Drive My Car (Movie)

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares99 Views

    Oscars 2022 Predictions: Who Will Win Best Picture, Actor and Actress?

    by

    In an interesting year with a duel for the top award and some wide-open races, here’s how our expert is marking his ballot.Best PictureEmilia Jones and Troy Kotsur having a moment in “CODA.”Apple TV+, via Associated Press“Belfast”✓“CODA”“Don’t Look Up”“Drive My Car”“Dune”“King Richard”“Licorice Pizza”“Nightmare Alley”“The Power of the Dog”“West Side Story”In a novel twist, this race has become a face-off between the best picture candidate with the most Oscar nominations (“The Power of the Dog,” with 12) and the one tied for the least (“CODA,” with just three). Still, “CODA” has recently surged after key wins with the actors, writers and producers guilds, the sort of bounty that almost always points the way to best picture victory. Though it’s awfully rare for a film to win Hollywood’s top prize without nominations for editing and directing — in fact, it hasn’t happened since 1932’s “Grand Hotel” — “CODA” can bypass those statistical precedents with an appeal that goes straight to the heart. In a year when I think voters are desperate to crown a crowd-pleaser, “CODA” is the clear favorite.Still, “The Power of the Dog” shouldn’t be counted out: Netflix has spent heavily to try to earn the streamer’s first best picture win, and the film’s 12 nominations indicate broad strength across several different branches of the academy. The tricky part is that the Oscars use a preferential ballot, which asks voters to rank the 10 nominees and tends to produce a winner that consistently shows up in the No. 1 and No. 2 slots. That favors a likable consensus choice like “CODA” instead of the more polarizing “Power of the Dog,” which will have to net a whole lot of No. 1 votes to offset the ballots cast by voters who found Campion’s film a little too austere.Best DirectorJane Campion, right, with associate producer Phil Jones, during production.Kirsty Griffin/NetflixKenneth Branagh, “Belfast”Ryusuke Hamaguchi, “Drive My Car”Paul Thomas Anderson, “Licorice Pizza”✓ Jane Campion, “The Power of the Dog”Steven Spielberg, “West Side Story”Campion is the first woman to be nominated for best director twice, and her win could make even more Oscar history, since it would follow Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland” victory and mark the first time this Oscar has gone to women two years in a row. It’s true that Campion stepped into a controversy of her own making at the Critics Choice Awards, where she compared herself to Venus and Serena Williams but said the tennis superstars had never had to compete against men like Campion had. That diminishment of the sisters’ accomplishments caused an internet furor, but the older-skewing academy rarely pays attention to social-media conflagrations, and Campion remains the prohibitive favorite.Best ActorWill Smith opposite Demi Singleton, left, and Saniyya Sidney in “King Richard.”Warner Bros. Javier Bardem, “Being the Ricardos”Benedict Cumberbatch, “The Power of the Dog”Andrew Garfield, “Tick, Tick … Boom!”✓ Will Smith, “King Richard”Denzel Washington, “The Tragedy of Macbeth”The best actor Oscar rarely goes to young men, and bankable movie stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey were only able to win it once they were on the other side of 40 and had paid an appropriate amount of dues. That’s why Smith is so perfectly situated: His two other nominations, for “Ali” and “The Pursuit of Happyness,” came when he was a superstar in his 30s, and now that he is a lightly grizzled 53-year-old who has proved himself over four decades, the timing is right for his first Academy Award win. All the better that in playing the father of the tennis phenoms Venus and Serena Williams in “King Richard,” Smith has found a character-actor role that he can animate with every ounce of his movie-star charisma.Best ActressJessica Chastain as the Christian broadcaster Tammy Faye Bakker.Fox Searchlight Pictures✓Jessica Chastain, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”Olivia Colman, “The Lost Daughter”Penélope Cruz, “Parallel Mothers”Nicole Kidman, “Being the Ricardos”Kristen Stewart, “Spencer”Last year’s best actress winner, Frances McDormand, had a leg up on her competition by hailing from the best picture winner, “Nomadland.” This year, none of the best actress nominees come from movies in the best picture race at all, which gives you a sense of just how wide-open this field is. Chastain won the Screen Actors Guild Award for her role as the disgraced evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, but this could really go to any of the five nominees: Chastain, Stewart and Kidman all gave the kind of transformative biopic performances that Oscar voters love, while Colman and Cruz are critical favorites from much better-reviewed films. I’m going to play it safe by picking Chastain, but feel free to live dangerously in your own Oscar pool.Best Supporting ActorTroy Kotsur opposite Marlee Matlin as his wife in “CODA.”Apple TV+, via Associated PressCiaran Hinds, “Belfast”✓ Troy Kotsur, “CODA”Jesse Plemons, “The Power of the Dog”J.K. Simmons, “Being the Ricardos”Kodi Smit-McPhee, “The Power of the Dog”Smit-McPhee was recognized by year-end critics’ groups for his performance as Kirsten Dunst’s crafty son in “The Power of the Dog,” but once the televised awards shows began to weigh in, Kotsur cleaned up at SAG, the Indie Spirits and BAFTA. With his warm and funny acceptance speeches at those ceremonies, Kotsur has become this season’s breakout performer, and the Oscars can surely count on him for a winning moment that is both heartfelt and historic, since Kotsur would be the first deaf man to earn an acting Oscar. He is instrumental to the tear-jerking third act of “CODA,” and he has a personal narrative every bit as compelling as what you see on the screen. This is Kotsur’s to lose.Explore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.Best Actress Race: Who will win? There are cases to be made for and against each contender, and no one has an obvious advantage. Hollywood Legend: Danny Glover will receive an honorary Oscar for his activism. He spoke to The Times about his life in movies and social justice.A Makeover: On Oscar night, you can expect a refreshed, slimmer telecast and a few new awards. But are all of the tweaks a good thing?Return to the Playground: For his Oscar-nominated short film “When We Were Bullies,” Jay Rosenblatt tracked down his fifth-grade classmates.Secret Sounds: Denis Villeneuve and the “Dune” sound team explain how far they went to create an aural experience that felt familiar.Best Supporting ActressAriana DeBose, with David Alvarez, in “West Side Story.”Niko Tavernise/20th Century StudiosJessie Buckley, “The Lost Daughter”✓ Ariana DeBose, “West Side Story”Judi Dench, “Belfast”Kirsten Dunst, “The Power of the Dog”Aunjanue Ellis, “King Richard”It’s Anita’s America, and we’re just living