A.O. Scott

“It’s so metaphorical!” Kim Ki-woo exclaims early in “Parasite,” Bong Joon Ho’s new film. Ki-woo is the college-aged son of one of the two families — the impoverished Kims and the wealthy Parks — whose fates entwine with horrible and hilarious results. He uses the phrase a few times, most notably with reference to the large, decorative “landscape rock” that is a gift from a better-off friend. In the interpretation of “Parasite” that emphasizes the movie’s fairy-tale aspects, the stone brings good fortune to Ki-woo, his sister and their parents, even as, like so many magical objects, it also curses them. (Spoilers follow, for “Parasite” and other Bong movies.)

Before long, Ki-woo stops talking about metaphors. Maybe because things start getting real. He takes a job tutoring the Parks’ teenage daughter, Da-hye, and pretty soon his whole family is employed, under dubious premises and fake identities, in the Park household. His sister, pretending to be a highly trained art therapist, starts working with Da-hye’s younger brother, Da-song. The Kim patriarch, Ki-taek, replaces the chauffeur who drives Park to and from his fancy tech job. Kim Chung-sook, the mother of the clan (a former Olympic-level hammer thrower), takes over as housekeeper.

Or maybe — and it might amount to the same thing — the Kims’ reality has turned into an unsettling allegory of modern life, and Ki-woo doesn’t see metaphors in the way that a fish doesn’t notice water. What started out as a clever scam has turned into a fable.

In South Korea, where “Parasite” is already a blockbuster (having taken in more than $70 million at the box office), it has contributed to that country’s continuing debate about economic inequality. In the United States, where similar arguments are swirling, it has begun to turn Bong from an auteur with a passionate cult following into a top-tier international filmmaker. Fifty years old, with seven features to his name — most of them available on North American streaming platforms — he combines showmanship with social awareness in a way that reenergizes the faded but nonetheless durable democratic promise of movies.

The cramped, leaky “semi-basement” apartment the Kims call home is a metaphor of sorts, and so is the spacious, modern, architecturally significant mansion where they work. The Park home in particular comes with built-in symbols, including a deep subbasement where inconvenient secrets can be stashed away, like dead bodies or hidden meanings in an Edgar Allan Poe story.

And “Parasite,” which won the top prize in Cannes in May and has recently become the rare subtitled release to be mentioned as an Oscar contender beyond the foreign film category, plays out like a parable of contemporary social relations. It’s part horror film, part satire and part tragedy, conveying a sharp lesson about class struggle in South Korea and just about everywhere else.

But the houses in the film — like every office, alley, field, railroad car and precinct house in Bong’s expanding cinematic universe — are also actual physical places. And their inhabitants are anything but symbols or ciphers. Bong likes to choreograph wildly improbable chases and fights, but he doesn’t cheat at physics. A reason for the frequent comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg is the ruthless precision of his technique. But for all his love of whimsy and absurdity, he doesn’t play games with human psychology. The actions and reactions in his movies are often surprising, but they are never nonsensical. His characters have gravity, density, grace and a decent share of stupidity.

To call Bong a realist, though, would be crazy. The movie of his that first caught the attention of genre geeks on a global scale was his third feature, “The Host” (released here in 2007), about a giant, carnivorous mutant fish spreading terror along the Han River in Seoul. In 2014 came “Snowpiercer” (based on a French graphic novel), which confirmed Bong’s status as an international action auteur. A gaggle of movie stars from Hollywood and beyond (including Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton and Song Kang Ho, the solid South Korean Everyman who has appeared in four of Bong’s movies and who plays the Kim patriarch in “Parasite”) were packed into a high-speed train zooming around an apocalyptically frozen earth. The passengers were sorted into haves and have-nots, rebels and sellouts, and their struggles were both surprising and grimly familiar.

That was followed by “Okja” (2017), an antic updating of the basic “Charlotte’s Web” material (a young farm girl fights to save the life of her beloved piglet) for an age of genetic engineering, mass media and multinational capitalism. Swinton returned, playing twin moguls, but the real stars were Ahn Seo Hyun, as the young girl, and the digitally rendered shoat whose soul was at stake in the hectic battles among scientists, executives, animal-rights activists and other motley human specimens.

In obvious ways, “Parasite” is more realistic than those films. It returns Bong to the workaday Korean settings of his first two features, the grotesque comedy “Barking Dogs Never Bite” and the detective drama “Memories of Murder,” and also of “Mother,” his masterpiece (released here in 2010) about a woman whose mentally challenged adult son is accused of killing a schoolgirl. “Parasite” is more noir than science fiction, farcical until it turns melodramatic.

But to sort Bong’s work by genre or style is to miss both its originality and consistency. His movies are bold and bright, infused with rich colors and emphatic performances. They are funny, suspenseful and punctuated by kinetic sequences that can make even jaded multiplex-potatoes sit up and gasp. There are at least a half-dozen such moments in “Parasite,” perhaps the most thrilling of which involves three people hiding under a living-room coffee table while another camps out in a tent in the backyard.

At the same time, his movies are dark and subtle, burrowing deep into sticky ethical problems and hot zones of social dysfunction. You could say that he uses blockbuster means to advance art-house ends. You could also say the opposite. His real achievement, though, is to scramble such facile distinctions, and a host of others as well.

His stories are often tragic, but the mood tends to be more exuberant than somber, an emotional effect that can be hard to describe. The full awfulness of human beings and their circumstances is on vivid display: venality, vanity, deception and outright cruelty. But the aim isn’t mockery or glib sensationalism, or the routine fusion of the laughable and the grotesque that has been a staple of Hollywood cool since the mid-1990s. The most shocking thing about Bong’s films might be their sincerity, the warm humanism that flickers through the chronicles of spite, sloth and self-delusion.

The flickers are sometimes faint. In Bong’s debut feature, “Barking Dogs Never Bite” (2000), the humanism is all but buried in a gruesome, urban-legend-inflected conceit. A beleaguered graduate student, desperate to become a professor — an advancement that depends on his ability to come up with a large bribe for a senior figure in his field — is tormented by the barking of a neighbor’s dog. Since he lives in a vast, impersonal apartment block (the first of Bong’s metaphorical architectural spaces), he can’t identify the offending creature. The wrong dog ends up dying, more than once, and being eaten by a janitor with a taste for stewed canine flesh. Meanwhile the student’s marriage starts to crumble.

A measure of redemption — or at least a twinkle of mischief, innocence and decency — arrives via a subplot concerning a young woman in the building, and her friend, who works in a convenience store. They represent archetypal Bong characters: socially marginal, loyal to each other, but not necessarily heroic or noble by virtue of their poverty. Bong’s sense of class solidarity, which threads through every one of his movies, doesn’t involve romanticizing the people on the losing end of an increasingly ruthless economic competition.

The Kims in “Parasite” aren’t necessarily nicer, more loving or more honest than the bourgeois Parks. The small-town police officers in “Memories of Murder” are hardly pillars of virtue. The snack vendor played by Song in “The Host,” who enlists his father and his siblings in a valiant crusade to save his daughter from the monster, is a bit of an oaf. The mother in “Mother,” who sells herbs and practices acupuncture without a license, pushes maternal devotion to the point of homicide.

To sentimentalize or idealize any of these people would not only be a form of condescension. It would strip their stories of dramatic and moral interest, making them less disturbing and also a lot less fun. The pleasure and the discomfort can’t be separated.

We are watching players compete in a rigged game with potentially mortal stakes and unreliable referees. Institutions — schools, companies, governments — are comically and also lethally useless. There is no legitimate authority, only raw power. Family connections are the only bonds that count, but families are a mess. The only answer is a kind of wily resourcefulness, an on-the-fly problem-solving knack that can deliver at best small, local victories. That those can be satisfying is a tribute to Bong’s own wily resourcefulness and also to his radical compassion.

What makes “Parasite” the movie of the year — what might make Bong the filmmaker of the century — is the way it succeeds in being at once fantastical and true to life, intensely metaphorical and devastatingly concrete.

