Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023)

Carey Mulligan and Bradley Cooper in Maestro

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Matt Bomer, Gideon Glick, Maya Hawke, Sarah Silverman, Vincenzo Amato, Michael Urie, Greg Hildreth, Brian Klugman, Nick Blaemire, Mallory Portnoy, Yasen Peyakov, Zachary Booth, Miriam Shor, Alexa Swinton. Screenplay: Bradley Cooper, Josh Singer. Cinematography: Matthew Libatique. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Michelle Tesoro. Music: Leonard Bernstein. 

The Aussies call it "tall poppy syndrome." It's that tendency to try to undermine or underestimate the achievement of anyone who excels. And I think we saw it directed at Bradley Cooper when the first big wave of negative publicity came out from a critic from the Hollywood Reporter who saw the trailer for Maestro and called the prosthetic nose Cooper wore to play Leonard Bernstein "ethnic cosplay." The word "Jewface," analogous to blackface and "yellowface," labels for white performers pretending to be Black or Asian, was tossed about, as if Cooper were somehow guilty of antisemitism, or even depriving a Jewish actor of the role. Defenders came to the fray, including Bernstein's family, who indicated their approval of Cooper's choice, and others who pointed out that Cooper wasn't playing a negative stereotype, or even a character like Shylock or Fagin, but an authentic musical genius. But the damage was done, and the controversy continues to be a kind of scrim through which we watch and assess the film. I think much of it stems from the fact that Cooper is one of the most exceptional talents of our time, recognized for excellence as an actor, director, and screenwriter  -- a tall poppy indeed. He has a total of nine Academy Award nominations in all three of those fields plus producing -- for Todd Phillips's Joker (2019) and Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley (2022). He won a BAFTA for the music of A Star Is Born (2018), for which he wrote and sang several songs, and for which he also won two Grammys. He was nominated for a Tony in 2015 for his performance on Broadway in The Elephant Man. (One of the critics of the prosthetic nose observed that he wore no disfiguring makeup for the role of John Merrick, suggesting that if he's that good an actor, he should have played the role of Bernstein without the help of makeup.) All of this is preface to saying that Maestro is an exceptional film that only adds luster to an already distinguished career. It has been labeled a biopic, which is inadequate. Biographical films are usually distanced from their subjects, dramatizations of events in a career. Maestro is more intimate than that, a portrait of a man and a marriage. Cooper goes beyond mimicry of Bernstein in a serious effort to suggest the social and sexual and artistic tensions seething within the man. If I have to voice a criticism it's that he doesn't quite bring it off -- it's a little too much for any actor or screenwriter to achieve. But Cooper shows us the depths even if he doesn't plumb them. He wisely lets us have our own thoughts about something even Bernstein probably couldn't define about his sexuality: whether he was gay or bisexual, or whether that question is stupid and irrelevant. Carey Mulligan's performance as his wife, Felicia, brittle and burning, is a perfect match for Cooper's. If they don't have the chemistry that Cooper had with Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook (2012) or Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born, that's partly the point: The marriage of Lenny and Felicia was one of unresolved tension. Hence the epigraph for the film: "A work of art does not answer questions, if provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers." I have the feeling that Maestro will be remembered and studied for years to come.

Emitaï (Ousmane Sembene, 1971)

Cast: Andongo Diabon, Robert Fontaine, Michel Renaudeau, Osmane Camara, Ibou Camara, Alphonse Diatta, Pierre Blanchard. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene. Cinematography: Georges Caristan, Michel Renaudeau. Film editing: Gilbert Kikouïne. 

