Two-Film Review: I’M NO LONGER HERE & MINARI

REAL AMERICAN STORIES

Two new movies—one in Mexican vernacular Spanish and the other in Korean—use realism to depict the hearts and lives of the newest arrivals to the United States. Fernando Frías’ I’m No Longer Here and Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari are films that delve deeply into the lives of American immigrants—real people, not soundbites on the evening news.

Both artworks explore culture and family, how these people dance, how they talk, how they deal with conflict in their daily lives. The result is a feeling that you really know them, which serves viewers better than movies that rely on simplistic caricatures.

I’m No Longer Here is the story of a young man who finds himself in the crosshairs of an ambitious drug cartel in Monterrey, Mexico. He flees for the U.S., but becomes homesick for his own small-time gang and their adopted, music-rich lifestyle called kolombia. Gritty and handsomely photographed, the film satisfies on both intellectual and visceral levels.

Minari is a delicately observed and efficiently realized movie about a young family of four from Korea. They move to Arkansas determined to farm their way to financial independence. Mom and dad work at a chicken hatchery while dad slowly develops the crops. The conflicts and obstacles along the way help reveal the filmmakers’ philosophy on the true meanings of family and home. Fine performances, led by Steven Yeun as the father, combine with a smart script full of symbolism to form this picture of quiet power and unusual insight.

I’m No Longer Here and Minari are deservedly receiving nominations this awards season. They’d be worth seeking out if they were hard to find, which they aren’t. They’re streaming on Netflix and Prime Video respectively.

the international CRITIQUE ratings:

I’m No Longer Here

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Minari

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

NOMADLAND

Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao (The Rider [2017]) sees the American West with fascinating eyes. In Nomadland, she takes source material from the non-fiction book of the same name and sets it bracingly free on screen.

With camera and cinematographer seemingly imperceptible to the actors, Zhao transports us into the midst of a group of American nomadic workers. Living in their vans and modest RVs, they travel across the West working temporary, seasonal jobs at National Parks, amusement parks, and even a sprawling warehouse of the online retailer Amazon.

The director’s third feature, it’s a gentle, but unflinching film. A true hybrid of drama and documentary, it’s form and structure are not just for the sake of combining two storytelling methods, but because it serves the story.

If you watch many documentaries, you’re familiar with the “talking head” device, used to give first-person accounts of the events at hand. You’ve probably noticed that few docs manage to get around using this typical shot. To the extent that Nomadland is a documentary, director Zhao avoids talking heads. The characters might be similarly framed at times, but they are, technically, characters and not real people testifying about what they know. At the same time, they are exactly that. The fine line between fiction and non-fiction that Zhao draws is part of the miracle of this picture.

And what more can be said about Frances McDormand? Here we see the craft and talent that put her in the top tier among living actors. Committed to her roles and to the work required for excellence, in Nomadland she takes it all to a higher level. Instead of living among the van-dwelling travelers as preparation for her performance, McDormand immerses herself into the nomadic-worker culture in the performance itself. Most of the supporting cast play fictionalized versions of themselves, which results in an unusual level of realism.

Zhao and McDormand have fully realized the concept of filmmakers as explorers, and it’s unlikely that you’ve seen a film much like Nomadland. With remarkable depth of emotion, it’s a movie and a story that stay with you long after the closing credits.

the international CRITIQUE rating:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

JUDAS & THE BLACK MESSIAH

Writer/director Shaka King (Newlyweeds [2013]) boldly avoids the sophomore slump with his ambitious and accomplished second feature. Judas & the Black Messiah, based on real events, is a big movie in several ways. In it, King depicts the dynamic rise (and eventual demise) of the Illinois Black Panther Party and its fervent chairman, Fred Hampton, in the 1970s.

Hampton managed to, among other things, bring together disparate sides of the Chicago slums—even a White people’s club—to address the needs of the community. Among those needs are ones that still exist today, of course. Putting an end to police abuse and corruption. Providing food and education to needy youths. Director King seamlessly weaves all these many elements and stories into a cohesive, taut historical thriller.

Maybe even more impressive are the performances of Daniel Kaluuya (as Hampton) and LaKeith Stanfield (as car-thief-turned-FBI-informant William O’Neal). The latter is a complex, often-conflicted personality that Stanfield embodies with aplomb. In a scene where Hampton waits like a coiled king cobra for his introduction on stage, Kaluuya plays him with the perfect swagger, beautifully inhabiting the role. He’s a treat to watch. 

