Tribeca Film Festival 2016: Don't Think Twice

Writer-director Mike Birbiglia condenses years of experience in live comedy into this smart, affectionate take on the rivalry, love, ambition, and creative juices that fuel the lives of professional comedians. When one of members of a New York City improv group called The Commune gets hired at Weekend Live, an SNL-like kahuna of a TV show that represents the ultimate in ticket-punching success for a professional comic, his coup sends most of the other members into a frenzy of self-doubt, frustration, or attempts to ride his coattails into the limelight.

But Don't Think Twice isn't about success or failure as much as it is about the creative life, as experienced by a group of youngish comedians who've achieved a certain level of success, but still need day jobs or indulgent parents to support their comedy habit. As thirtysomething Bill (Chris Gethard) puts it: “I feel like your 20s are all about hope, and then your 30s are all about leaning how dumb it was to hope.” And most of the group's members are in their 30s.

There’s a real sense of family within The Commune, as evidenced not just in the ritual pre-performance group hug, but also in mind-meld moments like the group’s trip back from visiting Bill’s father in the hospital after the man suffers from a stroke, in which they get Bill to laugh by competing for the best impression of the one halting phrase his father managed to croak out. No wonder Samantha (Gillian Jacobs), perhaps The Commune’s most talented member, wants nothing more than to keep performing with her friends in their shabby little theater.

But everyone else in the group—including Sam’s boyfriend, Jack (Keegan-Michael Key), its most scene-stealing member—has at least one eye on Weekend Live. Their obsession with the show keeps putting them into comically embarrassing situations, like when guest host Ben Stiller comes to see their show, after one of them has joined Weekend Live, and they blow their big chance to connect with a star, peppering him with awkward questions when he comes over to their table in a bar afterward to congratulate them. It’s just one of many slightly painfully funny and truthful moments in this surefooted film.

The Tribeca Film Festival runs from April 13—24.

Written for The House Next Door

Tribeca Film Festival 2016: The Family Fang

There are a lot of surface similarities between The Family Fang and Arrested Development, another tragicomedy about an extravagantly dysfunctional family in which Jason Bateman's character reacts against his parents' high-handed neglect by trying to become a model of emotional health and stability. But where Arrested Development used a light dusting of sorrow to add shading to a gleefully absurdist romp, The Family Fang is an earnest story of redemption with a wacky veneer that doesn't quite fit.

Girls recap: Season 5 Episode 10: "I Love You Baby"

Several characters make significant psychological progress in tonight's season finale of Girls, which begins and ends with Hannah (Lena Dunham) jogging. The first instance is played for laughs, as she plows doggedly up and down her block, in workout clothes that couldn't be less flattering, while her parents (Becky Ann Baker and Peter Scolari), camped out on her stoop, try to get her to acknowledge them. The second is played straight, with a determined Hannah running toward the camera in the great outfit her mom bought for her reading at the Moth's creative writing slam. But whether it's presented as comedy or drama, the jogging is another sign that Hannah is learning how to take care of herself.

Girls recap: Season 5 Episode 9: "Love Stories"

The first half of Girls' two-part season finale includes several kinds of love: romantic, platonic, and that sparkly feeling somewhere in between that can spring up in the glow of a new friendship, like the one between Hannah (Lena Dunham) and her old classmate and nemesis, Tally (Jenny Slate). It's surprising to see Hannah connect so deeply with a new potential friend, especially someone whose success used to trigger such jealousy in her. Maybe it helps that Hannah hasn't been writing—or doing much else—for so long that she no longer feels as if she's in competition with Tally. As she says, when she accepts her offer to hang out: “I'm not really headed anywhere particular at the moment.”

Then again, maybe being open to Tally is another sign of the emotional maturity Hannah's fitfully tumbling toward. Or maybe she's just open to a new friendship because her old friends have been busy or evasive lately. Whatever the reason, Hannah and Tally do some serious bonding, confiding in one another, dancing to Beyoncé, and getting so high on falling-in-friendship endorphins that they briefly consider making love before dismissing it with a mutual “nah.”

On the romantic side, Hannah still seems totally over Fran already, telling Tally she was “just using him to get over Adam, who’s probably the only person I’ve ever loved.” But she can’t stop ruminating about Adam (Adam Driver) and Jessa (Jemima Kirke), feeling left out and confused as her lost love and estranged bestie get lost in one another. As she tells Tally: “The worst part is, I miss them both, you know? I love them both so much I don’t know who to warn about the other one.” Meanwhile, Elijah (Andrew Rannells) does his best to close his open relationship with Dill (Corey Stoll), only to get a devastating rejection when Dill thanks him for helping him realize that he is ready for a committed relationship, but with someone a little less “aimless.”

The only bright note in all this heartache is the reunion between Marnie (Allison Williams) and Ray (Alex Karpovsky), after her “love dream” about him makes her think that he might actually be the one for her. Ray welcomes her back with a graceful ease and delight that feels like true love. “It can’t be you!” she says, to which he gently replies: “I think it might be me, Marnie.”

