Patient and kindhearted, a painted storybook in motion, “Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds” is a lovely glimpse of what animation can be. Directed and cowritten by Belgian moviemaker Benoît Chieux (with writing partner Alain Gagnol), it’s a work that has a lot of influences, from “Yellow Submarine” and “Fantastic Planet” and “The Wizard of Oz” to Dr. Seuss and the collected works of Hayao Miyazaki, but it doesn’t do direct homages or references; it’s much too elegant and clever for that. I’m guessing that American rereleasing company GKids decided to screen it for two days only at the AMC Theaters chain out of a mistaken belief that a soft-spoken, patiently told movie that seems to glide across the screen should automatically be considered niche or “arthouse.” There were a lot of young kids at the screening I attended yesterday, and they all seemed enraptured by it. It has a bedtime story feeling. It opens the eyes, the ears, and the mind.
The movie jumps into its simple story. Little Juliette is about to turn five, and is sent with her eight-year old sister Carmen on the weekend of her birthday to the home of her mother’s friend Agnès, who wrote a popular series of children’s fantasy books about “The Kingdom of Winds” in which a sorcerer named Sirocco (who has one visible eye and dresses like a mid-20th century impresario) holds sway by controlling air streams. An encounter with an enchanted toy sweeps them into the storybook world, where they morph into cats (a design that tips its hat to the little boy in Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are“) and get into a series of adventures and misadventures sparked by an accident that angers The Mayor of a community (a big, goofy, somewhat blank-faced goblin-type) and turns the girls into public enemies. As punishment for their mistake, the Mayor hands Juliette over to the opera singer that he idolizes, Selma, and tells Carmen that she’ll have to marry the Mayor’s dumb-as-box-of-rocks son. Only the wizard Sirocco (like the Wizard of Oz before him) can help them escape this awful situation and return home.
It’s hard to describe the simplicity and perfection of the imagery in this movie in a way that captures its calming, centering effect on the viewer. Chieux and his team of hundreds of artists use a wide-and-narrow frame to create enveloping panoramas but also more abstract tableaux that are dependent on repeated shapes and solid colors. And I do mean solid. This is a movie that looks and feels substantive, like a thing that was actually drawn or painted, or made, on paper or a traditional cel, rather than being comprised of weightless ones and zeroes in a computer. There’s a little bit of shading here and there, but for the most part the movie’s color palette is so regimented that some of the compositions look as if they’re constructed from mosaic tiles, or the ovoid or circular glass pieces used in Turkish lampshades.
There’s no standard design to the magical beings in the movie, just as there weren’t in “Fantastic Planet” or “Yellow Submarine.” It’s a polyglot, a potluck, and all the more playful for that reason. The opera singer Selma has aspects of the water-drinking bird and probably a half-dozen classic toys. There are creatures that look like they came out of a Miyazaki movie (including a spider-legged creature that could be a cousin of the soot creatures in “Spirited Away“) and landscapes that might’ve been pieced together from overlapping pieces of carefully-cut construction paper. The story is mostly “these girls want to get back home,” but there’s a buried layer of secondary inferences and meanings that might not be noticed by young children, such as the theme of transforming grief into art (the author of the Sirocco books has modeled the character of Selma on her sister, and it seems as if it’s her way of bringing her back, if you catch my meaning). It’s a subtle movie in every way, even in its bold imagining of characters and landscapes.
We’ve gotten used to thinking that animation must be made within a very narrow bandwidth of style to be considered commercially releasable: you know, the “three-dimensional” kind of animation that either tends towards photorealism (and what’s the point of that, honestly?) or that makes all of its characters look kind of like bobblehead dolls or Funko Pop characters, with oversized heads and sped-up limbs and overdone facial expressions (the “DreamWorks face” is the worst) and tops it all off with a soundtrack of overly familiar pop songs, often deployed in the most crushingly literal manner. A phrase that came to mind about halfway through “Sirocco” was “mental palate cleanser.” It clears out all the preconceptions that corporate animation has encrusted upon the moviegoing imagination and turns it loose to fly again.
When I was in college I worked at a Dallas movie theater, the Inwood. It was an art house theater that mainly showed foreign films, independents, and some repertory titles. During my workdays there, most of the time I was working at the concession stand. But sometimes they’d put me in the box office.
In case anybody very young is reading this, the box office is the place where the phrase “box office”—as in how “much money a movie made last week”—comes from. It’s the boxy little booth at the front of the movie theater with a window where people trade money for tickets.
The box office is the place where the hermetically sealed wonderland of the movie theater connects with the world outside.
Removing that—along with marquees on the theater itself and out on the road leading to the theater—shifts movie theaters into the “out of sight, out of mind” category,” which I think is ultimately bad for business.
I get why most movie theaters thought it was a good idea to close their box offices. In order to have a functioning box office, you have to put a person in it, and that’s an employee who could be working inside, probably at the concession stand, where a lot of theaters have enabled ticket sales (which means you can buy a ticket and then get popcorn and a soda).
Plus, people usually order tickets online now, and most theater chains let you choose where you sit in advance, and it’s more time consuming to deal with that at a box office window, and a little bit more stressful, because there might be people lining up behind you while you try to figure out which row you want to sit in.
Probably these chains think of physical box offices as vestigial appendages of another time. But this is short-term thinking.
Bringing back staffed box offices, combined with functioning marquees both on the theater itself and roads leading to the theater, amounts to a coded form of marketing or advertising. It says, “This is a movie theater. There are movies here, and the titles are listed right where you can see them.”
People might still go to the movies on impulse, if they have the opportunity, and they are more likely to just suddenly decide to see a movie if (1) they can see what’s playing at the movie theater and (2) there’s a person right in front of them, and they can walk right up to them and buy a ticket from them.
