most feminist filmmakers would be quick to dismiss this type of power as toxic, Hardwicke takes a good long look at it, considering the ways in which violent force is often necessary in a fundamentally violent world. It is not violence itself but the way it is wielded – the direction that it is pointed – that is of ethical interest here.
Now, I’ve largely praised Prisoner’s Daughter on the thematic richness of its story, which is not Hardwicke’s own doing – the screenplay is by television screenwriter Mark Bacci – but it is the way in which the actors breathe life and humanity into it that makes the film work. Hardwicke doesn’t bring the same type of visual flair to Prisoner’s Daughter that she brought to Twilight and Thirteen, but she here demonstrates her skill as a fantastic director of actors, and she pulls great work out of a small but dedicated cast (which also includes ex-All-American Rejects singer Tyson Ritter in an impressively unhinged role). While its ambitions are modest, Prisoner’s Daughter is a solidly crafted, intellectually rigorous family drama that, in a just world, would prove Hardwicke to be an auteur worth paying attention to.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Man by Pierre Foldes
France
Zach: Working as an anthology that (kinda?) comes together at the end, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman captures a set of stories by Haruki Murakami in the aftermath of an earthquake and tsunami that hit Tokyo in 2011.
The first story follows Komura who is trying to find center following the national disasters but also his wife Kyoko, who sits on the couch in a depressive state and devours news coverage of the disasters. At the same time, a lonely accountant named Mr. Katagiri is visited by a giant frog (yes) who enlists his help in saving Tokyo once again from another natural disaster.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a French/Dutch production with no real ties to Murakami or Japan outside of using the source material, and while not a complete dealbreaker, it does have this disconnect from the source that makes the entire thing feel incomplete. That – coupled with the fact that recent Murakami adaptations such as Burning and Drive My Car have found this soulful serenity in their most quiet moments – makes Blind Willow feel like a puzzle with pieces missing.
Komura tries to right himself and attempt to treat his wife’s mood by searching for their cat, which leads him to different pockets of his neighborhood and in Japan on its own. The entire affair also challenges him to change his career path as a businessman, but that doesn’t lead to much more than just moping around other places that aren’t an office. He’s not an entirely endearing character, to the point that you can’t really argue when his wife eventually leaves him towards the middle of the film over his inability to engage in their relationship.
While the story feels half-baked, that is also a way to describe the animation, which goes for this digital comic realism that seems akin to Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. To be honest, the style isn’t my favorite and I find it almost antagonistic. I’m not sure if the director and animators were trying to go for this stab at some realism, but the designs feel limiting to the characters and their motions and lacks the depth to really engage in the picture it's trying to paint. The city feels tacked on and fleeting, as if it was barely lived in.
Maybe that’s the point though. In the wake of these tragedies, there’s this untethered feeling towards the world around you. So much loss that the streets are now just drastically less filled and things around you feel almost tarnished rather than lived in – connected to loss, death and tragedy now rather than love, life and passion.
It still didn’t make me enjoy the style any more. The film either.
Godland by Hlynur Pálmason
Iceland
Reid: Despite religious epics typically being right up my alley, Hlynur Pálmason’s Icelandic story of a 19th century priest traversing the remote land to set up a church left me very cold. Godland follows Danish priest Lucas (Elliot Crosset Hove) as he is sent on mission to Iceland where he is to build and shepherd a church in an isolated section of the country. More than anything, the film is about duality as Lucas is paired with the guide Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson) and the two continually butt heads throughout the journey and the construction of the church.
Beyond the interpersonal dynamics at play, Pálmason foregrounds the duality of Iceland’s beauty and its brutality. Characters even go so far as to describe the “terrible beauty” of the land. This aspect is magnificently captured by cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff as we see the tremendous landscapes daunting the characters throughout the entire film.
Godland is reminiscent of The Lighthouse both formally and metaphorically. As two charismatic characters conflict, it becomes increasingly clear that the central point of the film is the question of what will win: the strong brutality of nature, or a weaker-appearing religious fervor? Similarly to The Lighthouse, the climax here left me cold – although the film takes a severe stance on my question in the previous sentence – and I found myself asking why? It seems Godland is asking questions we already know the answers to, and that would be fine if it did it in a more interesting and meaningful way.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Aitch Alberto
USA
Andrew: The first thing you might notice about the two romantic leads of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is the first thing the two notice about each other: their names. During their meet-cute at a public pool, Aristotle gets saved from drowning by Dante, who serves as Aristotle’s savior throughout the story in more ways than one. Aristotle is embarrassed by his too-fancy literary name, while Dante wears his like a badge of honor, interested in all things poetic and artistic. In many ways, Dante is a fresh embodiment of the “manic pixie dream girl” trope, de-problematized here by it’s use in a gay male relationship with no extreme power imbalances. Aristotle is a Mexican-American loner kid who has lived his entire life under the roof of an emotionally distant father and overly nurturing mother, and the mixed-race Dante has a much healthier relationship with both his family and his own emotional world. Both are coming to terms with their own burgeoning sexuality, but it is the more emotionally adept Dante who, somewhat ironically, needs to lead Aristotle out of the hell of repression and into the paradise of love.
Like much of the YA lit genre that Aristotle and Dante belongs to, the film is occasionally guilty of slipping into cornball territory with its melodramatic teen dialogue and overly explainy voice-over narration, but at the end of the day this is a film that has the heart to back those cliches up. One long and particularly effective stretch of the film involves the two not-yet-lovers separated for an extended period of time, with Dante writing letters to Aristotle, who reads but never replies. The intermittent voice-over of Dante’s letters slowly unfolding over footage of Aristotle fumbles through life can be downright haunting, and actually reminded me of Chantal Akerman’s News From Home, a challenging but beautiful film in which the Belgian filmmaker silently explores New York City while concerned letters from her mother play out slowly and quietly over the raw footage. Aristotle and Dante is not nearly as cinematically ambitious as Akerman’s film (they’re playing in completely different keys), but I was impressed by its emotional heft nonetheless.
