Tag Archives: Matt Weiner

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See What Happens When You Find a Stranger in the Alps

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Vermiglio

by Matt Weiner

Way up north in the Italian town of Vermiglio, everything feels more remote. As World War II lurches toward its end in Europe, the fighting is far away but the trauma of war haunts the town and its men of fighting age. But it’s the women who face the more implacable enemy, as a region—and an entire country—finds their traditional (and deeply patriarchal) ways of life coming into conflict with a modernity struggling to be born.

In Vermiglio, the new feature from writer-director Maura Delpero and Italy’s entry for this year’s Academy Awards, the lives of three women are forever changed when the town shelters Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a deserter from Sicily.

The women are three of many children from local schoolteacher Cesare (Tommaso Ragno) and his wife Adele (Roberta Rovelli), who spends most of the movie either pregnant or newly with child. Adele’s life of tradition and respectability—and suffering—foretells what Cesare’s daughters might hope to get out of life. Or would have, had it not been for the destructive chaos of the war.

Lucia (Martina Scrinzi) is the oldest and expected to land a fine husband. Flavia (Anna Thaler), the youngest, is also a keen student, and so Cesare selects her as the only one he can afford to send away to boarding school. Then there is Ada (Rachele Potrich), wayward middle child among the tight-knit trio.

Delpero eases us into the languorous seasons of Vermiglio, both metaphorically and literally, with Cesare’s precious Vivaldi record of the Four Seasons as a constant companion on the soundtrack. So soothing are these lush mountain vistas, untouched by a war coming to a close anyway, that it’s a remarkable sleight of hand from Delpero when these rhythms fall apart and the women are left to pick up the pieces and create what lives they can when their options are so limited.

Whether it’s the scandal that erupts from Lucia’s entanglement with Pietro, the unfulfilled longing that Ada must confront, or Flavia’s budding sense that even her “advancement” is decided at the whims of their imperious father, Vermiglio is less about the consequences of actions and more about an uncanny (and very much contemporary) feeling of not even being in control to make those choices in the first place.

But along with the oppressiveness, Delpero offers a sense of something that, if not hope, is at least a reminder that the seasons do change. Her daring women can’t escape when they were born, but their fates aren’t fixed either.

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Have the Moths Stopped Flapping?

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Nocturnes

by Matt Weiner

You’ll never look at a moth the same way again after seeing them up close—very close—in Nocturnes. The new documentary film from Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan is an intimate look at the hawk moth population in the dense forests of the Eastern Himalayas.

But this isn’t a traditional nature documentary. Night after night, the filmmakers slowly reveal the work of the scientists as they study the moths, with a slice of life in the laboratory here and there. Mostly, though, there is only a well-lit screen in the middle of a dark forest, with only a scientist or two and a few local guides to assist with the meticulous photography.

Nocturnes is the kind of film that’s impossible to not use the word “meditative,” but that also doesn’t fully do justice to Dutta and Srinivasan’s subject. It is meditative, sure, but also hypnotic—and never dull.

And like other philosophical nature documentaries (with Koyaanisqatsi feeling like its biggest spiritual predecessor), Nocturnes is as much interested in humanity’s relationship to the natural world as it is to the moths themselves.

Climate change might seem far away from the verdant forests, but its presence and our human effects on a delicate ecosystem hover over the research. Nocturnes looks beautiful and sounds even better.

And yet the nonstop insect and animal noises from the forest (a soundtrack that pairs well with a restrained score by Nainita Desai) is nothing compared to its clarion call for humans to reflect on our place in the environment. And how even the smallest creatures can become a subject of endless fascination and study with the right perspective.

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Good Evening

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My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock

by Matt Weiner

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock isn’t the first Alfred Hitchcock documentary in the last decade. It’s not even the second prominent one. But this unique take on the director’s entire filmography sets out to show why these movies have not only endured, but continue to speak to audiences—and some of our seamiest impulses.

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock is a welcome companion piece to the other recent documentaries, falling somewhere between the broad interrogation of 2015’s Hitchcock/Truffaut and the technical hyper-focus of 2017’s 78/52. Writer and director Mark Cousins uses Hitchcock’s “voice” and—more importantly—almost exclusively clips from his films to take a fresh look at the legend.

