I'M STILL HERE

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B
Editing: A-

The more I think about I’m Still Here, the more impressed I become with it—and not just because Fernanda Torres, as the central character, Eunice Paiva, is easily the best thing about it. That’s the most obvious thing to be impressed by, actually. I found myself saying, a bit prematurely, that this movie was good but didn’t blow me away. But “blowing me away” is not what director Walter Salles is going for. He’s going for something far more subtle, something that succeeds in impressing those who pay attention to detail.

This is based on the true story of a wife and mother, and her five children, and their resilience in the face of a brutal dictatorship—specifically the military dictatorship in Brazil between the 1960s and the 1980s. And the word “brutal” is not used lightly here. It’s easily to imagine graphic violence when thinking of such things, but one of the many takeaways from I’m Still Here is that there are many forms of brutality. Some of them hide in plain sight, while society goes on as though everything is normal. Families still go to the beach, barely noticing military trucks driving by.

There’s a memorable quality to the editing in this film, as Salles initially immerses us in the Paiva family’s daily life, showing us a casually comfortable, happy marriage, and five kids clearly being given a great childhood. All of this changes in a matter of hours, when unfamiliar men show up at their door, and declare that “Congressman” Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) must be taken in for questioning. Rubens has not been a Congressman for several years, and has even recently returned from exile after being ousted from his position, but the reference is pointed.

This is the last time anyone in that family sees Rubens, and I’m Still Here is the story of how the family left behind coped with this injustice. This includes both Eunice and one of her older daughters shortly thereafter being detained as well, questioned, pressured to identify other people in a binder of mugshots. Eunice is held for 12 days, the entire time having no idea what they’ve done with her daughter—who is sent home after only a day, but Eunice doesn’t know that. Meanwhile, she can overhear the torture of other detainees in other rooms.

There is a key moment in the sequence of scenes at the place Eunice has been taken, a young man, a guard, who escorts her from her cell to questioning and back. Just before her release, the young man says to her, “I want you to know, I don’t approve.” And that means what, exactly? This young man represents something far too few people think about: that terrible regimes thrive on the willing cooperation of people who “don’t approve.”

This whole experience, as well as years of experience thereafter, changes Eunice. She does everything she can to get the government to admit her husband was arrested, and accepts him as dead within a couple of years. She becomes a lawyer and an advocate. And most critically, she still insists on raising a happy family. When a local reporter comes to get a family photo and says the publisher asked for them to look more serious, Eunice refuses. All the kids giggle, she encourages it, and insists that they all smile for the photo. Eunice is an inspiring woman for many reasons, not least of which is her refusal to let anyone steal her joy—even as she still works tirelessly for justice.

I’m Still Here makes two unusually large time-jumps, first 25 years from 1971 to 1996; then another 18 years to 2014. Both of them function as epilogues of a sort, first when Eunice finally gets some closure, if not quite justice—the regime change is to her advantage, although it’s also noted how even when regimes change, the perpetrators of the worst crimes are far too often never held to account. The final sequence, in which little occurs beyond a portrait of how the extended family has grown to that point, Eunice is played not by Fernanda Torres, but by Torres’s real-life mother, Fernanda Montenegro—an accomplished actress in her own right, and who starred in Walter Salles’s previous film from 1998, Central Station.

With I’m Still Here, Salles has created something so straightforward that it doesn’t seem all that profound while watching it. But there is something ingenious about its construction, a subversive thread that is a indicator of the sinister nature of dictatorship, especially when daily life seems basically unchanged for anyone besides those directly affected. This is a film that could not possibly be more timely.

Don’t let the bastards get you down.

THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A-

It has been widely reported that The Seed of the Sacred Fig was made in secret, and that is the first thing we see in the film, white text on a black background: This film was made in secret. There is a second line on that title card, though, something that will stick with me for a while: When there is no way, a way must be made.

A way was certainly made by writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof, who made this film in Tehran, shortly before he was sentenced to eight years in prison, flogging, a fine, and confiscation of his property. He had already faced legal troubles from the Iranian regime for previous films, dating back to 2010. He has since fled the country, a painstaking journey that took 28 days but allowed him to be present at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024. As far as I can gather from extremely limited information online, Rasoulof’s wife (Rozita Hendijanian) and child are still in Iran.

People love to use the word “brave” to describe all manner of involvement in art, and particularly in film. Anyone be hard pressed to outmatch Rasoulof when it comes not just to his dedication to art and craft, but the use of art to speak truth to power—something we rarely see employed to the same degree in America, though we may see more of it here soon. It’s unlikely Rasoulof used The Seed of the Sacred Fig as any kind of allegory for where the U.S. is headed, but it’s difficult not to make the comparisons as American audiences. This kind of fascism is very much the direction in which we are headed, which is also stepping in the direction of theocracy.

Iran, of course, is already there, and Rasoulof pulls of an astonishing accomplishment with The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Just knowing the entire film was made in secret puts everything we see onscreen in a different light, as none of it looks like a film made with any such constraints. This includes several scenes of characters driving through Tehran streets, and I kept wondering how he could have mounted cameras on the vehicles without looking conspicuous.

There are so many things I love about this film, I’m not even sure where to begin. Perhaps with the title itself, which, after the initial title card, the film offers a brief explanation: the “sacred fig” is a species that wraps itself around another tree and gradually strangles it to death, until it can stand on its own. This is a symbol of the story to follow, which centers around a family of four: regime-loyal parents Iman and Najmeh (Missagh Zareh and Soheila Golestani, respectively) and their much more progressive and idealistic teenage daughters, Rezvan and Sana (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki, respectively).

