Flicks with The Film Snob KXCI

Jeff Nichols’ films are known for their gritty working class flavor. His latest one, The Bikeriders, is based on a book of the same title by photographer Danny Lyon, about an actual motorcycle club in the Midwest during the 1960s that eventually turned into a gang. Nichols wrote the screenplay, which captures the inchoate speech patterns of these working class tough guys, and the picture has the loose style of ’70s American cinema. For those accustomed to the slick, overpowering modern Hollywood action aesthetic, this movie might seem like a throwback. In a good way, I think. The biker film genre has of course been associated with low budget exploitation, but here there’s less grandiosity and more honesty. Nichols made an excellent artistic choice; the film’s point-of-view character is a woman.
Jodie Comer plays Kathy, a strong-willed, fairly conventional seeming young woman from Chicago. In a bar to meet a friend, she encounters members of the Vandals Motorcycle Club. Many are drunkenly rude, which turns her off. But as she’s leaving she sees a very handsome biker named Benny, played by Austin Butler, and it’s love at first sight, which was still something people believed in, in 1965.
Comer is from Liverpool, England, but you’d never be able to tell that from this performance, where her Chicago accent and streetwise mannerisms seem genuine. She narrates a lot of the film, as we see her character being interviewed by the photographer, Danny Lyon. Kathy’s outside and inside perspective—in a way she’s not from the same world as these guys, yet becomes one of them—is a crucial ingredient that makes the film effective. She enjoys and reflects the romantic self-glorification of the bikers, but at the same time she can see all the stupidity, waste, and absurdity too.
Austin Butler, who gained some fame playing Elvis Presley a couple years ago, plays Kathy’s partner Benny, whose hatred of authority manifests in crazy violent ways. He is fearless, which makes him a dangerous man, and lends him a lot of prestige within the club. But his love for Kathy hints there’s more to him.
The Bikeriders’ other main ingredient, holding the narrative together, is another English actor, Tom Hardy, as the leader of the club, Johnny. He is an inarticulate married guy with a job, but also a wild streak. Hardy is a master at depicting exploding rage, which Johnny usually does when he’s drunk. But he plays the role otherwise as tense and strongly contained. His sometimes high-pitched mumbling delivery reminded me of Brando. Sure enough, we find that Johnny was inspired to start the club after seeing Brando in his one biker film, The Wild One. Hardy’s performance elevates the film to a more deeply felt level.
Jeff Nichols’ favorite actor, Michael Shannon, is on hand as one of the more unruly gang members. A lot of other male character actors do some fine work. These young men being portrayed are full of energy, high spirits, and fierce loyalty. They also resent what you might call straight society, and people who have managed to get more educated, and the cops, and eventually other gangs. The dramatic arc leads to more violence. Kathy recognizes the insanity, and thus we, the audience, can also see through the toxic myths that the characters weave around themselves. The Bikeriders takes us on quite a journey.
 
 
 
 
 
 

