FLICKERS

GENA ROWLANDS

It was the honor of my life to present Gena Rowlands with the Career Achievement Award in 2015 from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Her close friend, Angelina Jolie, flew in from Italy to join in the evening. I was nervous as a cat standing next to them, but they were both funny and kind and afterward, Gena spent some time talking with me. She invited me to come for a movie night the following week, but a change in her plans kept that from happening. No matter. The night was a dream and a joy and Gena Rowlands, onscreen and off, unforgettable.

Disney Calendar 2025

Each year since 2012, I've written Disney A Year of Animation, a page-a-day calendar published by Chronicle Books. The 2025 edition has just been published and is available on Amazon and via Barnes and Noble Bookstores. Each pages features a final frame image from a classic Disney or Pixar film with text below describing the scene, quoting dialogue or giving film trivia. This year is extra fun because we were able to include Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck shorts--a thing we haven't done since the first year. Grab a copy today!

 

Review: Crossing

CROSSING

By Chuck Wilson

Crossing, the moving new film from Levan Akin, writer/director of the much loved And Then We Danced, opens with a woman known to all as Miss Lia (Mzia Arbuli) striding by the beach outside the Georgian town of Batsumi, along the Black Sea. A retired history teacher, she appears to be heading somewhere specific, but Lia will turn out to be a woman who always walks with purpose, even when completely out of her depth, as she is now. A moment later, she’s spotted by a former student, a surly fellow who’s just been haranguing his half-brother, the 18-ish Achi (Lucas Kankava). Lia says she’s looking for the current location of a niece who had been living in a nearby cottage. Her mother, Lia’s sister, has just died; Lia promised to find her child and bring her home. 

“She calls herself … Tekla,” Lia says hesitantly, as if she’s never said the name aloud before. “She’s talking about one of those trans girls,” Achi proclaims, to the dismay of his brother, who offers Lia his condolences, adding that having a trans relative is “a real tragedy.” Does Lia agree? Maybe.

As she leaves, Achi gives chase, saying he has an address for Tekla in nearby Istanbul. He can be Lia’s guide in the search for Tekla. Clearly desperate to get away, he’s full of promises he can’t possibly keep. Lia looks at him with her arms crossed and lips pursed, a teacher who’s heard every form of nonsense, but she agrees. Later, as you replay Crossing in your mind, you might realize that without Achi’s address for Tekla, Lia would have had no idea where to go next. 

That night, Lia dreams of a young hand with painted nails caressing her face, a hint that Lia needs to find Tekla not just to keep a promise she made to her dying sister but to assuage the guilt she feels for not sticking up for Tekla when she came out as trans. “What will you tell her if you meet her?” Achi asks, but Lia cannot answer. It is the search itself that pulls her forward, even as she approaches the various trans enclaves of Istanbul with fear in her eyes and not a little judgment in her heart.

On an Istanbul ferry, Akin and his And Then We Danced cinematographer, Lisabi Fridell, send their hand-held camera floating around the ship to capture workday passengers being served tea on gilded trays, as if aboard a luxury liner, and on a lower deck, a boy singing and strumming a lute for coins. He has a little girl at his side. Like the heroes from a Vittorio De Sica neo-realist drama of old, the two will eventually cross paths with Lia and Achi, and with Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a trans lawyer riding on an upper deck. 

Akin begins to crosscut among the five, with an emphasis on the charismatic Evrim, who has just graduated law school and is working for a trans rights NGO. Evrim has completed her own transition, and needs only to grease enough palms at the local hospital to obtain her official female identification paperwork, a corrupt process she accepts with surprising cheer. Although it takes most of the film’s running time for Evrim’s daily path to finally cross with Lia and Achi, she’ll prove essential in bringing Lia closer to Tekla.

But even Evrim’s powers have limits, and questions about Tekla linger. Akin is too empathetic a filmmaker to leave Lia hanging, so he devises a narrative flourish — a cinematic wrinkle in time — to settle her unanswered questions, and to ease her heart. The intent is generous, but the sequence feels underwritten and more awkward than affecting.