Thankfully for anyone tackling a feature-length video essay, you’re at a huge advantage when the subject is Alfred Hitchcock. Cousins breaks the documentary up into six key themes, some expected (height, escape) but others taking a surprising metaphysical turn.

It’s hard not to want to dive into a full Hitchcock movie after watching the clips. Especially notable is the amount of time that Cousins devotes to the less usual suspects. There are the silent films and early movies pre-Hollywood, but also plenty of love for techniques in his late films that show him fully in command of his craft.

Even the classics that have been analyzed to death show off new themes. If you want more on the shower, well… there’s an entire movie for that. It was novel to sit with some of the other parts of movies like Psycho or North by Northwest without getting caught up on “that scene.”

The documentary’s strict adherence to showing us “what’s on the page” has some limits, though. Hitchcock’s wife, Alma, gets a section of the movie. But it doesn’t do justice to her role, not just as beloved muse, but extremely influential collaborator. 

And then there’s the voice. Hitchcock gets a writing and voice credit at the start of the film, and it isn’t a spoiler to point out that Alfred Hitchcock is not writing new scripts in this century. The voice belongs to English impressionist Alistair McGowan, who does a solid job sounding equally plummy and put-upon.

But it’s an affectation that wears across the two-hour runtime, especially when it shouldn’t be a surprise reveal to tell the audience that this was just part of the artifice of film. Cousins’ script, plus the exceptionally deep range of highlights, stand on their own without the gimmick. The shots speak for themselves to reveal even more than the voice of the director himself ever could, if you buy into the psychology behind the movies. And Cousins makes a decent case that you should.

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Brighton Beach Memoir

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Anora

by Matt Weiner

Sean Baker doesn’t shy away from seamy subcultures, and the worthiness of people trying to get by outside of conformity. Yet it hasn’t been until his Palme d’Or winner Anora that he has found one group without any redeeming qualities. This shocking and depraved group of people is, in this case, the jet-setting global elite.

Anora “Ani” Mikheeva (Mikey Madison) is no stranger to high rollers at her luxe Manhattan strip club. But there’s wealthy, and then there’s wealthy. When a party of Russians ask for a dancer who speaks their language, Ani becomes an object of desire to Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn, pitch perfect as a manic boychild whose naivete can turn on a dime from charming to something nearing sociopathic disinterest).

Vanya has taken up residence in his Russian oligarch parents’ Brighton Beach mansion. He is in America to study, but spends his days playing video games and his nights partying into oblivion—anything to avoid being sent back to Russia to join the family business. His relationship with Ani quickly escalates, from sex work outside the club to becoming an exclusive escort to an impromptu Vegas marriage.

This being a Baker fairytale, Ani’s whirlwind rags-to-riches marriage is only the beginning of her Cinderella story. What follows is a comically grotesque odyssey through the Russian-dominant Brighton Beach, as Vanya eludes his new bride and a superb supporting cast of family fixers and toughs sent to get the marriage annulled before more shame is brought on the Zakharov family.

With the callow Vanya on the run, Baker instead focuses on the chaos and damage (both physical and emotional) left in his wake. And while this is a deserved star turn for Madison, who is electric and enthralling, she is just one of the victims of Vanya’s selfishness.

She joins—or rather is dragooned into—the evening’s hunt for Vanya by a trio of Russian and Armenian strongmen, led by the beleaguered Orthodox priest Toros (Karren Karagulian, a Baker mainstay in his best role yet).

For much of their night together, Baker pulls off a risky balance between outright comedy and what is, essentially, the kidnapping of a sex worker by three large, powerfully connected men. None of this would work without Baker’s characteristic empathy for everyone. And it certainly wouldn’t feel so easy-going were it not for the relationship between Ani and the silent strongman Igor, played by Yura Borisov with a standout turn that nearly rivals Madison’s.

Baker’s most memorable characters are often wrestling with the American dream, and Baker himself seems like a Rorschach test for your own baggage: both pointed critic and secret optimist. Even at his most hopeful, though, there’s always a catch. Save the very few who can buy their way to hedonic bliss, carving your own real-life fairytale ending won’t look like it does in a Disney movie.

