LOVE LIES BLEEDING

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

As 21st-century noirs go, Love Lies Bleeding is pretty great—until it takes an inexplicably wild swing at the end. I would recommend this film, but I would have to warn you about that at the same time. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say it’s somewhat debatable whether what happens is something we are meant to believe is actually happening, or if it’s a character fantasy. I am not averse to wild swings as a concept, mind you; I just want them to be clear in their purpose or what they represent, which is really lacking here—in spite of several allusions to it earlier in the film, which only make at least that much sense in retrospect. Without the wild turn at the end, I might have felt confident that this could be one of the year’s best movies.

It could be argued that, so far at least, it still is. There’s a lot of far worse stuff out there, after all. It’s just that there’s a sequence of maybe five minutes in this movie that really straddles the line between subversive and bafflingly weird.

All that aside, Love Lies Bleeding is a dark, twisted, violent, lesbian romance thriller that is absolutely worth a look. It’s beautifully shot in New Mexico, starting with an opening shot that we only realize well into the story later was the camera lifting out of a ravine that plays into the plot. And it’s edited with a unique sort of precision, moving the plot forward without any excess bloat while keeping the pace at a steady clip. Best of all, it’s exceptionally well cast, with Kristen Stewart as gym manager Lou, who falls for mysterious body builder Jackie, played actual body builder Katy O'Brian, wandering in from out of town. They both get increasingly mixed up with Lou’s gun range owner and insect enthusiast dad Lou Sr (Ed Harris, with both his telltale bald head and a ring of hair that is nuts-long, and somehow it fits the character.)

We learn early on that Lou doesn’t speak to her father, and one of many refreshing elements of Love Lies Bleeding is that this estrangement has nothing to do with Lou’s sexuality—evidently he couldn’t give half a shit about that. I expected some kind of cathartic confrontation between Lou and her father by the end, but much of the story goes by without giving a sense of any catharsis coming with an earned payoff. This is where director and co-writer Rose Glass’s expert construction of the story comes in, because eventually we get just enough revealed about Lou’s dark history with her father, and we understand perfectly why she doesn’t speak to him.

In the meantime, both Lou and Jackie find themselves suffering the consequences of impulsive, violent mistakes. It should be noted that, in at least two scenes, something pretty gruesome occurs. In the first, we see the same shockingly horrid wound so many times, it begins to feel like Rose Glass is toying with us. She’s certainly having fun with this movie: the comic moments are few and far between, but when they do come, they are pretty hilarious.

And that’s the bottom line with Love Lies Bleeding: this is a postmodern take on film noir, with its own sensibility, in a world that is dark and dangerous and yet you love being witness to it. It takes a brief detour into “Wait, what?” territory that I could have lived without—but then immediately reeled me right back in with one final bit of humor, and then a bit of interpretive dance over the end credits. You kind of have to be there. Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go there.

I don’t know if you’ll root for them exactly but you’ll still want to know where they’re going.

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!

ALL OF US STRANGERS

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

How do I adequately convey how much I loved All of Us Strangers? How do I even explain what it’s about? Except, perhaps, to say it’s a beautifully melancholy, queer love story with an emotional through line that cuts deep?

Mind you, I say this as a gay viewer, and this is incredibly relevant. I can’t help but wonder how the response to it might be different among audiences that are not gay men. I am certain anyone open to the experience of this film can be deeply moved by it, and even have an intricate, nuanced understanding of what the characters are feeling. But for me, in a way few other movies ever have, this story wrapped my very soul into a warm embrace.

Will I love this movie as much upon rewatch, I wonder? There’s only one way to find out.

In the meantime, I must say there is plenty of All of Us Strangers that evades straightforward understanding. That is beside the point. You need only to feel it. And boy, did I.

Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Aftersun’s Paul Mescal) are two gay men, living in the same London high-rise apartment building. It must be a new building, very few other people living in it, as they discuss how distractingly quiet it is living there. We really never see them interact with anyone else in the building, only each other. When a fire alarm has Adam exiting the building, he sees Harry’s silhouette in his sixth-story window, looking down at him. After Adam returns to his unit on a much higher floor—with spectacular, panoramic London views—Harry knocks on his door, drunk, and introduces himself.

