Movie review by Greg Carlson

At the Sundance Film Festival, writer-director Todd Solondz described drawing his inspiration for “Wiener-Dog” from an unlikely pair of cinematic hallmarks: Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar” (1966) and Joe Camp’s “Benji” (1974). Solondz’s movie, as dark, hilarious, and observant as any of the features in his deeply impressive filmography, does indeed borrow from those two movies, aligning with Bresson’s unflinching examination of life’s cruelties and Camp’s flair for open and earnest communion with the lessons we can learn from our four-legged friends.

Like the long-suffering donkey in Bresson’s phenomenal masterwork, the title dachshund of Solondz’s film passes from keeper to keeper, silently witnessing a parade of the filmmaker’s signature oddballs and outsiders as they struggle with disappointments, humiliations, and defeats. The whole affair plays out in Solondz’s familiar, off-kilter neighborhoods, and longtime fans will undoubtedly be pleased that the director continues his fascination with the darkest facets of ourselves – and does so with his ever-present grace. Few cinema artists have matched Solondz’s ability to withhold judgment of and fully humanize pedophiles and predators.

The storytelling structure plays out as a series of chapters, inevitably inviting post-screening conversation in which the merits and possible shortcomings of each of the segments can be argued and ranked. The first of the tales is an absolute humdinger. A now cancer-free 9-year-old named Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke) invests his affection in the newly acquired pooch. Friction between Remi’s mother (Julie Delpy) and father (Tracy Letts) is mirrored by the stress of the pup’s unplanned bodily functions, and a sustained tracking shot of seemingly limitless diarrhea set to “Claire de lune” competes directly with Delpy’s speech schooling Remi on the realities of canine rape for one of the biggest laughs in the movie.

The subsequent caretakers of the title pet, like the custodians of Balthazar, will not all treat her with the same love shown by Remi, and Solondz brilliantly maintains audience interest via the foreboding suspense that something awful might happen to Wiener-Dog. Todd McCarthy finds a flaw in “how the lead character becomes increasingly marginalized as the story lurches along, to the point where she’s more of an ornament than a figure of any central importance either dramatically or to her master of the moment.” While this position will not be shared by all viewers, Solondz’s choice to omit a character like Anne Wiazemsky’s Marie (whose own trials are paralleled with Balthazar’s even after the two are separated) refocuses audience attention each time the dog gets a new master.

While Ellen Burstyn’s bitter, regretful Nana and Greta Gerwig’s Dawn Wiener both project galaxies of intrigue and imagination through the actors’ wonderful performances, Solondz lavishes a great deal of attention on a self-reflexive metanarrative in which Danny DeVito’s Dave Schmerz, a fading teacher and screenwriter at the breaking point, implicates the hound in a shocking plot when he can no longer suffer the ridicule and indifference of his callow, entitled students. Happily, the film’s conclusion delivers everything one wants of Solondz and then some, commenting as it does on the legacies of the creative, our understandings and misunderstandings of the philosophy of art, and the fine line between life and death.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Following its Locarno Film Festival premiere in August of 2015, the great Chantal Akerman’s final work, “No Home Movie,” now makes its way to limited theatrical release and digital platforms in the United States. Currently viewable on Fandor – a fitting small screen residence – the nonfiction meditation featuring Akerman’s mother Natalia in her twilight takes on new shades of meaning and acute pangs of melancholy in light of Akerman’s October 2015 suicide. Natalia died in 2014. A study of contrasts, the movie is alternately inviting and chilly, intimate and detached, demanding and comfortable.

Natalia, a Pole who survived Auschwitz but lost her parents there, shares several conversations with Chantal throughout the course of the movie, often over a meal and seated at a kitchen table. The two speak candidly and urgently – in the way that any parent and grown-up child might – about all kinds of things. From the philosophical to the quotidian, Chantal engages Natalia on dietary habits, the challenges of the elderly, childhood memories, motherly advice, family history, and politics and religion. The little squabbles and teasing give-and-take are suggestive of a big love. As the film goes on, Akerman’s travels take her away from Brussels, and she and Natalia meet over Skype.

