Film auteur Lee Chang Dong has taken Haruki Murakami's sparse 10-pager Barn Burning and turned it into a 2.5 hour elegy of fierce loneliness and simmering rage in the film Burning -- a story that both expands its Murakminess while becoming something completely individual.  Never has Murakami been adapted so well, or subverted so significantly.

The film opens on Jongsu (Ah-in Yoo) making a delivery to a shop where he clearly catches the eye of one of the girls working at the front, scantily clad and dancing to promote the store's sales.  Her name is Haemi (newcomer Jong-seo Jun), and it turns out that she's an old neighbor, whom he ends up not recognizing.  It might be because of the plastic surgery she had, she offers blithely, or it might be because his memory of his childhood waxes insubstantial most of the time.  He clearly doesn't remember the time that he crossed the street to tell her she was ugly when they were kids, but that also doesn't stop him from being completely taken by her now.  She becomes the object of his desire, partially because of her attraction to him, and partially because of his...well, objectification.

Murakami is known for writing accomplished, lonely men who exist vaguely alienated.  Jongsu is certainly lonely, but in him simmers an anger as well as an existential ennui.  He's an aspiring writer who can't write because he doesn't understand the world around him; he's a college graduate who can't hold down a job, a former creative writing major who cleans cow droppings.  Surprisingly, Murakami's cypher makes a sort of appearance in the form of Ben (Steven Yeun), the man who arrives to become the point of the love triangle involving Jongsu and Haemi.  Mysterious and cosmopolitan, not quite belonging, and yet affecting an easy privilege as he cooks pasta while listening to jazz.  His laconic posture and obvious wealth stun a round-shouldered Jongsu, who is only a few years younger and can't fathom this kind of achievement.  At first, he can only sit idly by while Ben sweeps Haemi off her feet.

While Murakami's writing tends to leave loose threads at the end, Lee has created a story that permeates the ambiguity throughout.  It's carefully orchestrated to heighten its nebulous qualities and it does so masterfully.  Several of the key scenes are shot at dusk (including one incredible dance to jazz music which searches for greater meaning only to disintegrate into its lack -- it's quite possibly one of my favorite scenes of the year), that time where night is as strong as day.  Lee explores those imprecise boundaries constantly:  Jongsu's old farmhouse is an area of land that is slowly becoming encroached upon by the city and he lives close enough to the DMZ that he can hear North Korean propaganda being blasted from across the border.  Ben is a character that doesn't entirely belong in South Korea, and even his highly sophisticated language is peppered with oft-Anglicized words and the accent is just off enough to make you feel its foreignness even if it's impeccable otherwise.  But more than that are the borders between morality, which are played with constantly here.  Even a brief side view of a newscast of Trump reminds us that not everyone operates on the same rules of truth.

Burning is stunning in every facet.  The actors live their parts rather than act them out;  there is a deep understanding that they have achieved of their characters that we as an audience will never fully know.  Yeun is a revelation, making a new turn as a sinister, indeterminate figure.  The story hinges on both the familiarity and stark unknowableness of his character, and Ben is at turns terrifying and suave.  There's so much he claims to not feel and so much he gives the affectation of knowing, but neither stops him from thoroughly enjoying the spectacle before him.  Yoo is a powerhouse of constrained emotion -- it's fitting that we never see the release of his masturbation and that one of his wrought confessions of love midway through the movie is just laughed away.  Even as his helplessness and confusion mount however, the distortions are often only shown on his face in the aftermath of waking up from troubled dreams.  Jun is also sensational here, literally fresh-faced, disarming in her childlike but not childish behavior.  But it's the writing, the direction, and the colors that bring everything together.  Burning is paced meticulously and it shouldn't surprise anyone that cinematographer Kyung-pyo Hong's last film was The Wailing, which also has gorgeous fog-rimmed mountainous backdrops.  Lee's beauteous long-shot takes subside into darkness, pushing the limits of what our eyes can make of expressions and feelings in the gloaming of its characters.  His writing is clever and sophisticated, giving each character a different flavor, always revealing just enough to make us ask more.

