THE ASSESSMENT

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

There is so much to unpack, something so provocative at the core of The Assessment, it’s difficult not to recommend for the conversation potential alone. There’s also something in the execution, however; something in the details—well: I have notes.

In the world of this film, the focus is on a married couple, Mia and Aaryan (Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel), living in a near-future society preserved under a climate controlled dome (rendered only in subtle ripples briefly shown in the daylight sky, a clever effect). This society is a deeply oppressive one, with strict laws of population control. The inference here is that these are citizens giving up freedoms in exchange for living well—a theme well mined in cinema, but here in a hyperspecific context. Mia and Aaryan are visited by Virginia, an “Assessor” (Alicia Vikander), who stays with them for seven days to determine whether they are fit to have a child.

This is very much the focus of The Assessment, the future world in which they live simply being the context. Virginia is an uncomfortable presence from the start, assessing “all aspects” of their relationship, including hovering outside their open bedroom door during oral sex. Mia and Aaryan are so desperate to have a child, the suck it up (so to speak) and perform their sex acts even with the knowledge of a stern observor.

By the next day, Virginia wakes up, sits at the breakfast table, and is immediately acting like a child. It becomes instantly clear that Virginia is testing Mia and Aaryan’s parenting skills by doing this—breaking her plastic spoon on the table, flinging food from her spoon onto the would-be parents. The behavior, in this context, occupies a nebulous space between rational and psychotic. And with only a couple of pointed exceptions, Virginia behaves like a small child for the rest of the week, testing how the would-be parents handle it.

I was pretty locked in with The Assessment until this turn, which happens fairly early on—day two of the Assessment, to be exact. I pretty quickly lost my own patience with Virginia and her antics, especially as they became increasingly bizarre, reckless, and dangerous—even to herself, that being very much the point notwithstanding. Mia and Aaryan are so nervous about behaving correctly in the presence of the Assessor, this being the one chance “The State” will give then for this, that they rarely question the lapses in logic, and do even less as the week wears on.

On the one hand, there could be much discussion among viewers of how fit Mia and Aaryan are as parents regardless: psychotic or not, Virginia gives them multiple chances to make mistakes but then learn from them. On the other hand, the only way to truly test their fitness would be to put an actual child in their care. Virginia herself is a grown woman, merely acting like a child, but it’s not possible to just shut out the fact that she knows better than a child. There are other, far more practical considerations, like the fact that an actual child of which Virginia is ostensibly embodying would weigh far less than her. Aaryan has a bad back, and after an outing to the beach near their house, Virginia insists he give her a piggyback ride, literally until he has to put her down because his back can’t take it anymore. In all likelihood, he’d have managed to carry an actual child the entire way. These sorts of details, which to me were glaringly obvious, are never acknowledged by a single character in the film, which is frustrating.

The Assessment is written by a team of three writers, and if they had really taken the time needed, they would have understood that a premise this specific yet complex needs to account for all potential plot holes. On this particular front, they were apparently not up to the task.

There is still much to make The Assessment worth watching, though. In the film’s best sequence, Mia and Aaryan are cornered into hosting a dinner party. The guests include a man Mia once had an affair with and his current girlfriend; Aaryan’s not-very-maternal mother; a lesbian couple composed of a work friend of Aaryan’s, her wife, and their own adoelscent child; and, mostly delightfully, an older woman named Evie, played by the perennially underrated Minnie Driver. Driver, an undeniably beautiful woman, plays a character who reveals herself to be 153 years old—we learn of a medication all these citizens can take to stop the effects of aging. This detail is part of the giant exposition dump that this dinner party doubles as, but specifically a long monologue by Evie, who shares some of the history of “old world” (later revealed to be any place outside this climate dome) and memory of how people used to tear each other apart “over scraps.”

Evie has no faith whatsoever in the sustainability of this new society, and openly regards it with contempt, even as she sits from an obvious position of privilege borne directly from it. Minnie Driver’s performance is incredible in this sequence, easily the best thing in the movie, both because of her innate talents as an entertainer—and her performance is very entertaining, offering most of what little humor this film contains—and because of how deftly she executes such exposition while we barely recognize that as her character’s sole purpose.

