Film

There is probably no American documentary filmmaker more respected than Ken Burns. From his landmark 1990 series about the Civil War to his most recent work that has explored everyone and everything from Ernest Hemingway to country music, Burns has established himself as a fearless chronicler of stories that illuminate the nation’s history, sometimes in ways that viewers might find uncomfortable. His 2005 documentary about the African-American boxing champion Jack Johnson, Unforgiveable Blackness, was a fine example of the filmmaker turning his gaze on a subject that many might have preferred be left obscure, and it won him an Emmy for Outstanding Directing as a result — one of fifteen that he and his films have won to date.

With the possible exception of 2016’s The Jungle Book, none of Disney’s live-action repristinations of its animated classics have been a real success. Beauty and the Beast was too rococo for its own good. Aladdin obsessed over politics at the expense of romance. The Lion King traded elegant animation for dead-eyed CGI. And on it goes. None of these come close, though, to the disaster that is Robert Zemeckis’s Pinocchio — a turgid, nihilistic recreation of the 1940 classic that fails utterly to honor its source material. This month, it’s been dumped unceremoniously onto Disney+ rather than given a proper theatrical release; even the almighty Mouse knows when it has a stinker on its hands.

The death of French director Jean-Luc Godard, at the age of 91, is probably doomed to not get its due because of the saturation media coverage of Elizabeth II. That said, it should be noted that admirers of Godard and ardent royalists probably occupy a relatively small space on a Venn diagram, and, once the funeral obsequies for the Queen have passed, the legacy of one of France’s most innovative and influential — if also infuriating — filmmakers might be taken as seriously as it deserves.

If Warner Brothers’ expensive superhero film The Flash is released next summer — and does not follow the fate of this year’s Batgirl, which has been summarily canceled — it will be fascinating to watch what the publicity circus does with its leading man. Or, to be more exact, leading human, as its star Ezra Miller has dismissed conventional ideas of being pigeonholed as anything conventional. They declared in 2018 that, “Queer just means no, I don't do that. I don't identify as a man. I don't identify as a woman. I barely identify as a human.” It is perhaps not a long path from these statements to Miller’s recent announcement that they are finally attempting to put their wildly chaotic life in some sort of order.

If anyone told you that Ron Howard was their favorite film director, you might be forgiven for laughing out loud. Yet on paper, Howard has had as successful a career as any other filmmaker working today. Of the twenty-seven pictures he's directed, there are Academy Award winners and nominees for Best Film, massive box office hits and several critically acclaimed pictures that show a degree of both eclecticism and an apparent ability to turn his hand to anything imaginable. There are few directors who have made everything from epic fantasy to gritty '70s-set dramas about the David Frost and Richard Nixon interviews.

The Cannes Film Festival remains the most glamorous and famous gathering of the movie industry in the world. High-profile, black-tie premieres attended by some of the best-known actors jostle alongside the more disreputable commercial market. Films on sale this year include My Neighbor Adolf, about the unlikely friendship that is struck up between a Holocaust survivor and a mysterious man who may or may not be Adolf Hitler. But back in the main festival, everything is going entirely to plan. Apparently. There has not been a “normal” Cannes Film Festival since 2019. The 2020 edition was canceled, and the 2021 event took place in reduced and rather glum circumstances in July. But now Cannes is back, back, back, bébé!

Next week marks the release of the third J.K. Rowling-scripted Fantastic Beasts film, a series that has overstayed its welcome. This latest iteration is subtitled The Secrets of Dumbledore. As if to wrong-foot those who would smirkingly speculate that one of Dumbledore’s secrets is his sexuality, the film opens with the old wizard and his former lover-turned-nemesis Grindelwald (now played by Mads Mikkelsen, replacing a disgraced Johnny Depp) mourning the end of their love affair, which at least makes the homosexual subtext hinted at in previous films explicit. But that, alas, is about it for any kind of coherence, or interest, or originality.

It may come as a surprise to anyone who has read Mick Herron’s peerless Slough House novels, but Slow Horses, Apple TV’s high-profile adaptation of the first book in the series, is not funny. Instead, it takes Herron’s uproariously comic premise — that a group of misfit British spies, cast out of MI5 for misdemeanors exaggerated and accurate alike, have been reduced to grubbing about in a grim office on the periphery of the City of London — and plays it almost entirely straight. Gone are the laugh-out-loud one-liners and endearingly witty pieces of throwaway badinage. Instead, we have a big-budget spy thriller, polished and scripted to within an inch of its life. It’s a bit like seeing the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reinvented as a gritty urban drama.

The news that Bruce Willis is to “step away” — rather than explicitly retire — from acting following a diagnosis of the brain disorder aphasia, is sad for both personal and artistic reasons. Even as a flood of stories emerge about Willis’s erratic and unpredictable behavior on film sets over the past few years, it is a bitter irony that, after a lengthy career as the tough guy hero — in Armageddon, he defeated no less an antagonist than a planet-threatening asteroid — the actor has finally been undone by his own brain. The news also makes the recent receipt of Willis’s Golden Razzie “award” for his performance in Cosmic Sin particularly cruel, not least because he was “honored” with a special category, “Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie.