Movie review by Greg Carlson

Krystin Ver Linden’s feature debut “Alice” premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and arrives in theaters March 18. The Sundance press notes described the movie as “equal parts earthy Southern Gothic and soulful Blaxploitation,” but critical reactions since its January debut have been decidedly mixed. The imaginative genre-mashup works in fits and starts, but there is no question about the quality of lead Keke Palmer’s smooth Pam Grier-inspired performance – even if she inhabits a universe that never fully comes together for viewers. Theatrical box office potential for the Roadside Attractions limited release looks to be quiet.

Palmer’s protagonist, enslaved by cruel plantation owner Paul Bennet (Jonny Lee Miller), survives the horrors of daily assault, rape, and abuse by the cruel and inhumane monster for whom she toils. Ver Linden, who appends a title card suggesting the story was “inspired by true events,” claims to have drawn from the accounts of people who remained in bondage following the Emancipation Proclamation. This basic premise was also used in Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s problematic “Antebellum,” another messy and uneven feature led by a performance (Janelle Monae in the 2020 movie) stronger than either the script or the direction.

In an interview with Julia Teti for “She Knows,” Ver Linden cites the story of Mae Miller, whose own “involuntary servitude” concluded in Mississippi in the 1960s, as the true-life account that stuck with the filmmaker during the creative process. In “Alice,” like other films that operate using variations of the City in a Bottle trope, we discover that the period setting is not, in fact, the mid 1800s. When a bewildered Alice escapes to a stretch of highway and nearly gets creamed by a truck driven by one-time Black Panther Frank (Common), Ver Linden reveals that the setting is 1973. In an instant, everything Alice thinks she knows about the world is erased.

Once the determined heroine trades her braids for an afro – Ver Linden’s most prominent visual signifier of her movie’s indebtedness to “Coffy,” “Foxy Brown,” and other action-packed 70s-era revenge thrillers – the film lurches toward a predictable showdown that fails to deliver the kind of ass-kicking violence perfected by Grier. Odie Henderson’s brutal takedown of “Alice” makes a series of compelling arguments against Ver Linden’s movie. While I am not sure whether the film features Common’s career-worst performance, I do concur that there is little chemistry shared between him and Palmer.

Henderson torches the “fetishistic lip service” paid to the cultural figures who ignite Alice’s outrage, suggesting that Ver Linden rushes her character’s transformation into radicalized freedom fighter. I don’t disagree that the director’s shorthand is too short, or that one must really suspend disbelief to enjoy “Alice.” There are, however, enough touches that make the film worth a look. In particular, I keep returning to a diner scene in which Alice confronts a white supremacist played by Alicia Witt. How we got there doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s one of the only sections of the movie that addresses the past/present divisions of the film both structurally and philosophically. “Alice” sorely needed more of this.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Filmmakers Kevin Smokler and Christopher Boone have added a worthwhile document to the group of movies devoted in one way or another to the world of record collecting. “Vinyl Nation” will appeal principally to those already familiar with the activity, but the directors make clear a desire to reach beyond the hobby’s traditional demographic of middle-age white men by including the voices of those who have been marginalized for a long time. Additionally, Smokler and Boone strive for a genuine big-tent inclusiveness that avoids the “boys club” elitism sometimes associated with old-school, know-it-all record collectors.

Better yet, they manage to do all this while retaining enough insider content to please longtime crate-diggers and discerning audiophiles – the latter of which, Third Man’s Ben Blackwell humorously acknowledges, are “the worst.” A trip to Salina, Kansas breaks down the process of making a record as narrated by the great Gary Salstrom, general manager at Quality Record Pressings. The entirety of the tour through QRP, a company known for the introduction of fresh techniques, improvements, and innovations that have enhanced the manufacture of records, plays like one of the classic factory visit shorts seen via Picture Picture on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

In one sense, “Vinyl Nation” is the B-side of Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller’s 2019 feature “Other Music,” which focused on the final days of the beloved East Village record store of the title. But while “Other Music” was about endings, “Vinyl Nation” looks ahead with optimism and excitement. The little girl who scores the teal-colored edition of Weezer’s corresponding LP at Kansas City’s Mills Record Company doesn’t care about the opinions of dismissive fossils eager to explain that black vinyl is acoustically superior. Later in the movie, music critic Eric Weisbard cuts right to the heart of the matter, identifying the way in which “consumer culture [welcomed in] large groups of people who previously were not affluent enough to be targeted.”

