Review: Radioactive — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Radioactive

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

Stars: Rosamund Pike, Sam Riley, Yvette Feuer, Aneurin Barnard

Writer: Jack Thorne

Director: Marjane Satrapi

Streaming on Amazon Prime

Tackling the life story of pioneering nuclear scientist Marie Curie, Rosamund Pike continues her recent explorations of tough-to-pin-down historic women — pithy females who tossed aside their cultures’ expectations and plunged stubbornly forward, either failing to hear the cries of objection or simply choosing to ignore them.

In A United Kingdom she played Ruth Williams, a London woman who defied the social norms of two countries when she married an African king in the late 1940s. She chain-smoked and growled her way through A Private War, painting an uncompromisingly coarse portrait of war correspondent Marie Colvin. And here in Radioactive, playing the Mother of the Atomic Age, Pike strikes yet another defiant pose as a woman who, despite her obvious brilliance, battles at every turn to make her mark in the male-dominated scientific world of the early 20th century.

It’s a startling performance that commands virtually every moment of the film’s run time, as Pike’s Curie runs into one institutional blockade after another.

Unmarried and fighting to keep her position at a Paris laboratory, in one early scene Curie storms into an all-male (of course) board meeting to demand more lab space — and ends up fired. Facing professional ruin, Pike’s face swims with conflicting emotions: fury, surprise, hurt, and dread fear. But even as her expressions flit from one state of mind to another, she seems to grow in stature to the point where the guys with the cigars — and we — begin to wonder if she’s going to leap at them from across the conference table.

So prickly is Pike’s Curie that we almost gasp in astonishment when she lowers her stoic resolve long enough — but just barely so — to fall in love with and marry Pierre Curie, an uncommonly open-minded fellow scientist (Sam Reilly, channeling the same suave charm that made him the perfect alt-world Mr. Darcy in 2016’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies).

Iranian director Marjane Satrapi — Oscar-nominated for her animated film Persepolis — knows she’s got a good thing going in Pike. When’s she’s not simply turning the whole film over to her star she’s taking devilish delight in depicting the world’s turn-of-the-century radiation mania — depicting with dark glee such products as radioactive toothpaste and chewing gum. Of course, the fun is all over when Marie, Pierre, and their fellow scientists start coughing up blood, signaling the awful realities of unchecked radiation.

Screenwriter Jack Thorne (Wonder, The Aeronauts) makes the risky choice of repeatedly flash forwarding to the decades following Curie’s death, reminding us of the world her discoveries created, from the atomic bomb to radiation therapy to Chernobyl. Indeed, at times he literally injects Madame Curie herself into these scenes, a ghostly witness to her complicated legacy. It doesn’t always work — Curie’s life is compelling enough without resorting to a tricked-up narrative — but the ploy does serve to remind us that although the events here unfolded more than a century ago, some of the modern world’s most profound dilemmas harken back to that dusty, irradiated laboratory in pre-World War I Paris.

In any case, all is forgiven whenever Pike is on the screen. History is always more fun when filmmakers leave the rough edges intact, and Radioactive does just that — thanks mainly to the superb work of an actor who thrives on showing those edges in stark, supremely human, relief.

Featured image: Rosamund Pike in Radioactive (Photo Credit: Laurie Sparham; StudioCanal/Amazon Studios)

Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott: The Best Beach Movies

See all Movies for the Rest of Us.

Featured image: Bill Newcott appears in “Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott: The Best Beach Movies

Seriously Good Films for a Sulky Summer

Kajillionaire

Who could resist the notion of Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins as the heads of a family of small-time grifters — with Westworld’s Evan Rachel Wood as their socially inept daughter? In writer/director Miranda July’s off-kilter family drama, Mom and Dad have raised their daughter as an essential cog in their two-bit heist lifestyle. Then comes an ambitious newcomer (Jane the Virgin’s Gina Rodriguez), who topples the family’s low-rent dynamic with dreams of a bigger score. July is a master of the out-of-left-field twist, and her characters are stubbornly endearing.

The Truth

I usually don’t have much patience for films about how hard it is to be a movie star, but there’s no denying the thrill of seeing the great Catherine Deneuve as a fading screen goddess coming to terms with movie mortality. She plays Fabienne Dangeville, a bygone screen siren who has written her memoirs — a selective account at best. Now her daughter (Juliette Binoche) has come to Paris with her hubby (Ethan Hawke) in tow, fuming because Mom’s book totally sugar-coats her miserable childhood. To make matters worse, Fabienne is currently starring in a cheesy sci-fi flick in which she plays the elderly daughter of a beautiful young mother who never grows old.

Sunken Roads

In 2014, 20-year-old U.S. filmmaker Charlotte Juergens traveled to France for the 70th anniversary of D-Day. Her initial intent was to trace the steps of her late great-grandfather, who was part of the Normandy invasion — but she soon became swept up by the stories of the surviving veterans with whom she traveled. In a disarmingly sweet film that is part historical documentary, part home movie, Juergens provides the men with a chance to make one final plea that the world not forget the things they did and saw. She proves to be a charming intermediary: One vet calls her “Dear Heart”; another starts introducing her as his granddaughter.

This article is featured in the July/August 2020 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

Featured image: Kajillion (Sundance Institute)

Review: The Outpost — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

The Outpost

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: R

Run Time: 2 hours 3 minutes

Stars: Orlando Bloom, Scott Eastwood

Writers: Eric Johnson, Paul Tamasy

Director: Rod Lurie

In theaters and streaming on Apple TV and Fandango

I have always had a problematic relationship with war movies, particularly those that are set within the living memory of myself and the people I know — and especially those of more recent vintage, the ones that depict the essential cruelty of combat in ways earlier films seldom did (Think of the D-Day invasion depicted in The Longest Day, told with almost newsreel-like detachment, versus Saving Private Ryan’s version, as horrific a 15 minutes as you’ll ever spend in a movie theater.)

Part of that, I think, comes from the fact that through the sheer randomness of my birth date, I never had to go to war, nor even contemplate the possibility that I might. That made me, from the start, an observer of war rather than a participant; leaving me with a simmering survivor’s guilt I’ve never been quite able to shake.