in it. The key supporting role in “West Side Story” has proved to be catnip for Oscar voters across decades: Rita Moreno won the Oscar for her Anita in the 1961 film, and DeBose is well-positioned to repeat for playing the part in Steven Spielberg’s reimagining. Musical performances often do quite well in this category, as previous winners Anne Hathaway (“Les Misérables”) and Jennifer Hudson (“Dreamgirls”) can attest, but if there’s a dark horse in the race, I’d look to Dunst: She’s worked with a lot of academy members who can appreciate the hard-earned awards breakthrough she managed with “The Power of the Dog.”Best Original ScreenplayLeonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in “Don’t Look Up.”Niko Tavernise/Netflix“Belfast”✓“Don’t Look Up”“King Richard”“Licorice Pizza”“The Worst Person in the World”This is one of the night’s toughest races. Many of my fellow pundits are picking Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” but if it couldn’t win in this category at the BAFTAs despite being a box-office hit in Britain, I don’t expect a sudden reversal from the academy. Besides, Oscar voters tend to take the “original” part of this category very seriously, voting for films that feel sui generis. To my mind, that leaves “Licorice Pizza” (which won the BAFTA), “Don’t Look Up” (which won the WGA Award) and “The Worst Person in the World,” which could earn votes here in a race where it doesn’t face “Drive My Car.” Ultimately, I think that the environmental satire “Don’t Look Up” prevails because of its topical, urgent subject matter.Best Adapted ScreenplayEmilia Jones as the hearing daughter of deaf parents in “CODA.”Apple TV+✓ “CODA”“Drive My Car”“Dune”“The Lost Daughter”“The Power of the Dog”The path to best picture almost always cuts through the screenplay categories, so this race could provide a crucial sneak preview of the night’s ultimate winner, especially because it contains another face-off between “The Power of the Dog” and “CODA.” The latter film won at the Writers Guild, where “The Power of the Dog” wasn’t eligible for a nomination — but at BAFTA, where both films competed, “CODA” still pulled out a victory. If “CODA” (adapted from the French film “La Famille Bélier”) can win over a snobby bunch of British voters, there’s no reason to think it will fall short with the academy.Best Animated FeatureA scene from “Encanto,” with Stephanie Beatriz voicing the central character, Mirabel. Disney✓ “Encanto”“Flee”“Luca”“The Mitchells vs. the Machines”“Raya and the Last Dragon”“The Mitchells vs. the Machines” has won most of the awards doled out by the animation industry, and it shares an innovative elan — as well as the producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — with “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” which previously triumphed in this category. Still, it will be tough for any film to beat “Encanto,” which has the year’s most viral song, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” as well as a popular pitchman in the songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda. The Mitchells may have triumphed in their battle against the Machines, but “Encanto” boasts even heavier artillery.Best Documentary FeatureNina Simone, as seen in “Summer of Soul.”Searchlight Pictures, via Associated Press“Ascension”“Attica”“Flee”✓ “Summer of Soul”“Writing With Fire”This race is filled with worthy contenders, including the animated refugee story “Flee,” which made Oscar history when it was nominated in the documentary, animated and international categories. But “Flee” is up against juggernaut front-runners in all of those races, and here, that No. 1 pick has got to be “Summer of Soul,” the Questlove-directed documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. Oscar voters often fall for music docs — past winners include “Searching for Sugar Man” and “20 Feet From Stardom” — and the previously lost concert footage of artists like Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder and Mahalia Jackson is catch-your-breath, stomp-your-feet wonderful.Best International FeatureReika Kirishima, left, and Hidetoshi Nishijima in “Drive My Car.”Sideshow and Janus Films“Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom,” Bhutan“Flee,” Denmark“The Hand of God,” Italy✓ “Drive My Car,” Japan“The Worst Person in the World,” NorwayThis should be a no-brainer, since voters gravitate to films in this category that have also made the best picture and best director lineups. (Think “Amour,” “Roma” and “Parasite.”) Therefore, the odds favor “Drive My Car,” Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s insightful three-hour drama about grief and art, which swept the major critics’ groups and kept amassing momentum as awards season continued. Still, I’d keep a watchful eye on the wonderful romantic dramedy “The Worst Person in the World,” which came out awfully late this season and has been winning a healthy share of Hollywood admirers. If enough voters gravitate to that Norwegian film because they think “Drive My Car” is taken care of, Hamaguchi’s breakthrough may run out of gas before reaching its destination.Best CinematographyBenedict Cumberbatch, left, and Kodi Smit-McPhee in “The Power of the Dog.”Kirsty Griffin/Netflix“Dune”“Nightmare Alley”✓“The Power of the Dog”“The Tragedy of Macbeth”“West Side Story”“Dune” won at BAFTA and with the cinematographers guild, and it’s probably the safer choice. But there have been several recent profiles of the “Power of the Dog” cinematographer Ari Wegner, who would become the first woman to win this Oscar. In a squeaker, that’s who I’m picking.Best ScoreZendaya in “Dune,” which has music by Hans Zimmer.Warner Bros. “Don’t Look Up”✓“Dune”“Encanto”“Parallel Mothers“The Power of the Dog”Even more than the powerhouse visuals, the rumbling, uneasy score of “Dune” makes the best case for watching the movie in a theater.Best SongDaniel Craig and Ana de Armas in “No Time to Die,” which is also the title of its nominated song.Nicola Dove/MGM, via Associated Press“Be Alive” (“King Richard”)“Dos Oruguitas” (“Encanto”)“Down to Joy” (“Belfast”)✓“No Time to Die” (“No Time to Die”)“Somehow You Do” (“Four Good Days”)If “Encanto” had submitted “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” instead of “Dos Oruguitas,” or if Beyoncé had done any campaigning for her rousing “King Richard” song, things might be different. But since they didn’t, expect a victory for Billie Eilish and Finneas for “No Time to Die,” the third James Bond theme to win in a row.Best Sound“Dune” is nominated for audible effects like sand crunching. Warner Bros. “Belfast”✓“Dune”“No Time to Die”“The Power of the Dog”“West Side Story”The sounds of “Dune” are designed to hit you in the solar plexus, and they bleed into the score and the edit in all sorts of memorable ways. Plus, the story behind crafting those sounds is fascinating: Who knew it involved Rice Krispies?Our Reviews of the 10 Best-Picture Oscar NomineesCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

