Movie review by Greg Carlson

Documentarian Penny Lane adds another entertaining movie to her filmography with an inside look at the recent rise of the Satanic Temple. As a movie experience, “Hail Satan?” often lives deliciously. The film might even turn out to be a prime recruitment video for the organization co-founded in 2013 by onscreen imp/spokesperson Lucien Greaves. TST is the perfect subject for the witty and insightful Lane, who detonates truth bomb after truth bomb in a campaign to highlight the group’s unrelenting quest to expose hypocrisy and double standards and politically engage opponents of the separation of church and state. Unlike previous “devil worship” outfits, TST’s deliberate activism and community engagement far surpass the showmanship and self-promotion of Anton LaVey.

Lane’s focus on several of TST’s provocative operations takes precedence over any in-depth historical account of Satanism, but the filmmaker does make a little bit of room to consider the so-called Satanic Panic of the 1980s, in which hysteria over purported ritual Satanic abuse and deep fear of the occult destroyed the lives of innocent people wrongfully accused of molesting children in their care. The most well-known example, the McMartin preschool trial, has been deconstructed elsewhere, but Lane effectively contextualizes the phantom conspiracies that scapegoated everything from Dungeons and Dragons to Motley Crue and other heavy metal acts that could be unmasked by playing their records backwards.

And speaking of goats, Lane squeezes every drop of blood from TST’s battle to bring the towering statue of Baphomet to the same public spheres occupied by Ten Commandments monuments in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Based on the illustration by Eliphas Levi, the striking 3000-pound bronze by sculptor Mark Porter quickly became the primary symbol uniting those who would challenge the likes of Tea Party conservative Jason Rapert, who serves District 35 in the Arkansas State Senate. A walking caricature, Rapert makes for a broad villain based on his sponsorship of a bill allowing for a stone marker similar to the ones popularized by Hollywood producer Cecil B. DeMille in a publicity stunt to drum up ticket sales for the 1956 Charlton Heston movie.

Lane also introduces viewers to a rainbow range of adherents and admirers of the dark side, using their many personal anecdotes to explain the appeal of the group. Especially savvy is the presentation of TST’s seven fundamental tenets, a list of logical, humanist principles that give the Old Testament laws a run for their money. But can the center hold in an organization given to the aggressive questioning of authority and the demonizing of hierarchy? Detroit’s Jex Blackmore partially answers that question, splintering from TST following disagreements over policy in performance art pieces too radical for Greaves and the central leadership.

Blackmore’s breakaway brand of Satanism could fill another feature, but Lane keeps her eye on TST’s media spotlight actions. While the Baphomet sequences dominate, viewers also bear witness to several of the group’s more curious pieces of political theater, from the innocuous (an adopt-a-highway clean-up) to the eyebrow-raising (After School Satan) to the deliberately scandalous (the ribald Pink Mass, teabagging and all, held at the gravesite of the mother of Westboro Baptist figurehead Fred Phelps). Viewers new to TST’s approach to the headline-grabbing values of blasphemy will surely be surprised that members do not worship any incarnation of an anthropomorphic, horned, pitchfork-wielding manifestation of evil, but instead use the iconography to satirize all manner of injustice, folly, and corruption.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

While his Fred Rogers documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” arguably captured more attention than any nonfiction feature released in 2018, Morgan Neville’s other big project, “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead,” deserves careful examination by anyone who loves movie history. A companion piece to the posthumous release of Orson Welles’ notorious “The Other Side of the Wind,” Neville’s film uses, among other sources, Josh Karp’s 2015 book “Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind” to offer viewers a contextualization aiming to sort out fact from fantasy. But Neville’s movie is also a beribboned box of irresistible petits fours that will be hungrily gobbled by Welles completists.

In the always-changing, ever-morphing screenplay for a film Welles claimed would only take two months to shoot but instead stretched to eight years, an aging film director named Jake Hannaford holds court at his Hollywood birthday party on what will be the last night of his life. Hannaford was played by a game John Huston, although Welles never let anyone, including Huston, forget that he could or should have taken the role himself. The character, of course, is Welles writ large, an amalgam of the wily mythmaker/truth-stretcher and other borrowed and stolen traits the one-time boy genius collected along his fascinating path — including a healthy dose based in part on Ernest Hemingway.

