There have been few more controversial Supreme Court cases in the modern era than 1973's Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in the United States and set off a culture war that has been raging ever since. At this point I'd wager most folks know where they stand on the issue of abortion, but fewer know the real story of Jane Roe (nee Norma McCorvey) and how she unwittingly became one of the most contentious figures in American politics.

In the new documentary, AKA Jane Roe, her story finally takes center stage, away from the glaring lights of the culture war, with its many complicated facets on display. When she was recruited as Jane Roe in the early 70s, McCorvey was working as a prostitute when she became unexpectedly pregnant. Unable to procure a legal abortion, she sought help from underground abortion doctors, but decided against it when she saw the filthy, dangerous conditions of the back alley clinic. She never got the abortion she sought, but her struggle became the flashpoint for the abortion rights movement as the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, winning the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy for generations of women after her.

The film examines McCorvey's early life, growing up gay, sexually abused, and destitute in the rural south. After helping to codify the right to an abortion into American law, she was mostly ignored by the pro-choice movement. She was too unpredictable, too rough around the edges, too crass to be an effective spokesperson, they thought. And so Jane Roe became more of a symbol than a real person. That is until she was recruited by an evangelic anti-abortion group called Operation Rescue, who paid her hundreds of thousands of dollars to renounce Roe v. Wade and become an anti-choice crusader.

AKA Jane Roe serves as McCorvey's own candid "deathbed confession," acknowledging that her conversion to anti-choice zealotry was a scam and that she had, in fact, been manipulated into betraying the very cause that bore her name. It's a portrait of a complex, complicated woman who never asked for the national spotlight in which she found herself. Here was a woman who lived a life of abuse who was neglected by the very movement she helped to victory, manipulated by bad-faith actors on the opposing side, and forced to end a long term relationship with her beloved partner, Connie, by the right-wing evangelists who saw her as little more than a trophy. In that way, the documentary almost plays as a personal tragedy set against the backdrop of national political unrest.  And while I wish director Nick Sweeney had asked some harder questions of the dying McCorvey, who dismisses her time advocating against abortion as using the very people who were using her, her troubled life tells a very different story.

Why did she throw millions of women under the bus after such a sweeping victory? It can't have just been for the money, can it? Sweeney sifts through decades worth of personal reflections, interviews with friends, family, and the anti-abortion leaders who sought to use her for their own ends, to paint a startlingly complex portrait of a woman with a troubled and complicated legacy. As her final statement before her death in 2017, AKA Jane Roe dispels the right-wing myth of her anti-choice conversion once and for all, but it also leaves just as many questions as it answers. Perhaps that's the way McCorvey would have wanted - fiery, flawed, and never quite ready for prime time, she was not a typical activist or a camera-ready symbol of resistance. She was a fully formed human being filled with troubles, pains, and contradictions of her own. In other words, she was perhaps the most indelible symbol of the very women Roe v. Wade ultimately helped; the regular people whose struggles the cameras rarely capture in the ongoing political battles surrounding abortion. In AKA Jane Roe, McCorvey finally gets to tell her story in her own words and on her own terms, and the results are as fascinating, as frustrating, and as full of life as she was. It's a moving, must-watch experience.

GRADE - ★★★ (out of four)

AKA JANE ROE | Directed by Nick Sweeney | Not Rated | Now streaming exclusively on Hulu.

A still from Alice Guy-Blaché's The Cabbage-Patch Fairy (1896)

While the Netflix original series, Hollywood, is playing revisionist history with the origins of the motion picture industry, other distributors are working hard to get cinema's real overlooked pioneers the spotlight they deserve.

Spinning off from their successful box set, Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers, Kino Lorber has released several new collections focusing on individual filmmakers. First up, Alice Guy-Blaché, the subject of last year's documentary, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, a true pioneer who became the first woman to direct a film and run her own studio. Volume 1 focuses on Guy-Blaché's years at Gaumont, one of France's leading studios in the early days of cinema. Here we are treated to some of Guy-Blaché's earliest films, including several that she has only recently received credit for. Most notably among them is 1896's The Cabbage-Patch Fairy, in which a fairy checks on a cabbage patch full of babies. At only 1-min long, the film is considered the first narrative film, a departure from the actualities and scenes of daily life that were common in the earliest days of cinema. While there isn't a plot, it does conjure an obviously fictional scenario that sets it apart from other films of the period. Guy-Blaché would revisit the idea with less success in 1902's Midwife to the Upper Class, establishing the idea of cabbage patch babies as an early trademark.

A scene from Alice Guy-Blaché's The Consequences of Feminism (1906)

The set also includes some of her most incisive work in the form of comedies that poked fun at social issues of the day. On the surface, Alice Guy-Blaché's 1906 silent short, The Consequences of Feminism, seems like a warning about the dangers of feminized men. Guy-Balché  creates a world where men inhabit stereotypically feminine roles - doing the laundry, watching the children, gossiping in their hat-making circles; while the women smoke cigars, read the newspapers, and sexually harass the men without consequence. Therein lies the sly genius of this film. The Consequences of Feminism isn't a warning against feminism, as it initially appears to be.  By the end of the film, the men have had enough, and stage a revolt to take back their "rightful" place. It is, in fact, an argument for the necessity of feminism, a bold choice for 1906. By casting men in the feminine roles, Guy-Balché shows men just what it was like to be a woman in that time. By turning the stereotypes on their head, she cleverly subverts the conventions of the time, arguing that if men wouldn't stand for this sort of treatment, why should women? It's certainly a compelling argument. And even in the more enlightened 21st century, its subversive social criticisms still ring true.

Volume 1 also includes some rare glimpses into the world in which they were created, with Alice Guy Films a ‘Phonoscène’ in the Studio at Buttes-Chaumont, Paris (1905) providing a unique window into the early filmmaking process, and several "phonoscenes" of singer Félix Mayol. It's really hard to distinguish between Alice Guy-Blaché's Félix Mayol photoscenes (and she made several) because they're all just a few minutes of him standing on a stage singing, but the chronophone syncing of sound to picture, especially in 1905, is jaw-dropping, and their value as historical record is hard to deny. Guy-Blaché wasn't trying to be a filmmaker here so much as a historian, documenting popular performers of the era for posterity. And not only can we see him, but we can hear him - a voice echoing down through the centuries. It may not sound like much, but in many ways it's truly stunning.

