Author: SceneByGreen

Steven Spielberg | 2hr 36min

In a film culture drowning in adaptations of existing intellectual property, West Side Story is a timely reminder that remakes of beloved movies need not necessarily be considered an attempt to displace revered legacies and treasured childhood memories. Besides the very specific casting choice of Rita Moreno, Steven Spielberg barely references the original at all, making this adaptation just as much a product of his own vibrant artistic vision as the 1961 version was Robert Wise’s. No longer is New York lit like a furnace burning with the passion of lovers and rivals, but it is rather washed out with cold blues and greys, underscoring the scarcity and desperation of this city that can only be pierced by the vibrant cultural expressions bursting forth from the characters’ costumes, blocking, and dancing.

In this cinematic take on the classic musical, scaffolding, machinery, and debris litter the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Spielberg brings us into this right from the very first shot when he lifts us up into the air in a magnificently long take, sweeping across dystopian demolition sites of torn-down buildings before dropping us into the prologue’s heated balletic clash between Sharks and Jets. Later on in the musical number ‘Cool’, the collapsed shell of an old freight station becomes the tumbledown stage upon which Tony calls the Jets to step down from the planned rumble, visually working in conjunction with the questions of territory roiling around in the screenplay to turn this urban environment into an apocalyptic wasteland ruled by gangs.

Though praise must be given to the editing in those quiet montages of the city that underscore a palpable tension in the air and the precariously balanced ‘Tonight Quintet’, Spielberg’s brilliant camerawork largely forms the foundation of his cinematic achievement all throughout West Side Story. At its most dazzling, he soars his camera over the top of a dance at the local gym, before dropping it to the floor and letting it crawl around the legs of the attendees. In subtler moments it effortlessly integrates with his choreography and blocking, particularly in ‘Gee Officer Krupke’ where the Jets turn the police station into a playground for both themselves and the camera to energetically zoom around in an irreverent mockery of clueless authority figures. This is to say nothing of Spielberg’s creative angles which heighten the forbidden interactions between lovers Tony and Maria through extreme highs and lows on the side of an apartment building, as well as those Dutch tilts which further throw this desolate world dramatically off-kilter.

Beyond Spielberg’s acute visual acumen, his casting similarly astounds right across his entire ensemble, the only weak link being a performance from Ansel Elgort that never quite matches the edgy verve of almost everyone around him. There is little he can do from being blown off the screen by his co-stars Rachel Zegler and Mike Faist, respectively playing Maria and Riff. In Zegler’s performance, the sweet passion of romance manifests in full bloom, shining brightly in her wide, expressive smile, while Faist’s deadpan disillusionment draws out a touching vulnerability in the leader of the Jets. Rounding out the trio of breakthrough performances in West Side Story is Ariane DeBose, whose charisma and conviction as Anita lifts the number ‘America’ to spectacularly energetic heights and brings the tragedy of this Shakespearean narrative crashing to devastating lows.

In smaller characters, Spielberg builds out the social commentary of the piece with minor tweaks, emphasising their attempts to find their place in a society that despises them. On the Sharks’ side, Chino is far more timid than historical representations of him, and as such is equally motivated to earn the respect of the gang as he is to win Maria’s love. Meanwhile, the traditional queer coding of Anybodys manifests here in fully embracing the character’s identity as a trans man wanting to become part of the Jets. This does not exist purely as an adjustment to pre-existing material though, nor does it act as a strained call to modern audiences to appreciate that which came before. Spielberg is one of the truly great pop artists of cinema, and his broad, sweeping style of iconographic filmmaking is well-suited to such classical Shakespearean stories as that which West Side Story takes its own spin on. Above all else, this film is an eruption of creative genius from a master of his craft, flowing with musical excitement, tragedy, and remarkable stylistic ambition.

West Side Story is currently playing in theatres.