Adam and Harry’s steadily blossoming relationship expands beyond that first meeting, which is tentative, cautious, a bit shy. They don’t hook up immediately. They do a bit later, though, and it’s some of the most beautifully shot and tender, gay sexuality I’ve seen onscreen since Moonlight (2016). It’s both highly erotic and genuinely moving—a feat of narrative execution that has me tempted to call director and co-writer Andrew Haigh a cinematic magician.

And All of Us Strangers is indeed magical, even when it defies logic, and quite deliberately so. The story of Adam and Harry runs parallel to the story of Adam and his late parents, who died in a car crash when he was twelve years old. And yet, he takes a train across town to his childhood home—and finds his father (Jamie Bell) and his mother (Claire Foy) there, the same age they were when they died, somehow unsurprised to find their son coming home, now a grown man they had never actually gotten to see grow up.

Mum and Dad have an understanding that about 35 years have passed, but have no knowledge of what has transpired in that time. Their knowledge and relative ignorance remains stuck in, we can only estimate, about 1988. And as premises go, this is a little out there, because All of Us Strangers never makes explicit exactly what’s going on, and there’s a physicality between Adam and his still-young parents during their visits that negates any idea of them as conventional ghosts. It’s a little more like they exist as flesh and blood, but in a different dimension.

What it does allow for, however, are conversations Adam never had a chance to have with his parents otherwise. He comes out to them both, in separate conversations. It’s notable that his mom has a more complicated, slightly more negative reaction than his father, who is much more quickly accepting—a scenario that defies the stereotype of gay experience, and is likely more common than many realize. This, among many other conversations Adam has with his parents, packed a unique emotional punch for me, and so far as I could tell, I was crying before most of the rest of the people in the theater.

All of Us Strangers features gorgeous cinematography, and is edited with unparalleled finesse, transitioning between Adam with Harry, and Adam with his parents, with seamless grace. There’s a sequence in which Adam and Harry go out dancing, do some drugs, and then proceed into a sort of montage of domesticity, with the club music continuing uninterrupted through it all. It’s beautifully executed.

There is a bit of a twist at the end, very directly related to Harry, which ultimately had me baffled. It calls into question a great deal of what has been seen beforehand, but then, there is even a moment when Adam asks his mother, “Is this real?” The answer, evidently, is that if it feels real, then it is. And All of Us Strangers is all feeling, which therefore makes it real. Adam tries to introduce Harry to his parents, and for most of this sequence, Harry seems to be the only one existing in a grounded reality. This is now a film that will allow things to be that simple.

This is a movie I will be thinking about for a very long time, maybe for years to come. I haven’t been this in love with a mood-piece queer love story since Moonlight. Indeed, that film and All of Us Strangers would make for a spectacular double feature. From end to end, it is beautiful and sad and cozy and charming and erotic and mysterious and bewildering. It would seem there is no end to the riches it has to offer.

Nowhere to go but up: together,

Overall: A

FALLEN LEAVES

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

Fallen Leaves is reveiving virtually universal acclaim, and I’m over here thinking: I must be missing something. It’s fine, but with all due respect, it has yet to strike me as being something particularly special. This is a very simple, surprisingly short (81 minute) tale of two middle-aged people awkwardly falling in love.

This film is being billed as a “romantic comedy.” Romantic, I can get on board with it being. I got a light chuckle out of it maybe three or four times. Otherwise, I’ll concede that Fallen Leaves has a unique sort of sweetness to it. This is about two people who lead very solitary lives, one a little more content with the solitude than the other. They meet at a karaoke bar, and in this particular scene, I did enjoy the furtive glances back and forth between a man and a woman who seem subtly taken aback by how attractive they’re finding each other.

We never learn the names of the characters, but Ansa is played by Alma Pöysti, who is 42; and Holappa is played by Jussi Vatanen, who is 45. Curiously, the story seems to be set over-so-slightly in the future: after getting fired at her supermarket job for taking expired food, Ansa is seen in the kitchen of a bar where she’s hired as a dishwasher, and a 2024 calendar is seen hanging on the wall. This might seem an insignificant detail given how close we are indeed now to 2024, but for the many scenes in which Ansa’s radio plays news reports of Russian attacks in Ukraine.