There doesn’t seem to be much distance, in other words, between the dire futures projected in “Snowpiercer” and “Okja” — nightmares of technology and greed run amok — and the class-specific domestic spaces of “Parasite,” “Mother” and “Memories of Murder.” A much-remarked-on feature of human existence at the moment is how dystopian it feels, as some of the most extreme and alarming fantasies of fiction reappear as newsfeed banalities. Fires and hurricanes feel less like symbols than signals, evidence of a disaster that’s already here rather than omens of impending catastrophe. Monsters walk among us. Corruption is normal. Trust, outside a narrow circle of friends or kin, is unthinkable. Whether we know it or not, it’s Bong’s world we’re living in. Literally.

Where to Watch Bong’s Films

“Snowpiercer”: Stream it on Netflix; buy or rent it on iTunes, Vudu, Amazon and YouTube.

“Mother”: Buy or rent it on iTunes, Amazon and Vudu.

“The Host”: Buy or rent it on iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.

“Memories of Murder”: Buy or rent it on iTunes and YouTube.

“Barking Dogs Never Bite”: Buy or rent it on iTunes.

This article originally appeared in

It's Bong Joon Ho's Dystopia. We Just Live in It.

(Critic’s Notebook)

NEW YORK — One of the durable clichés of film criticism is the observation that “the city is like another character in the movie.” While I don’t have the data to prove it, my strong suspicion is that this has been said more about New York than any other city.

But it’s not quite right. Really, New York is a movie star, with Paris as its only serious rival among the world’s great metropolises. Its charisma is that of an old-fashioned screen idol, like Bette Davis, Cary Grant or Sidney Poitier. However many different faces the city might present to the camera — dressed up or roughed up, gritty or glamorous, tragic or madcap — it remains always and unmistakably itself.

And like any human movie star worth talking about, New York off screen can be difficult as well as charming. It’s seductive, demanding, elusive and impossible to separate from its image. Perpetually on, perpetually engrossed in the theater of its existence.

To live in the city is to play a part in that spectacle, and to play along with it. You might be strolling through your own private tracking shot, accompanied by a voice-over narration in your head (some days it’s “Taxi Driver,” some days it’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” some days it’s “Do the Right Thing”), when you’re brought up short by the sight of a blocklong line of trailers, equipment trucks, dollies and cranes. A recent film-studies graduate with a headset or a walkie-talkie blocks your path, telling you not to cross the street until the take is finished. Sometimes you discover that the corner grocery where you get your egg-and-cheese has been made over in some outlandish period style and stuffed with costumed extras. Or that your Subaru has been towed to make room for a boxy old Buick.

Movies may conjure an aura of magic in our lives, but moviemaking offers New Yorkers one more thing to complain about, along with late trains, snarled traffic, hordes of slow-moving tourists, incomprehensible parking and trash-collection rules, and everything that just isn’t the way it used to be whenever it was supposed to be better than now.

Movie production, which has waned and waxed over the years and is currently booming, is at once a source of present-day frustration and a subject for nostalgic wonder. These photographs selected from the archives of The New York Times — spanning the middle and later decades of the last century — illustrate that wonderful temporal paradox. They are fragments of the daily record that survive as time capsules.

It isn’t a comprehensive record by any means. These images are the products of serendipity, or days when film crews and news photographers happened to occupy the same block at the same time.

Producers and stars don’t always accommodate journalists on set, and journalists are sometimes chasing more urgent news, so some of the most famous New York movies aren’t represented here. But most likely you can picture those too. Every movie-lover carries an archive of moments and images, a fantasy history gleaned from the work of born-and-bred New York filmmakers and Hollywood interlopers alike. Even if our firsthand local knowledge is strictly tourist fare, we’ve acquired street wisdom from Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Spike Lee. We’ve breathed the smoky, sleazy air of 1950s Times Square night spots with Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in Alexander Mackendrick’s “Sweet Smell of Success.” We’ve sashayed and stumbled through the pre-gentrification Lower East Side of the ’80s with Rosanna Arquette and Madonna in Susan Seidelman’s “Desperately Seeking Susan.”

There’s a core curriculum emphasizing early-’60s glamour and mid-’70s grime — Rock Hudson and Doris Day; Al Pacino and Gene Hackman — but also as many private canons as there are viewers. I can’t cross 110th Street without thinking of Yaphet Kotto and Anthony Quinn in “Across 110th Street,” with its great Bobby Womack theme song. When I’m in the part of Brooklyn where brownstones give way to free-standing wood frame houses, I think “it’s the filet of the neighborhood,” quoting a line from “The Squid and the Whale.” Central Park has been filmed a thousand times, but for me it always evokes “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One,” William Greaves’ 1968 meta-masterpiece about a filmmaker trying to shoot a movie in Central Park — a film bristling with the atmosphere of its era.

In some movies, though, the captured present is also a reconstructed past. Consider the image of the street crowded with pushcarts, horses and clotheslines crowded amid the cranes and lighting rigs. It’s from the set of the 1920s period piece “The Night They Raided Minsky’s,” reportedly the first musical to be filmed entirely in New York. When the movie was released in 1968, Renata Adler, then the Times’ chief film critic praised “its denseness and care in detail.” “The Lower East Side looks real,” she noted.

Looking at the photograph, we’re simultaneously in the ’60s and the ’20s, two distinctive moments in the modern metropolitan. A picture taken during the making of “Hair” produces a similar double image, looping the Age of Aquarius into the era — a scant decade later — of fiscal crisis and civic unraveling.

The city’s “now” is always right on the verge of turning into a “then.” The bubble that Natalie Wood is blowing on the set of “Penelope,” an all-but-forgotten mid-’60s bored-housewife caper, is a symbol of this transience, which photography at once confirms and contradicts. We can see the bubble is about to pop, but it never does. And Wood remains forever stylish and insouciant in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art.

“The Night They Raided Minsky’s,” by the way, was directed by William Friedkin, much better remembered today for “The French Connection,” one of the defining New York movies of the ’70s, both timeless and entirely of its time, its grainy collage of battered locations growing more poetic each time you see it. There’s also one of the great car chases in all of cinema, with Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle speeding under the elevated subway tracks of Bensonhurst in pursuit of a suspect riding the train.

Popeye is a familiar New York movie archetype — the gruff, dogged, cynical NYPD gumshoe, cousin to Frank Sinatra’s Joe Leland in “The Detective” (a nasty piece of ’60s pseudo-noir) and Walter Matthau’s Zachary Garber in “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.” That is maybe the great New York public transportation movie — a picture so nice they made it twice, with Denzel Washington and John Travolta in the 2009 version updating roles created by Matthau and Robert Shaw.

In 1974, when the original opened in theaters, the Times’ Nora Sayre declared, “It’s been a while since we’ve had a movie that really captures the mood of New York and New Yorkers.” “Pelham” did so then, and it does so still. It’s not just about an elaborate, possibly far-fetched scheme to hijack a train full of passengers and extort a huge ransom from the city; it’s also about the interplay of crime, bureaucracy and infrastructure, and about a system and a city organized around work.

These pictures reveal and celebrate the labor involved in the production of illusions that make their way back into reality. The movie camera arranges real, physical elements — buildings, faces, sidewalks, signs — into a fantasy. The still camera finds the seam between that fantasy and the world as it is and then unravels it. But also, what could be more ordinary? Movie stars are always movie stars, whether they’re blocking a scene, taking direction, getting their makeup done or enjoying a regal or raffish smoke between takes. Their glamour is intrinsic, ineffable. You know it when you encounter it, even as you go about your regular business and even when you can’t quite describe what you’ve seen.

When Filming in New York, the City is Always the Star

(Past Tense)

There is a lot of love in “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” and quite a bit to enjoy. The screen is crowded with signs of Quentin Tarantino’s well-established ardor — for the movies and television shows of the decades after World War II; for the vernacular architecture, commercial signage and famous restaurants of Los Angeles; for the female foot and the male jawline; for vintage clothes and cars and cigarettes. But the mood in this, his ninth feature, is for the most part affectionate rather than obsessive.

Don’t get me wrong. Tarantino is still practicing a cinema of saturation, demanding the audience’s total attention and bombarding us with allusions, visual jokes, flights of profane eloquence, daubs of throwaway beauty and gobs of premeditated gore. And yet “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” whose title evokes bedtime stories as well as a pair of Sergio Leone masterpieces, is Tarantino’s most relaxed movie by far, both because of its ambling, shaggy-dog structure and the easygoing rhythm of its scenes.

Though trouble percolates on the horizon and mayhem arrives in the final act, this is fundamentally a hangout movie, a bad-guys-come-to-town Western more like “Rio Bravo” than “High Noon.” Above all, it’s a buddy picture about two middle-level entertainment industry workers doing their jobs and making the scene over a few hectic, sunny days in 1969.