Aristotle and Dante also stands out from the crowd for its setting, which is late-1980s El Paso, TX rather than some interchangeable upper class coastal community or generic suburbia where so many other YA stories are set. The world of the film feels authentic and lived-in, probably due to the life experience brought to the table by director Aitch Alberto and original novelist Benjamin Alire Sáenz, both of whom are queer, Hispanic, and grew up in communities comparable to the one depicted here. They bring a lot of sociopolitical expertise to the table, touching not only on the stigmatization of homosexuality, but also male emotional repression, violence against trans people, and identity crises often experienced by mixed-race people – all without ever really feeling like its spreading itself too thin. Because of course, in certain social contexts, all of these things naturally intersect and overlap with one another. Above all, this film is instructive, which I believe is one of the most wonderful things that a YA story can be: a narrative education in the kinds of things that the American public education system rarely touches out of fear of being too “controversial.” As cool as it would be to see this film get picked up by a big theatrical distributor and played in every multiplex across America, I’m actually hoping it gets picked up by a major streaming service instead, where queer kids across America could sneak in viewings without their parents finding out.
Susie Searches by Sophie Kargman
USA
Reid: When I realized Susie Searches features unexpected performances from Rachel Sennott and Jared Gilman, I knew it was likely to be better than I had anticipated. To be clear, these are not surprise cameos: I just hadn’t read past the top-billed performers of Susie Searches, which also includes pitch-perfect performances from Kiersey Clemons and Alex Wolff as well as an expectedly solid performance from Jim Gaffigan, who has become a consistently good indie-film presence and talent.
Susie Searches is the story of a college-aged woman (Kiersey Clemons) who is so obsessed with solving fictional and true crimes that she starts her own true crime podcast. When a classmate (Alex Wolff) goes missing, it gives her the perfect chance to showcase her skills and prove her podcast’s merit. To say anything else about the plot would be to give away a little too much. The key to Susie Searches’s success is that it takes this fun and mysterious setup and turns it into a vicious character study that ends up being much more fun than even promised.
Sophie Kargman’s direction seems ambivalent to any genre trappings and thrills and instead forces us into the headspace of Susie as her circumstances grow darker and her relationships more twisted. As mentioned above, the cast is the real secret weapon of the movie, as both Clemons and Wolff, two young actors who got their start on different children’s shows, deliver possibly career-turning performances.
No Bears by Jafar Panahi
Iran
Zach: You’re immediately set a bit off-axis when you watch a Jafar Panahi movie if you know anything about the director – or more specifically, if you know his ongoing fight for free speech against the Iranian government.
Movies such as This is Not a Film become works of activism activism that feel so much more charged than anything else taking to the silver screen today. No Bears doesn’t necessarily open with that feeling, but it gradually rolls into this sense of anxiety and dread, not only for Panahi himself but for those around him who have shown care towards him and provided him with help. There’s also that level of reality versus fantasy, and this is no different. It becomes even more surreal if you learn about the recent imprisonment of Panahi by the Iranian government as almost a coda to the entire film.
In No Bears, Panahi has found shelter in a small Iranian border village where he is remotely directing a narrative film that is filming in a relatively nearby city. It throws you off-balance as you watch a full narrative play out before someone walks in front of the camera asking Panahi if that’s what he was looking for in the scene. Cut to Panahi attempting to find wi-fi signal in this village; the film then introduces us to Panahi’s neighbors and current caretakers, who he entrusts with a camera as they make their way to a wedding. Panahi seems to be a recluse but has gained some notoriety with the locals as a filmmaker – whether that gains their trust or not. At the same time, his assistant on the narrative film pushes him to escape his imprisonment and go across the border to freedom, a move that Panahi seems unwilling to take.
That level stuck with me: this unwillingness to run away from your home, even when it is doing everything in its power to oppress you.
Andrew: Panahi has gotten bolder and bolder in the way that he has defied the Iranian government by way of guerrilla filmmaking, and this film is perhaps his most ambitious project yet: while on one level it appears to be a film about its own making (like This is Not a Film), No Bears must have been blocked and rehearsed much more carefully than his earlier movies, many of which take place in a single location (like Taxi). There are dozens of actors in this thing, and the scenes are long, winding, and purposeful.
This is maybe the most thematically dense thing I’ve seen from Panahi as well, as it aims to shine a light not only on his usual foe – the Iranian police state – but also the social pressures of provincial traditionalism that restricts human autonomy even in places where the state isn’t watching. Much of the film involves a love triangle (of sorts), between a woman, her lover, and the man she’s been married off to without her consent; Panahi finds himself entangled in this plot when the village community believes he possesses photographic evidence of this woman breaking the social code, and the amount of hoops he has to jump through in order to prove that he doesn’t have such a photo is absurd to the point of being Kafkaesque. Seeing Panahi navigate this injunction on his freedom both mirrors his conflict with the state and serves as a profound counterpoint to it, demonstrating that it’s not merely large-scale policies that need to change in order for people to live freely, but community hearts and minds as well.
What individual actors do when they find themselves in such an oppressive panopticon is the central question of the film, and a conversation about this question gives the film its strange title. While Panahi struggles with the question of whether or not he should cross the border illegally to get out of Iran altogether, he mentions the widely-held belief that there are bears living along the parts of the border where the police can’t monitor. “There are no bears,” his confidant replies – the bear story is merely a propagandistic piece of mind control, keeping individual Iranian citizens from realizing how much autonomy they actually have. Does that mean that they should simply free their minds and give themselves permission to defy these restrictive forces, as Panahi has continued to do with his filmmaking? The answer is not that simple, as later plot developments – and Panahi’s own recent imprisonment – make manifest.
