Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson as a zombie in Thriller in Michael: "Yeah, you can totally tell he's had work done"

Michael (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jaafar Jackson, Nia Long, Miles Teller, Colman Domingo
written by John Logan
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw I didn’t want to review Michael because talking about this film recognizes this film. I wonder, though, if not talking about it also validates it, in the way you’re trained to be quiet about uncomfortable things when you’re a minority. It’s a tough position to be put in, particularly because the people putting others in this position are the ones who should be called to the carpet for their lazy ignorance and/or malicious bad faith. Shitty, broken people have a habit of scrambling the basic morality of everyone in their orbit. I’m speaking not of whether Michael Jackson was a serial predator who targeted young boys–a charge that dogged him for the last decades of his life, leading to a string of settlements and a highly publicized and scatalogically intimate trial–but rather of the dishonesty involved in creating a hagiography for one of the most galvanizing, indeed polarizing, figures in pop-cultural history by pretending none of that happened. That he was a transformative figure is undeniable, a transcendent talent who spent much of his social capital on songs that yearned to heal rifts between the races. He was one of one. That his legacy is tainted is similarly undeniable. If director Antoine Fuqua’s focus were Bill Cosby, this film would be about his success as the “I Spy” hero, kid-show icon, and pudding salesman and end right when the curtain rises on that first episode of “The Cosby Show”. If it were about Polanski, it’d stop at the premiere of Rosemary’s Baby.

Jeremy Irons smoking and looking officious in Palestine '36: "An Irons curtain has descended across the continent"

Palestine ’36 (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Denmark, Drama, France, Jordan, Norway, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UK, War

***/****
starring Hiam Abbas, Karim Daoud Anaya, Yasmine Al Massri, Jeremy Irons
written and directed by Annemarie Jacir

by Angelo Muredda “A new page in history is written today,” a stodgy Englishman pronounces at a launch for the first state-sponsored radio broadcast in so-called Mandatory Palestine early on in Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine ’36. Although the boast is met with eye-rolls from the few well-to-do Palestinians in the mostly colonial British audience, one of whom jokes to her partner that “this is the part where they elevate us,” the line ironically serves as a good encapsulation of Jacir’s project to make something significant and new out of a familiar form. A mainstream historical epic that hits its dramatic beats with energy if not freshness, and which demonstrates classical filmmaking chops if not revolutionary aesthetics, Palestine ’36 can’t help but feel like a turning of the page in spite of its modest aesthetic choices. In the frankness with which it dramatizes the Great Revolt of the late 1930s against the British occupation and its military support for the Zionist project, the film is a rebuke to the representational lacunae that make up Western depictions of the history of the Middle East and the Palestinian liberation movement, which usually gets barely named at all.

Hudson and Jackman performing on stage: "Girl, You’ll Have an Oscar Soon"

Song Sung Blue (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Musical, Theatrical

*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson, Fisher Stevens, Jim Belushi
based on the documentary Song Sung Blue by Greg Kohs
written and directed by Craig Brewer

by Walter Chaw I wonder sometimes about movies like Craig Brewer’s Song Sung Blue, the “live-action” version, if you will, of a documentary about a popular pair of Wisconsin wedding singers and the surprisingly “VH1 Behind the Music”-friendly arc of their career. What I wonder is: Who wants this? Is there still pleasure in patronizing yokel-sploitation? Still meat left to worry on this feature-length Marty and Bobbi Mohan-Culp bone? It’s the Golden Corral of movies: emotionally un-taxing and mentally affordable, a determinedly middlebrow bellwether for class-coded nostalgia that reassures no matter how bad things are going for you, they’re going worse for some other good, hard-working, God-fearing folks out there. It’s not that one’s taking pleasure in the suffering of Thunder (Kate Hudson) and Lightning (Hugh Jackman), see, it’s that one’s taking pleasure in the fact that their suffering is not only more humiliating, protracted, and public than our own, but also inspiring. Always that.

Ben Whishaw lounging in bed and smoking: Marmalade and cigarettes, baby

Peter Hujar’s Day (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Spain, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall
screenplay by Ira Sachs, based on the book Peter Hujar’s Day by Linda Rosenkrantz
directed by Ira Sachs

by Angelo Muredda Celebrated New York portrait photographer Peter Hujar becomes the subject of a distinctive portrait himself in Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, a gentle, minor-key experiment in memorializing the everyday. Anchored by a puckish performance from Ben Whishaw, who spends most of the time platonically seducing his interrogator–Hujar’s friend, author Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall)–and, by extension, the spectator listening in like a fly on the wall, the film lovingly recreates not a day in Hujar’s life but his languid recalling of it the day after.

