Peter Hujar's Day (Ira Sachs, 2025)

Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw in Peter Hujar's Day

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Ben Whishaw. Screenplay: Ira Sachs, based on a book by Linda Rosenkranz. Cinematography: Alex Ashe. Art direction: Ryan Scott Fitzgerald. Film editing: Affonso Gonçalves. 

Ira Sachs's Peter Hujar's Day lacks everything that people go to movies for: action, conflict, spectacle, laughter, tears, even plot. And yet it's wonderful, a small brilliant gem of a film. It consists of two characters, Linda Rosenkranz (Rebecca Hall) and Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), talking about what happened on a recent day in Hujar's life, detailing every event he can recall from waking up in the morning to going to sleep at night. The film is based on transcripts of a tape Rosenkranz made of her interview with Hujar, a freelance photographer, for a "day in the life" book. It helps that Hujar moves in circles that include such mid-1970s celebrities as Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and that he lives in a city like New York, undergoing a constant social upheaval, so what might be an ordinary day for him is more colorful than most of our days. But we never meet these celebrities or see the streets of the city except through Hujar's narrative. What we do see is the confines of Rosenkranz's apartment as Hujar talks and Rosenkranz prods, and the light shifts from day to dusk to night. Cinematographer Alex Ashe's deft use of that light gives the movie what action it possesses beyond the two people moving about the apartment, lying on the couch, talking on the balcony, and Hujar smoking incessantly even as Rosenkranz scolds him for it. Sachs never even lets us see the photos Hujar took, like this one of Ginsberg.

But Peter Hujar's Day is a small triumph of filmmaking, reliant heavily on the consummate acting skill of Whishaw and Hall. 

The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006)

Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Piper Perabo, David Bowie, Andy Serkis, Samantha Mahurin, Roger Rees, Ricky Jay, Daniel Davis, Jim Piddock, Christopher Neame. Screenplay: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan, based on a novel by Christopher Priest. Cinematography: Wally Pfister. Production design: Nathan Crowley. Film editing: Lee Smith. Music: David Julyan.

With his low-budget feature Following (1998), Christopher Nolan showed a genius for making the preposterous plausible, and he followed it up well with Memento (2000). But although he managed to get his footing again with Inception (2010), after his excursion into the comic book world of Batman, in The Prestige he lost control. It's a dark thriller about dueling illusionists with a sci-fi twist that seems to take to heart Arthur C. Clarke's assertion, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." As Nolan is careful to show from the outset, stage magic is technology-based, a careful use of low-tech apparatus like trap doors and collapsible cages that can prove accidentally deadly -- or intentionally so, as the sacrifice of several pigeons demonstrates, and the film's plot will exploit. But as the rivalry between illusionists Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) heats up, The Prestige wanders into the fancifully futuristic, a sort of molecular cloning technology devised by no less than Nikola Tesla (David Bowie). The problem for me -- if not for the fans who give The Prestige an astonishingly high 8.5 ranking on IMDb -- is that this insertion into the story of a real historical figure, who never crafted anything of the sort, is about as cheesy as turning Abraham Lincoln into a vampire hunter. It undermines the suspension of disbelief we need to appreciate the film's intricate plotting (complicated by Nolan's non-linear narrative technique) and enjoyable performances. I didn't get the exhilaration I expect from a thriller's twists and turns, but instead a kind of numb depression set in.