CHALLENGERS

Directing: A-
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-

Had Challengers been directed by anyone else, I likely would not have been interested. But, offbeat Cicilian director Luca Guadagnino is a game changer. This is the guy who previously brought us the beautiful Call Me By Your Name in 2017; the unusually subtle and lovely queer-ish limited series We Are Who We Are in 2020; and the jarringly tender cannibal love story Bones and All in 2022. He also made the wild mess that was the remake of Suspiria in 2018—the director can be all over the place with his projects, but one thing you can never say about him is that he is unoriginal.

Challengers is easily Guadagnino’s most mainstream project to date, with superstar Zendaya at its center, her injured-tennis-player-turned coach Tashi also being the center of a dysfunctional love triangle with two other rising tennis talents: Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist, who played Riff in Steven Spielberg’s underrated 2021 version of West Side Story). This movie is also only about tennis on the surface, featuring plenty of onscreen tennis matches, but always as a metaphor for the personal tensions between the players. And of course, it wouldn’t be a Guadagnino film without some homoerotic undertones, which here occasionally veer into overtones.

It’s easy to say that these are the kinds of film details that speak to me, but it’s much deeper than that. I don’t think it’s even an accident that O’Connor and Faist are both hot young men, but almost pointedly unconventionally hot—as they compete for a woman played by one of the most universally attractive woman stars in the world. And this is a film that sexualizes all three of them, albeit in one case the camera zooms in on an inexplicably gratuitous shot of Faist’s butt in form fitting pajama bottoms. I found myself wondering if there were any conversations about the intentionality of that on set. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were.

Challengers is presented with a curious narrative structure, where “present day” is a 2019 tennis match that turns out to be a rematch between Patrick and Art after thirteen years, a pivotal match that we return to regularly throughout the film. It jumps back and forth from there to a week ago, or three days ago, or in a great many cases, thirteen years ago—when Patrick and Art first meet Tashi. This is where the homoerotic undertones begin: “I’m not a homewrecker,” she says, about getting in between the two of them, who have been “bunking together” since they were twelve.

I had mixed feelings about this approach to editing at first, and honestly it took several scenes at the beginning of the film before I started to find any of these characters interesting. But this is Guadagnino’s subtle, secret weapon: an expertly applied slow burn, getting you to a point where you don’t even realize yet that you’ve been won over. And in retrospect, Challengers would not have been as effective with a more linear plot line. As it was, every time we jump back to the “present day” match, at which point Tashi is married to one of the eternally competitive (yet unusually intimate) friends as well as acting as his coach, the stakes become clearer. Tennis is just used as a uniquely effective framework for a deeply compelling romantic drama.

Still, in anyone else’s hands, I could easily have lost interest. Guadagnino works with frequent collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom for his cinematography, consistently finding angles on the action that are at once beautiful and offbeat. Several scenes largely hinge on their visual impact, from a sudden wind storm, to a bevy of unconventional shots during tennis matches: off-center closeups of the players’ tense bodies, or POV shots of the players hitting the ball with their racquets, or in one memorable sequence, taking on the point of view of the tennis ball itself. I remain eternally confused by how the hell tennis is scored, but somehow I remained deeply invested in everything happening onscreen.

The performances are excellent all around, but especially stellar on the part of Zendaya. Challengers had already more than won me over by the climactic end to the present-day tennis match at hand, but then the acting, the memorably propulsive score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the editing, and the cinematography all converge with first-time feature writer Justin Kuritzkes’s script, and everything comes together with such deep satisfaction, it’s like a beautiful puzzle where the picture isn’t clear until the final pieces are set in place. Sticking the landing is a significant challenge even in many otherwise great movies, but here it’s done so well that it elevates an already great film. I left the theater thinking about what a fantastic experience it was.

Match points: I suppose you could call this my favorite tennis movie.

Overall: A-

SASQUATCH SUNSET

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B-

I went into Sasquatch Sunset expecting a kind of gross-out comedy that happened to be about Sasquatches. I had heard there was a lot of Sasquatch fucking and shitting. These things do happen in the movie, but, if you can believe it, they are used sparingly—which only heightens the impact when it does happen. What I was not quite prepared for was an ultimately bleak mood piece about extinction. In retrospect, the very title of the film should have been a clue.

There are only four characters in this movie, and none of them speak anything beyond a somewhat organized series of grunts. While watching, I kept thinking of the 1986 film The Clan of the Cave Bear, in which no verbal language is ever spoken. What I forgot about that movie is that they have established a form of sign language, with which the film presents subtitles. Sasquatch Sunset doesn’t even have that; in this movie, we just get the grunts. Beyond that, all communication and emotion is conveyed through a sort of mime by actors in hairy suits.

To say that Sasqutch Sunset isn’t for everyone is an understatement. There were reportedly many walkouts when the film played earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. This is not difficult to believe: I was one of six people in the theater when I went to see this, and a person in the row in front of us did indeed walk out in the midde. She even booked a seat for an AMC screening of Dune Part Two on her phone before getting up and leaving. An excellent choice, to be fair, but still, side note: don’t do that shit. Your phone screen is distracting and annoying—it’s why I know what movie you booked as an alternative, which you should do after leaving the theater.