A scene from Alice Guy-Blaché's The Birth, Life, and Death of Christ (1906)

Volume 2 focuses on Guy-Blaché's years at Solax, the production company she founded with her husband after moving to America. As head of the studio, she helped establish the house style for all films made there during her tenure. This also shows a period of creative growth for the filmmaker; not only does she excel in domestic comedies, but she begins to branch out into other genres such as westerns (Parson Sue) and historical epics like The Birth, Life, and Death of Christ, with somewhat mixed success.

Her passion play wasn't credited to her until recently, but her attempt at a historical epic is surprisingly dry, taking a "stations of the cross" tableau aesthetic that isn't half as interesting as the comedies she was making around the same period. It's impressively mounted and and the sets are well constructed, but it's so strenuously respectful and static that it never really blossoms. She just doesn't feel like she's comfortable with the material, and the results are surprisingly passion-less, handsomely mounted and clearly laying the groundwork for the epic film but otherwise rather cold and distant.

Comedies were the Solax house speciality, and Guy-Blaché proved herself quite adept at them. Liquor gets mistaken for lime juice in her 1911 comedy, Starting Something, in which a series of people accidentally get gassed in quick succession. This early Solax film showcases Guy-Blaché's razor sharp comedic timing, and her use of repetition here make Starting Something a consistently funny short, building up dramatic tension but putting everyone back exactly where they started every few minutes. It just gets funnier and funnier as it goes along, and Guy-Blaché's refusal to switch things up mid-film makes the comedic action all the more potent. She also began to tackle three hankie dramas around this period. Take The Coming of Sunbeam, for example, a 1913 melodrama that features a grumpy old man suddenly finding out that he has to care for his young granddaughter after the untimely death of her parents. Resistant at first, he soon comes around and the two become inseparable, that is until she falls gravely ill. Reminiscent of Guy-Blaché's Falling Leaves from the previous year, but without it's more lyrical grace notes, The Coming of Sunbeam is still a beguiling little film, and the central pairing of the old man and the little girl is hard to resist.

There are so many gems to discover here, and both discs represent a veritable treasure trove of some of Guy-Blaché's most indelible work. These are must-own discs for any serious student of cinema, not only is Guy-Blaché one of the pioneering women of the art form, she was also one of its principal movers and shakers, starting off as a secretary and becoming one of the most influential figures in early film, helping to steer it away from amusing novelty to serious art form. This is an A+ collection that belongs on every cinema lover's shelf.

Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers - Alice Guy-Blaché Volumes 1 and 2 are now available on Blu-Ray and DVD from Kino Lorber.

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE

John Huston | USA | 1967

You have to give John Huston credit for his commitment to making idiosyncratic passion projects, but even in a career as varied as Huston's, the 1967 film Reflections in a Golden Eye stands out.

Starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor as a cuckolded military commander and his free-spirited wife, Reflections in a Golden Eye is a disarmingly horny exploration of sexuality and desire that makes the most of its post-Production Code leniency. Brando, frustrated by his wife's constant infidelity, finds himself drawn to a young private (Robert Forster in his screen debut), who is known for going horseback riding naked in the woods around the base. Forster, in turn, has eyes for his CO's wife, and often lurks outside their house to peep on Taylor's dalliances.

Originally released in a golden-tinted version (the figurative "golden eye" of the title), the film was eventually given a wide release with a more typical color palate to appease mass audiences. Warner Archive's new 2-disc Blu-Ray release gorgeously restores Huston's original vision alongside the general release version. The golden version gives the film a heated, otherworldly quality, as if its characters are wondering around in some sort of erotic dream, lost in a tangled web of their own unexplored desires. You have Brando slowly losing his grip on reality, Taylor flaunting her infidelity while completely dominating her husband - a figure of authority to everyone but her, and Forster as a young enlisted man who has much greater confidence than his commanding officer. It's an odd, dream-like film, and its unusual structure is occasionally uneven, but it's hard not to respect its bold vision. It's almost as if this is the film Huston's character from The Other Side of the Wind was making; a troubled, thorny, deeply personal exploration of the darkest recesses of the human psyche, and the results are hard to shake.

GRADE - ★★★½ (out of four)

BLOOD ON THE MOON

Robert Wise | USA | 1948

Robert Mitchum and Barbara Bel Geddes star in Robert Wise's 1948 western, Blood on the Moon, a surprisingly gritty oater that casts Mitchum as a hired gun who slowly begins to realize that he may be on the wrong side of the conflict.

Recruited by an old friend to help run a local cattle baron out of business by preventing him from removing his herd from an Indian reservation by the legal deadline (thus forcing him to sell the cattle for pennies on the dollar), Mitchum unwittingly finds himself falling for the baron's beautiful and headstrong daughter (Bel Geddes). As his relationship with her deepens, begins to understand that he isn't sticking up for the little guy at all, and is in fact the villain in someone else's story. It's an interesting twist on the lone gunslinger archetype, long before the trope would be subverted by the revisionist westerns of the late 1960s and 70s.

Wise was an incredibly versatile filmmaker, fitting right in across various genres, from horror (The Haunting, The Curse of the Cat People), to musicals (West Side Story, The Sound of Music), to science fiction (The Day The Earth Stood Still, Star Trek: The Motion Picture), so it should come as no surprise that he was equally adept at westerns as well. It's that workman-like adaptability that made him one of the most accomplished filmmakers of his time, although he is rarely given his due by auteurists. He had a knack for getting under his characters' skin, and in Blood on the Moon, Mitchum manages to find a sense of moral ambiguity to his amoral gunslinger that elevates the film above your typical western B-movie. Wise's commitment to a surprising amount of violence for 1948 gives the film actual stakes, and you can feel the conflict within Mitchum boiling over as the world he thought he knew no longer seems to make sense.

GRADE - ★★★ (out of four)

Biospherians (left to right): Jane Poynter, Linda Leigh, Mark Van Thillo, Taber MacCallum, Roy Walford (in front), Abigail Alling, SallySilverstone and Bernd Zabelposing inside Biosphere 2 in a 1990. Courtesy of NEON.

