FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 3, 20151970s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection, West Germany

Merchantfourseasons1

Händler der vier Jahreszeiten
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla, Hans Hirschmüller, Marian Seidowsky
written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

by Jefferson Robbins When beleaguered costermonger Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmüller) shouts his wares in the courtyard well of a grey Munich apartment block, he might as well be shouting into the void. Although his singsong calling of the prices of fruits is mesmeric, it summons practically no customers. Blocky and straining against his own skin, Hans has been humiliated all his life, and the manner in which he makes his livelihood is a further humiliation in the eyes of his family. The word used for “livelihood” in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons is the German noun Existenz. Clearly, it has multiple edges.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

July 30, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

***½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw At some point, sneakily, wonderfully, Tom Cruise became our Jackie Chan. It happened when the storyline shifted away from his essential ickiness–the Scientology thing, the Katie Holmes thing, and all the attendant nightmare gossip–and onto his fearlessness and absolute willingness to perform his own stunts wherever possible. (I realize of course that said storyline may never shift for some.) There were murmurs when he did the rock-climbing in the second Mission: Impossible flick–the one where he recruited John Woo, who was at the time the best action director on the planet. Those murmurs turned to grudging admiration once it was revealed that Cruise let himself be suspended for real outside the Burj Khalifa in Brad Bird’s superior Ghost Protocol; and now, with Christopher McQuarrie’s fleet, intelligent, immanently professional Rogue Nation, for which Cruise hung from an airplane in flight and held his breath for six minutes, Cruise’s bravado is a big part of the draw.

Miracles

July 27, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Blu-ray Disc, Books About Movies

Closing the book on Miracle Mile

by Walter Chaw I set down in California for the first time since I was there for a cup of coffee at the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind junket a little over a decade ago. I had flown into Riverside, where my sister and her husband live. A lifetime of living in Colorado made me confused when a mountain range right outside the airport indicated east rather than west. It was hot. It was February.

Tangerine (2015)

July 24, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, Mya Taylor, Karen Karagulian, James Ransone
written by Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch
directed by Sean Baker

by Walter Chaw Tangerine acts like, sometimes even looks like, a Fassbinder film. It's a relational melodrama, a social allegory, an outsider text presented with seriousness and formalism that distinguishes itself with its energy and a willingness to address taboo unadorned. It's not a masterpiece, but it is a rarity: one of those glimpses into another culture obsessed with ordinariness, mendacity, and universality. Tangerine has the urgency of another generation's independent cinema. It doesn't play like a calling card, although there are moments, most of them coming in the final third of the film, arranged with a careful, painterly intentionality. The picture plays for all its narrative looseness (and then conveniences) like an opinion urgently held, urgently shared, but repeated so often that sometimes details are neglected in the retelling. It reminded me a lot of Nir Bergman's little-seen gem Broken Wings, which takes place in a very particular time and place (Haifa during the height of suicide bombings) yet is really just about a family. Broken Wings is not a masterpiece and neither is Tangerine, but both are important in the same way.

Irrational Man (2015)

July 24, 20152015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Jamie Blackley, Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Parker Posey
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There’s an odd, mean little movie kicking around in Irrational Man, if you can sift past the tired bromides about love and continental philosophy to find it. The fifty-first feature from the not-so-venerable Woody Allen reads like a work of sloppy automatic writing given some surprisingly rich shading by an alert, unpredictable performance from Joaquin Phoenix and the steady hand of Allen the director, who once again proves he’s as efficient at handling the near-screwball mechanics and black pitch of crime pictures as he is inept at romantic comedies. A nominal May-December romance about an aging fusspot granted a new lease on life by a twentysomething sunflower, Irrational Man is a far more disquieting film than its marketing would suggest–if not a confession of the director’s real-life pathologies, then one of the most incisive profiles of a sociopath ever tucked into the back of a dark comedy.