Beyond that, though, I still have trouble thinking of war movies as “entertainment.” The very word implies fun, or thrills, and that just seems wrong. The idea of getting my jollies from depictions of sacrifice on the altar of human folly seems inappropriate at best; immoral at worst.

So, for me, watching a serious war movie (not a cartoonish one like The Great Escape or The Dirty Dozen) is more akin to a meditative walk through a cemetery than a visit to an amusement park. I’m soaking in the atmosphere, but I’m not really having fun.

Which brings me to the based-on-fact The Outpost, as serious a war film as you will find, and as visceral. After a quick briefing via some terse titles, director Rod Lurie — working from a spitfire script by Oscar winners Eric Johnson and Paul Tamasy (The Fighter) — straps us into a buffeted helicopter, crammed together with a team of U.S. soldiers headed for a remote outpost in the mountains of Afghanistan circa 2007. The men’s faces, barely illuminated by red night lights, fill the screen, their expressions burning with varying states of resolve, confusion, and fear. It’s clear this is no milk run —particularly because the introduction has informed us the men are headed for what the brass candidly refer to as an “indefensible position” — a valley surrounded by steep mountains from which the enemy Taliban can fire at will. It’s just the first of a seemingly endless string of insane official miscalculations that would be the stuff of comedy if the implications were not so deadly serious.

We meet the guys, one by one, identified to us in no-nonsense fashion via their names superimposed on the screen. Aside from Orlando Bloom (The Lord of the Rings), the actors here are by and large not familiar to us —although their last names are: There’s Milo Gibson, son of Mel; Will Attenborough, grandson of Richard; James Jagger, son of Mick (!), and, most notably, Scott Eastwood, son of Clint, who proves himself to be quite the capable stand-in for his poker-faced dad as a no-nonsense sergeant.

Much of The Outpost is spent exploring the complex relationships among the soldiers; a rowdy, seemingly dysfunctional mix of frat hazing, passionate professions of fidelity, and varying measures of adoration and disdain for the Brass. There’s just one constant at Combat Outpost Keating: At any random moment, the surrounding hills can (and will) erupt in hails of enemy gunfire. Lurie’s masterstroke here is in taking that notion of randomness and tightening it around our throats.

After decades of watching war movies, we’ve grown to sense when a script writer is building up to a moment of violence — we’ve even become desensitized to the tricks filmmakers use to try and catch us off-guard. But even as Lurie allows long passages of relative peace to unspool, his actors never let up their sense of vigilance mixed with dread. When those bullets and bombs come flying, we may jump from our seats, but there’s never a moment of surprise in these guys’ eyes.

The Outpost features some of the most stunning you-are-there camera work I’ve ever seen. Cinematographer Lorenzo Senatore (Hellboy) ingeniously employs a camera-carrying drone that weaves in and out of the patrol formations. The uncanny result is a sense of being more than a fly on the wall: we’re a hovering spirit of Death, lingering on one set of haunted eyes, then moving on to the next, contemplating which of these souls we will claim next. It is one of the great artistic tragedies of the COVID-19 theater closures that most audiences will never get to experience Senatore’s artistry on the big screen it deserves.

Inevitably, those small but deadly skirmishes lead to a climactic battle as the Taliban tries to overrun the sickeningly vulnerable post. I will of course defer to anyone who has actually experienced battle, but even if this extended, pulse-pounding scene is one-tenth authentic in its representation of the sheer chaos and shockingly reckless heroism that accompanies it, The Outpost more than qualifies as one of the most important war films of the past decade.

Admittedly, there is one point when The Outpost threatens to dip into Kelly’s Heroes-like cliché: It’s the moment when Eastwood’s sergeant, seeing all is nearly lost, grits his teeth, Dirty Harry-like, and seethes “Not today!” — at which point he becomes a one-man fighting machine, rallying his comrades to follow him to inevitable bloody victory.

It’s a jarring moment, but it is also undeniably thrilling. In fact, it’s just the sort of thing we’ve been secretly hoping for: a hand on our shoulder assuring us everything is going to be okay. Sadly, that’s more than the real-life heroes depicted in this exceptional film ever got. Stick around for the end credits, during which CNN’s Jake Tapper — who wrote the book on which the film is based — interviews the real-life survivors of this, one of the 21st century’s most notable cases of U.S. military hubris — and the incomprehensibly dedicated men who were its devoted victims.

Featured image: Scene from The Outpost (Screen Media)

Review: The Short History of the Long Road — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

The Short History of the Long Road

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

Stars: Sabrina Carpenter, Steven Ogg, Danny Trejo, Maggie Siff

Writer/Director: Ani Simon-Kennedy

Decidedly low-key films like The Short History of the Long Road are seldom star-making vehicles, but I have a feeling a decade from now lots of us will look back at this big-hearted road movie and say, “Oh, yeah — that’s the first time I noticed Sabrina Carpenter.”

With a winsomeness and everywoman beauty reminiscent of a younger Saoirse Ronan, 21-year-old Carpenter has actually been around for a while, most notably as a wildly successful teen pop idol. But she really ought to give up the touring grind and concentrate on film — she’s that good in this movie, and she barely sings a note.

In fact, just about the only time Carpenter raises her voice in song is early in the film, as her 17-year-old character, Nola, is tooling along a New Mexico highway with her dad (Westworld’s Steven Ogg) in the beat-up VW Westphalia camper van that they call home. The two are singing along with a radio doo-wop tune, exchanging knowing smiles and laughing like they don’t have a care in the world.

And in a way, they don’t. Dad has designed for his daughter a life of detached hedonism. They sleep wherever they happen to park each night. He picks up pocket money by doing odd jobs. They seek out empty houses and lounge by their swimming pools. Dad is Nola’s teacher, her mentor, and her confidante. Clearly, these two live a life that is utterly entwined.

Then something happens that leaves Nola suddenly on her own. Without friends or known relatives to fall back on, she decides to take the wheel of that van and look for the mother who abandoned her as an infant. Along the way — after a brief but disastrous stay with a family that takes in stray kids — she befriends a gruff but big-hearted garage owner (Danny Trejo, being Danny Trejo in the best possible sense) and a young Native American woman (Jashaun St. John) who is being abused by her father.

