On this traditional day of moviegoing, here is my quick take on ten new feature films, most of them only available in cinemas, including “A Complete Unknown,” “The Fire Inside” and “The Room Next Door,” all opening today. All these movies are worth seeing, but the reviews are organized in descending order from those I most enjoyed.
Anora
Anora, a young woman who lives in Brighton Beach and works in a Manhattan strip club, meets Ivan, a rich kid from Russia who was sent to New York to study but is actually just partying. Things heat up quickly. Vanya is rich enough to be living in a palatial estate in Brooklyn, where he pays Ani to stay with him for a week to have sex; then he takes her on a private jet to Las Vegas for the weekend…where they wind up getting married. This of course makes you think of
Cinderella, or at least Pretty Woman. But “Anora” is not just an R-rated sexy romance; it’s also a screwball comedy, when Ivan’s parents find out and send some muscle to fix things; and it turns out to be a pointed and poignant drama as well. The film is also not just a vehicle for the actress Mikey Madison, though she is unquestionably memorable as the title character. But there are two other actors giving (what should be) a star-making performance, Mark Eydelshteyn as Ivan, and (in something of a third-act surprise) Yura Borisov as Igor, one of the henchmen. Both of them are Russian actors trained in Moscow theater, apparently making their English-language movie debuts.
A Real Pain
Two cousins go on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland, where their grandmother had survived the Holocaust, in this film written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, who co-stars with Kieran Culkin. The two visit a concentration camp with a guided tour of fellow American Jews, and then travel on their own to visit the still-standing Polish home that their grandmother was forced to leave. This may seem an incongruous setting for a film that devotes much of its time to the comedy of how annoying Culkin’s Benji is, especially to Eisenberg’s David, and even the drama of how troubled he is. He is indeed a real pain. But the double meaning of the title is a clue that Eisenberg is subtly exploring the very incongruities of modern-day personal pain against historical trauma. As I point out in a previous post about the film, Eisenberg seems to have worked out in this film the themes and characters he was exploring in his Off-Broadway plays.
The Brutalist
Adrien Brody portrays (the fictional) Hungarian-Jewish architect László Toth, who survives the Holocaust and flees post-war Europe for Pennsylvania. The title undoubtedly derives from the Brutalist school of architecture, which eschews decorative design and finds beauty in showcasing the raw building materials. There is certainly something raw and brutal in his struggle to rebuild his life (it takes years to get his wife and niece to America) regain his career and pursue his vision. The film directed by Brady Corbet is intended as a sweeping epic, and it’s certainly long enough to be one – three hours and thirty five minutes, including (weird for a movie in 2024), a 15-minute intermission. Much of the film turns out to focus on the increasingly eerie (and, yes, brutal) relationship with the mercurial millionaire Harrison, portrayed by Guy Pearce, who commissions Toth’s first great work in America. I was hoping for a bit more sweep – we don’t really get past that first commission until an epilogue – but Brody gives what is arguably the best performance of his career, certainly on a par with his Oscar-winning portrayal in the title role of The Pianist.
A Complete Unknown
Timothée Chalamet’s depiction of the young Bob Dylan is the reason to see director James Mangold’s biopic, which begins with the 19-year-old Minnesota musician’s arrival in New York City – first stop, a visit to the hospital to pay tribute to his idol, a now-mute Woodie Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) – and ends four years later, when the folk music superstar and voice of his generation outrages Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and the other folkies at the Newport Folk Music Festival by playing an electric guitar. We get a greatest hits of the people (Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez; Elle Fanning as Dylan’s first and long-suffering girlfriend), places (Greenwich Village, Newport) and songs ( “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-changing,” “Like a Rolling Stone – 37 in all, including five by Baez and two by Johnny Cash – all sung credibly by the cast.)
“A Complete Unknown” tells an oft-told tale that I doubt will completely please the many Dylanologists (much is fudged and omitted) and I wonder whether there is enough substance or insight here to draw newcomers into the enigmatic (jerky, talented) persona that so fascinated his generation. But if they don’t find the songs or the songwriter as swoon-worthy as their elders did, they’ve already fallen for Timothée, in roles for which he was neither as well-suited nor as cool as this one.
