Movie reviews
Luca Guadagnino directs “Challengers,” a time-shifting drama about a love triangle between tennis pros, as if he’s a top-seeded player so ruthlessly focused on winning Wimbledon that he’d run over his grandmother if she got between him and the stadium. Every shot is a serve, every montage a volley. There’s even part of one match done from the point-of-view of a ball being smacked to-and-fro at high speed. It’s extravagantly goofy. But it’s also hilarious and wonderful, because it’s an objective correlative for how far the film will go to entertain you.
Zendaya stars as Tashi, a former teenage tennis pro in the mold of one of the Williams sisters whose career on the court is ended by an injury and pivots to being a manager. Her only client is her husband Art (Mike Faist, who played Riff in “West Side Story”). Art is a nice guy who’s been a dominant force in men’s tennis thanks in large part to Tashi’s guidance and loyalty. Art is having an existential crisis when the story begins. Tashi gets the bright idea of having him enter a low-level championship match in hopes that he’ll reconnect with the energy that fueled him when she met him.
But there’s a secret agenda here, one whose motivations and machinations we’re never entirely privy to: one of the players expected to appear at the match is Patrick (Josh O’Connor), a scruffy hustler who used to be best friends with Art until Tashi came between them. Like, literally came between them: one of many dazzling non-tennis showpieces in “Challengers” is a lengthy flashback scene wherein Tashi visits the motel room that the two guys are sharing during a tournament, slinks onto the bed with them, and makes out with both men simultaneously, until the point where Art and Patrick, who are so close and physically comfortable with each other that they could be mistaken for lovers anyway, start making out with each other, and Tashi coolly withdraws from the tangle of bodies and watches what she’s delighted to realize is her own handiwork.
What, exactly, drives Tashi? The movie lets us poke around the edges of her psychology but prevents us from getting enough of a glimpse at her emotional interior to draw solid inferences. What drives Patrick, who realizes early into the Art-finds-his-roots tournament that Tashi is there for him as well, and that there’s still powerful sexual energy between them, way more electric and obvious than what flows between Tashi and Art? We don’t quite know. Their connection is more feral than intellectual. What drives Art? Goodness, mostly. He’s a smart, decent guy. You instinctively understand that he’s quite aware there’s still some unspoken thing happening between Tashi and Patrick. But he has decided to be grateful to have been the official “winner” of this relationship tournament, and seems to believe that the best strategy is to let things play out while trusting in his wife’s love and loyalty.
What a situation! The instability of it keeps “Challengers” on its toes even when it’s on the verge of getting tripped up by plot machinations and the past/present storytelling churn of Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay and Marco Costa’s editing. There’s a lively cinematic subgenre that deconstructs the rise and fall of a relationship by jumping around in time—two excellent examples are “Blue Valentine” and “Two for the Road”—and this movie carries on that tradition with panache, and adds many spectacularly blocked, framed, and edited scenes of athletic competition that, taken together, feel like a tennis fan’s answer to a boxing picture. (Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor's score is insistent and relentless and loud, the techno-inflected answer to a full studio orchestra score in an old Hollywood melodrama.)
Is "Challengers" too ambitious for its own good? Or too much? Or less than meets the eye, as the late, great Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris might have put it? Probably. It kinda gets sucked into the vortex of its own narrative and technical ambitions in the final stretch. And there might be a too many clever transitions from one time period to the other, sometimes at moments when what’s onscreen is so engrossing that you’d rather the film continue immersing itself rather than cutting away to chase some other thing. And the 1970s American New Wave “What just happened and what does it mean?” ending feels unearned. It’s not so much pretentious as out-of-nowhere and feels not-right for what preceded it.
The pleasures of “Challengers” are visceral, intuitive, at times animalistic. Despite the intricate structure, there’s nothing about it that announces, “I am an art film, and I will take you into the hidden recesses of the human heart and mind and leave you there to ponder the complexities of what you’ve just seen.” The tone is more like those great entertainments that starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall from the 1940s, where every line seemed dirty because of how the actors said it.
Which is to say that the film is more Hollywood than Cannes—and not only is that perfectly fine, it’s exciting. Commercial cinema is terrified of sex these days, and adult sexuality, and adulthood generally. Anything over a certain budget level seems to neuter itself by repeatedly worrying throughout the production process whether what’s happening on the screen might potentially cause even mild discomfort in a family with young children, or between an older parent and the adult child who lives with them and has to sit beside them on the couch while watching TV. It’s a shame how the phrase “adult movie” has become associated almost exclusively with erotica/pornography, because it also describes the kind of work that concerns itself with matters that children cannot understand because they’re children.
All three lead actors carry themselves like movie stars. Guadagnino and his game-for-anything cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (who shot two other Guadagnino films as well as several by Apichatpong Weerasethakul) shoot the performers as if they’re legends of both the court and the big screen that they're very lucky to have in the cast. It’s a treat to see three young, contemporary actors nailing the understated flirty gravitas that the stars of films for grownups used to exhibit in earlier eras, but that almost nobody knows how to do at this comparatively sexless moment in 21st century cinema.