Writer/director Ani Simon-Kennedy masterfully manages the ebb and flow of her script, giving each character who enters Nola’s transient life plenty of time to unfold their quirks and qualities. There’s a gentle whimsy to Simon-Kennedy’s storytelling; a sense that good people are everywhere around us — and occasionally we need them to set us straight when we wander off course. (One of the film’s briefest and most tender scenes involves an elderly man who catches Nola trying to siphon gasoline from his camper.)

Nola eventually does find her mom, Cheryl, who owns a struggling diner somewhere in the American desert — and it’s here that The Long Road takes its most intriguing turn. Happy to see her daughter, Cheryl nevertheless remains unrepentant about having abandoned her. She lets the girl sleep over and even helps her raise some money, but she’s clearly miffed when Nola turns up unexpectedly at work — and self-consciously introduces her to the staff as her niece.

Cheryl, a complex character to say the least, is played with perfect precision by Maggie Siff, the invaluable costar of TV’s Mad Men and Billions. Self-confident yet a mass of contradictions, Cheryl tries mightily to mine some trace of motherly instinct — only to find that particular vein came a cropper long ago. Likewise, although she’s yearning for the security of a family, Nola discovers the self-reliant streak instilled by her father is not going to fade any time soon. In a daring and effective writer/director choice, Simon-Kennedy chooses to show us the pair’s denouement from a distance, their words muffled, as if only these two could possibly understand the unique dynamics that draw them together and drive them apart.

The Short History of the Long Road flows with such moments. When the final fade-out comes, you sort of wish you could hitch a ride for the long run.

Featured image: Sabrina Carpenter in The Short History of the Long Road (Photo credit: FilmRise)

Review: The Trip to Greece — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

The Trip to Greece 

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

Stars: Rob Brydon, Steve Coogan

Director: Michael Winterbottom

In theaters and on various streaming services.

 

Only Bob Hope and Bing Crosby have made more road movies than actor Steve Coogan and comedian Rob Brydon, who in four films over the course of a decade have toured, eaten, and verbally jousted their way from England to the eastern Mediterranean.

For their fourth — possibly last — installment the boys retrace the route of Odysseus, but don’t be fooled by that high-minded premise: Coogan and Brydon are the main attraction as they casually tweak each other’s’ egos, ruefully negotiate the minefields of middle age, and engage in breathtaking can-you-top-this celebrity impersonations. Coogan’s take on Mick Jagger after his heart surgery would seem insurmountable — until Brydon chimes in with his version of Keith Richards. And both fly into show-stopping imitations of Dustin Hoffman, each one different but getting to a separate facet of the actor’s screen persona.

Speaking of persona, when Brydon dons a Greek theater mask and erupts into an Anthony Hopkins monologue — invoking that ingeniously evocative monotone, those deliciously twisted “r”s — it’s difficult to remember that’s not Sir Anthony hiding back there.

The premise of the Trip movies has always been the same: Coogan and Brydon play fictitious versions of themselves, two guys whose greatest joy seems to be being gloriously abusive of each other in the most civil and jovial manner possible. Over a truly delicious-looking fish plate, Brydon tells Coogan he has become more handsome with age, adding, “you were unpalatable as a young man.” When Coogan says the thing he’s most proud of is his seven BAFTA awards, Brydon chastises him: “I’d have said my children.” To which Coogan coolly replies, “That’s because you have no BAFTA awards.”

For the first three Trip films and two-thirds of this one, the main focus is on banter, the scenery, and the so-beautiful-you-can-taste-it food. But from the outset of this installment, there’s a sense that the guys and director Michael Winterbottom are aiming for something a bit more substantial. There’s a lot of talk about the subtle ravages of age — which at one point leads to the pair engaging in an ill-advised swim across a Greek harbor. And we know from the start — through phone conversations back home and some touchingly staged dream sequences — that Coogan has serious matters on his mind.

Then, not 15 minutes before the fade-out, The Trip becomes a totally different film. Shortly after the guys float through a cave that the ancient Greeks believed led to the Underworld, the sunny skies and impossibly blue waters give way to a cloud of sudden sadness. In one dark moment, that ever-reliable trove of ready jokes is swept away, as if by an Aegean tempest.

It’s a jarring change of tone, made even more head-spinning by Winterbottom’s decision to take this opportunity to illustrate one of life’s more unpleasant realities: Despite the best intentions of good friends and close relatives, our personal tragedies are ours alone.

Like the Greeks understood, the boat on the river Styx only has seating for one.

Featured image: Still from A Trip to Greece (Photo credit: IFC Films)

Review: American Trial: The Eric Garner Story — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

American Trial: The Eric Garner Story

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: NR

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

Director: Roee Messinger

Streaming through independent theater websites. Find the latest links at www.passionriver.com/americantrial.html

It would be difficult to imagine a film more timely than American Trial: The Eric Garner Story — a daringly imaginative attempt to bring closure to one of the more notorious police brutality cases in recent history.

Garner was the Staten Island African-American man who, in 2014, was arrested for selling loose cigarettes on a sidewalk. He ended up face-down on the sidewalk, his neck in a choke hold, gasping “I can’t breathe” — three words that have become a haunting mantra in America’s latter-day civil rights movement.

A grand jury chose not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who tackled Garner and who, according to the coroner’s office, applied the choke hold that led to Garner’s death. So, aside from a civil suit against the city won by Garner’s family, no one paid a price.

That’s where director Roee Messinger comes in: Summoning equal measures of inspiration and ingenuity, he mounts a trial for Pantaleo on film, hiring actual defense attorneys and real-life prosecutors, and bringing in true-life witnesses to what happened that awful day on Staten Island. We meet Garner’s widow and his best friend — but we also hear testimony from genuine medical experts who differ on the cause of Garner’s death, and real ex-cops who speak urgently about the supreme difficulty of making split-second life-and-death decisions on the street.

Only one actor is employed in the cause: Bronx-born Anthony Altieri, who convincingly plays the accused as a guy who feels badly about what happened — but whose years on the beat have seemingly dulled his ability to respond emotionally to anything.

The result is a film that seems more like a nightly news summary of Pantaleo’s trial, documented by cameras mounted on the periphery of a nondescript urban courtroom. No mahogany tables or soaring windows here — the furniture is purely utilitarian, the lighting harsh, the confines almost claustrophobic. And ever-present on the soundtrack, like a minimalist musical score, clicks the keyboard of the court reporter, a touch that lends uncanny reality to the proceedings.

