Did you know that, in the United States, wild horses run free on publicly-owned land in 10 states? These lands are managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), charged by a 1971 Concessional Act signed into law by Nixon to protect the horses and keep them in balance with the overall ecosystem in which they live.
In shooting footage of wild horses for her 2020 Disney+ film Black Beauty, Ashley Avis became familiar with the Onaqui mountain herd outside of Salt Lake City, Utah and was shocked to find that instead of prospering under BLM’s care, the horses were disappearing. According to the filmmaking team, privately-owned cattle and sheep (often owned by rich ranchers and large corporations) are being allowed to graze on the land in large numbers. They are much harder on the ecosystem, but it’s the horses that are scapegoated for the damage done to the land. The horses are rounded up via helicopters owned by private contractors, and herded into holding facilities, then sold at auction, often to slaughterhouses. The film alleges that up to one half of the BLM’s budget is spent on long- and short-term holding facilities, rather than on maintaining the horses on the public land itself.
The BLM often argues that the horses are overpopulated and in poor body condition. The herd sizes must be reduced to avoid future starvation. If this justification is undercut by the robust physical appearance of the horses once penned up, another rationale is adopted, for example, upcoming drought conditions.
Shot on location in various states including Oregon, Wyoming, North Dakota, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah, the film features breathtaking cinematography of the diverse wild landscapes across the American west and the majestic horses that inhabit them. So, of course, it is equally devastating to watch the horses running terrified from whirring helicopter blades, bloodied in cages, and separated from and screaming for their families.
Avis certainly does an effective job of spotlighting the plight of these animals and tugging at our heart strings. Hopefully her storytelling leads to positive change.
When Jaime’s (Anwen O’Driscoll, delivering a memorable performance of youth in crisis) father dies, her unstable mother sends her to stay with family in Quebec. Jaime is left in a strange new place to navigate her grief, sexuality, and attempted indoctrination by Jehova’s Witnesses.
Writer/Director team Sarah Watts and Mark Slutsky construct a taut canvas for their characters’ longing, repression, and resentment to build upon. You Can Live Forever is shot with lingering, even dreamlike takes, in direct opposition to the ever-mounting tension. With a relatively unknown cast and a focus on the interconnected lives of a small community, Watts and Slutsky deliver a sweet and painful coming-of-age tale. The resulting film immediately feels claustrophobic and grounded.
Everything about Jaime’s world shrinks and isolates throughout the film. Several new friends worry that she doesn’t speak French, and will struggle to get along in Quebec. She drops her walkman in a river, losing one of her favorite forms of escapism. Her aunt and uncle, while seemingly understanding that she is not “in the truth,” continually urge her to attend meetings with them at church.
Though the Jehovah’s Witness community is welcoming and warm, there’s a cold truth to their world. Birthdays are not to be celebrated. Appropriate behavior must be supervised. Defectors are not to be acknowledged.
Jaime becomes entranced by another young member of the church, Marike (June Laporte, in a sweet, wide-eyed performance). When Jamie asks what happened to her mom, Marike responds, “She’s not in the truth anymore…we’re supposed to imagine that she’s dead.”
The girls grow close at a lightning pace. Sleepovers with a misplaced hand or arm rapidly blossom into stolen kisses in dark alleyways. Jaime teeters between two selves. She smokes cigarettes and plays video games with Nathan (Hasani Freeman, charming) and she pretends to proselytize so she can spend more time with Marike.
Marike knows that Jamie doesn’t believe, but she doesn’t lose her faith as she discovers her own sexuality. “I can believe enough for the both of us,” pleads Marike. Jamie is challenged to choose between a delayed love that may never come (in an uncertain afterlife) and happiness in her life now.
When all the growing tension comes to a head, the religious community does what they do best: deny, divert, and convert. None of the tension is truly relieved, and everyone is left to continue grinding their teeth until they die.
That lingering tension and guilt stays with you, just like societal shame, religious trauma, and all the other oppressive forces in our lives. And the lack of resolution, the lingering touches and sidelong glances, are what keep You Can Live Forever on the mind once the screen fades to black.
Zoe (Lily James) is having trouble pitching her next documentary. The execs want something upbeat, so she spitballs about her childhood friend, Kazim (Shazad Latif), who’s decided to let his Pakistani parents arrange a marriage for him. Why doesn’t Zoe follow him through all the steps of marrying a stranger?
What will they call this documentary? Meet the Parents…First? My Big Fat Arranged Wedding?
They go with: Love, Contractually.
