ANORA

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

It’s so rare, and so deeply satisfying, when a movie actually lives up to the hype. Anora is everything it promises to be and more.

It’s also very much a riff on the 1990 romantic comedy Pretty Woman, a movie as beloved as it is quite rightly criticized as a vapid look at sex work. Anora takes the concept of a rich guy who woos a sex worker with the promise of riches in exchange for exclusivity, and makes it grittier, more real, with both more authentic joy and more authentic sorrow. Instead of a high-end Beverly Hills escort played by Julia Roberts, we get a no-nonsense Brooklyn exotic dancer played by Mikey Madison—who is a revelation in the role.

And in the case of Anora (Ani for short), the fairy tale begins to crack fairly early on. She’s on the job when she meets Ivan (a stupendous Mark Eydelshteyn), a young Russian man with money to burn. He buys a lap dance, then invites her to his giant home, and within days he’s asking her to be his “boyfriend” for a week. Within that week, he proposes to her, convinces her he’s serious, and flies her with some friends to Las Vegas, where they do indeed get married,

This is all extended setup, and it last probably a good hour into the movie: Ani being taken in by a whirlwind fantasy life moving so fast she doesn’t even have time to consider whether it’s too good to be true. All the while, Ivan has an irresistibly sweet, youthful exuberance that is easily mistaken for innocence. It’s just as easy to be taken in by it as a viewer as it is by Ani as a character, which is testament to Eydelshteyn’s performance.

It’s when Ivan’s parents catch wind of this marriage that things take a turn. He is visited by two men we would reasonably read as henchmen, working for Toros (Karren Karagulian), the handler hired by Ivan’s parents. But Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) get far more than they bargained for when they come face to face with Ani, who is having trouble processing the idea, suddenly presented to her, that her marriage is a sham.

This turn in the plot, though, would in just about any other movie get scary and violent. Garnick and Igor, as it turns out, are not interested in violence—only in getting Ivan and Ani to sign paperwork to annul their marriage. It’s Ani who turns out to be unexpectedly wild, a young woman with ample experience not taking anbody’s shit, and she’s the one who get surprisingly violent. This is an extended sequence in Ivan’s house, and it is hilarious.

Garnick and Igor have such trouble containing Ani’s outbursts—which, to be fair, are reasonable under the circumstances—that Toros is forced to leave the performance of a baptism to assist. He’s astonished at how beat up Garnick and Igor are when he arrives at the house, and instead of being on board with Ani being tied up like he would be in most movies, he’s aghast. The other two struggle to convince him it would be a mistake to untie her.

Writer-director Sean Baker has made easily his best movie since his masterful 2015 breakthrough Tangerine. I wasn't quite as huge a fan of his next two films, The Florida Project (2017) and Red Rocket (2021), which were both very good but not quite as incredible as many other critics asserted. With Anora, Baker adds to a truly impressive body of work and, so far at least, makes possibly his crowning achievement. It’s beautifully shot, beautifully acted, expertly edited, and its sexual frankness only adds to its quality.

It doesn’t take long to find online discourse about whether Anora is “feminist,” which misses the point. This is not what the story is concerned about, but rather with telling a nuanced story of a stripper who is neither ashamed nor explicitly proud of her job. She’s just matter-of-fact about it, about the line of work she’s in, and even about the clear talent she has (and yes, pole dancing takes talent). I would argue that alone is a feminist take.

Anora exists in a fully realized world, which is both very specific and something you can’t look away from. And this is Ani’s story from start to finish, Ivan much more a part of it in the first half than in the second, during most of which Ani, Toros, Garnick and Igor are searching the city for him. Igor in particular proves a surprisingly tender character for someone clearly meant to be a villain, and how he relates to Ani over time evolves organically until he plays a part in the closing scene of the film that is bittersweet at best and tragically sad at worst. In either case, he’s the one character who offers Ani any truly genuine intimacy.

There’s a lot of sex in Anora, particularly in its first half, when Ani is falling in love with Ivan. The fantastic trick Sean Baker pulls off is that it’s never gratuitous, at least not in the context of storytelling—not even when Ani gives a kind of performance in Ivan’s living room usually reserved for a private room at the strip club. In every case, it moves the story forward, and has a refreshing frankness about how sex plays an undeniable part in people falling for each other.

There have been many characterizations of Anora as “Pretty Woman meets Uncut Gems.” I would push back a bit on that characterization, as Uncut Gems is an unbearably tense and stressful portrait of a gambling addict you’re desperate to see make the right decision even once and he never does. Anora gets somewhat similarly frantic in its second half, but it’s far funnier and nowhere near as stressful. What it does do, on the other hand, is end with a couple of extended, quietly profound scenes that really drive home the inability of Ani to escape the trappings of her social and economic class, no matter what gets disingenuously promised to her.

