Movie review by Greg Carlson

The Daniels – Kwan and Scheinert – further cement their cult status with the hellzapoppin and appropriately titled “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the team’s follow-up to “Swiss Army Man.” That joint theatrical feature debut, the buzziest word-of-mouth must-see at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, remains the finest film ever made about a friendship between a marooned loner and a flatulent corpse. So what do you do for an encore? Sans Kwan, Scheinert directed oft-overlooked gem “The Death of Dick Long” in 2019, but the wide A24 release of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” should shine the brightest spotlight on the filmmakers to date.

Sprinting to cinemas just ahead of Sam Raimi’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” – which premiered on March 11 as part of South by Southwest – also embraces the premise of infinite cosmological possibility, wrapping its old-fashioned family reconciliation drama in a sprawling tribute to classic kung fu fantasy. In their wild landscape, the Daniels catapult Michelle Yeoh’s frustrated laundromat proprietor onto the tracks of a rollercoaster careening through a dizzying set of alternative (sur)realities.

Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang may be on the cusp of divorce from husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, fantastic from start to finish), but that’s just one of her problems. A strained relationship with daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) and the recent arrival of disapproving father Gong Gong (James Hong) compound the stress of an IRS audit being conducted by Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis). During the tax probe, Evelyn is interrupted by Alpha Waymond, a version of her spouse familiar with a “verse-jumping” technology. Our protagonist may be the greatest failure of all the Evelyns who exist, but she also might have what it takes to save everything, everywhere, all at once.

A single viewing cannot do justice to the movie’s giddy array of references, shout-outs, and homages. One can already anticipate the swell of YouTubers gearing up to elucidate as many Easter eggs as a frame-by-frame analysis will allow. From a reconstruction of the Dawn of Man sequence from “2001: A Space Odyssey” to more subtle nods to the stylish looks of Kar-wai Wong’s distinctive photographic palette, Kwan and Scheinert cram so much information into their project, we marvel at the ability of the duo to ground such a kaleidoscopic carousel of eye candy in the recognizable feelings of frustration and regret that bedevil Evelyn.

Some sequences resemble the videogame-influenced kinetics of Edgar Wright’s “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” but the weird brew of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” has its own distinct flavor. The Daniels plant a sloppy kiss on “The Matrix” and remix beloved Pixar rat Remy into the hysterical Racacoonie. A tough-as-nails martial arts mentor checks Tarantino checking the Shaw Brothers, and unless I’ve missed my mark, Kwan and Scheinert – longtime aficionados of the rectal – are sui generis when it comes to combat involving butt plug power-ups. At a few minutes short of two and a half hours, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” nearly wears out its welcome, but as far as hot dog-fingered audacity goes, the Daniels will make plenty of new eyeballs go googly.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Cow,” Andrea Arnold’s first nonfiction feature, opens theatrically and on-demand in the United States on April 8. The talented writer-director, whose “Red Road,” “Fish Tank,” and “American Honey” received jury prizes at Cannes, spent more than four years working on the project. The result of the filmmaker’s labor is as beautiful as it is painful. “Cow” is a stirring, contemplative, and observational examination of the life of Luma, one of the hard-working inhabitants of the Park Farm dairy operation in Arnold’s home county of Kent, England. Luma’s daily routines are captured by Arnold and director of photography Magda Kowalczyk in stark and arresting detail.

“Cow” premiered out of competition at Cannes last July. Prior to that date, director Viktor Kossakovsky’s “Gunda” made its debut at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival. Comparisons between the two movies, which forego dialogue and narration in favor of intimate encounters with barn-based life cycles and unrewarded motherhood, have been frequent. While the films make a sorrowful double-feature, I prefer the clarity, focus, and personality of Arnold’s story. For my money, “Cow” strikes just the right balance between the filmmaker’s self-awareness, which punctuates the movie’s soundtrack selections, and Arnold’s long-game feminist commentary.

Arnold’s assembly stops short of making any condemnation of the human masters who guide Luma through her paces, but “Cow” surely raises age-old questions about the relationship between people and “their” animals. Arnold relentlessly reminds those of us who have little or no contact with commercial livestock that the pasteurized milk we purchase from neighborhood supermarkets starts out a long distance from the aesthetically pleasing cartons and jugs that neatly line refrigerated shelves. The sights and sounds of farmyard reality – lots of mud, excrement, amniotic fluid, swollen udders, wet noses and tongues – are rendered with a visceral punch. The handheld camera is often so close, Luma bumps into the lens.