Jeremy Allen White as the Boss: "I’m a fancy-ass chef, what’s a boy to do?/Locked myself in the freezer, at the end of season two"

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham
based on Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, by Warren Zanes
written and directed by Scott Cooper

by Walter Chaw There are a handful of untouchable albums; Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska is one of them. It’s a record that didn’t make a lick of sense to me until it did, and then, once it did, burrowed in, insinuating and close. It occupies a place in my heart with Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones and Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush: chronicles of broken men adrift in cold shoals constructed from their own inadequacy, in love with women who deserve better. If you alternate Nebraska with Suicide‘s self-titled debut (itself an all-timer), they play like a double album, given how deeply the one influenced the other. A couple of tracks on the Boss’s project function as sequels to tracks on Suicide‘s masterpiece; another even sounds like a remake. That’s what Nebraska is: a masterpiece–and a conversation. It’s this dark postcard from the edge where Springsteen teetered for a while. He would have fallen in, I think, if he didn’t have this project tethering him to the earth. Nebraska is a chronicle of depression delivered directly from a battered Gibson J-200 into a four-track TEAC 144 Portastudio cassette recorder in the Colts Neck, New Jersey bedroom of some guy who’s at once the most miserable and most successful he’s ever been.

Colman Domingo in Dead Man's Wire/Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen in Eternity

TIFF ’25: Dead Man’s Wire + Eternity

Posted in2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

DEAD MAN’S WIRE
**/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Cary Elwes, Al Pacino
written by Austin Kolodney
directed by Gus Van Sant

ETERNITY
*½/****
starring Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner, Da’Vine Joy Randolph
written by Patrick Cunnae & David Freyne
directed by David Freyne

by Bill Chambers Bill Skarsgård finally butts up against the limits of his versatility as he lamely channels Michael Shannon in Dead Man’s Wire, Gus Van Sant’s first feature since 2018’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. (Most recently, he worked on Ryan Murphy’s “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans”, directing six of its eight episodes.) Both are based on true stories, an enduring kink of Van Sant’s going back to 1995’s To Die For, which riffed on the Pamela Smart case with a satirical bent that hasn’t really resurfaced in his docudramas since. But when, late in the game, Dead Man’s Wire develops something like a comic edge, it feels like Van Sant might be heckling the material out of boredom, if not something more problematic. The film dramatizes the 1977 kidnapping of mortgage broker Dick Hall (Dacre Montgomery) by Skarsgård’s Tony Kiritsis, who tied a 12-gauge shotgun to Dick’s neck and held him hostage for three days at his rathole apartment in Indianapolis. He believed that Dick and his wealthy father, M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), were waiting for him to fall behind on his mortgage payments so they could poach a valuable piece of property he owned, and he demanded the Halls give him $5 million in damages as well as–and this was the sticking point, according to the film–a full-throated apology in exchange for Dick’s life.

Tall Margaret Qualley holding flowers and short Ethan Hawke holding court in Blue Moon

TIFF ’25: Blue Moon

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Film Festivals, Ireland, Music, Romance, TIFF

***½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott
written by Robert Kaplow, inspired by the writings of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Contrasting epitaphs set the tone for Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a melancholy tribute to the self-destructive genius of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, a not especially handsome guy played by Linklater’s decidedly handsome long-time muse, Ethan Hawke. Moments before we see the man’s lonesome onscreen death from pneumonia on a rainy street, a title card offers Hart’s posthumous characterization from a pair of observers: his contemporary Oscar Hammerstein II, who hails him as “alert and dynamic and fun to be around,” and cabaret performer Mabel Mercer, who pronounces him “the saddest man I ever knew.” Hawke’s Hart is both–a charming but embittered barfly in a personal and professional crisis who loves conversation as much as he resents having to make it with perceived dullards like Hammerstein, who, in the film’s timeline, has just replaced him as Richard Rodgers’s creative partner on the verge of their major commercial breakthrough, Oklahoma!.