This film is unusually long, at two hours and 47 minutes, but a lot goes down, it is never slow, and almost none of it feels like wasted time. The run time allows for an illustration of how ideologies can gradually either strengthen or unravel, depending on the person and the circumstance. Iman has been working as a government “investigator,” then given a promotion, in a new job where he is asked to approve sentencing with no time to actually review the cases. He starts with some level of indignity but ultimately an inability to shed his dedication to this government; Najmeh can only tell him it’s his job so it’s what he has to do. They spend a lot of time giving what appear to outsiders to be clear oppressors the benefit of the doubt. Rezvan and Sana respond to increasingly violent government crackdowns on student protests with the healthy skepticism of their youth.

It’s when Rezvan’s friend from school gets mixed up in a violent clash with police at a school demonstration, and she is brought to this family’s home to dress her wounds, that things get thorny. Najmeh does this only begrudgingly, having already spent a great deal of time admonishing her daughters to be extremely careful about their associations and their public behavior as a reflection of their father in his new position. This friend, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), maintains her innocence, that she just happens to have been outside her dorm when the police attacked, and so Rezvan maintains the same, to the last. Rasoulof never makes explicitly clear whether Sadaf and Resvan really are “innocent,” perhaps because it doesn’t matter.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is set during the 2022 protests in Iran, and Rasoulof’s editor, Andrew Bird, who did his work after the footage was smuggled out of Iran to Hamburg, pointedly cuts in real footage of some very distressing violence in the government crackdown. Much of it just feels chaotic and without direction; several show some pretty shocking images. The characters in the film are divided in a way presumably many families in Iran were: parents taking television news at their word; younger people watching clips online posted by protesters.

The plot takes a very specific turn, quite a while into the film, when Iman’s gun goes missing. This is a pistol lent to him by a colleague as self-defense against oppositional forces already known to find and publish the home addresses of judges and associates hauntingly down clearly unjust convictions and sentences. The disappearance of this gun sows distrust between all four members of this family, and serves as a kind of central mystery to the story: what happened to this gun? Which one of them took it? For some time, I was convinced Iman, over-stressed by his job, just left it somewhere he forgot. Of course, things get much more complicated than that.

All of this political unrest serves as the backdrop for this conflict, which becomes the—pardon the pun—trigger point for what might finally, truly tear them apart. Iman can’t imagine any of the three of them taking his gun from him, but is effectively forced to regard all three of them as suspects in the matter. And when the inevitable happens and they have to flee their home due to their address getting shared online, conflicts come to a head between the four of them in a secluded house far outside the city.

This was the one stretch of The Seed of the Sacred Fig where I disengaged slightly, as the narrative shifts to something closer to a conventional thriller than the dense story and plotting that led up to it. In the end, the conflict shifts to the patriarch against all the women, which also feels (rightfully) pointed. I do love that Rasoulof has made a film where all of empathies, and nearly all of its depicted perspectives, lie with the three women central to the story.

Then, the “climactic” sequence involves an extended foot chase through some desert ruins, which went on long enough for me so start wondering what exactly we’re doing here. This was the only point in the film where I felt some cutting for time would have been fine, even as I can acknowledge that Rasoulof might very well have had specific intention with how he dwells on wife and mother, daughters and sisters all running in panicked, labyrinthine circles around the man trying to dictate their lives. I felt slightly ambivalent about the very end, but not enough to move how deeply impressed I am by this film overall.

We should all be spending more time hearing the voices of women like these.

Overall: A-

HARD TRUTHS

Directing: A-
Acting: A
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Marianne Jean-Baptiste previously teamed up with director Mike Leigh for the stellar 1996 drama Secrets & Lies, a film about a Black woman who was adopted and surprised to discover her birth mother was White—and her birth mother is surprised to discover her biological daughter is Black, having mistaken which of the two men she had sex with six weeks apart was the father. Watching that film, I found myself wishing we could have learned more about the Black family she was adopted into, even though the “secrets & lies” of the title were very much a logical focus of the biological, White family.

It’s the closest I got to any criticism of that film, which is totally absorbing, heartbreaking, and packed with stellar performances. Now, 28 years later (this is technically a 2024 film, we can talk about the stupidity of delayed regional release dates another time), Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Mike Leigh have teamed up again for Hard Truths, which almost serves as an answer to that lack of Black family representation in the earlier film. This time, the focus is indeed on a Black family, and Jean-Baptiste is a matriarch of sorts, albeit a truly miserable person who everyone else she knows tiptoes around.

The Mike Leigh approach to filmmaking is a fascinatingly unique one. Reportedly, he develops a script collaboratively with his entire cast, settling on character arcs across the board through improvisation in early rehearsals. Leigh has a script finalized before they actually start shooting, which is perhaps why he still gets sole script qriting credit—but, for an old White guy writing a story about a Black family, this very much lends an aspect of authenticity to the story itself: none of these actors would be delivering these sterling performances if any of it didn’t ring true, especially after guiding their own characters’ directions in the early stages of development.

How the Black experience differs from others is touched on in both Secrets & Lies and Hard Truths, albeit very subtly and briefly in both cases. Hard Truths is much more about how Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) is anxious, depressed, and filled with suicidal ideation—none of these words are ever uttered by any character in the film, underscoring how it’s better to show rather than to tell. Instead, Pansy is heard many times saying things like, “I just want it all to stop” or commenting on how she’d like to just go to sleep forever. Pansy doesn’t necessarily set out to make every human interaction in her life a confrontation, but it’s what seems to happen. We see this from the very first scene in Hard Truths, as she lives with a husband, Curtley (David Webber), and a 22-year-old son, Moses (Twain Barrett), both of whom are beaten down just by living with Pansy.