I won't go into the details of the story, but it's clear that aspiring writer Jongsu isn't the only character who struggles to create a narrative, even going so far as to fabricate one when writing a petition partway through the film.  Haemi is searching for what she calls "Great Hunger" and there's an effacement not only physically by changing what she looked like, but in the stories she weaves.  There's a warring desire to be found, but also to disappear.  Burning is about class disparity, an anger that has no outlet, and the destruction that comes from creating.  Throughout the film, Lee gives us mysteries that will linger and mysterious characters.  Who is Haemi?  Who is Ben?  The genius is that by the end, it burns out to ask us the actual question:  Who is Jongsu?

Alfonso Cuarón's Roma is visually phenomenal and Proustian in this deeply personal cinematic story.  Although available for streaming on Netflix, it is currently showing in various theaters worldwide for a limited run and should really be seen on the largest screen possible.

Roma is not just about its heroine, a maid named Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), but the confusion of the life around her in Mexico City.  Appropriately, Cuarón favors long takes where the camera moves slowly around the room, even from the start which shows Cleo moving around the large house that she takes care of.  Often when it cuts to the next scene, the camera continues the same motion as before, making it feel as if we are in a consistent, continual motion.  Roma emphasizes this impartiality to viewpoint by the constant panning, but also the marriage of action between the foreground and background.  Like life, there's always something else going on outside of what feels to be your own story -- sometimes it aligns with yourself and at others it seems to be a cruel juxtaposition.  At one point, the story's main family dejectedly eats ice cream cones after an announcement of a tragedy while a joyous wedding blares right behind them.  Cuarón's Mexico City is a cacophony of class disparity, of protests, but also of very human problems of the heart.

Roma was shot in a wide 2.35:1, both physically and mentally enlarging the scope of Cuarón's vision.  It's rare that he allows the frame to be centered on one person, but none of those moments should be taken for granted.  It's there we can see who Cleo is -- we see her eyes shine as she looks on someone she loves, or we see the thoughts skitter across her face as she looks outside of a car window.  Sometimes, the wide screen is meant to show us how small she is in the world, like when she's pummeled by wave after wave in the ocean, but others are meant to show us how she looms so much larger than the world itself.

Cuarón has done something phenomenal here in that he is retelling his childhood (he is apparently one of the children in the family that Cleo takes care of), but was able to tell a story that is outside of himself.  Although Roma is constructed mostly from his memories of the time, the film is careful to detach itself from the viewpoint of the children.  The sheen of Roma's 4K, black and white, and 2.35 format is a blessing and a curse.  The deep depth of field (literally and figuratively) is razor-sharp.  We're able to see everything happening on the screen, but there's a distance in how clean it is and how manufactured it comes off in the wide black and white.  There are times you wish you could feel things in the movie more tangibly, get a little more grit; there's a 70mm version out there that I'd dearly love to see, but hasn't received a wide theatrical release.  The sharpness gives it an arthouse quality, an almost omniscient viewpoint of life's profundities in the details.

Ultimately, that visual focus consistent in every facet and intent of the film.  You get the feeling that everything is articulated, captured, and blocked just the way it was meant to be by the director, which is another reason why it can be considered so personal to Cuarón.  Roma, for this reason, is a masterpiece.  It emotes beautifully in its vision, both on screen and from the heart and mind of its creator.  Few artists can say that they've conveyed their story just in the way they wanted to -- Roma is that moment for Cuarón.

Yorgos Lanthimos' follow-up to last year's The Killing of a Sacred Deer goes back to the 18th century for a scathing period piece on the love and power dynamics between three women: Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), her most trusted adviser Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz), and a new servant Abigail (Emma Stone).

