As of June 23rd, 2025, The Reveal has stopped publishing on Substack. We are now published on Ghost. You can read about our reasons at our new site, TheReveal.film.

Dear Revealers,

After much deliberation, we have decided to move the newsletter from Substack to Ghost. You will no doubt have some questions about the change, so let’s answer a few of them:

Oh no! Ghost sounds scary! What happens to my subscription? And to the three-and-a-half years’ worth of features, reviews, and other posts in the archives?

Nothing at all. Your subscription will port over seamlessly from Substack to Ghost and newsletters will arrive in your inbox just as they always have. Through Ghost’s concierge service, all of our posts have made the transition, too, and your access to the archive will be unchanged. See? Not scary at all.

What if I prefer to access the newsletter through my browser? Where do I go now?!

We have purchased a new, easy-to-remember custom URL:

http://thereveal.film

If your friends ask you about your favorite film site online, all you have to say is, “The Reveal dot film.” We’re far from the days of Geocities blogs here.

What does this mean for the community functions available to paid subscribers, like commenting privileges and chat?

The bad news is that comments on previously published posts will not port over from Substack to Ghost, though newsletters published before our departure (and the comments) will still reside at Substack. Paid subscribers can, of course, comment on our Ghost posts just as you were doing at Substack. As with most other aspects of this move, nothing has changed.

As for chat, we have really enjoyed the addition of a subscriber chat on the Substack app, which has led to fun discussions, a “What did you watch this weekend” thread, and even a New York meet-up. We love our community and want to give you the chance to continue to speak in real time about movies. To that end, we will have a Discord for paid subscribers and send out an email with access information shortly. Discord offers a lot more features and versatility than Substack’s chat function, and we want to build a bigger community for our readers. We don’t plan on being strangers there ourselves.

Why are we doing this?

When we launched our Substack in October 2021, we had the good fortune to win support from the company, which offered us a contract to give us financial security while we grew our subscription base in addition to resources for a first-rate editor (Alan Scherstuhl) and graphic designer (Mike Renaud). We remain grateful for their enthusiasm for the project and their expertise in advising us on the many technical and strategic questions we had throughout the process. We wanted to reward their faith in The Reveal as much as we could.

However.

There are two basic reasons for our departure:

1. Though we have a lot of other freelance outlets, The Reveal belongs to us. For hosting the site, Substack takes 10% off the top. Ghost charges a hosting fee based on the number of total subscribers. The difference between those two numbers is considerable. We are not greedy people, but we want The Reveal to be sustainable many, many years into the future and this move ensures we can.

2. We have been uncomfortable with some of the decisions Substack has made internally about the types of voices it accepts and elevates. Back in December 2023, we joined a number of publishers in pushing an open letter to the company about the extremists it was platforming and monetizing, as reported most prominently in Jonathan M. Katz’s Atlantic piece “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.” The response from the company’s co-founder, Hamish McKenzie, was a significant disappointment to us. We understand, from our earliest days in the trenches of the A.V. Club comment boards, that content moderation is an extremely complicated issue and impossible to do perfectly. Indeed, when we posted the open letter, we got a range of responses from commenters, including a few who did not want Substack to bend to the pressure we were applying.

And yet in the time since, there’s been too much evidence of Substack’s complicity in platforming far-right extremism. We have heard from many cinephiles who refuse to subscribe to The Reveal due to its Substack connection and we have witnessed many examples of writers and friends who have felt marginalized or attacked due to the company’s editorial priorities and policies. The bottom line: Substack has made its choices. We have now made ours.

What can I expect from The Reveal in the future?

A lot. We have been creative partners for almost our entire careers, built on creating a community of thoughtful film lovers. That’s never changed for us, and that we want to give our readers as much bang for their buck as possible. Newsletter subscriptions are expensive, adding to whatever other subscriptions you might have for other digital publications, streaming platforms, wellness apps, or whatever. We want to make sure you’re getting good value every week and we want to continue to be ambitious in building out the newsletter, including some exciting new features slated to launch soon.

Ghost will give us a level of independence we have never had before—and, all things considered, we have enjoyed more than our share at The A.V. Club and The Dissolve—and we intend to keep pushing ourselves long into the future. At our current pace of one entry every three weeks, our Sight and Sound Top 100 conversation project alone will take another three-and-a-half years to complete, so consider that a promise that we’re not going anywhere.

Finally, it bears mentioning that this move is not without some risks. More than ever, we’ll be dependent on word-of-mouth and paid subscriptions. If you like The Reveal, tell your friends. And tell them to tell their friends. If you’re currently a free subscriber, please consider purchasing a paid subscription. We'll always have content that’s free, but we give our subscribers our best work — and that’s something you don’t want to miss.

Something to remember: Platforms are platforms. Substack never owned the newsletter and neither will Ghost. The Reveal is ours. The Reveal is yours. We may be moving to a new home, but we’re keeping the occupants.

And now we can get back to the business of talking about movies. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow!

—Scott and Keith

We often use the word “escapism” to describe the experience of going to the movies, so naturally part of that experience to imagine inhabiting those worlds yourself. And when one of those worlds looks (a) extremely pleasant and (b) accessible to you, then maybe you’ve given some thought to planning your next vacation accordingly. My answer to this week’…

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28 Years Later
Dir. Danny Boyle
115 min.

For director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland to reunite for a sequel to their post-apocalyptic horror film 28 Days Later after a 23-year gap suggests one of those dreary legacy tours where middle-aged bands convert nostalgia into cold hard cash. Yet even those who don’t like 28 Years Later—and given the wild gearshifts in storytelling and tone, plenty won’t—could not accuse Boyle and Garland of cynically playing the hits. To a degree, the new film mirrors the structural surprises of the original, which starts with a viral infection that decimates London and wends its way to a militarized compound outside Manchester that’s experimenting in sex slavery. Yes, Boyle and Garland still have to pay off their hyper-aggressive twist on the zombie movie, but their primary interest, then and now, is how pockets of humanity respond when the world falls apart and survivors have to reinvent society on a new, often radical set of terms. 

The opening titles inform us that 28 years after the “rage virus” escaped a laboratory and infected much of the populace, the illness has been largely contained within the United Kingdom. One resilient community has managed to survive on a small island separated from the mainland by a well-guarded causeway that’s traversable only during low tide. Naturally, children are raised from an early age to defend the island from attack, including Spike (Alfie Williams), a 12-year-old preparing for his first training mission on the mainland, where he’s accompanied by his father Jaime (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Spike’s mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is bedridden with an unknown illness that has led to memory loss and there are rumors of a doctor across the sea who may be able to help her. But in this environment, simply surviving the day tends to take precedent over long-term care. 

Reuniting with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, whose grimy digital-video photography gave 28 Days Later a home-movie verisimilitude, Boyle has made a slicker film with 28 Years Later, but he and Dod Mantle are still in experimental mode, shooting largely on an iPhone 15 Pro Max that amplifies and distorts color while putting the same premium on immediacy. The action sequences are underscored by a flurry of archival battle footage and stop-and-go freeze-frame violence, and, if anything, the visceral punch of the earlier film has been accelerated, in part because the “infected” have mostly lost human hosts to feast on. Some of them have also evolved in beings that now have the intelligence to support their animal ruthlessness. One of the scariest aspects of the film is how much regular humans are completely overmatched. That’s rarely a case in zombie movies—or monster movies of any kind, for that matter. 

It’s the final third of 28 Years Later, when Spike and his mother strike out to look for the doctor, that the film grows truly audacious, nearly abandoning all horror convention in order to pursue themes more common to Garland projects about broken civilizations and the way survivors reckon with them. Boyle and Garland reject the verse-chorus-verse rhythms of most genre films and grapple instead with madness and death, along with the hardscrabble life of a boy whose future is bound in grim uncertainty. (Blockbuster horror films tend not to evoke Ken Loach’s Kes or the Brando scenes in Apocalypse Now.) To go back to the legacy tour analogy, 28 Years Later is the type of reunion where the old hits are packaged in a medley and the new songs are energized, off-the-wall bangers. Sequels aren’t supposed to be behave like this. — Scott Tobias

28 Years Later opens in theaters everywhere tonight.

Elio
Dir. Adrian Molina, Domee Shi, Madeline Sharafian
98 min.

Elio’s a lonely kid who really hopes we’re not alone. The hero of Pixar’s latest feature, Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) lives with his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), an Air Force officer who’s had to pass on a chance to train as an astronaut in order to take care of Elio after his parents’ death. For Olga, he’s an unexpected responsibility, and Elio knows this. That he’s not an unwanted responsibility isn’t always so clear. So, seemingly unable to get the love and affection he needs on Earth (a difficulty making friends doesn’t help matters), Elio looks to the stars, even going so far as to try to be abducted by aliens by laying on the beach and writing his desire to be taken to the stars in the sand. It’s a silly plan—until it works.

That’s a pretty clever jumping-off point for a film that goes to some fantastic places without shaking the sense that it’s playing it safe. Elio’s abductors, it turns out, aren’t really abductors at all but a concerned group of interstellar residents called the Communiverse who need some help repelling the aggressions of the tough-talking Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett). Surely Elio, as a powerful Earth representative, can help, right? Not wanting to out himself as just an ordinary kid—and relieved that the Communiverse has thoughtfully sent a clone back to Earth so his aunt doesn’t worry about him—Elio plays along, a decision that doesn’t get the desired results but does allow him to befriend Grigon’s son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), a similarly sweet misfit who’s developed decidedly mixed feelings about sealing his caterpillar like body in the armored mechanical shell that will allow him to take his place by his father’s side.

If Elemental proved anything, it’s that Pixar’s 2020s films have a baseline. Even the company’s weaker efforts are filled with imaginative designs, well-honed storytelling skills, and at least a couple of moments sure to affect even the most tug-resistant heartstrings. If anything, Pixar’s current era is a bit underrated, thanks to the muted mid-pandemic releases of the terrific Soul, Turning Red, and Luca. But ‘20s Pixar has also produced films that are not-quite-there in one way or another. Elio is one of these, at least in part because Elio, though winningly performed, never becomes a particularly notable character. He’s cheerful, energetic, eager to please, and easy to forget. It makes all the sense in the world—and the rest of the universe—that the movie bears his name. —Keith Phipps

Elio begins visiting theaters tonight.

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"This is the way," laughed the great god Pan
(Laughed while he sat by the river),
"The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed."
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
— from “A Musical Instrument,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Anyone who spent time watching American television in off-peak hours for stretches of the 1980s and ‘90s likely has a handful of commercials burned forever in their memory. Few made impressions as deep as those for music collections that offered a few tantalizing seconds of songs as a rolling tracklist for the full collection rolled in the background. Most were for familiar names. But one commercial more or less introduced a name to viewers in the United States: Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute.

Zamfir, viewers were told, had “sold more than 20 million records around the world” and now they, too, could enjoy his work via the two-disc collection Zamfir Plays the World’s Most Beautiful Melodies. The spots alternated between dreamy stock footage and images of Zamfir in performance with his pan flute, “that magical instrument with the unforgettable sound.” “Relax,” the ad commands, “as Zamfir sweeps you away to a world of haunting, tranquil beauty.” Said world, we were to conclude, could best be accessed by way of pan flute-driven, easy listening music in which compositions by Mozart, Chopin played side-by-side with “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” and “The Rose.”

The collection sold well — the ads ran forever and spawned a sequel — but they’re not fully representative of Zamfir’s larger contribution to the world of music and, especially for our purposes, film.

Consider this: If you’re watching a movie and Zamfir pops up on the soundtrack, you’re probably watching a pretty great movie, most likely a masterpiece of one kind or another, even if the films to which Zamfir made contributions have little in common. Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Karate Kid, Once Upon a Time in America, and Kill Bill, Vol. 1 would not be the movies we know without Zamfir and his pan flute. And it’s through a series of quirks of history that we even know about Zamfir at all.

Gheorghe Zamfir was born near Bucharest, Romania in 1941. His father enrolled him in a music school at the age of 14 where Zamfir planned to study the accordion. Unfortunately, the accordion class was canceled before Zamfir could begin his studies. Fortunately, he caught the attention of the Romani-Romanian Fănică Luca, Romania’s foremost nai, or pan flute, virtuoso.

