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The Double (2013)

André Crous

In The Double, Richard Ayoade’s stylish thriller set in a futuristic underworld, one plus one does not make two.

The DoubleUK
3.5*

Director:
Richard Ayoade
Screenwriters:
Avi Korine
Richard Ayoade
Director of Photography:
Erik Wilson

Running time: 90 minutes

Not unlike Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, which was released in the same year, Richard Ayoade’s The Double shows signs of noir, with a lot of the action taking place in yellow-hued, toxic-looking daylight (Enemy) or at night time and inside windowless buildings where the rooms are lit with hard yellow lights (The Double). Also, both stories are adaptations of works by renowned novelists – the former from José Saramago and the latter from Dostoyevsky. The two films are surprisingly similar in tone, with very thin storylines enveloped in a sense of utter hopelessness that, especially in The Double, seems positively Kafkaesque.

Set in an anonymous city at an unknown time in what is more a world of nightmares than that of actual reality (thus differing slightly from the recognisable yet alien Toronto landscape presented in Enemy), Ayoade’s film seems to have borrowed its sombre ambience from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, with all devices simultaneously appearing to be advancements of and regressions from those of the present day.

The main character here is an awkward, gangly fellow named Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), who loses his briefcase in the subway when he fails to be assertive. This lack of action pervades the film, and at times the viewer will be thoroughly demoralised by how pathetic he is. But when he arrives at the reception desk of the behemoth that is his workplace, where he has been employed for more than seven years, he discovers that the clerk doesn’t recognise him without his ID card. In fact, he slowly realises he is mostly invisible to those around him.

But then, something extraordinary happens. A fellow who looks and dresses exactly like him arrives. This doppelgänger is called James Simon, and he is everything Simon James wishes he was: pro-active, confident, charming, likeable and immediately noticeable.

As in Enemy, we are provided with no reason why the two of them look the same, but here our frustration is compounded by the utter lack of investigation from Simon James’s side. Whenever he wants to say something, he fidgets, clenches his teeth and grunts, but he doesn’t speak up.

It is a thrill to watch Eisenberg in these two roles. The actor alternately draws on both of his strengths – the awkward goody-two-shoes we know from Zombieland and the snake capable of delivering rapid-fire retorts in Social Network – and whenever he is onscreen (which is all the time), he lights up the story and grabs our attention, even when we want to give him a kick up the backside to make him move, or to stop moving.

What is even more thrilling is the interaction between the two characters, especially when the relationship is one built on working together rather than against each other. This collaboration doesn’t last very long, however, and before we know it the two are at each other’s throats again, with James Simon making it clear he will do whatever it takes to dash any hopes his original has of getting the girl or proving his worth to the man at the top, the founder of the mysterious company: the Colonel.

There are bursts of music, mostly from 1960s Japan, and other strange sounds regularly pepper the soundtrack for brief moments before ending just as abruptly as they started. But in terms of sound, nothing is as good as what happens at a restaurant on a date between the girl from the local copy shop (Mia Wasikowska) and Simon (who, she thinks, is James). During a major argument, the volume on the radio is turned up past 11, and other implements start whizzing so loudly we can’t hear anything. It’s the North by Northwest trick of using noise to drown out dialogue for effect, and it is used brilliantly.

Less brilliant, however, is the plot, which is deliberately enigmatic and offers the viewer little opportunity to follow what exactly is going on. We know where things will end up eventually, but just as in Fight Club, whose two main characters are analogous to the ones here, the film doesn’t really explain the eventual demise (or murder) of the more reckless one, except to imply a kind of Pleasantville transformation brought on by choosing action instead of stagnation.

Paddy Considine stars in Simon’s beloved sci-fi television series here as an unnamed laser-gun toter whom he eventually tries to emulate, but even this explanation is fraught with a lack of clarity and doesn’t help us all that much.

The Double is a stylish, surrealist neo-noir that you shouldn’t be watching if you expect all your questions answered, but on top of wonderful casting and a frightening sense of doom throughout, this may be one of the most original films in recent memory.

Buoyancy (2019)

André Crous

Taking as its central character a soft-spoken teenager from Cambodia, Buoyancy is a restrained but effective depiction of the very real machinations of slavery in the 21st century.  

BuoyancyAustralia
4*

Director:
Rodd Rathjen
Screenwriter:
Rodd Rathjen
Director of Photography:
Michael Latham

Running time: 90 minutes

There have never been more slaves in the world than there are at present, in 2019. The final title card of Rodd Rathjen’s strong debut feature, Buoyancy, informs us that some 200,000 of them are trapped in Southeast Asia.

The ones we meet here represent but a drop in the ocean, but their story is simple enough to comprehend. It also clearly represents the broader range of experiences among the region’s workers often held captive in inhumane conditions. Based on the experiences of many real-life (presumably former) slaves in the region, the story follows the journey of a Cambodian teenager named Chakra (newcomer Sarm Heng) facing the grim reality of life as a slave in the 21st century.

The film has beautiful bookmarks: In the opening shot, we see the back of Chakra’s head. He is carrying a heavy bag across his shoulders, and his shirt is drenched with sweat in the tropical heat. He is heading down a road. In the final shot, we see his face as walks down the same road, his life now completely changed. The events that mark this transition, however, are anything but innocuous.

Buoyancy’s opening minutes broadly sketch Chakra’s domestic situation as one that seems like the beginning of a decades-long dead-end. Living with his parents and multiple siblings under one roof is difficult enough, but Chakra knows things will never get better for him out here in the rice fields of Cambodia. He learns from his football buddies that it’s possible to escape the village for a better life in neighbouring Thailand.

Since he doesn’t have the money to pay a smuggler, he agrees to work for free for the first month. But instead of going to a pineapple factory like the others, he ends up on a boat where time stands still. Underscoring their grim social position are the fish they have to sort through, which are destined to be turned into dogfood. The notion of getting paid anything more than a bowl of rice at the end of a gruelling day of work is one his violent Thai captors, led by Captain Rom Ran (Thanawut Kasro), clearly do not share.

Chakra shows remarkable maturity, or maybe it is his inscrutability that makes him seem less childlike. Despite the hopelessness of this situation, which drives some of his fellow slaves to despair, he perseveres by working as hard as he can. When he realises there will never be a salary at the end of the month, he seeks any way possible to make life bearable and, especially, to rise through the hierarchy among the workers, many of whom are Burmese and stick together against him – an outsider among outsiders.

