2023 Film Review: Till (12A)

 Now I want America to bear witness.

Gist: In August of 1955 a 14-year-old African American lad named Emmett Till left his home in Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi. It was the final time his mother Mamie Till-Mobley would see him alive. While in the Delta, young Emmett died at the hands of a lynch mob, having been accused by a white woman of inappropriate advances. Till is the story of Mamie's efforts to achieve justice in the aftermath of her son's vicious torture and murder, a struggle that would act as a major catalyst for the US Civil Rights movement.

Juice: This film is a compelling watch and a difficult one, as, realistically, it should be. It only alludes to the central act of violence, but lingers on the consequences - both the emotional devastation wrought by Emmett's death and the appalling image of the boy's body that his mother shared with the world's news outlets. It's a tough and unflinching drama that doesn't seek a way to soften the black American experience in that era. At its heart (and wrenching those of the audience) is a performance by Danielle Deadwyler that's nothing short of extraordinary. She portrays a mother's love and grief, for sure, but also a fierce, controlled rage and steely courage as the story progresses, the camera fixing on her and refusing to cut away in protracted moments of intensity. 

Nor is hers the only noteworthy talent on show. Nigerian-born director Chinonye Chukwu makes some striking decisions, not least to have the film shot in vivid colour, giving it the warmth of a Normal Rockwell painting at odds with the ordeal endured by the protagonist and her extended family. She also keeps the story's racist tormentors shoved to the periphery, focusing instead on both the grief and the endurance of its black characters, and aided all the while by the elegiac depth of Abel Korzenioski's score. The support performances are strong too, not least that of Jalyn Hall, who with limited screen time invests the precocious Emmett with a naive likability that only rubs salt into the story's emotional wounds.

Judgement: 9/10. Co-written by Keith Beauchamp, director of a 2005 documentary on Emmett's murder, Till is a terrifically made film underpinned by a sense of authority and carried home by Deadwyler's remarkable performance. That the Academy failed to nominate its lead for a Best Actress Oscar this week suggests that many of its members simply haven't seen the film, resulting in one egregious oversight. Till is one of those movies that once seen may prove too painful for a rewatch. But its ongoing relevance, its accomplished direction, and that frankly astonishing central turn deserve your time. They'll certainly have your attention.

2022 Catch-up: The Wonder (15)

 I live on manna. From Heaven.

Gist: In post-Famine rural Ireland a girl named Anna O'Donnell has seemingly gone four weeks without eating, yet without starving. Enter Florence Pugh as Elizabeth Wright, an English nurse come from the Crimean War and summoned to Ireland specifically so she can observe young Anna. Locals are calling the girl's condition a miracle, but Elizabeth, along with London reporter (Tom Burke) originally from the locality, are understandably skeptical. The truth behind the fasting girl's situation, however, may prove more haunting than either believers or dissenters could fathom.

Juice: Based on Emma Donoghue's 2016 novel, The Wonder is a film where characters clash on multiple fronts, the lines of division either explicit or merely implied. Faith versus science, Irish versus English, community patriarchs versus a female outsider - relations are complex and strained, with slim chance of common ground as the odd and secretive Anna's fate plays out. It's a finely tuned screenplay, with input from both director Sebastian Lelio and Succession writer Alice Birch, who supplied lines for Pugh in the equally bleak and windswept Lady Macbeth. 

For all the cross-currents of conflict, this is a dramatic slow-burn. Lelio is restrained in his direction, letting the story get its hooks in elsewhere. Like in the austere, perfectly lit cinematography of Ari Wegner (The Power of the Dog and - again - Lady Macbeth) and Matthew Herbert's creepily mesmerising score with its evocative, unsettling female vocals that insinuate their way right under your skin. Pugh is - no big shock - terrific, gradually exposing depths of empathy under a brittle exterior. Her chemistry with the amiably cynical Burke is a welcome counterpoint to the grimness elsewhere, and the support cast, including Ciaran Hinds and Toby Jones (he gets everywhere these days), provide additional weight. But it's relative newcomer Kila Lord Cassidy who gives the other standout performance as Anna, embodying the peculiar, otherworldly girl with enough humanity to get you fully invested in her increasingly precarious fate.

Judgement: 8/10. The Wonder deals, among other things, with the stories we tell ourselves to explain the inexplicable, the heartbreaking, or the just plain scary. That helps explain the film's strange third-wall-break framing, and just maybe the events of the final act, where all that simmering emotion pays off in ways you won't necessarily expect. While presenting a very different mystery from fellow period drama The Pale Blue Eye, it could work well as a companion piece, with both movies' chilliness - environmental and otherwise - ultimately countered by the intensity of complex human passions. At any rate, it's a lovingly crafted and affecting tale, with a further knockout turn from unstoppable Florence. Yet she's only one one of many reasons behind the film's stealthily creeping power. 