One of the more surprising recent developments in cinema for me has been the rise to fame of a Greek avant-garde filmmaker named Yorgos Lanthimos. His films satirize the darker aspects of human nature, usually in forms of ego and control, and they employ bizarre, sometimes alarming narrative devices. The gallows humor and the challenging depictions of sexual behavior, were not a liability in the art film world. But his English language films, that he started making in 2015, have gained him a much wider audience. His last two movies actually won some Oscars. So how did such an uncompromising artist achieve mainstream success? I think his films offer painful ideas that are connecting with our painful times.
His latest film is called Kinds of Kindness. Teaming up with his former co-screenwriter Efthimos Philippou, Lanthimos returns in this film to the difficult aesthetic of his earlier stuff. The film consists of three separate stories, with a group of the same actors playing most of the characters in each story. Foremost among them are Emma Stone, Jesse Plemmons, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley.
In the first story, Plemmons plays an enigmatic fellow who deliberately rams his car into that of an older man with the initials RMF, whom we have already seen being given a package by Qualley’s character in an earlier scene. Her husband is a sinister corporate executive played by Dafoe. Plemmons’ character, we then learn, is under the complete control of this CEO, who tells him what to do in every aspect of his life, even deciding whom he should marry. In fact, he controls him sexually as well. But this timid follower played by Plemmons is unwilling to kill RMF by smashing into his car more forcefully, and because of this, his controller loses confidence in him.
In the second story, Plemmons plays a cop whose wife, played by Stone, has been in a helicopter crash. The pilot, RMF, has died, but she survives and returns home, only to have her husband develop the paranoid belief that she’s not really his wife, but some kind of replacement. It is this husband that is trying to control everything in this tale, and his wife’s desperate determination to obey everything he says in order to prove her love, results in extreme horror and disgust.
Finally, in story number three, Stone and Plemmons play members of a cult that have been asked to find a woman foretold to possess the power to revive the dead. This creepy cult, with Dafoe as the leader, insists on its followers being pure, “uncontaminated” by outside elements. Once again, people are being dominated by an authority, in this case the cult. And the person they want to resurrect from the dead? You guessed it: RMF.
The film is maniacally focused on this issue of authority, and the distortions that people go through in relationship to it. There are many disturbing things symbolized, but of course rather than explaining anything, Lanthimos leaves it all out for us to untangle. Who is RMF? Why is everyone afraid of freedom? Even though there is an occasional strained sense of humor, Kinds of Kindness is more than anything else, terrifying. The world Lanthimos presents is not at all one of kindness, but of violence. It’s a dark vision for our times—not for the faint hearted.

I’m not a fan of the Oscars, the Golden Globes, or most of the other Hollywood awards, but one thing I know: to win or even just be nominated helps an artist become much more well known. Lily Gladstone won a Globe and was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, the first Native American actress to do either. She now stars in a film called Fancy Dance. Erica Tremblay directs, in her feature debut, and co-wrote the picture with Miciana Alise. They’re both native women.
Gladstone plays Jax, a tough character living on the edge in Oklahoma’s Seneca-Cayuga Reservation. Her older sister has disappeared; there’s been no word from her for weeks, yet law enforcement doesn’t care enough to put any effort into finding her, since she’s run off suddenly before. The film’s excellent depiction of gritty life on the “rez” makes it clear that the disappearance of native women is sadly not unusual, but another symptom of neglect, mistreatment, and poverty.
In the meantime, Jax is taking care of her sister’s 13-year-old daughter Roki, played by Isabel Deroy-Olsen, a bright new talent who holds her own with Gladstone. An interesting aspect of the story, that Gladstone makes wholly believable, is that Jax is involved in some shady stuff, and is not at all what you would call a completely healthy influence on her niece. Together they make money through hustling and stealing—at one point they steal a white man’s truck and sell it to a guy Jax knows, and it turns out she has sometimes sold drugs for him. There’s a self-destructive streak in Jax’s nature, but we also understand that there aren’t a lot of respectable ways to thrive in her world. Roki has adopted her aunt’s attitude and has developed talents of her own, getting into the habit of shoplifting even when she doesn’t really need to, something that worries Jax.
The title of the movie, Fancy Dance, comes from a form of dance that has become common in gatherings known as “powwows.” Roki danced with her mother at powwows, and she desperately wants to get to this year’s annual event in Oklahoma City, convinced that her mother will show up there. Jax has her doubts, but doesn’t share them with her niece, promising to take her there. But then Child Protective Services discoves Jax’s arrest record, and decides to give custody of Roki to her white grandfather, played by the reliable Shea Wigham. He wants to be helpful, but Jax has never forgiven him for abandoning them when their mother died. The threat of losing Roki becomes the crisis fueling the plot, and eventually we end up in thriller territory.
Gladstone is nothing less than compelling throughout the film. I was amazed to discover that she did this performance during breaks in the making of Scorsese’s film, which was also shot in Oklahoma. Tremblay makes the stakes high—things could go terribly wrong in this story. The thriller aspect really got my heart racing. But above all this, Fancy Dance presents a steady, vivid awareness of the many details, large and small, that make up contemporary native life, and of the strength and love that must hold it all together.

