Author page: mrqe

Mounted horses bifurcate the hazy horizon, armed silhouettes in furious charge dash towards a village beneath them; in seconds, we see above and below, the predators and their prey, a telephoto lens collapsing space to signal their invasion.

Take this village too?

Take it! Take it!

Not so fast!

We just took their rice last fall.

They’ll have nothing now.

Very well.

We’ll return when that barley’s ripe!

It’s only a matter of time. They will come back. They must hire samurai — seven.

Speaking on the timeless power of “Seven Samurai,” filmmaker Jane Campion declared “I love it for its balance of humor, drama, and its deep affection for our noble and flawed natures.” With his landmark classic, Japanese writer-director Akira Kurosawa birthed the modern adventure film, and as it hits its 70th anniversary, it prevails as a thrilling, effervescent, yet boldly sullen epic. Between the volleys of arrow-fire and fraught duals, Kurosawa’s made a humanist masterpiece of our best and worst selves, towering above its many imitators nearly a century later. It is said to be among the most influential movies of all time. Without it, we not only wouldn’t have “The Magnificent Seven” (there have been more than a dozen straight remakes) or “Star Wars.” The influence of “Seven Samurai” is so generationally seismic, it’s as though it has penetrated the nitrate matter of film itself.

“Seven Samurai” contains dozens, possibly hundreds, of cinematic techniques that revolutionized how movies tell their stories. To summarize each of them is a Sisyphean task; in trying to list them all, you would only find another. I’ll do my best. To start, Kurosawa gave the kiss of life to outdated samurai archetypes, giving them a soul. He is the master of when to go wide, arranging actors with paint-brush precision (the villagers hunched in a demure circle, sitting in terror of their imagined end), and when to use the close-up, reserved for maximum impact (the village elder commanding them to find “hungry samurai”). Kurosawa mastered the disciplined practice of setup and payoff, and the way James Cameron stages the first half of his movies as a careful propping up of dominoes — locations, props, character motivations — only to knock them down in the climax, can be directly linked to “Seven Samurai.”

He perfected when to keep the camera steady, as in the famous duel, to accentuate the movement in-frame. And likewise, when to move it, to create momentum. Kurosawa was among the first to intercut footage at differing speeds, using slow-motion to punctuate the brutality of key deaths while the onlookers gazed in the normal 24 frames per second, an effect as central to “Hard Boiled” and “300” as to anime like “Attack on Titan.” Later, “Mad Max: Fury Road” will alternate its framerate shot to shot. His realistic handling of action would change action film forever, with Kurosawa’s cameras racing to keep up with his fighters rushing between the edges of the 1.33:1 frame, as though his multiple cameras were breaking a sweat.

In Kurosawa, his villains frequently die with the same frank brutality as his heroes, finding equality in death, a device Steven Spielberg subsequently used in “Saving Private Ryan.” Motifs are visually reinforced, subverted, and repeated again, Sergei Eisenstein’s rules of Russian montage looms over the 3.5 hour adventure epic. As in the early Westerns, heroes usually move on screen from left-to-right while villains descend right-to-left, yet to show the moral decline of the samurai class, he stages two montages so the samurai move both directions, as if good and evil have become a blur. He knows when to hold his shots and when to unleash a flurry of rapid edits, as when six of the seven warriors rush towards screen-right in a series of six percussive mid-motion match-cuts, as if to layer one over the other, the individual and the group as one. “Seven Samurai,” like all of Kurosawa’s great films, would be called fearlessly experimental if it didn’t flow with the steady exuberance of one of Japan’s woodland streams.

Kurosawa’s own influences are both obvious and contested. They are, at once, refreshingly cosmopolitan and distinctly Japanese, a combination that simultaneously earned him a reputation for “not being Japanese enough” while also priming his films for easy international export. It was he, not his contemporaries Yasujirō Ozu or Kenji Mizoguchi, who became the first Japanese to break through onto the global scene.

He pulled equally from the tragedies of Shakespeare and Noh Theater, the moral psychology of Russian and Japanese literature, the formal might of D.W. Griffith and Eisenstein, and the seedy bowels of film noir. And as any passing Kurosawa-head knows, the director was deeply smitten with the films of John Ford. Almost all of his films, whether his crime pictures or samurai epics, use this genealogy of influence to wrangle with the social unease and search for meaning in post-war Japan. His films ask, “how do we live, when so much has been lost?” giving an existential anchor to stories like when a rookie cop’s gun goes missing, a ronin wanders to town, or a village needs protecting. Arguably no filmmaker welcomed so many cultural traditions as Kurosawa, making it seem inevitable his films, especially “Seven Samurai,” would go on to influence a near-century of future filmmakers as he inspired others to do the same.

You feel the weight of all these influences on “Seven Samurai,” starting with the plot which on the surface is disarmingly simple, but deceptively works as a complex morality play. We meet an impoverished village beset by bandits, and they seek a group of warriors to defend their town from the oncoming attackers. The head of this warrior troupe is Kambei (Takashi Shimura), a wise but weary ronin (a samurai with no master) who recruits a diverse ensemble that ranges from the lethal swordsman Kyūzō (Seiji Miyaguchi) to the lovelorn aspiring samurai Katsushirō (Isao Kimura), who falls for a villager’s daughter. 