2022 Catch-Up: The Pale Blue Eye (15)

 The heart is a symbol or it is nothing.

Gist: The year is 1830, the place West Point military academy, New York, and world-weary detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) has been summoned to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of a young cadet. A verdict of suicide is rendered problematic by the fact that the corpse has been mutilated in macabre fashion. Senior officers want the mystery solved swiftly, but are perturbed when Landor enlists the help of a young private, with a poetic turn of mind, named Edgar Allan Poe. And as the truth unfolds, it proves as dark and twisted as anything of which young Poe's literary imagination will ever conceive.

Juice: The Pale Blue Eye is a snowbound January treat from director Scott Cooper, one best watched by a fire warm enough to thaw its icy Gothic chill. West Point in winter is a beautifully bleak setting for this morbid tale of human frailty and evil, the uniform blue of the cadets standing out against the crisp white backdrop. It's down to stark and spectacular camerawork from the sure hand of Masanobu Takayanagi, complimented by Howard Shore's epic lamentation of a score. The performances are chilly too. Christian Bale is at his most gruff and contained as the damaged detective, while a coterie of great character actors - Timothy Spall, Simon McBurney, Toby Jones - populate the military command with frosty skepticism. Lucy Boynton, meanwhile, is all pale reserve as a focal point of several characters' romantic attention, and Gillian Anderson delivers an altogether more gregarious and enjoyably scenery-chewing performance as the doctor's wife. But it's Harry Melling who stands out as the theatrical and morbidly romantic young Poe, adding humanity to the proceedings along with greater warmth (albeit a mite creepy) than all the ale he downs with Bale. The lad has come a long way from the Dursley household in Harry Potter, and his portrayal of the burgeoning literary genius is a big step along his road to acting greatness.

If the film has a drawback, it's the slow and meandering mid-section, one that pushes the story beyond a two-hour running time and loses along the way some of the plot momentum so briskly established in the opening. Compensation comes in the form of sheer melodrama in the movie's final stages, which deliver more plot layers than the snow blanketing West Point. This includes a twist you'll either embrace completely or dismiss as too damn much. I chose the former.

Judgement: 7.5/10. Director Cooper is no stranger to bleak stories - his western Hostiles, again with Bales, portrayed a brutal landscape - but The Pale Blue Eye has a specifically desolate beauty to it, while spinning a tale worthy of Edgar Allan himself. The film is an especial treat for lovers of American Gothic, leaning hard as it does into influences that might have shaped the writer of The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart. It takes its bitterly cold time, for sure, but makes it worth the while. So - throw a few extra logs on the fire, settle down with a snifter of something warming, and enjoy.

Filmic Forays 2023 Preview - Twenty Most Anticipated Films

I set about writing this feature with some trepidation. The last time I listed my most anticipated films of the forthcoming year was January 2020, three months before all of the UK's cinemas closed. When they opened again during the summer I was too covid-phobic even to go see Tenet, one of titles that had enthused me the most pre-pandemic. (I finally saw it when it came out on blu ray the following year, and it was almost worth the wait.)

Anyway, barring further global catastrophe - and were in the Reaming Twenties, so let's not tempt fate too far - I intend to view and report back on all the titles listed below. Here's hoping that the greater part of them live up to my expectations, and that their combined success provides the film industry and all our favourite movie theatres with the cash transfusion they continue to need. In case you're wondering, the first few of my picks were all released in North America and elsewhere during 2022, hence their inclusion. Enough said. Let's leap right in. 

1. Till (6th January)

This promises to be uncomfortable New Year viewing, focused as it does on the fight for justice in the aftermath of the notoriously racist crime from 1950s Mississippi. Danielle Deadwyler plays the campaigning mother of murdered Emmett Till, with Chinonye Chukwu as co-writer and director. The film has garnered critical praise and high audience scores, but hasn't scored the kind of box office that makes a hit. Let's see if the imminent awards season can create some additional buzz around around this weighty drama. Either way, it's on my early-2023 radar.

Verdict: TBA

2. Tár (13th January)

Tár has got all the buzz for which an arthouse movie could wish, most of it due to a front and centre performance that many people are calling the best of Cate Blanchett's career. This from the actress who gave us Kathryn Hepburn and Galadriel, Blue Jasmine and Carol, to name-check a mere handful of her greatest hits. Here she's in the spotlight as Lydia Tár, celebrated composer and glass ceiling-shattering conductor of a major European orchestra, the sins of whose past are threatening to unravel all the success in her present. It's written and directed by Todd Field, who's yet to do anything less than really, really good, so count me in for this character-based ride.