Another of Ray’s old loves, Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), also comes back into his life, this time in the form of savior. When she sees what a wasteland the coffee shop he manages has become, Shosh springs into action—and provides some classic moments of Dadaesque humor. First she reminds Ray and his boss, Hermie (Colin Quinn), of her marketing skills: “What do you think I was doing in Japan? Other than origami and eating candy that tastes like other candy.” Then she scopes out the competition in a trench coat and hat before declaring that they must brand Ray’s shop as “the destination for the anti-hipster,” selling coffee to “people with jobs.”

One important part of “Love Stories” has nothing to do with love. When Hannah quits her job as a teacher, Principal Toby (Douglas McGrath) is still supportive and understanding, even as she packs up her stuff and gives him an explanation for her departure that combines pompous self-righteousness with clueless entitlement and smug condescension: “I’ve been trying to stay more open to signals from the universe, and I don’t know if I can be open to those signals if I’m tuned into another song. This job being the song.” But Toby, that most patient of men, sees past Hannah’s patronizing bullshit to the essence her students—and Girls’s audience—respond to. He admires her, he says, because “with all your setbacks and your issues, you live your life with such joie de vivre.” Maybe he’s more of a sage than a sap.

Written for The House Next Door

Tribeca Film Festival 2016: Adult Life Skills

If it had bigger stars and a less quirk-dependent plot, Rachel Tunnard's Adult Life Skills would be right at home at the multiplex, probably starring someone like Kate Hudson. The romance here is relegated to comically awkward background, sparing us the trope of the hapless heroine whose messy life is all tidied up by the love of a good man, but the rest is dispiritingly predictable. Anna (Jodie Whittaker) is a kind of English Zoe Deschanel, a wide-eyed free spirit who doesn't realize how loveable she is. She lives in a shed in her mother's backyard, which she has crammed full of artsy detritus like pinwheels and homemade tinfoil rocket ships. When she's not working at a community center, she likes to draw a rudimentary face on each of her thumbs and then shoot video of them having a conversation.

Tribeca Film Festival 2016: All This Panic

Jenny Gage’s All This Panic is a somewhat meandering but engaging documentary about a handful of girls from a private high school in Brooklyn and a couple of their younger sisters. Talking about how girls her age are objectified, Sage says: “People want to see you, but they don’t want to hear what you have to say.” The film is a response to that insidious tendency. Gage and her husband and director of photography, Tom Betterton, appreciate the girls’ beauty, employing magic-hour lighting that bathes them in a soft glow, but the filmmakers are far more interested in the girls’ inner lives.

Sweaty Betty

Made on the cheap by residents of the neighborhood it depicts, this shaggy pig story offers a lo-fi snapshot of Hyattsville, Maryland, a low-income, predominantly African-American town just outside D.C. As seen through the eyes of teenage friends Scooby (Seth Dubois) and Rico (Rico S.), it’s a lively yet mostly aimless place, peopled with loving parents, loyal friends, and local characters the rest of the community appreciates and supports—like Floyd (Floyd Rich), who’s trying to get his beloved Washington Redskins to make a mascot of his gigantic pet pig, Charlotte.

Girls recap: Season 5 Episode 8: "Homeward Bound"

Hannah (Lena Dunham) finally breaks up with Fran (Jake Lacy) in tonight's episode of Girls, but it doesn't register as drama, let alone tragedy. Instead, it plays out as absurdist, almost slapstick comedy. Looking slightly ludicrous, as always, in PJs and cowboy boots, Hannah escapes the RV Fran rented for the summer, which she insists on calling a “house car,” and runs away from him at a rest stop—until she trips on a tree branch and lands ass up on the ground. It's a fitting end to a relationship that always felt fated to fail, his bland sweetness and respect for the status quo fatally out of balance with her sharp tongue and reflexive rebelliousness. Their breakup doesn't appear to be a particularly big deal even for Hannah, who tells a kind stranger who gives her a ride later that day that she's more upset about the fact that Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Adam (Adam Driver) are fucking.

Interview: Joachim Trier

A third-generation filmmaker (his grandfather, Erik Løchen, was a well-known avant-garde director, and his parents both worked in film), Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier makes intelligently constructed movies, like Reprise and Oslo, August 31st, about the sometimes agonizing inner turmoil of characters whose lives seem deceptively calm on the surface. The plots of these films may sound uneventful, even banal, but Trier and his screenwriting partner Eskil Vogt's empathic understanding of their characters' emotions infuses his films with deep feeling. His latest, Louder Than Bombs, centers around a renowned war photographer, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), who died before the film opens. Still recovering from the shock and grief of losing Isabelle, her husband, Gene (Gabriel Byrne), and sons, Conrad (Devin Druid) and Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), are intermittently trying, and mostly failing, to help one another as they stumble separately toward emotional equilibrium. Trier met with me in New York this week to talk about the film, what skateboarding taught him about filmmaking, and why he loves revenge movies.