I had difficulty ascertaining the point of these news clips, in the middle of a love story between two people in Helsinki, Finland. Granted, Finland is the scandinavian country—indeed, the European country—with by far the longest border with Russia. But, there is no political element to the story here otherwise, and if there were supposed to be some symbolic element to these news briefs of war, they sailed right over my head.

Furthermore, the performances across the board are rather flat, muted, almost monotone. This was clearly a deliberate choice, something that happens in a lot of independent and/or foreign films. I wonder how this film is playing in its native Finland. Critics in America are loving it. Am I just jaded after being in my own relationship after twenty years? I’m inclined not to think so, but I’ve been known to be off base about things.

Holappa is a heavy drinker. Ansa doesn’t much care for it. Before they confront that issue, far more minor things occur that result in persistent missed connections: Ansa’s written phone number falling unnoticed out of Holappa’s pocket. Ansa’s playful but ill-advised decision to wait until their second date to tell Holappa her name. They both get fired from their jobs, although Holappa’s drinking is a good reason for it.

That’s not especially a spoiler. There aren’t any major plot turns in Fallen Leaves, which is appealingly unsophisticated in its execution. There’s not a lot to unpack here, really. Nor is there much in the way of emotion. Some movies are wildly emotionally manipulative; Fallen Leaves is the antithesis of that approach. Some might argue that this beautifully underscores the very simple love story at play, one about two people finding love much later in life than most people do. I would argue that this is just a pleasantly simple, straightforward love story and there doesn’t seem to be any more to it than that.

Yep. That’s about all that’s going on here.

Overall: B

ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE

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

And here we get yet another charming, moving, gay coming-of-age story that just makes me wistful for what I could never have. Even if I could never have had the experience of the young characters in this story, what might it have been like for me had there even been a movie like this to watch when I was a teenager? When I was sixteen, I was alone in my bedroom, secretly lusting after the gay men in Madonna’s “Erotica” video.

There’s a bit of irony there, the means I had of tapping into dark sexual fantasy, as compared to Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, which is almost shockingly innocent, about the blossoming of young love, of a kind the protagonist does not understand nearly as well as, amazingly, his parents do. This story, actually, is comparatively chaste, the physicality never moving beyond a couple of kisses, the holding of hands. It’s a good two thirds of the way through before it even gets to that. This movie is perfect for young kids around the age of puberty, maybe just past it. And what a beautiful thing, to get something legitimately age-appropriate that explores these themes, asserting that kids of all kinds are perfect just the way they are.

This kind of shit gets to me, it’s so far removed from the experience of my youth. Some stories work by being relatable, and others are more aspirational. I can only guess as to what it’s like to be a young person today with access to a movie like this—which, incidentally, is based on a multiple-award-winning 2012 young-adult novel by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, which I have immediately put on my reading list.

It appears, though, that this film is a pretty faithful adaptation, with many lines of dialogue lifted directly from the source text. If I have any genuine criticism of this film, it would be that sometimes the dialogue doesn’t necessarily translate perfectly to the screen—I must admit, at times, I found the script, co-written by Sáenz himself and director Aitch Alberto, distractingly just outside the realm of real-life delivery. Some of the lines feel a little oversimplified and slightly stilted.

Ultimately, it’s a small quibble—there are just so many other things to love about this movie, not least of which is the very specific universe in which it exists, about Mexican-American families in 1987 El Paso, Texas. Aristotle (Max Pelayo), or Ari for short, is a solitary boy who is unaware of his own abiding loneliness. He’s been faltering at swimming lessons, and then meets Dante (Reese Gonzales), who volunteers to teach him how to swim. They become fast friends, and maybe the first third of Aristotle and Dante is just a lovely, leisurely paced portrait of the evolution of their friendship. Nothing more is even suggested until Dante’s family moves to Chicago for a year thanks to his professor dad’s job, and in one of Dante’s letters he slightly scandalizes Ari by bringing up masturbation (this is the most frankly sexual the movie ever gets).

During their year apart, both Aristotle and Dante pursue relationships with girls, presumably because that’s all that occurs to them, and it’s just what’s expected. It’s great to see that, unlike many other films about gay people, the interactions with girls stay healthy and never end in any melodramatic heartbreak. This is much more about these boys slowly realizing who and what they are.