The most famous is Toshiro Mifune’s Kikuchiyo, among the great rapscallions on film, who uses the turbulent era in which the film is set to climb the caste ladder and become samurai, mostly by pretending to be one (his comic vulgarity is a clear pull from the supporting characters of Ford’s films, as is how he slowly grows in emotional weight). Together, they arrange a geometric defense of the town, like the flooding of a field to protect one angle of attack, or the building barricades on another, and so on. It is a few against many, and they seek to even the odds by narrowing the enemy’s points of attack, the Battle of Thermopylae set in fields of Japanese lilies and rice. The rain-soaked siege is one of the great action sequences put to film, exhilarating as hell and vibrating with what Lumet called the full “Kurosawa Sound.” Every carefully planted character moment, every thematic seed, comes into transcendent blossom.

A decade before guys like Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah reinvented the noir and western in the 1960s and 70s, Kurosawa was transforming the “Chambara” swordplay film. By supplying the same kinetic thrills as those 30s and 40s classics, Kurosawa got away with outwardly reshaping the samurai caste in an almost meta-textual way, what film scholar Tony Rayns called a “redefinition of warrior identity.” The “bushido” value system of the samurai class not only collided with the Western values of the U.S. occupation and the rapid cultural change that followed, but Kursoawa himself, who sought to create an ahistorical but more aspirational (yet richly human) incarnation of these core Japanese characters.

It’s Shimura’s Kambei who most embodies that ethos, warning Katsushirō from becoming a samurai and joining their near-hopeless cause: “You dream of training yourself, distinguishing yourself in wars, then becoming lord of your own castle and domain… but as you dream those dreams, time flies. Before your dreams become reality, your hair would turn gray like mine. By that time, your parents would have been dead and your friends gone, and you’ll find yourself all alone.”  Kambei’s confession of his lost dreams, mirroring those of the classic samurai, directly connects to what Kurosawa aims to achieve with “Seven Samurai” –– rather than have his warriors fight for land or title, they must defend the villagers as an act of nobility unto itself, beyond material gain. It would be a new kind of Bushido, a banner of virtue a new generation could aspire to meet.

While those earlier films depicted samurai either as noble heroes or endearing rebels, typically slavishly upholding the will of their masters, Kurosawa’s samurai are mostly rapists and thieves. In contrast to Kambei’s project of moral renewal, the only upstanding thing about these ronin is they will stand while stabbing you in the back. In one of the most desperate sections of the film, the villagers are ripped off by a samurai they hope to hire. He steals their rice and flees, a man without honor.

Later, in one of the film’s most famous moments, Kikuchiyo delivers an impassioned speech that reveals the farmers are also more complicated than their popular image suggests, accusing them of also being killers and thieves, “stingy, greedy, blubbering, foxy, and mean!” But who made them beasts, he asks. It is the samurai. This is a point Kurosawa underlines by revealing hero and villain both come from the same broken social system: the bandits raiding the rice farmers are samurai too, and the villagers are nearly as terrified of our seven heroes as they are of their attackers. All sides of the conflict shoulder degrees of complicity, a level of ethical nuance never before seen in a “Chambara” film.

“Seven Samurai” was an instant smash success, the second highest-grosser of its year, proving literary depth could flourish within what was once a throwaway genre, successfully melding the high and the low, the art-film with popular entertainment. That blurring of moral and social categories might make “Seven Samurai” the first truly “revisionist samurai” film nearly a decade before that became in-vogue, simultaneously playing as a rousing celebration and meta-deconstruction of the old “Chambara.” His most devoted of acolytes — notably George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Spielberg — then followed suit, taking that eroded division between genre and substance to heart. 

His seven samurai are self-sacrificing yet complex, fighting for the ideal of a classless utopia where farmer and ronin can co-exist in Zen-like harmony. Yet by “Seven Samurai’s” end, that remains only a dream. The once-forsaken ronin rediscover their usefulness and save the village, but at too great a cost. The lovable scoundrel Kikuchiyo has finally earned his place as a true samurai, only to die in the village’s violent defense along with three others, betraying Kambei’s earlier teaching: “By protecting others, you save yourself.” If only that were true.

As in “Ikiru” made one year prior, “Seven Samurai” shows how hope and failure, loss and victory, seem paradoxically intertwined. If Kurosawa was influenced by Ford, it’s a prescient grace-note that “Seven Samurai” then prefigures the closing shot of “The Searchers,” released two years later. In that iconic final shot, Ethan may have rescued Debbie, but he cannot rejoin the family unit, framed in a doorway he cannot pass, doomed to forever wander a purgatorial horizon. In “Seven Samurai,” Kambei knows that same dour truth. As the surviving ronin stand between the village graveyard and the farmers in hymn they helped save, they know theirs is a legacy of blood and violence they can never fully cleanse; they would only spoil the soil they’ve helped save. They, like Ethan, must depart. If the enduring legacy of “Seven Samurai” is that it hasn’t had one influence but many, its greatest might be how Kurosawa proved you can deliver pathos and poetry to any genre, by making a paean to the necessity of selfless heroism between the clash of steel and song. 