In 1991 a group of enthusiastic dreamers built what would become known as Biosphere 2, a massive internalized ecosystem meant to emulate Earth's atmosphere, in an attempt to study what it would be like to live in an enclosed ecosystem on another planet. Depending on who you ask, the mission was either a spectacular success or an abysmal failure, but regardless of the ultimate outcome it makes for fascinating viewing in Matt Wolf's new documentary, Spaceship Earth.

The group started as a commune of hippies in the 1960s who brought their talents together to build their own desert community before branching out by building a ship and going on to build and design everything from hotels to art galleries around the world thanks to the funding of a generous family benefactor. Inspired by works of science fiction, they turned to their most ambitious project yet - a sprawling recreation of Earth's atmosphere where eight intrepid explorers would spend two years sealed into an entirely self-contained environment to simulate life on another planet. The project was met with much anticipation from the public, and ultimately a great deal of controversy as disagreements arose over their methodology, calling into question the legitimacy of the experiment.

Wolf doesn't ask too many hard questions - dismissing many accusations leveled against the group out of hand without delving too deeply into them. The suggestion that the group was some sort of cult is mostly laughed off, and the lack of real scientific method that went into the experiment is fairly glossed over in favor of a more awe-struck examination of the participants and the utopian vision that drove them. For those of us who were either too young to remember it or not even born when it happened, there's an undeniable air of discovery to this odd little piece of history, and it's hard not to find their goals admirable, if perhaps a bit naive.

The film takes a turn with a bit of modern relevance when the wealthy backers eventually take over the product, led by none other than Steve Bannon, former advisor to Donald Trump and the architect of his unlikely 2016 presidential run. That's the point at which Spaceship Earth becomes the most fascinating - a portrait of idealism brought crashing back down to earth by capitalist greed. There are clearly many more avenues to explore here, and Wolf leaves several very big stones mostly unturned, but it's hard to resist the sheer boldness of the project, whose data (especially regarding climate change and greenhouse gasses) has been suppressed for the last two decades by Bannon. It's a mildly diverting documentary that makes for some intriguing quarantine viewing, painting a big picture but ultimately failing to ask big questions. Clearly this is a story worth telling, but the glossing over of the shortcuts taken by the participants ultimately leaves more questions than answers, and leaves us wanting to know the rest of the story.

GRADE - ★★★ (out of four)

SPACESHIP EARTH | Directed by Matt Wolf | Not Rated | Now streaming exclusively on Hulu.

Wonder Bar is an odd entry in Busby Berkeley's impressive run of pre-code musicals for Warner Bros. For one, it's a huge downer, with its murder/suicide plot ending the film on a strangely sour note for a Depression-era toe-tapper; and it simultaneously manages to combine one of Berkeley's best musical numbers with one of his absolute worst.

Coming on the heels Berkeley's legendary 1933 run of 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade, Wonder Bar (along with his last, and lesser known, film of 1933, Roman Scandals) feels at once tired and inspired, with its typical showbiz plot surrounding the scandals and drama in a Parisian nightclub, making it one of the biggest mixed-bags of the legendary choreographer's career. Al Jolson stars as Al Wonder, night-club owner and entertainer extraordinaire, who presides one the titular nightclub and all its comings and goings. He's in love with one of his Dolores del Río, as is fellow performer Dick Powell, but she's dealing with the fallout of her own relationship with onstage partner, Ricardo Cortez, who's planning on running off with Kay Francis.  Warner stalwarts Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert provide comedy relief as two henpecked American businessmen attempting to ditch their wives for a night on the town.

Of all the pre-code Warner musicals, Wonder Bar is perhaps the most overtly sexual, with its cheeky double entendres practically jumping right off the screen; not to mention it features the most blatantly queer moment I've seen in a pre-code film, in which a man taps on another man’s shoulder to “cut in” with his dance partner, and instead waltzes off with the man, leaving the woman standing on the dance floor. Jolson then turns to the camera and shrugs “boys will be boys.” It’s a funny moment without being a punchline, and impressive for the way it treats such a thing as normal in gay Paris in a major Hollywood production in 1933. It also features one of Berkeley's most dazzling musical set pieces in "Don't Say Goodnight," a dizzying masterpiece that features hundreds of dancers, 60 massive columns moving independently, and an octagon of mirrors that multiplies the dancers into infinity.

But then comes "Goin' to Heaven on a Mule," a cringe-worthy parade of racist stereotypes featuring Al Jolson in blackface as a former slave who goes to heaven with dozens of children as blackface angels. It's racist even by 1933 standards (watch out for the giant dancing watermelon), and even discounting the racial stereotypes it isn't even particularly clever by Berkeley's standards. It lacks the sparkle of his best comedy numbers like "Hollywood Hotel" (from Footlight Parade) and "Pettin' in the Park" (from Gold Diggers of 1933 , and is generally a lackluster climax for a film that summarily wraps up with a murder/suicide that's supposed to be a happy ending for its characters.

As it stands, Wonder Bar is a fascinating curio, structured like a high class soap opera in the vein of Grand Hotel sprinkled with a good dose of naughty pre-code humor, but once "Don't Say Goodnight" is over, the story doesn't seem to have anywhere to go. The cast is capable, and Berkeley delivers a knockout around the midpoint, but the screenplay can't seem it unravel its tangled romantic subplot, and the climactic 10-minute long blackface number is a hard sit that adds nothing to film. Worth watching for Berkeley aficionados and fans of classic musicals, but it lacks the escapist flair of his best work with its strangely downbeat ending.

Cinema Obscura is a regular feature at From the Front Row, highlighting little-known films that I believe need a second look. The mission of Cinema Obscura is to bring attention to hidden gems and forgotten masterpieces from around the world that readers may not otherwise have had a chance to discover. 

Perhaps one of the most famous of the German Expressionist films, Paul Wegener's The Golem: How He Came into the World is one of the most visually striking films of the silent era. With its curved architecture and unique set design, it stands alongside The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and Metropolis as one of the quintessential examples of Expressionism in film. 

Few other films of the era took such a radical approach to its overall design. Nothing in the film is practical or "realistic," from its twisted staircase to the misshapen buildings of the ghetto in which it is set. And yet everything about the film seems based in a kind of recognizable milieu that makes its off-kilter sets seem like something out of a dream, as if we're wandering through the haunted landscapes of our subconscious mind.