Woody Allen | 1hr 25min

Two years before Woody Allen left his immortal mark on the romantic-comedy genre with Annie Hall, he pushed another set of narrative and film conventions in Love and Death. Early 19^th century Russia is his chosen setting, and those great Russian novels by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are his inspiration, but this is no insipidly self-serious period piece. Anachronisms abound here, as playfully irreverent as they are pointed in their satire, targeting the quaint pretensions of this era with rapid-fire repartee and a good deal of meta-humour.

Allen continues the trend of starring in his work in Love and Death, playing the part of a Russian literary protagonist reluctant to take part in his war-bound destiny. Boris Grushenko might as well stand in for Allen himself in all his contemporary sensibilities, as he gleefully belittles those around him while suffering the consequences of his own hubris. The Groucho Marx influence on his work has always been evident, but rarely has it been so palpable as it is here in one of his earliest films, when in the most dire of circumstances of being challenged to a duel he continues rattling off quips with all the speed and impudence of a man who possesses both great intellect and great ego, and can’t help letting both show.

“My seconds will call on your seconds.”

“Well, my seconds will be out, let them call on my thirds. If my thirds are out, go directly to my fourths.”

Quite unusually for Allen, slapstick rules alongside verbal wit in Love and Death, though once again such a smooth integration of both high and lowbrow humour comes back to his love for the Marx Brothers. A sophisticated conversation over moral imperatives is deflated in an instant when Boris and his wife, Sonja, pause mid-way to hit an unconscious Napoleon Bonaparte on the head with a wine bottle, underscoring the incongruency between the lofty philosophical questions and life-or-death scenarios often presented side-by-side in Russian literature.

Even as Love and Death is drenched in jokes and references to classic novels, Allen’s focus remains on the cinematic applications of his satirical commentary, further building out his movie into a pastiche of European arthouse films. The montage editing of a battle deliberately evokes the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin right down to a shot of broken spectacles, though when Allen cuts to the view of the war from the general’s perspective he amusingly slips in a shot of sheep running together in a flock. Meanwhile, a white cloaked figure representing Death acts a direct allusion to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, even as its austere presence is undercut by Boris’ flippancy, considering his own mortality as little more than an inconvenience.

“Boris! What happened?”

“I got screwed.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Some vision came and said that I was gonna get pardoned, and then they shot me.”

“You were my one great love.”

“Oh thank you very much, I appreciate that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m dead.”

In his fourth wall breaking voiceovers and facetiously subversive attitude, Allen smashes through cultural, narrative, and cinematic convention, fashioning an entirely new kind of artistic statement out of the fragments left behind. Though there is a cerebral and ironic detachment in his attacks upon old-fashioned ideals, it does not possess the sort of savagery that he reserves for his own self-criticisms. Ultimately, it is in that combination of the two where Love and Death reveals itself to be just as much a pointed comment on the way haughty academics and artists interpret history as it is a critique of the foibles of history itself, all the while wryly refusing to take itself seriously on any level.

Love and Death is available to rent or buy on iTunes, Youtube, and Google Play.

Woody Allen | 1hr 22min

The story of The Purple Rose of Cairo is so simple it might as well be a fairy tale, or perhaps a fable for twentieth century America. In such dire times as the Great Depression when jobs were being lost and poverty was widespread, the escapism of the movie theatre could let that all fade away for a few hours. Down-on-her-luck waitress Cecilia is no exception. Hollywood gossip is her matter of expertise, and the cinema is where she falls into a dreamy daze, consumed by fantasies acted out by stars who never acknowledge her in return. That is at least until she catches the eye of archaeologist Tom Baxter, a character from the other side of the silver screen. All of a sudden he is walking out of the frame and into reality, much to the shock of her fellow theatre patrons and his fellow movie characters.

