FATHERLAND

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

Rarely does a movie say so much with so little. Fatherland runs a shockingly short 82 minutes, directed and co-written by Paweł Pawlikowski (Ida, Cold War) with striking economy. There is not a lot in the way of action, and the pacing is pretty staid, which may make some viewers feel as though it drags, in spite of its run time. These are people who should not be watching a Pawlikowski film to begin with.

I will freely admit I felt like a lot of Fatherland was inaccessible to me—historically, culturally, maybe even metaphorically. This is a film by a Polish writer-director, using real historical figures in a story about post-war Germany in 1949, steeped in rich storytelling that belies its sparseness, shot in starkly beautiful black and white by cinematographer Łukasz Żal (The Zone of Interest). The characters are beloved German novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter, Erika (Sandra Hüller), embarking on a tour returning to both Western and Eastern Germany after many years of exile—thereby revealing the double meaning of the film’s title.

This is a father and daughter returning to a homeland that doesn’t exist, and they are characters for us to relate to. as we learn they fled Germany instead of engaging with Nazism. We see brief but effective exchanges at a reception for Thomas, certain individuals making stupid assumptions about Thomas’s opinions. It’s a fascinating and rare thing, to see a film set so soon after Germany lost the war. We have a broad understanding of what Germany has evolved into today, with its mix of insistence of remembering the horrors perpetrated by their forebears, and minority but increasingly influential far-right factions. Fatherland is a glimps into the early days of that country’s cultural journey to this point. The country is now generations removed from the second World War, but here Erika can look at a table of partiers in a country she thought she would never set foot in again, and say, “Imagine what they were up to four years ago.”

Every single shot in Fatherland is packed with meaning and intention—I couldn’t always tell you what those intentions are, but it is clear they exist. Certain shots give us brief glimpses of the remnants of destruction: rooftops still hollowed out; rubble inside a church. We learn Thomas is returning for the first time since leaving Germany in 1933, during a press conference that provides a fair bit of elegantly deployed exposition. Thomas is asked questions in German, French and English, as Karla translates Thomas’s responses in German as needed.

Many of the shots are static, with little or no camera movement. The opening scene is the only one featuring Karla’s brother, Klaus (August Diehl), sitting naked on the floor next to a bed in which a sleeping woman lies. She dresses and leaves quietly while Klaus is on the phone with his sister, discussing Thomas’s desire that he join them on this brief tour back to Europe. What becomes of Klaus, you can either read online or learn by seeing the movie, but he looms large over the rest of the film, right to the closing scene, set in the aforementioned church, when we finally see some real emotion from Thomas. There is a relatability to the grief he feels, for what could have been and never will be.

Sandra Hüller, for her part, is joining the ranks with Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, and Zendaya in near-overexposure in the year 2026. Hüller has arguably demonstrated the greatest range, from her stellar turn in Project Hail Mary to ill-advised, meta histrionics in Digger. In Fatherland, she is the star player, offering a restrained but mesmerizing performance. Much like the Scandinavian characters in Fjord, many of those here are characterized by an almost unnatural, deadpan delivery—but, as in the wide shots of both West German and East German audiences attending a speech by Thomas Mann, this tends to be a clearly artistic choice, something for us as viewers to ruminate on.

I found myself thinking a lot about how Fatherland played in Germany, how reactions might differ across ideological, generational, and educational divides. Even as I felt like I was missing some cultural and historical context as an American far removed from the setting’s time and place, I found myself rather taken with it. This is a film overflowing with meaning and intention, and the fact that it compels me to learn is perhaps its greatest compliment.

A daughter and father making their way through Fatherland.

Overall: A-

LA BOLA NEGRA

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

There is so much depth, so many layers, so much richness entangled with Spanish history in La bola negra, it begs to be watched again. Being an American with only a cursory knowledge of things like the Spanish Civil War, some of its themes went a bit over my head. The more I learn about La bola negra and all that it references, the more impressed I am with it. To be clear, I don’t think homework should be necessary to fully appreciate a film. Thankfully this works incredibly well even if you go in with no prior knowledge of these things.

For instance? La bola negra really was an unfinished play, with a gay protagonist, started in 1936 by Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, portrayed briefly in the film by Alberto Cortés. Lorca had a lover, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, a Spanish soccer player, actor and soldier who figures far more prominently in the movie, as portrayed by Miguel Bernardeau. Rafael is among the Spanish Repiblicans captured and rehabilitated from serious injury by the Nationalists intending to interrogate them before their execution. This is where he meets Sebastián, La Bola Negra’s primary protagonist, played by the gorgeous Spanish singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente, in a truly stunning feature film debut. His performance is breathtaking.

References to La bola negra thus go through multiple degrees of separation, between characters, across history, even in the space between fact and fiction. The timeline of this film switches back and forth between the late 1930s and 2017, with a contemporary protagonist, Alberto (Carlos González), himself a playwright, albeit one who has given up writing. Alberto has a loving boyfriend, Juan Pablo, who some may recognize as Salvadorian writer/actor/comedian Julio Torres, who created Los Espookys and multiple comedy specials for HBO, in addition to starring alongside Tilda Swinton in the 2024 film Problemista.

To say that La bola negra features a stacked international cast would be an understatement—many stars from Spain, including a memorable sequence with a woman entertaining the troops played by Penélope Cruz. We are even treated to an American star, Glenn Close, as an American scholar of Federico García Lorca, whom Alberto seeks out after discovering what a grandfather he didn’t even know was still alive until recently left him in his will. Alas, this part is not substantive enough to garner Glenn Close yet another Oscar nomination she doesn’t win, but it’s still a treat to see her.