One of the film’s best stories relates the depth of cinematographer Gary Graver’s devotion to Welles, and it operates as a metaphor describing the risks of all-consuming commitment to a mesmerizing guru happy to snare any flies who venture too close to the web. Graver put everything, including his money, physical health, mental wellness, and his relationships with his own family members, on the line to help Welles realize “The Other Side of the Wind.” Graver’s labor was unpaid, and the photographer would take B-movie and porno gigs during the protracted production of Welles’ movie just to make ends meet. The details of the cameraman’s saga make up several it’s-all-true jaw-droppers in the documentary, and Neville doesn’t even have time to get to the fate of Welles’ “Citizen Kane” writing Oscar, which * gifted to Graver.    

Along with Graver, Neville admirably keeps track of a lengthy scorecard of commentators, conspirators, and contributors great and small, including Oja Kodar, Peter Bogdanovich, Frank Marshall, Cathy Lucas, Dennis Hopper, Cybill Shepherd, and on and on. Each functions to connect a few or more of the dots of head-spinning in-jokes, asides, insults, and references Welles made in “The Other Side of the Wind” on behalf, or at the expense, of those in his orbit. Bogdanovich was one of the closest, and the longtime keeper of the Welles flame shares the incredible anecdote of receiving an envelope containing two letters from his mentor following cruel comments made by Welles and Burt Reynolds on “The Tonight Show.” One of the notes was heartfelt apology and one piled on the venom. Welles told Bogdanovich to take his pick.

Obviously, Welles did not live to finish “The Other Side of the Wind,” but the cut that now accompanies “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” into the world allows viewers to decide whether the great auteur has pulled off another of his famous magic tricks. As the ultimate maverick estranged from the studio system that chewed him up and spit him out, the master’s “final” film will be the experimental metanarrative gift that keeps on giving. “The Other Side of the Wind” adds another row of reflections to join with the ones in Xanadu and the Magic Mirror Maze. Its vibrating self-awareness, its doppelgangers, its arch life-imitates-art and art-imitates-life observations, its unwieldy traveling circus vibe, and its mind-bending movie-within-a-movie duality allow Welles to simultaneously mock and indulge in the critically celebrated, sexually-charged, Antonioni-style, European art film.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Shirkers” is title to both an uncompleted Singapore-based road movie starring Sandi Tan that was shot in the summer of 1992 and the autobiographical nonfiction examination of that lost film. With the benefit of time, Tan looks back on her own experiences, constructing a reflective bildungsroman with the requisite excitement, heartache, friendship, loss, and pain one expects from any great coming-of-age tale. As a 19-year-old on the island nation known more to outsiders for being cleaner than Disneyland than for any indie filmmaking scene, Tan joined forces with sisters-in-arms Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique to reach for cinematic glory. But after principal photography wrapped, much older mentor Georges Cardona disappeared with every can of the film.   

How many movies have been lost or nearly lost to circumstances that cause a derailment before a public release can provide closure for the anxious and expectant filmmaker? In some sense, “Shirkers” joins longstanding legends like Jerry Lewis’ “The Day the Clown Cried,” the Sex Pistols in “Who Killed Bambi?,” David O. Russell’s “Nailed,” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Kaleidoscope” (just to name a few) as a broken dream that lives on in the what-might-have-been corners of the imagination. As is the case with Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind” and Morgan Neville’s companion piece “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead,” the journey almost always looms larger than the destination.      

Tan astutely minimizes the mystery of Cardona, refusing to turn the attention of her story to a narcissistic user undeserving of the starring role. Instead, she investigates the memories of her friends, both of whom were as gutted as Tan by the betrayal perpetrated by Cardona. Like “Rashomon,” each woman remembers unique aspects of the “Shirkers” endeavor that conflict with some of Tan’s thoughts. Ng, without mincing words, accuses Tan of being an asshole. Tan runs with it, examining vintage video that corroborates the claim. That willingness to make a deep dive on pieces of the puzzle that still trigger raw emotions is in keeping with Tan’s collagist, cut-and-paste, DIY, punk rock ethos.  