That’s actually a great nod, since Emma Thompson is in this movie. (And aside from the ’93 Tina Turner biopic, there is also a 2013 documentary called What’s Love Got to Do with It by Rohena Gera that follows eight people in India who’ve decided on arranged marriage. From what I can tell, this movie has no direct relation to that except that everyone is having trouble coming up with an original title.)
Thompson, by the way, is a hoot as Zoe’s mum because she’s a remarkable performer who elevates everything she’s in.
What’s Love… treads similar themes as Michael Showalter’s 2017 The Big Sick. It does not live up to that comparison, but what could? That film was brilliant, touching, authentic and hilarious. This one is safe.
Both films expose the conflict between falling in love and living up to a family’s expectations. WLGTDWI goes one step further by also watching Zoe’s struggle over whether to settle or live up to her own expectations of love.
Kazim’s choice stems from the fact that he’s not sure he even believes in love, or in “in love”, and he’s weary from trying. Meanwhile, Zoe sees herself as a fairy tale princess who can’t find the kind of love she feels she’s been promised. So, she repeatedly makes terrible, often drunken decisions that she immediately regrets in her search for her handsome prince.
There’s also a very big question about what to do with well-meaning but overbearing parents who continue to pressure you well into your thirties. And that’s a lot for one movie to cover. Director Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth, Elizabeth: The Golden Age) keeps it warm – there really are no villains here – while Jemima Khan’s script offers messy, human characters you can identify with.
The point is, marry your best friend. Which is good advice, and Latif and James have a wonderful, lived-in friendship, but no real chemistry. The film does what it can to resolve the issues it raises, but that last gasp “will they or won’t they” felt more like “do I really want them to?”
It feels indecent to call this euthanasia-based film from Francois Ozon “laid back.” But Everything Went Fine pulls off an exceptional character study with cool restraint, grounded performances and an unexpected well of humanity.
With a screenplay by Ozon based on a memoir by frequent collaborator Emmanuèle Bernheim, this dramatized version centers around the loving but complicated relationship between Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) and her father, André (André Dussollier, playing a difficult role with grace—and without sentimentality).
As the favored daughter, Emmanuèle bears the full emotional weight of her father’s request to end his life after a debilitating stroke at age 85. Assisted suicide is not an option for them in France, but the family has the means to maneuver through the quasi-legal (and not inexpensive) hoops for André to travel to a foundation in Switzerland that assists in the process.
The film counts down André’s final months with the matter-of-fact detailing of a documentary. The Bernheim sisters ride waves of false hope alongside “last milestones” together as André’s progress in physical therapy does not diminish his desire to leave the world on his terms.
Ozon presents the fullness of André’s life with a light touch—a mix of pregnant flashbacks, current regrets and the odd row with past lovers. André’s love for his daughters shines through it all, which is shadowed by a masterful cameo from Charlotte Rampling as André’s deeply depressed wife. Brief and reserved as her time is onscreen, Rampling’s detached presence breathes life into the couple’s challenging lifelong relationship.
The film mostly concerns itself with philosophical end-of-life questions. A sudden moment of legal suspense arises toward the end of André’s countdown, but Ozon clearly favors interpersonal drama over legal minutiae. Who are lawyers or the French courts to say what life means, anyway? That’s for the artists to decide. A noble sentiment from the filmmaker, if one that has the effect of blunting the controversial subject. There’s surprisingly little bite here for such a provocative topic from a filmmaker who doesn’t shy away from taboo.
But even that works in the movie’s favor. The family’s various responses to death at first feel soulless, even for a group of wealthy, ultra-cool Parisians. But Ozon allows longstanding tensions to simmer slowly alongside familial bonds. And even if the pot never boils over, this more detached approach ends up being all the more cathartic in the end.
In Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N, Transylvania is a tense place. The landscape is bleak. The light is weak and casts blue shadows over the snow-covered ground. The people are lean and tense. But it’s not vampires that have them concerned.
It’s the European Union.
Many of the locals are working at exploitative jobs abroad while the businesses at home are struggling to find workers who are willing to labor for minimum wage. The EU will provide assistance, but only for certain projects. Parks can get funding, but forget money to update the sewer system. And they are willing to help local businesses who hire workers from countries out East, but only if the businesses can fill out the right forms.
When the local bakery hires three Sri Lankan immigrants after weeks of unanswered advertising for local workers, the town’s quiet desperation flares into xenophobia. Ethnic tensions going back generations erupt back to the surface.
Mungiu’s film allows the drama to unfold slowly. There is a wide cast of characters whose agendas and relationships overlap and clash in interesting ways. The most arresting scene, by far, is a long one, done in one shot, of a community meeting to discuss whether the town will vote to kick out the Sri Lankans. It’s ugly and full of recognizable hypocrisy.
