The new drama Past Lives centers on three ordinary people taking realistic actions, leading to messy outcomes. There are no clean Hollywood endings, heroes, or villains. Characters don’t die. Nobody is saving the world. Writer-director Celine Song challenges audience expectations of Hollywood escapism and genre conventions and, in the process, makes a riveting movie.
Reflecting on the forty-plus films I’ve seen this calendar year, three of my favorites – 2020’s The Nest, 2022’s Saint Omer, and Past Lives – share the same small scale and grounded feel.
Each film has different aims and subject matter. The Nest follows a rich family moving to 80s England for business opportunities. Saint Omer is a French courtroom procedural covering a woman accused of infanticide. Past Lives centers on two childhood friends who split apart, later in life reunited.
For over a year, I was in a movie rut where merely “fine” movies dominated what I watched. Most were only mildly recommendable. It was passable entertainment, but I missed that feeling of raw exuberance that came with the greats, where I couldn’t wait to tell friends and family what I just saw.
For someone who argued on how important it was to push beyond algorithms, ironically, I had fallen into the trap of my own “algorithm.” With limited time and firmly held personal tastes, I wasn’t taking risks on fresh ideas or untested genres.
But over the last few months, I’ve had a breakthrough: I found curators I trusted and gave into their recommendations.
Midway through Nicolas Winding Refn’s new Netflix series Copenhagen Cowboy, I was thoroughly bored. The repetition was annoying: another neon-drenched set with stilted dialogue and glacial plot development. Then, in a shot that probably lasted no more than a minute, the series’ protagonist moved upwards in an elevator as a synth score kicked into overdrive. The brief scene’s immaculate construction ended up burrowing in my brain for days.
That small example underlines how Refn and fellow art house helmer Gaspar Noé are some of the most stylistically dazzling directors working today, to the point I regularly seek out their work. Yet I struggle to recommend almost any of their films. They provide memorable moments of stylish brilliance that clash against sophomoric writing, turgid dialogue, and nihilistic, sadistic violence. It’s frustrating because both could produce fantastic work with the right writers and collaborators.
Admittedly it can take a lot of work to group these two directors. Noé’s and Refn’s most famous films derive from different genres, if not at times, entirely different worlds. Noe’s 2002 Irréversible is messy and heavily improvised, a French extreme horror revenge tale whose reverse narrative structure feels in conversation with Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Refn’s 2011 Drive is a slick, minimalist crime thriller that meshes late 70s Walter Hill with 80s synths and a stoic turn from star Ryan Gosling.
Tár is one of my favorite movies from 2022, thanks to a herculean performance by Cate Blanchett alongside Todd Field’s bold direction. For Field, this is only his third feature as director and his first in sixteen years. With such sporadic output and little connective tissue to his past work, I find his contributions to Tár fascinating to dissect. The film is Kubrickian in its clinical detail, subtle yet purposeful, messy and enigmatic, with an open provocation for the audience to get on board with the film’s unique wavelength or head for the exits.
Nowhere is that challenge clearer than in Tár’s opening thirty or so minutes. Like the fictitious composer and conductor Lydia Tár (Blanchett), the opener is bold and uncompromising in a way that feels tailor made to rankle some audiences. On an otherwise sparsely attended weeknight screening, I saw several moviegoers visibly impatient, sighing and shifting audibly in their seats.
Before I dive into that opening, it’s essential to set the larger context: Tár is a nearly three hour movie for which most is a patient “slice of life” character study. We learn about Tár (Blanchett) as she works through her musical projects and interacts with her wife and colleagues. Except for a guest lecture at Juilliard where Tár criticizes a student, onscreen conflict is mostly muted for the opening half or so of the film.
Over Warner Discovery’s Q2 earnings call, the new media behemoth announced plans to merge HBO Max and Discovery Plus as a single service in 2023. While we’ve got a solid year to evaluate if CEO David Zaslav’s bet will be a financial hit, early signs are worrisome.
Sticking to safe, proven programming was always what I expected from the new, post-Netflix dip “content perspective” era. But early signs point to Zaslov and his team taking Warner Discovery into extreme, creatively bankrupt directions. Their actions risk driving away their existing subscriber base.