Several critics commenting on “No Home Movie” have tackled the metaphoric possibilities of the movie’s introductory image of a windblown tree whipped in a desert landscape (reportedly shot in Israel but not geographically identified in the film). In a typical reading, Clayton Dillard equates the tenacious roots and branches to Natalia, claiming that “Akerman turns an initial instance of isolation into a visual leitmotif, where subsequent iterations of singular personages, whether a man on a bench or a lawn chair in the backyard, serve as functional equivalents for Natalia’s disintegrating self.” As Akerman takes us deeper into the film, evidence of Natalia’s failing health moves into the foreground.

Akerman’s decision to collect the images for “No Home Movie” on digital video provides the work with a particular quality that implies a homemade or handcrafted character. In many scenes, the viewer is left with the impression that the camera has been placed on a tabletop or perched on a counter (perhaps to blend in unobtrusively and become invisible to the subject being filmed), and the apparent absence of a tripod suggests additional DIY sensibilities. The compositions, often framing spaces through open doorways and capturing speakers from behind, work in tandem with the auditory effect of hearing dialogue without being able to always see the face of the person talking.

As the swan song of a legendary filmmaker, “No Home Movie” might direct newcomers to Akerman’s best-known film, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” alluded to in both a potato-peeling anecdote and, as Peter Debruge points out, the “domestic apathy” embodied by Natalia. “No Home Movie” also calls to mind the excellent “News from Home,” among other films in Akerman’s oeuvre. That Akerman herself appears – the last time we see her, in a staged callback to a story about shoelaces – is a haunting sight. Viewers experiencing “No Home Movie” will now negotiate its meanings and messages in terms of two deaths instead of one.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Werner Herzog shares another meditation on humanity in “Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World.” Lit with the master filmmaker’s blazing curiosity, the fascinating documentary ponders a wide variety of digital era conundrums and curiosities via ten chapters. Bouncing from topic to topic, “Lo and Behold” accomplishes the showman’s trick that leaves the audience salivating for more – many of the sections could sustain feature length examinations on their own. From our dependence on the electronic infrastructure that could be wiped out by human error, hacker malfeasance, or solar activity, to the scary eventualities surrounding the self-awareness that will accompany artificial intelligence, Herzog knows how to ask questions that simultaneously fascinate, delight, and terrify.

In the film’s most harrowing sequence, the family members of Nikki Catsouras – a young woman who died in a car wreck in 2006 – recount the shocking and unconscionable anonymous online harassment they faced when trolls began sharing, posting, and emailing crash site images that had been taken by California Highway Patrol officers. The Catsouras case, which attracted national attention when the family sued the CHP, continues to illuminate and inform the parameters of speech, personal expression, and First Amendment protections in virtual space. Herzog knows that he cannot possibly arrive at an answer.

Herzog’s respectful inquisitiveness elicits some terrific responses from many of the colorful characters represented on camera. The subjects include a higher than normal percentage of unbelievably intelligent respondents, but Herzog’s warm sense of egalitarianism extends to those who do not hold advanced degrees on complex matters. For example, the typically skeptical filmmaker shows compassion for Internet addicts, and a sequence in which we visit a community of people physically affected by electromagnetic radiation is so expertly constructed, you find yourself envying the cellular phone-free lifestyle made possible by the legal restrictions of the National Radio Quiet Zone.

While the inhabitants of Green Bank, West Virginia live under tech-restricted conditions for their health if not for their ideological beliefs, many of the movie’s thinkers have developed relationships to computing, robotics, and theoretical physics that are just as intriguing. Kevin Mitnick breezily describes just how easy it can be to con someone into giving up what should be secure information. Ted Nelson, still youthful in his 70s, makes for the perfect mad scientist/Cassandra mash-up. His incredible vision for creating code that would allow powerful flexibility in linking ideas (and simultaneously organize and store the entirety of the world’s knowledge) makes Google look like a drop in the bucket.

