Movie review by Greg Carlson

How many “Babylon” reviews and essays will at some point use the words orgiastic and overlong to describe Damien Chazelle’s raucous Hollywood fable? To date, the filmmaker remains the youngest winner of the Oscar for Best Director, which he received for “La La Land” during a ceremony enshrined in Academy legend for the embarrassing Best Picture envelope gaffe at the end of the telecast. That film, which also mines movie-mad dreamscapes, cemented Chazelle’s status as a top-tier storyteller following sophomore barn burner “Whiplash.” His latest, a wild and uneven quasi-epic that ogles stardom and cinephilia through the eyes of a group of characters during the tumultuous transition from the silent era to the advent of synchronous sound, is certainly hungry for attention.

The film’s length, a whopping three hours and eight minutes, could test the patience of ticket buyers who might opt instead to watch at home, where bathroom break pauses can be made on demand. “Babylon” goes big and refuses to be ignored, even if a much better, much shorter movie exists somewhere inside the messy sprawl. Among the ensemble, Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt command the most scrutiny based on star power, but Diego Calva’s Manny Torres serves as the point of audience identification. Several other supporting players, including Jovan Adepo’s jazz trumpeter and Li Jun Li’s intertitle writer/chanteuse, seem at first to point in the direction of an interlocking narrative structure that never fully materializes.

Despite good intentions, Chazelle’s approach to the inclusion of historically marginalized characters of color partially backfires. Calva ends up with more screen time than either Adepo or Li – whose Lady Fay Zhu was based in part on Anna May Wong – but the climactic “Cinema Paradiso”-style montage that Chazelle offers as an affirmation of the magnificent, life-altering power of the art of the motion picture is something of a curiosity given the dark and grim critique of the soul-crushing production conditions preceding it. Are we supposed to sympathize with the once optimistic Torres, who grows increasingly bitter, disillusioned and unpleasant as he rises through the ranks?

For maximum enjoyment, movie lovers will make a sport of identifying Chazelle’s many homages and intertextual acknowledgments. Obviously, “Singin’ in the Rain” serves as inspirational sunshine to the “Babylon” thunderstorm, and Chazelle pays his respects in multiple scenes. The tragedy of the unfairly maligned Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle is used as the basis for a sequence of events that will launch the career of Robbie’s “wild child” Nellie LaRoy. The ghosts of Murnau, Griffith, Wellman, von Stroheim and others haunt the productions mounted at the Kinoscope studio and the milieu surrounding it.

Chazelle pays tribute to more contemporary heroes, too. The influence of Scorsese and Altman is unmistakable and one scene straight-up copies the anxious “Jessie’s Girl” drug deal gone sideways in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights.” Pitt relishes the tragedy and the comedy in perpetual bridegroom Jack Conrad, his Clark Gable/John Gilbert mashup. Like Cliff Booth in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” – another metanarrative blending Los Angeles fact and fiction – Conrad never has to think about how incredible he looks. The actor wears the role of silver screen royalty like a finely-tailored suit.

With an explosive elephant, a golden shower, and cocaine-fueled, money-to-burn decadence, the Dionysian bender that opens the film is rivaled only by the frenetic sequence in which Nellie becomes an overnight sensation, summoning tears at will and upstaging the irritated headliner while a nearby battle scene rages before a different crew. Even though Nellie’s accent and affinity for sewer-mouthed profanity veer close to Harley Quinn, Robbie sinks her teeth into the role. To paraphrase the sentiments expressed by Jean Smart’s gossip columnist/critic Elinor St. John in the movie’s best speech, Margot Robbie will live forever.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Veteran critic Elvis Mitchell’s excellent documentary/essay “Is That Black Enough for You?!?” gazes deeply and lovingly at the rich and varied historical contributions of African American film artists, focusing especially on the vibrant and tumultuous 1970s. Extending beyond Blaxploitation to consider the complete cinematic spectrum from independent productions to the output of the major studios, Mitchell’s guided tour is every bit as indispensable as “A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.” Like that sprawling 1995 gem, Mitchell’s work comes from a place of intense cinephilia and personal knowledge. If you can’t live without the movies, “Is That Black Enough for You?!?” is one of the year’s essential experiences.

The film’s home on Netflix follows an October premiere at the New York Film Festival, where Mitchell and producer Steven Soderbergh engaged in a conversation moderated by NYFF executive director Eugene Hernandez. During that discussion, Mitchell says that at one point he pitched the project as a book and was subsequently turned down by every major publisher. Fortunately for viewers, the artifact that ultimately came to fruition brings to bear the very same storytelling tools of sound and vision that the director highlights through dozens of electrifying movie clips and choice music selections.

