Top 10 Worst Films of 2019

10. The Laundromat (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

Indie-veteran Steven Soderbergh directs and produces this light-weight pastiche of Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2016), a facile, amateur project that fails to live up to its star ensemble (including Gary Oldman and Meryl Streep). Unfortunately for Soderbergh – who, ironically, is also brought to light in the film’s finger-pointing agenda – it has all been done before, and better, despite possessing the ingredients for a worthy competitor. High Flying Bird (2019), his other picture to be released this year, is worth streaming instead.

9. The Dead Don’t Die (Jim Jarmusch, 2019)

Jim Jarmusch delivers zombified opera with his latest picture, The Dead Don’t Die, flitting loosely between the oddball townsfolk of a fictional US town, ‘Centreville’, on the dawn of apocalypse. George A. Romero’s cult classic Night of the Living Dead is acutely remembered in Jarmusch’s addition to the genre, but also recast, as glacial storytelling dredges up well-used motifs to unoriginal effect. Jarmusch’s film is peppered with glorious moments, but they are few and far between. Self-conscious irony becomes increasingly painful as scenes repeat and characters circle one another. A tepid, half-hearted effort.

8. Jellyfish (James Gardner, 2018)

Jellyfish is not a bad picture, nor does it completely mispresent a way of life. Nevertheless, much like the free-swimming, marine animal from which it takes its name, Jellyfish floats with no real direction in mind, swept one way and then, inevitably, another. Partnered with this, Gardner’s picture indulges in the poverty of its  seaside landscape – unsubtle, melodramatised scenes that leave a bitter taste in the mouth. 

7. Between Two Ferns: The Movie (Scott Aukerman, 2019)

Zach Galifianakis’ absurdist, internet talk-show finds new turf with a full-length picture, helpfully distributed by Netflix. Gluing together an assortment of interviews – with high-profile names such as Matthew McConaughey, Gal Godot, and Keanu Reeves – the film barely reaches its finale, offering up a loose collection of unfunny scenes. As per, Will Ferrell makes a typical, hideous showing. Between Two Ferns should remain on the internet, not on the big screen.

6. 21 Bridges (Brian Kirk, 2019)

Originally titled ‘17 bridges’ – did they somehow forget 4 in the original? – this is a forgettable and mediocre blockbuster, whose limp narrative is only just supported by the performance of its lead actor, Chadwick Boseman. Little can be said for J. K. Simmons, whose loud-mouthed performance (winning him an Oscar in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (2014)) is here loosely parroted, offering laughs where before we might have trembled. 21 Bridges is delivered more like a weak, Dirty Harry sequel than its clear James Bond-esque ambitions. Over its 100-minute runtime, director Brian Kirk allows a leisurely pace to the proceedings, in which, surprisingly, there is very little substance or plot to carry things forward.

5. All is True (Kenneth Branagh, 2018)

Kenneth Branagh plays Shakespeare in his final, declining days – maybe the most “Kenneth-Branagh” performance Kenneth Branagh has ever given. Cosied up in the English countryside with his ever-tolerant wife, Anne Hathaway (played by Judi Dench), Shakespeare gardens and strolls, often visited by the ghost of his dead son (‘Hamnet’). A titanic bore, Ben Elton’s script reads much like a fact-checking list, unoriginal and mundane. (I am still grieving for the five pounds that this film robbed from me.)

4. In the Tall Grass (Vincenzo Natali, 2019)

Of the glut of Stephen King adaptations to have been produced this year (the highlights including Pet Sematary (Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer) It: Chapter 2 (Andy Muschietti) and Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan)), In the Tall Grass is undoubtedly one of the less memorable, and, contrary to expectation, one of the least frightening to date. An abridged plot summary is possible simply by viewing the opening ten minutes: a young couple wander into a field of tall grass and can’t get out. Nothing more happens, really, except for the appearance of a large rock – as if the grass wasn’t terrifying enough – whose ominous presence curdle the minds of whoever (intentionally or not) touches its surface. Unsatisfying overall.

3. Murder Mystery (Kyle Newacheck, 2019)

Adam Sandler and Jennifer Anniston solving mysteries on a big yacht, whilst playing light-weight, sexist jokes. Is there anything more to add?

2. Dumbo (Tim Burton, 2019)

One of the most horrendous, live-action remakes to be regurgitated by Disney – a gargantuan, ever-broadening empire of sorts – Dumbo is a retelling of the classic story of the elephant that could fly … and more! Not only can the elephant fly (otherwise the pinnacle of Walt Disney’s original effort) but, with the miracle of CGI, we also witness Eva Green straddle its back whilst it flies circles around an audience. More or less another convincing reason to not watch Tim Burton, if you weren’t convinced already. (To quote Marge Simpson: “I like to think that I’m a patient, tolerant woman and that there was no line that you could cross […] but last night you didn’t just cross that line, you threw up on it!”)

1. Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell, 2018)

Uncompromisingly, unapologetically dreadful. David Mitchell, having previously succeeded with indie gems The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010) and It Follows (2014), serves up a 130-minute comic spree of jumbled, inter-crossed events that loosely centre around the disappearance of a young woman. Under the Silver Lake, undoubtedly the worst film to be released this year, is a pretentious and lazy tome that can at no point buoy itself up. It’s a shame the waters were never that deep to start with.

Marriage Story – review | scenes from a marriage falling out of love

Marriage Story (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2019)

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Listening to his father’s fifteenth studio-album, Blood on the Tracks (1975), Jackob Dylan – the estranged child of Bob and Sara – recognised it as “my parent’s talking,” a conversation in lyric between two people once so familiar. His remark is, of course, belated, having only properly understood their divorce with the hindsight afforded by time; and yet, by contrast, the simplicity of his phrase reminds us of how such damage is registered in the mind of a child (simply understood, they just appeared to be “talking.”) Henry Barber (Azhy Robertson), the child of Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, might have understood his parents’ divorce in a similar way, conscious of his pendulum swing between their two embraces, the confusion of life distilled into a minor civil war of sorts.