His expressionlessness saves him because he is not as easy to read as his countryman, Kea (Mony Ros). Kea has a family and wants to send money back home to his children. He senses the danger early on and does his best to protect Chakra as well as his fatherly instincts can, but he also demonstrates how dreams unfulfilled can lead to tragedy. By contrast, Chakra appears not to daydream. He keeps despair at bay by always remaining focused on the present. And when opportunity comes knocking, he is quick to seize the moment and change the future.

Rathjen mixes a documentary approach, including a very mobile camera, with a more artistic sensibility that can sometimes seem dreamlike. Brief moments of respite from the horror include the camera seemingly suspended from the clouds as it looks down at the ship passing below us, framed by the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Thailand, or when Chakra spends a rare moment floating in the water at sunset.

Although deeply satisfying to viewers wound tight as a drum after more than an hour of Chakra’s harrowing and seemingly hopeless fate, the film’s final act seems like wishful thinking. Despite his lack of experience outside the bubble of his small town, he doesn’t make a single mistake out on the boat. Somehow, the sea gods smile on his predicament and allow him to take control of his destiny without much pushback. He reveals himself to be buoyant, able to rise up from intense turmoil, and he doesn’t even get stained by the dirty froth on top.

The sharp focus on Chakra, who appears in every single scene, draws us into his story regardless of whether we feel we understand him. Although a couple of the scenes are haunting because of their implicit inhumanity (the dismemberment of one of the slaves is particularly tough to watch), Buoyancy does not engage in gratuitous violence. Its mostly taciturn central character stoically confronts the tribulations onboard without contriving a drama that might justify a strong reaction. And as a result, the realisation of injustice dawns all the more forcefully on us as we leave the cinema.

Viewed at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

André Crous

In this sixth instalment of the famous franchise, Ethan Hunt (rather, let’s face it, Tom Cruise) is as ready as ever to do the hard work himself, but tying up decades-old loose ends can be a messy business.

Mission: Impossible - FalloutUSA
3*

Director:
Christopher McQuarrie
Screenwriter:
Christopher McQuarrie
Director of Photography:
Rob Hardy

Running time: 145 minutes

Imagine, for a moment, you’ve reached the climax of a high-energy, globetrotting action film. For most of the past two-and-a-half hours, the characters have been relatively solid, and the story has unspooled at a pretty good clip. On top of the Eiffel Tower, the good guy and the bad guy have been at each other’s throats for what feels like ages. For the umpteenth time, we suspend our disbelief and tell ourselves that the 15-minute countdown to the end of the world is still in effect. Finally, as we catch our breath right after disaster has been averted in the nick of time, the camera zooms out to reveal the Bellagio fountains in the background, and we realise this “Eiffel Tower” is, in fact, the one in Las Vegas. And yet, the film continues to insist that this is Paris, not the Las Vegas our eyes so very plainly see.

That’s basically the stupid stunt Mission: Impossible – Fallout pulls right at the end, when we are told the action takes places in the Himalayas, but down below the fjords are pretty, the hillsides are green, and this rocky outcrop is very clearly not the Roof of the World but rather the world-famous Preikestolen (Pulpit Rock) on Norway’s west coast. Unless we’re to believe that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) somehow helicoptered his way through a wormhole linking Kashmir to Scandinavia, this makes very little sense, particularly because so little effort has gone into hiding the truth. After all, a crucial interaction early on involves a Norwegian nuclear weapons specialist.

In this instalment (the sixth in total), Ethan Hunt again teams up with his long-time computer hacking partner, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), who’s been with him for the past two decades, and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg in a welcome low-key appearance), who’s done half the time. Given Hunt’s team’s track record, however, the new CIA director, played by Angela Bassett, insists that someone from the agency’s special division join the team. That individual is the seemingly by-the-book August Walker (Henry Cavill), who, attitude problem aside, appears to be professional enough.

Not unlike a James Bond plot, the film’s villain is bent on having a global reach and is ready to inflict significant pain to achieve his goals. Although his identity is a mystery at first (we can quickly figure it out for ourselves), his nom de guerre is John Lark. He heads up the terror network called The Apostles, whose goal is allegedly world peace, but the price to pay is immense suffering: Chillingly, three of the Abrahamic religions’ holy sites – the Vatican, Jerusalem and Mecca – are the initial targets of the nuclear devices.

In a film like this, however, our attention is not going to be on the generic details of the narrative but rather on how good or memorable the action scenes are. And while director Christopher McQuarrie’s plot is pretty standard for this kind of production, he does manage to stage one of the most exhilarating scenes of any of the (first) six films in the series: a chase scene on motorcycle through the streets of Paris that rivals anything that has come before and is the most high-octane piece of filmmaking in the City of Lights since Claude Lelouch’s C’était un rendez-vous.

The whole scene is sublime, from start to finish. Pursued by police, Ethan steers a truck into a narrow alleyway to force them to climb over the vehicle while he and August escape through the front window and speed off on waiting motorcycles. August speeds off, but for a tense few moments, Ethan can’t get his bike to start. When it does, damn the torpedoes, it’s full speed ahead. Not satisfied with merely weaving in and out of traffic, Ethan also heads straight up against the flow into one-way streets (and even clockwise around the Arc de Triomphe) and races through heavily congested crossroads, all shot with a camera that is as mobile as Ethan and follows him at full tilt as he swerves to evade the French police. In all of two minutes, McQuarrie reinvigorates the whole franchise.

And yet, the whole thing ends with a deus ex machina so preposterous the film takes on shades of that same impossibility-induced hilarity that the recent Fast & Furious films have mined for laughs. Whenever the screenplay writes itself into a corner, it simply paints an exit door through which to escape. Finding himself trapped, Ethan simply cuts some netting, falls through a grate and ends up inside an underwater canal where his buddies are calmly waiting to whisk him off in their speedboat. With these types of films, one will always suspend disbelief, but in light of the (albeit hyperreal) thrill ride of a chase scene, this kind of a twist is just a bridge too flimsy.