As the festival program points out, Mitchell’s approach is both “personal and panoramic.” “Is That Black Enough For You?!?” consistently finds the right tone and balance even when one wishes certain movie titles, filmmakers, or performers were afforded more time on the screen. The vibe is so fluid – in terms of quantity and quality – you’ll want to frequently pause, rewind, and review the incisive assemblage. One imagines scores of wannabe directors feverishly scribbling notes and making to-see lists while Mitchell lays out one astonishing lesson after another.

The talking-head subjects, including Harry Belafonte, Samuel L. Jackson, Charles Burnett, Whoopi Goldberg, Zendaya, Antonio Fargas, Billy Dee Williams, Glynn Turman and others, follow Mitchell’s lead by outlining their own relationships to hallmark movies and silver screen gods and goddesses. Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Pam Grier and Richard Pryor are better known by mainstream (read: white) audiences than Rupert Crosse, Diana Sands, Sheila Frazier, Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln, but Mitchell seamlessly transitions among assessments of these talents and others without skipping a beat. The expert curation makes you feel like you are at a party where our generous host is making warm introductions to old friends.

With editors Michael Engelken and Doyle Esch, Mitchell illuminates dazzling and enticing moments from too many films to name in a short review. “Nothing But a Man,” “Save the Children,” “The Education of Sonny Carson,” “Cornbread, Earl and Me,” “Abar,” “Watermelon Man,” and “Ganja & Hess” are just a fraction of the total. In one example of Mitchell’s brilliance as an educator, the lasting influence of Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” is presented in side-by-side diptychs, a terrific technique also used to great effect this year in “Lynch/Oz.” Mitchell returns to the device to mark the way that the opening strut and swagger of “Saturday Night Fever” cribbed from “Shaft,” illustrating just how much big-budget fare for white audiences borrowed and stole – Mitchell goes with “expropriated” – from Black cool.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Noah Baumbach’s ambitious, hysterical adaptation of Don DeLillo’s famously “unfilmable” modern classic “White Noise” is – given the bona fides of the source material – certain to divide opinion. For the supporters, the director’s cinephilia sparks and shimmers from one giddy moment to the next. Nobody will overlook the homage to Godard’s “Weekend,” but the filmmaker just as enthusiastically embraces the 1980s-era Spielbergian domesticity on display in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “Poltergeist.” Snootier members of the intelligentsia will whine that the movie dumbs down or misses altogether the philosophical heft of the book, and the structure presents some screenplay difficulty, but Baumbach mostly has his cake and eats it: “White Noise” is very entertaining and very funny.

Netflix splashed out a reported 80-million dollars on the movie, and from the opening frames, it is clear that Baumbach is working with the largest budget of his career. Rejecting digital acquisition, the glorious 35mm motion picture photography by Lol Crawley captures all the hues in Jess Gonchor’s candy-colored production design. The 1984 setting keeps with the novel and Baumbach runs wild with the consumerism relentlessly critiqued by DeLillo. The shelves of the well-stocked A&P offer seemingly endless choices for product brands that are looped on television screens playing well-known jingles. It’s all presented as a period piece, but the foundational themes (as well as the odd coincidence linking the central protagonist’s research agenda with Kanye West’s latest awfulness) are evergreen.

Adam Driver, making his fifth movie with Baumbach, plays Jack Gladney, a middle-aged, death-obsessed, oft-married professor known as a pioneer in the field of “Hitler studies.” Gladney’s inability to speak fluent German may cause feelings of deep insecurity, but he puts up a good front for his colleagues and an even better one for his family. Spouse Babette (Greta Gerwig) is equally concerned with mortality. Daughter Denise (Raffey Cassidy) suspects that Babette is taking pills and aims to expose the secret. Baumbach condenses and simplifies the book’s presentation of the Jack/Babette family tree, keeping the focus on the interactions of the core group. Don Cheadle’s Murray Siskind and the rest of Gladney’s fellow academics (including Jodie Turner-Smith as Winnie Richards and Andre Benjamin as Elliot Lasher) are not utilized to their full potential.