Southpaw (2015)

July 23, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Naomie Harris, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Kurt Sutter
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw TV-writer Kurt Sutter breaks into feature-screenwriting by amalgamating Taxi Driver with Raging Bull in a movie that has the distinction of being not only the second film of 2015 with Fiddy Cent in it for some inexplicable reason, but also the second film that Jake Gyllenhaal shares with a little slow-motion girl on a trampoline. Southpaw has the distinction, too, of being the second picture in a row following Nightcrawler that is absolutely not the equal of Mr. Gyllenhaal’s performance in it. Antoine Fuqua’s latest is a rote, by-the-numbers sports melodrama that ultimately lacks the courage of its convictions, meaning that although it’s shooting for Rocky and Requiem for a Heavyweight, it ends up as Real Steel. It wants to be gritty like the American ’70s, see, but if Disney made ultra-violent boxing movies, this is exactly what they’d be like: dead mother and all. The real wonder of it all is that Fuqua manages to match every one of Sutter’s overused sports clichés with an overused Scorsese homage. That’s the real toe-to-toe slugfest, sports fans.

Ant-Man (2015)

July 17, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Michael Douglas
screenplay by Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish and Adam McKay & Paul Rudd
directed by Peyton Reed

by Walter Chaw You’ve got to feel for director Peyton Reed, the Tobe Hooper to Edgar Wright’s Steven Spielberg in a film, Ant-Man, that will forever be discussed in terms of lingering evidence of Wright’s contribution following his very public divorce from the production. Reed’s like the guy dating the supermodel: everyone’s looking around him to see the main attraction. Indeed, multiple moments are clearly the product of Wright’s sensibility–the flashbacks, in particular, where characters speak in the exact cadence and rhythm of narrator/sidekick Luis (Michael Peña). There are multiple moments, too, where it could be speculated that the movie would have played a lot looser had Wright been allowed to see his vision through to the end. But what’s there is still a pretty good palate cleanser. It’s silly and aware of that without being snarky about it, only once or twice lowering itself to broad slapstick that, here we go again, I don’t believe Wright would have let pass without some kind of edged stinger. At the end of the day, frankly, any film that references The Incredible Shrinking Man so beautifully deserves its moment on the stage.

It Follows (2015) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

July 13, 2015****/****, 2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary
written and directed by David Robert Mitchell

by Walter Chaw For me, David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover occupies a space in recent nostalgia films alongside stuff like Adventureland or the theatrical cut of Donnie Darko. It properly identifies a certain period in adolescence as grand drama and surreal dreamscape–when everything takes on magnified import both romantic and Romanticist–and paints that world in rich, velvet strokes. Mitchell’s follow-up, It Follows, exists in the same time and place, pools in the same crepuscular half-light of fading youth. It’s a horror movie, it’s true, and it has a bogey, sure, but what works about the film is that it’s actually about a fear of experience as it progresses, inexorable and unstoppable. Its bad guy is time, should you survive–which is really, truly fucking terrifying.

Limelight (1952) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 20151950s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Chaplin, Directors: Charles Chaplin, Drama, Music, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Charles Chaplin, Claire Bloom, Sydney Chaplin, Nigel Bruce
written and directed by Charles Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer The opening titles of Limelight describe the film modestly but self-consciously as “the story of a ballerina and a clown.” The clown, of course, is Chaplin himself, playing a faded superstar of the stage named Calvero. The ballerina is Chaplin’s own discovery, Claire Bloom, playing a beautiful and earnest young dancer. The story is about their relationship–how a washed-up old comedian takes a despairing young performer under his wing and gives her the confidence to become a great artist, even as his own career fades into irrelevance. The main dilemmas facing Calvero–his steadily advancing age and the fickleness of his public–were the same ones that bedevilled Chaplin at the time.

The Gunman (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 7, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK

*½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Sean Penn, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Don McPherson, Pete Travis, Sean Penn, based on the novel The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette
directed by Pierre Morel