The restored version of “Seven Samurai” opens at Music Box Theatre today and is touring around the country.

“Istanbul is a place…where people come to disappear.” This is the sad conclusion arrived at by late in this moving film by one of its principal characters, Lia, a stern-faced older woman who has crossed over into the Turkish capital from the Black Sea’s Batumi, a desolate-looking spot in Georgia. A retired school teacher, she has left her home after making a promise to her now-dead sister. The promise was to find that woman’s child, who’s living in Turkey. All Lia has to go on is a name, and the fact that the now-adult child is transgender.

The movie, written and directed by Levan Akin, begins in the messy, tumultuous house where Achi, a young man who’s for all intents and purposes still a boy, lives miserably under the thumb of his older brother. Lia happens by the house, is recognized by one of its residents, and on the spot Achi concocts a tale, saying he knows the niece, Tekla, and has an address for her. He attaches himself to Lia, who accepts his company reluctantly, and soon they’re off, settling awkwardly in cheap lodgings and combing the poorer areas of Istanbul with not much to go on but hope.

The two actors who play Lia and Achi, Mzia Arabuli and Lucas Kankava, are marvels. Kankava has a wide-open face that registers Achi’s boundless naivete, which is always there no matter how cocky or obdurate he makes himself. Arabuli’s own expression as Lia is often pinched, but as time wears on her, and as she starts to let herself go in a “what the hell” sort of way — she likes to dip into a bottle of a fermented drink called “chacha,” a habit she initially tries to hide from Achi — a pained vulnerability makes itself felt. These are two lost souls who make an unlikely temporary fishbowl for themselves, far from homes they may never return to.

On one of their ferry rides, Akin’s camera makes a graceful camera move away from the anxious Lia and Achi and settles on the more content-in-the-moment face of a trans woman, whose story the movie then picks up. This is not, as is soon made clear, Tekla. The character’s name is Evrim, and she’s a woman who’s found a purpose. Near to completing a law degree, she works for a trans rights NGO that also looks into various cases in poorer neighborhoods; at one point we see her springing a young boy and his younger sister, who act on the peripheries of the movie’s central story threads, from jail. She’s confident and compassionate, enjoys a fairly robust sex life, but she’s subject to condescension — at best — from the various authority figures she’s obliged to deal with. Deniz Dumanli’s portrayal of the character is extraordinary, grounded, vanity-free.

Lia and Achi’s story will intersect with Evrim’s, but not right away. Akin is here working in a tradition established in Italian Neo-realism — and by the end of the film, he shows he can turn on the viewer’s tear ducts as deftly as De Sica did in his prime — but his narrative approach brings a vivid freshness to the proceedings. The camerawork he concocts with cinematographer Lisabi Fridell, often shooting through windows and doorways, often gives the viewer a “fly on the wall” feeling, but never becomes voyeuristic. It invites empathy, not titillation. And the movie’s portrait of Istanbul — roiling, unglamorous, and yes, packed with stray cats — makes the city a character in and of itself.

Within the first two minutes of Apple TV+’s “Lady in the Lake,” we learn that one of the series protagonists is dead. We watch as Cleopatra “Cleo” Johnson (Moses Ingram) is flung from the shoulders of an unnamed man into a lake, until her body disappears beneath the murky waters. Throughout her death, her monologue, done through voiceover, makes it apparent that while she may be dead, Cleo will haunt the narrative, and the people who had a hand in her demise. She directs this monologue to one character in particular: the series’ other protagonist, Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman). “You came in at the end of my story” she tells Maddie. “And turned it into your beginning.”

The series is based on the 2019 Laura Lippman novel of the same name, which was inspired by two real-life murders that happened during Lippman’s youth in Baltimore. The seven-part limited series follows Maddie, a Jewish housewife who is stirred out of her weary existence after a young girl from her community goes missing. An avid writer in her free time, she’s desperate to make a name for herself by investigating the girl’s disappearance, but while it initially feels like it comes from a selfish place, perhaps she’s closer to this missing girl than she wants to admit.

On the other side of Baltimore is Cleo Johnson, who Maddie first spots in a department store window. She’s dressed to the nines, almost immobilized through her modeling: a perfect representation of a doll. The way she’s framed in this first scene directly references how Maddie will continue to see Cleo throughout the series, stagnant and a perfect prop to use for her own successes. While this interaction is the only one they directly share, over voiceover it becomes clear that the two will somehow become tethered together. As viewers follow Maddie’s investigation, and her tone-deafness to the struggles of the Black community she moves into, Cleo’s final weeks play out in a similar fashion to Maddie’s.

The two women share little, yet their stories are paralleled. Maddie’s life as a housewife crumbles quickly — within the show’s first episode — and the life Cleo is attempting to build for herself and her children is unwoven by powers out of her control. While Maddie seeks agency by moving out of the suburbs and into a Black Baltimore neighborhood, Cleo’s story becomes gripped and controlled by the men around her. The contrasting of their stories could leave a bad taste in one’s mouth, but as the series unravels, director Alma Har’el handles this story with an appreciated amount of care. 