Girls recap: Season 5 Episode 7: "Hello Kitty"

Because it's about the emotional lives of a group of young women, Lena Dunham's Girls is also very much about friendship—real friendship, not the wish-fulfillment kind you see on TV shows where a tight little group of besties go through life in lockstep, anatomizing every triumph or frustration over cocktails or coffee. So one of the most poignant motifs of the show's last couple of seasons is how Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna often grow slowly, almost imperceptibly apart as their interests change or they head out of town for a while—whether it's the Iowa Writer's Workshop or rehab or Tokyo.

Girls recap: Season 5 Episode 6: "The Panic in Central Park"

Last night's installment of Girls continues this season's run of eventful, emotionally revealing episodes, in which one or two of the main characters zigzag toward some kind of self-awareness, often while exploring an unfamiliar environment. The settings feel like a significant part of that awakening, since Hannah (Lena Dunham) and her friends spent the great majority of the first four seasons either indoors or on dark city streets at night. These artificially lit, often cramped or crowded locations functioned as a series of cocoons in which the characters hung out almost exclusively with people more or less like themselves. But the girls are breaking out of gentrified Brooklyn more than ever this season, exploring environments like a sun-drenched Coney Island, cat cafés and communal hot tubs in Tokyo, or that spa where Hannah and her mom went to last week.

The Dark Horse

In James Napier Robertson's The Dark Horse, down-and-out former chess champ Genesis Potini (Cliff Curtis) finds a measure of salvation for himself, his nephew, and an endearingly scrappy group of at-risk kids by teaching the young ones how to play chess. That may sound either like a film you've seen too many times already or like a formula for easy uplift. But it's neither, thanks to powerful performances and a realistic depiction of the dangers and challenges that face Genesis, a bipolar Maori man who was raised by his older brother and spent much of his life either homeless or in a mental institution.

I Saw the Light

This carefully respectful, sensitively acted biopic sands all the edges off Hank Williams’s story to create a frustratingly inert portrait of an artist whose soul-piercingly mournful music and preternaturally confident and captivating stage presence made him one of the great musical stars of the last century.

Girls recap: Season 5 Episode 5: "Queen for Two Days"

The uncharacteristically tidy march that Girls's main characters have been making toward maturity and relative happiness gets satisfyingly disrupted in “Queen for Two Days,” which focuses on the surprising difficulty of figuring out who and what makes us feel at home. In the episode's main storyline, Hannah (Lena Dunham) reluctantly spends a weekend at a tony spa with her mother, Loreen (Becky Ann Baker), who wants a time-out to figure out whether to stay in her marriage now that she knows that her husband is gay. Loreen tells Hannah about her decision in a speech that's a realistic, if rueful, acknowledgement of what home means to her: “I know it sounds sad to you,” she says, “but I like our house, and your father's very nice, and he makes me laugh when he does that Chris Rock. And he plays Scrabble really well. These things count for a lot.”

New Directors New Films: Under the Shadow

Under the Shadow was screened in this year's New Directors New Films festival.

Like an Iranian take on The Babadook, writer-director Babak Anvari's Under the Shadow is an emotionally direct and realistic horror story centered around a socially isolated mother and child who are terrorized by eerie supernatural events. The paranormal happenings are very likely a combination of the mother's hallucinations and the child's way of making sense of the violence the mother perpetrates as her sanity ebbs and flows, but Anvari keeps things creepy in part by leaving open the possibility that there really may be something supernatural out there.

Miracles from Heaven

As she did in The 33, director Patricia Riggen introduces Miracles from Heaven's characters by establishing one dominant trait that will define them throughout. Also as in that film, she shoots those characters early on at a beatific backyard barbecue, pushing in for idyllic close-ups of wholesome sights like ribs being basted and kids on rope swings to establish a family in the context of its community—a lively congregation led by the friendly, funny, and wise Pastor Scott (John Carroll Lynch). In short, the film's first few minutes are engineered to make clear that, as Kevin Beam (Martin Henderson) tells his wife, Christy (Jennifer Garner), “It's a good life, Christy Beam!”

The Confirmation

Bob Nelson's The Confirmation is bookended by two confessions by eight-year-old Anthony (Jaeden Lieberher). In the first, he strains to come up with something worthy of penance eight weeks after his last confession. By the next afternoon, he has a roll call of sins to confess after spending an eventful day with his father, Walt (Clive Owen), filled with lying and stealing. We're meant to understand that it isn't through the religious ceremony of the title, but through those sins—or, more precisely, through learning that committing such “sins” is sometimes the right thing to do—that Anthony makes his first meaningful step toward manhood. That's an interesting premise for a coming-of-age story, but it's undermined by the film's occasionally dubious ethics and its tendency to soft-pedal the dangerous situations it sets up.

