Telluride ’23: Daddio

Telluride23daddio

***/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Sean Penn
written and directed by Christy Hall

by Walter Chaw Girlie (Dakota Johson) gets in a cab from JFK to Manhattan, and over the long drive through construction slowdowns and other diversions, she and driver Clark (Sean Penn)…talk. Girlie receives a few lewd texts from her lover, sure, but Clark praises her for how little she’s on her phone in this age of screen intermediaries. He’s surprised again when she wants to know his name: “You are a human being,” he says, and there’s hardly anyone who could deliver this line the way Penn does: free of insinuation or sarcasm, hinting at emotions like gratefulness and even flattered surprise. Penn is one of our great “face” actors. Robbed of tools other performers rely upon, he won an Oscar for Dead Man Walking, where he spent most of his time behind a glass partition, shackled to a table. The four inches reflected in the rearview mirror in Daddio are a better actor than almost anyone who’s ever done this. His persona outside of film has outgrown him in many ways, but I was shocked by how glad I was to be in his company again. Penn’s large humanitarian gestures and vile history of abuse, spotlighted whenever he shares his unevolved and indeed apparently devolving Neanderthal viewpoints on women and consent have obscured his accomplishments as an actor. Perhaps rightfully so. Seeing him on a big screen again made me realize how much I’d missed him in this context–and how much I wish it were the only context in which I knew him.

Telluride ’23: All of Us Strangers

Telluride23allofusstrangers

****/****
starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy
screenplay by Andrew Haigh, based on the novel by Taichi Yamada
directed by Andrew Haigh

by Walter Chaw What if I could? What if I did and they were there, my parents as I remember them when I was 12, and I was not so fixed in time and grief? When I was a child and needed them even though I thought I didn’t, but now, as the old man who knows I still do. What if I went to the place where I grew up and rang the bell and they answered it, and I could tell them the things I had done that would make them proud of me? And the things I never could tell them because I was afraid they’d reject me again for everything I could’ve helped and everything I couldn’t. I can see them in the living room. I can see them in the kitchen. What if they, knowing how short the time had gotten, could tell me what was in their hearts so I didn’t have to wonder? Was there love there that had hardened? Or had it retreated to an armoured place to protect it from breaking? In Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, a man tells his new lover how something awful happened to him once, but it’s okay because it was a long time ago. His lover corrects him: “A long time ago” doesn’t matter when you’re talking about terrible things. “Oh,” the man says, and quieter, “oh.”

Telluride ’23: El Conde

Telluride23elconde

***½/****
starring Alfredo Castro, Catalina Guerra, Paula Luchsinger, Diego Muñoz
written by Guillermo Calderón & Pablo Larraín
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Walter Chaw El Conde is the bitterest of farces: a satire of excess and great evil that uses vampirism as a blunt metaphor for the forces that sap places and entire peoples of their share of a nation’s fortunes. Always timely, Chilean director Pablo Larraín turns his attention to his country’s last bogey, Augusto Pinochet, who, with the support of the United States government, staged a brutal coup in 1973 and consequently ruled Chile with an iron hand until 1990. Among the disastrous programs initiated by his regime? Abolition of all trade unions–an act that seems specifically pointed, given the millions poured into this project by Netflix. The country’s wealth tanked as Pinochet’s exploded. At the time of his death in 2006, over 300 criminal charges were left pending against him. Larraín speculates that Pinochet staged his death to avoid continued persecution and is, in fact, a centuries-old vampire who once fed on the blood of Marie Antoinette. The image of a young Frenchman licking her blue blood fresh from the guillotine’s blade is, in a tidy nutshell, critique of thaumaturgical contagion: hereditary wealth and power, distilled into the tastes of a vampire so smitten by the tang of royal blood that he steals the Queen’s head and keeps it in a jar as a fetish object. When he seduces a young nun in the present day of the film, he first makes her dress up like Antoinette and is dismayed when she shows not just disinterest in the onanistic trophy he uses as a reference for her costume, but actual disgust.

