Movie review by Greg Carlson

Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s narrative fiction feature debut “All We Imagine as Light” is, among other things, a cinematic consideration of place. The movie begins but does not end in Mumbai, and the viewer hears multiple languages spoken throughout the deceptively simple and seductive story. Like Varda’s Paris in “Cléo From 5 to 7” (1962), Wong’s Hong Kong in “Chungking Express” (1994), and the titular Rio suburb in Meirelles and Lund’s “City of God” (2002), Kapadia conveys the essence of a particular city from the perspective of a native with deep knowledge. The weather, and especially the rains of monsoon season, evoke nothing less than a central character with just as much to say as the trio of women at the heart of the story.

Kapadia, now in her late 30s, also wrote the screenplay, inviting viewers into the lives of dedicated Malayali hospital caregivers. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), the deeply serious and occasionally dour head nurse, has labored for a long time without her husband, who moved to Germany for work shortly after their arranged marriage began. Younger roommate Anu (Divya Prabha) has fallen hard for Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), despite the reality that their differing religions stand in the way of a formal commitment. A third friend, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), is on the staff of the same hospital’s kitchen. Facing eviction after decades in Mumbai, she makes the decision to return to her birthplace in the seaside district of Ratnagiri.

Prabha and Anu accompany Parvaty to assist with the relocation. Kapadia capitalizes on the geographical shift, highlighting the immediate change of pace between the unforgiving speed of Mumbai and the relative tranquility of Parvaty’s village. Shiaz follows, as he and Anu are determined to find some privacy following the comic (and possibly cosmic) interruptions that have kept them from one another in the city. For the lovers and the viewers, the wait is worth it. Kapadia stages their encounter with lush sensuality, collaborating with cinematographer Ranabir Das to construct one of the year’s most intensely erotic scenes.

Prabha, whose own loneliness contributes to a hint of jealousy at Anu’s semi-secret love affair, applies her professional training when an unidentified man washes up on the shore after nearly drowning. Kapadia wrings an intense moment of clarity and reckoning from the surprising outcome of the encounter, trusting the audience to make sense of Prabha’s profound experience. The missing husbands have become a significant theme. In addition to Prabha’s absent spouse and the practical impossibility of a union between Anu and Shiaz, Parvaty is a widow. The director subtly plants the seeds of many ideas on the subjects of marriage and the partnership between friends.

“All We Imagine as Light” is simultaneously slow cinema and fast cinema, insofar as the blazing speed of life in Mumbai is depicted in stark contrast to the detailed relationships of the people Kapadia chooses to share with us. The turn away from the city to Parvaty’s hometown reinforces Kapadia’s commentary on the challenges faced by the three women in a system and culture built to the advantage of men and the disadvantage of women. Justin Chang points out that one of the movie’s villains is “ … a world in which a woman’s rights effectively die with her husband,” and “All We Imagine as Light” ruminates on that complex issue along with questions of loneliness, solidarity, and autonomy.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn’s previous feature, “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” was a dizzy, snarky riff on the Old Dark House motif and one of 2022’s most slept-on cinematic treats. Now, with a major Oscar-winning star in Nicole Kidman and a high-visibility Christmas Day release, the director – who also wrote the screenplay and produced – is poised to raise her profile with “Babygirl.” A throwback to the era of psychologically-motivated erotic thrillers that were occasionally taken seriously at the 1980s and 1990s box office, Reijn’s movie is a fully engaging fantasy investigating the desires of a high-powered CEO who embarks on an ill-advised infidelity with a young intern (Harris Dickinson, perfectly cast).

Reijn’s exposition includes the crackerjack revelation that Kidman’s Romy Mathis has never been brought to orgasm by her devoted and seemingly skillful husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas, also perfectly cast). One might think that a top-of-his-game theatre director – he’s working on a stylistically “edgy” production of “Hedda Gabler,” naturally – might be able to sniff out the real versus the pretend after nearly two decades with his partner, but as soon as Romy can fake her climax, she scampers down the hall with her laptop to privately masturbate to some domination/submission porn. Whether Jacob wonders where she went matters less than his inability to play along whenever Romy hints that she would like something other than vanilla.