Anora is a movie that passes no judgment on any of its characters, even while plenty of them—especially Ivan’s parents–are passing judgment on her. Mikey Madison is a star among stars in this movie, all of them giving unforgettable performances, and this is a stellar movie I won’t soon forget,

The promise may be too good to be true but this movie isn’t.

Overall: A

WE LIVE IN TIME

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

Make no mistake: We Live in Time is a tragic story and a bit of a tear jerker. I walked in pre-equipped with tissues and I suggest you do the same.

It is not a spoiler to say this is about a woman dying of cancer, as that’s the whole premise. Now, director John Crowley (Brooklyn) and writer Nick Payne (The Sense of an Ending) sprinkle in some classic rom-com elements, some of them a bit far fetched, from a meet-cute where Almut meets Tobias by running into him with her car, to the delivery of a baby in a gas station bathroom. I was easily able to lock into this stuff, largely because it illustrated the life worth living even in the face of it being cut short.

The biggest reason it’s easy to engage with We Live in Time, though, is the casting, which can make or break a movie. I might not have even had much interest in this movie, certainly not based on the premise alone, if not for the two leads: Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. These two are well-established as stellar actors, and neither of them have ever had more palpable chemistry with their costars. Their story unfolds with a warm sweetness that is never saccharine, making you want to hang out with them, even when they face terrible and likely fatal news. Perhaps even especially when that happens. These two are precisely what makes this movie work.

Tobias gets a job with Weetabix, an odd bit of product placement, getting several mentions in the film. Far more notably, and ultimately very key to the story, Almut is a high-end chef with aspirations to participate in a European cooking competition. A lovely subplot involves Almut mentoring another chef, Jade, and their relationship develops both personally and professionally over the course of the story. Jade is played by nonbinary actor Lee Braithwaite, in their debut feature film role, more than holding their own alongside a powerhouse actor like Florence Pugh. I only wish the Tobias character could have gotten an equivalent subplot, although a few scenes with his father (Douglas Hodge) comes kind of close. There’s a sweet scene in which Tobias’s father helps him prepare for a date with Almut, giving him a haircut and even shaving the back of his neck.

Next to the phenomenal casting, though, a key part of what makes We Live in Time work is the editing—very relevant to the film’s title—by Justine Wright. This story is told as a nonlinear narrative, jumping back and forth in time in Almut’s and Tobias’s relationship. It regularly returns to key periods, though: when they first start dating; when they have a baby; and when Almut is given her ovarian cancer diagnosis. Over time, we are even provided more context around her cancer, the risk for which could have been significantly lessened but for her choice to keep the possibility of having a baby. And even with all the time jumps, we always know where we are, and it always feels like the story is unfolding just as it should.

In the cancer-diagnosis era scenes, their little girl, Ella, is played by a tiny actor named Grace Delaney. Even this proves to be excellent casting. Delaney isn’t given a lot of lines, but she is in a lot of scenes, and her presence always feels just as natural as anyone else’s. This is likely more a product of skilled direction and editing than anything else.

In the end, though, it’s Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield who are everything to the success of We Live in Time. Their performances, and their chemistry, are the magic sauce that makes the movie deeply compelling from start to finish. Conceptually, it’s just a romantic drama with just as many joyful turns as sad ones, but on paper does not sound particularly exceptional. What is exceptional is its cast, who make this a movie well worth the time.

Don’t fret! A lot of the movie is way more fun than this looks.

Overall: B+

CHALLENGERS

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

Had Challengers been directed by anyone else, I likely would not have been interested. But, offbeat Cicilian director Luca Guadagnino is a game changer. This is the guy who previously brought us the beautiful Call Me By Your Name in 2017; the unusually subtle and lovely queer-ish limited series We Are Who We Are in 2020; and the jarringly tender cannibal love story Bones and All in 2022. He also made the wild mess that was the remake of Suspiria in 2018—the director can be all over the place with his projects, but one thing you can never say about him is that he is unoriginal.

Challengers is easily Guadagnino’s most mainstream project to date, with superstar Zendaya at its center, her injured-tennis-player-turned coach Tashi also being the center of a dysfunctional love triangle with two other rising tennis talents: Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist, who played Riff in Steven Spielberg’s underrated 2021 version of West Side Story). This movie is also only about tennis on the surface, featuring plenty of onscreen tennis matches, but always as a metaphor for the personal tensions between the players. And of course, it wouldn’t be a Guadagnino film without some homoerotic undertones, which here occasionally veer into overtones.

It’s easy to say that these are the kinds of film details that speak to me, but it’s much deeper than that. I don’t think it’s even an accident that O’Connor and Faist are both hot young men, but almost pointedly unconventionally hot—as they compete for a woman played by one of the most universally attractive woman stars in the world. And this is a film that sexualizes all three of them, albeit in one case the camera zooms in on an inexplicably gratuitous shot of Faist’s butt in form fitting pajama bottoms. I found myself wondering if there were any conversations about the intentionality of that on set. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were.