The offbeat rhythm of the editing is another of Arnold’s masterstrokes, aligning the viewer with Luma’s experiences. The labyrinth of Park Farm’s gates, chutes, and pens, in which all sorts of modern machinery assists the farmers with the smooth and steady scheduling of every aspect of Luma’s existence, reinforces the recognition of helplessness and inevitability. One requires no special expertise to fathom the film’s central reality: to keep cows lactating, calves must be produced. In one of the movie’s moments of lighthearted relief, Arnold underscores Luma’s pregnancy-producing encounter with a bull to the sounds of Mabel’s 2019 electropop track “Mad Love.”

Anyone who has read “Charlotte’s Web” or “A Day No Pigs Would Die” can make an accurate guess about the conclusion of “Cow,” but the climax arrives with a startling and matter-of-fact thunderbolt. In an interview with Simon Hattenstone, Arnold said of her bovine protagonist, “I wanted to show a non-human consciousness.” Anthropomorphism in fiction and nonfiction film has been the subject of scores of essays. And Arnold knew that some viewers of “Cow” would find fault with her stylistic choices just as others would praise the movie. I fall squarely in the latter group; “Cow” is a film I will think about for a long time.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Abiding enthusiasm for continued discussion of the life and work of Stanley Kubrick manifests once again in feature-length documentary “A Forbidden Orange” (also known by its original Spanish title “La naranja prohibida”). Delving into the exhibition history of “A Clockwork Orange” in Spain, director Pedro González Bermúdez shines his flashlight into all kinds of nooks and crannies, but the movie – now available to watch in the United States via HBO Max – doesn’t measure up to several recent explorations of the master filmmaker’s singular career. Like many SK artifacts, Bermúdez’s movie will appeal most directly to those who already identify as rabid followers, cultists, and completists.

The complex story of the public reception to “A Clockwork Orange” has already been detailed in stacks of books, journal articles, biographies, and films. Like Paul Joyce’s 2000 Channel Four documentary “Still Tickin’: The Return of A Clockwork Orange” (included with the bonus features on the Warner Bros. 50th anniversary home media releases), the participation of lead actor Malcolm McDowell adds first-person star power to Bermúdez’s effort. McDowell alternates between scripted narration and personal recollections of his work with Kubrick, establishing a curious dual role.

Ostensibly, Bermúdez sets out to chronicle the programming of “A Clockwork Orange” at the 1975 Valladolid International Film Week festival via talking head interviews with many who participated, but the side trips are more tantalizing than the sights on the main highway. Scenes from Eloy de la Iglesia’s “Clockwork”-inspired, Sue Lyon-starring “Murder in a Blue World” (referred to here as “A Drop of Blood to Die Loving,” one of several different names attached to the movie) allude to a more dynamic and fascinating study of the immediate pop culture impact of “Clockwork.”

In the Cambridge Film Handbooks series on “A Clockwork Orange,” Kubrick scholar Robert Kolker writes, “Its apparent thesis that unfettered free will, expressed as violent disruption of other people’s lives, is better than repression and a loss of freedom seems undeniable. What’s more, its style and narrative structure keep the spectator in a position of awed conviction, distant and involved, amused and horrified, convinced and querulous, and at every moment involved.” Occasionally, Bermúdez latches on to this sentiment, elevating “A Forbidden Orange” beyond the memories of those involved with the Villadolid screening to critically address one of Kubrick’s most controversial creations.

The film’s anecdotes about bomb threats, ticket queues, university students, and the waning influence of the Franco regime over contemporary artist expression – the dictator died just seven days prior to the “Clockwork” screening – rhyme with other tales in which film and politics combust (like the May 1968 events in Paris following the dismissal of Henri Langlois from the Cinémathèque Française), but the most engaging sections of “A Forbidden Orange” return to Kubrick’s film and the way in which it affected viewers.

Near the end of the documentary, Bermúdez presents a series of portrait shots of younger subjects, the vast majority of whom have never seen “A Clockwork Orange.” Their fresh before-and-after responses remind veteran cinephiles that even the most durable and seemingly timeless objects could be more fragile than we think. As long as there are enthusiasts like Bermúdez, however, the posthumous Stanley Kubrick industry looks to continue for a long time.

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.