It’s impossible to tell the rest of Zamfir’s story without a digression about the pan flute. One of the world’s oldest instruments, it shows up in the art and literature of Ancient Greece and Rome (hence the association with Pan). But the pan flute’s origins go back further still, so far it’s hard to talk about a single origin. Variations on the pan flute, or panpipe, can be found across the globe (Zamfir was sometimes mistakenly referred to as Andean because of that region’s panpipe music) and seem to have developed independently of one another. The instrument’s simplicity helps explain this. In its most basic form, a pan flute is a series of pipes that play a single note bound together. Many cultures developed varieties of pan flutes and European pan flutes can be traced to Greece. These include the Romanian variation, the nai. The nai has had a centuries-old place in Romanian music, but waned in popularity in the 19th century.

It was the self-taught Luca who helped turn that around in the 20th century, first by taking pan flute music to the rest of Europe, the 1939 New York World’s Fair, China, Russia, and elsewhere. Luca also trained a new generation of pan flutists of which Gheorghe Zamfir became the most famous. Zamfir would become an even more high-profile ambassador via a series of concerts in Paris in 1970 that brought him to the attention of a much wider audience. Paris was also home to Vladimir Cosma, a prolific Romanian composer who’d been based in Paris since 1963. Sensing a chance to infuse his latest assignment, the Yves Robert-directed/Francis Veber co-scripted spy comedy Le Grand Blond Avec Une Chaussure Noire (The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe), with an unusual sound, Cosma recruited Zamfir for the project, beginning the pan flutist’s work in film.

I wanted to know more about Zamfir’s film work, so I reached out to his office. Zamfir, now 84, agreed to answer a series of questions via email. You’ll find that conversation below, accompanied by a history of Zamfir’s soundtrack contributions.

A big European hit in the 1970s (albeit one whose charms have not weathered the years well), later remade as the Tom Hanks-starring 1985 film The Man with One Red Shoe, The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe further raised Zamfir’s profile. He’d again collaborate with Cosma on the 1974 sequel, The Return of the Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe. Cosma’s score makes good use of Zamfir as a quirky element in a bouncy score perfectly suited to a low-stakes comedy about a hapless violinist who’s unwittingly swept up in a tale of international intrigue. But it was Zamfir’s next high-profile assignment that would more fully explore the otherworldly qualities of the pan flute.

How did you first come to work with composer Vladimir Cosma? Did you come to his attention via the Paris concerts of 1970?

My collaboration with composer Vladimir Cosma began in 1972, when Cosma invited me to perform as the soloist for the film Le Grand Blond Avec Une Chaussure Noire. Before this, I had gained recognition in Romania and internationally, notably through my association with Swiss ethnomusicologist Marcel Cellier, who introduced me to Western audiences.

The 1970 Paris concerts were significant in my early exposure to Western audiences, but they were not the direct catalyst for my collaboration with Cosma. Instead, it was Cosma's specific interest in incorporating the pan flute into his film scores that led to our partnership.

The pan flute was not a standard element of a film score in the 1970s. How did your collaboration with Cosma work on The Tall Blonde Man with One Black Shoe come about?

Indeed, the pan flute was not a standard element of a film score in the 1970s. The instrument set a significant milestone in both mine and Cosma's careers, introducing the Romanian pan flute (nai) to a broader Western audience.

Cosma sought to create a distinctive sound for the film, avoiding the typical spy-movie style. He chose to feature the pan flute, played by me, alongside an Eastern European cymbalum, to evoke a sense of Romanian musical heritage. Director Yves Robert and producer Alain Poiré supported Cosma's vision.

My contributions included playing traditional Romanian themes, such as the sârba and doina, which became integral to the film's score. The unique blend of instruments and melodies ultimately contributed to the film's charm and success.

My performance, my interpretation style in particular, showcased the expressive potential of the pan flute in cinematic music, leading to further opportunities in film scoring and concert performances worldwide.

Zamfir isn’t solely responsible for the soundtrack of Picnic at Hanging Rock, but his two contributions to Peter Weir’s 1975 film help set the film’s haunting, unclassifiable tone. Both “Doina: Sus Pe Culmea Dealului” and “Doina Lui Petru Unc” adapt traditional Romanian folk melodies as duets for the pan flute and organ. What does this have to do with the story of a group of turn-of-the-century Australian schoolgirls disappearing during a school outing? On the face of it, nothing. But Weir’s film brilliantly recontextualizes music that had been largely confined to Romania just a few years later to serve a story in which time and space seem to bend in disorienting, disturbing ways. Though maybe “recontextualize” isn’t exactly the right word. Zamfir’s tracks have their origins in a particular tradition but here they sound like they might be melodies as old as Pangea, The sound of Zamfir helps sweep the girls away. Whether they enter a world of haunting, tranquil beauty, remains unanswered.

Did your work with Cosma lead to your contributions to Picnic at Hanging Rock?

Director Peter Weir chose existing recordings of my performances, particularly my renditions of traditional Romanian pieces and classical adaptations, especially “Doina: Sus Pe Culmea Dealului” and “Doina Lui Petru Unc” – traditional Romanian sorrow songs, played on the pan flute, which became the film’s signature musical motif. The pan flute, with its breathy and ancient tone, evokes a sense of timelessness and natural mysticism that aligns perfectly with Weir’s themes of nature, repression, and the unknown. Picnic at Hanging Rock became a classic of Australian cinema, and my music was often credited as a key part of my pan flute's hypnotic effect.

The music's success in the film led to its release on various albums, including A Theme from Picnic at Hanging Rock (1976), which featured the same compositions and instrumentation. This piece was originally released on recordings made in collaboration with Swiss ethnomusicologist Marcel Cellier, and has nothing in common with Cosma.

If I understand correctly, Picnic at Hanging Rock uses your versions of traditional Romanian folk songs paired with just an organ. It's haunting and one of my favorite uses of music in any movie. How did that arrangement come about?

The organ's sustained chords provided a grounding counterpoint to the pan flute's melodic lines, enhancing the film's dreamlike quality. This pairing of instruments, though not originally composed for the film, became iconic in its association with Picnic at Hanging Rock. These recordings have since become cherished examples of how traditional music can transcend cultural boundaries to evoke universal emotions .

Did you know what context your music would be used for?

Absolutely. Though there was no direct collaboration between Weir and me during production, this approach helped establish a new kind of sound in film scoring—sparse, non-orchestral, and globally reaching.

I hoped that the acceptance of using my music would help define the film’s signature emotional atmosphere, and my pan flute music would be exposed to a new and [broader] public.

A collaboration with German composer and bandleader James Last, best known for his work in the easy listening sphere, “The Lonely Shepherd” became a considerable hit in much of the world before being repurposed as theme music for several TV series. The song undoubtedly didn’t sound out of place on the softer ends of the radio dial in ‘70s Europe. It also sounds like it might have been written specifically for the scene in 2003’s Kill Bill, Vol. 1 scene in which The Bride (Uma Thurman) commissions then later receives a sword from master wordsmith (Hattori Hanzō), where it underscores the sense of shared hurt and the inevitability of their interaction. These two were always going to have this moment. “The Lonely Shepherd” gives it an understated grandeur.

You had an international hit with "The Lonely Shepherd." Did its second life in film and television surprise you? Did you like the way it was used in Kill Bill?

“The Lonely Shepherd” represents the aesthetic that I became known for: evocative, haunting, and spiritual music that transcends genres and cultures. It was not a surprise for me that Quentin Tarantino used “The Lonely Shepherd” in a powerful, atmospheric sequence near the end of Kill Bill, Vo1. 1. The song is a blend of Eastern European folk, classical, and cinematic ambient music, melancholic, mystical, reflective — with a sense of solitude and timelessness. Because of that, it became a cross-cultural anthem of introspection and power. It’s a perfect example of how music, especially pan flute music’s transcendent sound, can elevate a cinematic moment into something unforgettable.

By the early 1980s, Zamfir enjoyed tremendous success as a concert and recording artist almost everywhere except the U.S., despite having a strong following just to the north in Canada, where he purchased a home. That didn’t apparently diminish his appeal to the American film industry. Zamfir worked on the score of Robert Duvall’s now impossible-to-find Angelo, My Love and his playing can be heard throughout Bill Conti’s score for The Karate Kid (and its sequels), usually in scenes concerning Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita).

1984 was a big year for your movie work. How did you come to work with Bill Conti on The Karate Kid score?

In The Karate Kid, I recorded new material specifically for the film with Conti. Conti's orchestral writing and my minimalist, expressive style created a deeply resonant and emotional score. The pan flute has ancient and cross-cultural connotations — it feels both Eastern and Western, ancient yet timeless.

Our collaboration stands as a beautiful example of how film scoring can merge classical orchestration with world music traditions to enhance storytelling.

Did Conti talk about why he wanted to use a pan flute?

Conti's decision to incorporate the pan flute was driven by his appreciation for the instrument's unique timbre, aiming to evoke an 'ethereal quality' that aligns with the film's themes of wisdom and mentorship.

Zamfir’s film work included a remarkable contribution to Ennio Morricone’s score to Sergio Leone’s swan song, Once Upon a Time in America, also released in 1984. Morricone experimented with new sounds and textures throughout his career. It seems a fortunate coincidence that his work on Leone’s mournful gangster epic coincided with the peak of Zamfir’s work on movie scores. Leone had composed the music years earlier in the 1970s as Leone struggled to get the film made. The elegiac “Cockeye’s Theme” would undoubtedly work with another instrument at the fore, yet Zamfir’s almost seems to have been summoned by the sense of loss at the heart of the film. Zamfir’s film contributions would become less frequent in the years that followed, even as his name became more familiar to American viewers.

Once Upon a Time in America was also released that year. What was your collaboration with Ennio Morricone like?

In 1983 ,I was invited by Ennio Morricone and director Sergio Leone to contribute to the film's score. Reflecting on this experience in my autobiography, Binecuvântare și blestem [Blessing and Curses —ed.], I described it as "unique," noting that the pan flute's inclusion had a significant impact on the film's emotional depth. My distinctive pan flute performance added a haunting and evocative quality to the film's music, particularly in the tracks “Cockeye's Song,” one of the most famous pieces in the score, and “Childhood Memories.”

I believe Morricone wrote the score for the film years earlier. Did he always have you and the pan flute in mind or did you come in later?

The pan flute wasn't Morricone’s choice. The script writer wanted to have someone play that instrument... Morricone called me because he knew that I was a good performer on the instrument. One of the most famous pieces in the score, my version of “Amapola” that was featured on my 1985 album Atlantis, also gained audience through its inclusion in the 1984 film Once Upon a Time in America, directed by Sergio Leone, where it was arranged by Ennio Morricone.

You’ve contributed less often to films after the 1980s. Was that a conscious choice? Did your recording and performing career limit your time?

After 1980, I toured extensively around the world and was heavily involved in recording new albums. I dedicated myself to developing the instrument andintroducing it to new musical styles, because its potential was not being fully exploited.

Beyond my performance, I have contributed to music education through my instructional book Traité Du Naï Roumain: méthode de flûte de pan, fostering a new generation of pan flute musicians which are spread all over the world.

Are there any movie scores with pan flutes you like other than those to which you contributed?

I have not come into contact with the music of another composer who uses the pan flute in movies apart from Elia Cmiral [whose work includes scores for Ronin and Wrong Turn, among many other films. —ed.], a Hollywood composer, with whom I have had a very beautiful collaboration since 2018. With Elia, I recorded the soundtrack for the short film “Lacrimosa,” very awarded, and he composed, especially for me, a masterpiece for the pan flute, named Two Suites for Pan flute and Orchestra (Six Stories from an Enchanted Garden and Sinfonia Concertante for Pan Flute and Orchestra), available now on digital platforms and as a physical CD.

What would your advice be to filmmakers who wanted to use the pan flute in their movies?

I recommend that filmmakers use the divine sound of the Pan Flute to highlight the depth of landscapes, evoke positive emotions, and convey deep feelings. Feelings like love, passion, admiration, contemplation, and introspection can be easily evoked with a Pan Flute sound background. There is not a drop of negativity in the Pan Flute sound.

On December 1st, 2022, Sight & Sound magazine published “The Greatest Films of All Time,” a poll that’s been updated every 10 years since Bicycle Thieves topped the list in 1952. It is the closest thing movies have to a canon, with each edition reflecting the evolving taste of critics and changes in the culture at large. It’s also a nice checklist of essential cinema. Over the course of many weeks, months, and (likely) years, we’re running through the ranked list in reverse order and digging into the films as deep as we can. We hope you will take this journey with us.

Sans Soleil (1982)
Dir. Chris Marker
Ranking: #59
Previous ranking: #69 (2012)

Premise: Part documentary, part meditation on time and memory, and part sketchbook for a film that will never be made, Chris Marker’s 1982 film features footage shot in Japan, Iceland, San Francisco, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and elsewhere, all of it framed as recollections sent to the film’s narrator (Alexandra Stewart, in the film’s English-language version) by a filmmaker named Sandor Krasna. Krasna’s letters offer his observations on everything from the revolution that ended Portuguese rule in Guinea-Bissau to Japanese horror movies to the significance of a pair of dogs frolicking on the beach. Other topics include Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a science fiction film about a time traveler from the year 4001, and Krasna’s favorite animals: owls and cats, a fondness he shares with Marker.

Keith: Where to start with Sans Soleil? It’s tempting to call it an overwhelming experience. Marker throws out one challenging idea after another amidst a steady procession of arresting images, often accompanied by memorable quotes. (No stranger to the world of political activism, Marker has a gift for aphorisms. A favorite: “Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.” Another: “Video games are the first stage in the plan for machines to help the human race. The only plan that offers a future for intelligence.”) But Sans Soleil is anything but intimidating. It’s a film of serious ideas that features a handful of horrifying images, but there’s also a sense of lightness, sometimes playfulness, to it. In one scene, for instance, Marker cuts footage of dozing passengers on a Japanese train with images of horror movies. It beautifully captures the idea of movies being the visual realization of a culture’s collective unconscious in a way that no other art form could accomplish. But it’s also funny. I think Marker gets that, just as he understands that it’s possible to take seriously the film’s observations on loss and mourning and be amused by the scenes of extremely horny taxidermied animals in the sex museum that accompany them.

Sans Soleil takes its name from “Sunless,” a cycle of songs written by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky based on lyrics by the poet Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov (part of which also provides a portion of the film’s mostly electronic soundtrack). They’re mournful pieces with titles like “The Noisy Festival Day is Ended” that at least seem to touch on some of the same themes Marker covers. I’m sure there’s an essay to be written about the relationship between the two works, though I don’t have the expertise to do it.

But I keep thinking that the term “sunless” might refer to movies themselves, which cannot be seen in sunlight. Sans Soleil opens with a shot of children in Iceland that Marker, err…, Krasna believes represents perfect happiness but laments he cannot find an appropriate image to pair with it. From the start, Sans Soleil doesn’t just let you know you’re watching a movie, it makes you think about how movies work, which undoubtedly had to be on Marker’s mind, too, as he made Sans Soleil using a silent camera and a primitive tape recorder. In one scene, Marker captures a woman meeting the camera’s gaze for the length of a single frame, which he then returns to later in a form altered visually by a friend who works in electronic images and sound. What does this mean?

I don’t know! But it seems significant. Scott, any thoughts? There’s a lot to talk about here, so I’ll hand it off to you with that question and then tee up a discussion about what initially feels like a digression. Sans Soleil travels the globe, but it mostly moves from Japan to Africa and back again several times. Yet Marker takes some side trips, including one to San Francisco to visit the locations used for Vertigo, a film Krasner has seen 19 times and describes thusly: “Only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory, insane memory.” Does he make a good case for this? And what is Vertigo’s significance to the rest of the film?

Scott: Sans Soleil is “anything but intimidating”? Speak for yourself, my friend! Another word you use, “overwhelming,” is more apt in my view, and I think how you engage with the film is the determining factor on whether it’s intimidating to you or not. This is a film dense with visual and philosophical conceits that interact with each other at a speed that I don’t feel many can process in real time, though I suppose by “many,” I could just be referring to “me” and making assumptions about others. But I think the best way to approach Sans Soleil is to imagine yourself fishing in a stream of consciousness: You’re not going to catch everything that swims by you, but you can expect to reel in a few whoppers during the stretch of time that you watch it. And you may feel inclined to spend more time with it and pick up that much more.

An obvious point that has nonetheless struck me many times throughout this Sight & Sound poll project is that when you’re narrowing down a 125 years of cinema to 100 movies, you’re often encountering work that’s truly singular and influential. We saw that with our last entry, Daughters of the Dust, a landmark production from an African-American woman that opened cinema up to a new point-of-view and a style of filmmaking that feels almost sui generis. When watching Sans Soleil, my mind turned to a mode of poetic, essayistic nonfiction filmmaking that’s more common now at festivals like True/False, but didn’t have much precedent. The only films prior to Sans Soleil that come to mind as models are Alain Resnais classics like 1959’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour and 1961’s Last Year at Marienbad, which both use voiceover narration to explore all sorts of historical and philosophical subjects in ways that challenge (and often stymy) their audience. Marker marries Resnais’ approach to a highly personal and idiosyncratic form of documentary and seems to invent a new subgenre in the process.

Yet I can see why you might not find it intimidating, because Marker’s tone is so playful and his images are so inviting. You’ve already mentioned my favorite sequence of the film, when Marker imagines the dreamworlds of various people sleeping on the train in Japan. It’s just one of countless examples where he’s captured real-life imagery and given himself the creative freedom to imagine scenarios around it or to manipulate or re-contextualize those images any way he chooses. Consider “The Zone,” his homage to the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, which is about a guide who leads people through an otherworldly area where the laws of physics don’t apply. Marker’s “zone,” a computerized garble of images accompanied by an electronic score, seems to me an attempt to liberate cinema itself, particularly nonfiction cinema, from the aesthetic laws that we tend to apply to it.

As for the film’s Vertigo obsession? That’s a tough nut to crack, but then again, so is Vertigo. (As we’ll see about three and a years from now, when we’ll have nearly completed this project!) Hitchcock’s film is Marker’s favorite, and it’s a major influence on La Jetée, too, which we talked about when we covered that film late last year. With Vertigo, the phrase “impossible memory, insane memory” describes Scottie’s attempt to recreate a person and a moment that has been lost to him, a mad obsession that is nonetheless deeply romantic and identifiable. Memory is a primary theme in Sans Soleil, too, and you get several moments where Marker focuses on the impossibility of remembering things clearly or the outright obliteration of the past.

I’m thinking of a sequence where Marker is reflecting on the history of Okinawa after World War II, when it went through 27 years of American occupation before reverting to what he calls a “controversial Japanese sovereignty.” Marker observes this Ryukyuan ceremony involving a Noro priestess and refers to the “magic knowledge” of women and how he (or, um, “Sandor Krasna”) felt like he was witnessing the end of something. “Magical cultures that disappear leave traces to those who succeed them,” he says. “This one will leave none. The break in history has been too violent.” That’s a sobering thought, to say the least, but war does have the effect of accelerating changes and wiping out pieces of our culture and collective memories.

Marker seems stuck on those spirals in Vertigo’s titles, too, so kudos to Saul Bass for that. What do you think of the Vertigo connection, Keith? What other themes or sequences stood out for you? I’m also curious to hear your thoughts about how Marker’s Marxism figures into the film, particularly as it pertains to Guinea-Bissau and the legacy of Portuguese colonialism in that country.

Keith: It’s funny, Scott: I wanted to get into some possible precursors to Sans Soleil at some point in this conversation. I’m not surprised you beat me to it, but your picks aren’t what I had in mind (though I can definitely see those connections to Resnais). I think the closest work to Sans Soleil we’ve covered as part of this project (so far) is Godard’s Histoire(s) Du Cinéma, which similarly throws a lot of images and ideas at the viewer with a studied weariness and an intense sense of curiosity. I’m similarly tempted to dub Sans Soleil sui generis but maybe it’s Marker’s take on one of the most disreputable genres ever created: the mondo film.

Hear me out. I am not a crackpot. In 1962, the team of Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara, and Franco E. Prosperi released their film Mondo Cane, a documentary (using that term loosely) that traveled the world searching for colorful, bizarre, and disturbing practices. The film’s point of view is decidedly Eurocentric and the film alternates between exoticizing what it captures and treating it as shameful and primitive. A nudge-nudge, “Can you believe this tone?” underlies the whole project. Mondo Cane wasn’t just a big hit—though one that’s largely been erased from history—it prompted a flood of similar films, most of them even less tactful and more intent on shocking and disgusting viewers. The notorious 1978 film Faces of Death takes the genre to its logical conclusion.

To my eyes, Sans Soleil often plays like a mondo film with its polarity reversed. (And I thought I was alone in making this connection before discovering that Vincent Canby referenced it in his original New York Times review.) There are a few moments in Sans Soleil that wouldn’t be out of place in a mondo movie, particularly that grisly scene of a giraffe being hunted and killed, and shots of dead bodies. But rather than emphasizing the otherness of what it’s showing, Marker’s film seems interested in making us understand what we’re seeing, and in connecting it to what’s universal in the human experience, how the particularities of the place and time in which we live can shape that, and how whole ways of seeing the world can disappear.

The Okinawa sequence is a good example of this, but so is the depiction of the history of Guinea-Bissau. I’m no expert on Marker’s particular politics or on the currents of Marxism through which he swam in the ‘70s and ‘80s when making Sans Soleil. But I do know, in its most basic form, Marxism is predicated on the notion of revolution pushing history forward toward a perfect socialist state. Whatever Marker’s politics, they aren’t naive, and the depiction of Guinea-Bissau’s shifting leadership captures this via footage of toppled statues and smiling revolutionaries destined to turn on one another not long after the cameras stop filming. However little they resemble each other otherwise, both the revolution and the magic ceremonies provide frameworks for understanding the world, and both can be violently destroyed.

So what does that leave? I’m not sure Marker has an answer, but one possible answer, at least for him and for anyone who seeks out Sans Soleil, might be movies. Like La Jetée, Sans Soleil pays homage to Vertigo, but it also seems to turn “Krasna” into that film’s hero. Only instead of looking for a lost love, he’s seeking to find the film itself by visiting its locations. Some remain intact. Some have vanished. Some, like the Mission Dolores bell tower, never existed. Elsewhere, Krasna recalls the specific moments in which the footage we’re seeing was filmed with a kind of wistfulness that time has made unreachable. But in some ways, all of Sans Soleil plays like, to borrow a phrase from another French artist, a search for lost time, made with the understanding that any movie—be it Vertigo or a scene of an animatronic John F. Kennedy in a Tokyo department store—is a document of a lost world.

I feel like we could just endlessly go back and forth with “What do you make of this scene?” exchanges, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on the imagined science fiction film inspired by Iceland. My contribution: I’ve been to some of the places in Iceland shown in the film and they really do feel otherworldly, particularly those black sand beaches. I’ve also been to the island of Heimaey, a large portion of which disappeared under volcanic ash in the 1970s, which feels like a physical realization of some of Sans Soleil’s themes, doesn’t it?

Scott: First off, if I were asked in advance which film you’d be comparing to Sans Soleil, I’d be guessing for a lifetime before getting to Mondo Cane, so kudos for that. (Though I only know that film, its sequels, and Faces of Death by reputation, so perhaps I’d have made the same connection.) But I love your thought about Marker’s film being “like a mondo film with its polarity reversed,” because while we might be witnessing these foreign rituals from an anthropological distance, there’s a level of respect and engagement on Marker’s part that makes the film curious rather than merely emphasizing the exotic. (You have to imagine the late Anthony Bourdain was a fan.) And we learn more than once in the film that certain traditions, when faced with the violent forces of history, can be abruptly obliterated.