Creative editing gives the film greater grit and provides ballast for Sean Bobbit’s slick cinematography. Here we see how slick doesn’t necessarily mean glossy, as the director and his production design team have chosen a muted palette of pastels and earth tones, for day shots, and long-shadowy blacks-on-black for night. 

But it’s neo-noir sans nostalgia (Sin City [2005], this is not). Judas & the Black Messiah’s story and action pack wallops more akin to Scorsese circa The Departed (2006). It would have made a good crime movie or an excellent historical biography—lucky for us, it’s both.

the international CRITIQUE rating:

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

AMMONITE

Writer-director Francis Lee (God’s Own Country [2017]) tells a story here loosely based on the celebrated early-19th-Century English paleontologist Mary Anning. 

The biodiversity of the English Channel coast over the millennia resulted in all manner of objects of geological and archeological interest, attracting the talented scientist Anning and, eventually, tourists. It’s a wholly believable and relatable tale: a human being living daily with the crunch of stones beneath her feet, and the abrasiveness of fossils at her hands, comes to crave the softness of another’s flesh.

Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Jones (God’s Own Country), and James McArdle (Mary Queen of Scots [2018]) highly satisfy in the striking degree to which they inhabit their roles. The director steers Ammonite away from all things ponderous, and the actors transmit the on-location fun to the audience.

I can’t think of a recent film in which sound design was so important to the themes, or one in which it was so successfully realized—the waves lapping at the shore, the clicks and rubbing together of wet pebbles. Perfect angles and lighting from cinematographer Stephane Fontaine also contribute to the sublime atmosphere. A parade of fantastic stovepipe hats leads the way in the creative, enjoyable costume design. The movie is rich with symbolism, which works for it and, to a lesser degree, against it.

In the end, Ammonite is a lusty steampunk study in contrast and texture. One that invites the viewer to scrape away their own fossilized layers and lay themselves bare, soft, and vulnerable to love.

the international CRITIQUE rating:

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

THE LITTLE THINGS

The American director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, 2009) brings forth a crime “thriller” with no thrills and no fun. The plot? A serial killer is on the loose. That’s it. Seriously. With fewer twists than a landing strip, The Little Things plods along, almost dutifully presenting unlikely behaviors from its two-dimensional characters every 15 minutes.

Why does Hancock feel so comfortable asking us to make these leaps of faith? Because it’s a big-budget movie, and we should be grateful we only paid seven dollars for the privilege of beholding it? Because he’s got not one, not two, but three Oscar winners in the cast? Well, Jared Leto won for Dallas Buyers Club which, by now, most honest critics agree was a mediocre film. Leto’s performance in it was flamboyant but not great in hindsight. And Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody… what can be said? It was an absurd performance in the most laughable “serious” movie in decades. Is all this what made Hancock so sure of himself?

Along the way, the director strikes some hackneyed noir notes, like the stoic detective (two, in this case) who “has his own reasons” for obsessing over catching the killer. Hancock seems to subscribe to the idea that audiences love cliches and, having provided plenty of them, he needn’t furnish plot details or full characterizations. “The audience will fill in the blanks!” you can imagine him rejoicing. It’s a sour and cynical way to make movies, and the filmmakers ought to pay dearly for this $30-million, bona fide bomb. It all must have looked very good on paper, bless Denzel Washington’s heart.

the international CRITIQUE rating:

⭐

Rating: 1 out of 5.

GIRL

The content war among streaming services rages, and you have to be a sharpshooter to find a good movie amidst the casualties these days. Enter the Bella Thorne (“Big Love”) vehicle, Girl (wherein the filmmakers were too lazy even to name the main character).

The first feature by Canadian writer/director/supporting actor Chad Faust, it centers on a twenty-something millennial who has some unfinished business with her estranged father. Faust’s main concern seems to have been keeping the action moving along, and in that he succeeds. Elsewhere—in plot, dialogue, suspense, characterization, photography, and editing—the effort and resulting work falter badly.

At this point, one might think the hatchet-wielding “girl” might make for a fine protagonist in an enjoyable B-movie. Unfortunately, that would be wishful thinking. Girl, the movie, takes itself way too seriously. In a scene where Thorne’s movie-mother reminds her brusquely that she worked hard and made the girl “spaghetti and chicken pies,” the dialogue almost gets into  venerated so-bad-it’s-good territory. But, ultimately Faust—perhaps encouraged by his own and Thorne’s serviceable acting—stands pat and tries to hoist the film onto a thought-provoking, psychological thriller pedestal where it has no rightful business.

