November 15: Thor: Ragnarok (2017 -- Taika Waititi)

★★★

November 14: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017 -- Martin McDonagh)

★★★

November 12: The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017 -- Yorgos Lanthimos)

★★★★★

November 10: Lady Bird (2017 -- Greta Gerwig)

★★★★★

November 9: Blade Runner 2049 (2017 -- Denis Villeneuve)

★★★★★

November 8: Blade Runner (1982 -- Ridley Scott)

★★★★★

November 7: Loving Vincent (2017 --Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman)

★★★★

October 29: The Florida Project (2017 -- Sean Baker)

★★★

October 6: The Strange Case of Angelica/O Estranho Caso de Angélica (2010 -- Manoel de Oliveira)

★★★★★

October 5: Gangs of Wasseypur (2012 -- Anurag Kashyap)

★★★★★

October 4: May in the Summer (2013 -- Cherien Dabis)

★★★★

September 26: Ixcanul (2015 -- Jayro Bustamante)

★★★★

September 25: Embrace of the Serpent/El abrazo de la serpiente (2015 -- Ciro Guerra)

★★★

September 23: Neon Bull/Boi Neon (2015 -- Gabriel Mascaro)

★★★★★

September 22: August Winds/Ventos de Agosto (2014 -- Gabriel Mascaro)

★★★

September 21: Post Tenebras Lux (2012 -- Carlos Reygadas Barguín)

★★★★★

September 20: Canoa: A Shameful Memory (1976 -- Amat Escalante)

★★★★

September 19: Heli (2013 -- Amat Escalante)

★★★

August 3: The Beguiled (2017 -- Sofia Coppola)

★★★

July 27: The Beguiled (1971 -- Don Siegel)

★★★

July 25: Dunkirk (2017 -- Christopher Nolan)

★★★★

Some of Christopher Nolan’s best movies happen when he has a plot gimmick to work with.  Memento, Inception and Interstellar all proceed like a game with specific rules, and all rank among his most tightly-focused, successful films.  Dunkirk fits into this category.  In its opening minutes, the film gives us three perspectives and the period they occur over, and then the movie tells us the story of the Dunkirk evacuation from the three points of view, culminating in the film’s showing us the last parts of the story by stopping actions and repeating them from the differing perspectives.

This technique is a source of huge pleasure.  Unlike the story mechanism that can become predictable in some of Nolan’s earlier work, the shifting perspectives here engage us strongly.  Dunkirk doesn’t use a predictable pattern when it shifts from one perspective to the other, so we don’t find ourselves expecting a particular order to the shifts.  The changing perspectives also keep us off balance because Nolan doesn’t use all three of them for every event or action. We have to pay attention to understand whether we’re watching a new action or the same action from a different perspective. And there’s the simple pleasure of watching events that we already know in one perspective and seeing them from a different perspective, mentally comparing the information from our first exposure with the information from the new perspective.  Even the meaning of a simple gesture like a pilot waving from the cockpit of a downed plane changes depending on the perspective we’re seeing it from.

And there’s more to Dunkirk that the plot device.  Throughout, the film uses little dialog – especially in the opening minutes – but relies instead on visuals to give us the information we need to follow the story and the characters.  And these visuals are riveting.  The space in much of the film is packed and claustrophobic, whether we’re inside ship chambers, manning the cockpit of a plane or looking in close-up among soldiers squeezed tightly together in a much more open space we don’t see.  Nolan even lenses a crowded ship sinking beside a wharf so it looks like the commander standing on the Mole could reach out and touch the vessel.  The sound design reinforces the claustrophobic tension, whether by having a faint reverb to suggest a tight interior or by creating space outside the frame, space we can hear but not see in the tight confines of the frame.  Likewise, Hans Zimmer's score seems to endlessly add to the tension without finding resolution.

In contrast to the claustrophobia, Dunkirk occasionally yields itself its moments of visual poetry.  For example, a fixed camera gives us a disorienting angle on one ship as it capsizes.  And some images seem driven by a poetic impulse at least as much as a narrative.  In one shot, we watch a band of soldiers rush toward a beached trawler, an image of the desperation and futility of the situation that the soldiers at Dunkirk face.  From that point, their situation becomes even more dire.  Another poetic image shows us the beach landing of a plane that has run out of fuel, a image of beauty that expresses aspiration, struggle, loss, and victory all in the same moment.  For images like these, the film pauses briefly to let us weigh what we’ve seen in a short moment of beauty.

For all its strengths, Dunkirk isn't without drawbacks.  Despite the deaths of a couple of the characters we follow, the film is mostly an Apollonian paean to virtue, heroism and character, even to the point of creating legends from the fallen.  There is little sense of futility or waste in the story we’re told here, and there’s no irony whatsoever.  As we follow the three perspectives though the film, it’s never hard for us to know who the good guys are and who, the bad; to know who acted well and who, badly.  Despite the obstacles that Dawson faces, he still manages to be a steady father to his son and the unerringly righteous captain of his vessel.  Farrier opts for self-sacrifice in the service of the cause, and Commander Bolton has no thought but for the welfare of his men.  And towards the end of the movie when a Churchill speech suggests that the evacuation of Dunkirk was a defeat, the film presents us with images of people feting the evacuees on a British train in celebration.   As visually thrilling and compelling as it is, Dunkirk isn’t a film of nuance or compromise.  It’s a straight up celebration of righteousness.

Dunkirk is a wonderful cinematic experience.  It does little shading and even less investigation, but Nolan's technical control of the medium makes it a worthwhile time at the movies.