I’m glad you asked me about the Iceland footage, because it bookends the film, which tells you how important it was to Marker. Over the weekend, I was in Washington D.C. to do a panel and moderate a few screenings at the DC/DOX Film Festival, including David Osit’s Predators, which I'd raved about earlier this year, when it was my favorite film out of True/False. Predators is about the early-to-mid ‘00s Dateline NBC hit To Catch a Predator, a show that prided itself on luring would-be child-sex offenders to a house via a human “decoy” and then brought out the host, Chris Hansen, to snare them Candid Camera-style. One of the many revelations of Predators is how much the show relied on sticking to a narrow formula, because the moment viewers saw the full context of the event—whether it was the production’s unsavory (and legally inadmissible) relationship with the authorities or any signs of genuine vulnerability from the “predator”—the whole thing would fall apart. We needed to feel good about catching monsters.

That got me thinking of a great Martin Scorsese quote: “Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.” Those are the choices that filmmakers have to make, and it gives them great powers of expression and deception. The first lines of Sans Soleil refer to those three children on the road in Iceland in 1965, which “Krasna” describes as “the image of happiness” and how he’d failed to link it to other images. The children were part of a larger, imagined science fiction project in a setting that American astronauts had used for training because of its resemblance to another planet’s landscape. But I think once you open up the frame beyond this instance of “happiness” that you’ve applied to it and see the children in another context, your feelings about the image completely shift. That’s cinema as Scorsese describes it.

Earlier in our discussion, I talked about Sans Soleil being a movie where you’re “fishing in a stream of consciousness,” so I wanted to wrap up by noting some moments that really caught my eye. Here are a few: The restaurant in Nishi-Nippori, Japan where the chef specializes in “action cooking,” an artful combination of ingredients that Krasna likens to “painting, philosophy and karate” all at once. The mesmerizing shots we get of television in Japan, where “the more you watch Japanese television, the more you feel like it's watching you.” The passage about how writing the Bible was a way that people remembered things before they could film, photograph, or tape them: “The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.”

I don’t always know what to make of the film’s abstractions, which often went over my head, but Sans Soleil is such a satisfying drift through ideas and images. (Richard Linklater also has to be a fan, right?) Between the

travelogue beauty of the footage, which captures corners within corners of the world, and a soundtrack that mixes this philosophical narration with a cool electronic score, its surface pleasures are far more inviting than, say, Histoire(s) du Cinéma, which actively alienates viewers by design. The little tributaries Marker heads down can be profound and challenging, but I think what sticks with me about Sans Soleil is how surprising and even whimsical his essay can get. He loved cats and owls. He's so enthralled by a neighborhood celebration in Japan that he cuts the narration and just watches it unfold over a Moog soundtrack. He even imagines train nappers dreaming in cinema. What’s not to love about that?

We’re looking at an incredible logjam of great films tied at #54 for next time. But let’s go with the second of three (!) Billy Wilder movies on the Sight and Sound list, 1960’s The Apartment.

#95 (tie): Get Out
#95 (tie): The General
#95 (tie): Black Girl
#95 (tie): Tropical Malady
#95 (tie): Once Upon a Time in the West
#95 (tie): A Man Escaped
#90 (tie): Yi Yi
#90 (tie): Ugetsu
#90 (tie): The Earrings of Madame De…
#90 (tie): Parasite
#90 (tie): The Leopard
#88 (tie): The Shining
#88 (tie): Chungking Express
#85 (tie): Pierrot le Fou
#85 (tie): Blue Velvet
#85 (tie): The Spirit of the Beehive
#78 (tie): Histoire(s) du Cinéma
#78 (tie): A Matter of Life and Death
#78 (tie): Celine and Julie Go Boating
#78 (tie): Modern Times
#78 (tie): A Brighter Summer Day
#78 (tie): Sunset Boulevard
#78 (tie): Sátántangó
#75 (tie): Imitation of Life
#75 (tie): Spirited Away
#75 (tie): Sansho the Bailiff
#72 (tie): L’Avventura
#72 (tie): My Neighbor Totoro
#72 (tie): Journey to Italy
#67 (tie): Andrei Rublev
#67 (tie): The Gleaners and I
#67 (tie): The Red Shoes
#67 (tie): Metropolis
#67 (tie): La Jetée
#66: Touki Bouki
#63 (tie): The Third Man
#63 (tie): Goodfellas
#63 (tie): Casablanca
#60 (tie): Moonlight
#60 (tie): La Dolce Vita
#60 (tie): Daughters of the Dust

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In the last week, we lost both Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, two artists to whom the often overused word “genius” undoubtedly applied. By the time I started becoming aware of music, both Stone and Wilson’s breakthroughs had been confined to oldies radio, where it was easy to appreciate the greatness of their work (or at least their enduring hits) without …

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Materialists
Dir. Celine Song
117 min.

It’s clear from the first moment we see Lucy (Dakota Johnson) in action that she’s good at her job. She knows exactly what to say and when to say it without sounding practiced. She’s skilled at math, too, particularly complicated calculations in which some numbers can be a little flexible while others have to stay fixed or else the whole equation falls apart. That these calculations involve single New Yorkers in search of love doesn’t seem to bother her. She has the people skills to make her clients feel heard and liked and the processing power to know when a woman who is, say, looking for a man over 6-feet-tall who takes home a salary in the high six figures might be willing to give a bit on inches or income (though probably not both). It’s this combination that’s made her a star at the Adore matchmaking service. She knows how to close a deal, at least for others.

Past Lives director Celine Song’s second film, inspired by her own stint working as a matchmaker, flirts with then rejects committing to a couple of clichés. That Lucy has an uncanny knack for finding love for others but seemingly no interest in securing it for herself plays less like a gimmicky bit of dramatic irony than a professional hazard. When pressed, Lucy says she simply wants to marry rich, as if her on-the-job experience has taught her wealth and security might not assure true love, but it’s the least risky of all available options. When the film presents her with two love interests—one rich, one poor—it appears to be assembling the pieces of a love triangle, but the unusual angles don’t allow it to assume a pleasingly familiar shape.

Both of Lucy’s possibilities arrive at the wedding of a client. Harry (Pedro Pascal) is blindingly rich and approaches her with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what he wants. Lucy tries to rebuff him by suggesting she take him on as a client, not a lover, but what good would that do when he’s already found his match? But Lucy finds her attentions divided by the near-simultaneous appearance of John (Chris Evans), an aspiring actor who’s there on a catering job and interrupts her conversation with Harry by arriving with her drink of choice in hand. Lucy and John have a history, it turns out, one in which their obvious fondness for one another wasn’t enough to keep them together.

Though it seems clear where the movie will go next, Song sidesteps the expected tug of war, following Lucy as she explores her options while simultaneously grows disillusioned with her job due to Sophie L. (Zoë Winters), a client who’s hard-to-match despite having an abundance of appealing qualities. In the parlance of the trade, she checks a lot of boxes, just never enough boxes, a situation that leads to a disastrous date that makes Lucy question whether what she does is worth doing, no matter how good she might be at her job.

Materialists is at its sharpest in early scenes exploring Lucy’s profession and what it might reveal about the nature of romance and commitment. Everyone wants to believe that love conquers all and other pleasant notions, but maybe it is a matter of numbers? And even if it’s not, how much discomfort can true love withstand? The film doesn’t provide any simple answers, following Lucy as she tries to harness chaotic forces that drive attraction and attempt to put a romantic spin on the sometimes craven reasons that drive couples to commit to one another. Love might be a transaction at heart, but is it so bad to feel valued?

Materialists loses some of this sharpness in its back stretch, but this also seems by design. As with her debut, Song moves at a deliberate pace and Materialists’ second half sometimes seems directionless until its intentions snap into shape and it becomes clear that the story needs all the space it occupies in order to unfold fully. The cast uses that airiness well. Pascal and Evans craft characters with strikingly contrasting charms and the film plays to Johnson’s gift for meaningful understatement. Lucy’s not someone who reveals what she’s thinking until she has to (and even then maybe not fully). They play characters waltzing on the edge of cynicism without tumbling in. That Materialists ends up becoming a love story in spite of its gimlet-eyed perspective is the one cliché Song doesn’t even try to escape. —Keith Phipps

Materialists opens in theaters tonight.

Echo Valley
Dir. Michael Pearce
103 min.

There’s a scene in Echo Valley, a mostly forgettable thriller doomed to the Phantom Zone of Apple TV+, where Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney, as a mother and daughter in a fraught relationship, are given the opportunity to really cook. Moore plays a woman who lives alone on a horse farm in rural Pennsylvania, where she’s still grieving the loss of her lesbian partner, a relationship that seemed to have brought her some happiness after her conventional marriage broke apart. Sweeney plays her daughter, a drug addict who has burned through multiple second chances, but realizes that her mother is the type of person who will give her one more. The two get into a screaming match over money that’s excruciating for both sides: The child who claims, surely for the umpteenth time, that she’s really in trouble, and the parent who’s resolved to give her a few boxes of Narcan and send her away.

Yet Echo Valley isn’t a story about addiction per se, and the performances by Moore and Sweeney, while excellent, are kindling for a plot-heavy scenario that doesn’t quite deserve them. Scripted by Brad Ingelsby, the creator of HBO’s superb miniseries Mare of Easttown, the film tries the same basic tactic of using an atmospheric, twisty crime thriller to evoke a particular region and the fraught lives of the characters within them. But the balance is a little off here, perhaps because Ingelsby and director Michael Pearce don’t have the time to marinate in the setting or the relationships for long. There are too many narrative rugs that need pulling.

Nine months after her partner’s death, Kate (Moore) still tends quietly to the upkeep on her farm, but her instinct to isolate herself further in grief has financial repercussions, because she’s stopped doing the riding lessons that have been paying the bills. When her daughter Claire (Sweeney) turns up in the middle of the night with a story about her junkie boyfriend (Edmund Donovan) breaking her phone in an argument, Kate agrees to buy her a new one, but that doesn’t turn out to be Claire’s last request for money. She and her boyfriend happen to owe a fortune to their dealer (Domhnall Gleeson), and the conflict leads to a violent incident that tests Kate’s devotion to her child.

The issue of trust between Kate and Claire in that situation becomes a genuine moral quandary. When Claire shows up on her mother’s doorstep with someone else’s blood on her shirt, Kate is forced to decide whether she must intervene or consider this another act of shady manipulation. Echo Valley is almost too quick to resolve that ambiguity, but the action does lead to a terrific back-and-forth between Moore and Gleeson, who’s much more sober and sure-handed in terrorizing a person who isn’t part of his criminal world. Though Ingelsby’s deftness in plotting pays off here as it did in Mare of Easttown, Echo Valley ends up feeling more like an actor’s showcase and a potboiler than anything that sticks to the ribs. Remember the title if you can: It’ll get you a 1% rarity score on Cinematrix sooner than you might imagine. — Scott Tobias

Echo Valley premieres on Apple TV+ tomorrow.

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“The Japanese find big arm movements threatening.” — John Connor, Rising Sun

Though properly hailed/criticized as the master of the hardcover screenplay, Michael Crichton had a knack for devising “what if” scenarios that frequently captured the public imagination. What if a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism could infect a human host, which would have no way of combating it? What if the android performers populating an Old West amusement park started rejecting their programming and retaliated against their hostile guests? What if another amusement park could be created through the dinosaur DNA preserved in amber? Those are the premises of Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, Westworld, and Jurassic Park, respectively, and they’re almost diabolically good as Hollywood loglines, getting him to a point where his adaptations had a green light the moment his novels hit the shelves. That Crichton was significantly less skilled at characterization made little difference, not when the bones of his projects were this sturdy. 

Yet there proved to be a fine line between “what if” and “oh yeah, but what if?!” as Crichton reached the apex of his popularity in the mid-‘90s, and a pair of hot-button novels, Rising Sun and Disclosure, showed off his reactionary streak. In the guise of the techno-thrillers, each set in companies with an eye toward conquering the digital future, Crichton could continue to speculate about image manipulation, virtual reality, and the mighty power of the CD-ROM while trojan-horsing political freak-outs about corporate culture. Arriving in theaters just after Jurassic Park—with Rising Sun coming out two months later in the summer of 1993 and Disclosure in December the next year—the films put Crichton in the entertainment pages and cable-talk ecosystem simultaneously. 