The story is inspired by Jewish folklore, in which a rabbi brings to life a monster made of clay in order to defend the Jewish people from persecution. It is believed that the Golem myth provided the basis for Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," and there are certainly some parallels in Wegener's Golem that foreshadow James Whale's take on Frankenstein 11 years later, especially in the Golem's interactions with children near the film's end. Because the rabbi makes a deal with an evil spirit to bring the Golem (played by Wegener himself) to life, he loses control of the creature and must deal with the personal consequences of summoning a monster to do his bidding, even if his intentions were noble. It's a classic morality play, a warning about fighting evil with more evil, and the personal toll of revenge played out in the increasingly ominous streets of the ghetto.

Wegener had previously tacked the Golem myth in 1915's The Golem, a film now mostly lost to time, which took place in the 20th century after the ancient creature was reawakened. This 1920 prequel, The Golem: How He Came into the World,  explores the original 16th century  myth of Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinrück) and the consequences of human arrogance in creating life. As one of the earliest remaining feature length horror films (released not long after seminal Cabinet of Doctor Caligari), it holds a special place in film history, and remains one of the most beautifully designed and evocative films of its time, and it hasn't lost any of its eerie luster in the century since its release. Wegener was not a particularly prolific filmmaker (the 1920 Golem is his most widely seen surviving film), but his vision was undeniable, and Kino Lorber's new Blu-Ray breathes new life into the now 100 year old film with a flawless new  4K transfer of the German release version, featuring three scores, as well as the shorter US release version and a comparison essay between the two cuts of the film.


F.W. Murnau adapts Moliere's classic play of religious hypocrisy in 1925's Tartuffe, which frames Moliere's original story as a film-within-a-film inside another narrative. While Tartuffe wasn't the first film to conceive of such a device (Buster Keaton's 1924 comedy, Sherlock, Jr., is the earliest example I've been able to find), it is somewhat unique for its time - making it a rare film in which most of action takes place in a film that other characters are watching.

The modern day framing device centers around an unscrupulous housekeeper (Rosa Valetti) trying to convince her wealthy master (Hermann Picha) to cut his grandson (André Mattoni) out of his will and leave everything to her, because the young man has chosen to become an actor. Upon learning of the housekeeper's scheme, the grandson disguises himself as the leader of a traveling film troupe on tour with a film version of Tartuffe  bringing the film to his grandfather's home in order to open his eyes to the housekeeper's scheme.

The resulting version of Tartuffe is heavily abridged from Moliere's classic text. The basic idea is the same - Tartuffe (Emil Jannings) is a  religious zealot who uses his piety to control others and drain them of their wealth. When he arrives at the home of his latest victim, Orgon (Werner Krauss), Orgon's wife (Lil Dagover) immediately recognizes Tartuff for the charlatan he is, and sets out to expose him to her brainwashed husband. The story mostly focuses on her attempts to reveal Tartuffe's true nature, leaving the meat of Moliere's text cut down to a sort of Cliff's Notes summary. The essential thematic content remains the same, but Jannings' choice to play Tartuffe as a gruff, boorish brute rather than a charismatic, manipulative cad seems to undercut the story's essential message about being wary of charming hypocrites who disguise their true nature in false piety.

Murnau is, of course, an incredible visual stylist, and the golden-tinted hues of Karl Freund's cinematography are often breathtaking. But Tartuffe is ultimately one of Murnau's minor works - its all-too-brief 74 minute running time barely giving the story time to breathe, and the normally terrific Jannings seems miscast here, his penchant for overacting smothering the legendary character. The framing device also seems unnecessary - its attempt to connect Moliere's themes to modern times feels redundant, taking precious minutes away from the already truncated story it sets out to tell.

THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD - ★★★½ (out of four)
TARTUFFE - ★★½ (out of four)

Now available on Blu-Ray and DVD from Kino Lorber.

In 2002, a student reporter working for her high school newspaper, The Hilltop Beacon, inadvertently uncovered a massive embezzlement scheme while working on a puff piece about a new construction project at her high school in Long Island.

That embezzlement scheme ended up being the largest public school fraud in American history, with over $11 million stolen from the school system's budget to fund luxury homes, lavish vacations, and other extravagant expenses for administrators and their families. The scheme reached the highest levels of the school district's administration, and serves as the inspiration for HBO's new film, Bad Education, starring Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney, and directed by Cory Finley (Thoroughbreds).

The film originally debuted at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival before being picked up by HBO for distribution. Yet despite skipping theaters for a television premiere this past weekend, Bad Education (not to be confused with Pedro Almodovar's 2004 film of the same name) is an engaging tale of corruption, vanity, and hubris that gives Jackman one of his meatiest roles to date. Jackman stars as Frank Tassone, beloved educator and school superintendent, whose penchant for taking a personal interest in the wellbeing of his district's students put his schools on the map and fueled a surge in early acceptance decisions to some of the nation's top universities.

After discovering some discrepancies in the school's expense accounts, the school board comes to realize that Assistance Superintendent Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney) has been cooking the books in order to fund her lavish lifestyle. But Tassone steps in to cover for Gluckin in order to keep the situation out of the press, ostensibly to preserve the school system's reputation and maintain their budget for the next school year. That's when Bad Education really starts to get interesting - slowly revealing its protagonist's motivations as it delves deeper into this wide-ranging scandal. At first, Finley plays his cards close to the vest, but as the true depth of the fraud becomes clear, he turns the film into a fascinating character study of people who do very bad things for the "right" reasons.

Everyone involved here seems to think they have the best interests of the students and their community in mind, deluding themselves into thinking that they're good people who aren't really doing anything wrong, as if their professional strengths somehow offset their personal failures. In the film's greatest twist of irony, it is that very encouragement of student involvement that the young reporter (Geraldine Viswanathan) to dig deeper into the district's spending and discovering millions of dollars worth of hidden expenses buried in a seemingly innocuous breezeway expansion for the high school. While the film is stylistically more straightforward than Finley's last film, his slow-burn portrait of a man whose flaws as an administrator are uncovered by his own strengths as an educator, is deeply engrossing. Jackman has never been better than he is here, portraying Tassone's slow unravelling barely masked by his vain obsession with appearance - a man hiding who is truly is on many levels. Bad Education is worth watching for Jackman's performance alone, but he anchors a ripped-from-the-headlines story of true crime with an emotional center that is hard to shake. The road to hell is truly paved with good intentions, and Jackman's multi-faceted performance reveals the conflict of a deeply troubled man undone by his own success.

