2022 Movie Reviews

[TrueFaith77]

55.Dead for a Dollar (Walter Hill); grade: A

Finally! A real movie! The great Walter Hill returns cinema to American movies by also returning to its foundational genre, the Western. Doing so, Hill clarifies contemporary socio-political quandaries with concrete forms of morality. Moral action drives the plot, fulfills the characters, burnishes the images, and provides rhythm to the editing. One character quotes Marlowe—“Is this ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’?”—to explain the reason for the rescue mission of a married white woman (Rachel Brosnahan) presumably by a black deserter from the army (Brandon Scott) that goes from New Mexico (and Texas) to Mexico, but it also signifies the mythic nature of the story that leads to an irrevocable confrontation between ancient foes (convict Willem Dafoe and bounty hunter Christoph Waltz). It’s an American myth brimming with American tensions and dynamics, and characters who cross a porous moral border only to be defined by the hard line of truth. When his partner, a black solider (Warren S.L. Burke, conveying conflicting loyalties) asks about his nationality, Waltz answers with a Germanic accent: “I’m an American.” Every character gets the chance to state his or her position—but differences get settled (like a fair and honest election) by persuasion (Brosnahan appealing to Waltz’s essential goodness) or quick-draw contests. When Burke challenges a racist to a bullwhip duel, the whip-snaps crack like gunshots. Lloyd Ahern’s vivid lighting in sepia tone—providing delicate shading across a spectrum of skin tones—provides a sense of place (the harsh sunlight of the desert) and the perceptual reality of America’s collective unconscious like faded photographs (flashbacks are in dreamlike black-and-white). Similarly, the town names that flash on screen provide direction like a spiritual compass (Pueblo de Guadalupe, Ciudad Trinidad Maria). Ideas burst through the screen a la the patented Hill image of a horse careening through a proscenium-like window (it remains as thrilling as ever!). The abstract, cubistic editing of Hill’s Streets of Fire, The Driver, and The Long Riders matures into the metaphysical legibility of Bullet to the Head and, now, Dead for a Dollar. When one character kills someone for the first time, Hill establishes the spatial context and moral necessity by cutting to a distant character’s reaction—yelling, “Dios!”—before cutting back to show the character on the bullet's receiving end dropping dead. The title cards at the end explain the fates of the characters who survive the final shootout—a character-testing “humdinger!” exclaimed one Hill afficionado on Twitter. It appropriates the true-story trope to convey beneficent faith. It’s the best American film of the year. Viva Walter Hill!

[TrueFaith77]

56.Will-o'-the-Wisp (Joao Pedro Rodrigues); grade: B+
58.Amsterdam (David O. Russell); grade: B+
59.Raymond & Ray (Rodrigo Garcia); grade: A-


"He was a racist who liked everybody," that's how half-brothers Raymond (Ewan McGregor) and Ray (Ethan Hawke) remember their enigmatic father who left behind psychic wounds that remain fresh in Rodrigo Garcia's Raymond & Ray. The enigma of race haunts the most intriguing romantic entanglements in three films made my deeply serious artists who seem over-burdened by contemporary political concerns.

Will-o'-the-Wisp (Joao Pedro Rodrigues)
For Joao Pedro Rodrigues, this tension manifests itself in the structure of Will-o'the-Wisp. The prologue and epilogue overtly conjure the absurdities of political idolatry (Greta Thunburg, Barack Obama). Then, the film's main narrative about a blanco Spanish Prince (Mauro Costa) who joins the fire department and falls in love with a Black fireman (Andre Cabral) achieves an uncanny combination of Bunuelian surrealism and amazing sensuality to tear down contemporary shibboleths. It begins with a rhapsody on fire department drill movements and climaxes with a frisson-busting 69 position in a fire-ravaged forest with looming phalluses framing contrasting angelic faces trading naughty racially-tinged provocations. At the film's best, its sweetness (when Cabral comforts Costa after a prank) and its bold gay sexuality (nude firemen recreating famous artworks) challenges the assault on intimacy in the post-Obama, post-Covid, post-January 6 era.