Telluride ’23: Nyad

Telluride23nyad

*/****
starring Annette Bening, Jodie Foster, Rhys Ifans, Johnny Solo
screenplay by Julia Cox, based on the book by Diana Nyad
directed by Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

by Walter Chaw Film festivals are expensive and not profitable. They underpay their staff, which mostly comprises volunteers and a nomadic group of technicians who follow festivals around the country like roadies on an eternal tour, and they suffer from the need to please their wealthiest supporters, who, for the most part, have more money than taste. Certainly, they have more desire to be coddled than hunger for risk-taking. That’s why, every year at the Telluride Film Festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the country, there’s an entry like thrill-seeker documentarians Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyl’s Oscar-bait biopic Nyad. Last year it was Empire of Light, and the year before it was King Richard, and the year before that it was Judy. In 2017, there was that Battle of the Sexes thing about Billie Jean King, the only one I’ve mentioned to get zero traction at the Academy Awards. Each of these movies is as functionally formulaic as a suppository: machine-tooled and well-lubed, with only one measure for its success or failure. It either wins the middlebrow’s greatest honour, thus enriching its producers, or it fails to do so. But are these movies any good? I wouldn’t know how to begin to answer that question. Is a suppository good? I dunno, man, I don’t spend much time thinking about a capsule I shoot out of my ass annually around this time of year.

Telluride ’23: The Zone of Interest

Telluride23zoneofinterest

****/****
starring Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Freya Kreutzkam, Ralph Herforth
screenplay by Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Martin Amis
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw A real sense of evil permeates every nook and cranny of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which is an adaptation of the Martin Amis novel in the same way Glazer’s Under the Skin is an adaptation of Michel Farber’s novel. That is to say, one of tone and mood that discards all but the broadest strokes of the original premise. If Glazer applied the same process to this film as his previous one, he let the mysterious currents of his intuition guide his hand across the text. He is the philosopher as artist, an anthropologist locating himself in a human blind and documenting the mysterious movement of the dark as it oozes from one crooked and low place to another. I don’t know how he finds the threads he pulls, but his fingers must be more sensitive than mine. I also don’t entirely understand how he sneaks toxins past my defenses, desensitization, and tolerances: the draft you can never locate after the first freeze of a long winter locks you in place. Glazer isn’t interested in moralizing, in trying to understand, even contextualize, how an ordinary, upper-middle-class military family in The Zone of Interest can owe their existence to mechanized genocide and feel no call to conscience. He doesn’t see his characters as so complex they defy binary judgment; he sees them as so mechanical and simple they defy binary judgment. The universe tends to comfort. It’s a fool’s mission to impose systems of understanding on the ant Isserly beholds at the beginning of Under the Skin. Trying to do so could drive one to madness. Trying to do so says more about you than it does the ant.

Telluride ’23: Fallen Leaves

Telluride23fallenleaves

Kuolleet lehdet
***½/****

starring Alma Pöysti, Jussi Vatanen, Janne Hyytiäinen, Nuppu Koivu
written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki

by Walter Chaw I adore Aki Kaurismäki, the deadpan, live-action Bill Plympton of Finland, who tells his small stories, little romances and tiny tragedies, with a style one might call rigid but that for me plays like the legacy of Fassbinder carried through into our dotage. (Mine and his, had he lived.) Kaurismäki’s latest film, Fallen Leaves, reminds me a lot, in fact, of Fassbinder’s winsome Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), about a young Tunisian immigrant who falls for an older cleaning lady in West Germany. Its story of star-crossed lovers, separated by culture and generation, race and creed, is presented with the kind of simplicity that’s all the more emotionally lacerating for its reserve. Fassbinder’s slow, mannered pace allows his actors to find their breath, to expand into the skins of their characters so that we register every minute change in expression, every tightening of the skin by the eye, every roll of the muscle in the jaw when a small slight lands like a blow. Kaurismäki’s pictures engage in the same slowing-down, the same understated dialogue, the same complexity of emotion.