And although I’ve made it clear that I think this film is fairly rehearsed and fictionalized for thematic effect, the illusion of documentary naturalism is nevertheless impressive. About 30 minutes into the TIFF screening I attended – during a scene in which Panahi was illegally scouting the Iranian border while talking to an assistant about how to travel with hard drives – the screen all of a sudden glitched out and cut to black. For a nonzero number of minutes, the audience sat in rapt silence, wondering if that’s all the footage he was able to get before being apprehended by police. The fact that such a scenario felt possible in the first place is a testament to Panahi’s audacity and heroism in the face of overwhelming authoritarian stricture, as well as his cinema’s verisimilitude to what can easily feel like real life.
The End of Sex by Sean Garrity
USA
Reid: A Canadian sex-comedy is an easy enough sell at a film festival packed with lengthy, heady movies, but Sean Garrity’s genuinely funny The End of Sex still managed to surprise and delight me throughout. It follows the marriage of Emma (Emily Hampshire) and Josh (Jonas Chernick) as their children head off to a week of camp. Now temporary empty-nesters, they are determined to reinvigorate their sex life and feel the strong physical connection they used to have. From threesomes to sex clubs to acid trips, Emma and Josh are willing to try almost anything to save their sexual connection, which in turn would hopefully salvage their marriage.
While being fairly conventional in terms of structure and plot, the comedy and characters are the real source of enjoyment. Garrity surrounds his two main characters with a cast of enjoyably over-the-top supporting roles that highlight both the mundanity and the seriousness of the issues Josh and Emma are facing. While I may have some questions about the film’s resolution – which I imagine Andrew may elaborate on – The End of Sex was one of the most enjoyable experiences I had at the festival and is incredibly deserving of finding an audience.
Andrew: I would love to elaborate on the film’s resolution, which feels to me like a bit of a non-resolution. Up to the point of its ending, this sharp-witted comedy feels like it’s gradually drawing a picture of what a loving, co-parenting relationship could look like, freed from the expectations of heteronormativity, monogamy, and even allosexuality. Each scene feels like it’s placing a point on a grid and tracing a line from one point to the next one until the picture is almost complete…then it kind of ends? If there are 10 dots to connect here, this film feels like it presents eight of them and (maybe?) assumes that the audience is smart enough to draw the final two. There are precious few movies willing to openly advocate for polyamory as an ethical way to organize adult relationships, and this film felt like it was teasing me with the prospect that it might be added to that unfortunately short list. Instead of a full-throated endorsement, however, the film hand-waves away the ideas it’s been planting with a slapsticky final gag that felt like a major letdown as a conclusion to such a thoughtful interrogation normative relationship dynamics.
Don’t get me wrong, though: I loved this movie! The broadness of its comedy almost always landed for me (that last scene notwithstanding), the actors were fantastic across the board, and one particular piece of surprise stunt-casting (in a film without many household names featured) midway through the film had my audience in hysterics. I also love the way this movie simply lets its leads fumble through difficult conversations about sex and relationships in real time – it doesn’t feel like it was written via improv or was artificially organized around getting from joke to joke, but the conversations still unfold in a consistently funny way just by virtue of the fact that people are often awkward and uncomfortable when openly discussing their own sexual preferences and limitations. There are plenty of comedies about sex out there, but few treat the subject with as much care as The End of Sex, which recognizes that sex is a vital part of adult life and many adult relationships, regardless of how much any individual person actively seeks out for themselves. Now if only those two leads could have decided to be nesting co-parents with a non-sexual relationship who felt free to pursue other people!
I Like Movies by Chandler Levack
Canada
Andrew: On paper, this sounds like a recipe for disaster: a teen coming-of-age tale about a male movie nerd working in a video store and forming a crush on his older female boss. This synopsis reads like a wish-fulfillment fantasy of a young Quentin Tarantino, inhaling movies and making awooga-eyes at an inappropriately objectified love interest. I Like Movies could have so easily been just an egocentric circlejerk of young male cinephilia – and it is a small miracle that it is exactly the opposite.
For one thing, I Like Movies excoriates cinephilia in a way that only an insider can, lampooning the ways in which young movie nerds rabbit-hole themselves to the point of becoming completely unrelatable. Lawrence, the film’s protagonist, is intensely entertaining as a neurodivergent goofball, but he’s also obnoxious and condescending in such a specific way unique to film bros. I see more of myself than I’d like to in his self-aggrandizing certainty in himself as a purveyor of taste. Just last night, I caught myself complaining that movie trivia questions all too often concern themselves with types of movies I consider “low-tier shit,” which isn’t too far off from Lawrence refusing to sell Shrek DVDs or insisting to a couple shopping for a light comedy that Todd Solondz’s Happiness is the only way to go. I felt very seen in an embarrassing way, and the experience was surprisingly hilarious.
And the fact that I Like Movies is hilarious is self-evident in the earliest moments. The opening sequence is a piece of early-2000s video art that is modeled after the SNL of the time, which was so spontaneously funny that it reminded of masterful present-day memesmiths like Brian David Gilbert and Neil Cicerega. And the rest of the film – which alternates between being a high school hangout film and a workplace comedy set in a Blockbuster equivalent – feels consistently fresh and humorous despite being willing to go to some serious places. The overall feel and tone of the film feels incredibly grounded in the real compared to most teen comedies of its ilk, even the best of which can often feel cartoony and over-the-top. And it’s perhaps because the tone of the film feels so real that the thematic heft of the film – which concerns itself with gatekeeping and sexual abuse rampant in the industry – never feels minimized or diminished by its comedy.
Zach: Yeah, I really enjoyed this film and had PTSD back to high school and college with Lawrence’s character, a bit because of myself and more because I felt like I knew about 50 Lawrences during that time. You mention the emotional depth, and that was really what lingered with me.
I think a lot of times with these types of teen comedies nowadays, there has to be a constant knowing wink at the screen. Not only to make sure the viewers are aware that this is in fact a reference they should know, but also because you have to reassure (generally younger) audiences that the behavior presented on the screen is not endorsed by the filmmakers.