Challengers is presented with a curious narrative structure, where “present day” is a 2019 tennis match that turns out to be a rematch between Patrick and Art after thirteen years, a pivotal match that we return to regularly throughout the film. It jumps back and forth from there to a week ago, or three days ago, or in a great many cases, thirteen years ago—when Patrick and Art first meet Tashi. This is where the homoerotic undertones begin: “I’m not a homewrecker,” she says, about getting in between the two of them, who have been “bunking together” since they were twelve.

I had mixed feelings about this approach to editing at first, and honestly it took several scenes at the beginning of the film before I started to find any of these characters interesting. But this is Guadagnino’s subtle, secret weapon: an expertly applied slow burn, getting you to a point where you don’t even realize yet that you’ve been won over. And in retrospect, Challengers would not have been as effective with a more linear plot line. As it was, every time we jump back to the “present day” match, at which point Tashi is married to one of the eternally competitive (yet unusually intimate) friends as well as acting as his coach, the stakes become clearer. Tennis is just used as a uniquely effective framework for a deeply compelling romantic drama.

Still, in anyone else’s hands, I could easily have lost interest. Guadagnino works with frequent collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom for his cinematography, consistently finding angles on the action that are at once beautiful and offbeat. Several scenes largely hinge on their visual impact, from a sudden wind storm, to a bevy of unconventional shots during tennis matches: off-center closeups of the players’ tense bodies, or POV shots of the players hitting the ball with their racquets, or in one memorable sequence, taking on the point of view of the tennis ball itself. I remain eternally confused by how the hell tennis is scored, but somehow I remained deeply invested in everything happening onscreen.

The performances are excellent all around, but especially stellar on the part of Zendaya. Challengers had already more than won me over by the climactic end to the present-day tennis match at hand, but then the acting, the memorably propulsive score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the editing, and the cinematography all converge with first-time feature writer Justin Kuritzkes’s script, and everything comes together with such deep satisfaction, it’s like a beautiful puzzle where the picture isn’t clear until the final pieces are set in place. Sticking the landing is a significant challenge even in many otherwise great movies, but here it’s done so well that it elevates an already great film. I left the theater thinking about what a fantastic experience it was.

Match points: I suppose you could call this my favorite tennis movie.

Overall: A-

LOVE LIES BLEEDING

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

As 21st-century noirs go, Love Lies Bleeding is pretty great—until it takes an inexplicably wild swing at the end. I would recommend this film, but I would have to warn you about that at the same time. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say it’s somewhat debatable whether what happens is something we are meant to believe is actually happening, or if it’s a character fantasy. I am not averse to wild swings as a concept, mind you; I just want them to be clear in their purpose or what they represent, which is really lacking here—in spite of several allusions to it earlier in the film, which only make at least that much sense in retrospect. Without the wild turn at the end, I might have felt confident that this could be one of the year’s best movies.

It could be argued that, so far at least, it still is. There’s a lot of far worse stuff out there, after all. It’s just that there’s a sequence of maybe five minutes in this movie that really straddles the line between subversive and bafflingly weird.

All that aside, Love Lies Bleeding is a dark, twisted, violent, lesbian romance thriller that is absolutely worth a look. It’s beautifully shot in New Mexico, starting with an opening shot that we only realize well into the story later was the camera lifting out of a ravine that plays into the plot. And it’s edited with a unique sort of precision, moving the plot forward without any excess bloat while keeping the pace at a steady clip. Best of all, it’s exceptionally well cast, with Kristen Stewart as gym manager Lou, who falls for mysterious body builder Jackie, played actual body builder Katy O'Brian, wandering in from out of town. They both get increasingly mixed up with Lou’s gun range owner and insect enthusiast dad Lou Sr (Ed Harris, with both his telltale bald head and a ring of hair that is nuts-long, and somehow it fits the character.)

We learn early on that Lou doesn’t speak to her father, and one of many refreshing elements of Love Lies Bleeding is that this estrangement has nothing to do with Lou’s sexuality—evidently he couldn’t give half a shit about that. I expected some kind of cathartic confrontation between Lou and her father by the end, but much of the story goes by without giving a sense of any catharsis coming with an earned payoff. This is where director and co-writer Rose Glass’s expert construction of the story comes in, because eventually we get just enough revealed about Lou’s dark history with her father, and we understand perfectly why she doesn’t speak to him.

In the meantime, both Lou and Jackie find themselves suffering the consequences of impulsive, violent mistakes. It should be noted that, in at least two scenes, something pretty gruesome occurs. In the first, we see the same shockingly horrid wound so many times, it begins to feel like Rose Glass is toying with us. She’s certainly having fun with this movie: the comic moments are few and far between, but when they do come, they are pretty hilarious.