by Bill Chambers Sean Penn seems like the last guy who would walk into his agent’s office and say, “Give me the Liam Neeson™,” because his work doesn’t operate on that kind of cynicism. Even I Am Sam, in which he courts an Oscar by playing mentally-challenged, fits neatly into a career whose primary auteurist concern has been the sanctity and fragility of daughters’ lives (see also: The Crossing Guard, The Pledge, 21 Grams, and Mystic River). So it’s reassuring, sort of, to see him use The Gunman as a pulpit for his humanitarian concerns (presuming I’ve correctly extrapolated the political firebrand’s credited contribution to the screenplay), but there is a disappointing transparency to the character, as if he’s afraid that reinventing himself too much in the Neeson mold will reveal, God forbid, a desire to stay popular in a profession he has threatened to quit numerous times. In The Gunman, one of our most transformative actors–a guy who as recently as 2011 turned himself into the spitting image of The Cure‘s Robert Smith and affected a childlike drawl for the length of a feature–comports himself with a tedious self-seriousness, makes time to surf, and smokes way too much to be a credible action hero. He’s Sean Penn in all but name, and he’s kind of a drag.

Terminator Genisys (2015)

July 1, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Clarke, Emilia Clarke, Byung-hun Lee
screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis & Patrick Lussier
directed by Alan Taylor

by Walter Chaw Once you come to terms with the fact that there's no internal logic to it (that it's without external logic is a given), once you've accepted that the only way to enjoy something like Terminator Genisys (hereafter T5) is at a great distance, through multiple irony filters and possibly a coma, T5 is still largely unwatchable. Its screenplay is one of those rare disasters generally reserved for a Syfy Channel Original, and indeed, the whole thing plays like the fourth sequel to Sharknado rather than the fourth sequel to James Cameron's The Terminator, which for some reason it replicates shot-for-shot in a series of 1984-set sequences. The premise, see, is that this time around, a Terminator has been sent for Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), mother of future resistance leader John Connor (Jason Clarke) and somewhere-in-time consort of heroic soldier Kyle Reese (Jai-Zzzzzzzzzz). What this means is that when Kyle gets sent back into the Cameron film, Sarah is already a badass, has a pet Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) she calls "Pops," and has an adversary in a liquid T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun). I still don't understand how the T-1000 time travels because the rules in this universe are that nothing metal can go through the stargate without a flesh covering. Something else that doesn't make sense, T5 also has a call-out to Chris Marker's La Jetée.

Get Hard (2015) [Unrated] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 30, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

Gethardbd2

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras Oy
starring Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, Alison Brie, Craig T. Nelson
screenplay by Jay Martel & Ian Roberts and Etan Cohen
directed by Etan Cohen

by Walter Chaw The title pretty much says it all, as screenwriter Etan Cohen’s gay-panic directorial debut Get Hard works as the exact antidote to his own work on the smart, occasionally vital Tropic Thunder. It’s puerile and indelicate–that much to be expected, I suppose, but it’s laboured, too, and flat as a pancake. If Get Hard were a middle-aged man, you’d be calling an ambulance for all the wheezing. Two scenes: in the first, Wall Street wolf James King (Will Ferrell) does a patented Will Ferrell freak-out, mistaking attendant Darnell (Kevin Hart) for a carjacker, ending with Darnell saying, “I didn’t mean to freak you out, man;” in the second, two scary-looking Boyz N the Hood-era gangbangers say, “Wall Street is where the real criminals at!” The former demonstrates how poorly matched are the improvisational styles of the leads, with Ferrell needing a deadpan straight world to his shenanigans; one wonders at the wisdom of casting two alpha-comedians in a film–with no one setting up the jokes, there’s never anything to pay off. (It’s why Jeff Daniels is Jim Carrey’s counterpart in the Dumb and Dumber movies and not Robin Williams.) The latter demonstrates how desperate the film is in trying to be smart and relevant. What could be more sophisticated and racially sensitive, after all, than a screenplay written by a bunch of identical-looking white guys imagining a Los Angeles street gang called the Crenshaw Kings transitioning their drive-by and street-smart jive business into day-trading?