Telluride ’23: The Royal Hotel

Telluride23theroyalhotel

**½/****
starring Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, James Frecheville, Hugo Weaving
written by Kitty Green & Oscar Redding
directed by Kitty Green

by Walter Chaw Aussie hyphenate Kitty Green’s follow-up to her superlative office horror The Assistant is The Royal Hotel, a lighter, distaff version of Wake in Fright in which two college girls looking for a little adventure but out of money find themselves in the Outback tending bar to a bunch of despicable degenerates. Hanna (Julia Garner) is the cautious one and Liv (Jessica Henwick) is the broken one, leading to a few uncomfortable scenes where Liv gets fall-down drunk while surrounded by a bunch of men who would most assuredly like to rape and murder her. Maybe not in the bright light of day, but a few dozen pints later all’s fair in love and the poor decisions most of us somehow survive. For the record, I liked Hanna very much and loathed Liv, which is evidence of not only a profound empathy gap in me that stops me from caring about people who, by their damage, end up damaging those who’ve made themselves responsible for them, but also a script (by Green and Oscar Redding) that leans perhaps too heavily on the horror-movie dichotomy of good girl/party girl. What works so well about Wake in Fright is how its hero is both a respectable doctor and a drunken gambling addict with a sadistic streak. You hate him, but you hate everyone else a tiny bit more. Still, when he puts a gun to his temple, you hope he doesn’t miss. Imagine the film now with a friend for the hero who is fully equipped with a working human warning system that no one will heed. It’s distracting; it becomes a different movie when there’s someone in it making sense.

Telluride ’23: Poor Things

Telluride23poorthings

****/****
starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef
screenplay by Tony McNamara, based upon the novel by Alasdair Gray
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

by Walter Chaw Ex Machina by way of Anaïs Nin, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is a libertine exercise-cum-fable about the hypocrisies of politesse and the occasional eruptions of collective sexual hysteria designed exclusively for shackling women to proverbial bits and millstones. It is the final of three films in 2023 that use Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a launchpad for progressive genre explorations, locating in the novel’s stitched-together creature a fulsome metaphor for the indignities afforded the spirit encased in prisons of rotting flesh. Rather than quibble about the merits of one over the other, watch all three (Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Laura Moss’s Birth/Rebirth being the other two) in any sequence to witness the unfolding of an extended treatise on gender and racial politics delivered with brio, invention, wicked intelligence, and bracing creative courage. It’s possible to make a movie of a lecture, but it’s more effective to make dangerous, even experimental, art from which all manner of lecture and examination will eventually be constructed. The former is the province of creators limited by their fear and ignorance, the latter of mad scientists inordinately confident in the ability of their cinematic children to find a way through the rubble of a drowned and ruined world. I don’t know that these three films are the best three films of the year, but they’re among them, and certainly, they comprise an uncanny trilogy for a period in which the United States has stripped women of their bodily autonomy at the moment of a suspiciously-timed rise in fascist white nationalism and its handmaiden, Puritanism. They’re doing it in the open: raising a flag of moral panic waved by Evangelical fucknuts pushing hard for an Apocalypse they hope will consign everyone else on this burning Earth to a damnation born of their perverse, onanistic fetishism.

Telluride ’23: Fingernails

Telluride23fingernails

½*/****
starring Jessie Buckley, Jeremy Allen White, Riz Ahmed, Luke Wilson
written by Christos Nikou, Stavros Raptis, Sam Steiner
directed by Christos Nikou

by Walter Chaw If you ever wondered what a tuneless Yorgos Lanthimos rip-off would look like, Christos Nikou’s Fingernails has your answer. It’s lifeless, pointless, idiosyncratic in the basic, formula-bound way non-idiosyncratic people imagine idiosyncrasy to be like, and it staggers around trying to make sense of its internal logic before it’s too late–but it’s too late. There’s no plan here that makes sense, only a high concept that sounded smart one night and a trillion-dollar corporation desperate for something to fill the voracious maw of its content extruder. Fingernails is the stupid-person’s version of Dogtooth, substituting an explicitly violent and sexual fable for the dangers of oppressive belief systems with a conspicuous nothing-burger that, not knowing what it’s about or how to be about it, is predictably a dumpster fire that thinks it’s about the indomitability of love yet in execution is about nothing. The movie has going for it three of the very finest actors working right now in Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, and Jeremy Allen White–and it has going against it a script that feels like a first draft, desperate direction, and a technical presentation that, at least in its festival incarnation, was marred with flaws that exacerbated the impression the film’s brand is “undercooked.” Everyone deserved better.

