31.Firebird (Peter Rebane); grade: B

“There is a thin line between bravery and carelessness.” That’s how a character describes flying fighter jets in the Soviet-era set Firebird. This warning also applies to two soldiers’ gay love story. Their daring gets heightened by a society of surveillance (wires, spies, anonymous reports) and flashes hot in tame love scenes. The movie is best when glorying over the actors. Blond, impossibly defined, birdlike Tom Prior (Sergey) and lean, handsome, square-jawed Oleg Zagorodnii (Roman) connect over their artistic interests as photographers and, then, when Roman introduces Sergey to ballet. Director Rebane makes their chemistry palpable whether focusing on their shoulders and clavicles or when heightening their bold sexual adventures with stolen kisses hiding in the forest or when jet engines signify orgasm. Totalitarian suppression and military accoutrement give their desire the frisson of doomed liberation absent from domesticated consumer-capitalist homosexuality. Oleg uses his camera—and acting as an athletic Hamlet—to capture fleeting moments (the birth of a flirtatious smile). Rebane similarly captures an actor’s expression of grief and gratitude. Firebird achieves surprising emotion by providing psychological (individual) background to Sergey and jettisoning the victimization catalogued in Brokeback Mountain.

8. Top Gun 2, grade B+ = what makes this movie good are the flight and combat scenes. They are excellent. However, that's pretty much it. The love interest is pretty much unbelievable and so is the plot. However, I believe this is the best they could of done with this sequel. The movie is a good time, but it's forgettable and I don't have much to say about it. I think Tom Cruise is starting to look old though.

33.Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski); grade: B

The amazing authenticity of Tom Cruise really makes Top Gun: Maverick soar. The publicity around the movie focuses on Tom Cruise performing his own stunts. He demonstrates this most obviously in his Buster Keaton-esque derring-do in the Mission: Impossible movies, especially the fourth installment Ghost Protocol (directed by Brad Bird). With Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise impresses folks with the realism of actually flying fighter jets. (The CGI is seamless.) The g-force tugs at his facial muscles. But the greatest special effect in the movie is Cruise's face and his physicality (remember the paternal phantom punch in Spielberg's War of the Worlds? It's still Cruise's finest moment--and it's magnificent.) Here, Cruise amazes when emotional recall plays over his countenance when he sees a new generation of pilots singing along to "Great Balls of Fire" like he and his buddy Goose in the original Top Gun, part of that 80s tradition that reduced narrative to commercials and music videos. Now, Cruise imparts emotional weight to the utterly weightless characterization of the first film. Similarly, Cruise affords emotional generosity to his reunion scene with Val Kilmer's Ice Man. Both scenes induce goose bumps. Unfortunately, Cruise's gravitas (earned after 2002's breakthrough Minority Report) grounds the film in his significance but does not apply his significance. There is no frisson to his generation-gap conflict with Goose's son (Miles Teller is like a ripe eunuch) or in his romantic redemption with gorgeous Jennifer Connelly. Commitment-phobe Maverick never links Cruise's emotional authenticity to the audience's need for social-spiritual commitment--as did his characterizations in Minority Report, War of the Worlds, Tropic Thunder, and Lions for Lambs.

34.Benediction (Terence Davies); grade: A+

Terence Davies, one of the few living giants of cinema, daringly connects man's capacity for cruelty represented by World War I to gay men's cruelty to each other in the Siegfried Sassoon bio-pic Benediction. That makes this the most sophisticated bio-pic since Visconti's Ludwig and the most unsparing and morally insightful gay portraiture since Chereau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train--epochal achievements. Epitomizing Davies' formal genius (and frugality), he expresses Sassoon's horror at the devastations of World War I by integrating found footage of the War. Doing so, Davies movingly connects his own personal responses to the men in the footage with Sassoon's political and poetic protest of the war (the footage recall's Pauline Kael's line in Riefenstahl's pre-WWII Olympia: "these young men who were so soon to kill each other"). After the war, which took the life of Sassoon's unconsummated friend, the poet Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), Sassoon joins England's gay elite and enjoys its hedononism--headed by Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine). Broken-hearted, Sassoon breaks hearts. (More to say on the bitter irony of Novello's betrayal of the fame afforded by his common touch and good looks.) Years (decades?) pass, but Davies ingeniously keeps his actors young until applying morphing special effects to visualize youthful beauty's fading and the spiritual-physical ramifications of hard-heartedness (a reunion of lovers dredges up old betrayals and new vindictiveness). By humanizing the generational conflict between Sassoon and his son (an agonizing scene of Sassoon's hissyfit over loud rock-'n-roll music), Davies demonstrates the lingering effects of World War I to achieve a wide-ranging critique of British culture and the legacy of the 20th Century. Sassoon's ineffective objection to World War I and his seduction in the world of fine young cannibals engenders a need for redemption. Sassoon expresses this need in his art, his heterosexual marriage and parentage, and his conversion to Catholicism. Davies expresses this in overwhelming imagery--tableaus come to life--and musical juxtapositions. He answers Sassoon's longings with ravishing rhapsodies (poetic meditations on trees as signs of permanence and natural beauty like Godard's Nouvelle Vague and on rainfalls over empty space charged with remembered bonhomie and overlapping imagery of synchronized swimming with his one true love). Finally, Davies achieves a spiritual epiphany when Sassoon discovers in his desire to redeem his life the necessity for humility. Davies juxtaposes the youthful pairing-off denied Sassoon and the physical ravages of war spared Sassoon in a montage unified by the poetry of a superior artist. Here, the appealing poise of Jack Lowden's Sassoon and the stony inflexibility of Peter Capaldi's older Sassoon finally crumble--a life's pose deconstructed compassionately. It's the best movie of 2022.

