Author: Addison Engelking

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Daredevil

Marvel’s Daredevil: Season One (2015; various dirs., including Phil Abraham, Farren Blackburn and Brad Turner)— Although it eventually succumbs to its own primal fan-service instincts and climaxes with a final-episode alley brawl between two grotesque, guilt-wracked gargoyles seeking imaginary control over a city they will never truly own, Drew Goddard’s brutal, film noir-inflected 13-episode Daredevil reimagining is, along with Iron Man 3, Guardians of the Galaxy and Jessica Jones, one of the smartest and most rewarding recent additions to the oh-God-will-it-ever-stop-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Set in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, the show’s visual scheme is typically dark and atypically striking; so many scenes and framings recall writer/penciller Frank Miller’s influential work on the Daredevil comic in the early 1980s that it’s easy to imagine the whole production team poring over individual panels from those issues every night and then re-decorating the sets for maximum angular moodiness the following day. The show’s cinematographic signature is an invasive, piss-yellow light that leaks down rain-slicked streets and into shadeless tenement windows.

Daredevil’s first nine or so episodes display unusual courage and tenacity in that they refuse to let the titular hero—a.k.a. blind, combat-savvy vigilante Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox)—off the hook for his actions. While the show has plenty to say about fatherhood, the sins of the past, and an individual’s ability to change a system from either within or without, its central question—and the only superhero question that truly interests me anymore—is “Why would someone take to the streets as a masked crime-fighter in the first place?” In spite of the massive institutional corruption in and around Hell’s Kitchen, why does Matt bother working within the law as a criminal defense attorney by day if he’s going to subvert his beliefs in rules, regulations and due process at night? If he’s going to spend his evenings pummeling thugs and breaking bones before staggering home to stitch himself up, where will he draw the line?

Such questions plague Murdock and hamper his already-aloof relationships with his partner Foggy Nelson (Elden Hanson), his secretary Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and a compassionate nurse named Claire (Rosario Dawson). Yet Cox’s handsome, smallish Murdock remains unreachable; he’s only really alive during the regular after-hours missions that are one-third personal penance, one-third suicide attempt and one-third (I’m so sorry, everyone) blind rage. His spinning kicks, flips and acrobatics throughout the many unusually well-choreographed fight scenes compare favorably with Gina Carano’s work in Stephen Soderbergh’s great Haywire. And, almost unique among today’s superheroes, he never escapes unscathed. This masked man bleeds. A lot.

As Murdock’s rich and powerful nemesis Wilson Fisk, Vincent D’Onofrio feasts on the huge slabs of supervillainy-glazed ham thrown his way. His Fisk is a giant, glabrous, all-powerful baby overdressed for picture day and simmering with barely suppressed rage and pain that nearly shoot out of his ears like cartoon steam whenever he loses control. D’Onofrio dramatizes Fisk’s moral dilemmas by making every sentence he utters a clenched-throat combination of measured negotiations and hissing threats. As unsettling as Fisk in the flesh is, he is more frightening earlier in the series, when he exists only as an idea, a phantom, or a voice on a walkie-talkie.

Episode highlights include “Cut Man,” (the one with the astonishing single-take fight scene that I love without reservation), “World on Fire,” (the one that has the only Matt Murdock POV shot) and, best of all, “Stick” (the one guest-starring an inconceivably leathery and ornery Scott Glenn as Murdock’s mentor). The new season airs on Netflix March 18; here’s hoping its rehabilitation of the Punisher and Elektra is as successful as its resurrection of Kingpin and “The Man Without Fear.”

Grade: A- 

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Phoenix

Phoenix (2014; dir. Christian Petzold)—You haven’t heard this Holocaust story before. At the end of World War II, Nelly (Nina Hoss), a German Jewish nightclub singer whose everlasting love for her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) helped her survive the horrors of Auschwitz, returns to Berlin. Like DC Comics’ Unknown Soldier, her badly scarred face is covered in bandages. She needs reconstructive plastic surgery, but instead of altering her looks, she insists on getting as much of her old face back as she can. She also insists on trying to reconnect with Johnny in spite of some ominous rumors about his role as a Gestapo informant. After some nighttime wandering around Berlin’s Trümmerlandschaft (literally “rubble landscape”; expertly recreated here, the real thing spilled into nearly every frame of such postwar classics as Rossellini’s 1948 Germany Year Zero and Carol Reed’s 1949 The Third Man), Nelly eventually finds Johnny washing dishes at the Phoenix nightclub. When he sees her, he seems to look right through her.