Akin is on more solid ground when he lets the natural flow of Istanbul life dictate action and feeling. That’s Evrim’s gift, too — taking the day as it comes. At the end of a hard day of searching, she leads Lia and Achi to a restaurant where a wedding celebration is taking place. It’s crowded, but Evrim is greeted warmly. She is known and welcomed all over the city.

You might notice that Achi holds Lia’s chair for her — he is not the loutish boy he was at the story’s start. Evrim pulls him to the dance floor. He hesitates. Can Achi dance? Of course he can. He is Georgian, and traditional dance is second nature. But he won’t dance without Lia. Soon, Lia, Achi, and Evrim have joined in the joyous dance circling the bride. Lia throws her head back, exultant. This won’t be the end of her story, or of her search for Tekla, but for a long sweet moment, she’s in a well-earned state of grace.  ❖

Review: Janet Planet

JANET PLANET

By Chuck Wilson

The remarkable mother-daughter drama Janet Planet opens with a wonderfully staged comic moment. It is late at night in the Massachusetts countryside, circa 1991, and a redheaded girl in round glasses runs from a trailer to a nearby barn and makes a call on the wall-mounted payphone. Punching the keypad with the focused awkwardness of a child, the 11-year-old Lacy (miraculous newcomer Zoe Ziegler) threatens to take her own life if the person on the other end of the line doesn’t come to get her, posthaste.

The next day, Lacy changes her mind, but her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), has already arrived to save her daughter from summer camp. “This is a bad pattern,” Janet says when Lacy begs to stay. In all families, no doubt, there are bad patterns at play, but for Janet, a single mother, and Lacy, an only child, patterns that might be deemed unhealthy (or, to put it more kindly, ill-advised) are retained by first-time writer/director Annie Baker for the audience to glean. A Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright (The Flick), Baker pulls us deep into the quotidian details of Janet and Lacey’s world, where long summer walks, hours lost to dollhouse play, and whispered bedtime conversations cover deep currents of feeling. 

Baker structures her film around titled sections devoted to three visitors to Janet and Lacy’s splendid, woods-surrounded home, beginning with Wayne (Will Patton), Janet’s new live-in boyfriend. Much older than Janet, the cranky Wayne barely speaks, and doesn’t appear too happy to see Lacy returning early from camp. They both want the same thing: to have Janet for themselves.

Janet and Lacy still sleep side by side, with Lacy cupping her hand against her mother’s cheek as she likely did when she was a toddler. Wayne, Janet tells Lacy, doesn’t approve of this arrangement; maybe bunking with Lacy was a way for Janet to avoid intimacy with him. The screenplay skimps on Janet’s motivations for just about everything, frustratingly so at times. Yet the mystery of what she wants and needs is the engine that drives the film, even if there is the suggestion, by the movie’s end, that the mystery is starting to wear thin for her daughter.

Lacy spends an afternoon with Wayne’s daughter — they go running through a mall at top speed. The sequence is vibrantly photographed by Swedish cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff, energizing the film but also making us wish, in vain, for more such friends for Lacy. She’s not a kid who runs much. Instead, she spends her time practicing piano on a lap keyboard and tending to the figurines in her dollhouse, some repurposed from salt and pepper shakers. She pours drinks for them from an empty juice box. Like many bookish children, Lacy is most like a kid when she’s alone in her room. She’d host excellent sleepovers.

Near the end of the film, Janet swirls around a dance floor with a series of partners at a local contra dance. No one partner lasts for long, and it could be said that the three guests who move through her house over the course of the movie are much the same — they’re in on a pass. And so it is that Wayne exits (“End Wayne,” as the title card reads), making room for Regina (Sophie Okonedo), an old friend who’s been living on a counterculture-style arts collective/farm as the romantic partner to the group’s leader, Avi (Elias Koteas). After an afternoon theater piece, which might once been called avant-garde, Lacy witnesses Regina weeping to Janet about something or someone (Avi, we assume), and soon, Regina has moved in.

Okonedo, a renowned stage actress best known to movie audiences for her Oscar-nominated work in Hotel Rwanda, presents Regina as a counterbalance to Janet — she wears her heart on her sleeve. Some days that heart is a bit brittle, which will be her undoing with Janet, but there is space in there for others. In a marvelous car scene, Regina’s attention prompts Lacy to express her loneliness, and Lacy suddenly looks so very tired. But the scene is funny, too, because she and Regina agree: Janet has lousy taste in men.  

