Reaction Shots

James Gray’s evocation of a formative time in his is one of the clearest-sighted, unsentimental, and not infrequently, uncomfortable looks at childhood that I’ve seen in quite some time. That his protagonist/stand-in, Paul Graf (a scarily good Banks Repeta), is not immediately likable. In fact, just about everyone in this film is hard to warm up to, except Johnny, Paul’s running buddy, an equally impressive Jaylin Webb, but whose path seems to be determined by the relentless, racist ethos driving America with the ascendancy of Reagan and his Republican Party. Indeed, Paul’s journey into middle school mirrors much of what a number of us felt who were older. The sense of being unmoored in a rapidly changing for the uglier world permeates the kid’s life as well as that of his family’s. Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway fill out two of the most complex parental figures on screen; both are torn between obvious love for their youngest, as well as the hopes they’ve projected on him and the fru...

Here’s a hot take: no one has a more complete mastery of the English language than the Irish and few come close to the long tradition of marrying crushed dreams and stunted lives with gallows humor in quite the same way. There is a rich vein of black, absurdist humor that, if it doesn’t heal the gaping wounds of existential dread, is mined expertly for cauterizing them.   Martin McDonagh has released a cinematic masterpiece in “The Banshees of Inisherin”. It may be his most complete statement as a filmmaker and this is saying something. Like many, I love “In Bruges”; “Seven Psychopaths” is a gem that I wish more people had seen; and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” may have been his best film of the three. I hate “best of” on principle, and on any given day, I might well have said “In Bruges” instead. Hell, I can’t even choose and I wrote that idiotic sentence. However, I do know this: “The Banshees of Inisherin” is his masterpiece. At lest, in cinema. McDonagh’s sta...

This may come as a shock, but Millie Bobby Brown is the real deal. She is in one of the biggest series on streaming , has been in two blockbusters (kaiju films, at that - “Godzilla: KIng of the Monsters” and “ Godzilla vs. Kong ”), started her own production company at sixteen, and stars in and produces the Enola Holmes films for Netflix. I really liked the first one from a couple of years ago and genuinely love the second one that just premiered on November 4.   I won’t go on at too great length because it is fresh enough and likely to be seen by more people (than, say, “Triangle of Sadness”) and I don’t want to spoil it so soon out of the gate. However, I have to say that Harry Bradbeer, who also directed, and Jack Thorne have made a superior sequel by giving more time to other characters, recognizing that Enola is a young woman out to make a name for herself, and adjusting the tone with the passage of time from teen to young adult (well, Brown is only < checks IMDb> eight...

There are times when satire is too on point, too on the nose, and threatens to overwhelm other aspects of a story. “Don’t Look Up” came close to that, but skirted it by couching the satire in farce and going very, very broad. Conversely, Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness” is assured, spot on, and with a script that imbues its characters with nuance and even warmth. It remains an unsparing indictment of class, racism, privilege, disconnect, and the reduction to living on the surface that comes with the ascendancy of “influencer culture” and social media in the larger sense. It begins with what seems as a broadside fired at the fashion industry and reaches peak snark when judges at an audition remark that Carl (an excellent Harris Dickinson) should consider Botox (at twenty-five years old in real life and I assume the same for his character, that is, of course, laughable) and one of the judges asks that he relax his “triangle of sadness” the furrow between the eyebrows. The first c...

Italian giallo is the most operatic of horror cinema sub-genres. At its best, the genre is comprised of works that are unsettling at a deep level, characterized by hyperstylization, and often, characters who read less as people than somnambulists caught in waking nightmares, aware of unavoidable fates. The names Mario Bava and Dario Argento loom largest over the landscape with the latter still active at 82.   Of the two, I prefer Bava’s work overall. He was more disciplined and assured in his storytelling. While many of the elements mentioned above are present in his work, he did seem to care more about his characters than most, and I should hasten to note that Bava also worked in other genres, from sword and sandal epics to spy fiction a la James Bond (“Danger Diabolik” is so many kinds of awesome).  Argento, by contrast, is almost pure opera. “Suspiria” and “Bird with the Crystal Plumage” are usually regarded as his masterpieces, but I would add a couple of others to the...