Top Cliche starring Tom Cringe
 

As an unsentimental neophyte who never saw the original (although I did read the screenplay as homework just in case), the new Top Gun was a cringefest of Tom Cruise glorification comprising a succession of cliched dialogue and plot development that is laughable despite taking itself seriously. Much of the film was rehashed from Cruise and Kosinki's earlier, and far superior, film "Oblivion".
Looking forward to the next M:I installments and anything from Kosinksi with a decent script.

I agree with everything you say—especially about Oblivion!—except I think Cruise is extraordinary in the film.

36.Lost Illusions (Xavier Giannoli); grade A

At 2.5 hours, Lost Illusions adapts the 1840s serial novel by Balzac at breakneck speed. Director Giannoli's visual imagination illustrates dense narration to simultaneously detail a young writer's rise and comeuppance in post-Revolutionary Paris (a portrait of Napoleon appears in an antique store window). It juxtaposes the return of the aristocratic classes--to which the writer believes he belongs--and the era's corrupt upstart media--through which the writer plots his climb and revenge. The plot hurtles toward an unholy collusion between these forces to destroy the benighted young writer by exacting a cruel proxy vengeance. The modern parallels to today's media elite and the climbers of internet alternative media prove bracing and, ultimately, devastating. As Armond White points out, Balzac seemingly invented the term "fake news"--and deconstructed how it works through this story (as a promising rural poet, Lucien de Rubempré works in a printing press). What energizes this adaptation is the casting of actors whose modern gay portraitures have always rubbed me the wrong way--Benjamin Voisin (Ozon's Summer of 85), Vincente Lacoste (Honore's Sorry Angel), and Xavier Dolan (his own I Killed My Mother). In period garb, each of them physically embodies a Mythic type--naïveté, cynicism, and ambition, respectively--as immediately recognizable as the era's caricatures illustrating newspapers with names like Le Satan. The actors' gay-cinema resonance in heterosexual roles here creates a shorthand for shared sympathy and envy. In this way, the film awakens political consciousness in the audience by activating the political significance of its actors. So, their exploitable humanity matches that of the film's sacrificial lamb, an innocent who she dares to expose her vulnerability in the public sphere.

Ranking Terence Davies

Greatest Films of My Lifetime
1.The Long Day Closes (1993)
2.Distant Voices, Still Lives (1989)

Masterpieces
3.A Quiet Passion (2017)
4.Benediction (2022)

Great
5.The House of Mirth (2000)
6.The Neon Bible (1995)
7.Sunset Song (2016)
8.The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

Near-Great
9.Of Time and the City (2009)

37.Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg); grade: C

Crimes of the Future combines elements of my two personal "favorite" Cronenberg films. Here the perverse techno sexuality of 1996’s Crash meets the bizarre labyrinthine conspiracy of the 1991 Naked Lunch. Yet, it jettisons the most interesting parts of those films. Instead of the common connection between people and cars in Crash, Crimes of the Future focuses on niche performance art and body-horror sadism. Instead of the literary-biography elements of Naked Lunch, the original screenplay of Crimes of the Future reflects the faux-existential pretensions of Cronenberg. Double agents engage in a pseudo-political war between those who support body adaptation (incorrectly labeled "evolution") and those serving the powerful which seeks to maintain the biological status quo. Yet, the status quo means making a spectacle out of mutilation, and the radical means accepting the reduction of humanity to biological impulses. It affirms the question: are we just eating and ****ing machines? That's why Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart give labored performances and why Cronenberg over-relies on cgi instead of practical effects. Even Lea Saydoux, the most believable and emotionally dynamic performer in the movie, plays a character who cynically fakes her own expressiveness when the film reaches its transgressive climax. The movie's consensual mutilations reaches their logical conclusion in the desecration of a child's corpse. Some complain that the movie's final shot acts as too much of a cliffhanger. Note: it fulfills the movie's art direction--bio-furniture designed to achieve maximum comfort. It features the rebellious act of the story's main mole who risks death for the chance to embrace dietary evolution. Still: It's more interesting and more intelligently crafted than Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Northman, and The Batman! They’re the crimes of Cronenberg’s ‘90s future.

I was surprised at how much they tried to make this movie politically correct, but. I shouldn't of been. I wonder is Armie Hammer is done with sex addiction therapy sessions. It was his first movie since the controversy.

38.Jerry & Marge Go Large (David Frankel); grade: C
39.Spiderhead (Joseph Kosinski); grade: F
40.Hustle (Jeremiah Zagar); grade: B