I’m always curious as to how a script like this gets made. Did Faust make an irresistible pitch to Thorne, who also got an executive producer credit? Both have respectable pedigrees in television acting with some experience in movies. Thorne’s sex appeal—she made her directorial debut with the X-rated film Her & Him (2019)—might also have influenced financiers to put up the total of about $1 million. Whatever the deals were, the producers and filmmakers set themselves too low a bar for a serious movie and too high a bar for B-movie schlock.

the international CRITIQUE rating:

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Film Review: Promising Young Woman

A disclaimer of sorts: It’s not easy to write honestly about movies that carry a strong #MeToo message and, in this case, one that’s created by a (rightfully) unapologetically direct director who is a woman. This might be especially true when the critic is a man. If he does his job—to tell the good and the bad of an artwork—there will nonetheless be some accusations of bias and sexism. If we can agree that works with good messages can also be bad art, then the following review may be of interest to you.

“Revenge”: That’s the word marketers of the new Carey Mulligan vehicle Promising Young Woman want us to latch onto. After all, revenge is a personal form of war, and all’s fair in that department. “All’s fair,” “anything goes,” “sweet revenge”—these are convenient euphemisms for a film at which everything was thrown to see what would stick. Turns out precious little stuck, but what’s Focus Features supposed to do with it, go straight to VOD and DVD?

Mulligan plays Cassie, a woman who experienced secondary trauma in college and has turned to revenge against sexual offenders as a coping mechanism. 

The tremendous tonal challenges in telling such a story seem lost on writer/director Emerald Fennell (or maybe she simply chose to ignore them). So we’re introduced to character after character with nearly no intellectual lives or interiority, as if they’ve learned everything they know from watching television. (Which verges on disturbing when you consider that Fennell’s day job is showrunning BBC America’s “Killing Eve.”)

Unlike the genre it so readily claims for itself, Promising Young Woman depicts little of the burden which the obsessed, vengeful person carries. Cassie seems casually afflicted with her “hobby,” but never genuinely seethes or stews obsessively.

So, the satisfaction that, for better or worse, the viewer shares with the protagonist—the whole reward of the revenge genre—is wholly missing here. Worse, the script is so lazily composed and the direction so cavalier that hardly 20 frames go by without a predominant phoniness. (How many times can a viewer tolerate the thought that “Nobody talks like that!”) This makes for a difficult trudge of nearly two hours.

Can a #MeToo revenge movie ever succeed, then? Of course, and someone probably ought to accept that challenge—acknowledging that it won’t be easy, and eschewing the idea that being part of an important, righteous social movement makes one immune from making bad art.

the international CRITIQUE rating:

⭐

Rating: 1 out of 5.

Quick Look Back: La cienaga (2001)

Writer-director Lucrecia Martel (Zama, 2017, Argentina) didn’t ever attempt to answer the why about anything in her auspicious feature debut, most especially not its characters’ man vs. nature conflicts. Instead, in La cienaga, she seems genuinely uninterested in explanations of any kind. Relationships among family members – when they can be identified as such – are nebulous and lack archetypal social boundaries, including sexual ones.

A true absurdist artwork that’s message is clearer through what Martel subtracted – the “why” and the relationship boundaries. The focus naturally shifts to the strange ways in which the characters interact. In this way, La Cienaga acts as a sort of anthropological survey, but mostly outside the context of the people’s motives. The settings include characters’ homes, public nightclubs, and the natural outdoors; nothing really out of the ordinary. But Martel’s perspective makes these almost clinical.

As in Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-end (1967), momentum flows from the central characters, bending and twisting through rivers and creeks of action, though not technically plot. The result is a purposely chaotic, yet sensitively observed work which boldly and incisively questions the interpersonal dynamics of the status quo.

the international CRITIQUE rating: ★★★★★

Film Review: Carmen & Lola

by A.R. Solar

The multi-nominated, double Goya-Prize-winning feature debut from Arantxa Echevarria caught me by surprise. I hadn’t heard of it and, if I expected anything, it was that it’d be a casual, modern romp-com told from an LGBTQ angle. It is, I’m happy to say, much much more than that.

Carmen is a vivacious almost-18-year-old who is, as her father has arranged, about to be engaged to a boy her age. Like her, he is part of the Romani culture in a poor section near Madrid. (In Carmen & Lola, the Romani call themselves “gypsies.”) Lola is an introspective almost-17-year-old trying to explore her lesbianism via cybercafe computer in a neighboring Romani area. The two meet by chance at Lola’s family’s vegetable stand in the bustling outdoor market. Though their encounter is brief, Echevarria conveys (in an extreme close-up) a tender, tiny, skin-to-skin touch that neither woman will soon forget.