I grew up on Hollywood films, which were all that were available in the small town where I lived. (This was before cable TV, not to mention streaming.) They made me love movies, but they also gave me a limited awareness of what film could do. So when foreign films finally became part of my movie-watching life, I was astonished at how little I knew about what cinema could be, but also about how limited my experience of human behavior was. The people in the French and Italian and Swedish films I saw didn't behave the way people in American movies did and the way the filmmakers told their stories was somehow different from the way Hollywood did. There were fewer happy endings and predictable plot turns. And when I moved beyond European films into the work of Asian directors, there was still more culture shock coming. But as my cinematic horizons widened, and I came to embrace Satyajit Ray along with Nicholas Ray, to rank Ozu and Renoir among my favorite directors alongside Hitchcock and Hawks, there still remained (and remains) an ignorance of what's called "world cinema," the work of filmmakers outside the developed countries of Europe and Asia. I still approach these movies with a bit of trepidation, uncertain whether the differences between the cultures they show and my own will stymie my understanding and appreciation of their work. So I'm working my way through the Criterion Channel's collection of the films of Ousmane Sembene with a kind of divided awareness. I have to remind myself that these movies weren't made for me, but for an African audience. There's a kind of urgency about his films that's more vital for the intended audience than it is for me. Emitaï is set in Senegal during World War II, when the French drafted the native people of their colonies into the fight. It takes place in a village that resents having its young men taken away and its rice crop collected as taxation. But there's no resisting the superior arms of the French authorities, and the film evokes the impotence and frustration of the villagers. The elders decide to call on their gods, which we actually see in a fantasy sequence, but they get no help. Sembene depicts the latent strength of the tribe, especially its women, but this conflict of cultures can only end tragically. Sometimes, Sembene's storytelling relies on blatantly expository dialogue and didactic speeches that verge on propaganda, but this is anything but naïve filmmaking. Emitaï is a subtle and poignant depiction of the destructive absurdity of colonialism.  

Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023)

Margot Robbie in Barbie

Cast: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Ariana Greenblatt, Rhea Perlman, Helen Mirren (voice), Will Ferrell, Michael Cera, Connor Swindells, Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Mackey, Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ncuti Gatwa, Scott Evans, John Cena, Dua Lipa. Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Production design: Sarah Greenwood. Film editing: Nick Houy. Music: Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt.

For all the snarky cleverness of its screenplay, the brightness of its performances, and the liveliness of its direction, what is Barbie if not a 114-minute image ad for Mattel, Inc.? The movie allows the toymaker to look like a good sport by acknowledging its oft-criticized influence on young girls and its marketing mistakes, and by letting its management be portrayed as clueless males, with its CEO played by the master of cluelessness, Will Ferrell, while still raking in more money than ever. It's a masterpiece of corporate self-justification. The points the movie makes about the Barbie phenomenon (which became an even bigger phenomenon when its release date coincided with another blockbuster, resulting in the "Barbenheimer" meme), couldn't have been made without the participation of Mattel. Sure, you could make a movie satirizing the toy business, focusing on a girl doll laden with separately purchased accessory toys. You could call the doll something like Mitzi and give her a boyfriend called Bob, and you could call the company Rattel or Battel, and you could score all the same points with almost the same script and the same cast. But it wouldn't have the same sharply real edge. This is a movie that future analysts of American society in the 21st century are going to come back to when they examine childhood and capitalism and the role of the sexes in the year 2023. The story the movie tells is essentially the same as that of another toy that comes to life, Pinocchio. Except that when Pinocchio became a real boy, I'm pretty sure that he ran out to play. If Ken had been the one to become real, he probably would go out to shoot hoops or see his mates at the bar. When Barbie becomes a real woman, the first thing she does is visit a gynecologist. It's an ending that sums up the film's view of what it means to be a woman today.  

Woman of Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

Yoshiko Okada and Ureo Egawa in Woman of Tokyo

Cast: Yoshiko Okada, Ureo Egawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Shinyo Nara, Chishu Ryo. Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara. Art direction: Takashi Kanasu. Film editing: Kazuo Ishikawa. 