Tan is nothing if not gutsy, and like so many established celluloid heroes, she might have been practicing Academy Award acceptance speeches in the mirror before making anything of substance. She breathlessly identifies “Rushmore” and “Ghost World” as simpatico with “Shirkers,” juxtaposing rhyming shots to make a case for the hipster credibility of her unfinished opus. Lost synchronous sound recordings and mature judgment guided the decision to leave “Shirkers” a phantom. Like Tan, Ng, and Siddique, we may never know why Cardona robbed his young collaborators of their commitment and hard work, even though a few people acquainted with Cardona offer tantalizing theories.

Along the way, Tan finds a sympathetic sharer in Stephen Tyler, another protege of Cardona similarly mistreated by the movie magpie. Tyler credibly surmises that Cardona’s sense of pride, entitlement, and jealousy partly drove his cruelty. For example, Cardona began to claim that he was the inspiration for James Spader’s character Graham in “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” after Tyler and another mutual friend worked on Soderbergh’s film. “Shirkers” brims with references and allusions to movies that aid Tan as she spins her story. Clips from “Blue Velvet,” “Paris, Texas,” “Heathers,” “Nosferatu,” “Fitzcarraldo,” Singapore’s own “Cleopatra Wong” and many others will be familiar to anyone who speaks the language of cinephilia.  

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Another stunning work of perfectly placed ellipses and calculated restraint, Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Cold War” is a film filled with images as iconic and austere as its blunt title. A haunting experience of history by suggestion, the movie traces a tragic romance across years and landscapes, relying as heavily on Lukasz Zal’s arresting, monochromatic, Academy ratio cinematography as it does on the sharp editing by Jaroslaw Kominski. Pawlikowski collaborated with both of those craftsmen on Oscar-winner “Ida,” and “Cold War” is a gorgeous companion that is every bit as good, and possibly even better, than the celebrated 2013 title.  

Clocking in crisply and efficiently at 85 minutes, “Cold War” wastes nothing, often presenting strings of diabolically economical short scenes to advance the narrative that focuses on musician/composer/conductor Wiktor Warski (Tomasz Kot) and singer/dancer/performer Zuzanna “Zula” Lichon (Joanna Kulig) as they come together and move apart and come together on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Pawlikowski dedicates the film to his parents and uses their names for his two protagonists. So skillful is the filmmaker at communicating in pure visual language, one need not know much about mid-20th century Eastern Europe to understand the challenges faced by artists trapped in the cogs of an oppressive political machine.

Along with the beautiful photography and knockout cutting, Pawlikowski laces “Cold War” with a soundtrack that captures the conflicting moods of clashing ideologies. Beginning with the rural folk and work songs sung by peasants and accelerating through small jazz combos and wild communist transpositions of swinging big bands, the fortunes and misfortunes of Wiktor and Zula are traced as much through the musical arrangements they perform together and separately as any dialogue they exchange with one another. At one exhilarating turning point, the infectious, magnetizing 12-bar blues of Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” instantly pulls Zula from her stool to the dance floor and the bar top.

As star-crossed as Ilsa and Rick, Zula and Wiktor painfully discover that they can’t live with or without each other in just the same way that they cannot live with or without Poland. One bureaucratic official is disbelieving and incredulous when Wiktor petitions to leave Paris to return to his homeland. We understand, even though the decision guarantees something menacing and horrific. Among the many other echoes of “Casablanca” is a shot that mirrors Ilsa’s surprising late night visit to see Rick at the Cafe Americain. As an analogue to Mr. Blaine, Wiktor also happens to be his own Sam. He plays his own placeholders for “As Time Goes By” whenever the longing for Zula overtakes him.  

Some viewers will adore the way in which Pawlikowski collaborates with his actors to create characters filled with the wholeness of familiar humanness, especially when the filmmaker withholds so much of the stuff we would expect in the presentation of a traditional screen romance. The pauses, the fades to black, and the spaces in between are all elisions that arouse deep curiosity, but also inspire us to wonder and imagine all kinds of things that Pawlikowski keeps from our eyes and ears. One of the best gifts of “Cold War” is that we never feel like we have been cheated.  

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Compared to the Betsy West and Julie Cohen documentary “RBG,” Mimi Leder’s period biographical slice “On the Basis of Sex” is nowhere near as notorious as one might hope, but the hagiographic reverence for Ruth Bader Ginsburg is tempered by enough heart and humor to overcome some of the film’s more predictable adherence to its genre. Like a good law student, Leder focuses on a presentation of the factual and procedural. That choice, similar to Reginald Hudlin’s time- and case-specific look at a pre-icon status Thurgood Marshall in 2017’s “Marshall,” sacrifices some elements of richer and deeper characterization — including the flaws that help us recognize heroes as humans.  