Though the two films had different fates at the box office, Rising Sun and Disclosure dated themselves almost immediately as debate topics. No, the exotic demons known as “the Japanese” were not on the verge of infiltrating and dismantling American business from within our borders. And no, the sexual harassment issue was not about to be weaponized by evil, StairMaster-toned women looking to get ahead. (Crichton’s politics had drifted so far to the right by the next decade that State of Fear, his climate change-denying novel about eco-terrorists, proved too toxic to make it onto the screen.) Yet there’s a time-capsule quality to these films that remains fascinating, both as a carbon-dated record of what was on people’s minds in the mid-‘90s and as examples of filmmakers whose agendas weren’t entirely aligned with Crichton’s. It turns out that film was still, stubbornly, a director’s medium. 

*** 

For all of Crichton’s power in Hollywood, he learned this the hard way on Rising Sun, which had drawn so much negative press over its alleged jingoism and its behind-the-scenes conflicts that the studio slipped it into theaters towards the end of the summer. (It didn’t do too badly, all things considered.) I can still recall one glossy summer movie preview writing something like, “Fox, Crichton and Connery hated it. But maybe you’ll like it!.” Crichton’s novel had already generated a ton of controversy for its warning of direct foreign investment in American technology sectors, which in his broad rendering struck many critics as a racist depiction of his Japanese interlocutors. The novel isn’t simply fretting about Japanese aggression in international business, but about a sinister, insular culture that’s as debased as it is ruthless. 

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Open a newspaper to the movies page as spring turned into summer in 1975 and you’d have a hard time avoiding the fearsome image of a shark poised to attack. And, depending on where you lived, you might have your choice of several maneaters. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws debuted in theaters across North America on June 20, 1975 after an unprecedented and carefully coordinated marketing campaign based around the then-unusual decision to debut the film across the continent all at once, rather than letting it roll out a few markets at a time, and saturating the market with ads nationwide. The success of that approach would help usher in the blockbuster era. But in 1975, Jaws had a shadow, a remnant of a different way of making and marketing movies that Jaws would help push to extinction, but not quite yet: Sharks’ Treasure, a film whose release first preceded then overlapped with that of Spielberg’s far more famous shark tale.

The playing field was never a level one. Beyond having the full production and marketing muscle of Universal behind it, Jaws was based on a bestselling 1974 novel by Peter Benchley that both helped stir up interest in all things shark and doubled as a year-long advertisement for the film to come. Sharks’ Treasure was, to put it mildly, a smaller movie, rolled out with a less muscular push in a few markets at a time by United Artists. But in February, months ahead of both films’ release, it was possible to see them as part of the same phenomenon. “Sharks Take Over Movies,” screamed the headline of a February Copley News Service piece written by James Meade. “During 1971-72, rats and insects were motion picture box office draws,” Meade observed, referring to the success of the rat-heavy horror movies Willard, its sequel Ben, and the insect “documentary” The Hellstrom Chronicle. “Now apparently sharks have prevailed over rats and insects as movie stars.” Three might officially make a trend, but two has to count for something, right?

Yet apart from the obvious elements (sharks, boats, the ocean, etc.), Jaws and Sharks’ Treasure have little in common. One is a horror-inflected thriller directed by a generational talent expanding the boundaries of what a big-budget genre movie could do. The other is an adventure film inspired by The Treasure of the Sierra Madre that’s heavy on grit, light on polish, and very much of a piece with other, better-known (and better) films starring and or directed by Cornel Wilde, an actor and director whose credits stretched back to the 1940s. Wilde was in his sixties (though he’d shaved a few years off his official age) when he made Sharks’ Treasure, but still determined to make tough (and tough-minded) movies that put him front-and-center. Sharks’ Treasure would mark the end of Wilde’s directing career, but he’d go down fighting.

It was fighting that had gotten Wilde into acting and directing in the first place. Born Kornél Lajos Weisz to Hungarian Jewish parents in the city of Prievidza (now part of Slovakia), Wilde emigrated to America with his parents at the age of seven. In 1936, he

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Earlier this week Scott’s latest New Cult Canon entry covered Red Rooms, a chilling Canadian thriller in which an alienated woman finds herself most at home in the shadowy corners of the dark web. Movies aren’t always that in touch with the realities of the internet. A while back, I looked at the cyberthrillers of 1995, and while subsequent depictions h…

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The Life of Chuck
Dir. Mike Flanagan
110 min.

From Marty’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) perspective, things aren’t looking so good, either for himself or the Earth in general. Hardly anyone shows up to the high school English class he teaches anymore, and why should they? The news is filled with one catastrophe after another and every time the internet blinks out, it feels like it could be the last. (As one dad laments in a parent/teacher conference, even Pornhub has disappeared.) Marty’s still friendly with his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan), a nurse who lives across town, but she has her own set of problems as her hospital’s skeleton crew tends to an alarming spike in suicides. Life carries on as best it can as the end of the world looms on the horizon, but how much longer can that last? The only person who seems to be having a moment is Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), whose smiling face adorns billboards and other spaces across town congratulating him on “39 Great Years!”

Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, The Life of Chuck adapts a 2020 Stephen King short story of the same name and stays close to its unusual structure. The film is divided into three acts presented in reverse chronological order. The opening act (which is also, in ways that will only become clear later, the last) often feels chillingly of-the-moment. In one memorable scene, Marty and his neighbor Gus (Matthew Lillard) work through a list of losses as the world falls apart and places and institutions that seemed destined to last forever crumble and disappear. It’s terrifying but what can they do about it?

But the seeming end of the world is not the end of the movie. The Rod Serling-like inflections in Nick Offerman’s narration point to The Twilight Zone as an influence. And as chilling as The Life of Chuck’s opening act often is, the film taps into the sentimental streak that runs through that series and through much of King’s work, too. It would be a disservice to reveal too much more about the second and third (or, more accurately, second and first) acts of The Life of Chuck beyond saying the film’s middle section focuses on Chuck as an adult and the third on his childhood. Also, both revolve around dance sequences (choreographed by Mandy Moore) performed with great enthusiasm and technical skill that still feel like spontaneous expressions of the characters performing them. The third part is a ghost story, sort of, concerning a forbidden room in the home of Chuck’s grandparents (played by Mia Sara and a bewhiskered Mark Hamill.) If that sounds like a peculiar structure for a movie, it is, even if The Life of Chuck ends up providing odd packaging for some decidedly square philosophizing about the preciousness of life that never quite matches the intensity of its opening stretch.

That said, it’s also an undeniably moving film, familiar sentiments and all. Other directors have made better King adaptations (though this one should join the top ten of any King ranking), but none have made adaptations as locked into King’s particular voice as Flanagan, as evidenced by Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep and deeply King-influenced efforts like the miniseries Midnight Mass. The uncanny intrudes on everyday life to sometimes unsettling, sometimes persuasively corny effect. Much of Chuck’s dialogue (and narration) comes directly from the page. Flanagan fills out the rest with the winding monologues that have become his trademark, delivered with assurance by what’s become a reliable and expanding stock company. (Everyone’s good, but Hamill and Carl Lumbly are particular standouts in the supporting cast here.) The Life of Chuck begins with a cataclysm that’s cosmic in scale. It ends in a much smaller, quieter place, yet somehow the film brings it all full circle anyway. —Keith Phipps

The Life of Chuck opens in theaters tonight. (Unless it opened years ago or will open at some point in the future.)

Ballerina
Dir. Len Wiseman
125 min.

The new John Wick spinoff Ballerina takes place between the events of John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum and John Wick: Chapter 4. Before you go scrambling to figure out why that timeline is significant and what you might need to remember going into the new film, let me reassure you: That fact is completely meaningless. There are familiar faces from the franchise that surface in Ballerina, including Keanu Reeves as Wick and Ian McShane and the late Lance Reddick as the operators of the Continental Hotel, a safe space for professional assassins. (The underworld of John Wick is like a game of tag that never ends, with the Continental as a home base.) You don’t need to know much of anything going in. For a franchise built wholly on the strength of beautiful action setpieces, such mythology is dead weight.

If anything, the most relevant background information for Ballerina might come from watching the James Bond movie No Time to Die, which featured Ana de Armas as a CIA agent who elegantly sluiced her way through gunmen in a black cocktail dress. With that proof of concept in hand, Ballerina casts her in the stock role of a Wick-style revenge-seeker who’s brought into the life of an elite assassin and tries to shoot her way out. There’s nothing complicated about her mission and nothing terribly imaginative, either, in bringing on Len Wiseman for the first Wick movie not directed by stuntman-turned-action-maestro Chad Stahelski, who was brought in anyway for extensive reshoots. The logic seems to be that Wiseman made a star out of a slinky Kate Beckinsale in the lousy Underworld movies, so he’d be a natural to do likewise for de Armas. Such lizard-brain thinking isn’t as damaging to this series as it sounds, even if Wiseman is an uninspired choice.

De Armas stars as Eve Macarro, introduced as a small child who witnesses her father’s death at the hands of trained assassins. Eve’s dad tried to wriggle free from a cult-like sect of fellow assassins, led by the nefarious Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne, having the time of his life), but its reach proved too immense for him to escape. As an orphan, Eve is brought into the house of the Ruska Roma, led by a not-so-motherly Director (Anjelica Huston) who trains women in ballet and martial arts. She graduates into a career as a killer, but doesn’t let loyalty to her employers keep her from pursuing the Chancellor, even if that means running afoul of the Ruska Roma and the rules of the Continental.

It takes a while for Ballerina to find its footing, because Eve has to grow into her potential through the grind of training, which here resembles an airless Black Swan. The quick-start efficiency of John Wick avenging his dog in the first film is missing here, replaced by a lot of lugubrious business about honor codes and underground sects. De Armas is asked to carry herself with a seriousness of purpose that saps some pleasure out of the film without adding the world-weary gravitas that Reeves brings to the table. But then the switch flips. Once Ballerina sets Eve off to a snowy Bavarian village to confront the Final Boss, it suddenly levels up to the high standard of the best John Wick movies, treating the last half hour as one gigantic set piece that keeps paying off. The best approach to the film is to be like Eve: Just be patient and grind through those stretches where you’re stuck in the mud. You’ll get your satisfaction. — Scott Tobias

Ballerina tiny-dances its way into theaters everywhere today.

“Did you hear about the claustrophobic astronaut? He just needed a little space.” — “Guinevere,” Red Rooms

Before the internet existed—and certainly before the accelerants of broadband connections and social media—there was no ability for the public to experience traumatic images and videos without a great deal of vetting first. Much as we like to decry the “gatekeepers” that might stand between us and the raw, unvarnished truth of the world, responsible people in the media had to put some thought into how (or if) this information should be received by the public at large. When footage and photographs from the Vietnam War started finding their way into magazines or broadcast television, they shook our collective conscience, but they were never presented without warning or context. That they were deemed important and “newsworthy” did not shake their power to traumatize, but at least a process was in place to keep us outside the blast radius.

Now we are fully in the age of “doomscrolling,” a useful term to describe our addiction to the unpleasant content that jams up Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and every other social media feed. Yet even that term seems inadequate to describe the firehose of horror that confronts us with little warning, especially now that even fig-leaf moderation is treated like an egregious affront to the First Amendment. It is not uncommon, in the flow of the day, to witness smartphone videos of mass shootings, children in war zones, raids by ICE agents, or violent confrontations with the police. And as much as we might tell ourselves that it’s good to see the world as it truly is—though we have to put big fat scare quotes around the word “truth” in some instances—how much perspective can we claim to have on how it’s impacted us? What can we actually handle, physiologically, as human beings?

The French-Canadian shocker Red Rooms comes closer than any film I can recall in squaring up to the darkest implications of the digital age, particularly for those alienated souls known as the Extremely Online. (It’s not usually my habit to induct a film into The New Cult Canon only a year after its theatrical run, but no one I know who has seen Red Rooms has been left unshaken by it.) We don’t know enough about

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“I find it more and more difficult to find a subject I should do,” Richard Lester told The Los Angeles Times in a profile of the director published ahead of the release of The Three Musketeers in 1973. “I think I have grown out of my wish to preach only to the converted,” he continued, referring to three films he’d made shortly before taking a break from features at the end of the 1960s: the anti-war satire How I Won the War; Petulia, a mismatched love story that plays out amidst a skeptical depiction of the counterculture; and the little-seen The Bed-Sitting Room, a beyond-grim absurdist comedy set in the wake of a nuclear war. Collectively, they suggest a lot about how Lester viewed the world. They also didn’t find much of an audience despite one of them, Petulia, being a masterpiece. So Lester waited for the right project, one that audiences might want to see, and found it via a story that had been retold countless times since the beginning of movies.

