Culture

Auteur director Darren Aronofsky has never made the same film twice. From the grainy mathematical horror of Pi to the romantic fantasy-drama of The Fountain to the sprawling biblical vistas of Noah, each of his films sharply diverges in style and subject matter from the one before it, pressing forward into strange new genres. That said, his movies certainly share some common motifs — particularly a piercing sense of longing for transcendence, for the eternal. Every single film he’s ever directed has this quest at its center. Almost as ubiquitous across his work, though, are ferocious depictions of the body in pain, pressed to its limits and beyond in pursuit of the infinite’s perfection.

At a private liberal arts college in Minnesota, art history is now Islamophobic. In October, an art history professor at Hamline University was teaching Islamic art, a segment that included two depictions of the Prophet Mohammed in fourteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings with significant historical value. The professor alerted her students beforehand, careful to ensure that observant Muslims who object to the depiction of their prophet would not have to see him on screen. It seems that the professor had done everything right: providing images of famous paintings for her students’ edification but allowing students to opt out of viewing them if doing so ran contrary to their religious beliefs. But who are we kidding? This is a liberal arts college in the twenty-first century.

The screen begins on black; a slow reverse zoom reveals that we're looking at a laptop screen during a Zoom meeting. We think we’re watching a film reflecting the realities of Covid. But it’s 2016, and the black screen in the middle (reading “instructor” in the lower right-hand corner) belongs to our protagonist, Charlie (Brendan Fraser). He’s teaching an online English class, going through the motions of a job that means very little to him. His world is dark and painful; he doesn’t want to let anyone in. After he logs off, we see his enormous body masturbating to gay porn. His orgasm triggers a heart attack that feels like the punchline to a cruel joke, but it plays as anything but that.

In the early going of The Piano Lesson (1987) there’s mention of a merchant buying up musical instruments in the black neighborhoods of 1930s Pittsburgh. When offers for the titular family piano are rejected by its current proprietor, Berniece, her brother Boy Willie, who has arrived from the south, hopes to sell it to him behind her back. It’s a coy reference to that great Broadway salesman of band equipment, Meredith Willson’s Music Man (1957), and the reversal gives you some idea of playwright August Wilson’s method. Where Meredith built a full musical around a musical zero (Harold Hill is tone-deaf), August composed a stage play from the music of the blues, which he called the “sacred book” of black literature.

For those with a love of history who remember what the History Channel once was, its current state is a travesty. What was once populated with interesting documentaries is now home to Ancient Aliens and Swamp People. Despite the channel being quite literally called the History Channel, history was not bringing in the dough. Now Netflix is joining the party. In early November 2022, the streaming platform released Graham Hancock’s eight-episode series, Ancient Apocalypse. Hancock believes that there was an advanced civilization that was destroyed at the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,800 BC. Its members supposedly circumnavigated the globe, built wondrous feats of architecture, and may have left signs for future civilizations warning of coming catastrophes.

Half an hour or so into the new Whitney Houston biopic, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, two bros sitting next to me asked, “Why is gay Whitney in Black Panther?” They were in the wrong movie, but based on the other audience members screaming at the screen, the lone straight men weren’t alone in finding director Kasi Lemmons’s new film shocking. Sony promoted I Wanna Dance with Somebody as the feel-good biopic of the year. The trailer starts with the hook of the titular song and goes on to show Houston (Naomi Ackie) dancing to “How Will I Know” and singing her iconic rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl. Houston rarely speaks, but when she does, she talks about music: “My dream,” she purrs, “sing how I want to sing.

As a film critic and historian who's written for Sight and Sound since 2011, I like to think that the greatest films of all time are always on my mind, but, in truth, they were particularly on my mind last summer. Last July, I received the official word that I was among the select group of critics picked to partake the Sight and Sound critics' poll to decide the greatest films ever made; a survey the British magazine first convened in 1952 and has repeated on a once-per-decade basis ever since. In the weeks before my deadline to vote, I meditated on what constituted a great film with unusual intensity and self-reflection.

Quiet in the feature film world since the 2018 release of First Man, Damien Chazelle returns to the Hollywood-centric beat that brought him success in La La Land for Babylon, perhaps his most ambitious film yet. Opening in a raucous Hollywood party at the height of the Roaring Twenties, through a series of tracking shots, Chazelle introduces us to the three central characters of the film. Manny Torres, played by Diego Calva in his breakout role, attempts to navigate the atmosphere as an aspiring, wide-eyed Mexican immigrant who dreams of leaving his lowly assistant work to become something more. This allows Manny to serve as the surrogate for the audience.

In 1997, the Swedish pop act Aqua released a novelty single which combined being hugely popular with being even more irritating. Entitled “Barbie Girl,” it was a helium-voiced ode to the wonders of the famous Mattel creation, dusted with just enough ironic detachment to allow the musical connoisseur to believe that they were savoring a joke, while giving the unreconstructed pop lovers everything they could hope for. The lyrics are especially lamentable: the chorus declares “I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world/ Life in plastic, it's fantastic/ You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere/ Imagination, life is your creation.” It was successful for a while, sold a huge number of copies and can, very occasionally, still be heard on the radio.