In the meet-cute featured in the heavily marketed trailer, Romy is “rescued” from an aggressive dog by Dickinson’s resourceful Samuel, who calms the canine with a cookie from his pocket. Reijn makes enough room for us to wonder whether Samuel planned every last detail of this initial encounter, and that second-guessing and uncertainty will bloom into a motif as the story takes its inevitable course. Soon enough, the boyishly insouciant Jacob starts pushing Romy’s buttons, immediately stepping over the boundary so clearly marked by any corporate sexual harassment training. But unlike Barry Levinson’s “Disclosure” and Chloe Domont’s “Fair Play,” Reijn is not interested in directly addressing the broader political dimensions at the intersection of sex and the workplace.

Instead, the filmmaker aligns the viewer with Romy as she struggles with her interior conundrum: the seemingly irreconcilable divide between the protagonist as an effective boss and leader who also derives sexual gratification from being told what to do. As a (still) rare woman in the male-dominated realm of robotics applied to warehouse automation, Romy wonders more than once if there is something inherently “wrong” with her or if what she desires is “bad.” Fortunately, Reijn mostly pulls back from the standard equation that kink deviates from the norm as the result of trauma or is otherwise something that can be “repaired” (i.e. “Fifty Shades of Grey”).

Part of the fun in watching “Babygirl” is experienced by engaging with Kidman’s total commitment to the role and Reijn’s smart decision to not take anything too seriously. In addition to the director’s devilish sense of humor and appreciation of camp, she sidesteps a list of genre cliches while subverting others. Supporting characters are handled with a refreshing sense of respect (including the minor subplot that probes Romy’s evolving relationship with her teenage daughter). Others have already pointed out ways in which the movie thematically overlaps with predecessors like “Belle de Jour” and “Secretary.” I would add Joanna Arnow’s recent “The Feeling When the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” to that list as a key companion piece.

“Babygirl” opens in cinemas on Christmas Day.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Essential viewing for cinephiles of any generation, director David Hinton’s engrossing documentary “Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger” celebrates one of cinema’s most fruitful partnerships. Hosted by on-screen narrator Martin Scorsese, whose personal relationship with Powell is addressed in the film, “Made in England” is a heartfelt tribute to the uncompromising vision of a pair of remarkable artists. Like previous Scorsese passion projects that highlight the inspirations and influences that helped to shape the directorial style admired by thousands of wannabe auteurs, Hinton’s study assembles an incredible array of clips (often shown side-by-side or in sequence with Scorsese’s direct homages) and wonderful archival material to make the case that the Archers deserve to be recognized as the most fabulous duo in British film history.

In the way that Scorsese hits the bullseye by carefully balancing a fan’s devotion with keen critical observations, “Made in England” mirrors previous compendia like “A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies” (1995) and “My Voyage to Italy” (1999). Using the divisive “Peeping Tom” (1960) as the turning point that negatively affected Powell’s career before critical rehabilitation many years later, Hinton organizes the movie with superb insight. In collaboration with editors Margarida Cartaxo and Stuart Davidson, Hinton covers a massive amount of territory. Only the most hardened superfans might complain that certain titles or signposts need more in-depth treatment, but given the 131-minute running time, nothing feels out of place or shortchanged.

The only possible exception to the argument above is not particularly surprising: Emeric Pressburger, like so many times before, is frequently presented as the lesser of two equals. Fortunately, Hinton exerts genuine effort to explicate just what made the partnership work and what each man contributed that the other needed. In this sense, the less celebrated of the principal Archers receives some juicy moments, including a few sharp and witty quips that typify a wonderful collaboration and a real kinship. The exposition tips in favor of Powell, whose apprenticeship under Rex Ingram would leave a lasting impression in terms of the most fantastic and otherworldly possibilities afforded only by the magic of the cinema.