Once Regina departs, Avi enters, and Janet Planet droops. Guru or cult leader, he’s an energy zapper, and his presence raises more questions than Baker’s elliptical story structure can answer. But let’s forgive her, because once Avi fades from the tale, the filmmaker re-centers her camera on Lacy. She’s sitting in a chair at the county dance, her eyes locked on her mother, who’s across the room smiling happily as she dances with a succession of friends and strangers, oblivious to the fact that her daughter is realizing she’s seen this dance before. ❖

 

Review: Camp Snoopy

CAMP SNOOPY
by Chuck Wilson

Everything I know about summer camp I learned at the movies … and now from Camp Snoopy, the delightful new Apple TV series created, in part, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Peanuts’ universe’s Beagle Scouts. Snoopy’s round-headed pal, Charlie Brown, is, of course, an old hand at summer camp fun (and its emotional complexities). He’s been going there since June 5, 1965, the day the late cartoonist Charles M. Schulz first placed a forlorn Charlie Brown at a bus window as it drove him away from home. In a follow-up strip, Charlie Brown wrote a letter home, saying, “My first day of camp is over. I lived through it.” 

In the first of the 13 20-minute Camp Snoopy episodes, all directed by Rob Boutilier, Snoopy, wearing his green Beagle Scout troop leader hat (with a yellow paw print as its center emblem), comes into the kitchen where Charlie Brown is preparing his little sister, Sally, for her first camp summer. Suddenly, the telephone rings. It’s Beagle Scout Headquarters with distressing news. Snoopy’s troop is on the verge of being kicked out for not having earned enough performance badges. Snoopy sputters in outrage but then does some quick arithmetic to calculate how many badges his troop has earned: 5 + (-5) = 0. To attain the necessary badges, Snoopy’s five-bird troop, which includes Woodstock, hurriedly prepares their own trip to Spring Lake. Charlie Brown and Sally take a bus. Snoopy calls a taxi. 

This might be the moment to say that Spring Lake and the mountains that surround it have never been so artfully rendered. The Peanuts gang went to camp in some of the 1970s-era feature films and TV specials, but the color palettes of yesteryear pale considerably against the sweet vibrance of Camp Snoopy. The daytime skies over the camp are pastel-blue and the verdant landscape below is darkened with a marker, as Schulz himself might do. At night, the moon shining down on the tents has rings radiating from it, like a child’s painting pinned to the refrigerator. 

There are three segments in each episode, all of them jauntily scored by composer Jeff Morrow, who clearly keeps a reverent ear tuned to the original Vince Guaraldi Peanuts music. Morrow appears happiest when bringing to life the adventures of Snoopy and his Scouts, who demonstrate in each episode a key lesson from their Handbook, such as How to Pitch a Tent and the importance of being Trustworthy. They also steal all sorts of extra screen time. My favorite: Snoopy is sleeping atop his tent and his noisy snores are generating giant Z’s that float up and over the tents of the bird troopers, one of whom gets so annoyed that he flies over with a butterfly net, captures Snoopy’s Z’s and buries them. 

Kids are sure to love the antic “Beagle v. Bug” and relate to “Sally’s Tooth,” which finds her worried that the Tooth Fairy won’t be able to locate her at camp. Lucy is not sympathetic; she knows to always leave a forwarding address. Among the summer’s key events are a cardboard boat regatta, the presentation of the Piney Awards (Pigpen wins Tidiest Bunk), and a bonafide crisis when Linus’s blanket goes missing: “I guess I have to learn to live as one-eighth of myself.” 

In the surprising “Leave It Like You Found It,” halfway through the season, the kids crash into an idyllic meadow the Beagle Scout troop has discovered and end up ruining it with loud music, trash, and general disregard for the natural world. Snoopy is disgusted. The gang quickly sets things right, but the story remains jarring, one of the rare times Charlie Brown and his friends have acted rashly, and, worse, affected the world in a negative way. 