Woman of Tokyo, which runs only 45 minutes and was shot in nine days, shows Yasujiro Ozu moving toward the economy of narrative that marks his mature style. In it, Ozu also pays homage to one of the master directors who influenced him: Ernst Lubitsch. In the middle of the film, Harue (Kinuyo Tanaka) goes to the movies with her boyfriend Ryoichi (Ureo Egawa), and we see a bit of the movie they're watching: the 1932 anthology film If I Had a Million. It's the segment directed by Lubitsch featuring Charles Laughton as an office worker who, upon being given a million dollars, celebrates the windfall by razzing his boss. The Lubitsch segment has nothing to do with the plot of Woman of Tokyo, other than that the central character, Chikako (Yoshiko Okada), works in an office, which doesn't pay her enough to support herself and her brother, Ryoichi, a university student. Chikako resorts to prostitution as a result, and the plot turns on the revealing of her secret occupation. If I Had a Million was a talkie, but Lubitsch's segment is virtually silent, and I think Ozu alluded to it in Woman of Tokyo, which is one of his late silent films, as a kind of homage to visual narrative, at which Ozu would continue to excel. 

Hitchcock/Truffaut (Kent Jones, 2015)

François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock/Truffaut

Cast: Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Bob Balaban (voice), Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas, Peter Bogdanovich, Arnaud Desplechin, David Fincher, James Gray, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Richard Linklater, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese. Screenplay: Kent Jones, Serge Toubiana. Cinematography: Nick Bentgen, Daniel Cowen, Eric Gautier, Mihai Malaimare Jr., Lisa Rinzler, Genta Tamaki. Film editing: Rachel Reichman. Music: Jeremiah Bornfield. 

I urge anyone who's interested in movies, and not just interested in Alfred Hitchcock or François Truffaut, to see the terrific documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut, beautifully put together by Kent Jones and Serge Toubiana. Although the focus is on Hitchcock, and to a lesser extent on Truffaut, the film constitutes an invaluable lesson on how to make a movie, particularly what a director does to grab hold of viewers and manipulate their thoughts and emotions. Hitchcock's techniques were unique, of course, derived from his own interests and obsessions as well as from his experience as someone who began his career directing silent movies, which taught him how to tell a story through images. But the comments in the film by contemporary filmmakers like Wes Anderson, David Fincher, and Richard Linklater on Hitchcock's techniques, particularly Martin Scorsese's analysis of Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), open a new perspective on their own works. 

Ravenous (Antonia Bird, 1999)

Guy Pearce in Ravenous

Cast: Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, David Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, Jeremy Davies, John Spencer, Stephen Spinella, Neal McDonough, Joseph Runningfox, Sheila Tousey, Bill Brochtrup. Screenplay: Ted Griffin. Cinematography: Anthony B. Richmond. Production design: Bryce Perrin. Film editing: Neil Farrell. Music: Michael Nyman, Damon Albarn. 

When the only thing critics can agree on is that your movie has a distinguished music score, you kind of have to admit that the film's a botch. Ravenous is an interesting botch, however: a horror Western about cannibalism, a topic that tantalizes anyone who has ever heard the story of the Donner Party. It has a strong cast, filled with actors who are gifted at playing baddies and weirdos, like Robert Carlyle, Jeremy Davies, and Neal McDonough. The cannibalism in the film is based on the Algonquian legend of the wendigo, an evil spirit that possesses humans and turns them into killers with a desire for human flesh. Yet the movie comes off scattered and sometimes clunky, with the grisly violence arriving without the buildup of suspense. The central character, Capt. Boyd (Guy Pearce), is given a confusing backstory. During the Mexican-American war, he tasted flesh, sort of, when he was wounded, heaped in a pile of corpses, and, unable to move, swallowed the blood of one of the men stacked above him. It gave him a brief surge of strength, during which he struggled out of the pile and performed the act of heroism for which he was honored. But when the commanding officer realizes Boyd is really a coward, he punishes him with a post in an isolated fort located in the Sierra Nevada. The fort is staffed with misfits, and soon falls prey to a mysterious stranger named Colqhoun (Carlyle), who claims to be the survivor of a wagon train that got lost in the mountains and had to resort to cannibalism to survive. Colqhoun is not what he seems, of course, and the rest of the business is bloody. Some of the movie's disjointedness stems from the disagreement between the original director, Milcho Manchevski, and the producers and a subsequent conflict between his replacement, Raja Gosnell, and the cast. Finally, Antonia Bird was hired to complete the film, but even she had problems with the producers and was critical of the cut that was released. Critics generally disliked the movie, but everyone seems to have been pleased with the innovative score by Michael Nyman and Damon Alborn, which relies on instruments from the historic period in which the action takes place and echoes of hymns and patriotic anthems.   