Melodrama is somehow, miraculously, avoided despite topics including selective mutism caused by childhood trauma, tumors, suicide, ethnic cleansing, racism, the legacies of the Cold War, and toxic masculinity. But this comes at the risk of it being almost too cold and underwritten.
The two main characters are Mattias (Marin Grigore) and Csilla (Judith State). He’s a menacing former meat packer who has come back to town after assaulting his boss in Germany and is on a mission to toughen up his young son. She’s in management at the bakery, a classical musician, and a mother figure to the Sri Lankans. That the two have some sort of romantic relationship is a source of confusion that writer/director Mungiu doesn’t seem particularly interested in explaining.
The ending, similarly, isn’t especially enlightening. But, I suppose, dealing with the complex impacts of an emerging global economy on a struggling rural town, a straightforward ending might have been an odd choice, too.
With The Innocent (L’innocent), director/co-writer/co-star Louis Garrel takes Shakespeare’s declaration that “all the world’s a stage” to some clever and literal ends.
Or, he mines madcap laughs from a man trying to catch his mother’s new husband in a lie.
Or, he builds tension from a “sure thing” heist sure to go wrong.
Or maybe he’s just trying to comment on the needless games we sometimes play for love.
Really, the film’s biggest hurdle is keeping the whiplash at bay as it juggles all of these tones for just over 90 minutes. And for the most part its balancing act is successful, crafting a breezy and amusing take at all the untrue stories we tell.
Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg) teaches drama to prison inmates (as Garrel’s own mother did for many years), and falls in love with the incarcerated Michel (Roschdy Zem). They marry, which doesn’t thrill Sylvie’s adult son Abel (Garrel, who you may remember as Theo from The Dreamers), and once Michel is released, Abel sets out to prove to his mother that Michel is still up to no good.
Meanwhile, Abel and Clémence (Noémie Merlant, so good in Tár and Portrait of a Lady on Fire) stand delicately on the last rung of the friend zone, each seemingly waiting for the other to jump off.
Garrel blurs the line between acting and lying (to others and ourselves) with a slyly comical hand, amid pauses to remind us how crucial sincerity is to successful relationships.
Okay, that’s enough, now back to this zany caviar robbery!
American audiences may find The Innocent to be more of an acquired taste than those in Garrel’s native France, but anyone who dives in shouldn’t bail too quickly. Give this splendid cast time to pull all the threads together, and they’ll build a stage big enough for comedy, drama, romance and heart.
Even if James Gunn had forgotten that his Guardians of the Galaxy formula was plenty familiar, the way Dungeons and Dragons just repackaged it would serve as a winning reminder.
So for the finale of the Guardians trilogy, writer/director Gunn smartly adds some unexpected layers to the good-natured humor and superhero action.
How unexpected? Well, if you had existential tumult and Return of the Jedi homages on your bingo card, congratulations to you. But if you figured Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) as the catalyst, think again.
Gunn wants us to know that this whole story has been Rocket’s all along.
Peter is indeed still hurting from losing Gamora (Zoe Saldana) to memory loss, but it’s a threat to the life of Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper) that gets him back with Drax (Dave Bautista), Nebula (Karen Gillan), Groot (voice of Vin Diesel) and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) – with yes, help from Gamora – for one last ride.
The mission? Stop the “High Evolutionary” (Chukwudi Iwuji) on his quest to program evolution until perfection is achieved. The themes are heady, with both echoes of the past and callouts to the current “burn it all down” crowd, but Gunn still finds plenty of room for goofy laughs, warm camaraderie, and real heart.
Plus, mean Gamora is so much more fun than righteous Gamora. Drax and Mantis continue to be a joyous mismatch of besties and Gillen’s deadpan delivery is maybe more funny in this episode than any other.
Gunn’s MCU sendoff retains his trademark mischievous humor and fondness for raucous violence. The action sequences here match anything Gunn has done previously, while Rocket’s origin story packs Volume 3 with an unexpected emotional wallop.
When Gunn joined the MCU for 2014’s first GoG episode, he made his silly mastery of the blockbuster known. With ruffian charm, Rocket and the gang deliver deeper, more believably touching chemistry now than they did then. Volume 3 is a fitting, emotional, madcap swan song.
Ghosts! Maybe the first ever scary idea in all of history, the first thing to haunt our dreams. To give us the word haunt. Ghosts have been a staple of horror for as long as there was such a thing, so it was with great difficulty that we narrowed down our five favorite ghosts in horror movies.