The Favourite, appropriately, is a battleground for the three actresses, each who put on blistering, darkly humorous performances that also manage to somehow evoke empathy at different parts in the film.  Who are we rooting for?  The answer is constantly changing, which we can attest to both the writing and the acting skill -- all three are deplorable women, and yet they're not monsters.  They're not necessarily nice people (as Abigail says, "As it turns out, I am capable of much unpleasantness") but they're undeniably human.

Lanthimos steps away from the story and script this time, which actually improves the piquant dialogue dramatically.  His previous movies, The Lobster and the aforementioned Sacred Deer, got most of its kicks out of its deadpan delivery and bizarreness.  The Favourite owes much to the timing of the lines, but fires up its verbal anachronistic flirting to the best.  The anachronism is there in the actions and words of the court, but also in the costumes which have a definite edge (as well as more contemporary techniques and materials such as denim) that is a reflection of the spoken barbs and the distortion of the world.  Lanthimos frequently angles the camera up at a character, and it's fascinating to note what power dynamics he alludes to with each viewpoint and how he personalizes a lens to each woman.  His extreme wide angles show us the full opulence of the surrounding set (such a contrast from the stark, minimal glacial atmosphere of ​Sacred Deer), but also show us how hemmed in and insignificantly small the characters are.  The lavishness adds to the claustrophobia and the constant borders and lines emphasize confinement.  There's constant use of a fish-eye lens, which through its bloatedness is constantly reminding us of the excess of the court as well as the fact that this is a manipulation of history as it happened through the visual perversion.

That is part of the interesting contrast here as he clearly employs natural lighting as much as possible, which is most apparent in the lovely scenes where a person crouches in a dark corridor with only a brightly burning candle to illuminate their features.  Lanthimos shoots 35 mm which gives a lovely tone and grain to those images.  However, he has no problem showing his hand as a director and story-maker, of bringing the audience out of the story to remind them that what they are seeing is a fabrication.  The Favourite is told in chapters, each section coming with a title card.  Other than the fish-eye, there are swish pans, and action is often done on a Libra Head, giving both a smoothness and often a sort of physical "come look at this action with me" movement.

The obvious fabrication of the story does more than add to the fun and playfulness however; it does more to remind us how their relationship and power struggle can be reflected in contemporary times.  Queen Anne's subjects are at the whim of their monarch's petulant mood swings and whoever can flatter her best at the moment.  Furthermore, the war is not always won by those who love best or who are the most capable, but by whoever is most skilled at bamboozling others.

Lanthimos is not known to be tender towards his characters, but The Favourite at least is actually a story of its women rather than an exercise on a hypothetical.  Anne, for example, could easily be a monster to behold on many levels.  However, her dotage on her pet rabbits is representative of her burden.  They symbolize both her helplessness in situations small and large, and also the tragedies of a past she is unable to move on from.

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan does terrific work in collaboration with Lanthimos here, showing a large departure from the light-dripping American Honey.  The music, like everything else, veers from period appropriate to not with the harpsichord leanings of Vivaldi to the atonal scrapes of Messiaien.  It's lavish at times and startlingly austere at others.

The Favourite is not a particularly warm story, but it is visually extravagant, and features three powerhouse performances that aren't to be missed.  With all its obvious technique, Lanthimos' best move was in the casting of this well-written and stellarly-performed piece.  Through all its reference of black and white, both visually and metaphorically, it's the shades of grey here that take this movie up a notch from what he's done before.

In Border, Swedish customs officer Tina (Eva Melander) has an inexplicable but undeniable talent for sniffing out the feelings of people around her -- she can smell anger or guilt, which allows her to uncover any number of crimes enclosed within the people walking by her inspection point.  Her senses go haywire one day when Vore (Eero Milonoff) comes through, and she encounters for the first time someone who looks like her but at the same time holds no shame or apology for it.  It's hard to tell which aspect is more intoxicating to her, which has consequences that alter her world irreparably afterwards.