The film also relies too heavily on the viewer’s knowledge of, never mind emotional attachment to, characters from previous instalments: Ethan’s former wife, Julia, and former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust are two specific individuals whose presence here seems gratuitous. By contrast, a new character in the form of the mysterious White Widow (played by Vanessa Kirby with a mixture of sensuality and pure cheek) holds our attention in every one of her scenes. If she does make a comeback in the next episode, one hopes that hers would be a big role.

Clearly, this sixth instalment of the now more than 20-year-old big-screen Mission: Impossible franchise is not the best of the series. That distinction will (likely forever) belong to the very first one, directed by Brian De Palma and written by David Koepp and the legendary Robert Towne. That film’s set pieces, from the break-in at CIA Headquarters in Langley to the fast-paced climax on top of the Eurostar, might be small in scale compared with those of its successors, but – with the major exception of Fallout‘s chase scene in Paris – they still set our adrenaline pumping faster than anything else the series has offered us since.

Wings (1927)

André Crous

Wings was the first film to receive a Best Picture statuette at the Academy Awards, but just maybe the awards show was created especially to honour this remarkable World War I film.

WingsUSA
4.5*

Director:
William Wellman
Screenwriters:
Hope Loring
Louis D. Lighton
Director of Photography:
Harry Perry

Running time: 145 minutes

More than 90 years after it was first released, Wings continues to impress in large part thanks to the majesty of its aerial combat scenes. The film was directed by William Wellman, who turned 31 towards the end of production and had served as a fighter pilot in the French Foreign Legion during World War I a decade earlier. This experience in the air clearly came in very useful during the shoot, as the most exciting moments all take place high above the earth.

In staging and shooting his “dogfights”, Wellman anticipated what Steven Spielberg would do more than 40 years later in Duel: To impress upon the viewer how fast an object is moving, it needs a background against which its velocity can be made visible. In the case of planes, that means a clear blue sky won’t do, and Wellman allegedly waited days – sometimes weeks – for clouds to form. The results speak for themselves as the camera perfectly captures both the speed and the motion, from a soaring take-off to a tumble through the clouds.

We start somewhere in middle America, where the carefree Jack (played by the clean-cut Buddy Rogers), still very much a boy rather than a man, is the connecting tissue between two separate love triangles. His neighbour, Mary (Clara Bow), whom he considers a friend, likes him as more than just a friend. But he only has eyes for Sylvia, who, in turn, is in a secret relationship with the rich, soft-spoken and socially awkward David (Richard Arlen). When Jack and David heed the call to enlist in the army in 1917, they receive training as combat pilots and, before long, are sent off to the battlefields of Europe.

A title card informs us of the “mighty maelstrom of destruction” that the war turned into over its four years of combat, and the film depicts this apocalyptic vision with vivid scenes of violence. Mortality hits home for the two small-town boys at their training camp when an aviator they just met and will be sharing a tent with crashes overhead.

Wings is at its best during the action scenes, while the romance is as shallow as one would expect from a 1920s production. However, the virtuosity of Wellman and cameraman Harry Perry is not limited to the skies. The battle scenes are equally impressive as we can see and feel the enormity of events.

When the French town of Merval is bombed, one of the explosives hits a church, whose bell tower flies straight off and comes crashing down on an automobile. The trench warfare includes explosions all over that make it seem like the earth is opening up and swallowing the armed forces whole. At another point, as reserves are marching across the countryside, another explosion sends the men and their limbs flying over the fields. Elsewhere, a tank drives across soldiers as bombs go off and others are stabbed with rifles. It is all a ghastly sight but brings the horror of war home, even to a viewer a century later.

The film was recently restored to 145 mint-condition minutes that also include orange colouring to add emphasis for fire, including gunfire. One can easily see how it came to be that the Oscars handed out its first-ever Academy Award for Best Picture (then called the award “for Outstanding Picture”) to Wings, but given the scale of the achievement and, especially, its contemporaries, one might start wondering whether, perhaps, the Oscars were established because Wings simply had to receive its due recognition.

The serious drama on the battlefield is counterweighted, however, by the simplistic melodrama of the duelling romances. One particularly egregious scene takes place at a nightclub in Paris, which starts with a famous track-in across (and seemingly through) a series of tables and bar patrons and ends on Jack, who is already hammered. Mary, who is no wallflower and has already survived at least one major bombing raid in France while serving as a wartime ambulance driver, finds him there but almost immediately collapses into an emotional mess. All of this is quite in keeping with the roles assigned to male and female characters at the time but feels at odds with what appears to be an authentic portrayal of real life on the battlefield.

Although struggling with some overly theatrical acting, Wings more than makes up for its melodramatic lapses with stunningly rendered battles scenes both on land and in the air. From spectacular long shots that fill our field of vision with scenes of mayhem in motion to singular moments of grandeur, like the immolation of an airship depicted 10 years before the infamous Hindenburg disaster, this is a film that could reach its ambition because the art of filmmaking had come so far. This production would not have been possible again for a very long time, as the microphone would have greatly hindered the camera’s movements, and even today, it is worth reminding ourselves what was already possible without special effects in 1927.

By the Grace of God (2018)

André Crous

Based on real events, François Ozon’s By the Grace of God recounts the struggles of multiple middle-aged men in Lyon to come to terms with being sexually abused by their local priest in their youth.

By the Grace of GodFrance/Belgium
3.5*

Director:
François Ozon
Screenwriter:
François Ozon
Director of Photography:
Manuel Dacosse

Original title: Grâce à Dieu

Running time: 135 minutes

Religion is theatre, so it comes as little surprise that the opening act of François Ozon’s By the Grace of God, a film dealing with a real-life church abuse scandal in the French city of Lyon, is mostly about people in robes speaking their lines but ultimately just playing roles. And yet, the feeling of despair is ubiquitous and, especially in the film’s first third, close to suffocating.

The story, by now, is a notoriously well-trodden one. However, it bears repeating because it appears the (perhaps tens of) thousands of priests engaged in this abominable, sometimes decades-long behaviour, have not been properly held to account. Columnist Dan Savage has rightly noted that, “If kids got raped by clowns as often as they get raped by pastors, it would be against the law to take your kids to the circus.”

And yet, even some of those who have been raped or otherwise molested continue to take their own children to church, perhaps in the devastatingly naïve belief that their own experience was unique. In the meantime, however, children continue to be exposed to predators who talk about forgiveness as much as they commit sins against the vulnerable children in their care.