During Herzog’s post-screening discussion at the film’s Sundance world premiere, the director insisted that he was not a journalist. His subsequent thoughts offered insight into his filmmaking technique, especially in the way he approaches on-camera conversations with participants. Echoing some of the movie’s thematic fiber, the presentation included heartfelt pleas for continued critical thinking, even if the next generation of technological unknowns threatens to erase our desire/need to process certain kinds of information with our own brains. “Lo and Behold” certainly dispels the possibility that Herzog is a Luddite tethered to the old-fashioned and the analog (even though he did refer to himself as an anomaly when compared to the percentage of first-time directors presenting at film festivals). Still, it was refreshing when his advice to the cinematically inclined audience was to “Read, read, read, read!”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

At 63 years of age, Paul Reubens completes a minor miracle with the return of beloved, iconic manchild Pee-wee Herman, the eccentric creation whose appeal to grown-ups and children hit the bullseye in Tim Burton’s feature directorial debut “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and on television in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday” fails to top the 1980s incarnation of the character, but longtime fans will smile at several of the movie’s colorful gags. Produced by Reubens and Judd Apatow and directed by John Lee, the film is a nostalgic reminder of the anarchic charms of the devilishly singular Herman. The movie could end up pointing some viewers to the early, harder-to-find content showcasing Reubens’ huge talent. It’s unreal that Pee-wee debuted more than 35 years ago.

The screenplay, written by Reubens and Paul Rust, conservatively retraces much of the basic road trip narrative that propelled “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” but without the deeply motivating homage to De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves.” This time, Pee-wee slings hash and mixes milkshakes at Dan’s Diner in the picture postcard town of Fairville, until a chance encounter with Joe Manganiello (playing himself) develops into a star-crossed friendship. Invited to the “Magic Mike” star’s NYC birthday party, Pee-wee lights out cross country, encountering another parade of unusual and idiosyncratic personalities. Perhaps the most welcome cameo comes courtesy of Diane Salinger (so memorable as Francophile dreamer Simone in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure”). Salinger appears in a brief scene as a fearless aviator who takes Pee-wee in her flying car.

Depictions of the Amish community and flamboyant hairdressers don’t feel particularly progressive, and in one scene the movie plays with the ancient “farmer’s daughters” joke, placing Pee-wee in the path of a nonet of enthusiastic young women. In Rebecca Keegan’s Los Angeles Times review, the critic writes, “…it’s not entirely clear who is meant to be the butt of the joke, as when a farmer with a house full of chubby daughters tries to marry one off to Pee-wee. The moment feels strangely mean-spirited, as if the joke is on unappealing fat women instead of Pee-wee’s ‘Ew! Girls!’ response.” I did not read the film’s presentation of the physicality of the women as mean or negative, but Keegan’s comments speak to the challenges of cultivating subtlety and complexity when viewer response is so subjective.

A significant part of Pee-wee’s enduring appeal manifests in the carefully calibrated subversiveness that allows glimpses of sexuality, selfishness, and anti-authoritarianism alongside a genuine inclusivity and egalitarianism that welcomes and celebrates difference. For me, once a Pee-wee fan, always a Pee-wee fan. I probably won’t watch “Big Holiday” the way I mainlined “Big Adventure,” which saw several VHS copies spool through the deck so many times they fell apart. Still, I loved much about the new odyssey: Pee-wee’s sustained boy soprano scream, pitched a couple octaves above middle C; the exquisitely timed deflating balloon demonstration; the visual homage to the heroines of “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” Sometimes, you should just loosen your red bowtie, slip off your glen plaid jacket and white tassel loafers, kick back, relax, and sip from your tiny root beer barrel.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Craig Cobb, the white supremacist who purchased properties in Leith, North Dakota as part of a warped plan to establish a community for like-minded racial separatists, takes center stage in “Welcome to Leith,” recipient of the Bill Snyder Award for Documentary Filmmaking at the 2016 Fargo Film Festival. Principally examining the period during which Cobb’s actions and publicity-seeking behavior ran afoul of the townspeople (depending how you count, not more than two dozen souls) and ended with Cobb’s arrest and subsequent incarceration, the riveting feature by directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