But to look at The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers—the two films Lester made from Alexandre Dumas’ oft-filmed 1844 novel The Three Musketeers, both of which have recently been re-released as part of the Criterion Collection—as a purely commercial move would be a mistake. Huge hits in their day, they clearly did give moviegoers something they wanted to see, namely high-spirited swashbuckling action in a pair of star-packed films. Yet Lester’s Musketeers films are as pointed as one of his 17th-century heroes’ swords. Relatively faithful adaptations scripted by Flashman creator George MacDonald Fraser, they cast a dubious eye at the very concept of heroism itself, particularly heroism in the service of a status quo with corruption at its eye level and degradation at its lowest. The story gets increasingly dark, and its protagonists less noble, as it unfolds across two films It’s almost as if Dumas’ book was just waiting for the anti-heroic early 1970s to find it.

It doesn’t take long, for instance, for the films’ D’Artagnan (Michael York) to lose the stars in his eyes. Arriving in 17th century Paris from his rural childhood home with

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It’s a pretty simple question, but the context is a little more complicated. Drive-in theaters have had a hard time since the ‘80s thanks to a variety of factors, chief among them the rise of home video, suburban sprawl, and escalating property values. But they’re still hanging in there. Our friend and Next Picture Show co-host Genevieve Koski lives nea…

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The Phoencian Scheme
Dir. Wes Anderson
105 min.

Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) lives on the edge. An industrialist not afraid to get his hands dirty trading weapons in the easily inflamed world of mid-century Middle East and North Africa, he’s accumulated an enemies list that includes former trading partners, high-powered rivals, and even a member of his own family. When Korda survives an elaborate assassination attempt in the opening moments of The Phoenician Scheme, the new Wes Anderson film, it doesn’t come as that great of a surprise. More surprising: a brief glimpse of heaven that suggests he might be found wanting when he makes his eventual entrance through the Pearly Gates.

Heaven looks quite pearly, too; it’s shot in black-and-white, completing a trifecta of tips-of-the-hat to the Archers’ A Matter of Life and Death after the opening crash and Korda’s name, which he shares with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburgers’ producer Alexander Korda. Yet given that the stakes are (probably) nothing less than a man’s soul, The Phonician Scheme never feels itself like a matter of life and death. It has all the usual pleasures of an Anderson film. Del Toro, returning to the Wes Anderson ensemble after his work in The French Dispatch, steps to the fore with a winning deadpan performance. Anderson’s technical precision and ability to create immersive storybook worlds remains unparalleled (though, given that no one else is even trying to make movies like this, that word might be inapt). Yet where other recentAnderson films like The Grand Budapest Hotel and Asteroid City build those storybooks around themes of loss and perseverance in the midst of bleak times, The Phoenician Scheme reveals little interest in such matters on first viewing. Its pleasures are almost entirely on the expertly appointed surface.

They remain considerable, though. Two intertwined plot devices drive the film’s action: a family reunion and a potential financial crisis. Pained by his narrow escape, Korda decides to reunite with his estranged daughter Liesel (Mia Threapleton), a novitiate with no desire to leave the convent, and prepare her to take over his affairs. (Korda keeps a gaggle of sons nearby, but they seem unsuited for the task.) Liesel reluctantly agrees to hear her father out, her arrival coinciding with that of Bjørn (Michael Cera), a Norwegian entomologist who’s signed onto the Korda team as a tutor. When Korda promotes Bjørn to assist him, this unexpectedly turns into a mobile position. Korda, it turns out, finds he’s overextended himself when a price-fixing scheme threatens “the gap,” the rolling deficit created by his many in-progress projects (mostly ambitious construction projects with a light dusting of slave labor). Staying solvent means striking new deals with various contacts, a process that includes a lot of travel, the occasional basketball game, and a few generously dispensed hand grenades.

Anderson packs the film with delightful touches, from Cera’s accent work to Korda’s estate and its absurd masterpiece-filled collection of paintings to supporting characters played by Tom Hanks, Riz Ahmed, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, and others. (As usual, the list goes on: Willem Dafoe, Hope Davis, Charlotte Gainsbourg, etc.) So what’s missing? There’s usually a moment in Anderson films in which everything snaps into place, revealing the weight that anchors the fanciful creation: F. Murray Abraham’s final scene in Budapest, Jeffrey Wright’s “solitary feast” reverie in The French Dispatch, Asteroid City’s balcony scene. If there’s an equivalent moment here, it eluded me. Everything surrounding where it should be is, as usual, a lot of fun, however. —Keith Phipps

The Phoenician Scheme opens in limited release today before expanding.

Karate Kid: Legends
Dir. Jonathan Entwistle
94 min.

At 94 minutes, Karate Kid: Legends isn’t a particularly long film, but consider the amount of work it takes just to get Ralph Macchio, the star of the first three Karate Kid movies and the TV series Cobra Kai, and Jackie Chan, the star of the 2010 Jaden Smith reboot of The Karate Kid, on the screen together. First, the film has to situate them in the same narrative universe, which The Karate Kid Part II inadvertently made easier in a scene where Pat Morita’s Mr. Miyagi shows young Daniel LaRusso (Macchio) has family dojo in Okinawa and the framed pictures of his ancestors on the wall, including the originator of Miyagi martial arts, who learned his craft in China. Adding a few more lines of dialogue to the original scene—seemingly via the cursed magic of AI, as Morita died in 2005—the film establishes a connection between the Miyagis and the Hans, who developed their own kung fu through the generations leading up to Chan’s Mr. Han. 

As tortured as that sounds, it only wastes a handful of minutes, though they’re precious minutes, because they stall out the beginning of the film like Lucille LaRusso’s station wagon. The bigger problem is getting Han from Beijing to New York, where he comes to the aid of a former student, and Daniel from Los Angeles to New York, because he’s never met the student at all. (This is solved by Han arriving in New York for a few days, excusing himself from the dinner table, and then flying all the way to California and back.) Like so many franchises in our IP-addicted era, Karate Kid: Legends thoroughly exhausts itself on sorting out the mythology before it can gather its own momentum. The risk of not paying off on nostalgia may seem too terrifying, but Hollywood needs to listen to Mr. Miyagi: “It’s okay to lose to opponent. Must not lose to fear.” 

Had it jettisoned the “Legends” part completely, this Karate Kid would not only have been a more efficient entertainment, but might have stood up reasonably well on its own distinct merits. The lion’s share of credit for that belongs to Ben Wang’s performance as the martial arts prodigy of the title, which is much more ebullient than Macchio’s hot-headed LaRusso, despite the near-identical situation of being a bullied new kid with a single mother who runs afoul of a sinister dojo. Despite the grief of losing his brother and following his mom from Beijing to a lonely block of New York, Li Fong (Wang) carries himself with a lightness that reflects his mentor, Mr. Han, who runs a kung fu school back home. As he struggles to make new friends, he starts hanging out a local pizza joint run by former boxer Victor (Joshua Jackson) and has promising chemistry with Victor’s daughter Mia (Sadie Stanley), whose ex-boyfriend (Aramis Knight) is less like Johnny Lawrence than Mike Barnes, the snarling “bad boy of karate” from The Karate Kid Part III. 

Some plotting nonsense has Li training Victor to get back in the ring to fight off the debt he’s accumulated to mobbed-up loan sharks and later having to compete against Mia’s ex in a street-fighting championship that’s like the open-air, five-boroughs All Valley tournament. Director Jonathan Entwhistle, a British filmmaker whose chief credit is the fine Netflix series The End of the F***ing World, seems inclined to breeze through the contrivances of the story as quickly as possible in order to give Wang a chance to imitate a young Jackie Chan, who had to transcend stock material his entire career. Wang’s scenes with Stanley are sweet and flirty, and his legitimate proficiency in martial arts helps make the fight sequences credible. (You trust his big finishing move here could devastate opponents in a way that, say, LaRusso’s “Crane Kick” never would.) 

But it’s the legends that hold Karate Kid: Legends back, despite Chan and Macchio making an amiable team as two varieties of the wise-old-timer type. There’s barely any guidance from either of them that help Li prepare for the tournament, certainly not enough to justify the effort in bringing them together. It may be a riskier play to cultivate Wang’s physical and comedic gifts and see if he can serve as a Jackie Chan type for 21st century Hollywood, but it’d be so much easier, too. In order to play it safe, Karate Kid: Legends has to twist itself into knots. — Scott Tobias

Karate Kid: Legends opens today in theaters everywhere.

Bring Her Back
Dir. Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou
104 min.

Rarely have softheartedness and meanness struggled as fiercely as they do in the films of Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian brothers behind the 2023 horror film Talk to Me and the new Bring Her Back. The Philippous create teen characters so endearing and vividly realized that it’s awful to imagine bad things happening to them. Then, without fail, bad things happen to them, usually really bad things. Their movies stand at the opposite end of whatever spectrum has the Final Destination films at the other side. Those teens in those have seemingly been crafted to be annoying enough that it’s not a big deal, even welcome, when they get ground up in the movies’ meat-grinder machinations. When horror finds its way to the Philippous’ teens, it’s genuinely horrific.

The awfulness begins early for Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger sister Piper (Sora Wong) when they find their father dead on a bathroom floor. This throws them into a foster care system that at first threatens to break them up, even though Andy’s just a few months shy of being able to apply to become Piper’s guardian. That the two are close and that Piper is vision impaired—she can see shapes and light but nothing more—makes the situation that much more difficult. Fortunately, they find a foster mother willing to take them in, one who’s familiar with the needs of the visually impaired having recently lost her own daughter with a similar condition. Unfortunately, said mother is Laura (Sally Hawkins).

Laura quickly makes Andy suspicious. She’s enthusiastic and nice but she also seems only interested in Piper, to whom she tells a lie, seemingly in jest, that Piper can’t detect because of her vision. Then there’s Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), the strange, mute, borderline fellow boy Laura’s already fostering. Her place has a creepy vibe, even if the new arrivals don’t see the videotapes Laura watches when they’re not around, which depict some kind of brutal ceremony (and eventually help explain the title). Laura’s attempts to turn Piper against her brother make it creepier still.

The more we learn about Laura, the harder it becomes to write her off as pure sadist. Bring Her Back’s empathy, helped along powerfully by Hawkins’ performance, extends even to her—at least up to a point. Yet the film sometimes does seem motivated by sadism. Andy and Piper suffer all manner of psychological abuse at Laura’shands even before the film takes a turn toward the truly grim. They’re sweet kids, endearingly brought to life by a pair of promising young actors, but Bring Her Back puts through the wringer again and again. That’s more a warning than a criticism, however. Two films in, the Philippous have built up a remarkable skill for creating uncomfortable situations and then pushing them toward their shocking extremes, however innocent those involved might be. To paraphrase another movie, they make hard worlds for little things. —Keith Phipps

Bring Her Back creeps into theaters tonight.

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“I never say ‘no’ when it comes to macaroni and cheese.” — Daniel LaRusso, The Karate Kid Part III

“The Karate Kid is the story of Daniel, a violent sociopath who moves to a California town and begins tormenting a local boy and his friends.” So begins a popular video essay by J. Matthew Turner, which advances the theory that Daniel LaRusso, our scrappy young hero from Jersey, is the true villain of the 1984 sleeper hit, not his preppie nemesis Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and the other snickering goons from the Cobra Kai dojo. The video is hilariously tongue-in-cheek, making Daniel’s pursuit of rich-girl Ali (Elisabeth Shue) seem creepy and predatory, and imagining Johnny as a kid who merely isn’t processing his recent break-up with Ali that well. The logic is that Daniel needlessly escalates the conflict at every turn, like when he drenches Johnny with water at a school Halloween party then causes a multi-car collision when he makes his escape. (Turner refers to Pat Morita’s Mr. Miyagi, Daniel’s beloved mentor, as “local busybody, karate master and child batterer.”) 