Interview: Arnaud Desplechin

A nostalgic and deeply emotional tale, My Golden Days is Arnaud Desplechin’s second film about Paul Dedalus. Very loosely based on the filmmaker himself (his name is a nod to James Joyce’s alter ego in Ulysses), Dedalus is played here by two actors, longtime Desplechin collaborator Mathieu Amalric as a middle-aged man looking back on his youth, in three scenes that frame the adolescent action, and Quentin Dolmaire as the young Paul. In an unexpected and generous twist, what appears at first to be a male coming-of-age story winds up being less about Paul than about his first love, the volcanic, creative, and fearlessly original Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet). We spoke to Desplechin late last year, when he was in town to promote the film during the New York Film Festival. Animated and articulate, he talked about why it’s French to love M. Night Shyamalan, why it gets harder to collaborate with an actor after years of working together, and why it’s important to him to include black characters in his films.

Girls recap: Season 5 Episode 4, "Old Loves"

Like a Jane Austen novel, Girls seems obsessed lately with pairing its main characters up with long-term mates, but the romance is mostly a smokescreen for the show's—especially this season's—main focus: the slow, often painful crawl toward emotional maturity. As in Austen's work, making a good romantic match on Girls is just one of the more easily dramatized rewards of gaining enough self-knowledge to know what you want and enough self-discipline to make the sacrifices to get it. Several key characters make progress toward earning their relationship stripes in “Old Loves,” with Elijah (Andrew Rannells) leading the way with all the sparkly delight of a drum major.

New Directors New Films: Donald Cried

Donald Cried was screened at this year's New Directors New Films festival.

In this emotionally astute debut feature, Kris Avedisian anatomizes a type of encounter that's much more common in life than in movies: an awkward reunion between two long-estranged friends that unearths a complex mix of guilt and shame in the one responsible for the estrangement. It would be easy for a filmmaker to either make such an encounter feel tediously uneventful or to pump it full of movie-ish melodrama, but Donald Cried does neither, remaining resolutely realistic while mining plenty of pathos, humor, and drama from the situation.

The Americans Season 4

It's telling that several scenes from the fourth season of The Americans begin with Elizabeth (Keri Russell) or Philip (Matthew Rhys), married Soviet spies, waking up from a nightmare. These dreams are pungent metaphors for the couple's growing desperation, as they agonize over how to protect their children from a life they feel increasingly trapped within.

The Brothers Grimsby

Like Ali G and Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's Nobby from The Brothers Grimsby is a human Rorschach blot, crafted to suss out essential truths about the people he interacts with. But where those other two characters put their audiences in a privileged position, laughing at (or admiring the patience of) the non-actors they interacted with, Nobby tests us like a hyperactive preschooler, sometimes hamfistedly transgressive, sometimes simply mischievous, and occasionally scoring a surprisingly cogent point.

Girls recap: Season 5 Episode 3, "Japan"

This season of Girls has been partly about constructing a situation for each of the main characters that could presumably hold steady after the series ends next year, and “Japan” tucks Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) cosily into her totally Shosh-friendly Tokyo apartment, whose brightly colored façade makes it look like one big piece of playground equipment. From the moment she wakes up, to an alarmingly cute alarm clock, it's clear how well suited she is to her new city, from its love of all things young and perky to her doting boss, Yoshi (Hiro Mizushima), a curly haired cutie who sees her as “a shiny star.” When the two of them eye each other shyly in the company cafeteria, Shosh and her Japanese female co-workers holding cones of cotton candy while Yoshi and his boys lick ice cream cones, the stylized middle-school vibe is both touching (because it feels so right for Shoshanna) and sweetly absurd.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Like most films set in battle zones, including many that were intended to be anti-war, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot glamorizes armed conflict by stressing the romantic intensity of life lived and relationships forged under the shadow of death, an intensity that carries an atavistic appeal for young people hungry to test their mettle. But by making the fantasy of proving oneself by heading off to a foreign war its central theme, then taking an honest look at some of the messier ethical dilemmas that lurk beneath that narrative, the film lopes into some surprisingly complicated and thought-provoking territory.

Girls recap: Season 5, Episode 2, "Good Man"

The “white man!” cry of alarm directed at Ray (Alex Karpovsky) by a non-cisgender barista after he insults her, first by assuming she's male and then by asking if she's female, echoes throughout the entirety of “Good Man.” Hannah (Lena Dunham) and her friends all have their awkward moments as they alternately embody or encounter the blurring of gender and sexual boundaries that have continued to accelerate since their college days, but it's the straight—or until recently passing as straight—white men among them who struggle hardest to adapt.