Three new semi-streaming movies deal with characters seeking redemption. Each of them hinges on the persona of its lead actors as movie stars. Jerry & Marge Go Large superficially subverts Bryan Cranston's Walter White from Breaking Bad. He's still the smartest person in the room, but this time rather than justifying a fascist amorality based on intellectual superiority, Cranston redeems a retiree's intelligence by extending the gains he makes cracking the lottery code to aid his community (at the suggestion of his wife played by Annette Bening--a liberal paragon). Just when you think Cranston is going to enact super-smart vengeance on a rival, Harvard gang of professional lottery players, he gives a speech about the value of community. Unfortunately, the film lacks the sense of economic reality, personal idiosyncrasy, and moral rigor that Nia Vardalos brought to Larry Crowne and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. Vardalos is the only auteur of modern American economic crisis--I'll apply the word "genius"--while Jerry & Marge director never really challenges his actors' significance because the characters never get confronted with the inherent exploitation of the lottery system upon which their gains depend. In Oblivion and Top Gun: Maverick, Kosinski uses sci-fi gambits to explore the moral facets of Tom Cruise's persona. However, the sci-fi muddle of Spiderhead features non-stars Miles Teller and Chris Hemsworth, who both lack the charisma, gravitas, and mystery of true movie stars. Instead, they signify overgrown petulance and over-muscled blandness--thus appealing to franchise-movie audiences. Their characters' values get challenged first by experimental drugs that manipulate or stifle individual impulses for the purposes of total control and, then, by their ability to forgive a mother jailed for fatally neglecting her child; she's played by Jurnee Smollett whose only significance here is borrowed from her brother's public shame. The claustrophobic, neo-fascist setting betrays the worst of Netflix high-concept filmmaking and reveals Kosinki's unremarkable craftsmanship and limited imagination. Finally, Adam Sandler continues his prolific Netflix contract with Hustle by going into semi-serious mode. Instead of his superb team of comedy filmmakers, here Sandler collaborates with faux artsy Jeremiah Zagar who specializes in lower-class miserabalism. Sandler--the actor-as-auteur--transcends Zagar's verite aesthetic. His need to redeem the mistakes of his own past manifests itself in the care and guidance--the love--he imparts to a gifted unknown basketball player (played by Juancho Hernangomez). It's as if playing a basketball scout expresses Sandler's artistic quest to discover human value in unlikely, vulgar scenarios. In the film, Sandler's fatherly care for Hernangomez conveys the beauty of redemption.

Oops looks like I forgot to post this one


32.Firestarter (Keith Thomas); grade: C+
33.Memory (Martin Campbell); grade: C
34.Montana Story (Scott McGehee, David Siegel); grade: F

Two B-movies and an American Indie film deal in different ways with child abuse. None do so sufficiently, even as they tap into subterranean political fears. From best to worst (essentially in order of cinematically satisfying catharsis): 1) Firestarter streamlines typically overpacked Stephen King material. A secret government agency tortures two young adults in experiments that transform them into psychic human weapons. They parent a messianic child with nuclear-potential powers. Zac Efron’s perfect physique makes him an impressive Daddy and a Zaddy. When he unleashes his and his daughter’s rage—in refreshingly low-fi practical effects—it conveys something resonant about parental authority compared to all-too-believable government treachery (Gloria Reuben resonates as the villain). 2) Meanwhile, Campbell’s overlong Memory is the best directed of the 3. It emphasizes the determinism of trauma in Liam Neeson’s amorality as a hitman who finds his moral center: “I don’t hurt children.” His quest to destroy those that do takes him to the realm of the rich and powerful, those above the law and moral law. “My son was weak. You are not my son,” threatens Monica Bellucci. 3) Finally, McGehee-Siegel tie child abuse to abuse of the environment in an aesthetically constipated film. Haley Lu Richardson and Owen Teague play estranged activist sister and gay brother clenched expressions. They replace family obligation and forgiveness with murder, justified by their respective self-righteousness and guilt. The movie’s final shot could have given release after the dour resolution, but the directors euthanize the cinematic potential.

Another one I forgot to post…

35.Downton Abbey: A New Era (Simon Curtis); grade: F

Downton Abbey is anti-cinema. The latest installment in the franchise is directed by the abominable Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn, The Woman in Gold), but Julian Fellowes is the real show-runner here. Fellowes learned nothing from working with master auteur Robert Altman on the surprise hit Godford Park that made Downton Abbey possible—and unacceptable. As in Gosford Park, the invasion into an Upstairs-Downstairs world by movie celebrities rings Fellowes’ bells. In Gosford, Altman explored the sources of devastating fantasy while Fellowes now indulges it (but without offending his audience of aristocracy queens). A filmmaker cites Abel Gance’s titanic (now hard-to-find) Napoleon as the impetus for filming a silent movie on location at Downton abbey. Then, Fellowes ripping off Singin’ in the Rain, the filmmaker ludicrously makes the transition to sound without filming in a studio. Like the MCU, the Downton Abbey franchise is television that makes no room for artists or narrative fulfillment. There’s not an expressive edit or shot in the film (two characters exclaim over a French Riviera beach view, and Curtis cuts to a reverse shot in which the actors’ heads are in focus but the view is not). Like serialized TV, it’s all anti-climaxes (Will Mary cheat on her husband? Does Cora have cancer? Is Robert illegitimate? Will Thomas get laid? No, no, no, and who knows?). It completes the transformation from movie fantasy to TV’s total commodification.

9. The Black Phone, grade B = Atmospheric horror movie with a few scares. The movie has a simple plot, but it's very well-made and acted and very creepy. It's by the same director who made Sinister and the first Doctor Strange movie. Takes place in the 1970s and it has that Halloween feel. I'm going to add this to my horror collection. It is more creepy than scary though.