At first, that is. Then Johnny gets an idea. Since this new-face Nelly, who calls herself “Esther”, looks so much like the Nelly he married (because, you know, she’s the same person), he asks her to pretend to be his wife so Johnny can get his hands on Nelly’s inheritance. Never mind that Nelly can’t convince Johnny that she is the person he’s looking for even though she knows things about their relationship she couldn’t possibly have intuited. Never mind that Johnny either has forgotten what Nelly looks like or is submerged in such a deep, stinking cesspool of self-deception that he refuses to see who is standing in front of him. Never mind that describing the plot of Phoenix makes it sound completely crass and insane. It’s insanely and crassly provocative once you half-convince yourself that it could happen somehow. It’s happened before, after all; film critic J. Hoberman saw Petzold’s film as a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. You’ll probably see it as a somber Vertigo riff told from the point of view of the neon-green sign outside Judy’s room.

Petzold has designed a black-hearted wartime fable whose characters are pack mules dumbly hauling along ungraspable, uncomfortable ideas about human need and identity wherever they go. Nasty insinuations about memory, the past, culpability, inaction and imposture flit by in composed medium-long shot after composed medium-long shot. Hoss’ gaunt, knife-cut beauty suggests unspeakable pain and suffering, which she almost gets to articulate when she starts to tell Johnny a “made-up” story about life in the concentration camp. But Johnny cuts her off; the more he tries to control her, the more his firm sadism and imitation-Gable handsomeness slowly come to embody the banality of evil.

The final scene—a musical performance of Kurt Weill’s ballad “Speak Low” —is already famous among cinephiles who worship at the altar of the big finish; it turns on the liberation of a forearm from the confines of a long, bright red sleeve. Catch it on Netflix before it disappears into the night and fog.

Grade: A-

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Mustang


Mustang (2015; dir. Deniz Gamze Ergüven)—Whenever television shows and movies need a quick boost, they reach for a woman to brutalize in the same absent-minded way you or I might reach for a candy bar or some dill pickle chips.

Unfortunately, the sudden spasms of suspense and fear that come from putting women in danger are seldom explored onscreen with any degree of seriousness. That’s why Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang, France’s official submission for this year’s Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar, is so different and so important: it confronts female exploitation and subjugation from an explicitly female point of view.

Set in northern Turkey, Mustang follows five orphaned adolescent and pre-adolescent sisters—Sonay (Iladya Akdogan), Selma (Tugba Sunguroglu), Nur (Doga Zeynep Doguslu), Ece (Elit Iscan) and Lale (the indomitable Günes Sensoy)—who become the victims of some nasty rumors when they indulge in an innocent after-school romp by the sea with some of their male classmates. Their conservative grandmother (Nihal G. Kodas) and her angry, even more conservative son Erol (Ayberk Pekcan) quell these rumors by pulling the girls from school, locking them in their rooms, and hastily arranging to marry them all off as quickly as possible.

The girls of Mustang are not in full-throated, howling revolt against every facet of the culture; Ergüven’s even-handed storytelling balances patriarchal villainy with unlikely acts of heroism. It’s clear, though, that the girls’ bond is sacrosanct. As they fight to preserve that bond, they end up fighting for what Toni Morrison once called a woman’s right to “choice without stigma.” Sonay seems delighted by her arranged marriage; Selma does not. But neither has a say in the matter, and that’s the problem. (The other sisters respond to the idea of marriage in far less amicable ways.) Lale’s contempt for the “shapeless, shit-colored dresses” they are all forced to wear symbolizes several other repressive, repetitive aspects of the good-wife domesticity they’re being force-fed.

Lale and her sisters’ hunger for life and love and freedom is palpable and poignant; it’s often conveyed through over-the-shoulder handheld camera work so intimate that you may find yourself unconsciously brushing the girls’ hair out of your mouth. The movie’s visual and tonal range is as vast as the mountains they seldom see; it contains one of the year’s most suspenseful set pieces, and it contains a passage of universe-conquering exuberance, too, when the girls hitch a ride to a soccer match and, in spite of the cultural forces holding them back, they can be heroes, just for one day.