The brilliant 2022 special It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown finds Sally becoming the protector of a lone dandelion growing in the middle of Charlie Brown’s pitcher’s mound. Desperate to clear the field for a big game, Charlie Brown grabs at the flower and the dandelion is destroyed, devastating his little sister. Such moments, so unexpectedly fraught, confirm that the Apple TV Peanuts renaissance spearheaded by Charles Schulz’s son Craig is not only pleasing to the eye but thematically ambitious. And the filmmakers are quietly bringing joy into Charlie Brown’s life. It was there at the end of The Peanuts Movie, and it’s all through Camp Snoopy. He’s still a pessimist and still trips over his own feet (literally), but he also becomes something of a touchstone for his fellow campers. They continually turn to their friend Charlie Brown for insight when they feel down on themselves. Who better? 

Snoopy loves Charlie Brown too. He always has, of course, but in the emotionally evolved Peanuts animation of today, he’s more willing to show it. As summer ends, boy and dog get locked in a storage shed and end up playing astronaut, and they’re having a blast when rescued. Not long after, it’s time to head home. Charlie Brown climbs onto the bus. We don’t see him at the window but we know he’s not sitting alone, despairing at his summer failures. He’s sitting with his friends, sure as anything, and he’s smiling.  ❖

Review: Sting

STING

“Seriously misunderstood creatures, spiders are,” declares Rubeus Hagrid in the film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Hagrid is mourning Aragog, the enormous talking spider that terrified Ron Weasley and was thought sweetly benign by Hagrid. Benign and misunderstood are words that will never be applied to the spider that descends from space to maraud through a New York brownstone in Sting, a terrific new horror movie from Australian writer/director Kiah Roache-Turner. 

First off, it should be said that Sting boasts a fabulous opening title sequence. There’s an asteroid shower, see, passing dangerously close to Earth, dangerously close to Brooklyn, to be exact, and as it does, out shoots a tiny Fabergé-esque egg that blasts through an apartment window. The extraterrestrial lands inside a dollhouse, which is actually a model of the pre-war Brooklyn apartment building where the film will take place. A sleek, eager black spider hatches from the egg and begins scurrying about the walls and ceilings of the elegantly decorated model rooms, before setting down on a lovely miniature baby crib. The camera then pulls back to the apartment holding the model, and the movie begins. 

The arachnid, which is small (but not for long), dashes onto the hand of 12-year-old Charlotte (Alyla Browne), who’s entered this particular apartment (the landlord’s) via the building’s wide air duct, along which she scurries, unseen by her neighbors, much like her new friend. Charlotte is a bit of a spy. Her route back to the apartment that she shares with her mother, stepfather, and new baby brother gives Roache-Turner a chance to offer a quick glimpse, via air vents, of the other neighbors, an approach at once utilitarian and stylish. Back in her room, Charlotte puts the spider in a jar, feeds it a roach, and is astonished when it kills in a blur of motion. “Cool” she says. She clearly has never seen Alien. 

A graphic novel written by Charlotte and illustrated by her stepfather, Ethan (Ryan Corr), has become a bestseller. Ethan is missing deadlines on his solo followup, and, increasingly stressed, may be stealing ideas from his precocious stepdaughter. Sting, which is also the name Charlotte has given to her new eight-legged buddy, devotes a good bit of time to the dynamics between Ethan and Charlotte and her efforts to blame him for the hard fact that her real father never comes round. This familial angst may feel like filler to some, but Corr and Browne give it an emotionality that pays off in the final showdown with Sting. 

For quite a while, the filmmakers suggest the spider more than they show it. In the night, as Charlotte sleeps, the top of the jar turns and, in a lovely touch, cinematographer Brad Shield captures the reflection of the spider’s escape in the moonlight shining against Charlotte’s cheek. Sting gets its first kill (a pet parrot) in the apartment upstairs, prompting a call to Frank the Exterminator (a funny Jermaine Fowler), who dresses and talks like a Ghostbuster but knows his bugs. 

