Best netflix movies december 202111/29/2023 ![]() ![]() The story plays around in the sandbox of western tropes-there’s nothing plot-wise that’s not familiar (Jonathan Majors’s Nat Love seeks vengeance against Idris Elba’s Rufus Buck for a crime committed many years before)-but there’s a new energy here, a freshness. I gave it another shot-prompted by hearing great things from some friends I really trust-and it clicked right away. I tried to watch Jeymes Samuel’s western the day it was released, but I just couldn’t get into its rhythm and stopped it at about the ten-minute mark. Procession is an excavation of trauma, a reckoning with evil, and it has a simple message at its core: Stories can save us. Greene shakes loose the exploitative structures that infect so many documentaries. It’s a painful watch but a profound and important one. The abuse itself haunts them, of course, but they’re also deeply scarred by the Church’s repudiation of their cries for justice or even just acknowledgment. The men act in each other’s films, interrogating their memories and finding support from one another. The film documents the making of these shorts. Instead of simply telling their stories, he helps them create short films about their experiences to process the trauma. Greene teams up with victims of Catholic Church sex abuse in the Kansas City diocese. Kate Plays Christine, Bisbee ’17, and Actress experiment within the realms of documentary. Robert Greene is a filmmaker who’s not content with the status quo. Moody and erratic and full of genuine wonder. ![]() A sweet poem of a movie threaded with great songs-Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing” is central, of course-and a story that presents timeworn themes in a beautiful way. ![]() Anchored by a bunch of knockout performances-Lana Rockwell is just incredible, and character actor Will Patton gives one of my favorite turns in recent memory as the Bukowski-ish old man. It hearkens back to ’90s American indie cinema while also echoing a wide range of mythical masterpieces from other eras-there’s a little bit of Little Fugitive, a little Badlands, a little Beasts of the Southern Wild. Sweet Thing is soulful, big-hearted, and gorgeous to look at (shot in high contrast black-and-white 16mm). Their new pal, Jabari Watkins’s Malik, goes with them and they wander the Massachusetts landscape like classic American runaways-beaches and empty vacation houses and stolen cars. The kids fight against Beaux’s abusive behavior and go on the lam after lashing out at him. Their mother, Eve (Karyn Parsons, Rockwell’s real-life wife), flitters in and out of their lives with her awful new boyfriend, Beaux. Billie and Nico (played by Rockwell’s children, Lana and Nico) live with their father, Adam (Will Patton), a drunk who is mostly sweet but also has bouts of meanness and indifference toward his kids. I still have a bunch of films to catch up on, but right now this is my number one of the year and I’m not sure I can imagine anything dethroning it (though I have the highest hopes for The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Souvenir Part Two, Drive My Car, Licorice Pizza, and C’mon, C’mon).Īlexandre Rockwell’s Sweet Thing is one of the great hidden gems of the year, and its run on MUBI continues for another couple of weeks. There are visual and emotional echoes of East of Eden, The Searchers, Days of Heaven, Brokeback Mountain, and There Will Be Blood, and this feels like a revisionist western in the best way-alive and crucial and full of searching humanity. The Power of the Dog is a staggering film-epic and lonely and profound, full of melancholy and pain. The situation is rife with tension, but Campion manages to arrange these characters tenderly. Phil is homophobic and cruel and full of secrets. Peter is sensitive and lonely and feminine he makes paper flowers and wants to be a surgeon. When George marries “suicide widow” Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and brings her and her son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), to live at their ranch, relationships are strained. Instead of jumping the gun and creating a favorites-of-the-year list before I’ve seen everything I want to see, I’ll stick with some movies that will almost certainly be at the top of any list I make:īased on a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, Jane Campion’s newest movie is a western about two brothers (Phil and George, played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons) in Montana in the 1920s. While the film’s title hits a pleasing note of terror and despair, changing that one letter speaks to the joy of discovering new films and rediscovering old favorites, as well as the panic that comes with being overwhelmed by options. The column’s name is a play on the 1941 film I Wake Up Screaming, starring Betty Grable, Victor Mature, and Carole Landis. In this edition of “I Wake Up Streaming,” novelist William Boyle rounds up his top streaming picks for the month of December.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |