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.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The unsurprising reality that director John Crowley offers absolutely nothing new should not – and will not – deter fans of the weepie from purchasing tickets to “We Live in Time.” The opportunity to see the impossibly appealing domesticity and sparking chemistry of Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield as a fantasy couple faced with a double dose of ovarian cancer implores us to get out our very best embroidered hankies and buckle up for a ride on the Sirk Super Slingshot. Crowley, the Irish theatre veteran with plenty of solid television and film credits, is arguably best known in the United States for “Brooklyn.” “We Live in Time” should provide the workaholic with another success.

Crowley handles Nick Payne’s screenplay with machine-like efficiency, although the deliberately jumbled organization of the timeline fails to add value to the telling. This achronological presentation of the too-short partnership of Pugh’s aspiring chef Almut Brühl and Garfield’s Weetabix employee Tobias Durand may not do any significant damage to the movie’s legibility, but one is hard-pressed to see how the time-jumps enhance the story. Like recent release “The Outrun,” starring Crowley’s “Brooklyn” lead Saoirse Ronan, it is possible to read the sliced-up story beats as the point-of-view of a character making sense of or reflecting on life events.

“We Live in Time” should serve as a textbook for the kind of well-used tropes that Roger Ebert both coined and collected from readers before publishing the indispensable “Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary” in 1994. The subtitle of the book reads, “A compendium of movie clichés, stereotypes, obligatory scenes, hackneyed formulas, shopworn conventions, and outdated archetypes.” And while there is no shame in acknowledging that many of us keep going to the movies because they feature these familiar phenomena, “We Live in Time” deserves a gold trophy for the sheer commitment with which our filmmakers honor some classic entries.

Behold the shamelessness of the film’s meet-cute, in which Almut strikes Tobias with her car, sending her future lover to the hospital. It gets better: Tobias was inexplicably roaming the motorway in search of a working pen when his hotel room stylus couldn’t produce enough ink to sign his divorce papers! Marvel at the comic hijinks of the fuel station bathroom birthing scene, which joins a lengthy list of movies in which some of our finest thespians wring comic mileage from babies arriving in unexpected/inconvenient locations. Later, someone will forget to pick up a child from school, setting up a key showdown complete with obligatory tears and recriminations.

When his partner faces a round of chemotherapy, Tobias shaves Almut’s head, revealing an even more beautiful and radiant Pugh (a quintessential example of one of the very best Ebert-isms, “Ali MacGraw’s Disease”). Through it all, Pugh and Garfield make us believe while they make-believe. When we discover that Almut mysteriously elected not to share with Tobias that she used to be a world-class competitive figure skater, something tells us to file that information for what will turn out to be a tear-jerking future scene at the ice rink. For reasons such as these, and for the genius publicity tie-ins (like the “Sesame Street” chat with Elmo during which Garfield discusses grieving his late mother and the actor showing up with a cardboard cutout of Pugh at the film’s London premiere), we will live in time with “We Live in Time.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

German filmmaker Nora Fingscheidt’s adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir “The Outrun” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January to mostly favorable reviews. Star Saoirse Ronan’s performance attracted the most acclaim, but praise was also bestowed on Yunus Roy Imer’s impressive cinematography, which paints the fierce beauty of Scotland’s Orkney Islands as a character equal to Ronan’s Rona, a woman in her late 20s struggling with alcoholism. The magnetic and transfixing pull of the stark and austere physical environment cannot sustain interest on its own, however, and “The Outrun” overstays its welcome by a solid twenty to thirty minutes.

Fingscheidt’s fractured chronology, designed in part to illustrate the grip of addiction and its cyclical movements on Rona’s difficult recovery process, challenges viewers to pay attention to the timeline as the story unfolds. In a rhyme with Kate Winslet’s Clementine Kruczynski in Michel Gondry’s superior “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” we pick up clues to Rona’s progress (or lack thereof) based on the intense colors she dyes her hair. The achronological presentation of events also draws the viewer into the protagonist’s mind as she assembles the various anecdotes that will be used to construct the written account of her journey.

Rona’s memory stretches from a childhood observing the behaviors of her parents, portrayed in Rona’s adulthood by a terrific Stephen Dillane as bipolar father Andrew and an equally sharp Saskia Reeves as religiously devout mother Annie. Rona’s recollections also chart the dissolution of her romantic relationship with Daynin (Paapa Essiedu). Rona’s promising work as a graduate student studying biology in London is referenced principally through her inability to keep pace with her cohort once drinking starts to squeeze her, but Fingscheidt also stages several scenes in which Ronan loses control in clubs and pubs, to the concern of friends and dismay of Daynin.

A key turning point comes following a violent sexual assault that leaves Rona bloodied and bruised. Soon after, she seeks rehab. “The Outrun” joins dozens of movies that explore alcoholism through the eyes of a main character who stands to lose everything – and often does. Save for Ronan’s predictably excellent central performance, however, the movie does not fully measure up to the group’s best in class, including “The Lost Weekend,” “Barfly,” “When a Man Loves a Woman,” “Once Were Warriors,” “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Crazy Heart,” and more than one version of “A Star Is Born.”

Aside from examining one person’s recovery experience, “The Outrun” finds its voice as a contemplation of the pros and cons of solitude, a thematic element in the movie second in importance only to the pain of addiction. Once Rona accepts a post with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds on the sparsely populated and remote island of Papa Westray, Fingscheidt establishes the most effective and emotionally satisfying sequences in the film. Away from her family as well as the intense pace of London, Rona spends the majority of time on Papa Westray by herself, allowing us to take some comfort in her self-sufficiency as she works her way forward one day at a time.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“My Old Ass,” the title of writer-director Megan Park’s sophomore feature, probably didn’t do the movie any favors at the box office, but it is as spiky and forward as protagonist Elliott, an 18-year-old caught between adolescence and adulthood. Currently finishing up a theatrical run following a world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Park’s movie is a bittersweet coming of age tale that blends romance, melodrama, and even a touch of science fiction and/or fantasy and magical realism against the gorgeous scenic backdrop of Ontario’s Muskoka Lakes.

Elliott is principally portrayed by a thoroughly winning Maisy Stella, but in the film’s conceptual centerpiece, the 39-year-old version of the character shows up during a psychedelic mushroom trip to offer advice to the younger person who has yet to experience two decades of life lessons already known to the magical visitor. Aubrey Plaza may not initially seem to be a good counterpart for a down-the-road Stella, but Park encourages a free-spirited insouciance that plays to the strengths of both actors. The director also carefully meters the amount of screen time in which the two Elliotts interact, a shrewd choice that intensifies each of the scenes in which Plaza appears.

From many corners of the internet, we frequently encounter some variation on the theme of being kind to your younger self or listening to the advice we wish we could have given to our younger selves. Park transforms the essence of those self-affirmations into a larger lesson about appreciating the love and support of your family (should you be fortunate enough to have what Elliott has) and not being in such a hurry to move to the big city. Those are not exactly surprising pearls of wisdom, but Park builds a key conflict around Older Elliott’s plea to steer clear of anyone bearing the name Chad. Naturally, Younger Elliott will have her hands full when she encounters a beautiful young thing with that name.

Regular moviegoers and readers of YA fiction will be able to guess the reason Older Elliott warns her young self away from the heavenly suitor (played with easygoing chill by Percy Hynes White), but Park’s deep investment in character and in the development of the movie’s core romantic relationship gives viewers everything they need to ignore Older Elliott. Park throws in an additional twist that works within the specific world built for these inhabitants: Elliott sees herself as gay and until Chad has been only in same-sex relationships. Her feelings for Chad cause her to question a part of herself about which she was previously so certain.

For a pretty relaxed movie about a family that farms cranberries next to a stunning lake with postcard views, Park might have given Elliott’s pals Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks) – not to mention Elliott’s family members – just a bit more to do, but it is hard to fault the filmmaker for staying in her main character’s groove. Older Elliott says at one point, “The only thing you can’t get back is time,” and an equally apt saying that can be applied to the film is “There is no day but today.” Park’s movie deserves to find its audience, which should be composed of viewers of several different generations.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The epic ambitions of Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore feature “The Substance” are trumpeted by its whopping 141-minute running time, a length that may please body horror aficionados and exhaust the less patient. Demi Moore is brilliantly cast as Elisabeth Sparkle, a longtime media personality and aerobics segment host whose cruel boss (an absolutely repulsive Dennis Quaid) fires her in favor of a newer and younger ingénue. A devastated Elisabeth soon decides to try the Substance, a self-administered kit of injections, stabilizers, and liquid food packs that rather miraculously divides her in two. From Elisabeth’s own body, Sue (Margaret Qualley) is born. The only hitch is that consciousness must be traded every seven days without exception.

Fargeat’s fierce allegiance to David Cronenberg manifests most directly in the gruesome procedure that first brings Sue forth from a fissure along Elisabeth’s spine and then in a multitude of increasingly horrifying transformations that earn comparison to special effects hall-of-famers like “The Thing,” “The Fly,” and “Society.” The chic, gleaming modernism of Elisabeth’s antiseptic, subway-tiled bathroom will be interrupted with several types of fluids. The sun-drenched landscapes, gleaming lip gloss, and neon spandex struggle to hide the decay of thinning hair, rotting teeth, and putrefying flesh. Slick production design stands in for sturdy world building; Fargeat elects to keep the provenance of the Substance shrouded in mystery.

The satiric blade that slices into Hollywood’s insatiable hunger for youth and beauty also carves out empathy for the self-hating Elisabeth. The most effective element of Fargeat’s script (which received best screenplay honors at Cannes) is the extent to which the viewer understands the protagonist’s impossible bind. Sue and Elisabeth, we are constantly reminded via the Substance’s minimalist marketing materials and customer service line, are one and the same. But in dramatizing the weekly cycle of turn-taking, Fargeat makes the choice to pit the two halves against one another, amplifying the damage caused by breaking unbreakable rules.

In a different universe, Elisabeth and Sue might have attempted to cooperate with one another before descending into the depths of hell. Fargeat’s own obsession, however, favors visceral gut-punches and a barrage of stylistic homages to cinematic heroes including Hitchcock and Kubrick. Opportunities to play around with aspects of the mind-body problem are left unexplored. The film’s reception has sparked conversation about all manner of subtext, from the refreshing way that Fargeat focuses on an older woman to the critique by Amy Nicholson that “It’s a superficial film about a superficial world.”

Ultimately, Fargeat elects to withhold characterization to the brink of near absurdity, perhaps to point all attention to her queasy burlesque of the cruel entertainment industry. Without any interiority to parse, we are outsiders looking in. In her tough-minded takedown of the movie, Hannah Strong calls it “hagsploitation.” A film of deliberate circles, cycles, and repetitions, “The Substance” keeps insisting that none of the procedure’s side effects can be reversed. Some will find in the Grand Guignol ending an affirmation of feminist ideals, while others will identify the complete opposite. In either case, “The Substance” owes to Demi Moore a debt that cannot be fully paid.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Chris Wilcha’s excellent documentary “Flipside,” now available to rent on major streaming platforms following a successful run of film festival appearances, is essential viewing for Gen X pop culture hounds and any artists who have abandoned more creative projects than they have finished. Despite a thriving career as a director of television spots for major corporate clients, Wilcha confesses a familiar conundrum for so many film and media makers: shelves of hard drives filled with the assets and raw footage for labors of love that never crossed the finish line. Many producers and directors, when faced with the real need to pay the bills and make rent, have accepted gigs that force dream projects to the back burner. “Flipside” addresses that quandary, with heart and soul.

Wilcha cleverly seduces us by setting up a story about a long-ago movie he began about the legendary photographer Herman Leonard, whose gorgeously lit portraits of jazz icons like Dexter Gordon, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and many others are among the form’s most treasured and indelible. We find out that Wilcha failed to complete his biographical tribute before Leonard died in 2010 at the age of 87. For a moment, we are as devastated and disappointed as Wilcha. Some sage wisdom from Leonard’s friend, the television writer and producer David Milch, will rewire our understanding of the situation with the lightning strike of a Zen epiphany.

As the movie unfolds, Wilcha will skip around – like a needle dropping on different songs – to many things that have piqued his interest and sparked his imagination. “Flipside” just gets better and more compelling as it goes along. It reminds me of a cartoon snowball that gets bigger and bigger as it picks up speed rolling down a mountainside. Milch will factor in, and so will other notable creators like Judd Apatow and Errol Morris and Ira Glass. But Wilcha’s love for the people in his life, including his parents, his wife, his children, and his friends, tell, in his words, “the undeniable true story of what’s important to me.” The humans, as it turns out with no real surprise, beat the accumulation of physical objects that Wilcha has hoarded for decades.

The record store that gives the movie its title is a central location for the thematic concerns addressing time and aging and business and memory. Record collectors will probably wince more than once in solidarity with Flipside proprietor Dan Dondiego Jr and Wilcha’s high school pal and fellow music nerd Tracy Wilson, who worked as Dondiego’s store assistant following Wilcha. We also get to meet the offbeat Uncle Floyd Vivino, a regional personality name-checked by David Bowie. Many short and feature-length documentaries have tackled the obsessions of the customers and employees of independent music emporia. “Flipside” writes another heartfelt chapter with its own unique (don’t pardon the pun) spin.

The big irony of “Flipside” is that it got made. It got finished. It’s complete. Wilcha’s film draws from his own vast archive, introducing viewers to all kinds of glorious “what might have been” artifacts that now, in this time and place, finally see the light of day for a public audience. And while each of the separate ideas that were supposed to be standalone movies is deserving of a showcase, the sum of all Wilcha’s “broken” parts adds up to something even more special. There are scores of stories about movies great and small that stalled somewhere between shooting and post-production (not to mention the thousands that remained as rough drafts or polished scripts). “Flipside” argues that it is never too late to reclaim the past by finally crossing the finish line.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker makes an auspicious feature directorial debut with the bracing and stimulating coming-of-age story “Janet Planet.” Focusing on the microscopic details of a complex mother-daughter relationship, the movie is now available to rent on major streaming services following a theatrical run. Baker’s transition from the stage to the screen proves to be a best-of-both-worlds proposition; “Janet Planet” relies on precise language that hides layers of meaning beneath the crust of what might otherwise appear to be the common and mundane speech of the everyday. And yet, Baker also knows the cinematic ingredients that make a great piece of visual storytelling.

The terrific Julianne Nicholson plays a single mom making a living as an acupuncturist in rural Massachusetts in 1991. Watched closely by her 11-year-old daughter Lacy (newcomer Zoe Ziegler in an absolutely devastating performance), Janet seeks to sustain a meaningful romantic partnership with the taciturn Wayne (Will Patton), who does not seem particularly pleased when Lacy returns from summer camp early. Baker allows viewers to fill in many blanks, but it doesn’t take long for us to see that an unfulfilled and restless Janet moves from one romance to the next. The insertion of title cards signaling the ends and beginnings of several key satellites in Janet’s life confirms our suspicions.

The live-in visitors will come and go without any real fanfare or antagonism or even visible conflict (Justin Chang suggests that Baker is “allergic to melodrama”), but Lacy is the moon that orbits her mother’s sun with superglued fidelity composed of parental bonds and the complete dependence of children on their adult caretakers. One of the most deeply satisfying aspects of “Janet Planet” is the way Baker catches the lightning of a very wise, very intuitive, very mature human being who is still just a kid slipping toward that point of no return when many aspects of innocence vanish all at once. Janet talks to Lacy with unvarnished sophistication frequently reserved for grown-up peers. If Lacy asks a question, Janet answers it honestly.

There are any number of films and filmmakers that come to mind when searching for points of comparison. In terms of milieu and the breathing-room quietude so savored by the director, though, “Janet Planet” strongly resembles the worlds of Kelly Reichardt, an artist who knows a thing or two about what to illustrate and what to obscure. Janet, like her daughter, contains multitudes and plenty of contradictions. She yearns for love but doesn’t choose good partners. She’s driven to earn the credential and licensure that allows her to run a small business but she hovers on the fringes of post-hippie free-spiritedness. In one exchange both curious-funny and ha-ha-funny, Janet wonders aloud whether the collective to which new beau Avi (Elias Koteas) belongs is more or less a cult.

Lacy is every bit as critical to the story. One could make a strong argument that Baker aligns perspective and point of view with this younger character more than she does with the one whose name appears in the title. Ziegler is consistently amazing, putting together a wide array of emotions to define her character’s liminality. Despite her desire to cling to Janet with all her might, Lacy is often seen passing time by herself, arranging the eclectic collection of small figurines in her bedroom dollhouse or practicing for a piano lesson while Janet is seeing clients. As the movie draws to a close, Baker calls on Ziegler for a transcendent moment that should be talked about with the same reverence that frequently described a certain close-up of Timothee Chalamet in “Call Me by Your Name.”