July 24: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017 -- Luc Besson)

★★★★

July 16: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014 -- Matt Reeves)

★★★

July 5: Alien: Covenant (2017 -- Ridley Scott)

★★

July 4: Baby Driver (2017 -- Edgar Wright)

★★★

Edgar Wright pumps this film with energy.  From early on, we’re taken on car chases, and we’re involved in hold-ups and shootouts.  To this mix, he adds compelling editing.  Action sequences are cut in the short bursts that are standard, but Wright adds music that not only creates mood but dictates, in a very direct way, where cuts occur.  Throughout, he pairs a particularly strong rhythmic moment in the music with a movement or cut in the sequence we’re watching.  And the director doesn’t limit this editing technique to action sequences; we also see meetings and conversations cut to music.  One tour-de-force moment of this technique happens as Baby is walking to a meeting carrying coffee and Ansel Elgort gives us an athletic, dancelike performance which is edited to the music he is listening.  It even includes includes a pantomime sax line with the musical instrument painted on a wall in the background.  In fact, it’s frequently the music that Baby is listening to which ties into the editing, an engaging conflating of what’s happening in the film with the formal elements of the film’s construction.

And an exaggerated formalism fills much of the of Baby Driver, too.  We see it in the stylized editing and chase scenes, and we hear it in dialog that is at the edge of realistic but has the strong feel of art.  The story unfolds in a series of stagy scenes, from Baby’s conversations with Deborah and Joseph to set décor like the laundromat with lines of matching monochrome clothes in the front-loading machines.  The shot of Baby’s release from prison has an outrageous rainbow in the background.  Style dominates in Baby Driver, but for all the surface contrivance, the film has some emotional impact.  Baby Driver is not a cold exercise of method like we expect in a Tarantino project; instead, the form here has heart.   None of the characters is deep, developed or complex, but there’s enough in them for us to like them.

Baby Driver misses on some points.  While Elgort sells his Baby by the boyish physicality of his performance, what should have been good casting doesn’t pan out for other characters in film.  Lily James has the looks and manner for a good Debora, but she can’t deliver the character, while Kevin Spacey hardly tries in his line deliveries outlining the next heist.  Even Jamie Fox gives us a one-note psycho in Bats.  A bigger disappointment, though, is the way Wright drains the energy from the climax of the film as Baby and Buddy face off in an over-extended parking garage encounter.

Reservations aside, Baby Driver is one of the more enjoyable projects on the screen this summer.  Much of it has heart and energy, and it’s fun to see how Wright strives to make a car city like Atlanta into a character in the film.  And there really is an Octane coffee in town.

July 3: Sullivan's Travels (1941 -- Preston Sturges)

June 6: The Palm Beach Story (1942 -- Preston Sturges)

★★★★★

June 4: The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949 -- Preston Sturges)

★★

June 3: Sudden Fear (1952 -- David Miller)

★★★★

June 2: Asphalt Jungle (1950 -- John Huston)

★★★★★

June 1: Woman on the Run (1950 -- Norman Foster)

★★★★

May 31: Out of the Past (1947 -- Jacques Tourneur)

★★★★★

May 30: Double Indemnity (1944 -- Billy Wilder)

★★★★★

May 22: Alexander the Great (1956 -- Robert Rossen)

★★

Director Robert Rossen never quite pulls together this sprawling bio-epic about Alexander the Great.  Among its many problems is the way Rossen introduces characters and themes that the film drops later.  For example, the long first part of Alexander the Great gives us one of the movie’s more compelling figures in Fredric March’s Philip.  The Macedonian king is a complex figure who is striving with challenges among the Greek city states as well as within his own family.  While attempting to consolidate his rule over Greece, he feels his foreign-born wife is fomenting rebellion in Pella, he doubts the legitimacy of his son Alexander, and he’s working to gain the respect of the cultured elite of Athens.  All the while, he’s fallen in love with a young Greek woman, Euridyce.  These elements make Philip an interesting, well-rounded character, but all this development doesn't contribute to our understanding of Alexander.  In fact, in overdeveloping Philip, the film underdevelops the titular focus of the film.  Similar can be said of Alexander’s mother,  While she isn't as well-developed as Philip and her occasional appearances serve plot functions more than anything, the time we spend with her doesn't give us much insight into Alexander because we see so little of their interaction.  Rossen uses the parents to show us the independence of Alexander, but we're with them for far more time than we need in order to come this conclusion.  And the themes like loyalty and leadership associated with the parents don't become important later in the movie.

Richard Burton doesn’t give us a cohesive Alexander either.  We see Alexander as rash, when he takes the regency of Pellas; stubborn, when he rejects Aristotle’s advice; shrewd, when he decides not to destroy all that he conquers; intelligent, when he expresses openness about non-Hellenistic culture; self-promoting, when he commands that a hill tribe city be named after him; courageous, when he goes into battle; noble, when he executes Darius’ killers; and Oedipal, when told his father would have returned to Greece to repress Athens.  But Burton doesn’t pull all these characteristics together into a unified figure that we in the audience can understand.  His Alexander acts a certain way in a certain set of circumstances, but it’s hard to feel like there’s a single, complex psychology behind his actions.  In voiceover, Aristotle gives us an on-the-nose exposition of Alexander's character as "smart, brave, ..., " but Burton doesn't give us an inner logic to his Alexander.

Rossen’s unsteady direction also undermines our experience.  After lingering on the story of Philip, Rossen speeds up the pace when Alexander arrives in Persia to the point that we are unable to easily follow what’s happening, much less to see how the events there are related to the film's central figure.  We can hardly distinguish the battles of Granicus and Babylon, and it’s hard to know where Alexander is at each point of his Asian campaign.  At one point, he’s massacring Athenians, and at another he’s pardoning them.  The minor roles of women likewise confuse, and it’s hard to know when and why we’re dealing with Barsine or Roxanne.  And Barsine herself swings suddenly from supporting Alexander to opposing him without Rossen providing narrative support to either position.  And the film lurches from one idea to the next with little build up or support for it.  From his time with Aristotle, Alexander proceeds as an unflinching proponent of Hellenism,but we suddenly see him in Persian robes planning to marry Darius' daughter.  The turgid fluctuations of characters, locations and themes in the latter part of the film make watching it an unsatisfying experience.