Felicity Jones, trying a slightly odd facsimile of RBG’s Brooklyn accent, handles all the condescension, sexism, and dismissiveness that can be dished out by the likes of white Harvard men in suits, nevertheless persisting when faced with the insufferable bullshit of Sam Waterston’s dean and Stephen Root’s professor. The screenplay, by Ginsburg’s nephew Daniel Stiepleman, makes hay with a few choice shots at the storied Ivy League institution. The chauvinist Crimson jerks are expectedly hissable, which makes Leder’s more subtle and complex take on the ACLU’s Mel Wulf (Justin Theroux, doing a little Alan Alda) one of the film’s strengths.   

In a bit of movie magic that would have delighted RBG’s husband, Martin D. Ginsburg is played by Armie Hammer. Hammer’s recent and somewhat unexpected turns in “Call Me by Your Name” and “Sorry to Bother You” suggest fairly gutsy instincts by the usually safe matinee idol standards of big-budget players. Hammer’s “On the Basis of Sex” part is far from risky, but as A. O. Scott has pointed out, the actor “has never looked happier,” taking on a supporting role in every sense of the word. Viewed as a portrait of the progressive and, for its era, unorthodox marriage enjoyed by the Ginsburgs — which was delightfully highlighted in “RBG” — “On the Basis of Sex” is catnip. One of the best moments in the film is a touching scene in which Martin comforts daughter Jane after a mother-daughter disagreement.   

While Jones and Hammer remain impossibly gorgeous throughout the years covered in the narrative, Leder maintains an awareness of time not only through the costumes and cars, but by commenting directly on both opportunities and obstacles experienced by women of different ages. In one sequence, Bader Ginsburg and Jane pay a visit to the office of the legendary judge/activist/feminist Dorothy Kenyon (Kathy Bates), whose thoughts are as eye-opening to RBG as Jane’s assertive handling of unwelcome street harassment. Later, in the movie’s closing arguments, RBG will speak to the “radical social change” marked so noticeably by the passing of time.

The biopic-wary should applaud “On the Basis of Sex” for its avoidance of the temptation to cover a longer chronology of Bader Ginsburg’s life and career. In comments to the Hollywood Reporter following the film’s New York premiere, Stiepleman stated that he selected the Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue appeal because it “was the only one” that had husband and wife “fighting in court for what [the Ginsburgs] also created at home, which was real equality.” That parallelism works nicely, and it is just as nice to have Mimi Leder back in the director’s chair. Hopefully we will not have to wait as long for her next feature.         

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The sensational Claire Denis adds another wonderful work to her impressive filmography with “Let the Sunshine In.” An ode to many things, including restless hearts, the frustrations of romantic freedom versus security, the impossibility and ridiculousness of the fantasy sold by the Hollywood romantic comedy, the anxieties of middle age, and several more, “Let the Sunshine In” is foremost a showcase for radiant superstar Juliette Binoche. As the unlucky-in-love Isabelle, a Paris painter who drifts from liaison to liaison with a questionable parade of partners unwilling or unable to make the kind of connection that Isabelle imagines will satiate her, Binoche is fearless.

Instead of manufacturing sympathetic markers to anoint and glorify her protagonist, Denis insists on portraying the self-doubt and insecurities that vex Isabelle. To that end, the presence of Binoche is a bit of brilliance that taunts and challenges the viewer; if Isabelle can’t find lasting, fulfilling tenderness and companionship, what chance do the rest of us have? Denis eviscerates the old adage “if you can’t handle or love me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best,” collapsing or inverting the very notion of what constitutes a woman at her “best” or “worst.” Denis’ clinical detachment somehow makes the “unlikable” Isabelle more accessible and alive.

The men who most certainly play well below Isabelle’s league are a comic bunch of narcissistic assholes and navel-gazers. Denis opens with a sweaty, heaving Vincent (Xavier Beauvois), a piggish and married banker, struggling to climax on top of Isabelle and follows shortly with an actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle) who spends more time discussing why he and Isabelle shouldn’t have sex than actually, inevitably, having sex. At the end, Denis sticks the landing with yet another interrogation of amour fou, inserting a just jilted Gerard Depardieu as a quack psychic. The majority of his one scene with Binoche unfolds while the end credits roll.  