The spider can whistle and mimic other sounds Charlotte makes, but nothing much comes of this trick. No matter. The scene where it crawls down the robe of a grieving mother who lives alone (Silvia Colloca) and then crawls into her mouth is hide-your-eyes yucky, but too brief maybe. Sting could use more gore-fest intensity. Nonetheless, Roache-Turner stages some fun gotcha moments, including a scene where the spider, now officially a movie monster, finally reveals itself to Charlotte’s parents, and to us.

Sting might be only a low-budge spider movie, but it looks great. The apartment house, designed by Fiona Donovon, is ancient and dark, but the rooms are enviably big, and dressed with details keyed to character. It’s nice too that the spider isn’t a CGI effect but an admirably tactile mix of 3D mechanics and puppetry. In this devotion to detail and old-school practical effects, there’s a sense of joy in the telling, and in a talented young director worthy of a bigger playing field.   ❖

Chuck Wilson

Review (from the vault): The Station Agent

THE STATION AGENT

When four feet five inches tall Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage) takes up residence in Newfoundland, New Jersey, it quickly becomes apparent that the townspeople haven’t seen many dwarfs. On his first day, Fin walks to the local convenience store, and just as he’s reaching for a carton of butter, the old lady owner snaps his picture, with a camera she appears to have ever at the ready, like a mini-market Diane Arbus. Fin pauses in surprise, and then continues shopping, seemingly nonplussed, a man long resolved to the inherent weirdness of the tall.

          Fin’s mentor at a Hoboken model train shop died a few weeks ago, and much to Fin’s surprise, left his assistant a tiny plot of land in Newfoundland, upon which sits the town’s now obsolete train depot. Neither Fin nor the actor playing him gives much away, not at first anyway, but Fin is probably thrilled. He’s a trainman. Late at night, he lies on his bed (an old couch) and listens to the them roaring past his new home, heading for elsewhere. Their weight and clatter makes the sofa bed tremble, and although writer-director Tom McCarthy doesn’t linger, it seems likely that Fin doesn’t shut his eyes until after those cars have rattled past, until he’s sure the trains are still running on time.

          For Fin, there’s important restoration work to be done—a lifetime’s worth — and yet people — and who needs them? — keep knocking at the station door. First, and most persistently, like a gnat you can’t swat away, comes Joe (Bobby Cannavale), an adorable, can’t-sit-still, won’t-shut-up Cuban who parks his ailing father’s hot dog truck outside the depot everyday and who desperately wants a pal. Joe’s benignly hot for the haunting Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), who is so klutzy and distracted that she nearly runs Fin down, twice in the same hour. Initially, Fin isn’t any more forthcoming with her than he is Joe, but Olivia’s persistent too, and one night, over a bottle of apology wine (for almost running him over), she tells Fin that her little boy died two years ago. At the news, Fin stares, stunned (Olivia: “Could you not look at me right now?”), for here is someone with more of a right to sadness than he, and that, I think, is the moment Fin reengages with the world. Suddenly, he’s needed.

Despite a flurry of melodrama in the third act, not much happens in this movie, except that three people form a bond, for a lifetime, or maybe for just right now. Either way is fine. Joe, always talking, keeps trailing along behind Fin, pretending to love trains too, until, suddenly, he does. Olivia, whose husband has left her, keeps giving them rides home, and soon, they’re a trio, walking the tracks. And one day, to fulfill a dream of Fin’s, he and Joe take Olivia’s video camera and that lopsided tin can hot dog truck and go racing alongside a speeding train, like storm hunters pursuing a tornado. Fin, riding shotgun, proves to be a lousy cameraman and accidentally turns the camera on himself, forever capturing a glimpse of his own face — eyes wide, soul thrilled. Joe’s beside him, driving wildly, and whooping and hollerin’ like a cowboy roping his first steer. The pursuit is a rush, but mostly, Joe’s happy because he’s made Fin happy. They’re friends. It’s a quick flash of a scene, and yet, watching those two — so ecstatically engaged with life — I thought, Oh. This is what I’ve forgotten, and what Joe knows instinctively: Joy doesn’t just come. Sometimes you have to chase after it. You have to meet it halfway.