Curtley is the most mystifying character in the story, a guy who works as a plumber and comes home to his wife’s aggressive negativity and never challenges her, or even responds. I’m still baffled by, but thinking about, the moment he takes the flowers their son has gotten Pansy for Mother’s Day, and just tosses them out into the middle of the backyard lawn. Moses, on the other hand, is the character I found myself empathizing with the most: emotionally stunted, worn down by a mother who doesn’t understand why he has no dreams or aspirations. A scene late in the film where a random young woman blithlely strikes up a conversation with him provides a glimmer of hope.

The relationship Hard Truths focuses the most on, though, is that between Pansy and her sister, Chantelle (Michelle Austin—who played Jean-Baptiste’s character’s best friend in Secrets & Lies, incidentally). Shortly after we are introduced to a miserable Pansy and her miserable husband and son, Leigh cuts to who we soon learn is Pansy’s sister, Chantelle, and her two daughters, Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson). The contrast could not be more stark: Chantelle and her daughters are a happy, fun-loving family, quick to smiles and laughter.

All of them are reticent when it comes to dealing with Pansy, of course—all except for Chantelle, who has an easy rapport with Pansy, and has an easier time letting Pansy’s aggressiveness roll right off of her. In a key scene where Chantelle does have a bit of trouble with it, the two of them are visiting the grave of their mother, who only died a few years ago. Pansy is complaining about how often people ask why she can’t enjoy life, and Chantelle counters, “Why can’t you enjoy life?” Pansy instantly shoots back: “I don’t know!”

To some degree or another, we all know a person like this. Pansy is a particularly extreme example, igniting arguments in the checkout line at the grocery store, or just waiting in her parked car for some guy looking for an open spot to come along and yell at her about whether she’ll be leaving soon. It’s almost as though Pansy has a sort of battery inside her that can only be recharged through confrontation. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but leaving the theater, it was pointed out to me that this is a story about a woman with untreated depression. Suddenly it all seems so obvious.

The cast is fantastic across the board in Hard Truths, but Marianne Jean-Baptiste deserves special attention. There’s a scene in which Pansy sort of cracks, slow at first to build into laughing maniacally, shifting seamlessly into heaving sobs. It’s the only time in the entire film we see pansy laugh or even crack a smile, and it’s utterly heartbreaking—it’s the prime example of what elevates this film to something better than the sum of its parts. Her performance alone is worth the price of admission.

Mike Leigh isn’t exactly known for movies with much in the way of uplift. He makes movies about deeply unhappy people, but with a curious knack for sprinkling in truly funny bits here and there—even in the case of Hard Truths. Still, this film does end on a truly downbeat note, with the suggestion that people like Pansy don’t tend to change. Not without treatment, anyway. But this film was something I found to be an emotionally cleansing experience.

Some families have no choice in facing Hard Truths.

Overall: A-

THE BRUTALIST

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A-

I’ve been thinking about the plot structure of The Brutalist. It might just be a cornerstone of modern American cinema. It takes some time to digest it . . . architecturally. Okay, I’ll stop.

So here’s the great question: is The Brutalist a modern American masterpiece? I hesitate to use the word '“masterpiece” in reference to a film the very same day I saw it. Time will be the judge of that. The marketers of this film sure have been eager to share the many reviews that have referred to it as “monumental.” This was not how I responded to it, though. The Brutalist did not blow me away. Instead, it seeped into me, like some kind of narrative IV drip. There are certain narrative threads that remain unresolved and which I keep thinking about, but there is also a strong sense that that is by design.

I’m always impressed with a film that takes a fairly small cast of characters and successfully makes it an allegory for America. That is certainly what’s happening here, along with its examination of capitalism, massive income inequality, insidious antisemitism, and broad xenophobia. All of this is woven into the subtext—and often the text—of a story involving three principal characters: László Tóth (Adrien Brody), the title character having immigrated to the U.S. from war-torn Budapest; László’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), who isn’t even seen onscreen until the second half and yet she still looms large; and the Pennsylvanian millionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who discovers László to have been a renowned European architect and hires him to design a massive community center in his town outside of Philadelphia.

There are other key characters, of course. Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), László’s mute and orphaned teenage niece brought to America with Erzsébet, is in many scenes in which she never says a word yet conveys a great deal with her eyes alone. Later, as a young adult, she gets one scene in which she has any dialogue, when she and her young husband declare to László and Erzsébet that they have decided to move to the then-very-young state of Israel—a scene with many implications, both in their time and in ours. Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), Harrison’s entitled son, is the first to hire László for a design job, rebuilding his father’s library as a surprise that does not quite go as planned but kicks off Harrison’s and László’s complicated and ultimately tragic relationship. Attila (Alessandro Nivola), László’s cousin, takes him in when he first arrives in America, and hires him to work at his furniture store in Philadelphia. Audrey (Emma Laird), Attila’s Catholic wife, has convinced Attila to convert to her religion and clearly resents László’s Jewishness. Minutes after meeting him, she says, “We know someone who can take a look at that nose,” and although the conversation is about an injury, the double meaning is far from lost on us.

