Film
Right now on the website for A24 – the reigning enfant terrible of indie American film distribution – you can buy a ‘Babygirl Milk Tee’ for $40, a T-shirt prominently featuring an image of a tall glass of milk. This is an allusion to one of the more memorable moments in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, when upstart intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) surreptitiously purchases a glass of milk for his much-older boss, Romy (Nicole Kidman), at a work function, then watches her drink it in a single gulp; a semi-public display of psychosexual domination.
Brady Corbet made his first film, The Childhood of a Leader, when he was twenty-four. A former child actor, he came to directing after years as the Zelig of the arthouse, acting in films by auteurs such as Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier. When The Childhood of a Leader premièred at the Venice Film Festival in 2015, Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), serving as the president of the Orizzonti jury, likened Corbet to Orson Welles, an invocation so sacrilegious it was sure to provoke the ire of certain American critics, who have had Corbet in the gun ever since. ... (read more)
The famous backlash against Bob Dylan’s switch to playing electric music in the mid-1960s is often misunderstood. It was not an objection based on musical aesthetics. Folk purists, such as the audience at Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and the man who shouted ‘Judas!’ at a Manchester show in 1966, were not enraged by the simple fact of the volume, rhythms, and brashness of rock and roll. Dylan’s adoption of what many saw as a popular fad was more a social question of the artist-audience relationship. ... (read more)
The opening frames of Steve McQueen’s Blitz situate us in the midst of all the horror and chaos of Hitler’s lightning war – his blitzkrieg – on Britain in 1940-41. Bombs rain down on the densely populated streets of London’s East End, while firefighters and air raid patrol (ARP) wardens rush to counter the raging flames, dragging bodies, alive or dead, from the rubble. ... (read more)
Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco often darkly depicts the complex dynamics within dysfunctional families. That one of the protagonists in his latest film, Memory, has early onset dementia is by no means a red flag that this will be a hackneyed disease-of-the-week movie. Dementia has been a common theme in many recent films (Still Alice [2014] and The Father [2020] being good examples), sometimes to potent effect, though audiences’ resistance to the well-worn subject may be understandable. ... (read more)
My favourite Ralph Fiennes performance is in Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener (2005). Fiennes plays a British diplomat stationed in Africa, forced to unravel the conspiracy that led to his wife’s murder. Investigating her death, he comes to know her better than he did when she was alive; it is a backwards love story about honouring legacies we might not fully comprehend. Fiennes’s role as Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence in Edward Berger’s new Vatican thriller Conclave plays out in a similar key. ... (read more)
The first act set-up of a biopic is almost always laborious. Grandiose voiceover and lines of dialogue are laden with the knowing weight of history; various conflicting images of the subject and their ‘truth’ are forced, often boringly, into narrative harmony. Lee, the feature début from respected cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, [2004]) and long-time passion project of its star, Kate Winslet, is quick to fall prey to these generic obligations. Characters portentously refer to one another by their full names (‘What are you going to do now, Lee Miller?’) and historical turning points are neatly condensed into one-liners (‘We’re getting ready, aren’t we, for the invasion of Europe?’). ... (read more)
Where David Cronenberg’s body horrors of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Videodrome, The Fly, and Crash, were fascinating because of the fusion of technology and the human form, a new wave of genre films is anxiously asking: how much can we tweak and tinker before our bodies start to bite back? Like Theseus’s ship, how much can we swap out before nothing of our true self remains? Cosmetic surgery is booming in the 2020s, promoted via social media and normalised across every age group, so it is no wonder that a new generation of filmmakers have bodily modification on the brain. ... (read more)
The Apprentice begins with footage of Richard Nixon addressing a television audience. It is 1973 and the Senate Watergate hearings are underway. ‘People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook … Well, I’m not a crook,’ Nixon intones.
... (read more)Montessori (★★★★★) and There’s Still Tomorrow (★★★★1/2)
Italian Film Festival
by Angela Viora •
08 October 2024
Who are we to judge women like Maria Montessori, Lili d’Alengy, or Delia? Maria, whose son was raised by a nanny in the countryside while she devoted her life to educating children; Lili, who abandoned her disabled daughter to build a life as a courtesan; and Delia, trapped in an abusive relationship, demeaned and beaten daily – why don’t these women make different choices? ... (read more)
