Movie review by Greg Carlson

Following a 2023 South by Southwest world premiere, writer/director/star Leah McKendrick’s “Scrambled” gets a well-deserved theatrical run in U.S. cinemas. The busy and talented moviemaker, whose online presence in projects like the series “Destroy the Alpha Gammas” and the short Poison Ivy origin story “Pamela & Ivy” earned critical acclaim and caught the eye of Sony Pictures (among others), draws from her own experiences with egg retrieval in her new feature. Simultaneously a raucous, whip-smart comedy and a feminist treatise on self-image, self-actualization, and self-love, “Scrambled” has a heart as big as the laughs it consistently generates.

McKendrick plays Nellie Robinson, a woefully underemployed 34-year-old who feels like she’s running out of time to match the milestones of the peers inviting her to what seems like a nonstop celebration of engagements, weddings, baby showers, and birthday parties. Following pal Sheila’s (Ego Nwadim) nuptials, which inaugurate the movie with a hysterical cascade of rapid-fire gags alongside all the necessary exposition, Nellie decides to undergo the oocyte cryopreservation process. Borrowing funds from her financially successful brother Jesse (Andrew Santino), who perhaps attaches too many strings to the deal, Nellie starts a series of appointments with a deadpan and occasionally inappropriate doctor (a terrific Feodor Chin).

And if the painful abdomen injections aren’t enough, Nellie also embarks on a quest of hook-ups hoping to recapture some of the spark she briefly enjoyed with “The One (That Got Away).” Each of the doomed encounters is accompanied by an onscreen title (“The Cult Leader,” “The Nice Guy,” “The Prom King,” etc.) suggesting some character trait that summarizes romantic suitability or the lack thereof. When asked whether she is seeing anyone, Nellie’s reply is “I’m seeing everyone.” None of the prospects, however, click with our heroine, who faces additional pressure from the members of her family. The nuclear unit reminds Nellie (and us) of protracted childhood dependency.

Nellie’s father is played by Clancy Brown, who is just as good in the role of a gruff patriarch with a hidden heart of gold as he is inhabiting terrifying villains. Brown’s cluelessness as he perpetually manages to say the wrong thing at the wrong time finds a hilarious partnership with Santino. McKendrick the screenwriter has enough confidence to spread the best lines around. Her slow-burn reactions to insults lobbed by Brown and Santino add layers to Nellie. Many critics have identified the ways in which “Scrambled” walks and talks like a scripted television series. That may be true, but the style is not necessarily a liability or a shortcoming.

McKendrick doesn’t always find the perfect balance between horny comic hijinks and warm-hug affirmations (I prefer moments like the insistent, borderline cringe, pre-wedding dance review of the proper order of hand jive operations so that Nellie and her partner can make a memorable, if desperate, “Grease”-inspired entrance). The movie has at least one too many scenes in which Nellie pours out her heart in an act of brave vulnerability. Those monologues, however, are worth it as long as we also get to spend so much time with Nellie at her messy, embarrassing, free-spirited best.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Following a world premiere at the Palm Springs Film Festival, Jade Halley Bartlett’s feature debut as writer-director received a January theatrical release via Lionsgate. Despite the provocative subject matter and the presence of Jenna Ortega in the leading role, the absolutely dismal box office returns and mixed reviews of “Miller’s Girl” suggest the movie will soon be mostly forgotten. But for those willing to embrace the hothouse tone of Bartlett’s Southern Gothic-adjacent purple prose and the tongue-in-cheek black comedy that knowingly flirts with all kinds of teacher-pupil cliches, Bartlett’s inaugural outing is lurid, trashy fun.

Ortega plays the deliciously-named Cairo Sweet, an 18-year-old high school senior with literary ambitions and admission to Yale on her mind. Living alone in an empty mansion absent of neglectful attorney parents off somewhere to indulge their own pleasures and shirk any child-rearing responsibilities, Cairo walks to school each day through a kudzu-covered stand of trees like Little Red Riding Hood. Or perhaps the Big Bad Wolf. Her sexually frustrated creative writing teacher Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman) asks her, “Don’t you get scared, walking through those woods?” Cairo’s reply: “I’m the scariest thing in there.”

