A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) | Directed by Bill Melendez

 3.5/5

Bill Melendez’s A Charlie Brown Christmas is one of those holiday classics that has held up for over fifty years. There’s something so incredibly sad, and incredibly relevant, about this film and the way Charlie Brown keeps trying to find some kind of meaning in the holiday season, but keeps running into selfishness, pettiness, and thoughtlessness. The fact that even in the ‘60s, Christmas has become this garish mess of plastic, pink trees and entitled children demanding presents they believe they deserve makes you reflect on how supercharged the holiday has become due to the way we have let capitalism run amuck across our country. It’s enough to make anyone feel like Charlie Brown. The animation style is still charming and simple, the vocal performances incredibly compelling. It still remains one of the great classics of the Christmas season.

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Bacurau (2019) | Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles

 5/5

Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau is a glorious film that walks a delicate tightrope between high-minded, art-house, political treatise on the corrosive effects of capitalism and colonialism on the one hand, and deliriously pulpy, blood-soaked thriller borrowing elements from science fiction and horror on the other. The fact that this mash-up of tones and styles all works – and that each disparate piece serves to compliment the other – is something of a miracle. Filho and Dornelles’s use of wipes, crossfades, and slow dissolves harken back to the socially-conscious, near-future sci-fi films of the ‘70s – placing this film in direct conversation with many of the eco-minded, nuclear dystopias of yesteryear. The use of music inspired by (and even one track composed by) John Carpenter links the film to ‘70s horror, but Filho and Dornelles take all of these influences to make BACURAU their own sublime work of art. They take all of these pulpy elements to explore the ways in which western colonial powers attempt to erase Indigenous cultures and communities in order to get what they want from them. And yet, Filho and Dornelles haven’t made a two hour film where we watch a poor community suffer. Instead, it’s a stirring portrait of what it means to come together and unite for the common good. It’s an incredible film – vibrant, funny, violent, and one that has a whole lot on its mind.

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Sing Me a Song (2019) | Directed by Thomas Balmès

 2.5/5

Thomas Balmès’s Sing Me a Song has so many compelling elements in this documentary about the ways that technology and the internet has reshaped society, but he is never able to weave all of the film’s disparate threads into something as meaningful or profound as he seems to think it all is. There are some incredible moments of discovery and spontaneity as we observe young monks in a monastery in Bhutan – one of the last places in the world to receive the internet. There are so many compelling images throughout the film – faces of the young monks illuminated solely by the light of cell phones, a panning shot of the same young monks with pellet guns they’ve just purchased as the prepare to play war in violation of every Buddhist principle they’ve been taught, the monks saying their prayers as they play video games or watch YouTube videos on their phones… But there are also moments throughout that feel staged for the cameras and manipulated for the sake of narrative or visual aesthetics, lessening the film’s impact and making it feel less genuine and authentic. The film begins to touch on the urban and rural divide in Bhutan and the way that these young monks are unprepared for the fact that the people they meet online may not be completely honest about who they are in real life. However, there are issues of poverty, power, and privilege that are integral to these issues, but Balmès is unwilling to address them. Instead, he takes a detour into a much less interesting second half, following a mopey teenage boy pining over a girl, broken-hearted and disillusioned. There were so many other, more interesting threads of this narrative to follow, and there is so much that Balmès is consciously leaving out, that the film ends up feeling heavy-handed and overly manipulative in its message about “returning to innocence.”

Nimic (2019) | Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

 5/5

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Nimic is a deliciously sinister and utterly captivating short about the fungibility of identity and how easy it is to lose yourself when you let yourself be defined by others people without truly connecting. As with so many of Lanthimos’s films, the affected dialogue, the distance between characters, the odd behaviors – they all work together to create this dark and poetic representation of the disconnections we all find in our day-to-day lives. The precise framing and discordant score adds to the discomfort and unease we feel throughout the film. And the casting of the doppelgänger is a stroke of genius here – especially in what it has to say about just how disconnection affects our ability to truly know each other. And what’s even more impressive is that Lanthimos does this all in just 12 minutes. This is a really fantastic work of short narrative cinema.

Small Axe 5: Education (2020) | Directed by Steve McQueen

 5/5

Steve McQueen’s Education, the final film in the Small Axe anthology series, is so deeply moving, and moves us further into a space of hope for the future and a resolve to change the present. McQueen still explores the targeted racism faced by this community – this time focusing on the ways the education system fails Black children – treating their behavioral issues more harshly than their white peers, assuming a lack of intelligence and letting them fall further and further behind, and finally shuffling them off to “special” schools in order to improve the “regular” school’s test scores, all the while denying them access to the educational opportunities they so desperately need. Once again, McQueen shows how people’s political consciousnesses are awakened through connection and community, learning that they don’t have to accept the injustices that have been foisted upon them by a broken society. McQueen continues his use of powerful and poetic imagery to capture these moments of fractured and mended connections – a mother walking away from her son as he’s about to leave for this “special” school for the first time, the family coming together again in a tight embrace as they all realize how the system has cheated them. While much of the Small Axe series has focused on the power of music to unite, this installment features a long, stultifying sequence showing the power of music to dull and numb, whereas reconnecting with a heritage that has been stolen and repressed has the power mend divisions and inspire a young child to look to the future. McQueen ends the film – and the entire cycle of films – on an image of hope that is so stirring, powerful, and transformative. This is cinema at its best.