Ozon’s film is broadly divided into three parts, although he struggles to connect them and the transitions are often very abrupt. In the first and arguably the best act, Melvil Poupaud stars as Alexandre, a middle-aged actuary and family man from Lyon who has decided to open up to his family and the church about the abuse he suffered at the hands of a local priest, Bernard Preynat, in his youth. He is encouraged by the recent pronouncements of Philippe Barbarin, a cardinal and the archbishop of Lyon, against child abuse, and he divulges everything to a mediator from the church, who writes a report and arranges a meeting between Alexandre and his erstwhile abuser, the paedophile priest.

All of this happens in a tranquillity rife with tension as Alexandre shields himself from an emotional breakdown, but the turmoil is always bubbling beneath the surface. Watching all of this unfold feels like the film is stepping on our chest, slowly asphyxiating us with the knowledge that the Church always, ALWAYS protects its own. Alexandre initially views the church as an ally in the fight instead of an accomplice in the cover-up, but he is slowly disabused of this notion as the facts come to light.

These facts include the realisation that there were multiple victims of Father Preynat’s predatory behaviour, including the leads in the film’s two subsequent acts. The first is François (Denis Ménochet), who has become an outspoken atheist; the second is the slightly younger Emmanuel (Swann Arlaud), who suffers from epileptic seizures and still lives with his mother although he likes to boast that he is a “zebra”, a gifted child. The characters are all scarred in their own ways, and many of them have ended up in relationships with others who have gone through similar experiences, which seems to both soothe and compound the issues stemming from them. To fight back, they form the

Ozon’s decision to tell multiple stories gives a rich insight into the various ways in which people struggle with abuse, and by the end of the film, it has become obvious that there are victims – of Preynat, of the Catholic Church writ large and of other abusers – in many more people than we might have thought.

However, once the first act climaxes with a stomach-churning scene in which Alexandre is forced to hold hands with his abuser while praying for strength, the film’s drama stalls. Unlike Spotlight or the stunning documentary feature Deliver Us from Evil, both of which had narratives that continually revealed more and more of what was hidden and who did the hiding, By the Grace of God lands very few serious body blows in its second and third acts. Instead, it focuses on the affected characters’ domestic lives, which come across as complex but fragmentary and not particularly coherent.

The production is far from polished: The scenes with Alexandre feel like completely removed from those of the much less affluent François and Emmanuel. The latter two also seem more willing to wage a fight against the Church, even if it means exposing themselves and their families to the wagging tongues of their friends, acquaintances and the influential society at large in Lyon, a city whose massive basilica towers over it from the top of Fourvière hill.

While all the men’s stories are given coverage in the flashbacks, the film does not go the whole hog and accuse the Church of complete knowledge or committing a cover-up. In Cardinal Barbarin, we see a man who says the right things in public but stalls behind the scenes and is unwilling to change the way things have always been done. He is a conservative but, as far as we can tell, not engaging full-on in the obstruction of progress. And yet, his plodding is infuriating because it can only be read in the most selfish way possible: No matter what offences his fellow priests have committed, we must forgive them because God forgives us. Ozon leaves some room for us to interpret the events, but both Preynat and the Church are almost certain to be viewed as culpable for serious harm caused to scores of children over decades.

If you are not a believer, you will receive some clear evidence to justify your lack of belief. If you do believe in God, this film ought to make you question, once again, why such unspeakable abuse is allowed to happen day in and day out, seemingly “by the Grace of God”. 

Viewed at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival.

A Russian Youth (2019)

André Crous

A Russian Youth spends much of its time on the front lines of foolishness with a silly central character who shows no development and an experimental format that undermines its own potential seriousness.

Russian Youth / Malchik russkiyRussia
2*

Director:
Alexander Zolotukhin
Screenwriter:
Alexander Zolotukhin
Director of Photography:
Ayrat Yamilov

Original title: Мальчик русский
Transliterated title: Malchik russkiy

Running time: 70 minutes

A Russian Youth takes a promising premise set in a very serious context and turns it into a joke within an embarrassing experiment. Set on the Eastern Front during the carnage of World War I, the Soviet Army is facing off against the German Empire. In its midst is a blond-haired, baby-faced and seemingly very inexperienced 15-year-old soldier named Aleksey (Vladimir Korolev), who soon gets trapped in the trenches as the Imperial German Army closes in. When the Germans’ mustard gas washes over them, the makeshift gas mask that is a bit of gauze over his mouth and goggles over his eyes do little to protect young Aleksey, and he loses his sight.

At the same time, however, there is another intrusion, arguably just as bad as the mustard gas. In an experimental fashion that has a stunningly alienating effect on whatever empathy we might have, the film constantly but irregularly cuts to an orchestra performing the film’s score: Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 3 Op. 30” and his “Symphonic Dances Op. 45”, neither of which dates to World War I.

There is no question that the two parts were directed by the same person because both contain some of the most cringeworthy performances in recent memory. On the one hand, there are the constant close-ups of musicians’ faces as they either watch with pained involvement or tension or giggle at supposedly comical moments in the film – the same scenes we, the audience, had just seen ourselves, but without the emotional investment, the tension or the giggles. On the other hand, there is Aleksey’s performance, which can most charitably be described as histrionic. Not satisfied with merely being blind, he has to scream, stumble and fumble with every breath he takes. It fully appears the mustard gas immediately affected the boy’s mental health because no person in their right mind behaves like this.

For most of the film, I kept hoping for another attack to dispense with Aleksey so that the boy would no longer make a fool of himself. From the moment he wakes up with bandages over his eyes, realises he will never see again and then proceeds to clamber over a dozen or so fellow soldiers, all of whom are injured just as badly as him but behave with infinitely more maturity, we can see this is a hysterical child who does not belong in the army, never mind as the lead in a feature film.

He is taken under the wing of a fellow soldier, a young man called Nazarka (a very patient Mikhail Buturlov, who might be the only saving grace about this production), who manages to put up with his tantrums and tries to protect him against his own buffoonery. Eventually, for whatever reason, Aleksey is noticed by a superior officer, who takes him to a hilltop and introduces him to a new line of work: using a massive war tuba to listen out for attack planes. After making a mess of things on his first try, Aleksey hears planes buzzing overhead almost immediately upon his second attempt and is thanked by another senior officer for his service. The inanity never ceases.

