Director: Carson Lund
Writer: Michael Basta, Nate Fisher, Carson Lund
Stars: Jason Barbieri, Lou Basta, Cliff Blake

Synopsis: Grown men’s recreational baseball game stretches to extra innings on their beloved field’s final day before demolition. Humor and nostalgia intertwine as daylight fades, signaling an era’s end.

Where to begin with Carson Lund’s deceptively described Eephus, which is celebrating its North American premiere in the Main Slate of the 62nd New York Film Festival. At face value, the film is about two amateur baseball teams coming together for one last hurrah at their beloved Soldier’s Field; it’s being torn down soon after decades of hosting recreational games. We learn this while hearing a radio broadcast over the opening credits, voiced by none other than legendary documentary filmmaker Fredrick Wiseman. He asks his listeners to ponder whether or not the field will actually be missed, or if they’ll make the drive to another field a bit farther away. It’s here that Eephus stakes its claim as being something beyond just a generic sports film. There’s no town rallying around the fight to save the field. The plans are drawn, the decisions are finalized, and the digging begins in a few weeks. This final game captured in Eephus is a bittersweet post-mortem. But isn’t baseball immortal? It may be, but this massive ensemble certainly isn’t. And they take any opportunity to let it be known. These individuals, clearly having spent years, if not decades, at Soldier’s Field, let their wear-and-tear show. But they can’t simply put the bat down. They’re there for one last game, and it’s in this final game that Lund’s audience will both get to know these characters as three-dimensional humans, but also as complete strangers, walking off the diamond just as unceremoniously and mysteriously as they walked onto it. For a film so focused on capturing the tangible nature of a sport, Eephus does a tremendous job at placing its focus on the mysterious nature of life, and how we react when something we thought would be around forever will no longer remain as it was.

I admittedly am not the biggest baseball fan, but I’ve recently become enamored with it. A large part of that is due to the brilliant John DeMarsico, the Game Director for the New York Mets at SNY. A lifelong cinephile, DeMarsico has injected a lot of life and creative flair into how he’s capturing live telecasts. Whether pulling from Kill Bill or The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, DeMarsico is finding the beauty and the emotion in what many might think of as mundane. And in some ways, Eephus is a bit mundane. But that’s by design! It respects and admires the patient tone of baseball, and highlights it in a way much like DeMarsico is doing with these live games. In an interview, DeMarsico said, “You don’t know what the storylines are going to be, but every game has its own isolated little story that you can tell. It’s just a matter of finding it every day.” And Lund has crafted a storyline out of that beauty in Eephus.

Much like DeMarsico has done with the telecast of Mets games, Lund and cinematographer Greg Tango capture the baseball game in Eephus with such elegance and grace. It’s also given the same pedestal as any televised baseball game. This may just be a recreational game played amongst neighbors and casual acquaintances, but it’s also much more than that. This is the end of an era, and as such, the dugout is captured with all the mysticism and excitement of a real game. Whether the camera is on base looking over the shoulder of a runner, or atop the pitcher’s mound looking right down the barrel of whoever is at-bat, Tango provides a tangibility to the essential nature of the baseball game at play. But part of the beauty of Eephus is how the heart of this film, and what allows it to soar in the hearts of its audience, lies in the players.

As written earlier, it would appear that many of these players have been showing up to Soldier’s Field for quite some time. They all have their fair share of quips for one another, and more than a few qualms to go around regarding behavior and general skills. One would think that these men have gotten to know one another over the years. And at first glance, that might seem to be the case. The more likely scenario? They only know the most generic information about one another, and with some of the players, even that might be pushing it. Baseball is a game that primarily takes place in fleeting moments. Conversations are had when opposing players are momentarily on base. The dugout is, more often than not, full of remarks about their pain or about the upcoming play. Now, the conversations revolve around what’s to come next in their lives. It’s not necessarily that these men don’t care about the people they’ve surrounded themselves with for years. It’s just that, in the moment, the game takes precedence. And once the final inning wraps up, there’s not time for much else. Maybe a few beers are grabbed afterwards at the local watering hole. But it’s tough to imagine these men attending a barbecue together. This field, however rundown and cast aside it might be, is sacred ground to them. It is an escape; everything to them, yet nothing more than a place. It provides them the ability to shut everything else out in the world, and to channel all their focus into a singular thing. In sociology terms, it’s known as a third place. These places are a necessity of life. So what happens when we build our lives around such places, only to someday lose that escape?