GRADE - ★★★ (out of four)

BAD EDUCATION | Directed by Cory Finley | Stars Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Ray Romano, Geraldine Viswanathan, Annaleigh Ashford | Not Rated | Now streaming exclusively on HBO.

Commissioned by Shanghai's Expo 2010, Jia Zhangke's I Wish I Knew is a bracing blend of documentary and narrative styles that weaves a fascinating tapestry of Shanghai's rich and troubled history; from its glory days as an international shipping port to the second Sino-Japanese War at the outset of WWII, to the Chinese civil war in the 1940s, to the Cultural Revolution at the hands of Mao Zedong's Communist Party.

It is, perhaps, not exactly the bright and sunny portrait of a modern cosmopolitan city that the Shanghai Expo hoped for, because as Adam Nayman points out in his essay "The Name of this Film is Talking Heads: Jia Zhangke's I Wish I Knew" (included in the liner notes in Kino Lorber's new Blu-Ray release), nearly all of the stories featured in the film's 18 interviews are about exodus, people fleeing the city in times of upheaval and strife.

What the film does instead is paint a portrait of a nation in flux, using Shanghai as a prism through which to view the radical cultural shifts that have occurred in China over the last century. There are few more prominent chroniclers of modern China than Jia - his films have covered everything from the building of the Three Gorges Dam in Still Life (2006) to the evolution of industry in 24 City (2008) to his more personal chronicle of a Chinese family coping with generational change in Mountains May Depart (2015), Jia has keenly observed the shifting sands of life in modern China with the eye of an anthropologist and the hear of a poet. Of all his films, I Wish I Knew most closely resembles 24 City with its deft combination of documentary and narrative styles, juxtaposing Jia stalwart Zhao Tao (Ash is Purest White) wandering amongst the foggy gray vistas of Shanghai's World Expo Park with the childhood recollections of Shanghai expatriates. Politicians, soldiers, former revolutionaries, criminals, and citizens from all walks of life reflect back on their lives and the circumstances that lead them away from Shanghai.

In one particularly memorable segment, we are introduced to a woman named Huang Baomei who came face-to-face with Chairman Mao himself after being selected to participate in a propaganda piece as a "model Communist worker," and was invited to attend the opera with him. Jia also interviews fellow Chinese auteur, Hou Hsiao-hsien, about his 1998 film, Flowers of Shanghai. The art inspired by Shanghai plays a key role in I Wish I Knew as Jia uses clips of Hou's film as well as propaganda works like To Liberate Shanghai (1959) and Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town (1948) to paint a picture of the city's evolution over time through art.

There's something quite subversive in the way that Jia illustrates the city's ever-changing culture through the eyes of those who lived it, bearing witness to a nation's struggle through the shifting identities of one of its most famous cities. Even the title is something of a shrug, attesting to the city's ephemeral impenetrability. For a film meant to celebrate Shanghai, I Wish I Knew instead mourns the city it could have been, a potential constantly undercut by social unrest. By focusing on dissidents and underworld figures of Shanghai's shadowy past, Jia refuses to toe the party line of the city's "glorious" history without ever running afoul of the Chinese  censors. The result is something nebulous and melancholy, cagey about its true intentions but nonetheless direct in its depiction of the social unrest of the 20th century through one city's shared experiences. It's a vital, vibrant work, densely layered with memories of a not-so-distant past, full of disquieting revelations and warnings for the future. I Wish I Knew is a city symphony in a minor key, reminiscent of Pennebaker and Ruttman, that searches for the soul of a people and finds a microcosm of a century of upheaval and uncertainty.

GRADE - ★★★½ (out of four)

I WISH I KNEW | Directed by Jia Zhangke | Stars Zhao Tao | Not Rated | In Mandarin w/English subtitles | Available Blu-Ray and DVD from Kino Lorber on April 28.

Devin France, Gavin Naquin, Gage Naquin, Romyri Ross and Yashua Mack in the film WENDY. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2020 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved

After receiving four Oscar nominations in 2012 for his directorial debut, Beasts of the Southern Wild, including Best Picture and Best Director, Benh Zeitlin seemingly disappeared from filmmaking, only surfacing a few times to produce or compose scores for a few indie films that never saw wide releases. Now eight years later he has returned to directing with his sophomore feature, Wendy, a modern re-imagining of Peter Pan that puts young Wendy Darling (Devin France) at the center of the narrative.

Here, Wendy is the daughter of a rural train station waitress who dreams of hopping on a passing train and exploring the world beyond. She spins tales of fantastical worlds reached by lost boys who ride the rails to freedom, never growing up, existing in a kind of limbo of eternal childhood in the memory of those they left behind. Inspired by her stories, Wendy and her brothers James (Gavin Naquin) and Douglas (Gage Naquin) hop on a freight train bound for nowhere, and encounter Peter Pan (Yashua Mack) and his gang of lost boys, who take them to a deserted island far away, where their days are filled with magic and adventure.

That is until one day they discover the island is also populated with adults, children who lost their sense of hope and wonder and grew old, forgetting what it was like to be young. A series of tragedies and setbacks puts them on a collision course with the Neverland adults, leading to the rise of Captain Hook and the creation of a myth that will inspire them to stay young at heart even as their bodies grow old.

There's something inherently appealing about this reworking of the Peter Pan myth, but coming eight years after the sensational Beasts of the Southern Wild, Wendy feels like a regression, a half-drawn sketch of a much deeper exploration of a familiar tale. Not only is it visually unappealing and sloppy in its execution, it often feels like a retread of the ideas and themes already explored in Beasts. Wendy even delivers a near beat-for-beat recap of the famous “Once there was a hushpuppy” monologue. The whole thing just feels torpid and uninspired, a germ of an idea that never made it past the development stage.

