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.

Wolfwalkers (2020) | Directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart

 4.5/5

Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart’s Wolfwalkers is an absolutely gorgeous work of animation – a delightful family film from beginning to end. The hand-drawn images evoke medieval Irish illustrated manuscripts – the flattening of perspective, the highly detailed and intricate patterns around the edges of the frame, the use of split-screen as if they were separate illustrations laid out on the same page – giving the film a rich sense of myth and legend and folklore. The vocal performances are all fantastic and draw us deeply into the story, getting us to care (and believe) in the midst of all of the narrative’s mystical events. The film’s central conflict – humanity’s voracious appetite for conquest versus the untamable wildness of nature; the brutal constraints of certainty versus the freedom and joy to be found in mystery – is compelling, and the two girls at the story’s center are thoroughly engaging protagonists. So many children’s films speak down to their audience, so it’s refreshing to see a work of animation that treats its core audience with so much respect – never hiding the difficult truths of the world, never distracting its audience with scenes that belong in an amusement park instead of a movie, and never being afraid of letting a little danger and sadness seep into the story. It’s an incredible film, beautiful, joyous, empathetic, and deeply moving – exactly the kind of art we should be encouraging our children to seek out.

Let Them All Talk (2020) | Directed by Steven Soderbergh

 4.5/5

Steven Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk is a thoroughly captivating and wonderful bit of cinematic experimentation. It’s always a delight to see how Soderbergh chooses to play with form, theme, narrative, style, and technique. With his latest film, the short shooting schedule, the improvisation, and the barest sketches of an idea have yielded some intriguing results. The underlying pseudo-detective narrative that’s been fused into this story of three septuagenarian friends reconnecting after thirty years is incredibly fascinating. The twenty-something nephew, our viewpoint character, is tasked with discovering what his aunt’s friends think about her after all these years, his aunt’s agent has tasked him with learning more about the new novel, and one of his aunt’s friends even tasks him with finding out more about a potential suitor. Mysteries abound throughout the narrative, but the film’s real mystery is one of human connection – how one consciousness reaches out and touches another, however fleetingly. The improvisation adds to the feeling of the tenuousness of these connections, how quickly they can all melt away. Soderbergh’s handheld camera floats across the ship that serves as the backdrop for all of this action, capturing these generative conversations, these moments of surprised reaction, lending to the feeling of impermanence as well. It’s thrilling to watch these actors at the top of their game taking such risks with a filmmaker who is often taking risks, coming together to explore the mysteries of connection.

Where to Watch

Notturno (2020) | Directed by Gianfranco Rosi

 3.5/5

Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno is a documentary with mesmerizing and haunting sequences that unfortunately tries to do too much in the space of its limited running time. The ways in which Rosi presents these slices of life in the Middle East, on the edges of conflict, are all extremely compelling – a husband and wife smiling a hookah on the roof of their apartment, mothers and widows wailing for the dead, a young man in a boat out hunting ducks, traffic attempting to navigate a bombed out roadway – all while we hear gunfire and artillery off in the distance. But the film begins to lose the cumulative power of the images it has been building as it returns to sequences without a sense of purpose or overall structure. There isn’t any rhyme or reason for Rosi returning to the patients at the mental hospital rehearsing a play on the history of Iraq, or the soldiers on patrol, or the family whose eldest son works as a guide to hunters. And then these vérité sequences are punctuated by passages detailing the atrocities of ISIS – told by children in therapy in one instance and as a series of voicemail messages in another, all feeling a bit too manipulative in the context of the film’s other footage. If there was less structure to the film – if Rosi weren’t coming back to as many of the latter sequences and simply allowing this to be slices of life, this would have been a highly effective portrait of individuals eking out an existence in the midst of chaos and conflict. And if this was more rigidly structured in the way it returns to previous scenes or sequences, that also could have worked quite well. As the film stands, there are only moments and brief sequences that effectively convey what life is like in these conflict zone. The rest gets lost in Rosi’s attempt to do everything in the space of 100 minutes.

Small Axe 4: Alex Wheatle (2020) | Directed by Steve McQueen

 5/5

Steve McQueen’s Alex Wheatle, the fourth film in the Small Axe anthology series, is another stellar entry exploring the Black West Indian community in London and the ways that connection, community, and activism are intertwined in the struggle against oppression. The previous installment’s ending notes of quiet resignation over a broken system lead perfectly here into the title character’s feelings of helplessness over being trapped within that same system at the beginning of this film. The film’s exploration of the ways in which the dominant, white power structures attempts to cut young Black children off from their roots and culture is gut-wrenching. But as in all of the Small Axe films, McQueen doesn’t leave us in the sorrow and the pain. Once Alex moves into a predominantly Black neighborhood, the joy that erupts on his face is lovely. Growing up as a ward of the state, we’re shown the ways that he doesn’t quite fit in with the members of the West Indian community he’s moved into, and yet he’ll never be accepted by the dominant white culture that raised and abused him as a child. And so the tension within the film arise from his need to carve his own path. As with so many of the films in this anthology, music plays an integral role in creating the mood and the atmosphere, but also in telling the story – it’s Alex’s point of connection and entry-point to the community. Just as powerful are the visual touches McQueen peppers throughout – the low angle, slow push in on Alex at multiple points throughout his life as he is restrained by social workers, police officers, and other agents of the racist power structure. Most powerful is the photo montage of protests that comes midway through the film, accompanied by a spoken word poem that reflects Alex’s dawning political awareness. And like all of the films in the Small Axe anthology, this is a film about the need for connection and community, offering the first possibility for escape from this broken system that we’ve seen.