As for Mia and Aaryan, Elizabeth Olsen and Hamish Patel are also great, and provide nuanced explorations of the many ways the Assessment quite deliberately tests the limits of their relationship. Mia tends to many beloved species of plants in a greenhouse; Aaryan is a designer of AI “virtual pets” so advanced that he’s working on textured surfaces that can actually be felt to the touch. The latter stuff brings up a whole lot about the potentials and dangers of AI that The Assessment never fully explores—it is far more interested in the concept of regulated procreation in a bleak future—but also provides some pretty indelible imagery. Only this movie could depict something shocking with a human baby, I won’t spoil exactly what, and have it still be okay—because even the characters understand it to be a digital construction.

Aside from Minnie Driver, Alicia Vikander is ultimately the MVP of The Assessment, both in spite of and because of how contemptible Virginia is as a character. I spent most of the movie hoping Mia and Aaryan would be pushed to their breaking point, and they straight up murder her. On the other hand, a twist comes near the end that, while fundamentally disappointing on a narrative level, also manages to cultivate some empathy for Virginia. Empathizing with her did not make her less intolerable to me overall, however.

The Assessment is both imperfect and deliciously provocative, the kind of movie you love to talk about. It has some potential that it doesn’t quite realize, but there’s still something deeply satisfying about having seen it.

Hey maybe they do deserve to be judged.

Overall: B

Advance: THE PENGUIN LESSONS

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

The Penguin Lessons is one of those movies “inspired by true events,” in this case an adaptation of Tom Mitchell’s 2016 memoir of the same name, recounting his time in 1975 Argentina, when he rescued a penguin from an oil spill and then the penguin refused to leave his side. And although that is indeed what happened, “inspired by” remains the key phrase in the film adaptation, which engages with many typical movie tropes.

The biggest difference, though, is a curious one: Tom Mitchell was 23 years old in 1975, but here Steve Coogan plays him at the age of 59, complete with a tragic backstory that no 23-year-old is likely to have. The careless nature of rescuing a penguin on a holiday in Uruguay, and then smuggling it back to the Argentinian boarding school where he works, is much more befitting of a young man in his twenties. But, to be fair, Coogan kind of makes it work.

He also make The Penguin Lessons a film more appealing to older audiences, which I can’t help but suspect was deliberate. I attended an advanced screening billed as part of an AARP program called “Movies for Groups.” My husband and I drove out to the suburbs to watch it, and the theater was nearly filled to capacity with senior citizens. My husband is 51 (hence the target demographic of AARP, being over 50); I am 48, and I was almost certainly the youngest person there. One wonders: would an advanced screening of a sweet but slight movie about a young man and his penguin friend garner such a crowd size? The event was contextualized as part of fighting ageism, and I am all for making more movies for older audiences. Whether they can make money in the cinema landscape of the 2020s is another question. We already know they can’t.

The Penguin Lessons actually has a pretty wide range of ages amongst its characters. The Swedish fellow teacher who thrusts a somewhat unwanted friendship upon Tom is played by 39-year-old Björn Gustafsson. The headmaster of the school is played by 77-year-old Jonathan Pryce. The school’s resident housekeeper (Vivian El Jaber) whose outspoken young adult granddaughter (Alfonsina Carrocio) gets taken by the oppressive Argentinian military of the era. And Tom teaches English to a class full of teenage boys, a few of whom are minor characters in this story. That classroom is where The Penguin Lessons starts to feel a little like Dead Poets Society if the teacher happened to have a literal penguin sidekick—Tom gets the students to improve academically by bringing the penguin, given the name Juan Salvador, to class.

As directed by Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty), this story unfolds with all the expected charms of a movie that revolves around an adorable animal. Usually it’s a dog or a cat, so at least a penguin is something different—and something pulled from a real story. There is little doubt of the typical embellishments of film adaptations, though, particularly the young woman who reminds Tom of his lost daughter. On the plus side, there is no romantic interest there at all, and The Penguin Lessons really veers from cinematic obligations by having no romance at all. Unless you count the way everyone who encounters him falls for Juan Salvador. Multiple supporting characters become part of a running joke of finding themselves on Tom’s balcony, confiding in the penguin like he’s the attentive listener friend they always needed.

