Monday, January 30, 2017

GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933



Over the weekend, exhausted by creative setbacks and the nonstop barrage of depressing news coming out of my TV, radio and phone, I sat down with my father-in-law in front of a sparkling HD print (transfer? restoration? unsure of the proper terminology here) of Gold Diggers of 1933 which was recently procured by my DVR from TCM. My interest in/hunger for anything Busby Berkeley was tweaked by the taste we got on New Year’s Eve via the compilation doc That's Dancing, and I hadn’t seen GD33 in perhaps 30 years. As I watched it I began to really understand what had always been somewhat academic before, that audiences in the ‘30s used to flock to extravagant spectacles like this as a way of taking a 90-minute retreat from the oppressive reality they faced the other 1350 minutes of the day, because that was exactly how it was functioning for me in the moment.

Yet for being an ostensible bit of fluff, the movie is still surprising in the way it jumbles fantasy with sobering social consciousness right out of the gate. Berkeley’s staging of “We’re in the Money,” featuring a young and sassy Ginger Rogers knocking out the tune amid images of glittering lucre and the usual lavish extravagance of a typical Berkeley production number, immediately reminds the audience of the movie’s historical context, situated as it was four years into the approximately ten-year run of the Great Depression, and that teeming coffers of cash were the last thing they had at their disposal. Audiences in 1933 wouldn’t have needed reminding, of course, and that’s what striking about this “frivolous” entertainment, that it openly acknowledges and engages with the troubles of the world while conjuring a sublime bubble of escapism at the same time. (This thematic refusal to shy away from real life is, of course, a hallmark of Berkeley’s work across the board.)


That the movie ends not with optimistic affirmation and a neat tying-up of the its various romantic entanglements, but instead with its Broadway show’s big finale, “The Forgotten Man,” a spectacle dedicated to the dirt-scratching trials of a citizenry, faithful in the previous war, but bedeviled and brought down by economic disaster, might be even more remarkable—the number is powerful, of course, weightier than the content of the rest of the show staged by cranky producer Ned Sparks, and it amounts to a curiously solemn note on which to wrap up such an otherwise effervescent picture, hardly one to inspire much happy whistling as audiences headed back out to their considerably less sparkling lives. 

Even so, in presumably much the same way as audiences in 1933 must have embraced it, I somehow found encouragement to be taken from seeing Gold Diggers of 1933 this weekend which went beyond the emotional bump to be gleaned from its glittering charm, sassy performances and eye-popping staging, and this at a time when we’re not four years into a national crisis but, relatively speaking, more like four minutes into one. Busby Berkeley’s audiences, who would face the specter of Hitler once they got some dough back in their pockets, managed to appreciate a dose of social reality mixed in with their singing-and-dancing fantasias. This was what movies could do a little over 30 years after they were born. Eighty-some years later I’m left to wonder, with generous doses of optimistic anticipation in counteraction with the inevitable dread, how our great popular artists, the ones we know already and the ones who will hopefully emerge, will address or otherwise synthesize the realities of our suddenly up-ended world in the enlightened age of Trump. 

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And while we're talking about Gold Diggers of 1933  and satanic influence (we were, weren't we?), please be gratefully reminded of this flat-out brilliant piece by Richard Harland Smith on why the obvious sequel to that Busby Berkeley classic is not Gold Diggers of 1935 but instead... The Exorcist. As Richard puts it, "To say that a message was not intended is not to say that a message was not received."

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Sunday, January 29, 2017

KNEEJERK REACTIONS TO THE OSCAR NOMS AND THE FINAL WORD ON 2017



Even when you live in Los Angeles, as I do, if you’re not in the network of critics groups and press screening and screener DVDs it can be a challenge to keep up with everything you tell yourself you have to see before attempting an informed roundup of the year currently in the rearview mirror. And I also try to not let more than a couple of weeks of the new year go by before checking in, regardless of how many of the year’s big presents I have left to unwrap, though in past years I have not lived well by this dictum—let’s just say that if I’m still posting stuff on the year’s best after even Oscar has thoroughly chewed over the goods, as has happened in the past, well, I’ve overstayed my welcome.

2016 was, in most ways, a disaster of a year, but in terms of setting your glazzies in front of some high-quality cinema it was anything but, and it might have been better than most of late. The pickings were so good that rather than subject myself to the masochism of a strict roster of 10 choices, when I published my list two weeks ago, I allowed my list to expand into a Top 13, followed by a “Next 10” which during the average year would have easily been good enough to make the top echelon, and then an even longer list of other movies that I thought were varying degrees of keen.

Well, since the initial posting of my choices I’ve managed to see seven other films—Florence Foster Jenkins, Gleason, Hidden Figures, Love and Friendship, Paterson, Silence and Train to Busan (on tap for a Saturday night just past my deadline, Jackie)—three of which, had I seen them two or three weeks ago, would have caused me to thoroughly rearrange the scenery in the penthouse of my list. And since I’m not quite through bloviating about the year past just yet, let me give you a taste of my ch-ch-ch-changes.

 

Ted Melfi’s Hidden Figures is the sort of popular movie that will likely be just as well thought of 30 or 40 years down the line as it is today, a picture which honors its subject and its true-life African-American female protagonists with confidence and a sharp eye for historical context instead of pandering to the mainstream through synthetic trickery, audio-visual overstimulation and over-the-top histrionics. It’s a crowd-pleaser in the very best sense of the term.


In Silence, Martin Scorsese and co-scenarist Jay Cocks have crafted a sublime, demanding meditation on faith, colonial imperative and the complexities of East-West relations that reveals its genuinely spiritual nature through its engagement with the internal ambiguities and struggle of perspectives that can inform even the most genteel pursuit of religious fulfillment—it’s of a piece with the complex vision of faith that informs Scorsese’s other great religious films, Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ. And Andrew Garfield’s tortured repose as Fr. Rodrigues can well be imagined as the end point in a journey that links this 16th-century seeker with the self-doubting Catholic impulses of another of Scorsese’s wandering flock, Harvey Keitel’s Charlie in Mean Streets.  