I really thought Sasquatch Sunset would be funnier. If there’s so much sex and shit, why wouldn’t it be? Well, co-directors David and Nathan Zellner, working with a script by David, have created something akin to a nature documentary—but with mythical creatures as its subjects. They also mark their territory with piss, and in one fairly gross instance we see one vomit after eating too many fermented berries. But the thing is, once I got a recalibrated sense of the meditative tone of this film, I found myself surprisingly engaged by it. In the end, it’s a kind of family tragedy. About Bigfoot. But it takes an unusually “realistic” approach to what Sasquatch might actually behave as feral animals in the forest, particularly as a kind of “missing link” species between great apes and humans.

Speaking of humans, another curious detail of Sasqutch Sunset is that there are none. Inevitably, the Sasquatch characters encounter human civilization, in the form of things like a red X spray painted on a tree trunk, or a campsite. But, they never encounter any human beings. It’s unclear to me whether we are supposed to infer a loss of habitat due to human activity, though we do see them observe smoke from a forest fire in the distance. Several times the Sasquatch characters we’re following smack sticks against trees together in a coordinated pattern, clearly a signal to any other Sasquatch who might hear it. But, these are the only ones we ever see, and —spoiler alert—not even all of these ones make it to the end of the movie. I got to a point where I began to assume they would all be dead by the end of the film, but that’s not exactly how it ends. I suppose it depends on how you look at it.

I’ll definitely give Sasquatch Sunset credit for being absolutely unlike any other movie I have ever seen. I can’t think of a single person I would recommend it to, but I’m not sorry to have seen it. It’s certainly compelling to know that the Sasquatch characters are played, under intricate layers of makeup and prosthetics, by the likes of Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, playing the one female among the group. There is also a juvenile played by Christophe Zajac-Denek, and Nathan Zellner himself plays the “alpha.” There is also a baby Sasquatch, performed mostly through what appears to be puppetry, with somewhat mixed results.

There are indeed a few genuinely funny moments, but Sasquatch Sunset plays much more like a meditative drama. And given whose story we are seeing unfold, your mileage may vary. By the time it ended, this Sasquatch story had kind of lost me and then, somehow, brought me back around again. This is a fascinating specimen of experimental cinema, with an unusual blend of absurdity and sincerity. Whether you’ll be into it, even if the premise intrigues you, may very well depend on when you watch and and what mood you’re in. Somehow, in my case, it had a hook that ultimately got me.

They have been to the top and it wasn’t what they were expecting.

Overall: B

HOUSEKEEPING FOR BEGINNERS

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

I don’t know why, until I actually watched Housekeeping for Beginners, I thought it was a Spanish-language movie. It even took a few minutes into the beginning of the movie for it to register: this doesn’t sound like Spanish. For a hot second I thought it was Portuguese. Was this movie Brazilian? I looked it up: of all places, this film is from North Macedonia. Have I ever seen any North Macedonian films before? Apparently, I have—Honeyland, a documentary I actually felt was the best film of 2019. And while that one was the true story of a rural beekeeper, this one is about an urban, blended queer family in the North Macedonian capital of Skopje. (It turns out, I even saw the previous film by the director of Housekeeping for Beginners: You Won’t Be Alone, about a shape shifting witch in 19th century Macedonia, which I did not like nearly as much, and did not have North Macedonia as a producing country, while this one does.)

One might rightly wonder how the hell I started from Spanish to that: within a European context at least, this film could hardly be further from Spanish. Such is the legacy of colonialism, I suppose—the English are hardly the only ones in the world to have such a history. Spanish is actually the second-most spoken native language in the world (behind Mandarin), which can make it easy to forget: there are 16 times as many people in the world who speak some other language. In North Macedonia, the dominant language is Macedonian, but there are other officially recognized languages, including Albanian, Turkish, Bosnian, Serbian, and one that becomes a key plot point in Houesekeeping for Beginners: Romani. That last one is the language spoken in the neighborhood of Shutka, an autonomous Roma community on the outskirts of Skopje.

It turns out, there is a lot to learn about this small corner of the world—a country of just under 10,000 square miles (barely larger than Vermont), a population of 1.8 million (about the population of West Virginia), its capital a metropolitan population of 537,000 (about the metro population of Huntsville, Alabama). Such is the case with just about every international location you can think of, actually—but here, writer-director Goran Stolevski, an openly gay thirtysomething man born in Macedonia who grew up in Australia, finds a unique way to turn our attention to it.

It’s not often we get queer stories in global cinema that blend queer life with racial and ethnic concerns, making Housekeeping for Beginners an unusually intersectional story. When the film opens, we see what appears to be two teenagers, Ali (Samson Selim) and Vanesa (Mia Mustafi), belting out along to a song they both apparently love, using household items as fake microphones. It’s a deceptively charming and simple scene, and only moves into a portrait of a rather chaotic household.