Verdict: TBA

3. Babylon (20th January)

Sad to say, filmmaker Damien Chazelle has already crashed and burned with this one. Riding high on the twin box office successes of Whiplash and La La Land, and the critical plaudits won by First Man, he's gone for broke with Babylon, a period epic depicting the excess and debauchery of silent era Hollywood. At three hours plus, however, this has turned out to be a project very few people want to see, on the big screen at any rate. Seems I'm one of those few. Everything I've watched of Chazelle's I've more than enjoyed, and First Man (his emotional Apollo 11 space odyssey) was my favourite film of 2018. Babylon may ultimately go down as the director's great cinematic folly, but with Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and a host of others spiralling into hedonistic 1920s destruction, I'm up for every last minute of this courageous theatrical bomb.

Verdict: TBA

4. The Fabelmans (27th January)

In his mid-seventies, Steven Spielberg goes from the expansive genre storytelling of the past few years (Ready Player One, West Side Story) to the most intimate and personal film of his fifty-year-plus career. It's not actually called The Spielbergs, but with the mirror it purportedly holds up to his family background and formative years as an aspiring young filmmaker, it might as well be. The trailer hints at all kinds of cinematic magic, and since 2021's awards-baiting Sharks and Jets reboot showed this maestro at the top of his game, we can expect something of insight and beauty, and doubtless with a good sprinkling of sentimentality. The pairing of Michelle Williams and Paul Dano as those Spielberg-y parents is likewise no bad sign. Get ready, this side of the Atlantic, to be charmed.

Verdict: TBA

5. The Whale (3rd February)

I won't lie - I approach any Darren Aronofsky film with as much apprehension as anticipation. While it'll no doubt be made with technical finesse and carry a heavyweight dramatic punch, The Whale will very possibly leave a residual taste in my mouth that'll ensure I never watch it again. I'm always glad I ran the newest Aronofsky gauntlet, for sure, but those evenings simply don't exist where a re-viewing of Requiem for a Dream or Mother! seems like a good plan. The Whale is proving as divisive as everything else the director has done (you've got to admire that commitment to envelope-pushing content and execution), but Brendan Fraser is being hailed as a comeback hero in his role as a reclusive and dangerously obese academic, in process of facing up to the consequences of his life choices. It's also got Stranger Things star Sadie Sink and The Menu's Hong Chau for added dramatic clout. I genuinely am keen to see this one. If I end up wanting to repeat the experience, I'll let you know.  

Verdict: TBA


6. Women Talking (10th February)

Which women? Mara. Foy. Buckley. McDormand. Among others. And this isn't any old chit-chat. Women Talking is based on the novel of the same name by Miriam Toews, in which a devout female group in an isolated religious community confront deeply ugly truths about their existence there. Canadian Sarah Polley wrote the screenplay and, from the look of anything I've seen, has directed the hell out of it; her 2012 documentary Stories We Tell is excellent, which also bodes well. Embraced by critics, this has been so far ignored by US cinema-goers, arguably due to a Christmas release. (Festive subject-matter this is not.) There's also the matter of that uninspiring title for those not familiar with the book. Here's hoping it surmounts these obstacles on its UK debut, finding a more enthusiastic audience. I'll be there for sure.

Verdict: TBA

7. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (17th February)

Will 2023 be the year in which I resume my love affair with the Marvel Cinematic Universe? It's not that I actively disliked any of the content aired by the studio over the past twelve months, but there was an undeniable sense of market saturation and of quantity at the expense of both quality and overarching narrative coherence. Well, my Spidey sense tells me that the MCU is about to steady its course with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Director Peyton Reid has steered the Ant-Man franchise through two entertaining heist/caper movies and is now taking it into epic micro-territory with one of Marvel's more heavyweight and layered casts. To the weaponised likability of Paul Rudd and to-die-for pairing of Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas is added Jonathan Majors in a potentially magnificent villainous turn as Kang the Conqueror. How much fun can an audience have in the Quantum Realm? Hopefully macro amounts.

Verdict: TBA

8. 65 (10th March)

I really like the look of this film - there's something about the colour palette in the trailer that I find really appealing. From all appearances it's a stripped down survival story (cast-wise at any rate) with Adam Driver and a young girl/daughter surrogate(?) struggling to stay alive, somehow having travelled 65 million years into a prehistoric past. Okay, maybe I just want to see a quality dinosaur pic following the travesty that was last year's Jurassic World: Dominion. But Driver is always good value, and the writing-directing team of Bryan Woods and Scott Beck originally conceived and drafted the screenplay that became A Quiet Place. So that's got to be a good sign. Hasn't it?