And that’s the bottom line with Love Lies Bleeding: this is a postmodern take on film noir, with its own sensibility, in a world that is dark and dangerous and yet you love being witness to it. It takes a brief detour into “Wait, what?” territory that I could have lived without—but then immediately reeled me right back in with one final bit of humor, and then a bit of interpretive dance over the end credits. You kind of have to be there. Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go there.

I don’t know if you’ll root for them exactly but you’ll still want to know where they’re going.

Overall: B+

THE TASTE OF THINGS

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

It’s been said that you shouldn’t watch The Taste of Things on an empty stomach—and that is precisely what I did. And then I sat through this lengthy, gorgeously shot, expertly choreographed opening sequence of an elaborate dinner getting prepared in a large, late-nineteenth-century French kitchen.

Here’s the thing. If you are a carnivore, you might have greater need to heed such a warning: there is a lot of meat and seafood prepared in this movie. I am, however, a vegetarian—I don’t even eat seafood. I could appreciate the vividly shot food, clearly actually cooked on set, on a purely aesthetic level, but it certainly didn’t have me salivating.

Here’s what it did do. It made me think, a lot, about the way we eat our food. It made me long for a meal prepared with such intricate care, from ingredients sourced from the garden right outside the door. The film’s opening shot, in fact, is of Eugénie (a luminescent Juliette Binoche, still a genuine stunner at age 59) harvesting produce straight out of the dirt. We throw phrases around like “farm to table” as though it’s a marketing concept, and then we witness it occurring onscreen in this movie, almost in real time. And here, in the real world, 140 years after the setting of our movie, we pass our days eating food made quickly or cheaply or, in most cases, both.

The Taste of Things is populated with characters for whom flavor is more important than anything. I marveled at the technical proficiency already achieved by the 19th century, the myriad combinations of ingredients and cooking techniques, and the amount of time that it takes—and took—to master all these dishes.

As I said, the meat based dishes—beef, veal, fish, you name it—still failed to make me salivate, in ways I am certain it will most audiences. And then Eugénie whips up this Baked Alaska dish and I nearly cried with desire: Holy fuckballs that looks amazing! And I don’t even like meringue. The men Eugénie serves this dessert to discuss the physics of how the ice cream stays frozen inside, and I was rapt. This was one dish with meringue I could imagine using as skin cream. I wanted to bathe in it.

The Taste of Things is about much more than vividly shot food preparation, of course. At its heart, it is a love story, between Eugénie, a longtime cook, and Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), the restauranteur Eugénie worked for for many years. They now live together in a kind of perpetual romance, Dodin regularly proposing to her, and Eugénie regularly insisting she prefers things as they are. Their love and affection is quite overtly represented in the deeply rooted history and skill in the food they share. This includes both cooking and eating it, although Eugénie does most of the cooking.

There is a bit of sadness thrown in, and I won’t spoil exactly what that is, although it gets alluded to pretty early on, in the middle of the aforementioned, extended opening sequence. It’s easy to focus on that sequence, because of the incredible blocking and choreography and camera work, but most scenes in this film involve cooking, and without exception the food is shot with a cozy, loving eye. Beyond the focus on the food, the story is deceptively simple. But it stays with you.

There is a somewhat curious separation of genders in this film, and the heavy focus on Binoche notwithstanding, I kind of wish there were more women in it. Besides Eugénie, the only significant female characters are two younger cooks who work with her: Violette (Galatéa Bellugi), who evidently has relatively mediocre still; and Violette’s niece, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), who has an astonishing, precocious talent for gastronomy. Dodin, for his part, has a group of about five men friends who populate many scenes, often to pontificate on the prepared food or to provide support to Dodin, as needed.

But, it all comes back to Eugénie and Dodin, every other character serving their story. One of the great many things I love about The Taste of Things is the way it naturally veers away from any of the typical film tropes. Just because of the way I’ve been conditioned by decades of movie watching, I kept expecting one of the apprentice cooks to trip while climbing the many staircases in the house, or for one of the men to creep on young Pauline. But, nothing of the sort happens in this story, which is only about two character who are, as Dodin puts it, “in their autumn years,” and their earnest devotion to each other. Sometimes the simplest stories are the most moving and beautiful, and this is certainly one to savor.

Don’t insult this movie by eating cheap popcorn while you watch it!

ALL OF US STRANGERS

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

How do I adequately convey how much I loved All of Us Strangers? How do I even explain what it’s about? Except, perhaps, to say it’s a beautifully melancholy, queer love story with an emotional through line that cuts deep?

Mind you, I say this as a gay viewer, and this is incredibly relevant. I can’t help but wonder how the response to it might be different among audiences that are not gay men. I am certain anyone open to the experience of this film can be deeply moved by it, and even have an intricate, nuanced understanding of what the characters are feeling. But for me, in a way few other movies ever have, this story wrapped my very soul into a warm embrace.

