The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017) – Netflix

Posted in2017, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Streaming

Meyerowitzstories

***½/****
starring Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Elizabeth Marvel, Emma Thompson
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda Late in Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), one-time piano protégé turned arrested adult Danny Meyerowitz (Adam Sandler) bemoans the fact that his father’s casual abuse over the years never culminated in that one unforgivable thing he or his sister Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) could point to as a deal-breaker, beyond which no love or mercy could be extended. Instead, he says, Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Huffman)–a decently gifted sculptor and by most accounts better college professor whose work is now worth less than the attic it’s stored in–hit them with “tiny things every day. Drip, drip, drip.” With Kicking and Screaming and The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach carved out an impressive niche for himself as a chronicler of how parents’ micro-aggressions, that steady drip of petty criticisms and unnecessarily cutting observations, leave a mark on their hyper-literate upper-middle-class American children. But he’s never found so clear a voice to get across both the anguish and the humour of that condition as he has in his newest, a fussily-constructed but involving and at times impossibly sad family drama about the existential terror of being just smart enough and talented enough to know you’re nothing special.

Lost in America (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2017, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Road Movie, The Criterion Collection

Lostinamerica2

****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Albert Brooks, Julie Hagerty
written by Albert Brooks & Monica Johnson
directed by Albert Brooks

by Bryant Frazer Early in Lost in America, David Howard (Albert Brooks) is trying to convince his wife, Linda (Julie Hagerty), that it’s a good idea to abandon their Los Angeles house in favour of an interstate-ready mobile home. He describes the amenities in detail–it even has a “microwave that browns”–and outlines his dangerously misguided fantasy of dropping out of society to explore the country. “Linda,” he says, “this is just like Easy Rider, except now it’s our turn.” That’s a good line, and not just because Albert Brooks–round-faced, pushing 40, with enormous glasses and a distinctive Jewfro–is a physically and temperamentally unlikely candidate for the Easy Rider lifestyle. It’s really funny because it’s so clearly a terrible idea. In a rush of pride and vocal anger at being passed over for a desired promotion, David lost his job as an advertising copywriter, unwrapping himself from the protective swaddle of gainful corporate employment. Now he wants to drag Linda, a department-store HR functionary, into the void with him. It’s like a car wreck in slow-motion, except the guy driving sold his air bags for gas money and is delivering a peppy monologue about how great it feels not to be wearing a seat belt. This, we understand, is a calamity in the making.

Cult of Chucky (2017) [Unrated] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Horror

Cultchucky1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Fiona Dourif, Adam Hurtig, Alex Vincent, Brad Dourif
written and directed by Don Mancini

by Bill Chambers It’s not uncommon for a long-running horror series to embroider an increasingly convoluted mythology over time, as the kind of premise that launches horror icons also tends to be too primal to sustain a franchise. That’s why Michael Myers became part of the Thorn cult and Freddy Krueger sired offspring while his own backstory continued to blossom. The Chucky saga, the story of a bloodthirsty Cabbage Patch Kid run amok, is no exception, but it’s utterly unique in how the style of these films has pivoted, to use a buzzword, with the evolving narrative. What began as a mostly straight-faced slasher trilogy with a different identity altogether–these were Child’s Play movies–was continued seven years later as a tongue-in-cheek ode to monster mash-ups with 1998’s Bride of Chucky. Post-modernism then entered the picture and the comedy was pushed to the nth in Chucky creator Don Mancini’s directorial debut Seed of Chucky, which seemed to exceed the threshold for camp shared by both the franchise and its fans. Another seven years passed (incidentally, the mythical length of time it takes for the human body to shed its skin) before Mancini’s Curse of Chucky resurrected the title character, this time as the cursed object in an old-dark-house chiller. Now Cult of Chucky sees Mancini retrofitting his Mickey Mouse once again for a Bad Dreams-style psycho-ward thriller. Say what you will about Mancini being a maker of Chucky movies almost exclusively (he’s the rare auteur to initiate, then stay with, a horror franchise), but within these limited parameters he’s had an opportunity to show more range than most genre filmmakers.

ICYMI (10/6/17)

Posted in2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog
This week finally sees the North American release of the Ben Mendelsohn-Rooney Mara drama Una, which Walter Chaw reviewed at last year's Telluride. The Florida Project also begins trickling into theatres today; Angelo Muredda covered it for TIFF. And I hear there's a sequel to Blade Runner?

