Movie review by Greg Carlson

Natalie Erika James delivers a strong directorial debut with “Relic,” another Sundance 2020 world premiere now available on demand. Working from a screenplay she co-wrote with Christian White, James thoughtfully explores mother-daughter relationships, the icy grip of dementia, and the inevitability of human mortality. Situating her core themes within the corner of art-house horror often identified as the slow-burn variety, James mostly skips the jump scares in favor of creeping dread and layered metaphor. Some of the resulting ambiguity might disappoint viewers seeking either concrete, logical explanation or deeper, world-building mythology, but the three central performers more than make up for any significant shortcomings.

Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) visit the home of Kay’s mother Edna (Robyn Nevin) — some distance from Melbourne — when alerted to Edna’s strange disappearance. A prologue suggests Edna might be experiencing some kind of supernatural intruder, but James also supports the simpler possibility that Edna, now in her 80s, has reached a point where she can no longer take care of herself. Her otherwise well-appointed and spacious cottage will soon take on a sinister life of its own, but when Kay and Sam arrive, they are greeted by rotting fruit and several handwritten sticky-notes with Edna’s reminders to flush, turn off the tap, and take her pills. A more sinister one reads “Don’t follow it.”

Local authorities help Kay and Sam comb the surrounding woods. Not long after the search begins, Edna inexplicably shows up back in her own kitchen. She greets Kay with a nonchalance that strongly supports the theory that she became disoriented and wandered off, but the large and nasty bruise on her chest is harder to explain. Nevin, a veteran stage performer and director, fills Edna with all sorts of traits recognizable to families who have dealt with dementia, aging, and end-of-life care. On a good day, Edna showers her granddaughter with love. On a bad one, she calls Sam a thief, demanding the return of a ring she forgot she had just given.

As the events of “Relic”unfold, James entertains a few key subplots. In one, a rustic cabin on the family property appears to hold the secrets of Edna’s troubling behavior. In another, an incident involving the son of Edna’s neighbor leads Sam on a deeper investigation inside her grandma’s house. I like the way in which James handles the dualities of internal/external as a parallel to the lucid/foggy divisions in Edna’s personality. The gradual transformation of “Relic” into a haunted house movie begins with classic tropes, like the vibrating washer and dryer recalling similar appliance behavior in Peter Strickland’s wonderful “In Fabric.” Soon enough, it escalates to the unnerving architectural impossibilities, loops, and Mobius strips explored by Stanley Kubrick during his visit to the Overlook Hotel.

At first glance, the house-as-trap works in conjunction with the abundant symbols of decay. Together, the twin motifs grow and spread and reach toward a climax that balances revulsion with empathy. Reminiscent of an astonishing scene in Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant “Under the Skin,” James’ gutsy move is as emotionally stirring as it is unpleasant. As a memento mori, it shares something in common with Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” another movie, albeit one of a different genre, worried and concerned by what happens to us at the end.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Both Jim Jarmusch’s contemporary classic “Dead Man” and Kelly Reichardt’s newly released “First Cow” open with cosmic epigraphs. The former uses Henri Michaux’s idiosyncratic line, “It is preferable not to travel with a dead man.” The latter begins with “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship,” from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell.” Reichardt’s choice of Blake, along with the presence of Gary Farmer in a small but key role, pays homage to Jarmusch’s Acid Western. “First Cow” will rhyme and echo with that great movie in several other pleasing ways, but perhaps the most prominent yoke is the mutual investigation of close male friendship and love.

Farmer was Nobody to Johnny Depp’s William Blake, and in “First Cow,” a parallel connection develops between Orion Lee’s King Lu, first seen naked and on the run, and John Magaro’s Otis “Cookie” Figowitz, a one-time baker’s apprentice from Maryland now seeking his fortune in the Pacific Northwest of the 1820s. “Dead Man” marked accountant Blake’s westward journey as a mortal metaphor; Nobody shepherds Blake in the direction of a sea canoe that will bear his friend out of this world and into the next. Cookie and King Lu, like Nobody and Blake, will come together again following a separation, and may also remain together until death parts them.