Zendaya has that knowing, alpha-queen, insinuating blank-slate quality that emanated from Julia Roberts in many of her 1990s and early aughts roles. She carries herself like a young woman who has every right to be where she is. That feeling meshes perfectly with Tashi, who remains formidable even after a stroke of bad luck takes professional tennis away from her as a sport and leaves her as a business-and-media puppet master. Faist nails the difficult role of the nice guy who is strong and loyal but might not be tough enough to withstand the wringer that the other two characters seem like they’re about to put him through. O’Connor’s slightly-open-mouthed performance, dark-features, unshaven and sweaty presentation, and wrinkled and stained clothes turn him into the 21st century answer to a 1970s movie star like Elliott Gould or Donald Sutherland: somebody with a smirking countercultural edge. He's got a dangerously unstable yet attractive quality that's perfect for this film.
The perspective on the main characters is outside looking in. Even when the camerawork and editing dice up the story and rearrange meanings and facts, you’re never being allowed access to the main players’ minds or hearts. It’s not that kind of movie. You watch it like you watch the U.S. Open. Power dynamics are everything. Who’s up? Who’s down? Is there a potential for a comeback? It’s a great sports film because it shows you how what happens in the arena is a stylized and distilled mirror of what’s happening elsewhere in the players’ lives. There are several moments in the movie where one of the central trio faces another on the court and we draw in our breath because we know one of them has a secret advantage over the other—a trump card that they’ve been carrying around for a while, and are finally ready to play.
This movie doesn’t have a philosophical or understated moment anywhere in its running time, and seems not to care whether you think that’s a flaw, because it’s “in the zone” in the way that a professional athlete is. It doesn’t just want to entertain. It wants to win.
Opens in theaters on April 26th.
Several enemies of the state are murdered on live TV in a pivotal scene from “Boy Kills World,” a hyper-action movie about a media-addicted killer who wants to avenge his family’s deaths. We don’t know who these TV casualties are or what people think of their deaths, but we do know that their killers are Frosty Puffs cereal mascots. This should be a spoiler, but it’s not.
Frosty Puffs are proud sponsors of The Culling, an annually televised flex of power organized by the insecure fascist Melanie Van Der Koy (Michelle Dockery) and her family. Frosty Puffs also plays a crucial role in the over-exaggerated and under-developed backstory of the titular Boy (Bill Skarsgård), a deaf and mute orphan who fondly remembers eating sugary breakfast cereal when he was a happy child, before the Van Der Koys murdered his family.
“Boy Kills World” is a generic programmer about one more lonely mixed media junkie who wants to murder the demagogues that he blames for ruining his life. Skarsgård's character eventually feels conflicted about his murder-quest, as he tells us through overbearingly goofy voiceover narration (H. John Benjamin). But he doesn’t seem to care that his beloved Frosty Puffs have partnered with the Van Der Koys. And in a later scene, Boy also enjoys a bowl of Frosty Puffs. Something doesn’t add up here.
“Boy Kills World” dabbles at media criticism by fixating on the Van Der Koy family’s manipulation of the media. This only means so much in a gory and joyless action comedy that imagines media consumers and political dissidents as unmemorable extras. We know what Skarsgård's avenging hero wants because his stream-of-conscious narration never stops telling us everything he’s thinking or feeling.
We can also tell some things about the righteous nature of the Boy’s mission based on generic training montage sequences starring “The Raid” star Yayan Ruhian. Ruhian plays an eccentric bog hermit who knows how to fight and also takes hallucinogens. The Boy is also haunted by visions of his dead sister (Quinn Copeland), and she talks, too.
The Van Der Koys are also fairly obvious: Melanie is vain and she thinks televised executions are good for her TV ratings; her husband Glen (Sharlto Copley) is a temperamental buffoon who supposedly is (or was?) popular with his wife’s supporters; and Glen’s brother-in-law Gideon (Brett Gelman) is a frustrated artist, pouring his heart into pompous speeches and scripts for his uncaring family’s public demonstrations. In another key scene, Melanie literally projects her insecurities onto the Boy because he can’t communicate verbally. Which is weird, because he still speaks a language that she’s fluent in—over-the-top violence.
During manic action scenes, the cameras swoop over, under, and through teeming crowds of heavily armed and often faceless heavies. Limbs break, bodies tumble through the air, and chunks of flesh frequently explode in gouts of blood. There isn’t a significant difference between the dizzying, sensational presentation of violence in any of the Boy’s fight scenes and, say, the abovementioned Frosty Puffs massacre.
In fact, “Boy Kills World” implicitly associates all violence with video games, like the “Street Fighter”-style fighting game that Skarsgård's character tells us he based his voiceover narration voice on. These action scenes resemble the same antic slow-fast-slow pace of the “Kingsman” spy movie parodies and this year’s “Argylle.” In these braindead media critiques, so much pseudo-comic stress is put on sweeping camera movements and impact-driven maneuvering that it reduces everything funny, upsetting, and spectacular about these scenes to its sheer numbing impact. You don’t get to enjoy any of the on-screen action’s flow or development because the filmmakers constantly insert themselves between you and whatever cheap thrills you might’ve hoped to enjoy.
