Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023)

Barry Keoghan in Saltburn

Cast: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe, Carey Mulligan, Paul Rhys, Ewan Mitchell. Screenplay: Emerald Fennell. Cinematography: Linus Sandgren. Production design: Suzie Davies. Film editing: Victoria Boydell. Music: Anthony Willis. 

With its fine cinematography and production design and skilled performances, Emerald Fennell's Saltburn is an exquisite container that's so hollow it echoes. The echoes are those of sharper literary and cinematic satires on the English class system. Barry Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a first-year student at Oxford from an affluent and apparently loving middle class family who pretends to be a poor young man from a dysfunctional family and winds up conning his way into a decadent aristocratic family. Oliver's skill at lying and his lethal ways of covering up his lies recalls Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, whose adventures began in The Talented Mr. Ripley, memorably filmed by René Clément (as Purple Noon) in 1960 and by Anthony Minghella in 1999. Like Ripley, Oliver is sexually fluid, and makes his way into the Catton family through his infatuation with Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a handsome and popular fellow student who invites Oliver to spend the summer at the family estate, Saltburn. The Cattons, who include Sir James (Richard E. Grant), Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), and Felix's sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), are a collection of quirks and vices, including the other guests that summer: Felix's cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), an American who sees Oliver as a rival, and Elspeth's neurotic friend, Pamela (Carey Mulligan). If the gathering at Saltburn reminds you of Brideshead Revisited, Fennell name-checks its author when Oliver says Felix's description of his family reminds him of Evelyn Waugh; Felix replies that Waugh based his characters on the Cattons. Another analogue might be found in Alan Hollinghurst's novel, a satire on Thatcherite Britain. The Line of Beauty, whose protagonist becomes a part of the wealthy household of an Oxford classmate on whom he has a crush. And Oliver's sexual attraction to Felix, which has him slurping the bathwater in which Felix has masturbated, is an inevitable reminder of the cum-filled peach in André Aciman's novel Call Me by Your Name and Luca Guadagnino's 2017 film version. Now, I don't have anything against borrowing, but it has to be done with some originality. The time is ripe for a satire on post-Brexit Britain, for example, but Fennell doesn't even give us that: Saltburn is set in 2007. The film lacks sharpness and clear intent, so it winds up being a well-mounted, very well acted but wholly derivative collection of mildly shocking incidents.  

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017)

Colin Farrell in The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Steven Murphy: Colin Farrell
Anna Murphy: Nicole Kidman
Martin: Barry Keoghan
Kim Murphy: Raffey Cassidy
Bob Murphy: Sunny Suljic
Matthew Williams: Bill Camp
Martin's Mother: Alicia Silverstone

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Filippou
Cinematography: Thimios Bakatakis
Production design: Jade Healy
Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis

This is only the third film by Yorgos Lanthimos that I've seen, but I'd say that he and his screenwriting partner, Efthymis Filippou, have a beef with people who play god. In Dogtooth (2009) it was the parents who attempt to create their own utopia by keeping their children ignorant of the outside world. In The Lobster (2015) it was the manager of the hotel that purports to find its residents new mates. And in The Killing of a Sacred Deer it's that archetypal god-player, the surgeon, who finds that the son of a patient he may have killed on the operating table has a mysterious power over him and his family. Behind this film lies a Greek myth about hubris, specifically the story of the punishment meted out by the gods to the house of Atreus, as reflected in the Euripedean tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis, which is referred to in the film as well as its title. But Lanthimos isn't interested in a direct transmutation of the Greek legend into modern terms. His film is a droll, underplayed, and often quite chilling tale that keeps one foot in reality while plaguing the characters with forces that come out of myths about the Fates and the Furies. It's as creepy as any horror movie you can name, but because the cast is so skilled at underplaying I found myself laughing -- a little nervously, yes -- at the absurdities in which their characters found themselves as much as I was flinching at the mental and physical pain they were undergoing. Sex in the film is a kind of torment: Anna Murphy seems to be able to get off only by first lying in an awkward position, dangling from the bed, and she is forced to give the rather unpleasant anesthesiologist (who may have been the one who really killed the patient) a hand job to gain information about their tormentor. That tormentor, Martin, seems to have an attraction to Steven Murphy that he tries to fulfill by pimping out his own mother. Much is made of the fact that Kim, the daughter, is having her first period. And so on. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is such an accumulation of odd details that it almost founders underneath them, and if you're looking for a conventional narrative payoff, go elsewhere. But there is a strange genius at work here, and I'm eager to see more from Lanthimos, including The Favourite, which is getting extraordinary attention now in awards season.

Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017)

Tommy: Fionn Whitehead
Gibson: Aneurin Barnard
George: Barry Keoghan
Mr. Dawson: Mark Rylance
Peter: Tom Glynn-Carney
Farrier: Tom Hardy
Collins: Jack Lowden
Commander Bolton: Kenneth Branagh
Col. Winant: James D'Arcy
Shivering Soldier: Cillian Murphy
Alex: Harry Styles
Dutch Seaman: Jochum ten Haaf

Director: Christopher Nolan
Screenplay: Christopher Nolan
Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema
Production design: Nathan Crowley
Film editing: Lee Smith
Music: Hans Zimmer

I've said it before: If a movie's story and performances are secondary to its spectacle, is it really a good movie? I'm sure Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk was something to see in an IMAX theater, but truth to tell, I'm just as happy to have watched it in HD on my 32-inch Samsung. I don't mind losing the giddy spectacle of riding the waves or flying in pursuit of German fighter planes, so long as there's real artistry in the storytelling, the acting, and the production. I've liked Nolan's work with some reservations since I first encountered it in Memento (2000). I admired his ability to revivify the Batman story, but found the films in his trilogy a little wearying. I was kind of bowled over by the audacity of the concepts and their execution in Inception (2010), but Interstellar (2014) made me fear the worst: that he was so infatuated with cutting-edge film technology and with far-out science fiction speculations that he might never come back down to Earth. So Dunkirk was a relief to me: This is traditional war-movie filmmaking with a splendid contemporary spin, mostly in the way the story is told through cuts back and forth in time. This so-called "non-linear" narrative technique bothered some traditionalists, but I found it both illuminated the characters and suggested some of the tension and chaos of the actual Dunkirk evacuation. Best of all, Nolan forgoes CGI for the most part, using actual ships and planes or convincing models of them, giving the action a much-needed solidity. He also doesn't yield to the temptation to lard his film with star cameos, letting mostly unknown young actors carry the burden of the story. The stars who do appear -- Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy -- behave themselves, blending into the cast nicely. Hardy, for example, is capable of scene-stealing physicality, but he spends most of the film acting with only his eyes, the rest of his face covered by his pilot's breathing apparatus. (When he's liberated from that restriction at the end, I almost feared for the Germans who captured him.) Every genre movie has its clichés, of course, but a good writer and director -- Nolan is both -- knows how to work them, how to avoid stumbling over them and instead give them just enough weight to satisfy our expectations, as he does in the scene in which the returning soldiers, fearful that they'll be cursed and spat upon for losing the battle, are greeted at the train station with people cheering and handing them bottles of beer. He also handles the celebrated speech by Winston Churchill with finesse, never introducing Churchill as an on-screen character and having the speech itself read by the rescued men, as it should be. It's as stirring a moment as one could wish.