Abbasi's second film is based on a short story by Let the Right One In's John Ajvide Lindqvist and features the same sort of ubiquitous loneliness of the Other.  Abbasi has said he wanted to emphasize the experience of being a minority, and Tina is repeatedly shown to be maligned, sometimes subtly but often not.  She is stared at in grocery stores, she finds herself looking at closed doors that she realizes she has no power to open, and she lives with someone whose indifference is outmatched by the outright aggressive behavior of his three dogs who clearly detest her.  And yet, to typify her experience as a metaphor for the minority, for the immigrant or for the transgender (both of which Abbasi denies), is irresponsible when we see how the story unspools.  In many ways, Border is a love story...not even necessarily of Tina and Vore, but of Tina and herself.  For Tina, she is able to feel both remarkably beautiful but also finds liberation in being normalized.  But while it's important for her to grow and appreciate herself, it is not necessary to do so at the price of discarding humanity itself, especially if she is meant to embody a minority.

As a character, Tina is kind -- you see it in her interactions with others, namely her father, and in the childlike wonder as she communes with nature and the animals around her (besides, for whatever reason, dogs).  The film tries to balance a high-falutin idea in introducing the worst of humans, and yet emphasizing that perhaps it is the best of what humans are capable of that prevents Tina from completely abandoning them.  No more should be said plot-wise at the risk of spoiling Border, but there is a disavowal of nuance and depth in Tina's ultimate choice.  Her kindness comes from some of the goodness in life, even as she has experienced cruelty.  When Abbasi looks through a cut and finds a scene or a frame that looks too "good", he'll reportedly cut it out, because he doesn't want the beauty of an image to distract from the film.  Unfortunately, this application applies to both his visuals and his storytelling, but to deny that beauty is to disturb the verisimilitude of its subject.  There is good in humans, and there is beauty in the life that Tina lives -- and to ignore that is to simplify the subtlety of her moral decisions. 

More than anything else, Border is interesting because of its genre bends and plot twists, but beneath the core of that there's not much of a beating heart.  Abbasi is certainly to be appreciated for what he has attempted with the film, but it could have spent more time on the borders between nature and nurture, the borders we place within our hearts, and the borders we traverse to connect with other people outside of those we look like.

A group of WWII soldiers must take down a Nazi radio tower in a small French town in order to allow the Battle of Normandy to take place.  In the catacombs of the church underneath the tower, they find horrors concocted by Nazi scientists intending to build an immortal army for the Germans.

To call Overlord a Nazi zombie flick is misleading, although that's the go-to phrase for this movie.  The Nazi/WWII backdrop is more of a convenience, considering its revisionist alternate history makeup of the army (no one bats an eye at the mixed races and the sergeant is a respected African-American man) and the ease of an indelibly evil adversary.  There aren't quite enough zombies to make it a zombie flick either, nor do we have the usual braindead bloodthirsty inanimate bodies scrambling around.

The reason this isn't a zombie movie is because it misses all the beats of its predecessors, even while making references to Moreau and Carpenter.  It takes itself completely seriously, almost to a flaw.  There are beats in the movie where you expect a joke, but Overlord purposefully elbows those moment aside as if to assure you how seriously we should take it.  This is fine, but it then makes it harder to excuse the lapses in judgment the characters make.  There are a few too many unzipped bags, syringes used with devil-may-care-consequences, or trusting peeks into darkened cells for any normal person to make.  There's an attempt at the theme of not becoming the monsters you're fighting, but it peters out fairly easily.  Boyce (Jovan Adepo) is the protagonist here and he serves as a moral compass for the group, supposedly not even able to kill a mouse.  But as Overlord progresses, he sometimes unwittingly shows the lack of moral compass for the story, including his readiness to move to violence in one scene.  There's no moral quandary or dilemma found there...in fact, you'd find more of that in Shaun of the Dead.