But best of all is undoubtedly Jim Jarmusch’s sublime Paterson, a movie in which every unobtrusive moment seems to matter. I’ve always run hot and cold on this director’s brand of analog-only, deadpan observation—Stranger Than Paradise, Night On Earth and Dead Man are better than fine, but I find movies like Down by Law and Coffee and Cigarettes close to insufferable, the nadir being The Limits of Control, in which the director precisely locates the dead zone of his title and practically disappears in a black hole of Eurotrash cool. But Jarmusch’s next movie was the dazzling, achingly muted Only Lovers Left Alive, and the analog-only sensibility of the vampires in that film feels strangely of a piece with this new work, and it looks an awful lot like a masterpiece to these eyes. Paterson isn’t so much a hipster’s evocation of the working-class as it is one imbued with a poetry which illuminates, with a precision that’s never precious, the modest and poetic pursuits of its title character, played by Adam Driver, a Paterson, N.J. bus driver also named Paterson. (The movie has an offhanded fixation on twins that remains as ephemeral as its overall effect is overwhelming.) The Italian poster for the movie features the catchphrase “La bellezza spesso si trova nelle piccolle cose,” which translates to “Beauty is often found in the little things,” which is a lovely distillation of Paterson’s, and Paterson’s beating heart, the story of a man who searches for, and eventually finds, a measure of fulfillment in work, and in love, and simply by keeping his eyes and ears and soul open to the wonders of the everyday.

So, considering all that, and acknowledging that there are still many left to see, including the big Oscar contender Fences, here is are my final amended lists, now restricted to the “Top 10” and (you’ll see why) the “Next 11,” my 21 favorite movies of 2016:

THE TOP 10

O.J.: Made in America
Paterson
Silence
Moonlight
The Witness
Elle
One More Time with Feeling
13th
Hell or High Water
Krisha

THE NEXT 11

The Witch
Hidden Figures
La La Land
Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World and Zero Days
Loving
Indignation
Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words
Don’t Breathe
Everybody Wants Some!!
Dog Eat Dog

And now, here are just a few random, kneejerk reactions I had on Tuesday morning in response to the announcement of the 2016 Academy Award nominations. (Feel free to click here for a full list of the nominations.)


Well, I wonder if #OscarNotQuiteAsWhite will have as much traction as #OscarsSoWhite did last year. For the first time ever, African-Americans are represented in every acting category, as well as in the screenwriting and directing categories. And for the first time ever, an African-American woman, Joi McMillon, has been nominated in the Best Achievement in Film Editing category, for Moonlight. It remains to be seen just what effect the Academy’s newly adopted rules meant to encourage inclusion and expand the diversity of the voting body will have on future scores of nominations—it seems unlikely that they would have significantly moved the needle on this year’s crop. But one thing seems undeniable—if movies with diverse casts are made, and they get sufficient distribution, and people actually seem to like them, then the possibility of honor on Oscar night will be evident every year. A year when Fences, Moonlight, 13th, Hidden Figures and Loving are out there is necessarily going to be a year tailor-made for celebrating the contributions of African-Americans. If those movies were not on studio rosters, or came out to public and critical indifference, then we’d likely be facing another year of dissatisfaction, resentment and criticism of the Academy. It seems that the onus of making sure we have a diverse pool of work from which to choose Oscar honorees falls not to the Academy, but to the industry itself to have more faith in filmmakers and green-light more projects which tell the stories of people who have been traditionally underrepresented on screens and during award shows. That said, when each year we can finally talk not only about African-Americans nominated in every category, but when Asians or Latinos or Native-Americans also so amply present, then we’ll know that real progress is being made.


Congratulations to Ruth Negga and Isabelle Huppert on Best Actress nominations for Loving and Elle, respectively! It’s great to see two actresses in terrific movies which were not otherwise nominated manage to fight their way through the noise and wrangle some recognition, especially actresses who have been so off the Oscar radar— Negga is a relative newcomer (I wrote something about spotting her in World War Z almost four years ago), so I salute what I hope will be the first of many nominations to come. But somehow, this is Isabelle Huppert’s first Oscar nomination…



So, 20 nominations for Meryl Streep now. The Academy’s love apparently knows no bounds. And make no mistake: she’s very good in the entertaining, if slight, Florence Foster Jenkins. It’s just unfortunate that including Streep means taking up a spot that would more righteously be occupied by Taraji P. Henson as pioneering NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures. This has to rank, if one must rank them, as one of the year’s most egregious Oscar omissions.


Though it’s been brewing for a month or so, the official La La Land backlash can now begin. By the time the movie cuts a swatch through the PGA, DGA and Screen Actors Guild awards on its way to Oscar night, just about everybody will be sick of hearing about it and likely unembarrassed to say so. Even those who love the movie (like me) seem a little taken aback by the Academy’s historic endorsement—certainly for Best Picture I would pick Moonlight or Hell or High Water or Hidden Figures before I’d cast a first-place vote for this lovely movie. Oscar pools are going to play a bit tighter now—there’s the whiff of a juggernaut in the air, which makes La La Land the go-to choice in most categories, and the prospect of upsets at the actual awards show seem to be largely limited to the arena of who will do/say what during their acceptance speech, especially in regard to the regime currently occupying the White House. But even though it will reign supreme, I don’t expect anything close to a La La Land sweep on Oscar night. Off-the-cuff prediction: seven wins for Damien Chazelle’s musical.