The truly unique element here is Ari’s parents, who are giving him knowing looks largely from the start. Ari has a beloved aunt who visits and when she tells him “You are perfect just the way you are,” it feels incongruous to him, and to a degree, even to us as viewers, that early on. I wasn’t even sure at first whether we were meant to understand that Ari’s parents know he’s in love with Dante before Ari does. I found myself thinking of the deeply empathetic father played by Michael Stuhlbarg in Call Me By Your Name. The key difference here is that these parents are not as articulate, maintaining a family secret about Ari’s incarcerated brother that keeps them, and especially his father, largely silent.

Perhaps most notable is how Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe avoids stereotype at every level—quite plausibly because both writer and the director are of Latin-American descent, telling a story about Mexican-American characters. There is a uniquely heartwarming mix of specificity and authenticity here, while also avoiding any of the cliches of toxic masculinity in parenting. Ari’s parents are clearly imperfect, just like anyone, but their love and concern for him is never in doubt.

We don’t get as much about Dante’s relationship with his parents, perhaps because they are portrayed as progressive intellectuals and we are meant to assume they’ll be fine. Dante does worry in one of his letters about their reaction to him, but the narrative never revisits that thread.

I suppose you could say that, had I been a producer of this film, I’d have had notes. On the other hand, sometimes imperfections add to the charm. While I found myself debating exactly how good I thought this movie was in its first half, it really came together for me in the end. I was both charmed and deeply moved by it, practically weeping by the time these boys finally come around to their inevitable fate. That’s not a spoiler, because you should know that this is a coming-of-age love story and not a tragedy, and that’s how they go; besides, the value is in the journey, the experience, both for them and for us. This is one movie I will likely seek out for a rewatch.

Sometimes a connection becomes an opportunity for discovery.

Overall: B+

PAST LIVES

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

How does Past Lives hit, I wonder, depending on the personal romantic history of the person watching it? I have to imagine it varies. A good majority of its audience, I assume, had a “first love” who was not the person they are currently with, and perhaps they contemplate how they would handle being in a similar situation, meeting a childhood sweetheart not seen in person in decades but while currently in a perfectly happy marriage.

I have no way of looking at this movie through such a lens; I had no “childhood sweetheart,” and not just because I’m gay. This story really isn’t about sexuality, nor does it even really reference sex beyond the hypothetical of having children. I am still nearly two decades into the first romantic relationship I have ever had. And, still: this movie made me think, in a way no other movie ever has, about how much I love my husband. He still qualifies as my first love, though, and that’s what this movie is about. So maybe it even worked as intended on me.

Past Lives is a unique experience, in that its emotional resonance takes some time to percolate. I nearly started crying thinking about it on my way home after the movie ended, and I still can’t really say why, except that the movie permeated my soul, and it took some time for me to focus on anything else, rather than continuing to think about this deeply affecting love story.

I desperately want to use a cliché: “an instant classic.” Does anything even qualify as a “classic” anymore? What would be the most recent film for which there is any critical consensus on such a designation? Did it even come out in the twenty-first century? The Lord of the Rings, maybe? Moulin Rouge!? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind actually gets referenced in Past Lives, and that came out in 2004. How many people even still think about that movie? In Past Lives, it is brought up in the year 2011, when it had been released seven years prior. It comes up when our two would-be lovers discuss Montauk, which I completely forgot was even a setting in that movie.

All I can say is: Past Lives is every bit as worth the time and attention as any of those movies, or arguably any “classic romance” that came before them. It’s certainly unlike any other, writer-director Celine Song establishing a dreamlike tone that evokes every romantic, wistful memory you’ve ever had.

The fact that Past Lives is Celine Song’s first feature film is astonishing. She was previously a playwright, which explains her two protagonists both being writers—I have to admit, I wondered how the hell they could afford living in New York City with such jobs. This is beside the point, as Past Lives is about the life choices we make, and whether it can ever be possible to go back to a particular feeling we loved from the past. In the case of Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), they forged a quick but deeply emotional connection as twelve-year-olds in their native Korea, Nora convinced they will end up married, but having no idea her parents are about to move the family to Canada.