Telluride ’23: Cassandro

Tell23cassandro

*/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Roberta Colindrez, Perla de la Rosa, Raúl Castillo
written by David Teague & Roger Ross Williams
directed by Roger Ross Williams

by Walter Chaw Playing out as an exhausted vanity piece on the one side and an exhausted sports biopic on the other, Roger Ross Williams’s Cassandro essays the life and early career of flamboyant, El Paso-based luchador Saúl Armendaríz, who, under his nom de guerre “Cassandro,” became the first openly gay exóticos character in Mexican wrestling allowed to actually win matches. Armed with the “Mexico tint” coined by Steven Soderbergh in Traffic, a lot of Dutch angles, and an inexplicable 1.44:1 aspect ratio that makes everything seem like it was shot on an iPhone, Williams nudges the film along from one stale trope to the next like an old frog disinterestedly leaping across lilypads. There are flashbacks to Saúl’s childhood in which his “really into Jesus” dad, Eduardo (Robert Salas), feeds him doughnuts, not knowing his son will one day be an emblem of the love that dare not speak its name; interludes with Saúl’s figure-hugging-animal-print-dress-wearing mama Yocasta (Perla de la Rosa) that show her son to be a good boy; and then montages where Saúl trains with badass Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez) and starts climbing the Lucha Libre ranks. Cassandro, in other words, has nothing to say and doesn’t say it with any particular innovation, either. What a shame.

Telluride ’22: The Kingdom of Memory (Wrap-Up)

Tell22eternalsunshine

by Walter Chaw If I concentrate really hard–I mean, if I shut down as much external stimuli as possible, a dark room away from everyone–I can visit the tiny, rent-assisted apartment where my mom spent the final decade of her life. There’s a low couch, a small coffee table I remember from when I was a kid, an old fold-out dining-room table with wings that made it hard to get your legs underneath it. A hutch, a cramped kitchen cluttered with gadgets like the air fryer that’s currently on my counter and a rice cooker, of course. There are closets and drawers stuffed to overflowing with artifacts, some of which I would recognize and others I would not. I didn’t spend a lot of time there. A handful of visits over the course of a decade–thousands of missed opportunities to heal a relationship I didn’t believe could be healed and, moreover, didn’t have the strength to heal. I wish I were different. I think there’s a terrible irony embedded in how the pain I took on along the way made it impossible for me to redress the pain at the end.

Telluride ’22: Tár

Tell22tar

****/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Mark Strong
written and directed by Todd Field

by Walter Chaw Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is a monster. She’s also a genius of surpassing brilliance, which begs the question–as it so often does, although the artist is usually male–of what the connection might be between genius and monstrosity. Artists and athletes get a certain pass for their behaviour. The myth of the difficult genius is a popular one fostered, I suspect, by the “geniuses” themselves to excuse their neurodivergence…or the unchecked privilege and sense of entitlement their preternatural abilities have won them. When Todd Field, who has not made a bad film, though this is only his third in 21 years, makes the genius in question a woman, there is now the possibility the monster is a victim as well. A victim of systemic misogyny who has internalized that misogyny; a victim of a patriarchal collection of values and standards for success that diminish women, one who has figured out how to manipulate and exploit those values for her own advancement. I mean, what choice does she really have? The pathway to fame and success in this culture entails climbing a ladder constructed from the bodies of those who didn’t survive the journey. It’s dog-eat-dog out there, people tell you–but no one tells you this cannibalism metaphor is more a literal warning than an artful turn of phrase.

Telluride ’22: The Wonder

Tell22thewonder

**½/****
starring Florence Pugh, Niamh Algar, Kila Lord Cassidy, Ciarán Hinds
screenplay by Alice Birch and Emma Donoghue and Sebastián Lelio, based on the novel by Donoghue
directed by Sebastián Lelio

by Walter Chaw Sebastián Lelio’s The Wonder aspires to the scabrous experimental satire of Lars von Trier’s Dogville, down to establishing itself on an open soundstage, but it doesn’t quite have that film’s intellectual rigour, nor its nihilism. Some would say that’s to its credit. I guess I’m glad I didn’t feel like swallowing a shotgun after The Wonder, but I do, er, wonder if its effectiveness isn’t undermined by its essential hopefulness. I had a similar problem with co-screenwriter/source novelist Emma Donaghue’s Room, which treats severe trauma as not only a thing small children don’t suffer for some reason, but a thing small children are designed to heal in adults. It’s appalling. Evidently, Donaghue is stuck on a theme, as The Wonder is also about sexual abuse and the imprisonment of a young woman. It’s also, again, about a child tasked with redeeming the soul of a family and a society. But as the film ends right at the point the real consequences of the atrocities it portrays are about to bloom, we can at least imagine that its happy ending will be marred by the howl of PTSD’s florid demons. The Wonder is an improvement over Room as well in the sense that it’s a full-frontal attack on the patriarchy and its repulsive handmaiden–organized religion–rather than a somewhat tepid thriller with mishandled social grenades. Any full-bore offensive against systems of oppression, especially one as handsomely helmed and brilliantly performed as The Wonder, has undeniable value. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that Donaghue, for all the darkness of her narratives, is mainly interested in the fairy-tale ending.

