THE KINGDOM OF FAIRIES (1903)

While most people associate the silent era with black and white films, a primitive version of color has existed almost from the very beginning of cinema. Georges Méliès was one of the first filmmakers to embrace its possibility, employing a host of artists to hand paint every frame of some of his films. 

It was an expensive, work-intensive process, but some of these original hand-tinted prints have survived, giving us a look into a unique and long dead process that helped bring black and white silent films to colorful life. It is fitting that Méliès was one of the pioneers of this process. The consummate movie magician, Méliès was always looking for new ways to delight and entertain his audiences, and the enchanting images he brought to life have never looked more lovely than they do here.  Through this new Blu-Ray from Flicker Alley, 14 of the filmmaker's works have been preserved in all their hand-painted glory, preserved forever in vibrant HD. The disc also includes narration tracks that mimic the printed descriptions sent to theaters to be read aloud along with the films, filling in backstory and dialogue where intertitles were not present. For the young and the young at heart, Méliès' magic remains undimmed by time. Now over 100 years old, these films are as charming and enchanting as they ever were, and through the preservation of these hand-tinted copies, the work, the love, and the artistry behind every frame can now be seen for what they are.

The Pillar of Fire (1899)

A demon summons a vengeful spirit in this early Méliès short, starting off what will become a common theme in the filmmaker's work (see also The Infernal Cauldron). It's also part of a strange phenomenon in early cinema - films focused on women in long billowy robes flailing them around like wings. These were the subjects of many short films and actualitiés from the period, probably because they showcased the movement of the image which was still very new. Not much going on here really, but it demonstrates Méliès' budding artistry that was soon to take flight.

Joan of Arc (1900)

Ambitious, even by Méliès standards, Joan of Arc is an early retelling of the story of St. Joan that takes a brief look (although by 1900 standards, 10 minutes was quite long) at her life and untimely execution. Beautiful colors, but strangely stiff - Méliès is more comfortable with fantasy and fun, and the endless parade of extras (really just the same few people over and over) seems like a needless distraction to impress the audience. The lovely pastel quality to the hand-tinting is really what makes this one worthwhile. Otherwise it's an oddly listless and overly serious effort from Méliès that seems outside of his comfort zone.

A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902)

A Trip to the Moon (1902)

A 15 minute sci-fi fantasy about a group of astronomers who launch themselves to the moon, where they encounter an insectoid race that tries to hold them captive. By 2018 standards it's charmingly quaint, but it's also cinema magic in its purest form. All its tricks were done in-camera, and Méliès made the most of the tools that he had. People appear and disappear in puffs of smoke. An umbrella planted in the ground sprouts into a mushroom. And the spacecraft crash lands into the eye of the Man in the Moon. It's a dazzling display of early cinema's most advanced technology, yet what makes it so endearing even today is its almost naive earnestness. Méliès wanted to wow his audiences, to show them something they had never seen before. He was a magician to the end, and A Trip to the Moon is not only one of the earliest special effects films, it's also one of the earliest narrative films, moving cinema away from the documentary-like "actualités" into a new medium for storytelling.

The Kingdom of Fairies (1903)

Méliès' take on story of Sleeping Beauty, The Kingdom of Fairies, is perhaps one of his most beautiful and deeply magical films. The story is familiar, of course - a young princess is cursed by an evil witch because she was not invited to her birthday celebration. What follows, however, is not something you'll see in the Disney version of the oft-told tale. Méliès takes us on a journey through the sky, into the sea, and into the heart of mystical adventure as the prince chases after the young princess to rescue her from the witch.

It's a glorious tale, filled with a kind of epic sweep and grandeur that is rare for a film from 1903. The undersea sequences are especially impressive, as Méliès blends two different planes of action that includes real marine animals to create the illusion of actually being underwater.

Robinson Crusoe (1903)

Perhaps one of Méliès' weakest films, Robinson Crusoe takes the classic novel by Robert Lewis Stevenson and condenses it to its barest essence. Racist depictions of natives aside, the film is an attempt by Méliès to be more grounded that ultimately doesn't really work, despite a strong storm sequence. It flies through the events so quickly without inter titles or narration that it's difficult to keep up with, marking a rare failure in Méliès' ability to tell a story visually.

The Infernal Cauldron (1903)

Released the year after Méliès' iconic Trip to the Moon, The Infernal Cauldron is a much shorter, but no less impressive, showcase for the filmmaker's prowess for cinema magic. Telling a complete story in just over a minute, The Infernal Cauldron follows the brief exploits of a gleeful demon, whose devilish exploits soon backfire on him as his victims take their revenge. Beautifully hand-tinted,  Méliès creates a lovely tableau and dazzles with some top notch visual effects to support the short narrative.

The Impossible Voyage (1904)

A spiritual follow-up to the superior A Trip to the Moon, The Impossible Voyage follows a group of explorers who board a train that takes them across the mountains, into space, and back into the ocean. Slower paced and not as wondrous as A Trip to the Moon  the film still features some impressive effects shots and hand coloring, but you can definitely feel Méliès playing the hits here. He even borrows the iconic man-in-the-moon shot from A Trip to the Moon, replacing it with a man in the sun. There's a been-there-done-that feel to the whole affair that makes The Impossible Voyage feel tired and listless, unusual for a Méliès film.

