Digital Week – January 18

Although at times quite gruesome, David Fincher’s 1995 serial-killer classic remains an intelligent, witty and unsettling drama 30 years on, eschewing the crassness of many films of its genre. The plot hinges on two cops brushing up on their Dante and Milton to ferret out a “deadly sin” murderer, and Fincher’s impeccably stylish directing keeps things on track until the genuinely—and logically—creepy denouement. The performances by Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt are authentic and stabilizing, while Kevin Spacey enters in the last act and provides his customarily brilliant portrayal as the killer. Darius Khondji’s spectacularly moody cinematography looks superb in the UHD transfer; extras include four commentaries, deleted scenes, alternate endings and several featurettes. 

In Brady Corbet’s would-be American epic about a Jewish Hungarian architect who emigrates to the U.S. after surviving Dachau, the hero is named László Tóth—which has to be some kind of in-joke, since it’s also the name of the Hungarian geologist who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta in 1972—and he is put through physical and emotional ringers that leave him as scarred as  what he endured in Europe. Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s script is crammed with big gestures, little subtlety and empty platitudes, but Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley’s trusty camera dresses up the outsized dramatic ambition in gorgeous images, albeit often hackneyed or borrowed from better filmmakers. As Laszlo, Adrien Brody gives a towering performance, and he is sensitively supported by Felicity Jones as his physically frail wife Elszabet. But poor Guy Pearce, who starts out hammily amusing as the antagonist, millionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren, is saddled with the most ludicrous dialogue and character arc, and he wears out his welcome long before the film ends with a ludicrously unnecessary epilogue that risibly sums up the preceding 3-1/2 hours—including intermission.

Director Thordur Palsson’s brooding, slowburn horror film fashions many familiar tropes—isolation, darkness, xenophobia, madness—and into a stew that’s distinctly unnerving but not fully cooked. Set during winter in a cutoff Arctic outpost, the drama builds around a self-sufficient settlement that must deal with the moral issues of intervening when a ship sinks off the coast, knowing there aren’t enough foodstuffs to supply survivors. While enacted intensely by a cast led by Odessa Young as a widow, Palsson’s film never takes off, leading to a pseudo-Twilight Zone twist ending to cover up its shortcomings.

Mike Leigh has been making semi-improvised contemporary character studies for decades but, with a few exceptions (“High Hopes,” “Life Is Sweet”), I prefer his historical epics “Topsy Turvy,” “Mr. Turner” and “Peterloo.” His latest is a disappointingly shallow study of Pansy, a middle-aged wife and mother whose anger—at her husband, son, family members, even store employees and customers—masks deeper psychological issues. Leigh and actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s second collaboration gets the particulars right but plausibility in characterization and relationships goes out the window whenever Pansy starts yelling…and yelling. The best scene, between Pansy and her loving but exasperated sister Chantelle (a pitch-perfect Michele Austin) at their mother’s gravesite, works beautifully because it is so understated. Too bad Leigh couldn’t maintain that restraint for the rest of the film.  

Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman who voted with Trump 90 percent of the time while both were in office, was lauded by right-thinking people when he joined the January 6 committee and voted for Trump’s impeachment in 2021. Steve Pink’s chummy documentary portrait further humanizes Kinzinger as he and his wife go through her pregnancy while he’s preparing to leave office in 2023 after being primaried by a vengeful Trumpian party. Pink gives us a sense of how otherwise unbridgeable differences between Kinzinger and, say, Liz Cheney on one side and Democrats on the other are closed by a need to save democracy. But despite such good vibes, we all know how it turned out: Trump is back, and things look worse than ever. So who really won?

Colson Whitehead’s absorbing novel about two Black boys, Elwood and Turner, who met and bonded at a racist Florida boarding school in the early ‘60s has been made into a frustratingly diffuse film by first-time feature director RaMell Ross, who obviously struggled to come up with a visual equivalent to the book’s omniscient narrator and second half plot twist. Using the camera for the pair’s POV works in theory but not dramatically, as it keeps us at a remove from the characters; it also cheats, since camera movements are not the same as a person’s real POV and so several scenes, especially those that are intimate or shocking, play out choppily. When he cuts to one of the boys, now an adult and living in New York City, Ross uses an even more tortured form of POV in a desperate attempt to hide the twist’s inevitable shock. There are moments of power and emotion, and Ross brings his documentary skills to the fore in the final montages that juxtapose actual history with Elwood and Turner’s lives. Ethan Herisse (Elwood) and Brandon Wilson (Turner) are rarely onscreen, while others—like Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Hattie, Elwood’s beloved grandmother—play to the camera in an unnatural way, something that prods Hamish Linklater to give a cartoonish portrayal of the school’s corrupt and racist administrator.