Grade: A

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Sherlock: The Abominable Bride

Sherlock: The Abominable Bride (2016; dir. Douglas MacKinnon)—Sherlock co-creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat have a problem: they’ve outsmarted themselves, and they don’t know what to do or where to turn next. What else could explain the fact that three of the four Sherlock episodes since 2012’s splendid “The Reichenbach Fall,” including “The Abominable Bride,” either directly or indirectly address the fiendishly complicated rooftop standoff that ended with the apparent deaths of Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his arch-nemesis James Moriarty (Andrew Scott)? In “The Empty Hearse,” 2014’s Series Three premiere, Gatiss and Moffat did an honorable job providing a winking, plausible-enough explanation for Sherlock’s survival. But Moriarty’s demise and subsequent resurrection at the end of “His Last Vow” has apparently left the two showrunners as troubled as it has left Sherlock himself.

That’s not a good thing. But before it stumbles into a flashback/flash-forward-heavy mind palace walk that’s both too obvious and too clever in retrospect, “The Abominable Bride”—which topped the box office in China last weekend—is a funny, energetic and creepy account of the Victorian-era Holmes’ most perplexing case. And one of the most pleasurable elements of this return to the character’s imaginary roots is Cumberbatch’s restrained re-re-imagining of the Holmes persona. He exchanges his modern-day Sherlock’s high-functioning sociopathic hostility for a less confrontational yet equally supercilious set of manners and witticisms. This new-old Sherlock plays a fine, well-tuned violin, sucks at his pipe with lip-smacking self-satisfaction, and glides through prickly encounters with Dr. Watson (Martin Freeman) and Scotland Yard’s Inspector Lestrade (Rupert Graves) on a magic carpet of pragmatic, faux-prissy erudition.

In late 19th century England, Freeman’s Watson is less of a victim of Holmes’ whims and more of a collaborator. He’s also earned a measure of fame by publishing stories about his adventures with Holmes in the penny dreadfuls. Some provocative, confusing Don Quixote-esque mix-ups ensue when Watson presses Holmes about his relationship status and Holmes deflects inquiries with philosophical pontifications plagiarized from Watson’s stories. Who’s writing whom here, anyway? Larger and more menacing destabilization appears quickly enough, and soon Holmes and Watson find themselves on opposite sides of the old “ghost/not a ghost” debate when they are asked to solve the mystery of an undead bride who keeps returning to wreak havoc on unsuspecting men.

“The Abominable Bride” is perhaps overloaded with divertissements, including a Diogenes Club encounter starring a Taft-fat Mycroft Holmes (played by Gatiss himself) ringed with puddings and meats, a memorable exchange about the foolishness of the “secret twins” theory, and all kinds of nods and nudges directed at both Sherlock Holmes the myth and Sherlock Holmes the man. Yet by the end, this tenth feature-length Sherlock installment is a pleasurable if failed dramatic experiment that’s obsessed with its central character’s own failures. It’s also an addictive mess that provides many fleeting pleasures before examining the messes that addiction makes of most people’s lives. Here is the final problem with “The Abominable Bride”: as Gatiss and Moffat continue to expand and deepen Sherlock’s psychological profile, Sherlock’s ability to construct an exciting, rewarding mystery that can handle its inter-textual baggage and its own recent history continues to falter.

Grade: B

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The Hateful Eight: 70 MM Roadshow Edition

The Hateful Eight: 70MM Roadshow Edition (2015; dir. Quentin Tarantino)—First impressions: Formally striking but morally bankrupt, just like always. What a waste of a potentially awesome widescreen format. What a way to spend Christmas night.

Second impressions: Maybe The Hateful Eight isn’t so disappointing after all. Maybe once you wash all the blood off your face and out of your hair, it’s actually pretty effective in its savage and meaningless way. Maybe I’m just being contrary because so many other people love QT so unconditionally, it’s embarrassing.

Or maybe when it comes to Tarantino movies, I shouldn’t trust my first impressions.

I am a deeply conflicted QT fan whose minor-to-major issues with most of his films has never prevented me from seeing them on the day they premiere. And once I found out that the “Special Roadshow Engagement” of The Hateful Eight was coming to my town a week before its nationwide release, I even bought my tickets in advance, like I was going to an unrepeatable event. Rather than running down The Hateful Eight’s numerous strengths and weaknesses, though, I want to focus on the roadshow experience—the first of its kind in American theaters since Khartoum in 1966.