Chandler Levack obliterates that and makes Lawrence deeply unlikable – not just with kids at school or his friends, but also at home. It’s impossible to see how anyone could really like him, and as the movie moves farther along, he seems to fight even liking himself. That choice by the writer/director is refreshing because at the end of the movie, it doesn’t necessarily fully redeem Lawrence or clean the slate of his past actions but shows enough growth that you can tell the character has evolved a bit from his obnoxious, and honestly self-destructive, tendencies that not only created issues for him but also for people around him, specifically his mother and the older female boss you alluded to.
It’s a way more messy movie that I see from similar teen comedies today, and that alone made me really appreciate it.
Wavelengths SHORTS
Various countries
Zach: Resonating most in this year’s two Wavelengths programs are a collection of films related to the land and how we make sense of it in a rapidly technologically advanced age we live in.
Fata Morgana by Tacita Dean brings the mirage on the water to land as the filmmaker captures trucks along the Utah landscape in the distance. Completely silent, the film demands you engage through this discomfort with engaging in purely silent media – forcing you to focus on the images on screen and not any sort of device that would impede you. It works well as the images veer into the surreal the farther you go along and the more you begin to intensely study the landscape in front of you, forcing attention to parts you didn’t register at the beginning.
While only running 22 minutes, the silence makes it feel much longer, returning your gaze to the screen. The film works well in tandem with After Work from filmmakers Ben Rivers and Céline Condorelli, which examines the boundaries between labor and leisure by mirroring images on top of one another.
Capturing a similar mirage perspective to Fata Morgana, the film feels indebted to the work-from-home experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, merging our places of rest and work together. Children play at the park as workers engage in their duties at a factory. This confluence of everything on top of one another feels like the world around us is layered and pressing us deeper into a scape where memories can’t exist – extracting deep fibers of our essence away as we try to find a genuine role in whatever definition of community we feel closest to.
Rivers and Condorelli capture the blurred lines of our modern existence, placing one of work or play in red with the other in blue; the images finding some commonality in space but the industrial fighting with the natural, which breaks you from any sort of wholeness.
The confluence of images grows even more deeper with the best offering from both programs this year, F1ghting Looks Different 2 Me by filmmaker Fox Maxy. The maximalist representation of an intra-tribal land dispute between Native tribes captures their fight through the lens of video games, pop music and other filters that takes the historical and emotional weight from the moment and makes it feel like an item on TikTok.
Maxy expertly diminishes the actual narrative that effects a lot of people in favor of showing it through the media gorging that we try and process news through daily. Attempting to understand the different members who are seen in quick clips and body cam footage between the songs, emojis and gifs feels like all moving images falling on each other so no genuine emotion can be generated – just content to feed us until the next drive for content erupts from our brains.
Going even deeper inside our minds is filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax with Bigger on the Inside. The film goes a bit more philosophical than its predecessors but takes us into the deep recesses of loneliness and desire of humans through the modes we use to communicate. Minax combines Grindr messages, pieces of typed commentary of what’s on screen and found footage to craft something that at times feels completely fantastical but also deeply real and terrifying.
At times, the film’s narrator speaks to the audience, at one point saying that most of the time they’re going to “take ketamine and spin out” before admitting that this was a lie to sound cooler. The development of an online persona is often merely false wall that people hide behind in a reality filled with loneliness.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery by Rian Johnson
USA
Zach: The internet sure loves a good discourse on heading to the theaters to see movies, but I have to admit the case was sound when the first Knives Out released in 2019.
The movie made bank in the box office – partially, I would say, due to a cast that included Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis and Chris Evans among others, but also because it’s just a fun movie to watch in a group. Craig is back with a new cast in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and I’ll have to admit I’m disappointed.
Not in the movie – it’s great – but that Netflix scooped the series up.
I can’t imagine a better communal theater experience than a Knives Out movie and Glass Onion has all the magic again. Andrew, I know you were much more into this one than the first (and I might join you after a second viewing) but I did struggle a bit getting into this new entry.
Rian Johnson is back as writer and director, and this time around Craig’s Benoit Blanc is “investigating” a lavish murder mystery party thrown by isolated billionaire Myles Bron (Edward Norton), who is joined by his friends (played by Kathryn Hahn, Dave Bautista, Kate Hudson, Leslie Odom Jr. and Janelle Monáe).
Glass Onion very much revs into murder mystery mode after awhile but the set-up for the characters took a bit of time for me. We really don’t get into the actual mystery until about an hour or so in, but I do think the payoff works.
Andrew: While it’s true that Glass Onion spends a good bit of time time getting the cast together rather than jumping right into the mystery like its predecessor did, I’d argue it more than makes up for this by hiding at least three mysteries in one, with a structure that resembles a Russian nesting doll or the titular, famously ogre-esque vegetable.
I had a great time watching the first entry in what is now the Knives Out series, but it wasn’t until watching Glass Onion that I realized just how adept Rian Johnson truly is at both reverse-engineering these highly intricate mysteries and presenting them by way of such striking cinematic images. I’m fully with you, Zach, when you express your disappointment that this movie is just going to die on Netflix rather than get the theatrical celebration that it deserves, because it is such a blast of star power and crowd-pleasing filmmaking that I know it would absolutely slay in the multiplexes during its holiday release window.
I also can’t close out this review without mentioning how tickled I was to realize that Rian Johnson had constructed this high-effort confection of a movie with the express purpose of calling Elon Musk a moron (along with all the grifters that ride his coattails). Johnson could have just quote-tweeded the guy on the platform he now owns, but instead he made a fucking great movie that will immortalize this portrait of idiocy forever, and for that I applaud him.
Zach: I think it’s fair to say that if you have the means and power to say fuck you to a person through a movie, you take it.