Chuck Wilson

Review: Shirley

SHIRLEY

The late Shirley Chisholm is having a moment. The first African American woman elected to Congress, and the first woman to run for president of the United States, Chisholm, who died in 2005 at the age of 80, is the inspiration for Shirley, a compelling but dramatically stilted docudrama starring a superb Regina King. The Netflix film continues an unexpected small-screen Chisholm boon, beginning with Udo Aduba’s vibrant depiction of her in an episode of the Cate Blanchett series Mrs. America and continuing in Hulu’s recent History of the World: Part 2, which finds an exuberant Wanda Sykes starring in a sitcom called Shirley!

Sykes bursts into song as Chisholm attempts to win over delegates at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, an irreverence that isn’t available to King, who must play it straight, per writer-director John Ridley’s determinedly intense reenactment of the convention’s tumultuous behind-the-scenes events. In focusing on Chisholm’s presidential campaign, Ridley, who wrote 12 Years a Slave, as well as the brilliant ABC series American Crime, which also starred King, sacrifices the details and range of Chisholm’s life and accomplishments, a choice that makes for a film that often struggles to find the personal in the political.

Shirley opens in 1968, as the 43-year-old New York state assemblywoman is elected to Congress. Each day, in her first week, she’s stopped in the rotunda by a Southern congressman. He’s a newcomer too, but can’t resist taunting her with the same observation, “Imagine, you making 42.5 like me.” There’s a world of contempt in the way his voice comes down hard on “42.5,” but he’s not prepared for Chisholm to answer him with her own sharp enunciation of the number. He slinks away, abased, however briefly. It’s a small moment, but one of the few in the film that offers a chance to see Chisholm squaring off, with her trademark wit and ferocity, against the institutional racism she must have encountered every day of her political life.

In a beat, three years pass and Chisholm has been petitioned to run for president by her constituents, who’ve raised a bit of money to get her started. She assembles a team of advisors, including her stalwart friends Wesley McDonald “Mac” Holder (the late Lance Reddick) and her head of finance, Arthur Hardwick, Jr. (Terrence Howard), as well as a former aide named Robert Gottlieb (Lucas Hedges) who agrees to be her youth coordinator. When she tells him she’s running for president, Gottlieb exclaims, “Right the hell on, Mrs. C.”

Not many in power support her — not the Congressional Black Caucus, or the leaders of the women’s rights movement. But on the road, Chisholm finds adoring crowds among people of color and among college students eligible to vote for the first time. Along the way, she takes on a young protégé, Barbara Lee (Christina Jackson), a Black activist (and future Congresswoman) who didn’t believe in voting until she met Chisholm.

In a movie overstuffed with men, Jackson and King spark off one another, and share one of the movie’s best scenes. Lee keeps pressing Chisholm to attend a Black political convention in Gary, Indiana, but Chisholm keeps refusing. Frustrated, Lee demands to know why. “They have made it clear they don’t care what Black women have to say,” says Chisholm. “That’s just how they are.” “They?” Barbara asks. “Men,” Chisholm replies. “Always plottin’ and plannin’.”

This is Ridley’s central theme, just as it was for Chisholm. It’s the endless machinations of powerful and wannabe powerful men, white and Black alike, that will prove to be the undoing of Chisholm’s daring last-minute bid to gain a spot for her platform at the ’72 Democratic National Convention in Miami. The road to that disappointment, filled as it is with arcane delegate math, is not completely gripping, but there’s beauty in the light that fills King’s face as Chisholm lists all that will be possible if they’re able to influence George McGovern’s administration. Afterward, her voice catches, as if she can’t believe she dared voice her truest dream.

It is in these small gestures that King finds Chisholm, even when it seems as if the screenplay itself is losing touch with her. It’s a deceptively physical performance. Shirley Chisholm walks and sits with her back straight at all times, but late one night, she comes home from the campaign trail to find that her husband (Michael Cherrie) hasn’t thought to leave her any dinner. She pulls a frozen dinner from the freezer and then sits at the kitchen table, too tired to put it in the oven. Leaning right, she takes off her glasses, crosses her leg, leans her head into her chin and falls asleep, a working woman in a plain kitchen, catching rest when she can, just like the women she grew up with, and like those she hopes to represent in the White House.