And the home includes a lesbian couple, Dita (Anamaria Marinca) and Suada (Alina Serban), and their gay housemate Toni (Vladimir Tintor). As we just hang out with this household for several minutes, it takes a little while to fully register what all the relationships are. Vanesa, and insanely cute little Mia (Dzada Selim) are Suada’s children. Ali, just a few years older than Vanesa, is Toni’s 19-year-old hookup—the opening scene of him singing with Vanesa really driving home how he’s rather young.

But, there are several other queer teens who also hang out at the house, which serves as a de facto safe house for kids who are rejected by their families or communities. And here, in a country with no legal recognition of same-sex couples or their children who are not blood relatives, this chaotically supportive mini-community they have created for themselves is massively disrupted when Suada is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The first third or so of Housekeeping for Beginners focuses on this lesbian couple, how they deal with a prognosis understood early on to be hopeless, and how they drag their feet in regards to informing the family. It’s not a spoiler, per se, to say that Suada dies, because the overall point of this film is Dita dealing with both her promise to Suada that she will be the children’s mother going forward, and in particular Vanesa’s passionate rebellion against that scenario, all while navigating the legal hoops and deceptions necessary for her to stave off any threat of the children being taken away. Toni, for his part, is resistant to being pressured into playing the part of a straight father / family man type. Ali organically settles into his own position in the family, his relationship with Toni having complications of its own.

I was fully absorbed and moved by ths movie, a rare feat of ensemble storytelling in which every principal character has dimension and character development. It should be noted, also, that both Ali and Suada happen to come from the aforementioned Shutka community, a people for whom “gypsy” is considered a bigoted term, and they are people of color—making Dita and Suada not just a lesbian couple, but an interracial couple, and then Dita a White woman raising children of color. There are many references to this dynamic in the film, and when Vanesa insists on seeking out a grandmother in Shutka she hasn’t seen in several years, deep cultural differences quickly become apparent.

I can only imagine Housekeeping for Beginners would be seen in a far more intricate way by Macedonian audiences, and I would be fascinated to learn how the film was received there—it was indeed their submission for the Best International Feature award from North Macedonia, but, criminally, it did not make the cut among last year’s nominees. This is a film that absolutely deserves attention, both in its home country and abroad—even the most frustrating characters are deeply human, and the domestic situation portrayed is emblematic of evolving ideas of family the world over. I won’t soon forget this one.

Love makes a family, and so does not taking any shit lying down.

Overall: A-

MONKEY MAN

Directing: C+
Acting: B
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

I really, really wanted to like this movie. I have long enjoyed Dev Patel as a leading man. This being his feature directorial debut was a compelling idea. Most exciting of all, Monkey Man is a Hollywood-style action movie set entirely in India, specifically Mumbai, fully embedded in Indian culture. There’s only one White character in the entire movie, and he’s a South African underground boxing emcee (Sharlto Copley). There’s no American characters to be found anywhere, giving Patel—actually a British actor—the space to showcase the culture of his heritage. What’s not to love?

There’s a lot not to love, it turns out. Patel so directly wants us to think of Monkey Man as “John Wick in Mumbai” that his character, credited as “Kid” (side note: Dev Patel is 33), buys a gun from a man who directly references the Keanu Reeves films: “Have you seen John Wick?” the guy asks. “This gun was in it.”

Here’s the trouble with comparing this to John Wick—a franchise that consistently puts out solid-B action movies: there’s a purity to John Wick’s premise, which is also less serious but delighted audiences: some assholes kill Wick’s beloved dog, a crime worse than human murder to dog lovers, and he spends the first movie getting revenge for this wrong. As the series has gone on, the world of assassins in which John Wick inhabits gets increasingly ridiculous and elaborately structured, but at least it stays in its lane, and consistently offers moments of levity in between its many extended “gun fu'“ action sequences.

Dev Patel’s movie is also a revenge tale, but seeped in sectarian and religious tensions that have characterized India for decades. “Kid” is out to get back at both the police chief (Sikandar Kher) who killed his mother when he was a chid, and the Hindu nationalist politician (Makrand Deshpande) who gave the order to destroy the settlement on the land later used for his temple. This turns what could be a movie about good clean, personal vendettas into an action “thriller” that amounts to little more than political violence. I struggled to understand how I was supposed to sit in the theater and root for it—and make no mistake, Monkey Man is not a Dune-style commentary on the pitfalls of hero worship. It simply glorifies violence for its own sake, using the dressing of social justice in a way that is far more transparent than it realizes.

There is also a significant presence of transgender characters, known in India as hijras, which I have very mixed feelings about. Setting aside the fact that the prinary trans character is played by Vipin Sharma, a cisgender man—I cannot find any confirmation whether any of the other hijra characters were played by trans actors—the Kid character’s position among them never sat quite right with me. The way the hijra characters help Kid felt only a step or two away from a queer Indian version of the “Magical Negro” trope; the way Patel is clearly proud of himself for offering unprecedented trans representation in his film feels like a straight-Indian version of White saviorism.