Bartlett goes on to flex her affinity for all kinds of allusions, none more intense than the incorporation of Henry Miller’s “Under the Roofs of Paris,” which Cairo totes, along with a copy of Jonathan’s moldering short story collection “Apostrophes and Ampersands,” to class. The inclusion of the latter among Cairo’s stack simultaneously flatters and shames Jonathan, since his own dreams of bestselling fame and fortune have long been resigned to life as an educator. He is also reminded daily of his shortcomings by dipsomaniac wife Beatrice (Dagmara Domińczyk), who can never quite tear herself away from the phone long enough to intimately connect with him.

I am fascinated with the disagreements over the movie’s self-awareness, or lack thereof. Katie Walsh writes about what she calls the Completely Bonkers Cinematic Canon, placing herself among those who believe that Bartlett takes “Miller’s Girl” too seriously. Beauty is surely in the eye of the beholder, since my own gut feeling is that the filmmaker and her actors deliberately violate Walsh’s condition that a Completely Bonkers film “cannot wink or nudge at the audience.” To my eye, Bartlett’s metatextual flourishes, especially those contained in the running conversations between Jonathan and his pal Coach Fillmore (Bashir Salahuddin), offer all the necessary winks and nudges and then some.

The dual Millers – Jonathan and Henry – become dueling Millers as Bartlett fulfills some expectations of the erotic thrillers of the 1990s while undermining others with thought-provoking choices more in tune with contemporary conversations surrounding consent, ethics, gender dynamics, and power differentials. Bartlett makes a confident decision to let the viewer decide the extent of intimacy between Cairo and Jonathan by staging key scenes as dreamlike and possibly imagined fictions. “Miller’s Girl” is nowhere near perfect. It’s not always successful. But it did, at various points, call to mind a range of texts including the Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” David Mamet’s “Oleanna,” and Rob Cohen’s “The Boy Next Door” – and that’s enough for me.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Science fiction thriller “I.S.S.” managed a woeful seventh place at the box office over its opening weekend, collecting 3 million dollars from a 2500+ theater release. To make matters worse, negative word-of-mouth will shut down any potential rebound. A small handful of critics have praised director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s B-movie sensibilities, but the cumulative impact of the “Blackfish” documentarian’s movie – essentially left for dead in the January dumping-ground doldrums where theatrical releases wither and fade – is something less than the sum of its parts.

Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose leads the cast of six, a group of astronauts aboard the International Space Station faced with impossible decisions when nuclear war between the United States and Russia devastates Earth below. In December of 2020, the screenplay by Nick Shafir was included on Franklin Leonard’s Black List of best unproduced scripts. I don’t know how closely the finished film resembles the draft that received that honor, but much-needed intensity and paranoia is missing from the finished version. What should have been a roller coaster of shifting allegiances, filled with twists and turns alongside weighty political and philosophical puzzles pitting competition versus collaboration, never awakens from frustrating somnolence.

Instead of even the most rudimentary, reheated “2001: A Space Odyssey” leftovers, “I.S.S.” sidesteps the juiciest aspects of the logline, lurching toward “The Old Dark House” and “Alien” mathematics as the number of survivors moves in the direction of “And Then There Were None.” If you’re not paying close attention, the male cosmonauts Alexey (Pilou Asbæk) and Nicholai (Costa Ronin) look similar enough to mix up. Their colleague Weronika (Maria Mashkova), romantically involved with American skipper Gordon (Chris Messina), offers the most promising dramatic link between the increasingly wary teams, but Cowperthwaite is curiously stingy with character moments.

The sense of zero-gravity verisimilitude is so-so. Without the money to capture the most realistic onscreen depiction of weightlessness, actors were strapped into harnesses that would be digitally erased in post-production. The cheaper option doesn’t measure up to the razzle-dazzle of the big dogs, but fans of stuff like “Moon,” “High Life,” and “Prospect” will attest that audiences willingly suspend disbelief for something novel. “I.S.S.” production designer Geoff Wallace, who replicated what some refer to as the “clutter aesthetic” of the International Space Station, succeeds in suggesting believable conditions aboard the claustrophobic modules. But the authenticity of the sets is not enough.

