Once again, this past year yielded some movies of interest that I didn’t get to write about, mostly because they didn’t play in Tarrant County theaters. With that, here’s some thoughts about some of those films for you to track down.
Blitz
While I found this World War II drama to be the least of Steve McQueen’s films, I also found some stuff of interest in it. Saoirse Ronan stars as a factory worker named Rita, who’s the mother of a mixed-race son (Elliott Heffernan) whose father was deported to the Caribbean for defending her from some white thugs. They become separated during the Nazi bombing. The characters are cardboard, but McQueen stages some admirable set pieces, like when the boy takes refuge in a train station that starts to flood after it’s hit by a bomb. Leigh Gill from the Joker movies appears here as Mickey “The Midget” Davies, a real-life 4’6” man and socialist activist who was much admired for organizing underground bomb shelters.
The Critic
I cited this movie in my post about the year’s best movie dialogue. Ian McKellen plays Jimmy, a longtime drama critic at a London newspaper in the 1930s who finds his job under threat when the paper’s owner dies and his adult heirs (Mark Strong and Romola Garai) think Jimmy is a disgusting pervert of his homosexuality. Jimmy thinks they won’t dare fire him because he’s a beloved institution — always a dangerous attitude for a journalist to take — but when he realizes he’s in jeopardy, he recruits a stage actress (Gemma Arterton) to seduce and then blackmail the male heir. The criminal plot isn’t the best, but the movie is pretty strong about how critics do their job and the casual racism and homophobia that Jimmy and his younger Black boyfriend (Tom Turner) face, and McKellen is great as an old man who’s ethically shady for a reason.
The End
Joshua Oppenheimer directed two documentaries about Indonesia, and The Act of Killing might just be the best documentary of the 2010s. His fiction debut was this striking musical set on a postapocalyptic Earth when a family in an underground bunker takes in a refugee (Moses Ingram) from a different bunker. It’s a star-studded affair with Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay singing songs by Marius de Vries and everybody singing about how their future is bright even though, for all they know, they might be the only people left in the world. Is it a tribute to human optimism and resilience or an indictment of human self-delusion? I don’t know, but it looks cool.
Fancy Dance
Erica Tremblay’s film really should have caught more buzz, not least because it stars Lily Gladstone, but also because it’s the best Native American film in a wave that is continuing to build. Gladstone portrays a Seneca-Cayuga woman who’s dealing with the recent disappearance of her sister from their Oklahoma reservation while also raising her sister’s 13-year-old daughter (Isabel DeRoy-Olson). Both plotlines work tremendously well, and Gladstone (whom I mentioned in my best performances list) is great as someone who pesters the local cops, the FBI, and the tribal cops to find her missing sister. The climax at a powwow in Oklahoma City is great stuff, with our heroine dancing with her niece before taking the fall to give the girl a future.
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
I do appreciate a movie that delivers exactly what its title promises. Somewhere between Wes Anderson and Tim Burton lies this French-Canadian film about a teen vampire (Sara Montpetit) who doesn’t want to kill people for food until she sees a young bowling-alley employee (Félix-Antoine Bénard) on the roof of his building thinking of jumping off. That’s when she gets the idea to only kill people who want to die anyway. You may remember the canceled Netflix show First Kill. This is like that, but without the lesbianism. Director Ariane Louis-Seize manages the tone of cracked romance quite well.
Hundreds of Beavers
I just saw the new Looney Tunes movie, which came to grief stretching out the premise of a 10-minute cartoon to feature length. Take a gander at Mike Cheslik’s comedy, where every gag is precisely timed in the near-silent story of Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), a 19th-century applejack distiller who switches to becoming a fur trapper after beavers destroy his apple orchard. He tries to trap a rabbit by building a female snow-rabbit with big boobs, and when that doesn’t work, he builds a massive carrot out of snow and tries to crush the rabbits with it. Oh, and all the rabbits, beavers, raccoons, and dogs are played by people wearing animal costumes. This movie feels Canadian for a lot of reasons, but it was made in Wisconsin.
The Invisible Fight
I’m a sucker for a premise like this: During the Soviet era, an Estonian heavy-metal rocker (Ursel Tilk) gets into a motorcycle accident outside a Russian Orthodox monastery and decides to give up music to become a kung fu master like the gravity-defying monks who heal him. They keep telling him, “Go home, you clown!” (the movie’s catchphrase), but then their religious icons start weeping tears of honey around the guy. Rainer Sarnet previously made the much creepier November, but here he manages to combine the verdant majesty of King Hu’s martial-arts movies with the deader-than-deadpan humor of Aki Kaurismäki’s comedies. Who knew such a thing was possible?
Mothers’ Instinct
This film came out last April and received poisonous reviews. I understand that people were expecting Oscar winners Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway to produce something fantastic, and this remake of a similarly titled 2018 French thriller is well short of that. Even so, Benoît Delhomme (the cinematographer of A Most Wanted Man, The Theory of Everything, and others, here making his directing debut) makes everything look good in this story set in the early 1960s about a mother who spins into madness and murder when her only child dies in an accident. Anders Danielsen Lie co-stars as one woman’s husband who sees all this death and thinks “Bitches be crazy,” which is what an American man at that time probably would think.
The People’s Joker
I didn’t mention this movie at all in my year-end coverage. That’s for a simple reason: I don’t think it’s that good. Still, it is interesting. Transgender filmmaker Vera Drew stars in it as Joker the Harlequin, an aspiring stand-up comic turned outlaw who starts dating Mr. J (Kane Distler). The stuff about dating as a trans person and getting out of a toxic relationship is really good. Everything else fails, though: the anti-corporate satire, the parody of movies about the Joker, the depiction of trying to find success as a trans artist, the wild mix of live-action and animation styles. I feel like a movie about the Joker should really be funnier. I do think Drew could be a viable filmmaker if she finds the right collaborators.
Red Rooms
The other French-Canadian film on this list made my Top 10 list. Juliette Gariépy stars as a Montreal fashion model who sits in at a high-profile murder trial, the sort that has the defendant (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) sitting behind bulletproof glass because he’s accused of kidnapping, murdering, and dismembering underage girls and selling filmed footage of his crimes on the dark web. Because it’s not clear that the accused is the guilty party, our internet-savvy model conducts her own investigation in a dark apartment with no furniture, and we wonder what her deal is. Despite her youth and beauty, she has no friends or romantic attachments, and she starts a mysterious friendship with a fangirl (Laurie Babin) who’s in love with the defendant. The twists and turns in Pascal Plante’s script are so very clever, especially when our model pulls a ghoulish stunt at the trial and then when she enters an online poker game while she’s bidding in an online auction for evidence that will crack the case.
The Shadow Strays
Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us made this feature six years ago, and now he has another super-violent Indonesian thriller on Netflix that’s worth a look. This is different because it has a woman in the lead: Aurora Ribero plays a teenage assassin who accidentally kills a geisha while taking out yakuza bosses in Japan and has to undertake a mission in Cambodia as penance. The plot makes more sense here than in The Night Comes for Us, and if the action sequences aren’t quite as badass, there’s still a huge shootout in a warehouse between the Indonesian mafia boss (Kristo Immanuel) and a bunch of Arab drug dealers. Some time when you have a free evening, this entry will let you give in to your bloodlust.