Cleo is often heard recounting the story at hand through narration, but after the first episode she takes a much larger role. Ingram and Portman share almost as much screen time as the other, and the show is all the better for it. Her character’s name, Cleopatra, is one that commands power and it’s fitting for a character played by Ingram, who feels revelatory to watch. With each tear that leaves her eye and each broken word that leaves her mouth, you feel as if you’re watching a star be born. The series is at its most interesting when she’s on screen, and thankfully, it’s apparent that Har’el and her camera both know this. 

The camera also frames its surrounding actors and set pieces exquisitely. There are an abundance of club scenes throughout “Lady in the Lake,” but there is a singular sequence featuring Ingram in Episode 3, that is a series standout. After witnessing something she shouldn’t have that begins to haunt her every move, Cleo takes to the club to release her inhibitions. Ingram throws her body around as if she’s exorcising demons, feet thumping on the club floor until it almost drowns out the singer on stage. Har’el frames the surrounding bodies on the dancefloor as if she’s filming churchgoers at a sermon, understanding this inherent link between dance and freedom. 

This is where “Lady in the Lake” is the best version of itself: when winding plotlines are abandoned for striking sequences that showcase the talents of everyone from the music supervisors to the actors on screen. And this only increases as the show goes on. While its pilot is quite weak, Har’el and everyone involved up the ante with every episode, until it becomes one of the most interesting limited series in a post-“Big Little Lies” world. In a streaming climate filled to the brim with series like this, it takes a lot for them to stand out. Thankfully, it feels as if everyone involved with this project gave it their all, and the result is fascinating to watch. 

“Lady in the Lake” is an adaptation done right, and while the blending of the two stories doesn’t always flow as well as it needs to, it’s impossible to not be intrigued by both Maddie and Cleo’s separate lives. The darkness Har’el leans into gives this series some cutting edge that the genre desperately needs, and it allows the story to bloom into something wholly original. From Mikey Madison reciting a haunting monologue from one of Anaïs Nin’s diaries, to Maddie’s fractured teenage memories, it feels like just when we as the audience think we understand where this show is going, the rug is ripped from beneath our feet, pulling us into the dark unknown along with the series’ characters. 

All episodes were screened for review.

“Caveat,” Damian Mc Carthy’s directorial debut, was unnerving in the extreme. So, too, is his follow-up, “Oddity”. “Oddity” is, if anything, even more unsettling. In “Caveat,” Mc Carthy created a creeping sense of dread and outright terror, sometimes from merely pointing the camera at a slightly ajar door. Mc Carthy has patience as a filmmaker. He can wait. He doesn’t try to overwhelm with easy jump-scares. He allows the sense of uneasiness to build and build. Both “Caveat” and “Oddity” share a fascination with potentially supernatural objects, maybe cursed, but also maybe sentient. In “Caveat,” it’s a toy rabbit with alarming angry glass eyes. In “Oddity,” it’s a life-size wooden man. There’s something weird about these objects. They loom large in McCarthy’s imagination.

“Oddity” opens strong. Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is alone in an old stone country house, far from civilization. There’s a loud knock on the door one night. She opens the peephole and a man (Tadhg Murphy) with a wild glare peers through. He has one glass eye. He tells her, urgently, he saw someone enter the house and she is in terrible danger. Dani is, naturally, suspicious of this scary-looking man, and she is hesitant to believe him. It could be a trap. She did hear creaking noises upstairs, though. Maybe he’s right? But does she really want to walk outside with this stranger?

The film then, surprisingly, jumps a year ahead, leaving us in suspense. Dani was killed that night, and the event is cloaked in mystery. Her widower Ted (Gwilym Lee) makes a visit to a little curio shop, run by Dani’s blind twin sister Darcy (also played by Bracken). He has come to deliver an object: a glass eye, the same glass eye worn by the man at the peephole. Perhaps Darcy, who can “read” objects, will be able to “see” through this eye, and figure out what happened to her beloved sister. (Look closely: the terrifying rabbit from “Caveat” is in one of Darcy’s glass cases.) Ted doesn’t seem eager to find out what happened to Dani. He has already started dating someone else, the glamorous Yana (Caroline Menton). Ted and Yana take a weekend trip down to the now-renovated stone house. Darcy makes a surprise visit, and she comes bearing a family heirloom: a life-size wooden man.

Paul McDonnell designed the wooden man, and it is a terrifying creation. The wooden man’s face is awash in agony, his mouth gaping open in a screen. Darcy places him at the table, as though he’s ready for a meal. Yana is freaked out. Ted is a doctor (he works at a hospital for the criminally insane) and is skeptical of all this mumbo-jumbo. He’s got to get back to the city, so he leaves Yana alone there with Darcy (and the wooden man). The wooden man sits at the table all through the dark night. Sometimes, though, he appears to have moved. He’s not where he’s supposed to be. Yana is strangely drawn to the wooden man. What does it mean, what does it convey? The sense of menace in this weirdly-shaped stone house is so thick there’s almost no oxygen. Mc Carthy, again, creates a panicked fight-or-flight response at the sight of a slightly ajar door, or a blank window, an empty hallway. Whatever terror Dani faced on that original night is still alive.