The friendship between Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) functions for Tarantino as both keystone and key. It’s an organizing principle and a source of meaning, and a major reason that “Once Upon a Time” is more than a baby-boomer edition of Trivial Pursuit brought to life.

Unlike many of the people they share the screen with — the period-specific A-list characters include Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) and Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) — Rick and Cliff are made-up. Rick is an actor on the downward slope of a moderately successful career. A star in a handful of Westerns and combat pictures, and of a popular TV Western series, he is now mostly cast as a one-episode villain on other people’s shows. He’s considering an offer to make spaghetti Westerns in Italy. (Tarantino supplies perfect fake clips to annotate Rick’s filmography). Not a has-been, exactly, but not quite what he used to be or might have been.

Cliff is his longtime stunt double, but as Rick’s roles have shifted, his role has changed too. His duties include driving Rick (whose license has been suspended) to and from auditions and sets, performing minor household repairs and generally being available as a sounding board and drinking partner. You can’t really call Cliff a sidekick — we’re talking about Brad Pitt — and he’s not really a servant, either, even though Rick pays him for his time. An older vocabulary is needed: Cliff is a gentleman’s gentleman, a man Friday, a dogsbody, a squire. “More than a brother but less than a wife” is how the movie puts it.

The relationship isn’t defined by money or sex, but by a difference in rank accepted without comment or complaint by both parties. The inequality between the men — Rick lives in a spacious ranch house up in the hills, Cliff in a cluttered trailer down in the valley — is what dignifies their bond, just as the contrast of their temperaments sustain it.

Rick, a sloppy drinker and a furious smoker, wears his feelings close to the surface. He weeps aloud over the state of his career, throws an epic tantrum in his trailer when he messes up a scene and is moved to tears by the exquisiteness of his own acting. Cliff is a different kind of cat — lean, taciturn, self-effacing, slow to anger but capable of serious violence. Some say he’s a murderer; he himself occasionally alludes to a criminal past. Better not to ask. Apart from Rick, his main attachment is to his dog, Brandy, whose loyalty is the mirror of his own. (DiCaprio’s baroque, exuberant emotionalism perfectly complements Pitt’s down-to-the-bone minimalism. They’re both terrific.)

If the guys aren’t quite Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, their companionship nonetheless takes shape within a fundamentally aristocratic social order. Joan Didion, in an essay first published in 1973, described the Hollywood of that era as “the last extant stable society,” and Tarantino’s tableau confirms this view. Life isn’t perfect, but it is coherent. People know their place. They respect the rules and hierarchies. Rick’s neighbors, Sharon Tate and her husband, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), live higher up in the canyon (at the end of a gated driveway) and also on the status pyramid. They are regarded not with envy or resentment, but with awe.

The governing virtue in this world is courtesy. The things produced within it are ridiculous, but also beautiful. Residents take seriously things that are objectively silly, which lends a measure of charm to otherwise pedestrian moments. A series of on-set interactions between Rick and two other actors — a leading man played by Timothy Olyphant and a juvenile played by the phenomenal Julia Butters — demonstrate the workings of this code. What they’re collaborating on might look like disposable commercial trash, but making it involves craft and tradition, folk wisdom and spiritual discipline, trust and integrity.

Tarantino’s sense of the movie past is often described as nostalgic. He tends to be seen — by admirers and critics alike — as a film geek, a fanboy, a fanatic cinephile with an encyclopedic command of archaic styles and genres. True enough. But “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood” shows that he deserves a loftier, possibly more contentious label. It’s the expression of a sensibility that is profoundly and passionately conservative.

John Ford, one of old Hollywood’s greatest conservatives, ended one of his greatest movies with the exhortation to “print the legend.” Tarantino’s answer is to film the fairy tale.

Alongside the knight and his squire, there is a princess — Tate — who lives in something like a castle and is married to a man who looks a little like a frog. Tarantino has never been much interested in sex or romance — violence and vengeance are what makes his stories run — but he has a sentimental investment in marriage and a thing about wives.

Sharon, who is barefoot, pregnant or both in most of her scenes, is not so much a symbol of innocence or glamour as an emblem of normalcy. The best stretch of the movie follows her, Cliff and Rick through their separate routines on a single day.

Rick is at work, fighting off a hangover and his own self-doubt. Cliff picks up a hitchhiker — a girl he’s noticed before, played by Margaret Qualley — and drives her to the Spahn Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, where she lives with a bunch of other young people (and an old guy played by Bruce Dern, one of many memorable cameos). Sharon also gives a stranger a ride, buys her husband a gift and stops in at a theater in Westwood to watch herself in “The Wrecking Crew,” a spoofy action caper starring Dean Martin. That’s a real movie, as are most of the others whose titles appear on billboards and marquees.

In the real world, six months after that magically ordinary imaginary day, Tate was murdered in her home on Cielo Drive, along with four of her friends. The killers lived at the Spahn Ranch, and were disciples of a failed musician named Charles Manson.

That’s the opposite of a spoiler, by the way. If you don’t know about the Manson family, or if you’re vague on the details of their crimes, you may not feel the tingle of foreboding that is crucial to Tarantino’s revisionism. Didion, in “The White Album,” wrote that “many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on Aug. 9, 1969, ended at exactly the moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brush fire through the community.” But what if the ’60s never ended? Or rather, what if the ’60s, as a half-century of pop-culture habit has taught us to remember them, never really happened?

The political struggles of the decade are deep in the background, occasionally crackling through car radio static along with traffic and weather reports. The music we hear isn’t a soundtrack of rebellion, but an anthology of pleasure. Tarantino’s anti-ironic celebration of the mainstream popular culture of the time amounts to a sustained argument against the idea of a counterculture. Those who would disrupt, challenge or destroy the last stable society on earth are in the grip of an ideological, aesthetic and moral error. Hippies aren’t cool. Old-time he-men like Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth are cool.

You don’t have to agree. I don’t think I do. But I also don’t mind. There will be viewers who object to the movie’s literal and metaphorical hippie-punching on political grounds. There will be others who embrace it as a thumb in the eye of current sensitivities, and others who insist the movie has no politics at all.

To which I can only say: it’s a Western, for Pete’s sake. Politics are wound into its DNA, and Tarantino knows the genome better than anyone else. Which is just to say that like other classics of the genre, “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood” is not going anywhere. It will stand as a source of debate — and delight — for as long as we care about movies. And it wants us to care.

‘Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood’ is rated R (not the bloodiest Tarantino, but still Tarantino). Running time: 2 hours 41 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/movies/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-review.html" id="f300f81b-c396-3b67-a6e3-2667c37fd28e">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick)

'Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood' Review: We Lost It at the Movies

The opening minutes of “Honeyland” are as astonishing — as sublime and strange and full of human and natural beauty — as anything I’ve ever seen in a movie. A woman makes her way on foot across wild meadowlands and up a mountainside, carefully stepping along a narrow ledge to a rocky outcropping, where bees have made a hive. Without much protective gear, and apparently without being stung, she extracts several honeycombs and secures them in a sack.

Back home, in the valley — she is one of two permanent residents of a hamlet in what is now called the Republic of North Macedonia — she transplants the colony to a stone wall near her house. In the coming months, she sings to the bees and talks to them, explaining the terms of their relationship. When the time comes to take the honey, she’ll leave half of it for them. It’s not a bargain, exactly, since the bees have no real say in the matter, but it is a sustainable arrangement and one that has survived in this region for generations.

The woman, Hatidze Muratova, is an actual beekeeper, and “Honeyland,” directed by Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska, is a documentary about her life and labors. Originally commissioned to make a video about conservation efforts in North Macedonia, the filmmakers spent three years with Hatidze; her mother, Nazife; and the late-arriving people next door. (More about them shortly). As a result, Stefanov and Kotevska have done more than record the rhythms and textures of rural life. They have shaped their observations — more than 400 hours of footage — into a luminous neorealist fable, a sad and stirring tale of struggle, persistence and change.