Rip's Dream (1905)

The hand coloring on Rip's Dream is surprisingly sloppy, as if it were colored in large blocks rather than any attempt to color actual individual elements of the frame. Still, Méliès is in top form here, relating the oft-told tale with his trademark visual wit and sense of wonder. His use of multiple planes and his exploration of the frame makes for some of his most visually striking moments - the scenes in the forest are especially stunning, as row after top of people descend the hill to search for Rip Van Winkle. The growing trees around his sleeping form add a sense of mystery and magic, creating a lovely atmosphere that make the film one of Méliès' most mystical and wondrous works.

THE MERRY FROLICS OF SATAN (1906)

The Merry Frolics of Satan (1906)

Satan comes to Earth to steal some souls, and tricks an inventor into signing his away in Georges Méliès' delightful romp, The Merry Frolics of Satan. Satan then takes the inventor on a wild carriage ride through heaven, before cashing in his ill-gotten contract and taking him down to hell. It's a surprisingly dark storyline, but Méliès treats it with a light touch. The climactic carriage ride through the heavens, featuring swirling planets and shooting stars, is perhaps one of the filmmaker's most visually stunning sequences; allowing him, if only for a few moments, to break free of the tableau based static frame that was so common at the time, and give us the feeling of flight. It's an astonishing reminder of why Méliès remains one of cinema's most visionary magicians.

The Witch (1906)

This 1906 short film finds Méliès experimenting, if only briefly, with close-ups, breaking the usual two-dimensional plane of very specific wide-shot aesthetic made necessary by the size of his studio. The Witch is bookended by these medium shots, setting the film apart from much of the filmmaker's other work. But what really distinguishes it is what happens between those two shots.

The Witch is one of Méliès' most completely bonkers works, following the misfortunes of a young man who stiffs a witch on payment her supernatural services and must suffer the consequences. Of course, the witch is vanquished in the end because she's a witch, despite the fact that the young man was clearly in the wrong, but Méliès throws everything he's got at this one. There are giant frogs and owls, fire-breathing dragons, flying witches, vengeful ghosts, and a flaming sword. It's pure Méliès magic, and perhaps one of his most dazzling achievements.

The Inventor Crazybrain and His Wonderful Airship (1906)

One of Méliès' most impressive qualities was his inherent ability to tell well-rounded and complete stories in such a short period of time. In The Inventor Crazybrain and His Wonderful Airship, Méliès takes us into the mind of a crackpot inventor whose dreams of a zeppelin crash lead him to scrap his plans for his latest invention.

One of the filmmaker's most beautifully hand-tinted works, Inventor Crazybrain also finds Méliès exploring new ways to escape the one-camera tableau structure that always confined him, restructuring sets around his subject to take us on a fantastic journey into a man's dreams. Yet perhaps what makes it so wonderful is the realization that it's not the inventors dreams being realized on-screen - they belong to Méliès himself.

The Diabolic Tenant (1909)

Méliès may be most famous for his grand sci-fi and fantasy work, yet the smaller scale shorts best showcase his wit and love of simple magic. The Diabolic Tenant finds a man renting a room with an unusual method for decorating. Paintings fly up on the wall, stationary objects move on their own, people appear and disappear - it's a short but sweet piece of early silent magic that returns Méliès to his roots, finding joy and wonder in the seemingly mundane objects of every day life.

Whimsical Illusions (1909)

Whimsical Illusions is exactly what its title suggests - this is Méliès at play, casting himself as a magician whose illusions gradually get grander and more complex. This one isn't so much trying to tell a story as it is trying to wow the audience, and it does so with aplomb. Méliès goes from simple card tricks to bringing mannequins to life.

The film is really a showcase for what a skilled editor and showman Méliès was. Whimsical Illusions looks like it was shot in one take, yet its magic was brought to life through a series of nearly imperceptible cuts (perhaps some of his finest work) that give this cinematic magic show its sense of realism and wonder.

Méliès: Fairy Tales in Color is now available on Blu-Ray/DVD combo from Flicker Alley.

It's almost become cliché to compare the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda to those of the great Japanese filmmaker, Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu's family dramas have etched themselves into cinematic history, and any Japanese filmmaker since who has attempted to explore family dynamics has inevitably been compared to him, for better or worse.

It is a comparison most frequently drawn with Hirokazu because his films so often deal with the idea of family and the ties that bind Still Walking, Like Father, Like Son). In his latest film, the Palme D'Or winning Shoplifters, however, Hirokazu is investigating a very different kind of family, taking the Ozu framework of intergenerational conflict and turning it on its head. Here, Hirokazu is not only investigating what it means to be a family, he's exploring some very dark territory about poverty and finding connections where none exist.

The film centers on a poor family who make their living by shoplifting. Everyone gets involved, from the grandmother down to the youngest child, distracting store employees while others pick up the items they need. On their way home one day, they discover a little girl on the street, cold and hungry. After taking her home, they soon discover that her home life is abusive, and decide to keep her, bringing her into their own family and recruiting her as a shoplifter to save her from her real family. Things get complicated for them, however, when the police come looking for the little girl, threatening to dissolve everything they've worked so hard to build.

That's where Shoplifters becomes really interesting; as the film moves on, Hirokazu slowly begins to peel back the layers, revealing the truth about the nature of this family. Why, for instance, the oldest son seems to have such trouble calling his father "dad," or why the grandmother is such a cold and imperious matriarch. This family is not at all what it appears to be, and Hirokazu plays his cards close to the vest until just the right moment. It is an exploration not only of family, but of cyclical poverty and its devastating human toll. Like the best of Ozu, Shoplifters zeroes in on the friction and misunderstanding between generations, but there's something much darker and deeper going on here than just parents who are unable to communicate with their children. It navigates tricky emotional territory with Hirokazu's trademark grace and a deep and abiding sense of humanity.