9 and 10. Pearl (17th March) / MaXXXine (TBC)

Ti West's X was one of my favourite horror films from 2022, and gosh darn it if he isn't in the latter stages of turning his '70s-style slasher into an unconventional trilogy. Pearl was released forever ago in North America, but over here we have to wait till March to see Mia Goth play the girlish version of her decrepit antagonist X role. This time the Texas Chain Saw milieu has been replaced with something more akin to an MGM studio-era classic (a twisted Wizard of Oz springs to mind), and Goth's performance has been widely hailed as breathtaking. As for MaXXXine, that one - release date included - remains shrouded in secrecy. All we know is that Goth will reprise her other X character, wannabe adult-movie starlet Maxine, into the 1980s. I have little if any idea what to expect and, with the same gifted team in charge, that's just how I like it.

Verdict: TBA

11. John Wick: Chapter 4 (24th March)

Did ever the killing of a house pet result in so much carnage as within the John Wick franchise? It seems a long time since Keanu Reeves' killing machine came out of self-imposed assassin's retirement to wreak vengeance on the perpetrators of that senseless dog-murder. Four films in and expect to find our antihero mired in the kind of glossy, balletic, high-octane violence that has become his trademark. The John Wick universe and its gloriously over-the-top mythology has expanded with each episode, production values escalating together with the choreographed mayhem's complexity. On realising at the end of part three that the film's Parabellum subtitle meant 'Prepare for war', I beamed, happy in the assurance that there would be more. Now that I've seen the trailer, I'm smiling again. We're mere months from re-immersion in this crazy world, and I for one couldn't be more glad.

Verdict: TBA

12. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 (5th May)

In all honesty I'm not a huge fan of Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2. I sensed, for much of the running time, that James Gunn's efforts to rebottle the first film's lightning simply weren't working. It was bigger and brasher, sure, but the humour felt forced and at points unnecessarily mean-spirited. Since then, however, the characters have been enjoyably developed elsewhere in the MCU, and the recent Guardians Holiday Special recaptured much of that original magic. The recent Vol. 3 trailer supplied both the lols and the feels while suggesting additional dramatic weight. This is to be the final outing for the disparate band of heroes and their dysfunctional-family dynamic, so consider my hopes renewed and my anticipation stoked.

Verdict: TBA

13. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2nd June)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse wasn't on my radar back in 2018. While I enjoy the live-action Spider-Movies as much as most people, comic-book animation isn't my bag at all. It's a measure of how much I was impressed by this film's narrative imagination and wealth of creativity that its sequel has made this list. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse promises to advance on its predecessor's spectacular visual craft, while spinning its multiversal myth-making into a significantly more complex web. With the cast list including a stupid amount of voice talent and the trailer exhibiting the same visual ingenuity and wit as first time around, I'll be surprised if this chapter doesn't out-smash the first on every conceivable level.

Verdict: TBA

14. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (14th July)

Tom Cruise may be a divisive figure, but no one can deny his commitment to one film project after another and, frankly, his willingness to risk his own sky-highly-insured neck in service to quality mass entertainment. Top Gun: Maverick remains my unexpected favourite film of last year, and I've loved the previous two Christopher McQuarrie-directed Mission: Impossible episodes, so based on that alone the odds of a top blockbuster experience are strong. Add an impressive trailer, the addition of Hayley Atwell to an already crackling cast, and an on-set featurette involving the franchise's most inadvisable stunt to date, well - what reason not to salivate?

Verdict: TBA

15. Oppenheimer (21st July)

Christopher Nolan continues to alternate between fiercely conceptual science-fiction and 20th century historical drama. (Let's face it, the guy's unlikely ever to give us a romantic comedy.) Regular Nolan collaborator Cillian Murphy is this time is front and centre as the so-called Father of the Atomic Bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and from what glimpses we've seen so far should be a mighty subatomic fusion of guilt and hubris in the role. He's not going to be left out to stew on his own, though, surrounded as he is by a support cast that includes Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, and Gary Oldman, along with Robert Downey Jr. in a turn that might redefine him post-Ironman. Of course the ultimate reason to get excited is the broad and start cinematic vision of the director paired with subject matter of such moment. Even in the trailer the sense of tragedy and awe is palpable. 