Given the massive scope and diversity of DeLillo’s themes, any film adaptation would necessitate deletions and sacrifices. Baumbach favors the black comedy over a sense of real existential dread, but the decision doesn’t necessarily cause the movie any harm. The scale of the novel’s second section, “The Airborne Toxic Event,” sees Baumbach choreographing eye-popping action in and around evacuation site Camp Daffodil. The ensuing panic perfectly captures the confusion caused by rapidly-evolving instructions from apparently clueless civil and government authorities. The proximity of the movie to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic rings some bells. Other chimes are sounded in the environmental and climate-change disaster realities that have only become more urgent since “White Noise” was published.

By the time “White Noise” returns to the grocery store for a dance party finish that shares some DNA with the concluding scene of “Fantastic Mr. Fox” – incidentally the only other literary adaptation for which Baumbach has a screenplay credit – admirers of the filmmaker will be smiling at the ways in which the new movie embodies Baumbach’s longtime preoccupations and simultaneously points toward bold new possibilities.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Citizenfour” Oscar-winner Laura Poitras profiles photographer and activist Nan Goldin in “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.” Like its talented subject, the movie cannot be confined to a single category or story arc. Along with a penetrating, candid examination of Goldin’s career trajectory, the film spends considerable time on the artist’s efforts to hold Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family accountable for the overprescribing of opioids including OxyContin. Poitras artfully covers lots of territory in the documentary, which received the Golden Lion, the Venice International Film Festival’s highest honor, in September of 2022.

Goldin may not be a household name outside the art world, but her searing and confessional pictures are among the most influential to emerge from New York City’s post-Stonewall cultural explosion. Documenting friends, acquaintances, and her own intimate relationships, Goldin profiled members of the gay and transgender community with the eye of an insider. Her interests also led to photos of the Bowery-based drug scene and images of the vibrant post-punk and new and no wave music worlds. The film’s center section examines in detail “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” Goldin’s protean slideshow.

Goldin crosses paths with many other aspiring creative artists during her most fecund years, and Poitras carefully organizes the guest book by allowing some notable faces to flutter and flicker by and others to take up more space and greater prominence. The deeper Poitras dives, the greater the realization that so many of Goldin’s peers lost their lives to AIDS or drug overdoses. Goldin once wrote of her late friend and collaborator Cookie Mueller: “She was the starlet of the Lower East Side: a poetess, a short-story writer, she starred in John Waters’s early movies. She was sort of the queen of the whole downtown social scene.”

Mueller may personify and characterize the moment in time that Goldin so memorably captured, but Poitras devotes just as much or more attention to David Wojnarowicz, who was recently memorialized in Chris McKim’s vital, feature-length portrait. Goldin’s curatorial role in the “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” exhibition in 1989 is highlighted by the director for more than one thematically resonant meaning – you marvel at the way Poitras connects the dots between ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to illuminate the intersection of politics and art that will factor in different stages of Goldin’s life.

Seen planning and carrying out the civil disobedience designed to force prominent museums to remove the Sackler name from buildings, wings, galleries, and collections, Goldin leverages her own prominence to bring about change. Like many autobiographically-inclined artists, Goldin preserved and archived her own family history. The tragedy of older sister Barbara, who took her own life in 1965 when Nan was eleven, haunts “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” as profoundly and poignantly as any of the photographs Nan would go on to make. Goldin’s openness and forthrightness extends to her advocacy on behalf of so many others who, like herself, struggled or continue to struggle with opioid addiction.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Few reviews of Maria Schrader’s sturdy “She Said” go without mentioning “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight.” The new film, in line to pick up some award season recognition on the basis of its subject matter alone, follows the work of Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporters Megan Twohey (played by Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (played by Zoe Kazan) as they doggedly pursue on-the-record confirmation of the sexual misconduct, sexual assault, and rape accusations against Miramax mogul and Oscar-winning producer Harvey Weinstein. “She Said” is based on the 2019 Kantor and Twohey book of the same name – which emerged from the Times story first published in 2017.

Schrader is steady at the helm, navigating all manner of curious obstacles that come with dramatizing such a high-profile chapter in recent Hollywood. Scenes are shot at the newspaper’s iconic Midtown Manhattan location, Ashley Judd plays herself, and a number of other well-known celebrities factor in the narrative. The damning, horrifying, undercover audio of Weinstein made by Ambra Battilana Gutierrez while working with the NYPD in 2015 is included, extending its status as a smoking gun in the saga. Gutierrez just testified on November 8, less than two weeks before the premiere of “She Said,” during Weinstein’s current rape trial in Los Angeles.

Screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz and director Schrader make the right decision to carefully limit the ways in which Weinstein physically inhabits the movie. With the exception of the authentic sting recording, Weinstein is played by actor Mike Houston. But the filmmakers refrain from allowing a fully-formed performance of the figure to occupy center stage as the ranting bully previously established in Weinstein profiles. Instead, the disembodied voice heard in a small number of phone calls focuses on the producer’s paranoia, manifested in a strange obsession with Gwyneth Paltrow. Instead of giving Weinstein oxygen, the story is methodical and procedural. Can Twohey and Kantor convince women previously victimized by the serial predator to talk?

Condensing, combining, and streamlining are expected elements of movie storytelling, but “She Said” works toward a composite that validates as many facts and details as possible within the limitations of the feature film format. The depiction of the personal, nonwork experiences of Kantor and Twohey revolves around the ongoing challenges of motherhood and work/life balance. “She Said” acknowledges the toll of the job. In one scene, Twohey tees off on a rude and aggressive creep who doesn’t want to be dismissed. In another, a threatening, anonymous phone call unnerves and unsettles.

In 1982, Carol Gilligan wrote, “As we have listened for centuries to the voices of men and the theories of development that their experience informs, so we have come more recently to notice not only the silence of women but the difficulty in hearing what they say when they speak.” Gilligan’s words are an apt reminder to those who have criticized “She Said” for not fully conforming to the rhetorical strategies embodied by so many cinematic “true life” accounts of journalists at work. The way in which the film presents the testimony of Laura Madden (Jennifer Ehle), Zelda Perkins (Samantha Morton), Rowena Chiu (Angela Yeoh), and others affirms the value of Schrader’s strategy: listen and then listen some more.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Amy Bandlien Storkel and Bryan Storkel dispense delights of all kinds in their breezy documentary “The Pez Outlaw,” an imaginative portrait of wily entrepreneur Steve Glew. A single-minded obsession with the colorful candy containers sets the stage for a tongue-in-cheek drama that casts Glew as himself in a series of “Unsolved Mysteries”-meets-Wes Anderson reenactments. Some viewers may not receive the title subject’s idiosyncratic personality in the spirit offered by the filmmakers, but the whole goofy tale is so harmless, it’s hard to watch without a smile on your face.

Depressed and discouraged, Glew was working in a Michigan machine shop when he experienced a “light bulb” moment that would soon lead him to a Pez factory in Eastern Europe. Traveling to Slovenia with son Josh, Glew made key contacts and filled duffel bags with Pez designs and prototypes that were unavailable in the United States. His intuition was correct: the toys he acquired for pennies could be resold to rabid collectors for a significant mark-up. From there, it was just a short leap to the wild brainstorm of commissioning variant colorways and other modifications. Some of the film’s interview subjects affirm that Glew single-handedly transformed Pez collecting.

There was only one small problem: Glew was breaking the law as a smuggler.

Even though the Storkels flirt with the idea of a deeper dive into the ethics of Glew’s willingness to flout import and customs regulations, the manner in which the movie addresses the blunders of Pez’s American administration paints executive Scott McWhinnie as villainous killjoy to Glew’s mischievous elf (“magical troll” is the more common epithet used by some of the collectors who knew him). With a flowing white beard and a glint in his eye, Glew gleefully recounts sticking it to Pez U.S.A. for as much and as long as possible. Although not quite in the same league, “The Pez Outlaw” is reminiscent of Seth Gordon’s “The King of Kong,” with Glew as the beleaguered Steve Wiebe and McWhinnie as the hissable Billy Mitchell.

Glew is far from a reliable narrator, and the filmmakers seize the opportunity to run with all sorts of the farfetched claims made by or about him (one of the most amusing is Glew’s insistence that he was personally responsible for the institution of the one-per-household limitation on mail-in cereal box premiums). The more time you spend with him, the more he comes across as a shrewd mercenary hiding behind the “dumb American” facade that he acknowledges served him well on his excursions overseas and his subsequent battles with “Pezident” McWhinnie.

Fortunately, the Storkels include enough material centered on the durable and enchanting romance between Glew and wife Kathy to keep us firmly on his side. Candid and every bit as sweet as a sleeve of twelve cherry-flavored Pez, Kathy represents a nurturing and encouraging spirit able to keep her partner grounded when he would otherwise zoom off into the stratosphere. In 2014, the enterprising and ambitious Glew offered the movie rights to his life story on eBay. Fortunately for us, the documentary approach eventually prevailed, proving the old adage that truth can be stranger than fiction.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, “Catherine Called Birdy” lands on Amazon Prime Video following a short theatrical window. One of two 2022 films directed by the perpetually controversial Lena Dunham, the medieval bildungsroman was a labor of love based on the filmmaker’s professed affection for Karen Cushman’s 1994 Newbery Honor Book. Dunham, who also adapted the novel for the screen, delivers the most polished and confident feature of the four she has made so far, demonstrating a genuine affinity for both spirited anachronisms and timeless challenges that outline the similarities and differences faced by young women in the 13th century versus today.