Echoing Jesse Moss’ “The Overnighters” as another documentary focused on themes of outsiders/insiders in one of the nation’s least populous states, “Welcome to Leith” succeeds in part because of the all-access privilege enjoyed by the filmmakers, who shadowed both Cobb and Leith mayor Ryan Schock over a period of time. The moviemakers also get to know key players like the no-nonsense Lee Cook, Leith’s only African-American resident Bobby Harper, and Cobb’s confederate Kynan Dutton. Both “The Overnighters” and “Welcome to Leith” observe details of North Dakota life that alternately refute and reinforce stereotypes about the inhabitants – both newly arrived and lifelong.

Many North Dakotans followed the unfolding events in Leith without knowing that Nichols and Walker were simultaneously collecting the images that would be shaped into their film. As a result, locals may view the finished work with a sense of déjà vu. Key flashpoints in the Cobb saga, including the town’s efforts to pass ordinances that would require sewer and water for property owners, the November 2013 arrest of Cobb and Dutton on terrorizing charges after they patrolled Leith on foot with loaded rifles, and Cobb’s appearances on broadcast media, are communicated with clarity and urgency.

In one moment that will remind some of the circus-like atmosphere that set up a broken nose for Geraldo Rivera in 1988 when a brawl erupted after a confrontation between John Metzger and Roy Innis during a taping, Cobb appears as a guest on “The Trisha Goddard Show,” a syndicated talk tabloid. Goddard shares the results of Cobb’s DNA test, shocking the grinning hatemonger and the hooting studio audience with news that fourteen percent of Cobb’s genetic material comes from Sub-Saharan Africa. The no-publicity-is-bad-publicity revelation seems to be of little consequence to Cobb, who accrues his power from page views and time spent in the public eye.

Whether or not the filmmakers go too easy on Cobb is debatable, but the objective and observational style of the photography and editing suits the atmosphere of dread and unease that mounts with each of Cobb’s disconcerting and alarming antics. Following the incidents covered in the film, Cobb got up to his old real estate acquisition tricks in Antler, North Dakota, bidding – but eventually losing to the city – on a trio of properties. Not surprisingly, Cobb, according to Forum Communications reporter Adrian Glass-Moore, claimed that he intended to change the name of Antler to “Trump Creativity” or “Creativity Trump.” Glass wrote that the proposed alteration would be “in honor of Donald Trump, who Cobb admires deeply.”  Welcome to Leith and welcome to America.

“Welcome to Leith” will screen on March 18 at 7 p.m. at the Fargo Theatre as part of the 2016 Fargo Film Festival. Directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker will be there to take audience questions.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

WARNING: The following review reveals key plot information. Read only if you have seen “The Witch”

Near the thrilling, ecstatic conclusion of first-time feature director Robert Eggers’ “The Witch: A New-England Folktale,” our young protagonist Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), having endured unspeakable horrors, demands that family goat Black Phillip, a possible vessel for the Devil himself, converse with her. The resulting exchange, a pulse-quickening negotiation that maneuvers Thomasin to the brink of damnation, leads to a climax of intoxicating potency, subverting audience expectations and confirming certain suspicions about what it is, exactly, that we have just witnessed.

Part psychological study, part old-fashioned campfire yarn, “The Witch” provides an imagined preamble to the events that would unfold some six decades later in Salem.  There are many reasons to endorse the film, from Eggers’ finely understood sense of cinematic space to the elegant simplicity of the chronologic presentation of the narrative’s increasingly unsettling events. But underneath the many competing interpretations of Eggers’ thematic agenda, one tremendously positive reading stands out above the others: “The Witch” is a powerful feminist statement.