As the trial unfolds, Messinger seems to consciously eschew every common trope of courtroom dramas. The lawyers don’t perform Shakespearian orations — they read their opening and closing statements from laptops and pads of paper. The jurors seem to occasionally lose interest, or at least focus. There are no tight shots of sweating witnesses, no outbursts from the gallery, no stern lectures from the judge. Then there’s the perfunctory “Good morning” that each lawyer offers to every opposition witness — and their guarded “Good morning” response as they brace for the coming evisceration. This is the American trial process in all its banal beauty; the imperfect grunt work of imperfect people seemingly at odds — yet in a real sense working together to reach that elusive quality called Justice.

An American Trial: The Eric Garner Story won’t replace To Kill a Mockingbird or Inherit the Wind as the cinema’s quintessential courtroom drama, but it may well endure as the most authentic. And because it depicts a trial that never happened, it also serves as a solemn reminder that the denial of justice blocks closure not only for the aggrieved, but the accused, as well.

Featured image: Actor Anthony Altieri with witnesses, friends, and family (Passion River Films)

Review: Military Wives — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Military Wives 

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes

Stars: Kristin Scott Thomas, Sharon Horgan

Writers: Rosanne Flynn, Rachel Tunnard

Director: Peter Cattaneo

Streaming on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and other video-on-demand platforms

“Sorry,” says a military wife to a protester offering her a leaflet. “We don’t have the liberty to be anti-war. We’re married to it.”

That seemingly offhand comment cuts to the poignant heart of this warmly affectionate comedy.

It’s the shared dilemma of these women — separated from their spouses as they fight the futile conflict in Afghanistan — who flinch at every ring of their phones; holding their breath every time the doorbell sounds.

Director Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty) captures the somber rhythms of life on a military base where the actual soldiers are all deployed to some far-flung war zone. With unfettered empathy, he traces the real-life story of some British women who form an impromptu choir to pass the time while their spouses are off fighting.

They got to be pretty good — and besides bringing down the house at an annual military concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall, they inspired the creation of Military Wives choirs at bases around the world (many of which get charming cameos at film’s end).

Of course, for purposes of a movie some sort of conflict must be introduced to the plot, and that comes in the person of a commanding officer’s wife, Kate, played with vulnerable authority by Kristin Scott Thomas. A woman who’s used to getting her own way thanks to her husband’s rank — and also still traumatized by the battlefield death of her soldier son — Kate clashes almost immediately with her fellow choirmaster, freewheeling Lisa (Sharon Horgan of TV’s Catastrophe).

Two fine actors, Thomas and Horgan have an engaging oil-and-water chemistry that carries most of the movie. Still, true to its title, the film also has the good sense to give the various women in the chorus plenty of screen time. What could have been a mawkish flight of sentimentalism is kept firmly on the ground mostly thanks to the script co-written by Rachel Tunnard, who similarly avoided easy sentimentality in her criminally overlooked 2016 comedy Adult Life Skills. 

As they say: You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. And you’ll come away with a sense of kinship for those who, while they may not risk their lives, place their hearts in the line of fire every day.

Featured image: Scene from Military Wives (Photo credit: Transmission Films)

Review: Capone — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Capone

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

Rating: R

Stars: Tom Hardy, Linda Cardellini, Matt Dillon, Kyle MacLachlan

Writer/Director: Josh Trank

Streaming on Amazon Prime, iTunes, and other video-on-demand platforms

One thing’s for sure with this grumbly, sweat-soaked account of mob boss Al Capone’s last days: Nobody is slumming it.

In the title role, Tom Hardy (Dunkirk) plunges headfirst into the crumbling mind and body of a one-time tough guy, now riddled by syphilis-steeped dementia. Writer/Director Josh Trank (Chronicle, The Fantastic Four) breaks all the rules of gangster filmmaking, trading lethal swagger and explosive shoot-outs for spiraling decrepitude and fever-induced hallucination. And cinematographer Peter Deming, a longtime David Lynch collaborator, leads the viewer into a dark, disorienting half-real, half-illusionary house of mirrors. Even hip-hop legend El-P’s musical score, a barely-there tone poem of jarring dissonance, provides layers of troubling sonic atmosphere.

But despite all these artists clicking on all cylinders — or maybe, in a perverse way, because of that — Capone never really engages its audience, keeping us at arm’s length even as it probes the most private recesses of a character’s psyche.

We meet Al “Scarface” Capone — or Fonse, as he prefers to be called these days — on Thanksgiving, 1945, six years after he was released from federal prison and sent home to die of the venereal disease that was eating his brain. History tells us Capone was among the first people in the country to receive penicillin treatment for syphilis, in 1942, but it was too late to save his ravaged body and mind. (At a loss for anything to help his doomed patient, Fonse’s doctor, played with upbeat enthusiasm by Kyle MacLachlan, prescribes raw carrots to replace Capone’s ever-present cigars.)

Capone traces the year between the last two Thanksgivings of Capone’s life. Stooped and at times barely coherent, his trademark facial scars drooping like a falling curtain, Capone shuffles around the Miami mansion he bought with his kingpin fortune. He barks demands for food, drinks, and cigars from his long-suffering yet somehow loyal wife — played with tough tenderness by an under-used Linda Cardellini (Mad Men) — and listens in childlike awe to radio dramas re-creating the most sordid chapters of his life, like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

As Capone’s mind disintegrates, he finds solace in the company of ex-gang members, who may or may not be real, but who satisfy his yearning to still be the Boss. His memories also haunt him as he re-lives tortured scenes from his past, including the frenzied, fuzzy recollection of having fathered a son by a woman who died in a mob shootout.

For Fonse, grim reality and fever dream fantasy interweave like the lines of a somber jazz piece echoing in a seedy Chicago speakeasy. Suffering perpetual sweats, debilitating coughing fits and persistent (not to mention distressingly graphic) incontinence, Fonse becomes progressively agitated to the point where he pulls out an old gold-plated Tommy gun and starts spraying bullets all over the place.

Or does he? Indeed, Capone plays the is-it-real-or-is-it-memory card so often the film threatens, by the end, to become an impenetrable slog. There’s no denying the movie’s cerebral ambitions — but its heart lies somewhere at the bottom of Lake Michigan, wearing a pair of cement shoes.

