The man who killed the British Empire but not the Bigfoot

MISSING LINK

2019

Written and directed by Chris Butler

Spoilers: moderate

Farewell my concubine

LEGEND OF THE DEMON CAT

2017 PRC/2019 USA

Directed by Chen Kaige

Written by Hui-Ling Wang and Chen Kaige (based on the novel Sramana Kukai by Baku Yumenakura)

Spoiler alert: mild

Oh the huge manatee

CHILDREN OF THE SEA

Kaiju no kodomo

2019 Japan/2020 USA

Directed by Ayumu Watanabe and Kenichi Konishi

Written by Hanasaki Kino (based on the comic by Daisuke Igarashi)

Spoiler alert: I feel like I'd need to have understood what happened in order to spoil it, but hey, let's say "moderate"

Child of light and darkness

DARK PHOENIX

2019

Written and directed by Simon Kinberg

Spoiler alert: severe

Terminatrix

ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL

2019
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
Written by Laeta Kalogridis and James Cameron (based on the comic, like, all of the comic, Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kushiro)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Pacifics

RIDE YOUR WAVE
(Kimi to, Nami ni Noretara)

2019 Japan/2020 USA

Directed by Masaaki Yuasa

Written by Reiko Yoshida

Spoiler alert: moderate

Reviews from gulag: And 2019's still stinking up the place, part 3

In this installment: I Lost My Body, Atlantics, and Penguin Highway.

I LOST MY BODY
I Lost My Body, always the most purely-theoretical of this year's five contenders for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, is indeed one of those cartoons—foreign, weird, comparatively modest—for which just being nominated really was an honor, the extra eyeballs drawn to it by an Academy Award nomination always the best-case scenario for its existence.  I won't say it don't deserve them eyeballs, either.  It's a fun and thrilling, even moving piece of work, driven by a nonsensical but novel premise that could probably only fully work in flat animation in the first place (Body is partly-rotoscoped, and highly CGI-boosted, albeit mostly only in terms of backgrounds).  Arguably, that premise justifies the whole exercise, and it's certainly bizarre enough to get you to stop and at least think about watching it: I Lost My Body's title is to be taken literally, for it is about a body's part, specifically a right hand, that has been violently separated from its owner, and which has come magically back to life, absconding from the medical fridge it's being kept in so as to undertake an arduous journey across a tough urban landscape to reunite with the body it has, as noted, lost.

Reviews from gulag: And 2019's still stinking up the place, part 2

In this installment: Knives Out, Ready Or Not, and Black Christmas.

KNIVES OUT 

I mean, yeah: 2019 was definitely the year of Me Not Getting It.  But "not getting it" seems like an awfully weird sentiment to voice about Rian Johnson's Knives Out, which is mercilessly obvious in the "it" it intends you to get, while simultaneously committing (hell, if you listen to critics, you'd think Johnson had signed a pledge or something) to being the proverbial fun time at the movies.  It's not even not a fun time.  It's more like 130 minutes is a long span to spend having its particular brand of a fun time, much of which is dedicated to the overfreighting of a theme (singular) that still winds up slightly-incoherently expressed, and to a structure that spends the first half hour unproductively faking you out regarding the movie you're here to enjoy.  I mean, at bottom, it's basically an episode of Monk, right?  One of the ones where you know the broad shape of the crime but are left in the dark as to the rest?  What's so hard about that?  Heck, that would be great, I love Monk, except Knives Out is more than three times as long, still with roughly the same amount of content, and the Poirotish super-detective it showcases (I like Poirot too) is almost entirely uninteresting, just in and of himself.  It must be said: that this may start a franchise, and may have been intended to start a franchise—a franchise revolving around Benoit "CSI KFC" Blanc (Daniel Craig, and yes, these are the jokes, folks)—remains the most insoluble puzzle of the tale.

After the rain

WEATHERING WITH YOU

aka Tenki no Ko (Weather's Child)

Chalk another one up for the most important animator working today, even if it's not as good as his other masterpieces.

2019

Written and directed by Makoto Shinkai

Spoiler alert: moderate

Army of two

1917

A technical juggernaut, 1917 nevertheless finds the soul beneath its spectacle and justifies itself, in every frame, as the death dream of a world lost in the trenches a century ago.

2019

Directed by Sam Mendes

Written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns and Sam Mendes

Spoiler alert: high

Reviews from gulag: And 2019's still stinking up the place, part 1

Happy (belated) New Year!  Before we get started with 2020, there's still a lot of debris to clear out from 2019.  In this installment: In Fabric, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and 47 Meters Down: Uncaged.