This person can also answer questions about the (potential) moviegoing experience, like, “What’s this movie about?” or “Is this movie appropriate for my child?” or “Which of the movies playing at this theater is your favorite?” I used to answer these questions and others all the time when worked inside of a box office. My job as the box office person wasn’t just to take money and hand back change plus a ticket. It was to sell people on the idea of going to see a movie. I enjoyed it. It was one of the most enjoyable parts of working in a theater, actually. There were times when I’d even tell potential customers, in all sincerity, “I’ve seen this movie three times, and I can pretty much promise you that you’re going to enjoy it.”
If they didn’t enjoy it, I’d give them a refund. Movie theaters give refunds for almost any reason! (I thought I’d put that out there, in case you didn’t already know it.)
There are a lot of factors that explain why movie theaters have struggled post-pandemic. But I think it would be an error to downplay one very subtle but insidious one: the physical space that is the movie theater has become psychologically cut off from the rest of the world; from pedestrian life, or whatever version of it exists in suburbs or malls; and from the reality that people buy stuff on impulse.
I think theaters are leaving money on the table by not having functioning box offices plus physical signage that tells the public “There is a movie theater here” and “Here is a list of the movies you can see here” and offering them an opportunity to buy a ticket without going through the hassle of opening up their phones and searching for the name of the movie theater and then searching for the name of the movie and seeing what the showtimes are and…I am getting tired even TYPING all of that. Why would anyone out in the wild go through the hassle?
They wouldn’t. They’d just keep walking.
So why not make things easy on them?
The tools are already in place.
Right now, with some rare exceptions, the only people who go into a movie theater are people who made the decision to go into a movie theater hours or days earlier. The industry, in the name of convenience and profitability, has trained people out of moviegoing, except as a predetermined act. A huge swath of potential customers is now being excluded from the possibility of spontaneously deciding to go to THE MOVIES, as opposed to a specific movie.
There’s a theater at a mall in my town, the NorthPark, that still staffs its box office windows. People can buy tickets at the box office and then go over to an employee stationed at the base of the escalator leading upstairs to the multiplex who scans their ticket and says “Theater five, on your left,” or whatever.
I see people walking up to the NorthPark box office and making chit-chat with employees every time I’m at the mall. A lot of the time these people walk away with tickets and go upstairs.
If there was no box office, the theater wouldn’t have made that money. And if there was no marquee, they might not have thought to approach the box office, inclined to see a movie and just needing a nudge.
“The Last Front” is a first-rate calling-card movie—a medium-budget project that feels much bigger because it puts all the money on the screen, as studio executives like to say, and that will make people want to trust first-time director Julien Hayet-Kerknawi with bigger budgets moving forward. But it seems more likely that it’ll be a Dwayne Johnson action thriller than a historical drama is somewhat troubling considering the subject matter of the film: the attempts to liberate a small Belgian farming community from German troops who’ve occupied it during World War I, and the unrelenting cruelty that invading soldiers inflict on civilian populations under the guise of carrying out orders.
The two main characters are Leonard Lambert (Iain Glen)—a soft-spoken widower who lives on a farm with his daughter Johanna (Emma Dupont) and his son Adrien (James Downie)—and a German army officer, Lt. Laurentz (Joe Anderson). On top of his obvious psychological problems (including psychosis, a hair-trigger temper, and alcoholism), Laurentz is a world-class scumbag villain, the kind you spend an entire movie rooting for somebody to murder as gruesomely as possible.
This is not a shades-of-grey kind of movie. Nor is it one where the characters have more than two dimensions or the hint of a personal life beyond their immediate plot function. Lambert is, it appears, a committed pacifist who would rather avoid confrontation than participate in it (his last name begins with “Lamb” after all). At the same time, Laurentz is so detestable and chaotic that his superior officer and actual dad, Commander Maximilian (Philippe Brenninkmeyer), calls him a monster and briefly ends up having the lad’s pistol pointed at his forehead. The rest of the characters—including Adrien’s girlfriend Louise (Sasha Luss) and her father, Dr. Janssen (Koen De Bouw), and the parish priest Father Michael (David Calder)—are mainly there to create suspense as to whether they’ll be tormented or murdered by Laurentz, whose solution to every problem is to reach for his gun. (Gotta hand it to the guy: he’s not big on delegating. He personally kills so many people in this movie that you start to wonder why he brought those other guys with him.)
The violence is circumscribed, usually showing you just enough gore and/or pain to get across the idea that war is indeed hell (though the goopy sound effects and screams fill in the blanks as far as horrors-of-war). But the more “The Last Front” seems to want to speak seriously to the inhumanity of wartime, the less I was inclined to trust it because it traffics in the visual and aural language of the red-meat revenge thriller. At many points, connoisseurs of action cinema may be reminded of films starring and/or directed by Mel Gibson, such as “The Patriot,” “Braveheart,” and “Hacksaw Ridge” that genuflect toward some kind of larger statement about a certain historical period but end up being functionally indistinguishable from a 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone picture where one man can become an army.
Considering that other villagers almost immediately start suggesting that Lambert is the perfect guy to lead a rebellion against the Germans—plus the fact that Glen is best known for spending eight seasons on “Game of Thrones” playing the only thoughtful guy in a room full of petty, bloodthirsty maniacs, then dutifully kicking butt, often on horseback—it’s mystifying that the film spends to much time letting us watch the poor man do the “to be or not to be” thing. Why not skip to the part where he takes up arms against a sea of troubles? This is not a psychodrama–there’s not a whole lot of “psych” to dramatize–so there’s no reason to delay the inevitable scenes of Lambert going full John Wayne on the Huns.
There are compensatory pleasures. The supporting performances are above and beyond, and Glen is so likable and so believable as a decent man pushed too far that if this film does well, he might be in line to have a late-in-life career renaissance in another of the butt-kicking, R-rated senior citizen franchises that have become ubiquitous. The cinematography by Xavier Van D’huynslager puts the widescreen format to excellent use in presenting information and blocking large numbers of people, something too many contemporary filmmakers no longer seem to know how to do. The action sequences are lean and clean; you know what’s happening, what’s at stake, and why things turned out as they did. Frederik Van de Moortel’s score is fundamentally honest in that it’s more “’80s action thriller” than “Oh, the humanity!” It’s superb at escalating tension in the lead-up to violence, and there’s a brilliant moment in the second half where he introduces what sounds like distorted and truncated feedback loops, as if to suggest that the character the scene is focused on is losing his grip on reality.