The adapted script, as written by Jeff Pope (Philomena—which also starred Steve Coogan, incidentally), is a little bit clunky, especially in the early scenes, with dialogue somehow both stilted and sedate. The live penguin used to play Juan Salvador injects life into the proceedings, though, and turns The Penguin Lessons into a cute comedy. The subtle comedy works better than when things turn more dramatic, and the penguin is used as a strained metaphor for resisting fascist governments. The movie itself even acknowledges this: when Tom refers to “putting the penguin in the pool” as a metaphor, Pryce’s character actually says, “not a very good one.”

Still, I cannot deny that The Penguin Lessons ultimately got to me. It took a while, but eventually I was locked in, both charmed by that flightless bird and shedding tears of sorrow for it when the inevitable occurs by the end of the film. This is a movie with a job to do—manipulate our emotions—and it does it well. Granted, I spent a lot of time also thinking about how much bird shit there must have been for someone to clean up, something this movie only references a couple of times as offhand gags. It spends a bit more time acknowledging the pungent fishy smell that follows Juan Salvador everywhere he goes.

I have mixed feelings about this sort of domestication of a wild animal at all. There’s the argument that Juan Salvador would not leave Tom no matter how much tried to shoo him away, so what could he do? He probably should have just left the penguin and let nature take its course—notwithstanding the character who literally counters, “Oil spills aren’t natural!” A student later notes that if a penguin loses its one chosen partner, they separate and eventually die. We can feel for Tom and his inability to push Juan Salvador away, except that a subplot involves Tom struggling to get the local zoo to take the penguin, only to change his mind. The quarantine area of the zoo, clearly designed to look like the 1970s zoo version of a medieval dungeon, puts him off the idea. This is an example of a film easily convincing its audience that the wild animal is better off living in as a boarding school teacher’s roommate than in a place that’s actually best for it.

But hey, look at me, just being a killjoy. The Penguin Lessons is pleasant enough. I’m happy to have seen it. I just, as always, have thoughts. This film is sweet and entertaining, but taking a penguin home with you is never a good idea! This concludes my overlong public service announcement.

That is one very unconventional TA.

Overall: B

BLACK BAG

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

Black Bag begins with an extended dinner party sequence, the kind of scene that usually happens much later in a movie. George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) have invited four colleagues over, because George has been warned that they are among five who could possibly be the source of a leak in the intelligence agency they all work for. As it happens, George has been informed that Kathryn also has both the motive and the capability.

This is the third Steven Soderbergh film in as many years to be written by David Koepp, and it’s the best one yet—Kimi (2022) had a production limited by covid restrictions, but still takes a sudden and very satisfying turn at the end; Presence, from earlier this year, had a fascinatingly novel premise limited by a story not fully fleshed out. No such limitations exist in Black Bag, which is all of 93 minutes long and still achieves what many spy series only aspire to, and in a fraction of the time.

And this brings me back to that dinner party. Through deft writing, skilled editing and solid performances all around, we learn a great deal about all six of the characters at that kitchen table in a very short amount of time. What could have been clunky exposition in someone else’s hands, Soderbergh and Koepp reveal key character details while also moving the story forward—all with just a group of people sitting around a dinner table. Granted, it does culminate in an act of violence which is, in context, both shocking and delightful. Soderbergh has a unique way of keeping us on our toes.

Black Bag’s suspense both starts and ends around that dinner table. In between, a lot of time is spent with all of these characters in the UK intelligence office where they all work, with only occasional scenes shot on location. The central mystery shifts and moves, but with an unusual grace, never a particular jolt of plot turn. George and Kathryn’s four colleagues are in two known romantic pairings as well, but over time we learn who’s been sleeping around with which of the others in the group. Ultimately, their actions serve as a test of George and Kathryn’s marriage—it’s telling that others in the group call them “psychos” because they put their devotion to each other above all else.

This is a story largely about trust, and the type of work that tests it. George and Kathryn aren’t the only couple who use the phrase “black bag” as code for something that is work-confidential, something they cannot talk about. Somehow, though, they are the only ones who manage to make it work—even as they get playful with it: “Would you lie to me?” George asks. “Only if I had to,” Kathryn replies.

Cate Blanchett is 55 years old, and she’s as luminous as ever—this time with long, luscious brown hair. Michael Fassbender is a bit younger, 47, and he’s had showier parts in other movies. But he and Blanchett have a crackling chemistry, the kind without which this film would instantly fall flat. It is unclear to us early on whether George has reason to suspect Kathryn, or if the source of the leak is among the other four characters. The evidence ebbs and flows, and so do our ideas of what’s actually going on between George and Kathryn.