In short, it never quite feels like the trans presence exists for the right reasons. And Monkey Man clearly wants us to applaud it for featuring these trans characters as badasses, an idea I very much support in theory—except they just engage in the same gruesome violence as anyone else, their saris shot spinning in slow motion while they slaughter nameless enemies with the same ruthlessness with which they themselves are targeted. Somehow, we’re supposed to feel good about this?

The fundamental problem with Monkey Man is that it’s convinced it has a righteous point of view while its moral center proves nebulous from start to finish. This applies to Kid’s showdowns with both the corrupt police chief and the Hindu nationalist politician running for Prime Minister. What should have been fun movie violence, with only very sporadic moments of minor humor, gets weighed down in South Asian politics with real-world implications that are muddled at best—a phrase that would be aptly applied to this movie as a whole.

The Hindu legend of the hanuman has more clarity than this movie.

Overall: C+

ONE LIFE

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

More than eighty years on, with a seemingly infinite amount of books and movies and television shows produced about the Second World War, it’s easy to forget the stunning breadth of that global conflict. The holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—these are the most enduring symbols of World War, and they are really just the tip of the iceberg. Will we ever run out of new stories to tell about that period of history? Just last year, Oppenheimer asked us to consider the horrors we unleashed upon the Japanese, while also imagining where we would be had the Nazis managed to split the atom first.

And yet, there remain countless, only seemingly smaller stories left untold, a whole lot of them coming from places outside the locations that dominate typical World War II narratives, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, or Japan. The many places affected by both Japanese and German expansionism of the time are just as worth considering.

And that brings us, now, to One Life, a new film based on the amazing accomplishments of Sir Nicholas Winton (a wonderful Anthony Hopkins). Winton, a man of Jewish descent and son of immigrant parents who fled the Germany of World War I, traveled to Prague in late 1938 with the intent of assisting humanitarian efforts with refugees there. He led the impossible task of compiling lists of refugee children, most of them Jewish, getting them British visas with the help of his mother (played by Helena Bonham-Carter), lining up British foster parents to take the children in, and transporting them from Prague to London by train.

One Life focuses largely on Winton’s humility, cutting back and forth between Hopkins’s version in the late eighties, and the younger version working tirelessly on this project in 1938 and 1939, much of it later focused on logistics and paperwork back in the UK. The younger Winton is played by Johnny Flynn, exceptionally well cast as a man you could easily believe as a younger Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins, for his part, spends the first half or so of the film milling about his home, cleaning out his clutter, trying to come up with a use for a decades-old scrapbook of all these children, and otherwise just contemplating his past.

Winton’s stunning feat was saving 669 children from almost certain death; Germany invaded Czechoslovakia as expected, and rounded up virtually all of the parents of these children and sent them to concentration camps—the small number of survivors amounted to about a third the number of children Winton and his cohorts saved. This all went mostly unknown until Winton went looking for a place to conserve his scrapbook, and then a usually-silly British television program called That’s Life! picked up the story in the late eighties, reintroduced him to dozens of the former children he saved, and had the British press celebrating him as the “British Schindler.”

That phrase never actually gets used in One Life, somewhat wisely, despite the obvious parallels. The key difference is that Winton was among people who saw what was coming very early on, and took action immediately. All these children boarded trains, saying goodbye to their parents with the idea that they would return to them once it was safe to do so. There are many scenes of goodbyes on departing trains, and it’s impossible not to think about how this was actually the last time these kids ever saw their families. One Life is a somewhat unusual World War II movie in that it shows very little in the way of the grotesque violence of war—but is steeped in the widely understood expectation that it is coming. This was a time of panic, which those who kept their heads had to leverage into organized action.

The trailer to One Life gives way too much of it away, but doesn’t take away the effects of those later scenes that are sure to get the tears flowing. Anthony Hopkins is 86 years old, still working, and I watched this movie thinking about what a treasure he is—he was already 53 when he became truly famous as a deliciously wicked cannibal in The Silence of the Lambs, as iconic a role as there could ever be, and still has since embodied a stunning array of characters since. More often than not anymore, he plays a sweet old man, and Nicholas Winton would have to be in the hall of fame of such characters. Hopkins evidently really loves to work, because he’s been in plenty of films that aren’t as great as others, but he offers a performance here that is really worth a look, especially in the second half, when Winton shifts from silent rumination to getting caught up in the world’s discovery of his stunningly accomplished past.

As with any story like this, there is always the reminder of the far larger number of people who could not be saved than the number who could. In this case, just as the Nazis were arriving in Czechoslovakia, the last train was stopped, and more than a hundred children who were loaded on it did not get to leave. Winton never knew what became of them, but it’s easy to imagine. This is how we keep hope alive, however, by focusing on the 669 children he did help save, and the large number of them reunited with him 40 years later. It’s very difficult to watch those reunion scenes without weeping, and taking away from this movie the notion of hope and perseverance in the face of unimaginable horrors. Some people break through, and so does this movie.

Anthony Hopkins is a the top of his game leading yet another untold story deserving of remembrance.

Overall: B+

PERFECT DAYS

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

I guess you could say Perfect Days is a mood. In which case, your mileage may vary widely, depending on your frame of mind when you approach this film—if you approach it at all. This is another one of those movie where critics predictably adore it, and I know many people who would never have the patience for it.