If Liam Neeson ever wants to get back into the “Taken” business, he could save time by hiring this entire team, including Glen as the hero’s previously unmentioned cousin Nigel, who used to work for MI-6. I don’t know if that’s the impression the filmmakers wanted to leave, but that’s what comes across.
Fittingly, director Tilman Singer’s “Cuckoo” feels very much like a bird’s nest in form and theme, namely in how it finds ways to coalesce multiple disparate strands into a cohesive whole.
The film sees seventeen-year-old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) arriving in the German Alps with her father, Luis (Marton Csókás), stepmother, Beth (Jessica Henwick), and her seven-year-old stepsister Alma (Mila Lieu). Still grieving at the loss of her mother and feeling ostracized due to her father’s focus on Beth and Alma, Gretchen schemes to end her trip early and go back to America. To pass the time, she works as a receptionist at a hotel run by a family friend, Mr. König (Dan Stevens). Nothing is as it seems, though: guttural screams reverberate throughout the idyllic environment, and people randomly go missing. It culminates when a shrieking woman (Kalin Morrow) begins stalking Gretchen, forcing the teenager to uncover the deeper mystery and conspiracy within the hotel walls.
The title and direction for the film were inspired by the common cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. “I thought, ‘Well, I have something here … how do I project this onto humans?’”, Singer shared. The result is a gory addition to the avian monster genre that nests its thrills within a touching story of found family. It plays out like a fever dream fairy tale, thanks in no small part to Richard Neustra’s set designs and Dan Steven’s enigmatic antagonist, who feels just as sinister whether he’s playing the flute or holding a gun. Schafer’s the fierce, bleeding heart of the film, and her struggle for belonging and angst keep “Cuckoo” from flying off the rails of its ambition.
At the SXSW, where the film had its international premiere, RogerEbert.com spoke with Singer as well as stars Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens about why action scenes are the essence of cinema, how learning new skills for a role is a way to fully embody a character, and the bird films that inspired them.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Tilman, in just over 100 minutes, you’ve crafted such a tight-knit mythology for this modern movie monster. Where did the “seed” for this film come from?
Tilman Singer: When I first write stories, I’m usually guided by a vague feeling. As production of the film continues, the feeling reveals itself. For “Cuckoo,” I was guided by sadness and anxiety. It got triggered when I watched a documentary about how cuckoo birds breed. The cuckoo bird doesn’t have a nest; it puts its eggs in the nests of other birds, and those birds raise their offspring. That’s pretty crazy.
I watched this documentary where these host parent birds end up with this chick that’s not theirs, and yet they work day in and day out to feed this chick. There was a sense of tragedy and despair to this but there was also beauty and hope to it because they didn’t abandon this bird that isn’t theirs. I thought, “Well I have something here … how do I project this onto humans?” (Laughs)
Actually, the first character that formed was Hunter’s character. In nature, the cuckoo’s offspring often hatches first and pushes out the original eggs and chicks of its host family. At first, I thought about making this a “Rosemary’s Baby” thing where we have a child, a demon child, and then a mother character. But after thinking about it, I was like, “Actually, being a sibling in that cuckoo nest is the worst.”
Hunter and Dan, what were your reactions when you first read the script?
Hunter Schafer: I remember reading the script and initially was like “Woah…okay.” I needed more context on where Tilman was drawing his inspiration from, i.e., the cuckoo lore. I fucking loved learning more about that. I saw “Luz” and understood what Tilman was doing as a director and how he goes about world-building. I then jumped back into reading the script and looked at it through the lens of his past work and his intentions and it all came together for me.
A sort of “I see how your mind works” moment.
(Laughs) Yeah. After that, I was like, “Okay, done. I’m doing this.”
Dan Stevens: I think watching “Luz” was hugely helpful. That film already had an intriguing script and story but watching it, there’s this sense that for all involved, they’re in the hands of a very talented filmmaker. Tilman is someone who understands the tricks of the trade in terms of interloping weird sounds to create an atmosphere or how to bring to life what’s written on the page. I like that feeling when you know you’re in good hands.
It was an intriguing story, but I was reading it with a slightly different lens. I was a sort of late addition to this; I don’t think it’s a secret to say that John Malkovich was originally attached to this role. When he was no longer able to do it, the question was: “Well how do we replace him?” Did this character need to be a man in his sixties, or is there a way that we could make König younger and make it still work with the purpose of the story?
Reading the script, I was like, “I know who I would make this guy, I know who I would present to Tilman.” I was inspired by this very particular German personality type. I’ve spent a lot of time in that country, and I have a lot of German friends. In meeting their parents, there were traits that I thought would fit well with this character.
TS: We kept him older in spirit.
DS: Yes, König is a traditionalist, a little more conservative. He has these really weird, old-person shoes. They were really fairytale-esque. I don’t even know if we see them that much …
HS: There’s an incredible shot of them … it’s my favorite shot in the film.
DS: (Laughs) Yeah, we called them “the fairy tale shoes.” In many ways, my character is straight out of a fairytale, too. That’s what struck me right away: What happens when you have this very grounded and raw girl in Hunter’s character, Gretchen, enter into this bizarre fairytale arena orchestrated by my weirdo character? That was my starting point.
Speaking to that collision, that final fight scene is where all these huge personalities finally clash. Hunter, you’re fighting Kailan Morrow’s monster character, while Dan is having the slowest shootout possible with Jan Bluthardt’s police detective character. It looked chaotic and fun, but also there were so many moving parts. What was orchestrating and filming that sequence like?