Black Bag is intrigue at its finest, a feast of sleek production design as a backdrop for a mystery both complex and concise. Not a moment is wasted in this movie, which is so well done, it leaves you wondering why so many other similar movies dwell on their own plotting so pointlessly. There is an irony to this film in that, by not engaging in any pretense of self-importance, it achieves an unexpected excellence.

Blanchett and Fassbender teach us about trust in the face of suspicion.

Overall: A-

MY DEAD FRIEND ZOE

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

Spoiler alert! Zoe is dead. But, Natalie Morales plays her throughout My Dead Friend Zoe—never as a ghost, but only either as a memory in flashback, or as a figment of her best friend Merit’s imagination. Sonequa Martin-Green plays Merit as a woman with a very peculiar form of PTSD, who has been court-ordered to attend group therapy for veterans after an incident at work. It’s always clear that Merit feels guilt about Zoe’s death, but the specifics of Zoe’s death are not revealed until nearly the end of the film. It turns out to be a bit of a narrative zag that real-life veterans will likely find unsurprising, as it’s a pervasive problem among veterans.

My Dead Friend Zoe is a film that is both very much veterans-forward, and seems somewhat cautious with its themes and representations. Nearly the entire supporting cast is made up of actors who are also veterans, which is very cool; the end credits feature stills of the actors from the film and then photos of them in uniform. This includes Morgan Freeman, who served in the U.S. Air Force from 1955-1959, ages 18-22. Freeman, who has been a professional actor for over sixty years and remains at the top of his game at age 87, plays Merit’s group therapy facilitator. The other members of the group are all also actor-veterans hired for the parts.

This is a film that pointedly sidesteps politics, instead focusing on what traumatic experiences while serving does to people in the military. Indeed, it is noted to have been “inspired” by the stories of two veteran friends known to director and co-writer Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, himself an Iraq War veteran. The two different friends are shown to have been men, but Hausmann-Stokes makes the compelling choice of making the two friends in this film young women—one a Latina woman (Morales) and one a multiracial Black woman (Martin-Green). Indeed, Ed Harris, a veteran of acting if not of the Armed Forces himself, plays Merit’s grandfather Dale, who is the most significant supporting character in this story.

There is a lot of socioeconomic issues at play between Zoe, who characterizes herself as a person with no familial support to go back to after serving; and Merit, who points herself out as “a Black woman in America” just before Zoe points out that she’s one with a lake house. “I don’t have a lake house,” Merit counters. “My grandpa does.” Hausmann-Stokes seems to be playing a bit with common notions of power and privilege, and subtle ways. Whatever the reason for it, it’s unusual to see a multiracial family like this depicted on film, although aside from the one aforementioned reference, there is nothing discussed regarding the differences of cultural experience between Merit, a young Black woman, and her grandfather, an old White man—who does make a point of contrasting veterans of more recent conflicts being welcomed home after they served in Iraq or Afghanistan with how terribly veterans of the Vietnam War were treated when they came home.

There could be some ambivalence with seeing such a depiction of an old White man inferring that a young Black woman should count her blessings, and My Best Friend Zoe makes no effort to even illustrate how their experiences might be different outside the specific context of being veterans. It’s possible Merit’s grandfather was cast as a White man because so few people of color could have risen to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Vietnam War—though, not impossible: only 5% of Army Officers in Vietnam were Black, but they did exist—the highest-ranking, Roscoe Robinson Jr., having been the first African American to become a four-star general. How many of them might still be around today is perhaps a more challenging question, especially considering the number of them to reach the rank of Lieutenant Colonel or higher amounted to merely a handful.

None of these considerations detract at all from Harris’s performance, which is great as Dale, Merit’s grandfather who is diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s. If anything, it’s kind of a bummer to see Harris, like so many older actors, getting relegated to roles like a grandpa with dementia. On the up side, Dale is just as multi-dimensional a character as Merit, a character written well enough to make playing the part worth the effort.