So Silence was, Rodrigo Prieto’s completely deserved nomination for Best Cinematography aside, virtually silenced, and the closest Rules Don’t Apply will make it to the Dolby theater on Oscar night is the Best Screenplay nomination for 20th Century Women, a movie which stars Annette Bening (also overlooked), who happens to be married to the director of Rules Don’t Apply. My friend Larry Aydlette had one of the best comments on this year’s Oscar’s I’ve seen so far, so of course I’ll steal it from him, paraphrased from memory: Warren Beatty and Martin Scorsese now know for certain that the ‘70s are over.


The Best Original Score nominees are among the most interesting, Oscar-unfamiliar names I can recall ever seeing gathered in any one category. Thomas Newman, who is fast becoming legendary for his inability to score a statue in this category, is nominated for the 14th time for Passengers, a movie apparently designed to be forgotten. The rest are a grab bag of talent who have never seen much in the way of the spotlight before, the highest profile of which, Justin Hurwitz for La La Land, will be the inevitable winner. But it’s encouraging that Oscar found room for Dustin O’Halloran (Marie Antoinette) and Volker Bertelmann for Lion, Nicholas Brittell (The Big Short) for Moonlight, and most especially for Mica Levi for Jackie—Levin also wrote the dissonant, unnervingly beautiful score for 2013’s Under the Skin.


From Most Hated Man in Hollywood to a Best Director nominee who snagged the honor without an accompanying DGA nomination, a feat even Martin Scorsese couldn’t manage—he won’t win, but Mel Gibson has to come away thinking it’s his year anyway.


Casey Affleck will probably win (although given his recent bad press and some high-profile and outraged reaction to his nomination, I’m not prepared to say he’s a lock), but all of the sudden Manchester by the Sea doesn’t look like the unstoppable force many thought it was going to be back in December. Its only other solid chance is in the screenplay category, where I’m hoping Kenneth Lonergan will be the victim of an upset at the hands of Taylor Sheridan and Hell or High Water.


Kubo and the Two Strings isn’t the first animated movie to score a nomination for Best Visual Effects—that honor goes to The Nightmare Before Christmas. But it’s an unusual honor nonetheless, undoubtedly a nod, as Nightmare’s was, to the painstaking craft of stop-motion animation, for which Laika Studios, the producers of Kubo  as well as Coraline, Paranorman and The BoxTrolls, have repeatedly distinguished themselves.


Finally, no group seems as absent of head-scratchers as the Best Documentary category. Life, Animated seems the slightest of the five, and it’s still remarkable. But from Fire at Sea’s singular examination of the refugee crisis, to the complex and illuminating examinations of race and American history at the heart of I Am Not Your Negro, 13th and O.J.: Made in America, the rest of the category is populated by movies that seem seized by this moment in American and global history. I know which one I would pick, and I think I know which one the Academy will pick, but that does not mean that anyone faced with it would find this one an easy choice. My hat is off to directors Gianfranco Rosi, Roger Ross Williams, Raoul Peck (and James Baldwin), Ava DuVernay and Ezra Edelman, and hell, to the Academy in this case, for keeping it real.


And while we’re here, congratulations also to the Academy for issuing this statement in regard to Ashgar Farhadi, Oscar-winning Iranian director of A Separation who is again nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category for his latest film, The Salesman:

The Academy celebrates achievement in the art of filmmaking, which seeks to transcend borders and speak to audiences around the world, regardless of national, ethnic, or religious differences. As supporters of filmmakers—and the human rights of all people—around the globe, we find it extremely troubling that Asghar Farhadi, the director of the Oscar-winning film from Iran A Separation, along with the cast and crew of this year's Oscar-nominated film The Salesman, could be barred from entering the country because of their religion or country of origin."

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FOR FURTHER RECOMMENDED READING:

Freelance critic and journalist Kevin Courrier on the end of the Obama era and how the changing times are reflected in films like Moonlight, Hidden Figures and Southside With You.

Critic Charles Taylor brilliantly extrapolates Paterson's rich tapestry.

Odie Henderson, film critic for RogerEbert.com, on the power of 13th.

And finally, two from one of my favorite critics currently writing, the Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang: first, a typically thoughtful piece on how the Academy chose to honor the lesser of the two big religious epics of 2016, and then Chang’s original review of Silence, which he picked as the best movie of 2016.


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Monday, January 09, 2017

THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES: MOVIES OF 2016



2016: the reviews are in! And they have been for quite some time, actually. If you keep up even a distracted presence on social media you’ll be well aware that the year past is largely considered at the very least a bad patch, and in thinking of it as something more than an isolated phenomenon of 365 random days I’d probably have to agree—it was a pretty disagreeable and sometimes dispiriting 365 days, geopolitically speaking and for speculating on days to come. To paraphrase the words of Timbuk 3’s Pat MacDonald, the future’s so bright we’d better wear shades.

Some are even speculating dim prospects for the cinema too. To hear Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott tell it, the medium, in which they are both still vitally active, is more or less dead. “Cinema is gone,” Scorsese recently said in a widely circulated interview, but Scorsese was mourning more the death of the theatrical experience than the quality of the movies themselves:

“The theater will always be there for that communal experience, there’s no doubt. But what kind of experience is it going to be? Is it always going to be a theme-park movie? I sound like an old man, which I am. The big screen for us in the ’50s, you go from Westerns to Lawrence of Arabia to the special experience of 2001 in 1968. The experience of seeing Vertigo and The Searchers in VistaVision.”

The director argued that the “proliferation of images” on all manner of portable devices and screens has diluted the experience for younger audiences—and, I’d add, for some older audiences too. “(The theatrical experience) should matter to your life,” he said. “Unfortunately the latest generations don’t know that it mattered so much.”