With all that said, however, Overlord is still a fun ride.  Part of this is because you come to love the troop, and that's always half the battle.  The characters are easily established in the first few minutes, from fast-talking Tibbet (John Maguro) to brooding transfer Ford (Wyatt Russell), and this unfortunately is what so many current horror movies lack and what their weakness is.  The livelihoods of these men wouldn't matter a whit otherwise, and thankfully we don't have that problem here.  The special effects don't have the same verisimilitude that, say, Saving Private Ryan does, but we don't really need it to.  The first sequence of their parachute jump is a completely whipped around, manufactured ride...but it's still exciting and breathless all the same.  On par with that is the discovery of the Nazi lab, which is manufactured and breathless in a different way.  The eeriness of that scene makes it one of the highlights of the movie, where otherwise things are little too matter-of-fact.

Zombie movies have often been a social commentary on the current events.  If Overlord were to serve that purpose, it might be the refreshing recourse of an easy bad vs good and being able to take matters into your own hands on the side of good.  The film might not be trying anything at all though, because the strength of Overlord is indeed in the artificiality of it, including its disavowal of the other horrors that can be (and were) created by those with power.  Its assurance of no moral grays is vaguely reassuring, and it's a movie that would be better categorized as an action movie that will engage the viewers for its runtime.

There's a scene in Wildlife when Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) takes her 14-year-old son, Joe (Ed Oxenbould), to see a wildfire raging in the Montanan forest.  "Do you like it?" she asks him.  His response is in the negative, as he gazes, bewildered and horrified at the destruction before him.

The same could be said of Joe's reaction to his mother's path of destruction in Paul Dano's directorial debut Wildlife.  The film is about the changing roles of a nuclear family in 1960s, but only tangentially.  Wildlife is told chiefly through the eyes of Joe, who is unaware of social shifts of the decade, and can only witness and feel what is happening to his family before him.

Jeanette is devoted-- supportive in every way and perfectly fulfilling all that the role requires of her as a good mother and wife.  This is perhaps why she reacts the way she does when her husband lets her down in conforming to his role of what a good husband should do in providing for the family.  Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), loses his job and decides to take on low-paying and dangerous work of fighting wildfires, ostensibly abandoning his family to do so.

Mulligan does an excellent job of playing an unmoored Jeanette, confident as she charges forward, and yet completely uncertain of what her identity is.  She's done her part, but what happens when her partner doesn't?  She takes on the role of an independent woman, but she's not sure of what that means for her or if she really wants to.  At one point, she says "If you have a better plan for me, tell me."  Early on in the movie, someone assumes she's angling for a job and she quickly assures them that she's a stay-at-home mom -- it becomes a bit of a loaded statement as the film proceeds. 

​The question of identity is one that the whole family struggles with to some degree.  For Joe, he's still maturing and his questions at first angle around the image of being a good son and football player.  He later takes a job where he is taking snapshots of perfect ideals, or perfect moments in time.  For Jerry, there's obvious hurt pride after losing his job, but he doesn't even seem to know what his pride is in.  His worry consistently is that Jeanette won't be mad at him, and he seems surprised when she doesn't fulfill that cliche.  Jeanette of course struggles to fit warring identities throughout the story.

Dano's assurance in composing the film is lovely -- there are some truly wonderful framing shots and for the most part, he avoids the pitfall of trying too hard.  There are a couple parts where the technicality of a shot gets in the way of the storytelling, but really only a few.  Dano's use of light and landscape is reminiscent of Kelly Reichardt, just one beautiful shot of a face angled in morning light after another.  His greatest strength is in the space he allows his actors -- Mulligan of course, but Oxenbould is really fantastic as a precocious adolescent whose love for his parents gives us a more forgiving lens to view the movie in.  Gyllenhaal is looser here than usual -- his film roles are often too controlled, too thought through before the film starts shooting.  Jerry is so uncertain and Gyllenhaal's portrayal of him is similarly ambiguous, making those moments where he crystallizes into hard focus that much more effective.