There is a great deal to unpack in The Brutalist, but perhaps the most with László’s Ivorian single father friend Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), and Gordon’s young son William (Charlie Esoko as a little boy; Zephan Hanson Amissah as a teenager). William is also orphaned; Gordon is also an immigrant; both of them are Black; and it feels somewhat like a missed opportunity that The Brutalist has nothing to say about them as it pertains to these facts, least of which how their experiences might differ from László’s. They are just László’s friend—met in a bread line; Gordon later hired by László to work on his projects—and his son. There is a moment when Harrison returns from a trip sooner than expected, discovering the library “surprise” mid-construction, and refers to Gordon as a “strange Negro” in his front yard, and this is the only overt reference to their race. There is no doubt that director and writer Brady Corbet is unusually intentional with every choice in this film, from casting to editing, and still some of it remains a mystery. We get a brief glimpse into Gordon and William’s relationship when Gordon insists William does not remember his late mother, and William replies that he just wanted to make it easier on him—and then it cuts to the next scene.

That said, one of the notable achievements in The Brutalist is how quickly it seems to go by in spite of its length. This is a three-hour and 35-minute movie, including a 15-minute intermission (which helpfully features a countdown clock), and when the intermission happened roughly ninety minutes in, I was surprised we were halfway through already. And this is with a narrative that is not especially fast-paced—but, you still can’t take your eyes off of it: not the excellent performers, not the beautiful cinematography, not the tragically typical American immigrant story unfolding onscreen. During the opening titles, the camera follows László through a tightly crowded, dark space that I first suspected to be some chaotic place he was escaping from in Europe, but turns out to be the depths of the ship he’s taken to Ellis Island. This is where we see, within minutes of the film’s beginning, the iconic shot of the Statue of Liberty viewed upside-down. László is elated, but we already know what American experience awaits him. Much later, he utters one of the most memorable lines in the film: “We came here because we had no other option.”

Felicity Jones deserves special mention, as László’s wife, Erzsébet. We hear her, narrating letters from Hungary during László’s first five years in America without her, in the first half of the film, before the intermission. We see her onscreen for the first time in the opening scene of Part Two, when she finally arrives. Others have already commented how Erzsébet is “the wife” character but also more than that, and this is true. Brady Corbet and his co-writer, Mona Fastvold, have written her with much more autonomy than most characters of this sort get, and she is much more integral to the story in the second half. I actually found her to be one of the most interesting and dynamic characters in the film.

Guy Pearce’s Harrison Lee Van Buren, on the other hand, is by turns the most enigmatic and the most predictable character. His son, Harry, is much more readily pompous, but Harrison is subtly every bit the entitled figure one would expect from someone with far more money than he needs. Money changes how people view the world, and how they view everyone else in it, especially those without wealth, and Harrison embodies this to his very essence. Pearce plays him as a deeply repressed man, with occasional bursts of shocking violence. In one such scene, between him and László, I was so taken aback my jaw dropped, and I’m still not entirely sure how I even feel about it. In the end, though, it all comes down to power and privilege, and how casually they can be leveraged when people simply move from one system of oppression to another. They may have different structures, but the same people are granted access to separate spaces designed only for them.

Opening doors to the intersection between aesthetics and knowledge, but without equal access to either.

Overall: A-

A REAL PAIN

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A

In A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play adult cousins who attend a guided holocaust tour of Poland, and the tour guide is a Brit who is the only person in the group not in any way Jewish. How often does it actually happen that way, I wonder? I could be wrong, but I would expect that more often than not these tour guides are Jewish or have some connection to Judaism, or at the very least to the country they have chosen to operate in. I’m sure there are exceptions to that, as in this story, in which it’s a fascinating narrative choice.

Eisenberg wrote and directed this film, his sophomore feature film effort on both counts. It’s easy to be skeptical of yet another young(ish) actor fancying himself a director, but it really should be noted how assured and accomplished A Real Pain is. It’s a film filled with scenes set up to go a predictable direction, but which consistently go a different way. There’s a scene in which Eisenberg’s David is ranting to the rest of the tour group over dinner about Culkin’s Benji while he’s gone to the bathroom. He goes on so long that I was sure Benji would be revealed to be standing behind him and overhearing all this. Instead Benji does something totally different, serves as an effective disctraction, but is wholly in character.

Eisenberg and Culkin are two very different people, and so are David and Benji. After a while, it becomes increasingly clear that this casting is inspired. These cousins were only born three weeks apart, so they grew up very close, and you really feel it in their characters. David consistently allows Benji to walk all over him, and it’s never clear whether this has always been their dynamic, or if it’s only happening now because of a recent, sad incident in Benji’s life. Either way, I found Benji often deeply annoying, and can’t imagine tolerating him the way David does. He even asks David to lend him his phone so he can play music in the shower, making the dubious claim that he can’t on his own phone. I’d tell him to use his own fucking phone.

The magic trick of A Real Pain is how much we empathize with both of these guys in spite of their character flaws. In typical Eisenberg style, David is neurotic and nervous and awkward, taking anti-anxiety pills. At least he’s not a pretentious prick, a type of character Eisenberg excels at playing. David feels wholly his own person, someone with deep affection for the people in his life, from his wife to his son to, vividly illustrated here, his cousin.

I do love a story about grown men with an enduring love for each other, that isn’t sexual. We do get more of them these days than we used to, but there can never be too many stories of platonic but deep bonds between straight guys. Audiences need that modeled for them, and this movie does it stupendously. Granted, David and Benji are cousins, so it’s about more than friendship, as they are family. But, they are also so wildly different from each other, they function as best friends who complement each other.