That populist sentiment guides “Vinyl Nation,” which understands how the mass consumption of music as physical media communicates the format’s charm not only through the remarkable and life-changing sounds conjured from within the grooves but through the tactile and visual elements embodied in the way records and their sleeves look, feel, and smell. Graphic design nerds will drool over the packaging tutorial by Stoughton Printing’s Rob Maushund in California. Smokler and Boone cram a huge amount of thoughtfully-considered material into their movie, which invites us on their coast-to-coast road trip.

“Vinyl Nation” accentuates the positive, but the movie can also be commended for at least raising questions about industry downsides to the record boom. Profit-driven major labels risk the future of vinyl by rushing mass-produced titles to market without quality control standards. Environmental impact, rising prices (that put collecting new music out of reach of many buyers), equitable artist compensation, and plant backlogs that fast-track reissue pressings ahead of unknown artists are a few of the existential considerations addressed in the film. And yes, toward the end of their movie, Smokler and Boone brave the thorny question of whether or not vinyl sounds better. The answers, provided by many voices that now feel like old friends, are almost as satisfying as listening to your favorite song.

“Vinyl Nation” screens at the 2022 Fargo Film Festival on March 15 and March 19.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Director Mimi Cave’s feature debut “Fresh” was one of the highlights of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival’s Midnight section. Working from a wicked screenplay by Lauryn Kahn, Cave’s jet-black satire lands exclusively on Hulu starting March 4. Most definitely not for the faint of heart, “Fresh” joins a handful of classic cannibal films that tiptoe along the edges of the comic and the horrific. Echoes of wide-ranging precedents like “Eating Raoul,” “Parents,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” and “Raw” place “Fresh” in solid company, but Cave makes her own mark on the subgenre, using healthy doses of gore and mayhem to challenge the disappointments of our technology-driven dating culture and the shabby treatment of women by men.

“Fresh” is potent enough to operate effectively outside of metaphor, but essentially every reviewer who tackled the title following its January 30 Sundance premiere commented on the ways in which Cave addresses the downside of the female experience in an app-based hookup scene that emphasizes sexual availability and the superficialities of physical appearance. Swiping left or right based on split-second impulses, Cave asserts, contributes to the alienation. The very nature of online “romance” can perpetuate a kind of contractual arrangement suggesting a marketplace devoid of genuine human connection.

The movie’s opening section, in which protagonist Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) suffers through a ghastly encounter with clueless chauvinist Chad (Brett Dier), could readily work as a hilarious standalone short film. A self-absorbed bore who insults Noa to her face multiple times before insisting they split the check, Chad appears to confirm Noa’s fears that decent men are as scarce as unicorns. Later, in a stroke of real life luck that seems too good to be true, Noa encounters charming stranger Steve (Sebastian Stan) while shopping in a grocery store’s produce section. Sharp eyes will no doubt spot the prominent and ominous “Fresh Meats” sign, but Noa and the viewers are hard-pressed to find fault with Steve, who seems to know just what to say.

It would be unfair to spoil the details of what happens next, but Steve turns out to be more the man of Noa’s nightmares than her dreams. Khan’s writing, through the characters of Noa’s bestie Millie (Jonica “Jojo” T. Gibbs) and Mille’s ex Paul (Dayo Okeniyi), adopts the color and the shape of an urgent thriller. The deployment of classic tropes leads us from one tense dilemma to another, but Cave frequently upends expectations with shrewd surprises and reversals of fortune. By the time we reach the breathless climax, only the smallest plot holes remain. And those minor shortcomings will only bother the crankiest viewers who overlook the film’s wild forest for its gnarliest trees.