Telluride ’22: Women Talking

Tell22womentalking

**½/****
starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Sarah Polley, based upon the book by Miriam Toews
directed by Sarah Polley

by Walter Chaw At the end of the note that opens Miriam Toews’s novel Women Talking, she says that her book is “both a reaction through fiction to these true-life events, and an act of female imagination.” Sarah Polley’s adaptation begins with the same declaration of “female imagination,” and it occurred to me finally, after sitting on the film for a couple of weeks before writing on it (and after reading Towes’s book for the first time to try to better understand my disquiet), that my problem with Women Talking is mainly one of my own expectations of the text. I expected this to be a galvanizing bit of agitprop: a rallying cry and a soapbox. It was an expectation exacerbated by Polley’s intro to the film at its world premiere in Telluride, where she introduced an “army of women” that included 11 cast members and one producer, Dede Gardner, who is the president of Plan B Entertainment, the production company founded by Brad Pitt. Though Pitt, too, is a producer on Women Talking, he was for obvious reasons absent on that stage–the same reasons, I reckon, that led to male characters in the Toews source being pared away for the film. But while it has powerful moments, as any piece of art inspired by a real-life case of mass rape (including the rape of children as young as three) in a closed-off religious cult (aren’t they all?) would have powerful moments, Women Talking is a romantic fantasy told from the perspective of a dreamy male narrator who has a doomed crush on a perfect projection of gauzy, unearthly femininity. It’s mostly my fault for assuming it was something else.

Telluride ’22: Aftersun

Tell22aftersun

***/****
starring Paul Mescal, Francesca Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Brooklyn Toulson
written and directed by Charlotte Wells

by Walter Chaw My parents are dead; my in-laws, too. Us outliving them is how they would’ve wanted it, and that’s the wonder of surviving, isn’t it, that this is what happens when everything works out? My dad has been dead for 19 years now, and that anniversary is coming up soon. I’m bad with dates, but my body seems to remember, and I can feel him retreating in my memory. I can’t really recall what his laugh sounded like anymore. We weren’t the kind of family that took home movies. I’m careful not to disturb the pile of dead leaves that is my childhood, though, because what if there’s nothing in the middle of all those paper-thin fragments? Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun is about trying to piece together who your father used to be once he’s gone: dead or dead enough; it’s never clear which it is in Wells’s movie, but it hardly matters. We can glean a traumatic event has shaken Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), who turns to a small pile of old DV videotapes she took as an 11-year-old on a trip to Greece with her dad in search of answers to questions she doesn’t know how to ask. The questions the film itself asks are elliptical, elusive, as diaphanous as the images Wells puts together to present the insubstantial nothing that’s left over after all this time. I’m reminded of childish experiments with microscopes, looking at a housefly’s wing under magnification to find hundreds of opaque cells joined in an unknowable order, a jumble, that doesn’t give any insight into the bigger picture, much less its function. Viewed in microcosm, anything is just confused nothing.