    More stories

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Bong Joon Ho and Ryusuke Hamaguchi on Oscar Surprise ‘Drive My Car’

      by

      The Korean filmmaker and the Japanese director have long admired each other. The two explain why Hamaguchi’s best-picture nominee resonates.In January 2020, just weeks before his film “Parasite” would make Oscar history, the director Bong Joon Ho was in Tokyo doing a magazine interview. By that point in what had become a very long press tour, Bong had dutifully sat for dozens of profiles, but at least this one offered a little bit of intrigue: Bong’s interviewer was Ryusuke Hamaguchi, a rising director in his own right.For Bong, a fan of Hamaguchi’s films “Asako I & II” and “Happy Hour,” this was a welcome chance to mix things up. “I had many questions that I wanted to ask him,” Bong recalled, “especially since I’d been doing many months of promotion and I was very sick of talking about my own film.”But Hamaguchi would not be deterred. He was a man on a mission — “pleasantly stubborn and persistent,” as Bong remembered him — and every time a playful Bong tried to turn the tables and ask the younger director some questions about his career, Hamaguchi grew ever more serious and insisted that they speak only about “Parasite.”“I really wanted to know how he made such an incredible film, even though I knew how tired he was of talking about ‘Parasite,’” Hamaguchi said. “I felt sorry for him, but I still wanted to ask him questions!”Now, two years later, Bong has finally gotten his wish: The 43-year-old Hamaguchi is the man of the moment, and Bong is only too happy to jump on the phone and discuss him. Hamaguchi’s film “Drive My Car,” a three-hour Japanese drama about grief and art, has become the season’s most unlikely Oscar smash, receiving nominations for best picture and international film in addition to nods for screenplay and directing.Hidetoshi Nishijima, left, and Toko Miura in “Drive My Car.”Bitters EndThose happen to be the same things “Parasite” was honored for two years ago, when that South Korean class-struggle thriller collected four Oscars and became the first film not in the English language to win best picture.Explore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.A Makeover: On Oscar night, you can expect a refreshed, slimmer telecast and a few new awards. But are all of the tweaks a good thing?A Hit: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is the season’s unlikely Oscar smash. The director Bong Joon Ho is happy to discuss its success.  Making History: Troy Kotsur, who stars in “CODA” as a fisherman struggling to relate to his daughter, is the first deaf man to earn an Oscar nomination for acting. ‘Improbable Journey’: “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” was filmed on a shoestring budget in a remote Himalayan village. In a first for Bhutan, the movie is now an Oscar nominee.“‘Parasite’ pushed open that very heavy door that had remained closed,” Hamaguchi told me through an interpreter this week. “Without ‘Parasite’ and its wins, I don’t think our film would have been received well in this way.”Called a “quiet masterpiece” by the Times critic Manohla Dargis, “Drive My Car” follows Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a theater director grappling with the death of his wife, as he mounts a production of “Uncle Vanya” in Hiroshima. The theater company assigns him a chauffeur, Misaki (Toko Miura), who ferries him to and from work in a red Saab while holding back vast emotional reserves of her own. Though Yusuke at first resents Misaki’s presence, a connection — and then a confession — is finally made.“There are many directors that are great at portraying characters, but there is something peculiar and unique about Hamaguchi,” Bong said via an interpreter by phone from Seoul. “He’s very intense in his approach to the characters, very focused, and he never rushes things.”And though that unhurried approach can result in a long running time, Bong felt that the three-hour length of “Drive My Car” only enriched its eventual emotional impact.“I would compare this to the sound of a bell that resonates for a long time,” he said.Perhaps it’s fitting that the film’s awards-season journey has been slowly building, too. Unlike “Parasite,” which rocketed out of the Cannes Film Festival after winning the Palme d’Or, the intimate “Drive My Car” (adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami) emerged from Cannes last summer with a screenplay trophy and little Oscar buzz. But after critics groups in New York and Los Angeles both gave their top film award to Hamaguchi, the movie’s profile began to steadily rise.From left, Choi Woo Shik, Song Kang Ho, Chang Hyae Jin and Park So Dam  in “Parasite.”NeonStill, the road to Oscar is littered with plenty of critical favorites that couldn’t go the distance. When I asked Hamaguchi why “Drive My Car” had proved to be his breakthrough, the director was at a loss.“I honestly really don’t know,” Hamaguchi said. “I want to ask you. Why do you think this is the case?”I suggested that during the pandemic, it affects us even more to watch characters who yearn to connect but cannot. Even when the characters in “Drive My Car” share the same bed, the same room or the same Saab, there’s a gulf between them that can’t always be closed.Hamaguchi agreed. “We are physically separated and yet we’re able to connect online,” he said. “It’s that thing of being connected and yet, at the same time, not.”To illustrate what he meant, Hamaguchi recalled that 10 years ago, while working on a documentary about the aftermath of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, he traveled through eastern Japan interviewing survivors. As he lent those people a camera and his trust, deeply buried thoughts came spilling out of them.“After the interviews, I wrote out the words, and I realized that the ones that really shook me were the words that were quite normal or ordinary,” he said. “They were things that perhaps these people had already thought but had never thought to verbalize until that moment.”The same is true when it comes to the “Drive My Car” characters, whose internal struggles can only reach the level of epiphany when they find someone to confide in.“It’s possible that when the characters say what they’re thinking, the audience could think, ‘Oh, they didn’t actually know this?’ But it’s about the journey of being able to get to a place to verbalize that, and for that journey to happen, it’s because someone is there to witness it,” Hamaguchi said. “Somebody being there to listen has an incredible power.”And Hamaguchi wouldn’t mind some company himself, if only to help him process all those Oscar nominations. When I spoke to him last week, he was quarantining in a Tokyo hotel after returning from the Berlin Film Festival. “I haven’t seen anyone, so no celebration for me,” he said.As the Oscar nominations were announced on Feb. 8, Hamaguchi was flying to Berlin; when the plane landed hours later, he turned on his phone and was flooded with text messages. Even now, recounting the story, he remains in a state of disbelief.“To be honest, I don’t think I’ll feel like all of this is real until I’m actually at the awards ceremony,” he said. “No matter how many congratulations I get, it’s hard to believe, especially when I’m confined to a narrow, small hotel room. Perhaps when I’m at the awards ceremony and I see directors like Spielberg there, reality might kick in.”Bong, center, onstage at the Oscars when “Parasite” won best picture in 2020.Noel West for The New York TimesBong was less gobsmacked by Hamaguchi’s nominations. “I knew ‘Drive My Car’ was a great film, and I didn’t find it surprising,” he said. “And since the academy lately has been showing more interest in non-English films, I expect that the film will do well at the awards.”His own Oscar ceremony was a whirlwind experience — “I can’t believe it’s been two years already,” Bong mused — but he declined to offer advice to Hamaguchi on how to navigate the night.“I’m sure he will do well,” Bong said. “He is someone who is like an ancient stone — he has a very strong center.”Instead, Bong extended a request. When they first met in Tokyo, and again last year during a panel discussion at the Busan Film Festival in South Korea, there wasn’t much time for the two men to hang out. “So this year, I hope we will be able to get together either in Seoul or Tokyo and have a delicious meal,” Bong said. And after the Oscars, surely they would have plenty of notes to compare.Hamaguchi was eager to accept the invitation. “I’m truly delighted to hear that,” he said, though he cautioned that Bong might not like the topic of dinner conversation: “I would really love to keep asking questions about how he makes such amazing films. I want to keep asking him until he’s sick of me asking!” More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      2022 Oscars Nominations: Snubs and Surprises for Lady Gaga and Jared Leto