Family is what we make it, and in Shoplifters Hirokazu paints a heartbreaking portrait of a family like no other, built from scratch and forged by fire. It leaves an indelible impression, slowly building to an unforgettable emotional crescendo that is so expertly devised that we almost don't see it coming. Like Hirokazu's best work, it is quiet, hushed, and often unassuming, but lands with power of an earthquake.

GRADE – ★★★½ (out of four)

Jean-Luc Godard's The Image Book is at once perfectly at home with his other late-period collage films such as Film Socialisme and Goodbye to Language, and yet completely unlike anything the 88-year-old Nouvelle Vague iconoclast has ever made. It's part of the filmmaker's quest to investigate and reinvent the cinematic language, a life-long passion for Godard at least since 1967's Weekend, in which he infamously declared the "end of cinema."

His last film, Goodbye to Language (2014), similarly tried to redefine the cinematic language, a brazen attempt to force viewers to reevaluate the very way we watch and engage with movies. There his medium was 3D, experimenting with the prevalent gimmick of the day to explore the multiple dimensions cinematic plane. In The Image Book  he moves in a different direction entirely. Now having re-written cinematic language, he seeks once again to make audiences redefine their preconceptions about the confines of the film frame and explore the dynamics of the moving images.

Through re-tooled images from cinema history (taken from such films as Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou, Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar, Hitchcock's Vertigo, and Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down) and an often shifting aspect ratio, Godard is quite literally making the audience look at these familiar images from alternate points of view. It's an effect created by the way Godard transfers films from VHS to his DV camcorder, as the camera attempts to adjust to the different aspect ratio, yet this digital "mistake" was purposefully left in.

In fact, The Image Book is filled with such "mistakes." From analog "snow" to layers of grain, to hyper-saturated color, choppy edits and fading sound, Godard has taken all the imperfections that come with both digital and analog technology and turned them into a kind of art of their own. Godard refers to film restorations as "botox," rejecting the cleaned up image for the grainy ravages of time. And indeed, these repurposed clips reflect their age - they are copies of copies of copies, fading and taking on new qualities with each new transfer. They have, in essence, become something new.


Yet perhaps Godard's boldest statement in The Image Book is his exploration of Middle Eastern cinema. The Image Book  somewhat controversially, incorporates ISIS propaganda videos - perhaps some of the most iconic images of evil of our time. Yet they are also some of the most iconic images to come out of the Muslim world in 21st century. This is how the west views the Middle East - these are the images that define Islam for many. It is with that in mind that Godard explores the films of the Middle East. We're no longer in the familiar territory of the western canon that Godard so deftly reconstructs in the film's first half. These are very much foreign images, even for many cinephiles. This being a late-period Godard film, don't come expecting any definitive philosophical statements (we're a long way from the pointed didacticism of his Marxist/Maoist period of the late 1960s and early 1970s), but one can't help but feel Godard asking us not only to reframe our point of view of the moving image, but of the Muslim world itself.

The value of these images, in fact the very nature of their beauty (or lack thereof) lies in our own perception of them. Godard gives us the tools to decode them, but intentionally leaves us without a guidebook. Through the various lenses he places in front of them, be they digital imperfections, analog glitches, or simply the fog of time, The Image Book asks us to look at the world around us in ways we've never before considered. It's all perhaps best summed up in its final moments, in which Godard, his voice raspy, his thoughts interrupted by fits of coughing, waxes philosophical about the the "necessary utopia" of cinema over scratchy, unrestored scenes from Max Ophül's Le plaisir, as if the same degradation of time devouring our cinematic history has finally caught up with the man himself. His compilation of scenes from his own work (Nortre musique, Forever Mozart) lends credence to the idea that Godard is not only putting the past behind him, he's reinventing it into something new, a vessel to recycle old ideas and carry them into the future as a new entity. It's an endlessly fascinating and somehow wistful work, a career summation by a legendary iconoclast who continues to reinvent himself well into his ninth decade of life, now looking back at a life's work and asking "what was it all for, and what can I do with it now?" The answer lies somewhere buried in the bleary fragments of images recorded from Godard's VHS player, a radical reinvention of cinematic language that will be studied and appreciated for decades to come.

GRADE - ★★★½ (out of four)

THE IMAGE BOOK | Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | Not Rated | In French w/English subtitles | Opens January 25 in New York City. Additional cities to follow.

There are few actors who have risen to ubiquity in recent times quite as quickly as Lucas Hedges. Hedges, who burst onto the scene in 2016's Manchester by the Sea (a performance for which he earned an Academy Award nomination), has had prominent roles in five films in the ensuing two years (two of which were Best Picture nominees), and three this year alone: Mid90s, Boy Erased, and Ben is Back.