It’s a funny exercise to work your mind around The Karate Kid being something other than director John G. Avildsen tweaking the underdog formula that brought him an unlikely Best Picture winner in Rocky. After all, we’re currently in a “Are we the baddies?” phase in popular culture, when popular franchises have flipped the script on heroes and villains, with Hollywood reconsidering the legacies of Cruella de Vil, Maleficent, and The Wicked Witch of the West. To that end, it was easier than expected to attempt a sympathetic portrait of Johnny Lawrence in the hit streaming series Cobra Kai, which started in 2018 and spent six seasons casting Johnny as a down-on-his-luck handyman who suffers from alcoholism and depression while his erstwhile rival owns a car dealership across town. Maybe he acted like a jerk in high school, but he was just a kid with a bad teacher, still paying a steep price for his misdirected aggression. 

It didn’t take long for Cobra Kai to burn through nostalgia for the franchise—the first season on YouTube Red is a good time, but it was on a steep downward slope once the series moved to Netflix for seasons three through six—but one of the more pressing questions is how that nostalgia got so built up in the first place. And that question has to start with Ralph Macchio as Daniel LaRusso, who may not have been a part of the 1994 Miyagi-focused spinoff The Next Karate Kid or the Jaden Smith/Jackie Chan reboot of The Karate Kid from 2010, but who has had to carry the films like Sylvester Stallone carried Rocky, only without Stallone’s imposing physique or soft-souled machismo. To his credit, Macchio has maintained his boyishness well into his 60s and thus will always be a karate kid, but looking at how Daniel developed over the first three movies validates the idea behind Turner’s video essay and Cobra Kai’s treatment of Daniel as a family man who still surrenders to his impulses. He may be a scrawny kid fighting for what’s right, but he’s not Mr. Miyagi. He’s a bit of a hothead. 

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On December 1st, 2022, Sight & Sound magazine published “The Greatest Films of All Time,” a poll that’s been updated every 10 years since Bicycle Thieves topped the list in 1952. It is the closest thing movies have to a canon, with each edition reflecting the evolving taste of critics and changes in the culture at large. It’s also a nice checklist of essential cinema. Over the course of many weeks, months, and (likely) years, we’re running through the ranked list in reverse order and digging into the films as deep as we can. We hope you will take this journey with us.

Daughters of the Dust (1991)
Dir. Julie Dash
Ranking: #60 (tie)
Previous ranking: N/A

Premise: In 1902, members of the Peazant family prepare to leave their home on Dataw Island, one of the Sea Islands off the Georgia coast, for the mainland and life in the north. This means leaving behind a unique Gullah culture in which Western and Christian traditions have been blended, not always harmoniously, with African beliefs and practices. The move inspires contrasting feelings in the family. Nana (Cora Lee Day), the family’s matriarch, is reluctant to leave. Viola (Cherly Lynn Bruce) and her cousin “Yellow” Mary (Barbara-O) have returned from the mainland in the company of a photographer named Mr. Snead (Tommy Redmond Hicks) and a woman named Trula (Trula Hoosier), who appears to be Mary’s lover. Eula (Alva Rogers) and Eli (Adisa Anderson) are preoccupied with Eula’s pregnancy and the child who might be the result of her rape at the hands of a man she won’t name. (Eula’s child, billed as the Unborn Child (Kai-Lynn Warren), provides occasional narration and sometimes appears as a fantasy figure.) Iona’s (Bahni Turpin) love for the Cherokee man Julien (M. Cochise Anderson) has her pondering whether or not she can go. As they prepare, the film explores the life they plan to leave behind and consider their hopes for the future.

Keith: Daughters of the Dust writer-director Julie Dash opens her film with a pair of title cards explaining the origins of the Gullah communities that populate the islands off of South Carolina and Georgia, but the film otherwise invites viewers to figure it out for themselves. We get glimpses of elements of island life that are never explained in full. Here’s an example: in one shot, some of the children play a game that involves moving stones on a board with round depressions. I recognized this as Mancala (or some variation) only because the game has since been packaged and marketed to the board game market. (I think I first played it at your house, Scott, losing badly to one of your daughters.) It’s there for those who get it to appreciate—and I certainly didn’t recognize it the first time I saw this film—and makes the setting richer even if you don’t.

Here’s how Dash explained her approach to A.O. Scott in 2020:

We shared intimate stories [...] profound moments that connect us to the history of the diaspora — without explaining, without going all National Geographic. A meditative type of thing, structured the way an African griot would narrate a family’s history over days and days.

That accurately suggests the feeling of the film, which tells many sorts of stories piece by piece. It’s a film filled with many different characters. (My plot summary above doesn’t even mention Bilal (Umar Abdurrahman) a member of the island’s Muslim community or Haagar (Kaycee Moore), who’s disagreeable but willful and one of the forces pushing the migration). It also makes a great effort to capture how they live their lives with the bittersweet knowledge that, for many of the Peazants, this is the end of their way of life. It’s closing time at their home on Ibo Landing and nothing will be the same after today.

Daughters of the Dust is gorgeous and dreamlike . Dash and cinematographer Arthur Jafa (who’d go on to a long career as both a director of photography and a video artist) shot the film on location using natural light and they truly create a sense that they’re capturing a lost place and time. At the heart of Daughters of the Dust is a depiction of a unique, vibrant community whose creation is the result of enslavement and the horrors of American history. And, without feeling programmatic, Daughters of the Dust touches on sometimes harrowing ways Gullah culture intersects with the larger story of American history.

It’s a lovely, fascinating film. I also have found it a bit challenging each time I’ve watched it. Dash does something truly unusual with her languorous approach to storytelling. The film has one pace that it sticks to from start to finish and I suspect it’s my own expectations of how a film is supposed to move and the ways stories typically unfold that gets in the way of my ability to lock fully into that rhythm. It’s a film I would love the chance to see on the big screen, where I suspect it would play differently than at home.

It’s hard to overstate the film’s historic importance. Daughters of the Dust is sometimes referred to as the first feature film directed by a Black woman, which isn’t strictly speaking true. Several Black women directed films in the early days of film. Kathleen Collins directed a 1982 film called Losing Ground that did not play outside festivals in her lifetime. (Collins died in 1988. I have not seen the film but I should seek it out.) It sounds really interesting. So technically, Daughters of the Dust is the first film of the modern era directed by a Black woman to receive a theatrical release. In 1991. That’s really recent. And it’s not like it’s now super-easy for Black women to make films and have them released, but a lot has changed since, and because of, Daughters of the Dust. Beyond that, it’s stylistically quite bold and influential. Much of the renewed interest toward this film stems from a restoration and re-release for its 25th anniversary. But at least some of it comes from Beyoncé’s Lemonade video album being filled with nods to Dash’s work.

Scott, how was your experience of watching Daughters of the Dust this time? And there are a lot of narrative strands to talk about. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Nana, who’s presented as both a keeper of traditions and, maybe, an inhibitive force on the Peazant family’s progress. I think one of the strengths of this film is to let a character not be merely one thing, just as its view of history is complicated and its attitude toward the migration at its center feels bittersweet. What was your read on her?

Scott: I’ll get into the Nana character in a bit, because she’s really the fulcrum of this whole family narrative and maybe the soul of the movie. But I wanted to start by talking a bit about my own tortured history with Daughters of the Dust, which seems to mirror yours a bit. I first encountered this film during its theatrical release, when we programmed it at the Tate Theater on University of Georgia campus while I was still a movie-crazy undergrad. I confess to being a bit flummoxed by it then, at least in engaging with its unusual rhythms and conceits, though the island setting, the costumes, and Arthur Jafa’s gorgeous cinematography stayed with me, along with the faces of Dash’s actors. Even when I saw it a second time a couple decades later, it remained a film I respected more than loved and I probably would not have returned to it were it not for this project.

Well, the third time turned out to be a charm. And I think a big reason is something you laid out above: Daughters of the Dust was, insanely, the first theatrical release of a feature directed by a Black woman. (Incidentally, I caught up with Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground when it was on Criterion Channel and likened it to “homegrown Eric Rohmer.” The early ‘80s were truly a fallow period for American independent cinema for that film not to get any play.) Put simply, Dash’s film is singular, which is why it now finds itself on the Sight & Sound list, along with the National Film Registry, which enshrined it quite a bit earlier, in 2004. When singular works of art first find their way out into the world, they’re not always well-received, for the obvious reason that nobody has experienced anything quite like it. And while Daughters of the Dust was kindly reviewed at the time, its poetic language and symbolism, its languorous style, and its cross-generational conflicts are difficult to parse. Even now, it might be good to advise those seeing the film for the first time to allow the images and the score to take them on a reverie, and just pick up whatever they can from the storytelling.

Daughters of the Dust feels like a feature made by a director who suspected she’d never get an opportunity to make another, which is exactly what happened, though Dash later found work in television and a few music videos. It’s a prismatic work about Black identity, particularly the plight of Black women, that uses its unique turn-of-the-century island setting to reflect on the past, present, and future of characters scarred by slavery, bound by ancestral traditions and values, and still seeking a place they can call home. And while the opening titles seem to celebrate the Gullah and their “distinct, imaginative and original African American culture,” the reality on the ground is much more unsettled, because this family is about to split apart.

Set over the course of one day—that early helicopter shot introducing Ibo Landing at sunrise is something else—the film would seem to be about a celebration, one last family reunion before the majority of these characters migrate from Sea Island to the north, where a more just and prosperous America presumably awaits. The photographer Mr. Snead has arrived with a camera to create official portraits of the Peazants before they depart, and a big feast with shrimp, corn, and okra is being prepared, which again makes it seem like a party when, in fact, it’s more like a funeral or an outright reckoning. Leaving the island may feel like an opportunity for some, but the cost of assimilation is steep, and we already see some tension building up between those who have spent time on the mainland like Viola, a Christian convert, and those who cling fiercely to the spiritual and cultural ideas brought over from Africa.

Which brings me to Nana Peazant, played by Cora Lee Day, whose anguished face burns into your brain. We’re first introduced to her when she’s having a heated discussion with Eli, who’s intends to leave the island, but is fuming over the rape that led to his wife’s pregnancy. Nana’s line “We carry these memories inside of we” seems to me the thesis statement of the movie, supporting this idea of an important continuity between generations dating back as far as Africa. (Or as Nana says, “They’re all the same, from the ancestors to the womb.”) Nana refuses to leave the island and seems determined to persuade others to stay, putting her in conflict with people like Viola, who seems to have turned the page along with others who have spent more time on the mainland. She warns that the north is “no land of milk and honey,” and while she’s resigned herself to Eli and Eula moving away, she wants him to keep his family together and continue to celebrate Gullah ways.

I’m curious, Keith, what impact do you think Nana ultimately has on the Peazants in the end? There’s a small faction who seem to think she’s hindered by those remnants of the past she keeps in a tin memory box, but it’s obviously significant that Eli, Eula, and our “unborn child” narrator ultimately decide to stick around. How do we arrive at this conclusion? And what is Julie Dash’s perspective on all this?

Keith: I think Dash, and the film, have the benefit of a perspective unavailable to any of the characters (except maybe the Unborn Child): the knowledge of what happens next. They’ll live in a 20th century of profound change, but also profound struggle. The North won’t be a land of milk and honey, but it’s also a place they can play a role in reshaping. The Sea Islands, for all the history they’ve experienced, seem destined to stay much the same or change at a rate too frustrating for those inclined to build new lives elsewhere. (As a side note, Dash followed the film up with a literary sequel, a novel of the same name set a decade after the events of the film, so anyone curious about what would happen next might get some answers there. Rewatching this has made me curious about it.)

But I don’t think Daughters of the Dust has any interest in those who leave or those who stay. As you point out, Dash took on an enormous task with this film, which uses one day in a particular time and place as a nexus point for many in-progress stories about the experiences of Black people in America. It’s a sweeping film in which distinctive individual characters alternately swim against or get swept along by the tides of history.