Hatidze, born in 1964, lives with Nazife, who is bedridden and partly blind; a hound named Jackie; and those industrious bees. It’s an austere existence, but it has its satisfactions, and Hatidze isn’t entirely isolated from the rest of the world. Skopje, the Macedonian capital, is only a little more than 12 miles away, and she travels there, on foot and by train, to sell her honey. Because of its superior quality and her shrewdness, it fetches a good price. She uses the revenue to buy household goods, including dye for the graying hair she wears tucked into a kerchief.

Just as you are settling into Hatidze’s company, appreciating the edges and contours of her personality and savoring the deep pleasure of her work, the pastoral calm is shattered. A family rumbles into the village in a noisy trailer that turns out to be the quietest thing about it. The patriarch, Hussein, and his wife, Ljutvie, bring chickens, cows and a small army of children. At first, Hatidze welcomes these neighbors, who are Turkish speakers like her. She tutors one of the older boys in the mysteries of the apiary and tolerates periodic invasions of her privacy from the littler ones.

Though she is too courteous to say so, you have the feeling that Hatidze views Hussein as a man who may have overestimated his abilities. He has a habit of blaming other people — Ljutvie and their children, mostly — for his misfortunes and mistakes. His plan is to herd cows and keep bees, turning this empty patch of territory into a literal land of milk and honey, at a scale sufficient to feed his family and his ego.

Hussein is not exactly a villain. He’s doing his best. But his crude methods, his sandpapery personality and the sheer chaos that surrounds him conspire to disrupt Hatidze’s routines. As relations between them deteriorate, “Honeyland” touches on what may be a universal feature of modern experience, familiar to urban apartment dwellers and house-proud suburbanites, as well as to old-school agrarians. The Rolling Stones wrote a song about “groaning and straining with the trouble and strife.” Neighbors are a nightmare.

But the presence of Hussein and his unruly household is also serendipitous, a gift from the gods of film narrative. This isn’t to attribute the filmmakers’ remarkable achievement to luck. They draw comedy and pathos out of the conflict. They render the thick complexity of experience with poignant clarity. Their movie is quiet, intimate and intense, but touched with a breath of epic grandeur. It’s a poem including history.

And one that regards the future with both apprehension and hope. Hatidze seems to be the last of her kind. Hussein’s rapacious exploitation of scarce and fragile resources represents the norm, supported by a crude utilitarian argument. Their struggle feels like a microcosm of the human predicament at a time of environmental catastrophe, and Hatidze, precisely because of her modesty and patience, looks like a heroic figure, offering a warning and an example to the rest of us, her wasteful, wanton neighbors.

It may be a strange thing to say about a documentary, but “Honeyland” reminded me of “The Lorax,” Dr. Seuss’ great, prescient tale of ecological folly. Like the title character in that story, Hatidze is a kind of prophet. She speaks for the bees.

Not rated. In Turkish, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/movies/honeyland-review.html" id="3a749e09-41c9-333a-a99b-bb7224f7346b">The New York Times</a>.

'Honeyland' Review: The Sting and the Sweetness

Though trouble percolates on the horizon and mayhem arrives in the final act, this is fundamentally a hangout movie, a bad-guys-come-to-town western more like “Rio Bravo” than “High Noon.” Above all, it’s a buddy picture about two middle-level entertainment industry workers doing their jobs and making the scene over a few hectic, sunny days in 1969.

Unlike many of the people they share the screen with — the period-specific A-list characters include Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) and Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) — Rick and Cliff are made-up. Rick is an actor on the downward slope of a moderately successful career. A star in a handful of westerns and combat pictures, and of a popular TV western series, he is now mostly cast as a one-episode villain on other people’s shows. He’s considering an offer to make spaghetti westerns in Italy. (Tarantino supplies perfect fake clips to annotate Rick’s filmography). Not a has-been, exactly, but not quite what he used to be or might have been.

That’s the opposite of a spoiler, by the way. If you don’t know about the Manson family, or if you’re vague on the details of their crimes, you may not feel the tingle of foreboding that is crucial to Tarantino’s revisionism. Didion, in “The White Album,” wrote that “many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on Aug. 9, 1969, ended at exactly the moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brush fire through the community.” But what if the ’60s never ended? Or rather, what if the ’60s, as a half-century of pop-culture habit has taught us to remember them, never really happened.

To which I can only say: it’s a western, for Pete’s sake. Politics are wound into its DNA, and Tarantino knows the genome better than anyone else. Which is just to say that like other classics of the genre, “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood” is not going anywhere. It will stand as a source of debate — and delight — for as long as we care about movies. And it wants us to care.

There is a lot of love in “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” and quite a bit to enjoy. The screen is crowded with signs of Quentin Tarantino’s well-established ardor — for the movies and television shows of the decades after World War II; for the vernacular architecture, commercial signage and famous restaurants of Los Angeles; for the female foot and the male jawline; for vintage clothes and cars and cigarettes. But the mood in this, his ninth feature, is for the most part affectionate rat...

Dunne was pounding the pavement on the 20th Century Fox lot at a time of political tension and social fracture, when the Hollywood studios seemed to be facing an existential crisis. Pretty much like now, in other words, except that the money and ingenuity those studios used to spend on things like teaching chimps to make breakfast now go toward turning lines of code into fur and sinew. This is undoubtedly an ethical improvement, much as Chee Chee may have enjoyed hanging out with Rex Harrison. The hope behind this “Lion King,” opening July 19, is that advancing digital technology will also enhance the luster of the moviegoing experience.

It does and it doesn’t. There are a great many impressive moments in this film, and a few that might elicit a gasp of amazement or an appreciative burst of laughter from even a jaded viewer. For example: when Pumbaa, the flatulent warthog voiced by Seth Rogen, absent-mindedly scratches his left ear with his hind leg, I confess that I nearly wept. Not because the scene was especially touching or sad, but because of the sheer extravagant craft that had clearly gone into rendering those two seconds of reflexive animal behavior. I was nearly as moved by the efforts of a dung beetle to propel a ball of scat across a patch of desert. The digital artisans responsible for these images didn’t necessarily have to do it all with such fanatical care, and the fact that they did is surely worthy of admiration.

So if a movie could be judged solely on technique, “The Lion King” might qualify as a great one. And it kind of wants to be judged that way — for its technical skin rather than its dramatic soul. The opening sequence (it doesn’t seem right to call it a “shot”) fools the eye in subtle and brazen ways. You might think there are real creatures mixed into the computer-generated menagerie (there aren’t), but at the same time the flights of animal choreography lie beyond the skill of any trainer. Then the music starts, and it’s “The Circle of Life” and baby Simba is cute enough to make all the trolls on Twitter go awwwww.

The mixture of coziness and, well, awe in that opening number is as on-brand as anything Disney has done since — I guess since a few weeks ago, when it released “Toy Story 4.” Once the voices start up, we are in a comfortable and familiar pop-cultural space, even if the talking beasts don’t look much like cartoons. (A possible exception might be Zazu, the hornbill who sounds like John Oliver. Or maybe it’s just that John Oliver looks like a hornbill.) The antelopes lope. The elephants lumber. The graceful lions bask in their languorous power, lolling and growling and setting up the parameters of the story.

Not many surprises there. Simba’s father, Mufasa (James Earl Jones), rules the savanna with a gentle paw and a loyal queen, Sarabi (Alfre Woodard). Mufasa’s brother, Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is the snake in this garden, scheming first to kill Simba, the rightful heir to the throne, and then to get rid of Mufasa. Scar has the help of Shenzi (Florence Kasumba) and her army of hyenas, whose closed-up, predatory faces are genuinely scary, especially when they appear for the first time.

Small children may have some trouble at that point, and also with Scar’s ruthless political machinations, which are pretty murdery for Disney. But it’s likely that much of the audience, young and old, will have some familiarity with the narrative, whether from the 1994 animated feature or from the long-running, much-loved Broadway show. “The Lion King” currently under review isn’t meant to replace or outdo either of those, but rather to multiply revenue streams and use a beloved property to show off some new tricks. A lot of people will go, expecting to like what they see, and for the most part they won’t be disappointed.