Ridley Scott’s concern was more about the movies themselves. “Cinema mainly is pretty bad,” said the director, and maybe if you focus on the industry’s ongoing dirty infatuation with the blockbuster mentality and the phenomenon of the superhero movie you could find some common ground with Scott’s surly conclusion. The director managed to recognize that many of his movies (he pointed out Blade Runner as an example) have plenty in common with the average comic book movie of the 21st century, but he says that there is a difference. “You could almost put Batman or Superman in that (Blade Runner) world, that atmosphere, except I’d have a fucking good story, as opposed to no story,” said the man who made Exodus: Gods and Kings and GI Jane.

And Scott’s got a point too, but only if your eyes are fixed unshakably on the slate of heavily promoted releases choking the studio pipeline and the arena of the 21st-century multiplex. The reality of what’s actually available out there, on big screens, theater and home, as well as all those tiny little tablets and phones Scorsese disdains, reveals that many of the actual movies of 2016 were pretty damn good, and that includes some of the eye-popping spectaculars which Scott rather disingenuously knocked. (I still agree more than disagree with Scorsese about those devices, though—I just haven’t gotten myself comfortable with watching a movie on a tablet yet, which is unfortunate, because that’s my only option for drinking in Filmstruck at this point.)

Eight of the 13 movies in my top echelon of 2016 I saw in a darkened theater. The other five I caught up with through the magic of streaming. And as I become ever more the homebody and continue to rankle at the ridiculously high admission prices of some of the quality cinemas in Los Angeles, that ratio is likely to continue to destabilize and shift. Already, of the 80 features released in 2016 that I’ve seen to date, 44 of those were seen at home or on my computer monitor, and curiously most of the weight anchoring the bottom of my list is provided by those 44. (I saw all but one of my bottom 10 on a home computer screen.) You can draw your own conclusions.

And while you’re doing that, I’ll be taking this last opportunity to celebrate the best of what I saw in 2016, which is bountiful enough that I have once again allowed myself some flexibility in regard to the arbitrary top 10 format. There was just too much good stuff this year to limit myself to just 10. I went for a top 13, but I’ve got a “Next 10” that, in any other year, might easily be top 10 (or 13) material. I’ll follow that with a pretty long list of other movies that I also liked, with varying degrees of reservations. And just in case you think that I think I’ve seen it all, a long list of what I have yet to see follows, consisting of a boatload of movies that, once I see them, could change the complexion of the list you’re about to read profoundly. It all adds up to a year at the movies that was, at least in terms of artistic reward, in stark contrast with the bleak prospects on display almost everywhere else we seemed to look over the past 12 months. They say that movies, always necessarily a less immediate response to life than other art forms, reflect their times. A little distance will certainly tell if that’s true. But many of the films comprising my best of the year ended up feeling very much of the moment just the same, and maybe even for the better as those times themselves became worse.

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MOVIE OF THE YEAR



The early sections of O.J.: Made in America, my pick for the movie of 2016, make it clear just how separate Simpson intended to be from the black community which took such pride in his acceptance and achievements, and that separation went beyond securing a life of fame and riches with Hollywood always foremost in mind. While he professed to understand the importance of Muhammad Ali’s refusal to accept conscription into the Vietnam War and the need to provide support for everyone in the black community, Simpson continued to make it clear that their fight was not necessarily his fight: “What I’m doing is not for principles or for black people. I’m dealing first for O.J. Simpson, his wife and his baby.”
That, having heard such a philosophy expressed openly, blacks could have remained as supportive of O.J. Simpson as his life took an infamously surreal turn into ugly violence in Brentwood, California in June 1994, is one aspect of the mystery of O.J. Simpson upon which Ezra Edelman’s film, with its grounding in the racial inequity and violence at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department, sheds plenty of welcome light. However obvious the evidence may have been against him, however bungled by prosecution the apparently slam-dunk case ended up being, the Simpson verdict was perceived by many blacks across the nation, according to the evidence and testimony accrued in Edelman’s film, as a huge emotional release, payback to a system that repeatedly failed to provide justice for the likes of Eula Love and Rodney King.

And it’s to Edelman’s credit that a conclusion like that one has its place in the context of the larger conversation O.J.: Made in America engenders, neither summarily dismissed nor thoughtlessly endorsed but instead woven into the expressive, reverberating fabric of this unusually evocative, angering and enlightening work. O.J.: Made in America unfolds with masterful certainty and illuminating power, delineating the mind-boggling path toward a third act in the life of a man who many, even some of his staunchest supporters and friends, now believe must have committed those heinous murders, a third act which surreally nose-dives into Vegas decadence, petty crime and, yes, even perhaps one more dose of payback for crimes left unpunished.


To take up the thrust of Scorsese’s sword one last time, it seems to me that in the inescapable age of iTunes and iPads and iPhones it’s becoming increasingly pointless to debate whether or not something like O.J.: Made in America or 13th qualify as “movies” when it comes time for annual list-making. The chin-rubbing becomes especially silly and academic if the main criterion is whether or not the work was made initially for distribution by means of theaters or broadcasting, and especially when one of the most “cinematic” works I’ve seen all year, in terms of formal and technically effective storytelling bravado, was the “Battle of the Bastards” episode of Game of Thrones, which put to shame many a similar-scaled big-budget effects bonanza by its sheer creative energy alone. (“Battle of the Bastards” was directed by Miguel Sapochnik, a TV director by trade—some of his credits include House, True Detective and Fringe, and his sole feature film credit, 2010’s forgettable Repo Men, would hardly suggest he had the sort of chops he displayed in this Game of Thrones episode.)

But O.J.: Made in America, which was originally commissioned by ESPN and intended for a multi-night broadcast on that channel (the first episode was also shown on ABC), was not only the best movie I saw all year, it was also the best theatrical movie-going experience I had all year. Earlier this year ESPN put together a week-long Academy Award-qualifying theatrical run, so I packed lunch—and dinner-- I made my way over to Santa Monica via the new train line to catch the last scheduled screening of the week at 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon. The movie showed in a tiny auditorium—27 seats in all (I counted)—and that was only about half full.