The narrative of Dylan’s album, much like Baumbach’s film, is of course just one side of things, tilted, hardly a univocal measurement of their heartbreak. Marriage Story is partially inspired by his divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh, as well as that of his parents, a story – quite literally, as the title would imply – of two people falling out of love, a devastating and harrowing event to unfold. Charlie (favouring the East coast) is a successful director of amateur theatrics, lean and tall, as if borrowed from Woody Allen’s Manhattan in many ways; whereas his wife, Nicole (favouring the West coast), is a former teen actress who now plays the lead in his productions. Unable to reconcile their differences, the two reject counselling in favour of marriage lawyers, the python-like Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern) hired by Nicole and Jay Marotta (Ray Liotta) used by Charlie, respectively; their participation, ironically, demands a theatrics to the weather of the proceeding, one ugly and turbulent in every aspect.

Tuning characteristic elements of his prior films, The Squid and the Whale (2005), Margot at the Wedding (2007) and The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) most evidently, Baumbach again pursues familial ties, disappointment, and the polished, New Yorker-esque shine of his everyday people. Marriage Story is far more calibrated than his other works – which, recurrently, seem to be underpinned with their own brand of cynicism – uncovering every faultline of the human experience whilst, thankfully, suggesting grounds for hope. Randy Newman’s animated soundtrack, largely confined to the piano, boosts such a promise with every note played, lending softness to the remains of the day; we might compare such use of music to Baumbach’s evident inspiration, Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1974), only here minimal and quieter throughout. 

Marriage Story deserves all the praise it has inevitably received, especially for the understated performance of Johansson, whose sunshine personality battles so evidently against the encroaching frontiers of divorce. Of the two, Nicole is the more empathetic, even if she is less understood.

Undoubtedly one of the best films of the year.

Motherless Brooklyn – review | an imperfect, monumental achievement

Motherless Brooklyn (dir. Edward Norton, 2019)

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It is a recurring trend amongst contemporary, American novelists – such as John Updike, Saul Bellow or Norman Mailer – that cinema has generally steered clear of their literature. Such fictions represent dense, philosophical moodscapes, following the quest of an individual as they try to make sense of an increasingly different world; a way of life, as lyricises Bob Dylan, where there’s every chance “you’ll sink like a stone/ For the times they are a-changing’.” Motherless Brooklyn, adapted by Edward Norton from the novel by Jonathan Lethem, is proof that such works can be flattened on the screen – even if waiting on the backburner since October 1999. Audacious throughout, Motherless Brooklyn drifts across its 144-minute length much like a Himalayan glacier, both epic and lumbersome.

Edward Norton stars as Lionel Essrog, whose undiagnosed Tourette’s syndrome – calmed only by gum, weed, or “something a little stronger” – impedes every step of his career, working under the wing of Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) in a small-time, detective agency. Living under the heights of Brooklyn bridge, similar to the poet Hart Crane (whose view provided much inspiration), Essrog drifts between existential musings (“it’s only the biggest city on Earth”) and his daily battles of involuntary tics. Failing to protect Frank during a business operation, Essrog later commits himself to find out what transpired, leading him between jazz bars and city halls, a world of capitalist expansion that appears to stem from the John Hughes-esque figure of Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin). Amid racial tensions and the polarising gentrification of city ‘slums’, a story unfolds of a broken society; to quote Saul Bellow, a place wherein one ‘wanders about […] like a man who has lost many teeth’.

Norton’s picture beautifully reimagines a time and place, rewinding Lethem’s novel forties years back into the 1950s – evident from polished, chrome vehicles parked at every corner, or a headlining, John Osbourne play “Look Back in Anger” flashing above sidewalks. Elements of the original novel, however, do not survive the translation into cinema, characters speaking in a kind of theatrical prose – the script, for the greater part, appears recited more than it is learned. Lines as cliché as “everybody gotta find their way in the world” are delivered with staccato emphasis, slipping between sincerity and caricature.

It is remarkable to watch Edward Norton construct the identity of Essrog, moreover. Jazz functions as a kind of analogy to his way of thinking – its athletic, improvisatory surface concealing patterns of finely-tuned order (“a thing for numbers and words”). Norton himself emerges as the orchestrator of the picture, though it can be difficult to distinguish whether or not he is the character, director, producer, or screenwriter when present onscreen. (His inventory of roles, during the end credits, rival even Orson Welles).

Motherless Brooklyn is by no means a perfect film, its idiosyncrasies – similar to its central protagonist, Lionel Essrog – are hard to disregard. Yet it is confident and bold filmmaking, a giant of sorts in contemporary cinema.

21 Bridges – review | an overboiled, Scooby-Doo cliché

21 Bridges (dir. Brian Kirk, 2019)

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“For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer,” reads a minister, solemnly, at the closed-casket funeral of Reginald Davis, a former NYPD officer. His young son, Andre (Christian Isaiah), sits in the pews with every intention of one day becoming that “avenger” – a single, well-timed tear falling down his face; an accidental parody, maybe, to Anthony Hopkins’ teardrop in The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980). And so, from these opening scenes, begins a moderately immersive, limp narrative, whose predictability is only just supported by the performance of its lead actor.