In a recent column, Todd VanDer Werff interviewed Satanic Temple spokesperson Jex Blackmore, who noted, “There is an interest in controlling a female figure and in dictating to her what her role is in a society that benefits males.” While the must-read “Vox” post focuses primarily on A24’s bold marketing relationship with a group well outside the mainstream, Blackmore’s thoughts on patriarchal theocracy in an already intense political atmosphere provide some context for the movie’s depiction of a young woman about to be, in essence, rented out by her parents to another family as a domestic servant.

Blackmore’s written statement on “The Witch,” released to coincide with the temple’s set of public events, says in part, “While the patriarchy makes witches of only the most socially vulnerable members of society, Eggers’ film refuses to construct a victim narrative. Instead it features a declaration of feminine independence that both provokes puritanical America and inspires a tradition of spiritual transgression.” These ideas, I think, are at the heart of claims regarding the film’s potential for future classic status in intriguing pieces like the one Chris Eggertsen wrote called “Why Do So Many Horror Fans Hate ‘The Witch’?”

Starting with Thomasin but extending to members of her immediate family and the coven she will eventually join, images of womanhood in “The Witch” are stitched into an important motif that acknowledges several persistent archetypes. The succubus and the hag bookend the external representation of the spellbinder who operates outside the rules and expectations of the governed community. Thomasin herself, passing through the liminal state between childhood and post-adolescent maturity, stands at the center of a precarious place – whether that be 1630s North America or today.

The last sections of “The Witch” bring to full fruition any number of Eggers’ promises. Has Thomasin been groomed for her moment with Black Phillip since the family’s arrival at their forest-edged homestead? Is she responsible for brother Samuel’s disappearance? Typically, young women accused of witchcraft by others, including their own family members, are only guilty of threatening masculine authority. Eggers can be commended for his handling of Thomasin’s emerging sexuality as recognized most viscerally by brother Caleb, but the reactions of mother Katherine and father William are equally stirring. No matter what Thomasin has done or not done, her answer is the same we would give when asked by Black Phillip, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

As sharp and entertaining as the man it examines, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s “Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You” is a substantive chronicle of one of the most influential television creators/producers in the history of the medium. While some degree of hagiography is inevitable on the heels of Lear’s 2014 memoir “Even This I Get to Experience,” the filmmakers handle several delicate and/or controversial public and private themes important to Lear’s biography. While some of these – most certainly the treatment of race on “Good Times” and “The Jeffersons” – demand closer scrutiny, Ewing and Grady’s work will send plenty of new Lear scholars to the archives.

Framed with a series of snazzy, staged interstitials that depict a preteen version of Lear played by Keaton Nigel Cooke ambling around backstage in signature white hat, the documentary stretches its creative muscles to imagine one of television’s eminent elder statesmen as the ultimate show business innovator. Plenty of stars are lined up to speak on behalf of Lear’s mentorship, but the often hysterical and always articulate thoughts and expressions of Lear himself are the main attraction start to finish.

Ewing and Grady are not nervous about skipping over huge chunks of Lear’s vita, making choices that reflect a sense of what they endorse as the most critical passages. As a result, one of the film’s finest sequences takes a long look at “All in the Family.” Lear’s tribute to Carroll O’Connor is moving and tender, and the clips selected to illustrate the commentary are electrifying – especially one from the legendary 1978 episode “Two’s a Crowd” (reportedly O’Connor’s series favorite) in which Archie Bunker talks about his abusive father when he and Mike Stivic are locked in a storeroom.

