Stranger Things, Season 2, episodes 5, 6, 7 (2016)
Continuing the very slow “binge” watch with my niece Lucy, and having so much fun. She gets such a kick out of showing it to me. She knows every moment and every detail. We discuss things. It’s so funny because it takes place in the era of my childhood, and is full of references to movies of the time period. So I’ll be like, “Hey, that’s from ET!”, like a true old-timer. It feels like this series has been going on for a decade and I guess it kind of has.
Small Things Like These (2024; d. Tim Mielants)
The entire horrible story of the Magdalene Laundries is there on one man’s face. One of the best performances of the year. I reviewed for Ebert.
The Substance (2024; d. Coralie Fargeat)
The scene where Demi Moore prepares for her date, and has an increasingly fraught relationship with her reflection in the mirror, is the best scene in the film. The rest I found intriguing, in some respects, but not particularly insightful. I was mostly enjoying it as this twisted pas de deux between two naked actresses flopping all over each other in a white-tiled bathroom, shoving needles into each others’ arms. I couldn’t help but think – what an interesting acting challenge. It’s such a bizarre sight, unprecedented really, but the two of them – and the filmmaker – and the crew – clearly created a space of trust and exploration where nudity is non-sexual and where the reality of the “given circumstances”, in good old acting talk, is given full rein. You totally accept it. And this was probably not an easy feat.
All We Imagine as Light (2024; d. Payal Kapadia)
One of the best films of the year. Clearly I am crafting my Top 10. I was totally captivated by this story of three women doing their best to get by, and also live lives of meaning and integrity, in the “impermanent” bustle of Mumbai. Kapadia really knows what she’s doing. And she’s young, so this is very exciting: so much to look forward to.
Gilda (1946; d. Charles Vidor)
I had so much fun introducing Gilda at the Jacob Burns Film Center in November. It was a packed audience and half of them hadn’t seen it – which is always the best case scenario, in my opinion. It’s a thrill to watch a classic surrounded by people discovering it for the first time. Good to see friends too – Monica, Ian – Allison came with me, and my sister Siobhan met us there. I actually don’t think I’d ever seen Gilda in a theatre. Hayworth is overwhelming. (My first booklet essay for Criterion was on Gilda.)
The Brutalist (2024; d. Brady Corbet)
A movie about brutalist architecture and the Holocaust survivor immigrant experience? Shot on VistaVision – !!! – and printed on 70mm? And it’s almost four hours long with an intermission? And it’s …. amazing? From the jump, Brady Corbet announced himself as a singular artist, not particularly interested in pleasing the so-called masses. He started off with Childhood of a Leader, which I considered one of the best films of 2015. It is the opposite of an ingratiating work. But it sticks, and also turned out to be one of the most “relevant” films of the year, if you consider its release date and what was coming. Childhood of a Leader actually had something to say, and said it without pamphleteering. It was haunting, and – fascinatingly – Scott Walker did the score. Corbet’s use of music is old-fashioned, in the best sense. His movies have real scores. And … Scott freakin’ Walker, come on. Walker also did the score for Vox Lux, Corbet’s riff on pop stardom in the mirage-like late 90s/early aughts, which I loved, and reviewed for Ebert. I appreciate works of art that don’t give a damn about me, they’re too busy doing what they need to do to worry if I am keeping up, or even if I like it. They don’t care about being “relatable”. They are just trying to say something. Sometimes this type of art is unnecessarily obscure, or obscure just to be obscure – but Corbet’s films aren’t like that. He has big ideas. Vox Lux is, perhaps, the best way to be introduced, because if you hear the plot of the film, you’ll think it’s maybe a slightly grittier A Star is Born, or another Beyond the Lights, a girl’s rise to fame. But it’s so much weirder than that. I don’t know much about him – nor do I want to know, actually. It’s fun getting to know him solely through his work. What I can guess is that he goes so deep into these obsessions – like dictatorships/power/psychology, pop stardom/fame/pre-internet virality/the emptiness of living in a dying empire, or … brutalist architecture/class/immigrants – that they overtake him, balloon out into all kinds of imaginative spaces. This is a free-ranging