It's hard to know what happened that makes this film so rambling.  Maybe Rossen tried to remain so true to history that he sacrificed narrative cohesion.  Or perhaps Rossen's cut of the film was indeed cohesive and when the studio cut a third of its running time, that destroyed the unity of the film.  Whatever the case, Rossen's Alexander the Great offers some interesting visuals but little insight into the character or times of the hero.

April 2: The Promise (2016 – Terry George)

★★★

On the surface a historical film about a love triangle set in Ottoman Turkey, The Promise is actually a polemic about the Armenian genocide carried out by the Turks at the turn of the century.  One of the film’s strengths is the way Terry George evokes the era, showing how the Armenians are integrated into Ottoman life.  We see Armenians going to parties, attending schools and doing business shoulder-to-shoulder with Turks.  We observe this life from the point-of-view of the Armenians, mostly from Mikael’s perspective, so we also get to go a little deeper in Armenian life, visiting a church and spending time in a villa owned by an Armenian businessman.  In the beginning of the film, the Ottoman world we experience is vital and cosmopolitan on both Christian and Muslim sides.

As we begin to notice the growing anti-Armenian sentiment, the film makes an important shift.  Soon we no longer see what’s happening in society in general but become locked exclusively into what’s happening to the Armenians.  We experience a series of gripping Armenian persecutions and losses, from discriminatory conscription at Mikael’s medical school to the destruction of his uncle’s business in Istanbul.  Armenians begin to vanish into prisons and become the victims of street violence.  We follow Mikael though brutal experiences and many personal losses, only leaving him so we can join an American reporter Chris Myers as he observes the wholesale evictions of Armenian villages as well as massacres of the people.  The narrow perspective points to George’s limited directorial purpose in the film, to recreate the injustice of the Armenian genocide.

With Promise having such a tight polemical purpose, it’s no surprise that that its love story receives cursory treatment.  Despite convincing acting by Oscar Isaac as Mikael, we feel little real emotion or engagement in the romantic triangle.  Charlotte Le Bon’s Ana often looks like a fashion model and doesn’t sell us on her attraction to either Mikael or Chris.  And for his part, Christian Bale’s Chris doesn’t seem to have feelings for anything.  He shows so little warmth or attraction to Ana that it’s hard to accept they would love each other, and Bale plays Chris as so emotionless that he doesn’t even project feelings about the horrors he’s documenting.  The most that Bale gives us in Chris is a cold, self-righteous anger at the genocide.  And Chris’ posture echoes the larger purpose of Promise, to focus on the horror of the killings rather than on the stresses of the love triangle.

As a gesture of being inclusive, Promise gives us a couple of Turks who resist the growing carnage.  A governor, for example, takes a major risk in warning an orphanage that its Armenian children will be slaughtered. He even allows Chris to leave the area despite an arrest warrant out for the American.  And Marwan Kenzari as Emri conveys an extraordinary vulnerability and decency toward his American and Armenian friends.  It’s unfortunate that George isn’t interested in this side of his story because theirs would certainly have among the most interesting in the film.

While the thrust here is to dramatize the Armenian genocide, it’s hard to watch Promise and not think of our contemporary political situation.  How could a cosmopolitan, tolerant culture suddenly turn on a segment of its population, as happened with the Jews in Germany or the Armenians in Turkey?  Promise doesn’t address the factors that led to the horror in Turkey, but it’s a reminder of how fragile a multicultural environment can be.  It's not much of a love story at all.

Atlanta Film Festival: Sunday April 2, 7 pm at the Plaza Theater.

April 1: Waiting for B. (2015 – Paulo Cesar Toledo & Abigail Spindel)

★★★★

As it starts, Waiting for B. shows us a group of enthusiastic Beyoncé fans in Brazil starting to line up at the stadium two months before her concert.  Young, animated and mostly gay, they want to be first in line when the stadium opens.  In fan mode, they dress like Beyoncé and dance in sidewalk imitation of her choreography; one group of friends even does Beyoncé imitation performances at a Sao Paolo gay bar.   They joke, tease, and vamp Beyoncé.  

But even as we enjoy the irreverence and enthusiasm of the group, we begin to see that the posing, glitz and energy is a contrast to the daily living conditions of these kids.  Paulo Cesar Toledo & Abigail Spindel take us into the intimacy of the waiting kids’ tents, where we eavesdrop on conversations about issues that concern them like race and discrimination, discussions that Beyoncé’s public image naturally invites but that has particular resonance in Brazil's poor, mixed-raced population.  We also hear about the kids' insecurities and vulnerabilities like dating and relations with their families.  And the film takes us along with some of them beyond their waiting to see their modest homes, their terse interactions with their families and their daily grind of public transportation and work.  They are part of the poor youth of Sao Paulo, and we see that Beyoncé fandom gives them not only a way to express a sexuality they generally suppress but also a way to think of a world outside the one they live in most of the time.

Other scenes show us an even darker aspect of their lives.  An occasional car goes by that shouts an anti-gay epithet, but the waiting fans quickly close ranks and respond in kind, secure in their group.  During a soccer match at the stadium a couple of weeks before the concert, however, they’re massively outnumbered, and Toledo and Spindel capture their wide, alert eyes as they hunker down out of sight of the soccer attendees.  Even on the level of imagery, we sense the menace the Beyoncé fans feel in the middle of the mass of macho soccer fans.  In contrast to the youth, delicacy, play and agility we see waiting for the concert, the soccer fans are older, stockier, louder, and aggressive, particularly since many were drinking.  The sequence with the soccer fans powerfully implies the danger the kids live in only because of their sexuality.

Waiting for B. starts as film about Beyoncé fans but gradually morphs into a description of the social environment that poor, out, gay youth faces in Brazil.  It leaves us simultaneously celebrating the energy and confidence of the kids but also concerned about their vulnerability in a society that largely doesn’t want them.  Few documentaries evoke such a range of emotions simultaneously.

Atlanta Film Festival: Friday March 31, 9:30 pm at the Plaza Theater.