The title character is played by a winning Bella Ramsey, perhaps best known as Lyanna Mormont in “Game of Thrones.” Currently 19, Ramsey believably inhabits the rambunctious and irrepressible 14-year-old confronted with the painful social realities and expectations that come with the territory and the times. The central conflict and several subplots revolve around the custom of arranged marriages. Though not long a teenager, Birdy has virtually no say regarding her husband-to-be. To make matters worse, the fragile economics of her family place tremendous pressure on Birdy’s father Lord Rollo (Andrew Scott) to choose a groom based on financial security above all else.

Despite the unwelcome reality that she will likely be married off for money and most certainly not for love, Birdy lives life at a breakneck pace and finds joy where she can. Dunham pokes at the outrageous unfairness of the patriarchal grip governing the women of the Middle Ages without reducing her supporting ensemble to flat and predictable stereotypes, even when it would be convenient to do so. Birdy’s attempts to sabotage every suitor play out a bit like the shenanigans on display in “Harold and Maude” when Mrs. Chasen arranges dates for her son. The frontrunner and worst of Birdy’s lot, a wealthy lech nicknamed Shaggy Beard (Paul Kaye), is only encouraged by the girl’s boorish behavior.

In a spot-on observation, Alison Willmore writes, “ … misogynistic brutality has always seemed like one of the fictional universe’s essential elements, part of an insistence that its crypto-European historical trappings be accompanied by some period-appropriate dehumanization.” Fortunately, Dunham refuses those conventions without erasing the large and small struggles faced by all women of the era. And even though the screen version risks some major alterations to Cushman’s original story – perhaps most notably in making Rollo his daughter’s hero by tweaking the climax – the essence of Birdy survives.

Like Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” and Brian Helgeland’s “A Knight’s Tale” (to name just two), “Catherine Called Birdy” takes great pleasure in placing perfect, period-incongruent needle-drops of great pop songs that provide thematic commentary on the action. Carter Burwell’s score is performed a cappella by Roomful of Teeth and several familiar tunes, including Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You,” the Angels’ “My Boyfriend’s Back,” and Rod Stewart’s “Young Turks” are delivered by Misty Miller. In Birdy’s world, girls are not allowed to attend a public hanging, go on a crusade, marry who they love, or have autonomy over their own bodies. Dunham’s movie reminds us that – at least on the latter point – the times are still darker than we’d like to believe.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Photography buffs and silent film aficionados will enjoy Marc Shaffer’s feature documentary “Exposing Muybridge,” a visually engaging account of curious cinematic forefather Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge’s place as a film pioneer was ultimately secured via the influential motion studies he produced following his ill-fated collaboration with railroad baron Leland Stanford in the early 1870s, but Shaffer attempts to put his subject’s entire creative life in context. Drawing from a series of new interviews with historians, theorists, photographers, and (in actor Gary Oldman) an enthusiastic collector, Shaffer recounts the dizzying highs and abject lows of Muybridge’s fascinating career.

Film students young and old will certainly recall class viewings of any number of Muybridge’s photo sequences come to life through animation, but so iconic are these images, Shaffer ends his film with a montage of allusions in paintings by Francis Bacon and David Hockney, Seth Shipman’s DNA data storage experiments, the photography of William Wegman and Sol LeWitt, and even U2’s “Lemon” and the animated series “Rick and Morty.” Had Shaffer been in production a little later, he could have added Jordan Peele’s “Nope” to the above list. At just under 90 minutes, the film doesn’t wear out its welcome, but there are a few aspects of Muybridge’s colorful legacy that could have used more detail and consideration.

Given that Muybridge’s life spanned 1830 to 1904 – a period, as the movie points out, of remarkable mechanization and modernization – it is a rather tall task for Shaffer to go into as much depth as Rebecca Solnit’s essential 2003 book “River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.” The talking heads interviewed by Shaffer, including Oscar-winner Oldman, are erudite, charming, knowledgeable, and passionate, but it is a real shame that Solnit is not among them. Her exceptional work, a must-read companion to Shaffer’s documentary, synthesizes several themes alluded to in the film.

