Meet Me in St. Louis

Judy Garland is at her soft-eyed, honey-voiced, urgently empathic best in this story of an upper-middle-class Smith family in St. Louis in the year leading up to the 1904 World’s Fair. But the film’s greatness comes mainly from its detailed and relatable depiction of the emotional ups and downs of three of the family’s daughters: Rose (Lucille Bremer), a proper beauty on the brink of marriage; the emotionally labile Esther (Garland), who’s nursing an enormous crush on the boy next door; and young Tootie (Margaret O’Brien), a strongwilled tomboy who gives the film its most wrenching scene when she knocks the heads off all her snowmen, heartbroken by the thought of the family leaving their beloved city (Dad’s been offered a promotion that would involve a move to New York). Director Vincent Minnelli dances nimbly on the line between comedy and drama, keeping the camera and the story moving as he cuts from one member of the family to another.

The Hollars

In John Krasinski's second feature as a director, we've barely met Holland family matriarch Sally (Margo Martindale), her perpetually verklempt husband, Donald (Richard Jenkins), and Ron (Sharlto Copley), the grown son living in their basement, when Sally collapses and is diagnosed with an advanced brain tumor. John (Krasinski), the Hollars' other son, a depressed graphic novelist trying to make it in New York, is summoned home and soon joined by his very pregnant girlfriend, Rebecca (Anna Kendrick). The rest of The Hollars observes the family members as they coalesce around Sally or splinter into smaller groups or pairs to conduct charged conversations about their work lives, their love lives, and their relationships with one another.

Hands of Stone

Considered one of the greatest boxers of all time, the Panamanian-born Roberto Duran punched so hard that he earned the nickname Manos de Piedra. The man was known for his iron will, never quitting and almost never losing, yet he infamously blew his hard-won reputation by walking away in the middle of a fight to defend his welterweight title. His story has all the makings of a fascinating film, but Hands of Stone isn't it.

The Interrupters

The Interrupters will screen on August 19 for opening night of the Museum of the Moving Image’s Kartemquin Films retrospective; Steve James will be on hand for the 162-minute original cut of the film, which was never released theatrically.

In the five years since I first saw Steve James’ indelible documentary, I’ve never heard about another killing in Southside Chicago without thinking about The Interrupters’ stars, Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams and Eddie Bocanegra. Former gangbangers who abhor the violence they perpetrated and bear the scars of the harm done to them, they are now “violence interrupters” with a program that treats violence as a socially transmitted disease rather than an individual failure. The interrupters aim to disrupt the vicious cycle of shootings in their city by helping their neighbors manage their emotions and learn new patterns of behavior, choosing not to react to insults and attacks with more of the same. James’ tiny crew (three people, including him) anatomizes Chicago’s violence pandemic close-up and from many angles, attending monthly meetings where the interrupters strategize and compare notes, learning about the three leads’ backgrounds and the paths they found out of the mayhem, and tracking their fitful progress and their enormous outpouring of effort and love as they work with several of their cases. If Chicago’s violence epidemic is ever cured, it will surely be largely through the heroic interventions of people like these. Written for Brooklyn Magazine

Florence Foster Jenkins

Florence Foster Jenkins was a mid-20th-century New York socialite who became known for her generosity to musicians and musical institutions, then grew notorious for the abysmal singing voice she insisted on sharing, through concerts and recordings, with an increasingly amused public. Florence Foster Jenkins, the latest take on her life (the most recent before that being Marguerite), is the story of a long con told from the point of view of the perpetrator and her enablers. That technique worked well in Penny Lane's recent Nuts!, where it set up a second-act reversal that revealed the dark truths behind the triumphal myth that film's subject had created around himself. But director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Nicolas Martin construct a suspiciously simple and sympathetic story about Jenkins (Meryl Streep) and play it straight through (though not entirely straight, as a streak of broad comedy runs through the film), leaving audiences to wonder about the very things that make Jenkins's story intriguing in the first place.

Tallulah

Writer-director Sian Heder's Tallulah has an impressive set of genes on the matriarchal side. Heder was a writer and story editor on Orange Is the New Black, and the film's co-stars Ellen Page and Allison Janney play roles much like the ones they so memorably embodied in Juno—Page as a sardonic young woman grappling with unplanned motherhood and Janney as the no-nonsense mother figure who helps her. But Tallulah, a kind of neofeminist Lifetime movie, is high drama writ in black crayon, lacking either Orange Is the New Black's moral complexities or Juno's sweet-and-sour sass.