Of the three films, Ben is Back is perhaps the most personal for the actor. Written and directed by his father, Peter Hedges, Ben is Back is a searing family drama about a young drug addict named Ben Burns (Hedges) trying to recover with the help of his tenacious mother (Julia Roberts). Hedges wrote the role specifically for his son, and the pair make a formidable team. The elder Hedges is an alumnus of the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem (his film debut, Pieces of April, was the first film I reviewed as a professional reviewer for the Teen Page in The Dispatch way back in 2004), and has made a career out of modestly scaled dramas with a strong emotional core. Even his Disney film, The Odd Life of Timothy Green, while not a major success for the studio, is a surprisingly intimate drama, wearing its sentimentality on its sleeve to great success.

Ben is Back is perhaps less sentimental than Hedges' more recent work, but no less effective. Ben's full history is never really known. We know he's a recovering addict, that his past is full of dark skeletons, and that his mother is the only person who has faith in him. When he shows up at their door just before Christmas, it threatens to put a rift in the family - but his mother refuses to turn him out. Even as his past begins to catch up with him, she resolves to stand by his side, even when Ben's old friends start getting frighteningly close to her family.

Ben may be the focus of the film, but ultimately the emotional center is his mother. Roberts delivers one of her finest performances yet as Holly Burns, a ferocious mama bear who exudes a kind of stalwart resolve through her vulnerability. Roberts manages to seem both strong and fragile, a mother out of her depth still determined to do anything she can to save her son from the nightmare of addiction. Hedges is equally strong - an air of hopelessness radiates off him, a desire to get clean coupled with an innate need to pursue his next fix. That's perhaps the strongest aspect of Ben is Back  it's an ultimately uplifting story about how far a mother will go to save her son, but even though it ends with a glimmer of hope, there's still the nagging sense that this is far from over, and that the cycle is only beginning again.

Peter Hedges' understated style keeps the film from slipping into melodrama. Roberts and Hedges' performances are so natural and lived in, the screenplay so unassuming, that it invites us into its world and takes us along for the ride. It doesn't have anything new or particularly profound to say about addiction, but its illustration of its cyclical and sometimes inescapable nature is gracefully rendered, exploring how society tacitly enables destructive behavior in the name of trying to discourage it. Ben is Back examines drug addiction's human toll without coming across as sanctimonious or sensationalized - it's simply a story of two people trying to fight an inner young man's seemingly invincible inner demons.

Come for the performances, but stay for the sensitive rendering of the struggle of drug addiction. It's not always an easy film to watch, but Hedges deftly finds the humanity and ultimately the silver-lining created by unconditional love. It appears in every gesture of Roberts fully realized and deeply grounded performance, a marvel of restrained emotion that provides Ben is Back with a wrenching and poignant backbone that is hard to shake.

It's been over 50 years since we last saw Mary Poppins on screen in 1964. Perhaps one of Walt Disney's most beloved classics, Mary Poppins has entered into the popular lexicon in a way few films ever have. With Disney's current penchant for raiding its own back catalogue for sequels and remakes, it was perhaps inevitable that they should eventually return to Poppins, despite the fact that original star Julie Andrews is now too old to reprise the ageless role in a direct sequel.

So the studio turned to Emily Blunt, who capably (but not completely) fills Andrews' prim shoes as the titular magical nanny. Set some thirty years after the original film, Rob Marshall's Mary Poppins Returns finds Mary returning to the London home of the Banks family, where widower Michael (Ben Whishaw) now lives with his three children, and his sister Jane (Emily Mortimer). A series of bad financial decisions has put the Banks family on the brink of losing their home, and unless they can locate their father's bank shares by the end of the week, they'll lose the Banks house.

Naturally, Mary Poppins comes to the rescue, along with lamplighter Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda), leading the family through a fun-filled romp that teaches them all to let go and recapture their childhood. The film follows a very similar trajectory as its predecessor, very carefully replicating original musical numbers with new songs that are far less memorable. "Can You Imagine That" is the new "A Spoonful of Sugar," "The Royal Doulton Music Hall" replaces "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," "Trip a Little Light Fantastic" stands in for "Chim Chim Cher-ee," "Turning Turtle" is another silly supporting character sidebar much like "I Love to Laugh," and "Nowhere to Go But Up" is the modern answer to "Let's Go Fly a Kite." Yet for the most part, it all feels like reheated left-overs, never able to recapture the original film's simple magic. It hews so closely to the plot and structure of the original film that it is never able to establish any sort of personality of its own, or really any reason for existing in the first place.

No other studio is quite so adept at weaponizing nostalgia as Disney. But the formula is starting to feel tired. Mary Poppins Returns follows very similar thematic territory to the studio's other belated 2018 sequel, Christopher Robin, yet that film managed to handle ideas of recapturing childhood with greater care. By contrast, Mary Poppins Returns feels overstuffed, brimming with elaborate musical numbers and grand production design, but never really goes anywhere. Even the appearances of Dick Van Dyke (reprising his role of the bank manager from the original film) and Angela Lansbury in the film's final 20 minutes can make up for the lackluster quality of the preceding two hours.

Van Dyke and Lansbury are naturally the highlights of the film (sending the film off in a wistful sense of whimsy it had been sorely lacking up to that point), and the film does manage to pick up steam after its climax (which makes the mistake of arriving the obvious solution to the problem at hand after quite a bit of superfluous suspense), but the whole affair is so listless that its manufactured joy never feels genuine or particularly magical, bludgeoning the audience into submission with its nostalgic cheerfulness rather than with the graceful touch that made Christopher Robin so endearing. Moments of inspiration (the lovely animated sequence mid-way through, Meryl Streep's wacky cameo, David Warner as an ancient Admiral Boom) are then drowned by director Rob Marshall's busy and overstuffed musical numbers that have the spirit but none of the wonder of the original Mary Poppins. It's a film that's been focus-grouped within an inch of its life, immaculately designed to follow its formula to the letter without offering any surprises or any real warm and fuzzy recollections of its predecessor, unless it's to wonder why you're not just watching the original film instead.