      by

      “The Power of the Dog” led the Oscar nominations on Tuesday, but plenty of other high-profile contenders fell short. Here, the Projectionist muses on the morning’s most startling surprises and omissions.Kristen Stewart gets the royal treatment.Kristen Stewart’s role as Princess Diana in “Spencer” is the sort of thing Oscar voters usually rush to crown: It’s a juicy, transformative lead in a biopic, performed by a famous actress who has successfully leapt from blockbusters to prestige films. Then came a shocking snub from the Screen Actors Guild, followed by another shutout from BAFTA, and pundits worried whether she’d get nominated at all. Still, Stewart was game, continuing to do press and awards-season round tables, and the 31-year-old actress was rewarded Tuesday morning with her very first Oscar nomination.Lady Gaga and Jared Leto are shut out.“House of Gucci” was stripped to its studs Tuesday, as former winners Lady Gaga and Jared Leto were both snubbed by the academy. Few performances this year were talked about more — both by audiences and by the two actors themselves — and the red carpet will be a little lesser for their absence. (Hey, nobody said the Oscars were particularly ethical … but they are fair.)‘Drive My Car’ overperforms.Coming out of last summer’s Cannes Film Festival, no one had tagged Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” as a major Oscar spoiler: Instead, films like Asghar Farhadi’s “A Hero” and Julia Ducournau’s “Titane” had all the buzz. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Dolby Theater: A year-end surge from critics’ groups put Hamaguchi’s contemplative three-hour drama in the thick of the awards conversation, thanks to high-profile best-film wins from the critics in New York and Los Angeles. Off that momentum, “Drive My Car” managed an astounding four Oscar nominations, with citations in picture, director, adapted screenplay and international film.‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ is snubbed.There was no bigger film last year than “Spider-Man: No Way Home” — in fact, with a domestic gross of more than $748 million so far, there are only three other films that have ever been bigger. As the superhero movie kept raking in cash, the drumbeat grew louder that if the Oscars really wanted to reflect the year in film, they should honor one of the few movies that kept theaters open at all. And the academy did … but only with a nomination in visual effects. A best-picture nomination proved well outside the web-slinger’s reach.The director of ‘Dune’ goes missing.The academy’s directing branch is often dazzled by technical achievement, and a filmmaker who can wield blockbuster scale in the service of a soulful story usually has a leg up over more intimate fare. That’s why it’s startling that this year’s best-director race didn’t make room for Denis Villeneuve, especially since his sci-fi film “Dune” did score 10 nominations in a host of categories. But history was made elsewhere in that category, as Jane Campion became the first woman to earn two directing nominations (for “The Power of the Dog” and 1993’s “The Piano”) and the “West Side Story” filmmaker Steven Spielberg became the first person to be nominated in that category in six different decades.Two couples were nominated.Not only did the real-life partners Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons score their first Oscar nominations this year for “The Power of the Dog,” so did Penélope Cruz (“Parallel Mothers”) and Javier Bardem (“Being the Ricardos”), the rare married couple to have already won before. Even better: It’s a four-category split, as Cruz and Bardem were nominated in the lead races while Dunst and Plemons continued the spread in the supporting categories. Talk about a double date!Kenneth Branagh makes history.Even before “Belfast,” Branagh was an Oscar favorite, collecting five nominations over the course for his career in categories as varied as director, actor, supporting actor, adapted screenplay and live-action short film. But Tuesday morning’s collection of nods for the black-and-white film “Belfast” vaulted Branagh to a surprising Oscar record: He is now the first person to be nominated in seven different categories, having added citations for best picture and original screenplay to his haul. (Hopefully that makes up for a few surprising “Belfast” snubs in editing and cinematography.)‘Flee’ scores the hat trick.Look, it’s hard enough to earn just one Oscar nomination, as so many of the morning’s snubbed artists can attest. That makes what “Flee” just accomplished all the more remarkable: This animated documentary about an Afghan refugee is now the first film ever to receive Oscar nominations for documentary, animated film and international film all in the same year. A win in any of those categories seems unlikely, but at least when the makers of “Flee” claim it’s an honor just to be nominated, you’ll know that they mean it. More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      One Indelible Scene: When the Show Must Go on in ‘Drive My Car’

      by

      Through a staging of “Uncle Vanya,” the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi creates an intimacy for his characters that lets the artifice of cinema fall away.I’m going to talk about how the movie ends, but I’m not going to spoil it.The plot of “Drive My Car” doesn’t really work that way in any case. Adapted by Ryusuke Hamaguchi (working with Takamasa Oe) from a novella by Haruki Murakami, the film is an adventure of gentle turns and an occasional swerve, with big surprises and small revelations scattered like scenery on a long road trip. You may be startled at how quickly it all goes by; the movie lasts almost three hours, but the time passes easily.A brief, tactful summary may be in order, a kind of Google Maps précis of the route. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a Tokyo theater director and actor, is married to Oto (Reika Kirishima), an actress, who is having an affair with a younger colleague. The couple had a young daughter who died some years before, and when Oto dies suddenly, she leaves Yusuke paralyzed with grief. Or so we surmise. He has a tendency to camouflage his feelings behind a facade of calm, punctuating his habitual reticence with an occasional flash of irritation or sardonic humor.He keeps working, taking up a residency at a Hiroshima arts center, where he will direct an experimental production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” I don’t think I can spoil that one either. The great works are like that, and one of the marvels of “Drive My Car” is the way it illuminates and refreshes a sturdy old classic, deriving some of its own power, novelty and mystery from Chekhov’s well-thumbed text.A little bit more about “Drive My Car,” though. In Hiroshima, Yusuke is assigned a chauffeur, Misaki (Toko Miura), who shuttles him to rehearsals, errands and social engagements in his beloved red Saab. Like Yusuke, she has suffered a terrible loss, and their shared grief — or rather, their common state of raw, lonely, unacknowledged anguish — becomes the foundation of a delicate and improbable friendship.Unacknowledged anguish underlies the relationship between the characters played by Nishijima and Toko Miura.Sideshow and Janus FilmsThe story of that bond culminates in an intensely emotional scene in a snowy field — tears are shed, and Yusuke at last gives voice to his hitherto unarticulated pain — that would surely be an Oscar-night showstopper. (And if the academy has the good sense to nominate “Drive My Car” for best picture and Nishijima and Miura for acting, maybe it will be). But what I want to talk about is what happens next.Which is that the show goes on. As the “Uncle Vanya” opening night approaches, we have been privy to some backstage intrigue and immersed in Yusuke’s unusual approach to the play. The cast includes actors from various countries, all of them speaking Chekhov’s dialogue in their native languages, including Mandarin, Japanese, Tagalog and Korean Sign Language. Once an audience is present, supertitles are projected on a screen behind the stage. The English-language viewer, already reading subtitles, learns to listen for the tones and rhythms of the different languages, including the swish and tap of signing hands.That may sound forbiddingly cerebral, like the kind of high-concept aesthetic undertaking that tends to be more interesting in theory than in practice. It turns out to be the opposite. “Uncle Vanya,” a play about how hard it is to hold onto a sense of what matters in life, has rarely felt more vital or immediate, as if it had not been written in the 1890s but rather lived in front of our eyes.Yusuke, white powder sprinkled in his hair and a mustache pasted to his lip, is playing the title role, a 47-year-old man driven almost to madness — almost to murder — by unrequited yearning and existential disappointment. His appearance onstage is an unexpected development, the payoff of a subplot that I will leave to you to discover.“Uncle Vanya” being performed in a scene from “Drive My Car.” Sideshow and Janus FilmsYusuke has stayed away from acting since Oto’s death, and as “Uncle Vanya” unfolds, the shock to his system seems apparent. After Vanya’s Act III rant about his squandered prospects and bitter regrets — “If I’d lived normally, I might have been another Schopenhauer or Dostoyevsky!” — he steadies himself against a table in the wings, seeming to struggle for breath and composure.Perhaps Vanya’s plight reminds him of his own, or perhaps the demands of acting are too much to bear. The first Russian production of “Uncle Vanya” was directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky, the progenitor of Method acting, in which the actor plumbs his own experience to locate the emotional truth of the character. Knowing what we know about Yusuke — having seen him weeping in the snow in the previous scene — it’s easy to grasp why he would be overcome by Vanya’s torment.But he’s also a professional, and the scene proceeds briskly through a montage of the performance. We see the onstage action from the side, then on a video monitor in the green room, observing the movement of props and bodies rather than absorbing the movement of Chekhov’s drama. The film seems to be settling into a muted denouement.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      10 Works of Art That Evaded the Algorithm This Year