I would build off of that and say that it’s also a great example of saying something about (*waves insanely*) today without being a basic-level reading of our current situation. In this case, he’s able to capture these personalities in such a careful way that each of these characters feels very in line, to your point, with real life people who follow Musk but without feeling like it’s just an impression of them. Hat tip to everyone involved.
How To Blow Up A Pipeline by Daniel Goldhaber
USA
Andrew: Say, for the sake of argument, you’re watching a movie – any type of movie will do – and the film’s most climactic scenes involves the characters attempting to defuse a ticking time bomb. How do you imagine yourself feeling during that scene? Ambivalent? Bored? Whatever the feeling, your answer is surely not “on edge” – we all know what happens to ticking time bombs in movies: they get defused with mere moments to spare. The trope meant to ratchet up tension, but it simply doesn’t work anymore; we’ve seen the trick done too many times. It’s too easy to write and too easy to brush off.
Now imagine you’re watching the first movie to ever employ that trope*. You’ve never seen a ticking time bomb in a movie before. What must that have felt like? Imagine feeling truly stressed seeing the numbers ticking down, sweat beading from the protagonist’s brow, each moment bringing them and their struggle closer and closer to fiery death and destruction. Imagine a version of that scene that feels truly dangerous, volatile, and incendiary.
That’s what it feels like to watch Daniel Goldhaber’s new film How to Blow Up a Pipeline – one of the most dangerous, volatile, and incendiary movies I’ve ever seen. It is that feeling, bottled, for a full 100 minutes. Every element combined here, from the score to the editing to the narrative structure to the title, feels fine-tuned to maximize its audience’s sense of panic, both in terms of it’s moment-by-moment popcorn-chomping movie-tension and the broader sense of urgency necessitated by the film’s sociopolitical context.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline was originally a nonfiction book of political theory by Andreas Malm in which he argues for the ethical validity of sabotaging oil infrastructure contributing to climate change and eventual human extinction. Director Daniel Goldhaber has – brilliantly, in my view – decided to repackage that book’s difficult, radical content into a familiar form with mass appeal: a heist movie. The adaptation in and of itself is an act of political praxis, as his movie will no doubt be seen by a much broader audience than the one frequenting the online store of leftist publisher Verso Books.
Many of the film’s characters, however, would probably have a few Verso titles on their shelves. In keeping with the film’s collectivist spirit, there’s no clear protagonist in Pipeline; rather, the film follows an ensemble of political activists of varying stripes: some are college students dissatisfied with their campus’s lackluster efforts towards awareness-raising and tree-replanting; one is a young Indigenous man enraged at the way oil excavation is wrecking his hometown; another is a Don’t-Tread-On-Me-style Texan who doesn’t want his property reappropriated by the government as part of of an ever-expanding drilling project; others are simply rebellious punk kids who want to stick it to the man between binge-drinking sessions. In spite of all that divides them, they are united in their desire to actually do something about the impending climate apocalypse.
What these characters are attempting to do is relatively straightforward: they want to blow up a pipeline, the biggest in Texas. The destruction of a refinery that the entire oil industry uses to set prices will, our heroes believe, send the entire industry into free-fall and make the switch to renewable energy into an urgent necessity on the part of world governments. Actually doing this is anything but straightforward, and it’s the slow, methodical, and never-not-life-threatening process that generates a constant sense of stress for the viewer, who is repeatedly placed on a knife’s edge as the characters’ riskiest moves are regularly interrupted for flashback sequences filling in the gaps of each character’s backstory and motivation.
To call back to another overused movie trope that Pipeline finds a way to reinvigorate, the film’s organization structure is like the Seven Samurai-style “getting the gang together” trope in reverse: everyone’s already here for the job, but the large roster of characters all get their own individual chapters along the way. And not only are these flashbacks deviously placed at the most stressful of moments – even the order in which they are introduced is thrilling, as learning one character’s backstory completely reframes scenes you just watched and builds anticipation as to how other characters’ backstories will intersect and complicate the full picture. The way all these micro-plots are paced and sequenced is nothing less than masterful screenwriting and editing.
I could go on – especially about the film’s excellent score, which feels aesthetically akin to recent work by Oneohtrix Point Never, Disasterpeace, and Junkie XL, and drives the film in the same way that John Carpenter’s best stuff did – but I’ll restrain myself from further effusion here. Suffice it to say: I left the theater vibrating with adrenaline. The fact that I still feel the residual effects of that almost two months later seems like a testament to the lightning bolt of cinematic technique and political action that is this movie – easily the best new film I saw at TIFF this year.
(*The first use of the trope, by the way, might be Alfred Hitchcock’s TV series Suspicion.)
Wendell & Wild by Henry Selick
USA
Andrew: I don’t know how to write about Wendell and Wild, partially because I feel too emotionally invested in its filmmaker’s predecessor (2009’s Coraline) and partially because Wendell and Wild is an insanely complicated movie.
On the most basic of plot levels, it is the story of two demons (played by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, the latter of which also co-wrote this) escaping from hell by tricking a young orphan girl named Kat (played by newcomer Lyric Ross) into summoning them. However, this is far from the only layer of plot Wendell and Wild is working on, as there is also the story of Kat’s sinister Catholic boarding school, which is embroiled in the machinations of a private prison that has hollowed out the fictional rust belt town where this is set. There’s the backstory of Kat’s dead parents (who come back from the dead at one point in the story), the backstory of a nun who has been touched by demons herself, and the backstory of a strange man (I’m still fuzzy on how this guy relates to the rest of the plot) who has a spooky doll that allows for the summoning of demons. Crowded out by such a big cast, Wendell and Wild’s title characters fall almost entirely into the background for large stretches – a shame, considering they’re played by such superlatively funny and charismatic actors, working together again at long last.