Wherever your third place may be, it’s likely thought of as an institution of sorts. We can never imagine a world without it. The reason? Because they’re normally larger than us. A historic movie theater, a massive park with a beautiful, towering tree to sit under, a café or dive bar to sit and watch people go by as you sip your favorite beverage. They’ve likely been around for ages, long before we ever came around to make them an integral part of our lives. In Eephus, Soldier’s Field is that third place. And it would appear that it’s been a staple in the town for generations. Take Franny (Cliff Blake), for example. He looks to be the sage of the field, penciling in his aged scorebook with this final game. It’s likely a place that’s been around since before his time. Perhaps he started keeping score as a pastime. Maybe he did it simply for the love of the game. Maybe he did it because he recognized that, while its players may come and go, there is history embedded in every bleacher seat. In every blade of grass, and in each corner of the diamond. And however trivial some things may seem in the larger scope of the world, these personally historical moments matter. At one point, one of the children of a father playing in the game asks, “Why do they care so much? Don’t they have more important things going on?” And that’s precisely the point of Eephus.

When watching a movie (a personal escape), of course I have much else going on in my life. But for whatever the runtime of my choice might be, I have given myself up to that filmmaker. It’s essential to throw your all into what you love. So the men in Eephus have done so weekend after weekend for years… and they’re being repaid by having it ripped away. Some teammates begin discussing what they’ve been getting into to prepare for no longer having the field. Some are watching movies, others reading books. But it’s easy to tell that the passion isn’t there. When discussing the alternative field as an option for a place to play, it’s immediately out of the question. It’s too far (30 minutes at most) or there’s a septic issue (the whole outfield will be gross). The list goes on and on. The real reason? Likely the simple fact that it’s not their field. The memories they have made in this institution matter because they happened there. They’d rather put it down and step away with dignity than settle for a new place. Are they cutting off their nose to spite their face? Perhaps, but it’s upon hearing about the namesake of this film that maybe we begin to understand the headspace of these players.

The eephus pitch, as one of the pitchers who uses it details, is a technique both simple and complex. It’s a pitch that’s not often utilized, mainly due to its difficulty to pull off. The pitcher appears to be preparing for a fast curve ball. Only instead, the ball moves incredibly slow, and has a high arc to confuse the batter. When one reserve player hears about it, he confuses the next pitch he sees with an eephus pitch. The eephus pitcher details that, in reality, they look similar, but what was just seen was in actuality a very bad curveball being thrown. They acknowledge some of the similarities, but in practice, there is a world of difference between the two. As the game drags on and the light becomes lost, the players complain, some abandon their position, and some question how they’ll continue. And it’s in these final at-bats that the players attempt to finally embrace the loss they’re about to face. Not just the loss of the game, but the loss of this part of their life. There’s a scene in the film that I feel perfectly captures the magnificent and sprawling nature of the intimate Eephus. A player at-bat tells his wife and two children to watch. He strikes out and they head home. There’s an immediate joke made off-screen, and it’s uproariously funny. That’s immediately followed up by a devastating remark from the player who struck out. And then, a teammate poses a simple question that slowly brings a smile to the face of the batter. In three deft set-ups, Eephus pulls you through a range of emotions with ease, embedding you more and more into the emotional resonance at stake at Soldier’s Field on this random evening. A bittersweet ode to the institutions that provide us comfort, Eephus is one of the most emotionally rich films of the year, and an absolute joy from beginning to end.

Eephus is celebrating its North American premiere as part of the Main Slate of the 62nd New York Film Festival.

Grade: B+

Director: Neo Sora
Writer: Neo Sora
Stars: Hayato Kurihara, Yukito Hidaka, Yuta Hayashi

Synopsis: A near-future Tokyo awaits destruction as the city is rocked by a series of foreshocks that predict a larger, more disastrous quake on the horizon. With the anxiety looming over them, a group of teenage best friends and musicians get into typical teenager trouble that tests the strength of their relationships.

Plenty of powerful themes are at work in Neo Sora’s narrative debut, Happyend, but none shape the film’s dynamism quite like the angel and devil on every young person’s shoulder: acquiescence and anarchy, respectively. Quite early on in his self-described “story about the near future,” Sora makes this emphasis abundantly clear. The film’s first scene, which sees us meet the group of teenage besties in whom we’ll become invested as the story rolls along at an energetic pace, takes place at an underground nightclub, where Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), Kou (Yukito Hidaka), Ata-chan (Yuta Hayashi), Tomu (Arazi), and Ming (Shina Peng) are hoping to sneak in to watch one of their favorite DJ’s perform a techno-heavy set. Only Yuta and Kou make it inside, after posing as delivery men, and are able to enjoy a few minutes of music before police arrive to shut down the rave. While both boys agree it would be best to flee with the rest of the crowd, Yuta isn’t willing to end his night so soon after it began; he stays, listening to the beats he and his cohort admire so much, almost as if the longer his ears are trained on the pulsating bass, the closer his friends will get to having experienced it themselves. Even as the cops shout in his ear, telling him to leave, he stands proudly, bopping his head with the rhythm of the night.

