Reaction Shots

I’m late to the party for Downmania, but at halfway through the fourth season, I was already acclimated to the characters and story beats and took a chance on the latest film about the Crawley’s upstairs and downstairs travails.   Julian Fellowes struck gold with “Gosford Park”, a surprise hit for Robert Altman with a predominantly British cast (Bob Balaban is the token American, as memory serves, and Fellowes based his script off ideas from Balaban and Altman). He started carving out diamonds with “Downton Abbey” though.  The movie, like the series, is hardly a serious critique of class in Britain, despite how it shoehorns references in to the changing times, the decline of the aristocracy, the rise of the middle class, suffrage and so on. Robert, Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville in a career defining role), is a kind man who is caught blindsided by those winds of change, along with his mother the Dowager Countess of Grantham, Lady Violet Crawley (the always amazing Maggie...

Although set in early 1960s France, Audrey Diwan’s “Happening”/“L’événent” could not be more timely nor more important. It is at once a horror story, a warning, and masterpiece of depicting the very human, very real cost of denying women agency over their bodies (indeed, over their lives). Adapted by Diwan and Marcia Romano from Annie Ernaux’s novel(1), the film evokes the waking nightmare for a young woman with an unwanted pregnancy in a world where she is condemned to give birth. There is no alternative. To even talk to a doctor about an abortion is to invite rebuke and censure. If the woman survives, she will be arrested. The resonance with our current climate in the United States surrounding access to abortion, reproductive healthcare for women, and the potential for turning back the clock on other aspects of societal progress over the past fifty or so years is unnerving. That the past is - or is likely to be - prologue, is frightening. “I didn’t intend to make it a thriller, or...

Along with Kevin Smith, I count myself one of the easier marks for the MCU. If you throw Sam Raimi into the mix, I'm a goner. That said, I feel like this one is far more a Raimi movie than a Marvel one. The kineticism of the camera, the dutch angles, the slapstick, the ability to take into stride jumping from one universe to another without missing a beat, and the goofy and genuinely jarring dispatches of characters are all of a piece and from the Sam Raimi playbook.  Having said that, it is very much a Marvel movie, of course. It continues Wanda Maximoff's journey from "WandaVision", picks up where "Spider-Man: No Way Home" left off, and of course, gives us a Steven Strange who has been integral in saving the world but has grown a good bit since we first met him years ago. Even so, Raimi and Michael Waldron (co-writer and creator of the "Loki" series) show us a guy who still has a bit of figuring out to do. In some ways, the movie is as much abou...

After “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse”, it was pretty much assured that whatever Robert Eggers is going to do will be at least interesting and more than likely, masterful. “The Northman” is both. It is a far more sprawling work and more explicit in its themes, perhaps, but it ain’t boring. That last clause is not damning with faint praise. There is a remarkable amount of work - thematic and narratively - that threatens to overwhelm the film. In some parts, I think it kind of does.  While it is an unrepentantly gorgeously shot movie, there are places where the camera lingers overlong and a scene overstays its welcome. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how sometimes a director just seems to love the composition, the set-up, or hell, the composition so much to the detriment of moving forward. In Eggers here, it’s not that egregious, and I’m not of the mind that major cuts would be in order; if anything, the edits would be invisible and who knows, really, if they’d make that much of a diffe...