At this point in Woody Allen’s career, The Purple Rose of Cairo was about as childishly whimsical as he had gotten, but as much as he indulges in the fanciful imagination of the piece he is also in complete control of this delicate balance of conflicting tones. It is namely the incongruities between reality and fantasy that come to a head as Cecilia herself tries to sort one from the other, painfully considering how she can live a life of bright idealism while trapped in an abusive marriage. The touching vulnerability that Mia Farrow summons up in this role is of an entirely different kind to that which she displayed in Rosemary’s Baby. It is both naïve and disillusioned, seeing the world as it is yet choosing to turn away from it to absorb another where people are “consistent and always reliable.” How crushingly magnificent she is as well in simply sitting and letting her reactions tell entire stories, moving between smiles and tears as Allen dreamily dissolves between her face and the movie screen, forming a bond between the two that cannot be destroyed by anything that happens outside that darkened room.

But at the end of each movie session the lights inevitably turn back on and Cecilia must once again return to a life where happy endings are rare, and where the most one can really hope for is a bittersweet reconciliation with misfortune. As she discovers, the idealism of fiction can provide an aspirational standard that may inspire positive values and self-confidence, but this is not always enough to wrestle with any issues of real substance. “Where’s the fade out?” Tom asks as he and Cecilia begin to kiss passionately, unfamiliar with a world where sex is not simply implied. His chivalry and romance are certainly desirable, but his claims that he only possesses those since they were “written into my character” suggest that anything that was not instilled in him at conception is not something he can grow to understand.

In this self-aware layering of film conventions within other film conventions, Allen’s comedic writing and directing is simply superb, and demonstrative of the depth of his talent even when not crafting an all-time great screenplay such as Annie Hall. Fourth walls are broken in the most literal manner possible, characters within the ‘fake’ movie reference their own artificial existence, and then every so often he punctures the lightness of the story with a stab of black comedy, addressing the potentially disastrous consequences of both real and fictional worlds meeting. As we learn at one point, the black-and-white characters up on the movie screen are damned back to an empty void of nothingness each time the projector is turned off, and in a narrative twist further along the actor who plays Tom also gets tied up in the farce, complicating the matter with cases of mistaken identity.

This rather simple premise doesn’t outstay its welcome either, as within the film’s brief 82-minute run time Allen keeps the narrative moving in exciting directions, turning his lovingly stylistic construction of a classical black-and-white Hollywood movie into a transgressive artistic choice when the fourth wall is spun around and Cecilia enters Tom’s fictional world. The film grain and slightly tinny sound quality is authentically rendered in detail, but even greater is the montage of their “night out on the town” that affectionately plays into silent film techniques in tremendous ways, creating gorgeously layered collages through multiple exposures. The Purple Rose of Cairo is just as much an ode to the world of movies and moviemaking as it is a fable warning against the temptation to use them as a replacement for living, though it is through its intelligent, enthusiastic screenplay and one of Farrow’s most touchingly sweet screen performances that it transcends its already imaginative premise.

The Purple Rose of Cairo is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.

Maggie Gyllenhaal | 2hr 4min

The decades that Maggie Gyllenhaal has spent watching and learning from directors on film sets has paid off – The Lost Daughter is one of the more outstanding directorial debuts of 2021, delivering an entirely unsettling take on motherhood that has no inhibitions in peeling back the sensitive and at times ugly layers of what it means to lose yourself in such an overwhelming duty of care. Olivia Colman is in the lead role here as Leda, a woman whose beach holiday in Greece starts to quietly derail after meeting young mother Nina and her small family. The psychological drama that unravels from here is almost entirely internal, depicted in flashbacks that reveal Leda’s own fraught history as a mother of two young girls, and yet there is an anxiety which seems to arise in her immediate environment as well.

Part of this troubled atmosphere can be put down to Leda’s paranoid, erratic behaviour, particularly in her strange decision to steal the doll of Elena, Nina’s child, which gives rise to symbolic suggestions of wishful surrogacy. But then there are those falling pinecones that always seem to target her along the same path home from the beach, and a group of troublesome local men who seem to be everywhere she goes. The uneasiness attached to these threats draw a very thin line between drama and thriller, as does the subtle suggestion that there may be some deeper truth to Leda’s past which she refuses to address. While meeting new people and answering basic personal questions, the hesitancy in Colman’s line deliveries suggests nervous dishonesty even when she is speaking the truth. In actuality, it is what she leaves unsaid that conceals the explanations we are looking for.