43.Marx Can Wait (Marco Bellocchio); grade: A+

Leave it to Marco Bellocchio to use the autobiographical documentary genre to advance the language of cinema. At first, Bellocchio utilizes various familiar documentary tropes to explore his own complicated relationship to the very personal subject: testimonials (witnesses and "experts" recount the unexpected suicide of Marco's twin Camillo in 1968), family ritual (a birthday meal with the families of the Bellocchio siblings), found footage and family archives, and clips from Bellocchio's own filmography. Aesthetic Spoilers: Bellocchio then astonishes with devastating formal gambits that achieve spiritual revelations. He expands the Rappaport-esque Kuleshov effect by splicing in baby photos of he and his siblings to create the impression that they are responding to a sequence from one of his films that dramatizes his own family's playtime (recalling a similar use of the technique to witness the rise of fascism in Italy and to reflect the moral investigation of his own daughter's gaze). In slow-motion, he completes the individual portraiture of his surviving siblings--whose insights into and conflicting memories about Camillo and his death constitutes the film's narrative--as a thorough examination of family dynamics--one sibling turns another's frown into a smile. After that, Bellocchio reminds of his powerful compositional sense and exquisite lighting with a deep-focus shot of Marco walking on a bridge with the fog and a city behind him as if left alone with the mystery of his brother, only for Bellocchio to tickle spectator imagination and express his own deepest longing with the image of a jogger running past with a logo on his sweat jacket that explodes in the mind with unexpected associations (Camillo was a gym trainer). The moment fulfills Bellocchio's exploration of a gym space earlier int he film as he ponders his brother's occupational disappointment. Finally, Bellocchio shows us something I can't remember ever seeing before that challenges preconceptions about personal ambition and artistic pursuit (I won't spoil it). It rivals the visionary expression of radical faith that concluded Bellocchio's career-revitalizing My Mother's Smile (2005)--which kicked off the most awesome run of films in the 21st Century. No wonder a Catholic priest read that particular film as a penitent's confession. Both films climax with the post-postmodern spectacle of divine absolution. Now, Marx Can Wait constitutes Bellocchio's act of contrition.

44.A Night in the Fields (Guillaume Grélardon); grade: B+
45.Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryusuke Hamaguchi); grade: B
46.My Donkey, My Lover, & I (Caroline Vignal); grade: A

Three recent art-house movies aim to reconnect audiences to a cultural heritage that vivified human relations in opposition to contemporary alienation (essential dependence vs. authoritarian isolation).

1) The platonic friendship at the center of A Night in the Fields provides the opportunity for Grélardon to catalogue various forms of intimacy and physical love during a fateful night of working-class recreation. His visuals connect the gay-youth films of fellow French filmmakers Andre Techine, Gael Morel, and Francois Ozon with the American youth-cult films of Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Hill. The resonances culminate in an iconic image of male affection—sharing a seat on a bike ride—familiar from those French auteurs in Wild Reeds, Full Speed, and Summer of 85 The image originated as mother-son love in Pasolini’s Mama Roma, a process Grélardon tracks narratively from family tenderness to friendly compassion.

2) The overrated Hamaguchi practices rare narrative efficiency in the three thematically-linked shorts in Wheel of Fortune. Although the rhetorical progression reminds of Eric Rohmer’s anthologies, Hamaguchi highlights each story’s existential moment of grace with zoom shots—countering the zoom prisons of Kubrickian misanthropy. (The second story’s perverse feminist triumph is worthy of Mary Gaitskill.)

3) Last, and best, Vignal awakens her self-involved heroine (and audience) to the Other In My Lover, My Donkey, and I. After receiving a benediction from the impossible protagonist in Rohmer’s masterpiece La Rayon Verte (Marie Rivière), Laure Calamy unfurls her self-destructive romantic history onto a saintly donkey named Patrick. Through this dynamic, Patrick chases out the snakes of sociopathology that threaten to doom Calamy. Cineaste Vignal leverages the spiritual-narrative trope of human-and-animal/alien bonding (from National Velvet to E.T.) to revivify Rohmerian existential Faith. Hence, the film’s range of feeling—from enervation to hilarity to endearment to catharsis—achieves the spiritual version of restoring dead flesh (as in a fling with a biker). The adulterous “lover” played by Benjamin Lavernhe (hilarious on stage as Scapin the Schemer) further anchors the film, beyond cinema tradition, to Moliere romantic ritual. I imagine Clarence Brown, Rohmer, Spielberg, and Moliere moved to tears by Patrick’s final bequeathing of hope.

10. Thor Love and Thunder, grade C - = Huge disappointment. Basically its a comedy. There are some cute moments but they turned Thor into a joke.He doesn't seem like a super hero. He seems like a comedian.. Marvel movies used to be dependable. You could count on them to be good, but more and more you never know what you are going to get. This movie is blah.

11. Bullet Train, grade F = Hated this movie. I couldn't follow the plot and eventually fell asleep in the movie theater. I still don't know exactly what is about. The British accents and humor were hard to follow and the timeline of events made things even more confusing. Definitely style over substance. I give it the finger.

12. Where the Crawdad Sings, grade D = Poorly directed. Based on a very popular book and is a murder mystery. It's just not done well and feels amateurish. Beautiful cinematography and is well acted but that's it. You can tell there is a good story in the movie somewhere but the story is told wrong. The movie also feels like a movie of the week and not like a real movie. Big disappointment.

13 Fall, grade B- = Not bad, but forgettable. Two young women get stuck on top of a tower and get down. That's the whole plot. Well acted with a nice cinematography, the movie had me until the end. The ending is weak. I did have vertigo during parts of the movie and there are some tense moments and few decent plot twists.However, the ending hurts the movie and it's just sort of forgettable.

14. Beast, grade C = A lion with a grudge tries to kill a family on sightseeing trip in Africa. Well acted, with good cinematography, the movie is just not that fun. And some of the choices the characters make are soo stupid that by the end I was rooting for the lion to kill them. Totally forgettable. I will say Ibis Elba really is a movie star and I want to see him in more movies.

47.Fall (Scott Mann); grade: B-

Just as an exploitation film teasing one's fear of heights, Mann's Fall achieves the desired effect. It's concept: Two women get trapped atop the country's 4th tallest structure with no way down. (My hands are sweating just typing this, remembering the film.) However, the proves to be a double-entendre as well: it's about the perils of falling in love, of the potential for grief and for betrayal. Overcoming the former and confronting the latter provides the dramatic arch and conflict between the two women on a platform a bazillion feet above the ground. Grace Caroline Currey (from TV's Revenge) and Virginia Gardner give the film their conviction--and are exciting female heroines when survival mode kicks in (reminding me of the pleasures offered by My Side of the Mountain or Castaway). Two obligatory twists get thrown in (one I saw coming, but still gasped at the reveal; one I saw coming so hard, I thought the film wouldn't fall so low--it did, continuing a new survival movie cliche). At its core, it suggests a man's ideas about women's relationship fears.

48. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi); grade: F

Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness expands the Fascist dimensions of the MCU and the recent fascination with the concept of a multiverse. The metaphysic is one of randomness conquered by Will (dictatorial social planning). Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness hooks audiences with sentimentality (Strange's romantic regret and Wanda's maternal pain). As with Lennon imagining a sky with no significance in the fascist anthem "Imagine" and Everything Everywhere All at Once conceiving of a creation with no meaning--no creator--DSATMM offers the salve of images lacking emotional resonance. It completes the dulling—the cleansing from Difference—of pop culture.

49.Peter Von Kant (Francois Ozon); grade: A

Ozon remakes Rainer Werner Fassbinder's lesbian melodrama Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant as a fictionalized biography of Fassbinder. The layers of mise-en-abyme intoxicate like a vertiginy of movie love (made palpable by Manuel Dacosse's liberated camera and rich complementary color scheme). First, in 70 minutes, Ozon tightens and personalizes the Brechtian theatricality of Fassbinder's 2-hour-plus dirge (that climaxes with genuine revelation--a Brechtian coup de grace). Because the film is now about a middle-aged gay filmmaker obsessed with a male ingenue in the '70s, it hones in on the sex politics of today's #MeToo moment. Ozon deepens the topicality by revealing the complexity of sexual and capitalistic exploitation, the willing participation on both sides and the way an artist's desires manifest themselves personally and artistically. So, yes, Ozon finds within Fassbinder's dialectic materialist-then-spiritual tract, the essence of gay sensibility that Fassbinder revealed in his last--and greatest--film Querelle. Hence, the film's diegetic soundtrack includes a rendition of that film's theme song as sung here by Isabelle Adjani. Another layer, Ozon's inspired casting of Isabelle Adjani as Peter Von Kant's muse allows him to investigates her significance as a female expression of gay men's deepest longings: a wall-paper sized photograph of her face looms over many of the scenes, just like the Renaissance artworks portraying the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. So, Ozon continues his own personal investigation of melodrama--distinct form Fassbinder's. Furthermore, Ozon's casting of flirty-eyed Khalil Ben Gharbia suggests his own affinities more than Fassbinder's--and expands to surprising classical and pop ideas of male beauty. (Adjani devastates with her response to Peter’s demand to know if she slept with Gharbia.) Put simply: through creative non-fiction and disguised autobiography and intertextuality, Ozon creates through the characterization of Denis Menochet as Peter Von Kant an emotional catalogue of gay sexual life--the profound need at the center of it all. Menochet gives the performance of the year because his eyes capture the way a lover begs for every morsel of reassurance. Ozon discovers the genesis of that need in a profound scene featuring Hanna Schygulla, Fassbinder's young ingenue now playing "his" mother. However, Von Kant the filmmaker only finds an outlet in movie-making for his capacity for feeling. That makes this top-tier Ozon. But still not great. The Fassbinder structure contains an ellipsis in which the power dynamic shifts between the two characters--deconstructing and critiquing the role of power in human relations. Therein resides the lost opportunity for Ozon to explore the specifics of sexual experience--intimacy--that seems to reside in the memory of the filmmaker's eyes that open and close the film. Ozon's Querelle remains pending.

What? Fascist anthem??? Where did you pull that one from???
Get outta here

50.I Came By (Babak Avari); grade: D-

The Brits jumping on the race-based horror genre bandwagon (think Get Out and all its white-guilt indulging progeny) only demonstrates that they have slightly more wit than their American counterparts. In I Came By, the cleverness manifests itself in a few identity-politics genre twists. First, the white supremacist, homophobic, imperialist serial killer played by Hugh Bonneville at first appears to be a gay offing his exotic tricks. Nope. He's just British! (He barks into a black female detective's face: "I thought you were one of the smart ones!") Then, director Avari sneakily makes it seem as though middle-class graffiti terrorist George MacKay and, then, his mother Kelly Macdonald will take down the villain. It's a double-down on the gimmick that Hitchcock (and De Palma) would raise into profound art in Psycho and Dressed to Kill. Because those two actors were so memorable in, respectively, The True History of the Kelly Gang and Gosford Park, the spectator may not have guessed that it is unknown Zimbabwean actor Percelle Ascott who must avenge them. I was hoping his baby mama and then his child would have to carry the mantel to extend the joke. Instead, it's just more wish-fulfillment fantasy.