TS: Well firstly, thank you for sharing that.
DS: I want to immediately shout out Jan, who brought such a cool intensity to this recognizably noirish character. I really loved playing opposite him. He’s this incredible German theater actor, and I don’t think he’s done a huge amount on the screen, but he was so intense. I loved that sequence because he was really into it and was willing to go weird.
TS: The sequences were also very technical so it was to do them. But I discovered something about myself: my jam is filming shootouts and action. I don’t remember a day where I’ve been that excited where you and Jan are shooting at each other. It takes hours to set up ten seconds of a shooting sequence-
DS: Dealing with squibs and all that.
TS: Yes, but even still, it’s crazy and supercool. Shooting action feels like the essence of cinema. It’s all about direction and where everything merges: camera, sound …
HS: It’s all very physical and almost all practical effects, too.
TS: There has to be a flash coming out of the gun, but also, in that scene, something has to hit the wall at the same time. So, we had to get into a rhythm of when a trigger was being pulled and how it correlated with the sound.
DS: We all had to be in sync. You’re sort of playing jazz with the sound guys on the buttons to make sure everything is on cue. I love it too. It’s a whole set experience. You have makeup coming in and saying, “Well, you’ve been shot here, so you’ve got to look like this now … your hair has to be more fucked up.”
TS: If you can’t tell, I’m getting excited just talking about this.
DS: Is it worth mentioning that I made this weird insistence about the guns which kind of fucked you initially, and kind of resulted in some weird choices?
TS: Yeah, do that!
DS: We were shooting this very much in the aftermath of the tragedy on the set of “Rust.” A lot of people in the industry have been calling for the use of nonactive firearms. There’s no reason why you should be firing an active one. Frankly, it’s easy to get muzzle flashes in post now. So I said to Tilman, “I don’t want to be on set with any active guns.” We had a few on set that we would be firing with, but this directive limited the specific weapons we could get our hands on.
TS: It’s not limiting per se… you can get any firearm you want. It’s just that the insides are completely replaced. With these nonactive guns, you couldn’t even load it with a bullet if you wanted to. But what was very important to me was that a muzzle flash came out, and you had the recoil. I’d rather have the John Woo sort of sparkle come out and have everything be fake rather than doing it in post. I don’t mind that enhancement (laughs). Eventually, we managed to get weapons that could do a muzzle flash, and we did do some enhancing with the post. You never know if you’ll get the flash when you shoot on film.
Hunter, your character’s weapon of choice by the film’s end isn’t a gun but a butterfly knife. I love how you play an unconventional “scream queen” in that you have to survive with a lot of restrictions … you really just have your knife, sling, and iPod to fight with. Was there a skill that was most fun to learn?
HS: Yeah, there were several skills I got to pick up for this movie, which was fun to learn. The first was learning how to use a butterfly knife, which Tilman sent me a dummy of. I got to practice in the two years we waited to film this. I also got to learn bass, which was so much fun and I still play it now. Sign language was another one. I love sign language, and I’m still learning it. It’s popped up in another role I’m currently preparing for. I think I’m just going to go all the way and keep the tutor I have.
You should pick roles based on what skills you want to acquire next.
HS: For real. Because you get to learn for free!
DS: I genuinely do think, though, that if you pick a skill that a character would know and that is outside your wheelhouse, you are, in some way, entering into the character’s mindset because you’re teaching yourself something that character could do that you don’t do. It’s like a module. Like say, a character knows how to windsurf … I don’t know how to, but if a character I play ends up windsurfing … I’d give it a damn good go, and it would teach me something about what my character’s experiences that weren’t my own life experience.
HS: Even with bass, the way there’s a physicality to it … that was something that surprised me as I learned it. There’s an attitude and personality that comes with playing it.
TS: It is very important to me that she is a bassist, not a lead singer, drummer, or guitarist. Gretchen has a relaxed and casual attitude but also has a drive.
This film delves into so many themes: environmental preservation, nature vs. nurture, sibling rivalry, processing grief, reproductive rights, found family, etc. There’s a lot to balance in this. Were there any in reading/developing the script or filming that resonated the most?
TS: I never have a plan … I always write towards that feeling and emotional structure that I’m aiming for. The theme of family and found family is important to me. I thought a lot about conflict that spans generations and the loops of pain caused when people hurt each other continuously. I get at some of that in this film, too. But also, sometimes ideas come up that I didn’t quite register till later in production. While writing Dan’s character, I began to think, “This guy is an environmentalist.” Mind you, he’s a fucked up environmentalist … but what does that mean? What does it mean for him to try and preserve things at any cost?
DS: There’s this satirical element to my character about how he wants to uphold such ancient values. Sometimes that’s a great thing. Sometimes, that’s messed up and something that we need to examine.
HS: I said something earlier where when we watch documentaries about cuckoos or other animals … we can project human motive and emotion to what they do, but in the end, it’s just a cuckoo’s nature. There’s a darkness and bleakness in what cuckoos do, but it’s also, in a way, what humans do to each other too. It’s interesting to see the ways humanity is reflected in nature.
What about the horror genre makes it seem like the right vehicle for your ideas?
TS: For me, making horror movies is very much rooted in how I felt about something at a particular point in time. Maybe different feelings will grow into different genres. Horror as a genre, though, is very fun, and they have this vocabulary and grammar that the audience understands. You can play with their expectations. For “Cuckoo,” it was about creating an atmosphere instead of having this super concrete plot that makes a lot of sense. It has to make emotional sense and the horror genre, in an unconscious way, felt like the right home for this story.
Were there any bird or monster movies that served as a Pinterest board for inspiration as y’all were filming this?
DS: Have you guys heard of “Kes?” This great Ken Loach film is about a little boy rescuing a falcon. He’s sort of like Hunter’s character.
HS: I’d say “The Last of Us” was an inspiration. Specifically, the infected zombies/zombie monsters … (gestures to Tilman and Dan) y’all gotta play this video game! I keep telling you.