That creative fussiness suggests an unfortunate parallel between the makers of “Boy Kills World” and Gideon, who at one point bitterly tells off Dennis (Pierre Nelson), an actor stuck rehearsing one of Gideon’s scripted Van Der Koy spectacles. “Feel a ****ing feeling, Dennis,” Gideon pouts. Surely, that meta-criticism means something, like the fight scene’s aggressive stylization or the connection between the Van Der Koys and their breakfast cereal sponsors. Well, yes and no.
You can’t watch “Boy Kills World” passively—did Benjamin’s character have to talk so much?—nor can you draw meaningful conclusions from the third-act plot twists that disrupt the Boy’s plans for revenge. The makers of “Boy Kills World” don’t trust their audience enough to let us just feel a feeling, nor do they encourage their enthusiastic cast members enough to deliver fully-developed performances. Copley plays creepy well, Skarsgård pantomimes his butt off, and Ruhian unsurprisingly looks more convincing than anyone else tasked with executing complicated stunt work. Everything else in “Boy Kills World” could have been directed and scripted by the Van Der Koys.
Spiders. Why’d it have to be spiders? Any of us who flinch at the sight of a spider can confirm the many legged arachnids are an easy source of terror. Most of us don’t like finding them on our windowsills, crawling on our walls, or making thread-y homes of their own in forgotten crevices. They are our foes as much as any unwelcome pest—even if they are helpful in keeping out other creepy crawlies. In Sébastien Vanicek’s nightmarish feature debut “Infested,” there are more spiders than you can count and spiders of unusual size that weave together a frightfully stellar monster movie that will make many viewers jump, squirm, and maybe even scream.
In Vanicek’s film, a young man named Kaleb (Théo Christine) collects a small menagerie of creatures and bugs in his room, much to the annoyance of his sister, Manon (Lisa Nyarko). While she’s busy refurbishing their old apartment to sell after the death of their mother, Kaleb’s future is less certain, and although many in his orbit think the worst of a hoodie-wearing young man with a side hustle of selling high-priced Nike shoes, he still tries to do what’s right for his neighbors. However, his passion for housing rare species by his bedside brings chaos into the apartment complex when a poisonous spider escapes and begins to lay its eggs throughout the building, leaving Kaleb, Manon, and their friends Mathys (Jérôme Niel), Jordy (Finnegan Oldfield) and Lila (Sofia Lesaffre) to fight for their lives.
Our collective fear of spiders has manifested into its own horror subgenre. That includes the 1955 giant bug classic "Tarantula," deadly spider infestation in a smalltown thrillers like “Kingdom of the Spiders” and "Arachnophobia,” the early aughts Blockbuster favorite "Eight Legged Freaks" and the aptly named "Big Ass Spider!" that followed kaiju-sized monsters quite simply too big to contain. Like its predecessors, “Infestation” taps into our fear (rational and irrational) about poisonous bites, quick moving spider colonies that set up webs over our homes, spiders becoming too big or deadly to control, and the unpredictability of their behavior—as any kid tasked with killing a spider could attest.
But “Infested” feels somehow more intense as the threat is not just poisonous spiders or spiders of unusual size—it’s that they are simultaneously growing exponentially almost every time you see them on screen, they attack in packs, and their bite is pretty lethal. They will take up residence in a host’s body then crawl out of their victim’s skin. They capture others in their webs or conquer them in their own homes. No place is safe, and once the infestation sets in, the apartment building where Kaleb lives is put on police lockdown, trapping everything and everyone inside. In addition to the arachnid horror movies of yesteryear, Vanicek channels the camaraderie of “Attack the Block,” another invasion thriller where friends band together to fight off aliens, and the confined apartment terror of David Cronenberg’s “Shivers,” where parasite unleash violent sexual chaos in a posh complex.
Vanicek, who co-wrote the screenplay with Florent Bernard, gives some present-day nuance to what could have been just a one-note jump scare. Before the eight-legged melee begins, Kaleb’s community comes into focus—the different neighbors ranging from welcoming long timers who fondly remember his mom to the paranoid grouch who accuses him of selling drugs, and the strained relationships he shares with those closest to him. Later, we learn of how the neighborhood has been mostly abandoned by the cops and local government because of their lower income status, adding a little social critique to the mix. Once the spider dam breaks, it echoed the early days of COVID isolation when everyone was quarantined to their respective apartments and in some cases, it became every person for themselves. This phase does not last long, as the spiders are multiplying and growing with mutant speed and danger grows with every new propulsive track Vanicek layers into the movie.
Of course, it had to be spiders. The little creatures are everywhere and nowhere we want to find them. They show how quickly we can jump into a state of fear, how we react to their intrusion (violence, tears, and so on), and how we take care of others who are also afraid of their presence. For all its skin-crawling, “ew!”-inducing moments, “Infested” delivers the roller coaster thrills of a well-made horror movie. Maybe you dare yourself to watch this movie about something you fear, brace for the twist of venomous spiders that get bigger and feel a sense of relief of surviving that adrenaline rush. Vanicek’s first feature is an impressive debut, driven by an energetic fright, turning a worn-down apartment complex into a catacomb of spider webs, moving shadows and blocked escapes. As wonderful as it felt to leave “Infested,” it’s not helped my fear of its eight-legged villains.
