Censor (2021) | Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond

 4.5/5

Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor is a creepy and effective horror film exploring the effects of grief and how unacknowledged pain and trauma can end up leading us into isolation, wreaking havoc in our lives. The film is anchored by a tour de force performance from Niamh Algar as Enid, a censor working for the British Board of Film Classification, whose grounding and matter-of-fact approach to the material helps us fully believe in the ghoulish twists and turns the narrative takes, her emotional vulnerability in the role allowing us to completely invest in our protagonist’s journey – no matter how dark that journey gets. Bailey-Bond’s visuals are mesmerizing throughout, creating hypnotic and eerily subjective landscapes through the use of highly stylized color palettes and a production design that leaves one feeling as though reality itself is unstable. Sound becomes an essential component in the terror, layering in ominous and unsettling tones, amplifying everyday sounds to the point of menace, and transforming sounds that should be familiar and warping them into something horrific. As Enid continues her work evaluating films filled with violent misogyny – as well as being confronted by her many sexist male colleagues on a daily basis – we see the toll this takes on her in ways both subtle and not-so-subtle throughout the film. This is a haunting and terrifying film – one that crawls under your skin and stays there long after the movie has ended.

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The Little Things (2021) | Directed by John Lee Hancock

 2/5

John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things is a boring and predictable thriller that aims for depth and profundity, but winds up saying nothing and wastes the skills of the perennially excellent Denzel Washington. Like so many serial killer narratives, the film revels in female terror and the images of victimized women, while at the same time privileging white, female innocence – especially evident n the shot the teenage girl driving alongside Washington’s character that inspires him to help solve this series of murders. The script is filled with half-baked dialogue containing references and allusions to moments that have been excised from the film in its many revisions. While Hancock is attempting to craft a weighty meditation in obsession, guilt, and regret, the film keeps our protagonist’s past and motivations such a mystery that we never care about his journey toward redemption. On the mystery side of the equation, details and clues become maddeningly obvious (at one point, a clue’s even written in bold on sandwich board for all to see), until Hancock decides to throw the details out and make up new rules for us to follow as it goes along. Unlike the films noir it seeks to emulate, the film is more steady accumulation of coincidence rather than fate shaping the lives of its characters. Hancock is desperate trying to produce a subtle and nuanced thriller with an ambiguous ending, but the elements just don’t come together.

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) | Directed by Shaka King

 4.5/5

Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah is a thoroughly compelling biopic told through the structure of a political thriller, giving us a more nuanced, complicated, and honest look at the Black Panther Party than most mainstream narrative films have been willing to attempt. In splitting the narrative’s focus between Fred Hampton’s work with Black Panther Party and Bill O’Neill’s work with the FBI to surveil Hampton, King and his screenwriters have almost created two separate films that overlap and merge as the characters’ lives becomes more intertwined. It’s a technique that works surprisingly well, giving us the tender and powerful moments of a Hampton biopic while we watch him form the Rainbow Coalition and fall in love. And in O’Neill’s story, we’re given the beats of a political thriller as we watch a young man in over his head, manipulated and coerced by his handlers to make choices that will haunt him the rest of his life. The two central performances are stellar – Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield each bring such a different and unique energy to their respective roles that keeps us fully invested in both characters’ arcs. King’s use of archival material at the beginning of the film is highly effective, especially in the way it transitions us into the main plot, showing the ways that images of Black solidarity are immediately threatening to white authorities. Like a few other films that have been released in the last few years, the film’s depiction of police racism and brutality is a necessary corrective to Hollywood’s near-constant glorification of the profession. There’s also a timeliness in the way the film shows how uncomfortable it is for the established powers that be (as well as white, paternalistic liberals) when the Black community (or any BIPOC community) demands equality rather than waiting to be granted equality out of beneficence. It’s a powerful film – hopefully just one of many necessary correctives to decades of popular cinema’s demonization of the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement.