Nineteen-years later, Andre (now played by Chadwick Boseman) has grown up into a gaunt-faced, efficient killer of cop-killers – claiming the “DNA” of his late, influential father – whilst also caring for his elderly mother, Vonetta (Adriane Lenox). “You gotta look the devil in the eye,” she forewarns, coincidentally, on the night of a surprise attack. Events domino when an ugly cocaine raid, led by ex-Afghanistan veterans Ray and Michael (Taylor Kitsch and Stephan James), leaves eight cops dead, one-hundred pounds of uncut cocaine having been stolen (from an original three-hundred kilogram). Unable to continue with their identities, the two slip into hiding, acquiring new names before their planned getaway to Miami. Pressured by Captain McKenna (J. K. Simmons) to apprehend the duo before 5 am city-time, Andre, partnered with Detective Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller), initiates the lockdown of Manhattan island – closing all twenty-one bridges, waterways, and underground networks – before they dramatically “flood the city with blue.”

Chadwick Boseman, in his first role since T’Challa in Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018), is excellent in the role of Andre Davis, despite low performances across a stellar, ensemble cast. Little can be said for J. K. Simmons, whose loud-mouthed performance (winning him an Oscar in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (2014)) is here loosely parroted, offering laughs where before we might have trembled. Other ancillary, male characters otherwise form a backdrop of overly-serious, chiselled faces.

21 Bridges, although competently executed, is delivered more like a weak, Dirty Harry sequel than its clear James Bond-esque ambitions. Over its 100-minute runtime, director Brian Kirk allows a leisurely pace to the proceedings, in which, surprisingly, there is very little substance or plot to carry things forward. A brief hiatus to the apartment of a suspect, Leigh (Jamie Neumann), for example, takes over two hours to complete – according to the onscreen countdown – deflating any real sense of pressure. Credited producers Joe and Anthony Russo – following their incredible success with Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Endgame (2019) – lend comic-book qualities to Kirk’s drama, action sequences taking precedence over muddled, colourless dialogue. It might as well be another serial of ‘Scooby-Doo’.

Originally titled ‘17 bridges’ – did they somehow forget 4 in the original draft? – this is a forgettable and mediocre blockbuster. You will find more interest in simply looking at bridges.

La belle époque – review | rekindling the good times of marriage

La belle époque (dir. Nicolas Bedos, 2019)

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‘La Belle Époque’ (translated from French as “the beautiful epoch” or “the good times”) is a period in European history, dated approximately from 1871 to 1941, and typically characterised by its renewed sense of peace, wealth and optimism. It is also the neon-lit title of a café in Lyon, where, on the 17^th of May, 1974, a young man called Victor (Daniel Auteuil) encountered the woman he would one day marry, Marianne (Fanny Ardent).

All of this is learned in the present day, where the stagnating marriage is finally concluded, and Victor – no longer quite so handsome, possessing only “grey or black clothes” – is kicked out of the apartment by his wife. After receiving a gift from his son and the director of a theatrics service, Antoine (Guillaume Canet), who can promise a kind of playhouse ‘time travel’ (wherein “tailor-made, historical events” are meticulously restaged), Victor decides to pay and re-experience the moment he first came into contact with Marianne. If anything, as a final salutation to what has since been lost. “Nostalgia has become big business,” Antoine impresses, though Victor is yet to fully understand the implications of his subscription.

In a landscape reminiscent of the fake ‘Seahaven’ in The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), Victor is swept into the rapturous, pseudo-realism of the day he first met Marianne, in 1974 – an atmosphere finely tuned, yet sometimes imperfect, to exactly replicate the details of the event. (“It was ‘big slut’, not ‘bitch,’” he corrects one actor; the alcohol thrown across the table must be “red wine”). On the other side of two-way mirrors, Antoine and his crew monitor the grand design as it unfolds: dimming or raising a light on cue, adding “music” where appropriate, or prompting a performance with the help of an earpiece. Marianne’s on-stage imitation, the dazzling Margot (Doria Tillier), is also undergoing a separation from Antoine, and, by her commitment to the role, unknowingly inspires a new love in each of the men. Inside this blossoming, hothouse environment, emotions are rapidly stoked, each metanarrative coinciding with and complicating the other.

Nicolas Bedos writes and directs La belle époque (his second endeavour behind the camera) with entertaining and brilliant gusto, frenetic energy that lends itself to the make-believe past. Seriousness is balanced with levity in many instances, scenes toppling from graveness (Marianne confessing her unhappiness) to scatological farce (drinking vodka whilst sat on the toilet; Victor stood patiently nearby). It is an abrasive style of comedy, unremitting and often unapologetic. Elements of David Fincher’s 1997 mystery-thriller, The Game, are married to the kind of narrative blueprints we might anticipate from Charlie Kauffman (the scripts of Being John Malkovich or Synecdoche, New York). Confidence exudes from every performance, notably in the violent duet of Antoine and Margot, which, ultimately, makes for quick and pleasurable viewing.

“It’s fake, but enjoyable all the same,” the imitation of Marianne comments, leading Victor between memories, intoxications, and recollections: “I’d forgotten about you!” His trip down memory lane (if we can even label it a ‘memory’) is one that pleads for the rekindling of his marriage – the essence of which has been lost to bitterness and dissatisfaction – and to place exactly where it all went wrong. Their lives, however, cannot be mapped so easily. The café, ‘La belle époque’, outside of time and reality, is shuttered into a comfortable refuge for Victor to replay the romance of before; though how many times can the feeling be experienced? 

La belle époque is a deft and hilarious romance, one highly imaginative in its reach.