Kou, on the other hand, leaves the club, his desire to hang back trumped by the need to keep his record clean. It’s a face-off between those aforementioned ideas, acquiescence and anarchy. And who among us hasn’t struggled to commit to one or the other as both played tug of war with our bearings? The thing about Sora’s film, however, is that the lines quickly become blurred in regards to what exactly constitutes obedience and rebellion; better yet, the two are considered as more complicated paths than what they present themselves to be. The further into Happyend we get, the more Kou defies authoritarian rule. But he does so in the form of lawful protest, not as an insurrectionist or a hateful rioter. Yuta, meanwhile, begins to act in accordance with the only thing he knows how to be: A disruptive prankster who can’t bear the fact that his best friends aren’t following the map they charted together. 

What is, on its surface, a simple tale about a once-tight-knit group of students that find themselves being pulled in opposite directions as they stare down the end of their high school careers, Happyend is a film with a lot on its mind, a familiar characteristic for a first-time work of fiction. But Sora has a distinct command of his many trains of thought that allows his narrative to maintain cohesion despite its many ideas. That they blend together nicely and thus aren’t competing for space helps matters, as an over-abundance of plot can often derail even the most straightforward frameworks. Yet Sora’s film – a story about relationships told with a futuristic backdrop that doesn’t distract from its primary point, instead adding a wrinkle to its routine conceit – manages to avoid the fate of a lesser work with a similar amount of ideas. The substance his concepts carry make their inclusions worthwhile. 

The near-future Tokyo in which Happyend takes place isn’t all that unrecognizable; cars don’t fly and teleportation isn’t readily available for the wealthy elite. Yuta, Kou, and co. tend to walk to school. They spend a great deal of time in their “Music Research Club” headquarters, a room that is smaller than any true music classroom should be but larger than a storage closet, so it will do. Really, what makes their surroundings stand out is a number of clever details that Sora conceived so as to distinguish the peculiar from the pedestrian. There are television-like billboards that humorously toggle between news of the country’s prime minister being attacked to a 20-percent-off sale on canned goods. The police force can obtain information about a person’s background just by scanning their face with a cell phone. (Here’s hoping Tim Cook isn’t much of a cinephile.) Most prominent of all, though, is the surveillance system that the school’s principal (Sano Shirô) installs in the film’s first act, one that assigns every student a code and monitors their movements and actions in order to deduct a certain number of points from their overall score. Known as “Panopty,” its formula isn’t ever fully explained, but it doesn’t require a detailed instruction manual. Given the digitized fortress the city has become, it’s easily understood that this is but another way for authority figures to control their underlings, particularly the youth. 

Again, these details are imperative to the story, but never distract from what Sora has his mind on from the get-go. Happyend never loses sight of the fact that the relationships between its characters are what drives the story forward; the evolving collective friendship between the film’s fab five remains the most interesting element here, even with all of the bells and whistles Sora has at his disposal. Yuta’s plan for him and his friends to rule the pranking world together rapidly comes undone as all of his friends begin to find new outlooks on the future. Kou develops a crush on Fumi (Kilala Inori) and begins to take part in the activist events she organizes, a profound personal journey for a young man that leads to one of the movie’s strongest sequences, a sit-in conducted by 15-plus students inside the principal’s office. Tomu is about to move to America; Ata-chan and Ming are flirting up a storm, and a budding relationship seems inevitable. 

With a future as uncertain as the one the film’s fivesome is staring down, that it is disrupted in the eyes of the one character who has the least to fret over – Yuta’s family is particularly wealthy, and his parents are often out of the house – brings a tension to the proceedings that might otherwise feel nonexistent given the playful tone that exists throughout. Shot by Bill Kirstein, who shot Sora’s Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus, a documentary that serves as a swan song for the brilliant composer – who also happens to be the director’s father – many of these themes are captured indelibly in some of the year’s best shots. We see two boys standing on opposite sides of the street, in different lighting, a shot that might be considered overt and on-the-nose if not for its raw beauty (especially when paired with Lia Ouyang Rusli’s techno score, a marvel). The film is littered with images like this; you want to put the entire thing in a frame to hang for all to see.

Furthermore, each character’s individual intricacies are wisely rendered to provide Happyend with an undercurrent that is not just political, but sociopolitical. For instance, Tomu is Black and struggles with his identity in a country where few others look like him. Kou is Korean, and despite his family having lived in Tokyo for the better part of 40 years, their restaurant is consistently vandalized in an effort to remind the community that it isn’t an authentic Japanese business. He’s also the first person the school’s principal looks toward when anything goes wrong, casual racism that never goes unnoticed by the boy subjected to it, his youth never clouding the fact that he is viewed as a troublesome outsider.

If the film sounds as though it’s light on plot, that’s not a reflection of its activity level, instead a sign of its ostensible simplicity. As it continues, Happyend becomes a film primarily about the dilemma between youth and adulthood, and how goals transcend the typical boundaries age can force us to operate within. It goes without saying that maturation changes one’s view on the world and the people in it, but Happyend exists as a moving testament to the idea that, despite the cracks that form in our strongest connections. Its title may not hint precisely to its outcome; sometimes mutual understanding is as happy an end as one can be. Better yet, the happiest ends might be ellipses; continuation may or may not be certain, but the option is enough to hold out hope for.