To call La bola negra a movie about the gay experience in Spain would also be an understatement, as it does so via three different threads: Sebastián and his brief acquaintance with Rafael; Alberto, who also happens to be gay, and his journey of discovery with his recently departed grandfather; and the one I haven’t even mentioned yet: young Carlos, also in the 1930s, who is applying for membership at the “Casino” (an exclusive club) his father is a part of, and encountering rejection due to local rumors of his homosexuality. The club members vote on his admission using a form of blackball ballot, hence the title.

It is some time before it’s fully clear how Carlos’s story fits into the overall story, and even though he and Rafael clearly have different names, I must confess I went a long time thinking they must be the same character at different ages, because no other explanation was provided. Eventually an explanation comes, though, and the intricate plotting clicks together extraordinarily well, thanks to the clearly deep well of talents shared by co-directors and co-writers Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo (a third cowriting credit is shared with Alberto Conejero). The duo is known as “Los Javis,” and their 13-year relationship ending during principal photography, with no end to their creative partnership, is already part of this movie’s lore.

There is so much to mine in La bola negra, tons will get left out—but that is fitting, as this is a film that should be an experience of discovery. We are introduced to Sebastián, Carlos and Alberto separately, at different points in time, and we must travel across Spanish history before finding out how they are all connected. Each of them must navigate relationships with their own brand of complexity, and the key thing they all have in common is their sexuality. La bola negra is a story about gay men, written and directed by gay men, representing other gay men who wrote about gay men at a time when it was lethally dangerous to do so. Gris Jordana’s cinematography is exquisite, especially during the occasionally fantastical visual flourishes.

In other words, it’s as though La bola negra were created in a lab just for me, a gay writer with an appreciation for queer history and an abiding love of cinema. I have a clear bias here, but I won’t apologize for it. La bola negra is also about many other things, including familial relationships, the Spanish Civil War, and how the two intersect. Alberto has a strained relationship with his mother (Lola Dueñas), who is kind of horrible to him, but eventually we learn how she also fits into all of this, collateral damage of a history of homophobia.

This is a film of intricate delights, visual splendor, and tragic sorrow. La bola negra is an epic of our times, an instant classic of cinema—queer or otherwise. It’s a tapestry of narrative threads that I feel privileged to have been wrapped up in. It will be streaming on Netflix on December 2, but for now I am deeply grateful it was given a theatrical release. This is a film that commands immersion, which an only truly be provided by the theatrical experience.

Behold, Sebastián: just one of the indelible images in La bola negra.

Overall: A

WILD HORSE NINE

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

Someone should file suit against whoever cut the trailer for Wild Horse Nine, because its vibe is wildly different from that of the actual movie. This trailer has been playing in theaters nonstop for months, and it gives the impression that the movie is a zippy crime comedy. It is a good movie—a very good one, even—but it’s not that.

There’s a moment when John Malkovich’s CIA agent character Chris ruminates on the idea of a Western being made from the point of view of a horse. He concludes that such a movie would be “downbeat.” That’s really the perfect word for Wild Horse Nine: downbeat. It’s also sunny and pretty to look at, set mostly on Easter Island, where Chris and his close friend Lee (Sam Rockwell) are taking a weeklong trip. It has several funny moments, but in the end it was sad enough to make me cry.

One editing choice in the trailer irritates me in particular. Anyone who has gone to a movie in the past six months has seen it: Lee gets off the phone with CIA bureau chief MJ (Steve Buscemi), signing off with “Why don’t you shove it up your flabby ass?” Chris says to him, “Who was that, your mom?” The trailer makes this look like a needling joke, using a pretty cliché line. In the film, it’s contextualized very differently. It almost seems as though Chris thinks it actually could have been Lee’s mom, and this gets into the circumstances of their friendship at this time and place.

The time is 1973, shortly before the Chilean coup d'état. Much of the dialogue is distractingly anachronistic. How commonly would someone in 1973 say, “I hear he’s been acting problematic”? Or accusing someone of “whining like a bitch”? The production and costume design all look like the 1970s (at least to someone who was not born for another three years after this), but they all talk like it’s 2026. This is a quibble, admittedly, but it took me out of the movie.

A lot of the plot strains plausibility, but I guess that’s fine. We quickly learn that Chris and Lee are professional assassins, though Chris, who is of course much older, has killed far more people. More gradually, we learn that Chris may or may not have been involved in the Kennedy assassination. By the end, the answer to that question appears to be clearer, but I still had a hard time buying it.

I had really high expectations of Wild Horse Nine, both because I bought into the hype and because writer-director Martin McDonagh has made other movies I loved: In Bruges (a film this one has a lot in common with), Seven Psychopaths, The Banshees of Inisherin. McDonagh doesn’t always quite knock it out of the park: see the deeply divisive Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Maybe the secret sauce is for McDonagh to cast Colin Farrell in his movie. Farrell is not in Wild Horse Nine, though; Sam Rockwell is. To his credit, Rockwell is still well cast, offering some of the greatest facial expressions in response to Malkovich’s line deliveries.

Parker Posey also appears in a couple of scenes as Lee’s wife, though we only ever see her talking on the phone with him. Posey is always a welcome presence, and nearly always underused. This woman is an icon among character actors. There are two young women Chris and Lee meet at the airport (Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas), and they cross paths multiple times while on Easter island, the women figuring into key plot points. But they are all merely in the orbit of Chris and Lee, and Malkovich’s and Rockwell’s performances, which really make this a movie worth seeing, even if it proves to be surprisingly downbeat.