Modern Love: Falling in Love in 21st-Century Cinema

Cinema has always been a playground for love affairs, whether fulfilled or frustrated. It is easy to fall in love with the movies, but easier still to watch others do exactly that. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the act of falling in love could not be further removed from its roots in “Golden Hollywood” – to disagree with Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), ‘[it is not] the same old story/ A fight for love and glory’ – modern couples instead preoccupied by the changing times. It is possible to understand love as now being filtered through technologies, often dependent on it, and, as a result, patterned to its digital freedoms. Outside of this, lovers ruminate in ways that never occurred before – either swept into the political, the conceptual puzzles of post-modern cinema, or simply illustrative of greater representation. To quote Laura Jesson in Brief Encounters (David Lean, 1945): “oh, Fred, I've been so foolish. I've fallen in love. […] I didn't think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.”

Across ten pictures that I have loosely selected, the way people fall in love – its conventions, sex, friendships, and infrequent break-up – are viewed from the perspective of the modern stage.  

1. Catfish (Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, 2010)

Questions of inauthenticity do not dim this documentary feature from Schulman and Joost, the brother and friend to a young photographer, Yaniv “Nev” Schulman, who is inadvertently caught in a deceptive, online relationship. It is via the cupidian platform of Facebook that Nav is unknowingly cajoled (or ‘catfished’: ‘to lure (someone) into a relationship by means of a fictional online persona’). Catfish, more than anything else, is a unique recasting of the traditional love story – one whose realisation has no chance of being completed. Angela, whether online (posing as one of 15 profiles) or as a person in the flesh, illustrates an open vulnerability to what the internet can afford: an escape into an artificial reality.

2. Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)

Old age is not exempt from the experiences of love in modern cinema, not least in the relationship of Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and her husband, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) – octogenarian piano teachers, comfortably living in Paris – whose shared existence is quickly interrupted after Anne suffers a silent stroke. From here, Georges watches the collapse of her body with impassive agony, a quiet bystander to the process of death. (I am reminded of the recurring, nameless observer (played by Artur Barciś) in Dekalog (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1989) who sees each tragedy unfold and yet never intervenes). Sensitively realised by the deft script of Haneke, Amour – or “love”, translated from the French – is in many ways a displacing of what love traditionally represents. Similar to Georges' tender handling of a pigeon that flies into the apartment, coaxed back to where it came from, so does his understanding of Anne require a certain approach; the nature of death distils a shared lifetime of love into a basic, elemental care between two people. 

3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)

What if you could forget about somebody you loved – every single moment of pain and happiness experienced – whilst retaining your sunshine for all eternity? And, what if you accidentally met that person again? Such are the quandaries of a Charlie Kaufman-penned script, whose authorial presence – much like with Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) and Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008) – is undeniably visible, as if spun from the same thread. Forgetting is not synonymous with escape, as Joel Barrish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) unwittingly realise, whose compulsion to reunite (and reunite again) does not transcend their fracturing memories. Everything about love to the peculiar, imperfect couple is messy – but just as love is accepted with happiness, so should it also be with pain. A truly mesmerising picture from Kaufman and Gondry.

4. Valley of Love (Guillaume Nicloux, 2015)

Undoubtedly my favourite film of 2015, Valley of Love is the story of two actors – played by Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert, reunited in life as well – whose paths converge around the spectral writings of their dead son, Michael, entreating them to be at Death Valley on November 12^th. “It might sound like a bad joke, but I swear it’s the truth,” reads the letter, and so beginning their programmatic journey across the sun-bleached, Californian hinterland. Late in their lives – “[do you] remember how we met? […] you were handsome,” – the two recall their old love whilst searching for their son, unable to reconcile their past with the present. Touches of David Lynch texture this deeply profound, and often impenetrable, picture from Guillaume Nicloux; it is never solely one thing. It is unclear whether the couple will fall in love again, or if they will accept their shared tragedy – the fantasy of hope is ever-present.

5. Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

Somewhere, in a near-future metropolis, the everyday spender can purchase an operating system – fitting snugly into your ear, much like a translucent hearing aid – that, above all else, includes a virtual assistant with artificial intelligence, designed to learn and grow with you. Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) – whilst divorcing his childhood sweetheart, Catherine (Rooney Mara) – chooses a female voice (Scarlett Johansson), and she promptly names herself Samantha (in the Aramaic language, it connotes ‘Listener’). Theodore falls in love with Samantha, taking refuge in her assurances, intelligence, and logic; she is at once a disembodiment of his own need for desire, but also, as Theodore is inevitably led to realise, a way by which to enlighten his existence and find acceptance. Her epitomises love in the modern age, a visionary glimpse into what technology can satisfy and enable for those who choose to live with it. “Falling in love is kind of like a form of socially acceptable insanity.”

6. Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, 2002)

Indie veteran Steven Soderbergh revisits Stanisław Lem’s classic science-fiction novel, Solaris – initially adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972. After having journeyed to a space station plagued by unusual phenomena, Dr. Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) discovers that most of the crew have committed suicide – the few who remain on board, moreover, are persistently haunted by the physical presences of their dead loved ones. In consequence, Kelvin reunites with his dead wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), who despite knowing of their relationship is otherwise empty of any kind of feeling, unable to fully remember what she has not lived. Experiences of love focus and unfocus as Kelvin struggles to recall his former wife: does the idea of love exist more strongly in the present, or the dream? Solaris – both the nebulous, blue planet and the film itself – offer no immediate answers, and neither should we expect to receive them from a single viewing.

7. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)

One of my favourite films of all time, Lost in Translation is the crowning achievement of Sofia Coppola’s prolific career – a beautiful ode to friendship, loneliness, and the silent, unsayable love affairs. Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an ageing actor (now resigned to whiskey commercials) briefly encounters Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a newly-wed, young woman unsure of her future (adrift in ennui and insomnia). The two strike an unlikely friendship, experiencing the Japanese nightlife and culture, quietly falling in love with each passing day. Lost in the neon-lit wilderness of Tokyo, in their respective lives and marriages, the two find consolation in displacement by regularly talking and confessing, similar to the exchanged qualms of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963, new-wave drama, Contempt/Le mepris. Heart-breaking and comedic in equal measure, Lost in Translation is a modern classic of post-romance cinema.

8. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)

Before Sunset is the centrepiece to Richard Linklater’s decades-spanning trilogy (preceded by Before Sunrise (1995) and followed by Before Midnight (2013), reuniting Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) in Paris, who had previously met and fallen in love nine years before. Taking place in cinematic real-time – eighty minutes of the film is equivalent to the same duration in their day – the two wander, ambling between streets, gardens, and find themselves tripping between conversations that become increasingly personal. Slowly, we understand that they have changed as people, even if their intimacies radiate as strongly as before; with the benefit of hindsight, reviewed memories are now imbued with a sense of destiny. It all culminates at Céline’s apartment – persuaded to play, she strums a self-composed ‘waltz for a night’: “one single night with you little Jesse/ Is worth a thousand with anybody.” “Jesse” (spoken after a brief pause) rings like a small, musical bell in the room, bringing them together in a moment of realisation. Ordinary life has never been more romantic, more beautiful.

9. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)

Wong Kar-Wai achieves new levels of exquisiteness, of gorgeousity (to quote Anthony Burgess) and rhapsody with In the Mood for Love, a slight tale of men and women and the passage of time. All of the improvisatory skill that defined his previous works – Days of Being Wild (1990) and Chungking Express (1994), for example – is here replaced by smooth, gliding shots of corridors and roadways, a patience reflected in the measured pace of Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen’s (Maggie Cheung) fulfilment of love. Wong and regular cinematographer Christopher Doyle stage scenes of dialogue in humid, neon-lit alleyways, in smoky interiors, or deep in the shadows of a taxi. In the Mood for Love is a story of love but also of how easily it is evaded, both Mo-wan and Li-zhen pledged to their own, unhappy fidelities.

10. Blue is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)

Unanimously winning the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour is undoubtedly one of the most singular, fierce and painful depictions of love conceived in modern cinema. An intense, erotically-charged relationship forms between Emma (Léa Seydoux) and Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), beginning in the years of high school and continuing into later life; the two, crowded by Kechiche’s camera, are viewed at every stage of their emotional development. Onscreen intensity, however, was likewise matched to its offset environment, its director shooting approximately 800 hours of footage, whilst forcing the actors to undergo tortuous shooting routines, notably with their graphic and protracted sex scenes. Blue is the Warmest Colour is not a film that has survived the #metoo movement, and nor should it be viewed independent from its controversies – in many ways, it constitutes an abuse of cinema and to the profession of acting. Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos’ searing, impassioned performances, moreover, shine through its ugliness and are deserving of all the praise they received. It is a magnetic, devastating onscreen dynamic.

dir. Wes Anderson – filmography rated (1996 – present)

Unexpected stories of whimsy and drollness, propped by their trademark air of melancholy – narratives whose imperfections (and imperfect characters) work against their visual symmetry and neatness. Sentimental and decadent “coolness” in every frame.

9. The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

8. Bottle Rocket (1996)

7. Isle of Dogs (2018)

6. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

5. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

4. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

3. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Anderson’s first stop-motion animation, later followed by the Silver Bear-winning Isle of Dogs (2018), is an ingenious adaptation of the classic Roald Dahl novel (of the same name). Every element of this children’s picture is weighed perfectly, not least the eccentric soundtrack and ensemble of character voices. Unusually, Anderson chose to record the voice work outside of a studio: “we went out in a forest, […] went in an attic, [and even] went in a stable.” Aardman-esque in its heart-warming inventiveness, Fantastic Mr. Fox is so much more than another piece of eye-candy in the Anderson oeuvre.

2. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Influenced by the sombre Americana of J.D. Salinger, The Royal Tenebaums chronicles the lives and careers of three siblings – played by Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow – who, in their individual ways, are each racked by disappointment after their childhood glory. Quietly devastating in its reach, Anderson never allows its quick-paced cinematography, or slight gestures of comedy, to overturn the genuine seriousness of the family affairs. Complex and idiosyncratic behaviours.

1. Rushmore (1998)

Holding closely to the memory of François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) and Jules et Jim (1962), whilst also being wholly unique to itself, the story of Rushmore is at once a classic bildungsroman and again something else, a minor civil war of sorts. Often overlooked for the bolder and more extravagant later works, Rushmore is a small work of auteur genius – magisterial cameos (Bill Murray, for one) heighten the Wilson/Anderson duet, assuring its tragicomic proportions.

My personal favourite Wes Anderson film, for an abundance of reasons, and one certainly worth watching again.

Joker – review | fierce and underwhelming clowning around

Joker (dir. Todd Phillips, 2019)

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In the early moments of Peter Weir’s cult-classic The Truman Show (1998), its title character (played by Jim Carrey) is leafing through a photo album, reluctantly, when he discovers a picture of himself as a young child. “Little angel … Oh, my little clown,” speaks his mother, implicitly persuading Truman to uphold the fantasy of his existence. To a beady-eyed audience, he is an easily digested prospect for entertainment – ‘my little clown’, unknowingly, for a generation of television viewers; to himself, however, he is no playful, comic entertainer. Loneliness and confusion pervade: “You never had a camera in my head!” he resolutely declares.

In various ways does Todd Phillips’ Joker resemble the dynamics of such an existence – not least for how easily such a façade is peeled away, a consciousness that unfolds with the development of narrative. Sweeping the Venice film festival in August, where it received an eight-minute standing ovation, the picture has since provoked a momentous surge of backlash: tallying words such as “toxic”, “uncomfortable [viewing]” and “cynical” (more or less from people who haven’t watched the film). It is an exhilarating prospect when a contemporary film generates this kind of reputation before even having had a general release. 