Grade: B+

Director: Albert Serra
Writer: Albert Serra
Stars: Roberto Dominguez, Francisco Manuel Duran, Antonio Gutierrez

Synopsis: Explores the spiritual pain of bullfighting, the tormented torero in a ring, one of the most excessive and graphic examples of the origin of Southern European civilization

Since 2019, Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra, known for his French period pieces about kings and wealthy monarchs and transgressional takes on fictional characters (Don Quijote, The Three Kings, and Casanova), has stated that he was going to make the best film about bullfighting with his documentary Afternoons of Solitude (Tardes de Soledad, playing in the Spotlight section at this year’s New York Film Festival and recent winner of the Golden Shell in the SSFF). It is a very brash comment by him, which, considering his self-aggrandizing persona, one could not think less of Serra. He has placed himself on a high standard because of his repertoire and how he perceives cinema, the creative process, and the modernization of how people take art. 

Serra is held in high regard by critics, although many cinemagoers don’t seem to like him in the least due to his pretentiousness. But if there is one filmmaker who can say such pompous things and deliver his promises, it is Albert Serra. He sought to make the epitome of bullfighting movies with Afternoons of Solitude. And Serra ends up doing such a thing. The sport weirdly has not been used on the big screen that much, considering that it is a very cinematic part of Spanish culture. There are few and between, some of them only using it as a slight part of the narrative. The primordial example of bullfighting in cinema is Francesco Rosi’s criminally underseen and harrowing The Moment of Truth (Il momento della verità). 

It is a dispassionate picture, a towering yet nearly morbid look at the sport. Rosi shows us specs about the mundanity behind ’60s Barcelona daily living, where the great majority find themselves surviving as a full-time job. Yet his lens gears toward that miserabilism attached to the setting, which parallels the violence emerging from the duel between toreador and bull–a clash represented by the man versus beast metaphor yet beguiled by rampaging death. The poster and premise might make you believe that the titular “moment of truth” comes from that confrontation. In reality, what Rosi perceives as such is the moment one of them, either man or bull, comes face to face with death himself. 

This is a dance of death, with the balletic skills of the toreador bringing way to a haunting pageantry made to mock the beast fighting for its life. Its blood smearing in the sand as the man bows for his applause by his performance of death’s practitioner. And the people applaud; they throw flowers not to honor the dead but to celebrate the killer. A beast, so poised to stand, succumbs to the man who has pierced his heart and lungs. Rosi drowns you in many provocative and furious scenes of bullfighting down to its beginning and end, most of which are empty emotionally yet demonstrate the void that accompanies the mercilessness of a faux idol wanting to be worshipped by execution. 

The Moment of Truth displays how ruthless the sport is and questions why people would approve of it via a coldness behind the camera that evokes a distanced feeling from it. You are meant to wonder what is going through the toreador’s mind upon entering the bull’s territory, taunting red to replicate the color via violence later. This is the only film I recall that has been frontal and critical about the sport. It requires deftness and inquisitiveness to pull off the contradiction between the beauty and horror of bullfighting. One of the few directors who can manage that duality is Albert Serra, who demonstrates all of the aforementioned and more in his brutal and antagonizing documentary. 

Afternoons of Solitude follows Peruvian toreador Andres Roca Rey, a young star who has become the face of the next generation of bullfighters in a very short time. He was born into the sport, as his father, uncle, and brother all work (or used to) in the sport in many different ways. But the young one managed to outweigh them all, debuting in 2015 when he cut the two ears of his first bull. Andres Roca Rey is the main attraction, selling tickets instantly and impressing those who enjoy the sport, which is more than you would think. It is part of the Spanish culture–the “national spectacle” of Spain. 

Fascinatingly enough, Roca Rey’s first bull was named Pocosol (or little sunlight in English), contrasting with the title of Serra’s documentary, which boasts the bright light that kisses our daily lives. But what is the solitude referring to? Is it the man standing alone in the ring as his essence fills the void of tension, worry, and nihilism? Or is it the bull, a beast slowly dying all alone as the audience cheers its demise? Serra prompts it as a two-way isolation. Both man and beast enter limbo for a few moments of realization that one of them, in most occasions, the latter, will breathe its last breath. Recollections of The Moment of Truth–What will happen when you face death itself?–pop up when watching Afternoons of Solitude in its entirety.

Will you fight an unwinnable battle or succumb to the reality of death’s inescapability? As blood smears from their bodies, the cheers become distant echoes in their minds. The participants feel the fallen’s spirit floating away. We see this through Albert Serra’s portrait of Roca Rey and his tauromachy ventures as we spend a day in his life as a bullfighter from the moment he puts on his tights to when he takes everything, now tainted in the blood of the downed beast, off in a poetic and tormenting way. Albert Serra does not add tacky commentary on Afternoons of Solitude, nor does he put his thoughts on the matter; there are no interviews either. Instead, the Catalan filmmaker lets the images speak for themselves in their plasticity and viscerality. 

