At least in terms of a basic outline, Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall isn't very different from the kind of feature-length drama that ITV broadcasts on a Sunday evening: somebody insufferable has come to a sticky end, but who did it and why? The key difference here being that Triet's film, co-written with Arthur Harari, doesn't elide real, significant information or an omnipresent perspective as a dramatic device. Neither would have any real bearing on this story's objective or outcome, which is far more concerned with the time and energy apportioned to untangling the relationships unpinning a few thoughtless moments on the balcony of a half-built chalet. Attempts by the authorities to recreate the final moments of failing writer Samuel Maleski's life are complicated by the slight, volunteered pieces of data not really standing up to the scrutiny of a staged experiment and Maleski's preference for an appalling, repetitive steelpan cover of a 50 Cent track.
Blame for Maleski's therefore mercifully split skull naturally falls on Sandra Hüller's Sandra Voyter, Maleski's wife, despite there being no evidence of a murder weapon or appropriately soiled clothing. This seemingly key point is raised then instantly dismissed by Antoine Reinartz's rabid prosecutor once the case does eventually reach court. Again, this is where Anatomy of a Fall diverges with the Anglophonic norm. French legal cases, if Triet's film is to be believed, are marathons in which the accused party is expected to be constantly available to form responses and counter-arguments for the evidence or theories being presented. The scrutiny is both degrading and exhausting, dredging up success as well as infidelity to hammer home the idea that Voyter's cooled marital demeanour, as well as a casual approach to her own sexuality, emasculated her husband, putting him on a path to suicide. So, even if her own hands did not directly take his life, she is still the guilty party. One of Voyter's only weapons against these intrusions into the most private aspects of her life is a faltering grasp on the French language. Voyter's fluency comes and goes, allowing her to retreat a step from the stressful proceedings while apportioning a fraction of responsibility for ordering her unspooling thoughts to the in-court translator.
Existing outside the ultra-positive feedback loop of the central, female dolls is Ryan Gosling's Ken, an accessory cursed with enough basic cognition to be able to develop his own unhealthy desires. He covets Margot Robbie's oblivious Barbie, desperate to possess her for reasons he cannot even begin to articulate. Gosling, slathered in product that somehow manages to evoke both the bronze glow of the beach and the pancake make-up of Paul Reubens, is the male equivalent of Robbie's Barbie in the sense that he has a faint awareness of the ineffable frequencies emanating from the real world. While Barbie journeys into our reality for reasons of self-reflection, Gosling's stowaway does so as a way to tighten his grip on a Barbie who has stepped outside her natural habitat. This green-eyed monster instantly becomes an acolyte of the toxic masculinity he witnesses, returning to his birthplace, ahead of the heroine, to scour his shire by spreading the doctrine of the mini-fridge to other dim-witted appendages. Easily the most financially successful film of the Summer, if not the whole of 2023, Barbie has achieved all this while laying bare the strange inadequacies driving men who seek unquestioned power; the demand they have for a world pressed into monotonal servility. And it doesn't even make them happy.
Rather than chain-smoke his way through a well-earned retirement, Hayao Miyazaki has toiled again to deliver The Boy and The Heron, an incredibly charming, extradimensional fairy tale constructed around the kind of child who spends their school breaks in the countryside, fashioning weapons out of the abundant raw material. Partially inspired by How Do You Live?, Genzaburo Yoshino's 1937 novel about a teenager's investigations into the human condition (the Japanese release of Miyazaki's film even retaining that specific title), The Boy and The Heron uses its fantastical setting as a way for this film's central character, the grieving and emotionally cool Mahito Maki, to connect with and decode the adults he has either lost or rejected topside, in the real world. So, while trapped in a pocket universe that revolves around a throbbing, landlocked comet, school bullies have their role taken up by a manipulative harpy; an irritating, elderly nursemaid is given back her youth, transformed into an impressive pirate Queen; while Maki's step-mother, and the child she carries, become the centrepieces of a ceremonial nativity. For all the accusations of cosiness levelled against Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli (a remark based more on Tumblr food-prep gifs and the image ascribed to YouTube homework beats than anything actually in their films), The Boy and The Heron is, as with a great deal of the director's work, concerned with the anxieties and illogical frequencies experienced by children as they take their first, tentative steps into the world of adulthood. In Heron, the first inkling of this passage is marked by an electrifying sequence that sees Maki racing to the burning hospital that traps his mother. Powerfully animated by Shinya Ohira, this incident dispenses with Ghibli's admittedly approachable, house style to stretch and twist the appearance of an adolescent experiencing overwhelming trauma.
Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner's screenplay revolves around a certain kind of loneliness, one achieved through a lifelong dedication to emotional passivity all while possessing an incisive grasp on that which makes other, separate people tick. Michelle Williams' Mitzi Fabelman dominates both her son's life and the first half of The Fabelmans; a mother churning through a slow-motion nervous breakdown. Her constant crumble marked by varying gradients of grinning terror. Mitzi's neuroses are so obvious and so relentlessly acted out that they have, inadvertently, subordinated every other member of her family into the role of an appreciative audience. They are the extras or background players, condemned to swirl around this subject to very little effect. Mitzi is a sitcom character trapped outside of her natural habitat and suffering mightily for this cruel, cosmic displacement.
Anaita Wali Zada's Donya, the subject of Babak Jalali's Fremont, has her walls up. She isn't unkind or impolite, she simply withholds herself, reluctant to engage with the people around her in anything but pleasantly detached affirmatives. Donya's isolated, solitary existence is that of a pariah; a possibly self-imposed status she believes she has acquired by working as an English translator on an American army base in Afghanistan. The stigma of this collusion lingers even when living on the other side of the planet. Her apartment is in a building filled with other Afghanis, one of whom goes out of his way to demonstrate his disdain for Donya. This neighbour, the brusque Suleyman, is just one person though. The other men, though hardly romantic prospects given their advancing age, treat Donya with the same sort of non-committal friendliness that she herself deploys. Though disinclined to discuss her feelings of trauma directly, Donya seems to suffer from PTSD: as well being guarded and occasionally impulsive, she cannot sleep easily, even when medicated. Jalali's beautiful black and white film, shot in a narrow, Academy ratio, slowly but surely details the unlearning of the kind of subordination imposed upon a person when they live in a occupied country. Donya shedding years of dutiful compliance to arrive somewhere more concerned with her own needs.
Even if the familial melodrama doesn't quite do it for you (although deeply ungrateful when judged against the excellent film we already have, it's tempting to imagine what the Kinji Fukasaku of the 1970s could've teased out of a monster movie based around a failed kamikaze pilot raging in the ruins of post-war Japan), writer-director (and Visual Effects Supervisor) Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus One contains multiple sequences of expertly ordered action that account for several, complimentary layers of human and technological complication. The Godzilla that makes landfall in Minus One is explicitly a creature rooted in Archipelago folklore that has been mutated by the American hydrogen bomb tests. It isn't simply a walking, irradiated natural disaster, it's an enormous, malevolent manifestation of nuclear Armageddon; a boiling, bloodied beast that methodically lashes out at the scurrying vermin that have transformed him so horribly.
Godzilla's human counterpart is Ryunosuke Kamiki's Shikishima, a man shattered not just by The Pacific War but the obligation that he should have wanted to become a bomb himself, this time to vanquish Japan's Allied invaders. Shikishima is, for a great deal of the film's running time, robotic and meek; a person completely trapped by the trauma he has experienced. He isn't, therefore, a particularly likeable lead character for long stretches of the film. It's difficult not to enthusiastically side with the older men who chide him for his coldness towards his adopted daughter or his unwillingness to return the affections of Minami Hamabe's Noriko, the woman he co-habits with. Similarly, it's excruciating to watch him sink into the background during faltering citizen meetings in which scientists and old sailors talk about what's to be done about a territorial behemoth who expels mushroom clouds. Once the team is in possession of an experimental aircraft though, Shikishima begins to wake up and come alive. The power of flight, combined with an objective more deeply felt than despairing, suicidal nationalism, unlocks something in this bowdlerised man. Hearing composer Naoki Sato's urging, metronomic piece Resolution while Shikishama buzzes The God of Rubble isn't just satisfying, it's genuinely exhilarating.
David Fincher's The Killer takes the hobbyist tendencies of bored, middle-aged men and maps them over a personality that has coalesced around the most efficient means of ravenous consumption. Although his enemies found a cold trail when making their own attempts on his life, by trashing his beach house and putting his tight-lipped girlfriend in hospital, the people who came to kill The Killer performed an even greater outrage: as far as he's concerned, they attacked his possessions.
Martin Scorsese again looks to criminality as the prism through which he can examine the country (or concept) of America. Although certainly not celebratory, previous examples of this device, such as Goodfellas or Casino, featured people who exhibited a certain kind of appalling charm. Scorsese, then co-writing with crime reporter Nicholas Pileggi, essayed characters who were skilled raconteurs; wise guys with nasty mouths who were able to carry audiences from shock and revulsion to nervous laughter with little more than exasperated, but well written invective. In the telling and re-telling of these modern myths, Scorsese's means of communication have gotten harsher though, less willing to entertain the idea that sociopaths can offer anything inherently worthwhile or even entertaining.