Like many cinephiles, I love celluloid a lot more now that it’s virtually extinct. And I’ve been very fortunate to see Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jacques Tati’s PlayTime in the 70mm format; in fact, the Kubrick and Tati screenings are two of the most profoundly affecting moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had. Celluloid has a depth and warmth that digital photography can’t yet replicate; the browns and blacks in particular have volume and presence onscreen, and larger vistas, like a stagecoach wending its way through the mountains during a blizzard, are stark and elemental and man-made in a way that digital photography often isn’t. The format is ideal for capturing the nuances of the human face as well; Samuel L. Jackson’s unblinking glower, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s cruddy teeth and Kurt Russell’s magnificent walrus ‘stache are a few of The Hateful Eight’s more indelible physiognomical details.

I remember seeing the reels for the 70mm 2001 in the theater lobby and thinking that they were as big as stagecoach wheels. As Chapin Cutler of the specialty projection company Boston Light & Sound notes, the Ultra Panavision 70 format for The Hateful Eight is even bigger. According to Cutler, “Each shipping case is 5 ft. x 5 ft. by 1 ft. thick. When loaded, it weighs about 400 lbs. . . . With the reel full, out of the box, the film and reel weigh about 250 lbs. Four people can easily lift it onto a platter deck.”

The informative if overenthusiastic program notes in the 16-page Hateful Eight booklet handed to me by the woman who took my ticket assert that “The exclusive 70mm Roadshow engagement of The Hateful Eight pays homage to and recreates the grand film exhibition style popularized in the 1950s and ‘60s and that brought audiences to theaters with the promise of a special event. Taking place in the nation’s largest and grandest theaters, Roadshows presented a longer version of the film than would be shown in the film’s subsequent wider release, included a musical overture to start the show, an intermission between acts and a souvenir program.”

Great! I’d never call the AMC Southdale in Edina, Minnesota one of the nation’s “grandest theaters,” but I’m glad the management there made the efforts to accommodate Tarantino’s mad vision. I liked the slow burn of Ennio Morricone’s eerie, chiming overture, which plays before the film starts (there were no trailers beforehand) and mirrors the uncharacteristically slow burn of the film’s first 100 minutes. If I could guess which scene won’t make the cut of the official release edition, I’d say it was the one where two shady characters stake out the path to the outhouse as the blizzard gets worse. Tarantino’s decision to stay indoors most of the time is a strange one, and I wish he’d done more with the theatrical arrangements of tables, beds, chairs and chains in the mountain outpost where all of the action takes place. But there’s a musical number that plays with racking focus and the superwide format very well in case you thought he had no reason for shooting things the way he did. Also, the intermission is perfectly timed.

Some random notes:

  • Has any white male filmmaker ever enjoyed using the words “nigger” and “bitch” as much as Tarantino has? The knee-jerk defense for his kind of verbal button-pushing is, of course, that he’s challenging PC limits for entertainment and authenticity’s sake. Fine, whatever. So all he’s doing is portraying a bunch of racists. But he sure loves listening to those racists be racist, doesn’t he? Are we supposed to? Or are we supposed to be offended, thus PLAYING RIGHT INTO HIS HANDS? If that’s so, then perhaps the true antecedent of The Hateful Eight is not the Spaghetti Western. It is Blazing Saddles. 
  • Although the commemorative booklet informs us that, “The cast and crew would eventually finish the shoot on a Los Angeles soundstage, which was chilled below freezing temperatures to mimic the Telluride (Colorado) climate,” there’s no genuine feeling of wintery chilliness in the film. As a guy who’s spent his life in the snow, this is a hard one to explain but an easy one to spot. I just didn’t believe they were all that cold. (The champ in this regard remains Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller.) 
  • The best part of this Western is when Samuel L. Jackson starts sleuthing about and turns it into a mystery. His long fact-finding mission slowly and inexorably turns into the kind of scene for which Tarantino is best known—a long monologue filled with thinly veiled threats disguised as folksy, profane erudition. 
  • One scene in particular plays on prior knowledge so effectively that it is as nerve-wracking as anything Tarantino’s ever done.
  • Food for thought, per critic Armond White of Out (and, amazingly, The National Review): “Tarantino exploits gay porn—and repressed gayness—in the same vein that he notoriously exploits race.” You’ll know what I mean when you get there. 
  • Relevant Tweet #1, from Rembert Browne: 
  • “there’s nothing that has been allowed to slide, by liberal & conservative folks alike, quite like the notion of the big scary black person.”
  • Relevant Tweet #2, from someone named Zodiac Motherfucker: “TARANTINO REALLY DOES BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER. THIS THEATER IS LIKE A MELTING POT OF ASSHOLES”

Happy to be counted among them!