We watch at the cinema and see how Roca Rey works his way, day and night, one venue after the other when standing in the middle of the ring or traveling with his entourage. Serra uses repetition to demonstrate to the audience the power of this ritual between man and bull, society and culture, and heroism and violence. Through this reiteration, he creates a hypnotic effect, placing Artur Tort (Pacifiction, Liberte) and his camera in the middle so we can’t escape that existentialist horror of someone willing to die by confronting a beast that few can brutally tame. Plenty of emotions reign during the fight sequences, both from Roca Rey, the bull, and the audience watching in the stands. 

Roca Rey taunts, mocks, and breezes past the beast as his facial expressions dictate joy, praise, and valor during his swift Sarabande-like moves. In contrast, the bull foams blood and snot dribbles from his note, a hard image to shake off. Everything is upside down; in the way Tort captures everything, you feel Rey and the bull’s inner damnation–the understanding of death’s role in this ritual. And the audience loves to see this, enjoying the morality of it all. Serra does this one time and another; an encounter that is met in carnage is seen from all angles, making the corrida myths be peeled back and shown for what it truly is: a blood sport. 

It is war and the nature of masculinity personified; virility and the worth of man shown by Serra in the same way Hemingway described it–art in which the artist is in danger of death, brilliant coming from his honor–yet in the coldest way imaginable. However, while there is no technically blatant rhetoric against bullfighting, the close-up shots of the bull in its torn-apart state (or near it) show where Serra stands. He is admittedly blown away by the visual beauty of Roca Rey’s movements and the garments he wears. Yet he is at a loss for words for the brutality amidst it, with death being the main character, not the toreador or the bull. In between the haunting and beautiful lies the sport. And Afternoons of Solitude captures the “hidden” essence of what entails—bravery and passion, tragedy and isolation. 

What I love about Albert Serra’s work is how daring and ambitious it is, whether he is exploring a past event or creating a fictional portrait. His first foray into documentary filmmaking does not distance itself from what he has done before; rather, it complements his existing filmography thematically and metaphorically. His films contain a sensory element, highlighted by their exploration of death—dread being navigated through lavish settings and rich costumes. There will undoubtedly be plenty of criticism regarding his decision to record violence against animals without intervening, simply letting the camera roll. However, Serra aims to present the sport in its rawest form, forcing the audience to confront the stark realities often hidden behind the spectacle.

Grade: A-

Director: Danny Villanueva Jr. 
Writer: Danny Villanueva Jr. 
Stars: Michael Hargrove, Lisa Wilcox, Asya Meadows

Synopsis: Ozzie Gray video documents her investigation into the traumatic events from her early childhood, which involved her late grandmother, Dorothy Bell.

“Can I hold the camera, Daddy?” asks five-year-old Ozzie Gray (played by Arya Washington and voiced by Eva Williams) while Darren (Michael Hargrove) is filming her watching a childhood television puppet show. The song playing on the show is “There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly” and it will become the guiding roundelay for Danny Villanueva Jr.’s found footage horror, What Happened to Dorothy Bell. The old woman of the nursery rhyme starts with a small, strange thing happening to her – she swallows a fly. Thereafter, she swallows a spider to catch the fly, then something to swallow to catch the spider and so on until the the final line is “I think she’ll die.” It’s the path the adult Ozzie (Asya Meadows) takes to discover what happened to both herself and her beloved grandmother, Dorothy (Arlene Arnone); who, for no conceivable reason, became violent almost overnight and attacked her granddaughter before committing arson and then dying.

Years later, Ozzie is watching the tape (among others), and her repressed memories are resurfacing. She’s in zoom therapy sessions with Dr. Robin Connelly (Lisa Wilcox) reading Emily Dickinson aloud and discussing the power of literature and the love of books her librarian grandmother instilled in her. She has discovered that her grandmother did something terrible to her. Young Ozzie picked up the camera to play hide and seek with Dorothy late at night, only to find her slumped in her bedroom play fort wearing a creepy mask the child had made for herself. Dorothy wanders the house and attacks the child with a large knife slicing open her face. 

Ozzie has decided to keep a video journal of her investigations into her past and looking back into what happened to the much beloved local librarian Dorothy Bell. Returning to her hometown of Spellbound, Illinois and the home where she lived with her parents and Dorothy, Ozzie is determined to discover how her grandmother became an urban legend – the ‘Witch of Spellbound’ and if her spirit, as reported, still haunts the library.

Ozzie’s feelings of betrayal by her parents Darren and Victoria (Yera Constable) at keeping the truth of her grandmother’s attack from her leave her isolated. Both Darren and Victoria insist that Dorothy suffered from inherited mental illness and there was nothing supernatural happening – yet Ozzie has found evidence that Dorothy claimed a book was speaking to her telling her to do bad things. Ozzie’s first stop is the library where Dorothy hanged herself. The staff won’t help her but George (Steven Alonte) the janitor who knew and cared for Dorothy gives her after-hours access, leading to Ozzie to become caught in her own obsession with the past and a ‘Necronomicon’ like book that has claimed many lives since its inception in 1892.