GRADE - ★★ (out of four)

MARY POPPINS RETURNS | Directed by Rob Marshall | Stars Emily Blunt, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Dick Van Dyke, Angela Lansbury, Colin Firth, Meryl Streep, Karen Dotrice, Pixie Davies, Nathanael Saleh, Joel Dawson, David Warner | Rated PG for some mild thematic elements and brief action | Now playing in theaters nationwide.

Anna Zamecka's Communion is a verité-style documentary that follows a Polish family as they prepare for their autistic 13-year-old son's church confirmation. The title serves a dual purpose, literally referring to young Nikodem's Holy Communion, but also ironically to the communal relations of the family in question, which is falling apart before our eyes.

As her parents fight and begin divorce proceedings, 14-year-old Ola Kaczanowska essentially becomes the family's primary caretaker, helping prepare Nikodem for his communion while trying to hold her own life together while everything else is seemingly falling apart. Zamecka's camera follows the Kaczanowski through their crumbling lives up to Nikodem's communion in what becomes an almost unbearable of assault of miserablism without any apparent form or function.

The problem is that Communion has very little to say and offers no point of view. The slice-of-life aesthetic that worked so well in other verité-style docs like Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Distant Constellation, and Quest becomes something of a liability here. It feels as if we're intruding on someone's personal life, and that Zamecka is filming things we were never meant to see. Communion is a deeply uncomfortable experience, as if we're watching the disillusion of a family in real time. It offers no POV, no hope, no real insight into society or family dynamics. It simply...exists.

That's what sets Communion apart from its verité brethren; whereas the aforementioned films explore specific milieus and how they are affected (or ignored) by the world around them, Communion wallows in the misery of its subjects for no other purpose than to watch the family melt down. It's a work of painful voyeurism, never questioning or investigating to source of its subjects' strife, content to merely observe with a dispassionate eye. One can't help but wonder why Zamecka doesn't dig deeper into what's going on here. Ola tries to take responsibility for her brother, but the pressure is often too much. We watch her cry and scream in frustration, but to what end? What purpose does all this serve? The film offers nothing in return for its crushing nihilism, no insight, no deeper emotional core, just the utter helplessness of watching a family destroy itself from within, as if we're watching the home movies that never make it to social media. There's something to say somewhere in this unfocused collection of moments, in which a child much take responsibility for her own family, unfortunately Communion never seems to find it.

GRADE - ★½ (out of four)

COMMUNION | Directed by Anna Zamecka | Not rated | In Polish w/English subtitles | Opens today, Jan. 4, in select cities.

Perhaps the best thing DC currently has going for it is the lower expectations one has going into their films than one of Marvel's. While Marvel's consistently high standards continue to yield strong results, DC's mixed track record when it comes to their films, not to mention their backwards approach to creating a cinematic universe, has resulted in some decidedly underwhelming films.

While Man of Steel and Wonder Woman were both strong films, DC's attempts at world-building in Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League, and Suicide ranged from mediocre to painful, leaving the future of the series in doubt. While DC hasn't learned from all of its mistakes, they have shown a penchant for recruiting top-notch talent behind the camera, hiring Patty Jenkins (Monster) to helm Wonder Woman and Wonder Woman 1984, Ava Duvernay (Selma) to adapt New Gods, and  James Wan (The Conjuring) to tackle their latest big screen extravaganza, Aquaman.

Aquaman is perhaps one of the comic giant's more obscure superheroes, but in casting the ever-popular Jason Momoa, fresh of his stint as Khal Drogo in HBO's Game of Thrones, DC scored a coup that has pushed the character to new heights of popularity. Momoa is indeed charismatic as the reluctant underwater king, who must return to Atlantis to claim the throne from his evil half-brother, King Orm (Patrick Wilson). It's a narrative that borrows heavily from everything from Shakespeare's "Hamlet," to Marvel's Thor: Ragnarok, to Dreamworks' How to Train Your Dragon 2, peddling a tired story of reclaiming a throne in a mythical kingdom that has been done so many times at this point that's it's hard to tell what is being stolen from anymore.

The film's lack of originality is hampered by a tired screenplay that claims no less that 5 credited writers, and it definitely has that "written by committee" feel, cribbing liberally from other superhero origin films while bringing very little new to the table. Aquaman attempts to stuff so much backstory and ham-fisted mythology into its inflated runtime (2 hours and 23 minutes!) that it would be possible to excise at least 30 minutes from the film without taking anything essential away from the overall plot.

To his credit, Wan seems to understand the inherent goofiness of the entire premise (the film's villain, Black Manta, looks like a rejected Power Rangers villain), and directs the hell out of it. His fluid sense of storytelling keeps the flashbacks and digressions from becoming too unwieldy, and he stuffs the frame with so much business that it's almost shocking that the film doesn't buckle under the weight. As a result, the action sequences are just so gleefully bonkers that one can't help but get swept up in it, the film's climax becoming a vibrantly unhinged set piece that goes for broke and actually out-Bays Michael Bay, throwing in everything but the kitchen sink while maintaining focus on what's most important in the frame.