Honestly, it feels a little like McDonagh just thought a movie set on Easter Island sounded cool, and then thought up these details to fill out the story. There’s a definite flimsiness to the plotting, but exceptionally written dialogue can go a long way. It’s Malkovich and Rockwell who make it work, to such a degree that all the talk of them both getting Oscar nominations feels like a natural progression. These guys have an easy chemistry, and are very convincing as old friends. The age gap just means one of them is reflecting on his life in a way he never has before, skirting the edges of regret.

Not that this is especially important, but I’m a little stuck on the title, which I keep wanting to find a literal explanation for. There are indeed wild horses on Easter Island in the movie, and they feature relatively prominently. But there are definitely more than nine. Is it a reference to the characters? I can only count eight of significance. There is one horse that Chris feels he’s connected with, maybe that’s one of the nine, if we want to get metaphorical? McDonagh has been quoted as saying, “Yeah, I've got no idea. I like numbers, and I like horses.” Okay, got it.

In any event, it’s easy to see Wild Horse Nine gaining greater depth upon rewatch. It really helps to know exactly what you are getting into. I walked into this movie wanting to love it, but needed to temper my expectations as it consistently mellow vibe unfolded onscreen. I should have known better; McDonagh is known more for talkiness than overt excitement. Don’t let that trailer fool you. This is worth a look and features Oscar-worthy performances, but be prepared to be moved rather than thrilled.

A movie with a specific mood you’ll want to match if you want to get into it.

Overall: B+

THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK

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

People love to say “New York is a character,” or “It’s a love letter to New York,” both wildly overused phrases—but, in the case of The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, such claims are unusually and uniquely legit. Writer-director Noah Segan, a fourth-generation New Yorker, follows the pickpocket of the title, Harry Lehman (John Turturro), across all five boroughs in succession: the Bronx; Manhattan; Brooklyn; Queens; and a final scene in Staten Island. In all cases, the city environments are lovingly shot but with well-integrated characters. These are scenes deep in the neighborhoods, skipping the typical famous landmarks, until the final, extended shot panning from the Brooklyn to Manhattan skylines from across the water, holding the shot through the entirety of the end credits. I almost never sit through the end credits, but I was compelled to, even though nothing actually happens, except a memorably loving gaze on a city unlike any other.

For a movie largely about how America’s largest city has evolved over time, The Only Living Pickpocket is delightfully brief, clocking in at only 88 minutes. The script is well written, though; the editing is superb; and the film is visually compelling from the opening shots. Neither a moment nor a frame is wasted in this film, with a deceptively simple story: Harry has gotten by on pickpocketing for decades, but doesn’t see his own obsolescence coming. He makes a big mistake when he accidentally steals from a very powerful crime family, and the young man he stole from, Dylan (Will Price), sets a clock: get the USB crypto wallet back by 4:00, or his evidently paralyzed and mute wife, Rosie, will suffer the consequences.

The fate of Harry himself is set and stated early on, and Segan’s decision not to let Harry out of that is a refreshingly respectable narrative choice. Harry’s race against the clock is about Rosie rather than himself, and he must take a few moments to reckon with his own past. It must be said that Karina Arroyave is exceptional in the part of Rosie—perhaps more so than any other character never given a chance to move or speak onscreen. We never even watch her facial expressions change—but, they do change, from scene to scene, and you can feel her understanding of what’s going on around her, and the sadness and despair she must be feeling. Again: not for herself, but for her husband.

It’s been said that The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is a “small film,” and that is not inaccurate, but it’s also arguably misleading. This is a film more worthy of attention than most, with excellent performances—including from Steve Buscemi as Harry’s pawn shop owner associate, and Giancarlo Esposito as a detective long acquainted with Harry. Esposito is only in a couple of scenes, but you really feel the history between these two characters, and it’s always a nice change when this guy is not just another sneering villain.

I have only one complaint about this movie, really, and it’s a casting choice: we meet the mob boss of Dylan’s family in a final sequence that serves as the film’s coda. The actor who plays this boss is not something I will spoil, but I will say this actor has had such a late-career surge in fame and proliferation that the perfectly good writing gets wildly overshadowed by who the actor is, to the point of distraction. Turturro has had a long career as a character actor who easily disappears into his parts; this other person is very talented, but sticks out like a sore thumb in this part. For me, personally, it made the ending, otherwise very poignant, a slight bummer. I might very well have regarded this as a perfect movie otherwise.

On the upside, that sequence is followed by the aforementioned, lovingly held extended shot of the New York City skyline. If you have any history with New York at all, but probably especially if you are a New Yorker specifically, you’ll get it. I left the theater feeling real, nostalgic affection for a place with which I long had a love-hate relationship, and that is an impressive magic trick.

Be careful what you sell for: John Turturro and Steve Buscemi do some business in New York.

Overall: A-

FJORD

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

Fjord is quite the cinematic Rorschach test, making it quite easy to elicit empathy for different characters depending on your own cultural and religious background. Set in a village on the west coast of Norway, it all comes down to the cultural and legal judgment of a deeply conservative Christian family who immigrates from Romania, and the degree to which they may or may not be abusing their children. And this is really the crux of it: some might say the word “abusing” is being used loosely here, while others would say there is no other word for it.

Where might you side on this matter? Conservative Christians might easily side with the argument that Norwegian Child Protective Services involvement amounts to religious persecution. Progressives might easily side with the argument that authorities should intervene when parents get physical with their children at all.

The amazing feat of Fjord, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, is that, so long as you don’t have particularly extreme views in any direction, it’s easy to empathize—if not necessarily agree with—all parties involved. There certainly is a subtle sense of xenophobia among some of the school staff who report the existence of bruises on one of the children, even though it’s never clear that she got them from her parents. Police interview records state that these parents admit to “repeatedly hitting” their children, when all they ever explicitly admit to is a swat on the butt or a slap on the hand.