“Cuckoo” gets more confusing the more it explains itself. The further writer-director Tilman Singer goes in articulating the strange goings-on that drive this stylish, unsettling thriller, the less compelling it becomes.
Trying to comprehend the hows and whys of this twisted mystery creates a distraction from which the film never recovers. Either we needed to know more, or we needed to know less. Ambiguity actually would have been preferable; Singer creates such a foreboding mood, it would have been enough to hold us in its spell. Instead, we go from “Whoa” to “Wait, what?”
Still, deeply committed performances from Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens keep us hanging on, at least for a while. Both actors are doing extremely different things here, and that friction creates both humor and tension from the get-go. As he has in films as disparate as “The Guest,” “Abigail,” and “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga,” Stevens uses his gorgeous looks to sinister effect. (And as he did in “I’m Your Man,” he speaks perfect German.) There’s a slickness about him, a piercing quality to his eyes that makes him untrustworthy yet fascinating. Schafer grabs us in a totally different way: She’s our straightforward conduit, the only one who recognizes that something is seriously wrong within the film’s idyllic setting and is willing to call it out. But, reminiscent of Florence Pugh’s struggle in “Midsommar,” no one will listen to her in this beautiful and dangerous foreign land.
Schafer stars as Gretchen, a 17-year-old American who’s recently lost her mother. In a fog of grief, she’s forced to move with her father (Marton Csokas), his new wife (Jessica Henwick), and their young, mute daughter (Mila Lieu) to a resort in the Bavarian Alps. Working with cinematographer Paul Faltz, Singer frames this breathtaking place as a brutalist prison, shooting from the bottom of the mountains upward to signify how trapped Gretchen feels.
Stevens’ smarmy Herr König runs the place and has invited the family to stay a while as he works with Gretchen’s father on his next development. From the start, though, severe shadows and chilly reflections indicate to us that this is anything but a relaxing retreat. And Herr König’s demeanor, which morphs from merely passive-aggressive to outright controlling, makes her even more desperate to flee. The exaggerated way he pronounces her name, leaning hard into the R in Gretchen, is amusing but also symbolic of his arrogant cruelty.
But unnatural forces also seem to be holding her in place. One particularly gripping sequence finds Gretchen riding her bike home at night after reluctantly working a shift at the hotel’s front desk. With expert pacing, Singer and editors Terel Gibson and Philipp Thomas reveal just enough beneath the streetlights to terrify us. Similarly, there’s a hypnotic repetition of sequences that occurs over and over again, each time building to a startling crescendo. A seismic shimmer and a high-pitched shriek accompany this structure; while this sound design choice is disturbing at first, it eventually grows annoying, especially once we discover its source.
And yet, because she is grieving, we don’t know what’s real and what’s the manifestation of her trauma. The amorphous quality of her torment is sorrowful and unnerving, and the messages she leaves on her deceased mother’s answering machine never provide the catharsis she seeks. Schafer has such an accessibility about her that we feel every emotion, and as Gretchen taps into her fierceness, we root for her to use her physicality to triumph. She also has such a deadpan way of addressing the increasing absurdity around her that she brings some welcome comic relief within the tension.
But then we find out what’s really going on – or at least, we think we do. Somewhere in here, there might be a dark fairy tale about the importance of letting women do what they want with their bodies, but that message gets muddled within the chaotic narrative. Whether or not you truly understand it, or it’s even capable of being understood, “Cuckoo” will likely drive you mad.
In 2013, Angela Patton gave a TEDXWomen Talk that went viral. She spoke about a program she created in Richmond, Virginia, to bring girls and their incarcerated fathers together in an environment that would make the fathers and daughters feel cherished and connected. These “Daddy Daughter Dances” have been so impactful the program has expanded to other prisons. “Daughters,” co-directed by Patton, is a documentary about the first of these dances in a Washington D.C. prison. In the film, she says that when she wrote the man in charge of proposing it, he responded with a quick yes: “No one has ever requested something as powerful as this moment.”
To qualify for the program, the fathers have to complete a 10-week program to strengthen their fathering skills, which means sharing some painful experiences, regrets, and fears. One man says it is the first time he has ever been in an environment where men talk about feelings.
As the title indicates, Patton and co-director Natalie Rae make the girls the center of the story, with four as the focus. Aubrey is an adorable five-year-old when we first see her. She is proud of being the smartest in her class, and she has a wall covered with her certificates of achievement. She is especially interested in arithmetic and has already memorized the multiplication tables. As she keeps explaining the meaning of the numbers, we understand that one reason they are so meaningful to her is that she is trying to understand when her father’s seven-year sentence, longer than the time she has been alive, will be over.
The absence of their fathers affects them more traumatically as they get older and understand it is the result of bad choices. Santana, age 10, understands her father’s situation better and, with two younger siblings, says she has had to become the dad in her family. She grimly insists she might get married someday but will never have children. 11-year-old Ja’Ana says sadly, “I don’t even remember his face. I don’t remember nothing about my father.” Raziah, who is 15, is cynical, hurt, and angry, even considering suicide. The most telling example, though, comes from one of the men, who tells the group he first became sexually involved with his daughter’s mother when she was just 13. She gave birth to his daughter at age 14. He recognizes that if her father had been there for her instead of in prison, she would not have been so vulnerable to his attention.
Cinematography by Michael Fernandez and gentle music by Kelsey Lu give the film a warmth and lyricism that reflects the girls’ innocence. Slight slow-motion effects here and there reflect the long days and “long, long thoughts” of the very young. We see moving moments from Patton’s programs to support and encourage Black girls and their mothers to recognize their strength, resilience, and sense of community. Patton knows how much the mothers have contributed and wants them to feel pride and a sense of sisterhood with each other. By making it possible for the girls to bond with their fathers, she is helping the mothers, too. “When our families are intact, our communities rise.”