There are few times that Jerry and Jeanette come together in physical space, and they provide a poignant counterpoint throughout the film.  You can probably sketch the whole story from the weight of the glances Mulligan and Gyllenhaal share (or avoid) with each other.  Wildlife ​is seen through Joe's eyes, but everyone comes of age in this story, and the last scene is a truly heartbreaking portrayal of that.

Six acts and an epilogue, Luca Guadagnino's take on the Dario Argento film of the same name is set in 1977 Cold War Berlin.  Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) is a young Mennonite whose dream is to study at a dance academy under the choreographer Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton).  But something at the school is unsettling, other than the bombs and demonstrations raging outside.  A student has disappeared amidst uncertain rumors and something other than the dancers appears to be sighing within the walls.

Guadagnino's Suspiria is every bit as drenched as his former Call Me By Your Name, albeit in different ways.  But there are still his trademark moments in the smallest of motions -- the trace of a finger across a page that you can hear as well as feel.  And for whatever reason, there's no other director that can make you feel the wind blustering through tree branches outside the window more tactilely.  And then there are, of course, a few scenes where you get a little more than the scrape of a tree branch to feel.

At times, Suspiria appears a bit confused -- there are a few underrunning subplots that don't quite coalesce, including a constant reference to an RAF (Red Army Faction) guerrilla campaign.  However, the biggest mistake in going into this movie is to be under the impression that it is meant to be a horror movie that thrives on thrills.  It does have its share of gore and blood, but Suspiria is more of a suspense that explores themes of motherhood and guilt.  Not for nothing is the main dance of the film named "Volk".  When the dance company performs it, Madame Blanc announces that it will be the last time that they do so.

Guadagnino works again with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and editor Walter Fasano, and their work together is crucial in creating a flow -- not only of this story which is one of sadness as much as destruction, but also in getting the most impact from the choreography, which is reminiscent of Pina Bausch.  The camerawork here is never afraid to let us know of its intrusion.  Quick cuts show agitation, as well as the idea of something working behind the scenes.  Unlike Call Me By Your Name, where an outside touch is unobtrusive, we have sweeping camera actions and swish pan.  For all its debauchery at times, Guadagnino never turns his film into a spectacle.  The ending of the film may come as a surprise, but that's only if you've been too focused on the blood spurting out of wounds.  Take a look again (if you care or dare to), and think on the relationships between the women, but also the changing dynamic of a daughter or creation to her mother, as well as the meaning of memory and the tragedy in muting it.

Dakota Johnson is fantastic here, able to convincingly portray her evolution from the first innocence we meet in her character.  Tilda Swinton, with her sweeping hair and dresses is terrific in her enigmatic and eerie persona.  Thom Yorke also does the soundtrack wonderfully -- it's understated, but more than that it molds to the shape of Susie, from the heartfelt to the eerie.  It's a personal portrayal of the character's moods and evolution.

Can a movie become a cult classic when it's obvious how hard it's trying?  Director Panos Cosmatos' supremely weird Mandy is primed for midnight movie greatness, but at times it's a little too content to riding the coattails of its influences.

Lumberjack Red Miller (Nicholas Cage) lives in an isolated cabin with his artist girlfriend Mandy (Andrea Riseborough), who catches the eye of folk singer, sex/drug cult leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache).  Jeremiah attempts to seduce Mandy by way of impressing her with his sweet tunes, which doesn't really go as planned...as you could have guessed based on Mandy's penchant to wearing metal rock tshirts.  Unfortunately for her, Jeremiah is a sensitive artist who reacts to her disdain in a gruesome manner, launching a wrathful rampage by Red, bent on vengeance by any means.

Mandy is Lynchian at its first half, and Raimi-esque by the second.  It's a weird trip that often depicts an 80s heavy metal album cover come to life, and although it has some wonderful zingers of lines, it also has some oddly lazy ones like when a demon biker gang member slashes at Red with a knife and Red rages "that was my favorite shirt!"  It's a moment that easily gets some chuckles from the audience, but feels more like a missed opportunity at a better, wittier line.