Wan does his best with the cards he was dealt. Aquaman is a fairly standard superhero yarn Wan uses as a playground. He's clearly having a blast, and his sense of fun is infectious, even if underneath the flashy action sequences the film itself is incredibly rote. Yet it's hard to say no to a film with a cast that includes Nicole Kidman, Willem Dafoe, and Julie Andrews as a massive sea monster. It may be all flash and no substance, but it's some pretty damn impressive flash.

GRADE - ★★½ (out of four)

AQUAMAN | Directed by James Wan | Stars  Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Willem Dafoe, Patrick Wilson, Dolph Lundgren, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Nicole Kidman,  Temuera Morrison, Ludi Lin, Randall Park, Djimon Hounsou, Leigh Whannell, Julie Andrews, John Rhys-Davies | Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for some language | Now playing in theaters nationwide.

The Transformers series has always been something of a mixed bag. Michael Bay's original remains a high point in the filmmaker's career, a solid action/adventure epic that delivered on its promise to bring Hasbro's line of transforming toys to life. While a Writer's Guild strike hampered the franchise's second entry, Revenge of the Fallen (2009), Bay rallied for the original trilogy's 2011 conclusion, Dark of the Moon, which remains perhaps the filmmaker's most uninhibited opus of mass destruction.

However, the series has started to resemble something akin to dadaist cinema in recent entries, abandoning all sense of logic and narrative form in favor of incoherent world building and convoluted myth-making. Even Bay's normally strong eye for action had evolved into messy, garish CGI sequences that matched his "kitchen sink" approach to storytelling.

It's refreshing, then, that the series has gone back to basics for its new prequel, Bumblebee. Gone are the apocalyptic stakes of the last three films, replaced by a kind of "girl and her robot" story that actually remembers that these films are based on toys and are ostensibly for children. The result is a film with more heart than any other film in the Transformers franchise, focusing on teenager Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld) and her relationship with the titular hero. Of course, Bumblebee is pursued by some villainous Decepticons who track him to Earth, and we are treated to some glimpses of the war on the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron before Bumblebee makes his way to our planet. But for the most part the movie is relatively small scale  and self-contained, not so much interested in world-building as it is telling a good story.

Of course, it's a story we've all seen before in some variation, perhaps most notably in The Iron Giant. But director Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) keeps the focus on the relationships between the characters, and they carry the film even through its most outlandish moments. It helps that Knight realizes who his audience is, and rather than making a kids movie for grown-ups he plays straight to the young and young-at-heart. It's still a Transformers movie, with all the inherent goofiness that comes with it, and there are times when one misses Bay's penchant for visual mayhem, but Bumblebee manages to deliver on expectations without rocking the boat too much.

That is perhaps what most separates it from Bay's films - it never really takes any big risks or distinguishes its own personality. It works simply because it's more narratively coherent and straightforward than its predecessors. Perhaps it is being graded on a curve because Age of Extinction and The Last Knight were so unwatchable, but there's an almost understated charm beneath its story of giant warring robots that it's hard not to appreciate its relative modesties. The addition of Angela Bassett as villainous Decepticon, Shatter, is an inspired bit of casting, and her enthusiasm for the role is infectious. These elements may not add up to anything earth-shattering, but it's nice to see a major Hollywood blockbuster that's content to focus on character relationships over spectacle. The problem is that we've become so accustomed to large scale visual extravaganzas that when something moderately less destructive like Bumblebee, it almost feels revolutionary.

It's not, of course. Bumblebee is still a film about alien robots that can transform into cars, but unlike its predecessors it seems to understand, and embrace, exactly what it is. That's probably the most revitalizing aspect of Bumblebee of all - it isn't afraid to embrace its inherent silliness, and that gives it far more leeway to have fun. There's nothing new to see here, but Knight gives this series just enough juice to keep it going.

GRADE - ★★½ (out of four)

BUMBLEBEE | Directed by Travis Knight | Stars Hailee Steinfeld, Dylan O'Brien, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Cena, Angela Bassett, Justin Theroux, John Ortiz, Peter Cullen | Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action violence | Now playing in theaters nationwide.

From Beau Travail (2000) to Let the Sunshine In (2018), Claire Denis has consistently displayed a fascination with the human body and the ways it can move through dance. Anyone who has experienced Beau Travail can attest to the power of Denis' fascination with dance. In her 2005 documentary, Towards Mathilde, Denis turns that fascination into a feature-length celebration of the human body in a mesmerizing portrait of choreographer, Mathilde Monnier, head of the Montpilier National Centre for Choreography in France.

Denis sits down with Monnier for an interview early on in the film, but it soon becomes clear that this will not be the ideal format through which to tell her story. The film quickly transitions into a kind of verité, fly-on-the-wall style doc in the tradition of Frederick Wiseman, content to step back and observe Monnier's process in all its seemingly mundane detail. Yet where Wiseman is more intrigued by process, Denis is enthralled by bodies and movement. Her camera lingers on the bodies of the dancers as they writhe and contort in tentative movement, exploring the choreography before fully embracing it.

Captured on 8mm and 16 mm film by cinematographers Agnès Godard and Hélène Louvart, Towards Mathilde takes on a kind of languid sensuality, like hazy memories and impressions being filtered through time. This allows Denis to not only explore the process and theory of Monnier's art, but its practical applications through the human body. Denis so beautifully investigates physicality and movement by simply observing and allowing the dancers to tell the story. It's a visceral, often mesmerizing experience that showcases Denis' talents as a visual filmmaker fully in command of her art.