Twelve years later, after Nora has moved to New York, she and Hae Sung reconnect online, and this is when they make their first real connection as adults. This middle act is a peculiar experience, turning the year 2011 into a period piece, their video chats exclusively over Skype, with grainy and sometimes glitchy video. In spite of that, all of the scenes are as deeply romantic as any other in the film. I don’t think I have ever seen scenes of people video chatting so well shot—even this effectively evokes the kind of yearning these two characters are feeling, discovering they are just as desperate to be with each other as they were twelve years before. But, they have started lives and established plans that make meeting up again unfeasible.

About a year later, Greta meets Arthur (John Magaro) at an artists retreat. In spite of Arthur later fretting about possible inadequacies of his place in Greta’s life, the circumstances of their meeting are just as romantic as anything else in Past Lives, which is very much the point. Arhur jests that in a retelling of their story he’d be “the evil White guy,” but here he very pointedly isn’t. There is no villain, which is what makes the circumstances of this movie so ripe for discussion.

Any talk of suspense regarding what Nora and Hae Sung may or may not do when he finally visits New York City for the first time, another twelve years later, misses the point. Everything that actually happens is firmly grounded in reality, and to my mind is not the element up for debate. The bigger question is about the long-term futures for all three of these people. Do Nora and Arthur stay together indefinitely? Will Nora and Hae Sung finally get together, many years from now? Would that even work? There can be a pointed difference between what you yearn for and what it turns out to be once you finally get it.

There is one specific moment that has really stayed with me, when Nora breaks down, and Arthur comforts her, even though her tears are for another relationship. What a strange position to be in, for all of them. This is the kind of thing so rarely seen in cinema, a deeply unusual circumstance that still rings with an almost unnerving truth.

Past Lives starts and ends with these three characters out at a bar, deep into the night. In the opening scene, we overhear others in the bar playing that game where you try to guess what the stories are of people at other tables, and they actually skirt the truth. When we return to this moment, the perspective has long since shifted to that of Nora, Hae Sung and Arthur. There is some debate as to whether Arthur needs to be there, but Celine Song wisely never makes clear how they came to this as a group: for all we know, Nora asked Arthur to be there, perhaps not considering the likelihood that she and Hae Sung would wind up conversing in a native language Arthur mostly doesn’t understand.

It’s so easy to empathize with all three of them in this scenario, and Teo Yoo plays Hae Sung’s awkward nervousness especially well. They all feel that way, of course, and so do we, on their behalf. How often do we get a sort of love triangle in which we deeply yearn for all three of them to be okay? The most amazing thing Past Lives pulls off is how it tells a story with such specificity, and yet it will move anyone who has ever loved.

Past Lives will raise your hopes for their futures.

Overall: A-

JOYLAND

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

Joyland is an ironic title, I guess. There’s not much the way of joy in this movie. There are flashes of it, for sure, but always in the face of pressure to suppress it. Maybe director and co-writer Saim Sadiq went in a different direction with the title because Melancholia was taken. Joyland is a very, very different movie, but nevertheless it maintains an almost dreamlike, melancholy tone from start to finish.

Joyland is a notable film for a multitude of reasons, not least of which is its co-lead, Alina Khan, the first transgender actor to be cast in a lead role in a Pakistani film. In certain ways, it takes Pakistan’s evolution to warp speed in comparison to American cinema: this is also a trans character, actually played by a trans actor. They’re doing representation properly right out of the gate.

That’s not to say all the depictions in this film are comfortable. There’s a moment when another character says of Biba—without judgment, mind you—“She’s not a real woman.” But this is the thing: of course she’s a real woman, but these characters don’t have the sophistication of knowledge to understand that. I immediately thought about the need to meet people where they are, when trying to invite them to some greater understanding.

Joyland may just do that, for at least some viewers. It’s an extraordinary achievement in Pakistani cinema, creating a nuanced portrait of family, gender, sexuality, and how all of these things intersect. The central character, Haider (Ali Junejo), is an incredibly meek young man, seemingly satisfied with his domestic duties as his wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) is the breadwinner in their relationship, happily working a job at a salon. Haider and Mumtaz live with Haider’s older brother and his wife; their four daughters; and Haider and his brother’s elderly father—none of whom are especially proud when Haider lands a job at an “erotic dance theater.” He’s actually a completely inexperienced backup dancer, but he lies and says he’s the theater manager. It’s at this theater that he meets Biba, and quickly becomes infatuated with her.