Pootie Tang

Part goofily spoofy turn-of-the-20th-century biopic, part hip-hop Spinal Tap with the absurdist knob up turned to 11, Pootie Tang is not quite like anything else you’ve ever seen. Whether because of the self-described cluelessness that got writer-director Louis C.K. fired while the film was being edited or the voiceover-narrated frame that was then imposed by the studio, this parody of a star vehicle meanders a bit before sputtering to a stop, but it delivers plenty of pleasures along the way.

The Infiltrator

A strenuously sold yet inert string of anecdotes from a nonfiction book about a high-stakes undercover DEA operation, Brad Furman's The Infiltrator is all revving engines and no momentum. Interpersonal dynamics that might have helped propel the plot wind up in cul-de-sacs: When suburban dad and DEA undercover agent Bob Mazur (Bryan Cranston) gets paired up with scruffy, fast-and-loose Emir Abreu (John Leguizamo), their odd-couple friction might be expected to lead to clashes over strategy or execution, but aside from the unstable informant who Emir refuses to cut loose despite Bob's qualms, their differences never seem much more than cosmetic. Similarly, the sexual tension between Bob and Kathy Ertz (Diane Kruger), the inexperienced but savvy agent who's the third participant in the sting operation Bob is heading, plays out more as a Hollywood trope than a lived-in reality, though it's apparently enough of a threat to Bob's wife, Evelyn (Juliet Aubrey), to contribute to her decision to temporarily leave her husband.

Neither Heaven Nor Earth

Neither Heaven Nor Earth is screening tomorrow at the French Institute Alliance Française in New York City.

Set among an encampment of French soldiers stationed atop a couple of barren hilltops in Afghanistan in 2014, Neither Heaven Nor Earth injects strains of the supernatural into a realistic war story to highlight the eerie disorientation of modern warfare. As members of the troop begin to disappear, the soldiers lose their emotional footing, their relationship with the civilians in a nearby village transitioning from tense to toxic. The eerie green light that illuminates parts of the soldiers’ faces as they patrol at night underscores the dehumanizing effects of technology, as do the ghostly white silhouettes they see through their infrared scopes. Meanwhile, the nervous sheep the villagers tie to stakes in the dangerous open land create a growing sense of dread, their fate becoming mysteriously entangled with that of the missing soldiers.

Nuts!

Parallels between the controversial self-styled doctor John R. Brinkley and Donald Trump pop up with startling frequency throughout Penny Lane's lively Nuts!, which opens just under a century ago, as Brinkley is starting to treat impotence by surgically implanting goat gonads in men's testicular sacs. That and other Brinkley “cures” soon become wildly popular as Brinkley masters the most promising new media of his time, broadcasting a call-in show from a powerful radio station that he built so he could counsel callers nationwide about their sexual problems and prescribe treatments.

Interview: Penny Lane

One of Filmmaker Magazine's “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2012, writer-director Penny Lane exudes a winning blend of intellectual curiosity and sheer effervescent humor that shapes her films as well as her personality. In arty DIY shorts and two feature-length documentaries, 2013's Our Nixon and this year's Nuts!, Lane often investigates science or history in weird and wonderful ways, imbuing subjects like space travel, Nixon's presidency, and the use of goat glands to treat impotence with sly humor and unexpected emotion. In Nuts!, she also encourages audiences to explore their own susceptibility to charlatanism by first telling her conman subject's story as it's laid out in his authorized biography, then revealing the lies that story was built on and the price people paid for believing those lies. I spoke to Lane about why it's best to make art for an audience of one, the pros and cons of using animation, and what makes so many of us want to believe the whoppers spun by people like Donald Trump and John Brinkley, the self-styled doctor Lane anatomizes in Nuts!

Let's get the name out of the way. Were your parents hippies?

No. They were just teenagers with the last name Lane. It wasn't that thought out. Lois Lane was another option, so all I can do is be happy that they didn't go with Lois, from the depths of their 15-year-old stoner minds.