Director Alexander Zolotukhin, who, an opening title card reveals, made the film with assistance from a fund set up by master filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, uses sound and image to give an oblique impression of the World War I setting, although we are never directly informed about the story’s time and place. Since the spoken words do not directly correspond to the movement of the actors’ mouths, it is clear the dialogue was added in post-production. In addition, the visuals are quite gritty, and the colour is slightly washed out. At times, it almost looks like a colourised version of footage shot a century ago. But They Shall Not Grow Old this is not.

Whether the graceless performance by the lead, the exaggerated facial expressions by the musicians and the deplorable “German” spoken by the German characters (all of whom speak broken German and have Russian accents) are intentional is an interesting question. Would Sokurov, the man responsible for the sensitive portrayal of God-turned-mortal-Emperor-Hirohito in The Sun, have allowed such a brazen act of seemingly astonishing incompetence to be committed without good reason? One should hope not. Is A Russian Youth the Russian counterpart to Mark Wahlberg’s lamentable acting in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which allegedly sought to reflect the performances in the disaster movies from years gone by? It’s wholly unclear. If it is, then the joke is only funny to those who know the inside story.

Although some care was clearly taken in its formal audiovisual construction, A Russian Youth lacks context for the viewer and refuses to make its real intentions clear. The risible central character does nothing to overcome our objections, while the persistent comments from the conductor about his orchestra’s execution of Rachmaninoff’s compositions and the focus on their reactions to a film we are watching make for very annoying asides.

Viewed at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival.

Black Panther (2017)

André Crous

Not Ryan Coogler’s best work, but Black Panther’s mixture of big-budget special effects, intimate mythology and a yearning for what might have been is much needed.

Black PantherUSA
4*

Director:
Ryan Coogler
Screenwriters:
Ryan Coogler
Joe Robert Cole
Director of Photography:
Rachel Morrison

Running time: 135 minutes

Oakland, California, is where the revolutionary Black Panther Party was born in 1966. It is also where Oakland native Ryan Coogler, whose first two features – Fruitvale Station and Creed – are modern-day masterpieces, starts his superhero movie adaptation of the famous Marvel Comics character, in 1992, before moving to the present. But in a majestic, visually striking opening sequence, he tells the story of Wakanda, a nation hidden in the heart of Africa and endowed with limitless sources of the supermetal vibranium that have ensured the country’s financial survival and technological prowess despite its isolation.

The presentation of this history lesson calls to mind the opening minutes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, but the work of Coogler’s director of photography, Rachel Morrison, is much more sophisticated, as we appear to swing through time in an unbroken take whilst time unspools in the valleys below. Connecting Wakanda with Oakland is also the job of the camera, as it eventually swoops into the opening scene over a basketball court and settles on a young boy, who looks up and sees a space ship hovering above his apartment block. The links that Cooger and Morrison establish between past and present, poverty and technology, are a continual source of wonder because it is unusual to see this level of care taken in constructing a superhero film.

The titular Black Panther, king of the Wakandans, is played by Chadwick Boseman. Also known as T’Challa, he is the son of the former King T’Chaka, portrayed by South African veteran actor John Kani, and South Africa features everywhere in Black Panther. Not only is Wakandan really the Xhosa language (Nelson Mandela’s mother tongue and the second-most widely spoken language in the country), but one of the story’s main villains, Ulysses Klaue, is a white South African whose speech drips with an Afrikaans accent. Finally, the name T’Chaka is, of course, an unmistakable reference to one of the greatest military leaders the world has ever seen: Shaka, king of the Zulus.

But just as Shaka’s heirs could never match his acumen for waging battle, T’Challa does not do well in a comparison with his father, T’Chaka. This much is evident in his pitiful display of brawn shortly before his investiture: What is expected to be a coronation turns out to be something much more uncertain, as four of Wakanda’s tribes agree to T’Challa’s status as the new sovereign, but one tribe rejects him. This tribe, the Jabari, re-appears after centuries in hiding and have had no part in Wakanda’s development as an ultra-modern civilisation filled with technology that goes far beyond anything else on Earth, never mind the rest of the African continent. They are sceptical of the Wakandans’ talk of unity, particularly when they are themselves hiding out from the rest of the world.

This uneasy unity, of being one while being many, is an issue South Africa has sought for decades to address, even dubbing itself the Rainbow Nation. But for all the utopian idealism such metaphors inspire, it takes hard work for peace to be sustainable, and the tension is evident in Black Panther, too. Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), who is a Wakandan spy in Nigeria and helps to save a group of women from an unnamed terrorist group (clearly Boko Haram), continually pushes T’Challa to share Wakanda’s knowledge and riches with the less-developed world instead of hoarding it for itself.

The same thread runs through the film’s most complex vein, as its powerful male characters struggle to decide whether to help the world’s vulnerable or to turn inward and be selfish with the endless vibranium resources. While T’Challa is reluctant to find a solution, the arrival of Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan), a US war veteran and covert operations specialist who knows how to bring down a foreign government, forces him to face reality.

Although he is clearly the villain, Killmonger’s past (he grew up an orphan), justified feelings of betrayal (his father, N’Jobu, was T’Challa’s uncle, and he was killed by his own brother, King T’Chaka) and sense of purpose (he wants to use Wakanda’s technology to give power to the world’s disadvantaged black populations), not to mention his extraordinary good looks, all make him a complex character whom we empathise with even as we root for his enemies.

Such complexity is a welcome change from the standard big-budget and superhero fare. But it’s a shame T’Challa isn’t seen to be struggling with this issue more seriously. In fact, the ruler of the world’s most technologically advanced nation is surprisingly ill-prepared for the throne and the duties that come with it.

Just like Eddie Murphy’s Akeem Joffer in Coming to America, T’Challa seems to have skipped any and all discussions in the royal household about the road to being a king. His friendly demeanour endears him to most of his people, but he is clearly uncomfortable as regent, and his decision to change Wakanda’s approach to the outside world, well-intentioned though it may be, seems to be made without him realising how difficult it will be.

One of the film’s first scenes take place at the “Museum of Great Britain”, which houses artefacts looted by the British Empire over the centuries. There is a nagging question throughout as to whether things will change for Wakanda once it opens up to the world and its riches are discovered. Will it suffer the fate of fellow African countries whose resources have been plundered through outside meddling? Or will its mixture of tradition and advanced technology (not unlike a religious superpower such as the United States) protect it against the onslaught of an aggressive globalisation?