51.Athena (Romain Gavras); grade: F

Athena throws a Molotov cocktail into a combustibly divided culture. Background: Director Romain Gavras is the son of politically-sophisticated and aesthetically-gifted Costa-Gavras (Z, State of Siege, Capital, and the great The Confession). Romain's previous film The World Is Yours references both Scarface and Tarantino to address immigration culture-shock and ethnic criminal underworlds in France (featuring greatest-living actress Isabelle Adjani in a Cesar-nominated performance). So one enters Athena with more than the requisite open mind. The extended long-take that opens the film introduces the emotional-political terrain: 3 Muslim brothers' differing responses to the murder of their 4th and youngest brother by, it is believed, the police. It could also be read as a De Palma-esque media critique. A Molotov cocktail thrown by militant now-youngest brother Karim (Sami Slimane) explodes a press conference meant to encourage peaceful protest featuring the French military-garbed brother Abdel (Dali Benssalah). Shortly after, Karim choreographs the dropping of debris by utilizing his cell phone screen of live news coverage outside the Athena living projects that he and his marauding gang has barricaded. Ultimately, the technique, with its rousing music score and fluid snaking camera movements, celebrates cultural chaos. (The oldest brother Karim (Sami Slimane) has his own socially destructive and degenerate motivation during the tenement's collapse.) With their opposing approaches, handsome Slimane and Benssalah perfectly represent propagandistic semiotics--in balance. As Gavras perversely turns fate, the film and the two brothers choose a side and their equal appeal sentimentalizes privileged filmmaker Gavras's projection of revolutionary politics onto an oppressed minority. Too much a literalist, Gavras takes the barrio name of "Athena" to infuse the story with elements of Greek Tragedy. *SPOILERS*: Topping even Oedipus Rex, all 4 brothers ultimately die (including 1 by fratricide!). Then, Gavras reveals the previously withheld twist: that youngest brother was not killed by the police, after all, but by radical white supremacists posing as police. Their successfully achieved aims: the sparking civil unrest and the destruction of the Athena projects and the undermining of confidence in the police. The imagined power of a fringe political movement to manipulate social distrust actually exposes the irresponsible employment of technique by Gavras. Fortunately, nobody cares about this movie.

52.Gigi & Nate (Nick Hamm); grade: B-
53.Confess, Fletch (Greg Mottola); grade: C+
54.After Ever Happy (Castille Landon); grade: B-

In Greg Mottola's aptly titled reboot Confess, Fletch, Fletch (as played by John Hamm) is guilty as hell... guilty of being white. That ends up being the subterranean theme in a comedy about the good fortune of bumbling investigative reporter turned private investigator. "White privilege" also explain the mystery of comic actor Hamm's career--as in his ludicrously acclaimed psychotic cypher Don Draper in the pseudo-dramatic Mad Men (recalled here by the presence of John Slattery). Confess, Fletch brings this concern to the surface when police detectives played by black actor Ron Wood Jr. and Iranian actress Ayden Mayeri solve the case no thanks to Fletch's detective skills but with assist from Fletch's ability to infiltrate a yachting club. This is how Mottola (who directed the terrific comedies Adventureland and Paul) brings Fletch into the modern world--afflicted by pandemics of all sorts (the villain is a germaphobe, Fletch bemoans the state of journalism and the presidency). Fletch/Hamm attempts to expiate his white guilt with the spectacle of gifting various supporting characters with the film's loot of Mussolini-purloined art masterpieces. Face it, though, this sometimes-funny movie wouldn't have gotten made without white affirmative action. "Privilege" significantly provides the invisible safety net for the lead characters who deal with the repercussions of physical and psychological traumas, respectively, in the B-movies Gigi & Nate and After Ever Happy. (Notably, Marcia Gay Harden is in both Confess, Fletch and Gigi & Nate--she's never been better frankly; Josphine Langford is in both After Ever Happy and Gigi & Nate--showing a versatility and a sexiness more distinctive than the bland white affirmative action beneficiary and current "it girl" Florence Pugh.) The cgi "service animal" monkey in Gigi & Nate and the revolving, almost-surreal interchangeable cast of supporting actors in the After series (After Ever Happy is the 4th in the ongoing saga) orbit the perceptual reality of the whiteness of lead actors Charlie Rowe (Gigi & Nate)--so memorable in TV's Red Band Society and the stage's Judas Kiss--and Hero Fiennes Tiffin (After Ever Happy). The benefits--the options--their characters enjoy and even the privilege of the genres they inhabit (inspirational, extreme Romanticism) provide the context for the universal feeling that their stories engender. As New Order titled a song: Guilt is a useless emotion.

54-1/2. Dos entre muchos (Julian Hernandez); grade: A+

Julian Hernandez is one of only two great new filmmakers in the 21st century (Zack Snyder is the other, fyi). Hernandez and Snyder share, along with formal innovation and an operatic sense of Myth, the sensuality that evokes spiritual states comparable only to Sternberg and Bertolucci. Covidpocalypse provides the context for Hernandez’s erotic technique to take a radical stance against isolation in a new short film, translated as Two Among Many. Two long-distance lovers (Esteban Caicedo as a musician and Alan Ramirez as a dancer) improvise means of communication and intimacy when separated by Covid strictures (and other disasters). They use modern technology to collaborate on a dance piece and eat dinner together over FaceTime (and feed a pet fish). Hernandez makes palpable their longing in the most powerful love scene since his own Raging Sun, Raging Sky—that was set to Jose Jose’s “Cada Mañana”; this one is the finale of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea—both enrapturing. Cinematographer Chak Perez Pena lets the sunshine in at day-time and aims his keylight at night, both to sculptural effect—it’s the most beautiful movie of the year. Later, when, like the time-jumping tracking camera mise-en-scene Hernandez originated in Broken Sky, Ramirez takes new positions with each camera setup, the filmmakers already illuminated the space with meaning (and expanded the significance of Covid to gay men's AIDS-era confrontation with mortality). The song Caicedo prepares—“Is It Okay if I Call You Mine?” from Fame—provides accompaniment to Ramirez's final rooftop dance. Hernandez infuses the sequence with such heartbreak and hope that it reveals his unique, as-yet-unfulfilled potential to restore the musical form after Fame commenced the genre's 40-year demise.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

70.The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg); grade: C-
The final shot of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans stands as the worst image of his career. With it, for the first time, the accusations stick that his films are manipulative and sentimental. The final shot features Spielberg stand-in Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) amblin’ off away from the camera on a studio backlot after a lesson in composition from John Ford (played condescendingly by David Lynch) about the importance of an off-center horizon-line in Western frontier paintings. Janusz Kaminski’s camera jerks self-reflexively to adjust the horizon line in a composition so crowded with studio hangars it loses the horizon line—and movie-meaning. The UWS audience in NYC erupted with laughter (no wonder it’s the Oscar frontrunner). The autobiographical movie (Fabel = Spiel (as in, storyteller); Mans = Berg (as in, Jewish ethnicity) means to connect Spielberg’s single-focused interest in filmmaking with the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. However, the final shot exposes this personal confession as phony on both counts—as a disingenuous means to insidious ends.