Zoe, as a character, is easily the most complex, and is also fleshed out impressively well, although I would have liked more detail in her backstory. In My Dead Friend Zoe, Zoe exists half the time as her actual self, and the other half as a projection in Merit’s mind. Hausmann-Stoles skillfully illustrates how, in the latter case, Zoe is actually an extension of Merit, and her guilt, however unfounded it might be. Merit blames herself, even though what actually happened to Zoe is not quite what the story leads us to believe for most of the time it’s being told. She’ll say things that Merit fears are how Zoe would feel, but we get to know Zoe well enough to know her better than that.

Merit is a woman dealing with far more than she should have to: the loss of her best friend; the resulting distraction at her job that ultimately got her court-ordered to therapy; the just-discovered dementia in her beloved grandfather. The one positive, which is a welcome subplot, is a barely-budding romance with Alex, the man taking over the assisted living facility previously run by his parents. Alex is played with warmth and compassion—and a dash of snark—by Utkarsh Ambudkar.

There is a bit more I would have liked out of My Dead Friend Zoe, but it has a unique twist on a well-worn premise, and winning performances all around. Its pointed message of supporting the needs of veterans who have given so much to this country, especially in ways the rest of us can barely imagine, is well taken. This film puts its money where its mouth is in ways few others do, offering resources for how to offer that support beyond just seeing the movie, which is still worth the time on its own merits.

A haunting of a different sort, courtesy of Zoe and Merit.

Overall: B+

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

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

An odd and unusual thing occurred when I went to SIFF Film Forum to see Universal Language tonight. When I arrived, about 15 minutes before showtime, there was a surprisingly large group of people already waiting—I would guess at least 30—outside the theater, which was not yet open. I, like probably many others, assumed maybe they did not open until shortly before the one showtime they had tonight, and waited patiently, even though we could see two or three people skulking around the dimly lit lobby through the glass walls. The minutes passed, and the crowd grew larger. Who knew this many people were eager to see this obscure Canadian-Iranian film, six days into its run at SIFF’s smallest theater?

Shortly after 7:00, the listed showtime, a young woman finally opened the door to announce they were still waiting for someone to arrive who could run the projector. She thanked us for our patience, said they hoped to let us in within five or ten minutes, and declared she also had a ticket and was excited to see this movie. Within minutes after that, finally, we were all let inside, and filtered into the theater as quickly as possible. There were no concessions for sale, but this crowd didn’t seem to care. The house was nearly sold out (in a theater capacity of 90), and within moments of the film starting, the audience was eating up this film—generously laughing at the most subtle of humor, a crowd typical of SIFF Cinema, eager to bridge gaps across cultures through cinema. Just like the characters in this movie.

What is my take, then? Honestly, I’m relatively ambivalent—I found Universal Language’s self-consciously absurdist charms to be effective, but often had no idea what the hell was really going on. I still can’t decide if that even matters. I’m not as eager as the rest of that crowd clearly was wholeheartedly to embrace this film regardless of how much sense it made, and yet, I found it a fun experience, in a rather bemusing way. I was impressed by how successfully it conveyed an often surrealist sensibility, without the use of camera tricks or special effects. This movie was clearly made on a shoestring budget, and still it looks great, thanks in large part to cinematographer Isabelle Stachtchenko.

Much of Universal Language went over my head, but I got this much: it straddles the line between absurdism and realism, and its odd sensibility and tone belie great narrative depths. There is a peculiar fusion of both culture and language, between Tehran, Iran and Winnipeg, Manitoba (in spite of a running joke with multiple characters mistaking it for a city in Alberta). Director and co-writer Matthew Rankin is himself a native Winnipegger, who plays a character in the film named Matthew, a government employee in Montreal who sheds his identity and hops on a bus to Winnipeg. On this bus he is joined by the “French immersion class” teacher (Mani Soleymanlou) who is never seen again after the bus breaks down outside Winnipeg, one of the narrative threads that kind of threw me for a loop—especially given that the film opens on that class.

But, there are two other interwoven storylines, and one of them involves a couple of girls from that class, who discover money frozen in ice and then go on a quest through the city to find the tools to chip it out of there. In this location, I was under the impression that we were all still in Montreal, but their quest later has them in Winnipeg, as though the two cities are easily traversed back and forth—even though it is specifically noted on the aforementioned bus that they have to ride all the way through Ontario between the two. But, maybe I missed something. I may have missed several things.