One of the more fascinating things about Joyland is how it doesn’t define Haider’s sexuality in particular, basically depicting a kind of fluidity not often seen even in Western cinema. This is in spite of his offensive misreading and misunderstanding of Biba’s circumstances, not understanding her desire to save up for surgery (“I like you the way you are”), and awkwardly attempting a sexual position Biba has no interest in. With such avenues being explored, one can’t help but wonder how well Joyland played in its home country. The saddest thing, maybe, is that it being a mixed bag is kind of a sign of progress.

Joyland examines more than just Haider’s relationship with Biba. His relationship with his father is predictably fraught, as is that with his brother. Most significantly, his landing of a job results in his wife, Mumtaz, getting pressured to quit her job. She is forced to pick up domestic duties; she eventually gets pregnant; she is quickly miserable. Even as Joyland itself pushes boundaries, it reflects the kinds of enforced gender roles that are impossible to escape without drastic, sometimes fatal action.

Haider and Mumtaz’s relationship is fascinating because, through all of this, it stays surprisingly honest and healthy. That’s not to say that Haider can be open about his captivation by Bibi—but, given the nature of their relationship, in a different culture, they might very well have been able to be.

The characters in Joyland are exquisitely drawn, multidimensional and flawed personalities. Their motivations are often at odds, but easily empathized with. In a way, it’s about all of them accepting their fates. Some of them just take unconventional roads to get there. The fateful ending is ambiguous in its meaning, a sort of somber release. This film’s very existence, by extension, ironically offers a kind of hope its characters cannot find.

An example of Joyland’s indelible imagery.

Overall: A-

BONES AND ALL

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

I left Bones and All unable to decide what to make of it. I’m still feeling that way, to a degree. Maybe I would feel differently, or have more conviction, about it after a rewatch, maybe after some time has gone by. I’m not sure I’ll ever want to watch this movie again. The closest I can get to sincerely complimenting it is to acknowledge that it’s not just fucked up, but fucked up in a way we’ve never seen in cinema before.

It also could be argued that some innovations are entirely unnecessary. Indeed, one of the questions I keep coming back to is: why? Luca Guadagnino, who directed and wrote this adaptation of the novel by Camille DeAngelis, has married two very disparate genres: tender love story, and horror. But why?

Maybe because there was something more obviously valuable to the story as it existed in the novel. I can’t speak to that, as I’ve never read it. And when it comes to Guadagnino, that guy is all over the place: Call My By Your Name (2017) was a modern masterpiece of queer cinema; he followed that up a year later with Suspiria, which was a wild mess. Then, in 2020, he gave us the immersive and deeply ambiguous limited series We Are Who We Are, which absolutely was not for everyone but really spoke to me.

Maybe it’s just when Guadagnino shifts into horror that he no longer speaks to me. He has a unique sensibility that, when married to the horror genre, just puts me off. And what purpose does it serve for us to see a tender love story about cannibals? It’s possible there is an allegorical element here, except that I fail to see any need for allegory when we live in a time when it’s easier and more effective just to be straightforward.

Guadagnino hires very talented actors, and then doesn’t seem to direct them very much. And clearly there is loyalty to him here: Timothée Chalamet was previously in Call Me By Your Name; we also get a single scene each from Michael Stuhlbarg (also in Call Me By Your Name, here stunningly reinvented as a redneck) and Chloë Sevigny (previously in We Are Who We Are). The talented actors command the screen regardless, and are often unrecognizable in this film—I did not realize the nomadic and vaguely sinister old man and would-be cannibal mentor was Mark Rylance until I viewed the credits. Other, less significant characters, though, are portrayed by actors whose deliveries feel just barely this side of unrehearsed. There is a naturalistic looseness to Guadagnino’s approach that works spectacularly some of the time, and not at all at other times.

The primary protagonist is Maren (Taylor Russell), a teenager only just turned 18, at which point her heretofore stunningly protective father (André Holland) finally abandons her, no longer able to cope with the responsibility of moving them to a new town every time she bites off a friend’s finger.

There is a curious establishment of rules in the universe of this film, where cannibals have a kind of sixth sense about each other. More specifically, they can recognize each other’s scent, which is how the creepy old man finds Maren to begin with. He teaches her how to recognize and use their smell, as well as some rules to live by that he’s established for himself. Eventually it becomes clear there is an invisible minority that the public at large cannot see, but they have ways of recognizing each other.