Is the wooden man a protector? Or is he a neutral observer? The rabbit in “Caveat” acted like a canary in a coalmine, alerting people to danger. The wooden man, though, seems more stolid, inert. There are other things moving around this house, there are glimpses of them, maybe caught in a mirror reflection or a flashlight beam. Mc Carthy understands the horror tropes intimately, but he uses them with freedom and freshness, lifting his films out of a specific genre. “Oddity” is a murder-mystery, a supernatural horror, and a home invasion thriller, all mixed together. The glass eyes of “Caveat” travel into the glass eye of “Oddity,” connecting the films spiritually and sensorially.

In “Caveat,” the house was being sucked back into the earth, choked in vines and mold. The house in “Oddity” is a square-shaped structure with an interior parking lot/courtyard, and its renovation has turned it into a work of wonder. An interior balcony stretches above the lower floor. It’s not easy to maneuver around in this space. The characters can’t bolt for the door without exposing themselves. Mc Carthy uses the single settings of his films with sensitivity and creativity. Production designer Lauren Kelly (whose work includes the recent “You Are Not My Mother“) has done a superb job tricking out this stone house in ways that make it a very specific place, a place we have not seen before in film. Gifted cinematographer Colm Hogan makes gorgeous use of shadows illuminated by a fragile flashlight beam, the stillness of spaces, the tension of a static frame. It’s a fraught space, where anything can happen.

The actors are all excellent, with Bracken in particular a standout, playing a double role. Dani and Darcy are two very different women, with different energies and looks and postures. We never see them together, but we never doubt their bond. Menton is great as the increasingly flustered Yana, moving from entitled annoyance to outright terror, as she can’t help but move closer and closer to the wooden man, trying to understand who he is, what he is, what he might want from her.

How could all of this end without tipping into cliche? We know Darcy has been right all along. We know Ted is a little sketchy. We know the house is weird. We might know how things will play out. I won’t say more than this: the final frame is so perfect it exceeds expectations. The moment is a call-back, but it’s also a glimpse of the future. It makes me wish I had seen “Oddity” in a packed midnight show. Mc Carthy does the hardest thing of all: he sticks the landing.

Kei Chika-ura’s “Great Absence” is obviously a personal piece, the kind of drama in which one can sense a connection to the subject matter in the subtlety with which it’s handled. Anyone who has dealt with the deterioration of a parent will find something resonant in Chika-ura’s film, one that can sometimes feel self-indulgent in its pacing and length but never loses its nuance, thanks both to its refined direction and a truly stellar performance from the legendary Tatsuya Fuji. The iconic star of “In the Realm of the Senses” won an acting award at San Sebastian this year, and it’s easy to see why. Eschewing the many traps of a complex character, he truly elevates “Great Absence” above the melodrama it could have become, crafting it into a tragic tale of a father and son who may no longer have time to reconcile. How does one reconnect and forgive when one half of the relationship may not have the emotional and mental capacity to do so?

“Great Absence” has a framing device in which an actor named Takashi (Mirai Moriyama) and his producer/wife Yuki (Yoko Maki) are working on an avant garde production of Ionesco’s Exit the King. It’s a play in which a leader and his kingdom essentially vanish, making Chika-ura’s choice a bit on-the-nose given what unfolds in “Great Absence,” a story of a patriarch who has lost basically everything, including his dwindling mental faculties, and how he essentially has one chance to reconnect with a son from whom he’s essentially estranged.

Takashi and Yuki are forced to return to his home by a call to the police after an incident at his father’s home. They come back to find a deeply confused Yohji, a man who no longer seems certain of who is or where he is. They also find that Yohji’s longtime partner Naomi (Hideko Hara) is missing and Yohji asserts that she’s committed suicide. If this all makes “Great Absence” sound like a mystery/thriller, it’s not exactly that movie. Yes, there are secrets and plot twists, but Chika-ura’s style is more deliberate in its effort to create confusion instead of tension. The script jumps back to times that Takashi visited in the past, partially to fill in how tense their relationship was and to give us more details about the missing Naomi, but also to allow the film to unfold almost like the fractured memories of someone near the end of their life. The structure of “Great Absence” doesn’t aggressively recreate dementia like something like “The Father,” but there’s an element of that displacement that’s meant to unmoor viewers.

Takashi is certainly unmoored as he uncovers diaries that reveal elements of his father, Naomi, and his birth mother that he never knew about. Imagine learning great emotional secrets about a distant parent, only to be unable to unpack them because said parent can’t trust their own memories or even sense of reality. “Great Absence” is about family secrets, but it’s more about how those can be shrouded and warped by the cruelty of aging. 

While Chika-ura’s direction is strong enough to wonder if he’ll be one of the next Japanese masters, he sometimes gets a bit languorous in his pacing. The version that played TIFF and San Sebastian was reportedly 152 minutes, which means 20 minutes have been cut since then, but it’s still a film that drags in points even at 132. 

