Jason Bailey
After doubling up my inventory of new films after my last dispatch from the Toronto International Film Festival, I can report that the best film I saw there was The Fire Inside, which director Rachel Morrison and screenwriter Barry Jenkins take from the true story of Claressa Shields, “the teenage phenom from Flint, Michigan” who won the gold medal in women’s middleweight boxing at the 2012 Olympics. We all have an internal moviegoing clock, and you may feel yours going cuckoo here; she wins that medal at the 2/3 mark, when we’re all expecting that to be the triumphant conclusion. And then, miraculously, the picture keeps going, subverting the sports-movie Cinderella story formula and reminding us of the reality of sports entertainment (and the tenuous place of women athletes within it). Morrison started out as a cinematographer—her credits include Mudbound and Black Panther—and her fight photography is expectedly kinetic. But she also finds the beauty in the everyday, creating a credible reality in which her actors (particularly Ryan Destiny and Brian Tyree Henry in the leads) can shine without seeming to show off. It’s a deeply moving film, and a reminder of the dimensions that are possible even within the most seemingly staid formulas. Grade: A
It’s become a bit of a cliché to applaud an actor’s “bravery” when they’re doing a sexual role, but there’s really no more appropriate descriptor for what Nicole Kidman is doing in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl. During the focal couple’s first real, physical encounter, when he touches her for the first time and goes to work on her, Reijn holds on Kidman’s face, in a fairly tight close-up, for what seems like an eternity—and Kidman lets us in. It’s stunning, how vulnerable she is in that scene; this is the most private moment an actor can show us, and even when it’s within the confines of the character (and that’s certainly the case here), it still feels like we’re privy to something we’re not supposed to see.
Babygirl knows what it’s like to be inside a relationship like this, how it feels when the thing you need, on a basic and feral level, exceeds your control of it. Romy knows (and the film does too) that she’s potentially undercutting her job and jeopardizing her family, but as she puts it—in a scene of next-level acting by Kidman—“There has to be danger, there have to be things at stake.” It’s rare to find a filmmaker who even understands that, much less is savvy enough to convey it within a dramatic narrative without seeming like they’re making a movie about kamikaze pilots. It falls apart a bit in the home stretch, when the conflicts and conclusions veer into the kind of conventional and predictable territory that, until then, Reijn has studiously avoided. But if she fumbles there, it’s forgivable; what she achieves here far outweighs the mild shortcomings. Grade: B
There are, to be fair, flashes of good writing and some successful performances in Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s real-time dramatization of the run-up to the 1975 debut episode of Saturday Night Live. But there’s never even the briefest moment of immersion, nary a fleeting sense that we’re watching a story unfold, rather than a carefully cultivated affirmation of our pop culture priors. By the time Willem Dafoe’s blowhard network suit fumes, “Perhaps you kids aren’t quite ready for prime time,” we’re getting into full-on bullshit biopic “Yes, Dewey Cox, with meditation there’s no limit to what we can imagine” territory. And that’s before we get to the payoff with the brick floor, which may be the single clumsiest metaphor I’ve seen in a motion picture in longer than I’d care to remember. Grade: D+
David Gordon Green made his name with small, character-driven indie movies, and he tends to return to that form when his attempts at big, mainstream moviemaking go awry. He did it with Prince Avalanche, Joe, and Manglehorn after his run of studio comedies went sideways; he was back at TIFF with Nutcrackers, a “home base” movie that feels especially necessary after the likes of Halloween Ends and The Exorcist: Believer, but it also feels even more calculated than usual. Ben Stiller stars as a hotshot real estate agent called to rural Ohio to care for his utterly feral nephews after the tragic death of their parents; they live on a working farm, and if you don’t think we’re going to see our uptight yuppie chasing some chickens, you haven’t seen enough movies. Stiller’s done this role a thousand times (my god, he has to get back to Chicago for an Important Presentation—were they having a sale at the tired trope outlet?), though he does manage to dig out some new textures, and his offhand line readings and little comic tics are as reliable as ever. But it all shakes out pretty much as expected, and the ending is pure treacle, no matter how many artsy indie flourishes Green slaps on it. Grade: C
Julie Delpy opens her ambitious ensemble comedy/drama Meet the Barbarians with the on-screen text “Once upon a time in Paimpont,” and that’s a smart note to start on: this is a satire settled snugly in the hows and whys of the current sociopolitical moment, but it’s also a fairy tale in which a happily-ever-after is never really in doubt. Paimpont is a cozy little French village that has opened its doors to Ukranian refugees, only to find that “Ukranians are in high demand on the refugee market” and they’re being sent a Syrian family instead. Conflicts arise, tiny infractions that (credibly) become big deals, so the picture is something of a comedy of manners, with equal parts charm and cringe. The characters are distinct and mostly likable (and the focal family are not just used as comic props, but made real characters of depth and dimension), though the tone is tricky, with Delpy sometimes letting it tip too far into tragedy or farce. The resolution is totally pat, of course, but she’s summoned up enough warmth and goodwill by then for a pass. Grade: B-
The central conceit of The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey’s bio-musical Better Man is that he presents his subject, Britpop bad boy Robbie Williams, as he says he sees himself: as a dancing monkey. It’s a clever little gimmick that kinda-sorta works initially, but as the story progresses, it becomes a quick and easy (lazy, even) way to add a sheen or freshness or subversiveness while still gripping the musical biopic playbook tightly. Gracey’s approach is playful and ribald, the musical numbers are spiritedly staged, and the montages are appropriately manic. But the overlong picture keeps hitting the same beats over and over again, like a spectacularly limited drummer, and the dialogue in the inevitable scenes of bottoming-out conflict is a catalog of all the usual, dusty cliches. Grade: C-
South African photojournalist Ernest Cole published his book House of Bondage in 1967, an essential document of that nation during the shameful Apartheid era. Fifty years later, 60,000 of his previously unknown and unpublished negatives were discovered in a Swiss bank vault. “This is the story of what happened between those two dates,” notes the on-screen text of Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, and director Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) does that job admirably; he attempts to create, simultaneously, a bio-doc of Cole, an appreciation and analysis of his work, and the story of South Africa’s considerable shifts in that period. The photos, private, powerful, heartrending portraits of poverty in both that country and ours, are riveting, evocative, and brilliant, and Cole’s words are given life by LaKeith Stanfield’s often searing, sometimes halting, always thoughtful voice-over narration. That narration also creates a snag, though; the viewing experience is dogged by some documentary ethics questions, as you may found yourself distracted by guessing which are and are not his actual, written words (especially in the later sections). That complaint aside, this is a beautiful, poignant piece of work. Grade: B
Kill the Jockey is the kind of movie where our hero asks an underworld acquaintance for a gun, and when he’s handed the bag with the weapon, the tough guy adds, “I also put some hot dogs in there. You are too skinny!” It’s a crime thriller with a kooky, cockeyed approach, stylish and bewildering, right from the jump; the director is Luis Ortega, a filmmaker from Buenos Aires with a giddy absurdist streak and a gift for striking compositions (the cinematographer is Timo Salminen, Aki Kaurismäki’s go-to). What begins as a riff on American boxing noir turns into something much stranger, Lost Highway as remade by Almodovar, with an unexpected (and refreshingly cheerful) turn into a trans narrative. It doesn’t always land, and doesn’t make much sense. But it certainly doesn’t bore. Grade: B