There are dozens of carefully observed and touching moments in “Daughters,” which won both the Documentary Audience Award and the Festival Favorite Award at Sundance. Watching the fathers change out of their orange prison uniforms into jackets and ties is extremely powerful. And then it becomes even more meaningful as we see some of the fathers teaching others how to tie a tie, a skill we associate with tended bonding moments between father and son, then with occasions like graduation, dates, and interviews for office jobs that these men never had. It is enormously moving to see the men with boutonnieres on their lapels, and then, when the sad goodbyes begin, each of them passes the flowers on to the daughters as a symbol of their dedication.
Why are the men in prison? That is not the subject of this movie. What matters here is that, as a character says in “American Fiction,” “Nobody is as bad as on their worst day.” They love their daughters. Not being able to be a part of their lives adds to their sense of hopelessness. More importantly, their daughters need them to be present in their lives. As with the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program featured in “Sing Sing,” the recidivism rate for participants in this fatherhood program is around three percent. In an update at the end, one of the fathers explains that he had never been out of prison for more than six months since he was a teenager until he saw how important it is to be there for his daughter. By the time of the update, he had been out of prison for four years and was determined to stay out.
Many prisons have eliminated in-person visits in favor of expensive (for the families) remote connections. As they hug for the first time in years, the fathers and daughters show an ineffable release of infinite tension and sorrow. As one of the fathers says, “For that six hours, I wasn’t incarcerated.”
The crimes of the Catholic Church are no secret to most citizens of the Western world. Yet, as is the case with many historical recollections, the deliverance of information is often filtered through a lens of whiteness, and victims of color fall to the footnotes. For many non-Indigenous people, the lack of awareness about the forced attendance to federally-funded, Catholic-run boarding schools in North America is prevalent. “Sugarcane” demands otherwise. These segregated schools, designed to “solve the Indian problem” via indoctrination and shame, became breeding grounds for a wealth of weaponized authority that birthed long-buried, unpunished crimes.
Focusing in particular on St. Joseph’s Mission in Williams Lake, BC, Canada (closed in 1981), the documentary pieces together the testimony of former students and anthropological investigators to unearth the damning details of the violent systematic oppression that was allowed to inflict trauma and death upon a century of generations of their community. What ensues is a devastating bombshell of a reckoning.
Co-directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave Noisecat (the latter of which, along with his father, Ed, and grandmother, are subjects in this documentary) have, alongside the revelation of these historical wounds to public light via news media, entered the personal stories and voices that are vital to the understanding of these tragedies and the history of the oppression of American Natives. The discovery of unmarked graves incited the investigation into the school itself, and “Sugarcane” brings the story home.
The finesse and care with which Kassie and Noisecat unveil and explore the happenings and residual aftershocks of St. Joseph’s Mission bring the film to another level. Rather than functioning as a dossier, it instead serves as an investigation of generational trauma. From a litany of onsite deaths and unmarked graves to routine abuse and children fathered (and horrifically rid of) by the staff, the horrors of these institutions seemingly have no end. Yet these listed crimes pertain only to the time frame within which students were enrolled. The aftermath of these traumas also bears mortal consequences in the present day via PTSD, substance abuse, and suicide in the communities of alumni. As the film proclaims, “Indigenous peoples are still dying from residential schools. And still living, despite them.”
With a triad of personal avenues to unpack the reverb of influence – Noisecat’s relationship with his father, influenced by the latter’s lifelong struggle to cope with his origins (and his own mother’s pain in doing in the same), the religious and ancestral reckoning of the late Chief Rick Gilbert, and the overarching criminal research by investigators Whitney Spearing and Charlene Belleau – “Sugarcane” is deeply human, giving living, breathing faces and families to a history that, even when acknowledged, is too often rendered monolithic and impersonal. It begs the action of accountability, something so frequently symbolic rather than reparative, displayed through thin acknowledgments from Trudeau and a hollow offering of sympathy from Pope Francis (with no apology, compensation, or artifact returns to follow).
“Sugarcane” is soul-shaking. It’s profoundly evocative, with spoken memories and moments of inability to muster the words gut-punching with equal measure. The landscape of the communities’ culture as a backdrop – stunning, sprawling topography and a score of diegetic traditional soundscapes – counters the revelation of tragedies with the reminder of the colorful, resilient culture that persists.
Even as it educates on the history of institutional cruelty, the film is less attuned to an overarching thesis on the oppressive powers. Instead, as “I love you” transitions to a traditional song, “Sugarcane” bursts with the acknowledgment that they are most concerned with the emotional and the personal: the preservation and healing of their communities, still standing despite it all.
The tricky part with a docuseries like “Hollywood Black,” particularly if you have a deep reservoir of knowledge about its chosen subject, is realizing that it’ll probably never be as comprehensive as you’d like. After all, the four-part series directed by Justin Simien (“Dear White People”), adapted from the same-titled book by film historian Donald Bogle, is slated to premiere on MGM+—which isn’t really a historically minded network or streamer like TCM or Criterion Channel. Recalibrating one’s expectation, in that regard, is crucial.
And yet, a documentary series can’t be judged on intention alone. Simien assembles an impressive roster of talking heads (academics, stars, directors, and producers) to talk about the history of Hollywood from a Black perspective. His thesis is sound—Black people are imperative to Hollywood’s existence—and the joy he injects into the subject is pure. But it never feels like there’s quite enough substance to match his enthusiasm.
The abbreviated length of “Hollywood Black” often betrays its noble desires. Take, for instance, the first hour, which attempts to cram over sixty years of Black cinematic history into less than an hour. As such, the chronology of early Black filmmaking is simplified into a neater timeline. A pioneer like Nina Mae McKinney isn’t mentioned, while Josephine Baker only receives a passing nod (the docuseries instead turns its focus to Fredi Washington, an equally imperative figure). At one point, Issa Rae claims that no other Black director was producing and directing films except Oscar Micheaux. The broad statement ignores creators like Richard D. Maurice and brothers Noble and George Johnson.