While the intertextual references to “Dead Man” are more plentiful and prominent, Reichardt’s cast is also joined by the late, great René Auberjonois in one of his final screen appearances. The lucky-charm presence of the frequent Robert Altman ensemble member calls to mind “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” another frontier film in which the veil between life and death, happiness and despair, and love and loneliness is delicate and gossamer. Reichardt, sharing screenplay credit with longtime writing collaborator Jon Raymond for this loose adaptation of Raymond’s first novel “The Half-Life,” builds a world as rich and unique as the ones imagined by Jarmusch and Altman.

Behold the elegance and oft-cited aesthetic minimalism with which Reichardt unfolds so many thoughts and ideas about race, representation, and gender. Like “Old Joy,” “Meek’s Cutoff” and so many of her other films, “First Cow” addresses feminism and femininity in ways both inspired and insightful — the title milk source happens to be this particular story’s most prominent female. A territorial pioneer who has survived a journey that claimed her mate and her offspring, the brown-eyed marvel produces the secret ingredient procured illegally in the dead of night by King Lu and Cookie. Her gift will launch the entrepreneurs.

The two protagonists are partners in crime, partners in business, partners in dreams, and partners in life. The explosive popularity of Cookie’s delicious oily cakes means they are often sold right back to the very Chief Factor (Toby Jones) from whom the milk is stolen. Reichardt laces the film with an exquisite and ever-building tension revolving around the potential discovery of the scheme. Appreciative viewers will recognize familiar precedents for our duo: Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck and Jim, Bromden and McMurphy. Like those unlikely partnerships, the union of Cookie and King Lu is a special bond certain to please the discerning and the patient.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

For Beastie Boys fans, the personal “soundtrack of our lives” stories are at least equal in number to the records, cassettes, and compact discs sold. Some of us got in with “Licensed to Ill” in 1986 (gratitude to you forever, Brandon Roy) and never looked back, anxiously awaiting each album and committing to memory the rhymes within 24 hours of release. If you were of a particular age and inclination, you grew, and grew up, alongside Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D — every new project an evolutionary step in how to dress, how to sound, and how to behave.

Adam Yauch died of cancer at the age of 47 on May 4, 2012. We cried when we heard the breaking news reports. We cried again a few weeks later when mailboxes delivered the “Rolling Stone” with the black and white photo of MCA’s face on the cover.

We weren’t ready for the Beastie Boys to be over. Toward the end of Spike Jonze’s documentary “Beastie Boys Story,” available on Apple TV+, an emotional Adam Horovitz sits on the edge of the stage at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre and talks about headlining Bonnaroo in 2009, saying, “We didn’t know it was gonna be the last show we’d ever play.”

“Beastie Boys Story” is inspired by the 572-page, cut-and-paste, oral history/memoir “Beastie Boys Book,” published in 2018. Along with Horovitz and Michael Diamond, Jonze curates the arc of Beastie Boys history, condensing and trimming much from between the covers but (mostly) making up for it by carefully selecting from an expansive vault of dazzling audio, video, and photographic documentation. Presenting to a live audience, Mike D and Ad-Rock, with lots of jokes and a few tears, acknowledge the teleprompters and their frequent miscues.

Not everyone will appreciate the artifact. Writing for Pitchfork under the headline “Spike Jonze’s New Beastie Boys Movie Is No Fun,” Jayson Greene gripes that the film is like a PowerPoint “with running commentary.” Others have tagged it as a lengthy TED Talk.

If you listen to Beastie Boys, Jonze’s technique — a familiar blend of rough and smooth, high tech and low tech — comes correct. If you don’t listen to Beastie Boys, the movie serves as a biographical and musical introduction. In addition to the importance of centralizing and eulogizing the absent MCA, speaking for him because he can no longer speak for himself, Mike D and Ad-Rock walk the viewer through several volcanic, career-altering tracks. The chapter heading “The Song That Changed Everything” turns out to be applicable more than once.