Clockwatchers (Jill Sprecher, 1997)

Parker Posey, Toni Collette, Lisa Kudrow, and Alanna Ubach in Clockwatchers

Cast: Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Alanna Ubach, Helen FitzGerald, Stanley DeSantis, Jamie Kennedy, David James Elliott, Debra Jo Rupp, Kevin Cooney, Bob Balaban, Paul Dooley. Screenplay: Jill Sprecher, Karen Sprecher. Cinematography: Jim Denault. Production design: Pamela Marcotte. Film editing: Stephen Mirrione. Music: Mader. 

Blessed are the meek, they say. Certainly Iris (Toni Collette) qualifies as meek when, on her first day as a temp at a credit company, she does as she's told and sits patiently for a very long time until Barbara (Debra Jo Rupp), the human resources manager, sees her and scolds her for not letting anyone know she was there. Self-effacing to a fault, Iris soon finds herself with a group of new friends, all temps who have been "temporary" for quite a while (a dodge companies use to keep from paying benefits). Each of them is more outgoing than Iris: Margaret (Parker Posey) is sassy and subversive, eager to point out to Iris ways to do as little work as possible. Paula (Lisa Kudrow) claims to be just passing time while waiting for her big break as an actress. Jane (Alanna Ubach) is engaged and can't wait until marriage frees her from office work. Iris's father (Paul Dooley), meanwhile, is urging her to get a good job in sales, something that her shyness makes her unsuitable for. This is the setup for Jill Sprecher's satire on contemporary work in the kind of office, scored to the artificial peppiness of Muzak, that anyone who ever worked for a corporation that values productivity over creativity, routine over initiative, and regimentation over individuality will recognize. In Clockwatchers, meekness wins out: Iris lasts longer in the job than her friends, even after the company makes their work lives more miserable than ever. But she's bested by an employee even meeker than she is, but who adds sneakiness to the meekness. As satire, I happen to think the film is a little too low key, and that the casting of vivid actresses like Posey and Kudrow, wonderful as they are, works against the mood of the film, but it has the ring of truth throughout.  

Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight (Ernest R. Dickerson, 1995)

Billy Zane in Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight

Cast: Billy Zane, William Sadler, Jada Pinkett Smith, Thomas Haden Church, C.C.H. Pounder, Brenda Bakke, Dick Miller, Gary Farmer, John Kassir (voice). Screenplay: Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris, Mark Bishop. Cinematography: Rick Bota. Production design: Christiaan Wagener, Gregory S. Melton. Film editing: Stephen Lovejoy. Music: Edward Shearmur. 

I was going to say that failure to access the 10-year-old boy in me kept me from enjoying Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight, but then I remembered that when I was 10 years old I thought the Tales From the Crypt comic books were repulsive trash. So maybe I really enjoyed it more than that 10-year-old would have, which isn't saying much. It's still trash, but I've seen many movies that repulsed me more. There's a tongue-in-cheek element in its slimy rotting horrors (if there's a tongue to put in a cheek or a cheek to put one in) that doesn't exactly redeem it, but at least kept me watching. And it suggests that we have come to a point in the post-Christian era that what would once be regarded as blasphemous is now only a plot device: namely, the use of the blood of Jesus as a horror movie gimmick. Mostly, it made me feel a little sorry for the actors who have to go through their paces, trying to act but knowing that anything they do is going to be chopped up in the editing and stirred into a mess of special effects. Billy Zane as the demonic Collector and William Sadler as his heroic antagonist are the nominal leads, but Jada Pinkett Smith comes off best as the ex-con on work release who labors in the boarding house where most of the action takes place. She manages to create a character we can root for, which is all the otherwise well-worn plot needs. The frame story in which the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) introduces things is unnecessary and mainly serves to promote the HBO series from which it's a theatrical spinoff. 