The tour group they are on is fairly small, The others in the group are an older married couple (Liza Sedovy and Daniel Oreskes); a Rwandan man who escaped the genocide and converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan); and a recently divorced woman played by Dirty Dancing’s Jennifer Grey. I heard her interviewed on a podcast recently on which the hosts insisted she’s “a scene stealer” in this movie, and I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. She’s fine, but the part could just as easily have been cast with any other competent actor.

Will Sharpe, though, conveys some surprising subtlety as James, the tour guide—particularly when Benji randomly breaks and criticizes James’s over-reliance on historic facts and statistics at the expense of experiencing the moment. James takes the criticism with a graceful willingness to learn, an unexpected thing to see.

This tour also goes to locations notable to the holocaust not often seen in film, in particular the unusually well preserved concentration camp Majdanek, in Lublin, Poland. David and Benji take this particular tour in part because this is the city where their grandmother was from, and they leave the tour a day early to visit the house where she grew up. There, they have an interaction with a neighbor that is characteristically awkward, but which these characters manage to turn into their own brand of sentimentality.

That is perhaps why A Real Pain really spoke to me. The characters in it struggle to make it work, but with persistence they make it work. The story is very well constructed, and I can only imagine this film succeeds in much the same way, with loving layers of polish over time.

A relationship that’s more functional than it seems.

Overall: A-

THE OUTRUN

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-

How The Outrun hits may depend largely on your relationship to alcoholism: if you are or have been close to an alcoholic, or perhaps if you are one yourself. I don’t have a lot of direct exposure to the worst effects of the disease of this particular addiction, and still there are lines that feel a bit obvious when taken out of context, but are deeply heartbreaking when uttered in this film. It will be some time before I forget Rona (Saoirse Ronan) saying, “I can’t be happy sober.”

Rona is a woman in her late twenties, to whom we are introduced as a pretty sloppy drunk, downing the leftover booze in other people’s glasses at closing time in a London pub. After she’s thrown out onto the sidewalk, a man in a car pulls up and offers her a ride. We know this is ominous, but don’t know exactly how until we return to flashback later.

This is a big part of what makes The Outrun work, how it stands as an exceptional film even among countless others about alcoholism. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, to seemingly random points in Rona’s life—a lot of them flashbacks during her extended stay in rehab. That opening scene notwithstanding, it is well into the runtime of the film before we get a truly clear picture of the depths Rona’s life sinks to. It’s the kind of thing that suggests “rock bottom” has its own set of tiered levels.

Rona is from the Orkney Islands, a deeply remote archipelago off the northern tip of Scotland. Her long-divorced parents still live there: Andrew (Stephen Dillane), whose long history of mental illness still has him vacillating between manic and depressive episodes; and Annie (Saskia Reeves), who has found solace in religion. Rona helps Andrew on his sheep farm, but still faces temptations, which she runs from by moving to ever-more remote islands in the region. She seems to be trying, in vain, to find a place to settle where there is no alcohol near her. She finds a job on a further-out island, and when she visits the local grocer, the wall behind the checkout counter is fully stocked with wine and liquor.

This environment provides a uniquely beautiful backdrop to the story: rocky shores and cliffs, hilly fields of green grass, islands seen through fog and rain and wind. It also has a personal connection for Rona, as this is her home, and does not offer the same smorgasbord of temptations that London did. Or so it seems at first, anyway. We also witness the rise and fall of her relationship with boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), in snippets, entirely in flashbacks.

Eventually Rona meets an older man who recognizes in her a fellow sober person. He’s got over twelve years. She asks him, “Does it ever get easier?” He replies: “Yes. But it doesn’t ever get easy. It just gets less hard.” It may seem on the surface like small comfort, but it’s something for her to hold onto. This is the essence of The Outrun, really.

This is the kind of movie where it’s impossible to predict whether Rona, a deeply messy young woman we can’t help but root for thanks to Saoirse Ronan’s stupendous performance, will find happiness, or indeed even stay sober. Director and co-writer Nora Fingscheidt brings us to a conclusion that is a bit more ambiguous than it seems, until you think about it. Hope itself is not a promise, but it’s a great note to end on.

The more I think about The Outrun, the more impressed I am with it. Fingscheidt has created a nonlinear narrative that is easy to surrender to. Only once or twice did I find it hard to decipher where in time it was, but it also occurred to me that someone like Rona can easily get lost in time. I quickly cared deeply for her, to such an extent that when she was tempted by a forgotten wine glass in her dad’s home, it was like watching a horror movie: Don’t do it! But if The Outrun demonstrates anything, it is that sobriety is a process, more often than not with fits and starts. Rona learns in rehab that only ten percent of them make it through.

The Outrun also features some narrative flourishes that elevate its storytelling, not least of which is occasional voiceover narration by Rona, telling us about the myths and folklore of the islands, from how the land is formed to how the local seals (of which we see many) fit into the culture. There is also the subplot of a job Rona takes in which she recruits local farmers to participate in research on an endangered local bird. She spends a lot of time hoping to hear its specific bird call, which leaves us hoping to hear it eventually as well. There’s a connection to be made there, among many in this elegantly intricate story.

An iconic performer of human imperfection.

Overall: A-

MY OLD ASS

Directing: A
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A

There’s something to be said for savoring the great moments in your life as they happen. Big moments, small moments: their apparent size can be misleading, and they can diminish or expand in retrospect. It’s the savoring that counts.

On a couple of trips I’ve taken over the past few years, I’ve thankfully had the wherewithal to look around and think—sometimes even say out loud: “I’m having a great time.” Too often, the best times are only appreciated in retrospect.