I watched “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” on headphones, in my room, trying to stay out of sight while my roommate had a date over. This is, if not the ideal way to experience this film, at least an appropriate one. Joanna Arnow’s second feature is a symphony of ambient embarrassment, whose movements are structured around the various men with whom the protagonist, Ann (Arnow), has relationships of varying length and ambivalence. Within these movements, Arnow hits uncomfortable notes that range from cutting corporate indignities to the ritualized abjection of erotic humiliation.
The story unfolds in a series of dryly comic vignettes, beginning with a supremely awkward scene where a completely nude Ann rubs herself up against a fully clothed lover, telling him how hot it is that he doesn’t care about her pleasure. It’s not clear how much of this is an intentional kink scene and how much is Ann talking herself into interpreting his indifference as erotic. That’s the case with many of her interactions with Allen (Scott Cohen), with whom she’s had a casual BDSM relationship for nine years but who can’t (or won’t) remember basic facts about her life.
There’s a larger element of self-imposed humiliation in the way Arnow exposes herself on camera, both emotionally and physically, in this film. (In the tradition of Chantal Akerman [and, yes, Lena Dunham], Arnow performs all of her own sex scenes in this movie.) This is how her character gets off, and if there’s any element of autobiography at play here—which there presumably is, considering that her parents co-star as themselves—then the filmmaker must be getting off on it a little bit, too. It’s a testament to the skill with which Arnow manipulates tone that this comes across as just another nuance on the spectrum of the film’s uncomfortable emotions rather than a creepy imposition.
Although the scenarios in this film are mortifyingly realistic—this is the most truthful depiction of BDSM I’ve ever seen in a movie, full stop—the dialogue is written to be pithier and more stylized than the way the average person talks. This can be jarring at times, but it appears to be a deliberate stylistic choice in that Arnow is distancing herself from the material via her deadpan delivery and painful exchanges while simultaneously exposing the most sensitive parts of herself on screen. (Ironically, a scene where Ann sings passages from Les Misérables by heart is the most vulnerable moment in a film that also features extensive full-frontal nudity.)
The film's title accurately reflects the sense of floating, frustrated inertia that envelops Ann, a feeling of being suspended between phases of life without any clarity on what, if anything, is coming next. Scenes of varying length are cut musically, some stretched out to the point where they stop being funny, then come around to funny again (a classic trick) and others chopped up and juxtaposed to highlight the similarities between, say, being demoted at work and being dressed up in a pig costume by a date. One of the funniest cuts in the film comes early on when Ann insists that she’s “pretty busy,” actually, before cutting to a shot of her standing with her parents, watching a tide slowly roll in.
But where “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” pulls its most impressive trick is in the understated way this distress shifts into something more hopeful. It happens subtly, so that a shot of park greenery in bloom lands like a punch in the jaw after the bland neutrals that have dominated the film up to that point. It’s a feeling akin to waking up one morning after a depressive episode with the will to brush one’s teeth and face the world once more. Ann is a passive person, and a self-absorbed one. If good things can drift into her life, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us, too.
The Cronenberg cinematic family tree adds another branch this week with the directorial debut of Caitlin Cronenberg’s “Humane,” starring Jay Baruchel, Peter Gallagher, and Emily Hampshire. Anyone coming to this film for more of the body horror imagery in the work of David Cronenberg or Brandon Cronenberg should mostly temper expectations of surreal terror. But there's definitely thematic connective tissue: this is another genre flick about losing control of your own being.
Michael Sparaga’s script starts with a clever premise -- imagining a world in which climate change and overpopulation have led to forced euthanasia. But it then has almost no idea what to do with it, as Cronenberg's film dissipates into a series of unbelievable decisions made by people we don't care about, shot in a surprisingly flat style. The scariest thing about “Humane” is how genuinely believable its nightmare vision ends up being. However, the film’s micro approach to a macro crisis never connects because we’re never given a reason to care about these specific people.
All of “Humane” takes place on a single day at the fancy home of former news anchor Charles York (Peter Gallagher), who brings his family together as the world reels from an international order that the entire population must be diminished by 20%. Who would be forced into euthanasia? Would a "Purge"-like situation of lawlessness emerge? The most famous York son, Jared (Jay Baruchel), is the kind of guy who seems to be profiting off the misery of the world, a Tucker Carlson-esque talking head who believes national euthanasia is for the greater good.
The family gathering shifts gears when Charles tells the children that he’s decided that he and his latest wife, Dawn (Uni Park), have volunteered to shuffle off this mortal coil, and a smarmy technician named Bob (Enrico Colantoni) shows up to get the job done. While the emotional upheaval of that announcement is still thick in the air, something goes wrong—of course—leading to the kids having to pick another person to fulfill the order. You can imagine how that goes. Resentments, regrets, and general sibling anger fill the bulk of “Humane,” which sometimes plays like an episode of “Succession” in which the Roys must decide which one of Logan’s kids to execute.
That actually might make it sound more fun than this film ended up. Most of what’s clever about “Humane” exists on its fringe—including perhaps that a Cronenberg has made a film that’s, at least in part, about nepotism—primarily in how it throws its characters from their ivory tower and then watches them fight in the mud over who gets to climb back up. The social commentary talking points embedded in “Humane” are undoubtedly intriguing, but too many of them feel superficial, flirting with ideas about privilege without having much to say about them. Jared is the kind of guy who goes on TV to be a shill for his government, going as far as to suggest that he would sacrifice his own child if asked to do so. What would happen to someone like that when they have to actually act on their words?