My fellow audience members ran the gamut from young, white, college-aged kids who knew of the O.J. Simpson story from newspapers and urban legend, to an ethnically mixed collection of older viewers ranging anywhere from 30 to, best guess, mid 70s. The movie was shown with two 15-minute intermissions, each coming after about two and a half hours, during which, after a desperate run to the restroom, this collection of Los Angeles residents turned our screening room into a serious but good-natured sort of town hall meeting, leaning back and forward over seats to engage our neighbors in observations about the social context painted by the film, the experience of living in Los Angeles over the past 40 or 50 years from our varying perspectives, and whatever other issue the movie might have unveiled through its fascinating, fascinated methodology. O.J.: Made in America is not only a great movie documentary, it was also, for the eight and a half hours we spent together, a unique bonding experience for a few citizens of a city who might have once thought that their capability to reach out across racial and experiential boundaries of understanding might have been fatally compromised by having lived through the social upheaval propagated by “the trial of the century.”

MOONLIGHT 


A brilliant, intuitive, harrowing vision of three acts in a young man’s life, a bullied African-American kid growing up in the projects who slowly discovers his homosexuality and, as an adult, must continually shift his own self-measurement against an (almost) unforgiving culture of masculine intolerance. The marvel of Moonlight is that is never even flirts with preaching to the choir. Instead, the story of Chiron (aka Little, aka Black), played in three distinct stages by three very distinct actors, thrums with unexpected visual and rhythmic poetry which is discovered and explored with thrilling poetic acuity by director Barry Jenkins. (I was shocked to realize this gorgeous film is based on a play.) It’s also a showcase for a series of fine performances, from Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes as the three stages of Chiron, to Mahershala Ali, Naomi Harris, Janelle Monae and most especially Andre Holland, as Chiron’s childhood friend all grown up, whose welcoming face betrays its own troubles and contextualizes the director’s commitment to the mysterious landscape of the soul.  You hear it said so often by writers and others looking to fill reviews with facile commentary, but in this case it's true: I don't think I've ever seen a movie that's quite like this one.

THE WITNESS


In 1964, arriving home in the early morning to Kew Gardens, Queens from her job as a bar manager, Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered, repeatedly stabbed on the sidewalk by a man who, when interrupted by voices from nearby apartments, scurried away, waited nearly a half hour while Genovese made her way to the vestibule of her own apartment building, then returned to finish, as he put it, “what I set out to do.” A fundamentally inaccurate New York Times article about the crime would claim that “For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens,” and those horrifying accounts, true or not, became the focal point of sociological debate and inquiry about bystander apathy that still resonates today, 52 years after Kitty Genovese’s death. John Solomon’s riveting, emotionally lucid and angering documentary follows Kitty’s youngest brother Bill as he, initially in the name of closure, struggles to piece together the inconsistencies in the record and challenge the reported “facts” stemming from the Times article, whose veracity has long since ceded to the shadowy pull of urban legend. But the most spellbinding aspect of the work Solomon and Genovese undertake in their film is in the reclaiming of Kitty Genovese herself. Bill’s obsessive investigation into the circumstances of the murder begins to subtly shift to one dedicated to discovering who Kitty was before her memory had been subsumed by hastily sketched accounts of the victim referred to in newspapers and court documents. It’s in this investigation that The Witness takes on an emotional gravity to match its fascination as a dissembling of the mythology in which the crime has always been encased. (The Witness is available now through Netflix Streaming.)

ELLE 


Paul Verhoeven’s fearless thriller, the Dutch director’s first true feature since 2006’s Black Book, begins with a horrifying sexual assault (heard, but not seen), followed by the inexplicably matter-of-fact response of the victim, Michele (Isabelle Huppert in perhaps a career-best performance), an exceedingly composed owner of a company which specializes in graphically and sexually violent video games. Why does she silently sweep up the broken glass from the floor where the assault took place, and then take a bath, rather than report the crime? It’s behavior like this that has driven some viewers to distraction, but even the most inexplicable responses in Elle begin to resonate with psychological acuity as the details of Michele’s world, and more specifically her relationships with the men in her life, begin to accumulate. The movie is the last thing from a position paper—it’s an incredibly tense character thriller, and I felt as though I’d had electrodes sparking me with little bursts of voltage for the entirety of its running time. But with almost providential timing Elle serves notice on the squirmy misogynistic contempt currently moving from a subterranean position to overt expression in our culture, and how one female response to it might be more complicated than could easily fit as a slogan on a bumper sticker. (See also critic Justin Chang’s assessment of how Elle and other current films fit into the prickly task of analyzing the state of powerful women in the retrogressive Trumpian landscape, published in the January 8, 2017 edition of the Los Angeles Times Calendar section.) Elle certainly means to provoke, but that provocation isn’t perverse, it’s subtly, artfully pointed, and as such it’s definitely of a piece within the work of the man who made Starship Troopers and Showgirls.

ONE MORE TIME WITH FEELING 



For whatever reason, movies have traditionally had a hard time paying much more than superficial tribute to the experience of grief. In Andrew Dominik’s deceptively beautiful account of the rehearsals for Nick Cave’s newest album, The Skeleton Tree, grief gets its due as insistent, almost imperceptible subtext and then, with full force, inescapable text. Movies, whether fiction or nonfiction, are rarely patient enough to see the process through much further than documenting inevitable bursts of emotion and tearful testimony. But here Cave is allowed, through his music and his own tentative, not humorless relationship with Dominik and his cameras, to feel his way toward some sort of reckoning that never feels pushed or otherwise, because of the context, inauthentic. The result is one of the most soaringly beautiful films of the year, one whose weight feels expansive, not oppressive, even as it acknowledges devastation with the respect it deserves.