Verdict: TBA

16. Barbie (21st July)

No, I wouldn't have considered myself target audience for this one either. But then it turned out that Greta Gerwig - fresh from her Little Women success - is directing, having co-written the screenplay with partner Noah Baumbach of Marriage Story acclaim, and that Margot Robbie is starring as the iconic plastic heroine. There's also Ryan Gosling as Ken, which is fun. The nature of the film's concept remains an enigma, but a stand-out teaser trailer parodying Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (think evolution of the doll') suggests that this will be as riotous in its entertainment value as the colour scheme is pink. Life in plastic might just prove - in this case at least - to actually be fantastic. It should be a blast finding out. (Barbie is due to open the same day as Oppenheimer, so I'll watch the Oppenheimer blast first. I might find myself in need of some platinum blonde optimism afterwards.)

Verdict: TBA

17. Dune Part Two (3rd November)

Did you see Dune Part One? Have you read all of the book? If the answer to both those questions is 'Yes', then I scarcely need to explain why this is my most hotly anticipated film release of 2023. Denis Villeneuve (he doesn't do rom coms any more than Christopher Nolan) shouldered the challenge of adapting Frank Herbert's science fiction tome for the big screen with Sisyphean levels of commitment, and while he achieved an epic creative success, he's had to begin all over again, the story's halves not having been shot back to back. Unlike Sisyphus, however, he's got a whole lot of help with the task. That includes technicians capable of making gargantuan sandworms and insect-like ornithopters appear utterly real, the stirring musical contributions of Mr Hans Zimmer, and an already fine cast that's been bolstered by the likes of Florence Pugh (yup, her again), Christopher Walken, and Elvis himself, Austin Butler. How excited am I? Enough to read the book a second time - or at least listen to it on Audible. It's long, so November should come around just in time.

Verdict: TBA

18. Beau is Afraid (TBC)

Having proceeded in order of release date, I now come to a dicey trio of choices - insofar as their arrival in theatres isn't carved in granite. Of course, most of 2020's solid dates had to be rechiselled, so let's not get hung up on such petty details. Beau is Afraid - I know all of three things about this project. 1. It's written and directed by Ari Aster. 2. It's the life story of a (probably) fictional entrepreneur. 3. Its crazily talented cast is headed up by one Joaquin Phoenix. To take those each at a time... Aster, whether you loved or hated Hereditary and Midsommar, is one of the most exciting newer filmmakers around today. The fact that he's branching out from horror to embrace a story this enigmatic is fascinating in itself. And 'The Phoenix' doesn't sign up for any old crap. Frankly, if Ari and Joaquin made a Christmas Hallmark film together, I'd watch it gladly - this film all the more. Whatever it damn well turns out to be.

Verdict: TBA

19. The Killer (TBC)

The big 2023 hitters continue - hopefully - with David Fincher's The Killer. Sadly, this does suggest that there's no third season of criminal psychology drama Mindhunter on the horizon, but with a talent like Fincher, we're glad of what we get. And this film promises to hark back to cold steeliness of crime films like Panic Room and Zodiac in its subject matter, while drawing on the writing skills of Andrew Kevin Walker, with whom the director worked on the ever memorable Se7en. Adapted from a French graphic novel series about a ruthlessly efficient assassin having a psychological crisis, it'll be headed up by Michael Fassbinder and Tilda Swinton. That's one great combination of elements. Now just let it happen this year...

Verdict: TBA

20. Killers of the Flower Moon (TBC)

Let's round things off with a forthcoming opus from that other latter day great, Martin Scorsese. 2019's The Irishman was a mammoth achievement and an elegiac companion piece to movies like Goodfellas and Casino, and Killers of the Flower Moon feels like it'll carry similar dramatic heft. Based on a non-fiction book about murders of Osage tribespeople linked to big business interests, and the very birth of the FBI, it sounds like Scorsese is digging deeper into the forces of violence and corruption that have helped shape the modern US than ever before. The cast (DiCaprio, De Niro, Jesse Plemons) is as heavyweight as you'd expect, Dune writer Eric Roth is on screenplay duties, and Scorsese has only developed his visual mastery of storytelling on an epic scale. Now in his early eighties, he's still fighting the good fight on behalf of mature American cinema. It's a privilege to have him still working at this rate, so bring on another magnificent creation.

Verdict: TBA

Inevitably it's the most fiercely promoted films that grab attention, and the titles that make up my end-of-year favourites might look very different to this one. Terrific smaller films will show as if from nowhere, while some of the supposed heavy hitters will fail to land any punch. This is always the way. But so long as the public buy more film tickets and keep those cinema doors open, I'll be happy enough for now. Here's to some great theatrical movie experiences along the way. 

Happy New Year, and happy watching.