This was what I thought about watching My Old Ass, which uniquely captures this idea. It certainly does it in an unorthodox way: on her 18th birthday, Elliott (a superb Maisy Stella) takes a boat to a lake island with a couple of friends to trip on mushrooms. The three of them have individual, distinct trips, but what happens with Elliott, is she somehow conjures her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza, always welcome but without enough screen time overall to be what truly makes this movie special). For a good while after this, Elliott things this was just a one-time hallucination, and so do we. But then Elliott discovers her older self—her “old ass,” if you will—has put her phone number from 21 years into the future into young Elliott’s phone.

Elliott calls the number, and is shocked to discover it works. Just as she did on the island, Elliott is able to have conversations with her older self—a self who, incidentally, is just as amazed from her own vantage point. Writer-director Megan Park deploys a clever conceit here, skirting any need for sci-fi explanations by having both versions of Elliott say to each other: “I can’t believe this is working!”

When they are done so well, I love movies like this, which have a deeply fantastical premise that is rendered immaterial to the larger ideas it’s trying to convey. And, to be fair, a lot of the elder Elliott’s advice is pretty obvious: spend more time with your family, your parents, your two brothers. Don’t be so blasé about moving away from the second-generation cranberry farm in favor of the city (this being a Canadian film, here “the city” means Toronto). But, the obviousness is the point: the things that don’t appear to matter actually matter much more than you realize.

Then, Older Elliott tells Younger Elliott: “Stay away from any boy named Chad.” Naturally, we soon meet Chad (Percy Hynes White, also excellent), and just as Elliott spends a lot of time doing so, we wonder what horrible thing comes with his presence in the future. The more time we spend with Chad, the more wonderful he seems, both to us and to the younger Elliott. It doesn’t take long to realize the precise type of heartbreak the older Elliott is trying to warn against, and how even “dumb youth” can come with its own kind of wisdom.

Predictable or not, here’s the thing: My Old Ass really got its hooks into me. I surrendered to it completely and unapologetically, because of Megan Park’s finesse as a filmmaker, and because of the irresistible performances of its cast. By the end, I was wishing someone had forewarned me that I should have tissues handy. The marketing of this film—and certainly its title—belie the emotional depth it actually has.

I should also mention a peculiar element of Elliott’s character: she identifies as a lesbian, but she falls in love with a boy. (There’s even the memorable line, “I’ve never had dick sex.” It just made me want to use the phrase “dick sex” more often.) But, amazingly, in My Old Ass, there is nothing homophobic or even heteronormative about it. If anything, it’s an honest depiction of the fluidity of sexuality that queer people have been talking about for decades. The fact that Chad is just a nice young man you can easily see Elliott falling in love with is actually kind of refreshing.

The older Elliott does offer a few glimpses into the future, just from her dialogue—both illuminating and amusing. She makes an offhand reference to a girlfriend. She also tells the younger Elliott to savor salmon while it still exists, and scoffs when younger Elliott asks if they’re married and have three kids: “No one’s allowed to have three kids anymore.” This is all just the welcome sprinkling of comic elements, enhanced by Aubrey Plaza’s delivery. All of it comes back to savoring the good things you have before they’re gone.

Park makes the smart choice, though, not to suggest that the elder Elliott lives in a horrible world, or that her life is terrible. My Old Ass is much more concerned with themes that transcend such things: the kinds of longing and regret any of us might feel when looking back on our youth, and what we might say to our younger selves if we could. This is a story of that scenario actually playing out, and from the point of view of that younger self. The younger Elliott actually takes the advice to heart, and in different ways, both the younger and older Elliott learn how they have been wrong minded.

My Old Ass is far less the cute romp it appears to be, and much more of a deeply affecting meditation on aging, regret, and living openly in the face of life’s risks. I stand firmly on the side of its point of view, which is to mindfully savor the great times as they unfold, be they moments or whole periods of life. I savored the very experience of this movie.

Wistfulness never felt so good.

Overall: A-

REBEL RIDGE

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Rebel Ridge is not like other thrillers, and not just because it just gets better as it goes on. This is the kind of movie I wish I could have seen in a theater, except the fact that it was released on Netflix this week instead is precisely why we are able to experience a purity of writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s vision. Such is the contradictory state of the modern film industry, where certain compromises must be made in order to produce the highest quality product—at least this way a lot more people are apt to see this, a film that absolutely deserves your attention. I went into this expectng to enjoy it, and still it significantly exceeded my expectations.

What’s so great about it, I imagine you wondering. Where do I start? With the premise: a Black man, Terry Richmond (a stupendously controlled Aaron Pierre) is railroaded by local small-town Southern law enforcement when they knock him over on his bike, find a large amount of money on him, decide to declare it suspected drug money, and seize it. The rest of the film is an extended riff on the revenge thriller genre, and although it takes its time, the way Saulnier innovates the narrative really is a thrill to watch. We’ll come back to that.

Because we have to come back to how it starts: with a real thing, an actually-legal practice called civil asset forfeiture. As stated by Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), a helpful clerk Terry encounters, “Your property has no civil rights.” Law enforcement can take whatever is yours, keep it for as long as they want, and in many cases even sell it. This is a longstanding practice, often abused by local police departments to make up for budget shortfalls. Anyone watching Rebel Ridge may watch this play out in its opening scene and feel incredulous that it feels too unrealistic—but this is one of those things where truth is wilder than fiction. This shit actually happens, and you rightly feel infuriated on Terry’s behalf.