Emily Blunt and The Rock taking a nighttime stroll in The Smashing Machine

TIFF ’25: The Smashing Machine

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Canada, Film Festivals, Japan, Sports, TIFF

**/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten
written and directed by Benny Safdie

by Angelo Muredda The early narrative on Dwayne Johnson’s starring role as veteran mixed-martial artist Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine was that it was sure to mark an overdue career reinvention for the wrestler turned actor turned annoying social-media poster. After years of his star power waning in terms of prestige as well as audience appeal–the decline measured in cringe posts about how the “hierarchy of power in the DC universe is about to change” thanks to his appearance in Black Adam (which bombed) and unflattering headlines about how his character in the Fast & Furious franchise was contractually forbidden from losing a fight onscreen (which made him seem not invulnerable but narcissistic)–finally Johnson would develop both the deft comic touch and dramatic depth he’d shown in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales and Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. That Johnson is every bit as good as was promised by the PR campaign, as vulnerable and bruised onscreen as he has been aloof and guarded in real life, comes as something of a monkey’s paw situation, given that his fluid and charming performance is one of the only things worth unreservedly recommending in the otherwise fairly standard film. Despite the outcome at the Venice Film Festival, which saw Johnson go home critically lauded but empty-handed while Safdie took the Best Director prize, Johnson’s ascent comes at the expense of his director’s first real draw as an artist–a slightly spiky but mostly unremarkable sports biopic worthy of being in the awards conversation, in the derogatory sense.

Amanda Seyfried, arms spread wide in ecstasy amid a crowd of followers

TIFF ’25: The Testament of Ann Lee

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, TIFF, UK

Ann Lee
***/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott
written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet
directed by Mona Fastvold

by Angelo Muredda Speaking at the press conference following the Venice world premiere of Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, co-writer and second-unit director Brady Corbet, Fastvold’s husband, illuminated the couple’s fruitful creative partnership, which also yielded their co-screenwriting duties on 2024’s The Brutalist. “We firmly believe,” he said, pointing to Fastvold’s ownership of and final cut on the film, “that you can only serve one master at a time.” To say nothing of the film’s numerous aesthetic and thematic echoes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, not to mention those of their previous project, Corbet’s comment is an interesting critical pathway into an often impenetrably busy, ambitious work that, when one breaks it down, is about both a marriage in tension and a husband working in service–far more glumly than the gregarious Corbet–to his spouse’s singular vision of the world. Pricklier than the more awards-friendly The Brutalist, though vulnerable to the same structural imbalances and ambiguity, The Testament of Ann Lee is a pleasantly odd text: a rich, overstuffed period musical that makes a grand figure of its impossibly marginal fringe subject.

Telluride ’25: Hamnet

Telluride ’25: Hamnet

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Shakespeare, Spielberg, Telluride, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn
screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, based on O’Farrell’s novel
directed by Chloé Zhao

by Walter Chaw There is so much acting in Hamnet. So much. The most acting. A host, a bounty, a feast. Remember Denzel Washington’s Fences? It makes Fences seem subtle and reserved–even dignified, if you can imagine, which I could not. Hamnet is heavy with acting in the sense that brood cows are heavy with young in late July, teats pendulous and bellies stretched like unrefrigerated yogurt capsules whose live colonies have boomed under torpid, incubated petri-dish conditions. Miserable. Suffering. Ridden with monologue and gesticulation. The term “to the rafters” doesn’t begin to cover it, given how the great abundance (embarrassment, superfluity, profusion, glut) of acting in Hamnet is directed at the very heavens themselves, forsooth, screeched in the key of rent flesh and ripped bodice to the bowed ears of weary Danish gods. What is a stage that is only proscenium? Hamnet is the answer now and going forward.

A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown (2024)

Posted in2024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical

**/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro
screenplay by James Mangold and Jay Cocks, based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald
directed by James Mangold

by Angelo Muredda “I like everything, Pete,” a young Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) confesses to his soon-to-be-mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) early in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which traces for what feels like the hundredth time the chameleonic artist’s quick rise through the New York City folk scene in the early 1960s en route to his reinvention as a rock star circa 1965. (The film leaves him just as he goes electric.) Driving in Seeger’s car after Dylan’s famous pilgrimage to meet–and, in his words, “catch a spark” off–his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), by whose hospital bed Seeger has been keeping vigil, the oath-keeper to folk’s aesthetic and progressive causes and the scene’s as-yet unknown generational star and future turncoat talk past each other. Hearing the rambunctious rock of Little Richard on the radio and sensing his passenger’s divided artistic loyalties, the older man tries to put out the fire, espousing the values of traditionalism and the political utility of protest music while his protege, sounding like the puckish, curatorially adventurous future host of Theme Time Radio Hour he would turn out to be, sheepishly admits that sometimes electric instruments sound good.