13th 


Any year that could produce documentaries as emotionally varied and intellectually kinetic as O.J.: Made in America, The Witness, One More Time with Feeling, Lo and Behold, Zero Days and Ava DuVernay’s shocking political treatise ought to be considered some sort of watershed. But however history treats them, an attitude of gratitude for the existence of movies like these and that they are so relatively accessible ought to be the order of the day. 13th makes an air-tight case for the status of the current American penal system as a horrifyingly inevitable, economically justified and socially acceptable extension of slavery, a condition initially made possible by the very amendment—the 13th—whose ostensible intent was the abolishing of slavery after the Civil War. DuVernay makes connections through testimony and careful (but not cold-blooded) historical analysis and the result, much like O.J.: Made in America’s contextualizing of the Simpson phenomenon within the reality of African-American life in Los Angeles in the ‘50s and ‘60s, is a document that could be to date the definite statement of a culture of injustice that shows no sign of balance or meaningful restitution. (13th is available now through Netflix Streaming.)

HELL OR HIGH WATER 


Director David Mackenzie’s humanist, humanizing modern “western,” from a script by Taylor Sheridan (Sicario), finds the roots of its particular despair in the economic derailment of the Texas underclass, just the sort of gun-toting, matter-of-fact, working-class citizenry who might have claimed hope in Donald Trump’s bloviating gestures toward their desperate concerns. But Hell or High Water is a laconic, surprisingly observant act of empathy, not a populist screed, one in which the ordering of a T-bone steak reveals as much about the character of a desolate landscape as do the protagonists’ repeated acts of economic vengeance against a corrupt banking system, stealing money to be used to pay off the bank’s own suffocating mortgage and property liens which put the men in the hole in the first place. The drama would be too muted if all went well, and the inspired cast, from Chris Pine and Ben Foster as the would-be Robin Hoods, to Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham as sparring lawmen in pursuit, right down to Katy Mixon as a waitress seduced by Pine’s guarded demeanor just before an unexpected hell breaks loose, ensures that the richness of said empathy extends all the way through to the movie’s last pregnant, exquisitely modulated frames. (Hell or High Water is now available on VOD, Blu-ray and DVD.)
  
KRISHA


A cursory description of Krisha might conjure up visions of multiple DIY indie psychodramas already endured and flushed away—empty-headed hand-held camerawork facilitating shapeless, semi-improvised actorly canoodling meant to somehow coalesce in the editing room into a “meaningful experience.” The difference between those movies and Krisha is one of vision—the movie is directed by first-timer Trey Edward Shults (who also appears in it) with electricity and a mature understanding to how to make camera and sound not just duplicate states of emotional distress but express them naturally, intuitively, with purposeful clarity. The movie closes in on Krisha (enacted by an astonishing Krisha Fairchild), an unstable recovering alcoholic who reunites with her estranged family during a typically bustling and chaotic Thanksgiving celebration in the hope of some sort of tentative reconciliation. But this is no story of holiday redemption ending with familial unity and a sense of restored faith. Shults is wise enough to understand how the devastation of alcoholism and drug abuse undermines the foundation of family as well as the individual, and how sincere attempts at reform can also be undermined or undone entirely by cruelly refracted motherly instincts visited upon mothers, daughters and sons. Krisha Fairchild is so good, so artfully vulnerable and exposed, yet completely absent of self-consciousness as an actress that, were it not for a certain French icon having a career year, hers would be the female performance of 2016.



Robert Eggers’ debut feature is subtitled “A New England Folk Tale,” and that subtitle should be taken seriously, especially in light of the acclaim surrounding it as one of the best and scariest horror movies to come along in a couple of decades. Because The Witch actually lives up to both that level of hyperbole and its own modest descriptor, and on its own precisely committed and near-obsessive terms, which says a lot not only about what Eggers has achieved but also about what audiences have come to expect from a modern horror movie, and why those expectations are most often greeted by one disappointment after another. The Witch operates on such a level of visual and tonal confidence that I often wondered if maybe it wasn’t Eggers who was possessed, and it’s full of unostentatious, lyrically unsettling imagery—a woman cackling hysterically as a raven pecks at her breast, all the while dreaming of blissfully breastfeeding a baby; and later, in the sudden freedom of a calm epilogue after horrific violence, a young woman, her head looming in the frame and out of focus, stares out at a grave, behind which looms the wood where her apparent destiny will be fulfilled. Eggers’ vision can at times be overwhelming, but moments like these sneak up on you and take you down hard, justifying The Witch’s burgeoning reputation as a great new horror movie.

LA LA LAND


It’s hard to believe that this soaring, good-natured, defiantly sincere, formally daring and disarming movie, a musical for a land of unbelievers of which Jacques Demy himself would undoubtedly approve, would find itself positioned as a love-it-or-hate-it focus of cinephile debate, but it is apparently so. I walked into La La Land with a chip on my shoulder-- after all the advance praise, and after listening to several critics who swung to the extreme in the opposite direction I almost felt like the movie needed to prove itself to me. Turned out I didn't need Stone and Gosling to be Ginger and Fred, nor did I need lyricist and composer Justin Hurtwitz to be the second coming of Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed-- the score certainly revisits and recycles themes, like "City of Stars," with insistence and regularity, but that's hardly unusual in the history of the movie musical, and what he conjured was certainly pleasing enough for these coarse ears. As for charges of the cinematography being so inept as to make Emma Stone unappealing, well, those who believe this to be true clearly didn't see the same shots in the way I did. But La La Land’s spirit and its conviction are only two reasons it sang to me-- director Damien Chazelle's understanding of the way the camera can be used to tease out that spirit and conviction is seductively funny, and stars Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling have rarely been as luminous, funny or as vulnerable on screen, in the act of dance and song or in just being together, feeling out the course of a tentative relationship they’d like to believe is charted in the firmament. Movies don't often cause me to burst out in spontaneous tears of happiness, but this one did on several occasions. Though I know tears are no indicator of actual quality, the cloud on which I floated out of the theater certainly felt as if it had been inspired by the real thing. On top of everything else, La La Land is a lovely catharsis, two hours of blissful respite from the lingering effects of a grim year.