Featured image: Tom Hardy as Al Capone in Capone (Photo Credit: Courtesy of Vertical Entertainment)

Review: Driveways — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Driveways 

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Run Time: 1 hour 23 minutes

Stars: Brian Dennehy, Hong Chau, Lucas Jaye, Christine Ebersole

Writers Hannah Bos, Paul Thureen

Director: Andrew Ahn

Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes and Cable On-Demand Providers 

 

As gentle and sweetly endearing a film as you will find, director Andrew Ahn’s tale of a lonely eight-year-old boy (Lucas Jaye) who befriends the elderly Korean War vet next door (the late Brian Dennehy) is defiantly positive; a big wet kiss on the lips of a world that normalizes cynicism and celebrates conflict.

We meet young Cody as his single mom (Big Little Lies’ Hong Chau) is driving from their Wisconsin home to Upstate New York, where she must settle the affairs of her late sister.

What they find is an appalling sprawl of broken furniture and old newspapers: The sister was a pathological hoarder. It will take months to clean the place out and get it ready for sale.

Observing the process from the porch next door is Del, an octogenarian widower who becomes pals with Cody — largely because he has little else to do.

At this point, seasoned filmgoers will start writing their own script as the setup unfolds: Of course Del will be a grumpy old racist. Of course he will rail against these new Asians invading his neighborhood, especially after he spent his youth fighting them in the jungle. And of course his heart of stone will be melted, if only a little bit, by the inherent goodness of the minority folks next door.

But we ‘ve already seen that movie — it was called Gran Torino, and it starred Clint Eastwood. No, writers Hanna Bos and Paul Thureen (Mozart in the Jungle) have something very different in mind here. It turns out Del is a gentle soul, and if he’s taken note of his young neighbor’s race, he doesn’t let on. He is immediately helpful, as are the rest of the neighbors — including a friendly busybody, nicely played by Christine Ebersole. The local kids are a bit rambunctious, but not all that bad. Del’s daughter turns up to convince him to move to Seattle with her, but she’s not pushy about it. The fact is, like most of us, the characters in Driveways could certainly drum up reasons to be unhappy, or bitter, or angry — but each and every one of them makes a conscious decision to resist the temptation to slip into the trap of willful despair.

Not since Richard Linklater’s Boyhood has the company of genuinely good people, facing life with optimism and open hearts, seemed so compelling.

You can browse through Brian Dennehy’s 180-plus movies and TV shows and find just a handful of leading roles among them. A film like Driveways, enlivened by his understated portrayal of a quietly thoughtful veteran, makes you wish he’d had more. Still, there’s no denying he made a pretty good career of popping up in supporting roles, always leaving the audience wanting more.

Dennehy made three more movies after he finished Driveways, but this is the first of them to be released following his sudden death April 15 at age 81. I happened to be at the U.S. premiere of Driveways during last year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Dennehy was there, looking somewhat frail sitting in a director’s chair while the rest of the cast and crew stood. But he spoke animatedly about the film — and especially about director Andrew Ahn’s subdued approach to the delicately crafted script.

“Everybody’s so damned worried these days about making sure the camera is always moving,” Dennehy said in his familiar, no-nonsense manner. “God only knows it’s spinning around so much in most movies it makes you dizzy as hell.

“But the important thing in movies is this: What happens to the people? This film is about the characters: About a kid just beginning his life and an old guy getting ready to leave.

“I was really happy to do it.”

The actor seemed old, but not unhealthy, that night. Certainly, few of us there suspected that, like Del, Dennehy was also getting ready to leave. Driveways is a fine monument to remember him by.

Featured image: Brian Dennehy and Lucas Jaye (Credit: FilmRise)

Review: Bad Education — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Bad Education (On HBO)

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

Rating: TV-MA

Stars: Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Ray Romano

Writer: Mike Makowsky

Director: Cory Finley

 

Hugh Jackman has made just four movies in the past three years, and with each passing performance he is proving himself to be perhaps the most multifaceted actor working today.

Think about it: in 2017’s Logan he rewrote the book on bringing authentic intensity to a super hero character. The following year his Broadway musical chops singlehandedly saved The Greatest Showman. A few months later he triumphed as the brilliant yet infuriatingly haughty, self-destructive presidential candidate Gary Hart in The Front Runner.

There’s a touch of Hart in Frank Tassone, the guy Jackman plays in his latest film, Bad Education. For one thing, both men are real-life figures who plummeted from rock star-like status to pariah in less time than it took for them to comb their perfectly coiffed hair. And both were brought to their ends largely by their misplaced sense of indestructability.

But while Hart merely took himself down, Tassone was something of a human neutron bomb. As superintendent of schools in the tony Long Island bedroom community of Roslyn during the early 2000s, Tassone was lionized for raising the formerly middling school district to national elite status. But his legion of fans didn’t realize he was also presiding over the single largest public school embezzlement scandal in U.S. history.

What did Frank Tassone know, and when did he know it? Peeling the layers off that onion is just one of the great delights of Mike Makowsky’s script. What’s more, Makowsky, who wrote last year’s utterly brilliant but little-seen I Think We’re Alone Now, was born to write this screenplay: He was a middleschooler in Roslyn at the time his superintendent was led off in cuffs.

Jackman is in full can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him mode as Tassone, blinding students, faculty, and board of education members alike with his dazzling charm, impossibly chiseled features, and a smile that could guide the space shuttle in for a landing. One of the fun tricks of Bad Education is how Tassone checks off every box in everyone’s fantasy of the Hero Educator, and then some: He has memorized the names and interests of each kid in the district. He leaves his office door open to absolutely anyone with a problem. He even leads a community book club.

So what if Frank’s suits seem a tad too well tailored? And who cares that he’s obviously been having some work done on his face? And where does he live? Somewhere in Manhattan? Eh — better to focus on those SAT scores.

Everyone is happy until Frank’s top deputy (Allison Janney, cinema’s reigning supporting MVP) gets caught using district funds to redo her beach house — and by the way, how can she afford a beach house in the first place? Before long a reporter on the high school’s newspaper (doe-eyed Geraldine Viswanathan) is nosing through boxes of receipts as the administrators look warily over her shoulder.