Nana belongs firmly in the “swim against” column, and Dash both depicts what she’s losing by refusing to move with her family (most notably, that family itself) but also what would be lost if she didn’t keep to the old ways. She’s the living memory of their time as enslaved people. She’s also getting up in years, so what happens to that memory after she’s gone? The habits she keeps to maintain those memories, namely that tin box, are already mocked as eccentric and would be tough to sustain elsewhere. But, left behind, she can pass these memories down to whoever stays.

The film’s final scenes suggest that everyone who leaves and everyone who stays has made a choice to accept some losses with their gains. That’s true for Eli and Eula but also for Bilal and Iona, who also remain for differing reasons. I sometimes wish the storytelling in this film was a bit less wispy but a more straightforward approach might have made the bittersweetness of the ending harder to achieve. The end both suggests history is huge and complex and contains overlapping eras that put generations in conversation with one another but also conveys a sense of one chapter definitively ending as another begins.

Scott, can I confess to a problem I have with this film? I think it’s sometimes undermined by John Barnes’ near-constant score, a mix of African rhythms and ‘80s new age music. It feels like pedestrian, particularly when paired with the stunning imagery. Did that bother you as well? On a more positive note, do you have a favorite sequence or plot strand? I’m fascinated by the journey taken by Mr. Snead, whose confidence about what he’s learned about history, which he seems to view as marching forward, is undermined by stories of the importation of enslaved people from Africa after it was made illegal. His conversation with Bilal that reveals the grim origins of a local folk tale is particularly chilling.

Scott: I’m glad you mentioned the score as a hindrance, Keith, because I think it does some minor damage to the film overall. Pulling this observation directly from my notes: “score is a combination of African tribal music and the new age stuff you’d hear while getting a massage.” It does blanket the film, as you say, but where it really stands out is when Dash cuts off the dialogue and wants the lingering emotions or Arthur Jafa’s imagery to carry the day. Daughters of the Dust happens to be a movie where the score is more important than it might be otherwise, because Dash is so committed to tweaking storytelling convention. She relies on the music to enhance the film’s strengths, but it undermines them a little.

To get back to the many things that work in the film, I like your point about the “Unborn Child” narrator and how much that allows us to think about what the future holds beyond this one day in 1902. While Eli and Eula’s decision to stay on the island means that their child ultimately won’t experience what those who leave will discover about “the land of milk and honey,” we certainly have an idea of the obstacles that await Black people during that period and beyond. The film seems to support Nana’s belief about the continuity between past, present, and future, and it also expresses, with extraordinary anguish, the pain of the Peazants breaking apart, even if it was inevitable and perhaps the right decision. (Though this one day, with its generous feast and island breezes, makes a good case to stick around.)

One critical aspect of the film we haven’t talked about yet is the sexual violence that binds Eula and Yellow Mary together in trauma and shame. It’s certainly worth noting that our narrator is the product of rape by a white man, and Eli’s anger over what happened to his wife spills over into their marriage and even into his relationship with Nana. He is going to be this child’s father, but he doesn’t yet seem prepared to embrace the role. What happened to Mary isn’t quite as clear, but she’s been spending her time on the mainland forging a more independent life for herself and trying to push back against the idea that she was “ruined” by her past. With her big climactic monologue around her family towards the end, Eula pleads, “If you love yourselves, then love Yellow Mary. She’s a part of you, just as we’re a part of our mothers.” The toll of sexual violence, on top of a larger history of oppression, is a heavy one for the Peazants to carry and you can see that solidarity is both essential and sometimes hard to achieve.

The other piece of Eula’s monologue that moved me relates to the “scars of the past.” She says, “We wear our scars like armor for protection” while also asking everyone to live their lives “without living in the fold of old wounds.” There are specific horrors that come out at various points throughout Daughters of the Dust—a woman forced to nurse a white family’s infant after losing her own during childbirth, a ship full of slaves in iron shackles sinking en masse to the bottom of the sea—and Dash registers the agony of these injustices along with the resilience to move forward, especially as they leave this place and scatter to destinations unknown.

Though we still have Killer of Sheep and “Meshes of the Afternoon” ahead of us on the list, I think it’s significant that Daughters of the Dust is such a high water mark for American independent cinema, particularly the Sundance era that transformed the arthouse landscape to such a huge extent post-sex, lies and videotape. It remains a true independent film from production to distribution, finding its way into theaters through Kino, a company that’s now been around for nearly 50 years, and it exists apart from the frenzied marketplace of the festival, too. It followed no model for what a successful indie might look like, and almost seems sui generis as a piece of filmmaking, quite apart from being a milestone in Black cinema.

It took a few decades for it to make the Sight & Sound list—it didn’t even rank in the Top 250 in 2012—but its placement is a truly proud moment for American film. I complain often about how often American independent films tend to dodge uncomfortable political or historical moments, and that’s to say nothing about the barriers that have faced filmmakers of color. Daughters of the Dust is a crucial anomaly, and it’s been rewarded for standing out.

Next up, we’re going back to Chris Marker after covering him a few months ago with La Jetée. And Sans Soleil will give us 72 more minutes of footage to analyze!

Previously:

#95 (tie): Get Out
#95 (tie): The General
#95 (tie): Black Girl
#95 (tie): Tropical Malady
#95 (tie): Once Upon a Time in the West
#95 (tie): A Man Escaped
#90 (tie): Yi Yi
#90 (tie): Ugetsu
#90 (tie): The Earrings of Madame De…
#90 (tie): Parasite
#90 (tie): The Leopard
#88 (tie): The Shining
#88 (tie): Chungking Express
#85 (tie): Pierrot le Fou
#85 (tie): Blue Velvet
#85 (tie): The Spirit of the Beehive
#78 (tie): Histoire(s) du Cinéma
#78 (tie): A Matter of Life and Death
#78 (tie): Celine and Julie Go Boating
#78 (tie): Modern Times
#78 (tie): A Brighter Summer Day
#78 (tie): Sunset Boulevard
#78 (tie): Sátántangó
#75 (tie): Imitation of Life
#75 (tie): Spirited Away
#75 (tie): Sansho the Bailiff
#72 (tie): L’Avventura
#72 (tie): My Neighbor Totoro
#72 (tie): Journey to Italy
#67 (tie): Andrei Rublev
#67 (tie): The Gleaners and I
#67 (tie): The Red Shoes
#67 (tie): Metropolis
#67 (tie): La Jetée
#66: Touki Bouki
#63 (tie): The Third Man
#63 (tie): Goodfellas
#63 (tie): Casablanca
#60 (tie): Moonlight
#60 (tie): La Dolce Vita

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When cinephiles talk about Hollywood’s best summer movie season, consensus tends to build around 1982, that fabled stretch that brought us E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, The Thing, Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, and Poltergeist. (I’m partial to the vulgarities of Rocky III, too, but I won’t sully up the list.) But t…

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Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning
Dir. Christopher McQuarrie
170 min.

For a man who’s spent months on the run burdened with the knowledge that he’s all that stands between humanity and, as one character later puts it, “the end of the world as we know it,” Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) appears to be in remarkably good shape in the opening scenes of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. Lean, fit, alert, and ready to spring into action, he’s clearly been prepping to redouble his efforts to take down The Entity, the malevolent AI let loose over the course of 2023’s now confusingly titled Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. It’s the film around him that feels a little flabby.

The eighth film in the Mission: Impossible series, Final Reckoning has to attend to a lot of business left unfinished by the seventh film, which ended with The Entity threatening to exert its power on a global scale and Gabriel (Esai Morales), Hunt’s most recent archfoe, planning to harness that power for his own ends. As Final Reckoning begins, The Entity is already deep into what seems to be Phase One of the operation, using its power to blur reality and sew division across the globe,even inspiring a doomsday cult along the way. It’s a bold storytelling move that takes the series deeper into science fiction territory than it’s ever been. But boldness isn’t always successful.

Put simply, The Entity is boring, a dreary addition to M:I’s otherwise colorful rogues gallery. (Gabriel at least gives Hunt a human foil, but Morales isn’t given much to do but sneer for much of the film.) The Entity also requires a lot of explanation—or at least Dead Reckoning thinks it does. Much of the film’s opening act is taken up by laying out what the Entity wants and how it works, with some recapping of the previous film thrown in for good measure. The past weighs heavily on the film in other ways, too, as events from previous M:I films come to play a role in the plot, with mixed results (though the return of a seemingly throwaway character from the first Mission: Impossible pays off nicely).

Much of that might be expected of the eighth film in any series trying to do right by its legacy and expanding cast of characters, particularly one that’s been packaged as Cruise’s farewell to one of his most famous roles (though he’s hedged on that). Less predictable: the overwhelming sense of gloomy solemnity that tamps down any moment that threatens to make the film fun. The stakes have never been higher, we're reminded again and again and again. (And, in case you ever forget, a portion of the film takes place in an underground command center with a countdown clock.)

But what really makes Dead Reckoning disappointing relative to the high standards of the series is its stinginess in parceling out the action set pieces that have been the M:I trademark from the moment Brian De Palma blew up a Prague aquarium nearly thirty years ago. When they do arrive, however, they’re predictably strong, particularly a biplane chase that’s among the series’ best moments. Getting there, however, requires a lot more patience than usual. —Keith Phipps

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning arrives in theaters tonight.

Lilo & Stitch
Dir. Dean Fleischer Camp
108 min.

Released in the summer of 2002, before the wave of computer animation had crested at Disney and other major studios, Lilo & Stitch deployed painted watercolor backdrops of a kind that hadn’t been used since the earliest days of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Dumbo. Though the film is generally seen, with appropriate affection, as a modest 2D comedy with a little anarchy and a lot of heart, it cannot be overstated how much its visual texture, starting with those warm pastels, sets the right tone. Set on Kaua’i, the smallest and least populated of Hawaii’s four main islands, Lilo & Stitch succeeds first at capturing the lush, laid-back quality of its tropical locale and the quirky communities that inhabit it. In an environment like that, not only does the destruction brought by the universe’s most adorable chaos agent really pop, but the family-first message seems wholly rooted in the setting.

There’s rarely any good reason to do a live-action remake of an animated feature, other than the cold calculation of studio beancounters squeezing every last dollar from their IP. Yet Lilo & Stitch is about as bad a candidate for live-action as any film in the Disney catalog, because so much of what makes the original charming is completely obliterated by the process. Without those painted backdrops and minor-key island vibes, the comedy turns grating and loud, and Oahu (subbing in for Kaua’i) looks generic and artificial, despite the photorealism of shooting on location. Given the largely slavish adaptation of the plotting and major setpieces, there’s nothing new to appreciate here other than how the same basic material can result in films on opposite ends of the quality spectrum. The technical wizardry involved in turning a beloved animated gem into a grating piece of shit is like some demented magic trick that audiences are seemingly craving.

The one place the CGI actually belongs in the film is outer space, where a galactic council has determined that Experiment 626, a tiny blue six-limbed alien forged in a genetic lab, is too destructive a force for the universe to tolerate. So 626 is jettisoned to the faraway planet of Earth, where its capsule crash-lands on Hawaii rather than in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, which the creature could not survive. Meanwhile, six-year-old orphan Lilo (Maia Kealoha) lives with her older sister Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong), who has struggled so mightily to take care of Lilo after their parents’ death that a social service worker (Tia Carrere) is threatening to put the kid in foster care. When Lilo spots the rambunctious alien, who she names “Stitch,” at a local animal shelter, she brings him home as a pet and he immediately makes Nani’s case for permanent guardianship that much harder.

There’s a lot of other comic business here, too, mainly coming from a team-up between Zach Galifianakis as Stitch’s deranged inventor and Billy Magnussen as an agent tasked with tracking the alien down and keeping Earth’s natures from ever finding out about it. Of the two, Magnussen fares better, because he commits himself to the physical lurching of a one-eyed alien trying to operate inside the gangly body of his human clone. But much of the film is devoted to the problem-solving exercise of translating animated sequences into a live-action/CGI hybrid, so now when Stitch is smashing a sandcastle like Godzilla, it looks like a three-dimensional being leveling real sand.

How is that better? Who keeps wanting this? These are the sorts of questions that need to be asked in order to blow up the animation-to-live-action pipeline. Lilo & Stitch is bad enough to make those questions louder. — Scott Tobias

Lilo & Stitch opens in theaters everywhere today. And all of those theaters have sticky floors and bedbugs.

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