City Hall (2020) | Directed by Frederick Wiseman

 5/5

Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall is an absolute masterpiece of non-fiction filmmaking. After four years of living through the Trump administration (and writing review this from a region whose local government is frequently more beholden to corporate and business interests than its residents), there is something so beautiful about watching four and a half hours of civil servants doing all they can to make their city a better and more just and more equitable place. Wiseman alternates footage of Boston city council meetings, community gatherings, and briefings by city task forces with smaller sequences showing sanitation workers, health inspectors, courthouse marriages, and even traffic hearings. All of this is broken up by transition shots taken around Boston, reminding us of the city’s rich history and heritage, as well as its present. Taken together, Wiseman has crafted a comprehensive portrait of local government – the ways that it touches so many parts of our day-to-day lives, as well as the ways that having a functioning government makes our lives better. It’s an extremely compelling film, and even with the long running time, it flies by. And in this time of cynicism and ugly political opportunism, it’s an extremely hopeful film. When we come together and elect public servants who care about the community, we can see real change happen.

Where to Watch

Tenet (2020) | Directed by Christopher Nolan

 2.5/5

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet may be the first of the filmmaker’s logic puzzles and cinematic mind-traps in which he is so concerned with his own gamesmanship and trickery, the cools things he can do with cinematography and special effects, that he has forgotten to tell a compelling story. Yes, there are some interesting ideas floating around the film’s two and a half hours, but they never settle into anything as meaningful or substantial as Nolan would like you to believe them to be. For a film that explicitly tells you to stop overthinking things and just “feel it,” the dialogue is overweighted by heavy-handed exposition (buried by Nolan’s concussive sound design) and the overall experience is emotionally cold and soulless. Character relationships that are meant to be moving or intended to set up the narrative stakes never quite connect because we never see those relationships develop onscreen – either because Nolan is too eager to show off his clever time inversion nonsense or because he’s too busy setting up his action set-pieces to focus on the the smaller, more intimate character-driven moments that could actually give the narrative its stakes and drive. That said, I did appreciate the fact that the film uses its villain to skewer toxic white masculinity’s sense of self-importance as we discover more about the villain’s plot to destroy the world. Plus, John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki all give fantastic performances considering what they had to work with. It’s just too bad they’re situated within a disastrous film from a director who believes he’s making a deeply profound masterpiece.

The Whistlers (2019) | Directed by Corneliu Porumboiu

 4/5

Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Whistlers is a heavily plot-driven crime thriller, taking many of the familiar tropes and narrative techniques employed by the genre and working them into a thoroughly engaging wholly unique heist film. There’s a visceral pleasure to the film’s deadpan comedy and casual irony embedded in its many twists and turns. Chapter breaks provide an effective way to introduce the film’s numerous characters – especially as the plot gets more and more convoluted (in the best possible way). Corruption and paranoia seem to be a simple fact of life in Porumboiu’s Romania, with everyone under surveillance and everyone on the take. The only thing that separates the good from the bad is loyalty and compassion for another, which Porumboiu never sentimentalizes. Everything is played straight – the camerawork is simple, but elegant, both humor and emotions and presented with a slight distance and remove. With all of the twists and turns of the plot, character motivations do become a bit murky, but in the end it’s a thoroughly captivating thriller.

Golden Men (2019) | Directed by Vincenzo Alfieri

 1.5/5

Vincenzo Alfieri’s Golden Men is a crime thriller with a handful of interesting elements and a few intriguing ideas that all end up buried under the weight of some rather blatant misogyny and the director’s attempts to mimic the generic ’90s indie crime films that arose in the wake of Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting. There are a few moments that are fun and inventive (especially in the way Alfieri crosscuts between the armored car safe and the cab of the armored car throughout the robbery to ratchet up the tension), and the complications that arise once our criminals think they’re in the clear makes for rather compelling moments of suspense. But Alfieri is so enamored with his slick camera tricks – all of which are devoid of any meaning – and the film’s semblance of cool, that he never allows us to care about his protagonists and only manages to give us the barest sketch of their motivations for the robbery. Fragile male egos abound, and the film wants us to feel sorry for these braggarts, abusers, and manipulators. All the while, the women in the film are treated as sex objects, harping shrews, or obstacles to the male bid for freedom. It’s a messy film that takes all of the wrong lessons away from the abundance of Tarantino imitators, indulging in some of the worst excesses of the crime genre.

Where to Watch

The Ties (2020) | Directed by Daniele Luchetti

 3/5

Daniele Luchetti’s The Ties is anchored by a stellar performance from Alba Rohrwacher – which alone is almost worth the price of admission – but this overwrought relationship drama doesn’t quite hit the mark. Which is too bad – there’s so much here to like. In some ways, this is a fairly standard divorce story – infidelity, emotional outbursts, children caught in the middle. Here, it’s the story structure that makes Luchetti’s film unique. We’ve given these shifts in perspective – beginning with the wife’s viewpoint, then shifting to the husband’s – that don’t exactly make this revolutionary, but it certainly makes the narrative a bit more interesting. Well, it’s interesting until the film devolves into a brief section where we’re supposed to feel sorry for the cheating husband who can’t choose between spending time with his mistress or spending time his wife and kids. And the film leaves us with the impression that the wife (with whom we spent the first half hour, getting her intimate perspective on the relationship) has actually been a terrible “shrew” for years. What keeps the film from being completely insufferable is a final shift in perspective for the film’s final act – a delirious denouement that shows just how damaging this has all been on the children who have lived through their parents bitterness, selfishness, and fighting. It’s this lovely and cathartic moment in an otherwise fairly pedestrian film.