Call Her Applebroog

The possibilities and limitations of art as a route to self-knowledge are on display in Call Me Applebroog, Beth B's gently incisive portrait of her mother, Ida Applebroog. For much of the documentary, Applebroog, now in her 80s, culls through her conceptual drawings and self-published books, many of which incorporate handwritten-looking, Dada-esque snippets of thought or observations, in what she calls “a mass excavation of myself and my mind and everything that's pertained to me over the years.”

Interview: Amy Heckerling

Fresh out of film school, director Amy Heckerling hit the ground running in the early '80s. Her first feature, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, remains a classic for its delicate balance of absurdity and pathos and the way it treats its characters with bemused-older-sibling affection laced with comic incredulity. Her next few features were more uneven, the humor generally broader and the emotional stakes often less engaging, but they also had their moments, reflecting the director's quick wit and love of larger-than-life characters, and they never sold their female characters short. In 1996, Heckerling returned to form with Clueless, another brilliant high school comedy—this one written as well as directed by her—that deeply respects and understands its female characters at the same time that it laughs at their, well, cluelessness. This week, I had a chance to speak with Heckerling, who was promoting a retrospective of four of her films by the Metrograph theater in the Lower East Side. Quick to laugh, with a sense of mischief and a lack of interest in mincing words that may explain why she's so drawn to young characters, the filmmaker discussed gender inequality in Hollywood and what movies have in common with the economy.

Fast Times and Clueless are great in so many ways, but what I especially love about them is how well they get American teenage girls, and in such a fun away.
In a fun way is the different thing. There were so many movies about teenage girls. It's a scary, depressing time for a lot of people, and a lot of movies capture that brilliantly. But they may not be as happy. When we came out [with Clueless], there was this movie Kids...

The Larry Clark one?
Yeah. And people were saying, “Oh, you've captured American kids,” and I'm going, “Well, that one did too. It's just, I chose those kids.” [laughs] There are a million stories in the naked city, and I gravitated to the happiest one.

100 Words On ... Clueless

The first, and maybe the best, of the many movies to transpose the plot of a Jane Austen novel (in this case, Emma) to a modern context, writer-director Amy Heckerling’s Clueless is a fizzy SweeTart of a pop culture time capsule. It’s also a classic female coming-of-age story, echoing both Austen’s older-sister appreciation of her headstrong heroine’s good qualities and her bemused eye-rolling at her misplaced priorities and callow confidence. Young Emma’s early-19th-century version of entitlement and her appealing, if often delusional, self-confidence translates seamlessly to Cher’s (Alicia Silverstone) brand of 1990s alpha-girl California high-school cool.

Being Charlie

“I know what you're thinking. I do. Who is this kid with the silver spoon in his mouth and why does he keep cooking heroin in it?” says Charlie (Nick Robinson), doing stand-up at a halfway house's talent show. It's a good line, particularly because it's Being Charlie's first and only indication that its titular character, who's apparently spent most of the last couple years cycling in and out of pricey rehab facilities, has any awareness of how whiny and self-martyred he might appear to audiences.

Tribeca Film Festival 2016: Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Taika Waititi's Hunt for the Wilderpeople is told from the point of view of a chubby, self-confident orphan, Ricky (Julian Dennison), with a rich inner life who composes haikus for fun. As the film begins, he's delivered to the last foster home willing to take him in, a small farm carved out of the edge of New Zealand's bush country. Ricky has a bit of trouble in his past and fancies himself an outlaw, but he's really a goodhearted kid, as his enthusiastic and intuitive foster mother, Bella (Rima Te Wiata), sees from the start.

The Meddler

In Lorene Scafaria's The Meddler, the recently widowed and adrift Marnie (Susan Sarandon) tries to fill the hole in her life, first by launching an extreme invasion of her daughter's privacy, and then by offering random acts of generosity to near-strangers, who subsequently become her friends. Perhaps to embody Marnie's penchant for running from her own problems, Sarandon pumps the character full of raw, aimless energy, never walking when she can trot along briskly and talking fast in a broad, supposed-to-be-Brooklyn accent. The actress's frenetic need to keep busy betrays the loneliness and rootlessness underlying Marnie's impulsive acts, but even Sarandon's innate warmth and the sympathy she generates for her character can't make some of Marnie's stunts come across as anything other than unintentional cruelty.

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