The crafting of such persistent ambiguity and disorientation is the basis of Gyllenhaal’s filmmaking strengths here, as in the formal repetition of flashbacks and motifs she builds a character who feels both immediately accessible in her mental state, and yet mysteriously distant in her unsympathetic behaviour. Names are awkwardly misheard and mistaken more than once, and a rhyming couplet that continues to reappear in Leda’s flashbacks with her children brings both an eerie metaphoric significance and a sweet innocence to her fondest memories.

“Don’t let it break, peel it like a snake.”

Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal takes a step into Terrence Malick territory with the creative choice to let conversations run over shots from elsewhere within the same scene where the characters aren’t speaking, sinking us deeper into Leda’s distracted mental state. Seemingly the only thing that she can focus on completely without disturbance is Nina, within whom she sees a version of her younger self. There is certainly empathy in the complex relationship that develops between them, as Leda notices Nina’s troubles with motherhood and her desire to break free of its constraints, but there is also a little bit of jealousy over her still-intact family. Nina has not yet made the same choices as Leda, but it may only be a matter of time before she too finds herself separated from her children.

The film title’s description of a daughter as “lost” may on the surface imply some kind of missing persons narrative, but Gyllenhaal is clearly more interested in where those lost people actually go. Indeed, many things are lost in this film – multiple daughters, a doll, and most of all, Leda herself, who finds herself out of her depth wherever she goes. Back at home she finds herself struggling to raise her children, but then when she is away from them, they dominate her every thought. Certainly parenting isn’t something that everyone can weather, but even in her self-description of being an “unnatural mother” there is a recognition that her daughters are still very much part of her identity, regardless of her actual nurturing instincts. “Don’t let it break,” they continue to whisper to her all throughout the film, and it is within this mantra that Leda finds some hope of reconnection with kindness and understanding.

The Lost Daughter is currently streaming on Netflix.

Lin Manuel-Miranda | 1hr 55min

Since the explosion of Hamilton on Broadway in 2015, it has been nearly impossible to escape the pop culture presence of the playwright behind it. Lin-Manuel Miranda has sung, written, acted, and produced his way into the upper echelons of the theatre, film, and television communities with a joyful passion that has been embraced by most and shunned by others who have deemed his upbeat attitude too corny or intense to be loveable. How fitting it is then that his foray into movie directing centres a figure who once could have inhabited a very similar place as him. In 1996, Jonathan Larson’s rock musical Rent reached similar heights as Miranda’s own decade-defining, hip-hop spin on America’s Founding Fathers, though it was the night before its Off-Broadway preview that he unexpectedly passed away from an undiagnosed illness. Tick, Tick… Boom! seeps with a zest for life shared by both artists that can easily turn off any cynic unprepared for such open embraces of bohemia and playful, self-aware numbers, and yet at the same time Miranda plays out a deconstruction of the artist that may still hold hope of winning over his detractors.

While based off a semi-autobiographical musical of the same name that Larson himself wrote before Rent, Tick, Tick… Boom! also uses a performance of the very show as its own framing device. At the New York Theatre Workshop in 1992, he opens with a monologue. In his head, he has been hearing a ceaseless ticking noise. It is not a technical problem, a musical cue, or a joke, he tells the audience. It is an unstoppable countdown to the moment where he realises his youth, energy, and life has been squandered, and now on the verge of turning 30, he fears that that inevitable ‘Boom’ is close by. We cut to two years earlier, a time when Jonathan has been working on an entirely different project altogether, Superbia, and all throughout the film that ticking comes and goes, a reminder of what waits for him on the other end.