Stealing the film, Baruchel gives another unique performance (he always does) as a former anthropologist who has studied human nature enough to know how to stay on top of the food chain. Colantoni also gets some fun beats as a guy who has seen it all since the euthanasia order started, someone who might enjoy his job a little too much.
Sadly, everything else feels a little thin. Emily Hampshire, Alanna Bale, and Sebastian Chacon play the other three York children, and none of them register as three-dimensional, a fatal flaw in a film that relies on bounding characters off each other in a single setting. Hampshire’s an obvious sociopath who probably thinks the 20% number should be doubled, while Bale barely registers at all. Chacon, being the adopted York child, threatens to add an exciting layer to the debate that’s discarded for a twist.
This might be more forgivable if “Humane” had stronger visual language. Cronenberg eventually gets a little fun with close-ups of the bloody stuff, but the bulk of this film is surprisingly flat and poorly lit. It alternates from too dim to bizarre overhead bright lights that look like an interrogation room.
There are little bits of entertainment and insight buried throughout “Humane,” some in news footage about how the rest of the world is handling the crisis. The film is clearly a COVID allegory, with a patriarch who has profited from misinformation and fearmongering kicking off a single-setting thriller. However, all of this is concept more than execution. In the end, “Humane” is an interesting story told in a deeply uninteresting manner.
Being a fan of the Christian pop duo for KING & COUNTRY or having even the slightest interest in the musical genre probably goes a long way toward making the drama “Unsung Hero” more meaningful. For everyone else, it plays like a blandly well-intentioned tale of triumph over adversity and an earnest celebration of the importance of family.
And what a family it is. The massive Aussie brood at the film’s center provides both the inspiration for the story and the behind-the-scenes machinery to tell it. Joel Smallbone, half of the singing group with brother Luke, co-wrote and co-directed the film with Richard L. Ramsey. He also stars as his own father, David Smallbone, a music promoter who moved his pregnant wife and their six kids from Sydney to Nashville in the early 1990s with dreams of making it big in the United States. (A younger actor, Diesel La Torraca, plays Joel as a child with a natural yearning to perform.) Stick around for the credits, and you’ll discover how various members of the clan appear in minor supporting roles throughout.
But this isn’t a music biopic or even an origin story, even though much of the plot centers on whether older sister Rebecca can secure a record contract with her pure, clear voice, which could rescue the family financially. (Spoiler: she does and goes on to become Grammy winner Rebecca St. James; for KING & COUNTRY has won multiple Grammys, as well.) This is, as the title suggests, a tribute to the person who held the family together when everything was falling apart: matriarch Helen Smallbone, played with optimism and authenticity by Daisy Betts. “Unsung Hero” follows the highs and lows of the Smallbones' efforts to stay afloat in a foreign land, but Helen’s resiliency—as well as her faith—provides a consistent through-line. The casting of Kirrilee Berger as Rebecca is particularly effective since she so closely resembles Betts, adding believability to their mother-daughter bond.
We know these attractive and talented people will be fine even before they set foot in their local church and meet the big-hearted neighbors who will rally around them in times of need. It’s all very affirming to the Christian audience it’s geared toward and somewhat predictable from a narrative standpoint.
What is surprising, though, is that there are actual moments of raw emotion within the workmanlike direction and episodic script. Things get ugly. Pride takes over. Having dragged his family halfway around the world to an empty rental home, and with job prospects falling through left and right, David feels depressed and resentful. He lashes out at the friendly fellow churchgoer (Lucas Black), whom he feels has been too generous alongside his perky wife, played by Hallmark Channel and Great American Family mainstay Candace Cameron Bure. Helen, in a rare show of anger, even explodes at David at one point.
“Unsung Hero” could have used more of such emotional honesty. But it ultimately must deliver a broad uplift that’s palatable for the whole family, so it tends to skim the surface. And aside from the parents and Rebecca, the characterization is woefully lacking; the other kids are all kind of a perky blur. Joel Smallbone has a solid screen presence in what must have been a challenging role, but his choices behind the camera with Ramsey feel mostly pedestrian.
The ‘90s costume design is on point, though—so many bad sweaters on display—and the soundtrack of secular pop songs, including Jesus Jones and Seal, is period-specific if a little on-the-nose lyrically. For the most part, “Unsung Hero” does what David Smallbone himself didn’t do: It shies away from taking risks.
“Terrestrial Verses,” one of the most brilliant and provocative films to emerge from Iran recently, has qualities that link it to both the modernist formal traditions of post-1979 Iranian cinema and the more recent trend of social and political asperities aimed at the authoritarian repressiveness of the Islamic Republic.
The film’s stylistic approach is both simple and daring. In each of its nine episodes, the camera is locked in place, staring, as it were, at a single person who is interrogated by an off-screen authority figure of one sort or another. Each scene plays through without edits, making it resemble a one-act play with both documentary and dramatic aspects.
“Terrestrial Verses” (the title comes from a work by the renowned poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad) was written and directed by filmmakers Alireza Khatami and Ali Asgari. Perhaps the best way to convey its unusual tone and manner is to describe its first two scenes.