Much earlier, following a deeply unsatisfying encounter with piggish, married banker Vincent (Xavier Beauvois), Isabelle returns home alone, struggling to remove the black, over-the-knee stiletto boots that she so often wears like sexual armor. Tearfully soliloquizing an “Am I with him? Or not?” conundrum awash in self-pity, we glimpse an Etta James sleeve decorating the wall behind Isabelle. Later, Ms. James’ transcendent “At Last” will factor on the “Let the Sunshine In” soundtrack in the film’s most referenced scene, but for now, we are reminded of the stark and ironic contrast between the pain, abuse, and addiction suffered by James and the angelic ballads given flight by her voice.           

Isabelle’s privileged existence doesn’t match James’ suffering, but Denis moves to reclaim “At Last” from its cultural dilution in advertisements for products as unlikely as State Farm insurance and Hoover vacuum cleaners, and in films as far flung as “American Pie” and “Inland Empire.” Isabelle dances with a seductive stranger (Paul Blain, looking all Robert Mapplethorpe) to the song in an encounter immediately following a blown-gasket tirade during an artist retreat (one of the movie’s most hilarious scenes), but we know the fantasy lasts only as long as the three minutes it takes James to sing it. Her lonely days far from over, Isabelle’s love has not, at last, come along.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Helming her feature film debut, veteran theatre director Josie Rourke mounts a handsome but forgettable “Mary Queen of Scots” (no comma) with Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie. Like so many fictions rooted in the political intrigue of royalty, this latest model quickly reveals the same old preoccupation with matters of religious affiliation, sex for pleasure versus sex for the production of an heir, and marriage arranged for advantage. That narrative orientation is a bummer, since this oft-told tale becomes the very thing it aspires to criticize. Even with Ronan’s commanding presence, Robbie’s commitment to prosthetic-assisted physical transformation, and the costume and production design, Rourke’s middlebrow edition is bound for the same dusty shelf where the 1936, 1971, and 2013 versions reside.     

Rourke arguably favors character over the bullet points of key dramatic events, but neither category fruits. Instead of gripping drama, the film sketches a series of decisions, usually ill-advised and often taken following the pressure of petulant narcissists like Mary’s brother, her later pair of husbands, and counselors like John Knox (David Tennant in weird beard) and William Cecil (Guy Pearce also in weird beard). The movie tries out a particularly decadent interpretation of Mary’s first cousin and second spouse Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden), as skillful a practitioner of cunnilingus as he is a brutal rapist. Lowden, wearing a well-groomed Van Dyke, registers above the other onscreen fellows until his (un)timely demise.

Period costume drama can be most entertaining when examined through the lens of contemporary concerns. In one sense, who cares whether Mary and Elizabeth didn’t really meet face to face in real life? Could Rourke have made her version of the conflict work without that scene? Dramatic license is so much a given that discussions of authenticity are as damned as they are damning. Instead, we have a Mary whose Catholicism never appears to conflict with her anachronistically progressive attitudes regarding gender fluidity, homosexuality, and religious tolerance.       

Additionally, a full-length report could be written on the film’s muscular and misleading marketing campaign. The trailer suggests a kind of fantasized two-hander, but Robbie’s weirdly insecure Elizabeth factors far less, and enjoys scant screen time relative to Ronan, than what is suggested by the coming attractions preview. Long before the film was released to the public, writers of both the earnest and clickbait varieties were consulting with academics and historians regarding the inaccuracies baked into Beau Willimon’s screenplay, which is very loosely based on published work by John Guy.

Both the trailer and the posters invite a kind of expected and unsubtle compare/contrast simplification of the two women that steers away from nuance. Back in July, Nate Jones pointed out in “Vulture” that the taglines used by Focus Features in the striking character portraits — “Born to Fight” for Mary and “Born to Power” for Elizabeth — should be reversed. If one of the movie’s thematic concerns addresses the zero-sum realities of claims to the throne, that same set of disadvantages extends to the imagined “friendship” of Mary and Elizabeth. The film steers toward a reading of female leadership inside the patriarchy that says the queens, as fellow female monarchs, could have been allies instead of enemies, but Rourke never quite gets there.  