March 30: The Lost City of Z (2016 – James Gray)

★★★

Lost City of Z doesn’t satisfy an audience as much as it could.  It’s a historical movie with rich visuals of the UK as well as South America, and it’s an interesting story of adventure and exploration at the turn of the century.  It also deals with universal concerns like love, family, class and equality that impact all of us.  But despite all these appeals, Z doesn’t engage or reward us.

The script is a major problem here, and its biggest flaw is its failure to give us a consistent central figure.  Throughout, it’s hard to understand what drives Percy Fawcett.  Early on, it seems his battle is with an Edwardian society that won’t accept people of his class, though his problem might also be one of family honor since we’re told people knew of his father’s alcohol problem.  But we also see Fawcett and his wife talking about needing money early in the film, too, so that’s also posited as a possible motivation.  After Fawcett’s first trip to Bolivia, the script introduces religion and its role in perpetuating bigotry, and that topic even arises at the end of the film.  But it also seems that Fawcett has become concerned with his reputation as the film progresses.  Z moves from one of these motives to the next, dropping the preceding motivation in favor of the immediate but not delivering on any particular topic.

The script also has structural failings.  For example, a large section in the middle of the film follows Fawcett in WW I, but it’s not clear what this part contributes to the search for Z or to the development of the Fawcett character.  It’s an overly long digression with only vague relevance to the rest of the film.  Similarly, Fawcett’s visit to the opera house on his first trip to Bolivia is a highlight that the film emphasizes.  It’s not only visually striking, but it delivers the pointed theme that Fawcett’s survey work will help preserve the status quo in the area, which includes the brutal enslavement of the locals.  By the time of Fawcett’s last trip, the opera house is in ruins, but we’re left to wonder what to make of the script’s insistence on the contrasting scenes and how to relate them to any continuing theme in the film.  Another problem is that the dialog in Z can overstate conditions the film hasn’t shown us and try to create a dazzle that the script hasn’t earned.  There are many examples of this, but one of the most striking is at the end when Fawcett tells his son that they have seen things no one else has seen but the film hasn’t shown us these things.

Script aside, the performance of Charlie Hunnam as Fawcett, is another problem in Z.  Though the film gives him room for communicating Fawcett’s passion, Hunnam remains so aloof that his verbal assertions don’t mesh with what we see of him on screen.  We hear Fawcett talk about his intense desire to prove the existence of the City of Z, but we hardly see him obsessing or preoccupied by that passion.  In a similar vein, we hear him talk about his love and attachment to the children, but we feel little chemistry between them based on what we see on screen.  Our failure to see a connection between Fawcett and his family becomes especially important at the end of the film when his rebellious older son becomes one of the main characters.

Despite all these weaknesses that hobble Z throughout, James Gray manages an eerily beautiful ending to the film, one illuminated in the jungle by torchlight as Fawcett moves towards peace.  It’s a pity that haunting ending couldn’t come as the final images of a film that held together well before it.



Atlanta Film Festival: Thursday March 30 7:00pm at the Plaza Theater.

March 23: Woman on Fire (2016 – Julie Sokolow)

★★★

Julie Sokolow’s documentary gives us a portrait of Brooke Guinan, who became the only transgendered firefighter in New York’s Fire Department.  Brooke started life as George William and always wanted to be the third generation of firefighters in her family.  Woman on Fire gives us interviews with Guinan’s family, NYFD personnel, and Guinan herself to reconstruct her story, intercutting those with occasional shots of locations, photos or other memorabilia.  It’s a stolid approach to documentary.

Along the same lines, the content of Woman on Fire should be more interesting than it is, especially given its subject.  Sokolow’s interviews remain deferential, and we don’t hear much that we wouldn’t have expected.  Guinan’s mother was surprised at her son’s transition and had to adjust to it, Guinan faced discrimination at the firehouse, and Guinan has managed to find acceptance finally.  While the facts are interesting, Woman on Fire doesn’t give us insight into the driving energy of Guinan’s life.  We get little of how she felt as George or of what challenges she feels now.  Sokolow keeps a respectful distance from her subject with the result that the film feels more like a newspaper article than a documentary film.

There are interesting facts here.  For example, Guinan’s abiding interest in comics and superheroes is clearly linked to her desire to be a firefighter and to her trying to understand her own unique sexuality.  Guinan herself brings this up, but the film doesn’t pursue the topic further despite the correspondences Guinan sees.  It’s also interesting to learn that Guinan’s partner is a straight male, but the film doesn’t look deeply enough into this relationship to help us understand it.  What are the kinds of emotions and feelings that arise in both parts of such a relationship?  Woman on Fire could have brought some genuine insight into their lives if Sokolow had asked even a few more questions about that.  And one of the most interesting facts we learn doesn’t even focus on Guinan.  Her father had been one of the first responders in the 9/11 attacks, and he changed as a result of the experience, becoming withdrawn and eventually divorcing his wife.  This isn’t the film for that story, but there’s clearly another documentary waiting to look at the effects of that catastrophe on the people involved in it.

In general, Woman on Fire is a faintly hagiographic portrait of its subject that doesn’t take us deeply into Guinan’s experience as she sorted out her sexuality and forged her identity and future.  The film has a great topic, but it doesn’t help us understand what it felt like for Guinan or give us much insight into the myriad ramifications of transitioning from being a male to being a female in our male-oriented world.

Atlanta Film Festival: Sunday March 26 8:00pm at the Plaza Theater.

March 22: Cold Breath (2016 – Abbas Raziji)

★★★★

The surprises keep coming out of Iranian cinema, and Abbas Raziji’s Cold Breath numbers among the more recent.  Who would have expected a film about changing gender identity to emerge from one of the most hardline theocracies on the planet?  And yet Cold Breath is just that.

It’s also more.  Raziji builds his characters and their situations very deliberately, keeping us involved in the movie and keen to understand connections.  First, we meet the principals with little explanation of the way they’re related, and we then learn some details of each ones’ life as we moved among them.  Cold Breath parses out this information, always just enough to draw us on to the next detail until a network of relationships emerges naturally.  It’s an experience of cinematic pleasure when details like Qasem’s tender care for his father eventually fit so aptly into his character and into the developing story.  The way storylines merge and divide in unexpected but logical ways also satisfies.  The direction the film takes at end is as perfectly consistent with what we've seen as it is unanticipated..