Although by far one of the best superhero films out there, Black Panther nonetheless never veers too far from the well-beaten path of its predecessors, and the good inevitably triumphs over the bad without much of a scuffle. The film raises many issues that will require a thorough probing in a sequel, however, and if these issues are addressed head-on and in keeping with the rules of the real world instead of those of superhero fiction, it will easily clear the bar set by this first instalment.

Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)

André Crous

Different than any of its siblings in the canon, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi takes some real chances but seems hesitant to do so and never really manages to soar.

The Last JediUSA
3.5*

Director:
Rian Johnson
Screenwriter:
Rian Johnson
Director of Photography:
Steve Yedlin

Running time: 150 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Phantom Menace (Episode I)
– Attack of the Clones (Episode II)
– Revenge of the Sith (Episode III)
– Star Wars / A New Hope (Episode IV)
– The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V)
– The Return of the Jedi (Episode VI)
– The Force Awakens (Episode VII)

“The FIRST ORDER reigns. Having decimated the peaceful Republic, Supreme Leader Snoke now deploys his merciless legions to seize military control of the galaxy.

Only General Leia Organa’s band of RESISTANCE fighters stand against the rising tyranny, certain that Jedi Master Luke Skywalker will return and restore a spark of hope to the fight.

But the Resistance has been exposed. As the First Order speeds toward the Rebel base, the brave heroes mount a desperate escape….“

The Last Jedi is unlike any of its predecessors in the Star Wars canon. Not only does it deploy a different visual grammar (except for the limited use of the perfunctory, obligatory wipes that this fictional world’s creator, George Lucas, borrowed from Akira Kurosawa), but it takes the storytelling in a new direction altogether. This refreshing take on a universe that has been with us for four decades infuses it with a new kind of energy but also sets the instalment up as the odd one out.

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s previous film, Looper, proved time-travel films could both entertain us and take seriously the existential consequences of their time-hopping characters’ actions. In Episode VIII, he flips the script to bring the Star Wars franchise up to speed with present-day trends while retaining enough of its old charm to make us feel right at home.

After The Force Awakens, which was widely viewed as a safe reboot of the original Star Wars film, speculation was rife that this second film in the third trilogy would be similar to the second film in the original trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back. That was a mouth-watering proposition. The 1980 film is historically the most ambitious of all the films in the series precisely because it takes unexpected risks that pay off in spades. But while The Last Jedi tips its hat in the direction of Episode V, in particular with the reappearance of the AT-ATs, it struggles much more than its counterpart to overcome its position as the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end of a trilogy.

It is always a struggle to fit all the characters’ storylines into a particular instalment while keeping to a normal running time and allowing things to breathe. The Empire Strikes Back alternated between the storylines of two significant groups – Luke, Yoda and R2-D2 and Leia, Han, Chewbacca and C-3PO – and added sporadic glimpses of Darth Vader and the Emperor. By contrast, The Last Jedi divides its narrative into at least three different parts spread out across the universe.

An early skirmish between the First Order and the Resistance produces a pyrrhic victory for the rebels: The former suffers material damage, but many of the Resistance fighters are killed in the process, and because Poe defies Leia’s orders to stand down in the heat of battle, he is demoted for insubordination. Leia and the rebels escape but are somehow tracked through hyperspace by their technologically superior enemy. With fuel supplies running low, Poe sends Finn and Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran, a maintenance worker whose sister died in the opening fight, to the Monte Carlo of the universe, the ultra-rich city of Canto Bight. Their mission is to find a codebreaker who could get them onto the First Order’s main dreadnought, the Supremacy, and help them deactivate its hyperspace tracker. This part of the story, which features many important characters all too briefly, is the worst developed and executed of the entire film.

Continuing from the previous episode’s cliffhanger on a rocky island on the remote planet of Ahch-To, a major part of the plot involves Rey and Luke, the two characters in the film who are the most adept at using the Force. Luke, having lived the life of a hermit since Ben Solo (now Kylo Ren) turned to the dark side, has shut himself off from the Force and refuses to engage with Rey, who pleads for guidance in the ways of the Jedi. Over time, he realises it would be better for her to know than not to know, but what he sees in her frightens him… and us.

There is a mind bridge that is also a narrative bridge linking Ahch-To with the Supremacy. For the first time since Episode V, Star Wars uses faux raccords (literally, “fake cuts”) to have two characters – in this case, Rey and Kylo Ren – interact with each other even though are not physically in the same space. This link, or Force connection, which allows them to grow uncomfortably close, is ultimately revealed to be Snoke’s doing to lure Rey into a trap, but it also exposes Kylo’s vulnerable side, when he tells Rey how he came to feel betrayed by Luke. In the theatrical version, these faux raccords took the form of very short dissolves, but they are near-impossible to spot on the home entertainment versions.

With Leia incapacitated, the remaining Resistance cruiser, the Raddus, has only 18 hours of fuel left. It is commandeered by the purple-haired Vice Admiral Holdo, whose leadership Poe and many of his allies onboard call into question because she is so calm amid imminent disaster. But they (and we, the viewers) have limited information, which leads to people like Poe, well-intentioned though he may be, drawing faulty conclusions and going out over their skis.

The film’s most impressive moment of visual flair occurs on Canto Bight, when the rowdy interior of the casino is presented in a way that, with a striking, seemingly impossible, forward tracking shot, pays homage to the most famous William Wellman’s Wings. But many other moments stand out for their awe-inspiring capacity. Some are nostalgic, like Luke meeting R2-D2 again and being shown Leia’s emergency hologram message from Episode IV, now as relevant as then, or Kylo Ren’s decision to kill Snoke, which is followed by a masterfully crafted lightsaber fight. What the hologram also does is create a parallel between Luke and Obi-Wan Kenobi, who, when we meet him in Episode IV, had been hiding out for years before being called on to help the Resistance once again and teach a young fighter about the Force.

Although Finn still seems too easily flabbergasted by revelations, John Boyega is generally better than he was in Episode VII. Yoda’s appearance could easily have become sentimental, but the old rascal is as insightful and as naughty as ever. But Domhnall Gleeson’s toadyish portrayal of First Order General Hux is just beyond awful, and it’s a real pity the character will continue to stick around for another episode.