There's no denying Mandy's style, and it comes as no surprise that Cosmatos is the son of director George P. Cosmatos who helmed Rambo II and Cobra.  Cinematographer Benjamin Loeb works some grungy magic with red-drenched scenes and surreal strobe flares.  Not to be forgotten is Johan Johansson's synth heavy soundtrack, proving his versatility and skill once again (and once again making us mourn his untimely departure).  The low budget forced the team to work in digital, even if their influences are strictly analog, but Mandy is nevertheless able to evince a look that is both low-focus grain and slickly graphic novel.

That duality plays out in its tone, which is both its strength and its weakness.  Mandy ends up being a complete gorefest, but wants you to admire it more than have fun.  It never descends into camp or meta winks, but yet wants to be a vintage 80s action fest all the same.  It's not as genuine as a Lynch feature, which is just plain strange without worrying about how it will be perceived.  The production is so heavy, the only reason it doesn't completely overwhelm its characters is because of Cage's manic performance and Riseborough's otherworldly detachment.  Cage, thankfully, pops out of the blood-soaked veneer of the movie with the sheer strength of his white-balled gaze and bared fangs.  The same can't be said about its admittedly creepy yet mostly forgettable villains.

There's a masterpiece that's hinted at here, if Mandy had merely gone through a few tweaks.  But that doesn't mean it isn't a good romp to enjoy with a midnight crowd.  There's certainly a new scene to add to Cage's curriculum vitae of film freak-outs, and it might be worth it alone to witness Red's armory (including a shotgun crossbow, amongst others).  However, Mandy ends up being more of a missed opportunity that tries a little too hard.

There's a scene partway through Colette where the heroine is watching the opening scene of a play based on her semi-autobiographical book.  The stage actress pronounces her lines with affectation and she postures before a painted backdrop.  It's a pale shadow of the novel's words, and beyond that, of Colette's life -- a thought that visibly passes across Colette's face at that moment.

Colette, based on the life of French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette unfortunately has that feeling of being but a wan portrayal of the firebrand who became known for her journalistic and literary accomplishments, as well as her sexual exploits with men and women alike.  Director Wash Westmoreland chooses to focus on Colette's early life and her evolution from naive country waif to the exceedingly modern woman she became.  A country girl without a dowry, Colette (Keira Knightley) marries a man 14 years her senior, a lively Parisian philanderer named Willy (Dominic West).  Before long, he's using her natural writing skills to his benefit, putting his name to wildly successful novels that she writes for him.

Colette certainly gives Knightley more of a range to plumb, and it's satisfying to see her with a role she can sink her teeth into.  There's a distance from her character though, that is more at fault with the pacing and writing.  Scenes are separated by leaps in time, and despite being a sort of origin story, we don't see as much of the actual inception as much as we could.  We're led to believe that Colette needs only to be locked up into a room to produce literature, and to be subject to her husband's infidelity to pursue sexual fluidity.

This is not to say that Colette is not a thoroughly engaging film.  There are delicious barbs of wit punctuating the script and Colette's road to artistic independence is far more contemporary than its backdrop would suggest.  Westmoreland struggles to achieve the exact message he wants to convey.  Is it the double life or meta existence within existence that Colette creates for herself when she writes herself into a story for her husband?  Constantly throughout the film, we see Colette reflected and refracted through glass even as we experience her literary heroine reflected and refracted through her words.  She's transformed into the public's image of the literary heroine and thus begins to see images and imitations of herself wherever she looks.  It's an interesting theme that Westmoreland could have studied with more depth.  The trajectory of the story would indicate that he wants to talk about Colette's metamorphosis, but it's more of a push and pull between her and her husband -- in fact, it seems that the more that her husband does wrong, the more she finds freedom.