Spielberg and co-screenwriter Tony Kushner (Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story (2021)) badly need a dramaturge.

Before he gets the offer from CBS, Sammy/Spielberg bemoans college and, especially, the dorm-mate that makes him go back to his divorced father’s home when he claims that he can’t live with a Barry Goldwater supporter (eliciting more guffaws from the University-indoctrinated audience). However, this undercuts the reality that Spielberg’s movies (Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, War of the Worlds) appealed to those same Goldwater supporters.

It also pierces the pretension of the preceding section of the film in which Sammy uses his filmmaking prowess to win over some of his aryan tormenters in high school (busting the proscenium to honor gilded athleticism like Leni Riefenstahl). On the first day at a California school, Sammy wonders if he and his sisters have been dropped into “The Land of the Sequoia People”—the film’s best line, which, as Armond White points out, rings more like Spielberg’s bell than Kushner’s gong. Pure Kushner: His sexual envy manifests itself in a fantasy of high school victimization that actually represents Kushner’s own ugly vengeance. This is where the superficially pleasurable movie twists into reverse fascism.

Before marriage troubles drive the parents to move from Arizona to California, a planned move from New Jersey to Arizona triggers a psychotic episode for Sammy’s mother (Michelle Williams’s humiliating ethnic drag act) as she drives her kids straight into a tornado. Spielberg visualizes the loss of control as nested shopping carts careening across an intersection, recalling similar moments in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist, Twister, and a train crash in The Greatest Show on Earth—but without the panache, the wit, or the familial resonance. More disturbingly, Spielberg and Kushner never dramatize the degree of danger, the emotional disasters, into which both parents (crazy mother, deluded father) keep driving their children. (Spielberg already told this story better—and definitively—in the misunderstood Catch Me If You Can.) Herein resides the psychological opening for Marxist Kushner’s authoritarian influence.

The pretense that The Fabelmans is a movie about the “the magic of movies” represents an ideological sleight-of-hand.

The sequences dramatizing the formative influence of The Greatest Show on Earth (1952 Oscar-winner) and Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) constitute trite psychoanalytic emphasis on overcoming family trauma. Compare those sequences in The Fabelmans to the single most instructive moment in a popular film regarding how movies make meaning in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. There, Spielberg crosscuts between E.T. watching Ford’s The Quiet Man and a psychically inebriated Elliott recreating the Ford film’s famous kiss at school. Shots of little Sammy holding movie-projected images in his hands (eyes wide like David in A.I.) and of boys careening around a subdivision street corner on their bikes and admiring a pretty girl remind of E.T., but as reduced by Kaminski’s movie-based facsimile of Spielberg’s now-lost sense of childhood wonder.

The sequences of Sammy making movies emphasize shallow extensions of the film’s Oedipal drama:

1. His mother’s megalomaniac flirtation—a primal scene—after playing piano inspires Sammy’s solution to the problem of the unrealistic spectacle of kids playing cowboys with toy guns (no connection to his mother’s lover’s gift for prestidigitation)
2. His anger at his mother implicating him in her guilt provides the basis for Sammy’s direction of an actor in a backyard-shot war movie (no connection to his father’s military service)
3. His confusion over his parents’ menage a trois gets obliquely reflected in Sammy’s montage in a class-trip documentary that emphasizes a high school love triangle, culminating in the film’s dramatization (Spielberg’s career nadir) of the era’s canard about movie-going: the importance of “seeing yourself” in movies known by the buzzword “representation”

Sammy discovers his mother’s secret love for her husband’s best friend when he edits a home movie of a family camping trip. The well-edited sequence testifies to Spielberg’s skill but also to his lack of perspective. Over-obvious signs of intimacy between the two adulterers make for subpar imitations of Blow Up and Blow Out. Unlike Antonioni and De Palma’s existential investigations of images, this sequence reveals nothing about Spielberg’s own aesthetic. Spielberg comes up lacking compared to John Boorman’s association of Camelot ur-mythology to his own mother’s infidelity with his father’s best friend in Hope and Glory and, then, the visionary, radical empathy that inspired Boorman’s need as an artist to plumb the depths of Ophelia imagery in Queen and Country. Genuine self-reflection like Boorman’s is not Spielberg-Kushner’s intention anyway.

The sentimental triumph of the final shot of The Fabelmans means to manipulate Spielberg’s now-partisan audience, by congratulating its faux-sophistication, in order to reconcile itself to national divorce and to the spiritual oblivion of contemporary pop culture.

72.Tar (Todd Field); grade: F

I keep hearing Tár isn’t really a movie about the conflict between an artist’s personal failings and artistic contributions. Rather, Tár is a movie about “power.” Simply put, Tár is actually a movie made from the point of view of privilege for the purposes of sustaining current power structures by indulging the bourgeois fantasy of resistance (#MeToo, cancel culture). Semiotics—the study of how culture makes meaning to support status quo power structures—exposes the style of Tár as essentially bourgeois: a sub-Kubrickian fantasy of the paranoiac inner life of a cosseted EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony winner).