It is unfair to make side-by-side comparisons between “I.S.S.” and something like Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar-winner “Gravity,” released in 2013. Turns out, it’s also unfair to compare “I.S.S.” to Mario Bava’s “Planet of the Vampires” or Jim Lenahan’s “You Got Lucky” music video for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, both of which do a lot with a little. But the reality is that you can’t expect miracles without excellent writing and the imagination to capitalize on the most cinematic elements of space exploration. “I.S.S.” is sorely in need of a lot more strangeness, weirdness, and wonder. What kid hasn’t imagined what it might be like to spend time floating above our Big Blue Marble, doing important and amazing things in the name of science, discovery, and humankind?

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The new “Mean Girls” movie, based on the Broadway musical that was in turn inspired by the 2004 film directed by Mark Waters, originated with Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 book “Queen Bees and Wannabes.” All three adaptations were written by Tina Fey, who reprises her onscreen role as math teacher Ms. Norbury. Along with an avalanche of puff pieces and side-by-side comparisons debating the relative merits of the various incarnations, publicity surrounding the feature directorial debut of Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. has covered everything from the marketing strategy downplaying the film’s status as a musical to Lindsay Lohan’s “hurt and disappointment” at the use of a particular term that may or may not have been directly leveled at the star of the first version.

Both “The Hollywood Reporter” and “Variety” used the colorful description in their headlines, indicating more than anything that the tried and true technique of drumming up mock outrage and much ado about little is alive and well in the movie business. In the new “Mean Girls,” Angourie Rice – who was so brilliant as the daughter of Ryan Gosling’s character in “The Nice Guys” that she just about walked off with the movie – plays Cady Heron. Rice is fine as the naive transplant from Kenya, although Lohan remains the definitive Cady. In parallel with Rice’s sweetness and light, the revision sands off some of the edges of the 2004 telling in favor of a more inclusive and less offensive product.

The core plot points and principal characters arrive virtually intact. The previously homeschooled Cady struggles to learn the rules for survival among the cliques of North Shore High, forging friendships of fluctuating strength with queer-identifying outsiders like Janis (Auliʻi Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey) as well as the squad of Plastics composed of Regina (Reneé Rapp), Karen (Avantika), and Gretchen (Bebe Wood). To additionally complicate social expectations, Cady falls hard for Regina’s ex Aaron (Christopher Briney), feigning mathematical ignorance to set up opportunities for one-on-one tutoring.

The most devoted followers of the stage version will mourn the loss of many of the songs written by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin, who shuffled, shifted, and cut to meet the demands of a reasonable movie runtime. In some cases, it is clear that decisions were made in part based on vocal skill (when in doubt, let Spivey sing), even though the less-trained convey a particular charm. “Everything Is a Remix” guru Kirby Ferguson will have a field day with the updates; over the course of two decades, some things have changed radically while others have remained entirely the same.

This new “Mean Girls” feels somehow safer, even if Tim Meadows is effortlessly funny no matter the era. A small number of happy surprises and cameos pop up next to Fey and Meadows, but Amy Poehler, who played Mrs. George, is sorely missed (Busy Philipps steps into the role). Other updates, like the intensified incorporation of social media apps and current technology, are par for the course. Judging by the enthusiastic reaction of current teenagers, however, the themes of “Mean Girls,” including issues of bullying, self-image, and self-worth, are evergreen.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Palme d’Or recipient “Anatomy of a Fall” is now enjoying an award-season victory tour, recently picking up Golden Globe wins for both screenplay and foreign language film as well as the National Board of Review’s prize for Best International Film. Oscar nominations should be forthcoming. Filmmaker Justine Triet, who wrote the script with partner and collaborator Arthur Harari, expertly uses the framework of the courtroom drama to explore the complex ways in which women are expected to sacrifice their own ambitions when managing marriage and children.