What Happened to Dorothy Bell? thrives in its scripting and use of screens and ‘found footage’ to cover its small budget. There are echoes of The Blair Witch Project in how Danny Villanueva Jr. sets up Ozzie’s descent into the occult and her own possible inherited madness. Danny Villanueva Jr. leaves sections open to interpretation as to whether certain aspects of the film are happening or if they are Ozzie’s projection of her fracturing psyche. Whether there is a demonic book responsible for countless deaths that has found a new body to inhabit through an incantation hidden in the text, or if Ozzie is hallucinating a great deal of the action in the film seems to be answered in the former until the horrifying dénouement.

Either way the audience chooses to read the film, What Happened to Dorothy Bell? is an uneasy and excellent slice of small budget horror with sustained tension throughout. Everything Ozzie does is like the nursery rhyme at the beginning; one small thing happens, and she compounds it with doing something else which can only lead to doom. Her consuming desire to have her beloved grandmother mentally exonerated for her actions lead her down the path of destruction her parents wanted to protect her from. 

What Happened to Dorothy Bell? is as sad as it is chilling. A brilliant and upsetting film which uses its chosen format to great effect. 

Grade: B

Director: Pablo Larraín
Writer: Steven Knight
Stars: Angelina Jolie, Alba Rohrwacher, Pierfrancesco Favino

Synopsis: Follows the life story of the world’s greatest opera singer, Maria Callas, during her final days in 1970s Paris.

Pablo Larraín is one of the most recognized Chilean filmmakers working today. While his features about how the political administrations in the country have plagued one generation after another received plenty of acclaim from critics and film festival attendees, it was not until Jackie that he began to get more eyes on this work worldwide. The Jackie Kennedy biopic, with Natalie Portman as the widow in her best performance to date, blends true-to-life scenarios with a ghost story-esque element that explores the political figure’s grief and trauma and her struggles with her governmental surroundings. Larraín’s vision for exploring her condition is meshed with rigorous psychological constraints, although Jackie’s external demeanor is controlled and calculated, even amongst the people she internally loathes.

A few years later, Larraín released a companion piece about another historical figure with a tragic life with Spencer, this time covering the life of Princess Diana. Different from the 2016 feature, Spencer plays more with the horror genre; the fairytale setting of Sandringham turns into the Overlook hotel, switching from dreamy illusions to a complete nightmare–embodied by the lavish cinematography by Claire Mathon and Kristen Stewart’s magnetic portrayal of Diana. An incubus of desolation builds around the estate as the few scenes of happiness are followed by agony and angst forged by the urge to escape the castle where the princess (and her family name) is trapped. 

Through two thematically distant yet similar haunting approaches, Larraín crafts tales about what David Lynch would name them in Inland Empire: women in trouble, whether by their choking surroundings or suppressed emotions by performing to mask their trauma. Beauty and inner madness meet with one another in a cinematically poised contraption that holds more to the sensory and atmospheric elements of ghost stories rather than the regular biopic mold that has been played out for decades. Tortured souls explored a specific time in their lives where an incident–the assassination of their partner or a hostile family visit–paves the way for liberation or further subjugation by the public. But either way, Larraín does such with care and admiration, without dwelling on trauma porn or exploiting their conditions at the time. 

Now, a third project arrives to close out this trilogy of biographical portraits covering salient 20th-century women. The subject of this latest one is Maria Callas, the American-born Greek soprano known for her sublime bel canto technique and wide range vocally. Her unique gifts of three octaves blessed the ears of everyone who has gotten a chance to listen to her impressive, distinctive voice. Such power and presence had great stature when she was on center stage; each note had emotion, a certain verve that made even the most simplistic pieces into something astonishing and heartbreaking. But, she began suffering from a neuromuscular disorder, alongside other complications, that slowly was feeding her voice to the void. 

The famed opera singer was losing her gift. A couple of years after doctors ignored this illness, she gave her final performance in 1974 and withdrew from public life. Callas spent her days living in her Paris apartment in somewhat isolation. Larraín’s film, titled Maria (playing at the Spotlight section of this year’s NYFF), covers that part of her life near her death in 1977. Similar to Jackie and Spencer, Maria uses a ghost story to explore Callas’ life in her most vulnerable period. We first see Maria Callas (played by Angelina Jolie in what many consider her comeback role) covered in a white gown that makes her look like a ghostly presence inside her luxurious Paris apartment, as strings from the score cover the atmosphere in splendor and melancholy. 

You feel it down your spine; her commanding essence then covers the screen via a monochrome palette to divide the past (the woman in all her glory) and the present (the lost version of the angel-voiced singer). Jolie, who has always had a very magnetic screen presence, makes the frame hers as Callas’ bravura intertwines with the actress’s grandiosity–the pairing of two souls, matching Portman with Jackie and Stewart with Diana, in a collision of wistful ethos sparked by tragedy. Although Jolie’s work here does not convince thoroughly as the film reaches its second and third acts, the camera loves her and makes her shine bright. Callas has two paid companions in her apartment: housemaid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino).