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The Cook, the Nurse, the Musician & Her Daughter

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Allswell in New York

by Matt Weiner

A standout cast with grounded performances alongside a soufflé of light but surmountable tension—all the ingredients are there for a breezy, comforting hit.

And Allswell in New York has its moments. The film shines as an ensemble piece with its three leads: sisters Ida (a sparkling and newly Emmy-winning Liza Colón-Zayas) and Daisy (Elizabeth Rodriguez, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Ben Snyder), and their sister-in-law Serene (Daphne Rubin-Vega).

Allswell follows the three Nuyorican women and the ups and downs of midlife in New York. Daisy is welcoming a surrogate into her life, a young woman throwing out so many red flags that it feels almost offensive to Daisy’s intelligence when she is shocked by an inevitable twist.

Serene’s daughter Constance (Shyrley Rodriguez) is worrying her mother sick with a shady “modeling” career. And nurse Ida has trouble at work trying to help her good friend and coworker stay out of trouble for stealing rapid STD tests to help the poor. (This sets up a recurring theme where Ida’s main conflict is that she is just too much of a saint. It’s a thankless role compared to what the other women go through, but then that’s why you get Colón-Zayas to make it exciting and give the character more depth than her struggle suggests.)

When Serene’s long-absent husband, Desmond (Felix Solis)—and Ida and and Daisy’s brother—shows up at Ida’s clinic looking deeply unwell, the family’s tensions and long-simmering grudges come to a head.

If it all sounds soapy, much of it is. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except it ends up being at odds with both the affecting naturalistic turns from the leading women and, perhaps even more intractable, a tight runtime that leaves no room to explore the less stock sides of these women.

One striking example is the titular Allswell, a restaurant co-owned by Daisy that serves as a central meeting place. There’s an entire subplot with a barely used Bobby Cannavale that could’ve been its own movie. But the same goes for most of whatever glimpses we get of the peripheries of these women’s lives.

Rodriguez, Colón-Zayas and Rubin-Vega all invest so much in these women, and it’s a credit to their performances that we can fill in so much of their lives when the story itself doesn’t seem to want to spend any more time with them than is necessary for exposition. It’s not that the time spent at Allswell is unpleasant. But it does leave you wishing you could’ve ordered just a little bit more.

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Lost in Elevation

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Peak Season

by Matt Weiner

With the passing of M. Emmet Walsh this year, it might be time to update Roger Ebert’s (Harry Dean) Stanton-Walsh Rule—that no movie featuring either actor can be altogether bad—to include a living guidepost. And there are few more apt candidates than Fred Melamed.

Thankfully, Peak Season, which features a brief but memorable turn from the veteran character actor, is much better than “not altogether bad.” The second feature from directors Steven Kanter and Henry Loevner takes a familiar romantic premise to welcome new heights.

Amy (Claudia Restrepo) is a fish out of water in more ways than one as she enjoys a brief vacation away from New York to spend the 4th of July holiday at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She is staying with her well-to-do fiancé Max (Ben Coleman) at his uncle’s opulent vacation home. But after a family friend (Melamed) gets the couple fishing lessons as a welcome gift, she finds herself more in sync with the vibes of Loren (Derrick DeBlasis), a fly fishing guide, restaurant dishwasher, part-time landscaper, and whatever else pays the bills so he can fish and hike the Tetons.

When Max has to return to the city for a work crisis, Amy seeks out Loren as a stark contrast to the Silicon Valley-types Max left her with. His life trajectory is the total opposite of Amy’s—her career as a well-paid but burnt out management consultant pleases her immigrant mother, but she lights up at Loren’s unburdened joy. Or at least the appearance of ease, as we learn there are some downsides to living out of a Jeep without health insurance while pursuing vigorous physical activities.

Max bounces in and out of town, oblivious to Amy’s gnawing uncertainties and focused more on work and video calls than Amy’s casual mentions that she’s been spending a good deal of time with a ruggedly handsome stranger.

Amy’s soul-searching is comfortable territory for romantic dramedy, but Peak Season has two major advantages. First, there’s Grand Teton and the Wyoming scenery. It’s easy to see how the town became one big dude ranch to the wealthy, which Peak Season hammers home to great effect with numerous hard cuts between the struggling local workforce like Loren and the urban cowboys who rely on them as set dressing to live out their own fantasies of a life that could’ve gone differently, if only.