Young Devin France is a strong lead and a great discovery, but she’s cast adrift in a film that doesn’t know what to do with her. It brings nothing new to the story to justify its reframing, and its new mythology feels half-baked. Wendy's musings on growing up and adulthood are underlined and written in bold, but the story is lifeless and broadly drawn, taking vague inspiration from the legendary pages of J.M. Barrie's novel and removing all its sense of wonder and cohesion. Moments clearly designed to be moving and profound fall flat because they haven’t been given the proper context to be earned, as if it's forcing the Pan myth to fit its own story rather than radically reimagining it. Even the score by Zeitlin and Dan Romer feels like an almost note-for-note reprise of their thrilling musical themes from Beasts of the Southern Wild.

It's a film of muddled mythology and listless characterization, burying its sense of childhood magic in drab new trappings that feel bland and uninspired. It's certainly disappointing as a belated follow-up to Zeitlin's incredible debut, but by bringing nothing new to the table or having anything else to say in its reworking of Peter Pan, it feels like an incomplete concept in search of a heart that it never quite finds. Just as the lost boys desperately search for a mother, so too does Wendy fruitlessly search for a point of view that it never manages to find.

GRADE - ★★ (out of four)

WENDY | Directed by Benh Zeitlin | Stars Devin France, Yashua Mack, Gavin Naquin, Gage Naquin | Rated PG-13 for brief violent/bloody images | Now available to download or stream on demand.

In some ways, Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know represents a very particular time in movie history. Released in 2005, the film has come to seem emblematic of a certain type of quirky Sundance indie that became so ubiquitous in the early 2000s. July, an unclassifiable performance artist who dabbled in something akin to multimedia art installations and "video chain letters" before turning to filmmaking, may come across on the surface as an insufferably twee figure, filling her films with oddball characters making seemingly random philosophical musings about the nature of life, love, and death. But there's an authenticity to her work that sets it apart from many of her contemporaries. 

Taken at face value, Me and You and Everyone We Know feels representative of "Sundance quirk," its performance art aesthetic at once self-consciously strange and even pretentious in its cornball new age reflections on a world that doesn't come close to resembling any recognizable reality. And yet beneath the film's veneer of melancholy, candy-colored weirdness, July conjures something deeply and disarmingly human, instantly recognizable and yet wholly indescribable. All of her characters seem stunted somehow; emotionally, socially, lost and adrift in a world that doesn't quite seem to have the answers they seek. But through art, technology,  sex, or a simple gesture of kindness, each finds a kind of kinship and connection in the most unexpected of places.

July herself stars as Christine Jesperson, a lonely performance artist who moonlights as a cab driver for a company called Eldercab, where she drives elderly customers around for their daily errands. One day she meets Richard (John Hawkes) a single father who works as a shoe salesman at a generic mall department store, and strikes up a casual friendship that constantly threatens to become something more. His children, teenage Peter (Miles Thompson) and seven year old Robby (Brandon Ratcliff) are facing issues of their own. Peter is grappling with a budding sexuality and a sense of social awkwardness, while Robby has begun an online relationship with a middle aged woman who has no idea she been chatting via online messenger with a child. Their young neighbor, Sylvie (Carlie Westerman), spends her time collecting kitchen appliances in a hope chest for a dowery for her future husband husband, while Peter's school friends, Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend), get their first brush with adulthood through a flirtation with an older man.


July has a unique way of handling salacious material in such a way that makes it feel at once innocent and beautiful. Young Robby's online conversations regarding the sharing of poop should make us feel queasy, and yet there's something almost naïve about it that doesn't feel dirty at all. Everyone in the film has a kind of childlike guilelessness about them, a group of lost souls floating through life desperately searching for some kind of human connection, platonic, romantic, sexual, or otherwise. Yet its unique sense of innocence don't come off as cloying, striking a delicate balance between emotional honesty and eccentricity. July’s observations never feel like manufactured oddities - rather they feel like splintered reveries of a strange and beguiling world of small-scale wonders. Here, lost souls tumbling through space briefly bump up against one another, guided by July's singular vision and performance art aesthetic that feels at once off-kilter and incisive.

Criterion's new Blu-Ray release is truly stunning, rescuing the film from early aughts DVD bleariness and giving it new life, its brightly colored palate more vibrant than ever. Also included are two of July's early short films, The Amateurist (1998) and Nest of Tens (2000), along with selections from her video chain letter, Joanie 4 Jackie. There's simply nothing else out there quite like Me and You and Everyone We Know,  a film both timeless and yet distinctly of its time, transcendent and yet familiar, at once emblematic of cutesy Sundance indie treacle and an utter subversion of its vapidness. But perhaps most of all, it's a film that feels weirdly out of time, empathetic and kind, adrift in its own singular sense of sadness and hope, obsessed with death and yet completely accepting of its inevitability. And now its back, ripe and ready for the reevaluation it so richly deserves as one of the very best debut films of the new millennium.

GRADE - ★★★½ (out of four)

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW | Directed by Miranda July | Stars Miranda July, John Hawkes, Brandon Ratcliff, Miles Thompson, Carlie Westerman, Brad William Henke | Rated R for disturbing sexual content involving children, and for language | Available on Blu-Ray and DVD from The Criterion Collection on April 28. 

Special Features: 

• High-definition digital master, approved by director Miranda July, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray 

• New documentary featuring a conversation between July and filmmaker Lena Dunham about July’s artistic beginnings and the development of her debut feature 

• Open to the World, a new documentary about the 2017 interfaith charity shop and participatory artwork July created in collaboration with Artangel 

• July Interviews July: Deauville, 2005, a discovery from July’s archives, newly edited Footage from the 2003 Sundance Directors Lab, where July workshopped the film, with commentary by July

• The Amateurist (1998) and Nest of Tens (2000), short films by July 

• Four films from July’s Joanie 4 Jackie video chain letter, and a documentary about the project 

• Deleted scenes 

• Trailer 

• PLUS: Essays by artist Sara Magenheimer and novelist Lauren Groff

It's no secret that theaters are struggling right now. With movie screens darkened across the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic, independent theaters are especially feeling the negative effects of the nationwide lockdown. This has put many arthouse theaters in an increasingly dire position, but thanks to the ingenuity of some of the nation's independent distributors, you can still support your local indie theaters through "virtual cinemas." Essentially a pay-per-play streaming service, these online theaters allow independent theaters to bring first-run arthouse films into your living room, sharing a cut of the profits with the distributors, in order to stay afloat during this unprecedented crisis.