In the first, the camera is directed at a dapper, well-dressed young man, who is telling an off-screen official that he and his wife want to name their new son David. The official is having none of it. Why David, he asks sternly. The young man says it’s the first name of his wife’s favorite author (we never learn the last name). But it’s Western, the official objects; the couple needs a good Iranian name for their boy. They go back and forth like this for a while, until the official asks the young man who his favorite author is.
“Gholam Hossein Saedi,” he replies. An Iranian audience would surely laugh at the young man’s choice of one of Iran’s most famous leftist writers, an enemy of the Islamic Republic, but also at the officer appearing never to have heard of Saedi, an immensely influential author whose story “The Cow” was the basis for the late Dariush Mehrjui’s film of the same title, which was widely credited with launching the Iranian New Wave in 1969. (Asghar Farhadi pays tribute to both the story and the movie in his “The Salesman.”)
The young man says he doesn’t like Gholam Hossien for his son’s name and the officer says why not just Hossein (the name of one of the preeminent figures in Shia Islam). The young man retorts that the name is Arabic, not Iranian.
While an Iranian audience would find a lot of droll comedy in this exchange, non-Iranians will get both the familiarity of the conflict (who has never had to struggle with the overbearing obstinacy of a petty bureaucrat?) and its undeniable foreignness: In what other country does the government presume to dictate what a couple can name its children?
I will not describe the ending of this episode except to note that, like the endings of some other episodes, it happens in an abrupt, unexpected way—a poetic technique I once observed in other post-revolutionary Iranian films, most notably those of Abbas Kiarostami.
Kiarostami’s influence (which Khatami and Asgari have acknowledged) is also evident in the second episode, the only one involving a child. Her name is Selena, she appears to be about eight years old and when we first see her, she’s standing in the aisle of a clothing store wearing a cute Mickey Mouse shirt and dancing to Western pop music she’s listening to on her headphones. While this mini-Beyonce surely could be found in virtually every country in the world, we soon see why this one could only exist in Iran.
Off-screen, two voices discuss a uniform Selena will be obliged to wear at an upcoming school event. The voice of the saleswoman is harsh and demanding, spelling out the rules the outfit must follow; the other voice, Selena’s mom, reluctantly concurs. The scene’s action begins when Selena is ordered to come try on an article of clothing. She returns to the frame wearing a long gray abaya, a garment designed to cover the shape of her body. Asked to come back again, she returns with a white hijab that covers her hair.
This process continues until the uniform is complete and all traces of Selena the individual have been erased; she now looks like an anonymous medieval Islamic automaton, junior size. Any non-orthodox-Muslim viewer is bound to view the little girl’s transformation with a mix of wonderment and horror. But don’t suppose that Selena’s mind and personality have been subdued by the sartorial imprisonment. When the fitting ends, she rapidly and rather contemptuously tears off the costume’s layers and resumes dancing.
Like other episodes in “Terrestrial Verses,” this one resonates with a piercing undertone of dissidence, one that situates the film at a particular moment in Iranian cinema. When Jafar Panahi’s “No Bears” played the New York Film Festival in 2022, Iran was being swept by protests—featuring the slogan “Women! Life! Freedom!”—that followed the death of a young woman arrested for wearing improper hijab. More so than previous protests, this one to me felt not just political but cultural. In my festival report, I offered the prediction that “The current moment will mark the ending of one era of Iranian filmmaking and the beginning of another ... Going forward, we may see much more outright defiance on the part of filmmakers even as the government flails to tighten the screws ...”
Even though it contains no violence and no mentions of politics or the current regime in Iran, “Terrestrial Verses” may be the most dramatic validation so far of that prediction. It is a scathing critique of the poisoned power relations in the Islamic Republic, relations that corrupt interactions by people at every level of Iranian society. And you can be sure the Iranian authorities understood it as just that. After the film enjoyed rave reviews and public acclaim around the world, Iran banned co-director Ali Asgari from traveling (Alireza Khatami was spared that punishment as a Canadian citizen) and confiscated some of the cast’s passports, laptops and phones.
Given the extraordinary restrictions Iran places on its filmmakers, it remains a wonder that films as intrepid and original as “Terrestrial Voices” somehow keep emerging from the country. Asgari and Khatami even cleverly acknowledge the absurd barriers they and their colleagues face. In one scene, a filmmaker faces an official who, in reviewing his script, keeps finding faults with its actions and ideas. The exasperated filmmaker responds by ripping out one handful of pages after another. The scene would be simply hilarious were it not so close to the awful truth.
Across a strikingly monotone desert landscape a figure cloaked in black rides atop a horse. It’s a vision that instantly recalls the horsemen of the apocalypse. But when the rider dismounts the horse at the first sight of water and removes her breast from her robes, filling the oasis with breast milk, we are spellbound as we come to understand the concoction of historied fables and narrative reinvention that gives “Omen” structure.