Second, there’s the fully earned chemistry between Amy and Loren. Even as the story relies on some emotional shortcuts to save time on character development, the two are fully realized by Restrepo and DeBlasis.

For those who wrap up every vacation in a new place with a score of Zillow links for unaffordable homes in unaffordable neighborhoods, there’s a wistful comfort to be found in Peak Season. But when you ask yourself “How did I get here,” just know that you might not like the answer.

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Madame Robinson

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Last Summer

by Matt Weiner

The word “provocative” gets thrown around a lot in art, but French director Catherine Breillat has at least earned it over her storied career.

Last Summer, Breillat’s first film since 2013’s Abuse of Weakness, lives up to the label with an age-gap stepmother/stepson romance that dispenses with titillation to become a sharp, complicated and morally fluid examination of its leading lovers.

Anne (Léa Drucker, without whom none of this would work) is a successful middle-aged lawyer with a comfortable bourgeois life—business owner husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), two adorable young children who enjoy their horseback riding and trips to the cabin—just the sort of luxurious ennui that’s ripe to be upended.

And upended it is, when Pierre’s wayward son from a first wife comes to stay with the family after troubles at his boarding school. Théo (Samuel Kircher) is a stranger to his father almost as much as he is to Anne, but it falls to her to integrate the rebellious 17-year-old into the family.

Casual secrets and moments of raw openness between Anne and Théo quickly progress from emotional intimacy to a passionate affair. It’s a salacious premise, and the adaptation, written in collaboration with Pascal Bonitzer, is a natural fit for Breillat’s boundary-pushing explorations of sexuality.

Breillat’s rewrite of the Danish original takes almost sadistic pleasure in the unresolved ambiguity and hypocrisy on display from Anne. Drucker gives a performance that credibly swings from feminist advocate to abuser to… well, something Breillat leaves up to the audience to decide.

Last Summer is also a far more artful way of grappling with complex subjects like abuse and agency than Breillat’s blunt interviews on Harvey Weinstein in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

Anne is a compelling subject, and Last Summer refuses to condemn her as a one-note monster. In many ways, she is all the more fascinating for the way she seems unable to come to terms with her own deeply flawed behavior and actions toward Théo.

It can be an intense artistic exercise to bear the full force of Breillat’s provocations with none of the pitch-black humor of the similarly confrontational May December. There’s no clear-cut legal satisfaction here, by design. Breillat’s unsettling study of Anne and her motivations is ultimately an artistic one—and all the wallowing in moral uncertainty that goes along with that.

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In Nightmares

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The Blue Rose

by Matt Weiner

There’s a deep-rooted, surreal evil lurking at the heart of the idealized, candy-colored world of Blue Velvet that traps all its characters in a web of… no, wait, this is The Blue Rose.

Writer and director George Baron’s first feature film is either a love letter to David Lynch or a pale imitation that draws heavily—heavily—on that director’s themes, mood, tone, plots, imagery and characters. Your mileage may vary depending on your affection for the original source material.

Young LAPD detectives Dalton (Baron) and Lilly (Olivia Scott Welch) take on a gruesome, high-profile murder case set in a dreamy 1950s version of Los Angeles. Like anyone in Hollywood, the two are looking for their big break, one much needed after botching their last case.

This one should be a straightforward whodunnit: painter Sophie Steele (Nikko Austen Smith) has more than enough means and motive in the death of her abusive husband. As the detectives chase down leads and interview less than forthcoming persons of interest, the lines between potential witness and suspect start to blur.

And all of that’s before the pair gets thrown into a Lynchian nightmare of an alternate reality, masterminded by a femme fatale overseeing a vast conspiracy. While this nightmare world often fails to rise above echoes of Lynch, the production design is immaculate for such an ambitious setting. It also goes a long way—along with a number of wonderful off-kilter performances—toward giving the nightmare sequences some actual teeth. (In particular, Viola Odette Harlow channels her best Isabella Rossellini as the nightclub ingenue Catherine.)

Often, though, Baron’s dream world swaps out soul-shaking Lynchian horror for jump scares. The effects are creepy but fleeting, and emblematic of the bigger problems with the story. The Blue Rose might be a fun diversion for diehard Lynch fans. But it also serves as a helpful comparison for those usually put off by the director, to see what a skin-deep send-up looks like without the cosmically unnerving core of the original.