Joker loosely exists in orbit of the DC universe – we glimpse the Wayne family, as well as suggestions of other cultural phenomena – but, fundamentally, it is a character study in psychopathy, clothed in the comic-book tradition. To be surprised by its personality is a naivety on the part of the audience; it is an origins story that holds no pretensions of being anything else. For anyone paying to watch a tragedy, how could you expect not to be shocked? Phillips’ comic figure – seized fervently by the capable hands of Joaquin Phoenix – emerges not as a product of the world (much like Heath Ledger’s portrait in The Dark Knight (2008) instalment) but rather as a pedestrian of it, who by virtue of dressing as a clown is borne into a reactionary wave of anti-capitalist agenda. Not prompted to think any differently, the Joker trades a life of psychosomatic disorder for the effortless “comedy” of killing: “… for my whole life, I didn’t know if I even really existed. But I do, and people are starting to notice.” It is all too natural to be a clown in this society.

In a Harlem/Brooklyn-inspired Gotham city, Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) works as a professional clown for a living – twirling signs on street corners and dancing for children in hospital – whilst also caring for his aged, bed-ridden mother, Penny. Fleck suffers from a pseudobulbar affect, a neurological condition of involuntarily bursting into laughter; treatment is presented, in the form of counselling, medication and a thought diary, but nothing appears to work (“I just don’t want to feel so bad anymore”). Not unlike the 1920s paintings of Pierrot the clown, by Pablo Picasso, outward happiness is used to colour a complex, inward melancholy, only here the paint runs … even if it is regularly made up. Gotham is alive with societal corruption, witnessed in the beatings and offense inflicted upon Fleck himself – no one could be defeated more. Chance brings about a new beginning with the screening of his botched stand-up routine on the live Murray Franklin Show, helmed by an enigmatic Robert De Niro, and so does a new chapter unfold.

Todd Phillips – previously locked into frat-boy comedies such as The Hangover Trilogy (2009 – 2013) and Due Date (2010) – engineers a pretence of seriousness over levity, closely alluding to the works of Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet (although falling short of both, equally) when finding the tones and locality of his urban, American landscape. It is an homage channelled only superficially, the touchstones of Taxi Driver (1976) or The King of Comedy (1983) – the former gestured twice with a mock-finger headshot – compromised by the pseudo-serious, shallow depths of its script. Phillips’ does not engage his inspiration originally or tactfully (although a Rupert Pupkin-esque performance by De Niro is dazzling alone). Surfaces are important to the grammar of this picture – whether internally or externally.

Joaquin Phoenix introduces a uniquely upsetting performance of the infamous character, most notably during his bouts of laughter – all of which are followed by an equally strained intake of breath, attempting to avoid eye contact as he fumbles for an explanatory medical card. Far removed from the pantomime antics of Jack Nicholson’s 1989 rendition, Joker works somewhere between Jared Leto’s overt conceit in Suicide Squad (2016) and Heath Ledger’s spiritual damage from 2008. Once again it still cannot compare to the latter, but it is a masterful attempt. Phoenix elevates a hastily-drawn stereotype into moments of spectacle, in particular with dance – as observed in the bathroom; descending the concrete staircase; or before entering the stage. Such moments of carefully worked bliss are also indicative of control, the mind and body settled, if temporarily, as they are married to the high-sounding beat of Gary Glitter or the disturbed, throbbing cello of Hildur Guðnadóttir. I am reminded of the classical soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) – “now it was lovely music that came into my aid […] and I viddied right at once what to do” – otherwise a thematic extension to the acts of violence and rape perpetuated throughout.

Arthur Fleck, or the “Joker” (his title assumed with renewed purpose), is a deliberately tragic figure not a comic one – as pointed by Mark Kermode in a recent interview, a line is clearly drawn here between ‘empathy’ and ‘pity’; Joker is without doubt a pitiable figure. And yet for all its absence of character development, poor depiction of mental illness and homage, the second-half of Joker is a breath-taking plunge into the deepest limits of brutality and moral anarchy. It is by no means a dangerous film but it is certainly provocative, and for those unused to comic-books reflecting a glimmer of the world of today, many will be afraid to look again. Fierce and unimaginative craftsmanship.

#byNWR – a delicious streaming platform of unholy cinema

Nicholas Winding Refn is a precious filmmaker – look too hard and you might puncture the surface; look too carefully and the weight of his images could ring hollow. Few contemporary auteurs have gorged audiences so fully with their own vision, committed to their influence as much as to their cinematic label (his credit is now stylised as NWR). Spiritual successor to Lars Von Trier – though “he is envious of everything I have” – and a provocative, enfant terrible in his own right, Refn is a challenging figure to enjoy. “I’m a pornographer. I make films about what arouses me […] what I want to see,” he infamously commented, in an interview with The Guardian, a smile likely playing upon his lips. (Films such as Bronson (2008), Drive (2011) or Only God Forgives (2013) do little to alleviate accusations of misogyny, sadism and pugilistic, adolescent cravings). I, personally, have been unable to resist his work, even if I cannot always understand it – his thirteen-hour lumber, Too Old to Die Young (2019), being a recent epitome of such extravagance.