Finally, we meet Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), employee of the “Winnipeg Earmuff Authority” who freelances as a tour guide through amusingly absurd and innocuous “points of interest” in Winnipeg. This includes a briefcase abandoned on a park bench in 1978, and a stop at the memorial site for 19th-century Manitoban resistance fighter Louis Riel, where the tour group is asked to observe “thirty minutes of silence” in his honor. Eventually we learn that Matthew has returned to Winnipeg to reconnect with his ailing mother with whom he long ago lost touch, and who in her failing memory of old age has long been mistaking Massoud for her son, after a few years of him shoveling show for her. Ultimately this provides opportunity for connection through shared elements of identity, although for me this metaphor lacked clarity.

Still, between Matthew, Massoud, the girls, and even a couple of other students from the French immersion class, in the final act these seemingly disparate storylines connect in startlingly satisfying ways, puzzle pieces that suddenly fit together almost as if by accident. All the while, we are taken through a fictional version of Winnipeg where it has such a large population of Iranian immigrants that every sign is written in Persian, right down to those on a version of Tim Horton’s that is a teahouse that also sells doughnuts. Indeed, the vast majority of the dialogue in Universal Language is Persian, with merely a sprinkling of lines in French.

This blend of East and West is very much borne of the collaborators on this film, with Matthew Rankin co-writing the script with Iranian-Canadian friends Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati (Nemati being, again, who plays Massoud, and Firouzabadi appears in a cameo as the bus driver, who argues with an old lady passenger who complains about having to sit next to a live turkey—who, the driver points out, had its own paid ticket).

Universal Language has a clear love of Persian culture, at the same time it has some fun with the notion of Winnipeg as a dull city with nothing worth attracting tourists (something I am certain is not true). It has a “Grey District” and a “Beige District.” Ironically, it is shot beautifully, with stark, almost Brutalist simplicity, often framing characters against a backdrop of grey concrete and white snow. I don’t know what it is about Winnipeg that apparently inspires wildly absurdist films; I couldn’t help but also think of the 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World, set in a Depression-era Winnipeg in which Isabella Rossellini gets two glass prosthetic legs filled with beer. The director of that film, Guy Maddin, also a native of Winnipeg, later directed the very strange 2007 film, a sort of local history through a dreamlike lens, My Winnipeg. Rankin seems very much to be following in Maddin’s footsteps, just with a much more multicultural bent.

If there is anything Universal Language decidedly is not, it’s American—it’s very Persian and very Canadian, with no American sensibility whatsoever. These days, that comes as a relief: a celebration of diversity through quietly fantastical cultural fusion. I didn’t always know what to make of Universal Language, but I enjoyed the journey through its tightly structured if untethered narrative.

Matthew Rankin and Pirouz Nemati embrace their differences.

Overall: B

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-

NICKEL BOYS

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

America—or, I guess I should say, White America—has a stunning capacity for sticking our heads in the sand, for ignoring our own perpetrated horrors in our history. We aren’t told about things like what happened at the Florida School for Boys, the school that inspired “Nickel Academy” in RaMell Ross’s unforgettable new film Nickel Boys. The school in the film is thinly veiled in fictionalization, but the horrors that occurred there are not. The staff at the Florida School for Boys in Okeechobee, Florida, opened in 1955 and finally forced to close in 2011, really did abuse, torture, and in many cases even murder the Black students at that school, with dozens of unmarked graves discovered and excavated only into the 2010s.

Nickel Boys exists to force us to confront these horrors, and there should be no mistake: this is a difficult watch, of Schindler’s List proportions. I still have a deep appreciation for having seen it, even though it left me feeling even more dispirited about America than I already was. Much like two different Presidential elections in the past decade, it’s just another layer peeled off revealing who we really are as a nation. Any argument that “it was a different time” holds no water here—this is not a story set in colonial times, or during the Civil War. People are still living today with vivid memories of this stuff, and any idea that the permissive social structures that allowed this to happen no longer exist is preposterous.

The story presented here uses the Civil Rights Movement of the early sixties as a backdrop, largely as a way to underscore how the two teenagers whose points of view we see are beaten down in even worse ways than they could have imagined: inspiration and hope for change was in the air, only to be gleefully and cruelly crushed by local authorities. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is an incredibly bright and promising student, on his way to a new school recommended by his high school teacher when the car he got into hitchhiking is pulled over. The car is apparently stolen, and in spite of Elwood’s clear innocence in the matter, he is arrested and sent to Nickel Academy, where he is expected to stay until he graduates. He doesn’t even learn until much later that when his guardian grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) first tried to come and visit him, the staff lied and said he was sick and could not take any visitors.