Thanks to Alexander Korda, the Powell and Pressburger team-up took wing, initially with “The Spy in Black” in 1939 but really taking off with the commercial success of “49th Parallel” in 1941. Soon after, a run of miracle projects would later be acknowledged as a special set. Among them: “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” “A Canterbury Tale,” “I Know Where I’m Going!,” “A Matter of Life and Death,” “Black Narcissus,” and “The Red Shoes.” Hinton recognizes that the unique contours of “The Red Shoes” demand extra attention. This section of the documentary, powerful enough to merit a feature of its very own, sees Scorsese at his most laudatory – fully embracing the particular ways that Powell and Pressburger innovated and transformed filmmaking through approach and technique.

Equally as rewarding are the comments on stuff like “The Small Back Room” and “Gone to Earth,” with both Hinton and Scorsese making a strong case for closer looks. Near the beginning of the documentary, Scorsese recounts the oft-told tale of how his childhood asthma necessitated indoor hours watching and rewatching titles screened on television as part of “Million Dollar Movie.” The eye-popping special effects on display in the 1940 fantasy “The Thief of Bagdad,” produced by Korda and co-directed by Powell, made a huge impact on the young Scorsese, just as the spectacles of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (infamously dismissed by the filmmaker) might be laying the groundwork for a future storyteller.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Brady Corbet, the American screen actor turned auteur, is only 36 years old. He doesn’t enjoy the same level of fan adoration that accompanies the projects of Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and the like, but one imagines that the filmmaker hopes that his third feature film could change that status. Alexandra Schwartz’s fresh profile of Corbet and “The Brutalist” in “The New Yorker” acknowledges the risks of old-fashioned epic moviemaking and the creation of “art without compromise,” setting the scene with Corbet’s disarming line: “You really have to dare to suck to transcend.” The loaded statement, like the sometimes painful choices made by Adrien Brody’s Hungarian architect László Tóth in the film, invites multiple interpretations.

In one sense, the line appears to insulate Corbet from any detractors, a kind of “critic-proofing” against those who might dare suggest that this massive movie, apparently cruising to all kinds of award-season acclaim, is not quite the masterpiece announced by, among other things, the VistaVision production, stylish credits presentation, fifteen-minute intermission, Lol Crawley’s photography and Daniel Blumberg’s score. Along with those assets, “The Brutalist” never fails to keep us interested in the roller coaster saga of heroin addict/concentration camp survivor Tóth, who is repeatedly faced with the dilemma of being a poor man in a rich man’s house following a commission to design a staggering civic center and place of worship for the kind of people who can only tolerate him.

“The Brutalist” was written by Corbet with his partner Mona Fastvold and at its best, there are wondrous moments of visual expression. Classic American themes of the immigrant story are fully integrated into the drama. In the film’s first part, titled “The Enigma of Arrival,” Alessandro Nivola steals several scenes as László’s cousin Attila. Some will prefer that section of the film to the more mysterious “The Hard Core of Beauty,” despite the second part’s crystallization of László’s sad descent into a prison of his own making and the self-destruction that comes with it.

For all its massive scale, “The Brutalist” does not open up beyond its core cast the way that “The Godfather” or “Heaven’s Gate” breathed life and vitality into fascinating supporting characters. Isaach de Bankolé’s loyal Gordon is frustratingly underutilized. Raffey Cassidy, who plays orphan niece Zsófia, is another missed opportunity. Joe Alwyn and Stacy Martin, as the twin children of Guy Pearce’s Harrison Lee Van Buren, fare only a tiny bit better. Even Felicity Jones, locked in a multi-front battle with her wheelchair, her hairstyles and her accent, cannot overcome the narrowly conceived function of a thankless position as the pragmatic Erzsébet, László’s suffering spouse.