      by

      Contemplation, not clicks: Our critic looks back on marble sculptures in Rome, songs of “atmospheric anxiety” and the Frick Collection in a new light.From left: A performer in “Catasterism in Three Movements”; one of the Torlonia Marbles; a detail from the refurbished Hôtel de la Marine in Paris. Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation, Tom Bisig, Basel; Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times; James Hill for The New York TimesThe coronavirus pandemic is a health crisis with so many cultural sequelae: above all, the absorption of all facets of our lives deeper into networks and phone screens. Even more than last year, I’ve been drawn to art, music and movies that, in one way or another, evade the workings of likes and shares — and carve out a place for human creativity in a world too governed by algorithmic logic.‘Cézanne Drawing’The apple of my eye. The Museum of Modern Art’s meticulous, almost overwhelming summer exhibition distilled modernism’s father figure to his essence, revealing the day-by-day, stroke-by-stroke scrutiny needed to make a piece of fruit as weighty as the Holy Family. Those bottom-heavy pears, those clumpy bathers. Those short daubs of green and blue in his views of Mont-Sainte-Victoire. Those Provençal rock formations — rocks of air and watercolor, Cézanne as geologist! What these hundreds of sheets reconfirmed, right on time, was that your art will never change another person’s life if it merely shows what you think. You need the distinction, the seriousness, that can only come from form. (Read our review of “Cézanne Drawing.”)“Bathers,” an 1890 pencil and watercolor work by Paul Cézanne, was featured in a Museum of Modern Art show.Metropolitan Museum of ArtRyusuke HamaguchiI’d call the 42-year-old Japanese film director the most exciting in years if he weren’t so … calm. “Drive My Car,” Hamaguchi’s unfailingly precise tale of a widowed actor sublimating his grief through his chauffeur and Chekhov, has virtues one fears have gone missing from cinema: long takes, guillotine-crisp editing, an unhurried faith in the importance of images. Like Jacques Rivette and Mike Leigh before him, Hamaguchi contrasts his unobtrusive camerawork with the conventions of theater — in this case, a multilingual “Uncle Vanya” production that builds to a silent, heart-stopping finale, when the troupe’s Sonya sighs “We shall rest!” in Korean sign language. Add to that “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” Hamaguchi’s three-part fugue of love and intuition also released this year, and you have the emergence of a stunning talent who finds the romance in rigor. (Read our review of “Drive My Car.”)Barney & FriendsTwo decades ago his world-making was mistaken for American Wagnerism; but Matthew Barney is more collaborative and more relaxed than you’d think, and he’s doing the best work of his career in the lighter register first seen in his 2019 film “Redoubt.”For the performance “Catasterism in Three Movements,” this September at the Schaulager in Switzerland, he ceded more than half the evening to the Basel Sinfonietta, who performed Jonathan Bepler’s churning music alongside a Berniniesque sculpture of copper, brass and scorched pine. Three women brought the remainder of “Catasterism” to life: the contact improvisation pioneer K.J. Holmes, the Cree hoop dancer Sandra Lamouche, and the athlete Jill Bettonvil as a sharpshooting Diana who pumped a dense-as-flesh Barney sculpture full of lead. (Read our review of Matthew Barney’s “Redoubt.”)K.J. Holmes, a Cree hoop dancer, was featured in “Catasterism in Three Movements,” a collaboration between the artist Matthew Barney and the composer Jonathan Bepler.Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation; Tom Bisig, Basel‘The Torlonia Marbles’Alone in Rome this spring, at the nearly empty Capitoline Museums, I saw the first public display in half a century of the greatest collection of ancient art in private hands. Travel restrictions made an accidental sleeper of the Torlonia family’s Greek and Roman sculptures: dozens of portrait busts, a hirsute billy goat reclining like a love god, a shattered Hercules recomposed from a hundred shards. Rome was my first trip abroad since the pandemic, and I’d submit to a dozen P.C.R. tests to see this actually legendary collection before it disappears again on Jan. 9. (Read our report on the Torlonia Marbles.)More than 90 rarely exhibited sculptures were on display in the “Torlonia Marbles” exhibition at Rome’s Capitoline Museum.Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times‘Promises’Astral but never spacey, architectural yet also boundless, this nine-movement, album-length composition deserved every one of the rave reviews that rained down upon its release in March. As Pharoah Sanders’s subdued tenor sax (and occasional vocalizations) weave around the London Symphony Orchestra’s strings and the synths and celesta of Sam Shepherd — a.k.a. Floating Points, a British electronic musician nearly five decades Sanders’s junior — “Promises” comes to feel like a self-regulating ecosystem, an ever denser net of music and motion. These guys knew what they were doing when they chose, for the album’s cover, a painting by Julie Mehretu, whose retrospective this year at the Whitney Museum of American Art had the same accumulating grandeur. (Read our review of “Promises.”)Frick MadisonThe secret to good decorating: just buy the best stuff and do nothing! The Frick’s down-to-the-pith reinstallation in the Whitney’s vacated building refiltered the Vermeers and Velázquezes we thought we knew, and isolated Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” in a sublime Brutalist cell illuminated by one of Marcel Breuer’s trapezoid windows. What Frick Madison has proved, more subtly, is that we can give art context in a hundred digital formats; museums’ bigger challenge is carving time and space to really look. (Read our story on the making of Frick Madison.)Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” is illuminated by one of the architect Marcel Breuer’s trapezoid windows while on display at the Frick Madison.Gus Powell for The New York TimesThe Weather Station, ‘Ignorance’I feel as useless / As a tree in a city park / Standing as a symbol of what / We have blown apart …. As forests burned in B.C. and diplomats dithered in Glasgow, the Toronto singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman, who performs as the Weather Station, turned in an unreserved, openhearted album of atmospheric anxiety, in which guitars mingle with greenhouse gases and loss is measured in metric tons. She knows we don’t need artists to tell us the climate has changed; we need them to tell us how we have. (Read our interview with the singer.)Parisian RenovationsParis had a quartet of major cultural openings this year. The Bourse de Commerce, renovated by Tadao Ando for the contemporary art collection of François Pinault, drew the most Instagram shares, but it was two renovated historical sites — the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of Parisian history, and the Hôtel de la Marine, the stupefyingly grand naval headquarters — that best married old and new. The city’s sweetest surprise is the old Samaritaine department store, reopened after 16 years, its Art Nouveau expanses renewed with the undulating glass of the Japanese firm Sanaa. (Read our story on the restoration of the Hôtel de la Marine.)The Hôtel de la Marine, the former headquarters of France’s Ministry of the Navy, has reopened as a museum.James Hill for The New York TimesBooks Are Back!Closer to home, the New York Public Library re-emerged from a far too long pandemic closure with a sweet new home: the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, formerly the decrepit Mid-Manhattan Library, rethought and revived by the Dutch firm Mecanoo with Beyer Blinder Belle. Its clean white expanses have computers galore (there’s even a Bloomberg terminal for budding teen traders), but the core remains its 400,000-strong circulating book collection, open for free browsing. A few years ago, the N.Y.P.L. was planning to sell this place, and to exile the books in its main research branch to New Jersey. The Niarchos — as well as Toshiko Mori’s renovation of the Brooklyn Public Library — is an affirmation that cities need readers, and readers need print. (Read our review of the new library.)Daniil Medvedev’s MockeryThe year’s finest and funniest performance art took place at Arthur Ashe Stadium, when the lanky young Russian smacked his last serve, won the U.S. Open title — and dumped his whole body onto to the court, miming a PlayStation move as he lolled like a dead fish. As arrogant as it was ridiculous, Medvedev’s side flop has stuck with me all this fall as a Gen-Z master class in how to stay human in a world of memes. If you must dive into the algorithm, then do it with total contempt. (Read our profile of the “octopus” Daniil Medvedev.) More