The worst of the screenplay’s inventions, however, is the Porgs. Unlike the Ewoks of Return of the Jedi or even the Gungans of The Phantom Menace (groups that actually provided assistance to the main characters), the penguin-like Porgs on Ahch-To may be the most pointless creations across the first eight Star Wars episodes. In fact, they appear to serve no other purpose than as an otherworldly cuteness – one that has no bearing on the film but will be easily marketable as toys to younger viewers outside the movie theatre.

And who is the titular “last Jedi”? Luke firmly states (while seemingly looking straight at us) that it will not be him. Leia is still alive, but, as shown by the parallel cut to the Force being used to lift a pile of stones, it is Rey who assumes the mantle and is expected to continue the tradition of the Jedi Order, which at long last is also called a religion. We even glimpse the sacred Jedi texts in her possession on board the Millennium Falcon – presumably with Yoda’s consent.

The most important question that this particular instalment poses is also the one whose answer remains the most elusive: Can we really trust that Rey will remain as steadfast in her desire to remain on the side of the good as she believes? Or is she as likely to be tempted by the power of the dark side as Kylo Ren’s grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, was?

More than any of its predecessors, Episode VIII is interested in shading its characters. A persistent ambiguity about the central characters fills us with hope and fear – a perfect manifestation of the “balance” so often cited as fundamental to life with the Force. Kylo Ren is far from evil, while Rey’s seeming inexperience, perhaps even naïveté, leads us to believe she may be snatched up by the dark side. We also learn that Luke’s very understandable fears led to the destruction of a Jedi training camp (a parallel to Anakin’s killing of the Jedi younglings in Revenge of the Sith) and the rise of a Kylo Ren enamoured of Darth Vader.

Further compounding our uncertainty is Supreme Leader Snoke’s revelation that Rey and Ren, whose names differ by a single letter, did not really see into each other’s past and future when they touched but only saw what Snoke made them see. Thus, Rey’s confidence that Ren could be turned is based on planted evidence, and in turn, Ren’s vision of Rey’s parents is a similarly manufactured piece of fiction. In a scene on Ahch-To, Rey is confronted with an image that seems to suggest she was born not from any two individuals but from herself – a transcendental peculiarity not unlike Anakin’s midichlorian-orchestrated conception.

Our own alliances are in flux because of the uncertainty regarding Rey and Ren’s intentions and their abilities to withstand the temptations of the darkness and the light. The film concludes on a compassionate note that emphasises the bright future of the Resistance but is really just bizarre to watch in the context of all the other instalments because it chooses a peripheral character to convey its message. In the end, we all know that balance means both good and bad will prevail in some form, and Episode IX is likely to have a few nasty surprises up its sleeve.

The Virgin Spring (1960)

André Crous

Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring involves the rape of a virgin in medieval Sweden and questions the meaning of God’s (initial) silence when her father takes revenge.

Virgin SpringSweden
4*

Director:
Ingmar Bergman
Screenwriter:
Ulla Isaksson
Director of Photography:
Sven Nykvist

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Jungfrukällan

Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring opens with fire and closes with water. We expect a baby to be born, but instead, a virgin is raped and dies. We are reminded of God around every corner, but his apparent absence rings just as loudly. It is up to the viewer to decide whether to interpret these opposites as proof of balance or as markers of a fundamentally unpredictable existence.

Following on the heels of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, two of Bergman’s best-known films, Virgin Spring is less visual but equally interested in pressing questions related to mortality. In the opening scene, set in medieval Sweden, we see a wild-eyed servant girl, Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), quietly beseech the god Odin to come to her aid. The evening before, she witnessed her master’s teenage daughter, the pale-skinned, blond-haired, ever-smiling and pure-as-snow Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), dance with many young men, and she envies the attention the girl received from everyone. We later learn that she is asking Odin to put a stop to all this, failing to realise that the answer may not look very pretty.

Karin, a single child whose strong bond with her well-to-do parents is emphasised from the beginning, is sent to deliver candles to a church. The candles need to be delivered by a virgin, and Karin fits the bill. She even wears a special dress sewn by 15 “maidens”. For her own safety, she is accompanied by Ingeri, who is not very keen on talking to her, but during a conversation along the way, Karin tells her “no man will get me to bed without marriage”. Rather ominously, Ingeri suggests it might not always be her choice to make, but they continue onwards through the forest before Karin can consider the implication.

In the first half of the film, which culminates in the shocking rape and murder of Karin at the hands of a trio of vagrant brothers, there is a very strong focus on the two very different women. Karin knows nothing of the evil in the world, but perhaps because she is killed, she elicits some empathy from the viewer. We almost forgive her her ignorance because she passes away after a vicious assault.

By contrast, Ingeri seems to be slightly more world-wise and suspicious of men’s intentions. But she also reveals herself to be just as weak as Karin. At many turns, she becomes positively hysterical when overcome by fear or guilt or uncertainty, which makes her look all the worse. This film seems to imply that women are passive victims, while men are either malicious or vengeful.

But it is the rape scene that defines the film. Although mild in comparison with films of subsequent years, the act itself offers a few excruciating seconds of indirect assault, as the camera is positioned next to Karin’s face while she is being violated. While it only lasts a moment, and Bergman quickly reneges by going for a long shot that shows the full assault, this initial approach is stunningly effective and shows the “less is more” adage in action.

With the actions of the three goat herders that lead to Karin’s death, the focus turns to the male characters. By a stroke of pure bad luck for them, the malicious trio subsequently turns up at the estate of the late daughter’s parents, seeking food and shelter for the night and offering her 15-maiden-woven dress for sale – the same one she was wearing when they killed her. The youngest among them realises too late their fate is sealed and his petrified silence leads to their own deaths.

But the prospect of death hangs over the entire narrative. At the very outset, Frida, the housekeeper, mentions she nearly stepped on two dozen little chicks at night. She picks one up and says, “You poor thing, live out your wretched little life the way God allows all of us to live.”

Much later, when Ingeri has an awkward conversation with a man living in the forest, he shows her a few rudimentary implements that we quickly realise are to be used for an abortion: “Here is a cure for your anguish. Here is a cure for your woe. Blood, course no more. Fish, stop still in the brook.” To emphasise this point, he grabs her by the groin, but she manages to flee the scene.