The Films of Hayao Miyazaki (1979-2001)|Spirited Away (2001) – Blu-ray + DVD

June 25, 2015****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2015, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan, Romance, Sci-Fi, War

Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro) (1979)
***/****
Buy DVD at Amazon.com|Buy Blu-ray at Amazon.com
Adapted from a Monkey Punch manga that was itself based on Maurice LeBlanc’s popular super-spy Lupin, Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature-length film The Castle of Cagliostro came about as an offshoot of his experiences producing television episodes of a popular Lupin series (1977-1981). As such, the animation and backgrounds are more simplistic, the story is more cartoonish (though the very basic Miyazaki hallmarks of a girl in transition, flight, and gadgetry are already in place) and one-dimensional, and the pace is more relentlessly breakneck than occasionally meditative. Beginning as a heist comedy and continuing as an impenetrable fortress/princess in a tower action adventure film, The Castle of Cagliostro is a light, irreverent slapstick exercise with a healthy share of nifty gadgets and derring-do. Missing is a sense of completion and the deeper examination of themes that one will come to associate with the director’s work, but The Castle of Cagliostro stands on its own merits; despite being shackled somewhat by the artistic and thematic requirements of an in-place franchise, the picture reveals the burgeoning promise of a filmmaker who would become the most important voice of the new anime medium. 100 minutes

Miami Blues (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

June 23, 20151990s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Fred Ward, Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nora Dunn
screenplay by George Armitage, based on the novel by Charles Willeford
directed by George Armitage

by Jefferson Robbins Remember when handheld camera was a technique deployed to signal disorientation, estrangement, and vulnerability and not simply “the way we shoot movies now”? In George Armitage’s Miami Blues, the otherwise-steady camera first comes unhinged when ex-con Frederick “Junior” Frenger Jr. (Alec Baldwin) orders newly-requisitioned hooker Pepper (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to roll over on her belly, presumably so he can employ her the way male prisoners employ each other sexually. He can’t, though, because there’s something different there, and an afternoon’s purchased pleasure becomes an affair. Armitage’s use of the camera is a punctuation, a chapter break in Junior’s story, reassuring us that while Junior is malevolent and unpredictable, Pepper won’t immediately meet the same fate as the Hare Krishna that Junior (kind of accidentally) murdered an hour before. Still, you should probably worry for her.

Inside Out (2015)

June 18, 20152015, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Pixar, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve & Josh Cooley and Pete Docter
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw Films are objects and their interpretations are subjective. I start this way because there’s a sequence in Pete Docter’s Inside Out that enters an area of, literally, abstract thought–and then later, its characters accidentally spill crates of “facts” and “opinions” and have trouble getting them sorted out again. (“It happens all the time,” they’re reassured.) Someone brilliant once said that the measure of a work is the extent to which it’s examined. Inside Out is destined to be examined a lot and, therefore, deserves a great deal of merit–but for as uncannily perceptive as it is at times, it’s just as often pernicious in its gender stereotyping and establishment of straw situations that betray its core honesty. I’m reminded of Docter’s similarly-flawed, similarly schizophrenic Up, whose prologue is easily among the cinema’s best silent melodramas while the rest of it is missed opportunity, curious under-reaching, and overly dependant on shtick. Docter’s cited Paper Moon as a seminal film in his development. Of his three movies thus far, only his first, Monsters, Inc., deserves mention in the same conversation from start to bittersweet finish.

Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets (2014)

June 18, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Concert Doc, Documentary, Music, UK

**½/****
directed by Florian Habicht

by Bill Chambers There's an episode of "The Larry Sanders Show" where tragic sidekick Hank Kingsley asks producer Artie what he thinks of him opening his solo act with Blood, Sweat & Tears' "Spinning Wheel." "It's a showstopper, Hank," Artie says, briefly raising Hank's hopes before delivering the kicker: "Never open with a showstopper." I was reminded of this at the outset of Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets, which opens with the title band giving a rousing performance of their "Common People" that is, for those of us watching after the fact, vicariously thrilling. "[1996] won't produce a more indispensable song," wrote rock authority Robert Christgau, and indeed, "Common People" went on to crystallize the Britpop movement and be covered by the disparate likes of Tori Amos and William Shatner. If you're a dilettante like myself, you go into this first sanctioned documentary about Pulp (lead singer Jarvis Cocker receives a "concept" credit alongside director Florian Habicht) wishing to hear "Common People," and what follows pales for the instant gratification–at least until it becomes clear that "Common People" had to be up front: for purposes of this film, it's nothing less than the national anthem.