Will I love this movie as much upon rewatch, I wonder? There’s only one way to find out.

In the meantime, I must say there is plenty of All of Us Strangers that evades straightforward understanding. That is beside the point. You need only to feel it. And boy, did I.

Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Aftersun’s Paul Mescal) are two gay men, living in the same London high-rise apartment building. It must be a new building, very few other people living in it, as they discuss how distractingly quiet it is living there. We really never see them interact with anyone else in the building, only each other. When a fire alarm has Adam exiting the building, he sees Harry’s silhouette in his sixth-story window, looking down at him. After Adam returns to his unit on a much higher floor—with spectacular, panoramic London views—Harry knocks on his door, drunk, and introduces himself.

Adam and Harry’s steadily blossoming relationship expands beyond that first meeting, which is tentative, cautious, a bit shy. They don’t hook up immediately. They do a bit later, though, and it’s some of the most beautifully shot and tender, gay sexuality I’ve seen onscreen since Moonlight (2016). It’s both highly erotic and genuinely moving—a feat of narrative execution that has me tempted to call director and co-writer Andrew Haigh a cinematic magician.

And All of Us Strangers is indeed magical, even when it defies logic, and quite deliberately so. The story of Adam and Harry runs parallel to the story of Adam and his late parents, who died in a car crash when he was twelve years old. And yet, he takes a train across town to his childhood home—and finds his father (Jamie Bell) and his mother (Claire Foy) there, the same age they were when they died, somehow unsurprised to find their son coming home, now a grown man they had never actually gotten to see grow up.

Mum and Dad have an understanding that about 35 years have passed, but have no knowledge of what has transpired in that time. Their knowledge and relative ignorance remains stuck in, we can only estimate, about 1988. And as premises go, this is a little out there, because All of Us Strangers never makes explicit exactly what’s going on, and there’s a physicality between Adam and his still-young parents during their visits that negates any idea of them as conventional ghosts. It’s a little more like they exist as flesh and blood, but in a different dimension.

What it does allow for, however, are conversations Adam never had a chance to have with his parents otherwise. He comes out to them both, in separate conversations. It’s notable that his mom has a more complicated, slightly more negative reaction than his father, who is much more quickly accepting—a scenario that defies the stereotype of gay experience, and is likely more common than many realize. This, among many other conversations Adam has with his parents, packed a unique emotional punch for me, and so far as I could tell, I was crying before most of the rest of the people in the theater.

All of Us Strangers features gorgeous cinematography, and is edited with unparalleled finesse, transitioning between Adam with Harry, and Adam with his parents, with seamless grace. There’s a sequence in which Adam and Harry go out dancing, do some drugs, and then proceed into a sort of montage of domesticity, with the club music continuing uninterrupted through it all. It’s beautifully executed.

There is a bit of a twist at the end, very directly related to Harry, which ultimately had me baffled. It calls into question a great deal of what has been seen beforehand, but then, there is even a moment when Adam asks his mother, “Is this real?” The answer, evidently, is that if it feels real, then it is. And All of Us Strangers is all feeling, which therefore makes it real. Adam tries to introduce Harry to his parents, and for most of this sequence, Harry seems to be the only one existing in a grounded reality. This is now a film that will allow things to be that simple.

This is a movie I will be thinking about for a very long time, maybe for years to come. I haven’t been this in love with a mood-piece queer love story since Moonlight. Indeed, that film and All of Us Strangers would make for a spectacular double feature. From end to end, it is beautiful and sad and cozy and charming and erotic and mysterious and bewildering. It would seem there is no end to the riches it has to offer.

Nowhere to go but up: together,

Overall: A

FALLEN LEAVES

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

Fallen Leaves is reveiving virtually universal acclaim, and I’m over here thinking: I must be missing something. It’s fine, but with all due respect, it has yet to strike me as being something particularly special. This is a very simple, surprisingly short (81 minute) tale of two middle-aged people awkwardly falling in love.

This film is being billed as a “romantic comedy.” Romantic, I can get on board with it being. I got a light chuckle out of it maybe three or four times. Otherwise, I’ll concede that Fallen Leaves has a unique sort of sweetness to it. This is about two people who lead very solitary lives, one a little more content with the solitude than the other. They meet at a karaoke bar, and in this particular scene, I did enjoy the furtive glances back and forth between a man and a woman who seem subtly taken aback by how attractive they’re finding each other.

We never learn the names of the characters, but Ansa is played by Alma Pöysti, who is 42; and Holappa is played by Jussi Vatanen, who is 45. Curiously, the story seems to be set over-so-slightly in the future: after getting fired at her supermarket job for taking expired food, Ansa is seen in the kitchen of a bar where she’s hired as a dishwasher, and a 2024 calendar is seen hanging on the wall. This might seem an insignificant detail given how close we are indeed now to 2024, but for the many scenes in which Ansa’s radio plays news reports of Russian attacks in Ukraine.