Henry Selick and Jordan Peele are spinning so many different plates here that it’s somewhat overwhelming – and that’s not even getting into all the thematic complexities involving the school-to-prison pipeline, racial caste systems, and late-capitalist civilizational rot, all of which I personally think get hand-waved away far too easily in a protest-turned-big-climactic-showdown where the good guys win and the day is saved. Selick isn’t weaving an creeping fable about the personal psyche of a single troubled girl anymore, he’s trying to construct a grand allegory about the multidimensional and systematic troubles of our age, and the result feels (to me) like a movie that will both fail to keep kids engaged or awaken a broader audience’s political consciousness. It all just feels too messy and ill-judged to hit with the full potency that both Selick and Peele have proven themselves capable of in their best work.
There’s also plenty to say about the film’s art style, which is similarly multimodal, but I’m going to stop grumbling about my own disappointment in a film I hoped I would love so much and let Zach and Reid say much kinder things about it.
Zach: I’m much, much kinder to the film, but I also can’t dismiss your quite valid points regarding the story. To rah rah a bit, I think the film is gorgeous and the energy of its lead character Kat is so infectious that I couldn’t help myself. There was something so energizing to me when she first gets to the Catholic school, rips up her outfit to better acclimate to her style and then rolls down the hallway blasting punk from her massive boombox.
It’s tough to argue with your assessment of the story, though I’m much more lenient on what it attempts to do. There’s definitely some shredding (they could have easily cut the strange man and streamline the nun’s backstory a bit), but I was fascinated with how Selick and Peele were able to make this tale of private prisons and the decay of American industrial towns and African-American businesses and do it in a way that works enough for a kids movie.
Now do they capture every nuance of all these different points in under 90 minutes? God no. All of these issues are complicated, and we barely have an understanding on a national writing level in general, much less children’s entertainment. So maybe I’m giving the film’s story more of a pass than it deserves, but I think I do that because I appreciate the attempt, even on a surface level, to engage with these topics in a kids movie even if they don’t hit the mark. I mean you described it yourself, Andrew. I struggle to dislike a movie that equates private prison owners as much worse than actual demons! Let’s do politicians next!
Reid: I’m with you as well, Zach. After removing myself a bit from the hype of TIFF, Wendell & Wild may not be my best of the fest, but it is a damn good time that is trying to do a lot (perhaps too much, as stated) in a short period of time. The kicker? The look and feel of the movie. It is expertly animated by Henry Selick and his team of animators, of course, but the visuals left undone – i.e. seams in characters’ faces – bring an entirely different dimension to stop motion. It’s almost as if the characters can’t be bothered to be touched up due to the urgency of hell on earth. Maybe you could say that about the story, too, but that’s probably a little too generous.
As for the Jordan Peele angle, who arguably convolutes a lot of his stories, the characters retain a depth of emotion that felt honest despite the various plot machinations. I also deeply appreciate that Peele and Selick choose to not oversimplify their ideas to work for kids and instead ask kids to do a little more heavy lifting. Lofty ideas or not, the film is just incredibly enjoyable and even quite emotional at its best.
The Fabelmans by Steven Spielberg
USA
Zach: It must be contractually-obligated for a director with a small degree of industry clout to eventually craft their “this is how the movies changed my life” film. Some can be subtle (see Scorsese’s Hugo) while you wonder why some feel like they even had a story to tell (apologies to Sam Mendes and Empire of Light).
It’s a bit insane to claim that at this point in his career Steven Spielberg is “phoning it in,” to steal a line from another review. What some define as phoning in can be better classified as growing up. Not to diminish his early work in any way, as those are some of the best movies of all-time, but Spielberg’s curiosities have evolved as he’s grown older and it’s fascinating to watch someone who works in the mode of “movie magic” akin to the golden age of film bringing that attention to these more adult-focused films.
But what The Fablemans does most of all, and what separates it in the “movies changed my life” subgenre, is how it allows the director to get personal with his audience for the first time ever.
Up until this point, we’ve recognized Spielberg through a lens of how he’s wanted us to see him. We think of him through the shark emerging in front of the ocean in Jaws, the two fingers touching and a glow from E.T., the boulder rolling down the incline in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the little girl with the red dress in the otherwise completely black-and-white Schindler’s List. These trademarks of the director are seared into our minds in the way that only movies have the ability to do, but The Fablemans allows us to better understand the moments that stuck in Spielberg’s own brain that led to the development of his legendary status.
Skipping through decades, we first meet Sammy Fableman in line for a screening of The Greatest Show on Earth where his parents Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano) convince him that the experience, while scary, will be worthwhile. It might be a little too worthwhile, and the film’s climactic train crashes is so branded into Sammy’s head that he recreates it with his own train set with a 16mm camera in hand.
The Fablemans tracks the evolution of Sammy’s family. He seems more connected to his mom, who is free-natured, compared to his much more regimented father. He gets more relief from his “uncle” Bennie (Seth Rogen) who works alongside Burt and is a staple at family functions. Burt’s technological wizardry at work gains more attention and a new job lands the family (with Bennie) in Arizona. The move comes with tension and the Norman Rockwell panache of the film’s early moments is withered away for Sammy – now a teenager – as the dynamics of his parents becomes clearer.
A climactic moment where a well-known director playing another well-known director (sorry, it’s worth the thrill of it happening without prior knowledge) gives some insight into how Spielberg operates – uninterested in really “working through his demons” through his art but feeding the beast that has given him so much joy throughout his life. The problems of crafting an engaging story and the puzzle of working on set is much more manageable than understanding why your mother and father ended up being other people than you expected. Or at the very least, he knew how to solve the former over the latter.
But The Fablemans does paint some picture of Spielberg and his tropes – the absent father, the child latching onto some sort of wonder and this dedication to the artists that came before him bleed through the images in the film. What could seem like a Mad Lib of Spielberg films is actually a decoding device; I don’t necessarily believe we needed one, but if this is what we’re going to get, I’m damn happy it’s around.