Killers of the Flower Moon is the co-writer (with Eric Roth) and director's steeliest example yet: a Biblical epic-length confessional that relentlessly portrays the white people who have imposed themselves on these lands as reflexively vile and parasitic. They are a rash of thugs and dimwits who steal and consume, sometimes to no obvious advantage. The conspiracy that surrounds the relentless degradation and murder of wealthy members of the Osage Nation touches every level of the so-called civilisation white Europeans have brought with them: oil magnates plot with landowners who deal with their own dunderhead underlings (who struggle to stage believable misdirection even with local law enforcement firmly in their pocket) and a pair of doctors who couldn't give a shit about the Hippocratic Oath. This fascination with brutes means there's an argument to be made that Killers of the Flower Moon lacks a consistent perspective on what it is to be so relentlessly assailed precisely because the Osage themselves are kept at so respectful a remove.
Equally though, Scorsese's film, and space and dimensionality afforded to the sons of bitches orchestrating all this murder, provides a description of lawbreaking that is steeped in the banality and mediocrity of the violent occupier. Robert De Niro's King Hale murders with impunity simply because it is permitted by the country he resides in. For a significant amount of time, no-one with any power can be roused to take action, to provide any level of investigation that doesn't default to a position that, either directly or indirectly, blames the Osage for their own demise. Scorsese's skill is evident throughout his film but is specifically notable in the way that racism is portrayed as a tacit agreement between these white squatters that the indigenous people who share their lives (and even beds) are somehow beneath them. This stench is everywhere: in knowing glances between schlubs; in loaded but discursive comments; in an outright, unashamed bigotry that is aimed directly at children by their own Grandparents. Killers of the Flower Moon is angry and accusatory. A white, Catholic filmmaker expounding on the sin of conquest, the crime that has so thoroughly stained the country of his birth.
The hold that Napoleon's work-life has on Ridley Scott's film is such that we are never subjected to inquiring glimpses into the French emperor's childhood. There are no inciting events that shaped this personification of human ambition. Likewise there is precious little attention paid to Bonaparte's various periods of disgraced exile or the years surrounding his death. We view Joaquin Phoenix's Corsican brute as he powers himself up the social pecking order, usually through daring displays of explosive violence. Frequently, Napoleon himself is somewhere inside these swirling maelstroms. Sometimes leveraging panic attack-level anxiety to blast himself up a siege ladder; other times riding into the midst of bloody scrums, his sabre drawn then striking.
Cillian Murphy's lightning rod performance crackles at the centre of writer-director Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. The film, surprisingly, closer to an Oliver Stone-style investigation into the kind of person that can steward seismic scientific progress than a dry, television movie map through the creation of the fission bombs. Murphy is gaunt, even skeletal throughout the film. His J. Robert a pile of grinning bones barely inhabiting the roomy men's fashions of the 1940s. Occasionally he dresses like a cowboy to prowl the New Mexican scrubland that will one day house the Manhattan Project. His relaxed, confident countenance is, given the wider circumstances, evocative of an American Gothic depiction of the Grim Reaper. A powerful wisp seated on dark, animal musculature, readying himself to dispense absolute ruin. Throughout, Nolan leverages the theme of quantum mechanisms to sink into the thoughts that torment his subject, giving the film over to interior perspectives of swelling and contracting galaxies or subatomic cauldrons throbbing with deadly, fissile energies.
J. Robert Oppenheimer is, in these early passages, an anxious post-grad driven mad by an innate and terrible knowledge that must be tamed and expelled, somehow. These tensions are underlined by our awareness that any personal triumph experienced by this Oppenheimer will also mean death and destruction on a previously unimaginable scale. Nolan's film explores the political stances taken for and against Oppenheimer and his appalling gadget, with particularly attention paid to the snivelling hindsight of the 1950s. The America depicted here is in the full grip of McCarthyism, a dreadful victor poised to sink itself completely into the military-industrial complex as a way to combat the unsanctioned self-determination of countries that have been deemed 'lesser'. Above all though, the thesis of Nolan's Oppenheimer is the repulsion and sheer terror felt when a theoretical concept of indiscriminate death not only becomes practical but inevitable then, finally, scalable. Once the Nazis are defeated, the morally cleaner, scientific imperative - to possess that which the enemy could use - dissipates. Murphy, his eyes bulging, becomes the nauseous focal point in a psychological horror film about the sainted prophet of the nuclear chain reaction. The great mind who has trespassed into the realm of creation then given the gift of fire to an army of bank managers, all driven insane by their own blood-lust.