I said earlier that the movie, which was directed by Jon Favreau and written by Jeff Nathanson, looks like a nature documentary. But it plays more like an especially glitzy presentation reel at a trade convention, with popular songs and high-end talent pushing an exciting new product that nobody is sure quite how to use. Simba and his best friend, Nala, voiced as cubs by JD McCrary and Shahadi Wright Joseph, grow up into Donald Glover and Beyoncé, and when they get going on “Can You Feel the Love Tonight …”

It’s OK. When Pumbaa and his pal Timon the meerkat show up — I’m not going to stir up trouble by saying which one might be the other’s sidekick — we get a brisk vaudevillian double act from Rogen and Billy Eichner. That’s OK too. But of all the second-golden-age Disney animated features, the original “Lion King” is the most Shakespearean, as well as being the most ideologically coherent Hollywood defense of monarchy until “Black Panther.” The grandeur and intimacy, the earthy humor and heavenly songs have given it gravity and staying power.

Those are somehow missing here. The songs don’t have the pop or the splendor. The terror and wonder of the intra-pride battles are muted. There is a lot of professionalism but not much heart. It may be that the realism of the animals makes it hard to connect with them as characters, undermining the inspired anthropomorphism that has been the most enduring source of Disney magic.

Real lions don’t sing — not even like Beyoncé — and don’t actually govern other creatures. The closer the movie gets to nature in its look, the more blatant, intrusive and purposeless its artifice seems. It might have worked better without songs or dialogue: surely the Disney wizards could have figured out how to spin an epic tale of royal succession and self-discovery through purely visual means. Or else someone could have spent a few months teaching the digital Pumbaa to whip up a nice tofu scramble.

‘The Lion King’

Rated PG. Not too red in tooth and claw. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/movies/the-lion-king-review.html" id="b1d4ee6e-a1a4-3609-a0be-9832ce69fdf5">The New York Times</a>.

Watching the newest version of “The Lion King” — a big-screen celebrity-voiced musical trying its best to look like a television nature documentary — I recalled a line from John Gregory Dunne’s 1969 book “The Studio” that may be my all-time favorite sentence in the annals of movie writing. “Six months were devoted to teaching Chee Chee the Chimpanzee how to cook bacon and eggs,” Dunne wrote, referring to a character in “Doctor Dolittle,” one of many real animals cast in that big-budget, famil...

'The Lion King' Review: The Art of Herding Digital Cats

Mariana (Ioana Iacob), the heroine of this fictional, reality-saturated film, would agree. A theater artist who shares the name of a well-known poet, Mariana is planning an ambitious, provocative public pageant reconstructing a massacre that took place in Odessa in 1941. She envisions a show that will be more than just a dress-up opportunity for military buffs. She wants to confront spectators and participants with uncomfortable facts about Romanian complicity in the Holocaust, and to challenge deeply rooted myths of national innocence.

The slaughter — mostly of Jews from territories that are now part of Moldova and Ukraine — was overseen by Marshal Ion Antonescu, leader of Romania’s fascist government. Antonescu, executed in 1946 for war crimes, underwent a partial rehabilitation after the 1989 revolution, recalled by some as a staunch patriot whose fervent anti-communism led him into an unfortunate alliance with Nazi Germany. Both Mariana and Jude use their chosen art forms to push back against such revisionism. The movie and the theater piece within it insist that Antonescu (whose words are the source of the film’s title), was a ferocious anti-Semite and anti-Roma racist, and that his army’s killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other innocents can’t be blamed on Germany, the Soviet Union or the fog of war.

Until its devastating final scenes, the way “I Do Not Care” makes its points is discursive rather than dramatic. Its action consists mostly of a series of arguments between Mariana and others — all men — who think they know more (or at least show that they care less) about Romanian history than she does.

Cast members complain about her ideas and techniques, threatening to quit if she doesn’t cater to their sensitivities. Her lover, a married airline pilot, tunes out her passionate disquisitions on truth and justice. An official from the government agency funding her project subjects her to condescending lectures about other historical abominations. He pauses in these grandiloquent flights of whataboutism to threaten to cancel the performance, and also to ask her out for a drink.

Iacob is energetic and persuasive in her portrayal of an embattled intellectual, defending the integrity of her vision against doubters and peppering her conversation with references to Hannah Arendt, Ludwig Wittgenstein and various homegrown literary luminaries. Her distrust of authority also has a feminist dimension. As in other recent Romanian films, this one casts an exasperated eye on a society where power and male pomposity go hand in hand. Mariana’s personal, emotional and sexual struggles play out in the background, but they’re clearly connected to the critical spirit of her work.

There is an unmistakable idealism in her confrontational zeal, a faith in the power of art as a vehicle of moral enlightenment. If people see the truth about what happened in the past, their consciences will be awakened in a way that might help prevent history’s horrors from repeating. Jude honors this belief even as he views it with mordant, fatalistic irony. Mariana insists that empathy, reason and the acceptance of complexity can be powerful political forces, even as her work illustrates, in ways she can’t entirely control, that cruelty, ignorance and tribalism may be stronger still.

‘I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians’

Not rated. In Romanian, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/movies/i-do-not-care-we-go-down-history-barbarians-review.html" id="ceb29a61-cc58-335c-a7dc-087f833a99d8">The New York Times</a>.

One of the most interesting documentaries of 2018 was Robert Greene’s “Bisbee 17,” about a historical re-enactment in an Arizona town that exposed how past conflicts continue to fester. “I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” the latest feature from Romanian director Radu Jude (“Scarred Hearts,” “Aferim!”), takes up a similar theme, showing that history is never neutral and that present-day culture wars often carry out the violence of the past by other means.

Review: Making a Spectacle of History (and Herself)

The most notable — or, at any rate, a notably puzzling — aspect of Casey’s environment is the technology that seems to place the film in the fast-receding, nostalgia-eligible recent past. Casey watches an old movie on a boxy television set with a fuzzy picture. The answering machine connected to his landline phone clicks on to tell him he has “only one new message.” He gains access to pornography by borrowing a magazine from a co-worker’s desk and photocopying the pages. A crucial plot development will turn on the discovery of a room full of VHS cassettes.

The period details, the nowhere setting and the deadpan delivery of most of the dialogue signal vaguely allegorical intentions. Casey is a milquetoast Everyman, scared of the shadow he is almost too insubstantial to cast. After he is beaten up by marauding motorcyclists, he falls under the sway of a local sensei (Alessandro Nivola), whose soft baritone and hypermasculine message have a transformative effect on Casey.

The vibe is less “Karate Kid” than “Fight Club,” minus the aggressive stylistic poses and the apocalyptic mumbo-jumbo. The sensei’s conception of manhood is bizarre, but not entirely far-fetched, since there are plenty of guys in the real world who believe dumb stuff about what it is to be a guy. He counsels Casey to stop studying French and take up a tougher language, like German. Casey is eager to comply, though he doesn’t entirely embrace the sensei’s ideas about women. There is one in the dojo — which is to say in the movie — a brown belt named Anna, somberly played by Imogen Poots.

Stearns makes a few visual jokes about the homoeroticism latent in the sensei’s manly paradise, where the male karate students give one another naked massages after sparring. He also swats at a few of the themes that flutter about amid the fists and feet. Casey is drawn to the sensei’s disciplined approach to violence and then repelled when he discovers the shabby, brutal cult of personality behind the whispery spirituality. His vacillations follow no particular logic other than the filmmaker’s need to generate narrative surprises that feel superficially provocative. Is Casey mentally disturbed or morally confused, or has he actually — sorry for blowing your mind — figured something out about how the world works?

It turns out not to matter. “The Art of Self-Defense” is like the kid who withdrew from the introductory gender studies class before the midterm to pursue his own theories. And good luck with that. The one halfway-interesting part of this movie is Nivola’s performance, which operates at both a deeper register of seriousness and a higher pitch of comedy than anything else. Is the sensei (his name is a closely guarded secret) a wise man, a sociopath or a complete idiot? That doesn’t really matter either, except insofar as it can be fun to watch this shrewd, charismatic and somehow always underappreciated actor try to convince us that he is all three at once.

Additional Information:

Rated R. Sure, call it art. Whatever. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/movies/the-art-of-self-defense-review.html" id="f175a009-0321-337d-aae1-c60fe7024af2">The New York Times</a>.

'The Art of Self-Defense' review: Karate empowers a dweeb

Casey, a skinny, nervous nebbish — played, it may be redundant to add, by Jesse Eisenberg — lives alone with his dachshund in a nondescript apartment in an unidentified city. He works in the accounting department of a company that is as generic as everything else in “The Art of Self-Defense,” a wobbly sort-of satire written and directed by Riley Stearns.