The slices and samples of Kurtis Blow, Slick Rick, and Jimmy Castor Bunch on “Hold It Now, Hit It” and Yauch’s imaginative kitchen table reel-to-reel Rube Goldberg loop of Led Zeppelin for “Rhymin and Stealin” eventually lead us to another card that says “Earlier We Had Mentioned a Song That We Thought Had Changed Everything. And It Had, in a Way. But This Is Actually the Song That Changed Everything.” You may be familiar with how that next one plays out. “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)” becomes an anthem and an albatross, a skeleton key and a mummy’s curse.

When Diamond and Horovitz finally move on to the recording of “Paul’s Boutique,” the tale of which occurs about halfway through the nearly two-hour running time, one feels a sense of relief. The cartoonish dicks and boorish misogyny start to fade. The “Check Your Head” anecdotes continue to move the needle in a positive direction. It’ll be a minute before the film gets to MCA’s all-time most quoted verse, the turning point that begins “I want to say a little something that’s long overdue,” on the “Ill Communication” opener “Sure Shot.” The not-so-secret formula of longevity is so obviously found in the willingness to mature and to learn and to change. Mike D quotes Ad-Rock’s response to an interviewer’s accusation of double standards: “I’d rather be a hypocrite than the same person forever.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Writer Rita Kalnejais adapts the script of her own 2012 play “Babyteeth,” and Shannon Murphy, delivering her feature directorial debut, guides a fantastic ensemble of performers to success in what could have been an all-too-familiar dying-young melodrama. The depiction of terminal illness is so tried and true as a storytelling device that I can’t help but think of Roger Ebert’s pointed cinematic rule dubbed “Ali MacGraw’s Disease,” which notes that “the only symptom is that the sufferer grows more beautiful as death approaches.” While this is certainly the case with Eliza Scanlen’s radiant Milla Finlay, “Babyteeth,” largely allergic to cliche, feels more fresh and original than one might expect from the plot description.

Much of the movie’s vitality can be located in the way each of the central characters is so fully realized. Milla’s parents, Anna (Essie Davis) and Henry (Ben Mendelsohn), affluent and progressive, must come to grips with their teenage daughter’s romantic interest in Moses (Toby Wallace), a homeless, twenty-something fuck-up looking for small-time pharmaceutical scores he can turn into a little cash or his own next high. One imagines that mom and dad would be less likely to tolerate Moses’ presence if Milla wasn’t so sick, and Moses is smart enough to recognize how he can take advantage of the Finlay family’s largesse. The extent to which Moses genuinely cares for Milla evolves into one of the movie’s going concerns.

“Babyteeth” is finally available for American audiences on demand, following a Venice International Film Festival premiere in September of 2019. Scanlen, who played Beth in Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” and Amma on the HBO miniseries “Sharp Objects,” is quickly establishing the bona fides that could lead to higher profile roles. Last week, however, the actor issued an apology in the wake of claims of racism and cultural appropriation in her own debut as writer/ director, a short film titled “Mukbang” that won a Rouben Mamoulian Award at the Sydney Film Festival. Controversy aside, Scanlen is a presence in “Babyteeth,” playing Emma with a mixture of vulnerability and ferocity.

Mendelsohn, Davis, and Wallace are equally effective, and Murphy sets up little moments filled with acutely observed details for each. In one, Henry perfectly summarizes the tension that drives the narrative, saying to Moses, “I don’t like you, but Milla thinks you’re something special. She should have the world at her feet right now.” He then offers to write unethical prescriptions to feed Moses’ drug habit, a stunning demonstration of the lengths a father is willing to go for his daughter. The gesture is also a heartbreaking indicator of Henry’s own dysfunctional struggle to deal with an unthinkable set of circumstances.

Throughout the movie, scenes are labeled with chapter headings blunt and/or poetic, such as “Relapse. Milla Starts Chemo” and “Just Another Diamond Day.” The latter is a reference to the Vashti Bunyan song on the excellent soundtrack, which also features a sweet karaoke rendition of Donnie and Joe Emerson’s “Baby” and several other diegetic performances by violin student Milla and one-time concert pianist Anna. The inevitable outcomes of the genre exist within fairly narrow limits, but Murphy sticks the landing on “The Beach,” a coda that embraces sorrow and grief without undercutting or dismissing the humor and absurdity that came before.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

One of the most effective storytelling strategies in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” is the application of the simple and elegant dichotomy. Lee has long enjoyed exploring dualities, as the apparent bifurcation of moral choice-making appeals to our human nature: black and white, yin and yang, stop and go, yes and no. It is, however, the complementarity and interconnectedness of seemingly polar opposites that moves toward the complexity and richness that cannot be found in a heads/tails outcome. Four Vietnam veterans return to the place where the fifth member of their group was killed in action. Is the principal purpose of their pilgrimage to recover the remains of their fallen friend or is it to locate millions of dollars in gold bars they buried decades ago?

