Reverse Shot

This is an expansive, rich psychological portrait first, and a detailed pastiche second. While it feels almost deferential to its leading lady, a luminously tormented Kate Winslet—who’s in, and thoroughly commands, every scene—it’s also a perfectly calibrated, remarkably atmospheric work of popular art, both novelistic and, yes, here’s that word, cinematic. At first glance, it seems abundantly clear what makes Haynes’s Mildred Pierce a successful film: namely, great storytelling, acting, set design, cinematography, music, etc.—those basic building blocks. But it takes a while to sink in just what it is that makes it so extraordinary.

There’s a particularly marvelous shot of Ryu simply sitting in his bedroom, reading a comic book; his genuine, giggly enjoyment is impossible to fake (one imagines that the director set up a camera with little Ohshiro Maeda to capture the kid in his natural habitat and just waited). With its hanging-out rhythms, the film most resembles Nobody Knows in Kore-eda’s oeuvre; but it plays also as an antidote to that true-life story, which took a wrenching tragic turn. I Wish is about redemption, finding it not in the grand gestures but in every day kindnesses.

A noir without shadows? A women’s picture that posits its female protagonist as a ravenous, sociopathic schemer? A high body-count thriller in which not one drop of blood is spilled? Leave Her to Heaven doesn’t ultimately defy categorization so much as confound easy readings of classical Hollywood approach.

The title Patience (After Sebald) will remind readers of the late W. G. Sebald—whose unclassifiable 1995 book The Rings of Saturn (translated into English in 1998 by Michael Hulse) is the ostensible subject of Grant Gee’s new documentary—of the author’s book-length poem After Nature. And true to this association, the movie treats Sebald with great solemnity, as a sort of Stonehenge-like ruin in and of himself, posthumously trying to make him something like a novelty subsection of the great themes of his own antiquarian German poetry and prose—Civilization, History, Memory.

With character depth an impossibility given the crowd of Marvel properties assembled, we’re free to enjoy the superheroes at their most enjoyable—as shorthand conduits for our presexual fantasies (leather jumpsuited Scarlett Johansson notwithstanding). There are intimations of more, particularly with Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark—since we’re two films deep into that franchise, there’s backstory to quickly reference without having to explicate—but whenever action arises we’re left with only the essentials: the smart-aleck genius in the impermeable suit, the do-gooder vanilla dreamboat soldier, the linguistically archaic demigod with the blonde locks and impossibly heavy hammer.

Don’t let the poster scare you off from watching Bernie; let the film itself do that for you. Linklater’s latest doesn’t really fit comfortably into what we’ve come to expect from a Linklater film: it doesn’t have his oft-deployed limited narrative timeframe, instead dragging its story out to an indeterminate length; and it focuses not on philosophically ambitious outsiders, but rather on a handful of obtuse, considerably non-introspective folk who are fully ensconced in their communities. This is not a film fueled by garrulous and good-natured young people questioning themselves and the world around them, but rather populated by those who’ve been around the block long enough to stop asking.

While its hothouse paranoid atmosphere can be reconciled with any number of other post-Watergate thrillers—from The Parallax View to Winter Kills—its allegories are looser and more polyvalent. Its immersive portrait of a San Francisco fissuring between blanded-out pod-person converts and a dwindling, quasi-bohemian human resistance could be construed as an earnest portrait of (counter) cultural warfare or a jaundiced joke about the propagation of such exaggerated polarities.

Spielberg has conceded that he never fully supported the plot’s controversial reliance upon interdimensional beings, but ultimately chose to yield to the series’ grand vizier, his best friend George Lucas. Nevertheless, the film itself isn’t the work of a man wracked by doubt—Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is boisterous, hyperfluid, and ends on a note that resolves a tension that’s weighed upon the franchise since 1989.

Munich remains resolutely focused on the response to terrorism and on the effects of violence, and not on terrorism itself or its root causes; terrorism is context, justification, flashback. With the exception of two monologues, one by a PLO agent and another by Avner’s mother, the film deals with these matters indirectly. In fact, those two speeches are arresting—both making a strenuous case about having a home, a nation, a piece of land, from two diametrically opposed positions—because they so clearly stand out in a film that avoids speechifying.

Precisely what fears these sinewy tripods are intended to represent—or, indeed, whose way of life is being threatened—remains ambiguous, even as it seems clear that Spielberg wants us to think something important about our lives during wartime. For H. G. Wells, however, there was no such ambiguity. An avowed socialist and advocate of ethnic and regional self-determinism, Wells deployed his novel at the twilight of a long and bloody century of British imperial expansion.