The title bout and main event, unquestionably, is László versus Harrison, each desiring something that the other possesses. Both Brody and Pearce wrestle generous depth and nuance from the frequently on-the-nose writing for their characters. And even though you feel like you can see it coming from a mile away, the grim climax in their relationship is a jaw-dropping exclamation point/microphone drop that will earn Corbet as many hisses as ovations. Perhaps it is the proximity to the results of the most recent election, but the parallels between Harrison and the once and future leader of the United States might leave you with a queasy stomach and a bad taste in your mouth.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

For the better part of a decade, filmmaker Robert Eggers has worked toward the realization of an adaptation of “Nosferatu,” the genre-defining horror masterpiece originally brought to the screen by F. W. Murnau in 1922. The wait, as it turns out, has been well worth it. Murnau’s German Expressionist creepshow, still commanding attention more than a century after its unholy birth, previously inspired Werner Herzog’s 1979 stab featuring Isabelle Adjani and Klaus Kinski. Several other big and small screen iterations, cameos and spin-offs, including David Lee Fisher’s recent take, attest to the spell cast by Murnau and his collaborators, including Max Schreck as the repellent title creature.

In the Eggers version, Bill Skarsgård takes on the role of Count Orlok, the otherworldly Transylvanian ghoul at the center of a sticky and malevolent web that draws Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) into a vortex of madness and evil. Famously, Murnau failed to secure the screen rights for Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula.” And even more fortunately for generations of horror fans, when Stoker’s widow successfully brought legal action against the very existence of the unauthorized film, the court ruling that would have seen the destruction of the negative and all existing copies of “Nosferatu” failed to net every print. Compelling history lesson aside, Eggers draws on Murnau and Stoker in ways that will satisfy fans of the world’s best-known vampire tale.

Together with his longtime director of photography Jarin Blaschke (the Oscar-nominee who has lensed all four of Eggers’ features), the director showcases a gallery of sumptuous and painterly compositions. “Nosferatu” was shot principally in the Czech Republic, and both indoor and outdoor settings extend the filmmaker’s detail-oriented penchant for fluid camera movement and internal framings. The work of artists including Johan Christian Dahl and Caspar David Friedrich informs the romanticism of the 1838 setting. Eggers is too good a storyteller to lose sight of his cast even amidst the stunning settings. Nicholas Hoult, Emma Corrin, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson join the indispensable Willem Dafoe, who played Max Schreck once upon a time in E. Elias Merhige’s “Shadow of the Vampire.”

Anya Taylor-Joy was the original choice to star as Ellen, and she would have no doubt been excellent. Scheduling conflicts necessitated a different casting configuration, however, and the change clearly benefited Depp, who manages the impossible by commanding a level of viewer attention that somehow surpasses Skarsgård’s bold rendering of Orlok. Press materials have touted the extent of Depp’s preparation. Ryan Lattanzio’s Indiewire summary of a recent NYC screening mentions the performer’s training with “interdisciplinary movement artist” and butoh specialist Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, who worked with the actor on the movie’s incredibly physical (and CGI-free) choreography.

Akin to the thematic preoccupations of Coppola’s florid 1992 edition, Eggers fully engages with the eroticized thanatopsis between Ellen and Orlok, conjuring a climax – in more than one sense of the word – that stamps this latest version with distinction. It’s impossible to surpass the visceral and immediate cinematic originality accompanying several of Murnau’s uncanny moments, but Eggers pays respect to key elements, including those haunting shadows. The late, great horror historian and Stoker biographer David Skal called Dracula the “most mediagenic superstar of all time,” and Eggers, imagining a grown-up fairytale teeming with dread, humor, sexuality, mystery, and lots and lots of rats, perfectly understands the assignment. Sink your fangs and drink deep.