Grade: B+

[Editor’s Note: This review refers to the 70 MM film edition of The Hateful Eight, which is not screening in Memphis. The nearest theaters screening in this format are Ronnie’s in St. Louis and the Carmike Thoroughbred 20 in Franklin, TN. A full review of the film as it appears in Memphis will run in the Flyer’s January 7 issue. 

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World Of Tomorrow

World of Tomorrow (2015; dir. Don Herzfeldt)—It’s always fun to think up off-the-wall year-in-review argument-starters like “The best movie of 2015 is a 16-minute sci-fi animated short starring two stick figures.” It’s even more fun when such assertions turn out to be true.

It’s difficult to express my ever-expanding, ever-deepening love for Herzfeldt’s lovely and melancholy threnody to the future. I can tell you that it compares favorably with the quietly devastating final scenes of Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. I can also tell you that its Klee/Rothko/Chuck Jones imagery reminds me of Herzfeldt’s description of the digital animation process—“Animating this way at first seemed a bit like trying to read a children’s book in a foreign language: it all seemed vaguely familiar somehow, but was sort of weirdly scrambled.” And I can tell you that its main character falls in love with a rock, a fuel pump and an alien.

At the beginning of “World of Tomorrow” a little girl named Emily (Winona Mae) meets her eponymous third-generation adult clone (Julia Pott). After some brief introductory remarks, the synthetic Emily takes her younger self on a tour of the world to come. It’s a world where poor people pay to experience the nightmare of digital consciousness, botched time travel leads to disastrous cosmic mix-ups, and nobody seems to care because “Our more recent history is often just comprised of images of other people watching viewscreens.”

In a brilliant touch, the younger Emily (her clone dubs her “Emily Prime”) is old enough to understand what’s going on, yet far too young to grasp the ominous significance of her future self’s visit. When her clone describes her own birth and says, “Through this process you will hope to live forever,” Emily Prime chirps, “I had lunch today.” When her clone says, “Now is the envy of all the dead,” Emily Prime says, “OK.” And when her clone says, “The advice I give you now is the advice I remember receiving from myself at your age in this moment, so I cannot be certain where it actually originated from,” Emily Prime remains silent. (Read that line again and try to get to the bottom of it; you’d fall silent, too.)

When the cloned Emily starts talking about meteors and saying things like “I am very proud of my sadness because it means I am more alive,” the future—and, as with all great sci-fi, our future—starts to look dark indeed. The movie ends perfectly anyway.

Grade: A+

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Heart Of A Dog

Heart of A Dog (2015; dir. Laurie Anderson)—I own two dogs. Stanley, an 11-year old lab/Great Dane/blue heeler mix, is still loud and spry. He’s also tumorous and gray-haired and has kidney problems. He could go any time within the next year. Lucy is a cute but neurotic 9-year old mini pit-bull who’ll probably expire from despair when Stanley goes. Some days their eventual partings from this world weigh on me more than most of my human problems.

So yes, Anderson’s latest provides wise, humane advice about end-of-life pet care, and I’m grateful for that. But Heart of A Dog does a lot of other things, too. What it doesn’t do is behave like a traditional film. The handful of people who bolted the theater midway through the screening I attended last week could probably attest to this—clearly they weren’t expecting something so plotless (and smart and digressive and profound). It doesn’t behave as a museum installation or a long-form music video, either, even though the soundtrack album is literally the soundtrack to the whole movie. On her website, Anderson calls Heart of A Dog a “piece.” That sounds about right. Something to hold in your hand, turn over, put back on the shelf, and stuff in your pocket absent-mindedly one afternoon only to rediscover hours or months later.