Throughout “Fresh,” Cave shows a sophisticated command of the screw-turning suspense in the material and the milieu. And the escalating predicaments require both Edgar-Jones and Stan to craft performances within performances as Noa and Steve engage in cat-and-mouse funny games with one another. Perhaps the best reward is that none of the collaborators take things too seriously but still ground the movie in a recognizable world (despite the ultra-stylish “Dwell” photoshoot-ready domicile that serves as the central location). The result is a thought-provoking modern fable that sustains multiple readings.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The complexities and contradictions of Bill Cosby are the very essence of W. Kamau Bell’s incredible “We Need to Talk About Cosby,” a four-part meditation, examination, and true deep dive on the decades-long saga of the fallen icon that pulls off the nearly impossible task of bearing witness to the power and joy of so many of the performer’s artistic milestones and achievements while reckoning with the legacy of a credibly-accused serial rapist and abusive predator. Aired on Showtime following a world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, “We Need to Talk About Cosby” makes good on Bell’s self-acknowledged ability to have difficult conversations. The author, podcaster, television host, stand-up comic and filmmaker delivers one of the most valuable documentaries of the year.

Bell includes potent on-camera interviews with a variety of stakeholders, none of whom are more impactful than the women who share in detail their painful and personal stories of encounters with Cosby that followed the same horrifying pattern. In some instances, victims were pressured by Cosby to ingest pills along with alcohol. In others, Cosby surreptitiously slipped the drugs into the drinks of unsuspecting and unwitting targets. Bell is as masterful a listener as he is an interviewer, fully honoring the presence of those whose lives were changed after crossing paths with the star. Throughout the series, we often see the immediate reactions of interview subjects as they view a variety of clips on tablets.

Bell methodically outlines a dual narrative that addresses the public trajectory of Cosby’s unprecedented role in American media culture while simultaneously laying out, for the first time in this format, the private pattern of sexual assault alleged by more than 60 women to date. Bell covers all the biographical bases, including Cosby’s leap from clubs to “I Spy,” the mysteriousness of wife Camille, the tragic murder of son Ennis, and the controversial transformation from America’s beloved dad to conservative scold following the so-called “Pound Cake Speech,” which even has its own Wikipedia article.

It is impossible to know the extent of Cosby’s personal sense of invulnerability after he got away with his crimes for so long, but Bell calls out and comments upon the numerous instances in which questionable content was hidden in plain sight. For example, Cosby’s descriptions of the potency of Spanish Fly hung around from the time of a bit recorded for the 1969 album “It’s True! It’s True!” to more than a dozen mentions in his book “Childhood” in 1991. Bell also includes the unsettling segment on the toxic agent sold as an aphrodisiac from Cosby’s interview with Larry King.

In the same vein is the scene from the seventh season episode of “The Cosby Show” called “The Last Barbecue,” in which Cliff Huxtable’s special homemade sauce sexually arouses those who consume it. Bell reminds us that Cosby selected Huxtable’s medical specialty of gynecology/obstetrics. And that the doctor saw patients in the basement office of his brownstone. But alongside these red flags stood moments of steady, reliable Black affirmation, from art like Ellis Wilson’s “Funeral Procession” (central to the season two episode “The Auction”) to what professor Danielle Morgan calls “a million reasons that we don’t want what we know about Bill Cosby to be true.”