Cold Breath doesn’t shy away from melodrama, but Raziji uses it with deftness that that recalls the skill of the better directors of the late silent era.  For example, Maryam lives in grinding poverty, and when she discovers that her daughter Raha has cancer, she tries to give the child up because she can’t provide for her treatment.  It’s hard to imagine a more melodramatic situation, but Raziji sells it with effective direction and a strong performance from Bita Badran as Maryam.  The relationship between Raha and her brother Reza could similarly ease into sentimentality, but Raziji captures a touching sincerity as the older brother tries to protect and care for his sister.  Individual scenes, too, build to a deeply emotional intensity.  For example, as Maryam is overcome with emotion at a hospital, Qasem can only talk to her and reach toward her.  He can’t touch her to comfort her in public because the two aren’t married.  Cold Breath burns with such intensity and humanity.

Much of the heightened emotion in the film comes from the social actuality of contemporary Iran.  Oppressive poverty afflicts characters like Maryam and her family, while gender limits what some characters can do.  Homa, for example, wants to leave Iran, but her father holds her passport and won’t let her go; even Maryam’s decision to live as a woman is in part a result of society’s not accepting an effeminate man.    The film also shows a sharp class divide between the poor and the professional class when the affluent family that employes Maryam enters the film.  But love and compassion mitigate some of these factors, from Dr. Mansour and Qasem helping out Maryam to the tenderness between the children.  Cold Breath gives us an Iran of caring people in a harsh world.

The film is not without its drawbacks.  Sometimes it doesn’t give us enough information for us to understand characters’ motivations, and at other times, we wonder why a character like Nasrim is even in the film.  Occasionally, Raziji can’t maintain the balance between good melodrama and bad and tips into the latter, like by intercutting a cock fight into a fist fight between two male characters.  Cold Breath's blue and gray, desaturated color scheme works wonderfully, but the cinematography becomes attention-grabbing at times.  It’s not clear why we focus on colored chicks at the beginning of the film or that it’s necessary for the camera to tilt to a right angle a couple of times as Maryam smokes and moans quietly.

But little lapses and excesses hardly detract from this melodrama with a transsexual at the center.  The beauty in Cold Breath is the way the film combines grittiness, love and unexpectedly thrilling storytelling.

Atlanta Film Festival: Monday March 27, 9:45pm  at the Plaza Theater.

March 21: Atlan (2015 – Morin Karimoddini)

★★★★



Atlanta Film Festival: Tuesday March 28, 9:15 pm at the Plaza Theater.

March 20: Farewell Ferris Wheel (2016 – Jamie Sisley & Miguel "M.i.G." Martinez)

★★★★


Atlanta Film Festival: Saturday, March 25, 2:30 pm at the Plaza Theater.

March 18: Jackson (2016 – Maisie Crow)

★★★★



Atlanta Film Festival: Friday, March 31, 7 pm at the Plaza Theater.

March 17: Trenches of Rock (2017 – Paul Michael Bloodgood)

★★★

Paul Michael Bloodgood directs this film about the band he founded and led, Bloodgood.  While the tone here isn’t as self-congratulatory as it might have been, there’s not much new either.  We watch clips of talking heads, archival concert footage, and pans of photographs in a style that hews closely to that of PBS and Ken Burns.  And Trenches of Rock starts at the beginning and follows the story of the band chronologically through a rotation of various drummers to the band of today, pausing for occasional references to bad decisions in signing with a label and the controversy over the idea of a Christian metal band.  There’s not much that shakes the documentary house here.

But the film offers some interesting nuggets.  For example, Bloodgood was more popular in Europe than in the US not because of its faith but because European media doesn’t pigeonhole music like we do in the US.  Instead of being sold under the counter in Christian bookstores as happened here, the film tells us that Bloodgood was seen primarily as a metal band whose music might alternate with that of Madonna on the radio.  Another worthwhile point is the way Bloodgood merged extreme emotion, violence and theatricality with its Christian message.  With percussion crashing and guitar wailing, the band would enact whippings and crucifixions on the stage, dramatizing demons or the Passion in histrionic terms like Iggy Pop might have.  It’s an aesthetic that Catholics could recognize in artists from Mel Gibson to as far back as the medieval lives of martyrs and saints, and it’s a pity that Bloodgood doesn’t discuss it to some extent.  In fact, Trenches of Rock spends little time discussing its faith at all except in terms of rules for the band members.  The movie might have been richer if we'd heard more of the faith that informed it.

Trenches of Rock shows us a popular band that found a thought-provoking, paradoxical place in our culture.  It’s disappointing that Bloodgood, the director, couldn’t bring more technical proficiency to the film and more insight into what the band was actually doing in its time, blending its faith, the metal aesthetic, and the 80s.

Atlanta Film Festival: Saturday, March 25, 2:30 pm at Towne Cinema, Avondale Estates

March 16: League of Exotique Dancers (2016 – Rama Rau)

★★★


Atlanta Film Festival: Tuesday, March 28, 9:30 pm at Dad's Garage

March 15: Two Worlds/Dwa światy (2016 -- Maciej Adamek)

★★★



Atlanta Film Festival: Sunday, March 26, 12:15 pm at the Plaza Theater

March 14: City of Joy (2016 -- Madeleine Gavin)

★★★★★



Atlanta Film Festival: Sunday, March 26, 2:30 pm at the Plaza Theater

March 13: Minutes (2017 – Jim Cummings & Dustin Hahn)

★★★



Atlanta Film Festival: Sunday, March 26, 5 pm at Dad's Garage.

March 12: Everything But a Man (2017 – Nnegest Likké)

★★★




Atlanta Film Festival: Sunday, March 26, 2:15 pm at the Plaza Theater.