For Me and My Gal (Busby Berkeley, 1942)

Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in For Me and My Gal

Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, George Murphy, Martha Eggert, Ben Blue, Stephen McNally. Screenplay: Howard Emmett Rogers, Richard Sherman, Fred F. Finkelhoffe, Sid Silvers. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ben Lewis. Music: Roger Edens.

Gene Kelly became a star on Broadway by playing a heel in Pal Joey, so it's fitting that he made his movie debut playing a heel who becomes a hero in For Me and My Gal. Initially, he was too much of a heel for preview audiences, who indicated that they wanted Judy Garland to wind up with George Murphy instead of Kelly. So some additional filming and editing (eliminating a lot of Murphy's role, even though he was billed second below Garland and above Kelly) made Kelly's Harry Palmer more likable. The movie doesn't free up Kelly to do the kind of show-off dancing that he would later become famous for. It's a story about vaudeville, and the songs were nostalgic oldies even when the movie was first released. Harry Palmer is an ambitious hoofer and comedian who will stop at nothing to get to the top: the Palace in Manhattan. He muscles into the spotlight, breaking up with partners and stealing musical arrangements, to wind up teaming with Jo Hayden (Garland), whose ambition is similar to his but restrained by a conscience. When World War I starts, Harry breaks his hand to keep from getting drafted just as they're about to play the Palace and she tells him off, leaving the act. Naturally, the plot hinges on Harry's redemption. Busby Berkeley's direction keeps things lively, though the film doesn't feature the kaleidoscopic production numbers he became famous for at Warner Bros. and in three of MGM's "hey, kids, let's put on a show" musicals with Garland and Mickey Rooney. There's a subplot involving Harry's flirtation with a star called Eve Minard, played by Martha Eggerth, a Hungarian soprano famous for her performance in operettas. She was signed by MGM possibly as a replacement for Jeanette MacDonald, whose career as the studio's house soprano was ending. Eggerth sings splendidly, but she photographed less well, and the house soprano job went to Kathryn Grayson. For Me and My Gal is full of historical interest -- it was also the first movie for which Garland received top billing -- but it feels a little canned and unoriginal in comparison to the Freed Unit classics that followed.  

The Addiction (Abel Ferrara, 1995)

Lili Taylor in The Addiction

Cast: Lili Taylor, Christopher Walken, Annabella Sciorra, Edie Falco, Paul Calderon, Fredro Starr, Kathryn Erbe, Michael Imperioli, Robert W. Castle. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Charles M. Lagola. Film editing: Mayin Lo. Music: Joe Delia. 

Blood looks bloodier in black-and-white. In color it too often looks like ketchup or cranberry juice or corn syrup with red food dye. But under the lens and lights of cinematographer Ken Kelsch in The Addiction it turns black, flat and dry like an aging wound or glossy like the spill of an unsavory substance. And there's a lot of it in the film, which turns vampirism into a metaphor for not only drug addiction but any other self-destructive obsession. When Kathleen Conklin (the terrific Lili Taylor) is turned vampire, her attacker (Annabella Sciorra) tells her to resist, and after Kathleen is addicted, she makes a similar offer to her own victims: They should tell her to go away. Except "victims" is maybe the wrong word here. The film is about something as banal as responsibility or yielding to temptation: It almost devolves into a "just say no" moral treatise, except that it also exposes the inanity of that maxim. Christopher Walken plays a vampire who has managed to get his bloodlust under control, except that we can see the price he has paid doing so. As Macbeth put it, "I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er." Admonitions against self-destructive behavior aside, The Addiction is a fable with rich intellectual content, a meditation on human appetite and attempts to control it. That it's also a pretty damn good horror movie is only part of it.