Director and co-writer Wim Wenders focuses on Hirayama (a wonderful Kôji Yakusho, who is in nearly every frame of the film), an older man who spends his work days cleaning Tokyo toilets. The company he works for is apparently very literal when it comes to their business name: Hirayama’s jumpsuit is emblazoned with the words, in English, The Tokyo Toilet.

And to be clear: we spend a lot of time following Hirayama around, cleaning public toilets around the city. A more conventional film would spend a fair amount of time following him on his routine for, say, one day. And then the next day, maybe some variation. But Wenders really wants us to settle into Hirayama’s world, and we follow him around for multiple days, seemingly nothing of note happening to him. Any small variation that does occur—places he goes to eat, for example—prove to be just as much a part of his regular routine, just not necessarily on a daily cadence.

Watching this movie, I found myself thinking about the surprise #1 movie on the 2022 Sight and Sound list of the best movies of all time: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Both movies exist to make us feel as though we are living a person’s life with them. The key difference between Perfect Days is that we follow the character outside his home. He spends a lot of time driving through the mass of steel and pavement that is Tokyo—with a great many angles on the 2,080-foot Tokyo Skytree—and even more time cleaning toilets. But, many of these toilets are in city parks, small urban oases of lush greenery. And, in sharp contrast to Jeanne Dielman, whose point of view is ultimately bleak, Hirayama is a deeply contented man, living a simple life to which he is utterly suited. He is a man of so few words, he utters almost nothing in the film’s first 45 minutes.

And, over time, small details creep into notice. Other people passing through his orbit, using the toilets, indicate in very subtle ways how they think of him as dirty. When Hirayama finds a lost little boy and takes him by the hand to find his mother, the mother pays no attention to Hirayama and immediately disinfects the boy’s hands. I must admit to some ambivalence about this depiction, myself. I would also want to wash my hands immediately after, say, shaking the hand of a guy I knew just spent all day cleaning toilets.

Granted, there could be a cultural difference here. Hirayama cleans an astonishing number of single occupancy public toilets, and at least as depicted here, they look remarkably clean even before he gets to them. Whether this is typical of Japanese society or just a contrivance of this film, I have no idea. I just know that if these toilets were in the United States, they would look like a sewer exploded inside them within hours.

Hirayama indicates a tendency to notice and appreciate small pleasures, often while he’s doing his work. He takes photos, with an old camera that uses film, of branches overhead from his lunch bench in the park. He appreciates colorful reflective light under an overhanging roof of a toilet next to a busy street. The point is, if you are receptive to the specificity of what Perfect Days has to offer, it takes on a warmly compelling quality.

And, eventually, certain character details emerge. Hirayama’s young niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano), shows up unexpectedly, having run away from home. Hirayama is a man of so few words, he accepts this stoically, although he does call his sister soon enough. If this were an American movie, the niece would show up on day two. Here, the movie must be half over before she appears, interrupting Hirayama’s comfortable routine, but in a way that he accepts with passive grace.

Perfect Days is somewhat long, particularly at the pace it unfolds, at two hours and three minutes (counting the credits). But two key scenes occur in the last quarter of the film, and I am unconvinced that their impact would be quite as effective if we hadn’t spent all that time with him beorehand. One of them involves his sister, and one involves the ex-husband of the lady who runs one of the restaurants he frequents. Neither of them are major surprises—nothing in Perfect Days is jarring—but neither of the scenes that unfold are quite expected either. In a way, they just further enrich Hirayama’s world, whis is explicitly described to Niko as wholly separate from her mother’s. I found them to be unexpectedly, almost sneakily moving.

They don’t particularly change the mood, either. Perfect Days takes on a tone that evokes those days you spent out and about in a solitude you find yourself particularly enjoying. Hirayama has made that his way of life. We’ve just been granted the privilege of a brief visit into his world.

It’s a lovely day in the park. And in toilets.

Overall: B+

THE TASTE OF THINGS

Directing: A
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A

It’s been said that you shouldn’t watch The Taste of Things on an empty stomach—and that is precisely what I did. And then I sat through this lengthy, gorgeously shot, expertly choreographed opening sequence of an elaborate dinner getting prepared in a large, late-nineteenth-century French kitchen.

Here’s the thing. If you are a carnivore, you might have greater need to heed such a warning: there is a lot of meat and seafood prepared in this movie. I am, however, a vegetarian—I don’t even eat seafood. I could appreciate the vividly shot food, clearly actually cooked on set, on a purely aesthetic level, but it certainly didn’t have me salivating.

Here’s what it did do. It made me think, a lot, about the way we eat our food. It made me long for a meal prepared with such intricate care, from ingredients sourced from the garden right outside the door. The film’s opening shot, in fact, is of Eugénie (a luminescent Juliette Binoche, still a genuine stunner at age 59) harvesting produce straight out of the dirt. We throw phrases around like “farm to table” as though it’s a marketing concept, and then we witness it occurring onscreen in this movie, almost in real time. And here, in the real world, 140 years after the setting of our movie, we pass our days eating food made quickly or cheaply or, in most cases, both.