There is an early tension to the first episode. While scholars like Racquel Gates and Jacqueline Stewart are providing in-depth context, the celebrity talking heads, who, armed with some basic historical grounding, reduce the past to broad, generic observations That tension is emblematic of Simien trying to balance the research component of the docuseries and the approachability, with the latter party decided by spotlighting the celebrity participants.
While the docuseries includes plenty of Black women directors as talking heads: Ava DuVernay, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Cheryl Dunye, Melina Matsoukas, Lena Waithe, and more—the actual screen time directed at films by Black women is hardly sufficient. How does one make a documentary about Black filmmakers and not include Kathleen Collins? Outside of “The Watermelon Woman” and “Daughters of the Dust,” when the series talks about Black women directors, it’s those who mostly operate in Hollywood. While that decision is understandable, to a point, after all, the series is called “Hollywood Black,” it does erase core pieces of Black cinematic history. Barely any contemporary Black women directors are included—the same with creatives like Ayoka Chenzira, Cauleen Smith, Zeinabu irene Davis, and more.
Once again, Simien only had so much time, and aiming for comprehensiveness is almost a fool’s errand. And yet, what is cut to conserve time is nevertheless telling. Ultimately, “Hollywood Black” is a history lesson told from a male perspective with only a few diversions to Black women’s contributions.
There is enough missing from “Hollywood Black” that it very nearly blinds one to the wealth of history that is present. Very few mainstream documentaries, for instance, have tried to provide context to Blackface and the practice of minstrelsy. The genius of Bert Williams is noticed. The little-known, unreleased silent feature “Lime Kiln Field Day” (1913), starring Williams, is placed in its proper context as the oldest surviving Black-cast feature (it’s presently streaming on Criterion Channel). Charles Lane, the director of “Sidewalk Stories,” is also spotlighted. And while it’s heartening to see Bill Greaves’ boundary-pushing mockumentary “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One” talked about, the conversation between Simien and DuVernay, where the former gives their own odd interpretation of Greaves’ film can be painful to watch, if only because the critique provided doesn’t appear well-considered.
That doesn’t mean Simien’s first-person perspective isn’t worthwhile. The series is especially strong when he talks about the impact “The Wiz” had on him. As Simien stares up at the footage of the still-underrated Blaxploitation musical, there is a palpable joy to the proceedings. It’s clear Simien wants the series to be a celebration of Black creativity—hence cutting Bill Cosby’s presence in Black Hollywood’s history by uplifting the importance of Richard Pryor and also remaining deferential to Tyler Perry’s achievements—and his side steps keep him out of relative trouble, so to speak.
Still, I wish there was more in this film about the how versus what of cinema. When Ernest Dickerson talks about how the lighting of Black skin has changed over the years, it’s incisive and stimulating. But Simien, unfortunately, doesn’t dig that deep into the craft. Rather, he sticks to the broad beats of what these steps forward to progress mean. It’s worth noting that the craft in Simien’s own series slips. Simien critiques how Hollywood co-opted Blaxploitation only to cut to Rudy Ray Moore (an independent filmmaker). At another point, he makes a broad point about films during the late-70s but cuts to “Black Belt Jones” (released in 1974). These mistakes are compounded by the fact that in charting the rise of Blaxploitation, he skips over Ossie Davis’ “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” the film that kicked it all off.
Many of these grievances come with the knowledge that many people watching “Hollywood Black” will not be looking for deep-cut references or notice the many confusing nips and tucks used to tailor the history. This is a series meant to serve as an entry point. You just hope it primes enough people’s curiosity to look for more. In that regard, “Hollywood Black” might be moderately successful.
It’s hard to imagine that this summer will see a better crowd-pleaser than “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In,” a nostalgic Hong Kong action spectacular featuring the year’s most thrilling action filmmaking. Unbound by physics or any sense of psychological realism, “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” is also probably the best comic book adaptation you’ll see this year, featuring a murderer’s row of Hong Kong stars like Louis Koo, Aaron Kwok and Sammo Hung, and featuring the sort of intricate maximalist production design that puts most other blockbusters to shame.
On its face, “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” is a conventional us-against-them crime saga about Chan Lok-kwun (Raymond Lam), a luckless refugee who settles down in Kowloon, the dystopian-looking tenement city of the movie’s title. Chan’s allies treat each other like family despite some mischievous double-dealing and back-biting; his enemies only think of themselves.
Chan’s story, all about a community’s triumph over mobbed-up individualism, has already found a receptive audience in Hong Kong, where “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” is already the most-watched local production of all time. The movie’s reputation will likely continue to grow thanks to its lyrical pulp fiction dialogue, credited to four screenwriters, and its over-the-top fight choreography. “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” was custom-made to knock you on your ass, and while it’s sometimes a little too desperate to please, it’s also hard to resist a genre movie that works so hard to impress all comers.
The movie version of Kowloon resembles an animated M.C. Escher painting, filled with overlapping stairwells, choked with rebar, and overstuffed with low-drooping cables that bulge and creep over steam vents and crater-pocked concrete. Paint doesn’t peel off the walls so much as it accretes, one eggshell-thin layer on top of the other. Steam floats above the aluminum eaves but never seems to escape.
This movie’s Kowloon is a haven for kind-hearted degenerates like Cyclone (Koo), a barber and the city’s revered crime boss, as well as supporting characters like the media-obsessed AV (German Cheung) and his stalwart companions Twelfth Master (Tony Tsz-Tung Wu) and Shin (Terrance Lau). Their messy but stable microcosm is threatened by Chan, a desperate loner who only wants to make enough money to buy a fake ID. Chan is followed by the greedy triad gang boss, Mr. Big (Hung), and his flamboyant second-in-command, King (Philip Ng). Everybody knows how to fight and they all have garish wigs and costumes that scream mid-to-late ‘80s.