    • 50 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      Best Movies of 2021

      by

      Even when a film wasn’t great, filmgoing was. But there were some truly wonderful releases, ranging from music docs and musicals to westerns and the just plain weird.Benedict Cumberbatch in “The Power of the Dog,” left, Kristen Stewart in “Spencer” and Ariana DeBose in “West Side Story.”From left: Kirsty Griffin/Netflix; Pablo Larrain/Neon; Niko Tavernise/20th Century StudiosA.O. Scott | Manohla Dargisa.o. scottThe 10 Best Arguments for the Importance of MoviesThis year, it felt to me as if every good movie was also an argument for why movies matter. There is a lot of anxiety, pandemic-related and otherwise, about what the future of the art form might look like. Will everything be streaming except a handful of I.P.-driven spectacles? Will streaming platforms (and their subscribers) be receptive to daring, difficult, obnoxious or esoteric work? Anyone who claims to know the answers is a fool. What I can tell you for sure is that these 10 movies, and the 11 that almost made the list, do what they can to resist the dishonesty, complacency and meanness currently rampant around the world. They reward your attention, engage your feelings and respect your intelligence. Every little bit helps.1. ‘Summer of Soul’ (Questlove)This documentary about a series of open-air concerts in Harlem in 1969, interweaving stunning performance footage with interviews with musicians and audience members, is a shot of pure joy. The lineup is a pantheon of Black genius, including Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, the Staples Singers, Mahalia Jackson and many more. But the film is more than a time capsule: It’s a history lesson and an argument for why art matters — and what it can do — in times of conflict and anxiety. (Streaming on Hulu.)Mavis Staples, left, and Mahalia Jackson in a scene from “Summer of Soul.”Searchlight Pictures2. ‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’ (Radu Jude)From its hard-core opening to its riotous conclusion, this category-defying Romanian film captures the desperate, angry, exhausted mood of the present almost too well. A Bucharest schoolteacher (the brilliant, fearless Katia Pascariu) finds her job endangered after a sex tape she made with her husband goes semiviral. Meanwhile, the Covid pandemic and simmering culture-war hostilities turn everyday life into a theater of grievance and anxiety. Holding everything together — barely — is the abrasive intellectualism of Jude’s direction and the earnest rage that fuels his mockery. (In theaters.)3. ‘The Power of the Dog’ (Jane Campion)There are a lot of talented, competent, interesting filmmakers working today. Then there is Jane Campion, who practices cinema on a whole different level. The craft in evidence in this grand, big-sky western — the images, the music, the counterpointed performances of Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee — evoke the best traditions of old-style Hollywood storytelling. But there is nothing staid or conventional in the way Campion tackles Thomas Savage’s novel of jealousy, power and sexual intrigue. (Streaming on Netflix.)4. ‘Petite Maman’ (Céline Sciamma)The death of a grandmother, the grief of a parent, the acquisition of a new friend — these ordinary experiences, occurring over a few weeks in the life of an 8-year-old girl, provide the basic narrative structure of this spare, perfect film. Whether it’s best described as a modern-dress fairy tale, a psychological ghost story or a low-tech time travel fantasy is up to you. What’s certain is that the performances of Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz, real-life twins playing possibly imaginary friends, have a clarity and purity that Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) deploys for maximum emotional impact. (Coming to theaters.)Joséphine, left, and Gabrielle Sanz are possibly imaginary friends in “Petite Maman.”Lilies Films5. ‘Bring Your Own Brigade’ (Lucy Walker)This harrowing documentary about California wildfires is also, almost by accident, an exploration of the country’s polarized, chaotic, self-defeating response to the Covid pandemic. The picture Walker paints is complicated, partly because that’s the way people are: stupid, generous, reckless and brave. The movie is hardly optimistic, but its open-mindedness, compassion and intellectual rigor provide a buffer against despair. (Paramount+)6. ‘Bergman Island’ (Mia Hansen-Love)In a year when rumors of the death of moviegoing spread along with all the other bad news, it was delightful to encounter this warm, wry, emotionally savvy exploration of movie love, moviemaking and movie-centered tourism. Two filmmakers travel to Faro, a Swedish island where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked, and discover either that movies are life, or that there’s more to life than movies. (For rent on most major platforms.)Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie in “Bergman Island.”IFC Films7. ‘Drive My Car’ (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)A theater artist (Hidetoshi Nishijima), recently widowed, travels to Hiroshima to direct an experimental version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” A young woman (Toko Miura), also stricken by loss, is hired as his driver. Out of this scenario — and out of Haruki Murakami’s novella — Hamaguchi builds an understated, multilayered meditation on the complexities of human connection. The spirit of Chekhov hovers in the background and is honored by the film’s unsentimental, compassionate regard for its characters. (In theaters.).css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}8. ‘Memoria’ (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)Weerasethakul’s movies defy summary or easy categorization. To describe them as dreamlike is incomplete, since you never know who is doing the dreaming. In this case, it might be Jessica (Tilda Swinton), a Scottish expatriate living in Colombia. Or it might be alien visitors, the filmmaker, the Earth or time itself. What is certain is that this film sharpens the senses and activates emotions that are no less powerful for being impossible to name. (Coming to theaters.)9. ‘West Side Story’ (Steven Spielberg)Somehow, Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner — and an energetic young cast of Jets and Sharks — pulled off a surprising cinematic coup. Respecting the artistry and good intentions of the original stage musical, they turned it into something urgent, modern and exciting. There’s a lot to unpack in the movie’s gestures of reverence and revisionism, but mostly there are big emotions, memorable songs and an unabashed faith that sincerity will always be stronger than cynicism. (Coming to theaters.)Ariana DeBose, center, as Anita in “West Side Story.”Niko Tavernise/20th Century Studios10. ‘The Velvet Underground’ (Todd Haynes)Like “Summer of Soul,” this documentary revisits the music of the 1960s in a spirit that is more historical than nostalgic. Rather than assemble present-day musicians to pay tribute to their forebears, Haynes concentrates on the Velvets in their moment and on the artistic scene that spawned them. In particular, he focuses on their connections to the experimental cinema that flourished in New York, work that inspires his own visceral, cerebral, visually dense style of storytelling. (Streaming on Apple TV+.)Also …“Annette” (Leos Carax), “The Disciple” (Chaitanya Tamhane), “Flee” (Jonas Poher Rasmussen), “The Green Knight” (David Lowery), “The Hand of God” (Paolo Sorrentino), “King Richard” (Reinaldo Marcus Green), “Mogul Mowgli” (Bassam Tariq), “Parallel Mothers” (Pedro Almodóvar), “Passing” (Rebecca Hall), “El Planeta” (Amalia Ulman), “The Souvenir Part II” (Joanna Hogg), “Spencer” (Pablo Larraín), “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (Joel Coen).MANOHLA DARGISThe Best Film Was One in a TheaterIn July, I watched one of the most mediocre movies that I’ve seen this year — and it was glorious. After more than 16 months of streaming at home, I went to a theater to watch Matt Damon sing the white-guy blues in “Stillwater.” The movie was poky and trite and irritating, and I reviewed it accordingly. And while I regretted it wasn’t better, I was still grateful because it sent me back to theaters, big screens and other moviegoers.Those other people admittedly did give me pause. They were masked, well, most were, kind of, but could I be safe and feel at ease with these people for two or so hours? I was vaxed and masked but also still navigating being back in the world. But the room was great, the screen huge, and I decided that I could — though first I had to tell a guy near me that, yes, he did need to wear the mask he’d parked on his chin. He put it on. I settled in, back in the place that makes me supremely happy: I was at the movies.Since then, I have watched many more new releases in person, including at two festivals where I gorged like a famished person (so many thanks to both the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival). I had spent the first part of the year on book leave, and while I’d streamed plenty of new and old films then (hello, Marie Dressler!), I missed going out (anywhere). I missed really, really big bright images and I missed the rituals, including the quick search for the