It’s not the worst outing for a feature debut, but Baron should go beyond the sum of his influences if he hopes to equal them in profundity.

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Love Will Tear Us Apart

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Banal & Adama

by Matt Weiner

A tale of star-crossed lovers gets a welcome refresh that’s equal parts tragic and enigmatic in Banel & Adama, the feature debut from Senegalese writer and director Ramata-Toulaye Sy.

Khady Mane anchors the film as Banel, a fiercely independent woman who wants to chart her own destiny in life rather than adhere to the traditions of her rural village. Building a new home together rather than staying in the village is seen as odd enough, but her strangeness goes too far when she persuades Adama (Mamadou Diallo) to give up his bloodline claim to village chief.

What the elders see as a spiritual sickness becomes manifest when a drought falls over the remote village. Sy’s arresting use of brightness and color gives way to a desiccated village. The growing unease and desperation are palpable, and made all the more visceral as the starving cattle succumb to the oppressive weather. And all of that before death comes for the villagers.

These languid middle sequences in the village are some of the most powerful shots in the movie. Sy’s treatment of Banel and Adama is part Shakespeare, but there’s a healthy dose of Melville too. What starts out in happier times as a romantic refrain—Banel whispering their two names over and over—turns into an obsessive mania. Banel drops hints that her union with Adama might be fate… but it also might have been caused by more direct and nefarious human intervention.

Sy’s script, along with Mane’s performance, adds a welcome layer of complexity to the otherwise slight story. Banel can be frustrating, but also sympathetic and enchanting. (Adama never stood a chance.)

The film’s allegorical explorations of fate and destiny become more deeply felt as the village suffers. For Banel, too, it becomes unclear if her true love is Adama, or the idea of a different life.

Sy doesn’t offer clear answers. Only stellar performances that welcome the inscrutable, even haunting contradictions of love and life.

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Eastern European Capitalist Blues

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Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

by Matt Weiner

An overworked production assistant driving all over Bucharest to collect footage for a workplace safety video doesn’t sound like the most likely candidate for an era-defining film that best captures the current political and social moment.

Yet with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, writer and director Radu Jude has made an unsparing, pitch-black comedy with a sprawling but never dull nearly 3-hour runtime that attempts to distill the last decade-plus of precarity and decline felt by so many workers. What’s miraculous is how well Jude succeeds, without ever becoming cloying or didactic.

Angela (Ilinca Manolache) is a contract worker for a Romanian film production company. A multinational company has commissioned a safety video that sends Angela around the city to interview severely injured workers that will be vetted for the final video.

Angela, an overworked gig worker herself who is so exhausted she can’t stop falling asleep at the wheel, shows sympathy for the workers and their families as she draws out their stories for the camera. This stands out in stark contrast to how the Austrian bosses parachute into Bucharest and talk about the poorer Romanians that bring the company its massive profits.

Nina Hoss in particular stands out as a perfectly icy marketing executive whose feigned empathy masks a barely submerged contempt for the lower-class Romanian employees. (The company itself is kept vague, but Jude gets in plenty of digs about a deforestation scandal involving furniture, which narrows it down considerably.)

Angela’s diatribes take on everything from class politics to foul-mouthed influencers like Andrew Tate, with these being delivered by her filthy alter ego Bobita. Manolache created the character during COVID lockdowns, and Jude brings them to hyperreal life in one of the film’s few recurring segments shot in color.

Jude’s story is unabashedly political, and ruthless in its portrayal of the inhumanity of neoliberal austerity. But the script, propelled by Manolache’s indefatigable portrayal of Angela, is also laugh out loud funny. The capital class can take a lot from its workers, but not their profanity.

Or, as the film shifts into the making of the final safety video, their humanity. When the company selects the injured worker they want to star in the safety video, the film crew gets to work recording his story. This sequence makes up nearly the final half hour of the film, and Jude’s staging and camera choices turn a routine film within a film into an audacious set piece with an unforgettable gut punch.

Whether or not another world is possible seems to lie just outside the bounds of Angela’s day-to-day living. But Jude makes the case that one is urgently necessary, even as we laugh in the face of everything speeding up our destruction in the meantime.