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Posted in2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Bladerunner2049

***½/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Jared Leto
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is oblique without inspiring contemplation, less a blank slate or a Rorschach than an expository nullity. It’s opaque. There are ideas here that are interesting and inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick source material, but they’ve all been worked through in better and countless iterations also inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick. The best sequel to Blade Runner is Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, with a long sidelong glance at Under the Skin, perhaps–and Her, too. All three films are referenced in Blade Runner 2049 without their relative freshness or, what is it, yearning? There aren’t any questions left for Villeneuve’s picture, really, just cosmological, existential kōans of the kind thrown around 101 courses taught by favourite professors and at late-night coffee shops and whiskey bars. Yet as that, and only that, Blade Runner 2049 is effective, even brilliant. It’s a tremendous adaptation of a Kafka novel (a couple of them), about individuals without an identity in tension against a faceless system intent on keeping it that way. It has echoes of I Am Legend in the suggestion that the future doesn’t belong to Man, as well as echoes of Spielberg’s A.I. and its intimate autopsy of human connection and love, but it lacks their sense of discovery, of surprise, ultimately of pathos. This is a film about whimpers.

Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism [Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 2017, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Japan

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EROS + MASSACRE (1969)
****/****
Director’s Cut: Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
Theatrical Version: Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Mariko Okada, Toshiyuji Hosokawa, Yûko Kusunoki, Etsushi Takahashi
written by Masahiro Yamada & Yoshishige Yoshida
directed by Yoshishige Yoshida

HEROIC PURGATORY (1970)
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Mariko Okada, Kaizo Kamoda, Naho Kimura, Yoshiaki Makita
written by Masahiro Yamada
directed by Yoshishige Yoshida

COUP D’ETAT (1973)
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring Rentarô Mikuni, Yasuo Miyake, Akiko Kurano, Tadahiko Sugano
written by Minoru Betsuyaku
directed by Yoshishige Yoshida

by Bryant Frazer In director Yoshishige Yoshida’s restlessly erotic trio of films dealing with Japanese radicalism (aptly dubbed “Love + Anarchism” by Arrow Films), past and present merge as easily and ineluctably as the personal and the political. Released between 1969 and 1973, they were made at a politically turbulent time in Japan, when the New Left movement gained social currency and student anarchists, the Zengakuren, challenged the status quo by occupying buildings at universities and high schools around the country. In that conflict between anarchy and order, Yoshida saw reflections of Japan’s past–earlier generations of radicals who challenged societal structures in the same way that new activists were pushing back against contemporary norms. Yoshida was not inspired to make anything as simple as a series of biopics or historical dramas; instead, he embarked on a series of formally elaborate films that evaluated the struggles of radicals and would-be revolutionaries from decades past in light of the then-current political moment.

Ghost World (2001) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2017, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Scarlett Johansson, Teen, The Criterion Collection

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**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, Brad Renfro, Steve Buscemi
written by Daniel Clowes & Terry Zwigoff, based on the comic book by Clowes
directed by Terry Zwigoff

by Sydney Wegner Say “privilege” in 2017 and you will inevitably trigger an allergic reaction, particularly if you precede it with the word “white.” “Privilege” feels inflammatory and overused, a casualty of the movement for basic human decency snidely referred to as “PC culture.” For those to whom it applies, it can be hard to confront and accept–especially in America, where the idea that anybody got anything by luck alone goes against everything we’ve been taught is admirable and pure. But in order to use your unjustly-granted powers for good, the knee-jerk defensiveness needs to be agonized over and dealt with. As I’ve matured, I’ve learned that you can’t grow without feeling like garbage, that the concept of learning from your mistakes often applies to learning from the ones you didn’t make intentionally. Now that being a better person seems to have become a radical political act, it’s something that is on my mind a lot.

ICYMI (9/22/17)

Posted in2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog
This week, Mike White's Brad's Status expands its national rollout and Battle of the Sexes opens in limited release; we covered both on the festival circuit. Happy Friday! More to come.

Telluride ’17: Loving Vincent

Posted in2017, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Mystery, Poland, Telluride, Telluride 2017, UK

Tell17lovingvincent

*/****
written by Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman, Jacek Dehnel
directed by Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman

by Walter Chaw I love stop-motion animation. William Blake referred to the “infernal method,” talking about etching plates with acid and how each print of his work would be touched by him, the artist, to better imbue it with life. Stop-motion animation to me is evidence that there’s something to the idea of a transference of vitality through human contact. It’s why I was curious about Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s insane Loving Vincent, a feature-length film composed of over 65,000 hand-painted oil paintings, animating Van Gogh’s most famous paintings and making characters of his subjects. It’s a fascinating experiment, the product of one of those late-night bull sessions fuelled by cigarettes and whiskey where aspiring artist-types and freshman cosmology students get profound with one another. Consider Loving Vincent to be the cold reality of the morning after. Over 100 artists laboured over 10 years to essentially make a tedious rotoscope cartoon held together, barely, by an embarrassing screenplay dependent on loads of exposition and a repetitive flashback device. It’s an endurance test of rare sadism.