In Miranda’s skilful intercutting between both timelines, an interaction forms between Jonathan’s fiction and reality. Not just in the manifestation of his life in art, but the act of creation itself impedes upon everything else, from his relationships to finances. As we listen to a song comically expressing the complexity of arguing with your significant other, we simultaneously watch such an argument unfold with his girlfriend, Susan, and then just as it seems as if it has been resolved she catches Jonathan’s fingers tapping out a rhythm. Even in the heat of a quarrel, that artistic instinct to transpose real life into music remains. Or is it just an impulsively selfish disconnection from other people? Even then, that song we are watching composed and performed concurrently are not perfect reflections of each other. The resolution found in Jonathan’s musical interpretation is nowhere to be found in reality, but instead becomes a concoction of pure fantasy, embodying the exact kind of detachment that Susan has accused him of.

The power that Jonathan’s songs carry seems to radiate back from these future performances all through Tick, Tick… Boom!, as in one scene we watch the chaos of a busy diner suddenly dissipate in a burst of tranquillity the moment the first chord of “Sunday” is struck. Miranda’s visual aesthetic is at times plain enough to expose his relative inexperience in film direction, and yet his love for theatrics explodes forth in this number where Jonathan lowers the wall of the restaurant to create a stage upon which the figures of his imagination harmonise in a display of choral brilliance.

Given how much of himself Jonathan puts into his work, those sly references to Rent that continue to turn up are a little more earned than the typical piece of fan service. For better and for worse, his art is very much an obsession, and Andrew Garfield takes the composer’s electric, frazzled energy to new heights even beyond those songs that distil his complicated life into purely emotional expressions. It is also in those moments when Jonathan’s creative block keeps him from summoning up a single note that his desperation and frustration spill forth, and that anxiety around being unable to produce anything of worth takes over. The sentimental voiceover that caps Tick, Tick… Boom! might be a little too jolting even for Manuel fans, especially given how far it steps outside its own narrative form without proper setup, but with the fresh perspective of hindsight, Manuel lends the ticking motif an extra edge of poignancy, extending Jonathan’s fear of time running out to an existential fear of one’s own mortality. Death may arrive as a slow decline or a nasty surprise, but just as both Manuel and Larson strongly abide by in Tick, Tick… Boom!, it is also makes everything that precedes it all the more valuable in its fleetingness.

Tick, Tick… Boom! is currently streaming on Netflix.

Ridley Scott | 2hr 38min

It might be a little generous calling House of Gucci “Shakespearean”, but all the hallmarks are there – a conniving Lady Macbeth, the rise and fall of a noble family, fatally flawed antiheroes, and a poetic sense of tragedy in the culmination of remarkable treachery. If not Shakespeare, than perhaps comparisons may be drawn to The Godfather in its unfolding of an epic family saga, where empires built by parents are expanded and destroyed by their own children. The presence of Al Pacino as an uncle who must be cut out to let the younger entrepreneurs flourish is certainly a nod in that direction, though it is largely the strength of this operatic narrative and screenplay that gives House of Gucci such firm grounding in these historical archetypes.

In holding together this colossal historical story, Ridley Scott infuses a strong sense of destiny into its very fabric, most predominantly in the prophecies of Pina who offers counsel to Patrizia Reggiani, First Lady of the Gucci Empire. Though she acts as a soothsayer, she is no doubt a flawed one, often only telling her friend what she wishes to hear and even going so far as to foolishly conspire in her criminal plans. It is through her that Patrizia “sees” the affair going on between her husband, Maurizio, and his mistress, Paola, depicted in a seamless piece of editing that gives the appearance of them all sharing the same space.

The day that Patrizia’s ruthless nature fully surfaces and sets in motion the irrevocable downfall of the Gucci family is also spelled out right from the start, as her voiceover speaks with mournful nostalgia over an apparently ordinary sequence of Maurizio preparing for work. Two hours later we return to that same scene, though this time that narration is replaced with cutaways to Patrizia slyly submerging herself within a soapy bath, anxiously awaiting her dastardly plans to reach fruition. And indeed they do, as Scott brings his narrative full circle in a tragic manifestation of destiny, and the infamous mythology of the Gucci family is set in stone.

