Ultimately, Stinging Tragedy
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It’s Parasite. All week long, we’ve been keeping an eye on the New York Times countdown of the hundred best films of the twenty-first century, the result of a poll or more than five hundred filmmakers, actors, and other industry movers and shakers. Today we learn that the list’s #1 is Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 film, whose “social satire, tightly plotted caper, and character-based comedy give way to action sequences, horrorlike starts and stabs, and, ultimately, stinging tragedy,” as Inkoo Kang wrote in 2020.
The NYT’s #2, David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), tops the countdown at the Reveal, where Keith Phipps and Scott Tobias list their thirty favorites of the century. Each entry comes with a brief argument for its position and a note on a standout moment from the movie. From Mulholland Dr., Phipps picks the scene at Club Silencio, where Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring) are told “everything they’re about to experience is an illusion . . . When singer Rebekah Del Rio takes the stage to perform a heartbreaking rendition of ‘Llorando,’ a Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying,’ both are moved to tears (as, perhaps, are those watching the film). When Del Rio collapses, the song keeps playing without her, shattering the illusion. But the melody and the emotions it stirs still linger.”
Del Rio passed away on Monday. She was only fifty-seven. We’ve also lost Lea Massari, who appeared in films by Chantal Akerman, Louis Malle, Dino Rosi, Valerio Zurlini, and Francesco Rosi but is best known for playing Anna, the woman who disappears in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960). Massari was ninety-one, and screenwriter Mark Peploe, who cowrote Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) with the director and Peter Wollen and worked with Bernardo Bertolucci on The Last Emperor (1987), The Sheltering Sky (1990), and Little Buddha (1993), was eighty-two.
Before turning to this week’s highlights, we have to note that the Toronto International Film Festival has announced a first wave of five films set to see their world premieres during TIFF’s fiftieth edition (September 4 through 14). Miguel de Cervantes, the future author of Don Quixote, is captured in Algiers in Alejandro Amenábar’s The Captive. An artist’s estranged children hire a forger to complete his unfinished works in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers.
A secret operation is undertaken to land a hijacked plane in Sung-hyun Byun’s Good News. Nia DaCosta’s Hedda is a reimagining of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler starring Tessa Thompson, Imogen Poots, Nina Hoss, and Kathryn Hunter. And in Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks, Barbie Ferreira plays a music critic who moves to Montreal to write a book about Alanis Morissette but ends up working as a publicist for a struggling band.
- Revived interest in Serge Daney, an editor (Cahiers du cinéma), critic (Libération), and the founder of the journal Trafic, surged in the fall of 2022, and it shows no signs of abating. Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema is the title of both a series of twelve films screening at ICA in London from August 29 through September 7 and a new dossier at Sabzian edited by the series programmers, Arta Barzanji and Gerard-Jan Claes. In their introduction, they write that Daney “longed for a shared imaginary space through cinema, a global citizenship of viewers, where images connect us without requiring us to be the same, allowing us to imagine ourselves somehow in relation to the world; a way of taking without owning, of belonging without opting in.”
- “The desire to do a slow zoom out on 1975 as a particularly context-changing year in modern cinematic history—a high point equidistant from the independent saber-rattling of the late ’60s and the conglomerate complacency of the ’80s—comes from an honest place,” writes Adam Nayman in the cover story of the new Sight and Sound. “So do all the hypothetical-polemical cage matches between its keynote films . . . How about Jaws versus Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles? This one is irresistible. In one corner: an epochal blockbuster, typically summoned on trumped-up (but not unreasonable) charges of inventing both high-concept marketing and ancillary driven distribution; in the other, a movie made on (and consigned to) the industrial margins, one that cultivated and weaponized the very thing the young Steven Spielberg was congenitally allergic to—deliberate, confrontational tedium—in the service of a differently visceral sort of horror.”
- Dennis Lim’s 2022 book on Hong Sangsoo, Tale of Cinema, is “the first book-length treatment of the director in English, and comprehensive enough to be the last,” writes Andrew Eckholm for n+1. “Why do people respond to these movies? It took me years of watching Hong’s films, trying to piece together their puzzles, to acknowledge an embarrassingly simple truth: the response I felt was one of identification. I recognized the expressions on these actors’ faces. I felt the characters’ pains as if they were my own, because they were.”
- Metrograph Journal is running not only a conversation between filmmakers João Pedro Rodrigues (The Ornithologist) and Matías Piñeiro (You Burn Me)—turns out, they’re both really into Hollywood movies from the pre-Code era—but also Nick Pinkerton’s latest column, an appreciation of Mikio Naruse’s final film. Scattered Clouds (1967) “feels like a final distillation of the filmmaker’s cinema of thwarted longing, a film, in the words of director and critic Dan Sallitt, that ‘delves into the ontology of unhappiness.’”
- Whether or not you end up agreeing with Katya Grishakova’s reading of Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead, her piece for the Metropolitan Review on the film—starring Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef as stinky rich tech bros who can’t decide whether to run the world or leave it—makes for an incisive review of the first half of 2025. Grishakova begins by noting that every player currently in power seems to have “decided to cut out the middleman—the historian, the biographer, the screenwriter, the actor—and deliver their own unfiltered biopics straight to the consumer” in real time on live television. “Their act will soon become a derivative of a derivative, like an AI model trained on its own slop before it collapses on itself. We, the NPCs, just have to wait it all out in the analog world.”
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