But, in short order, CPS takes the children and places them in foster homes, and a criminal trial ensues. Many other complicating factors come into play, from the local school principal being a neighbor with whom the family has become friendly, to that family’s teenage girl who consistently convinces the two older children to disobey their parents. There is also the fact that these children seem perfectly well-adjusted, happy at home, and actually want to be reunited with their parents.

I find myself wondering how this film was received in Norway, where it is set. Was it very controversial? It seems there has been some controversy, but not a huge amount. Making the conservative family here Christian seems like a very deliberate choice. What if the family had been written as Muslim, its growing size in Scandinavian countries being a contentious issue (as everywhere)? That likely would have caused a far bigger stir, both in Norway and its surrounding countries as well as in the U.S.

I’m not judging the choice to make it a conservative Christian family, mind you, but one wonders if there is any sort of allegory at play, perhaps for other religions. Secular aversion to any kind of religious orthodoxy works in a story like this, however, and using Christianity was likely safer. And coming from a strictly Christian upbringing myself, I am by default inclined to judge this family—but, I always have great respect for films that portray Christian characters with the kind of dimensionality they do not often get in wide release films. Portraying them as wild fanatics is a trope that grew tired long ago.

In the story here, the situation is further complicated by the mother in this family being Norwegian, but who fell in love with and married a man in Romania. The husband, Mihai Gheorghiu, is played by Sebastian Stan, who happens to be Romanian by birth; still, his accent work and physical transformation here illustrates his stunning versatility as an actor. The wife, Lisbet Gheorghiu, is played by Renate Reinsve, in a performance so understatement you might wonder how good the acting is—until you see her ncredibly different performances in other films.

As the leads, Stan and Reinsve are incredibly compelling. It feels difficult to judge the rest of the cast, many of whom are Norwegian actors, with some who are either Romanian or of Romanian descent—such as the two eldest children, Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu). The director, Cristian Mungiu, is himself Romanian, and as an American viewer with no experience in Scandinavia, it’s impossible to tell whether the uniformly stoic delivery of nearly every other person on camera is a reflection of the local culture or a specific artistic choice on the part of the filmmaker. I will say, I found the consistently deadpan delivery a bit distracting.

The deeply provocative story is another thing entirely. I wish I could have seen it with someone, so we could spend a great deal of time discussing the many questions it raises. Setting aside the actual scientific evidence to support the idea that physical punishment is broadly ineffective: where do you draw the line in terms of dictating what parents can or cannot do with their own children? There is a blurred line somewhere in there, between “discipline” and “abuse.” At what point does it justify removing children from their parents? Is it wrong to acknowledge that even when you disagree with certain behaviors, there are still degrees of severity? And when all of these questions are considered on a case by case basis, to what degree does xenophobia inform those decisions in one case versus another?

We never see Mihai or Lisbet physically discipline their children onscreen, which is the right choice, as otherwise too many of these questions would get—or seem to get—cut and dried answers. We do see them get disciplined, however, such as Elia and Emmanuel being forbidden from attending the birthday party of their neighbor friend Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), after roughhousing dangerously around the baby. We see others use arguments against the Gheorghiu parents with debatable relevance, such as Elia stating to Noora her belief that being a lesbian is a sin, among other things. (Noora’s sexuality as a plot point, especially as she becomes closer friends with Elia, is a bit underdeveloped. It is never clear if the friendship makes Noora question her lesbianism at all, or if Noora’s influence in any way loosens Elia’s belief on the matter. Noora is clearly a bit smitten with Elia, but we never see any consequences of that.)

I have reached my own conclusions regarding how Mihai and Lisbet live their lives and raise their children, and it may not be exactly what you expect. I am eager for others to see the film and come to their own conclusions, which is the unique way in which Fjord is a must watch.

Should we just let them be happy in their own way?

Overall: B+

Tasveer Advance: ELEPHANTS IN THE FOG

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

It’s a challenge to find lived-in, stereotype-free representation of trans people in cinema broadly, but rarer still to find any kind of trans representation at all in international feature films. Enter director and co-writer Abinash Bikram Shah, with a truly stunning debut feature film Elephants in the Fog, starring Nepali trans activist Pushpa Thing Lama—also in her film debut. Several trans women actors are featured here, and this was the film debut for most of the cast; this is a big part of what makes the film such an extraordinary achievement.

The community depicted here is known as Kinnar, a legally recognized third gender in Nepal since 2007—the first country in South Asia to grant such recognition. (This community was given legal recognition in Pakistan in 2009; India in 2014; and Bangladesh in 2013.) In much of South Asia this community is known as Hijra, but in this film the Nepalese characters default to the evidently more respectful Kinnar—at least when the women in question are referring to each other.

Legal recognition or not, there remains cultural discrimination and oppression, as with anywhere on Earth. In South Asia, however, there is a sort of tenuous tolerance of this community, widely seen to be capable of either blessing or cursing. We see these characters in Elephants in the Fog clapping their hands together as part of this ritual, its intent contextualized by attitude and demeanor. In many scenes, one of these women is seen granting a blessing at weddings or to a pregnant woman. They are given often meager amounts of money for this service, and this is how they make a living, all the while living in a tightly structured community with a spiritual leader and a vow of celibacy.