Most of the first half of “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” sets up the inevitable clash between Mr. Big and Cyclone’s respective gangs. There’s a little mystery surrounding Chan’s identity, but it’s not as memorable as the movie’s action scenes, which feature the sort of manic energy that one might expect from a comic book movie. In an early scene, Cyclone flicks his cigarette into the air, executes some disarming moves, and then reclaims his butt before gravity can. This sort of fantastic establishing scene prepares viewers for later fights, including maneuvers like a “spirit shield” and beat-em-up video game-ready weapons like sledgehammers and lead pipes.
The fights in “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” are so thrilling I had to double-check to confirm that action god Sammo Hung didn’t choreograph them himself. That credit’s owed to Kenji Tanigaki, who also served as the action director for “Sakra,” last year’s Donnie Yen-helmed wuxia action fantasy. Here, Tanigaki and his stunt team are working on a bigger scale than their usual collaborations with Yen, and the results are even more exciting given the complementary efforts of director of photography Siu-Keung Cheng, production designer Kwok-Keung Mak, and a team of computer animators.
Moreover, director Soi Cheang specializes in this sort of half-squalid, half-romantic city symphony, having previously directed both big-budget action fantasies, like “The Monkey King,” starring Donnie Yen, and its two sequels (which swap Yen out for Aaron Kwok), and gorgeous/seedy neo-noirs like “Dog Bite Dog” and “Limbo.” Cheang synthesizes his career’s work to date in “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In,” the kind of movie where a man only credited as “Woman Beater” (Chu Pak Hon) attacks a prostitute (Fish Liew) and then gets aired out by Chan and his buddies, who each hold one of their opponent’s limbs and then repeatedly bash him into the ground like a dirty bedsheet.
The myth of the city as a kinder but not gentler home for outsiders is irresistible here, given the well-oiled collaboration between Cheang and his crew members, some of whom have been working together for years now. The filmmakers’ passion is infectious, and as a result, “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” is a once-in-a-while assembly of talent that will make even the most hardened skeptic agree—this one’s worth the hype.
There’s a scene in “Not Not Jazz,” a film about the fusion jazz trio Medeski Martin & Wood, where the camera prowls slowly around bassist Chris Wood as he slowly saws his upright bass on an upstate New York tennis court dotted with fallen leaves. There are a lot of scenes like that in “Not Not Jazz.” I suspect that if you’re as interested in the process of music as in the result, it’ll be one of the elements you’ll like most about the movie.
Directed by Jason Miller—and shot by camera operator Htat Lin Htut with such musicality that he deserves to be considered a fourth band member—”Not Not Jazz” is a short feature (74 minutes, not including credits). It perhaps feels a little too short for this viewer’s taste, because it doesn’t deliver on the stated premise that it’s about watching a group improvise their way through a new album in the Hudson Valley’s Allaire Studios (this turns out to be more of a pretext for a truncated and fragmented history of the band, scattered amid moments in which music is discussed, worked-through, or recorded).
The movie doesn’t go in the other direction, either, and become a decadently committed wallow in momentary pleasures and sensations that it could’ve gotten away with being. (The audience is going to be 95 percent people who like the band and/or jazz-adjacent music anyway.) There are references to intrapersonal troubles that the band had over the years but it’s not delved into with any sort of specificity. The best we get is a rather tossed-off remark from their manager Liz Penta (a producer on the movie) that they had to go into group therapy to work through problems, but we don’t find out what they were.
Still, this is a lovely piece of work that compensates for its flaws and omissions by giving you things you rarely get in music documentaries. If you’ve been in a band or know anyone who’s been in a band, you’ll recognize the energy flowing between Wood, bassist Billy Martin and keyboard player John Medeski. They’re been together long enough (33 years) to have developed not just a rapport but their own heretically sealed language consisting of sound fragments that are spoken as well as played.
It’s not often that you’re given as many opportunities as “Not Not Jazz” presents to see artists actually making art. The parts of the movie that concentrate on the process are far more eloquent than the standard-issue moments where we watch one of the band members walking through the woods while musing in voice-over. A piece might start out as an idea for a melody or rhythmic signature, get built-out in a session where the three guys just sort of noodle around, and be refined in conversations in the studio or some other room of the building (the kitchen is a hot spot) where two or all of the musicans discuss the work in progress. Sometimes one of them will say something like, “what if I go doot-doot-doot, doot-doot-doot-doot?” and another will accompany them with another cartoonish noise. They complete each other’s sentences. Sometimes they don’t even need to finish a sentence; one of them will just go, “right, right,” or something along those lines, and no further elaboration will be necessary.
Apparently, the road that led to this comfortable place wasn’t smooth. The band reached prominence in the late 90s at a time when their recording label (then Blue Note, home of many jazz greats) was still financially supporting the efforts of instrumental-only ensembles like Medeski, Martin & Wood. Then record labels withdrew most of their support of that kind of music and the band had to find its own way through the marketplace.
They figured it out because they had a good sense of themselves early on, and doubled-down on that self-image rather than trying to do something that might have been perceived as commercial (whether any kind of jazz is really “commercial” is probably a subject for another movie, one I’d like to see). Penta—who booked them into CB’s Gallery, the avant-garde boutique space within CBGB’s in New York City—says the guys had a hunch that a wider audience of rock fans might vibe with their music if they could only put it in front of them. When Penta became their manager, she hired a booker who got them into a lot of punk rock-focused venues, where they thrived. “They are all very studied jazz or classical musicians,” she says, “but they felt that music didn’t necessarily belong in jazz clubs which felt exclusive or expensive. They wanted to take that music into rock clubs (because) people could access it.”
This movie should probably be considered more promotional material than journalism, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing because it’s the most intellectually stimulating kind of promotion, concentrating on the illumination of the artistic process rather than cliches and hype. If you’re not a musician, you’ll come away from it feeling that a few of the aspects of music that were mysterious before have been somewhat illuminated. If you’re a musician, you’ll come away from it feeling seen, and heard.