Amsterdam (David O. Russell)
The tension between universal longing and divisive politics--expressed as the trauma of WWI and threat of WWII--in David O. Russell's Amsterdam results most plainly in it not being funny--and hence making a mess of history. Russell's technique appears to involve establishing the context for actors to unveil their own luminous individuality. Russell achieves an awesome spectacle: when Zoe Saldana and Christian Bale perform an autopsy looking at each other and down at the camera to express shared integrity and attraction, when Margot Robbie, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Rami Malek appear in a forward-facing three-shot balancing expositional and emotional cross-purposes, when Robbie looks at John David Washington (Denzel's son) in a p.o.v. shot to divine his essential innocence, and when WWI veterans put on a benefit show demonstrating their various talents. Through cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's emphasis on faces and the eyes shining through them, it's the most beautifully photographed American movie since Byron Shah shot Joe Nussbaum's Prom (2011). These inherently democratic images clearly testify to the uniqueness--the value--of each actor in a creative dynamic undercut by the overstuffed plot conflating political paranoia and the desire to escape. (Put bluntly, Russell proves oblivious to the contemporary resonance of a plot combining eugenics, exploitation of workers, and despotism.) Interestingly, Russell proffers escape in the form of romantic fulfillment--essentially conventional--made more complicated in Rodrigo Garcia's new film.

Raymond & Ray (Rodrigo Garcia)
Russell and Garcia are the best American directors of actors since the passing of Altman and Jonathan Demme. In Mother and Child (2011) and Nine Lives (2006), Garcia elicited from 12 actresses their best-ever performances in which they transcended even themselves to reveal each character's spiritual kernel of truth. In Raymond & Ray, Garcia gets to the essence of men's difficulty with expressing their feelings when two half-brothers reunite to bury their callous, magnetic father. McGregor and Hawke's characters suppress their pain so much that they stop short of a brotherly hug when grabs his own crotch and chides: "Hug this!" Scene-by-scene (during the car trip, interacting with two women at the wake, meeting more brothers for the first time at the burial), the brothers discover new facets of their father's mystery. They also clarify each of son's distinct responses to their father's abuse--what made jock McGregor and scholastic Hawke inseparable as children and estranged as adult cuckold and addict ("The boys are not the men"). When the funeral ritual calls upon McGregor and Hawke to say their piece, one can only speak with a trumpet, the other with a gun. These expressions draw out the feminine instincts of the "racist" white father's Mexican lover (Maribel Verdu) and Black nurse (Sophie Okonedo)--a felicitous twist of fate reminiscent of Annette Bening's reunification with her long-lost daughter Naomi Watts in Mother and Child. Through Garcia's direction--the camera tracking through the cemetery taking in the expanding brotherhood, closeups shot from the corpse's p.o.v.--McGregor and, especially, Hawke achieve such transparency that the slightest shifts in facial expression tap a wellspring of compassion.

Catharsis, at last!

[Jondalar]

15. Barbarian, grade B- = well-acted horror movie that's different but not that scary. I liked it but didn't think it was that memorable.The plot was original.

16. Smile, grade B = creepy horror move that is well-acted but not very original. It has a few jump scares that work but I kept thinking I've seen too many movies that are like it, such It Follows. Still it was effective.

17. Pearl, grade C = this is the prequel the horror movie called X. It's basically a character study of the villain Pearl. It shows how she started killing people in her early years. It's very well-acted but just not that interesting or very scary. It's forgettable.

18. Halloween Ends, grade C - = weird, takes a left turn from the previous movie and doesn't make much sense. However, I did feel there were a few original kills and I liked the ending to a degree. I'm glad this series is over though.

[TrueFaith77]

57.The Affairs of Lidia (Bruce LaBruce); grade: B
60.My Son Hunter (Robert Davi); grade: B+
61.Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Ostlund); grade: F
62.Stars at Noon (Claire Denis); grade: D

Two filmmakers in disreputable movie markets (one a sexual libertine, the other a political Conservative) both turn to Brechtian techniques to explore how contemporary politics alienate people from themselves and each other. In other words, aesthetic distance proves the route to compassion, in contrast to the bourgeois cretinism and condescending projection of two Cannes-feted arthouse films.

The Affairs of Lidia (Bruce LaBruce)
LaBruce designs this fashion-world bisexual hardcore porn to appeal to the swinger set (the mise-en-scene recalls Kershner’s The Eyes of Laura Mars). Doing so, LaBruce takes advantage of the mechanical nature of the genre (complete with a nod to Resnais’s magnificent Guerre Est Finie) through aesthetic innovation. He deconstructs the characters’ woke political poses to challenge them with the implications of radically open sexual relationships. The grieved party of the film’s sexual la ronde (Sean Ford) chastises Lidia (Skye Blue), explaining that through her existential “shallowness,” she personifies—she IS—Fashion. He exclaims: “And I LOVE fashion.” LaBruce develops an entirely new visual trope—existential AND semiotic—worthy of Kershner and Resnais: through split screens and montage, characters change or juxtapose different clothing within each sequence. It’s a dazzling extension of the profound Parent Trap montage in LaBruce’s masterpiece Saint-Narcisse.