It is within this framework that the story of Elephants in the Fog unfolds. I suppose I could give a trigger warning: this is indeed a tragic story—but not in anywhere near the typical way trans people have long been depicted in film. Pirati (Pushpa Thing Lama) is “mother” to several of the other trans women in this community, including the recklessly rebellious Apsara (Aliz Ghimire), who goes missing shortly after a confrontation between the two. These women share a house in a vollage bordering an area where dangerous wild elephants roam, and the immediate assumption is that Apsara may have been trampled in that adjacent forest.

The bulk of the story involves Pirati’s obsessive search for her, in the face of police indifference and building community resentment of this entire Kinnar community. This is all complicated by Pirati’s own hypocrisy, as she is engaged in an affair with a man who lives in the city of Birgunj, a little over 30 miles away. Pirati is all stoic resolve, but her refusal to give up even as she endangers her own standing among her “daughters” indicates a deep-seated guilt.

Apsara’s ultimate fate is not what we spend the movie expecting, and yet it’s deeply tragic in its own way. What makes Elephants in the Fog work so beautifully is how flawed all of these characters are—these are not magical heroines in the face of their oppression. They are simply surviving, and in this exceptionally well-written script, they are fallible and messy, just like all human beings. Rarely do trans characters come across as so well-drawn, their community and environment so authentically lived-in.

Elephants in the Fog is also beautifully shot, by cinematographer Noé Bach (in this case, far from a film debut: Bach has been working since 2012). The film’s budget does not appear to have been made public, but it’s probably safe to assume it was relatively small; I found myself wondering whether we would get to see any elephants at all, or if they would remain unseen and, to a degree, merely metaphors for partial truth. Never fear, though: elephants do get some screen time, but they are used so sparingly that their impact is incredible, and in the end almost overwhelming. The final shot of this film is one of the most powerful in any film released all year.

Indeed, Elephants in the Fog will easily be one of the best films I have seen all year, if not the best film I’ve seen this year—a bit of a frustration, in that I cannot tell you where to see it: there has not yet been any U.S. theatrical release date announced, and if there is one, it will not likely be until sometime in 2027. But I cannot ignore this film until then, because it simply cannot be ignored. I implore you to make a note of it, and see it as soon as it gets U.S. distribution.

Kinnar in the Fog: a beautifully painted portrait of a very specific community.

Overall: A

YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER

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

What a singular achievement Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is, to be genuinely unlike any other film. And a singular vision on the part of Bassam Tariq, who wrote and directed. Where else are you going to find a tense action-drama with violent grudges and retaliation, presented with deeply devout, Muslim characters?

Ultimately, this is a film about faith—and it very much acknowledges other faiths as well, and is surprisingly respectful of them. Recently widowed Latif (Mahershala Ali) and his three children live in an apartment complex where teenage Fatiha (Adia) hangs out with neighbors who are all devout Mormons. Eventually Latif gets mixed up with an evangelical preacher, Pastor Hwan (John Cho—looking, forgive me, a little ripe) who is convinced he needs to “liberate” people from the porn industry—including Hatty (Abubakr Ali), the son of Mike (Laith Nakli), the Arabic man who has a history of hiring Latif for hit jobs.

It is one of these hit jobs that opens the film, after an introductory reading of the Islamic story behind the film’s title. The film later returns to the characters we first heard reading and listening to that story, but in the meantime we see Latif dispatch a faceless man with some effort in a public restroom, which turns out to be out of both working faucets and paper towels. But within minutes after this scene, we learn that Latif’s wife has recently died, leaving him with his aforementioned teenage daughter; an preadolescent boy, Qadir (Jahleel Kamara); and a baby still used to breast milk who will not accept formula.

There is only a limited amount of pumped breast milk left, so Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother quickly becomes a race against time, as Latif desperately tries to find breast milk for his baby, from multiple sources. As a parent, this is Latif’s driving motivation whatever else is going on—and a lot else is going on. He’s trying to maintain family stability. And Mike is so pissed about Pastor Hwan’s baseless accusation that Hatty is using his porn studio as a front for human trafficking that he insists Latif dispatch him. He doesn’t care about Latif’s many other concerns at the moment, and asserts that he has no choice.

All of this is just the groundwork for the story that unfolds, and it’s a lot—Bassam Tariq works his own miracle by getting all of these characters to cross paths organically. Latif is a seasoned and skilled hand-to-hand fighter, who has created his own “code” in which he never uses guns and only uses knifes. Why is never made fully clear, but it makes for some great action sequences. It’s worth noting that, aside from the opening bathroom sequence, it’s a while before any real action takes place. The action in this film is exceptional but used sparingly and therefore with unique effectiveness. We really get to know these characters, which raises the stakes far higher than your average action movie.

In the midst of all this, Latif is having a crisis of faith—something clearly suspected by his most trusted elder at his mosque, Abdul (Giancarlo Esposito, finally in a role in which he is barely recognizable). But this is where I get into some ambivalence with Your Mother Your Mother, which takes a turn into the supernatural in the final act—something that ultimately connects Latif and Pastor Hwan in a surprising way. I still can’t decide how I feel about it. I prefer my tales of crises of faith to be ambiguous, and this film takes a sharp turn into the opposite.

On the other hand, it could be said that this is one for the Muslims: Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is a single dot of American cinema with a broadly positive depiction of Islam in a vast history of film that villainized Muslims by default. This is a story about flawed people, not a flawed religion. Granted, that is where my ambivalence comes in, because as an atheist I believe all religion is flawed. I also know I am in the minority on this, and I still champion fair depictions onscreen. Fair representation is one thing, though; telling a story in which something that appears to be an outright miracle occurs is quite another.