Still, every time it threatens to completely drift away, a choice made by Moriyama or Fuji will bring it back. Fuji deftly delineates the different versions of Yohji from the taciturn man who pushed his son away to the one crumbling under the weight of emotions that he can’t quite understand. “Great Absence” really conveys the bursts of anger and lashing out that often adjoin dementia, and it makes for a showcase for one of Japan’s best actors. There’s a part of him that wants to reconcile, but he’s not even sure how to handle today, much less all he’s done wrong in his life. The true great absence is one of time, as so many of us will eventually discover there’s just not enough of it left.

In the mode (but not the spirit) of documentaries like “Man on Wire,” “Free Solo,” and “Fire of Love,” “Skywalkers: A Love Story” is less about persistence, curiosity, and daring than it is about two careless adrenaline junkies taking ridiculous risks to get likes on social media. As the title indicates, writer Jeff Zimbalist wants to think of this as a romance about people who happen to climb to the top of tall buildings so they can post pictures on Instagram. His script makes the point over and over that it’s all a symbol of the same issues of intimacy and trust that all couples face. We can never quite settle into the connection to the couple because while it makes it indisputably clear, despite some claims of Photoshopping, that they really do scale the tallest and most iconic structures in the world, there is a discomfiting artificiality to the storytelling. 

Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus are Russians who were both captivated by the idea of “rooftoping,” an international fad along the lines of the 1920s flagpole sitters, only hundreds of feet higher, with an infinitely larger audience, and immeasurably more dangerous. Unlike the legendary comment made by George Leigh Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb then-unconquered Mount Everest, “Because it’s there,” the rooftoppers want to climb to the top of skyscrapers to be seen. 

It opens with brief 2019 scenes showing Nikolau and Beerkus preparing to climb to the top of the spire of the one of the tallest buildings in the world: the then-almost-completed 2,227 feet tall Merdeka 118 in Malaysia, soon to be featured in an MCU film (“Thunderbolts”). Then we get some backstory on the couple before they met and the literal and romantic ups and downs of their relationship.

Nikolau grew up in a circus family. She loved watching her aerialist parents perform together on a flying trapeze. But her father left for another woman and her mother never recovered. Nikolau was raised by her grandmother and promised herself she would never depend on anyone again. But she struggled to decide on a direction for her life until she began to see the rooftoppers on Instagram. They were all men. She knew what she was made for. “Seeing their passion, their freedom, was magical. They take crazy risks to feel their potential…. I knew I had found my performance. This is my trapeze.”

She wanted to outdo the men by climbing higher and more dangerous structures and she wanted to perform for her social media audience by wearing striking costumes (high heels!) and in gymnastic poses requiring supreme balance and flexibility. Now might be a good time to point out that Nikolau is exceptionally pretty.

Beerkus loved the exhilaration of the climb. He tells us the higher he climbed, the more he could breathe. He had the largest number of Instagram followers in Russia. And it was on Instagram where he first saw Nikolau. He was captivated by her posts and invited her to accompany him on a sponsored trip to China to climb the highest construction site in the world. They first met en route. And as soon as the pictures are online, Nikolau gets hundreds of thousands of new followers and some sponsorship offers. What could be a better path to true love?

There’s a rom-com style flutter of clips: they’re in a bubble bath together, they’re dancing, they’re snacking on street food. We see them climbing, posting, and getting thrown in jail. We also see them almost-casually noting that one of their fellow rooftoppers has fallen to his death. But what have they learned from this? Not that maybe this is dangerous and will inspire others to risk their lives. Not that maybe huge world events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the pandemic are about more than interfering with their social media posts and their rebranding of rooftopping as skywalking. The film would have been much more interesting if they went behind the scenes to show us where all this footage is coming from, especially footage of some very private conversations, and if it engaged with the problem of encouraging copycats who may not be as adept – or as lucky – as this couple. 

They are much more upset about losing sponsors than than other rooftoppers losing lives. What they tell us they learn is how to do a better job of staying out of trouble, including dressing like construction workers, covering the lenses of security cameras, bringing bolt-cutters, and planning a climb in the midst of the World Cup, when no one will be paying attention.

It isn’t just the climbers who are nonchalant about the lethal consequences of these stunts: it’s also the filmmakers, merrily accompanying the 30+ hour climb at the end of the film with a jaunty, breezy tune on the soundtrack. The climbs are real, if performative. But the movie itself feels as real as astroturf, with the couple relentlessly reiterating the issue of trust and the willingness to rely on others and ham-handed metaphors about how for trapeze artists the “catcher” (strong man) is less flashy but more important than the “flyer.” One interaction with a Ukrainian refugee who is a circus clown feels almost authentic for a moment, but clearly Nikolau has no idea that she comes across as completely self-centered. Clearly, Zimbalist (a sometime rooftopper) and his co-director Maria Bukhonina have no sense that this movie comes across as manufactured as Photoshop. 