The a/perture cinema in Winston-Salem, North Carolina is one such locally owned, independent movie theater that needs the community's support. They're currently showing an array of independent and foreign films for you to enjoy from the comfort of home, including Diao Yinan's riveting new gangster drama, The Wild Goose Lake, which was a hit at last year's Cannes Film Festival where it played in competition (ultimately losing the Palme D'Or to eventual Oscar winner, Parasite).

Set in China's Wuhan province, The Wild Goose Lake tells the story of Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge), a two-bit mobster who accidentally shoots a cop during a territory dispute with a rival gang. Now hunted by both the police and unscrupulous mobsters out to collect the handsome "dead or alive" bounty on his head, Zhou is forced to go on the run. His guide into the Chinese underworld is the mysterious Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun-mei), a woman whose motives remain unclear, but that doesn't stop the two of them from forging a strange kind of relationship as they navigate their newfound world of uncertainty and betrayal.

The film has all the trappings of a classic Hollywood film noir, complete with dark underworld intrigue, a mysterious femme fatale, and a propensity for violence (a man gets impaled by an umbrella at one point, and if that isn't a resounding recommendation I don't know what is). One thing I find particularly satisfying about contemporary Chinese cinema is that filmmakers aren't afraid to use color in creative ways (see also last year's similarly dazzling neo-noir, Long Day's Journey into Night). Whereas much of American cinema equates monochrome grays with gritty drama, Diao instead bathes The Wild Goose Lake in a striking palate of neon, its vibrant pinks and greens bleeding off the screen in a haunting evocation of the seedy underbelly of the world it depicts.


Yet despite its stylistic cues from American film noir, I couldn't help but be reminded of German filmmaker Fritz Lang's 1931 film, M. That film, which featured Peter Lorre as a murderer being hunted by both police and criminals alike, helped lay the groundwork for film noir as we know it, taking inspiration from the work of the German Expressionists and their striking use of light and shadow. But Diao takes the moral ambiguities at the heart of noir one step further - turning his crime drama into a sociopolitical critique of the Chinese police state. Here, the cops are often incompetent at best, sadistic at worst, using their manhunt as an excuse to curb civil rights and even posing for pictures with the bodies of men they've killed, bringing down the full weight of the state for an accidental shooting in ways they never would had Zhou's bullet hit its intended criminal target.

This is a world of moral criminals and amoral police, snitches and backstabbers, where the line between criminal enterprise and legitimate businesses is often indistinguishable. Diao wraps his scathing indictment of Chinese state capitalism in a package of sensationally choreographed action and nearly operatic violence that may have helped its underlying themes go unnoticed by the Chinese censors, but make no mistake; The Wild Goose Lake is not just a bone-crunching action film, it uses its criminal underworld setting as a way to juxtapose "legitimate" businesses and institutions with gang activity, exposing their inherent illegitimacy and throwing the entire system into question. And in a world turned upside down by a pandemic, at long last exposing our system's glaring flaws for all to see, I can't think of any message more timely.

GRADE - ★★★½ (out of four)

THE WILD GOOSE LAKE | Directed by Diao Yinan | Stars Hu Ge, Gwei Lun-mei, Liao Fan, Wan Qian, Qi Dao | Not Rated | In Mandarin w/English subtitles | Now playing in virtual cinemas nationwide from Film Movement.

For years, Jesus Christ Superstar was a Holy Thursday tradition for my family growing up. It's been a few years since I've been able to continue that tradition, but this week I decided to resurrect the tradition and revisit the film. It has always been my favorite screen adaptation of the story of Jesus, but this time it struck me differently than it ever had before; it felt somehow more radical, more subversive, and ultimately more hopeful. 

The story of Jesus has often been plagued by a strenuous sense of reverence in the Biblical epics of old, the notable exceptions being Scorsese's controversial The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Nicholas Ray's more politically minded King of Kings (1961). But Jesus Christ Superstar is a different animal altogether, a metatextual meditation on Jesus' humanity as told by a group of hippies putting on a play in the Israeli desert.  Like Last Temptation, Jesus Christ Superstar explores the inherent conflict between Jesus' divinity and his humanity, with Jesus' signature number "Gethsemane/I Only Want to Say" becoming an impassioned argument between Christ and his Heavenly Father about the necessity of his sacrifice. The juxtaposition of Jesus as both divine savior and simple man from Galilee struggling with his own human frailty and the burden of such a massive responsibility thrust upon him. Here, he questions if he even wants to be the savior of humanity, because the humanity on display almost seems beyond all hope.

And that's what really sets Jesus Christ Superstar apart. The thing that struck me the most watching the film this time was the way it illustrates the inherent selfishness of the movement that sprung up around him. Even amongst his disciples, the constant refrain is “what can you do for me Jesus?” - almost as if they had missed the point of his message entirely. Nearly every number has Jesus preaching a message that his followers immediately spin into “won’t you do THIS for ME Jesus?” The radical service, the message of the the triumph of the meek and marginalized against the authorities and the elites, ultimately becomes much smaller and insular in the hands of flawed humans - the potential for massive change centered around the least of these becomes a message simply of personal salvation without looking beyond what it can do for them.


With so much of modern Christianity centered around the idea of simply believing in Jesus above all else, I found this particularly haunting. "I believe in you and God so tell me that I'm saved" Simon pleads in "Simon Zealotes," as if his whole reason for being there is to save his own skin. Evangelists often ask "do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?" But what that really means often gets lost in the quest to win converts rather than actually spreading Jesus' radical, anti-establishment message, one that constantly advocates for "the least of these" and stood against powerful elites who used faith to make money off the backs of the poor and marginalized. This Jesus feels tired, weary from not only the expectations placed upon him by his followers, but from having to explain himself over and over again on seemingly deaf ears. While his disciples vie to be the most loyal and the most believing, Jesus is laying out a roadmap for a better world, and the reaction seems to consistently be "yeah but what can you do for me?"

I think somewhere among the desert ruins, sparse sets, and anachronistic costumes, director Norman Jewison and the songwriting team of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice arrived at a profound truth about Christianity. It may not be a "Christian" film in that it adheres strictly to religious doctrine, or seeks to convert its audience, but hidden amongst the catchy tunes is something at once painful and deeply moving, a portrait of a broken humanity, selfish and self-aggrandizing, interested only in how the savior can save them. And he makes the choice to die for us anyway. Therein lies the heart of Jesus Christ Superstar, a rock opera with a distinctly 70s aesthetic that nevertheless has more to say about the nature of Jesus than any number of ponderous Biblical epics or sanctimonious faith-based films that are so prevalent today. It holds a mirror up to the audience - and for those of us who are Christian dares to ask us why? Do we believe out of fear for what we are told could happen if we don't? Are we asking what Jesus can do for us? Or what we can do for Jesus? Are our prayers selfish or selfless? In the film it is only Mary Magdalene, here portrayed as a prostitute, an outcast, looked down upon even by the disciples, who gives Jesus what he needs here and now - washing his feet while his followers preen and posture about what battle to fight next, completely unable to see the savior's message of simple service and humanity. They don't seem to understand that Jesus has already won the war, and given them a blueprint for a more hopeful future - "Sing me your songs, but not for me alone. Sing out for yourselves, for you are blessed." And yet rather than get to work building it themselves they wait for him to do it for them.

"I believe in you and God so tell me that I'm saved!" They exclaim. It doesn't register that they already are. What the Jesus of Jesus Christ Superstar asks is "what next?"

I was a young teenager just becoming aware of the world of cinema outside my local multiplex in the year 2000 when Spike Lee's Bamboozled was released. I remember picking up my copy of Entertainment Weekly, then my weekly Bible and window into films I could only read about, and reading Lisa Schwartzbaum's negative review of Lee's latest film. "it’s also his own angrier, less persuasive version of the revolutionary TV series 'In Living Color,'" she sniffed, "which redefined modern, racially charged satire a decade ago." While Schwartzbaum was my favorite critic at the time, her pan of Bamboozled seemed to reflect the prevailing critical winds of the time, that the film was somehow an outdated satire of racial stereotypes that were no longer an issue, its depiction of blackface in popular culture lashing out in empty provocation many years too late.

Yet history has proven Bamboozled to not be regressive, but prescient. And in the 20 years it took me to finally see Lee's film after first reading that review as a high school freshman, it seems that Lee's blistering critique of the racism embedded in American culture has been more than vindicated.

There's a kind of broad comedic tone to Bamboozled that is at once wildly funny and deeply uncomfortable. Its plot recalls The Producers, in which black TV writer Delacroix (Damon Wayans) is tasked with making his show pitch "more black," and responds by sarcastically delivering an outrageously offensive modern day minstrel show complete with black actors in blackface. The problem is the producers love it, and it isn't long before the network has a bonafide hit on its hands, with white audiences embracing the stereotypes of shiftless Mantan (Savion Glover) and his lazy sidekick, Sleep ‘N’ Eat (Tommy Davidson). Soon Americans are wearing blackface again and critics have embraced the show as harmless satire, seemingly missing the point of its deliberately cruel racist tropes. But Lee isn't here to make us laugh in the vein of a Mel Brooks comedy. The jokes here hurt, and they sting on multiple levels.

It seems that message went over the heads of many critics back in 2000, because a quick glance at the film's Rotten Tomatoes page reveals a 51% rotten rating and an array of negative reviews from mostly white critics who turned up their noses at Lee's confrontational style. And indeed, Bamboozled is not an easy film to watch. Its grainy, digital video style is off-putting and occasionally quite ugly (with the exception of the blackface scenes, all slickly produced, a haunting irony all its own), and Wayans' stiff performance as Delacroix, a black man trying desperately to fit into a white world, seems almost too ridiculous to be believed. It's as if Lee wants to knock us off our feet, to make us uncomfortable, to rub our faces in the vast evil of American racism and the legacy of its original sin.


And that is, of course, entirely the point. There's nothing pleasant about Bamboozled. It works overtime to throw the audience off balance, to alienate us in almost Brechtian fashion, holding us at arm's length but demanding our attention as if saying "don't look away, you need to see this." This is easily Lee's angriest film, every frame nearly trembling with barely controlled rage at a system that continues to ignore its racist past. That Lee's film was dismissed in its time because of that anger speaks volumes, the stereotype of the angry black man causing white critics and audiences to dismiss a message made all the more essential by their indifference.

Bamboozled does not a pleasant evening at the movies make, but in the wake of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and countless others in the ensuing two decades, not to mention the seemingly never-ending parade of politicians who have dressed up in blackface since the film was released, it feels more necessary than ever. Its inclusion in the Criterion Collection may not widen its reach beyond the cinephiles already predisposed to accepting Lee's message, but its arrival on Blu-Ray feels especially timely; a film widely ignored in its time returning at a time when its message feels even more urgent, its ferocious satire now carrying an even more mischievous glint as if to say "I told you so." Ignore its warnings now at your own peril.

GRADE - ★★★½ (out of four)

BAMBOOZLED | Directed by Spike Lee | Stars Damon Wayans, Savion Glover, Jada Pinkett Smith, Tommy Davidson, Michael Rapaport, Thomas Jefferson Byrd | Rated R for strong language and some violence | Now available on Blu-Ray and DVD from The Criterion Collection.

Special Features Include:

• New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Ellen Kuras and approved by director Spike Lee, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray 

• Audio commentary from 2001 featuring Lee 

• New conversation between Lee and film programmer and critic Ashley Clark 

• New interviews with choreographer and actor Savion Glover, actor Tommy Davidson, and costume designer Ruth E. Carter   

• On Blackface and the Minstrel Show, a new interview program featuring film and media scholar Racquel Gates   

• The Making of “Bamboozled” (2001), a documentary featuring Lee; Glover; Davidson; actors Jada Pinkett Smith, Michael Rapaport, and Damon Wayans; and other members of the cast and crew 

• Deleted scenes, music videos for the Mau Maus’ “Blak Iz Blak” and Gerald Levert’s “Dream with No Love,” and alternate parody commercials created for the film 

• Poster gallery and trailer 

• PLUS: An essay by Clark