            #byNWR is his latest, cinematic offering. Established as “an unadulterated cultural expressway of the arts”, the streaming platform – working alongside the Harvard Film Archive and MUBI – works to revive and restore a glut of unseen, forgotten content. Quarterly volumes are directed by guest editors (with titles such as ‘Smell of Female’ or ‘You Ain’t No Punk, You Punk’), typically given three chapters, which themselves are plushed with film, mixed-media, interviews and other loosely tailored items. Refn refers to their collection as a hobby – yet it might be more appropriate to term it an obsession, one that is intended to justify, and compliment, his own work over the past few years. “Our times need sex, horror and melodrama,” Refn lays out, art to displace “our comfort zones – of complacency, and, for most of us in the west, an easeful life.” Something to hurt us, something to digest over an extended period, as if high-fibre viewing. Each of the works collected and restored in #byNWR achieves a double-helix of wonder and repellent, ephemeral euro-porn/art house works that unapologetically exist to be seen.

            I can only remark on what I have seen so far. Opening the first volume is Bert Williams’ The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds (1965), a relic of the past whose stimulations go far beyond the carnal, striking something altogether temporal and unidentifiable. Williams buries his sole protagonist, the investigative cop Johnson, deep into the airless swamps of Bible Belt America, where (chiming with the fairy-tale mystique of Night of the Hunter (1955)) spiders, drifters, and crocodiles haunt its recesses. A mysterious young girl, Lisa, is discovered as the captive bird in the nest of “The Cuckoo Inn” – defiled, reportedly, by the wants of her absent father. Volume One continues with Hot Thrills and Warm Chills (1967) – cheap sex scenes interspersed with a dull plot – before concluding with the lurid, racialised Shanty Tramp (1967). Onward: Refn restores cult classics such as Night Tide (1961), featuring a feline-beautiful Dennis Hopper in a story of fairgrounds and mermaids, in addition to Roy Ormond’s fascinating bible trilogy: If Footmen Tire You … (1971), The Burning Hell (1974) and The Believer’s Heaven (1977). In the volumes since, the site has looked beyond to classic and lost punk films, abandoned home videos, and lately to low-budget, grindhouse fare. If you choose to watch these films you will recoil – but it is hard to resist a second glimpse.

            In a time of streaming giants, Netflix and Amazon Prime soon to be eclipsed by Apple TV+, Disney+ and HULU, #byNWR holds its ground as a bastion of alternative creativity. Refn offers a free antidote (as of yet, there is no subscription fee) to the polished, formulaic trends in mainstream cinema. I am determined for the site to reach as many people as possible, and believe that everyone will find something of interest – in one chapter, or another – that reaches deep, with one long hand, and grasps tight onto that feeling you least expected. 

“In a world of the instant,” the bio to the site reads, it is here “where we can share, enjoy, and look to the future – with hope, prosperity, and the idea that culture is for everyone.”

#byNWR can be accessed at https://www.bynwr.com

Ad Astra – review | a secular odyssey of paternal desires

Ad Astra (dir. James Gray, 2019)

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If the genre of science fiction repeatedly finds itself, as the title offers, looking per aspera ad astra – from the Latin, “through hardships to the stars” – director James Gray returns the gaze, turning instead to the onlooker themselves. Brad Pitt is subject to an almost painterly study, his emotional muteness viewed with an intensity that rivals Miloš Forman’s scrutiny to the expressive script of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – the contours of skin, every facial tick, slur, or pause, as fathomless as the gulf between planets. Ad Astra knowingly plays into the traditions and grammar of space opera, its thrilling ambition met with typical unoriginality. Opening in the “near future” – its blazing red typography somewhat Bladerunner-inspired – Gray paves a transcendent, Conradian journey that staggers from planet to planet, eventually settling on the blue expanse of Neptune (a rarely used, planetary set piece). It is a story of fathers and sons, or rather fatherless sons, whose Freudian longings for something more dismantle the stability of their present. Space becomes a harbour for such internal damage, a site for the dispossessed – the lunar plane, for example, a focal point of territory warfare – which, over the course of its two-hour runtime, sees its drifting astronauts yearn for firmer groundings. Inseparable from prior instalments in the sci-fi genre, Interstellar, Gravity and Sunshine the most immediate examples, Ad Astra’s voltage inspires a sense of wonder and uncomplicated mystery with each passing scene.

Brad Pitt continues his year of acclaimed roles with Major Roy McBride, the abandoned son to famed Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) – “the first man to the outer solar system […] a pioneer” – whose career in astronomics seeks to leave the shadow of, and honour, his inherited paternal legacy. In the wake of a series of paralysing, anti-matter surges, Roy is employed by U.S. Space Command to investigate, an operation that leads him to make contact with the resurrected ghost of his father – long since considered dead. (Much like Schrödinger’s cat in a steel chamber, the father is neither dead nor alive, at first, as much a figment of imaginings as he is of reality.) Clifford had originally headed the “Lima Project”, oriented in its quest to find extra-terrestrial life, whilst in orbit of Neptune, though it had since been ruled defunct by its radio silence. Such an allure, as originally sketched in Tarkovsky’s psychodrama Solaris (and its later 2002 remake), opens its protagonist to an intellectual and philosophical risk. In space, no one can hear you scream … or meditate on life, you might also argue.

It is during Pitt’s introspective musings, as captured by a roughly-whispered voiceover (in the style of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life or To the Wonder), that director James Gray distinguishes Ad Astra from the current trend of mainstream blockbusters. Re-treading his arthouse/euro-indie roots, Gray requires more than banal thrills from his audience, daring us to wait out his silences, carefully hold each word, and allow each moment to contribute to a far greater whole. “What did he find out there, in the abyss?” Roy asks hesitantly, a question posed as much to himself as it is to a wider community. Ad Astra, moreover, is not the first time its leading star, Brad Pitt, has acted alongside the use of voiceover. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Andrew Dominik’s 2007 revisionist epic, also engages a similar effect, the dramatization of the titular killing guided with a storyteller-like, third-person narration. If to this narrative it felt supercilious, it can be argued that Gray is more explicitly successful (with the occasional laughable moment) – ponderous thoughts carried with the gradually drawn cinematography of Hoyte van Hoyten, resting finally on day-old stubble or the wrinkles in the corner of eyes. It is a wonderful and highly satisfying effect.