The Taste of Things is populated with characters for whom flavor is more important than anything. I marveled at the technical proficiency already achieved by the 19th century, the myriad combinations of ingredients and cooking techniques, and the amount of time that it takes—and took—to master all these dishes.

As I said, the meat based dishes—beef, veal, fish, you name it—still failed to make me salivate, in ways I am certain it will most audiences. And then Eugénie whips up this Baked Alaska dish and I nearly cried with desire: Holy fuckballs that looks amazing! And I don’t even like meringue. The men Eugénie serves this dessert to discuss the physics of how the ice cream stays frozen inside, and I was rapt. This was one dish with meringue I could imagine using as skin cream. I wanted to bathe in it.

The Taste of Things is about much more than vividly shot food preparation, of course. At its heart, it is a love story, between Eugénie, a longtime cook, and Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), the restauranteur Eugénie worked for for many years. They now live together in a kind of perpetual romance, Dodin regularly proposing to her, and Eugénie regularly insisting she prefers things as they are. Their love and affection is quite overtly represented in the deeply rooted history and skill in the food they share. This includes both cooking and eating it, although Eugénie does most of the cooking.

There is a bit of sadness thrown in, and I won’t spoil exactly what that is, although it gets alluded to pretty early on, in the middle of the aforementioned, extended opening sequence. It’s easy to focus on that sequence, because of the incredible blocking and choreography and camera work, but most scenes in this film involve cooking, and without exception the food is shot with a cozy, loving eye. Beyond the focus on the food, the story is deceptively simple. But it stays with you.

There is a somewhat curious separation of genders in this film, and the heavy focus on Binoche notwithstanding, I kind of wish there were more women in it. Besides Eugénie, the only significant female characters are two younger cooks who work with her: Violette (Galatéa Bellugi), who evidently has relatively mediocre still; and Violette’s niece, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), who has an astonishing, precocious talent for gastronomy. Dodin, for his part, has a group of about five men friends who populate many scenes, often to pontificate on the prepared food or to provide support to Dodin, as needed.

But, it all comes back to Eugénie and Dodin, every other character serving their story. One of the great many things I love about The Taste of Things is the way it naturally veers away from any of the typical film tropes. Just because of the way I’ve been conditioned by decades of movie watching, I kept expecting one of the apprentice cooks to trip while climbing the many staircases in the house, or for one of the men to creep on young Pauline. But, nothing of the sort happens in this story, which is only about two character who are, as Dodin puts it, “in their autumn years,” and their earnest devotion to each other. Sometimes the simplest stories are the most moving and beautiful, and this is certainly one to savor.

Don’t insult this movie by eating cheap popcorn while you watch it!

ORIGIN

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A

Origin isn’t so much an adaptation of the 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Isabel Wilkerson, as a telling of the story of Wilkerson, clarifying the ideas for and then writing that book.

It’s a clever conceit, which works surprisingly well, as it then works as Wilkerson herself, portrayed wonderfully here by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, presenting her thesis and arguments, both to her family, friends and colleagues—many of whom take some time to understand what she’s getting at—and to us as the audience. The basic premise is that American racism does not exist in a vacuum in the world, but is rather an aspect of caste systems with common pillars in many societies.

Specifically, though, she finds “connective tissue” (her words, or at least her character’s words in this film) between the legacy of American racism dating back centuries to enslavement; the Nazi demonization of Jewish people; and the persecution of the Dalit caste, historically regarded as “Untouchables” in India. And there are some mind-blowing revelations in there, which present irrefutable evidence of that connective tissue. Documented evidence of the Nazi Party in Germany using American Jim Crow laws as a blueprint for what they did, via legal processes, to the Jewish people. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visit to India informing the commonality between “Untouchables” there and the dehumanized status of Black people in America.

Origin features a minor flaw overall, one that informs a separate discussion about the nature of adaptation. It may very well be that writer-director Ava DuVernay has presented us with the best film version of this story, and these ideas, there could possibly be. That doesn’t change the fact that reading a book about all these things is far more likely to dig deeper, more permanently into our brains. I have not read the book, and it seems clear that I should. On the other hand, I am also, like many other people, getting the most immediate, and possibly the only, direct exposure to these concepts via watching this film.

And this film, while arguably a little slight on plot, is packed with scenes that are likely to stay with you a long time. Consider the conversation Wilkerson has with a couple over dinner during a visit to Germany. This German, White woman argues to the American Black woman that the Holocaust and the American legacy of slavery are too different to be compared, that they are not based on the same underlying precepts. She clarifies that slavery is about subjugation, and the Holocaust was about extermination. This conversation could perhaps have been better informed with more direct reference to the American genocide of Indigenous people, which absolutely was also about extermination.

What Wilkerson argues is that, whether it’s subjugation or extermination, it’s the pillars of caste ideology that gets used to justify the action. One of the great things about this film is how it lays out this argument, but allows us to spend some time pondering them. This is not a film spending time insisting on its rightness, but making its case. I even left the screening I attended not having taking it in quite the same way as the person I saw it with.