The fictional conductor/composer Lydia Tár is, herself, a semiotic construct of Linda Tar and, as a characterization, of Cate Blanchett. Linda eliminates the signs of her regional and class upbringing with aristocratic intonations. She even takes on the posture and gait of a U-haul lesbian. Like her Katharine Hepburn desecration in The Aviator, Blanchett conceives of Lydia as a human being devoid of any delicacy or sensuality; hence, reducing her approach to her art and her sexual conquests to power relationships. (Director Todd Fields cut from the final film the lesbian scenes used to sell Tár in ads.)

Field constructs straw men arguments in Tár that have little to do with the cultural calamities represented by #MeToo and cancel culture. The seemingly out-of-context viral video of her belittling a student who finds the classical music canon incompatible to his BIPOC, non-binary experience actually represents Field’s’ perspective entirely. It justifies rather than critiques the mob punishment it engenders—each isolated moment represents real abuse. Later, Field establishes Lydia’s abusive nature when she threatens a little girl bullying her daughter at school—but such character moments exist in a vacuum of credibility (entitled little girls know who have their backs). The women who invite Lydia’s attention are aware of exchange on offer, which is why Field only alludes to the relationship between Lydia and the protege who commits suicide, never risking presenting the dynamic to spectator scrutiny (another bourgeois ellipsis).

Compare this to the insights in Brady Corbett’s Vox Lux (Making sense of senseless times, Natalie Portman as a pop star rails against old things that smell of death and the impotence of threats against her artistic authorship). The mastery of that film must have shaken more pseudo-artistes like Todd Field than I would have guessed. Field’s Tár pits Corbett’s artistic contributions against Field’s artistic failings.

73.The Glass Onion (Rian Johnson); grade: F

Who pulls the strings in The Glass Onion? Director Rian Johnson obviously. He withholds information and flashes back to show what he didn’t previously show (which is also the m.o. of the film’s killer—its only straight white male). As with the previous Knives Out, these narrative layers mean to disguise this propaganda film as an entertaining puzzle. Yet, the solution to the mystery is obvious (if you didn’t guess the killer immediately, you will fall for anything). Equally transparent: Johnson’s ideological project to destroy culture. In lieu of justice, Johnson promotes the vengeance of young climate activists desecrating humanity’s artistic heritage. Here, Johnson establishes the destruction of the real Mona Lisa as a movie’s big crowd-pleaser moment. It’s the low-point of the brutalizing 2022 awards season at the movies. Peel the onion and weep at people accepting Johnson’s totalitarian escapism. He replaces the Mona Lisa with his own: Janelle Monae as twin sisters, but really it’s the same character. Monae, in the year’s worst performance, lacks the expressive skill represented in the sublime moment of the beginning of the smile of Da Vinci’s muse. Johnson films Monae in 3/4 profile vacuously almost-smirking at the camera. Her jaw is too small, her country and “rich bitch” accents too playacting, her grandstanding too short. Behind Monae’s smirk is the question: Is she and her sister one person, after all? The dead twin brought this Clue-like cast together, relying on the privileged access of her straight white male avatar (Ed Norton) to form a successful company and engage in influence peddling (a politician, unethical scientist, social media pundit, sweatshop industrialist). Ultimately, she or her surviving twin manipulates activist, disruptor super detective Benoit Blanc, as well. By exposing the stupidity of the suspects in the film, such a sweatshop owner who thinks a sweatshop makes sweat pants, Blanc also lets the real-world power classes off the hook. Johnson glorifies their willingness to lie for the truth. To Johnson, they are manipulatable morons, just like us.

67.Unhuman (Marcus Dunstan); grade: F
68.See How They Run (Tom George); grade: F
69.Grande Jete (Isabelle Stever); grade: C
71.The Menu (Mark Mylod); grade: F

The year’s brutalizing movies exploit real-world brutality, while the rare film attempts to explore the human dimensions of abuse. Both Knives Out wannabes Mark Mylod’s The Menu and Tom George’s See How They Run (also ripping off Wes Anderson) reveal the motivations of their respective murderers as founded in the child abuse they suffered. Upon this moral horror, the films hang the year’s most incompetent big-movie screenplay and display of film technique, respectively. Such indulgence of spiritual darkness proves enough to make audiences feel smart—these films use child abuse for cred. (Such a fall after Mylod made the definitive satire of the Washington closet in What’s Your Number?) The Tik-Tok style of Scream wannabe Unhuman means to congratulate the sophistication of young audiences, but is itself a form of abuse. More depressing than its twist (ripped off from the great Detention by Joseph Kahn), is its incapacity to highlight the talent of the underutilized Uriah Shelton (iconic in Rodrigo Garcia’s Blue, audacious in Christopher Landon’s Freaky). In international cinema, Grand Jete takes a stultifyingly dispassionate view of incest. Set in German drudgery in and outside of Berlin, it concerns a woman ballet instructor, whose physical demands she makes of her young charges she, too, probably suffered including giving up her son to pursue dance. “You have no maternal feelings,” her own mother drones. Returning home, she commences a sexual affair with her son after he invites her to an underground physique competition in which he participates. Their shared interest in pushing physical limits meets a desire to push social boundaries. The style of the film, handheld camera with characters moving in and out of shallow focus, keeps all prurience at a distance—but also empathy. The dulling emphasis on the mundane and punishing duration culminates in the scene where the mother gives birth to the child she shares with her son. The endless physical strain engenders within her, finally, maternal feelings. Somebody better cast Uriah Shelton in the American remake before it’s too late, but it better not be hacks Mylod or George!

19. Avatar 2: The Way of Water, grade A = This movie is too long and could have easily been trimmed by 30 minutes. The plot is also too simple. However, you have to see it. It is spectacular, especially in 3D. I felt like I was watching the next step in cinema and James Cameron deserves all the credit for pushing the boundaries of technology. I liked this movie better than the first Avatar. I was just spellbound by the visuals. However, I will warn you that it is very long.