Triet has a powerful force in lead performer Sandra Hüller, whose equally valuable turn this past year in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” signals the presence of a phenomenal talent building on the reputation of fearless characterizations like the one that anchored “Toni Erdmann.” Hüller’s Sandra Voyter is a novelist indicted for the death of her husband Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) after his body is found in the snow underneath the upper window of their mountain chalet in the south of France. Discovered by their visually-impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), Samuel’s corpse indicates a head wound that occurred prior to hitting the ground. The intrigue accelerates.

A sharp-eyed storyteller, Triet deftly juggles the circumstantial details that raise eyebrows as Sandra labors to prove her innocence. All sorts of genre tropes are layered, one by one, to cast doubt on the woman’s claim that she did not push her husband from a deadly height. Along with the curious pre-fall injury, Sandra contends with blood spatter theories, an inconvenient digital recording of a fight between her and Samuel, a bruise on her arm, and – in a touch that recalls “Basic Instinct” and other sources – fictionalized thoughts built into Sandra’s most recent book that make her look awfully guilty.

The inherent conflict of prosecution versus defense has too often been used as an easy chassis for novels, films, and TV shows; there are so many more bad courtroom-based stories than the handful of masterworks that have stood the test of time. Triet and Harari do better than most, showing the viewer so many compelling moments outside the legal proceedings. The death of Samuel may have been instantaneous, but the decay of the relationship he shared with Sandra took a long time. One of Triet’s triumphs is her refusal to compromise Sandra’s integrity in the face of the unfair and implicit accusations that share the same space as the explicit charge.

In her interview with Triet for “The New Yorker,” Alexandra Schwartz rhetorically asks exactly what components – other than murder – make up the accusations against Sandra: “ … neglecting [Samuel] for her work; flirting with other women; having ambition; being a foreigner, a mother, a writer, [and] an unreadable, unrepentant woman.” The themes of gender roles and expectations emerge as the film’s most powerful angle, and Triet has a great deal to say on the subjects. As a title, “Anatomy of a Fall” suggests multiple meanings. And the filmmaker relishes the charged back-and-forth of the exchanges that continually force the viewer to reevaluate what we think we know.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The rough UK equivalent of America’s hedonistic spring break rite of passage, the annual descent of sun-seeking young people on tourist-friendly coastal resorts in Greece, Spain and other spots following stressful academic exams conjures up youthquake fantasies and parental nightmares in equal measure. The provocative title of filmmaker Molly Manning Walker’s feature directorial debut “How to Have Sex” partially obscures the layered meanings and irony contained within. The busy Walker served as the director of photographer on Charlotte Regan’s well-received “Scrapper,” and her visual bona fides as a cinematographer pay off handsomely in a coming-of-age tale noteworthy for its sensitive point-of-view and standout lead performance by Mia McKenna-Bruce.

Walker has revealed that her screenplay is partly autobiographical. During the events surrounding the film’s world premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival,  where it won the Un Certain Regard prize, Walker spoke of being sexually assaulted at the age of 16. In the movie, the anticipation and tension surrounding what will happen to McKenna-Bruce’s teenage Tara is intensified by Walker’s stylistic choices, which plunge the viewer into the dizzying, neon-drenched, alcohol-fueled culture of clubs and casual hook-ups. Walker closely identifies the film’s perspective with Tara, taking care to withhold any judgment on the choices she makes.

Malia, on the island of Crete, is presented as a magnet for revelers enjoying a short respite before learning the results of their General Certificate of Secondary Education qualifications. The trio to which Tara belongs includes friends Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake), and Walker establishes the inconvenient fact of Tara’s virginity as a kind of ominous harbinger of what will transpire during the vacation. It certainly doesn’t help that her pals poke fun at Tara’s lack of sexual experience; Walker often uses subtle reaction shots to indicate that Skye might not be capable of the kind-hearted sisterhood Tara desperately needs.

Tara’s liminal suspension between childhood and adulthood distinguishes “How to Have Sex” from Lynne Ramsay’s more accomplished “Morvern Callar,” which serves as a partial inspiration for Walker. The introduction of a slightly older group of northerners residing in the hotel room next door sharpens focus toward a slippery triangle. Tara circles the possibilities of the gentler but still game Badger (Shaun Thomas) and the colder, more “fit” Paddy (Sam Bottomley). All the while, Walker conveys the performative flirtations and rituals with a strong sense of authenticity favoring showing over telling.