A few years ago, someone on Twitter brought up the fact that Avatar, despite being a massive hit, left little to no cultural imprint on American pop culture. I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but after December 2009, all I ever heard about the movie was that the precious material on alien planet Pandora was called “unobtanium,” and that the script was a lazy ripoff of Pocahontas. Those reviews must have been the first time I read the phrase “white savior narrative,” relatively late for a junior in high school. But beyond that, none of Avatar’s characters, story, themes, concepts or images have broken through into general consciousness. It’s the most obscure success of all time. How did a movie make so much money and leave so little behind?

Every film composer hopes that they will have at least one piece of music that they will always be synonymous with. (Some greedy bastards, such as John Williams and Hans Zimmer, have loads.) Whether it’s Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther theme, John Barry’s James Bond epics or, more recently, Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings majesty, it’s a wonderful thing to have elevated a film or television series single-handedly with one’s scoring. And so it has proved with Angelo Badalamenti, who has died at the age of eighty-five.

Any moment now, I expect Taylor Swift to announce a presidential bid, probably for 2028. By then, she’ll have done everything else that someone in the entertainment industry could reasonably be expected to have done. Endless hit records and awards? Check. High-profile spats with leading industry figures who have invariably come off worse? Absolutely. And, next up, her cinematic debut, a yet-untitled project that she will both write and direct? Not long to wait now. The announcement a few days ago that Swift will direct a feature for Searchlight Pictures based on her own screenplay caused much excitement, with appropriate genuflection accompanying the press release.

In March 2021, during his last major interview, Jean-Luc Godard reiterated a previous point about the coronavirus being a form of communication. “At first, I thought that production was the main aspect of cinema, and I realized distribution was more important, today more than before. Distribution has choked production by pretending to be at the service of the audience...The virus in its own way, distributes. Today, it would be interesting to know how the virus produces, but we only care about what it distributes.

The pitch meeting for Violent Night must have been fun: why not make a big-budget film where Santa Claus himself (David Harbour) must protect a spoiled rich family from a home invasion? It might even settle the age-old debate about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie: this is what a Die Hard-style Christmas really looks like! Violent Night largely delivers on that premise, serving up high-octane holiday mayhem for the grownup set. Here, we get a disenchanted (and borderline alcoholic) Kris Kringle, who’s grown tired of modern kids requesting only cash and video games and is contemplating hanging up his hat. We’re a long way from the jovial protagonist of The Santa Clause or even the crankier iteration of Elf. Years of munching Christmas cookies haven’t made this Santa soft.

Towards the end of her life, the Cheers and Look Who’s Talking star Kirstie Alley, who has died of cancer at seventy-one, did something that made her a pariah among her Hollywood associates: she tweeted support for Donald Trump. On October 17, 2020, Alley wrote, "I’m voting for @realDonaldTrump because he’s NOT a politician. I voted for him 4 years ago for this reason and shall vote for him again for this reason. He gets things done quickly and he will turn the economy around quickly. There you have it folks there you have it." The public response was swift and merciless. Writer and director Judd Apatow remarked, "Shelley Long was way funnier than you"; the actress Patricia Arquette announced, "Well my vote for Biden canceled yours out. I have done my civic duty of the day.

Fiddler on the Roof is a study of Eastern European Jewry: it is based on Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem’s short stories and is set in a Yiddish-speaking village in early twentieth-century Imperial Russia. Yet, in the hit musical, which premiered on Broadway in 1964, Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics only feature a handful of Yiddish words. Harnick later confessed that the creators downplayed the Jewishness of the story — something they thought might be too sticky; too specific — in order not to put off American audiences. As scriptwriter Joseph Stein said: “These were stories about characters who just happened to be Jewish.

Life imitated art to a depressingly predictable degree when a clip from Todd Field’s Tár circulated online. It’s part of a scene where the film’s title character, superstar conductor Lydia Tár (played by Cate Blanchett), leads a masterclass at Juilliard. She haughtily dismisses students’ reluctance to learn the classical canon because of their difficulty “identifying” with its composers. To some, Lydia’s monologue was a vindication: a righteous tirade against "wokeness." To others, the speech exemplifies Lydia’s abuse of power, which includes not only dressing down students and mentees but sleeping with many of them and torpedoing their careers.  But oversimplified views of Lydia as a crusader or villain flatten the film’s wrenching complexities.

Screen adaptations of Agatha Christie mysteries never go out of style. The problem is that they're so often concerned with literal fidelity that they get bogged down in self-seriousness, so desperate to “update” everything that they veer into the ludicrous. With 2019's Knives Out, Rian Johnson successfully updated the Christie-style whodunit because he had a deep knowledge of its formula and he played it with a pitch-perfect, kooky sensibility. For Knives Out’s sequel, the newly released Glass Onion, Johnson does what you should do when Netflix gives you buckets of money to make a whodunit. There are expensive locales and production design, a bevy of great character actors and a twistier murder plot.

Sweeping down and around the Aran Islands, The Banshees of Inisherin begins as any Irish film would. The official trailer had given little away, besides a couple of strong-sounding accents and weak-looking Guinness. Very Irish; too Irish, perhaps. Despite my respect for Martin McDonagh and reverence for In Bruges, even I felt trepidatious. My father, too, had an air of skepticism about him. The line between Irish and Oirish is so fine — so easily and often overstepped — that when the film opened on gray cliffs and green fields, you could be forgiven for fearing the worst. For despite the accelerated evolution of contemporary Irish cinema, Hollywood still speaks fluent Oirish.