That’s not to say that Shaffer doesn’t acknowledge the most remarkable milestones that link Muybridge to evolutions in image-making. One of the most enjoyable parts of the movie sees photographers Byron Wolfe and Mark Klett lining up near the exact spot where Muybridge took a breathtaking landscape plate in Yosemite National Park. By walking in Muybridge’s footsteps, minus his most reckless and perilous risk-taking, Wolfe and Klett link past and present with spine-tingling immediacy. The ways in which Muybridge edited and retouched pictures by adding dramatic details such as the favored cloud he placed in multiple compositions anticipated cinema’s commonplace manipulation of “reality” in favor of fantasy.

Shaffer frequently returns to Muybridge’s sketchy, dangerous personal character (or lack thereof). In 1874, Muybridge murdered Harry Larkyns, the lover of his spouse Flora, reportedly saying “I have a message for you from my wife” as he pulled the trigger. Over the decades Muybridge scholars have speculated that his utter lack of inhibition could be traced to a serious head injury suffered in an 1860 stagecoach crash. The personal and the professional are often interlaced, and Shaffer’s interview subjects go on to assertively debunk the “science” claims that Muybridge used to legitimize the costly University of Pennsylvania project that would, more than his majestic vistas, his San Francisco panorama, his volumes of stereograph cards, and his zoöpraxiscope, cement his place in history alongside proof that at a gallop, a horse does indeed lift all four hooves off the ground at the same time.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Known in its original French language as “Avec amour et acharnement” (“With Love and Fury” or “With Love and Relentlessness”), the first of two Claire Denis features released in 2022 swapped original English language title “Fire” for the more satisfying and effective “Both Sides of the Blade.” The latter name is taken from a song by longtime Denis collaborators Tindersticks, and its evocative lines suggesting the pain of being cut in two echo the film’s central love triangle. Following a February premiere at the Berlinale, where Denis received the Silver Bear for Best Director, the movie is currently available to stream in the United States via several major providers. It is well worth seeking out.

The second Denis film of 2022, Cannes Grand Prix-winner “Stars at Noon,” is currently in cinemas. Both movies are based on novels Denis adapted for the screen with writing partners. In the case of “Both Sides of the Blade,” the filmmaker worked with Christine Angot to prepare and reimagine Angot’s 2018 book “Un tournant de la vie” (“A Turning Point in Life”). The opening scenes of the movie bask in the warm ocean waters of a loving vacation idyll enjoyed by Sara (Juliette Binoche, making her third film with Denis) and Jean (Vincent Lindon, recently tremendous in “Titane”). They will shortly return to a chilly Paris and a series of unforeseen conflicts that challenge their union.

Denis, now 76 years old, rejected a producer’s plea for the on-camera events of “Both Sides of the Blade” to be free of masks. The director, however, insisted on grounding the action of the story in the midst of the pandemic. The eerie quiet and the dispiriting isolation intensify Sara’s reaction when she catches sight of ex-lover François (Grégoire Colin). Instantly, she is overcome with butterflies and long-buried feelings that will soon threaten the security of her relationship with Jean. Matters are further complicated when Jean – who was also friends with François years ago – announces that he intends to form a business partnership with Sara’s old flame.

Be it film, novel, poem, or song, the triangle is one of the most frequent tropes in storytelling. Denis is such a gifted moviemaker, though, that cliche is absent from the precise and specific moments inside her intelligently-constructed universe. Intriguing details, like Sara’s work as the host of a radio program or the reasons that sent Jean to prison, are deliberately unexplored and never used as central turning points in the narrative. For some viewers, the lack of greater context for these tantalizing ingredients will frustrate and/or contribute to a sense that the story is incomplete. Others will appreciate the way that Denis is able to keep us off balance and curious about where everything is going.

The central point of view belongs to Sara, but Jean receives equitable treatment. The movie’s primary subplot involves Jean’s estranged son Marcus (Issa Perica), a biracial teenager being raised outside Paris by Jean’s mother (Bulle Ogier). Jean’s post-incarceration inability or unwillingness to be present in his child’s life poses yet another of the film’s unanswered questions, but Denis finds ways to show how Jean’s absence is doing lasting, painful damage to Marcus. Both Sara and Jean lie to themselves and to others. Binoche, as brilliant as ever, draws us close to Sara even as we wonder at her disastrous, delirious choices.