Girls recap: Season 5, Episode 1, "Wedding Day"

The season-five premiere of Girls is a microcosm of the series as a whole. It mercilessly flays its four female leads and the men who love them, autopsying their narcissism, unearned self-pity, blindered entitlement, and youthful arrogance with a precision so clinical it can be hard to watch when it isn't slyly funny. But if they're easy to condemn, the characters are hard to dismiss, as their just as honestly depicted insecurities, intermittent acts of kindness, and deeply felt, if inchoate, love for each other lead to moments of hard-earned grace and connection.

Race

Stephen Hopkins's Race is a complication-smoothing take on Jesse Owens's elegant riposte to Hitler's racism at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where the legendary track star won four gold medals. The film's hackneyed mode of storytelling is evident as soon as Owens (Stephan James) is seen heading off to college, with the expository dialogue suggesting bullet points accumulating on a PowerPoint presentation. In quick succession, the audience is informed that Owens is so poor that he has only one shirt, that his mother is sure he's destined for greatness, that he's the first in his family to go to college, and that he helps support not just his unemployed father, Henry (Andrew Moodie), but his young daughter, Gloria (Kayla Stewart), and her mother, Ruth (Shanice Banton), who he plans to marry as soon as he can afford to.

Within Our Gates

The earliest known surviving feature directed by an African-American was probably a response to the racist Birth of a Nation. Pointed contrasts between South and North (the first intertitle places the characters in the North, “where the prejudices and hatreds of the South do not exist—though this does not prevent the occasional lynching of a Negro”) and cuts back and forth between often harrowing scenes make genteel schoolteacher Sylvia Landry (identified in the credits as “the renowned Negro artist Evelyn Preer”) a symbol of her people’s suffering. Her story encompasses lynching, the rape of black women by white men, and the abject kowtowing to powerful whites and casual betrayal of their own people of figures like a gossipy servant and a hypocritical preacher.  Written for Brooklyn Magazine

Touched With Fire

A film about bipolar lovers who bring out the mania in one another, Touched With Fire is overheated yet oddly inert, constantly invoking impassioned inspiration without ever quite evoking it. The film gets its title and its main theses from a scientific study of the link between bipolar and creativity by Kay Redfield Jamison. Marco (Luke Kirby) fetishizes the book, name-checking many of the bipolar artists it investigates (Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, Van Gogh, Tchaikovsky…) and insisting that his condition is not an illness but a kind of benediction, a state of enhanced sensitivity and creativity that inspires the (crappy) poetry he prides himself on, a form of improvised rap.

100 Words on... The Mother and the Whore

Unlike other directors of the French New Wave, Jean Eustache didn’t glamorize his preening leading man, even though he said this film was autobiographical. (Then again, he did commit suicide a few years later). Instead, he keeps the camera running as self-styled ladies’ man Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) chatters on, trading a near-endless stream of pseudo-intellectual observations with his even more pompous friend or monologuing at the unaccountably indulgent, occasionally bemused women in his life. The film’s implicit critique of male privilege and the hipster/poseur world Alexandre inhabits becomes explicit as the focus shifts to Alexandre’s latest conquest, Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), a watchful truth-teller who is as self-aware as Alexandre is self-deluding. Veronika provides both a sad-eyed moral center and a clear-eyed critique of what she calls Alexandre’s “shitty relationships with women” to this sometimes funny, sometimes wearying, ultimately absorbing and unsettling 220-minute slice of life.  Written for Brooklyn Magazine

Interview with Walter Goggins

With a great white shark of a grin and a maniacal laugh that's at once infectious and chilling, it's no wonder that Walton Goggins so often plays shady characters. As Justified's Boyd Crowder, the actor was first seen as a white supremacist bombing black churches in an episode that was meant to be the character's last gasp, but Goggins's performance was so mesmerizing that his death scene was reshot. Crowder made it to the last scene in the series as Deputy Raylan Givens's main antagonist and ally, a complex, charismatic and surprisingly sympathetic man who's at least as much victim as perpetrator.

Goggins is now co-starring in Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, an Agatha Christie-esque mystery in the guise of a western, in which a motley collection of shady individuals trapped inside an enclosed space spin stories, spar, and kill one another as the question of who's behind the murders and other mysteries are gradually revealed. Chris Mannix is another of Goggins's antiheroes turned unlikely hero, a vigilante who's just been appointed sheriff of Red Rock, Wyoming, and a proud but defeated Confederate who forms an initially reluctant alliance with a former Union officer—and a black one at that (Samuel L. Jackson's Major Marquis Warren).

When we spoke earlier this month, Goggins was analytical, witty, and sincere as he talked about having come to terms with playing “that guy,” being grateful for the opportunity to play smart, complicated characters for the past few years, and the Zen of discovering a new character.

Sisters

Sisters may be too formulaic to pose a challenge to the status quo and too silly to be mistaken for a manifesto, but it’s more than just another party-to-end-all-parties bromance with women in the starring roles. The plot (childishly furious that their parents have sold their childhood home, two 40-ish sisters throw one last wild party, hoping to scotch the deal, and spurring a series of epiphanies) may be as predictable as the sunset, but its strong girl-power vibe and steady thrum of rueful early-middle-aged self-awareness keep it from degenerating into the knee-jerk misogyny and mean-spirited outsider-shaming that often turn this kind of comedy into a cinematic bullying session.