The film’s interest in Odin, perhaps the best-known deity from Norse mythology, is tied to two rather debauched characters: the hysterical, irrational Ingeri and the aforementioned perverted man in the forest. By contrast, The Virgin Spring associates the god of Christianity with slightly more rational impulses. Even when Karin’s father, Töre (Max von Sydow), takes murderous revenge for his late daughter’s death, he does so after felling a birch tree and taking a sauna. This is not impulse but considered action.

In the film’s final scene, Töre lifts his hands to the heavens and delivers a prayer in which he looks up towards the Sun and questions why God saw his daughter’s rape but did nothing, why he saw Töre kill the three men but did nothing. “You allowed it to happen”, he seethes.

Of course, what he gets in response is more nothingness. Just like God failed to listen to him when he prayed to his crucified son the previous morning and asked that he “guard us this day and always from the devil’s snares. Lord, let not temptation, shame nor danger befall thy servants this day.” Like so many other believers in the centuries to follow, Töre decides that God requires penance for others’ sins but does not have to justify his own actions (or, more accurately, his passiveness when evil happens). Töre resolves that his “sin”, namely that he killed those responsible for Karin’s tragic death on Earth, will be sufficiently washed away by him building a church in honour of this god of his.

But then, something miraculous happens. When Töre and his wife, Mätare, move Karin’s body, water bubbles up from where her head had lain. Ingari washes her face, presumably to wash away her previous belief in Norse gods and all of her sins committed under the label of paganism. She appears to be happy for the very first time. And for a moment, all we can hear is the flow of the water, the symbol of life, even as the very dead body of Karin is draped in her parents’ arms.

The Virgin Spring does not have the visual inventiveness nor the intellectual force of many of Bergman’s other contemplations on religion and existence, but its simple plot is stripped of excess and easy to follow. It lacks real depth and eschews any serious probing of the issues it raises, but the final deus ex aqua moment shows a director open to making the presence of the extraordinary felt.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

André Crous

Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman is an artistic recreation of history, whose spotlight on the past also has the intended consequence of illuminating the present in all its whiteness. 

BlacKkKlansmanUSA
4*

Director:
Spike Lee
Screenwriters:
Charlie Wachtel
David Rabinowitz
Kevin Willmott
Spike Lee
Director of Photography:
Chayse Irvin

Running time: 135 minutes

America has always been a deeply racist place. From its founding to the American Civil War through Jim Crow, church bombings and lynchings up to the Charleston church shooting and the Charlottesville protests in the past few years, not to mention redlining, racial profiling and the stunningly disproportionate mass incarceration of the country’s black citizens, many (or most) whites have always struggled to accept the idea of racial integration. Perhaps because, for them, integrating meant not only compromising but surrendering their long-standing power.

And yet, in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers proclaimed that “all men are created equal”, even as they conferred a “three-fifths” status upon non-whites via Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution. This tension has underpinned continuous conflict, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 did little to quell the social distrust and downright hatred that had already been festering for centuries.

At the beginning of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, based on a true story, a young black man by the name of Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington) applies to be the first black police officer at the Colorado Springs station. He gets the job, but racist attitudes don’t just vanish like fog before the sun. He is undeterred, however, and quickly works his way into the intelligence division, where he stirs the pot by making a phone call to the Ku Klux Klan to express his alleged interest in joining the infamous white supremacist organisation.

Now, obviously, a black man is not going to rock up to the KKK and infiltrate it, no matter how talented a policeman he is. This is a real story, after all, not a comedy sketch by Dave Chappelle. Stallworth needs a white stand-in, and he finds a willing partner in the form of Flip Zimmerman (mesmerisingly portrayed by Adam Driver), whose Jewish heritage, which would be equally objectionable to the Klan if they ever found out, is luckily less apparent than Stallworth’s blackness.

Zimmerman infiltrates the Klan, which calls itself “the Organization”, by posing as Ron Stallworth, even as the real Stallworth continues to speak unrecognised over the phone with various hardcore white supremacists, including America’s most notorious pro-Aryan celebrity, David Duke. Eventually, Duke and Stallworth strike up such intimate conversations that Duke considers him a friend, little knowing that the colour of their skins is not as he imagines them to be.

Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen, who also played a white supremacist in Dome Karukoski’s outstanding 2013 drama Heart of a Lion, stars here as Felix, easily the most ominous KKK character in the cast. Immediately and continuously suspicious of Zimmerman’s/Stallworth’s intentions, Felix also speaks in such an insidious way it is hard to view him as anything other than a villainous piece of filth. The rest of the Organization’s local chapter is filled out by Walter (Ryan Eggold), who might even pass for a regular Joe outside the hate group, and the dim-witted and/or permanently inebriated “Ivanhoe” (Paul Walter Hauser).

But Spike Lee’s re-telling of this 1970s story is not meant purely as a middle finger to the white supremacists of the era. He makes no bones about connecting the story of racism perpetrated by whites against blacks to present-day America, and by hinting at a link between the Black Panther and Black Lives Matter movements, he also makes clear that history, as the saying goes, may not repeat itself but certainly does rhyme. Sometimes this bridge between the past and the present is so chilling it becomes almost hilarious. One example is the moment when the idea that someone like David Duke might one day occupy the White House is shot down as unrealistic – a self-explanatory subtweet of the 45th president.

At other times, the bridge is devastating: BlacKkKlansman‘s final moments underscore its importance as the first Trump-era Hollywood film to take the worst of the present-day political situation and turn it into art, just as George Clooney did by making Good Night, and Good Luck., a film that used the McCarthy era to make a point about patriotism and the importance of a free press in the midst of George W. Bush’s Iraq War. Lee all but states outright that Donald Trump – with his “America First” slogan with its antisemitic origins and his “good people on both sides” apology for Nazis and white supremacists who chant “blood and soil” and do much worse – is the new head of the KKK. The final scenes in the film are even more powerful than news footage we have seen because they are suddenly fully contextualised as part of a history of hatred and intolerance.

Despite some unnecessarily long-winded stabs at comedy – including an opening sequence with Alec Baldwin playing an inept narrator of a white supremacists’ propaganda video, as well as a screening of Birth of a Nation, in which the viewers’ behaviour is just as over-the-top and overtly racist as in D.W. Griffith’s notoriously anti-black film – this might very well be Spike Lee’s best film since at least 25th Hour and probably since Do the Right Thing.