The Whale by Darren Aronofsky
USA
Andrew: “You will never forget where you were the first time you saw mother!”
I’ll never forget where I was when I heard that hilariously menacing line, booming over the multiplex surround sound, as part of the trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s stealth-Bible-adaptation-by-way-of-descent-into-madness-thriller mother! Or maybe I did forget – I don’t even remember what movie it preceded at this point – but that trailer is now seared into my brain. The actual film it was advertising (which the trailer also promised would “mess you up for life”) was surprisingly audacious enough to merit such over-the-top marketing, and despite all the film’s supposed profundity about climate change and Biblical cosmology, the film proved that, on some level, Aronofsky enjoyed playing the schlocky provocateur.
Walking into The Whale, those words from the mother! trailer echoed around in my head. Why did a guy like Aronofsky, whose movies are so often marked by a desire to disturb their audiences, make a movie about a 600-pound English teacher (played by post-acting-hiatus Brendan Fraser in prosthetics and a bodysuit) attempting to reconnect with his daughter (played by Sadie Sink, in what is probably her best performance to date) – and why is he calling it The Whale? The whole enterprise screamed bad taste. The opening scene didn’t ease my worry, as we’re immediately dropped into this character’s life as he’s masturbating to gay porn so furiously that he gives himself a heart attack before being discovered by a young door-to-door evangelist. It all feels…gross, largely because there’s something gross about Aronofsky’s insistence that it’s gross.
Fortunately, the tone of the opening scene is far from representative of the entire film, most of which exudes the quiet solemnity of a Cormac McCarthy novel. McCarthy is often quoted as saying “If it doesn't concern life and death, it's not interesting,” and it’s easy to imagine Aronofsky being drawn to this story for similar reasons. The Whale follows a character living on the verge of death at every moment – even standing up and moving across the room is a dangerous ordeal – and the relationship between death and religion is discussed at length, both by the evangelist character who doesn’t seem all that strong in his faith as well as the protagonist, whose former male lover was beaten to death on a beach by the same Christian organization the evangelist belongs to. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised to find that this is yet another Aronofsky film preoccupied with questions of religiosity, after the Christian allegories at the heart of The Wrestler and mother! as well as the radical Biblical adaptation that is Aronofsky’s Noah.
Moreso than religious, however, The Whale feels like it’s going for literary, as its title refers not only to Fraser’s protagonist or his late beached lover, but also to Moby Dick, a novel that is referred to and discussed several times throughout the film. Having not read the novel myself, I can’t comment on any parallels that may exist there, but the screenplay of the film – adapted from screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter’s stage play of the same name – feels very written in a way that seems profound at times and forced at others. Seemingly throwaway lines are brought full circle and made to interconnect with a larger thematic coherence that feels held together by the thinnest of vapors. The sedentary protagonist spends most of the film sitting in a messy, dimly lit living room surrounded by books, as he speaks to his online students about how becoming a good writer “important” (his words, repeated often) and how they really need abandon their preconceptions and write something “real." When the film is operating in its literary-religiosity mode, it seems as though Hunter and Aronofsky are themselves highly concerned with making something Important and Real, perhaps to the detriment of the film. The surreal ending, which read to me as a visual quote of Carl Theodor Dreyer, certainly solidifies that feeling.
Regardless of how well the film’s potential profundity lands for some viewers, it is reassuring in these sections to feel as though this protagonist is being treated with respect – as a character whose existence is worth paying attention to and studying. However, the film does occasionally jerk into a more manic state, with Aronofsky’s camera whipping around the cramped house and the music exploding with bombast and terror. What inspires the film to switch gears like this – and it does feel like an abrupt, jarring gear shift – are scenes of the protagonist monstrously devouring food or violently regurgitating it. It is only during these scenes that the film feels directed by the guy who made mother!, and the gross-out intensity of these scenes clangs with the quiet existential ponderousness of the rest of the film. It is perhaps as though the film is daring the audience to find this character repulsive – or making them, by way of pointed cinematic techniques and extreme imagery designed to elicit a repulsed response – only to make them interrogate that feeling throughout the film’s long downbeat stretches.
Is this a worthwhile goal? I’m not even sure it is the goal. I’m honestly a bit baffled as to what Aronofsky’s up to here, and, his religious proclivities aside, he doesn’t really feel like the right person to be telling this story.
Sick by John Hyams
USA
Reid: Not to deflate anyone’s genuine enjoyment of John Hyams’ Sick, but this film is the most recent example of a horror movie that is going to be appreciated (beloved seems like too strong a word) because it is a horror movie. Even more than that, it is a slasher. Sick has all the markings of a good slasher: it is written by Kevin Williamson (who wrote Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer) and Katelyn Crabb, and it is intermittently scary and funny. A perfect movie for a film festival’s midnight horror movie? Yes. A good movie? No, not really. Sick has major formal and story issues that the enjoyable moments could not overcome.
Sick follows college students Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Bethlehem Million) in March 2020 at the beginning of the national shutdown due to COVID. For their indefinite college break, they decide to travel to Parker’s family’s isolated lake house. The movie attempts to mine the absurdity of those first few months of the pandemic as it uses wiping down groceries and masking for jokes. One of the biggest issues is that these are non-jokes; they are simply shared experiences massive groups of people have and can recognize from their past. This became increasingly clear as each “pandemic moment” within the movie was played for laughs and the audience’s laughs felt more and more obligatory, this is not to imply, though, that the laughter died down, but instead felt performative. The types of jokes here are reminiscent of the non-jokes in a Marvel movie that is simply shoehorned in to provide a moment of levity or the slapped together observational comedy of SNL. The grating comedic experience of this movie was worsened by the formal approach.
John Hyams is a supremely talented director most known for his Universal Soldier franchise entries. Here, he employs a largely handheld approach that undercuts much of the violence and scares. So much of the horror in a scary movie comes from what is seen and what is not seen, but here we are so uncertain of what we see – and not in an interesting or scary way – that it leads to boredom.