Bell says, “If I had to pick one scene to demonstrate how good this show was, and how much it meant to Black folks, there’s only one clip I would choose. Some of you already know what I’m talking about.” It is, of course, the Huxtable family lip-syncing to Ray Charles’s “Night Time Is the Right Time” on the season two episode “The Anniversary,” which aired on October 10, 1985. Cosby was so famous and so vital for so long, more than one generation admired the breadth and depth of his output. But for those like Bell and like me, who grew up feasting on “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” and “Picture Pages” and who taped every episode of “The Cosby Show” on VHS, “We Need to Talk About Cosby” will stop you in your tracks, stagger you, and bring tears to your eyes.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The only nonfiction film to be selected for the 2022 Sundance Film Festival’s Spotlight section – a prestige category highlighting movies that have already premiered to acclaim elsewhere – Bianca Stigter’s feature-length directorial debut “Three Minutes: A Lengthening” is an inspired piece of cinematic archaeology. Stigter does exactly what the title of the piece invitingly and enigmatically implies: she examines a short section of 16mm home movie footage from every possible angle, stopping and starting and running and re-running the images without ever cutting to talking heads.

The film in question was taken by David Kurtz in 1938 while on vacation in Europe and shows some of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk, a small town north of Warsaw where Kurtz was born. Kurtz’s grandson Glenn discovered the reel in a closet in 2009. Realizing the celluloid was brittle, faded, and on the very edge of salvageable, the movie was rescued and restored through the efforts of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. A lesson plan designed for grades seven to twelve on the museum’s website uses the Kurtz footage to “engage students in understanding both the individuality of Jewish lives affected by or lost in the Holocaust and the cumulative effects of the Holocaust on communities.”

Within seven years of Kurtz’s visit, only about one-hundred of Nasielsk’s approximately 3000 Jews would be alive.

Stigter’s excellent film, which does indeed lengthen the Nasielsk section of Kurtz’s home movies to a total running time of just under seventy minutes, works first as a rare and valuable artifact, a strange and unexpected crystal ball allowing us to peer into an ordinary moment in time just prior to the unthinkable arrival of and occupation by the German Nazis who would send so many to death. But Stigter’s direction transforms the film and story into so much more than a historical lesson on atrocity and genocide. The narration, delivered by Helena Bonham Carter, constantly asks the viewer to imagine contours, possibilities, and meanings about the act of seeing, witnessing, and understanding.

Several writers have already compared Stigter’s approach to the frame-by-frame scrutiny bestowed upon Abraham Zapruder’s 8mm documentation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. But instead of capturing a tragedy, “Three Minutes: A Lengthening” anticipates one; in a matter of months, the people we observe smiling and waving at the novelty of being in front of Kurtz’s camera will be removed to places like Treblinka.

In the Kurtz footage, around 150 individuals are seen. Of those 150, fewer than a dozen were positively identified by name. It is one of the film’s most sobering revelations, intensified by the passion in Glenn Kurtz’s voiceover as he details the efforts to track any survivors who might have been in his grandfather’s viewfinder. Sections like this one, or the one in which another person methodically decodes the blurry letters on a briefly-visible grocery shop sign, bring into proximity the limitations and the promises of film. That thoughtful metanarrative contemplation and Stigter’s exciting structural choices make for a profound experience.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In “Parallel Mothers,” the excellent melodrama from master filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, Penelope Cruz’s Janis Martinez wears a Dior shirt emblazoned with the hopeful thought that “We should all be feminists.” Grouches might say the touch is too on-the-nose, but fans know it’s on-brand and heartfelt. The director, now in his early 70s, has built one of the great bodies of work over the past decades by making so many films that take a deep and curious interest in the lives of women. When Taschen first published the Paul Duncan and Barbara Peiro-edited Almodovar addition to their massive Archives series, I thought, “Too soon!” This is an artist who still has some of his finest movies ahead of him. The volume has already been updated once. Taschen better prepare to do it again.