Early on at the school, Elwood makes a friend, Turner (Brandon Wilson), and Nickel Boys switches back and forth between their perspectives. And I do mean this literally, as in, with the cinematography, used as first-person perspective, the camera showing us exactly what is seen through the eyes of each character. The entire film is shot this way, and is what makes it truly stand apart on an artistic level—it really is a film experience unlike any other, and a stylistic choice, it turns out, I have very mixed feelings about.

Until Elwood meets Turner, the camera perspective is always that of Elwood’s. In the scene where they meet, at the school cafeteria, the perspective suddenly shifts from Elwood to Turner, and we see the entire exchange repeat from his perspective. Showing the same scene from both perspectives only happens a couple of times in the film, which otherwise just keeps moving the story forward each time the perspective shifts. This is how we finally start seeing both of the boys actually in front of the camera. A few times, we see very cleverly shot scenes where we see reflections in windows or mirrors, of course with no view of the camera (I found myself wondering if that was somehow done practically with camera angles or if some kind of special effect was used; either way it’s impressive). In one scene we see the two of them looking up at themselves together in mirrors mounted on a ceiling above them. Elwood spends an awkwardly long time looking straight up, even once they start walking along.

Nickel Boys is one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, and based on what I knew about it beforehand, I went in both expecting and wanting to really love it. What I did not expect was the extent to which its story gets obscured by its artistic abstractions, which permeate every scene, from beginning to end. The story this film is telling is essential, but I found its manner of telling to be frequently disorienting. Even with its first-person camera points of view, the editing and cinematography are so florid, sometimes even dreamlike, it was easy to get lost. Certain technical choices often took me out of the movie, such as how the perspectives of Elwood and Turner as teenagers were literally of their own sight, but when the narrative sporadically flashed forward to one of them as an adult, RaMell Ross and his cinematographer Jomo Fray pull the camera out and behind his head: those scenes all play out with us just behind the man’s head.

To be certain, the performances are great across the board, with one possibly key exception: when we are inside either Elwood’s or Turner’s heads, and we hear them speak, there’s a naturalism missing from their delivery, that is very much there when we see them perform onscreen. It seems obvious that Nickel Boys is a wildly impressive achievement on a technical level, with intricately planned blocking and choreography to make the scenes work, especially with everyone onscreen playing to a camera rather than to a fellow actor. I’m just not fully convinced this stylistic choice was the best way to tell such a story—or, one wonders, any story. In this case, there is actually a narrative twist at the end, and largely because of the ample technical and artistic abstractions, it took me longer than it should have to register what had really happened.

When it comes to the aforementioned horrors, it may do well to note that we see very little of it onscreen. What we see more of is the terror the kids feel at the expectations of these horrors, as in a pivotal scene where kids wait outside a closed door listening to the savage beatings of corporal punishment and knowing they await the same fate—a fate that has one of our two protagonists later waking up in the infirmary. A lot of abuse and torture goes well beyond the physical, however, and Nickel Boys also makes that clear. In the end, in the flash-forward scenes, we discover that the school was far worse than we even realized, or even those students realized. It’s these sorts of details that make it no less difficult a film to sit through.

I wonder if the uniquely unparalleled cinematography here is meant as a sort of buffer, an artistic space meant to cushion the act of facing horrifying realities. How well Nickel Boys works on an artistic level feels far more up for debate to me than apparently a lot of other people, who simply regard it as an absolute triumph. For me, though, the first-person visuals combined with its nonlinear editing often put the narrative a bit too far out of reach. The story itself, on the other hand, could not be more essential or relevant, although the impact is likely much greater in the Colson Whitehead novel on which it is based.

Elwood and Turner confront the viewers by facing themselves.

Overall: B

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR

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

The Room Next Door poses a compelling philosophical question. If a terminally ill, close friend asks you to be around—not in the same room as them (hence the title), but around—when they achieve a self-orchestrated death with dignity, would you do it? Should you do it?