most perfect seat and the anticipatory wait for the movie to begin, for someone to hit the lights and start the show.Movie critics tend to write about movies as discrete entities. Even when writing about franchise copies of franchise copies, we often stick to the object. Although we sometimes share how a movie makes us feel (happy, sad), we rarely write about the true depth of our experiences as we watched these movies — how it felt as the images flowed off the screen and into our bodies and memories — and how this too affected us. There are a lot of reasons for this, including reviewing conventions, which tend to measure movies by certain, traditionally prescribed, often literary and commercial values: Was it a good story, did it say something, is it worth leaving the house for, worth spending money on?It’s a given that money is always part of the equation, as much of the discussion around the future of moviegoing underscores. Most of the chatter about moviegoing these days often devolves into journalists and industry types parroting the logic of capitalism, i.e., whatever industry power dictates. Netflix and other big streamers have had a huge impact, no question, and we can chat about what it all means in a few years. But whatever the rationalization, the reasons there’s so much intense focus on Netflix and Disney is their monopolistic grip not simply on the entertainment industry but also on the hive mind of the mainstream media. But there are other considerations, as well.Benedict Cumberbatch as a malignant presence in “The Power of the Dog.”NetflixSo, yes, more people will likely watch “The Power of the Dog,” the latest from Jane Campion, than any other film in her decades-long career because it’s on Netflix. But what matters is the movie. And you should watch it whether at home or, if you can, in a theater. It looks beautiful no matter the size of the screen. But I’m grateful that I’ve seen it several times projected in theaters. For starters, I could focus on it rather than the distractions of my home, but mostly I could more fully experience the monumentality of its images, could feel on a profound, visceral level both the claustrophobia of its shadowy interiors and the liberating, heart-clutching boundlessness of its open landscapes.Like all the movies I love, “The Power of the Dog” got under my skin. I watched it, fell into it, felt it. And like all the movies I care most about, it is far more than the sum of its finely shaped story parts. I admire its narrative ebb and flow, but the movie’s meaning extends beyond its chapter breaks and dialogue. In Campion’s aerial shots of an arid, lonely land and in the anguished close-ups — in backlighted bristles of horsehair and in the rhythmic rocking of a strand of braided leather on a man’s body — she sets loose a cascade of associations. You see Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays its tormented villain, and in his strut you also see John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood. You see the sweep of the western genre, the men and women you know, the world you live in.1. ‘Drive My Car’ (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)A masterpiece about life and death and art from one of the most exhilarating directors to hit the international film scene in a long while, “Drive My Car” draws from theater and literature — a splash of “Waiting for Godot” but mostly “Uncle Vanya” and the Murakami short story that gives the movie its title — to create a work of pure cinema. (In theaters.)Hidetoshi Nishijima plays an actor and theater director in “Drive My Car.”Sideshow/Janus Films2. ‘The Power of the Dog’ (Jane Campion)Much has rightly been made of Benedict Cumberbatch’s powerful performance as a malignant force named Phil in Campion’s latest. Much more should be said about how delicately and beautifully Kirsten Dunst, as Rose, holds the movie’s moral center with a gutting performance that shows you how brutally optimism can both die and be reborn. (Streaming on Netflix.)3. ‘The Velvet Underground’ (Todd Haynes)Everything comes together in Todd Haynes’s superb testament to a lost world that helped make our own: the music and art, the drugs and ideas, Lou Reed and John Cale, Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas, the beauty and ugliness, the affordable New York housing and the artistic freedom that cheap rents allowed, the droning and strobing and darkening shadows that swallowed people whole. It’s all here. Watch it — play it — loud. (Streaming on Apple TV+.)4. ‘Summer of Soul’ (Questlove)There’s much to love in Questlove’s documentary about a New York concert that took place in the summer of 1969, most obviously the music that takes you higher. But consider too the formal design and rigor, and how the movie contracts and expands in time with the onstage call and response, how Questlove narrows in on a moment of beauty — a soaring note, a sliding foot, a beaming face — only to gracefully expand your horizons as he dialogues with the past, the present and the possible future. (Streaming on Hulu.)5. ‘Passing’ (Rebecca Hall)Set in the 1920s, Hall’s exquisite heart-wrencher centers on two African American women, friends from childhood, who can and do present as white. One (Tessa Thompson’s Irene) will pass for convenience, as when she enters a racially restricted hotel, while the other (Ruth Negga’s Clare) lives as white. Separately and together, with yearning and dueling looks, they negotiate the color line, which W.E.B. Du Bois called “the problem of the 20th century” and that still stubbornly defines and divides this country. (Streaming on Netflix.)Tessa Thompson with André Holland in the drama “Passing.”Netflix6. ‘Azor’ (Andreas Fontana)With chilled detachment and meticulous control, this shocking drama tracks a Swiss banker and his wife on a seemingly routine business trip through Argentina in 1980. As they travel about, the juxtaposition between the bourgeois homes they visit and the ever-present military creates an increasingly unnerving tension, culminating in a shattering finale. Here, every polite smile and bland pleasantry is in service to a world of evil. (Streaming on Mubi.)7. ‘The Card Counter’ (Paul Schrader)For decades, Schrader has been telling his favorite story — that of a man alone in a room, alone in his head — to greater and lesser if always interesting effect. Now, with Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish and Willem Dafoe, Schrader tells that tale again, getting into your head with feeling, some scattershot politics, horrific violence and auteurist confidence. (Available on most major platforms)8. ‘The Disciple’ (Chaitanya Tamhane)Every so often, the title character, a Hindustani classical singer (Aditya Modak), rides through the dark night, the voice of a musical guru filling the air and stirring your soul. Our young singer yearns for greatness, but as the years pass and practice never quite makes perfect, the divide between aspiration and reality grows impossibly wider. In a year of wonderful soundtracks, this is the one that soars highest. (Streaming on Netflix.)9. ‘Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy’ (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)This movie, the other of Hamaguchi’s to receive an American release this year, is split into three intricate stories that turn on chance and were, he has said, inspired by Eric Rohmer. Not all of the parts work equally well, but all have moments of beauty and grace along with amazing, complex rivers of words. By the time a character rests a hand on her heart in a rush of feeling, you may find yourself doing the same. (In theaters)10. ‘Spencer’ (Pablo Larraín)Larraín’s atmospherically perfect (and creepy) drama is at once a blistering takedown of the British monarchy, a blazing psychological portrait and a queasily funny Gothic horror freak-out. If you’re still chuckling and sometimes weeping over that soap opera called “The Crown,” this may wipe off your smile — or just make you roar with laughter. (Available on most major platforms.)Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in “Spencer.”NeonAlso!“Bring Your Own Brigade” (a smart, cleareyed, solution-oriented documentary about the climate crisis that won’t leave you curled up in a ball sobbing); “Dune” (yeah, I know, but I dug this immersive big-screen spectacle, the sort Hollywood rarely produces today); “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” (part of this year’s Benedict Cumberbatch wave and a must-see for animal lovers or, really, anyone with a beating heart); “Faya Dayi” (a gorgeous dream to slip into); “The First Wave” (a moving, intelligent, deeply human documentary on the pandemic); “In the Same Breath” (a tough, compassionate look at the pandemic via China); “Licorice Pizza” (especially the truck sequence — I could watch two hours of that amazingly directed, staged and choreographed camera-and-wheel work); “Prayers for the Stolen” (stirring and upsetting); “Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time” (a gorgeous labyrinth); “Stillwater” (eh, it isn’t good but it brought me back into theaters); “The Truffle Hunters” (a touching lament for rapidly disappearing communities and traditions); “The Woman Who Ran” (elegant, wry, touching cinematic serialism). More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy’ Review: What We Talk About