March 11: La Soledad (2016 – Jorge Thielen Armand)

★★★★

Although it’s rooted in the current social situation in Venezuela, La Soledad goes beyond that in its reach.  Venezuela is a country in crisis, and the film shows us that as we watch a young man, José, struggle to keep his family together.  When his grandmother runs out of medicine for her hypertension, he can’t locate any more for her as her condition worsens.  Getting milk for his daughter’s breakfast turns into a day-long ordeal as he first has to get a coupon to buy it and then has to wait for hours to get into a store with little stock.  His brother becomes involved with a criminal gang and has to move in with José’s family to escape a vendetta, and José’s friends are constantly pressuring him to work with them in crime.  Meanwhile, he has trouble finding work.  He helps his white childhood friend Jorge, when there's work, and he carries materials at a construction site on occasion, but sometimes José can only stay home with his daughter when his wife goes to her job.  She is a housekeeper for a wealthy family, who works for low wages, but she eventually gets a better offer in Colombia though taking that job would break up the family.  All these pressures on José reflect the current situation in Venezuela.

To worsen matters, José and his family live in the decaying villa his grandmother once worked at and where José grew up.  The white family that owns the villa has long since moved, and Jorge, a member of that family who also grew up there, confides in José that the family is planning to raze the villa and sell the property.

All this would lend itself to melodrama, but as these external pressures mount on José, director Jorge Thielen Armand moves La Soledad into a mystical and psychological space.  From television, José becomes interested in finding a possible hidden cache of gold on the property, and his grandmother tells him a similar tale concerning La Soledad, although her story has a warning about a spectral guardian.  Meanwhile, his daughter becomes interested in playing ghost with him, pulling a sweatshirt over her head and waving her hands.  And José dreams of an old slave watching him in his sleep.  These elements dovetail nicely with the old photos José finds around the house and with his childhood memories of being in the house. As we learn early, some of José’s recollections are only memories of photos and family films; for example, though he remembers his grandfather, the man had already when José was born.  In the crumbling villa of La Soledad, these memories and ghosts blend and feel much like a García Márquez gesture, a magical realist flourish that expresses the psychological and social pressure on José.

Rodrigo Michelangeli's cinematography here adds to the atmosphere.  Scenes, particularly in La Soledad, often have a vaguely washed-out look to them that keeps us from seeing every detail clearly.  And Michelangeli also preserves some visual mystery by backlighting or underexposing shots.  In one scene, the young daughter dances around a statue in a dark room, backlit by a line of windows.  In another, the film underexposes José lying in bed so we see only a few unclear contours until the man’s face emerges from the pattern, and Michelangeli uses strong, single-source light in the the film's many night scenes to preserve some of the mystery of the scene.  Ironically, the choice to move to a graphic clarity at the end of the film amps up the tension and ambiguity of the concluding sequence.  Throughout, the cinematography is an important element of La Soledad.

This film gives us an evocative blending of social reality, psychology and drama, which makes the achievement of its 25-year-old, first-time director all the more impressive.  Armand was a recipient of a 150,000 euro Biennale College grant from the Venice Film Festival, and he had only a few months to complete the movie.  He based the story on his own experience, and he introduced a documentary element by having people play themselves in the film.  The director himself plays the autobiographical character Jorge, and José plays Jorge’s friend because he was the director's childhood friend.  This element adds yet another level of significance to La Soledad.

Armand directs this film in a delicate balance.  La Soledad takes us into a specific set of circumstances with specific people, but this specificity ultimately shows us something that is timeless and universal.  There are some technical weaknesses here, but there’s also a keenly-observed truth.

Atlanta Film Festival: Saturday, April 1, 2:30 pm at the Plaza Theater.
Worth your time.

March 10: Rat Film (2016 – Theo Anthony)

★★★★★

Atlanta Film Festival: Thursday, March 30, 7:15 pm at the Plaza Theater.
This is not one to miss.

March 9: Cortez (2017 – Cheryl Nichols)

★★★

Co-written by the co-stars and directed by one of them, Cortez has a lot of the strengths of a good indie production.  Notable among the assets here is the way the West is a character.  You certainly see it in the landscapes, but it’s also present in the décor of the interiors and in everyone’s stylistically-heightened clothes.  Kelly Moore’s cinematography and F. Rocky Jameson’s editing add to the distinct local color.  Moore's camera is still during still moments and moves when the pace picks up, and the way she lets light work contributes to the sense of place, whether nighttime bonfire images of a machine beast crushing a burning structure or a daytime exterior with highlights washed out by the bright ambient light.  She also frames images to allow more space for the world around the actors.  Supplementing all this, Jameson allows enough room in a shot for the action to be clear, but he cuts away when we have enough information rather than lingering overlong.  And he jump cuts to move action along quickly.

For all this strength, the two creative principals show a less sure hand.  Cheryl Nichols and Arron Shiver both have strong careers in acting, but the dialog they’ve created here doesn’t make for compelling cinema.  It shifts quickly in tone from consciously over-eloquent to mundane, and it’s laden with heavy-handed symbols and even exposition, just in case we don’t get the symbols.  You can’t fight everyone the way a ninja does, Jesse tells us so we recognize the evolution of his character.  Jameson's editing compresses action and moves the story of Cortez quickly, but Nichols’ and Shriver’s dialog bogs down this movement into long scenes of discourse, often allowing characters to deliver extended orations that become tedious, no matter how good the acting.  As director, Nichols bears no small of amount of responsibility here.  She lets scenes of dialog run like theatrical productions rather than a movie, relying on language instead of images and action, and she does little to break up long narrative speeches.  The opening of Cortez sets up this aesthetic as a man tells Jesse a long story while the two are sitting in a hot spring with nothing to interrupt our view of the speaker's face and the flow of his words except an occasional reaction shot.

Cortez has many strong elements, especially its evocation of the West as enhanced by expert cinematography and editing.  Stronger direction and a more focused script would have made this a very fine film indeed.