Best Movies of 2015

Here is Slant's list of the top 25 films of the year, which I contributed to.

And here are my picks

Top 10
Mad Max: Fury Road
Timbuktu
Coming Home
Son of Saul
We Come as Friends (my interview with director Hubert Sauper)
Salt of the Earth (my interview with co-directors Wim Wenders and Julian Ribeiro Salgado)
Room
Diary of a Teenage Girl
45 Years (my interview with director Andrew Haigh on another of his movies)
It Follows

Honorable mentions:
The Look of Silence (my interview with director Joel Oppenheimer), Spotlight, Carol, Joy, Of Horses and Men, In Jackson Heights, Madame Phung’s Last Journey, Mustang, What We Do In the Shadows (my interview with Jemain Clement), The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

Timbuktu

In Timbuktu’s opening sequence, a line of ancient African figurines and masks torn apart by jihadi bullets lie in the sand like so many mutilated bodies, a foreshadowing of killings to come. But writer-director Abderrahmane Sissako, who grew up in Mali and Mauritania, is less interested in the terrible violence jihadists have inflicted on his people than in the many smaller humiliations and restrictions the jihadists impose and the heroic acts of defiance that often greet them. 

As he did in Bamako, Sissako illustrates the damage done by a ruthless institution (in this case, fundamentalists bent on establishing a new caliphate) by focusing on its effect on one formerly happy family. Professional and non-professional actors alike—including singer Fatoumata Diawara, whose improvised song of mourning provides the film with one of its most terrible and beautiful scenes—contribute to the film’s realism by inhabiting their characters with unself-conscious ease. At the same time, Sissako ramps up the underlying sense of dread. Unfolding his story of occupation, resistance, and collateral damage at a stately yet relentless pace, and often either cutting just before a moment of high drama or filming it from a distance, he maintains a powerful thrum of tragic inevitability while avoiding any hint of propagandistic exploitation. Written for Slant Magazine

Best TV Shows of 2015

Here's Slant's list of the top 25 shows of the year, which I contributed to.

And here are my picks:

Top 10
Fargo
The Knick
The Americans
Jane the Virgin
Mad Men
Justified
Transparent
You’re the Worst
Louie
Master of None

honorable mentions (too much good stuff to stick to just 10):
The Leftovers, Jessica Jones, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Mindy Project, Episodes, Bojack Horseman, Black Jesus, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Silicon Valley, South Park, Veep, Homeland, The Middle, Playing House, Girls, Doll & Em

Mad Men

Cool tomcat and longtime shape-shifter Don Draper (Jon Hamm) may have found yet another way to adapt in the final scene of this elegant series, but he spent most of the last season sidelined as people he once eclipsed without even trying—like his long-suffering colleagues Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) and Joan (Christina Hendricks), and his freethinking wife, Megan (Jessica Paré)—began to come into their own. As the series completed the arc it had been slowly building for eight years, Mad Men left us with an indelible portrait of the root-deep changes that shook up American culture in the 1950s and ‘60s, both for better, as in the emergence of feminism and civil rights, and worse, as exemplified by the increasing cynicism and sophistication of the pitches the gang at Sterling Cooper developed to sell America to itself. Written for Slant Magazine 

Fargo

Even more than its excellent first season, the second season of Fargo channeled the absurdist humanism of the Coen brothers’ film. The series features a rogue’s gallery of characters, each motivated by an urgent mission and many at least “a little touched,” as someone says of Kirsten Dunst’s accidental gangster Peggy Blomquist. Jean Smart’s grimly effective gang matriarch and the matter-of-factly unhinged characters embodied by Dunst and Zahn McClarnon, not to mention Bokeeem Woodbine’s sardonic henchman, are as indelible as the ones Steve Buscemi and Frances McDormand played in the film. Although they appear to be on a collision course toward mutually assured destruction, watching these vivid oddballs crash into one another in a deadpan dance of life, death, and (at least for Peggy) self-actualization is an oddly joyful experience. Written for Slant Magazine 

Transparent

Jeffrey Tambor’s odd blend of clueless narcissism and warm sincerity fits Maura, the loving but sometimes damagingly oblivious patriarch turned matriarch of a close but dysfunctional clan, much better than the muu-muu-like garments she favors. The show’s first season focused primarily on Maura, as she came out to each member of her family and experienced life as a woman. This season, it spends more time with other members of the family as they explore their own sexuality—and their near-universal inability to form long-lasting intimate relationships. Daughter Ali (Gaby Hoffman) is trying to make sense of the family history of secrecy and sexual nonconformity. Her quest is a reminder, like the show’s bittersweet opening credit sequence, that LGBT people have always been part of society, even though society has so often tried to deny their existence. Written for Slant Magazine 