eclectic and intellectual mind at work, and I am always here for that. I saw The Brutalist at a press screening – having done my best to avoid the buzz. There Will Be Blood is an obvious reference point: it is a similarly uningratiating movie about a long-past time period which helped shape the world we live in today. Both feature a monomaniacal central figure, battling his demons – outer and inner – on the field of his workplace, either oil wells or architecture. Guy Pearce is incredible in The Brutalist. It’s not just a performance. It’s a psychological case study: he understands the TYPE, because we all are “types”, whether we like it or not. I follow a couple of Instagram feeds devoted to brutalist architecture, because I’ve always been fascinated by it. I thought a couple of the plot points in The Brutalist were a little bring-down-the-hammer, obvious and maybe even imposed, stretching the point Corbet was trying to make into the implausible. But these are nitpicks considering the accomplishment. The film is a sprawling audacious prickly accomplishment, and I value that over easy safe perfection. It’s like PTA’s Magnolia. I don’t listen to people who criticize things for being too long, or uneven, or “messy”. All of those things may be true, but that’s just describing – in a way – your own limitations, as a viewer and as a writer. What is the film doing, and how is it doing it? It may not work for you but the “messy” and “uneven” parts of things are often features/not bugs. So how are you engaging with the film? I can’t stick with the writing if the thinking is shallow. Honestly, I can’t even believe The Brutalist exists, and I am happy it does. I can’t wait to see it again.
Blue Road — The Edna O’Brien Story (2024; d. Sinéad O’Shea)
Fascinating documentary about the recently-passed Irish legend Edna O’Brien. I interviewed the director for my Liberties column.
The Morning After (1986; d. Sidney Lumet)
It’s such an un-Lumet movie, particularly the bleak emptied-out Los Angeles-wasteland environment. Lumet films it like the outsider he is, fascinated by the desolation, the alienating sun, the no-mans-land of the Valley. The visuals are striking, artificial even – unlike his normal house style. None of these are criticisms. I think it shows Lumet’s sensitivity to material. The Morning After is a chilly modern noir, a California story, Hollywood-adjacent. The style suits it. I hadn’t seen it in years so it was fun to re-visit. It made me miss Raul Julia all over again.
Red Riding: 1974 (2010; d. Julian Jarrold)
The books by David Peace are extraordinary. They totally were not what I thought they would be. They are very loosely based on the Yorkshire Ripper case, but the quartet is really a vast sprawling experiment with language. Joycean. And I rarely make that comparison. Toni Morrison, to me, was the only real heir of James Joyce, the one who took up where he left off, and pushed forward in similar ways but into new territories. Only someone who really really understands language can even begin to experiment with it. And Morrison loved Joyce. She read Finnegans Wake on her own, and laughed out loud throughout. That’s someone who got what he was doing. David Peace experiments similarly. I was dazzled by Peace’s books. I’d seen this trilogy before. The first entry – with a very young Andrew Garfield, losing his innocence minute by minute – is the best.
Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1980
The trilogy loses steam almost immediately.
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (2024; d. Tyler Thomas Taormina)
Stunned by it. Flattened. Made me feel all kinds of things I normally avoid. I couldn’t shake it. It’s not depressing. But there is an ache to it. Wrote about the experience of this film, a surprise for me. Quickly raced to the top of my list for the year. Was not expecting to be rocked by it when I pressed play.
Hundreds of Beavers (2024; d. Mike Cheslik)
I think I’ve covered my adoration for this one.
Stay the Night (2022; d. Renuka Jeyapalan)
A fellow critic over on Blue Sky was introducing herself by putting up links toher writing, one of which was a review of Stay the Night, which jolted my memory of how much I had loved the same film. I was assigned to review, and it was one of the more happy discoveries of recent memory. Our exchange about the film inspired me to watch it again and, yes, it still works. I adore it! Unlike The Brutalist, this one gets in and gets out. It’s barely an hour and a half long. It’s perfect just the way it is. (This is not to say The Brutalist is “too long”. I think I’ve covered my thoughts on that.)