I had difficulty ascertaining the point of these news clips, in the middle of a love story between two people in Helsinki, Finland. Granted, Finland is the scandinavian country—indeed, the European country—with by far the longest border with Russia. But, there is no political element to the story here otherwise, and if there were supposed to be some symbolic element to these news briefs of war, they sailed right over my head.

Furthermore, the performances across the board are rather flat, muted, almost monotone. This was clearly a deliberate choice, something that happens in a lot of independent and/or foreign films. I wonder how this film is playing in its native Finland. Critics in America are loving it. Am I just jaded after being in my own relationship after twenty years? I’m inclined not to think so, but I’ve been known to be off base about things.

Holappa is a heavy drinker. Ansa doesn’t much care for it. Before they confront that issue, far more minor things occur that result in persistent missed connections: Ansa’s written phone number falling unnoticed out of Holappa’s pocket. Ansa’s playful but ill-advised decision to wait until their second date to tell Holappa her name. They both get fired from their jobs, although Holappa’s drinking is a good reason for it.

That’s not especially a spoiler. There aren’t any major plot turns in Fallen Leaves, which is appealingly unsophisticated in its execution. There’s not a lot to unpack here, really. Nor is there much in the way of emotion. Some movies are wildly emotionally manipulative; Fallen Leaves is the antithesis of that approach. Some might argue that this beautifully underscores the very simple love story at play, one about two people finding love much later in life than most people do. I would argue that this is just a pleasantly simple, straightforward love story and there doesn’t seem to be any more to it than that.

Yep. That’s about all that’s going on here.

Overall: B

ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE

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

And here we get yet another charming, moving, gay coming-of-age story that just makes me wistful for what I could never have. Even if I could never have had the experience of the young characters in this story, what might it have been like for me had there even been a movie like this to watch when I was a teenager? When I was sixteen, I was alone in my bedroom, secretly lusting after the gay men in Madonna’s “Erotica” video.

There’s a bit of irony there, the means I had of tapping into dark sexual fantasy, as compared to Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, which is almost shockingly innocent, about the blossoming of young love, of a kind the protagonist does not understand nearly as well as, amazingly, his parents do. This story, actually, is comparatively chaste, the physicality never moving beyond a couple of kisses, the holding of hands. It’s a good two thirds of the way through before it even gets to that. This movie is perfect for young kids around the age of puberty, maybe just past it. And what a beautiful thing, to get something legitimately age-appropriate that explores these themes, asserting that kids of all kinds are perfect just the way they are.

This kind of shit gets to me, it’s so far removed from the experience of my youth. Some stories work by being relatable, and others are more aspirational. I can only guess as to what it’s like to be a young person today with access to a movie like this—which, incidentally, is based on a multiple-award-winning 2012 young-adult novel by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, which I have immediately put on my reading list.

It appears, though, that this film is a pretty faithful adaptation, with many lines of dialogue lifted directly from the source text. If I have any genuine criticism of this film, it would be that sometimes the dialogue doesn’t necessarily translate perfectly to the screen—I must admit, at times, I found the script, co-written by Sáenz himself and director Aitch Alberto, distractingly just outside the realm of real-life delivery. Some of the lines feel a little oversimplified and slightly stilted.

Ultimately, it’s a small quibble—there are just so many other things to love about this movie, not least of which is the very specific universe in which it exists, about Mexican-American families in 1987 El Paso, Texas. Aristotle (Max Pelayo), or Ari for short, is a solitary boy who is unaware of his own abiding loneliness. He’s been faltering at swimming lessons, and then meets Dante (Reese Gonzales), who volunteers to teach him how to swim. They become fast friends, and maybe the first third of Aristotle and Dante is just a lovely, leisurely paced portrait of the evolution of their friendship. Nothing more is even suggested until Dante’s family moves to Chicago for a year thanks to his professor dad’s job, and in one of Dante’s letters he slightly scandalizes Ari by bringing up masturbation (this is the most frankly sexual the movie ever gets).

During their year apart, both Aristotle and Dante pursue relationships with girls, presumably because that’s all that occurs to them, and it’s just what’s expected. It’s great to see that, unlike many other films about gay people, the interactions with girls stay healthy and never end in any melodramatic heartbreak. This is much more about these boys slowly realizing who and what they are.

The truly unique element here is Ari’s parents, who are giving him knowing looks largely from the start. Ari has a beloved aunt who visits and when she tells him “You are perfect just the way you are,” it feels incongruous to him, and to a degree, even to us as viewers, that early on. I wasn’t even sure at first whether we were meant to understand that Ari’s parents know he’s in love with Dante before Ari does. I found myself thinking of the deeply empathetic father played by Michael Stuhlbarg in Call Me By Your Name. The key difference here is that these parents are not as articulate, maintaining a family secret about Ari’s incarcerated brother that keeps them, and especially his father, largely silent.