It’s in those convincing, gentle, loving moments between the two girls that you first experience the deep insights of the director and the thrilling talents of Pilar Sanchez Diaz, the cinematographer here. 

In scenes where the men of Carmen’s family and those of her soon-to-be betrothed meet to formalize the engagement, what’s on display is tradition, yes, but also an entrenched, unapologetic patriarchy. When Carmen herself finally enters the room in her future-bride regalia and is “given” to her boyfriend’s father, any moderately enlightened viewer will feel queasy. As the relationship between Lola and Carmen develops ever so gradually, the patriarchal lash isn’t as subtle.

Two days after experiencing the film, I’m still haunted by a scene where Lola’s mother confronts her. Her mom – a previously balanced, if stern, figure – gasps, wails, and pleads with her in a harrowing conveyance of sheer internal terror. And that’s before the father, prone to disturbing violent threats, is brought into the hysteria.

By this point, we have seen the craft of Echevarria’s hand – effective whether the touch is delicate or ferocious. Sanchez Diaz’s camera, as it ought to, enhances the director’s voice through deeply felt angles on the characters and settings.

This is a Spain not often depicted on film. The Romani neighborhoods are crowded with people and even more packed with emotions. Perhaps the filmmakers’ greatest triumph is bringing to the screen such a real rendering of a culture that – at least as written in this movie – doesn’t balk at showing the rawest of emotions, whether it be joy, through Flamenco dance at a party, or pain, through the fear of being excommunicated from the culture itself by the fathers and sons of the patriarchy.

the international CRITIQUE rating: ★★★★★

Film Review: Da 5 Bloods

The Jumble in the Jungle

by A.R. Solar

Wow. The latest feature from Spike Lee sees him lackadaisically dumping a bunch of ideas into an overlong-feeling two and a half hours. Not all of the ideas are bad. Some, in fact, are quite good.

Where to start, on what ultimately feels like a cheesy, ersatz tour-de-force… Four American vets return to Vietnam to recover the body of their fallen buddy, while also looking to unearth a treasure that they left behind. Those are the main plots, but there are at least three rather hefty subplots. The estranged son. The estranged lover and the secret daughter. The PTSD ghosts, and so on. It would have taken a great feat of editing to make it all cohesive, and Lee seems uninterested in even trying.

The veteran writer/director is interested in doing homage, on top of everything else. There’s archival war footage thrown in. Excerpts from speeches by Malcolm X and MLK. The tone veers from somber to mildly comedic to violent and back again, without a hint of a caring hand, seemingly random. What’s the trendy term, “a hot mess”?

But there’s one thing in particular that Lee accomplishes here. Through the character Paul (a challenging role that Delroy Lindo mostly manifests with aplomb), the auteur gives rare insight into the mind of a Trump supporter. Paul’s dialogue and soliloquies reveal a person driven, even driven mad, in a quest to be redeemed. At the outset, he tells his buddies (who balk at his MAGA hat) that he’s “done” with serving others and thinking about others’ needs and wants. “Now,” he says, “I’m voting for me!” He’s in his sixties, and he’s lost many battles—too many, in his opinion. It’s time for him to get his.

Spike Lee, in this respect, comes off as gifted, thoughtful. His Paul is the personification of desperation. He jitters, pleads, and is easily frustrated. Yes, PTSD is to blame, and we know his has gone untreated. But what makes him a bona fide Trumper is the inward intensity and outward urgency with which he works towards a singular goal: not to die a loser.

When the unseemly candidate Trump promised “so much winning,” that was a thing of real value to the Pauls of the U.S.A. That is the core Trump voter: the person who has lost so many times in their life that they themselves might identify as a loser. Trump, the false redeemer, offers redemption nonetheless. He says, in effect, “Follow me, and you won’t be a loser anymore. You’ll die a winner.” Of all the false products he’s peddled in his career, this is by far his most popular. Redemption for the American who has rarely won anything.

That is the biggest takeaway from Da 5 Bloods. The rest feels less like the films it references, like Apocalypse Now and (1979) Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and feels more like Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017).

We should know by now that when Lee misses the mark he misses big. This film fails on the level of his 2013 martial arts remake Oldboy, which is merely another way of saying it’s a parade of the wildly talented filmmaker’s careless overconfidences.

the international CRITIQUE rating:

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.