Strong and Sebastian in The Apprentice

The Apprentice (2024)

Posted in2024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blog, Canada, Denmark, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical

***/****
starring Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan
written by Gabriel Sherman
directed by Ali Abbasi

by Bill Chambers “The moment I found out Trump could tweet himself,” the Trump Organization’s former director of social media Justin McConney told ESQUIRE in 2018, “was comparable to the moment in Jurassic Park when Dr. Grant realized that velociraptors could open doors[.] I was like, ‘Oh no.'” Though it takes place before the dawn of social media as we know it, Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, whose title shrewdly weaponizes Trump’s pop-culture legacy against him, is essentially about a velociraptor learning to open doors. Indeed, the weight Sebastian Stan gained to play Trump–something of an anachronism for the time period being covered (like his blonde cockscomb), perhaps to narrow the gap between Stan’s handsomeness and our calcified image of Trump as an orange tub of Vaseline in Barry Egan’s hand-me-downs–contorts his lips into a reptilian grimace that’s not inappropriate, even as it departs from the glory-hole mouth that stiffens into a rictus around other terrible people. Stan’s performance is more expressionism than impression, but I think that’s the right approach: Dead-on impersonations of Trump are a dime a dozen, and they long ago stopped revealing anything about him. They’re fun–and “fun” is how you declaw a raptor for the masses.

Napoleon (2023)

Posted in2023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Theatrical, UK, War

Napoleon2023

**½/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Tahar Rahim, Rupert Everett
written by David Scarpa
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw I wish Ridley Scott’s Napoleon was weirder, kinkier, as perverse as it seems like Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the diminutive emperor, wants it to be. I wish it had more time for his relationship with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), who, in this incarnation, is cast as a kind of succubus: a barren nymphomaniac who pulls up her bloomers and spreads her legs during her courtship with Napoleon and tells him if he looks at her holiest of holies, he’ll never stop wanting it. It’s deeply weird, is what I’m saying, and there’s a version of this film that is just ninety minutes of these two actors, ready for anything, going full-tilt boogie. Maybe he puts on a dog collar, and she steps on him; then he goes out and murders a few tens of thousands of Egyptians while firing cannons at the Great Pyramids. In that Napoleon, however, we wouldn’t see the million-dollar battle sequences, but instead a series of disturbing tableaux vivant of codependency and sadomasochistic sex play ending in the same title card tallying up the number of people who died (over three million) because of this creepy little freak. “Him?” we would marvel–and then consider that maybe it’s only damaged men, damaged in exactly this way, who would consider the military conquest of the world a thing to be desired, possible to accomplish, and more, possible for them to accomplish. But, alas, that’s not the sort of movie Ridley Scott makes.

Priscilla (2023)

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, Italy, Music, Theatrical

Priscilla

***½/****
starring Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Dagmara Dominiczyk
based on the book Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley with Sandra Harmon
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Sofia Coppola takes a lot of heat for making movies about what she knows. This strikes me as peculiar, because I don’t really have any desire to see a Sofia Coppola film about, say, enslaved African peoples. But one about a rich little girl lost? Yes, please. It seems, in fact, that what Coppola is doing as an author is the kind of thing generally celebrated with auteur theories and canonization. I wonder why she’s been popularly singled out as a creator who’s failed to checklist minority groups outside her own. What would the reception of her remarkable remake of The Beguiled have been like had she foregrounded the enslaved African American character and attempted to write her through the lens of Sofia Coppola’s experience? Was her eliding of the character seen as whitewashing, was that the problem? How was the character treated in Don Siegel’s version? How do the Oscar-winning depictions of enslaved African Americans in Gone with the Wind fare? I wonder if the cries for Coppola to have more diversity in her films is a disingenuous complaint driven primarily by a general dislike of Coppola because she’s some combination of a woman and a nepo-baby who doesn’t seem the least bit interested in catering to a larger audience. I wonder why Jean Renoir didn’t get crucified for the same thing. Honestly, I don’t wonder.