At its very best, “How to Have Sex” journeys through the terrain of fear and confusion that accompanies the realization of being violated. How to process broken boundaries and the lack of positive consent? Lovia Gyarkye points out how McKenna-Bruce’s performance “dial[s] back Tara’s energy so that we can feel the character withdraw the more she remembers.” Tara’s awful experiences are not defined by Walker for her protagonist (as much as it might be obvious to the viewer) in a way that immediately registers in black and white. The outcome is less a critique of social constructs and their warped expectations than a moving and sympathetic diary entry simultaneously universal and specific.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The combination of biographical information and artist statement found under the “about” tab at Ann Oren’s website partly reads, “By dissolving distinctions between plant, animal and human, she asks what it is to be human in an ecosystem immersed in digital culture. Questions about intimacy and identity keep emerging through various audio-visual approaches, while exploring gender, fictosexuality, animality, interspecies and other hybrid conditions.” Those sentiments surely represent truth in advertising concerning Oren’s feature directorial debut “Piaffe,” originally released in competition at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival and now popping up on a number of 2023 “best of” lists.

Beautifully shot on Super 16mm film by Carlos Vasquez, “Piaffe” follows the physical transformation and sexual awakening of Eva (Simone Bucio), a young woman who takes over the preparation of audio for a drug commercial when sibling and original Foley artist Zara ends up in the hospital following a nervous breakdown. The mercurial Zara, played by the nonbinary performer Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, significantly influences the trajectory of Eva’s experiences while remaining a mystery to the viewer. In 2020, Paetau appeared in Oren’s short “Passage,” which screened in multiple festivals and was recognized at Slamdance with a jury prize for Best Experimental Film.

“Piaffe” is an expansion of “Passage.” Both movies address metamorphosis through the supernatural growth of what becomes a luxurious horse’s tail on a human, but Oren uses the longer running time of “Piaffe” to dive more deeply into the ways that her protagonist is affected by radical change that manifests emotionally and intellectually as well as bodily. Any impulse to frame the somatic component of Eva’s mutation within the realm of Cronenbergian body horror is rapidly dispatched by Oren’s attitude, resulting in a kind of liberation that Sophie Monks Kaufman calls “body pleasure.” As the hair on Eva’s tail grows, so too does her sense of self and her way of being in the world.

The erotic influence of the horse is well-documented. In her 2008 thesis titled “Sex and Gender in the Equine in Literature,” Leah Graysmith describes an array of historical treatments, noting, “Perhaps the examples set in classical mythology and by Chaucer and Shakespeare have had an inspiring effect on later literature and cultural expression, or perhaps the continued proliferation of horses representing all things sexual is something intrinsic to culture.” Oren guides her viewers to identify with the taciturn Eva, using the experimentation of the Foley stage as a gateway to embrace the thrilling spark Eva feels once she engages some kinks in a dominant/submissive relationship with fern botanist Novak (Sebastian Rudolph).

Eva’s operation of the fotoplastikon where Novak examines stereoscopic images of plants is just one of Oren’s great visual designs. An antique kind of theater that rotates a set of fixed viewports into positions that pause long enough for the observer to briefly ponder illuminated cards, the fotoplastikon in “Piaffe” is simultaneously suggestive of a peep show, a horse training ring, and a cinematically-inclined zoopraxiscope (Oren has previously acknowledged the influence of “magician of cinema” Eadweard Muybridge). The curiosity inspired by the filmmaker’s sensuously presented fusion of flora and fauna will lead admirers to the special rewards discovered only through repeat viewings.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In a movie year that brought to life an iconic plastic fashion doll and a theoretical physicist who ushered in the Atomic Age, there was no shortage of memorable characters. But for my money, the crown for the most remarkable cinematic creation of 2023 sits atop the head of reanimated adventurer Bella Baxter. Brought to life (after death) by Emma Stone in a comprehensively mesmerizing performance, Bella – who, the story explains, is simultaneously her own daughter and her own mother – takes viewers on an odyssey of the mind and the body.

Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos make one hell of a team, collaborating with a set of top-notch castmates and craftspeople to work up one “diabolical fuckfest of a puzzle” based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray. The screenplay by Tony McNamara honors the grandest themes of Mary Shelley’s infinitely influential “Frankenstein,” catapulting the 1818 touches of the Gothic and the Romantic to a kind of otherworldly, steampunk-influenced fantasia that reimagines the Victorian Era with retrofuturistic eye candy in every direction. As the Victor Frankenstein-esque Godwin Baxter (God, for short, and a nod to Shelley’s papa), Willem Dafoe works all the wonders of rationality beneath a patchwork of facial scars inflicted by his own character’s father in the pursuit of knowledge.

Dafoe’s delightful mad scientist is really anything but mad. His frank practicality can stun and even shock assistant/student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), who arrives at Godwin’s home surgery to study Bella – if not to rapidly fall under her spell. God’s unvarnished honesty rubs off on his spectacular “experiment,” as Bella’s uninhibited directness pumps the film full of frequently anachronistic and always hysterical wordplay. In one scene, Max reads aloud a postcard from Bella: “Me good Lisbon sugar tart lick me all day.” He hopes it is all one sentence.

The comic grenades continue to detonate with the arrival of caddish attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a horny and mischievous rakehell whose plan to fornicate with nary a pause (“Why do people not do this all the time?” wonders the equally insatiable Bella) is thwarted when Bella’s emotional intelligence quickly outstrips his. If, as Bernard Dick argues, all horror is in some way predicated on metamorphosis, then the Frankenstein mythology belongs to that genre as much as it does to science fiction. The horror of “Poor Things,” however, lies not in Bella’s physical transformation but rather in her understanding of men and how they operate. A volume of that knowledge will be earned in the Paris brothel run by Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter).

As she labors to master language and understand common social behavior, the early Bella glows with an aura evoking both holy foolishness and the incongruous, plain-speak wisdom of Chance the gardener and Forrest Gump. But watching Bella’s rapid education, which accelerates from a huge appetite for “furious jumping” (her words for sexual intercourse) to an appreciation of significant philosophical questions, is one of the movie’s greatest joys and one of Stone’s greatest triumphs as a performer. If substantive change inspired by an arc of experience defines a strong character, Bella Baxter shines as brightly as any diamond. She’s just as tough, too.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of “The Zone of Interest” makes a perfect visual companion to the great political thinker Hannah Arendt’s most quoted concept. Introduced in her 1961 work for “The New Yorker” and then incorporated into the title of the 1963 book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” Arendt’s argument that the Nazi bureaucrat fulfilled his duties without any deliberate sadism  – but rather, a kind of disengagement – continues to ignite debate (for a solid primer see Thomas White’s concise essay for “Aeon”). Glazer uses Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel), the longest serving commandant of Auschwitz, to probe the kind of unremarkable and ordinary evil that threatens us again today.

Glazer, whose rigorous stylistic choices have frequently drawn favorable comparisons to Stanley Kubrick, spent years preparing the film, returning the fictionalized version of his central figure (as imagined by Amis) to the historical SS officer who would eventually hang in 1947 for his role as a mass murderer. Glazer sought the support of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, accessing archival material that aided in the construction of a screenplay emphasizing the daily domestic routines of the Höss household overseen by Rudolph’s wife Hedwig (a chillingly effective Sandra Hüller).

Living in a neatly-kept house adjacent to the concentration camp, Rudolph and Hedwig raise their five children with the help of servants and the support of exploited prisoners. Glazer stages a series of scenes in which the members of the Höss family enjoy the leisure and comforts of their station. Swimming, sunbathing, gardening, playing, fishing, and celebrating birthdays mark the passage of time. But any sense of comprehensive peace is shattered by the constant sounds of screams and gunshots coming from the other side of the wall that serves as a barrier between the Höss home and the machine-tooled workings of the death camp overseen by Rudolph.