On the day of the earnings call, low performing TV series and movies disappeared off HBO Max to save residuals. Zaslav and friends also canceled a nearly finished $90 million superhero movie – Batgirl – as a tax write-off. A tone deaf presentation simplified HBO Max as “male skew” when some of the service’s biggest breakouts like Hacks and The Flight Attendant reach much broader audiences.
After a decade of rapid growth, Netflix took a tumble over the past quarter, for the first time losing more subscribers than it signed up. Wall Street’s reaction has been swift, with the market slashing Netflix’s valuation to less than half of its value from a few weeks prior.
Many schadenfreude-fueled takes revel in watching the king of streaming take a hit, but Netflix’s downturn won’t improve film watching habits or shake up streaming’s ascendance. The availability and discoverability challenges on streaming – clunky user interfaces, ruthless algorithms – won’t improve. Mega budget streaming sites will survive. What will change are the type of shows and movies that streaming sites buy, produce, and green light going forward.
Mainstream movies have crept up in length. A few years ago, feature-length films regularly ran a tight 90 or 100 minutes; today, that brevity feels increasingly rare. Almost half of the movies I watched that came out in 2021 ran for 130 minutes or longer, many from genres that historically tend to be shorter: action (F9, No Time to Die, The Matrix Resurrections, The Suicide Squad), biopics (King Richard), coming of age comedy romances (Licorice Pizza, Red Rocket), and neo-noir (Nightmare Alley). I suspect inflated runtimes trend beyond my tastes.
Superhero movies are a significant influence. The Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Comics have produced the biggest movies around for almost a decade, seen worldwide with record profits, and generate endless discourse everywhere from film journals to Twitter. They also tend to run long. Most MCU movies have a runtime over two hours, with installments from the popular Spiderman and Avengers series regularly exceeding two and a half hours.
Over the past several years, movies – specifically those that aren’t part of a blockbuster franchise or mega IP – don’t have the audience they used to. Compare four critically acclaimed dramas helmed by well regarded auteur directors, released two years apart: Licorice Pizza and The Power of the Dog in 2021, Parasite and 1917 in 2019. The difference is stark, with the 2021 films performing comparatively weak at the box office and anecdotally having far less attention among my friends and across social media.
Movies are aging into the rock music or baseball of entertainment, still enormously popular among a dedicated core audience, but with declining interest as other forms of media (primarily TV) fill the gap. The twin forces of the pandemic and the economic heft of massive entertainment conglomerates have only accelerated the phenomenon.
Several times this year, I’ve written about the decline of theaters and the rise of streaming, exacerbated through the effects of the pandemic. While there has been a recent theatrical comeback for big franchise properties, smaller budget indies haven’t enjoyed the same success. It’s harder than ever to find movies that aren’t a gigantic four-quadrant blockbuster on the big screen. For the exception of those fortunate enough to live in a film hub like New York or LA, moviegoing is a bifurcated experience: Marvel, James Bond, and other mega family-friendly IPs play at every cineplex around town, transitioning over time to heavily marketed streaming, VOD, and Blu-ray opportunities. Everything else gets quietly dumped off direct to VOD or streaming.
That void in theatrical availability is a lost opportunity that streaming can’t replicate. Powerful sound on a giant screen can give an enveloping, immersive quality to a film. In an increasingly distracted world where multi-tasking is the norm, theaters are a rare setting optimized for focus on a particular movie image. Audience reactions – laughter, clapping, gasps, cheers – provide a unique character.
Last week I caught a screening of Titane at the TIFF Bell Center here in Toronto, the first theater experience I’ve had in over a year and a half. It was an arresting ride with excellent sound, a high quality projection, and welcoming staff. But as the lights came up, even in a theater that can seat hundreds for an eight PM show, I counted only six people in the audience.
My knee jerk reaction was that a mix of pandemic caution and Titane‘s penchant for body horror and violence (Palme D’Or winner aside) kept many at home. But afterward, I had a sinking feeling the screening’s low attendance may be part of a larger trend.
Back in January, writing about the pandemic’s impact on cinema, I predicted theaters’ only path to survival would be on the backs of four quadrant blockbusters. Distributors would push smaller budget independent movies to VOD and streaming services. Ten months later, I’ve seen little to dissuade my opinion. Frankly, the state of indie movies in theaters is at best uncertain, at worst fairly bleak.