Several of the filmmaker’s other interests, including generational divisions and difficult father-son relationships, both of which are on view in, among others, “Jungle Fever,” “He Got Game,” and “Get on the Bus,” move in tandem with Lee’s always bold stylistic chops. Music choices, including familiar period expressions of social consciousness as well as loaded intertextual cues (including “Ride of the Valkyries”), take up residence alongside yet another emotionally-charged score by Terence Blanchard. Isolated vocals from Marvin Gaye, strikingly recontextualized, punctuate key scenes.

Lee’s cinephilia is yet another reason for movie lovers to enjoy “Da 5 Bloods.” Overt and subtle references to all kinds of classics, from “Apocalypse Now” and “Full Metal Jacket” to “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” populate both the principal plot and the margins. But in terms of Lee’s own decades-long reputation as a maverick working within and without the industry, “Da 5 Bloods” bears a close spiritual kinship with Samuel Fuller’s “The Steel Helmet.” Both Lee and Fuller capture the capricious, haphazard, and senseless violence of war and its particularly grim toll on the working class, the blue collar, and the poor.

There is surely a great deal of Fuller in the presentation of Delroy Lindo’s character Paul, a red MAGA cap-wearing sufferer of PTSD who is especially haunted by the death of brother-in-arms Norman Earl “Stormin’ Norman” Holloway (Chadwick Boseman). Giancarlo Esposito claimed that Lee might have cast real life father and son Denzel Washington and John David Washington, but Lindo — who has received richly deserved acclaim for his emotionally raw portrayal — and Jonathan Majors are so commanding it is difficult to imagine any duo surpassing the quality of their efforts.

Lee reworked the original script by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo with his “BlacKkKlansman” co-screenwriter and fellow Oscar recipient Kevin Willmott. The result of their labors perfectly suits Lee’s baroque, anything goes, more-is-more approach. Newton Thomas Sigel’s photography is vivid, crisp, and colorful, even if many of the computer-generated special effects — especially the repeated plumes and sprays of blood — don’t quite meet Hollywood’s state of the art verisimilitude. Far more impressive is the decision to use the same quartet of performers — Lindo, Broadway pro Norm Lewis, and “The Wire” castmates Clarke Peters and Isiah Whitlock Jr. —  in present and in flashback without any kind of “de-aging” nonsense. With this choice, Lee suggests something meaningful about time and how it can change or freeze us in indelible ways both predictable and surprising.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Another significant 2020 title skipping theatrical release for digital platforms, Josephine Decker’s “Shirley” premiered at Sundance in January, where Decker received a U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Auteur Filmmaking. “Shirley” marks yet another career milestone for the dynamic filmmaker as she moves in the direction of wider accessibility and potentially larger audiences without abandoning the sharpest hallmarks of her breathtakingly personal storytelling techniques. The presence of Elisabeth Moss in the title role adds a layer of appeal to the lushly photographed and handsomely designed re-imagining of author Shirley Jackson’s idiosyncratic life in North Bennington, Vermont.

Decker’s film, with a screenplay by Sarah Gubbins based on Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel, has been erroneously identified as a Jackson biopic, but the events depicted in the book and on the screen are largely fiction. The messier, blurrier canvas perfectly suits Decker’s gifts by offering a space in which the filmmaker can continue to explore her interests in liminality and artistic/philosophical truth without the encumbrances of the dreary and the mundane. In other words, viewers looking for some kind of historically accurate staging of Jackson’s “life” will not find it here. Instead, “Shirley” fantasizes an intense and sexually charged variation on Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and Mike Nichols’ 1966 film of the play.