“The Zone of Interest” sustains our sense of stricken fascination in part through Glazer’s use of hidden cameras placed throughout the set, a technique recalling the filmmaker’s memorable approach to capturing unrehearsed and unguarded moments of civilians whose curiosity brought them to the van piloted by Scarlett Johansson during “Under the Skin.” Other elements, including scenes of a girl presented in the otherworldly glow of monochromatic, night-vision negative (which may for some call to mind the child in the red coat in “Schindler’s List”), intensify the experience as surely as the brilliant Mica Levi score.

Late in the film, Glazer makes a Kubrickian cut spanning decades of time to a series of sobering shots that link past and present in a way that should unnerve anyone who has recently tolerated the extremism of the far-right and the rhetoric of politicians and candidates who espouse nationalism and authoritarianism. Glazer also includes a brief moment that rhymes with an eerily similar scene in “The Act of Killing” featuring another example of Arendt’s concept personified. Rudolph Höss, we notice, is an awful lot like the Indonesian death squad executioner Anwar Congo. We should all hope that we don’t resemble either man.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Bubbling up on multiple 2023 best-of lists and qualified for a possible Oscar nomination as Argentina’s international feature entry (prior to the eventual finalists, the fifteen shortlisted titles will be announced on December 21, 2023), Rodrigo Moreno’s excellent “The Delinquents” is a thoroughly satisfying slice of contemplative slow cinema. A simmering heist movie (in the loosest sense), the film uses the basic premise of an inside job as a springboard to a multilayered critique of clock-punching drudgery and how to break free from it. Moreno’s central characters toil away at a Buenos Aires bank, sleepwalking through the quotidian routines that add up, day after day, to a career of unfulfilling and forgettable labor – but is that all there is?

Moreno initially establishes the same kinds of bleak rhythms seen in Mike Judge’s “Office Space” and its sibling “The Office” – the stretches of quiet interrupted only by the sounds of electrical humming and corporate jargon. But unlike the lacerating comedy cooked up by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, “The Delinquents” reveals a more existential agenda. Given his access to large amounts of cash that he moves to and from the vault, Morán (Daniel Elías) at first appears to be the model of trustworthiness and responsibility. Turns out, he has decided to take $650,000 and then go to prison for the crime, trading approximately three years behind bars to net what it would take a quarter of a century to earn (times two, since half will go to a helper).

Morán has clearly spent some time figuring out the angles, so before surrendering to authorities, he targets unwitting coworker Román (Esteban Bigliardi) to mind the duffel bag stuffed with pilfered currency. In the first of several beguiling swerves, Moreno introduces a switch, as the person we assumed would drive the central narrative is set aside for the exploration of another who is equally interesting. The anagrammatic names of the two key men will soon be further entwined by the introduction of Margarita Molfino’s Norma – a playful choice Moreno extends with Morna (Cecilia Rainero), Ramón (Javier Zoro Sutton), and, for good measure, a shot of a comic book cover featuring Namor the Sub-Mariner.

Román is identified as Morán’s likely accomplice by the investigator (a great Laura Paredes) attempting to solve the embezzlement, and Moreno uses the threat of discovery to explore several enthralling ways in which we conceptualize freedom. In a sense, both men pay a certain price for their deeds. Once Román finds his way out of the city and into the countryside, where he will meet up with members of a filmmaking crew particularly attuned to careful appreciation of sight and sound, his own concerns and anxieties about holding the money melt away in favor of an idyll with no price tag. Soon, Moreno dazzles with yet another ripple/echo/switchback that would make Guy de Maupassant and O. Henry proud.

The doubling extends to Germán de Silva, cast as both bank boss Del Toro and as tough inmate Garrincha, mirrored in a way that allows Moreno to ask whether even the simplest and best-laid plan is worth the unforeseen complications of extortion and the threat of physical harm. The altogether leisurely pacing of the film, which clocks in at three hours, works on behalf of the filmmaker’s grand scheme. Split into two segments, “The Delinquents” sustains its expansive length by manipulating expectations and insisting that the journey is just as important as the destination. Additionally, Moreno stuffs the movie with intertextual gifts celebrating Argentina, including Ricardo Zelarayán’s poem “The Great Salt Flats,” Astor Piazzolla’s oboe compositions, and a vinyl copy of “Pappo’s Blues Volumen 1” for the viewer to unwrap.