LO AND BEHOLD: REVERIES OF THE CONNECTED WORLD and ZERO DAYS



These two films, the work of two of the premier documentary artists now working in movies, throw a wide and encompassing net around the implications of social media and the power of the Internet, each of them purely reflective of their creators’ inquisitive and, in the case of Herzog, poetic sensibilities. Alex Gibney’s soul-chilling account of Stuxnet, an insidious, self-governing malware, is frightening enough as it describes the efforts of a group of code-breakers to identify its source and intent, and the destructive effects the software inflicts once it’s set loose on an Iranian nuclear power facility. But Gibney’s powers as a natural storyteller are at full throttle here, and the implications of the Stuxnet assault will jangle your already paranoid nervous system as he tracks the malware’s US-Israeli origins and how it ended up being turned back on its creators and, of course, us. Herzog’s exploration of the origins of the Internet and the ways it can be employed to undermine and expand human experience leans more toward poetry and allusion than Gibney’s necessarily more prosaic approach, but it’s no less absorbing. Seen together, they paint an unnerving and suspicious, but also warily hopeful picture of a technologically reliant world which can no longer envision itself before it became inextricably connected and might possibly never understand everything that can happen from the application of indecipherable code or even the simple click of a mouse. 

LOVING


The eloquent understatement of Jeff Nichols’ drama of social history shouldn’t be undervalued. Nichols dares to tell the story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple in Virginia who married in 1958 and spent the next nine years as the subject of persecution and exile before becoming the nexus of Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 federal ruling that abolished anti-miscegenation laws nationwide, with spellbinding, hushed confidence. So naturally the movie is being dinged in some quarters for not being dramatic enough. But there’s enough drama for two or three movies in the way Ruth Negga, as Mildred, draws a hesitant breath while reticently considering the family she’ll have to leave to maintain her new one, or the way Joel Edgerton’s Richard preserves his dignity while furrowing his brow and deflecting his gaze from figures of authority, stealing a microsecond’s glance before resuming a position of deference. Loving never sacrifices the integrity of character for the momentary juice of effect, and despite the seductive call of the typical Hollywood take on true-life drama it never becomes about big moments, or self-righteous expressions, or even the resolution of the courtroom decision as it is delivered. Important stories like these have been butchered and falsified so often, their focus and weight shifted from the real (usually non-white) protagonists to peripheral figures of (white) authority like savior cops, lawyers and government agents at the hands of directors like Alan Parker in Mississippi Burning, that the value of Nichols’ composed, clear-eyed approach ought to be exceedingly apparent. Nichols values the basic honor he recognizes in the characters and transfers it with urgency to his graceful, eloquent film.

THE NEXT TEN…
Nichols dares to tell the story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple in Virginia who married in 1958 and spent the next nine years as the subject of persecution and exile before becoming the nexus of Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 federal ruling that abolished anti-miscegenation laws nationwide, with spellbinding, hushed confidence. And naturally the movie is being dinged by some for not being dramatic enough. But there’s enough drama for two or three movies in the way Ruth Negga, as Mildred, draws a hesitant breath while reticently considering the family she’ll have to leave to maintain her new one, or the way Joel Edgerton’s Richard preserves his dignity while furrowing his brow and deflecting his gaze from figures of authority, stealing a microsecond’s glance before resuming a position of deference.
LOVING never sacrifices the integrity of character for the momentary juice of effect, and despite the seductive call of the typical Hollywood take on true-life drama, it never becomes about big moments, or self-righteous expressions, or even the resolution of the courtroom decision as it is been delivered. I kept thinking how often important stories like these have been butchered and falsified, their focus and weight shifted from the real (usually non-white) protagonists to peripheral figures of (white) authority like savior cops, lawyers and government agents at the hands of directors like Alan Parker (MISSISSIPPI BURNING), and I was made even more grateful for Jeff Nichols’ approach, which exudes gentleness and a basic honor he recognizes in the characters and transfers to his film.

INDIGNATION 
DON’T BREATHE 
KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS 
DE PALMA 
EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! 
BARBERSHOP: THE NEXT CUT 
ALLIED
PETE’S DRAGON 
DOG EAT DOG 

TH-TH-THAT’S NOT ALL FOLKS! (More Movies I Liked)


ZOOTOPIA 
ONLY YESTERDAY (OMOHIDE PORO PORO)
EYE IN THE SKY 
MOANA (2016)
INTO THE INFERNO
SHIN GODZILLA
ARRIVAL 
STAR TREK: BEYOND 
MY GOLDEN DAYS
MANCHESTER BY THE SEA
CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR
MIDNIGHT SPECIAL
DEADPOOL


FINDING DORY
FASTBALL
THE FITS
THE SHALLOWS
TRIPLE 9
HAIL, CAESAR!
GREEN ROOM
THE BFG
THE LEGEND OF TARZAN
10 CLOVERFIELD LANE
THE EAGLE HUNTRESS
DEMON
CAFÉ SOCIETY
THE FINEST HOURS
THE NICE GUYS

FEMALE LEAD PERFORMANCES OF THE YEAR


Isabelle Huppert ELLE
Krisha Fairchild KRISHA
Ruth Negga LOVING
Emma Stone LA LA LAND
Anya Taylor-Joy THE WITCH
Royal Hightower THE FITS
Marion Cottiard ALLIED