The DVD from Grasshopper Film also includes Denis' arguably superior 2015 documentary short, The Breidjing Camp. If Towards Mathilde finds Denis channeling Frederick Wiseman, The Breidjing Camp finds her channelling her great contemporary, Agnes Varda. Inquisitive and probing, even playful, where Towards Mathilde is languid and lyrical, The Breidjing Camp examines life in a Chad refugee camp set up more than a decade ago to house those displaced by the conflict in Darfur.

THE BREIDJING CAMP.

Africa has always been near and dear to the filmmakers heart, and she has explored French colonialism's effects on the continent in multiple films. But here it feels more personal, more raw. Through interviews with refugees, camp employees, and local officials, Denis investigates the situation from multiple points of view, leaving one with the distinct impression that life in the camps isn't quite a good as officials would have us believe. Residents are grateful that Chad has offered them a temporary home, but the camp, once populated by tents, is now dotted by permanent structures as the situation in Darfur has deteriorated rather than improved while western powers continue to turn a blind eye.

Denis manages to find happiness and sorrow within the camp, but a clear dichotomy between the official story and the reality within the camps. People are still suffering, even if the situation is better than the one the refugees face at home. The Breidjing Camp allows Denis to put a human face on the suffering in Darfur, in the process discovering that the situation on the ground is not as black and white as it may seem on the surface. It is a testament not only to human resilience, but to the deafening indifference of a world that still refuses to see the humanitarian crises taking place in Chad.

Together, the two films offer a different perspective on Denis as a filmmaker, one who not only explores the human condition through fiction but also in stark reality. There are few filmmakers working today with such a keen sense of perception, and Towards Mathilde is a lyrical inquiry into human beauty just as The Breidjing Camp examines its ugliness. Taken together, they're an unforgettable portrait of a filmmaker of extraordinarily profound empathy and humanity.

GRADE - ★★★½ (out of four)

TOWARDS MATHILDE | Directed by Claire Denis | Not Rated | In French w/English subtitles | Now available on DVD from Grasshopper Film.

In a year when so many things seemed to be going wrong, one thing that seemed to be going very right were the movies. 2018 was a fantastic year for cinema. Filmmakers made the epic intimate and the political personal, examining the world in which we live with grace and candor. The ten films that hit me the most this year came from a diverse array of filmmakers, some living and some who haven’t been alive for three decades. They are statements of love, joy, sadness, pain, portraits of who we are and reflections of where we’ve been. Yet each one has something in common – a shared sense of empathy, no matter how caustic, that offers an uncommon insight into what it means to be a human.

1 | THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (Orson Welles, USA)

A film seemingly from beyond the grave, Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind began production 40 years ago, and became the legendary filmmaker's final obsession, a project decades in the making that was never completed before his death. Finally assembled by Peter Bogdanovich , Welles' final film can finally be recognized as the masterpiece that it is. Here, a man who started his career making avant-garde silent shorts and radio dramas creates one of the most brazenly modern films of his career, a work of experimental cinema that takes stock of the industry as Welles saw it - from the New Hollywood Cinema of Scorsese, De Palma, and Coppola, to the European art house cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni (mercilessly lampooned in Hannaford's film-within-a-film). This is cinema as voyeurism, for both the filmmaker and the audience. Is cinema a means to an end or simply an end? A journey or a destination? A penetrative act or a reflective act? Here, Welles dismantles the male gaze, the camera as a phallus, positioning cinema as an act of rape that destroys that which it seeks to exalt. It is a daring, reckless, uncompromising film that has risen like a phoenix from the ashes to take its place in the pantheon of great things - the final film of an American master who, 33 years after his death, has shown the world that he is just as vital and brilliant as ever.

Now that The Day After has been released, Claire's Camera has something of a reputation as the lesser middle child of Hong Sangsoo's trilogy of films dealing with his much publicized affair with actress Kim Min-hee that began with 2017's On the Beach at Night Alone. Yet a second visit to Claire's Camera reveals something much deeper going on beneath its seemingly modest surface.

At only an hour long, Claire's Camera is surely the shortest of the three films, and on first glance it seems such a lightweight bonbon of a movie, a meandering seaside ramble about a jilted lover and a sunny stranger with a camera. And yet, the mystery grows with repeat viewings. Who is Claire (Isabelle Huppert) anyway? Why does she suddenly show up in the lives of Jeon Man-hee (Kim Min-Hee) and Director So Wansoo (Jung Jin-young)? Did Man-hee really have an affair with the filmmaker, as his wife and her employer insinuates when she fires Man-hee at the beginning of the film? Is it all a misunderstanding? Or is something else going on?

Hong never answers these questions. Director So and Man-hee are clearly cinematic avatars for Hong and Min-Hee, yet it's as if Hong is using Claire, the mysterious schoolteacher who arrives at the Cannes Film Festival with her camera in hand, to suggest that what is viewed through the lens of the press isn't exactly reality. Hong's films rarely adhere to typical boundaries of space and time, and Claire's Camera is no different, unfolding in a non-linear structure that leaves the audience somewhat disoriented. But that also seems to be the very point of what Hong is driving at here. The film feels light and carefree, so it's easy to mistake it as slight. Yet Hong isn't one to make something so transparently superficial.