Cruz has forged a lasting partnership with Almodovar, and “Parallel Mothers” – their seventh movie together – is arguably the most satisfying collaboration. Janis is a successful photographer who lives in a signature Almodovar flat in Madrid: a perfectly-appointed dwelling adorned with vibrant objets d’art, bold splashes of color, and a gorgeous collection of glass vases, all situated within the mid-century modern aesthetic favored by the filmmaker. But as attuned as he is to style, Almodovar appreciates and respects substance. While jaw-dropping twists of fate and unbelievable coincidences have provided highlights in many Almodovar movies, thematic expressions of powerful ideas keep us returning to the Pedroverse.

Almodovar makes it look easy. The opening of “Parallel Mothers” – without ever feeling truncated or rushed – rockets through weeks of backstory and exposition in minutes, explaining how Janis meets Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a forensic archeologist whose work for the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory links him to Janis’s desire to exhume remains that could belong to her great-grandfather, who was killed by Franco loyalists. After a brief affair, Janis becomes pregnant. Making a decision that lays out one of the central motifs of the film, Janis informs the married Arturo that she will be raising the child on her own.

We meet Ana (Milena Smit) in the maternity unit of the hospital where Janis prepares for delivery. Ana is also pregnant, although her own circumstances are not as comfortable as the ones in which Janis operates. Ana’s pregnancy is the result of a sexual assault and her father has more or less disowned her. As you may expect in a narrative of absent men, our protagonists become parallel mothers to newborn daughters. Ana will eventually go to work for Janis as a live-in nanny and their relationship will be intertwined in several surprising, even shocking, ways. Almodovar delights in exploring the generational gap between Ana and Janis, who is old enough to be Ana’s mom.

The strings of the partially Bernard Herrmann-influenced score by Almodovar regular Alberto Iglesias conjure up Hitchcockian intrigue and supply another element that invites the viewer to connect with “Parallel Mothers.” Almodovar frequently scrutinizes the ways in which the past interacts with and intrudes upon the present. His keen sense of pacing and timing can take on the contours favored by the Master of Suspense. Underneath the mayhem, Hitchcock – like Almodovar – also understood that human reactions to extraordinary circumstances would be the point of intersection allowing audience members to identify with the characters in his films.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

No doubt many cinephiles first encountered the tale of the charismatic French volcanologist couple Katia and Maurice Krafft in Werner Herzog’s 2016 “Into the Inferno,” itself a spectacular meditation on the terrible wonders of pyroclastic flow. Another group would have made the acquaintance of the scientist-adventurers through the 1987 ”Nature” episode “Volcano Watchers,” broadcast just four years before their deaths on June 3, 1991 in the eruption of Japan’s Mount Unzen. Documentary filmmaker Sara Dosa honors the legacy of the intrepid pair in “Fire of Love,” her entertaining and accomplished master class in assemblage. The film was one of the opening night features of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

The Kraffts may be better known in their native France than in the United States, but American viewers will immediately recognize a kinship with Jacques Cousteau, arguably the most famous of the do-it-yourself conservation and ecology heroes of the second half of the 20th century (and the subject of “Becoming Cousteau,” the recent documentary by Liz Garbus). Dosa, like Wes Anderson in “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” seizes on the stylish allure of entrepreneurship: authoring books, delivering lectures, making regular appearances on talk shows, and writing, producing, photographing, and editing educational nature films are all part of the enterprise.

Dosa also embraces an Andersonian appreciation for filmmaking focused on Gen X childhood nostalgia – as well as the kind of deep Francophilia on display in “The French Dispatch” – illuminating Katia and Maurice as hip avatars of the intellectual godhood of physics, chemistry, and geology. In their Team Zissou-esque matching red stocking caps, the Kraffts and their collaborators perform all sorts of colorful and hair-raising experiments that, at least for the less sensible Maurice, appear to be as much about playing to the camera as they are about hard research and data collection. At one point, Maurice floats out on a lake of sulfuric acid in a rubber raft, leaving a furious Katia fretting on the shore.