Whether it still works for the purposes of the storytelling here is something reasonable people can debate. It just took it a step into the realm of the ridiculous for me, but that doesn’t change how expertly crafted this movie is. The acting is exceptional across the board, and especially impressive on the part of the young actors playing Latif’s children. It’s probably worth noting that this story is very specifically about American Muslims, which might account for the degree of religious tolerance they have. They live in a country in which they have no choice but to coexist with other religions, after all.

In any case, until that turn at the end, which was clearly what Tariq was leading up to all along, I was super into it. Perhaps it’s a parable, or a morality play, and I’m open to these interpretations—I don’t even begrudge the many who have only good things to say about this remarkable film. I may not have been moved by faith the way the characters were, but I was still moved by this movie.

A father sits in, for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.

Overall: B+

Tasveer Advance: LALI

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

I am clearly not the target audience for Lali, which makes me patently unqualified to comment on it. I can’t even tell whether director and co-writer Sarmad Sultan Khoosat made it with the idea of general audiences worldwide watching it. One would presume so, but consider this user review on Letterboxd: Fucked with this hard and could smell the white people‘s confusion in the entire cinema heheheheh. It is perhaps relevant to note that I am married to a South Asian man, and when the movie ended he asked what I thought; I said: “I didn’t get it.” He said, no fewer than three times: “That was a crazy good movie!”

Context is everything, right? I saw this at the Tasveer Film Festival, which is specific to South Asian film, and that audience ate it up. This is pretty typical of festival audiences, regardless of the festival and regardless of how good the movie really is. I once saw a “documentary” called Orwell Rolls in His Grave at the Seattle International Film Festival, and it was one of the worst movies I had ever seen. There was a Q&A after the screening and the questions were shocking in how they revealed that the audience there clearly thought it was brilliant.

There is nothing so stark going on with Lali, which I kind of vibed with until the unhinged final act. There remains the context of cultural and ethnic experience, this film being dense with both, and which I have almost zero experience with. Even my husband grew up Hindu in India, so I have some broad knowledge of that cultural context—but, notwithstanding the obviously fair amount of cultural crossover, Lali is about a Muslim family in Pakistan. It opens with a wedding, and my husband did explain to me that green is a traditional color worn at Muslim wedding events. This was the first I had heard of that, and that would be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cultural details densely packed into this narrative that I was unfamiliar with.

Even the experience of being one of only a handful of White people in the sold-out audience otherwise full of South Asians (or Americans of South Asian descent) was a somewhat peculiar experience. Lali is presented as a dark comedy, until the final act when it just slips into straight up (if not necessarily straightforward) darkness, but I was often baffled at what moments people in the audience laughed at. I laughed out loud a couple of times, but even my husband laughed a couple of times at moments when I thought: Is that supposed to be funny?

The basic premise of the film is that Zeba (Mamya Shajaffar) is finally getting married, to a man named Sajawal (Channan Hanif), or Sajju for short—after multiple previous engagements resulted in fiancés winding up dead. The community being convinced that Zeba is cursed is her cross to bear; Sajju’s is is huge birthmark on the left side of his face. The people in his family and community rarely use the word “birthmark,” though, in favor of the far more evocative word “scar”—an indicator of differing degrees of attitudes as compared to the West, perhaps. (Not to suggest that anyone in the West would have it easy with a giant birthmark on their face.)

It took me a while to understand why Sajju was so quiet and brooding. In the opening, wedding event sequence, he’s wearing a headdress with strings of flowers obstructing his face. Soon enough we see the birthmark, and we learn how it shaped him growing up. He has a comically overbearing mother (Farazeh Syed) and a father whose death he eventually reveals he blames on her. In the early scenes shortly after the wedding is finally over, with many people comically paranoid about Sajju’s fate with this supposedly cursed woman, it feels like we are meant to see that he’s deeply self-conscious but a good guy.

Much of Lali is very surreal, and it takes a turn when Sajju is suddenly prone to jealous rages. Maybe because of such deep-seeded self-loathing that he assumes Zeba must be looking elsewhere, despite all obvious evidence to the contrary? All I can say is, when a disturbing scene occurs in which Zeba comes home drunk, pours liquor over Zeba’s head, and the scene ends without depicting but unsubtly suggesting marital rape, it was a jarring narrative leap that felt a bit unearned, after we saw him making odd but still kind gestures toward her. This type of mystifying narrative turn only continues in the final act, in which I completely lost the plot and thought Lali went right off the rails, with both Zeba and Sajju having wild breakdowns that come out of nowhere.

Lal translates as “red” in Hindi and Urdu (this film is spoken in Punjabi but with sprinklings of Urdu). Lali is thus a pejorative nickname for Sajju and his “scar,” which he suddenly leans so far into in the final act that he wraps himself in a red blanket, covers himself with a red oil or paint of some kind, and otherwise starts hopping around and hanging from bars like a lunatic who thinks he’s a bat—all while referring to himself as a jinn, a dark spirit from Arabic mythology. The nickname is used exclusively by a neighbor woman who visits frequently and was much more kindly welcomed by Sajju’s mother than by Sajju himself; her condition is never specified but she is clearly mentally disabled in some way. If there is some symbolic meaning there, I completely missed it.

And therein lies the challenge in my experience with this film, which, while it left me baffled in the end, I did not hate—largely because the performances of both the leads were equally excellent. And I certainly cannot write it off the way I might have if it were made by an American director and writer and infused it with equivalent amounts of American or Western mythology. I read enough reviews and reactions to this film to know that I was certainly not alone in it losing me in the final act—what would be interesting but impossible to find out would be what the ethnic breakdown of these reactions were. It may be that it’s simply the audiences who are not of Muslim, Pakistani or South Asian background who do not get it. Lali is clearly dense with meaning that only a certain population can fully grasp. They get it, and I don’t, and I guess that’s okay.