Perhaps most notable is how Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe avoids stereotype at every level—quite plausibly because both writer and the director are of Latin-American descent, telling a story about Mexican-American characters. There is a uniquely heartwarming mix of specificity and authenticity here, while also avoiding any of the cliches of toxic masculinity in parenting. Ari’s parents are clearly imperfect, just like anyone, but their love and concern for him is never in doubt.

We don’t get as much about Dante’s relationship with his parents, perhaps because they are portrayed as progressive intellectuals and we are meant to assume they’ll be fine. Dante does worry in one of his letters about their reaction to him, but the narrative never revisits that thread.

I suppose you could say that, had I been a producer of this film, I’d have had notes. On the other hand, sometimes imperfections add to the charm. While I found myself debating exactly how good I thought this movie was in its first half, it really came together for me in the end. I was both charmed and deeply moved by it, practically weeping by the time these boys finally come around to their inevitable fate. That’s not a spoiler, because you should know that this is a coming-of-age love story and not a tragedy, and that’s how they go; besides, the value is in the journey, the experience, both for them and for us. This is one movie I will likely seek out for a rewatch.

Sometimes a connection becomes an opportunity for discovery.

Overall: B+

PAST LIVES

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

How does Past Lives hit, I wonder, depending on the personal romantic history of the person watching it? I have to imagine it varies. A good majority of its audience, I assume, had a “first love” who was not the person they are currently with, and perhaps they contemplate how they would handle being in a similar situation, meeting a childhood sweetheart not seen in person in decades but while currently in a perfectly happy marriage.

I have no way of looking at this movie through such a lens; I had no “childhood sweetheart,” and not just because I’m gay. This story really isn’t about sexuality, nor does it even really reference sex beyond the hypothetical of having children. I am still nearly two decades into the first romantic relationship I have ever had. And, still: this movie made me think, in a way no other movie ever has, about how much I love my husband. He still qualifies as my first love, though, and that’s what this movie is about. So maybe it even worked as intended on me.

Past Lives is a unique experience, in that its emotional resonance takes some time to percolate. I nearly started crying thinking about it on my way home after the movie ended, and I still can’t really say why, except that the movie permeated my soul, and it took some time for me to focus on anything else, rather than continuing to think about this deeply affecting love story.

I desperately want to use a cliché: “an instant classic.” Does anything even qualify as a “classic” anymore? What would be the most recent film for which there is any critical consensus on such a designation? Did it even come out in the twenty-first century? The Lord of the Rings, maybe? Moulin Rouge!? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind actually gets referenced in Past Lives, and that came out in 2004. How many people even still think about that movie? In Past Lives, it is brought up in the year 2011, when it had been released seven years prior. It comes up when our two would-be lovers discuss Montauk, which I completely forgot was even a setting in that movie.

All I can say is: Past Lives is every bit as worth the time and attention as any of those movies, or arguably any “classic romance” that came before them. It’s certainly unlike any other, writer-director Celine Song establishing a dreamlike tone that evokes every romantic, wistful memory you’ve ever had.

The fact that Past Lives is Celine Song’s first feature film is astonishing. She was previously a playwright, which explains her two protagonists both being writers—I have to admit, I wondered how the hell they could afford living in New York City with such jobs. This is beside the point, as Past Lives is about the life choices we make, and whether it can ever be possible to go back to a particular feeling we loved from the past. In the case of Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), they forged a quick but deeply emotional connection as twelve-year-olds in their native Korea, Nora convinced they will end up married, but having no idea her parents are about to move the family to Canada.

Twelve years later, after Nora has moved to New York, she and Hae Sung reconnect online, and this is when they make their first real connection as adults. This middle act is a peculiar experience, turning the year 2011 into a period piece, their video chats exclusively over Skype, with grainy and sometimes glitchy video. In spite of that, all of the scenes are as deeply romantic as any other in the film. I don’t think I have ever seen scenes of people video chatting so well shot—even this effectively evokes the kind of yearning these two characters are feeling, discovering they are just as desperate to be with each other as they were twelve years before. But, they have started lives and established plans that make meeting up again unfeasible.

About a year later, Greta meets Arthur (John Magaro) at an artists retreat. In spite of Arthur later fretting about possible inadequacies of his place in Greta’s life, the circumstances of their meeting are just as romantic as anything else in Past Lives, which is very much the point. Arhur jests that in a retelling of their story he’d be “the evil White guy,” but here he very pointedly isn’t. There is no villain, which is what makes the circumstances of this movie so ripe for discussion.