Chuck Wilson

Review: Disco Boy

DISCO BOY

Disco Boy, starring Franz Rogowski, who was so extraordinary in last year’s Passages, does indeed have propulsive beats on its soundtrack. But though the idea of club dancing as catharsis is central to its resolution, much of the film’s action takes place in settings of war and preparation for war. A striking first feature that might be too surrealistic for some and not enough so for others, this is a hard movie to pin down, which may be why it lingers in the mind.  

For his debut feature, the gifted, Italian-born writer/director Giacomo Abbruzzese deftly channels a bevy of heady influences, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s film adaptation, Apocalypse Now, to Claire Denis’s classic French Foreign Legion drama, Beau Travail, itself a riff on Melville’s Billy Budd. There might even be a hint of Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, a great, hallucinatory novel about a soldier walking out of the jungles of Vietnam, hoping to get to Paris. Those who are a bit fuzzy on such influences won’t be lost. The filmmaker folds them in organically and leads instead with setting and character. 

Abbruzzee opens, enigmatically, with shots of sleeping soldiers in a jungle setting and of a beautiful woman and a commanding man, a leader, who, like her, gazes directly into the camera as if daring us to reduce them to stereotype. This is the Niger Delta. She is Udoka (Laëtitia Ky) and he is her brother, Jomo (Morr Ndiaye). Keep them in mind. The director will return to them after a long detour to Europe. 

In Poland, Aleksei (Rogowski), a young Belarusian immigrant without national identity papers, and his friend Mikhail (Mical Balicki) slip away from a tourist bus to make their way to the countryside, and ultimately, they hope, to France, where they plan to join the French Foreign Legion. Late on a rainy night, to encourage one another as they try to cross the turbulent waters of the Oder River, the two men call out “Bordeaux!” and “Crème Caramel” — their notion of the essence of French life. Only one will survive.    

In France, Aleksei joins the Legion, which promises at the end of five years’ service a French passport and even a new name. For a man without papers, this is nirvana. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, Jomo has gathered together the young men of his village to fight against the American and European oil companies whose refineries are poisoning the land and water. This small band of militants knows how to wave their guns and look fierce for a visiting VICE TV reporter, but behind the macho bluster, they’re sweetly young, and probably in over their heads. An aerial wide shot of the Gulf of Guinea coastline, with smoke-spewing smokestacks and refinery fires filling the skyline, is crushing. The film’s sterling cinematography is by Hélène Louvart (The Lost Daughter).

When Jomo and his men kidnap three French oil execs, Aleksei and five other Legion soldiers arrive to launch a rescue. Is this Aleksei’s first mission? Abbruzzese isn’t big on details (which might drive some viewers crazy), but since Aleksei is acting as team leader, probably not. But this may be one fight too many. The sight of government soldiers burning Jomo and Udoka’s village upsets him. He wants to help, but can’t. We don’t know Aleksei’s life story, but maybe there are echoes of someone he lost in the past in the terror he’s witnessing on this night. Disco Boy, it would seem, is all about mirrored histories. 

From here, the film glides into Heart of Darkness territory. Falling into the Niger River, Aleksei and Jomo fight each other, brutally, and in the aftermath Aleksei does what he was unable to do for Mikhail that terrible night on the Oder: He pulls Jomo from the river. Is Aleksei a soldier in this moment and in the poignant minutes that follow, or is he simply acting as a citizen of the world?  

On leave in Paris, Aleksei goes to a club and finally orders “Bordeaux.” As he gulps his wine he sees a masked female dancer onstage, who will trigger something akin to a psychic break in him. Maybe it’s been coming for a while. Maybe he’s haunted by events on the Niger. His commander says Aleksei risks becoming a “ghost.” Perhaps he’s about to be truly free. 

Rogowski gives nothing away but somehow suggests all possibilities. In its final scenes, Disco Boy echoes the troop and solo dance movements from the much revered Beau Travail, a mad and nervy move a young director would only dare when he has a lead as riveting and emotionally daring as Franz Rogowski. He’s a reason to go back to the movies. ❖

Chuck Wilson

Review: Origin

ORIGIN

Watching Origin, the mind-stirring new film from writer-director Ava DuVernay, I found myself leaning forward, the way you do when a friend you haven’t seen in a long time relates an intensely personal tale of loss or love or both. University students no doubt do the same when Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian portrayed in the film by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, stands before them, lecturing. Wilkerson’s 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents became a surprise bestseller during the pandemic. For the unlikely film version, DuVernay, who is skilled in both documentary (13th) and docudrama (Selma, When They See Us), sets out to bring Wilkerson’s ideas to a wide audience by placing the author’s life and the history she unearths side by side. The result is both unwieldy and deeply moving. 