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Two of Us (2019) | Directed by Filippo Meneghetti

 3/5

Filippo Meneghetti’s Two of Us is an overwrought, sensationalized LGBTQ melodrama with two really strong performances at the center that keep the film from getting too emotionally unbelievable. The film ends up falling squarely in the tradition of LGBTQ trauma theatre. While it may be understandable that two older French women might have difficulty revealing their relationship to their children, Meneghetti keeps needlessly piling on the suffering in ways that smack of cruelty and arise out of misunderstandings that could have been cleared up with characters being honest with one another. This causes the plot to feel more mechanistic, functioning more in service of the director and his co-writer’s whims and caprices, rather than anything that arose from genuine character or relational motivations. Meneghetti does make use of some fantastic close-ups throughout the film to highlight his two leading performers, showing how much they can convey with the simplest flicker of emotion across their faces or the smallest darting of their eyes. Similarly, the production design is quite evocative and used to beautifully (and painfully) illustrate the characters’ isolation from one another during the film’s second act. But Meneghetti throws in unnecessary and heavy-handed dream imagery that, while beautifully shot, is entirely out-of-place in this film that wants to be more grounded in genuine relationships. And he also can’t resist adding unnecessary, and at times pulpy, complications to what could have been a beautiful and simple narrative, taking the film well past the point of credulity by the time the credits roll, so that we have lost much of the emotional connection we have with these characters. It’s a film with so much promise, but it ended up a convoluted mess.

Collective (2019) | Directed by Alexander Nanau

 3.5/5

Alexander Nanau’s Collective is an effective primer on Romanian politics, their broken health care system, and the nightclub fire that launched massive protests against government corruption. However, the film’s narrative construction is disjointed and slightly haphazard, keeping viewers at a distance from what should be an intensely personal story. For the first half of the film, we primarily follow the journalists of Sports Gazette, a daily sports paper whose investigative journalists broke the news of widespread corruption throughout Romanian hospitals. Over the second half of the film, we follow a new, reform-minded Minister of Health as he tries to battle the corruption. And through it all, we get glimpses of one of the survivors of the nightclub fire as she attempts to rebuild her life. All of the information presented is compelling on its own, and the film touches on vital issues about the importance of journalism and the threats of rising fascism across the globe. However, the three segments are never effectively integrated, and any attempts to make the pieces fit together feel forced – such as the moment the Minister of Health meets with the survivor on the eve of a major election. There’s compelling content throughout the film, it just never fully comes together.

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Soul (2020) | Directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers

 3/5

Pete Docter and Kemp Powers’s Soul has so much potential, but it suffers from many of the same issues that have plague Disney and Pixar’s recent efforts. It follows all of the tropes of Pixar’s odd-couple buddy-comedies and has nearly every beat from their previous films. While it sets up very clear rules for how the afterlife works in this narrative, it proceeds to break those rules for the convenience of its predetermined plot points. And for a film that is eager to be trumpeted as Pixar’s first foray into Black lives and the Black experience, the lead character spends most of the film as a green, blob-like soul or trapped within the body of a cat – playing into the unfortunate Disney trope that seems to require all animated Black leading characters to spend the majority of the film in a skin other than their own. And it’s even more egregious that we have the voice of a middle-aged white woman coming out of the Black character’s mouth for most of the running time. There are still some interesting things going on here – I love the ways in which they visualize the process of finding yourself in “the zone” while creating, playing sports, or engaging in some other activity that gives you life. And I love the way they show how quickly that can become an unhealthy obsession. The music is gorgeous, the vocal performances are great, and there is this tantalizing idea that our main protagonist is so focused on this one vision of how his life should be that it prevents him from truly connecting with others. But most of the ideas in this film are underdeveloped or end up being undercut by yet another underdeveloped thematic thread that shows up. And the final beats undermine any sense of poignancy that the film was building toward by giving us an easy resolution, without actually resolving anything. It’s a frustrating film, because there’s so much possibility here, but the Disney/Pixar machine just won’t let the pieces fit together as they should.

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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.