There's nothing novel or incendiary in the story, but it's worth it to see Knightley's performance in a role that is both period and relevant.  Where it fails is that in reading more into Sidonie-Gabrielle's history, we're surprised by a life that is far more expansive and compelling than what Westmoreland decided to convey.

Is there anything more entertaining than watching Tom Cruise run?  Whenever he's running, you legitimately believe that the world is going to explode if he doesn't get to his destination on time.  And so he runs against the ticking clock, or jumps out of a plane, or flies a helicopter, or does any number of stunts that prove to be more and more jawdropping as the film progresses.  And of course, the real draw has been (since Mission Impossible III) the fact that Cruise is doing all of his own stunts.  Production halted on Fallout because he broke his ankle during one of the stunts, and they actually kept that specific shot in the film.  The limp he affects right after the jump isn't an affectation at all, but a hobble as he struggles to finish the take on the ankle.

It's been over twenty years since Brian De Palma's original movie, and the series has blossomed into the best action film since Mad Max Fury Road.  Christopher McQuarrie comes back from the previous Rogue Nation to direct Cruise in the latest installment of Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and the IMF team who have to recover plutonium cores after a mission goes awry.

It's a deceptively simple plot, but McQuarrie juggles a mindboggling amount of balls in order to make the story as clear and emotionally relevant as it does.  First, we have the cast of characters that has grown together over the past few installments.  The chemistry between Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), and Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) is believably compelling because it's been built and hard-earned.  The trust that they have for each other is therefore a given.  A complaint I had about Rogue Nation was the lack of character development because the cast was already established.  Here, McQuarrie uses that familiarity to build serious moments and to make us care more for the characters.  As Ethan shows over and over again as his ethos, we care for the one just as much as the many.  McQuarrie wisely understands the best way to get us emotionally invested in the stakes and the plot is our empathy for this cast.

Second, McQuarrie brings the audience in again with the stunts.  There's something beautiful about the verisimilitude of Cruise's stunts.  When he tears around on a motorcycle without a helmet, he has to reach out his leg time and time again to keep his balance.  It's not a move that James Bond would ever have to make, but it makes it that much more realistic.  Cruise constantly shows that he's willing to take a hit.  He's like Jackie Chan in that way (just as Tom Cruise is to Daniel Craig as Jackie Chan is to Jet Li) -- when you put Jackie Chan in a room with 20 enemies, you know that he's going to get out, but he's definitely going to get banged up in the process.  The similarity to Chan doesn't end there -- McQuarrie and Cruise both understand that to film a proper action scene, we need to see both the hit and the impact of it in one shot.  It's the kind of editing that shows that Cruise is actually getting thrown from a collision.  It's also the reason why, when Cruise is driving against traffic at one point in the movie, the camera pulls back from his point of view to show him actually doing it.  It may not be closer to the action, but it definitely makes more of an impact to see him in the thick of it.  Fallout doesn't try to hide any of the action with shaky cameras, dark lighting, and confused or rapid edits.  When we're smack in the middle of one of the most exciting car chase scenes in the last decade, there isn't even a soundtrack to influence our emotions.  What exists in the scene is just the sound of the engine in an unadulterated, genuinely thrilling chase.

I'm still waiting for the day that Tom Cruise starts including a stunt blooper reel a la Jackie Chan at the end of his films.

Again and again, the team is given impossible scenarios.  And each time, Ethan Hunt says "we'll figure it out".  And that is the sort of trust that the audience builds for this movie.  It's all a little ridiculous -- the set up of a time bomb, or the hijinks that are necessary for every supposedly uncrackable security system -- but it's a conceit that we've come to accept.  At this time, we trust that every decision made is made for the good of the movie.  And each impossible situation comes with an excited expectation of being dazzled by the solution.

The impossible situation set up by Fallout's conclusion is thus:  how will they ever come up with a sequel to top this one?  But as always, we'll be eager to see how Hunt and his team figure it out.