Oh Canada (2024; d. Paul Schrader)
It’s so cool I lived long enough to see a reunion between Paul Schrader and Richard Gere. (Here’s the huge piece I wrote about Richard Gere in American Gigolo, and Richard Gere in general.) Based on Russell Banks’ 2021 novel Foregone, it’s an elegiac and incomplete – hauntingly so – look at one man’s grappling with his past, the lies and deceits, but also his self-justifications for why he did what he did, and do those justifications work anymore? (Describing this loops it in with American Gigolo in intriguing ways.) Gere is terrific and I’m so happy for him. I’m weirdly invested in his career and have been ever since I saw An Officer and a Gentleman in high school. He’s so good. And it’s great to see him playing this deeply morally ambiguous man. It’s a good spot for him.
Conclave (2024; d. Edward Berger)
I haven’t read the novel on which this excellent film is based, but it’s kind of amazing how well it works as a thriller, with twists and turns, and a growing sense of almost unbearable psychological tension (it works with or without any ambivalent and/or hostile feelings you may have about the Catholic Church – which, please, I grew up in this thing, I know of what I speak). Ralph Fiennes gives what I consider to be his career best here. But everyone is great: John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini, Lucian Msamati (a heartbreaking performance, which is some feat considering the character’s views on women and gays), Brían F. O’Byrne, Sergio Castellitto and Carlos Diehz … an acting feast. The film is such a great example of one of my pet themes: character actors are the engines on which stories run, and character actors play such an important role in … everything. The current trend of casting drop-dead gorgeous people in even smaller roles does a great disservice to the storytelling impulse and you go back and watch something like Diane Keaton in Reds, a leading lady with gold-capped teeth, or the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman carrying films, and you mourn for what once was. Real people. Character actors as leads. People with real SKILL in acting: not “stars” but real actors. I love star power. Everyone should know that. And stars are worth discussing. But so is skill. And character actors don’t often get to play sympathetic characters whom everyone loves and roots for: their job is often to counter-act the leads, to show other shadings and bring the real world close to the action. Here, all we have is flawed humans wrestling for power, motivated by so many things other than the divine office, but not snarling villains: each with a point of view and history and biases. The film wildly swings from candidate to candidate, and you’re never sure if the gossip mill in the Vatican is clouding your judgment. This whole thing is funny to me because on one level what you’re looking at is a bunch of guys in red cloaks who run an organization which has a terrible terrible history of abuse and oppression. Like, burn it all down. I get it. On another, though, this is a gripping film about a power struggle, and one man’s troubled “call” to “manage” the event, struggling against his own impulses and nature, battling doubts (in this world doubt is suspicious). Fiennes is magnificent. But Tucci is up there too. They all are. I LOVED watching these actors do their thing, all of them. Highly recommended. Do your best to avoid spoilers.
Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024; d. Mohammad Rasoulof)
In May of this year came the news that the great Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof was sentenced to a flogging and eight years in prison. The regime has been after him for years. You don’t make a film like Manuscripts Don’t Burn and expect you’re going to “get away with it”. His new film – Seed of the Sacred Fig – was just about to premiere at Cannes when the news dropped. History of Rasoulof’s persecution here. Shortly after he was sentenced, Rasoulof – and some of his crew members – escaped from Iran. (Rasoulof’s passport was confiscated back in 2011, I think). He practically walked out of the country, being hidden in safe houses along both sides of the border. It took him a month to escape. Meanwhile, as far as the world knew, he had been “disappeared”. Finally he emerged on the other side. So. Seed of the Sacred Fig. It was filmed entirely in secret. Every single person involved – from actors to crew – has taken their lives into their hands making this film. The fact the film exists is a miracle. No other film this year was made under these circumstances, and no other film represents so well the fight of the individual against oppression. The film isn’t just ABOUT that. It IS that. The cast is small and it mostly takes place inside an apartment – understandably. Outdoor scenes are shot from out of windows. There are some scenes in cars and a final scene in a deserted desert-mountain area north of Tehran. It is an intimate family story but – as with all films from Iran – has a serious political critique: the regime’s fanaticism infiltrates this family, creating distrust where before there was happy accord. The “woman life freedom” movement sweeps away this family, creating rifts that will never be repaired. At a certain point, things go too far. There’s no way back. An angry film. Its existence is a triumph but my God, at what cost.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