What I mean to say is that I like Peter Parker in “Spider-Man: Far From Home” for the same reason I liked Miles Morales in “Into the Spider-Verse”: he’s a teenager. In pop-culture years, the web-slinger is pushing 60, but his most recent movie incarnations have emphasized his youth. Tom Holland, the British actor who has played Spider-Man since 2016, recently turned 23, but he still plausibly looks and sounds like a 16-year-old New York City high school student. This is as it should be.

The character’s perpetual youth is explained in the movie (or “in-universe,” as I guess we’re saying these days) by what happened in between the last two “Avengers” movies. You remember, right? No? I know, it’s been almost two months. Anyway, a lot of superheroes along with half of the living beings in the universe were vaporized by a purple-faced villain with a corrugated chin. This felt like a big deal at the time, but they were all brought back to life and the whole episode is now recalled as “the Blip.”

The opening scenes of “Far From Home,” directed by Jon Watts from a script by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, recap that reversible apocalypse in brisk comic style, from the standpoint of Peter and his fellow students at Midtown High School. Peter is still living in Queens with his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and still crushing hard on MJ (Zendaya). Everyone’s getting ready for the school trip to Europe. All’s right with the world until the next supervillain shows up.

Which happens, of course. I’ll refrain from saying too much about him, but the bad guy’s motives are the usual mix of megalomaniacal diabolism and semilegitimate grievance, but his explanation of the grudge he holds against the superheroes of the world exposes the movie’s major problem, which is Tony Stark.

I know what you’re thinking: Didn’t he die at the end of “Endgame”? Didn’t we all choke up when Happy (Jon Favreau, who shows up here to flirt with Aunt May) remembered how Tony liked cheeseburgers? Robert Downey Jr. is not in “Far From Home,” but his image pops up from time to time, and the Stark/Iron Man name and brand are invoked frequently. The scion of Stark Industries may be gone, but his cult of personality is stronger than ever.

Fair enough, I suppose. The Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it — don’t we know it!— got rolling more than a decade ago with “Iron Man,” directed by Favreau. But because of various corporate intellectual-property issues, Spider-Man, licensed to Sony by Marvel, didn’t at first mix with the Avengers, who are Disney guys. Apparently it was part of the deal that Spidey would be Iron Man’s sidekick. For most of “Far From Home” he still wears the yoke of apprenticeship, speaking reverently about “Mr. Stark” and wondering if he could possibly fill the shoes (or the high-tech sunglasses) of such a remarkable visionary.

I thought we were starting to move past the breathless worship of narcissistic billionaire tech bros, but apparently not. Spidey’s nemesis used to work for Stark. His minions are a bunch of fellow ex-employees who complain about how Stark took credit for their work, ignored their best ideas and hogged the spotlight for himself.

What a bunch of losers. Everyone knows bosses are meant to be idolized, figureheads of aspiration rather than objects of envy. It’s a good thing that Happy is still around with the Stark private jet, various branded doodads and a mouthful of libertarian-plutocratic talking points.

Along with Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), Happy is on hand to reinforce the corporate grandiosity that is the “Avengers” hallmark. Jake Gyllenhaal saunters in to keep things interesting and keep would-be spoiler-mongers on their toes. As is often the case with these movies, a smaller, livelier entertainment is nested inside the roaring, clanking digital machinery. The filmmakers try to enliven the big fights and action sequences by injecting a bit of self-consciousness about the illusion-driven craft they pursue, and a few sequences take place in an austere, dreamlike virtual realm where visually interesting things are allowed to happen. For a little while, anyway.

The high-school comedy bits of “Far From Home,” while not especially original, have a sweet, affable charm. JB Smoove and Martin Starr are funny as the hapless teachers guiding a squad of teens through Venice, Prague and London. Jacob Batalon and Angourie Rice are delightful as Peter and MJ’s teen-movie best friends, who abruptly fall in love.

Will that happen for Peter, too? The freshest parts of the story revisit some of the character’s longest-standing issues, as Peter struggles with the competing demands of normal adolescence and superheroism. This isn’t just about the great responsibility that comes with great power, but about figuring out who or what you’re responsible for. Peter’s loyalty to his friends — a sweet, spirited crew embodying the tolerance, skepticism and earnestness that characterize their generation, as well as some of its less appealing aspects — is sometimes at odds with his vocation. You wish he could have some time off.

Of course that isn’t in the cards. “Spider-Man: Far From Home” ends with the usual mid- and post-credits kickers that are meant to be surprising but are really the opposite. Spoiler alert: there are a lot more movies like this coming. In the meantime, enjoy the Blip.

‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ is rated PG-13 (great cities in ruins). Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/movies/spider-man-far-from-home-review.html" id="e0c59866-4632-3834-a804-0e8ddb2f6c66">The New York Times</a>.

'Spider-Man: Far From Home': passport, check; webs, check

I stan a pipsqueak.

<h1>“The Dead Don’t Die,” Jim Jarmusch’s shaggy-dog zombie movie, isn’t all that scary, but one thing about it did haunt me. A character played by Selena Gomez is referred to as “a hipster from the big city.” If I were on Twitter right now, I’d note that fact and say something like “Wow. 2019,” except that I’m not sure I entirely understand the layers of irony and pop-cultural meta-textualism at work here. Or, for that matter, what the weary epithet “hipster” even signifies at this point, especially when deployed by Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny.</h1>

Those three play most of the police department of Centerville, a hamlet in some possible proximity to Pittsburgh or Cleveland — where the hipsters might come from — that advertises itself as “a nice place.” And so it is, in a familiar tongue-in-cheek, self-conscious manner. This isn’t quite “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” but it doesn’t feel so far away. There are no fast-food restaurants, strip malls or big-box stores. There’s a picturesque motel (where Gomez and the other two hipsters who arrived with her find a room), a diner, a hardware store and a gas station that also stocks comics and memorabilia. Packages are delivered by RZA, whose truck has “WuPS” written on the side.

Maybe that’s not a typical slice of Americana, but Jarmusch has never been much for realism. He’s a melancholy utopian, positing a world where most people are too cool to be cruel, and where aesthetic sensibilities take the place of political ideologies. The one politically minded guy in Centerville seems to be Farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi), who wears a red baseball cap that reads “Keep America White Again.” Nobody likes him very much, not because of how he might have voted — does anyone vote here? — but because he’s a jerk, excessively attached to his own property rights. He does get along with Hank, though, who runs the hardware store and is played by Danny Glover. This isn’t a place for hard feelings or fierce arguments.

Still, some serious trouble is afoot. A process called “polar fracking” has skewed the Earth’s rotation, wreaking havoc on the planet’s diurnal rhythms — sometimes the sun shines in the middle of the night; sometimes darkness falls at noon — and disturbing the slumber of the dead. They start climbing out of their graves and eating people in the usual sloppy, bloody way. The three cops have to deal with the situation, aided for a while by the town’s new coroner (Tilda Swinton). “This will end badly,” says Officer Ronnie Peterson (Driver), and I won’t spoil anything by saying how he knows.

Not that there’s really anything to spoil. “The Dead Don’t Die,” which features an excellent title song by Sturgill Simpson (who shows up, undead, dragging a guitar behind him), runs on mood rather than plot. And like Jarmusch’s vampire film, “Only Lovers Left Alive,” it’s not a terrible mood to be in. This is an end-of-the-world party with an appealing guest list and inviting, eccentric décor. Bill Murray is, if not the official host, then the master of ceremonies, as wry and craggy as you’d want him to be. Eszter Balint is here, and Rosie Perez, too. Also Tom Waits. The consumption of human flesh just keeps it interesting, and the crepuscular light — shot by ghoulishly gifted cinematographer Frederick Elmes — gives it a bewitching, Halloween ambience.

The only significant screams come from Sevigny’s character, who behaves as if she were in an actual horror movie. (When Driver’s cop is confronted by guts, gore or mild unpleasantness, his stock response is “Yuck.”) Jarmusch respects the genre without really committing to it. At several points, he pays explicit homage to George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” and those gestures are humble rather than presumptuous. More than 50 years after Romero set corpses walking, nobody really needs to update his vision — or his canny diagnosis of modern pathologies.

Zombies are just people, of course, reduced to a simple, insatiable, cannibalistic appetite. They’re horrifying, but also strangely innocent, since they don’t act out of evil motivations or through sinister conspiracies. It’s also easy and fun to kill creatures that are already dead, and the last stretch of “The Dead Don’t Die” is full of decapitations and exploding skulls, as Centerville becomes a zone of locally sourced retail carnage.