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Based on the 1956 novel by Antonio di Benedetto, Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel’s “Zama” invites the viewer to experience the humiliations of the title character, a doomed late 18th century Americano colonizer desperate for a transfer that we know immediately will never be authorized. Perfectly captured in a performance by Daniel Gimenez Cacho that balances the deadpan and the dignified, Don Diego de Zama may or may not be as clueless as he so often appears. His fate, however, is as certain as the moral corruption of the slavery that surrounds him.

In a series of deliberately staged scenes of ravishing visual and auditory design, Martel observes the folly with calculated detachment. Resisting any and all temptations to explain, the filmmaker speaks through images that explore a series of tensions: male/female, inside/outside, water/land, day/night, real/imagined and a number of other dualities. Some viewers will likely experience some frustration and disequilibrium in the presentation, but anyone who appreciates the observational poetry of filmmakers like Terrence Malick will be thrilled by pictures that can morph from dream to nightmare with each new sunrise and sunset.

Liminality is the coin of Martel’s realm in “Zama,” and she manages to make the excruciating uncertainty of the long pause an engrossing experience for the audience, both in terms of what unfolds onscreen and in the lengthy span since “The Headless Woman” came out. As Guy Lodge wrote, “The frustrating nine-year wait for new material from Martel has done nothing to blunt her exquisite, inventive command of sound and image, nor her knack for subtly violent exposure of social and racial prejudice on the upper rungs of the class ladder.” All the better to take in Zama’s monumental sense of privilege and entitlement en route to some bitter cosmic comeuppance.   

In one of Martel’s masterstrokes, Zama eventually joins a posse to pursue an enigmatic outlaw known as Vicuna Porto (an excellent Matheus Nachtergaele, equally funny and scary). Is Vicuna Porto real or imagined? Or could the name be traded, transferred, and imbued with power like the Dread Pirate Roberts? A late encounter between Zama and Porto contains a moment of searing clarity that summarizes the absurdity of laboring and striving so mightily for something that may be, like life itself, fleeting and ungraspable — or not there at all.  

Martel revels in the languid pace that juxtaposes the Spanish intruders in their stifling coats and wigs against the more breezily attired natives. The ill-fitting hairpieces become one of the movie’s tremendous running gags, as wearers are constantly rearranging the greasy weaves atop sweaty pates. You can practically smell them. Like so many other displays that Martel capably shows without needing to tell, the impractical fashions of the Spaniards are as wrong as the treatment of the indigenous people. The bankruptcy of the conquerors is telegraphed in the lazy downward spiral of Zama’s prospects, as his series of setbacks points toward the kind of object-lesson culture clash outcomes explored cinematically in Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” Roland Joffe’s “The Mission,” Bruce Beresford’s “Black Robe,” Ciro Guerra’s “Embrace of the Serpent,” Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” and many others.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Veteran filmmaker Jennifer Fox’s “The Tale” addresses child rape in as straightforward and clear-eyed a manner as any film ever made on the painful subject. Fox’s background in nonfiction storytelling informs the movie’s magnetic investigative structure, which arranges and rearranges details both large and small as the adult Jennifer Fox (played brilliantly by Laura Dern) rethinks a sexual “relationship” she shared with two grown-ups when she was only thirteen years old. The original story referred to in the title was written by Fox at the time of the abuse, and remarkably, she directly quotes it in the retelling we see unfold. It doesn’t feel quite right to call “The Tale” fiction, and its presentation falls well outside what most would define as documentary.

Memoir might be a better descriptor to effectively encapsulate some dimension of the film’s substance, and like most features based on some “real life” set of facts, a disclaimer warns that certain details were changed. A pre-show trigger warning and an end title explanation that an adult body double was used for all depictions of sexual acts bookend the movie.

What is most impressive about “The Tale” is the confident way in which Fox depicts her own evolving uncertainty. Drawing the audience into highly subjective recollections, Fox uses a variety of bold cinematic choices to show the fragility and mutability of memory. Most of these devices are simple and direct. For example, Fox’s belief that she was older at the time of her interactions with Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki) and Bill Allens (Jason Ritter) loops in a pair of flashbacks that replace the fifteen-year-old Jenny (Jessica Sarah Flaum) with the thirteen-year-old Jenny (Isabelle Nelisse). Dern navigates the complex series of emotional reckonings with a tremendously sympathetic understanding of Fox’s reluctance to identify as a victim.    