The film is charmingly light, yet its effervescent exterior belies a sense of pain and melancholy beneath the surface. When you take someone's photograph, Claire explains, they become a different person. When viewed through the lens of tabloid cameras, is Hong's affair with Kim something completely different? Did the press get it all wrong? Are we, the public, somehow to blame for skewing the relationship? With the camera, we only get part of the story, a frozen moment in time isolated from its own reality. In Claire's Camera Hong deftly tries to right that wrong. Unlike On the Beach at Night Alone or even The Day After, Claire's Camera is less apologia and more condemnation, a sly indictment of those who only see what is captured through a lens, delivered with smile and a knowing smirk.

GRADE - ★★★½ (out of four)

CLAIRE'S CAMERA | Directed by Hong Sangsoo | Stars Isabelle Huppert, Kim Min-hee, Chang Mi-hee, Jung Jin-young, Shahira Fahmy | Not Rated | In Korean w/English subtitles | Now available on Blu-Ray and DVD from The Cinema Guild. 

Special Features:

• Directors Dialogue with Hong Sangsoo at NYFF55 

• Theatrical Trailer 

• Booklet featuring an essay by filmmaker Claire Denis 

• Reversible Cover Art

At nearly 90 years old, Clint Eastwood is still going strong as a filmmaker, having directed 10 films in the last decade alone. However, The Mule marks his first outing in front of the camera since 2012's Trouble with the Curve, and the result is perhaps the Hollywood legend's most vivid and energetic film in 20 years. Everything about The Mule feels like a rejuvenated, invigorated filmmaker, directing with an energy that belies his years.

In fact, at 88 years old, Eastwood seems to be reflecting not only on his career, but on his entire life. If anything, The Mule  essentially a film about atonement and redemption, feels like a kind of apologia. It doesn't reach the lofty heights of 2008's Gran Torino, which found the filmmaker investigating and deconstructing his violent and often racist Dirty Harry persona, but there's a certain redemptive arc and sense of melancholy at work here that is hard to shake.

The Mule is also Eastwood's funniest film by a country mile. His character, Earl Stone, is something of a deadbeat father, a successful horticulturalist who spent more time with his flowers than with his family. He's also a bit of a racist - not in the virulent way of his character in Gran Torino  but in the casually ignorant way of so many people of a certain age who came up in a very different world. When his farm is suddenly foreclosed upon, he stumbles into drug running for a Mexican cartel to make some extra money, not quite realizing what he's doing until he's too far in to turn back.

Based on a true story, The Mule is an offbeat tragicomedy that features Eastwood running drugs in a truck while singing Frank Sinatra songs and letting whippersnapper drug dealers know that he's going to do it his way. Yet if you're expected Eastwood in his squinty, growly mode, you'll be sorely disappointed. Eastwood almost seems to be having fun here; he smiles, sings, and walks with as much of a skip in his step as it's possible for him to do. It's as if Eastwood, like Stone, has found a bit of late in life joy that has reawaken has passion for film. After the bland and joyless The 15:17 to Paris, The Mule is a marked improvement. Yet it fits right in with the themes of his late period work, from American Sniper to Sully, in which Eastwood investigates the lives of real Americans and their place in the American dream.

Whereas those films examined heroes - Chris Kyle, Sully Sullenburger, the soldiers who stopped a terror attack on a train to Paris, The Mule examines a different kind of hero, a WWII vet left behind by his country. For Earl Stone, the American dream failed him, as it did so many others. The farm that was supposed to sustain him until the end of his life is undercut by online retailers (the internet becoming his biggest nemesis throughout the film). Forced to turn to unconventional methods in order to survive (and to take care of the family he long neglected), Stone finds himself on the wrong end of the law. It's a kind of reverse take on Eastwood's 1993 film, A Perfect World, this time casting Eastwood as the outlaw finding redemption through his own illegal activities.

Yet this is as much an act of self-examination of anything. This is Eastwood grappling with his legacy as a masculine icon, wondering if he did right by his family while he was busy with other pursuits. A conservative libertarian by nature, Eastwood is often associated with Republican politics (thanks in part to his infamous conversation with an empty chair at the 2012 GOP convention), but although The Mule is very much a trip through America's struggling heartland, it's not a MAGA screed about the forgotten white man. This is something much more subtle and ultimately more tragic - it's about a country that no longer works for anyone; a place where tradition struggles to keep up with modernity, where race relations are lurching into an uncertain future (a clearly terrified Hispanic man informs police during a traffic stop that "statistically these are the 5 most dangerous minutes of my life"), and how our country so frequently fails on its promise of success - you can do everything right and still lose it all. Call it a deflation of the "bootstrap" myth. Hard work doesn't necessarily equal success.

Thematically, The Mule isn't far off from what Eastwood has been saying all along. He's made a career out of deconstructing American myth-making, and here he's not only subverting very idea of the American dream itself, but his own cinematic style. It's as if he's saying "don't count me out just yet." You can still teach an old dog new tricks, and in The Mule  Eastwood reminds us why he is still one of America's most vital filmmakers.

GRADE - ★★★½ (out of four)

THE MULE | Directed by Clint Eastwood | Stars Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper, Taissa Farmiga, Michael Peña, Laurence Fishburne, Clifton Collins Jr., Dianne Wiest, Ignacio Serricchio, Alison Eastwood | Rated R for language throughout and brief sexuality/nudity | Now playing in theaters nationwide.