Telluride ’17: First Reformed

Posted in****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2017

Tell17firstreformed

****/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Kyles, Victoria Hill
written and directed by Paul Schrader

by Walter Chaw The title character of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest is consumed by his inconsequence. Determined to make a difference, he can’t even make an impression on the vile inhabitants of the little town that is his parish. It consumes him. It kills him. No one notices. There’s nothing to notice. Bresson doesn’t even bother to show it. The priest’s voiceovers become more urgent, though his faith never flags. He develops terrible stomach pains he seeks to soothe with an austere diet of bread soaked in wine: the Host, I guess, that nourishes communion with the holy spirit, but also the cancer in his gut that consumes him. His last words? “All is grace.” Paul Schrader, raised in the Dutch Calvinist Christian Reformed Church, which basically believes that Christians don’t earn their salvation but rather receive it as a gift they don’t deserve, has made it his life’s work to react against his faith–and to live it, too, when reaction fails. Towards the end of his new film, First Reformed, the priest, Toller (Ethan Hawke), writes on his church’s whiteboard “Will God Forgive Us?,” which is less Calvinist–God already has forgiven us–than a sign of a faith in severe crisis. Schrader’s riffed on Bresson’s film before with his script for Taxi Driver, still his best-known work despite a career littered with masterpieces of individual fears, men in isolation from God, and spiritual self-loathing. In Taxi Driver, the Priest is a sociopath driving through a Times Square hellscape, praying for the apocalypse to come as a purifying, obliterating rain. He tries to kill himself, but becomes a hero instead. First Reformed is either less cynical or more cynical than that. It’s complicated.

TIFF ’17: Man Hunt + Happy End

Posted in2017, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Directors: John Woo, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hong Kong, TIFF

Tiff17happyend

ManHunt
**/****
starring Zhang Hanyu, Masaharu Fukuyama, Qi Wei, Ha Jiwon
screenplay by Nip Wan Fung, Gordon Chan, James Yuen, Itaru Era, Ku Zoi Lam, Maria Wong, Sophia Yeh, based on the novel Kimiyo funnu no kawa wo watare by Juko Nishimura
directed by John Woo

HAPPY END
**/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz, Toby Jones
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bill Chambers About five seconds into John Woo’s Man Hunt (no relation to that Fritz Lang movie with George Sanders in a cave), there’s a freeze-frame. Followed shortly by another. It’s glorious. Digital filmmaking has no doubt made it easier for Woo to be himself, as has being back in Asia: Hollywood never did warm to his Peckinpah flourishes, nor his melodramatic flair. But something is off in Man Hunt, which finds Woo returning, a touch desperately, to the Heroic Bloodshed genre in the form of a gloss on The Fugitive. (Officially, it’s a remake of a Ken Takakura vehicle variously known as Manhunt and Hot Pursuit.) Chinese Du Qiu (Zhang Hanyu) is a hotshot lawyer for a pharmaceutical company that frames him for the murder of an alleged lover (Tao Okamoto, bestowing her iconic look on a role that doesn’t thank her in return) to protect its secrets; Japanese Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama) is the hotshot Inspector sent after Du when he escapes custody. Du repeatedly eludes Yamura’s clutches, but over the course of the chase they build a rapport that transcends lawful and cultural barriers and, à la Hard-Boiled, unite against a common enemy, corrupt CEO Yoshihiro Sakai (Jun Kunimura). I should mention the two female super-assassins hot on Du’s trail, since Woo’s daughter Angeles plays one of them. For better or worse, this is personal filmmaking.

TIFF ’17: Brad’s Status

Posted in2017, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF

Tiff17bradsstatus

**½/****
starring Ben Stiller, Austin Abrams, Jenna Fischer, Michael Sheen
written and directed by Mike White

by Angelo Muredda Nobody captures the insidiousness and pervasiveness of depressive thinking quite like Mike White, who returns to the middle-aged professional anxiety and panic-inducing Impostor Syndrome of “Enlightened” with Brad’s Status, a quiet, obstinately minor film that largely unfolds through the emotionally-stunted protagonist’s daydreaming voiceover critiques of his own minimal actions onscreen. Brad’s Status positions itself as a lower-middle-class American B-side to Éric Rohmer in its focus on one man’s interrogation of his own moral failings, a modest goal it mostly pulls off.