Atlanta Film Festival: Saturday, April 1, 5:15 pm at the Plaza Theater

March 6: Too Late for Tears (1949 – Byron Haskin)

★★★★

March 5: His Girl Friday (1940 – Howard Hawks)

★★★★★

This Howard Hawks’ version of "The Front Page" is just fun.  Unlike Lewis Milestone’s 1931 talkfest, Hawks brings this play to the screen as a full-fledged screwball comedy that works as cinema.

In addition to the repartee that informs the dialog, there’s always something worth looking at in the frame in His Girl Friday.  In Hawks’ version, the camera is more fluid than in Milestone’s, which helps engage us with what we’re seeing and hearing.  The contrast in the opening sequences of the films points to that difference right away.  While both films open with a newsroom tracking shot, Hawks lets newsroom items loom suddenly into the frame and pass out, just as he has the newsroom personnel bustle in and out of the frame.  By contrast, Milestone’s pan is rather monotone.  One particular Hawks update on the opening is the way the camera tracks to the elevator, engages Hildy, then tracks back across the newsroom again as she walks to see Walter, greeting people as she goes.  Hawks tells us in this opening scene that it’s same story, but done in a more active, cinematic way.

There are other camera and action flourishes in Friday, too.  At one point, the camera pans around to a series of phones as they start ringing, replicating how the eye might move as one phone after another sounds.  And rather than simply learning that Hildy has discovered that Sheriff Hartwell's gun was used in the escape, which is what happens in Front Page, Hawks shows us Hildy chase down and tackle the sheriff.  The ironic humor in a woman of this era performing a running tackle adds to the audience engagement that camera and action are already creating in Friday.

To the dialog-heavy script, Hawks also adds action within scenes so there’s usually something interesting to look at while we're listening.  Early in the film, for example, as Hildy, Walter and Bruce go into a bar for lunch, the conversation among the three is continually supplemented with other input.  Hildy, for example, exchanges greetings with the waiter during their conversation, and as they walk to the table, the silhouette of a wood column momentarily splits up the three, attracting our eye.  With the dialog never pausing, Walter maneuvers Bruce to sit at the far end of the table away from Hildy, and when they’re sitting and still talking, Hildy is removing her coat, another action that keeps the film from becoming visually stale.  In a similarly animated scene after Walter’s physical, the editor is putting on his shirt and tying his tie while the dialog between him and Bruce unspools.  As the conversation continues, Walter puts his hand on Bruce’s shoulder, and Duffy pokes his head into the office to give a visual comment on the dialog he’s overhearing.  A long, two-person conversation like this could fall flat, but Hawks animates it with action and with having ancillary characters break up any monotony.

The cinematic wit here also adds to our experience of Friday, especially the way Hawks winks at Milestone’s version.  Hawks is clearly one-upping Milestone with his take on the earlier film’s opening tracking shot, and his embellishment of Hildy’s revelation about Sheriff Hartwell shows a similar wit.  And changing Hildy’s gender here, with the subsequent fun of having Bruce as the character with the mother, opens the door for lots of humor that Milestone could hardly access.  The intertextuality between these two productions is another fun element of Hawks' Friday.

Although Hawks’ version of "The Front Page" is more cinematic than Milestone’s, Friday keeps the social critique of the original play.  Government is corrupt, and officials are mostly interested in keeping their jobs even if it means scare-mongering or outright bribery.  Experts are cluelessly self-important; the press is uncaring and unreliable.  And the people who bear the brunt of this pervasive self-serving attitude are the poor, like Earl and Molly.  In His Girl Friday, Hawks imbues the strong play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur with the director’s command of the cinematic, and the result is a thoroughly engaging, deep social critique.

March 4: The Front Page (1931 – Lewis Milestone & Nate Watt)

★★★

Four years after The Jazz Singer, Lewis Milestone and Nate Watt pack The Front Page from start to finish with nonstop, fast dialogue.   It’s a smart, fun movie that takes joy in skewering public and domestic institutions with wit and satire, all the while feeling like the directors are trying to make up for the previous silent decades by keeping dialogue going at a wild pace.  The Front Page is one of the earliest screwball comedies and sets a standard to judge the rest by.

The satire here is as funny as it is over-the-top.  The press is a cynical lot whose reporters embellish events with outrageous false information and, when they can’t get a story, simply make one up with extensive verbal dexterity.  They criticize whatever they encounter and pass their time in self-absorbed card-play if they’re not making the dullard jailer go out to get their lunch.  They cynically demand that an execution occur earlier in the morning so they can make their reporting deadlines, scoff at the sadness of the woman whose friend is facing execution, berate every government official they encounter and mock institutions from family to respect for the elderly.  However, they do all this with such joyful abandon that the audience can’t help but laugh.  Among them, Edward Everett Horton’s Bensinger stands out as a gullible hypochondriac, but it’s Adolphe Menjou’s Walter Burns whose merry disdain for decency lights up many scenes.  This editor ceaselessly promotes his newspaper and does everything he can to undermine the life of his reporter, Hildy, in order to keep him working at the Post.  Burns’ relish in sabotaging Hildy at the end of film brings an especially big smile.

Beyond the press, The Front Page takes aim at government and municipal elections.  A corrupt mayor and incompetent sheriff want to hang an innocent man to shore up their support in an upcoming election.  The sheriff falsely links the man with Bolshevism – to the delight of the sensationalist press -- and when a pardon arrives from the governor, both try to suppress the news until after the execution.  They fawn over higher authority, bully their underlings and make error after error when pursuing the convict the sheriff has inadvertently let escape.  Government here is as bungling as it is self-serving.

The Front Page is a lot of fun, but it’s not without its drawbacks.  While it condemns hypocrisy and ineptitude, it doesn’t know what to do with goodness.  Molly’s suicide, for example, injects stakes into the movie that makes the film’s overall satire feel trivial.  And we discover a complexity to Earl, who is both innocent because he’s mentally ill but also dangerous that doesn’t fit into the good guy/bad guy ethical structure of The Front Page’s mockery.  And on a technical level, the film begins to seem monotonous at its midpoint due to the consistently high-pitched banter of the characters.  The movie could benefit more vocal variety for its first two-thirds.