By the time we’re into the second half of the film, the masks begin to slip. Even as the millions of missing dollars add up, the school board scrambles to hide the larceny lest the school’s reputation suffers — and local real estate values plunge. Ray Romano is in fine form as the school board president, at first struggling with his conscience yet ultimately deciding to let the whole thing slide.

To a point, that is. Eventually even those who didn’t gain one dime from the scam find their lives and reputations heading to permanent detention.

Second-time director Cory Finley (Thoroughbreds) deftly walks that caper film tightrope, allowing us to enjoy the company of scoundrels while never asking us to identify with them. He falters only once, near the final fadeout, when Frank finds himself face-to-face with a helicopter mom who has been dogging him from the start, demanding her son’s placement in an advanced course where he clearly does not belong.

With his upbeat, can-do reputation in tatters, Frank finally tears into the woman the way he’s clearly always wanted to. He berates her as one of “the people who trot their poor children out like race horses at Belmont.”

“Do you remember the teachers who held you by the hand? Do their names escape you? Are their faces a blur? You might forget, but we don’t. We never forget. Ever.”

It’s a fantastic speech, and Jackson seems ready to explode with anguish as he delivers it. But Frank doesn’t deserve that speech. Because while he may never have forgotten his students, he’s absolutely forgotten what it means to be accountable to them.

More fitting is the final shot: Frank’s face fills the screen, deep wrinkles finally claiming the territory he defended so fiercely for so long with other people’s money. He tries to flash that winning grin, the one that fooled everyone…even himself. But it doesn’t stay. It can’t stay.

In the end, the face of Frank Tassone is a skull wrapped in thin, nearly transparent skin.

Featured image: Scene from Bad Education (HBO)

Review: Love Wedding Repeat — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Love Wedding Repeat

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

Rating: TV-M

Stars: Sam Claflin, Olivia Munn, Freida Pinto, Eleanor Tomlinson

Writer/Director: Dean Craig

Available on Netflix

 

Man, I am so tired of thinking so much. I know movie reviews need to preserve their shelf life, and thus should avoid trading in current events, but as I write this — in the depths of America’s 2020 COVID-19 pandemic — I really, really appreciate any opportunity to turn my brain off and go somewhere else. Anywhere else.

So, at any other time would I award four stars to Love Wedding Repeat, the most frothy of romantic comedies, a film that cribs shamelessly from much better films like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Groundhog Day? Probably not.

But I laughed at Love Wedding Repeat. I liked most of the characters. I was dazzled by the Rome setting. And the story is so unabashedly silly, so proudly implausible, that I very soon lowered my 24-hour force field of dread-fed skepticism and willingly wallowed in its ridiculous excesses.

Sam Claflin (Me Before You), ably filling a role that would once have been claimed by Hugh Grant, plays Jack, the doting brother of a bride named Hayley (Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson, whose radiance intensifies with her character’s desperation). The guests have gathered for Hayley’s sumptuous destination wedding in a Roman villa, but there’s one unwelcome plus-one: Hayley’s old boyfriend Marc (mop-haired Jack Farthing), a coke-snorting train wreck who has arrived determined to stop the wedding and claim Hayley for his own.

Distraught to see her old beau and realizing what he’s up to, Hayley enlists her brother to sneak some knockout drops into Marc’s champagne, thus putting the intruder out of commission for the duration. Jack is understandably reluctant, but he forges ahead, determined to protect his little sis.

There’s just one distraction for poor Jack: One of the wedding guests is an American war correspondent named Dina (longtime Daily Show regular Olivia Munn, who’s a lot funnier than this film allows her to be), a woman with whom he fell desperately in love three years earlier but who slipped through his fingers. Much of the film follows Jack as he frantically tries to manage the steadily escalating mishaps surrounding the drugging scheme while also trying to sweet-talk his way back into Dina’s heart.

The wheels come off the plot so thoroughly it’s hard to imagine a more calamitous conclusion — at which point writer/director Dean Craig (Death at a Funeral) abruptly rewinds the action to the point where things began to go wrong and spins out a completely different scenario.

In version two, things still go wrong — but with vastly more satisfying results.  It’s all explained by the film’s narrator (uncredited, but if that’s not Judi Dench speaking someone has cloned Dame Judi’s larynx): “We live in a universe ruled by chaos and chance, where all it takes is one moment of ill fortune for all our hopes and dreams to go down the (toilet).”

In fact, chance — and its essential role in all our personal histories — is the subtext of Love Wedding Repeat. As Jack’s friend Bryan (Game of Thrones’ Joel Fry) puts it, every one of us is as lucky as we can get: If one single moment of history had been tweaked in some other way; if our parents had missed crossing paths by a quarter of a second, we wouldn’t even be here.

Or as that Dench-y narrator says, “Something as seemingly insignificant as where we’re sitting at a table is actually Chance dictating whether love will succeed or fail.”

Now that she mentions it, about 10 years ago someone sat next to me at a table only because there were no other seats available in the room. We’ll be married nine years next October.

Maybe that’s why I fell in love with Love Wedding Repeat. But darn it, now I’m thinking again…

Featured image: Eleanor Tomlinson and Sam Claflin in Love Wedding Repeat (Photo credit: Riccardo Ghilardi)

Review: Inside the Rain — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Inside the Rain

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: R

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

Stars: Aaron Fisher, Rosie Perez, Eric Roberts, Ellen Toland, Catherine Curtin, Paul Schulze

Writer/Director: Aaron Fisher

Streaming on Various Online Services

 

Confessional filmmaking can occasionally result in compelling art — witness last year’s Honeyboy, writer/director/costar Shia LaBeouf’s searing fictionalized account of his hellacious Hollywood childhood.

More often, such films seem to have been made as much for the filmmaker as for an actual audience, and that’s the case with Aaron Fisher’s Inside the Rain, a ripped-from-the-gut story about a young man named Ben (played by Fisher) trying to negotiate the world while dealing with a mind-bending emotional cocktail of ADHD, OCD, borderline personality disorder, and bipolarism.

The inescapable subtext here is that Fisher, who besides playing Ben also writes and directs the film, suffers from all those conditions in real life.