Telluride ’17: Lady Bird

Posted in2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, Teen, Telluride, Telluride 2017

Tell17ladybird

**½/****
starring Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges
written and directed by Greta Gerwig

by Walter Chaw Greta Gerwig’s solo hyphenate debut bears the influence of erstwhile collaborator Noah Baumbach’s urbane micro-comedies–Hal Hartley’s, too, along with some DNA borrowed from Ghost World and Welcome to the Dollhouse for spice. It’s a talky domestic drama featuring a precocious, strong-willed iconoclast who has named herself “Lady Bird” (Saoirse Ronan) and is, as a character, the best description of the film that houses her. She’s smart but not book-smart and, in the end, not smart enough to avoid having her heart broken by a couple of bad decisions on her way out of senior year in high school and the great grey beast Sacramento. She tells her first boyfriend, Danny (the already-great Lucas Hedges), that she’s from the “wrong side of the tracks,” which, when he lets it slip in front of Lady Bird’s mom Marion (Laurie Metcalf), obviously hurts Marion’s feelings a lot, but she bites her lip. When he does it, he’s there to pick up Lady Bird for Thanksgiving at his grandmother’s place. His grandmother lives in the nicest house on the other side of the tracks and, to feel better about her life, Lady Bird tells her shallow new “bestie” Jenna (Odeya Rush) that it’s Lady Bird’s own house. A miserabilist story about the horror of adolescence that is obviously helmed by a first-timer, Lady Bird is redeemed by a cast so sterling that I actually wished the film were longer. It’s that kind of movie.

TIFF ’17: The Florida Project

Posted in2017, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Tiff17floridaproject

***/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, Bria Vinaite, Caleb Landry Jones
written by Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch
directed by Sean Baker

by Angelo Muredda “Stay in the future today,” a motel sign ironically beams early in The Florida Project, Sean Baker’s gorgeous, ebullient, and, as the kids say, problematic follow-up to his profile-raising Tangerine. The film is a contemporary fable about a cast of poor people, mostly kids, whose transient lives are lived in Kissimmee, Florida against the looming backdrop of Disney World. Their cheap motel rooms, hosted in a purple monstrosity semi-teasingly named The Magic Castle and negotiated week-to-week at best, serve as a temporary respite from homelessness, their inability to invest in a more permanent future rubbed in their faces daily by the tourists just passing through on their way to somewhere better. Dire as that might seem, Baker turns this downbeat ‘America today’ premise into the stuff of everyday beauty and wonder by lining up his brightly-lit but cool pastel aesthetic with the way his 6-year-old protagonist, Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince), sees the run-down souvenir shops, ice-cream parlours, and rival motels around her as a kind of raggedy jungle gym.

TIFF ’17: Molly’s Game

Posted in2017, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Tiff17mollysgame

*½/****
starring Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Michael Cera, Kevin Costner
screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the memoir by Molly Bloom
directed by Aaron Sorkin

by Angelo Muredda You can thank anyone who came out of Steve Jobs yearning for Aaron Sorkin’s take on a sociopathic female protagonist with quixotic interests for Molly’s Game, the loquacious screenwriter/producer/playwright’s rancid directorial debut. Apart from some questionable onscreen graphics and stats that turn the film’s opening set-piece–a breakneck tour through the early history of subject Molly Bloom (not the one you’re probably thinking of)–into a gaudy arcade game, Sorkin the director shows some rare restraint, playing some seriously-overwritten material straight. That isn’t to say he’s an especially promising filmmaker, only that he mostly stays out of his cast’s way as actors like Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba stomp through mic-drop punchlines about money–Wall Street bro fist-pumpers like “I had just made three thousand dollars in one night”–and hyper-stylized speeches that tell us what their maestro really thinks about feminism, gossip, and overcharging prosecutors.

mother! (2017)

Posted in****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Mother2017

****/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer
written and directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw Darren Aronofsky’s mother! seeks to explain the ways of God to Man in an allegory of the monstrousness of the creative impulse that plays at once as apologia and barbaric yawp-cum-mission statement; imagine if Aronofsky adapted Paradise Lost. It’s The Giving Tree and Harlan Ellison’s “Try a Dull Knife” as told by Buñuel and Ken Russell: a marriage of essential truth with exceptional excess–a work of genuine arrogance and pretension. The picture aspires to answer large questions, to lay bare the heart of the artist, and it has as few apologies to offer as it does fucks to give. It’s unpleasant to the point of unwatchability–an instant entry into the films maudit hall of fame, predicting a popular failure and critical evisceration that are at least in part something Aronofsky must have expected, given how dedicated mother! is to destroying pleasure, to refusing the breast that its unnamed female protagonist (we’ll call her X, in honour of Joan Fontaine’s similarly anonymous heroine from Rebecca), played by Jennifer Lawrence, offers her infant in one of the multifarious religious tableaux that litter the piece. In fact, were the film a river to be crossed, the stones you’d step on would all be depictions of holy martyrs and Madonnas. In this way, it resembles Children of Men–even through to its long urban war and siege sequence, which mother! replicates during its feverish conclusion. It resembles Viridiana, of course, and The Exterminating Angel. It resembles all the great symbolist films because it’s one of them.