But overall, this is a fun and funny film, many of whose satirical flourishes still feel timely.  And it sets up the genre of screwball comedy well.

March 3: J'accuse! (1938 – Abel Gance)

★★★★

March 1: Bad Girl (1931 – Frank Borzage)

★★★

Bad Girl is an O. Henry short story wrapped in comedy.  Like in “The Gift of the Magi,” the two protagonists here miscommunicate throughout, though O. Henry lets things run to a bitter conclusion while Frank Borzage reigns in the consequences for this comedy.  Early in the film, Eddie says that he thinks things but they don’t come out like he thinks, and this condition governs much of what we see.  Dorothy thinks that Eddie doesn’t want them to have the baby she’s carrying, while Eddie is desperately doing everything he can to care for her and prepare for the child.  He’s gives up his dream of having his own store for Dorothy, and he’s almost late for the birth itself because he’s trying to get more money for Dorothy’s preferred doctor.  Dorothy meanwhile loves Eddie and wants him to realize his ambitions, but she’s saddened by what she thinks is his aversion to fatherhood.  Three-quarters of Bad Girl unspools with this misunderstanding as its most significant narrative spring.

But Bad Girl is a comedy at base, and Borzage layers in humor at every possible moment, most of it related to gender roles.  The film opens with a funny sight gag when we realize that what looks like a wedding is actually a department store show of wedding dresses, and a good deal of the rest of the humor in the sequence centers on the harassment women face in public from men.  The film follows this same line of humor as the girls leave the department store and later that evening at Coney Island with the women sarcastically batting away the constant harassment men direct towards them.  Later in the film, another sight gag also draws its humor from gender roles.  The shot starts with an apron and hands washing dishes until the camera draws back showing that we’re watching Eddie doing the dishes and not Dorothy, another good-natured dig at gender expectations.  Overall, the funniest dialog in the film occurs in the banter between Edna and Eddie, and it largely plays on what women should do and what men actually do.  It’s a forecast of future screwball.  A later, extended sequence in the film takes the gender joking beyond dialog as it dwells on how hard it is for men in the hospital to wait for their wives to deliver the baby.  It’s a funny and obviously ironic take on the birthing experience.  There’s other humor in Bad Girl to mitigate the pain from the misunderstandings between Dorothy and Eddie.  As they discover during a conversation while they’re locked up in a mid-ring fight, both Eddie and the professional boxer are fathers; this being the case, the pro lets Eddie last a few extra rounds to increase his earnings to take home for Dorothy.  It’s a funny scene that doesn't play on gender roles but that’s set up early in the film when Dorothy brushes off a suitor by saying her boyfriend is a boxer.

Bad Girl is not without its serious elements.  There’s a lot of pathos when Eddie breaks down and tells Dr. Burgess of his love for Dorothy and his anxiety to provide for her.  And overall, the film shows the travails of the working man, from the life we see in the tenement houses to the financial worries of the service clerks in stores.  But Bad Girl never successfully blends the serious, the humorous and the central plot device of the misunderstandings within the central couple.  It’s a good enough look at the early sound period, but this Borzage project never pulls its content together enough to make itself more than a pleasant time at the screen.

February 28: Children of Divorce (1928 – Frank Lloyd)

★★★★

Melodrama is the language of popular silent film, and Children of Divorce speaks it fluently.  The story moves from one melodramatic scene to the next, starting in the opening when Kitty as a child is dropped off a convent while her newly-divorced mother goes merrily out into the world.  Kitty is rejected by the other girls there until another child of divorce, Jean, befriends her.  Jean then takes care of new girl, even comforting her in a very expressionist dorm scene.  The melodrama continues at this same clip throughout, making Children of Divorce a moving film experience.

But as touching as the film is, Frank Lloyd doesn’t connect us with the film as strongly as he might because he doesn’t exploit the drama that good characterization can build.  Jean, for example, is largely a self-sacrificing paragon of virtue who worries about Kitty, her daughter, and everyone else.  She’s not a character with conflicts or with much background.  Meanwhile, Vico has no character development at all and seems more a plot device than anything else, while Ted is little more than the handsome pawn of the two women, doing whatever either one of them wants.  Clara Bow’s Kitty is the most complex character, repeatedly torn between her love for Vico or for Jean but at the same time following her mother’s teachings that she needs to secure an income through marriage.  Bow's acting delivers this moral conflict especially well.  In an early scene with Einar Hanson's Vico, Lloyd leaves the camera on Bow's face, and we watch her go from resisting Vico's profession of love to joyfully accepting it and then to setting her determination to marry Ted for his money.  And all this  only by changes in her facial expression.  But even with such masterful acting and a character of some complexity, Kitty remains difficult to sympathize with because her script treatment is so thin.  It's hard to sympathize with her internal conflict because the film doesn’t build the importance of wealth to her.

But while Children of Divorce isn’t as strong as it could be, it still packs a melodramatic punch at its end.  We know that Kitty should end up with Vico and Jean with Ted, so we expect to see how the couples overcome the blocks to these relationships.  Kitty and Vico need to resolve the problems the Catholic church would pose if Kitty were to divorce, and Jean and Ted would need to solve the problem posed by Ted’s daughter with Kitty so the girl doesn’t become another child of divorce.  At the end of the film, Frank Lloyd gives us an unexpected resolution to this tension, and it’s not a resolution that a viewer would expect or, for that matter, want.  The film goes dramatic through its final moments.

An irony of Children of Divorce is that although it wants to condemn divorce, money is the real force that drives the melodrama to the tragic ending.  Torn between love and money, Kitty choses money to the detriment of everyone involved.  While high divorce rates and an irresponsible approach to marriage is indeed an issue, it’s not the center of the film.  Children of Divorce ultimately condemns allowing money to rule the heart.