For the most part, this cast of bright stars understand and embrace the magnificently dramatic task at hand. In playing these larger-than-life figures whose existences are drenched in wealth and extravagance, their acting styles are suitably turned up to the brink of exaggeration. Some, like Jared Leto, tip over into full-on caricature, while Adam Driver is about as understated as you can be while faking an Italian accent. Lady Gaga is the one who hits the sweet spot in a performance that is certainly heightened, but still fully invested in drawing out the thrillingly dark power plays of the real Patrizia Reggiani. As relationships disintegrate between husbands, wives, fathers, and sons through affairs and backstabbing, there remains an irony to their attempts at upholding the “family character” of their brand that only thinly conceals their own hatred for each other.

True to the film’s operatic tendencies, classical arias and duets from such Italian composers as Rossini and Verdi find their way into House of Gucci, even as much of the soundtrack is dominated by 80s synth pop songs. It is in this blend of two conflicting styles that the duelling identities of the Gucci family are captured, being a family both propped up by tradition and utterly consumed in the hedonism of the modern world. Not every minute of this film is filled with the sort of tight, enthralling storytelling that its dramatic influences clearly possess, and yet Ridley Scott’s decades of experience working with classical narratives and universal archetypes effectively turns this complicated piece of recent history into an epic tragedy of grand destinies and fallen empires.

House of Gucci is currently playing in theatres.

Jacques Tourneur | 1hr 37min

It only makes sense that a classical Hollywood director with as thorough a grounding in cinematic horror as Jacques Tourneur can so easily slip into film noir and flex his expressionistic style in this adjacent yet still distinct genre. It almost doesn’t matter that Out of the Past’s narrative is eventually pushed to the point of inscrutability, especially given how much Tourneur turns this into a strength of the piece, stacking up lies upon lies from supposed allies and enemies trying to outsmart each other. The manner in which private detective Jeff Markham manipulates a fresh murder scene to confound the killer who herself is using it to manipulate others is almost amusing in its complexity. As with all great noirs though, such convoluted entanglements are deliberately undercut by the atmosphere of impending doom hanging over antiheroes and villains alike, threatening to send them all to early graves in spite of their intricate, egotistic endeavours.

Being a film as fascinated by the inescapability of old sins and crimes as it is, Out of the Past remains perhaps one of the purest noirs in its fatalistic pull. Jeff’s own destiny is etched out from the start in his decision to run away with Kathy, the mysterious woman he has been hired to track down, though Tourneur initially brings us into the narrative after all this has already taken place. As far as we know at this point, Jeff is a gas station attendant working in a small mountain town, dating a good-natured country girl named Ann, and it is only when summoned by a shady figure named Whit that he divulges through flashbacks and voiceover the shady past that he has been trying to outrun.

Such introspective presentations of urban and rural regions may even seem directly parallel to Shakespeare’s own contemplative considerations of court versus country life, whereby the latter represents a place of healing from the politics of the former. This is indeed the motivation for Jeff at least, who is ready to make a fresh start in Bridgeport after getting tangled up in murder, theft, and fraud in the city. As Tourneur lays out in the very first shot of a crossroads sign displaying the directions of both though, there is a connection that joins one to the other, and it is along this route that the gloom and danger of Jeff’s old life invades his new.

Robert Mitchum finds the ideal role for his screen persona in Jeff Markham, a man whose dialogue sizzles with sharp, succinct turns of phrase. “Tell me why you’re so hard to please,” Kathy teases him. “Take me where I can tell you,” he replies with understated cheek, and this wit very much defines his nonchalant, pointed style all through Out of the Past. His fedora and trench coat might make him appear like any number of other hardboiled black-and-white detectives, and yet the dark charisma he carries rivals Humphrey Bogart’s, much of it coming from that deep, resonant voice which is just as suited for narration as it is for short, quick-witted responses.