Here is a rare and excellent thing — a major dramatic feature about a Black woman intellectual. DuVernay is blessed in Ellis-Taylor, who played the Williams sisters' mother in the tennis drama King Richard. She has a great gift for both elucidating arcane ideas and for filling Wilkerson’s many moments of solitary reflection with resonant meaning. The author suffers a great personal loss just as she’s about to begin her book project. Ellis-Taylor infuses Wilkerson’s intellectual journey with the abiding current of that loss. 

In the first of many historical reenactments, DuVernay begins with the February 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost) by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. It’s a heartbreaking sequence. When a magazine editor (Blair Underwood) asks the film’s Isabel to write about the case, she resists, but after listening to the 911 calls from Zimmerman and a neighbor who heard Martin crying out, she knows she must dig deeper. (The film utilizes the real 911 tapes.)

Isabel is troubled by the terminology we use to describe such events. Zimmerman may have been a racist, but was there something more at work? “Racism as the primary language to understand everything is insufficient,” Isabel tells her editor.

She is fascinated by the story of a German factory worker (Finn Wittrock) in love with a Jewish woman (Victoria Pedretti) who was captured in a photograph crossing his arms and refusing to salute Hitler like the workers around him. In the Nazi structure, Isabel sees an example of the caste system, a social hierarchy rooted in the accepted superiority of one class of people over another.

The most famous such system existed in India, where Dalits, or “untouchables,” have long been made to live in barren poverty while performing the most demeaning of social services. Late in the film, a scene depicting a man toiling deep into a vat of human excrement is juxtaposed against recreations of the Middle Passage of enslaved Africans as well as Jews being separated upon arrival at a concentration camp. This quick collage of harrowing imagery, while familiar to many, feels essential to this moment of a faltering collective memory.

Isabel begins her work by traveling first to Germany, where she stands one night before the shining light of “The Empty Library,” a public memorial to a 1933 book burning by Nazi Party university students, the reenactment of which may reverberate for moviegoers against memories of recent hate marches here in America. In Berlin, she’s shown documents revealing a 1933 meeting of Nazi lawyers who found in American Jim Crow laws all the inspiration they needed to begin preparing German society to accept “the Final Solution.”

The first hour of Origin moves in fits and starts, as if the filmmaker, like Isabel, is finding her way toward a unifying structure. At the film’s midpoint, Isabel attends a family picnic and begins explaining (or over-explaining) her thesis to her loyal cousin Marion (a marvelous Niecy Nash-Betts). “One more time, in English,” Marion says. “A little less Pulitzer Prize.” She continues, “Make it plain,” and as if heeding that call, DuVernay’s storytelling becomes more focused and direct. 

It’s in the rich details of the personal that Origin soars. In one beautiful scene, the presence of which seems meant to suggest that the people in our very own lives have a living history worth documenting, Isabel records the remembrance of Miss (Audra McDonald), a longtime friend. Miss’ story of a belittling high school principal contains gratitude toward her father even as its specifics fill her with both pain and anger, a range of emotions that ripple across McDonald’s face all at once. Hers is a brief, classic performance. 

Origin is challenging. It requires us to participate, to lean in, to listen. I’ve seen it twice and though I can see that it could be shorter and is sometimes didactic, its rewards are many, not least among them the affecting tenderness with which Isabel and those she loves approach one another. And in a season of good movies, you might be hard pressed to find a sequence as indelible as the final story Isabel is told. It involves a nine-year-old African American baseball player (Lennox Simms) circa 1951, who isn’t allowed to celebrate a championship victory with his white teammates. Like Trayvon Martin and the faces of so many whose histories momentarily intersect with Isabel’s, he’s unforgettable.

Chuck Wilson