Run All Night (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 15, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

Runallnightbd1

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Harris
screenplay by Brad Ingelsby
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra’s Run All Night fulfills every requirement of the Liam Neeson subgenre of elder-vengeance while simultaneously completing the Grumpy Old Men trilogy in an unexpected way. It’s a hollow stylistic exercise that mainly exposes how good We Own the Night was, and while some slight comparisons have been to Phil Joanou’s underestimated State of Grace, really the only thing Run All Night resembles is everything else Neeson has decided will be his legacy since the first Taken movie about seven years ago. What’s most painful, I think, is how consistently great Neeson is at doing this one thing over and over again. He makes it hard, in other words, to stop wishing he’d go back to doing something worthy of him.

New Year’s Evil (1980) – Blu-ray Disc

June 14, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Roz Kelly, Kip Niven, Chris Wallace, Grant Cramer
screenplay by Leonard Neubauer
directed by Emmett Alston

by Bryant Frazer Every 1980s slasher movie needed a gimmick, and New Year’s Evil has two: a Halloween-inspired holiday tie-in and a youth-culture exploitation angle. A Hollywood-based serial killer promises to murder a victim at the stroke of midnight in each of the four continental U.S. time zones, announcing his intentions by calling “Hollywood Hotline”, a New Year’s Eve countdown TV show hosted by Roz Kelly (the erstwhile Pinky Tuscadero on “Happy Days”) that features live performances by punkish new wave acts. The results are surprisingly watchable. The psycho-killer story is actually a bit twisty as these things go, with a mid-film reversal of fortune aiming to give audiences a rooting interest in the villain. And though the bands on screen (Shadow and Made in Japan) seem to be employed mainly to help pad out the film’s 86-minute running time, their proto-Guns N’ Roses sounds are not entirely disagreeable.

Jurassic World (2015)

June 11, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ty Simpkins
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow
directed by Colin Trevorrow

by Walter Chaw Jurassic World is Dada. It is anti-art, anti-sense–wilfully, defiantly, some would say exuberantly, meaningless. In its feckless anarchy, find mute rebellion against narrative convention. You didn’t come for the story, it says, you came for the set-ups and pay-offs. It’s history’s most expensive porno: broad characters in familiar situations and then the fucking and the money shot. There’s a scene in the first third where raptor-wrangler Dirk, or is it Chet? Shane? No, wait…Owen (Chris Pratt), yeah, Owen, tells uptight eventual conquest Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) that his raptors are driven by eating, hunting, and *grunt–fist-push–grunt*, and surely Claire must be motivated by at least…one…of those things. Cue the throbbing bass and dirty guitar. There are also constant call-outs to the first film, old enough now to be held as totem to a generation of people wanting to recapture that initial experience. Jurassic Park was similarly a bad movie with great set-pieces; what time has taught us is that it hardly even matters if these films have human actors in them as long as they don’t waste too much time on them. It’s fantasy gratification, and the fantasy it’s trying to gratify is that you can lose your virginity again.

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 9, 2015****/****, 1930s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Makeway1

****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi, Fay Bainter, Thomas Mitchell
screenplay by Viña Delmar, based on the novel The Years Are So Long by Josephine Lawrence
directed by Leo McCarey

by Walter Chaw Orson Welles famously proclaimed that Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow could “make a stone cry,” and it could, not because of any sentimentality, but because it pinions essential human failure mercilessly. Its tragedy is born not of high melodrama, but of low archetype. It’s any story of a close, loving relationship, a mentor/apprentice relationship, that ends in less shocking than mundane betrayal that is largely preordained and even necessary. What so wounds about Make Way for Tomorrow is that the audience identifies with not only the parents who have outlived their usefulness to society and their families, but also the children who are too busy with their own lives to include them. It puts us in the role of both betrayer and betrayed. The agony it elicits is complex and multifoliate. It compounds on itself. At the end, it’s even a movie about the idea that every love story is a tragedy because if everything goes exactly right, one lover will still die before the other. The film is a passion play in which the audience is Judas as well as Jesus. Make Way for Tomorrow‘s impact is startling some eighty years after its release, and will remain startling another eighty years from now.

Borderline (2025) + Novocaine (2025)

Snow White (2025)

O’Dessa (2025)