Bruna and Ferruccio are the only people in her life who try their best to help her. Without knowing, Maria has contracted two angels to keep her safe, even if sometimes they aren’t successful because she ignores their pleas. The two do what they are told, even when they know Maria will not partake in it. Moving a piano from one side to the other, knowing she won’t play it; saying that her performance is excellent as her voice racks and shakes as a high note arrives. These are acts of love. It is the affection Callas needs now more than ever. Deep inside, Bruna and Ferruccio know they can do nothing to save her from succumbing to the mourning of her gracious voice that has been long gone by that point. 

Both Rohrwarcher and Ferrucio bring to life fictional characters that shine a brighter light than the titular one helmed by the famed actress. The Italian actors have a glistening spirit that makes the brooding atmosphere between dreams and nightmares–purgatory and bliss–feel like it has life inside. They are the heart and soul of Maria, pouring these silenced emotions through a telepathic connection with the audience since Jolie, as the film shifts through various stylistic endeavors and wallowing scenarios, cannot inveigle the audience by the faux empathy curated by Larraín and Knight’s screenplay–she has to rely on her acting chops, which, in some scenes more than others, crumble upon the weight of Callas’ essence. 

Lachman occasionally forces some prowess by having Jolie in plentiful, beautifully crafted scenes–both in black and white and color—containing a luscious hazy coating that makes everything feel like a daydream when in sunlight. Yet, she is not up to the task. Maria focuses on that lament for the past, which Larraín and cinematographer Edward Lachman (Carol, El Conde) beautifully frame in black and white sequences. It adds a soul-stirring nostalgia to those scenes. Jolie has her Callas glancing to the distance; she wants to reach that past version of her, which had the glamor and gift of the gods. It is something impossible to achieve. 

Like one of the lines in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance says: “What has been taken by the other can not be replaced”. Yet the pain continues to sting her daily living. The inability to move on from the loss of her one true love, Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), and her voice has left her as a living ghost, kept safe by two guardian angels. But she tries to remain composed, uncovering her face in a veil of equanimity. All of that begins to crack upon the arrival of a mysterious guest, a reporter named Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the human embodiment of the sedative that has taken control of Callas’ body, mind, and soul. 

Larraín’s dissections of these women’s turmoils arrive with a tragic tone, almost to the point where you believe the director defines their history by their woes. In Jackie and Spencer, that thought does not cross your mind because of the empathy being provided by Larraín and the writers attached. Even though Maria has similar scenes where there are brinks of happiness scattered across the setting, the film does not explore why the subject feels this way, why Callas sees herself as a doomed soul riddled by reminiscence and the sentimentality shared in the grand stages where her voice towered all. Larraín and Steven Knight, who also wrote Spencer, have a motif repeated in Maria: Callas signs to herself in hopes that her voice will return one day. 

They mean that this is her attempt to finally come to terms with her present life, isolated from the world that praised her and showered her with flowers after each performance. However, this exploration is diminished by the persistence of over-imposing the vicissitude of her life rather than the division of vulnerability and cognizance, which the two previous installments in this trilogy did very well. Jackie and Spencer also had similar criticisms. Yet, in Maria, it is more prevalent, with a dilapidated view of her mental state, nearly reaching a callous state. Visually, the film is as elegant as you would imagine. The costumes and settings have that opulence that matches Callas’ elegance and poise. However, some stylistic choices by Larraín and Lachman are highly questionable or without much reason. 

That is the least of worries when the screenplay limits the range of character dissection. It is a shame that the curtain closer to this fascinating trilogy idea comes up short with all of the necessary ingredients available. Maria feels as if Larraín and Knight did not have that vision for a portrait of Callas, unlike his previous features. They find themselves limited thematically and story-wise. Larraín mainly presents a film about internal suffering instead of identity and freedom, the critical element to the previous biographical portraits’ success. The spell is broken, and so little enchantment reaches the viewer. The ghostly sensation is left adrift for colder narrative breakdowns.

Grade: C-

Director: Athina Rachel Tsangari
Writers: Athina Rachel Tsangari, Joslyn Barnes
Stars: Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen

Synopsis: Over seven hallucinatory days, a village with no name, in an undefined time and place, disappears.

Given how keen most filmmakers seem to be to turn medieval lands into settings for horrifying folk tales involving demonic billy goats and/or cult-operated forests, Athena Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest looks, on paper, to be a welcome and necessary respite from familiarity. Described as a “tragicomic take on a Western,” the Greek auteur’s third feature, which premiered at this year’s Venice International Film Festival and has since screened at Toronto and New York, respectively, is a hallucinatory snapshot of a small village that is slowly disappearing before its inhabitants’ eyes, despite their inability to understand why. It oozes with ambiguity, but not the kind that is meant to send chills up spines, a la Robert Eggers’ The Witch or Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone. Instead, it’s a work of enigmatic visual storytelling that feels as though it’s constantly alluding to the existence of something disturbing, one that you expect to eventually reveal itself, until it evades doing so at the last possible moment.