In real life, Jackson was married to professor and critic Stanley Hyman (a fantastically vain and oily Michael Stuhlbarg), by all accounts a philanderer in frequent pursuit of liaisons with his students. In the imaginary account, Hyman’s academic admirer and fresh Bennington College hire Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman) is invited to take a room in the house Shirley rarely leaves. Nemser’s new wife Rose (Odessa Young), it is quickly decided, can provide domestic “help” (or, perhaps more accurately, servitude) to Shirley while the men are on campus. Decker mines the rich vein of skewed gender expectations, using the period setting to focus viewer attention on so many absurd inversions. Stanley’s jealousy over the literary celebrity — and profitability — of triumphs like “The Lottery” always threatens to boil over.

Moss is nothing short of phenomenal, filling out her performance with a steady flow of poisonously perfect wisecracks, putdowns, and insults that hit their marks like darts from an accurately aimed and effortlessly puffed blowgun. Decker beckons us to follow this unusual guide on a journey deep into the overgrown and tangled jungle of creation and art-making. Rose, it unsurprisingly turns out, is far more suited to Shirley’s mysterious and mystical witchcraft than she is to cooking and cleaning. Is Shirley capable of true friendship or is she too armored, too caustic, too far inside her own tortured processes and alcohol bottles to open up her heart to another human being?

The answer to that question takes up the later stages of the film, and Decker, Moss, and Young all bask in the complexity and ambivalence and eroticism of the dialectics favored by the filmmaker: teacher/pupil, writer/reader, veteran/novice, dominant/submissive. Working on the book that will become “Hangsaman,” Shirley and Rose spend time thinking deeply about the Bennington student who disappeared without a trace on the hauntingly named Long Trail. Shirley says to Rose, “The world is too cruel for girls.” Paula Jean Welden really did vanish in December of 1946, the likely victim of violence at the hands of a man, and she is both doppelganger and ghost — a vivid reminder of an unrealized future.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Natasha Gregson Wagner, known to David Lynch fans for her performance in “Lost Highway,” guides viewers through an intimate but tightly controlled portrait of her iconic mother in “Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind.” Available on HBO following a Sundance premiere in January, the biographical documentary is directed by veteran “making of” maestro Laurent Bouzereau, frequent chronicler of Steven Spielberg projects and architect of dozens of other behind-the-scenes shorts. Joined by producer Manoah Bowman, with whom Gregson Wagner co-wrote “Natalie Wood: Reflections on a Legendary Life,” Bouzereau accesses a huge trove of archival material, some of it never before seen publicly.

In part a response to the lurid gossip contained in books like Suzanne Finstad’s 2001 “Natasha” — reissued recently as “Natalie Wood: The Complete Biography,” with even more alleged revelations about the star’s untimely demise — Gregson Wagner’s account of her mom’s legacy is deeply sympathetic. So too is the film’s treatment of Robert Wagner, the man who raised her after reuniting with Wood for the couple’s second marriage to one another. Wagner, who turned 90 in February, has long faced scrutiny for what he did or did not do the night Wood left their yacht during a Thanksgiving weekend getaway in 1981. On-camera conversation between Gregson Wagner and her “Daddy Wagner,” or R.J., as he is known to friends and family, forms the spine of the chronicle.

In addition to framing Wagner’s role as the love of Wood’s life, the filmmakers capitalize on their expansive library of content and the colorful headlines ignited by Wood’s contributions to Hollywood history. As a child performer, Wood became the primary breadwinner for her family. Bouzereau and Gregson Wagner show a fair bit of restraint, but it is not difficult to get a sense of the latter’s strong disapproval of Wood’s mother (as well as sister Lana). Fans able to watch Wood grow up onscreen, from “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” and “Miracle on 34th Street” to “Rebel Without a Cause” and “The Searchers” to “Splendor in the Grass” and “West Side Story,” already know the star’s extensive filmography.

Interviews with several high profile friends, including Mia Farrow, Robert Redford, and Elliott Gould, are sandwiched among a handful of curious contributions by people like Natalie’s personal assistant Liz Applegate, who explains that she often worked from a desk in the corner of the master bedroom, with Wood and Wagner between the sheets just behind her.