The partnership of the Kraffts is, of course, the film’s raison d’être, and Dosa is fully aware that the rarity of the single-minded lovers is the heart and soul of her film. Katia and Maurice are equally obsessed by and addicted to the awesome power of volcanic activity. They speak a special language with a certain vocabulary known only to the other. In one sense, Maurice and Katia experience an ongoing, romantic ménage à trois with the volcanoes, although Maurice never did accomplish his impossible dream of inventing a lava-proof kayak/bubble that would allow him to ride directly atop a molten river.

The morbidly curious might tune in to see how Dosa handles the tragic final moments of the Kraffts (Katia was 49 and Maurice was 45 when they died). She does, but with tastefulness and grace, preferring instead to emphasize the joy and passion they applied to their vocation. Dosa’s decision to enlist Miranda July as the film’s narrator is absolutely perfect. And the incredible soundtrack, which uses needle-drops by Air and Brian Eno in between Nicolas Godin’s retrofuturistic flourishes, deserves a deluxe Mondo pressing on lava-red vinyl.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Multiple observers have pointed to filmmaker Sean Baker’s practice of extending radical empathy to the characters who inhabit his fascinating, colorful film world. In “Red Rocket,” Baker continues to explore this territory with a high-wire balancing act that has energized critical debate and sparked conversation about the fictional depiction of reprehensible, immoral, and illegal behavior as demonstrated by the charming, the clever, and the charismatic. Of course, it’s nonsense to argue that the actions of antiheroic figures reflect a moral failing on the part of the director – from Tony Camonte to Tony Montana and Alex DeLarge to Travis Bickle, bad boys, bad men, and bad manchildren have populated plenty of classics.

I suspect that Baker, writing again with regular collaborator Chris Bergoch, has been taking heat on these counts in no small part because “Red Rocket” is so damn funny, blasting off with such an air of exuberance. Not unlike the way the Coens made “The Big Lebowski” into a curious recent period film via the Dude parroting George Bush’s admonishment of Saddam Hussein, “Red Rocket” takes place during the time leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Background references to Clinton versus Trump have led some to read the film as an affirmation of just how easy it can be to fall for the empty promises of those seeking (or seeking to retain) power.

At the eye of a self-generated hurricane is Mikey Saber, the swaggering, shit-talking hustler whose capacity for manipulation is matched by the anatomical blessings that served him as a longtime performer in pornographic videos. The indefatigable Mikey is played to the hilt by once-upon-a-time MTV personality, model, rapper, and actor Simon Rex, whose own early career appearances in a small number of solo masturbation videos provide the bona fides to suggest the kind of carefully cultivated authenticity that Baker fosters through his usual onscreen blend of professionals and untrained newcomers.

Returning to Texas City, Texas from California with nothing but a black eye and a half-baked plan to get back on his feet, Mikey begs estranged wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) and mother-in-law Lil (Brenda Deiss) for a spot on the sofa. Their less than enthusiastic reactions tell us all we need to know about Mikey’s reliability, but they relent in exchange for household chores and rent money. The employment gap on Mikey’s resume baffles potential employers in a very funny sequence highlighting a series of interview failures. Unable to land a regular job, Mikey sells marijuana to oil refinery workers. Mirroring his domestic situation, he deals for a mother/daughter pair, and the way in which he relates to and interacts with the many women in his life bubbles with complexity.

Baker’s appreciation for even the smallest roles is a chief delight of “Red Rocket” (one of the best moments in the film is the exchange of looks between Mikey and the old man next door following what is most certainly Mikey’s biggest, most unforgivable fuck-up). Each one of the supporting cast members is terrific, but first among equals is Suzanna Son as Strawberry, the NSYNC-appreciating 17-year-old donut shop clerk groomed by Mikey for a triumphant return to Los Angeles and porn stardom. Each succeeding interaction between Mikey and Strawberry hoists another red flag, but the collaboration between Baker and Son is so skillful, you’re never quite sure whether Mikey is taking advantage of her or if she’s taking advantage of him.