My Son Hunter (Robert Davi)
Muckracking cinema takes on unexpected empathetic dimensions through the sensibilities of its auteurs. Actor-turned-director Davi knows the debaucherous reality of both Hollywood and D.C.—both of the elite and the exploited climbers. Reminiscent of his participation in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, Davi extends that understanding to satire. Both films dramatize a whore’s redemption—liberation—through righteous political action—and then, even better, familial reconciliation that gets to the heart of the national divide. The journalistic rigor of producers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney complements Davi’s low-down industry-town knowledge and, then, transcends it, because McElhinney borders on genius with her understanding of what truly matters in life. Davi visualizes the tragically perverted relationship of Hunter Biden with his father Joe Biden. He stages the Oedipal dialogue about their Ukranian-Russian kickback scheme against the backdrop of the most influential and still-unsurpassed sequence in movie history: the Ukraine-set Odessa steps massacre from Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet-era Battleship Potemkin. Provincial politics—like family dynamics and personal corruption—take on unfathomable geopolitical consequences. Still, the most ingenious Brechtian trope is Laurence Fox’s hilarious and heartbreaking portrayal of Hunter. Imagine Mike Leigh directing Shakespeare’s Henry IV.

Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Ostlund)
Phony in every way. Example: It implausibly portrays a long-in-the-tooth male model (Harris Dickinson) as naive about sexual exploitation in the industry (LaBruce and Davi know better!). It’s misogynist, classist, racist: a Mexican cleaning lady turns tyrant on a deserted island. She sexually exploits the male model. She murders his model girlfriend. She connives to keep the survivors of a yacht explosion under her thumb. In other words, she ends up just like the film’s rich white men—a mere projection of the filmmaker’s and the art-film audience’s own murderous power-lust.

Stars at Noon (Claire Denis)
The affair between a journalist-turned-prostitute (ha!) (Margaret Qualley) and a British secret agent (Joe Alwyn) trapped in Nicaragua amid a regional war and global proxy war should provide the opportunity for sexual exploration—two sexy actors exposing character depth and skin. (Alwyn smoldered in Ang Lee’s great Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.) Instead, we get the perceptual reality of Alwyn’s contract limiting nudity and, that cliche shorthand for hetero intimacy, the gross-out of Alwyn using Qualley’s menstrual blood for finger lube (again, LaBruce and Davi know better!). Two American CIA agents (Danny Ramirez and Benny Safdie) test this intimacy—Qualley’s fidelity—by offering her freedom in exchange for her betrayal of Alwyn. The film’s only dynamic visual vector is Qualley’s penchant for sudden outbursts directed at the camera—white fecklessness as existential privilege.

[TrueFaith77]

63.Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook); grade: F
64.The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh); grade: F
67.Peaceful (Emmanuelle Bercot); grade: A

Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook)
The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh)
Befitting their cultural fate, let's dispatch with them quickly: Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave and Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin argue for euthanasia (suicide) as a cover for the filmmakers’ advocacy of eugenics (genocide)--and are both too atrocious to afford more words.

Peaceful (Emmanuelle Bercot)
Leave it to the French to restore dignity and meaning to the process of death in the upcoming Francois Ozon film Everything Went Fine and, now, Emmanuelle Bercot’s bravely emotional Peaceful. As with her superb Standing Tall, about juvenile delinquents, Bercot transforms the instructional social-issue movie into art. She structures the film around the seasons—like Andre Techine’s Being 17. Reminding of Robert Altman (A Prairie Home Companion) or Patrice Chereau (Son frere), Bercot achieves resonances through the poetic integrity of her actors' performances (a testament to the value of an individual life). Reminding me a bit of Chereau, Benoît Magimel plays an acting teacher diagnosed with terminal cancer—coaxing vulnerability from his students (teaching them to hug, to say goodbye, to achieve “presence”). Similarly, at the hospital, staff go through exercises to cope with and improve their treatment of terminal patients—including musical performances. The staff also plays for the patients, accompanying tango dancers invited to entertain them. The motif of performance reaches many emotional peaks related to Magimel’s existential—spiritual—dilemma. A student with a crush plays Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Lou Lampros delivering my favorite scene of the year, in which three character's communicate Shakespearean levels of ardor). There's an impromptu performance by staff and patients of “Go Down Moses” (a deliverance) and, finally, a pop benediction (courtesy Prince) that resolves the film’s Oedipal conflicts—an overpowering mother, 2 generations of absent fathers. The resonances build and build so that p.o.v. shots of a plane’s trail in the sky and a reclined—exhausted—view of the Hospital on a rainy night generate spectator empathy for the dying and the grieving. The images of transfusion blood in tubes represents two meanings of the gift of the life. A shot of a mother cradling a baby in her arms provides the impetus for what might be the summation moment of Catherine Deneuve’s iconic career, which again (as in Standing Tall), Bercot integrates into the fabric of the family drama--she plays Magimel's mother. As her grandson, Oscar Morgan achieves “presence” (when his mother asks if he needs her, he replies, “I always need you”). As Magimel's doctor, Gabriel A. Sara conveys the empathy undergirding hospital protocol, while as the head nurse, Cecile de France, achieves the empathy that breaks protocol. Magimel registers the import of every moment befalling his character—and, like an actor, seizes them as opportunities to make meaning. Through it all, Deneuve's humility sets the stage for her family’s redemption. It's the year's most moving film.