Archival, behind-the-scenes footage of the making of “Good Times” hints at a level of intensity few viewers – and certainly the white ones – would not imagine during the show’s rise in popularity. Both Esther Rolle, seen in previously recorded interviews, and John Amos summarize the painful shortcomings wrought by the writers’ tendency toward broad stereotype and comic buffoonery, particularly when Jimmie Walker’s J. J. trumpeted his catchphrase “Kid Dy-no-mite!” Lear, who was supposedly not a supporter of the recurring bit or the move away from more serious topics, might have had more to say on the subject, but the filmmakers turn their attention to other issues and the viewers are left wondering.

Beyond the giant footprints Lear left on the small screen moonscape, his extracurricular activities as founder of the political action group People for the American Way and as a father (again) in his sixties offer more insight into his character. Lear’s strongly held beliefs about the meaning of patriotism and Americanism led to the 8 million dollar acquisition of a Dunlap broadside, an early copy of the Declaration of Independence, that was shown publicly throughout the United States. With an impressive list of professional accomplishments spanning the majority of the medium’s lifespan, one might imagine Lear would slow down. But at the Sundance Film Festival, the 93-year-old happily spoke about his current and upcoming slate of TV projects.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In the days leading up to the nationwide release of Joel Coen and Ethan Coen’s “Hail, Caesar!,” clickbait slideshows far and wide competed to sort the oeuvre of the siblings. This week, “Slate” culture blogger Gabriel Roth filed a short article laying out a six-point theory to answer his title question, “What Is It About the Coen Brothers’ Movies That Makes Everyone Want to Rank Them?” And now that the film has been met with the kind of public indifference and critical adulation guaranteed to at least keep the saga of Eddie Mannix out of last place in future installments of the game, Coen devotees can start to ponder the details.

“Hail, Caesar!” is entertaining enough and occasionally hilarious (“Divine presence to be shot”), but its breezy tone and deviation from the Coen films that more soberly ponder the life of the mind place it much closer to “The Ladykillers” (which I like) than to “Barton Fink” (which I love). “Hail, Caesar!” already has its champions. Asher Gelzer-Govatos lays out a moonshot of a dialectical schematic that pairs Coen films in a wild comedy/drama variation on Herodotus’ “one sober/one drunk” account of Persian lawmaking. For the record, Gelzer-Govatos has “Hail, Caesar!” as the supposed yin to the yang of “Inside Llewyn Davis.”

The noisiest “Hail, Caesar!” supporter so far is Richard Brody, who notes that the film is “a comedy, and a scintillating, uproarious one, filled with fast and light touches of exquisite incongruity in scenes that have the expansiveness of relaxed precision, performed and timed with the spontaneous authority of jazz.” Brody is not wrong about the “relaxed precision,” but individual scenes, no matter how entertaining, do not a complete and wholly satisfying experience make – even if one could watch Ralph Fiennes’ Laurence Laurentz enunciate line readings all day long.

Gorgeously staged homages to Old Hollywood dazzle and delight. Alden Ehrenreich’s pretty and vacant singing cowboy Hobie Doyle could have been the central protagonist in his own vehicle, instead of a Montgomery Clift doppelganger adrift in a crowded sea of cameo appearances by big performers one expects to factor in ways that never materialize. Given that the roll call features so prominently in the marketing, one can blame the trailer for intensifying some of that expectation, but why bother to stage Scarlett Johansson’s incredible Busby Berkeley/Esther Williams water ballet kaleidoscope if you’re only going to stick her with a one-note Jean Hagen/Lina Lamont joke and send her packing?

Along with Johansson, the other women of “Hail, Caesar!” also get the fuzzy end of the lollypop. The movie fails the Bechdel Test despite featuring Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Veronica Osorio, Alison Pill, and Heather Goldenhersh. It is something of an understatement to say that all of these actors are cheated in the male-centric universe of Capitol Pictures, where Josh Brolin’s Mannix operates. The Future, the movie’s organization of communists responsible for star Baird Whitlock’s abduction and indoctrination, is a heavy boys club. And the delicious homoerotic sailor number hoofed by Channing Tatum’s Burt Gurney in one of the many movies-within-the-movie is appropriately titled “No Dames.”