There are countless stories and countless ways in which civil asset forfeiture fucks people over. In Terry’s case, the reason he has all this cash is because he sold a car and is taking it in to post bail for his cousin, who has been detained for possession. Terry is facing a sort of countdown because there is a plan to transfer his cousin to a prison where he faces a lethal threat from a gang he testified against.

All of this is just setup. The thrill of the story is in seeing Terry get thwarted at enough turns to make him desperate, and force him to take drastic action. But here’s where the narrative innovation comes in: this is not Rambo. Spoiler alert, Terry never kills anyone in this movie. I can only think of one death at all, and it’s not part of any of the scenes of hand-to-hand combat. Among the many things that make Rebel Ridge stand out is that, while we do get some pretty significant injuries in an excellent climactic battle scene, all of the combat in it is nonlethal. And still it’s just as thrilling as the best-choreographed gun battles in other movies—in many cases more so. Just watching him disarm his opponents, over and over again, is incredibly cool.

It should be noted, however, that Rebel Ridge is still much more suspense thriller than it is action movie. There’s a lot of plot, which Saulnier simmers expertly. It may test some viewers’ patience, but I would argue such people are missing the point, not understanding what this movie is and should be. There’s a difference between “lackluster” and “restrained.” In another writer’s or another director’s hands, this could quickly go over the top. We’ve been served more than enough decades’ worth of those movies already.

Saulnier gives the story the time and space to breathe, allowing us to understand Terry’s motivations—and, as it happens, those of the local police upending his life (and the lives of countless others) for their own gain. They are headed by Police Chief Sandy Burnne, played by Don Johnson in a bit of perfectly inspired casting. Although Terry faces off with many different cops, several of whom get their own showcase of narrative thread—particularly Zsane Jhe as an officer caught in the cross-combat at the police station—ultimately this is a battle of wills between Terry and Chief Burnne.

Summer proves to be a much more significant part of the story as it unfolds, with many different turns you won’t ever see coming—she’s the very reason Terry returns to the town he’s been told to stay away from, at the halfway point. Rebel Ridge could be thought of as two one-hour episodes, but still they fit together exceptionally well. I do have some slightly mixed feelings about how Summer is handled as a character, particularly when it comes to agency. But, she remains a compellingly competent character drawn with dimension.

In any case, I was rapt and on the edge of my seat from start to finish watching Rebel Ridge. A significant amount of that could be attributed to the affectingly ambient score by brother-musicians Brooke and Will Blair. There simply isn’t any major misstep anywhere in the production of this movie, with exceptional direction, writing and performances. Much as it pains me to admit it, sometimes one of the best movies of the year is actually a streaming release. I would still argue Rebel Ridge would play better in a movie theater, but we’ll take great cinema wherever we can get it, from the screening room to the living room.

There are many more tensions at play than what’s first noticed in any given frame.

Overall: A-

DÌDI

Directing: A-
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Here’s a compelling question for me to ask myself: if Dìdi were a movie with the exact same script, but the characters were all White, would I be as impressed by the film? The boy at the center of the story would have to have equivalent but slightly different means of diminishing himself in an attempt at impressing potential friends, but that would not be so big a challenge. And given how deeply impressed I was by the 2018 film Eighth Grade—my #1 movie that year—I am incline to say the answer to that question is yes, even though there is no way to say for certain. It must be said, however, that even though Dìdi is very much in the same vein as Eighth Grade (just more of a “boy version”) and less about the Asian-American experience than a very American reflection of it, the fact that it is about an Asian-American family is a big part of what sets this movie apart and makes it memorable.

It certainly doesn’t hurt that every single character is exceptionally well cast. One might wonder if the excellent star Izaac Wang, who plays the teenage title character, is related to writer-director Sean Wang, except that is merely a coincidence of a common last name (Izaac was born to a Chinese father and Laotian mother; Sean is of Taiwanese descent). Other cast members include Shirley Chen as Vivian, Dìdi’s older and antagonistic sister who is preparing to leave for college; Joan Chen as their mother, Chungsing; and a diverse array of friends Dìdi either struggles to make or struggles to keep.

A special mention must be made about these friends, as Dìdi is fundamentally about this, in a way just about anyone can relate to, either as someone in their mid-teens or someone who vividly remembers being that age: the anxieties, the insecurities, the random ways of acting out without necessarily even knowing why. A big part of this film’s greatness is the specificity of context to convey a pretty universal experience. But when it comes to the “bro-y” types of boys Dìdi hangs out with, this film absolutely nails the depictions: from his initial friends who are mostly of Asian or Middle Eastern heritage (played principally by Raul Dial and Aaron Change) to a later trio of slightly older skateboarders, notably non-Asian, he is eager to impress (Chiron Denk, Sunil Maurillo, and Montay Boseman). They all provide a lot of comic relief in their often teen-boy dopey antics, which also never feel any less than utterly real. This extends to many other kids in bit parts, a favorite moment of which is when a girl says after a friend has been introduced, “She’s a dumb bitch.” (This becomes a cleverly subtle callback later.)

Such is the case with every part of Dìdi, including the mother’s dreams of making her painting hobby into something more, all while struggling to mother her two children in the absence of their father, who we never see in the film as he is in Taiwan for work. The other family member we see in the house provides plenty of her own levity, Zhang Li Hua as “Nai Nai” (they pronounce it “nay-nay”), Chungsing’s mother-in-law and thus the household’s live-in Grandmother.