Given that pedigree, Inside the Rain can’t help but be a brave piece of filmmaking. But you might not expect it to be as funny as it is. And above all, you may well be caught off-guard by its frequent moments of visual beauty.

When we first meet Ben he’s being dropped off at college — the latest in an apparent string of attempted stabs at higher education. His parents (Paul Schulze and Catherine Curtin) offer an oddly tentative farewell, as if they assume they will see him again long before Thanksgiving break.

They are, of course, correct. A misunderstanding born of Ben’s raging emotional issues leads to his temporary expulsion — a condition that will become permanent following a committee hearing several weeks hence.

Realizing he’ll never be able to talk his way out of his fix, Ben, a film student, decides to make a movie to show at the meeting — a short film that will re-create the events that led up to his unjustified expulsion.

All he needs is a costar, a producer, and $5,500 for production costs — the quest for which leads him to a comely stripper with a heart of gold (Ellen Toland) and a washed-up producer (Eric Roberts, who, since first appearing on Another World in 1964, has been in an astonishing 570 movies and TV shows).

All the time, Ben keeps checking back in with his patient, tough love-dispensing shrink, played with relentless exuberance by Rosie Perez.

Inside The Rain shows all the rough seams that afflict lots of first-time feature directors. Fisher — who directed nine episodes of his YouTube series Single and Baller — could have used someone looking over his shoulder with advice on what extraneous narrative strings to snip, and a veteran director may have drawn from him a more nuanced performance.

Then again, Inside the Rain is as personal as filmmaking gets. In the end, Ben has second thoughts about whether or not he wants to show his film to the college committee at all. At that moment we realize that we, too, may be little more than voyeurs, immersed in a movie that includes us almost as an afterthought.

Featured image: Aaron Fisher in Inside the Rain (Act 13 Films)

Review: Resistance — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Editor’s Note: Contains Spoilers

Resistance

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: R

Run Time: 2 hours

Stars: Jesse Eisenberg, Clémence Poésy, Matthias Schweighöfer, Bella Ramsey, Ed Harris

Writer/Director: Jonathan Jakubowicz

Every night these days the news is pointing us in the direction of heroes — medical personnel, store clerks — who are daily putting themselves between us and the COVID-19 virus. And heroes they are. But then comes a movie like Resistance — the true story of French patriots who braved torture and execution to rescue Jewish orphans from Nazi death camps — to remind us of the ultimate reaches of human bravery.

Inspiring and simultaneously horrifying, the film is a testament to how unspeakably awful we humans can be…and also to how astonishingly often the right person emerges at the right time to do battle with the darkness.

One gets the distinct feeling that writer/director Jonathan Jakubowicz wanted to keep the real-life identity of his film’s hero under wraps until about a half-hour in. Until that point, he goes to great pains to cloak the young man’s name. But here and there little clues emerge  — until all is made clear in a sweet moment of revelation.

But the distributor’s publicity department seems determined to spoil the surprise: The press materials tell all right up front, and my fellow critics have followed suit. So, here’s a reluctant spoiler alert: Resistance is based on the early life of legendary mime Marcel Marceau, who helped save 10,000 Jewish children, working with the French Underground in the South of France. If you choose to share this film with a friend, do them a favor and don’t let on.

Jesse Eisenberg plays Marceau, bringing the focused intensity he’s implemented so well in films like The Social Network and The End of the Tour. Here he ups his dramatic game, tracing Marceau’s emotional journey from self-absorbed outsider to fanatical liberator — while also tackling the gentle art of mime, a skill that takes a lifetime to master.

He’s striking on both counts, particularly in the film’s most heartwarming moment, as Marceau wins the trust of these traumatized children through the simple power of wordless pretend.

Much later, those same skills are brought to bear by the children themselves, perched silently on tree branches high above their Nazi pursuers.

Eisenberg is surrounded by a similarly committed cast, particularly Clémence Poésy (In Bruges), as the young woman who inspires him to be something more than a disinterested observer, and Bella Ramsey (the young Lorna Luft in Judy) as an orphan whose young life has been defined by the cruelest of atrocities.

Villains lurk on every corner in a film like this, but there’s a special place in Movie Bad Guy Hell for the monster played by Matthias Schweighöfer. His character, too, is based on an infamous real-life figure. I’ll leave the discovery of his identity to you, as Jakubowicz again leaves a nifty trail of clues leading up to the big reveal.

Ed Harris makes a brief bookend appearance as Gen. George S. Patton. He’s not on screen much, but if you listen closely you’ll hear in his delivery a sly tribute to the cadences of George C. Scott, who of course won an Oscar for the role.

Like any number of new films, Resistance suffers from being sent directly to TV instead of enjoying its planned release on a large theatrical screen. Production designer Tomas Voth (What Dreams May Come, Pirates of the Caribbean, Memoirs of a Geisha) has always provided an eyeful for film lovers, and here he has created a starkly striking vision of France under Nazi rule. In the later going, you can almost feel your toes go numb as Marceau leads his diminutive charges across the Alps toward Switzerland.

Most of all, Resistance is a monument to a man we thought we knew. If you thought of Marcel Marceau purely as the guy who begat an annoying generation of street performers, this film will stun you into silence. 

Featured image: Jesse Eisenberg in Resistance. Photo Credit: IFC Films

Review: Hope Gap — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Hope Gap

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

Stars: Annette Bening, Bill Nighy, Josh O’Connor

Writer/Director: William Nicholson

 

You might consider Hope Gap a bookend to last year’s A Marriage Story: that Oscar-winning domestic drama was a portrait of a marriage exploding like a white-hot supernova — while Hope Gap depicts one that has dwindled to a dwarf star, collapsing under its own weight and drifting off, almost invisible, into the darkness of space.

Two of the screen’s finest actors — Annette Bening and Bill Nighy — are Edward and Grace, a British couple whose mundane daily routine seems as unshakeable as the stately white cliffs that tower above their coastal town in the South of England. He’s a history teacher; she’s an editor of poetry, and despite whatever warmth they once shared, today their most intimate exchanges seem to involve him heating water for her tea.

Day after day, she sits at her end of their cottage poring over poems while he sits at his end updating and correcting Wikipedia pages related to Napoleon’s retreat from Waterloo.