MALE LEAD PERFORMANCES OF THE YEAR


Logan Lerman INDIGNATION
Chris Pine HELL OR HIGH WATER
Joel Edgerton LOVING
Michael Shannon MIDNIGHT SPECIAL
Ryan Gosling LA LA LAND
Ryan Reynolds DEADPOOL
Casey Affleck MANCHESTER BY THE SEA

FEMALE SUPPORTING PERFORMANCES OF THE YEAR


Michelle Williams MANCHESTER BY THE SEA
Naomi Harris MOONLIGHT
Sarah Gadon INDIGNATION
Kate Winslet TRIPLE 9
Lupita Nyong’o THE JUNGLE BOOK
Anne Consigny ELLE
Eve BARBERSHOP: THE NEXT CUT
Penelope Milford THE BFG
Katy Mixon HELL OR HIGH WATER
Jeanne Berlin CAFÉ SOCIETY
Lou Roy-Lecollinet MY GOLDEN DAYS
Sofia Boutella STAR TREK: BEYOND
Margot Robbie SUICIDE SQUAD
Margaret Bowman HELL OR HIGH WATER

MALE SUPPORTING PERFORMANCES OF THE YEAR


Mahershala Ali MOONLIGHT
Tracy Letts INDIGNATION
Jeff Bridges HELL OR HIGH WATER
Ben Foster HELL OR HIGH WATER
Andre Holland MOONLIGHT
Glen Powell EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!
Willem Dafoe DOG EAT DOG
Ralph Ineson THE WITCH
Laurent Lafitte ELLE
Alden Ehrenreich HAIL, CAESAR!
Patrick Stewart GREEN ROOM
John Goodman 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE
Bill Wise KRISHA
Cedric the Entertainer BARBERSHOP: THE NEXT CUT
Gil Birmingham HELL OR HIGH WATER
Jared Harris ALLIED
Paul Schrader DOG EAT DOG
Tom Holland CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR
Samuel L. Jackson THE LEGEND OF TARZAN

SO MUCH LEFT TO SEE


AQUARIUS
A BIGGER SPLASH
CAMERAPERSON
CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR
CHRISTINE
CREEPY
DON’T THINK TWICE
THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN


FENCES
FIRE AT SEA
GLEASON
HACKSAW RIDGE
THE HANDMAIDEN
HIDDEN FIGURES
I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO
JACKIE
JULIETA


LITTLE MEN
THE LOBSTER
LOUDER THAN BOMBS
LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP
THE LOVE WITCH
MISS SHARON JONES
NO HOME MOVIE
PATERSON
QUEEN OF KATWE
RULES DON’T APPLY
SILENCE
TONI ERDMANN
TOWER
THINGS TO COME
20th CENTURY WOMEN
WEINER
WEINER-DOG

MOVIES I SAW FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 2016


THE BESPOKE OVERCOAT (1955)
BROADWAY (1929)
BULLDOG DRUMMOND STRIKES BACK (1934)
BUONA SERA, MRS. CAMPBELL (1969)
CIRCUS OF HORRORS (1960)
THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES (1961)
A CRY IN THE NIGHT (1956)
THE DARK CORNER (1946)
DEATH FORCE (aka FIGHTING MAD aka VENGEANCE IS MINE) (1978)
DETROIT 9000 (1973)
DECISION AT SUNDOWN (1957)
DELUGE (1933)
DOUBLE HARNESS (1933)
THE ENDLESS SUMMER (1966)
A FINE PAIR (1968)
THE FRONT PAGE (1931)


GAMBLING LADY (1931)
A HOUSE DIVIDED (1931)
KISS THE BLOOD OFF MY HANDS (1948)
LADY SNOWBLOOD (1973)
LADY SNOWBLOOD: LOVE SONG OF VENGEANCE (1974)
LAUGHING SINNERS (1931)
LAW AND ORDER (1932)
A LAWLESS STREET (1955)
LOS TALLOS AMARGOS (aka THE BITTER STEMS) (1956)
MAID IN SALEM (1937)
MULTIPLE MANIACS (1970)
MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932)
MY SISTER EILEEN (1955)
NEVER FEAR (aka THE YOUNG LOVERS) (1949)
ONE POTATO, TWO POTATO (1964)
PICKPOCKET (1959)


POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE (1990)
PRINCESS MONONOKE (1999)
PRIVATE PROPERTY (1960)
ROAR (1981)
ROBIN AND MARIAN (1976)
SCREAM OF FEAR (1964)
SIX HOURS TO LIVE (1932)
STAGECOACH KID (1949)
STOP ME BEFORE I KILL (1960)
A TASTE OF HONEY (1961)
TRUCK TURNER (1974)
THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL (1960)
VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (1970)
WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS (1950)

MOVIES I LIKED BETTER THAN MOST DID


THE BFG
THE LEGEND OF TARZAN
PEE-WEE’S BIG HOLIDAY
SUICIDE SQUAD (don’t get me wrong—it’s still pretty bad, Margot Robbie notwithstanding, but I preferred it to the suffocatingly morose and stupid Batman v. Superman—Dawn of Justice)
X-MEN: APOCALYPSE

MOVIES I LIKED LESS THAN MOST DID


THE CONJURING 2
DOCTOR STRANGE
THE EAGLE HUNTRESS
HAIL, CAESAR!
HARDCORE HENRY
THE JUNGLE BOOK
MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN

BOTTOM OF THE BARREL (in descending order)


THE BOY
GOD’S NOT DEAD 2
MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN
MAX STEEL
ICE AGE: COLLISION COURSE
INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE
THE COMEDIAN
PAPA HEMINGWAY IN CUBA
MOTHER’S DAY

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