Wicked: Part 1
Director John Chu’s movie adaptation of the Broadway musical about the friendship between two witches from the land of Oz is one of the highest-grossing films of the year. As I wrote in a post comparing it with the stage musical, it felt overlong and overdone. But it still has the drawing power of both the long-running Broadway show and the long-popular Wizard of Oz story. And it has two appealing central performances. As Elphaba (eventually to become the Wicked Witch of the West) Cynthia Erivo has an astonishing voice, and a mesmerizing stare, and there are plenty of fun moments between her and Ariana Grande as Galinda (eventually to become the Good Witch of the North)
The Fire Inside
From the time she was a little girl, Claressa Shield, born and raised in Flint, Michigan, wanted to be a boxer, dreaming of the Olympics. “The Fire Inside” tells her story. It’s hardly surprising that she achieved her dream; would they have made a sports movie about her if she hadn’t? But this one is written by Barry Jenkins, director and co-writer of the Oscar-winning movie “Moonlight.” So the film has its exciting sports-movie moments, helped by fine performances from both Ryan Destiny as Claressa and Brian Tyree Henry as her coach Jason Crutchfield. But
“The Fire Inside” is as much about Claressa’s struggles before and after the Olympics, and also about Coach Crutchfield’s. The relationship between the two is the heart of the story.
The Room Next Door
Tilda Swinton plays Martha, a war correspondent dying of cancer, who enlists a long-time friend, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a novelist, to help her commit suicide – simply by accompanying her to a house she’s rented in Woodstock, and being in the room next door while she takes a poison pill. This is the first full-length feature film made in English by director Pedro Almodovar, and gone is the over-the-top theatrics of such earlier films as “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (which was made into a Broadway musical.) In its place is something contemplative and lyrical, which somehow kept my attention even though there was little surprise in where it was going. If the two women converse in an English that too often sounds as if it’s in translation, the actresses, especially Swinton, somehow bring their characters to life.
September 5
This is a suspenseful, claustrophobic account of the ABC sports division’s live coverage of the armed attack on Israeli athletes by the Palestinian Black September group during the 1972 Munich Olympics. It focuses on the moment-by-moment logistics of the coverage, and the decisions that had to be made mostly by people who had never covered such traumatic breaking news before; they were sports guys. The most compelling portrait is that of Marianne (Leonie Benesch), a newly hired German translator who is the only one in the room who knows German, and who seems the most pragmatic problem-solver even as she takes what’s happening personally, as another stain on the German people. The larger political and cultural implications of “September 5” are only occasionally suggested; at one point, they realize that the terrorists have a TV set and are likely watching their coverage.
Nickel Boys
Two Black teenagers are the inmates at a vicious, racist and corrupt reform school for boys in 1960s Florida, in director RaMell Ross’sadaptation of Colson Whitehead novel, “The Nickel Boys.” The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize, was itself based on the true story of the Dozier School for Boys, which was not shut down until 2011 after more than a century of abuse, torture and even murder. Ross’s approach to telling the story is unusual. For the first half hour or so, we follow Elwood (played by Ethan Herisse), through his childhood and the circumstances leading to his wrongful imprisonment, only from his literal perspective; it’s as if his eyes were the camera; we see only what he’s seeing. We finally see him in full after he’s imprisoned in Nickel Academy, when he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), and the camera switches to Turner’s point of view. Then it alternates between the two. Later, the scenes from the 1960’s alternate with cryptic scenes decades in the future; when we see only the back of Daveed Diggs’ head, although it’s not clear until the end of the film who he’s portraying. There is also much insertion of snippets of archival footage — a scene from “The Defiant Ones,” a report about the Apollo space program, Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral — as well as extreme closeups that feel like abstract art. These are often accompanied by a jazz score
There are legitimate artistic and even political reasons behind Ross’s filmmaking, and it can produce some mesmerizing moments. But much of “The Nickel Boys” feels aimed to impress professional filmgoers, requiring too much patience and deciphering from the rest of us.
Queer
Daniel Craig sheds his 007 person to star as the William Burroughs stand-in William Lee in director Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Burroughs cult novel about a self-loathing, drunken, drug-addicted homosexual expatriate American in Mexico infatuated with a younger man (Drew Starkey) and obsessed with finding a drug in the jungles of South America that will give him powers of telepathy. The story was so transgressive when Burroughs wrote it in the 1950s that it wasn’t published for another thirty years. There are some steamy sex scenes, but the film is otherwise taken up with the aimlessness and ennui of post-war expatriate life, followed by scenes of hallucinations and surreal dream sequences, artfully rendered and narratively incoherent.