In his directorial debut, Congolese-Belgian rapper Baloji reckons with the spiritual and existential in a narrative rife with sorcery and familial face-offs. “Omen” is split into four chapters, each named after its respective protagonist (though each chapter intersects). Koffi (Marc Zinga), like Baloji, is a Congolese man living in Belgium. With nearly two decades separating him from his last return home, Koffi and his wife, Alice (Lucie Debay), pregnant with twins, are heading back to introduce her and their children-to-be to his family. Yet Koffi, riddled with anxieties over his parents’ traditionalism, is nervous not only to bring his white wife home, but apprehensive to re-engage with the strict, highly spiritual culture that previously cast him out.
The film’s title rings as a warning through every action taken, every crossed path, every “accident” encountered. When Koffi lands in Congo, he is unable to reach his sister, who is supposed to pick him up from the airport. Left to their own devices, when they obtain a car, they travel to the mines to look for his father and deliver a dowry, and he is nowhere to be found. And after arriving at the family party, Koffi holds his sister’s infant son, and while doing so, gets a nosebleed that spatters the child’s cheek in blood. The boy is ripped from his arms as the women insist that he has cursed the baby, and he is dragged to a hut where a shaman performs rites to rid and redeem, dunking his head in water and nailing a wooden mask around his head. The question of omens is not only posed to Koffi, but to us as well. Are these hysterics wrong or warranted?
While Koffi is the film’s core character, his sister Tshala (Eliane Umuhire), mother Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua), and a young boy named Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya), whose story runs alongside rather than intertwined with Koffi’s, are given their own chapters in the story. The formula of “Omen” sees its cast approaching their utterly human fates under the influences of omens, shamans, and a surrealist spirit realm. Tshala, casually rebuked by her family for moving to South Africa “to live with the white Africans” hides her polyamorous relationship for fears of greater rejection. Mujila battles motherly instinct against spiritual belief, struggling to find ground firm enough for confident dwelling. And Paco, living in a repurposed bus with his crew of tutu-clad wrestling gangsters, mourns the loss of his sister while also navigating the increasingly violent threats of a rival gang.
Each of these protagonists finds themselves on the defensive end of a fight to pilot their own existences, and the world in which they search for support feels on constant brink of collapse. “Omen” excellently captures the feelings of both cultural and generational alienation. In script and performance, there is never a moment of certainty. When the hard-boiled problems of shunned family, complex relationships, and mortality are met with the elusive treatments of cultural spiritualism, it’s apparent in Koffi’s fear, Tshala’s dejection, Mujila’s mournful eyes, and Paco’s indignant anger that everyone is clawing for control in a world that permits none.
The tenets of the culture’s belief system are never unpacked, only passively hinted, and are portrayed differently from a separately suggested otherworldly dimension that we see in a flashback with Paco and his sister. What these psychic portrayals don’t lack, however, is style. Creative camera angles, puffs of colored smoke, static shots marked by nighttime chiaroscuro or daytime technicolor, and eclectic wardrobe choices that just makes you think “god that’s cool,” are easy distractions. While Baloji’s intent could be to lean into ambiguity, context becomes desired even as the stunning visual tableaus and excellent costuming seek to be enough. The surreal is in living breathing form in “Omen,” and the magical realism is aptly bewitching. What remains consistent is the film’s base commitment to the motif of life substances: blood, milk, and water; corruption, subsistence, and redemption.
“Omen” is a visually enthralling piece of magical realism proposing ideas on pariahs, culture, and individuality in a world with constantly changing rules. But in devoting so much work to the aesthetic, it falls behind in making sense of its phantasmagoric storylines. The intentions are clear, and some of the feelings snake their way through the high grasses of its flair, but the ideas that form the foundation of “Omen” are built on splintering wood, cheekily threatening to crush it all.
It’s weirdly funny to see a year mentioned in the title of “Art College 1994,” an animated Chinese college dorm rom-com about young people and their greatest loves, themselves. You could easily imagine this feature-length cartoon taking place in another time or place without losing much of either its specificity or universality. Swap out a Nirvana poster or a multi-tiered tape-deck stereo, and you’ll still have an unsentimental and quietly unsparing portrait of idealistic undergrads at a pivotal moment when they start to realize how small they are in the world that awaits them after graduation.
Director/co-writer Liu Jian’s affection for his impulsive young characters adds a welcome variation to the usual pre-graduation coming-of-age story’s concerns for life after college. It’s funny because it’s true, and not only to its young subjects’ inconstant values. These art students, like most art students, take themselves too seriously and also live in a beautiful oasis that fosters tendencies that, to anyone else, must seem indulgent. “Art College 1994” is unassumingly sweet because it’s about young people and their eternal quest for freedom and self-expression, mostly inside their own navels.
“Art College 1994” is a time capsule about that shimmering moment in time when you think you know exactly what you’re talking about without knowing much at all. Liu (“Have a Nice Day”) shows an unusual patience and fascination with his characters, whose overlapping stories tend to meander more than they progress. There’s some intrigue about who will go where after school and who’s dating whom, making fair weather partners out of musical students Hao Lili (Zhuo Dongyu) and Gao Hong (Papi) and fine arts majors Zhifei (Shaoxing) and Xiaojun (Dong Zijian). There’s also a frequently rotated cast of supporting characters who receive and project their own ideas back at these four core main protagonists.
Liu focuses more on his characters’ academic setting since his blinkered twenty-somethings only think they know what they want and only on their own vaguely personal terms. Jokes about the art world and its young, impressionable supporters abound. Some are more amusing than laugh-aloud funny, though even that makes sense since most people in this movie don’t seem to have an outdoor voice.