Yet while Tsangari and co-writer Joslyn Barnes’ adaptation of Jim Crace’s 2013 novel of the same name certainly maintains these characteristics throughout its runtime, it does so at a pace that feels overlong for the sake of it, dragging down the proceedings as it attempts to expand its shrinking world. Which is a crying shame, given that its cast and crew feature some of independent cinema’s most coveted and prolific current artists. Harvest boasts a stellar under-the-radar batch of actors who tend to give it their all no matter the size of the picture, like Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling, Rosy McEwan, and Arinzé Kene, to name a few. Its editors, Matthew Johnson and Nico Leunen, are well-respected talents; Johnson worked on Tsangari’s previous features, Attenberg and Chevalier, while Leunen cut films like Beautiful Boy, Skate Kitchen, and the underrated 2023 gem The Eight Mountains. Nicholas Becker, who co-composed the film’s score with Landry Jones and Ian Hassett, won an Academy Award for his sound work on Sound of Metal in addition to composing its score. And the best facet of this ever-creamy crop is Sean Price Williams, the texture-heavy cinematographer behind Good Time, Her Smell, and this year’s Between the Temples. 

Perhaps it goes without saying, but it is possible to have a film that is brilliant in its technical makeup while neglecting the rest of what must come together for a movie to work on the whole. Unfolding entirely on the grounds of a remote English village sometime during the Middle Ages – though no specific time frame is mentioned, the townsfolk’s focus on land cultivation and the film’s costumes, wool tunics and jackets designed by Kirsty Halladay, suggest that this is the case – the story is told from the perspective of Walter Thirsk (Landry Jones). It’s a curious-if-faithful choice, given that Thirsk is reticent to divulge his observations and feelings, even if they’re rooted in truth, due to a nasty case of imposter syndrome as he wasn’t born in the village, a fate that typically spells exile. He’s only considered a part of the community because of his relationship with Kitty (McEwan) and his loyalty to the village’s leader, Master Kent (Melling), for whom he’s long-worked. 

Harvest’s onset (and title) suggests that the settlement is about to boom with crops and thrive for the remainder of the active picking season, but a barn fire that occurs early on in the film threatens the citizen’s ability to gather. In an attempt to extinguish the blaze, Thirsk not only injures his hand severely – makeup head Anita Brolly’s handiwork makes Landry Jones’ hand look far blacker than Dumbledore’s after suffering from the curse on Marvolo Gaunt’s ring in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; shout-out to those who get the reference – but he deduces who caused the fire, a revelation he hesitates to reveal. Later, three outsiders descend upon the village only to be caught and imprisoned by Master Kent and his henchmen, if you will. Again, Thirsk remains at a remove, though he’s more inclined to have compassion for them than to spit on the stoop of their pillory. 

These intruders are far more than mere travelers who stumbled upon an unknown dwelling. That two of them are white men and the other is a Black woman (Thalissa Teixeira, a standout) complicates matters, not solely because there is only one other Black person in the town, a cartographer called Phillip “Mr. Quill” Earle (Kene, further fortifying an already-strong impression on screen) who was welcomed in by Master Kent, who wants him to draw a map of the village and its surrounding areas. Unsurprisingly, his task comes undone as the same happens to the town, and he begins to lose himself as everything around him falls away as well. Earle contemplates the role his race has in how he is being treated in the village just as every other settler reflects on their own treatment of others. Could their array of collective misdeeds be what’s causing their misfortune? Better yet, does it even matter?

The problem with the above fates and descriptions, along with the many, many other ideas that Tsangari and Barnes’ script explores despite not warranting consideration in the grand scheme of things, is that they could be applied to any of Harvest’s characters, principal or otherwise. So much of its overlong runtime is dedicated to ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake, as if to ramp up the dreamlike stakes to a point where they became nightmarish at their core – and not in the sense that the film scares you, unless the perpetual presence of urine is a disturbing concept. 

If nothing else – and there’s really nothing else – Harvest is bound to leave you mesmerized from a visual standpoint, yet entirely unmoved in the midst of that spellbound state. Price Williams’ consistently-brilliant cinematography has never done as much heavy lifting as it does here, as he provides a visual feast in spite of the film’s unrelenting darkness. But there’s such a heavy reliance on metaphor and imagery that it never really amounts to much of a narrative meal as it undoubtedly could have been. While we’re talking about visuals, roughly halfway through the picture, Price Williams turns his lens on a slug encased in mud for 15 seconds or so before cutting away. It’s a beautiful shot, but one that feels like a fitting metaphor for the film in and of itself: Harvest is moving as fast as it can, but like a mollusk slinking through the mire, it’s never going to end up anywhere at all.

Grade: C-