And yet as much as he acts like it, Jeff is not some cool, untouchable figure removed the danger of the piece. Around him, Tourneur’s lighting flickers from bright to starkly expressionist as quickly as it takes a lamp to topple off a table, and within the dark enclosures of mansions, apartments, and isolated cabins the detective is visually trapped behind drapes and doorways. Indeed, there always seems to be constant attention on Tourneur’s behalf to the manner in which characters are made vulnerable against others, often shrunken against those who spy on them from behind. Even when it isn’t at the forefront of the narrative, Tourneur is quietly underscoring that lurking threat that comes from behind, fatalistically drawing Jeff back into those past transgressions he would much rather hide from than confront directly and have to carry the weight of in all their hideous, damning indictments.

Out of the Past is currently not available to stream in Australia.

Adam McKay | 2hr 25min

After his exhilarating take on the Global Financial Crisis in The Big Short, and his slightly more polarising study of Dick Cheney’s political career in Vice, Adam McKay is tying off what he has labelled his ‘Freakout trilogy’ with his broadest satire yet in Don’t Look Up. What exactly his target is here is difficult to pin down – self-serving politicians, exploitative tech billionaires, nationalistic hero worship of soldiers, and vapid media personalities all come into play, though the catalyst for these send-ups is all-encompassing. The end of the world is on its way, as the discovery of a comet coming to obliterate Earth begs for immediate, cooperative action, particularly from those who hold social and political influence. Astronomists Dr Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky only barely slide into that category, though it is a strong current of blatant ignorance, arrogance, and nationalism which they are swimming against. 

Those who were only onboard with The Big Short for its sharp insight and incisiveness may be disappointed with the blunt approach with which McKay approaches his contentious subject matter here. Those who appreciate his irreverent wit and zippy, fast-paced editing as a means of crafting an entirely different kind of statement will still find value in Don’t Look Up, even if it is troubling in its formal inconsistencies. His efforts to break past the polished, conventional aesthetic on display to let his more familiar documentary style breathe are largely successful in his handheld camera, voiceovers, and comically harsh cuts away from intense scenes mid-conversation, though some oddly placed jump cuts and cutaways don’t fare so well, and neither does one strangely isolated fourth wall break. The flashing of some text over a freeze frame early on to inform us that the Planetary Defense Coordination Office is indeed a real organisation within NASA is the sort of self-aware, playful gag that gave The Big Short and Vice such distinctive humour, and yet given the lack of recurring acknowledgement of the story’s own fictionality from this point on, its insertion simply makes for poor film form.

While keeping all these flaws in mind though, there should still be no hesitation in pointing out McKay’s idiosyncratic and playful use of montages to imbue energy and texture into his work. His editing in Don’t Look Up doesn’t quite touch the heights of Damien Chazelle or Edgar Wright, but the great strength of his stylistic achievement here comes back to those mosaics of insects, cities, animals, babies, temples, riots, sex, planets – everything that encompasses the micro and macro experiences of human life in all its beauty and terror. The sheer velocity with which he flits through these images only ever allows us short, sharp glimpses before snatching them away in an instant, keeping us from appreciating the scope of humanity beyond its overwhelming transience. It is only in the weighty moment which this film eventually winds towards that he slows his footage right down to a snail’s pace, expanding milliseconds out to what seems like an eternity, and finally letting the humanity of the piece linger as each central character discovers the value in their fleeting lives.

Certainly McKay’s star-studded cast is yet another characteristic stamp of his that turns up here, and this too pays off on multiple levels. For Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, the gravity of the situation is fully realised in angry outbursts, panic attacks, and their characters’ eventual despairing turns to hedonism, keeping the centre of the film grounded as almost every other plot thread spins off in wild directions. In smaller parts, McKay does well to keep casting big names in amusingly appropriate roles – Ariana Grande as a parody of the kind of superficial pop star the world believes her to be, as well as an especially gruff Ron Perlman playing a grim-faced Colonel who is more than willing to unnecessarily sacrifice his life for his country. The satirical parallels are often all too plain, especially when it comes to Meryl Streep’s self-serving Trumpian President, and yet McKay has no pretensions about his style of low-brow humour. Don’t Look Up is an act of political catharsis more than anything else – provocative, contemptuous, and hilariously bleak from start to finish.