Driver, Murray and the other townspeople address the menace with sad stoicism, a show of resistance in the face of inevitable apocalypse that is not without its poetry. And yet there’s also something missing, an element of intensity or a sense of stakes. If I lived in a nice place and it was overrun by flesh-eating ghouls, I might get scared or mad. Does that make me a hipster? Or a square?

‘The Dead Don’t Die’

Rated R forhipsters. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/movies/the-dead-dont-die-review.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

'The Dead Don't Die' review: Zombies? Hipsters? A hamlet beckons

Those three play most of the police department of Centerville, a hamlet in some possible proximity to Pittsburgh or Cleveland — where the hipsters might come from — that advertises itself as “a nice place.”

A direct message like this, beamed from another person’s sensibility into your own sensorium, isn’t meant to be shared.

That other person, in this case, is Joanna Hogg, who wrote and directed. (Her previous features are “Exhibition,” “Archipelago” and “Unrelated,” all very much worth seeking out.) But there’s also something specific to the manner, mood and subject of her tale of amour fou and artistic aspiration in early ’80s London that invites discretion. “The Souvenir” feels like a whispered confidence, an intimate disclosure that shouldn’t be betrayed because it isn’t really yours.

There’s an interesting paradox here: a movie that feels like it was meant for you alone and also like none of your business. Watching the oblique scenes unfold, at first mysteriously and then with ever greater force and clarity, you might believe yourself more of an eavesdropper than a confidant, as if you were sitting at the next table at the ridiculously fancy tearoom where Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) and Anthony (Tom Burke) have come on a date.

Are we sure they’re dating? (Julie’s mother, played by Byrne’s real-life mother, Tilda Swinton, persists in supposing otherwise.) What exactly is their deal? Julie’s is that she’s a film student, trying to put together an ambitious, somewhat vague-sounding thesis set in the northern port city of Sunderland. It’s about a boy named Tony who loses his mother, though the more we hear about the project the less clear it seems. This is partly because the fictional Tony is often competing for Julie’s attention with the actual Anthony.

We surmise that Anthony is at least a few years older than Julie and also different from the relaxed, racially and sexually diverse group of friends and schoolmates who gather at her apartment to drink, smoke and listen to records. Anthony seems, at least at first glance, to be from what the British would call a rather posh background. His ironical, world-weary way of talking and his chalk-striped suits and monogrammed slippers suggest a privileged upbringing. Julie, by contrast, puts out a decidedly middle-class vibe, including the way she self-consciously checks her own privilege in conversations with her professors.

But these first impressions are soon revealed to be completely backward. Anthony’s father (James Dodds) is a former shipyard worker and an art school graduate who lives with the rest of the family in cozy, rural Bohemian dishevelment. Julie’s parents, meanwhile (the marvelous James Spencer Ashworth plays her father), reek of old, landed money, with aristocratic manners, solidly but not stridently conservative views and enough cash to subsidize their daughter’s student lifestyle in a comfortable Knightsbridge duplex.

Anthony claims to work for the Foreign Office. A note of skepticism is in order for the simple reason that, as Julie slowly discovers, he has a habit of lying about nearly everything. It’s not his only habit. I hesitate to mention this — less because of spoiler sensitivity than because of a strange impulse to protect the privacy of fictional beings — but he’s also a heroin addict.

And now, like Julie, I’m inclined to make excuses. Not to deny or minimize the increasingly obvious fact of Anthony’s drug use — as Julie does for as long as she can — but to dispel certain false impressions that the mention of it might leave behind. There is a way of describing “The Souvenir” at the level of plot that makes it sound interesting and absorbing but also conventional: another chronicle of addiction and codependency, another cautionary fable of a smart woman making a foolish choice, another period drama celebrating a wilder time.

It sort of is all of that, but it is also emphatically not that at all. The title refers to a small, exquisite painting by 18th-century French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard that Anthony and Julie behold on one of their maybe-dates. It depicts a young woman, sharply scrutinized by her pet dog, carving letters into the trunk of a tree. “She’s very much in love,” Anthony says with suave certainty, and perhaps he’s right. But there’s a lot more going on in the picture — and in the moving picture that shares its name — than that simple declaration would suggest. The woman is making a mark and putting down a marker, declaring her own presence with a mixture of shame and audacity, impulsiveness and deliberation.

Julie isn’t quite so bold, or so embarrassed. She does love Anthony, of course, and she sacrifices a great deal for him without quite realizing what she’s doing. Over the span of the film — it’s hard to know exactly how much time is passing, which is of course exactly how the passage of time can feel — her friends slip away, and the work that had seemed so urgent feels a bit more remote. But the interplay of forces in Julie’s life is subtle, as is the balance, in her own temperament, between decisiveness and passivity.

Byrne is a revelation, and Julie is an embodiment of the awkwardness and heedless grace of young adulthood almost without precedent in the movies. Byrne is, of course, the child of one of the greatest actresses alive, but her own talent is of an entirely different order. The point of Julie is that she’s a half-formed creature who we’re watching take shape, partly through the development of her own nature and partly under the influence of external forces. With her soft features and hesitant diction, Byrne gives Julie’s confusion a sensual, almost metaphysical, intensity. For the duration of “The Souvenir,” nothing in the world is more important than what will happen to her.

Or, to adjust the grammar a bit, what will turn out to have happened. This movie is a memory piece, after all (with a sequel in the works), set at a time of IRA bombings and ascendant Thatcherism. It’s also a coming-of-age story, implying a backward-looking perspective of maturity. The grain of the film (David Raedeker is the director of photography) shrouds the action in a delicate caul of nostalgia, communicating an ache that Julie can’t yet feel but that we can see forming inside her. This is one of the saddest movies you can imagine, and it’s an absolute joy to watch.

Rated R. A world of hurt. Running time: 1 hour, 59 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="26312eb7-a644-4025-b14a-c111195c0de4" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/movies/the-souvenir-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'The Souvenir': A great movie about a bad boyfriend

(Critic’s Pick): “The Souvenir” is one of my favorite movies of the year so far, but I almost want to keep it a secret. Partly because it’s the kind of film — we all have a collection of these, and of similar books and records, too — that feels like a private discovery, an experience you want to protect rather than talk about.

The setting is 19th-century Vietnam, which Mayfair, who was born in Ho Chi Minh City and studied film at New York University, renders with delicate precision. May’s new home, in a steep valley with flowering trees and airy wooden buildings, is both paradise and prison. Governed by rigid, patriarchal customs and rituals, her daily routines also make room for solitude and even pleasure. The two senior wives, Lao (Nguyen Nhu Quynh Le) and Xuan (Mai Thu Huong), welcome her with big-sisterly advice about sex, childbirth and domestic politics.

The story, which follows May from the day of her arrival through a pregnancy, illuminates her social and physical surroundings with quiet clarity. The seasons of her forced transition from child to mother are measured against the life cycle of the silk worms, a source of metaphorical as well as economic sustenance. Like them, the wives are part of a cottage industry that mixes beauty and utility, captives of their own productivity.

When May becomes pregnant, she prays for a boy, observing that Xuan, who has given birth to two daughters, holds a lower status than Lao, the mother of sons. She also observes the affair between Xuan and their husband’s oldest son, a relationship that brings conflict and tragedy to the clan and some heavy-breathing al fresco eroticism to the film.

The sensuality that Mayfair and Chananun Chotrungroj, the director of photography, create around May is seductive, and also unnerving. “The Third Wife” presents a tableau of injustice — a male-dominated hierarchy that directly oppresses women and brings collateral misery to some men as well — from a perspective that feels both compassionate and detached. It’s too cool for melodrama and too pretty for politics, and the drama of May’s experience occupies a middle ground between pity and indignation.

The cruelty she encounters is a fact of life, as is the solidarity she occasionally experiences with Lao and especially with the unfailingly kind Xuan. The possibility of freedom occasionally stirs like a faint breeze, and the film’s final scenes hint at desperate and defiant acts of resistance. But the movie is also trapped in the same claustrophobia it depicts, unsure of how much it can or wants to get away with.