      by

      In three stories, men and women circle one another as they casually and cruelly share intimacies, express desires and voice doubts.The geometry of desire is elegantly plotted in “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” a wistful, moving, outwardly unassuming movie. In three segments, men and women circle one another, talking and talking some more. As they exchange glances, confessions and accusations, their cascading words become either bridges or walls. Throughout these effusive roundelays, they yearn — for meaning, former lovers, lost intimacy, an escape.“Fortune and Fantasy” is among the latest talkathons from the Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, one of the more intriguing filmmakers to emerge in the last decade. If you haven’t heard of him, it isn’t surprising. The American market for foreign-language cinema has always been brutal, even before the pandemic, and his work has received scant theatrical distribution in the United States. But he’s a familiar name on the festival circuit, and both this movie and his superb “Drive My Car” were in the main slate at the recent New York Film Festival. (“Fortune” won a major prize at this year’s Berlin.)If Hamaguchi were another generic French filmmaker, or if he made gore-splattered genre movies or was just more obvious, he might attract greater distributor interest. Though maybe not: The length of some of his work likely presents a hurdle. While “Fortune and Fantasy” runs a crisp two hours, “Drive My Car” is three, and “Happy Hour,” an epic of minimalism, runs more than five. More challenging still, presumably, are his narrative choices and understated visuals, which don’t conform to the current template for American indie cinema with its dramatic problems, moral instruction and enough pictorial prettiness to make the emotional bloodletting go down smoothly.Hamaguchi’s realism is as constructed as that of any Sundance selection, but what distinguishes his work is his attention to ambiguity and to everyday moments, and his general avoidance of dramatic or melodramatic inflection. Things happen, terrible, heartbreaking things, though not necessarily onscreen. Instead, most of what you see has the flavor, rhythm and texture of quotidian life, which makes his artistic choices all the more intriguing and at times almost mysterious. You’re engrossed, but you may wonder why. (Hamaguchi cites John Cassavetes as a strong influence; the imprint of the French New Wave and the South Korean director Hong Sangsoo are also evident.)“Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” is a perfect entry point into Hamaguchi’s work. Not every episode works equally well or hits as hard, but both times I watched this movie, I found something to admire, consider, argue with and weep over. The three stories are clearly separated with coy or cryptic or plainly descriptive titles. They have separate casts and each takes place in contemporary settings, though one has a modest, somewhat random splash of speculative fiction. Here, as in life, the most blandly familiar spaces — the back seat of a cab, a cluttered office, a living room — serve as unadorned stages for ordinary, existence-defining encounters.All the episodes feature a handful of men and women, but the secondary characters soon peel off — a photo crew disperses, an assistant hustles out of an office — leaving two people who serve as conversational and emotional foils. The middle and longest story (“Door Wide Open”) centers on a woman who’s persuaded, if not entirely convincingly, by her younger male lover to become a honey trap for his loathed former professor. She does, putting on makeup and visiting the professor at his office. Although he insists that the door remain open, danger seeps in anyway, through a probing, teasingly erotic and unexpectedly existential tête-à-tête that changes everyone’s life.Hamaguchi doesn’t move the camera all that much, which makes the moments when he draws attention to his visuals more noticeable, like the punctuating tilt up at a flowering tree that closes the first story. However subtly, he distinctly choreographs each episode, using the camera and staging to underscore eddies of harmony and dissonance, shifting moods and awareness. In some scenes, characters sit side by side in the same shot, which underscores their familiarity; in others, they are isolated in the frame to accentuate their detachment or antagonism. In several crucial instances, characters look directly at the camera, a jolt of intimacy — but now between you and them.Mostly, though, these men and women talk, revealing themselves as they also tease the story’s themes, fortune and fantasy included. They chat, confess, overshare, open up and lash out. In the first story, “Magic (or Something Less Assuring),” a young woman confronts a former boyfriend by sneeringly repeating some blandishments that he’d shared with another lover, wounding him and, in the process, exposing the miserable arc of their failed relationship. There’s more tenderness in the final story, “Once Again,” which beautifully brings the movie to a close through two women with faulty memories who, by opening their hearts to each other, quietly break yours.Wheel of Fortune and FantasyNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More