BEAUTIFUL BOY

★★★1/2

Beautiful Boy brings with it an interesting duality. On one hand, it’s undeniable Oscarbait, on the other, it may frustrate people who normally fall head-over-heels for even the most shameless Oscarbait.

Produced by Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B, who previously brought to screen 12 Years A Slave, Selma, and Moonlight, it’s a portrait of a father dealing with the drug addiction of his son over years. It headlines Steve Carell, doing career-best dramatic work, and nascent star Timothée Chalamet, who is both generational heart-throb and generational acting talent. It’s adapted from a pair of acclaimed memoirs (Based On A True Story!) by David and Nic Sheff, with the screenplay penned by Luke Davies, the local poet who wrote the screenplay for Lion. And it’s directed by Felix van Groeningen, the Belgian filmmaker last seen making you weep with the bluegrass-and-drinking-and-death flick The Broken Circle Breakdown.

And, in such prestige-picture production, Beautiful Boy delivers on its promise: it’s amazingly well-acted, handsomely photographed, and full of moments profound, poignant, filled with pathos. But, as much as it succeeds in what it’s trying to do, the film has — outside of Chalamet’s performance— not been received on those terms, not being seen as some Oscar shoo-in. Maybe this is because it lacks some kind of je ne sais quoi. Or, maybe, it’s because the film isn’t quite as conventional as its component-parts suggest.

Rather than delivering that familiar, All-American, evangelical arc of the addiction movie — good times, downward spiral, rock-bottom, AA, redemption — Beautiful Boy is told in something more like an impressionist swirl. It moves back-and-forth in time, out to create an experiential feeling; van Groeningen fashioning less a linear drama, more a work of moments, memories, and associations between the two. There’s no neat narrative or easy emotional beats, instead, it’s messy, disorienting, pulling in different directions at once.

This choice — in drama, but, essentially, in editing — feels like it’s out to evoke lives riddled with addiction, going off the rails. Highs and lows aren’t sustained, something confined to discrete acts, but things mixed in together: those going through addiction mercurial, distant, difficult to know, impossible predict. To those around them, they’re so clear in memory, so opaque in the present.

For certain viewers/voters, that will make Beautiful Boy something approaching difficult, even disappointing. But for audiences who’re happy to be even mildly challenged with their awards-season dramas, there’s something at play here, both cinematically and in its understanding of humanity.

BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE

★★★

It’s the best Quentin Tarantino movie Tarantino never made. Whilst the ’90s was full of cut-rate QT knock-offs, made by insufferable director-bros who all wanted to concoct ‘cool’ movies where criminals had conversations about old sitcoms, it’s been a long time since I saw a film in thrall to Tarantino’s stylistic tics. Then along came Drew Goddard’s long-awaited Cabin In The Woods follow-up, Bad Times At The El Royale, in which all the chaptered title-cards, nonlinear plot diversions, movie-stars relishing idiosyncratic characters, performances within performances, cool needle-drop song placements, jukebox close-ups, and fetishisations of gun violence seem plenty familiar.

Like a Tarantino film, Bad Times At The El Royale is a movie that effectively plays out within quotations. “Let’s have ourselves an allegory!” says Chris Hemsworth, midway into a flashback, midway into the film, midway into a turn playing — no less — a Manson-esque cult-leader. And, taking place in a hyper-stylised unreality, an allegory is something this pic can indeed play as. On a dark-and-stormy night, various movie-stars and fresh-faces gather in the titular locale, a faded gambling hub straddling the border of California and Nevada. The film straddles the ’60s and ’70s: taking place on one night, but moving back and forward through time, as each character gets their own back-story, motivations, secrets.

It starts as a Priest, a Travelling Salesman, a Singer, and a Hippy walking into a (hotel) bar, but, soon enough, everyone is revealed to be something else; to be harbouring ulterior motives, fleeing from different traumas. There’s an art to the way perspective shifts, and the action is revisited from new vantages; even if, like so much here, it’s gonna remind you of a certain filmmaker. The movie, beyond its self-aware style, is about sins, atonement, punishment, patriarchy, greed; about cultural reckoning with blackmail, shaming, violence. It’s less Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, clearly about Right Now in Hollywood; its allegory speaking of a system of exploitation, and a contemporary moment — and movement — reckoning with explosive revelation and attendant fallout.

I WANT TO EAT YOUR PANCREAS

★★★1/2

Yes, that’s really the title. Most amazingly, I Want To Eat Your Pancreas isn’t some exercise in torture-porn or meta-horror, but an animé. And not just any animé, but a teen terminal-illness weepie. It’s like Me & Earl & The Dying Girl without the jokes and Criterion fetishry. Instead, Shinichiro Ushijima’s film is a sincere portrait of a bookish, dick-ish loner-bro who learns to come out of his shell — who learns to feel — when he’s befriended by a Manic Pixie Terminal-Disease Girl.