The late, great essay-film specialist Chris Marker, whom Anderson thanks in the closing credits, is one obvious inspiration; the whispering narrator from Godard films like Two or Three Things I Know About Her is another. But Anderson is a kinder, gentler, funnier and less theory-sodden guide. If you can approach her speculations, jokes and mysticism with the same smiling awe you can hear in her voice, then you’ll have a real cool time together. In little more than an hour, Anderson links up global surveillance, her loving relationship with her rat terrier Lolabelle, sorrowful nights spent in the children’s burn unit, her prickly relationship with her mom and the inherently “creepy” nature of storytelling. She talks a lot about death, too, which lingers in the background like the smell of a previous tenant. Her ground- and eye-level re-enactments and re-imaginings of past events are often veiled by sleet, snow and rain, as though she’s observing them from a safe distance behind glass. She heeds The Tibetan Book of The Dead’s instructions and refuses to cry. By doing so, she makes you “feel sad without being sad.”

Heart of A Dog is a mellow little mongrel bred from words, pictures and ideas. It includes at least two pieces of quotable wisdom—“Death is the release of love” and “Most adults have no idea what they’re talking about”—and one worthwhile existential question: “Are you perhaps made of glass?” It saves its best music for last, too; one of Anderson’s final images is a photo of Lolabelle and her late husband Lou Reed, whose “Turning Time Around” provides an appropriate postlude.

Grade: A

Heart Of A Dog plays tonight, Wednesday, December 16 at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. 

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The Best Films Of 2015: A Video Countdown

The Best Films of 2015: A Video Countdown (2015; edited by David Ehrlich)—The third time’s the charm for Ehrlich, the film critic and Rolling Stone writer whose most recent supercut is garnering plenty of rapturous, well-deserved praise from websites and magazines alike. And it couldn’t have arrived at a better time, because the ever-rising tide of new releases each year makes it impossible for a non-bedridden, non-cyborg cinephile to prioritize or even process them all. movie-induced exhaustion is realer than ever, and critical judgment suffers as a result. But Ehrlich’s crisply edited and shamelessly affectionate tribute to the year in movies is film criticism at its best and most helpful. It is both a tantalizing viewing guide and a minor Vimeo masterpiece.

THE 25 BEST FILMS OF 2015: A VIDEO COUNTDOWN from david Ehrlich on Vimeo.

The Best Films Of 2015: A Video Countdown

Ehrlich’s 2015 list is more eclectic than the ones he put together in 2014 and 2013, which means that at least 15 of his 25 choices either 1) haven’t been mentioned anywhere in the Flyer film section or 2) haven’t been shown in Memphis yet (or ever). Luckily, you can find many of his more obscure choices on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes or Netflix. They are well worth seeking out. Ehrlich has excellent taste, which is what people like me ought to say whenever we stumble across fellow admirers of such singular works as The Duke of Burgundy and Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on A Bench Reflecting on Existence.

The countdowns always begin with a musical overture, and this year’s version, which slathers Rhapsody in Blue onto Joe Manganiello’s convenience-store striptease from Magic Mike XXL, might be the most joyful mash-up since Freelance Hellraiser’s “Smells Like Booty.” But wait, there’s more! The music from Paul Thomas Anderson’s new, MUBI-only documentary Junun inadvertently provides a mind-altering optional soundtrack for a montage of melting, decaying images from Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room. A verse from Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” (“Some boys take a beautiful girl/and hide them away from the rest of the world”) smartly re-contextualizes the numerous golden-hued clips of Charlize Theron kicking ass in Mad Max: Fury Road. The klutzy majesty of Mistress America’s Greta Gerwig is contrasted with the desperate determination of Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter’s Rinko Kikuchi. A ghostly computer image of Marlon Brando quotes Macbeth in the beginning, and a stick figure cautions us: “We mustn’t linger. It is easy to get lost in memories” at the end. All in all, it’s the best free Christmas gift a jaded moviegoer could ever hope for.

Grade: A

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The Duke Of Burgundy

The Duke of Burgundy (2014; dir. Peter Strickland)—Although I missed Strickland’s smooth, golden-toned Eurotrash homage-cum-S&M romance during its extremely limited theatrical run last spring, I resolved to keep half an eye open if it ever resurfaced. In the meantime I gritted my teeth through some disappointing late-night Cinemax fare and refused to watch Fifty Shades of Gray as a matter of general principle. But now that Strickland’s third feature is finally available to purchase or watch via streaming video, I’m glad I waited.