Lali may surprise you, but who knows how much you’ll vibe with that surprise?

Overall: B

THE SOCIAL RECKONING

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

Aaron Sorkin is a rightly celebrated screenwriter. This is the guy who wrote A Few Good Men, The American President, The West Wing, The Social Network, and Moneyball. His most recent four movies, however—Molly’s Game, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, Being the Ricardos, and The Social Reckoning—were both written and directed by Sorkin. You can tell at a glance what the issue is there: other directors have historically raised Sorkin’s work to the level of excellence. Sorkin manages to direct his own material to a level one or two steps below that.

So it is with The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to The Social Network sixteen years later, thus qualifying as a “lega-sequel.” Critics left and right constantly hail The Social Network as “a masterpiece,” and I’ve never been willing to go quite that far—it’s a really good movie that I gave an A-minus, but it’s not perfect. I still clearly did myself a favor by not rewatching it before seeing The Social Reckoning, in which both David Fincher’s direction and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score are sorely missed.

It feels a little like Aaron Sorkin feels like he is the only one who can truly bring his visions to light, and he is mistaken. Parts of The Social Reckoning feel pointlessly heavy handed, and there’s a couple of editing choices that are genuinely baffling. Twice there are cuts to shots of only a set of people’s calves and feet walking on a sidewalk, with the audio deliberately going in and out. I don’t get it.

What I do get is the point of making this movie, though—I’m not really on board with the people saying the movie itself is pointless. Anything that keeps people talking about Facebook and its now-widely-known dangers is a good thing, however ineffectual it may ultimately be. “Based on a true story” movies don’t always have the intended impact when they are set less than two years before its release, and this one gets to within about five years ago. A lot of what was going on in the world then is still pretty vivid in our collective memory, and depictions of the covid years remains a tricky business. Yet again, we get shots with characters here and there wearing masks, but only just enough to jog our memory, and not nearly enough for it to be realistic. We have to keep seeing all these actors’ beautiful faces, right?

Covid is deeply relevant to this story, though, because it’s used as one of countless examples of Facebook being culpable in the spread of damaging misinformation. A brief but key scene is set in a grocery store (the one scene in which nearly everyone is actually wearing a mask), with a mask-less woman shouting at everyone “You’re a sheep!” And we all know she got this idea from Facebook.

Which is to say, of course, that The Social Reckoning is also often pretty on the nose. Is this movie actually providing any insight? I suppose it might be to some, who pay far more attention to movie entertainment than actual news, which sadly is most people—but most people seeing this movie aren’t necessarily going to care. I’d say you can just find the 17-part series The Facebook Files that was published in The Wall Street Journal in 2021 and the writing of which forms the basis of this film, but a) most of it is behind a paywall; and b) you wouldn’t likely read it even if it weren’t. (I haven’t read it, nor do I have a subscription to The Wall Street Journal.)

Still, by and large The Social Reckoning is pretty engaging, mostly because of being very well cast. This isn’t exactly a showcase for Mikey Madison, who plays the awkward and nerdy Facebook employee whistleblower Frances Haugen, but if you happened to see her in either the Scream reboot or her Oscar-winning performance in Anora, you’ll get a sense of her incredible versatility. This is a showcase for Jeremy Strong, whose performance as an almost sociopathic Mark Zuckerberg is almost worth the price of admission on its own. Nearly all of his scenes are set during a rehearsal for testifying before Congress, however, and we only get one scene in which Zuckerberg and Haugen are even in the same room (and they don’t even speak to each other). Sorkin’s choice to set this rehearsal on the same day the January 6 insurrection is one of several things that make this script feel a little over-written.

Jeremy Allen White is a great actor, but here he’s in a role—as Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz—that any competent actor could have played. The same could be said of Betty Gilpin, who plays Horwitz’s editor; or Bill Burr, who plays an evident frenemy of Zuckerberg’s implausibly brought into the rehearsals to help with crisis management. But, it’s still really fun to see them both.

In any case, The Social Reckoning is packed with performances that range from competent to quite memorable, and I’m not sorry I saw it. That’s a very different sentiment from being thrilled by it, I realize. Some of the writing choices are deeply contrived and corny, but I still left with a certain appreciation for the overall experience. I certainly hoped for better, but my highest praise for this movie is that it could have been a lot worse.

Watching pretty people look at Facebook internal documents is so exciting!

Overall: B

DIGGER

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

Digger opened five days ago, and it is already well-documented what a huge flop it is: made with a production budget of over $125 million and a marketing budget of around $100 million, it landed at #4 at the box office its opening weekend, grossing a paltry $8 million domestically and $23 million worldwide to date. This is a movie many media outlets are reporting needed to make $300 million in order to break even, and instead is Tom Cruise’s worst opening weekend in nearly two decades—likely longer in adjusted dollars, considering $8 million in 2007 was the equivalent of $13 million in 2026 dollars.

All of this is to say: Digger being not for everyone is the understatement of the year. Reactions have been sharply divided, to the point that word of mouth is actively working against it. It’s too bad, because there is a hell of a lot to say about this movie, and such conversations can be fun as hell. So: is Digger for me? I really couldn’t decide for a while. I actively thought about this while in the middle of watching the movie, which does not say much for it. And yet, I found it really stuck the landing in the end, on an unsettling note that was somehow both incredibly on the nose and subtle at the same time. There is no way of predicting this, especially in today’s siloed media consumption landscape, but this is a movie I can easily imagine being reclaimed sooner than later. It could be as soon as it releases on a streamer somewhere (it’s a Warner Brothers film, so probably HBO Max), or it could be a decade from now. Someone is going to discover this movie and wonder how they slept on it. The question is whether that someone will be in the company of significant number.