The sparse enjoyment of this movie and the occasional reminder that I was watching a horror movie were enough to render a slightly warmer original reaction from me, but in retrospect, Sick is the type of horror movie we should be incredibly wary of. The gradual lowering of the bar because a movie is a horror movie or is a slasher will continue to degrade the genre and produce worse and worse works. Horror fans seem so intent on protecting the genre that they’re willing to accept poor entries such as Sick in order to keep the genre – and one of its greatest writers, Williamson – churning, but it is a far greater threat to the genre to let the quality slide this much.
Chevalier by Stephen Williams
USA
Zach: With all the trappings of becoming lecturing awards bait, Chevalier doesn’t completely dodge the usual biopic pitfalls, but it’s anchored by a strong performance from Kelvin Harrison Jr. that keeps it as interesting and nuanced as its subject.
Chevalier de Saint-Georges, or Joseph Bologne (Harrison Jr.), was brought to Paris in the 18th century as the illegitimate son of a French plantation owner and one of his enslaved people. The plantation owner (either recognizing talent and wanting to do right, or just working off a guilt? Who the hell cares?) brings Bologne to study music, and specifically continue to hone his craft with the top teachers.
He does, and on top of also becoming the most-renowned fencer in France, he gains a title and the favor of Marie Antonette (Lucy Boynton) and King Louis XVI (Sam Barlien). But unrest starts to permeate Paris and Bologne also is joined at home by his mother Nanon (Ronke Adekoluejo) who has been freed and sent to France after the passing of his father.
For the most part, the corresponding path for Bologne goes as you might expect. The composer for the Paris Opera House opens and between his favor with the French court, and the fact that his resume exceeds anyone in Paris or elsewhere, leads him to think he would be a top candidate, he passed over because of his race.
Harrison is remarkable in the role of Bologne, capturing the struggle of fighting where he came from because he thinks he’s breaking through the ceiling that has impeded himself and so many others – only to find that the ceiling is made with brick. Harrison sells the first part with effortless charisma. You can see the writing on the wall from the beginning, but Harrison provides a performance that engrosses you enough that you feel the story will go the alternative route from history.
The place where Chevalier falters a bit is in its handling of the relationship between Bologne and Marie-Josephine (Samara Weaving), the wife of the crown’s lead prosecutor Montalembert (Marton Csokas) and the lead in Chevalier’s opera. The relationship works as the hinge between Bologne’s royal title and life, and where he is more truly himself. Where it eventually leads (naturally, not a great place) seems disengaged from the main plot and feels like it never tries to engage with its 18th century taboo as an interracial relationship rather than focusing on what might happen if her husband finds out. And after that fact, what the wreckage leaves for Bologne compared to Marie-Josephine and the ramifications on his life. She was just toiling with romance while his existence was in jeopardy, and he did so willingly for her.
Still, Chevalier is an interesting exploration into a relatively unexplored piece of history with Harrison’s lead performance as reason enough to watch.
All Quiet on the Western Front by Edward Berger
Germany
Zach: Between films such as 1917 and Dunkirk, a personal view of early 20th century war has returned to the movies. Both have shades of anti-war sentiments, but the directors in both of those cases (Sam Mendes and Christopher Nolan) never truly buy into those politics and would rather brutalize you with sound and effects.
All Quiet on the Western Front feels indebted to those two movies a bit, but it heralds from a seminal anti-war text that should widen the gap between those other examples. It does, to an extent.
Germany has gone to war, so Paul (Felix Kammerer) and three of his dearest friends enlist in the army to serve their country, with Paul going against the wishes of his family. Immediately Paul is swept to the trenches where he settles into the battle of inches and loses one of his friends quickly. The movie stabilizes from there, introducing others on the front lines such as Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch) that join the group.
Western Front tries to incorporate the main element of 1917 and Dunkirk that resonated with audiences: the hellish commitment to engrossing you in the chaos of battle. Body parts fly, bullets ricochet off helmets and extremities, and the consistent aesthetic palette is smog. Western Front does escape the trappings of the other two through its story, which tracks the young friends from excitement to serve their country to being grinded into the mud and fighting for a cause that no longer has any definition other than the vanity of its leaders.
What’s interesting is how the 2022 version strays from the 1930 version, which spends more of its runtime back home in Germany instilling that sense of service to the fatherland than the 2022 version. This modern re-telling spends less than 20 minutes at home before heading to the battlefield, leaving us to gather who these characters are in the midst of turmoil rather than gaining a bit of perspective on who they were before the war like the 1930 version does.
That version, which is easily recommended over this one, provides some insight to the audience on why Paul and his friends would be compelled to join the service as propaganda and fear-mongering in their town conflates the job in the trenches so much that there isn’t anything else they can see doing. This murder of a future accentuates where each of these friends end up because that spark and drive that you saw when you met them is grinded away.
In this new version, that narrative is still present, but to lesser effect, we we get to know each of the characters through their positions within the ranks rather than outside of the service. The film is also bogged down in scenes of surrender from the German government as Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) enters the story to help execute Germany’s surrender to France.
This steers us away from the battlefield a bit too much and takes from the personal stories of the soldiers in favor of lamenting the point that the war was being fought over inches through the vanity of its political and military leaders rather than with any set geopolitical goal in place. This detour into the falseness of goals from war seems like it can be more pointedly told through the eyes of the soldiers rather than suits in a room.
Despite that falling, All Quiet on the Western Front is probably the best of the recent war films I mentioned earlier. Kammerer keeps us invested through the lead role and the utter pummeling of the audience through on-screen violence leaves the film’s final moments feeling truly exasperating.
BEST OF THE FEST
Zach’s Pick
Decision to Leave by Park Chan-Wook
Andrew’s Pick
How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Daniel Goldhaber
Reid’s Pick
Susie Searches by Sophie Kargman
See you next year!