When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, you couldn’t avoid the international coverage of the chaos around that major event, one that ceded control of the country back to the Taliban. When the final plane had left and the journalists returned to their home countries, the story didn’t end. And that’s where Ibrahim Nash’at entered the picture, traveling to Kabul to document the transition of the Taliban from a militia to a regime. His film “Hollywoodgate” rarely leaves the former American base that gives it a title, showing both the mundanity of life on the base and the planning for what could be a violent future for the region, and possibly the world. 

One of the most interesting aspects of Nash’at’s film is the question of how much his subjects are playing to the cameras, creating a bit of propaganda embedded in the film’s construction. Opening and closing narration by Nash’at himself speaks to the idea that what they wanted to show him and what he wanted to show may not have been the same thing, and it’s that conflict that gives “Hollywoodgate” its power.

“If his intentions are bad he will die soon.” This is only one of several times that Nash’at captures Taliban members not only speaking about his existence in their space, but essentially threatening him in a way designed to provoke a film that unfolds the way they want it to unfold. Nash’at’s main subject ends up being Mawlawi Mansour, the Commander of the Air Force. Mansour is a confident figure, someone who strides through Hollywood Gate – the spelling of the actual base and the film’s title are slightly different, for the record – barking orders at his underlings, mostly about trying to get it back up and running as much as possible. The Americans left $7 billion worth of American weaponry at the base, including planes and helicopters that they basically dismantled but didn’t destroy, leading Mansour’s team to work diligently to reconnect the right wires to get them airborne. “Hollywoodgate” opens with soldiers finding booze and Red Bull in a freezer; it closes with them showing off their new flying, killing machines. This is how the world changes.

Nash’at reportedly spent a year with the people at Hollywood Gate, and so what he chooses to reveal over barely over 90 minutes is telling. There’s a lot of marching around the base, moments in which it feels like Mansour is trying to show off, but the film also settles on shifts in women’s rights in the country now led by the Taliban – a bunch of men sitting around talking about women while they watch the news. (In November and December 2022, the Taliban banned women from entering public parks or receiving an education.) There’s a cruel mundanity to a lot of “Hollywoodgate,” men who have a lot of opinions and a lot of time to kill when they’re not killing insurgents near the base, practicing with weapons left behind by the Americans, or even creating their own propaganda.

“Hollywoodgate” ends in a sequence that’s striking in its terror, a scene in which the Taliban basically shows off what the Americans left behind for other enemies of our country like Russia and China. It’s one of several moments in the film that feel like it almost shouldn’t exist. We don’t often see the curtain torn down like this, and we’re not often given access to exhibitions of power like this one. On the other hand, it’s a form of propaganda, a show of might to the world that Mansour would probably admire, even as he’s ordering his helicopter pilot to slow down to make it last.

“Hollywoodgate” is a study in cinematic journalism, a way to fill in the gaps in what the horrendous state of journalism lets slip in the 2020s. The writers and news agencies who left Kabul in 2021 only told one small part of a story that’s still unfolding as the new leaders trample women’s rights and fail their own population – Human Rights Watch estimated in March of this year that more than two-thirds of the country didn’t have enough food. It’s a film that feels like an overture to an international crisis, a warning as much as a documentary.

Last year, Hong Kong filmmaker Herman Yau directed at least two of the best action movies of the year. In the 1990s, Yau (“Ebola Syndrome,” “The Untold Story”) helmed sensational black comedies and/or true-crime thrillers about psychopathic skid row loners, some of which are now finding new audiences on American Blu-ray boutique labels. Today, Yau directs Hong Kong and/or mainland China-financed action movies, often focused on a team of diligent, but stressed-out law enforcement officials. 

“Customs Frontline,” a Hong Kong procedural that pits the local customs department against a ring of international weapons dealers, continues this trend. It’s also unusual given that it’s not only a star vehicle for Nicholas Tse, but also the first project that Tse’s worked on as the primary action choreographer. “Customs Frontline” is not quite as thrilling or as relentless as Yau’s other recent successes—particularly “Moscow Mission” and “Raid on the Lethal Zone”—but it still delivers more twists and surprises than you might expect from this tip of sudsy, formulaic cop drama. 

In “Customs Frontline,” Tse plays Chow Ching-lai, a frustrated but loyal Customs Department officer on the trail of the mysterious Dr. Raw (Amanda Strang), a well-connected arms dealer smuggling guns and other weapons through Hong Kong. Chow wants to nab Dr. Raw for personal reasons that coincide with his professional responsibilities since Raw’s operation was being pursued by Cheung Wan-nam (Jacky Cheung), Chow’s unstable but sympathetic boss. I say “was” because Cheung suffers an unfortunate fate early on in the movie. 

Cheung not only urges Chow to take his job more seriously—“Respect your uniform!”—but also inspires his subordinate by persevering despite a previously undisclosed bipolar diagnosis. Cheung also discovers a well-positioned mole within the Customs Department, leaving Chow to figure out how to stop Raw, who’s currently arming the clashing (and fictional) African nations of Hoyana and Loklamoa.