Past Lives, the uncommonly assured feature film debut of playwright and Amazon streaming screenwriter Celine Strong, withholds its most obviously dramatic developments - the sort of moments that a lesser piece might construct explosive gear shifts around - then only refers to them in shy, past-tensed enquiries, years after they have taken place. Since writer-director Song has decided not to dramatize these developments, we can only know about them if the characters talk about them. Past Lives' strength is that the coded demand for an explanation of inaction is completely consistent with both of the central characters. Greta Lee's Nora does, to some degree, see herself as the subject in a swirling fiction; Teo Yoo's Hae Sung is much more gently romantic, seemingly content to have simply let this other, wonderful person touch on his own, ordinary life.
Not just the adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar that Wes Anderson wrote and directed for Netflix but the further three Tales of the Unexpected-style shorts that arrived shortly afterwards, demanding that the whole enterprise be considered as a particularly successful anthology feature. Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher and, most especially, Poison are all united by a confidence that sees the filmmakers not even attempt to conceal the physical trickery and sleight-of-hand associated with staging each of Dahl's lightly fantastical yarns. Sets and backgrounds teeter; stagehands walk in and out of the frame to deposit props; while actors drop in and out of character depending on whether they are directly addressing the audience or not. Anderson's attempts to collapse the distance between the viewer and his performers was all over Asteroid City (also released this year) but, to clearly state a preference, it's the clip and insistence of Dahl's stanza that really allows this concept to soar. This is not to suggest that Anderson's direction is anything less than exacting either: the pleasant, antwacky energy of these productions would evaporate instantly if it wasn't so completely obvious that every gesture and tremor was the result of an expert conductor teasing out his tale. Particular praise must go to Dev Patel as well, for revealing the high-wire skill he so effortlessly displays when performing rapid-fire dialogue peppered with conspiratorial asides.
Kemp Powers, Justin K Thompson and (Justice League Unlimited alumnus) Joaquim Dos Santos' Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is so far ahead of everything else in its flea-bitten field that it's not even funny. If anything, it's been kind of revolting to see the live action Marvel phases plundering, and thereby depreciating, the Spider-Verse films' core concept of intersecting heroes culled from every end of the creative spectrum. In the live action films these collapsing realities are a way to bridge disparate, or even flagging properties. Here the impetus is practically archaeological, plumbing the depths of Marvel's signature arachnid as a way to celebrate the discordant energies at the heart of sixty years worth of serial comics. Everybody in Spider-Verse springs from different cultural or creative dimensions. They aren't united under a house style either. They clash, deliberately. Not just in terms of plot-progressing skirmishes either. Cutesy Lego people rub up against mixed media rebels and strobing, smearing sociopaths. Flat, creaky cel animation noses around live action bleed-ins that are, admittedly, the piece's weakest element. Nudge those cameos aside though and you're left with 140 minutes of world-class animators mapping the infinite ways in which a straining, human body can manoeuvre itself around imminent death.
Cate Blanchett's Lydia Tár knows she is a philanderer; worse she is haunted, in an unconscious and unacknowledged way, by the awareness that she has sabotaged and undermined at least one former girlfriend to such an extent that the young woman in question has seen no option but to take her own life. While spending minutes tearing down Zethphan Smith-Gneist's student for failing to see the art rather than the artist, Tár is aware that she is guilty of her own scurrilous trespasses. Misdeeds that, in the fullness of time, might one day make their way into the permanent cultural record, tarnishing her own legacy. She's scared, therefore she attacks this young person with every weapon at her disposal. Blanchett's performance here combines the sweeping charm of an arrogant expert, a pretentious insistence on using words and phrases derived from non-English languages (which are then immediately clarified to rub salt into the wound), and a physical intimidation so abrupt and unexpected that her jabbing actions generate their own strange kind of plausible deniability. Surely no-one would be so brazen?
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is delightful. The film an expert examination of a never-ending merchandise machine that manages to chart new, emotionally fertile ground while reconfiguring plastic commodities so successful that, once upon a time, they had to be rationed. Considering the distinctly homicidal look that Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird originally gave their sinister, sewer-dwelling creations, the ninja turtles have proven to be a particularly elastic concept. As it turns out, the basic appeal of repulsive-looking amphibians waving around martial arts weapons can survive even the most transformative of takes. Like many big screen adaptations before it, Kyler Spears and Jeff Rowe's film is a reappraisal, taking the four youngsters back to zero to explore their glowing origins. Rowe, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit's screenplay places their greatest emphasis on a previously untapped adolescent longing. One premised on being, essentially, a pack of home school children lumbered with a well-meaning but fanatically mistrustful rodent for a parent.
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