Origin has a fairly lengthy, 141-minute run time, with an even pacing that justifies it. It opens on Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost) walking the neighborhood after visiting a convenience store. It explores the concept of “endogamy,” the practice or romance or marriage as limited only to within one’s own defined clan or tribe, partly through Wilkerson’s own interracial marriage to the late Brett Hamilton (Jon Bernthal). Wilkerson is encouraged by her editors (one of whom is played by Vera Farmiga) to write something about the Trayvon Martin case, while she is considering a hiatus to take care of her elderly mother (Emily Yancy).

There’s a particularly memorable scene, of Wilkerson with her husband and her mother, discussing the Trayvon Martin case. Isabel and Brett argue that Martin should never have had to answer to another man questioning his presence walking through a neighborhood, a sensible argument. Isabel’s mother argues that if Martin had just answered the question, he might well still be alive, also a sensible argument. In a later scene, we see an interaction between Isabel and a plumber (played by Nick Offerman), investigating a flood in a basement. The plumber is wearing a red MAGA hat, and Isabel quite understandably looks upon him with unease. Still, she connects with him by mentioning her late mother, and asking about his parents. The scene seems simple on the surface, but it presents the same question: Isabel diffuses tension by taking the initiative to connect, but should she have to?

Origin spends a significant amount of time on the three societies Isabel Wilkerson explores, with conversations with “real people” in her personal life at home (including her cousin, played by Abbott Elementary’s Niecy Nash, and a close friend pointedly named Miss Hale, played by Audra McDonald), as well as extended visits in both Germany and India, wildly different societies with commonalities of oppression that are all too easy not to see.

It would be a fascinating exercise to see particularly how this film plays with German, Indian, or Jewish audiences, as it explores very disparate histories, and then connects dots, between them. These are issues very personal to people, as with the White German woman who is unable to see the similarities—something Isabel’s cousin also struggles with. This all just provides Isabel Wilkerson multiple opportunities to clarify her thesis, which the film Origin then imparts to its audience very successfully. It provides a huge amount of provocative food for thought, and I left the theater feeling very grateful to have been presented with it.

When different underclasses are not so different: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Isabel Wilkerson, visiting the site of the oldest example of it.

THE COLOR PURPLE

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B
Music: B+

Here I’ve spent many a year insisting any given film should be judged on its own merits, and then I go and watch this current iteration of The Color Purple directly after watching Steven Spielberg’s original 1985 adaptation.

I do not recommend doing this. It colors everything about how Blitz Bazawule’s current adaptation gets received, and it is unfair to this newer film. It can become difficult to draw the line between whether I’m not responding to it quite as well as I’d hoped, either because it is genuinely a weaker adaptation, or I simply like the earlier film better. And there is no question, I like the earlier film better.

A key difference between the two films is that the new one is a musical—not that you’d know that from its promotional campaign. Fans of Broadway will surely know it, as it may be a surprise to discover the Broadway musical adaptation is itself pretty old now: it debuted in December 2005, nearly two decades ago; ran through 2008; and then had a highly acclaimed revival run from 2015 to 2017. The latter would clearly be what then promoted this film adaptation of the stage musical, which I never had a chance to see but can easily imagine it being a fantastic, powerful experience.

The sticking point for me here is that storytelling works differently in different mediums. This is something too many directors forget when adapting books into films, and the same goes for adapting stage plays into films. Spielberg’s movie covers a great many years, and really lets the story simmer within each phase of Celie’s life, making each key occurrence all the more poignant. The Color Purple, the movie musical, covers just as much ground, but has a run time thirteen minutes shorter than the previous film, and it makes so much time for music sequences that the rest of the story, simply by definition, gets truncated and rushed through.

The actors portraying Celie and her sister Nettie as children (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi and Halle Bailey, respectively) don’t even look that young, thereby undermining the very point of their portrayals. Nettie then does not get near enough screen time, regardless of who is portraying her, which undercuts the intended emotion of the sisters’ eventual reunion after many years of separation. We hardly get to know Nettie here, and so have less reason to care.

All that said, there remains a lot to like about this Color Purple—particularly, somewhat ironically, the music. Your mileage may vary as to whether it’s worth trading effective storytelling for really good music, but at least when the music numbers are being performed, you’re happy to be there. We’ll just set aside how incongruous it feels to have characters breaking out into rapturous song in the middle of a story like this, which features fairly regular domestic abuse.

Furthermore, the actors can’t be blamed for what they’ve been given to work with, and The Color Purple is objectively well cast: Fantasia Barrino is effective as the older Celie (even if her incredibly distinctive voice bears no resemblance to Phylicia Pearl Mpasi’s). Colman Domingo is uniquely sinister as Mister, the man Celie is forced to marry; Taraji P. Henson is electric as Shug Avery, the blues singer with whom both Mister and Celie are enamored; H.E.R. is arguably underused as Squeak; and Danielle Brooks absolutely justifies her Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Sofia, belligerent wife of Mister’s son, Harpo (Corey Hawkins).