Pedro Almodóvar is a singular filmmaker with a recognizably unique style, here having made his first-ever feature film entirely in English. There would be justifiable concern as to whether his cinematic language will translate well, and certainly The Room Next Door has some awkwardly sedate pacing. Strangely, though, the more the film goes on, the more it somehow manages to justify its own existence.

The friends in question are Martha and Ingrid, played by Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore respectively, two older women who knew each other well when they were much younger but have gone many years without keeping in touch. All manner of contemplating death is a running theme in this film, and when we are introduced to Ingrid, she is at a book signing, supporting a successful work that directly examines her own deep fear of death. She learns from a mutual friend at this event that Martha is in the hospital with cancer, and so goes to visit her.

They catch up. They move through the small talk and get to substantive discussions quickly, for obvious reasons. They tell each other anecdotes that get presented to us in tangential flashback scenes with unclear purpose, though I suspect Almodóvar knew exactly what he was going for. A bit of time goes by, Martha and Ingrid get organically reacquainted, and in so doing forge a type of closeness somehow perfect for Martha’s request. Martha has already tried asking her other, closest friends, who have all refused. She can’t ask it of her estranged daughter as it would be an unfair burden to her. A clear argument is made that it is unfair to ask it of Ingrid given her fear of death, but in the end, she accepts: Martha wants Ingrid simply to be in the room next door when she ends her own life before the terminal cancer can.

Martha has a plan, and they leave New York City to rent a beautiful house together for a month in the woods outside Woodstock. And this is the deal: Ingrid won’t be given a heads up. Martha will do it once she’s ready. And Ingrid will know the deed is done by seeing her bedroom door closed rather than ajar as usual. We see Ingrid wake up on several mornings, walk halfway up the stairs, and check to see if the door is open or closed. All I could think about was the emotional agony that would put me through, how it would be all I could think about each night when I attempted, presumably with great difficulty, to get to sleep.

Through all of this, the dialogue is always soft-spoken—not deadpan so much as a sort of an oddly relaxed sadness. Martha has a bottle of sedative pills for Ingrid to use if the stress ever gets to be too much, and it feels a bit like this whole movie took one of those pills. John Turturro as Damian, the climate crisis writer and lecturer who was a lover at separate times in both Martha’s and Ingrid’s pasts, is no different. Even when he blithely refers to the entire planet being “in the throes of death,” putting a pretty fine point on Martha and Ingrid’s relationship here as a broad metaphor.

But, again, the more the story unfolded in The Room Next Door, the more it spoke to me. It took on an almost hypnotic quality in its beautiful melancholy, its very Almodóvarian visual poetry with a consistent color palate of solid reds, greens and blues, from their outfits to the deck furniture. Production design is as much a statement in Almodóvar films as anything else; in some cases more so—the line delivery of the dialogue has a slight feel of being under-rehearsed. And yet, The Room Next Door is such a quintessentially Pedro Almodóvar film that one can only assume the performances are exactly what he wanted.

Swinton also briefly plays Martha’s daughter, Michelle. Swinton has played multiple characters in the same film before (to great effect in the 1992 film Orlando), but here “mother” and “daughter” are so obviously the same person portraying them, I found it so distracting it briefly took me out of the movie. Thankfully the two characters never share screen time, which only would have made it worse.

If The Room Next Door has a thesis, I suppose it would be how to live in tragedy, particularly with grace and dignity. It’s about agency. Almodóvar does include a sequence in which a police officer is inappropriately aggressive with Ingrid because he suspects her of assisting in Martha’s suicide, which he is keen to point out is a crime. It’s a way of acknowledging passionate differences in philosophy when it comes to death with dignity, but Almodóvar throws in a lawyer pretty quickly to smooth out any narrative wrinkles the acknowledgment caused.

But fundamentally, The Room Next Door is about friendship, compassion, and sacrifice in the face of a hopeless situation. It focuses on these two women but with a pretty hard nudge to the global climate crisis, which also provides for a few moments of subtly dark humor. There’s some unevenness to the storytelling, but Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore go a long way to make up for it, even in their muted grief. The Room Next Door merely skirts the edges of “tearjerker” status, mercifully dispensing with any melodrama. I kept thinking less about the story structure than how effective its mood was, for several minutes after I left the theater. It felt like the film had worked exactly as intended.

As artists get older, it follows that more of their art would be about death.

Overall: B+

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-