Telluride ’22: Bones & All

Tell22bonesandall

Bones and All
****/****

starring Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg
screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the novel by Camille DeAngelis
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All is every single thing I like packed into one film: a swooning gothic romance; a gory and uncompromising cannibal movie; an American Honey middle-American travelogue; and a vision of first love as a consumptive, Romanticist fire. Shot in dirty sepia tones by DP Arseni Khachaturan (if you’ve not seen Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning, Khachaturan’s lensing is one of the dozens of reasons you should remedy that), it has about it an atmosphere at once nostalgic for the 1980s, during which it’s set, and aware of how the passage of time memorializes everything into unreliable emotional histories. I have no intellectual mechanism for retrieving memories–it’s all about the feel. I realized during one scene that a girl, Kayla (Anna Cobb), was wearing a Cyndi Lauper T-shirt, and the impossible tangle of reactions I had made what might happen to her unbearable to contemplate. She became precious to me in an instant. She is somehow part of my history. (A disgusting person will later wear a Dokken tee, and I had a visceral reaction to that, too.)  The picture’s needle drops, from Duran Duran‘s “Save a Prayer” to Joy Division‘s “Atmosphere” and New Order‘s propulsive/mesmerizing “Your Silent Face,” offer evidence of a creative team who listened to the whole album instead of cherry-picked singles; the music is used as a mnemonic device for oldsters and a gateway drug for their kids. I still remember one doomed summer day in high school that started with my friend picking me up for us to go record shopping, Love and Rockets‘ fourth album whirring away in his cassette deck, my hand porpoising through the air of my open window–that feeling of being completely alive. So alive. Kate Bush just enjoyed a renaissance–I can only hope the same for Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner after the Timothée Chalamet hive assimilates this film into their holy doctrine. It’s worth appreciating how “Atmosphere” and “Your Silent Face” are both anthems about finding your voice or making a statement through silence (ditto “Lick it Up,” off the first KIϟϟ album where they take off their makeup), and so these aren’t merely nostalgia triggers. Every element of Bones and All helps to amplify Guadagnino’s themes of discovering who you are in the midst of the whirlwind.

Telluride ’22: Empire of Light

Tell22empireoflight

*/****
starring Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward, Tom Brooke, Colin Firth
written and directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw While I know the “light” of the title refers to the light that carries a film from carbon arc to silver screen in a grand Art Deco theatre called the “Empire,” what it more accurately refers to is Empire of Light‘s puffed-up inconsequence. Whatever one thinks of Sam Mendes’s films (and I think not much of them if I can help it), Mendes is not the first director who swims to mind when it comes time to tackle questions of racism, “crazy” women, and institutional misogyny. Particularly not when it’s all wrapped in awards-trolling prestige, couched in the merry, glad-handing fuckery of “movies can bring us all together, and so can ska-punk pioneers the English Beat–and let me read to you the last stanza of ‘Death’s Echo’ by Auden, here, my hand, child.”

Telluride ’22: Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

Tell22bardo

Bardo
Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths)
Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades
½*/****
starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, Hugo Albores, Andrés Almeida, Misha Arias De La Cantolla
written by Nicolás Giacobone & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

by Walter Chaw I can’t tell you how tempting it is to just re-post my review of Birdman for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo with a neon “BUT MORE SO” flashing over it, given that I’ve already invested a full three hours in the Mexican auteur’s latest altar to unseemly false modesty. (Oscars four and five, here we come.) This one is another technically dazzling cri de cœur featuring a tortured artist caught in the vicissitudes of a midlife crisis. The stand-in for Iñárritu is Mexican investigative journalist Silverio (a wonderful Daniel Giménez Cacho), who returns to Mexico for the first time in years on the eve of his winning a prestigious award from an American institution. This leads to the usual mid-life stuff: a visit with a dead father and a dying mother; a raucous party where his old friends give him shit for exploiting Mexicans and Mexican culture for gringo fame, power, and approval; a magic-realist consideration of a still-born child, resulting in a repulsive gag played like a circus trick in which a newborn is shoved back into the womb; and the exploration of impostor syndrome, which feels increasingly disingenuous with every enormous set-piece ripped off the Film School Mount Olympus. Bardo is Jay Sherman’s , and knowing it doesn’t excuse it.

Telluride ’22: Good Seconds (An Introduction)

by Walter Chaw The plan was to drop my kid off at school this morning and then do the six-and-a-half-hour drive to Telluride, where, per tradition, I’d hide in the company of dear friends and try to refill tanks that have gotten dangerously low in the interim year. It’s an excellent place to do it: Telluride is not only geographically remote, set in a valley after what seems like endless ribbons of winding mountain roads, but emotionally as well–a diving bell in the midnight zone of my depression. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it this year–not to Telluride, but at all. My experience of depression is it’s a thing I can manage most of the time. Then sometimes and often for no proximate reason at all…I can’t.