Thelma, the debut feature from writer and director Josh Margolin, opens with the title character, a 93-year-old woman played by June Squibb, being taught by her grandson how to use email on her computer. Her difficulties learning such things as how to scroll down using a mouse, or what to do when an ad pops up, are a familiar source of humor, but instead of a broad farcical approach, it’s funny while seeming natural and wholly plausible. Fred Hechinger projects gentle patience as the grandson, Daniel, and as for Squibb—this is her movie all the way, built around her quirky personality, which seems not at all some caricature of an old person, but a genuine portrait of humanity.
The plot begins with Thelma getting robbed in a phone scam. This is not intended to be particularly funny. Unscrupulous characters cheating vulnerable older citizens through phone, texts, or emails—this is an unfortunate reality that has become more and more frequent in recent years. We can only groan in sympathy as we see Thelma taken in, and sending ten thousand dollars in the mail to supposedly post bail for her grandson. Of course she feels like an idiot when her family figures out that she’s fallen victim to scammers. They all say there’s nothing she can do about it, so just let go and stop worrying. But Thelma won’t let go. A strong-willed woman given to obsessions, she’s determined to somehow get her money back.
The actors playing Thelma’s family, in addition to Hechinger, are good. Her daughter, Daniel’s mom, is played by one of my favorite performers, Parker Posey, and Clark Gregg is amusingly low-key as the dad. The plot is of course, quite implausible if you step back and think about it, which you don’t because it’s an enjoyable easy-going comedy, and a fine excuse for showcasing June Squibb’s considerable comic talents. A lot of the humor lies in the contrast between the family’s view of Thelma as a simple lovable lady who can’t take care of herself, and the outrageous action that she chooses to embark upon. They underestimate her at every turn, and truth to tell, she sometimes acts more than a little crazy.
Thelma enlists a friend at an assisted living facility, played by the veteran actor Richard Roundtree, to help pull off her scheme. Roundtree, in his final film appearance (sadly, he passed away last year), adds a lot of depth to the picture. He’s as natural and relaxed a performer you could ever want, with sharp comic timing, and a good match for Squibb.
Margolin’s ability to make us believe and sympathize with all his characters is a rare strength. And far too often in comedies the elderly are depicted as cute & lovable, unbelievably witty and outrageous, or some other exaggeration. Margolin opts for a measured approach in both character and situation, which makes the laughs in this movie feel earned.
The screenplay is funny without having to try too hard, and the  film has a feeling of real affection. Thelma is a surprising little treat.