The first half or so of “Customs Frontline” sets up Cheung’s character as a figurehead for his department, plagued as it is by a generic sort of bureaucracy, largely represented by Kwok Chi-keung (Francis Ng), the bureau’s paternal, but unfriendly co-commissioner. A handful of shoot-outs and chase scenes break up these unusually drawn-out establishing scenes, most of which coast on Cheung’s charismatic performance. Still, while it takes a moment before Tse’s character takes over his own movie, his fight choreography eventually gets a decent showcase. 

It also helps to see the movie’s action scenes as punctuation for its kitchen-sink style of hard-boiled action. Every character has a backstory, including Dr. Raw, and they’re mostly endearing despite a lack of psychological or emotional complexity. Instead, a pile-on of pulpy twists and turns makes “Customs Frontline” a largely compelling potboiler. Both parts of the movie, the one led by Cheung and the one led by Tse, feature unusual details that will leave you guessing, like: why are we still talking about Cheung’s emotional intelligence, or who is Dr. Raw’s dad, beyond a supposedly beloved and respected weapons smuggler? There are crypto-currency bribes, a violent suicide, presumed inter-departmental sabotage, and, oh yeah, sometimes computer-generated cargo ships and tank-sized jeeps explode or flip over from end to end. 

Tse shows promise during his fight scenes, though his choreography’s never as convincing as his stolid body language and shameless action figure poses. He’s a little too stiff to carry the movie on his own, but he gets a lot of help from his co-stars, including Karena Lam, who plays Customs department officer Athena Siu, Cheung’s patient, devoted partner.

Yau’s still the real MVP of “Customs Frontline,” given his comfort and knack for unabashed sensationalism. Car stunts, including a chase where one vehicle gets boxed in by four others, often bring out the best in the movie, but they’re not the only standout moments. Yau notably brings out the best in his actors, particularly Cheung, whose extreme close-ups highlight his repertory of mercurial facial expressions. Yau also has a gift for escalating violence, which isn’t nothing given the probable limits he had to work with as a Hong Kong filmmaker who, like a lot of his peers, now has to cater to the mainland Chinese market and its government’s influence. In the 1990s, Yau stood out from his peers with trend-chasing thrillers. The Hong Kong film industry may have changed considerably since then, but Yau’s still doing what he does.

If anything, what’s most impressive about “Customs Frontline” is that it never slows down long enough for you to question its sketchy, cornball logic. “Customs Frontline” may not make much sense, and it doesn’t exactly move with fluidity or grace, but it does move, and often hard and fast enough to get you from one spectacular flare-up to the next with style and chutzpah to spare.

I haven’t had a drink in almost fifteen years, and during the last days of my drinking champagne certainly wasn’t doing the job for me anymore. So upon being called to consider this movie, I feel a little like a more extreme version of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World” character, who said, “I don’t always drink beer, but…” Anyway.

I have relatively fond recollections of Veuve Clicquot being a relatively affordable REAL CHAMPAGNE, as opposed to its cheap bastard cousin, sparkling wine. Back in 1985 you could get a 375 ml bottle for about 15 bucks, a real bargain for a fledgling freelance writer from Jersey romancing a real New York City Girl. It goes for about 40 bucks now, which I guess I could afford, but I don’t drink, the New York City Girl stopped imbibing herself, and my wonderful wife prefers brandy, whisky, or beer even, which she purchases herself.

It is a French story, obviously, but an international production, directed by Brit Thomas Napper and starring the American Haley Bennett in the title role. Its inspiration is the real life of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, whose husband François (Tom Sturridge, seen vividly in flashbacks) dies when Barbe is only in her twenties. She is nevertheless determined to keep control of François’ wine-making concern. This being the 18^th century, moving into the 19^th, we get a lot of “well that’s just not done” from tut-tutting males, including the folks at Moet, who want to butt Barbe out. François’ father Phillipe (Ben Miles) is a little queasy about this. But Barbe insists that not only can she do the job, but she’s also the only person who really understands the job. Why do we create, Barbe asks in voiceover at the movie’s beginning. “We” being humanity. Her answer is “it is so that we might uncover the secrets of ourselves.” You can only make champagne in the Champagne regions of France, but making it is, indeed, an act of creation. While the movie initially offers little beyond the dreamy foofaraw too often used to describe “creative process,” it eventually does pay attention to the practical aspects of winemaking, which in the case of Barbe and François, can have decidedly eccentric, or considered-by-the-squares-to-be-eccentric, components, like talking to the vines.

Bennett is better than decent in the title role; her characterization grows deeper as she seeks out love in the midst of her work struggle. Her business gets a boost due to the Champagne mania that seizes Russia during the Napoleonic Wars. But she’s also chained to the past, and one of the more interesting features of the picture is how François is depicted as the film’s flashbacks continue: at first he’s erudite, charming, idiosyncratic; increasingly, he’s temperamental and maybe a little nuts. Barbe tries to honor his ambition while coming to terms with having been pinned under her husband’s irrational thumb. The movie itself doesn’t capitalize on this intriguing dynamic as much as it might have, and despite various unusual touches, including a music score by The National’s Bryce Dessner, not necessarily the first guy you’d tap to do a period picture, “Widow Clicquot” ultimately resolves as a conventional portrayal of a woman’s determination. It would be reductive to call it a “girlboss” story, but it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate to, either.