[TrueFaith77]

22.White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch (Alison Klayman); grade: F-
28.How They Got Over (Robert Clem); grade: B+

Simply put, Klayman’s Netflix documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch is the year’s very worst film. Klayman misunderstands the mystery of how an entire industry can be built around one person’s beauty ideals and sexual desires because they unexpectedly synchronize with the multitudes who share it, aspire to it, and are frustratingly outside of it. That frustration manifested itself in a successful discrimination lawsuit by plain-looking A&F employees who just happen to be racially diverse (Asian devotees also protested en masse—a less healthy response than the Live at Budokan screams greeting Cheap Trick’s “BIG. EYES.”). Then, it curdles into something mercenary through the film’s own utterly unfounded #MeToo witch hunt of CEO Michael Jeffries (never even accused!) and salacious accusations against visionary photographer Bruce Weber (never criminally charged). Meanwhile, Clem provides clarity about how culture really works in How They Got Over. The documentary explores both the personalities and the material differences that instigated innovation on the church-based Chitlin circuit. That innovation birthed the American pop culture of the 1960s that expressed universal spiritual longing and aspiration. The ur-innovators experienced this seeming ecumenicism as an abandonment of Jesus. As such, with ears pointed toward eternity, they did not share in worldly reward or recognition. Yet, history responded to their faith with the pop culture that established the world lexicon of Love.

[TrueFaith77]

65.Please Baby Please (Amanda Kramer); grade: F
66.The Ambush (Pierre Morel); grade: C

Is all content propaganda? Even when I go in “blind” to a movie, filled with hope for personal expressions, filmmakers either proselytize or get appropriated by ideological agendas.

Please Baby Please (Amanda Kramer)
Kramer proves utterly incapable of utilizing the Panavasion camera Please Baby Please boasts. It results in garish colors smudged across straight-on tableaux compositions, nauseating fantasy sequence dissolves, and, in the year’s most queasy shot, a close-up of a deluded drag queen played Cole Escola mid-pop aria (is his creepy Search Party psycho just his usual schtick?). The movie means to deconstruct codes of gender from the era of Marlon Brando—in a style stolen from Fassbinder and Bidgood. However, the didactic structuralist jargon spewed by the actors ignores the surprise of sexual attraction and gendered sympathy. It’s a performance-art scam—paid for by celebrity benefactors—reminiscent of St. Vincent playing second bill. Only Karl Glusman’s mesh-attired biker—a symbol—seems a recognizable, tactile human being.

The Ambush (Pierre Morel)
The need for content (released on streaming the same week as its theatrical run), the endless revenue streams from governments (here, the UAE), and the market for cheapo action films (another Saban release) provides job opportunities for capable genre filmmakers like Morel (of the Besson-produced Taken and From Paris With Love). With The Ambush, Morel demonstrates his frankly excellent montage—delineating the ever-widening fields of defense and attack in the UAE’s response to an insurgent ambush—and compositional sense—the clarity of lighting and camera placements inside of tanks under assault. Morel achieves narrative economy as well, establishing each character’s motivation. He expands narrative economy into into thematic economy (one solider justifies the sacrifice of UAE’s fathers for the children of Yemen). Finally, he extends thematic economy into symbolic economy, climaxing with the gifting of a handmade toy horse. Morel fails to clarify the larger impetus for the war or to explore the complexities of character under durress (elements present even in his previous Peppermint). Ultimately, propaganda reduces his skill to sentimentality and manipulation, lacking intensity.