A museum curator’s “manifesto” is greeted with shrugs—“I know every word here, but I don’t understand a thing.” A bemused student teases a well-traveled artist from Taiwan (renowned filmmaker Jia Zhangke) with a quasi-Daoist question—“Is the moon more beautiful abroad?”—and is instantly shut down by an embarrassed administrator: “Please don’t bring up things unrelated to today’s topic.” Art is burned for freedom and portfolios’ sake, and love matches are pursued and rescinded with startling regularity. Also, really, you’re engaged to him—you, so soon??
“Art College 1994” doesn’t build momentum so much as it floats along with its characters, fixating on contextualizing details on both the movie’s depopulated sound design and mostly music-light score. The ambient noises you hear on the soundtrack tend to stand out given the “social realist” design that’s become central to Liu’s now-signature visual style. Human characters move haltingly across ostentatiously designed background screens full of eye-catching ornamental details. It’s not naturalistic but rather stylized in a mannered way that feels true to this kind of story’s nature as a snapshot of students who drink too much, philosophize more than they understand, and prop up their choices with quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, and Pablo Picasso. They think about “traditional art” and how to make new art, either by combining old media or maybe burning it all to the ground (“I’ve already come up with a title [for an exhibition]. 'Flame of Ideas!'”).
The bitter edge to “Art College 1994”’s humor is also undercut significantly by its matter-of-fact poetry and arthouse-friendly toggling back-and-forth between impressionistic details. Look at this ceiling's rafters, then join Yingjun in bed as he stares up at nothing. The movie’s music cuts short mid-space out. Soon, we’ll join Yinjun again as he trudges around campus at night, hands in his pockets, headphones on, and a melody of crickets on the soundtrack. Then it’s off to the Casablanca Club and its marquee’s flickering purple and green flickering halogen bulbs, which crackle on the soundtrack like a bug zapper.
“Art College 1994” isn’t really nostalgic because it vividly depicts what it’s like to be young and only responsible for yourself, with no frame reference but your own narrow, constantly fussed-over headspace. It’s a rare coming-of-age story that acknowledges that, yes, life was beautiful when you were younger and more passionate about your future, if only because of a confluence of timing and circumstances that happen to involve you, and not often as a main subject.
There are windows throughout “Nowhere Special,” real and symbolic. Over the opening credits, we view windows, giving us glimpses of the outside and a couple of interiors in a rural Irish town. One of those windows is being carefully soaped and squeegeed by John (James Norton). He smiles at a black and white cat on the other side of the glass. James is a single dad to three-year-old Michael (an extraordinary performance by Daniel Lamont). We first see him looking through their apartment window, waiting for John to come home. As soon as Michael sees his father, he goes to the door so he can see John the instant he arrives.
John is a wonderful father, devoted, loving, engaged, and with seemingly endless patience. It cannot be endless, however. John is dying. He has only months to find a new home for Michael. As painful and difficult as that task is, there is another that is worse. John has to find a way to explain what is happening in a way that somehow makes Michael feel safe and loved and not devastated by it.
The symbolic windows give us views into other lives, as John and Michael see possible new families, arranged by the adoption agency and accompanied by a sympathetic young member of the agency staff. These scenes are reminiscent of the lovely “Away We Go,” where a couple visits several friends to help them plan what their life with a baby should be. For John, an affluent couple offers opportunities and comforts. A warm, suburban family offers a diverse array of biological and adopted children. It is not until an obviously unsuitable prospect added to the pressure of time running out that John realizes, perhaps after we do, which is the right choice.
At first, John resists the gentle children’s book about death that the adoption agency offers, and refuses to make a “memory box” for Michael to keep. Like all parents, John wants to protect his child from learning about loss. And like all parents, he discovers that is impossible. Michael sees the other children being dropped off at school by their mothers and asks, not for the first time, where his mother is. At the park, Michael discovers a dead beetle, and John has to find a way to tell him why it is not moving and will not ever move again.
It takes nothing from Lamont’s performance to note it is as much a tribute to Norton and skillful editing as it is to the three-year-old actor. He is completely at home with Norton, and some of the film’s most potent images are of Michael just quietly thinking or listening, absorbing the world around him. Norton is also excellent, making the most ordinary domestic moments between John and his son achingly beautiful.
There are so many ways to go wrong with this story, which we are told was inspired by an unidentified real father and son. Writer/director Uberto Pasolini does not let that happen, relying on the most ordinary details to take on greater and greater weight. A casual comment that for a window washer rain is “another wasted day” is made to John, who needs to get the most out of every day he has left. John looks at another father helping a child. He watches an older boy walking to school. Norton’s quiet gaze tells us he is thinking of the Michael he will never get to see and all they will never share. Suddenly, the ladder John uses to reach the windows appears a longer climb. John counts out 34 candles for Michael to put on his birthday cake, knowing he will never get a 35th. Michael has a meltdown about not being able to wear his favorite pajamas. John’s response, beautifully subtle work by Norton, is endearing and utterly relatable to any parent who could not help but be touched by the ferocity of these life forces we bring into the world.