“The Tale” unfolds as a procedural, alternating between Fox’s pursuit of information that will help her fill in missing experiences and the harrowing, real-time scenes of Ritter’s predatory pedophile engaging in a virtually textbook pattern of sexual grooming. Fox attacks the nightmarish hallmarks with a clinical eye: the gaining of trust with praise and flattery, the normalization of frank sexual talk, opportunistic sleepover invitations, the bestowing of gifts, the perpetuation of increasingly intimate physical contact, and the carefully calculated opportunities for private/isolated one-on-one time. Those scenes are disturbing and difficult to watch.  

Even as the memories begin to sharpen back into focus, Dern’s Fox requires space to sort out the stubborn range of conflicted emotions that accompany the revelations and filmmaker Fox smartly insists on seeing that whole process unfold. “The Tale” is Fox’s first fiction feature, but she brings to bear much from documentary storytelling, including the development of an outreach campaign that she describes in detail in her May 26, 2018 “Deadline” guest column on the film. In that piece, Fox says, “There was no evidence of what happened to me, except in my mind” in response to why she opted to make the film with actors rather than create a documentary. The resulting work, which Fox calls “issue-based fiction,” resonates as both art and vehicle for change.    

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“The Diary of a Teenage Girl” director Marielle Heller beautifully translates another personal autobiography to excellent results. “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is based on the confessional 2008 memoir of literary forger Lee Israel, and Heller’s movie pulls off the impressive feat of bringing visual urgency to the typically uncinematic process of writing. Heller’s cast is uniformly excellent, but her collaboration with central pair Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant will continue to attract attention throughout the remaining weeks of the award season. “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is simultaneously suspenseful and laidback.    

In her review, Katie Rife articulates the movie’s most impressive achievement. Rife says, “Maintaining an audience’s sympathy for a character through their most fumbling, frustrating lows requires compassion and clarity of purpose, both of which McCarthy amply demonstrates here.” The sentiment could just as easily extend to Heller’s deft handling, Grant’s irresponsible and tragic Jack Hock (who is by turns infuriating and vulnerable), and the sharp screenplay credited to Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty. Holofcener was originally set to direct Julianne Moore in the principal role before personnel shifts rearranged the ultimate fate of the film.

Moore would most likely have turned in another customarily terrific performance, but McCarthy is just dynamite as the bitter, alcoholic Israel. For the dazzlingly funny actor, Israel is McCarthy’s high point to date, a role perfectly suited to the quicksilver insults she has so effortlessly conjured in the past (her unchained, foul-mouthed, improvisational prowess on display during the credit scene outtakes of “This Is 40” comes to mind). McCarthy, with very few exceptions, has been trapped by the phenomenal work/execrable film conundrum. Several examples, like “Tammy,” “The Boss,” and this year’s “Life of the Party” were directed by spouse/partner Ben Falcone.

Falcone’s broad brush is set aside for Heller’s finer strokes, and a substantial amount of pleasure can be derived from the subtleties and restraint of Heller’s impressionistic eye. The filmmaker consciously addresses themes of homosexuality with an awareness of the period setting. Israel keeps romantically-inclined bookshop owner Anna (an excellent Dolly Wells) at a distance, and later shares a pivotal scene of emotional reckoning with ex Elaine (Anna Deavere Smith). Peter Debruge questioned the trailer’s apparent muting of the gay themes, but many others have praised the end result, including Grant’s final interaction with McCarthy. Touching without wallowing in self-pity, the moment is capped with a fantastic farewell in which the friends say “I love you” to each other in a profoundly profane and unsentimental fashion befitting their acerbic personalities.

That flourish serves as a strangely wistful reminder of the exhilarating aspects of the criminal misadventures that came before. Israel’s guilt and shame over fraudulent transactions involved the names of witty, sharp-tongued bright lights like Dorothy Parker, Noel Coward, Louise Brooks, and several others for whom Israel developed a kind of parasocial masquerade. Heller and McCarthy take us into their confidence, making the case for both the awful, clammy anxieties associated with physical and intellectual property theft/deception and the pride at conjuring convincing intimacies that were valued as the real thing.