The trailer to and other marketing materials for Dìdi make it look a lot more chaotic than the surprisingly nuanced depiction of Dìdi’s family and social life it is, albeit with several chaotic flourishes. Dìdi, whose given name is Chris but whose initial friend group has nicknamed him “Wang-Wang” because his last name is Wang, is an early-years YouTuber (a couple of establishing shots indicate that the year is 2008), learning how to make cool videos, and this is what inspires him to offer his “filmer” services to the skater teens. A natural question, then, is whether this film is autobiographical, and reportedly Sean Wang drew from his life as inspiration, but did not directly base this story on it.

There is also a lot of visual depictions of ‘08-era social media websites, most notably both MySpace and Facebook (it’s easy to forget they actually co-existed for a short period), the camera following where we are meant to understand where his eyes are going—an unusually skilled manner of cinematography with social media representation in film. We also see a lot of AOL Instant Messenger chat exchanges, including with a girl on whom Dìdi is crushing hard, Madi (Mahaela Park). A couple of times, we see Dìdi type out a message that is honest and vulnerable—in once instance I found myself thinking: Send it, send it!—only to let insecurity get the better of him and delete it.

In any event, I left Dìdi feeling deeply impressed with it, and the more I think about it, the better the movie becomes in my memory. The stellar performances across the entire cast are both a reflection of actors with a startling awareness of the social nuances of other people their age, and of an assured director who has offered an astonishingly accomplished narrative feature film debut (he has done a couple of documentary features). Dìdi is a coming-of-age story of the very best kind: utterly specific yet utterly relatable.

Izaac Wang learns to play his instrument in real time.

Overall: A-

THELMA

Directing: A-
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

The marketing for Thelma would have you believe that it’s “The Beekeeper with senior citizens.” Both movies are about the seeking of retribution for criminals scamming an old lady out of her money. The key difference is that although Thelma features the old lady herself setting off to get her money back (as opposed to outright revenge, another critical clarification), it’s also firmly grounded in reality. Viewers might be surprised to find the degree to which Thelma leans into the challenges of getting really old.

It’s also genuinely funny, and incredibly sweet, something very much enhanced by the casting of real, genuinely old people rather than younger actors playing old. June Squibb, a revelation at age 83 when she was featured in the 2012 Alexander Payne film Nebraska, is now 94. That she can so successfully carry a film at this age is an inspiration, something that made me think of Rita Moreno, who is now 92. Those two should star in something together—they’re much closer in age than Moreno was to her costars in 80 or Brady.

There are multiple other elderly actors in Thelma, but the most notable of them is Richard Roundtree, who died last fall at the age of 81. There’s something bittersweet about these great roles that occasionally come along for older actors, that are about the perils of aging, and then they die shortly after production. Roundtree’s character, Ben, is an old friend of Thelma’s with whom she has not been in touch since he made the wise choice to move into assisted living—something Thelma is obstinately refusing to do because she can’t let go of her independence.

These are not new themes, of course, but in the hands of writer-director Josh Margolin, who reveals in the end credits the real Thelma who clearly inspired this film, we get a genuinely fresh take. Not a whole lot actually happens in Thelma because it takes so long for them to get accomplished: Thelma retrieves the address where she was tricked into sending $10,000 by someone impersonating her grandson on the phone, and makes it her mission to go there and get it back. She no longer drives, and so she attempts to steal the scooter owned by Ben. Ben attempts to thwart her, but cannot stop her, and so they ride on it together across town.

All the while, they successfully avoid the family looking for her: most notably her young adult grandson, Daniel. And I really must shout out 24-year-old actor Fred Hechinger, who gives an astonishingly authentic performance as a uniquely anxious young man who deeply loves his grandma. I have never seen him before, but would still say he was superbly cast in this part—as were Parker Posey and Clark Gregg as his hovering parents, giving a clue as to how Daniel grew up like this. Only Thelma treats Daniel like she takes it for granted that he’s going to be fine, and he’s too young to worry about whether or not he will be.

To be fair to Daniel’s parents, they clearly love him dearly, just as they do Thelma, who plays Posey’s mother. Thelma convinces Daniel to drive her to the assisted living facility where Ben lives, and when Thelma and Ben disappear, Daniel beats himself up for losing her. There’s a key scene where Daniel is angry with himself about this, calling himself a “stupid little bitch,” and Hechinger’s performance is so nuanced and vulnerable, it’s genuinely heartbreaking.

To be clear, Thelma moves in and out of such heavy tones, alternating with genuinely lighthearted, almost always incredibly sweet, and occasionally hilarious moments. Most of the time spent with Daniel and Thelma together, Daniel is just sweetly worrying that Thelma is safe. But then, of course, she and Ben speed off out of the assisted living home on Ben’s scooter, turning Thelma into a sort of road movie.

After a few requisite plot turns, they do make it to a point where they can confront the person who scammed her out of her money—and it’s another elderly man, played by Malcolm McDowell. He also has a young man cohort, and there is a moment during the confrontation where Thelma sort of opens the young man’s eyes in a way that’s far too easy and contrived. It was the one time in the entire film when something happened and I immediately thought: well, that was dumb. Few movies are perfect, I guess.

That said, few comedies are as beautifully shot as Thelma is, here by cinematographer David Bolen. In a way, Thelma is greater than the sum of its parts, as so few films with a premise like this would place such quality on elements of filmmaking that others could get away with phoning in. The script is far deeper and more layered than you might realize even until considering it in retrospect, it looks fantastic, and the performances are great. Thelma is a bittersweet experience that leans into the sweet part, in all the best ways.

You’ll want to keep your eye on these two.

Overall: A-