But then Maren meets Lee (Chalamet), and she’s more interested in being taught by him. A friendship blooms, and eventually romance too. It’s all very tender and sweet, except they are feeding on the corpses of fellow human beings in the meantime. This scenario doesn’t lay out any moral dubiousness, instead revealing elements of self-loathing and guilt over the things they are compelled to do. This all feels very on the nose as a metaphor for, say, queer people in the closet, especially at the time this is set (the 1980s). Except that cannibalism actually is literally grotesque, and I don’t know what any of this really has to offer the year 2022.

It’s entirely possible I am missing something. As it is, I kind of just don’t get it. I was fully engaged and consistently intrigued by this film, but I can’t say it enriched me in any way. Does it offer any useful insights? Is it actually entertaining? An older couple sitting in my same aisle got up and left the theater after the first onscreen feeding. Honestly they likely had a better time of the following two hours than I did, or at least had an easier time making sense of it.

Oh did I mention this movie features cannibalism as an act of love and mercy?

Overall: B-

MR MALCOM'S LIST

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

Mr. Malcom’s List is basically Bridgerton in feature film form. It’s fine entertainment, pleasant enough if otherwise unremarkable, except for its similarly “color conscious” casting. I suppose in this case it might be more accurate to fall back on the “color blind casting” phrase, given that in this case, unlike Bridgerton, none of the characters comment on their ethnic differences.

I’m never against this sort of approach, although it’s inevitably distracting when placed squarely within the context of a deeply patriarchal Regency-era society which is afforded none of the same revisionist history. Why make the cast unrealistically diverse but make no change to the subjugation of women? Because then we wouldn’t get the same Jane Austen-lite period pieces we love, I guess. Not that it would be impossible to change this aspect of society and still tell basically the same story, about a spurned woman’s attempt at revenge.

I can’t find any source online as to whether the Suzanne Allain novel on which this film is based also featured principal characters of different races, as though they all lived in 19th-century England harmoniously. All I can speak to is the film, which clearly serves as a salve for people going through Bridgerton withdrawals. The story telling is incredibly similar, right down to the narration by an older woman. Mercifully, the voiceover narration here is used sparingly.

The spurned woman at the center of the story is Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton), a woman reaching a ripe old age of mid-twenties and apparently running the risk of becoming a spinster. She is taken to the opera by one very wealthy and very eligible Mr. Malcom (Sope Dìrísù), who doesn’t bother taking Julia out again after she responds to an intellectual question with ignorance, and somehow this gets around and results in Julie’s public humiliation. When Julia learns from her cousin Lord Cassidy (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) that she was rejected by Mr. Malcom due to not meeting his list of qualifications to be his bride—hence the film title—she is quite unproportionately indignant, and enlists the help of her childhood friend Selina (Freida Pinto) in exacting revenge: she will meet all of these qualifications, then reject him with her own list.

Where this is going it easy to see from virtually the first frames of the film, and to say Mr. Malcom’s List is packed of conventional contrivances is an understatement. Most significantly, though, I had a hard time with Julia’s cousin Cassidy, who is bizarrely subservient to Julia’s many bizarre demands. Then again, there’s a minor twist later revealing ulterior motives on his part as well, and it barely works.

The bottom line is that Mr. Malcom’s List is a period romance just like countless others, but employing a template that has long proved effective. I can’t deny that I was engaged from start to finish, and found myself modestly charmed by the performances across the board—with the possible exception of Julia, who is insufferably self-involved, and her romantic resolution in the end is arguably the most contrived of all. It says a lot about the rest of the movie that the rest of the movie basically makes up for this. This movie is just another pleasant diversion, and of course there are times when that’s all you’re looking for.

Generally lovely isn’t it?

Overall: B

CYRANO

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

Here we have yet another victim of unfortunate circumstances, a movie whose release date was postponed seemingly endlessly. “Seemingly” is perhaps the operative word here, as it was originally scheduled for wide release on Christmas Day 2021, and finally got its wide release February 25—exactly two months later, but with two other wide release dates and two limited release dates in between, all of them either scrapped or postponed. This on its own might not have been such a big deal, except that I was sitting through this film’s trailer for months before Christmas, only to wind up having to keep sitting through it for another two months. Getting to see it now, when I don’t have to sit through a trailer I practically have memorized anymore, was a relief.