Any talk of suspense regarding what Nora and Hae Sung may or may not do when he finally visits New York City for the first time, another twelve years later, misses the point. Everything that actually happens is firmly grounded in reality, and to my mind is not the element up for debate. The bigger question is about the long-term futures for all three of these people. Do Nora and Arthur stay together indefinitely? Will Nora and Hae Sung finally get together, many years from now? Would that even work? There can be a pointed difference between what you yearn for and what it turns out to be once you finally get it.

There is one specific moment that has really stayed with me, when Nora breaks down, and Arthur comforts her, even though her tears are for another relationship. What a strange position to be in, for all of them. This is the kind of thing so rarely seen in cinema, a deeply unusual circumstance that still rings with an almost unnerving truth.

Past Lives starts and ends with these three characters out at a bar, deep into the night. In the opening scene, we overhear others in the bar playing that game where you try to guess what the stories are of people at other tables, and they actually skirt the truth. When we return to this moment, the perspective has long since shifted to that of Nora, Hae Sung and Arthur. There is some debate as to whether Arthur needs to be there, but Celine Song wisely never makes clear how they came to this as a group: for all we know, Nora asked Arthur to be there, perhaps not considering the likelihood that she and Hae Sung would wind up conversing in a native language Arthur mostly doesn’t understand.

It’s so easy to empathize with all three of them in this scenario, and Teo Yoo plays Hae Sung’s awkward nervousness especially well. They all feel that way, of course, and so do we, on their behalf. How often do we get a sort of love triangle in which we deeply yearn for all three of them to be okay? The most amazing thing Past Lives pulls off is how it tells a story with such specificity, and yet it will move anyone who has ever loved.

Past Lives will raise your hopes for their futures.

Overall: A-

JOYLAND

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

Joyland is an ironic title, I guess. There’s not much the way of joy in this movie. There are flashes of it, for sure, but always in the face of pressure to suppress it. Maybe director and co-writer Saim Sadiq went in a different direction with the title because Melancholia was taken. Joyland is a very, very different movie, but nevertheless it maintains an almost dreamlike, melancholy tone from start to finish.

Joyland is a notable film for a multitude of reasons, not least of which is its co-lead, Alina Khan, the first transgender actor to be cast in a lead role in a Pakistani film. In certain ways, it takes Pakistan’s evolution to warp speed in comparison to American cinema: this is also a trans character, actually played by a trans actor. They’re doing representation properly right out of the gate.

That’s not to say all the depictions in this film are comfortable. There’s a moment when another character says of Biba—without judgment, mind you—“She’s not a real woman.” But this is the thing: of course she’s a real woman, but these characters don’t have the sophistication of knowledge to understand that. I immediately thought about the need to meet people where they are, when trying to invite them to some greater understanding.

Joyland may just do that, for at least some viewers. It’s an extraordinary achievement in Pakistani cinema, creating a nuanced portrait of family, gender, sexuality, and how all of these things intersect. The central character, Haider (Ali Junejo), is an incredibly meek young man, seemingly satisfied with his domestic duties as his wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) is the breadwinner in their relationship, happily working a job at a salon. Haider and Mumtaz live with Haider’s older brother and his wife; their four daughters; and Haider and his brother’s elderly father—none of whom are especially proud when Haider lands a job at an “erotic dance theater.” He’s actually a completely inexperienced backup dancer, but he lies and says he’s the theater manager. It’s at this theater that he meets Biba, and quickly becomes infatuated with her.

One of the more fascinating things about Joyland is how it doesn’t define Haider’s sexuality in particular, basically depicting a kind of fluidity not often seen even in Western cinema. This is in spite of his offensive misreading and misunderstanding of Biba’s circumstances, not understanding her desire to save up for surgery (“I like you the way you are”), and awkwardly attempting a sexual position Biba has no interest in. With such avenues being explored, one can’t help but wonder how well Joyland played in its home country. The saddest thing, maybe, is that it being a mixed bag is kind of a sign of progress.

Joyland examines more than just Haider’s relationship with Biba. His relationship with his father is predictably fraught, as is that with his brother. Most significantly, his landing of a job results in his wife, Mumtaz, getting pressured to quit her job. She is forced to pick up domestic duties; she eventually gets pregnant; she is quickly miserable. Even as Joyland itself pushes boundaries, it reflects the kinds of enforced gender roles that are impossible to escape without drastic, sometimes fatal action.

Haider and Mumtaz’s relationship is fascinating because, through all of this, it stays surprisingly honest and healthy. That’s not to say that Haider can be open about his captivation by Bibi—but, given the nature of their relationship, in a different culture, they might very well have been able to be.

The characters in Joyland are exquisitely drawn, multidimensional and flawed personalities. Their motivations are often at odds, but easily empathized with. In a way, it’s about all of them accepting their fates. Some of them just take unconventional roads to get there. The fateful ending is ambiguous in its meaning, a sort of somber release. This film’s very existence, by extension, ironically offers a kind of hope its characters cannot find.

An example of Joyland’s indelible imagery.

Overall: A-