IN FABRIC

The Duke of Burgundy, Peter Strickland's second feature, was one of my ten favorite films of 2015.  Hell, it was one of my eight favorite films.  That's a lower bar than it would usually be—2015, as a cinematic year, has been exceeded in its lousy mediocrity only by the year that's just passed—but it's still a sign of some modest excellence to have cleared it, and I think it's a pretty great movie, an art-horror romance ribboned with surrealistic and absurdist touches that still has a real, genuinely emotional story of relationship dysfunction to tell beneath the opaque glaze of 70s-nostalgic Europastiche that represents its director's preferred, and only, mode of artistic expression.  In Fabric, Strickland's follow-up to The Duke of Burgundy, is rather more the follow-up you might've expected from Berberian Sound Studio, his first film.  That is, it's an ultimately-tiresome exercise in pursuing his various aesthetic interests which, in Strickland's conciliatory gesture toward his film being about something, or anything—and, in fairness, this does put it miles ahead of Sound Studio—winds up being about an absolute shitload of "somethings," which all add up to far less than the sum of their parts by the end.

Is this the end of the world, the death of the light?

A HIDDEN LIFE

Don't call it a comeback, but even so, A Hidden Life really is the best Terry since The Tree of Life, and it might be even better than that.

2019

Written and directed by Terrence Malick

Spoiler alert: inapplicable

Wars is hell

STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER

And The Rise of Skywalker proves that we have grown too fond of it.

2019

Directed by J.J. Abrams

Written by Chris Terrio and J.J. Abrams

Spoiler alert: severe

Look for the union label

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Reviews from gulag: Everybody's gotta start somewhere

Sure: I have an affinity for the bigger side of filmmaking,  but it's nice sometimes to check in on the other side of the spectrum.  Or, you know, it's supposed to be.  Oh well: as The Simpsons once observed, it's their first day.  So let's take a look at three first films from 2019: Luz, Cosmos, and Paradise Hills.

LUZ (Tilman Singer)

I know I mention "running time" a lot in these reviews, and almost always in a negative way; I mean, there's a lot to complain about when it comes to the cinema of the 2010s, but to my mind there's not a single more terrible or more pervasive problem than the slow creep of runtimes that began in the 1990s and exploded into absurdity in the 2010s, as every blockbuster started extending itself past two hours, often for no good reason, and often far past two hours, with an eye toward three.  It's why it's such a joy when a movie like Crawl appears, clocking in at 89 minutes and hence obliging itself be mostly killer, not so much filler.  It also probably partially explains why I like cartoons so much, since they usually have some measure of restraint, due to their expense as well as their presumed audience of babies.

So, with nothing else to go on, Luz's 70 minute runtime seems like a selling point; it's easy to presume a movie that barely lasts an hour couldn't even have the time to be bad.  But that's not all we have to go on (I mean, I've seen it, so I have everything about it to go on, but bear with me here): let's assume further that we know that Luz is actually the 70 minute thesis project by German film studies graduate Tilman Singer.  This is where you observe, "Aren't student films usually short subjects?"  Yes.  Indeed they are.

Turn away and slam the door

FROZEN II

On the plus side, it's not preceded by a 21 minute Coco short.

Directed by Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck

Written by Marc E. Smith, Robert Lopez, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Chris Buck, and Jennifer Lee

Spoiler alert: moderate

What do you do with the mad that you feel?

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Too good in certain limited ways to dismiss, and way too easy to forget to wholeheartedly recommend.

2019

Directed by Marielle Heller

Written by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster (based on the article "Can You Say... Hero?" by Tom Junod)

Spoiler alert: mild and virtually inapplicable anyway

King Week: You taste like whiskey

In which we arrive at the true purpose of this Stephen King mini-marathon, a film that I have some serious issues with, yet still could not recommend enough, particularly given how few of us went to go see it when we should have.

DOCTOR SLEEP

2019

Written and directed by Mike Flanagan (based on the novel by Stephen King—and, y'now, the screenplay, by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson)

Spoiler alert: moderate

The night is short, walk on boy

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

80 minutes of some of the more artful, emotionally-intuitive filmmaking that 2019 had to offer versus 60 minutes of pure clunking ego.

2018 PRC/2019 USA

Written and directed by Bi Gan

Spoiler alert: moderate

King Week: He who kind of chills out and doesn't get too worked up about it behind the rows

In which Halloween-related marathoning has resulted in reviews of several spooky movies from the mind of the world's favorite horror author, Stephen King.

IN THE TALL GRASS

2019

Written and directed by Vincenzo Natali (based on the novella by Stephen King and Joe Hill)

Spoiler alert: moderate