‘The Third Wife’ is rated R for sex and cruelty. In Vietnamese, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="b5aa57b6-d4f6-3e98-a3c9-8ac3dd15f1a9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/movies/the-third-wife-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'The Third Wife' review: Cruelty and sensuality in 19th-century Vietnam

At 14, May (Nguyen Phuong Tra My) travels up river to marry a man she has never met and start a new life on his family’s silk plantation. The household, which includes servants, her husband’s two other wives and their children, is a place where intimacy and cruelty can be hard to tell apart. It’s the center of a world rendered with pathos and somewhat prurient fascination in “The Third Wife,” Ash Mayfair’s finespun debut feature.

Day, who was 97 when she died Monday, broke through as a singer in the mid-1940s and crossed over into movie stardom in the next decade. She’s still often remembered as an avatar of the postwar, pre-counterculture pop culture mainstream: wholesome, friendly, sexless. Accordingly, the first adjective applied to her in that article’s summary is “virginal.”

That word evokes a leering one-liner attributed to the musician and wit Oscar Levant, who said he “knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.” Levant’s joke depends on a category mistake, confusing the persona of a star with her person (Day was married four times), even as it misses the joke tucked into the persona itself. The v-word applied to Day signals the acceptance of an alibi that was never meant to be believed in the first place, the literal-minded gloss on a text that was only there to beckon us toward the subtext.

The truth, hidden in plain sight in so many of her movies and musical performances, is that Doris Day was a sex goddess. That’s not a term we use much anymore (for good reason), and in its heyday it was generally applied to actresses who wielded their erotic energies more nakedly, so to speak.

Day wasn’t a glamorous blond enigma like Grace Kelly or Kim Novak — though she did, like both of them, work with Alfred Hitchcock. She was not a Hollywood bombshell in the manner of Marilyn Monroe (or Mamie Van Doren, with whom she competed for Clark Gable’s attention in the 1958 comedy “Teacher’s Pet”). And she certainly didn’t work in the same erogenous zone as European actresses like Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren, who promised sophisticated American moviegoers a glimpse of freedom from Puritanical inhibition, and sometimes also from clothes.

But it’s too easy to say that Day was simply the opposite — the prim, prudish, all-American avatar of Eisenhower-era repression, with her hair in a neat chignon and her figure sheathed in a soberly tailored suit. To see her that way is to take at face value an archetype that she did everything in her formidable power to subvert.

Really, though, the whole virgin thing doesn’t even rise to the level of archetype. It’s an artifact of a movie censorship system that was, in the years after the Kinsey Report, rapidly losing touch with the realities of American behavior, and with the rest of popular culture as well.

In the canonical romantic comedies she made with Rock Hudson — “Pillow Talk” and “Lover Come Back” two years later — Day, in her late 30s, played unmarried New York career women.

The character Jan Morrow in “Pillow Talk” is an interior designer with a thriving, if hectic, business. Her counterpart in “Lover Come Back,” Carol Templeton, is a high-ranking executive in a Manhattan advertising firm. They are (implicitly) virgins by fiat of the production code, but really it’s up to the audience to decide how credible it is that neither one has managed to sleep with anyone until Hudson shows up. (When Hudson and Day reunited for “Send Me No Flowers” in 1964, they were playing husband and wife, and it wasn’t as much fun.)

The simple, sexist premise of these movies — and also of “Teacher’s Pet,” in which Day’s uptight professor is seduced by Gable, her most unlikely student — is that Day needs a raffish he-man to come along and ruffle her feathers with his sheer masculine irresistibility, getting her into bed with the benefit of clergy. But that pursuit is played out by means of a plot that relishes its own ridiculousness. The color schemes and production designs in the Hudson-Day comedies pulsate with whimsy. The atmosphere is pure camp, of the zany rather than the melodramatic variety. Every line sounds like a double-entendre. Every encounter is full of implication and innuendo, every character a collection of mixed signals.

These movies are naughty beyond imagining, and as clean as a whistle. In “Pillow Talk” — in effect the first movie about the pleasures and consequences of phone sex — Hudson and Day take a bath together. It’s a split-screen shot, but still.

The plot of “Lover Come Back” turns on the mass marketing of a powerful, possibly hallucinogenic drug. Heterosexual courtship under the mandate of matrimony has rarely looked so kinky. We’re not even talking about what it means that Rock Hudson is the male lead. The ambiguity is ambient. The deniability is perfect, and perfectly preposterous.

Day is the key to it all, because her presence simultaneously upholds the pretense of virtuous normality and utterly transgresses it. She is a walking semiotic riot with a pert nose and a winning smile, keeper and scrambler of a whole book of social norms and cultural codes.

To see what I mean, consider a scene from “Pillow Talk” in which Jan takes Brad Allen (Hudson’s playboy classical-music composer) to a nightclub. It’s maybe daring for his square sensibilities, which is to say that the music is being performed by black people. (The clientele is all white.) It turns out that his date is familiar with the musicians, and the music. Midway through a song called “Roly Poly,” the pianist and singer (Perry Blackwell) invites Jan to take a verse — “come on Miss Morrow, you know this one” — and pretty soon Brad is clapping along. By the chorus, he and Jan are playing patty cake, and pretty soon the whole joint is singing about the satisfactions of a lover who is built for comfort rather than for speed.

It’s impossible not to interpret this number as a cringe-inducing spectacle of cultural appropriation, pushed to and past the point of parody. The sexual and racial undercurrents eddy and swirl under a surface of pure silliness. In old Hollywood movies, African American music is a complicated signifier, not least for the white characters who appreciate it. In not-so-old movies, too. When, for example, Ryan Gosling takes Emma Stone to listen to jazz in “La La Land,” he is telling her, and us, something about the kind of guy he is. He’s claiming access to, and a share of, what the music represents. Passion. Authenticity. Sex, too, of course.

In 1959, one name for this transaction — which might look from one angle like a gesture of respect, from another like an act of brazen existential plunder — was “hip.” It was a noun as much as an adjective, and it was not a word that anyone would have thought to apply to Doris Day. Partly because she was too canny to take it seriously, notwithstanding her serious interest in African American music.

In “Love Me or Leave Me,” a show-business biopic from 1955, she performs a version of Irving Berlin’s “Shaking the Blues Away,” wearing a low-cut bright-blue gown slit up to her thigh. The lyric’s absurd evocation of religious revivals “way down South” gives way to a stageful of male chorines in top hats and tails, as Day belts out a paean to dancing that is a rollicking celebration of … something else. She’s singing the language of rock ’n’ roll at the moment of rock ’n’ roll’s emergence, but what she’s doing is … something else. She’s messing with all our categories. Which was her great and underappreciated gift.

This article originally appeared in <a id="198ea13f-feac-4be6-8990-bd8f2c1a9815" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/movies/doris-day-appreciation.html">The New York Times</a>.

Doris Day: A hip sex goddess disguised as the girl next door

(An Appraisal): The Hollywood Reporter obituary for Doris Day describes her in the headline as “Hollywood’s Favorite Girl Next Door,” which is reasonable enough, if not terribly imaginative.

During the interview, Pasolini, played with melancholy poise by Willem Dafoe, is in a pessimistic, ruminative mood, contemplating a society so mired in corruption, violence and dishonesty that the only hope for the future may lie in its destruction. He also reflects on his own activity as a poet, essayist, filmmaker and novelist. “How do you define yourself?” he is asked. “As a writer,” Pasolini replies with a shrug.

His Olivetti typewriter serves as a talisman in this movie (first shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2014), which is more of an essay than a biopic. Pasolini, who was born in 1922, led an eventful and complicated life — Barth David Schwartz’s English-language biography runs to nearly 800 pages — and died a senseless and sensationally violent death at 53. “Pasolini” takes place mainly in the days leading up to his killing, but, if anything, Ferrara, a notorious provocateur in his own right, tries to dispel some of the feverish speculation and conspiracy-mongering that has surrounded that crime. His reverence for his subject as a fellow artist and kindred rebel spirit is evident in every frame, but he also works to strip away the layers of martyrdom and mythmaking that obscure the man and his art.

(Critic’s Pick): In the autumn of 1975, at the Rome apartment he shares with his mother and a cousin, Pier Paolo Pasolini is giving what will turn out to be his last interview. A week after his body is found on a beach outside the city, the conversation will be published in La Stampa under the headline “We Are All in Danger.” Parts of it are reproduced verbatim (in English), in Abel Ferrara’s new film.

A.O. Scott

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