Telluride ’17: First They Killed My Father

Posted in2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Streaming, Telluride, Telluride 2017

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First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
***½/****
starring Sreymoch Sareum, Kompheak Phoeung, Socheata Sveng, Dara Heng
screenplay by Loung Ung & Angelina Jolie
directed by Angelina Jolie

by Walter Chaw Angelina Jolie gets a lot of shit for being Angelina Jolie. She’s mocked for adopting children from places in the world that need more kindness and attention. Her behaviour as a young woman is brought up constantly to shame her. Her recent separation from Brad Pitt is held up as proof of…something. I haven’t liked her previous films as director, but I saw no malice in them. I suggested after Unbroken that she should stop making movies, maybe focus on her philanthropy. It’s a good thing I don’t know what I’m talking about. First They Killed My Father, adapted from Loung Ung’s memoir by Ung herself (with Jolie), is a beautiful, elliptical, child’s-eye war film that lands somewhere between Empire of the Sun and Come and See. Jolie is the prime example of a child of extreme privilege who has awakened to that privilege, who still stumbles now and again in her more self-aggrandizing moments but for all that hasn’t started a weird product catalogue and advised women to steam their vagina. It’s galling to hear about sensitivity from someone who’s new to it, I think; easier to go after her for an acting exercise reported in VANITY FAIR where she had auditioning Cambodian children hold money, ask them what they would use the money for, and then ask them to react to the money being taken away from them. Who could defend that sort of cruelty? No one could. I’m doubtful it happened that way.

TIFF ’17: Motorrad

Posted in2017, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Brazil, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, TIFF
**/**** screenplay by L.G. Bayão directed by Vincente Amorim by Bill Chambers There is a whole subtext, nay, context begging to be unpacked in Motorrad, yet the filmmaking never inspires much curiosity about it, and it's all too easy to substitute the legacy of George Miller's Mad Max movies for table-setting. Shaggy Hugo (Guilherme Prates) breaks into a seemingly-abandoned garage and sees a carburetor he would like. The proprietor chases him with a shotgun, but an alluring, tomboyish woman (Carla Salle) intervenes, like the farmer's daughter convincing daddy not to shoot the stranger climbing out her bedroom window. Instead, they…

Telluride ’17: Darkest Hour

Posted in2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2017, UK

Tell17darkesthour

***/****
starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Ben Mendelsohn
screenplay by Anthony McCarten
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw Joe Wright’s propulsive, compelling, awards-season prestige biopic Darkest Hour finds Gary Oldman in fine fettle, delivering a rousing performance as WWII-era Winston Churchill, from the moment of his usurpation of Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) for the Prime Minister-ship through to the beginning of the evacuation of Dunkirk. It’s a film about the suddenly-controversial position of not appeasing Nazis and the importance of rhetoric as a skill in our leadership. (Churchill uses Cicero as reference material.) It’s about principles and erudition. A shame that both seem suddenly in such short supply. When Churchill addresses Parliament in his famous “We will never surrender” speech, chief political rival Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane) mutters that Winston’s just mobilized the English language. Trapped as we are now as a nation under an illiterate, sub-human moron and Nazi sympathizer who is some combination of demented and narcissistic, I confess I got emotional a time or two imagining there were once leaders in the world of whom we could be proud and behind whom we could rally. A shame that it seems so much like quaint science-fiction as we work through our forever-war scenarios and jockey for battle against Southeast Asia again. Darkest Hour, in other words, feels aspirational rather than historical, finding its greatest tensions in the disagreement within Churchill’s war council over whether or not the British Empire should “hear out” the Nazis in order to avoid conflict, or whether they should make a stand and, should they be defeated, at least be defeated knowing the empire stood for something. Churchill says that great civilizations that fought and were conquered tend to rise again–but civilizations that capitulate tend to be swallowed by history. Call Darkest Hour a warning about the poison diminishing the United States, though I doubt we’re listening.