One might wonder, then: was it worth the wait? For the most part, yes. Granted, it would have been much better to get to see it in December, but the later postponements were clearly brought on in large part by the Omicron variant wave, which are now on the significant decline. That said, while I did enjoy this film and I always love the chance to go to a movie theater, I can’t say this one demands to be seen on the big screen. A few more weeks to see it on a streamer at home will be just as much worth the wait. Unless, I suppose, you’re a massive fan of star Peter Dinklage, and there are certainly those people out there.

Somehow, I did not realize that Cyrano had already been a stage production, written by Dinklage’s wife Erica Schmidt and also starring Dinklage, as well as co-star Haley Bennet as Roxanne. It ran first in Connecticut in 2018 and then off Broadway in 2019. As for Covid, acquisition of the rights to the film wasn’t even announced until August 2020, which means Cyrano as a film was conceived as well as completed in a post-pandemic world. It would seem that only the Omicron variant truly had any affect on its release, so compared to a lot of other movies that died on the vine over the past two years, this one was kind of lucky.

How much audiences like it seems to be somewhat mixed, a reflection of my own personal reaction to it. I’m a little mystified as to why the choice was made to make this a conventional musical, except perhaps that it’s what the stage production was. And while Dinklage’s voice is serviceable and Bennett’s is beautiful, the songs themselves are uniformly forgettable. Adapting this as a straightforward tragic romance, without the breaking into song, likely would have been to its benefit.

A lot of Cyrano is pretty fun otherwise, especially seeing Dinklage as an implausibly accomplished and lethal fencer. I have to admit, I found myself thinking about how unrealistic it was to depict Dinklage as someone who could easily dispatch ten men at a time. But, then I realized that none of the other onscreen depictions of swashbuckling heroes, regardless of their size, has ever been realistic. It’s always a fantasy, so why not let the likes of Peter Dinklage in on it? It’s great to see that, even though Cyrano is deeply insecure about his stature in light of the woman he secretly pines for, he has great agency otherwise—ridiculous amounts of it, in fact,

I suppose some might like to be warned, though, that this is only occasionally lighthearted, and is very much conceived of as a romantic tragedy, very much in the vein of Romeo and Juliet. The love between Cyrano and Roxanne isn’t so much forbidden as misdirected, as Roxanne convinces herself she has fallen in “love at first sight” with Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr., also a very good singer), having made the mistake of not finding out first whether he has the level of intellect she’s also looking for. This is arguably a flaw of the original plot of Cyrano de Bergerac, wherein Roxanne makes some pretty goofy assumptions that could easily have been disproved had she taken some real initiative on her own. But, then we wouldn’t have this classic story, in which Cyrano writes Christian’s love letters for him, seducing Roxanne to fall more deeply in love with both Christian’s beauty and Cyrano’s intellect and, most significantly, poetry.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know the original physical issue with Cyrano was his unusually large nose, but there have been many adaptations since the debut of the original French play in 1897, including ones where Cyrano is simply “ugly.” Playwright Erica Schmidt, under the directorial vision of Joe Wright in the film, offers a new take with Peter Dinklage standing in, his being a dwarf being the source of his romantic insecurity.

One major sticking point in this film is the one usage of the m-word, which Dinklage utters, as Cyrano, in reference to himself. It’s a genuinely shocking moment, and I can’t tell if it was meant to be—except that it’s surprising that an actor who has spoken out against its usage would agree to say it onscreen in 2021, it being a period piece notwithstanding. Miriam-Webster says the first usage of the word dates back to 1816, so it’s not anachronistic, at least from an English perspective. But what about in French? Google translate says the French equivalent is nain, except when you translate that the other way around, French to English, it comes up as “dwarf.” So why the hell doesn’t he just use the word “dwarf” in the movie? I don’t get it. Maybe we’re meant to see it as a reflection of Cyrano’s self-hatred, but if that’s the case, the word is not at all necessary to make that clear.

Once you get past that, Cyrano is a fun, deeply romantic, and relatively moving story, a movie that works in spite of its occasionally inexplicable imperfections.

It’ll reach the romantic in you.

Overall: B