“Nosferatu” opens in cinemas on Christmas Day.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The Oscar-winning writer-director Andrea Arnold returns to scripted, feature-length fiction with the quintessentially Arnoldian “Bird,” an unsettling coming-of-age tale set in the hard-edged environs of northern Kent. Arnold’s own personal history, which includes teenage parents and a council estate residency during childhood, has previously inspired the autobiographical impulse in her filmmaking. The fantasy elements that govern the imagination of lead character Bailey (Nykiya Adams), a neglected 12-year-old who fends for herself in a rundown squat with older half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda) and erratic father Bug (Barry Keoghan), might just represent our protagonist’s coping mechanisms.

Bailey is not particularly impressed when Bug announces plans to marry Kayleigh (Frankie Box), his girlfriend of a mere three months. And if that news isn’t stressful enough, Bailey’s mom Peyton (Jasmine Jobson) has partnered up with the awful Skate (James Nelson-Joyce), a verbally and physically abusive lout with a hair-trigger. Amidst the trauma, the mysterious vagabond Bird (Franz Rogowski) rises like an otherworldly phoenix from the ashes of Bailey’s bleak reality to offer a series of distractions and a sense of purpose. The always magnetic Rogowski laces Bird with an aura that balances on the blade’s edge between childlike openness and simmering danger.

Critical reaction to Arnold’s incorporation of CGI (and custom contact lenses) to intensify Bailey’s visions of Bird has been surprisingly negative, but the construction of the title character by Arnold and Rogowski – who perches in the nude on a neighboring rooftop overlooking Bailey’s bedroom window – has befuddled and alarmed viewers unable or unwilling to accept the filmmaker’s fierce alignment with the messy complexities of adolescence. Bailey’s intricate gender evolution, which Arnold expresses with a sensitivity and subtlety diametrically opposed to Bird’s florid symbolism, provides a strong clue that the central character is working extremely hard to figure things out, including her understanding of more than one unorthodox father figure.

Arnold will use the two older men in Bailey’s life to startling effect. Without spoiling any of the sublime joys that unfold during the movie’s late stages, I would argue that Arnold is in complete command of these rare creatures. Expectations are, if not entirely upended, certainly tinkered with in glorious fashion; the entire duration of Bug’s wedding reception is a tour de force, a glistening sunshower powered by Keoghan’s rendition of Blur’s “The Universal.” Unsurprisingly, Arnold continues to match the right song to the right moment. Burial provides the instrumental backbone to the film and tracks by Fontaines D.C., Gemma Dunleavy, Sleaford Mods, and several others focus our attention at key points.

Along with the grown-ups who cause so much pain and confusion, Arnold populates “Bird” with fledglings who receive Bailey’s attention, care and concern. Bailey may still be a child in several ways, but she is functionally a parent to the younger siblings in her mother’s household. Bug’s status as a teenage father is echoed in Hunter’s predicament, a mirror Arnold uses to reflect the cycle of babies having babies. And the arrival of Bailey’s first period is yet another way that Arnold asks the viewer to think about the liminal space between innocence and experience. Arnold’s commitment to social critique remains, but a willingness to stretch her wings in the direction of something that transcends the everyday is a welcome addition to an impressive filmography.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

For many years, Mark Cousins has been one of the most ambitious chroniclers of movie culture. The indefatigable documentarian might be best known for his 2011 project “The Story of Film: An Odyssey.” That 930-minute epic was programmed in America on Turner Classic Movies and is now available on physical media along with its 2021 sequel, “The Story of Film: A New Generation.” “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock,” running a “mere” 120 minutes, feels bite-size by comparison. It premiered in 2022 at the Telluride Film Festival, and is finally being released for wider consumption. Hitchcock fans won’t need to be prodded to seek it out, but even casual appreciators will discover all sorts of reasons to watch or revisit the films of the Master of Suspense.