Spielberg squandered the promise of his first film that went into production after 9/11. Released in the summer of 2004, The Terminal was the rare Spielberg film that was set in the present—and that disappointed critics and audiences alike. (We would have to wait another summer to get the definitive Spielbergian take on that national trauma, War of the Worlds.) Looking back from our vantage, The Terminal seems an even more remarkable misfire: completely tone-deaf, uncharacteristically ham-handed, a dud amid one of the great runs by any modern American filmmaker.

Its comedic tone may at first seem thin in the wake of A.I. or Minority Report, but, as tensions begin to crack that lively surface, the old saying about “many a true word spoken in jest” comes to mind. Jam-packed with product labels and advertising slogans and clips from TV shows and movies, this is perhaps the Spielberg film most saturated with pop culture, as well as the one that most cannily illustrates the director’s ambivalence towards it.

The overall tightness of Minority Report’s scenario is remarkable, as each further story progression reinforces central questions of man’s place in and potential lack of control over his limited universe; save A.I., Minority Report may well be remembered as Spielberg’s most intellectually probing work. It also may be the film in which he least indulges his worst instincts . . .

Goodbye First Love, the third feature from Cahiers du cinéma critic turned filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love, resembles her last, The Father of My Children, in several key ways. While the two films tell very different stories, both take a look at the fallout from personal catastrophes (in the new movie, the loss by attrition of a first love; in the older one, the death of a father), with a particular interest in these events as formative experiences for young adults. As time passes, via a steady rhythm of daily business (phone calls, appointments, parties, moping around), grief slowly begins to give way, as it never seemed it would, to a tentative levity.

The first decade of the 21st century, even with all the technological changes that have greatly expanded knowledge of our origins and pointed towards our potential futures, holds no monopoly on the great unending debate of what the word “human” means. But this troubled decade may well have produced one of the purest artistic examinations to date of what makes us us. Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence only seemed truly landmark to a few hardy souls back in the naive summer of 2001 (as an aside, if it weren’t for A.I., a true cinematic rallying point for myself, my co-editor, and several other Reverse Shot writers, this journal itself might not exist). Today it seems downright prophetic, but not for the obvious reasons.

In the wake of Ryan, realism ceased to be an aesthetic choice or strategy among countless others that might be employed to cinematically portray war; it became a de facto principle, an attitude taken for granted as the obviously correct one for approaching said material. (It’s interesting that in the Spielberg oeuvre Ryan should be followed by A.I. and its critique of mankind’s desire for perfect technological verisimilitude.)

Post Mortem’s political terror builds slowly: the cause of one victim’s death is determined as having been savagely beaten but cannot be recorded; the chief doctor professes the rise of a “new man” with fascist piety, as Mario’s coworkers eat lunch in grim, catatonic silence. Throughout, Mario seems apathetic to his country’s future. He is a bit of a prig, lecturing his coworker Sandra about the dangers of sleeping with men, and emotionally thwarted, as if his soul were itself a morgue. Larraín clearly intends him to stand in for all those who witness political violence on a daily basis, taking it in as subconsciously as one does air.

The most peculiar contradiction about Spielberg’s film—one of his least financially successful, and least widely admired—is that it’s a talky, often dry, procedural concerned with passionate, visceral subject matter. It stands alone as Spielberg’s only courtroom drama, and as thus is preoccupied with concrete matters that none of his other films are, in terms both historical (that history is a reflection of a given era’s social institutions) and philosophical (that natural law needs to supersede that of the land and government).

Schindler’s introduction is arresting, chic, and even romantic in a way that immediately disrupts and, to some extent, undermines all that comes before, the first sign of another kind of schizophrenia—not the tension between genocide and survival but instead an incongruity between documentary-style realism and noirish melodrama, between historical reenactment and mythmaking. With their low-angle, high-contrast Wellesian cinematography, which so perfectly accentuates Neeson’s towering frame, the sequences of Schindler’s List most focused on Schindler himself are steeped in movieness.

Schindler’s List, as a film, has gotten lost somewhere between the reverence characteristic of its popular reception and the highly charged, theoretically driven criticism it received elsewhere. In the years since its release, it has become increasingly easy to simply talk around it, to hurl vapid superlatives or to use a scene or an aspect of the movie to make a theoretical point, rather than to grapple with the messy whole. I’d like to attempt the opposite approach. Instead I’d like to try, to whatever extent possible, to write about Schindler’s List as a movie.