Don’t Look Up is currently streaming on Netflix.

John Huston | 2hr 6min

At times it feels as if every post-1940s representation of greed on film in some way comes back to that immortal figure of madness at the centre of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The image of Fred C. Dobbs talking to himself as he spirals into a whirlwind of paranoia bleeds into the characterisation of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings and Spike Lee’s screenplay for Da 5 Bloods. John Huston’s writing of a potentially great man whose hollow pursuit of riches leaves him with a corrupt, rotten soul also manifests in the arc of Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street, as well as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. There is something distinct about Dobbs’ treachery though, especially with it being so rooted in Western genre archetypes that form part of a greater narrative about humanity’s attempts to tame wild, natural lands beyond their control.

The adventure and shooting typically found in other films of this genre is not entirely missing here, though it does play a secondary role to the drama unfolding among the three American prospectors traversing Mexican mountainsides, and their conflicts with the locals. They do not belong in these parts, but the older ex-miner Howard possesses a little bit more experience, providing sage counsel and wisdom in their endeavours. “I know what gold does to men’s souls,” he warns ominously, and Huston thus sets in motion a cautionary tale that turns the weak-willed Dobbs into a mistrustful, insatiable, and vindictive creature, prepared to kill his friends in anticipation of their betrayal, as well as to enact his own. As he lays down behind the campfire with a haunted, wide-eyed expression, the flames continue to flicker up higher and higher, roasting him in a hellish image of spiritual damnation.

With such magnificent direction backing it up, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is hugely significant in solidifying Huston’s status as an all-time great filmmaker, though it is just as much a major achievement for Humphrey Bogart who steps far outside the realm of hardboiled detective roles to deliver a ground-breaking performance of pure insanity. He is in full command of his rambling monologues, many of which are directed to no one but himself, and in close-ups Huston sticks us with his sweaty, tanned face, at times twisted in wicked, cackling expressions. In the darkness Dobbs appears as a truly formidable figure, though in the broad light of day Huston’s superb use of deep focus cinematography and open, natural spaces allows some remarkable formations in the blocking of his actors, painting out this web of thorny relationships in great detail.

Perhaps the most important element of Huston’s staging is the framing of Dobbs and his companions against these graceful yet imposing mountains, wearing them down with bandits, deadly animals, and collapsing goldmines. Even as Dobbs digs deeper into his delusion, there remains an organic, circular flow to this environment. While the younger prospectors don’t dwell too long on the damage they have caused, Howard recognises the need to respect to the ecosystem he has plundered by closing up the “wounds” he has made in it.

Even then though, there remains a strange, auspicious mysticism in the earth’s efforts to claim back that which was taken from it. Friends and strangers alike murder each other to claim ownership over those tiny grains of gold extracted from the mountainside, and yet all their self-centred efforts are so quickly undercut by the simple winds of fate blowing in from across the ranges. “The gold has gone back to where we found it,” Howard roars with laughter, recognising in equal awe and amusement the absurd joke that the universe has played on them. Not everyone gets off so lightly, especially as Dobbs finds himself cowering beneath the lethal blows of bandits who send him to an end fitting of his obsessive mistrust. In this way, poetic justice finds its way home in each of Huston’s character arcs, orchestrated by some omnipresent force of nature that gives and takes in cyclical motions, ultimately carrying The Treasure of the Sierra Madre through to an end that leaves almost everyone no better or worse off than before – minus those individuals who tried and failed to exploit the earth’s resources in order to build self-serving worlds of delusion and greed.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.