We welcome director George Popov back to the podcast to run down the whole list. Keep up to date on his Sideworld documentary series and grab the cool merch we talk about by visiting sideworld.co.uk and following them on Twitter @Sideworld._UK, Facebook @SideworldUK and Instagram @sideworld_uk.
5. Santi in Devil’s Backbone (2001)
The Devil’s Backbone unravels a spectral mystery during Spain’s civil war. The son of a fallen comrade finds himself in an isolated orphanage that has its own troubles to deal with, now that the war is coming to a close and the facility’s staff sympathized with the wrong side. That leaves few resources to help him with a bully, a sadistic handyman, or the ghost of a little boy he keeps seeing.
Backbone is a slow burn as interested in atmosphere and character development as it is in the tragedy of a generation of war orphans. This is ripe ground for a haunted tale, and writer/director Guillermo del Toro’s achievement is both contextually beautiful – war, ghost stories, religion and communism being equally incomprehensible to a pack of lonely boys – and elegantly filmed.
Plus the ghost looks awesome. Del Toro would go on to create some of cinema’s more memorable creatures, and much of that genius was predicted in the singular image of a drowned boy, bloody water droplets floating about him, his insides as vivid as his out.
Touching, political, brutal, savvy, and deeply spooky, Backbone separates del Toro from the pack of horror filmmakers and predicts his own potential as a director of substance.
4. Jennett Humfrye in The Woman in Black (2012)
Director James Watkins was fresh off his underseen, wickedly frightening Eden Lake. Screenwriter Jane Goldman (working from Susan Hill’s novel) had recently written the films Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class, both of which are awesome. And star Daniel Radcliffe had done something or other that people remembered…
I’d have been worried that Radcliffe chose another supernatural adventure as his first big, post-Hogwarts adventure were it not for the filmmaking team putting the flick together. Goldman’s witty intelligence and Watkins’s sense of what scares us coalesce beautifully in this eerie little nightmare.
A remake of a beloved if rarely shown BBC film, the big screen version is a spooky blast of a ghost story. It makes savvy use of old haunted house tropes, updating them quite successfully, and its patient pace and slow reveal leads to more of a wallop than you usually find in such a gothic tale. Glimpses, movements, shadows—all are filmed to keep your eyes darting around the screen, your neck craned for a better look. It’s classic haunted house direction and misdirection laced with more modern scares.
3. Toshio in Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)
Yuya Ozeki was 5 years old when his melancholy, cherubic little face first appeared in Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge. He’d reprise his role as Toshio in Shimizu’s Japanese sequel as well as his English language remake of the original.
Ozeki’s presence onscreen is the perfect combination of adorable and terrifying. He sticks around this one hours, makes a mess, runs his little feet all over the place, sometimes meows.
The real gut punch of The Grudge series is that the ghosts are inescapable. You are doomed from the moment you set foot in Toshio and Kakayo’s home. It’s a way that the film perverts expectations of the gothic tale, and that corruption of something elegant is no more perfectly encapsulated than in the guide of little Toshio.
2. The Staff in The Others (2001)
Writer/director Alejandro Amenábar casts a spell that recalls The Innocents in his 2001 ghost story The Others. It’s 1945 on a small isle off Britain, and the brittle mistress of the house (Nicole Kidman) wakes screaming. She has reason to be weary. Her husband has still not returned from the war, her servants have up and vanished, and her two children, Anna and Nicholas, have a deathly photosensitivity: sunlight or bright light could kill them.
The new staff – Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), Mr. Tuttle (Eric Sykes) and Lydia (Elaine Cassidy) – is here to help. Amenábar uses these three beautiful performances as a way to talk to Kidman’s harried mum as well as the audience. Flanagan, in particular, is brilliant.
What unspools is a beautifully constructed film using slow reveal techniques to upend traditional ghost story tropes, unveiling the mystery in a unique and moving way.
1. Delbert Grady in The Shining (1980)
Have we talked about this movie before? As is true with The Others, The Shining offers a smorgasbord of ghosts to choose from: Lloyd the bartender, the little Grady sisters, the old lady in the bathtub, the guy in the bear suit. But we settled on Grady because he may come across like the help, but don’t let that fool you. Grady’s the one in charge.
In one of the greatest single scenes in a horror film – and one that contains no murder at all – Delbert quietly clarifies the power structure at work for Mr. Torrence.
Stanley Kubrick’s camera is, per usual, meticulous in creating an atmosphere that mirrors this shift in power. Jack Nicholson’s transformation from smug to obedient is glorious. But it’s longtime character actor Philip Stone who nails the terrifying nuance that amounts to the most pivotal moment in Kubrick’s masterpiece.