More than anything, because this movie is not for everyone, Digger has a marketing problem. For instance, let’s talk about that quite-obviously animatronic cat, which was featured prominently in the trailers. No context is given for why the cat looks and moves like that, and the result is something that seems to suggest the production skimped on budget and wound up with a pet that looked bafflingly artificial, given the state of visual effects capability today. And I don’t really know what the answer is here, as it would be a notable spoiler for the trailers to give context—maybe they should not have shown that cat in the trailers at all? Because the film itself does provide context to how that cat looks and moves, and it’s something that actually makes sense. But who would know that, watching the trailers? Whose boneheaded choice was this?

All that aside, I can’t say that Digger always worked for me, but it certainly worked better than I expected it to based on the reviews. This is perhaps one of the most critically polarizing films of the year, and usually a MetaCritic score of 46 is a reliable indicator that I will not like a movie. There are occasional exceptions, though, and this is one of them—fascinatingly, the user score on MetaCritic is a much more respectable 6.8 out of 10, so evidently I am not alone. (The user rating over on Letterboxed is a similarly respectable 3.8 out of 5 stars.) It’s worth noting that this is only among the few people who actually bothered to see the movie.

I just love what a swing Digger is—not that unusual for director and co-writer Alejandro G. Iñárritu (this guy directed both Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance and Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths; thankfully this movie’s title is shorter), but very unusual for Tom Cruise, who hasn’t taken a swing this big since his appearance in Tropic Thunder in 2008. I want him to keep taking swings like this, as it makes him a far more interesting actor. I was afraid the poor box office performance might scare him off such swings in his late-career years, but evidently he’s been defending Digger, which is a good thing.

Now, there are many big swings in Digger, and some of them work better than others. Cruise’s performance is excellent, especially considering he actually plays two characters—oil tycoon Digger Rockwell himself, and Curtis Markson, the actor playing Digger in a satirical play. This is where Digger leans hard into meta territory, something I love when done well, but the jury may be out on that point here. When the film suddenly shifts to the same actors we’ve been watching all along playing actors rehearsing a stage play, for a while it’s very confusing. It doesn’t help that clarity comes after these “actor” characters are suddenly arguing about whether this is a satire or a farce and whether it is funny. Up to that point, some of the comedy in Digger has landed well, but some of it also has very much not. I got several good laughs out of this movie, but also experienced multiple attempts at it that just fell flat. And if you are very directly asking us to consider whether what we are watching actually works as a satire, I’m not sure it’s actually working as intended. Or was that the point? Here Digger starts to get lost in its own convoluted plot machinations.

Digger has a sister, Emma, played by Sandra Hüller, an actor rightly celebrated as her profile has been raised in recent years. But this may be the worst performance I have ever seen her do, she spends so much time just shrieking at her brother, and it never quite feels genuine. Or was that a deliberate choice, and the actor playing Emma is not that great at her craft? It seems Iñárritu has built in a clever excuse for what appears to be subpar acting. The same can be said of John Goodman, as the idiotically bombastic President of the United States. His performance is so over the top it makes Digger himself—also an outsized character—seem subtle. And again, suddenly, we see the play actors discussing how different their play characterizations are from the real people they are playing, and how that is all part of the satirical intent.

There’s a lot going on on Digger though, and I have a feeling a lot of people are missing the point in what seems on the surface like a narrative mess, much like the characters themselves are missing the point of how they got themselves into the climate catastrophe that forms the basis of the story. There is a barely-detectable, unsettling truth seeping through Digger, about the hypocrisy of “advanced” societies reaping the benefits of the technology that they self-righteously deride as ignorantly self-destructive. There is a key scene in which Digger addresses a room full of world leaders prone to speaking out of both sides of their mouths, and again, much of what he says is very on the nose—and still, I listened to his screaming monologue about environmental hypocrisy and just found myself thinking: Well . . . he’s right.

I wonder what the carbon footprint of this movie’s production was, incidentally? Not that that’s part of Digger’s point either; this is not a movie that is preaching to its audience—if anything, it’s a skewer aimed at people prone to preaching to their audience. And there’s a lot in it that’s really fun, including Riz Ahmed as Digger’s Head of Environmental Safety, Dr. Ganesh, who seems to be a slightly stereotypical character at first but then proves to be satisfyingly nuanced. We also get Michael Stuhlbarg as the Vice President; Jesse Plemons in a ridiculous red wig as the play’s benefactor; and House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy, who it took me a while to fully recognize in the part of Digger’s assistant.

There are some baffling choices in Digger that only come halfway around to making sense later, such as the scene in which Digger, the President and a host of other government officials are watching a live feed of environmental destruction in Europe, but the camera only ever shows the reactions of the people in the room and never what they are actually watching. Was this also a budget choice? Clearly not; we later see news feeds of the same destruction, rendered quite impressively. Was this a staging choice if we were to later consider how it would have been performed in a play? That idea also falls flat when you consider the extensive use of screen imagery in the play. I still don’t have an answer to this one.

Some of Digger may always remain a mystery. Some of it may become clearer after repeat viewings. Will I ever rewatch Digger? Probably, although I couldn’t say whether it will be any time soon. I can only say it had my undivided attention from its first moment; it veered dangerously close to losing me in the middle; and by the last scene, which is expertly staged and edited, I found myself surprisingly satisfied, if not exactly blown away.

There is so much more going on than you think,

Overall: B