“I've got my wife and children and they're great, and I can find plenty of joy in that,” Gray assured in an interview for Digital Spy, discussing the possibility of encountering alien life, "[but] to rely on false Gods, the idea that there's these little green men out there that'll either save us or eat us, to me that's more horrifying than having to rely on other people." It is by questioning our reliance on myth and conjecture that we are forced, when watching Ad Astra, to re-focus our ideals, if for a moment – the fictions of space exploration revealed to be simply that, fictitious, especially when we come to realise that no other life accompanies our voyage. In this case, and by pulling the carpet from beneath our feet, Ad Astra might be said to be offer a family drama more than anything else, a movement away from cheap fantasy and instead turning inward, looking far closer, far more intently at ourselves. Clifford is a relic of this old ambition, a symbolic marker of what could be achieved, and his son a force to subdue this misanthropy, a lens by which to correct the dreams of another. “The enemy up here is not a person or a thing. It’s the endless void,” a sentiment captured in the recurring image of a helmet visor – at once reflecting space and, again, faintly revealing the profile of its astronaut.

Ad Astra is a beautifully simple picture that clothes itself with sustained philosophic reflection. If you choose to watch it, you must look past these obscuring elements to the universality of its narrative – I certainly found myself in several places. Gray undoubtedly built the apparatus of its narrative whilst looking to rival the same grandeur as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and yet, unlike the top-heavy nostalgia of films such as Interstellar, Ad Astra manages to subtly navigate its source material, achieving an effective counterweight to its intelligent agenda. Spectacle is found equally in the dazzling set pieces as it is the lyrical wonderings of Roy McBride, a wonderfully unstrained performance from Brad Pitt. It is possible that some of the ideas and their realisation here will be usurped, possibly even bettered, with later additions to the genre, but what we are given, nevertheless, is a pure example of what the wonders of cinema can achieve.

My Favourite Films: from Paris, Texas to The Wizard of Oz

From latest to earliest release date, these are the films that have affected me the most – cry, laugh, hide – and those that I will undoubtedly watch again, and again.

1. Moonlight (I) (2016)            

2. Valley of Love (2015)

3. Her (2013)

4. Under the Skin (I) (2013)

5. Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)            

6. The Great Beauty (2013)

7. The Master (2012)

8. Killing Them Softly (2012)

9. The Social Network (2010)

10. Moon (2009)

11. Revolutionary Road (2008)

12. There Will Be Blood (2007)

13. Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

14. No Country for Old Men (2007)

15. Sunshine (2007)

16. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

17. Brokeback Mountain (2005)

18. The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)            

19. Birth (2004)

20. Before Sunset (2004)

21. Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)

22. 21 Grams (2003)

23. Lost in Translation (2003)

24. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring (2003)

25. Elephant (2003)

26. Solaris (2002)        

27. Mulholland Drive (2001)  

28. The Piano Teacher (2001)

29. Donnie Darko (2001)        

30. The Pledge (I) (2001)

31. In the Mood for Love (2000)        

32. Magnolia (1999)    

33. American Beauty (1999)

34. The Thin Red Line (1998)

35. The Big Lebowski (1998)  

36. Fargo (1996)

37. Trainspotting (1996)         

38. Before Sunrise (1995)

39. Chungking Express (1994)

40. Three Colours: Red (1994)

41. Satantango (1994)

42. Groundhog Day (1993)    

43. Orlando (1992)

44. When Harry Met Sally... (1989)

45. Dekalog (1989–1990)        

46. Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)

47. Alice (1988)

48. Akira (1988)

49. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

50. Full Metal Jacket (1987)

51. Wings of Desire (1987)

52. Evil Dead II (1987)

53. Blue Velvet (1986)

54. Brazil (1985)

55. Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

56. Paris, Texas (1984)

57. El Sur (1983)

58. The King of Comedy (1982)

59. Blade Runner (1982)

60. Fitzcarraldo (1982)

61. Vernon, Florida (1981)

62. The Woman Next Door (1981)

63. Raging Bull (1980)

64. Airplane! (1980)

65. The Shining (1980)

66. Stalker (1979)

67. Apocalypse Now (1979)

68. Manhattan (1979)

69. Gates of Heaven (1978)

70. Days of Heaven (1978)

71. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

72. Stroszek (1977)

73. Annie Hall (1977)

74. Eraserhead (1977)

75. Network (1976)

76. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

77. Taxi Driver (1976)

78. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

79. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

80. The Passenger (1975)

81. The Godfather: Part II (1974)

82. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)   

83. Chinatown (1974)

84. Arabian Nights (1974)

85. Fear Eats the Soul (1974)  

86. The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974)

87. Don't Look Now (1973)

88. Last Tango in Paris (1972)

89. Solaris (1972)

90. Walkabout (1971)

91. Midnight Cowboy (1969)

92. Faces (I) (1968)      

93. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

94. The Graduate (1967)

95. Belle de Jour (1967)

96. Pierrot le Fou (1965)  

97. A Blonde in Love (1965)

98. Red Desert (1964)

99. The Gospel According to Matthew (1964)

100. Le Mépris (1963)

101. 8½ (1963)

102. Vivre Sa Vie (1962)

103. L'Avventura (1960)

104. The 400 Blows (1959)

105. Vertigo (1958)     

106. The Night of the Hunter (1955)

107. The Third Man (1949)

108. Paisan (1946)

109. Dumbo (1941)

110. The Wizard of Oz (1939)

111. M (1931)