Jane the Virgin

The birth of the baby with whom she was accidentally impregnated by a careless gynecologist at the start of last season focused all of Jane’s (Gina Rodriguez) attention on motherhood. It had a similar effect on this light-footed dramedy/spoof telenovela, paring away a couple of subplots that had been getting a little too baroque (that Sin Rostro business, for one) to get back to basics. But there’s still plenty of melodrama to trip up kind, earnest Jane, and to keep our suave but chummy narrator alternately flummoxed and delighted, as Jane figures out—with the help of the mother and grandmother who raised her—how to be a mother while pursuing her dream of being a writer. Written for Slant Magazine 

South Park

South Park spent much of its latest season calling out social constructs that sneak inside our heads and control the way we think and act, from the seductive, fake online news stories that fool everyone but Jimmy in “Sponsored Content,” to the knee-jerk celebration of LGBT culture that makes even Tweek and Craig’s parents kvell over their ostensibly brave gay sons in the wake of false rumors that they’re lovers. The series is also still rudely honest enough to give us a Caitlyn Jenner whose post-surgery face looks like a cubist painting, and silly enough to have her plow into a pedestrian every time she goes for a drive. South Park may look as if it was drawn by a six-year-old, but it’s consistently turning out some of today’s funniest and most incisive satire. Written for Slant Magazine 

You're the Worst

This smart, slightly acidic rom-com was bracingly unsentimental during its first season, when Jimmy (Chris Geere) and Gretchen (Aya Cash) were a couple of millennials hardened by single life who hooked up because they were the two worst-behaved guests at a wedding, parted ways with no intention of getting together again, and were later somewhat mortified to find themselves falling in love. The series followed Gretchen and Jimmy to a deeper place this season as the two, now officially a couple and living together, gradually let down their guards and got to know things about one another—like Gretchen’s bouts of clinical depression—that add poignancy and emotional depth to their sparring exchanges.  Written for Slant Magazine

The Lady in the Van

Maggie Smith carries herself like a countess in this “mostly true story” about a homeless woman in London, while hinting at a deep well of remorse and shards of panic beneath her grand froideur. In a kind of literary bait and switch, however, The Lady in the Van isn't really about the supercilious Miss Shepherd (Smith), but the fastidious, somewhat timid, and reclusive playwright Alan Bennett (Alex Jennings), the author of this screenplay, in whose driveway Miss Shepherd parked her van for more than 15 years.

Interview: Christopher Abbott

With roles in Nurse Jackie, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and A Most Violent Year already under his belt, not to mention his most famous part to date, as Marnie's initially lovesick, then over-it boyfriend Charlie on Girls, Christopher Abbott appears to be as talented at picking interesting projects as he is at acting in them. His latest film is writer-director Josh Mond's James White, an astute character study of a young man pushed to his limits, for better and for worse, by the death of his father and the rapid decline of his cancer-stricken mother. In his first starring role, Abbott runs a gauntlet of emotions as the title character, who lives, as his mother warns him, too much on the high or low end of the emotional scale and not enough in the middle. I met up with him this week to talk about the film, which he calls a “personal project” for both Mond and himself. Low-key but engaged, he talked about his work and his interest in what makes people tick with unpretentious sincerity.

100 Words on ... Moana (with sound)

The measured pace and muted drama of this partly staged 1926 documentary mirror the rhythms of the lives it observes. In a probably somewhat idealized snapshot of an obsolete culture, co-directors (and husband-wife team) Robert and Frances Flaherty structured a loose story around the everyday activities of a few photogenic residents of a small Samoan island town. Depicting some recently abandoned customs and costumes as if they were still in use, the Flahertys and their Samoan collaborators capture in fascinating detail things like snaring a wild hog and creating a garment from a strip of mulberry bark. Dialogue and ambient sound recorded by the Flaherty’s daughter Monica on the island five decades later was seamlessly integrated into the originally silent film in this newly restored version, augmenting the vitality of the unshowily beautiful and enviably well-balanced way of life it depicts. Written for Brooklyn Magazine

The 33

The saga of the Chilean copper miners trapped when the Mina San José collapsed in 2010 was mesmerizing for the millions who watched it unfold. Not only did all 33 of the men who were working nearly half a mile underground survive there for more than two months, but, in a miracle of sorts, an international team of engineers managed to drill a narrow hole through tons of rock to hit the sweet spot where the men were hidden, without further destabilizing the precarious mine. The machine that hauled the men up to the surface looked endearingly crude, like a man-sized vacuum tube or a clunky Dr. Who time-travel machine, and their reunions with their thrilled loved ones supplied a whole gaggle of blockbuster-worthy happy endings.

Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words

Stig Björkman's Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words highlights the potent dichotomies—a deep-seated sense of melancholy and an equally strong joie de vivre, watchful shyness and magnetic charisma—that, combined with the Swedish-born Ingrid Bergman's relatively unmediated beauty, made the actress luminescent both on and off screen. It also anatomizes the contradictions—a determination to lead an authentic, earthy life versus a love of Hollywood-style glamour, and a strong nesting instinct contrasted with a compulsion to uproot herself every decade or so—that made her a dearly loved, but mostly absent, presence in her own family life.

What I want to see ... December 2015

Hitchcock/Truffaut



A Royal Night Out



Before: Because if this is half as charming as Roman Holiday, it will be worth seeing. And because Bel Powley, who plays Princess Margaret, was wonderful in Diary of a Teenage Girl, and the rest of the cast looks good too. After: Oh well, so much for that. It's mildly entertaining, if you're in the mood for something light and sweet, but Roman Holiday it ain't.

What I want to see in... November 2015

When people find out that you write about movies, the first thing they want to know is what's playing now or opening soon that's worth seeing. So I often find myself scrolling through a couple of lists I keep in Evernote: one of movies I've seen, the other of upcoming films that look interesting. I create the second list each month when Ed Gonzalez at Slant asks his reviewers which movies they'll want to write about for the month starting six or eight weeks out.

I thought I'd start posting my list of upcoming movies here, as a way of keeping track of the movies I expect--or hope--to like. This month’s list is long, since a lot of good stuff always gets rolled out at this time of year, and it all opens here in NYC.  If I review one of these, or interview someone attached to it, I'll link to my piece from this list when it's published. If I don't write about it, I may add a sentence or two about the movie after I've seen it.

Hope this helps you figure out what you're interested in seeing. Are there other movies you're looking forward to?

In Jackson Heights

Ok, I've seen this now, and I'm glad I did. I wanted more on some of the cultures that make Jackson Heights one of the most multicultural neighborhoods not just in the city but in the nation (where were the Indians and Pakistanis?), but it's very good on Jackson Heights' LGBT history and on what immigrants bring to this country, the price they too often have to pay to get/stay here, and how the real estate investors behind so-called Business Improvement Districts are attempting to gentrify and homogenize this area just as they have other parts of New York. As always, Frederick Wiseman documents things that would have happened without him, and he finds plenty of evidence of a strong neighborhood with a proud history, which a lot of smart activists are fighting to keep affordable and livable for the people who made it what it is.

Sand Dollars

With the plaintive ballad that bookends Sand Dollars, bachata singer Ramón Cordero could be speaking for seventy-something Anne (Geraldine Chaplin). She's fallen for a young Dominican girl, Noeli (Yanet Mojica), who makes her living from the gifts and tips she gleans from tourists like Anne, engaging in a less overtly mercenary version of the “girlfriend experience.” As Anne wanders the streets of Las Terrenas, a Dominican seaside resort town, pining for her elusive love, Cordero croons: “I live in grief because I don't see you here.” Meanwhile, Noeli and her boyfriend, Menor (Ricardo Ariel Toribio), suffer the pain of another kind of thwarted love, more often triggered by seeing than by missing one another: Any time they run into each other in their favorite nightclub, Noeli is almost sure to be with one of her meal tickets, around whom the two pretend to be brother and sister.

100 Words on ... The House of the Devil

Set in the mid-80s, with pitch-perfect clothes, hair and props, The House of the Devil earns its screams with integrity, building slowly to a strobe-lit, blood-slimed, twist-ending final few minutes. Except for those last few minutes and the first shocking event, which happens about halfway through, our growing sense of dread is fed mainly by relatively subtle cues, like a camera that keeps pushing slowly in to pick out a suspicious detail; the creepy voice of Tom Noonan on the phone; or his even creepier behavior in person. Other than that, this is a largely realistic slice of likeable college student Samantha’s (Jocelin Donahue) life, culminating in the night when her loyal best friend Megan (Greta Gerwig) drives her far into the country for a babysitting gig Sam doesn’t think she can afford to say no to, though no-bullshit Megan keeps begging her to. Written for Brooklyn Magazine

Burnt

Adam Jones (Bradley Cooper) is a bad-boy chef trying to make good. You can tell he's bad because of his six-pack abs, movie-star shades, and leather jacket—and because we're forever being told about all the drugs, drinking, and women he used to do. As for the good part, he's clean and sober as the movie opens, determined to take over the kitchen of a fancy hotel restaurant and win his third Michelin star. But first he must round up his staff, recruiting a series of flattered and eager young men and one recalcitrant beauty, Helene (Sienna Miller).

Suffragette

Women are still far from having achieved equal rights almost everywhere in the world, but think how much worse we would be without the right to vote—those of us who have that right, that is. We make up half of the world's population, yet some of us are still denied the vote, and those who have it won it only through great struggle—and, as title cards at the end of Sarah Gavron's Suffragette point out, shockingly recently in many nations.