An even more peculiar inclusion is “Brainstorm” director Douglas Trumbull, who more or less condemns his own skills by insisting that Wood and Christopher Walken, a guest on the boat the night of Natalie’s death, had zero romantic chemistry. The idea, of course, is to pour cold water on the rumor that the co-stars were sleeping with one another. Not surprisingly, Walken was not interviewed for the movie, but does appear in a few old clips. Wagner goes out of his way to acknowledge the elephant in the room, saying, “Chris was there. He, by the way, is a very stand-up guy. A true gentleman.”

Trying to free Wood from the enormous shadow cast by her death is no small feat. “What Remains Behind” doesn’t quite manage the task, but the movie brightens up in sections focused on Wood’s devotion as a loving and involved parent and her efforts to combat the patriarchal inequities of the historically sexist motion picture industry. Even so, the complexities of Wood’s relationships with figures like Warren Beatty, Frank Sinatra, Michael Caine, and Nicholas Ray are downplayed in favor of a shinier and more polished version than one confronting the dark side of the routine exploitation of young women that pervaded, and continues to pervade, the movie business.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The most compelling and powerful idea in Kitty Green’s compelling and powerful film “The Assistant” resides in the network of complicity protecting the predator/stand-in for Harvey Weinstein and those like him. Green expresses, in the microcosmic minutiae of office-life orbit, a detailed picture of institutionalized harassment and mistreatment. Even though the movie’s particular events are set within the film industry, Green’s message is universal: for every man in a position of authority who manages to get away with the horrific behavior of sexual assault, cruelty, and bullying, there is a group of enablers maintaining a rotten status quo.

As aspiring film producer Jane, Julia Garner seldom leaves the frame and grips the attention of the viewer from first scene to last. As the lowly employee who arrives before sunrise to turn on the lights, make coffee, print and distribute reports, and tidy anything overlooked by custodial staff, Jane seems more intern than valued team member. Yet, her willingness to accept this grim hierarchy is instantly recognizable. We don’t need to be told that Jane’s hellish and humiliating servitude is a “rare opportunity and privilege” that hundreds of others would also suffer while chasing Hollywood dreams.

Green, the documentarian whose brilliant “Casting JonBenet” seamlessly traversed the realms of nonfiction and fantasy, wrote the “The Assistant,” and her screenplay carefully parcels out the dialogue that, little by little, exposes an insidious culture and climate. It is, however, the filmmaker’s commanding ability to communicate in purely visual terms that distinguishes “The Assistant.” Jane watches the copy machine spit out an endless stack of anonymous headshots. She tends to the chairman’s young children. She shares an elevator with a famous actor (Patrick Wilson) so used to owning physical space that a clumsy exit dance tells us he didn’t even register Jane’s presence. All three examples speak volumes about the dynamics of gender.

Green said in an interview with Marshall Shaffer that both “Casting JonBenet” and “The Assistant” are about the exploitation of women. In the latter, the protagonist will — against all odds — muster the courage to visit human resources to voice her concerns about the safety and wellbeing of a new hire: a very young former waitress from Idaho personally selected by the big boss and escorted by Jane to the Mark Hotel. The HR interaction that plays out, between Jane and Wilcock (Matthew Macfadyen), is arguably the movie’s critical scene. Their conversation is a tension-filled back-and-forth illuminating the wide berth of tolerance that shields money-makers against credible accusations, and it shakes Jane to the core.

Green’s skillful direction is a master class in strategic elision. Unlike the provocative private office scene between Margot Robbie’s Kayla Pospisil and John Lithgow’s Roger Ailes in “Bombshell,” Green withholds any dramatizations of behind-closed-doors transgressions. Instead, the chairman remains ever hidden from our view in a choice that only intensifies his fearsome reach and underlines Green’s critique of an unjust system. The mogul’s voice (supplied by Joy O. Sanders) is filtered through the telephone, and the sadism and degradation are as chilling to us as the ritual in which Jane writes him emails of apology helpfully wordsmithed by the two young men with whom she shares workspace.