Strickland’s puzzling previous film, 2012’s Berberian Sound Studio, followed a distressed and repressed English sound-effects man (Tobey Jones) who traveled to Italy and was eventually driven mad by (and/or possibly sucked into) a rough cut of the low-budget horror picture he was hired to work on. This crazy premise worked better than expected because Jones’ careful performance and Strickland’s studious recreation of 1970s-era post-production facilities gave the film’s avant-garde autodestruct climax some necessary and appropriate social and psychological context.

In spite of its risqué subject matter, The Duke of Burgundy is an altogether gentler and more compassionate film. It’s considerably less confrontational in its sound/image experimentation, and it’s more attuned to its characters’ delicate emotional states. It better be, too, because there isn’t much plot to worry about. Mostly we eavesdrop on some crucial scenes from the romance between fortysomething Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and twentysomething Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), a pair of lepidopterists whose emotional and romantic needs involve hand-washing expensive lingerie, carefully scripting multiple master-servant scenarios on high-class stationery, and locking people in wooden chests for the evening.

Sounds strange and sort of hot, doesn’t it? Well, not so fast. As these surprisingly tasteful sexual games continue, they start to resemble any one of a dozen regular routines and rituals around which most long-term relationships are organized. The exotic and complex articulation of Cynthia and Evelyn’s desires are slowly brought back to earth through hesitations, clarifying remarks (“Try to have more conviction in your voice next time”) and moments of off-book cruelty. What’s sold as a boundary-pushing piece of erotic transgression gradually transforms into something rarer and probably better: a story about two people trying to work it out.

Nevertheless, the film also deserves a merit badge for the way it turns on this wildly original line: “So had I ordered a human toilet, none of this would have happened?”

Grade: A-

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8 Movie and TV Reasons To Be Thankful

EIght reasons to be thankful for the movies and TV:

1. Watching personal assistant Val (Kristen Stewart) run lines and spar with her boss, neurotic actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) in Clouds of Sils Maria, Olivier Assayas’ latest and maybe best exploration of femininity, identity and performance. Stewart and Binoche are so natural and smart and supple together that their work overshadows most, if not all, of the other lead and supporting performances in most, if not all, of the other movies I’ve seen lately.

2. Relishing all the trace elements of writer-director Edgar Wright still discernible in Peyton Reed’s highly enjoyable Ant-Man, from the multiple-narrator relay-race flashback sequences to the fight between Ant-Man (“He can’t see me”) and the Falcon (“I can see you!”) to the climactic showdown that takes place in (among other places) a little girl’s bedroom and a businessman’s briefcase.

3. Tearing up at the closing scenes of Furious 7, which bids farewell to the late Paul Walker via an overhead shot of two cars going their separate ways that recalls the emotional elegance of finales like Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point or Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain.

4. Chuckling at that perfect escalating sight gag early in Paul Feig’s Spy that involves a balcony, a knife and some vomit.

5. Holding my breath at You’re The Worst (FX Network) and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (CW network), two fall series that breathe new life into the relationship sitcom by zeroing in on mental illness and manic depression for deep, unexpected pathos as well as spontaneous, unexpected laughs.

6. Learning to love John Mulaney’s delivery—call it his theater voice for the hearing-impaired—especially when he’s onstage explaining a Back to the Future pitch meeting, his mom’s early-90s reunion with Presidential hopeful Bill Clinton and the intricacies of the cliché “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” on his new standup special John Mulaney: The Comeback Kid (Netflix)

7. Binge-watching Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, also on Netflix, which does a whole lot of things right but lingers in the memory as a bittersweet, Eric Rohmer-esque chronicle of a relationship between two people that seemed terrific at the time but may have been nothing more than one of those crazy things in a person’s dating past. 

8. Waiting every week for the next episode of the classic rock-fringed, split-screen and maroon trouser-obsessed second season of FX’s Fargo, which, if it can tie together its numerous loose ends—and, based on the way showrunner Noah Hawley has paced his twists and turns so far, I see no reason why it can’t—will supplant Mr. Robot as my favorite TV show of the year. But like You’re The Worst, I’m gonna wait until Fargo wraps before writing anything else about it. If you’re not watching, it, though, well, why the heck not?

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!