In fact, the script by writer/director William Nicholson (Gladiator, Unbroken, Les Miserables) frequently returns to the cold, brutal imagery of Napoleon’s defeat. Edward relates in grisly detail how the devastated army’s survivors scavenged off the dead and dying in order to survive — and he draws some awful parallel between that grisly chapter of history and his own crumbling marriage.

Weirdly, although she’s aware that her marriage has all the excitement of yesterday’s black pudding, Grace is oblivious to the fact that the relationship is on life support — and has in fact flat-lined. When Edward breaks the news that he’s leaving her for another woman, Grace stares at him dumbly, as if he’s speaking some unknown foreign language. And when the reality of the situation finally begins to sink in, her state of denial extends all the way to the settlement meeting at the office of Edward’s lawyer, where she continues to profess her love and the belief that they can put all this unpleasantness behind them.

Bening continues — impossibly as it may seem — to hone her art of screen acting by subtraction. With a dip of the voice, a dart of the eyes, an almost imperceptible slump of the shoulders, Bening conveys unspoken volumes of Grace’s inner workings. In the course of a single sentence she ricochets from hope to despair, then back to hope again, because that is the only place she can survive without following her impulse to take one long, final walk to the precipice of those white cliffs just outside of town.

Needless to say, Hope Gap is no laugh fest — the tone at times threatens to remain as gloomy as the skies above the English Channel. The occasional laughs come from Grace’s flailing attempts at rebuilding her life, particularly when she gets a puppy that she names, of course, Edward.  “Stay, Eddie!” she snaps — and she smiles with satisfaction when this Edward, at least, does what she says.

Nighy has the more difficult role here — we want to share Grace’s ultimate assessment that Edward is a heartless scoundrel, and he does very little verbally to try and talk us out of it. But to dismiss him would make the drama infinitely less compelling, and Nighy refuses to offer that bait. Wispy as a willow — we almost fear he’ll blow away during a walk on the beach with his concerned son (Josh O’Connor, now starring as Prince Charles on The Crown) — Edward is almost a caricature of the ultra-repressed, defiantly distant British male, John Cleese without the laughs. Yet Edward is so obviously sad in so many ways — ways that long pre-date his marriage 29 years earlier — that we do long for him to find whatever he can define in his heart as happiness.

In a heart-stopping encounter with Grace, Edward’s new love (Sally Rogers) expresses the matter in a stark kind of calculus that recalls the hard choices made by Napoleon’s freezing soldiers: “The way I see it,” she says, “there were three unhappy people. Now there’s just one.”

For Edward, the wall of stoicism cracks only slightly in conversation with his son, relaying the two moments in his life when he fell in love: first with Grace, and later with the woman for whom he left her. Both are heartbreaking vignettes, and I found myself thinking of Shadowlands, written by this same screenwriter some 30 years ago. In that Oscar-nominated film, the British writer and theologian C.S. Lewis, played by Anthony Hopkins, finds his life of solitary dispassion cracked open by a vivacious, passionate American poet, unforgettably played by Debra Winger.

In that true story, a man allows himself to be changed for the better. The tragedy of Hope Gap is that the characters have long since changed for the worse and now remain unchanged and, in their inertia, ultimately incompatible.

Featured image: Annette Bening and Bill Nighy in Hope Gap. Photo by Robert Viglasky, courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Screen Media

Review: Portrait of a Lady on Fire — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Run Time: 2 hours, 2 minutes

Rating: R

Stars: Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel

Writer/Director: Céline Sciamma

 

The great difference between male and female filmmakers may not be in how they look at the world, but in what they choose to look at. In her deliberate, studied, yet viscerally passionate film about two women crushed under the social norms of late 18th century France, writer/director Céline Sciamma frequently has her characters tell each other to “turn around” or “look here.” We’d best heed their advice: There is much to see and appreciate in Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

A brief prologue presents us with a glimpse of the disturbing painting that gives the film its name and introduces us to its creator, a French portrait artist named Marianne (Noémie Merlant, whose dark, piercing eyes seem to burn with an artist’s vision). Then we flash back to its origins, with Marianne bobbing uneasily in a small boat, desperately trying to keep her oil paintings and canvas from tumbling overboard as she is rowed to a remote Atlantic island.

A brief meeting with the lady of the house (Valeria Golino) sets the plot in motion. The woman’s daughter Héloïse (Adèle Haenel, whose sly, knowing look reminds me of Scarlett Johansson) has been promised in marriage to a man in Milan, but first he wants to see a portrait of her. Héloïse, who is being unreasonably difficult about the arrangement, has already chased one painter from the house, so this time Mom has a plan: Marianne will pretend to be a woman hired to take long walks with Héloïse along the island’s towering sea cliffs. That may sound like an odd occupation, but Héloïse’s sister, similarly pledged to the man in Milan, recently took a header off one of those cliffs. Perhaps it was an accident, maybe not. In either case, Marianne’s ostensive job is to keep Héloïse’s feet on solid ground — all the while secretly studying her so she can whip up an oil portrait in her room after hours.

Director Sciamma takes us on lots of those long walks. Even longer are delicately structured scenes of the women gavotting around their growing attraction for each other. Once the mother’s ruse is exposed, and Héloïse finally agrees to serve as a willing model, Sciamma orchestrates extended scenes in the studio, observing the painter’s technique in patience-testing detail.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is defiantly a women’s film: Aside from those guys rowing Marianne ashore at the start, there’s nary a male to be found in the entire movie. In fact, when a subplot involving a pregnancy arises, one can’t help but wonder, “Well, how did that happen?” Yet, for a man in the audience, there are moments when Sciamma seems to be making the film just for him, pulling back a curtain to reveal the secret female longings and ambitions that for too long were kept in the shadows of this Man’s World.

In an age when ambitious women directors seem determined to prove they can slash through action flicks with the Big Boys, Sciamma goes for something infinitely more ethereal: a soft, feminine passion seldom captured on screen. If some of her choices seem derivative, at least she’s cribbing from the best: Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Jane Campion’s The Piano, Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons to name a few. All those films bravely lingered on their subjects, and here Sciamma is blessed with two lead actors whose haunted round eyes and exquisitely calibrated performances offer portraits of studied desperation, crushed beneath centuries of societal expectations.

Featured image: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, 4Lilies Films. Photo credit: Neon