Film critics, historians, academics and cinephiles will no doubt express a wide range of opinion on the central design feature settled upon by Cousins for the delivery of his message(s). The filmmaker, who wrote and (cheekily) attributed the movie’s script to Mr. Hitchcock, employs comic/entertainer/impressionist Alistair McGowan as the narrating voice of the famous director. The novel gimmick allows the disembodied Hitchcock to, in essence, chat with us from beyond the grave. All the time that has passed since Hitchcock’s death in 1980 melts away as Cousins imagines how the droll raconteur might respond to his own work more than four decades beyond the length of his own life.

By electing to stick with voiceover and not to visualize some kind of Hitchcock avatar (as I watched, I kept thinking of Stevan Riley’s captivating approach to Brando in 2015’s “Listen to Me Marlon”), Cousins can do one of the things he does best: assemble a cascade of film clips to illustrate his positions. With the help of editor and frequent collaborator Timo Langer, Cousins selects scenes spanning the breadth of Hitchcock’s monumental 54-year filmography. From the instantly recognizable touchstones to the cult gems to the less frequently screened early efforts, Cousins organizes “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock” into six chapters: Escape, Desire, Loneliness, Time, Fulfillment, and Height.

Cousins uses these thematic groupings to explore his favored aspects of the oeuvre, much the way author Edward White dissected “The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock.” White’s book, published the year before Cousins completed his movie, broke down one dozen of the filmmaker’s dimensions (the titles are worth repeating for the curious: “The Boy Who Couldn’t Grow Up,” “The Murderer,” “The Auteur,” “The Womanizer,” “The Fat Man,” “The Dandy,” “The Family Man,” “The Voyeur,” “The Entertainer,” “The Pioneer,” “The Londoner,” and “The Man of God”). I know I am not the only one who would love to see a documentary based on White’s Edgar Award-winner.

As with any two Hitchcock scholars, there are many points of overlap between Cousins’ movie and White’s book. Of course, books can do things movies cannot and vice versa, making it fair to say that White manages to wrestle with Hitchcock’s complicated, complex, and sometimes abusive relationships with actresses more substantively than Cousins elects to do in “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock.” Both documents, however, illuminate our ongoing fascination with the man, acknowledging the awesome visual power conveyed via Hitchcock’s gift for cultivating something well beyond the dreaded “pictures of people talking” that grind dynamic movement to a dead stop.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Certain to be included on a sizable number of 2024 best-of lists, Johan Grimonprez’s striking “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is essential viewing for political history and jazz music aficionados. The ambitious essay-style documentary experience, clocking in at a hefty but never dull 150 minutes, connects the dots linking the 1961 assassination of Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba to a grand narrative pulling together race, power, performance, clandestine CIA operations, Cold War tensions, grim colonialist fallout, and the growth of the United Nations, to name a few of the filmmaker’s concerns. The Belgian multimedia artist Grimonprez has been a sharp critic of the ways in which mass communication can be used as a powerful tool in the shaping of the collective acceptance of consensus reality.

“Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it received a Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation. Grimonprez’s stylistic approach does indeed merit this kind of recognition (regardless of the extent of any true “innovation”). The film’s many clips of brilliant musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, John Coltrane, Miriam Makeba, Thelonious Monk and others, drive the narrative organization; Grimonprez cuts in rhythm to beats, lines, and phrases that link songs to tumultuous historical moments under review. Along with soundbites from political figures large and small, Grimonprez frequently places informational title cards to offer additional context.

Needless to say, Grimonprez exposes the hypocrisy of powerful nations like the United States. Despite public support for the proliferation of democracy and democratic principles, American interests (then and now) in the affairs of weaker nations with exploitable resources – such as the trillions in uranium and minerals contained within the borders of the Democratic Republic of the Congo – inevitably choose whatever path will make the most money. The movie frequently uses bleak humor to communicate complex machinations, power moves, and posturing. Nikita Khrushchev, to whom a substantial number of scenes are devoted, is portrayed as a particularly wily and mischievous imp. He racks up more screen time than Eisenhower.

Along with Khrushchev and Eisenhower, Grimonprez quotes Malcolm X, Dag Hammarskjöld, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and a number of less well-known politicos and operatives involved in various aspects of the destabilization taking place in and around Lumumba’s rise and fall. Excerpts from Andrée Blouin’s “My Country, Africa” are read by Zap Mama. “Congo Inc.” author In Koli Jean Bofane also provides crucial perspective. Somehow, against the formidable odds, Grimonprez makes all of this work as an energizing piece of storytelling that never feels like a didactic history lesson.

Viewers need little if any knowledge of the film’s subjects to appreciate “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” as a cinematic experience. Historians and students of mid-twentieth century global politics have a head start, but Grimonprez makes certain that everything we need to know can be comprehended through the stunning arrangement of the archival footage (dazzlingly put together in collaboration with editor Rik Chaubet). Through it all, the songs and sounds serve as our guides. The sickening reality that some of these monumental jazz artists were used by the government is mitigated by the truth of their anti-imperialist solidarity with and championing of the struggle for self-determination by their African brothers and sisters.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner “Anora” is one of the year’s best. Fans of the formidable filmmaker might not claim that the beautifully crafted melodrama, which can turn on a dime between outrageous comic farce and heartbreaking humanist plea, is necessarily a better movie than “The Florida Project,” but “Anora” is of a piece with the grand thematic arc of Baker’s filmography. Memorably, the director dedicated the Cannes honor to “all sex workers, past, present, and future,” a reminder of his ongoing commitment to marginalized people whose lives on the fine edge of security and safety are every bit as worthy of love and compassion as the masses sleepwalking through “respectable” careers.

Like a funhouse Bresson, Baker also continues his tradition of unlocking transcendent, breakout performances from less-established actors. Title character Anora “Ani” Mikheeva, brought to life by Mikey Madison in an award-worthy tour-de-force, tumbles out of the screen as a classic Baker heroine. Like an industrious, supercharged vampire princess, she crashes in the Russian-speaking Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn by day in order to prepare for wild nights as a stripper at NYC’s HQ club, where charmed, drooling clients are happily parted from their cash. One fateful evening, Ani meets Ivan Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the feckless and horny scion of a Russian oligarch.

Not unlike the hidden-in-plain-sight markers that smoothly integrated political commentary in “Red Rocket,” Ivan’s privilege, including pockets deep enough to secure Ani’s exclusive companionship, highlights the impossible gulf between the billionaire class and the rest of us. Baker’s enviable filmmaking skills invite viewers to pay close attention to the deceptive simplicity of the blossoming “romance” (such as it is) between Ani and Ivan. Transactional clear-headedness is fundamental to success in Ani’s occupation, a reality that Baker deploys as a motif. We can see that Ani’s willingness to go along with Ivan’s whims, including a trip to Vegas to tie the knot, comes from business savvy more than true love.

When word of Ivan’s nuptials gets back to his parents, “Anora” pivots to a fresh set of concerns that upend both viewer expectations and genre conventions. A number of prominent voices (starting with the Cannes jury) have name-checked the influence of heavyweight Hollywood Golden Age screwball champs like Preston Sturges, Gregory La Cava, Ernst Lubitsch, and Howard Hawks. And while the rules of decorum and the self-regulated censorship of the 1930s and 1940s curtailed the degree of the explicit and the profane that could end up on screen, it is not so hard to imagine “Anora” as a post-modern spin upon, or perhaps inversion of, Stanley Cavell’s conception of the comedy of remarriage.

Seemingly in way over her head once the toughs employed by Ivan’s father show up to orchestrate an annulment, Ani must be quicker than she has ever been to find a way out of the increasingly tense situation. Baker shows remarkable skill with tone, juggling sticks of dynamite that rotate glass-shattering slapstick with nerve-wracking anxiety, especially with respect to Ani’s personal well-being. And then, once we think that Baker has ignited every last bit of flash paper hidden up his sleeve, “Anora” ends with a scene of jaw-dropping emotional intensity that pays off every second of the preceding odyssey.