Of course, here is where a generational divide creeps in again: none of these current actors can’t really compete with the indelible 1985 performances by then-newcomer Whoopi Goldberg as Celie; Danny Glover as Mister; or Oprah Winfrey as Sofia. The more relevant question might be how many people among 2023 audiences know or care about the 1985 film—they’ll certainly know who both Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey are, if not Danny Glover. The one performer who truly improves on the character in the current iteration is Taraji P. Henson, who truly lights up the screen.

There’s also the valid argument that Steven Spielberg, a rich White guy, was an inappropriate choice for directing this particular story—something he was actually insecure about even in 1985, only taking the gig once Quincy Jones convinced him to. Production of films about Black people plays out in this way less and less anymore, and it’s only right that a Black director should take on this film. It’s somewhat of a bummer, then, that a Black director could not have been given the chance to make just as good a film in 1985, and that the Black director who did direct the film in 2023 did a fine job but still not quite as good.

I do rather wish now that I could have watched 2023 The Color Purple in a bit more of a vacuum, without the 1985 film so fresh in my memory, from literally minutes before. I might not be quite as hard on it, although I feel pretty strongly I still would have given it the same rating, given its strong performances among tonal inconsistencies.

It’s hard to be as timid as the story really calls for when you’re regularly bursting into song.

Overall: B

THE ZONE OF INTEREST

Directing: A
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A
Music: B+

The Zone of Interest is a film that challenges you to pay attention, then makes you uncomfortable, forces you to sit in that discomfort, and regularly reminds you of the ease of complacency. It is within this context that I found how it ended to be one of the greatest endings of a film, perhaps ever.

Jonathan Glazer, who co-wrote the script and directed this film, previously gave us such wildly disparate films as Under the Skin (2014), Birth (2004) and Sexy Beast (2000), certainly takes his time between feature films, and has evidently honed his craft over time. Under the Skin in particular, a film now a decade old, is similarly subtle in both its profundity and provocative themes; it definitely has something to say. And, while it is imperfect, its ideas, its visuals, and especially its tone has me returning to it every few years.

The Zone of Interest is a bit more direct in its challenge, a slight irony given how it shifts nearly all the horrors of the Holocaust outside the borders of the frame. This is a story focused on Rudolf and Hedwig Höss (Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller), and their children, living their seemingly ordinary, every day lives in a home literally on the other side of the fence surrounding the Auschwitz concentration camp. Rudolf is the commandant of the camp, Hedwig is his wife, and in their minds, they are living the dream: everything they want in a home, with an elaborate garden, and a loving family.

The Jewish people loom large in this film, in that to the German family we are following—as well as the rest of their family, friends and colleagues—Jewish people are entirely incidental, no more or less worth considering than generic cargo. Their conscious thought about Jewish people is limited to questions of whether the few of them being used as slave labor on the grounds should be allowed inside the house. Occasionally an unusual consideration punctures their idyllic existence, such as when the ashes of human remains float down a nearly river and reach them while obliviously fishing or swimming. (That image of the ash flowing down the river toward them is not one I will soon forget.)

Glazer is a master of tone, particularly of the deeply creepy sort, but in The Zone of Interest, he quite intentionally does away with tone altogether. The proceedings are generally very matter-of-fact, the same approach the Höss family has toward Rudolf’s work. This only changes in sporadic fits, with Mica Levi’s truly nightmarish score, which reaches occasional crescendos over seemingly mundane images, like flowers growing in the garden. But, there is always something insidious under the surface of any particularly domestic image: those flowers are grown with human remains in the soil.

I might be tempted to call The Zone of Interest the 21st-century answer to Schndler’s List, except Jonathan Glazer is far removed from the kind of populist director that Steven Spielberg is. Even a film like Schindler’s List, which I would still regard as essential viewing, is similarly pointed in how it challenges its audience, but would never have reached the same number of people without the Spielberg name attached to it. Glazer, by contrast, is a longtime critical darling whose films just don’t get widely seen. Even with The Zone of Interest fairly likely to become his most-seen film, it’s never going to get genuinely mainstream exposure.

It’s too bad. The Zone of Interest is the kind of film you don’t particularly want to watch, but which you’ll be glad to have seen. I would hesitate to call it “homework,” but plenty of people would likely see it that way. For those who actively seek it out, and you absolutely should, it is likely to be seen as a profound work of art.

Is it a masterpiece? It’s too soon to tell. I was deeply impressed by almost everything about it—including Sandra Hüller, who also gave a spectacular performance recently in Anatomy of a Fall—but was left with mixed feelings about that jarringly severe score. I could feel differently after some time. And that is a specific thing The Zone of Interest plays with, time: nearly all of it is set in the last couple years of World War II, and that changes briefly only once, in a way that is incredibly effective.

I left this film thinking a lot about “the banality of evil,” and how easily it become part of our day to day existence. Rudolf recounts to Hedwig over the phone how he spent a party thinking mostly how he would gas everyone in the high ceilinged banquet room, and those were all people ostensibly on his side. This is a portrait of people far more concerned with logistics than humanity, and the casual way it invites us into their world is the most frightening of all.

The Banality of Evil: The Movie