In Greek mythology, a chimera was an imaginary monster combining the features of a lion, a goat, and a snake. But later, for some reason, it became a metaphor for foolish or delusional ideas and objectives. La Chimera, the new film by Italian director Alice Rochrwacher, tells of a young man who compulsively pursues the risky and impractical goal of quickly becoming rich through the theft of antiquities, a chimera that keeps slipping through his fingers.
The film takes its time letting us figure out its background story. We first see Arthur, played by the excellent Josh O’Connor, in a memory, or maybe it’s a dream, about a young woman he clearly adores. As we discover, he’s an English archaeologist just now let out of an Italian prison, returning to his ramshackle hut on a mountainside. He’s welcomed by a disreputable group of friends whom at first he rejects, but eventually falls back in with. They’re a rowdy gang of thieves who rob ancient Etruscan tombs of their valuable artifacts and then sell them on the black market. They need Arthur as their leader because he has a strange psychic talent that helps him discover these underground tombs, actually using a dowsing rod to find the general locations, and then going into a sort of trance in which he can pinpoint the spot where they need to start digging.
The marvelous Isabella Rossellini is on hand as an eccentric matriarch named Flora, who welcomes Arthur joyfully into her home where she lives with three adult daughters, because before prison he was the boyfriend of her favorite daughter Beniamina, the woman we’ve seen in the brief dreamlike opening of the film. Beniamina has gone away somewhere, but the old lady is expecting her to return any day.
Rochrwacher’s style is leisurely and richly seductive, with exquisite cinematography by Hélène Louvart. The boisterous gang of troublemakers surrounding Arthur is counterbalanced by Flora’s young servant and singing pupil Italia, played by Carol Duarte. Italia is a woman of great humor in the face of her challenges, who has two kids that she’s managed to conceal from Flora, and who presents Arthur with a beguiling mix of skepticism and affection. Arthur may be falling for her, even while his heart still dreams of the absent Beniamina. Yet nothing can tear him away from his obsession for finding ancient treasure.
In this rustic Italian landscape, in a time which seems to be before cellphones, perhaps the 1980s, we sense the presence of history underneath the old land and within the mind of this hapless dreamer. Josh O’Conner plays Arthur as if in a constant wandering reverie, lost in thought and bittersweet recollection. It’s hard to pin the character down, but the audience will find themselves rooting for him to succeed in his restless search. The gang does find a major treasure, a statue discovered in an ornate tomb, but their elaborate scheme is threatened by an unexpected rival, making wealth once more seem just out of reach.
The pull between the desire for riches and the need for love is the film’s central source of tension. The end of the movie provides a poignant and heart rending resolution. La Chimera is a haunting vision of beauty and loss.

A country village in Japan is threatened by a tourism company in this enigmatic film from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.
Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is an artist of the liminal—that place between perception and symbol that we experience as mystery. This makes his films difficult, because he refuses to break things down to an easily understandable linear pattern, preferring to let meanings arise at their own pace, and not by suggestion. This was true of Drive My Car, which won the Foreign Language Oscar a couple years ago. And it’s especially true of his latest movie, Evil Does Not Exist.
I reviewed a good Iranian film recently called There is No Evil, so I was surprised to encounter another movie title that is almost identical. The meaning of that other one proved to be fairly evident if you paid attention. But in this film, the understanding, if it comes at all, is delivered through shock.
In a village located in some beautiful forest and lake country in Japan, the people live with a rhythm close to nature. The director establishes an intense feeling right away, with a lengthy sequence, accompanied by the credits, of tall trees moving within our vision, a glimpse of immensity from the point of view of our life below. Then eventually we see, it’s a young girl looking up at these trees. She’s the daughter of a local man named Takumi who is living in a cabin, chopping wood, doing odd jobs around the village. The director doesn’t shorten his actions by cutting; we see the slow pace of his life, walking with the little girl, chopping the wood, moving yet living in stillness.
After this mood has been established, we cut to a town meeting at which two young representatives of a Tokyo company are explaining a plan to build a tourist site nearby for what they call “glamping,” which is slang for glamorous camping, and this just means putting up nice little hotels instead of tents and campfires. They get an earful from the residents at this meeting. For one thing, the planned location of the septic tank is bad—the waste will go downstream to the village’s drinking water. Other aspects threaten the traditional life of the village. Takumi is one of the more eloquent persons objecting to the plan.
The two young employees, a man and a woman, are open to what they’re being told, even though their supervisors won’t budge. This sympathetic couple makes friends with Takumi, and visit him at his home where he feeds them and discusses the village’s issues. But it so happens that his daughter does not return home from school that day, and he organizes a search for her.
After the interesting and somewhat amusing town meeting scene, we may have thought that this was a conventional story with a narrative arc and so forth, but as I’ve already said, Hamaguchi always challenges what we may habitually understand about events. The ending of Evil Does Not Exist provides an unexpected jolt. It’s one of those endings that an audience will argue about later. All I can say is Hamaguchi is presenting us with something more complex and more serious than we might have thought.
Evil Does Not Exist is a strange and unsettling experience.