At its worst, this plays as adolescent-male fantasy. Told from the perspective of its main bro, it’s a film where a cute, kooky girl blows into the life of a friendless loser, brightens up the joint, then dies to teach him poignant lessons. But at its best, the narrative allows its tragic heroine real life and agency of her own; the character drawn well enough (like, figuratively) that audiences, too, will shed salty teen-boy tears upon her timely final-act demise.

Beyond that, I Want To Eat Your Pancreas is also a study of the deleterious, corrosive qualities of things left unsaid and emotions repressed; sentiments clearly speaking to greater Japanese society. And, in its final reel, when the film hurls itself wholly into an extended Little Prince fantasy sequence, it makes great use of the animated medium; this working the whole flick towards a glorious, grandiose climax, rich with emotion and imagination.

RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: CODA

★★★

There’s no talking heads. This is the first thing you need know about the obligatory rockumentary chronicle of Ryuichi Sakamoto, the legendary Yellow Magic Orchestra founder, synth pioneer, and respected composer. Whilst it eventually touches on expected ‘hits’ — like, say, his scores to Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and The Last Emperor — Stephen Nomura Schible’s film doesn’t want to be a static presentation of the past. Instead, it spends time with Sakamoto in the cinematic present: watching him at work, whether that’s on new music or an activist campaign.

Whilst we sit with Sakamoto, we hear his meditations on life, legacy, mortality, music, composition, cinema, Tarkovsky, nature, the character of instruments. The thematic connections between his recovery from cancer and the Japanese environment’s recovery from Fukushima fallout are left to linger, never made overt. The film functions in the same way, with profundity hiding beneath simplicity in Zen fashion.

WESTWOOD: PUNK. ICON. ACTIVIST.

★★1/2

“Really, if I’ve got to talk about the Sex Pistols...” Dame Vivienne Westwood sighs, saying that she “couldn’t be bothered” going back over the same old story. It’s a statement good for a laugh. It also suggests, however, greater problems with Lorna Tucker’s documentary chronicle of the famed English fashion designer. Yes, this is another film in which we must rake over the coals of UK ’77 punk, parsing it for meaning (gladly, Westwood dismisses its subversion as just ‘marketing’, supposed sedition really just hollow bluster). But, moreso, her refusal to talk on certain topics symbolises a film being made on its subject’s terms.

This could be framed as being perfectly indicative of Westwood’s defiant, provocative character: this career-long cultural rebel refusing to play the part of benevolent interviewee, to be grateful to be holding court at the end of a long life. But, playing by her terms means that Westwood: Punk. Icon. Activist. just feels like more marketing, a work of celebrity-talking-heads-boasting brand-building that eschews thorny personal questions for a friendly, uncritical celebration of its maker and her designs.

THE CLEANERS

★★★★

Images posted to Facebook/Google that contravene T&C guidelines aren’t expunged by some all-knowing algorithm, wiped from the face of the internet by the machine itself. Instead, there’s an outsourced, offshore Filipino workface employed to do such dirty work. They toil at the coalface, out-of-sight and out-of-mind, their surreal McJobs involving going through 25,000 images a day, making snap decisions on what should or shouldn’t be banned. Watching these freelancers scrolling through images, saying ‘delete’ in a conspiratorial monotone, is hypnotic viewing. But, in The Cleaners, that’s just the beginning.

This sterling documentary — by German directors Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block — takes us into this covert realm; work often done, symbolically enough, under cover of darkness. Then the directors pull away, looking at the bigger picture, and how these micro-decisions suggest macro problems. The repercussions of the work of these ‘cleaners’ can be massive; especially when social-media platforms pledge to abide by local laws in countries, which, in certain places, is tantamount to enabling totalitarianism. The Cleaners shows how the corporate policies/standards of our internet overlords don’t just shape the way we see the world, but the world itself.

DONBASS

★★★★

Given Sergei Loznitsa, cinema’s preeminent chronicler of the Crimean conflict, alternates between documentary and fiction, it’s no surprise that the lines are, finally, starting to blur. Donbass is a narrative feature, taking its name from a site of Russian/Ukrainian conflict, which delivers a series of tragicomic vignettes about life during wartime. But its opening device frames the film as meta-movie: we meet a host of actors getting made up to play survivors of a bomb blast, then watch them walk onto set, delivering vox-pops to cameras in front of cameras in front of cameras. Later on, in sequences shot like a mockumentary, we see these opening scenes playing on the TV in the background as if a real news-report.

Loznitsa uses these devices not to get cute or show off, but to evoke wartime propaganda, and how that, these days, involves pro-nationalist TV reportage, fake news, PR stunts, public shaming, and endless selfies. Here, in the theatre of war, everything is a performance, everything is broadcast; be it bombing raids, bombing victims, peacocking soldiers, braying mobs, or drunken weddings. The result lives up to its tragicomic brief: Donbass at once darkly funny and deeply disturbing.