Telluride ’23: Nyad

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride

Telluride23nyad

*/****
starring Annette Bening, Jodie Foster, Rhys Ifans, Johnny Solo
screenplay by Julia Cox, based on the book by Diana Nyad
directed by Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

by Walter Chaw Film festivals are expensive and not profitable. They underpay their staff, which mostly comprises volunteers and a nomadic group of technicians who follow festivals around the country like roadies on an eternal tour, and they suffer from the need to please their wealthiest supporters, who, for the most part, have more money than taste. Certainly, they have more desire to be coddled than hunger for risk-taking. That’s why, every year at the Telluride Film Festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the country, there’s an entry like thrill-seeker documentarians Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyl’s Oscar-bait biopic Nyad. Last year it was Empire of Light, and the year before it was King Richard, and the year before that it was Judy. In 2017, there was that Battle of the Sexes thing about Billie Jean King, the only one I’ve mentioned to get zero traction at the Academy Awards. Each of these movies is as functionally formulaic as a suppository: machine-tooled and well-lubed, with only one measure for its success or failure. It either wins the middlebrow’s greatest honour, thus enriching its producers, or it fails to do so. But are these movies any good? I wouldn’t know how to begin to answer that question. Is a suppository good? I dunno, man, I don’t spend much time thinking about a capsule I shoot out of my ass annually around this time of year.

Telluride ’23: Cassandro

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Sports, Telluride

Tell23cassandro

*/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Roberta Colindrez, Perla de la Rosa, Raúl Castillo
written by David Teague & Roger Ross Williams
directed by Roger Ross Williams

by Walter Chaw Playing out as an exhausted vanity piece on the one side and an exhausted sports biopic on the other, Roger Ross Williams’s Cassandro essays the life and early career of flamboyant, El Paso-based luchador Saúl Armendaríz, who, under his nom de guerre “Cassandro,” became the first openly gay exóticos character in Mexican wrestling allowed to actually win matches. Armed with the “Mexico tint” coined by Steven Soderbergh in Traffic, a lot of Dutch angles, and an inexplicable 1.44:1 aspect ratio that makes everything seem like it was shot on an iPhone, Williams nudges the film along from one stale trope to the next like an old frog disinterestedly leaping across lilypads. There are flashbacks to Saúl’s childhood in which his “really into Jesus” dad, Eduardo (Robert Salas), feeds him doughnuts, not knowing his son will one day be an emblem of the love that dare not speak its name; interludes with Saúl’s figure-hugging-animal-print-dress-wearing mama Yocasta (Perla de la Rosa) that show her son to be a good boy; and then montages where Saúl trains with badass Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez) and starts climbing the Lucha Libre ranks. Cassandro, in other words, has nothing to say and doesn’t say it with any particular innovation, either. What a shame.

Oppenheimer (2023)

Oppenheimer (2023)

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, UK

**½/****
starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw Stolid, classical in form, stately in a way some would say is boring yet so precisely parcelled out in perfectly measured, oppressively scored, bite-sized mic-drop morsels that it holds one’s interest whether one is interested or not, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is indisputably well-made and certainly well-intended. If it’s not entirely unlike an amalgam of A Beautiful Mind and The Imitation Game, well, there you have it. As Oppenheimer ploughs no new furrows in the biopic game, what’s left to ponder is whether the story of the father of the atomic bomb is told with enough nuance and ambiguity to justify its declarative urgency, its…what is it? Self-satisfaction? Or, failing that, whether it has enough ticking-timebomb doomsday urgency to cut through the curtain of unjustifiably-pleased-with-itself-and-let-me-explain-to-you-why-with-an-unreasonable-amount-of-exposition that suffocates so much of Nolan’s recent work. I mean, it’s good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s neither novel nor mind-breaking–neither Mishima nor JFK. In the end, I’m not entirely convinced it’s much more than strong yeoman’s work bolstered by predictably fine performances from a prestigious cast hired to do what they always do.

Till (2022)

Posted in2022, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical

Till

*/****
starring Danielle Deadwyler, Jalyn Hall, Frankie Faison, Whoopi Goldberg
written by Michael Reilly & Keith Beauchamp and Chinonye Chukwu
directed by Chinonye Chukwu

by Walter Chaw At once a muddle and overly simplistic, Chinonye Chukwu’s Till is told in a broad visual style that signals “prestige picture,” replete with slow and stately circular pans and, in one appalling instance, the dolly zoom Hitchcock made famous in Vertigo to dramatize a mother’s pain upon confirmation of her son’s death. It’s handsomely decorated, and its costumes went on a national tour with the film’s rolling release, which feels as oblivious as a tie-in fashion show for Schindler’s List would have. That the screenplay, by a trio of authors including alleged Till scholar Keith Beauchamp (whose contentions a grand jury partially refuted in 2007), trafficks in debunked accounts of the inciting event in the film is one thing, but Till plays loose in favour of testimonies that eyewitnesses have since recanted, thus leaning towards Carolyn Bryant’s account–Bryant being the white store clerk who falsely accused 14-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) of making verbal and physical passes at her in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Her accusations led to Till’s kidnapping, torture, and murder, his body left for boys fishing in the river to discover. Till’s mother, Mamie, insisted he be returned home to Chicago, and though the corpse was bloated by its time in the river and mutilated by the attentions of the backwoods crackers who killed him, she held an open-casket funeral that earned national attention.

Elvis (2022)

Posted in2022, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical

Elvis

***½/****
starring Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Luke Bracey, Olivia DeJonge
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromwell and Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce
directed by Baz Luhrmann

by Walter Chaw Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is part Perfume, part Immortal Beloved–which is to say, it’s horny as fuck and formulates music as mass delusion and mind control. Safe to say, the sordid story of the King of Rock-and-Roll is the perfect match for a maximalist director I have found to be excessive to the point of obnoxious, even on those rare occasions where I’ve liked the movie anyway (see: Moulin Rouge!). Before Elvis, there wasn’t an establishing shot Baz didn’t torpedo with gratuitous angles and “whooshing” sound effects; before Elvis, his films were not just childish but relentlessly, punishingly childish. The first half of Elvis is more frenetic than the last, though neither sports any affectations that don’t augment the story in positive ways. Dissolves, triple-split screens, restless camera movements–they all underscore the breathless headlong rush of Elvis’s rise from broke Tupelo hillbilly living in the “Black” part of town to the biggest-selling solo recording artist in history. When it comes time for his inevitable fall, Luhrmann places it in a sociopolitical context, toning down his trademark freneticism in favour of a, most shockingly of all perhaps, thoughtful analysis of several factors that may have played into Elvis’s decline into paranoia, drug abuse, isolation, and despair. A story this familiar in a genre as permanently scuttled by Walk Hard requires a certain wisdom to know what to recap versus what to excavate. Elvis walks that line more than it doesn’t.

The Lover (1992) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Posted in1990s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, France, Romance, UK

Vlcsnap-2022-02-15-21h33m09s164Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jane March, Tony Leung, Frederique Meininger, Arnaud Giovaninetti
adapted by Gerard Brach, Jean-Jacques Annaud, based on the novel by Marguerite Duras
directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud

By Bill Chambers

“What must have happened is: I try it on just for fun, look at myself in the shopkeeper’s glass, and see that there, beneath the man’s hat, the thin awkward shape, the inadequacy of childhood, has turned into something else. Has ceased to be a harsh, inescapable imposition of nature. Has become, on the contrary, a provoking choice of nature, a choice of the mind. Suddenly it’s deliberate. Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire. I take the hat, and am never parted from it. Having got it, this hat that all by itself makes me whole, I wear it all the time.”

That’s author Marguerite Duras in the opening pages of her best-selling 1984 memoir L’Amant, describing the “brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon” she wore as a girl of 15-and-a-half. If you remember anything about Jean-Jacques Annaud’s eponymous 1992 feature-film adaptation The Lover (apart from its prurient reputation, that is), chances are it’s that hat, which actually captures some of the mythic quality Duras is getting at in the above-quoted passage. Watching the recent Holler, I realized that when I think back on it, I will likely remember it not as a movie about scrappers living in poverty but as the one with the girl in the Steve Zissou-esque red-knit beanie. Hats are incredibly cinematic, bestowing story and subtext on an actor’s face. Yet while the hat that 19-year-old newcomer and former teen cover girl Jane March wears in The Lover may strike the right note of self-assurance, the pigtails sticking out from under it combine to give her an Anne of Green Gables look that hardly contradicts “the inadequacy of childhood,” and I think that’s deliberate. From the get-go, she’s not just exotic fruit, she’s forbidden fruit. The Lover takes a short, discursive book without dialogue typical of the Hiroshima mon amour screenwriter and almost miraculously extrapolates a linear, if episodic, framework from it, but it leans into the sordid details that Duras almost glosses over.