Director: Andrei Ujică
Writer: Andrei Ujică
Stars: Tommy McCabe, Shea Grant, Thérèse Azzara

Synopsis: August 1965, The Beatles arrive in New York for a sold-out Shea Stadium concert. Crowds of frenzied fans fill Manhattan streets, hoping to catch sight of the band from their hotel.

Andrei Ujică constructs his latest documentary, TWST / Things We Said Today (screening Out of Competition in this year’s Venice Film Festival), using conventional and unconventional means to build a cinematic poem. Monochrome archive footage is experimented with as apparitions and drawings of people are placed in it. The old is blended with the new; the gift and curse of technology have made it possible for Ujică to create a project he has wished to create for a while. What is the poem about, you might ask. A time long gone, whose ripples continue to have their effects today in a variety of means. The time the Romanian documentary filmmaker, or more so the people who have borne these memories, is the 1960s America, a period of significant change both in the arts and politically. 

There were many countercultural and civil rights movements, anti-war protests, generational gaps, the construction and deconstruction of folk music, and the birth of The New Hollywood, better known as the Hollywood Renaissance. At that time, the country constantly changed; nobody knew where things were headed. You can say that with each passing decade. But the 1960s were a salient time known for the uniform shaping of society, art, and everything in between. Ujică depicts this through footage of rural life in New York City from August 13th to 15th, 1965–from the arrival of The Beatles in the Big Apple to their concert in Shea Stadium, their first stadium show in America. 

TWST is a wistful poem titled after the band’s track of the same name from their popular record ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. It borrows some of the thematic elements that the song has, although Ujică follows a more spiritual path to reflect the intertwining between nostalgia and dreams. At first, you don’t notice any correlation between The Beatles’ record and the director’s film. The Fab Four have a couple of appearances in the first couple of minutes, and their presence is felt through the footage that the unsung documentary filmmaker is showing us. In each second, whether relating to the New York World’s Fair or the Watt Riots reports seen on television, you get the feeling that they are guests in that sleepless city. 

The manic, overly joyous fans are also a great cause of this sensation, with their excitement on their arrival slowly spreading through New York like sunshine after a few days of rain. However, the moment when Ujică starts to tie TWST with the titular track through the poem dictated, everything starts to blend together in an intriguing and occasionally flimsy fashion. None of the lines from the song are said, but its structure is used to mold this documentary. “Things We Said Today” was a song about nostalgia. Paul McCartney was reminiscing about the present by projecting an idea of the future. Many fans have speculated that he wrote it with a nostalgic tone in mind because Paul knew that his relationship with then-girlfriend Jane Asher would not last, at least with their lifestyles. 

In Barry Miles’s book “Many Years From Now,” McCartney describes this sensation as “future nostalgia,” a term pop artist Dua Lipa later coined for her sophomore record. The first taste of the connection between TWST and “Things We Said Today” comes from the assimilation of the love McCartney had for Asher, as said in lines like “And though we may be blind, love is here to stay, and that’s enough”, with the recollections of a time the narrator holds onto sincerely. This bridge refers to McCartney’s enchantment when stumbling upon love and its various forms. Ujică takes advantage of this by initially showing footage of the Beatlemania-riddled fans saying the many reasons why they love them and their favorite member, later transitioning to a stanza about the power someone’s love has over a person. 

Unlike an unnecessary Hollywood legacy sequel, TWST does not use nostalgia as its main attraction. There is a bit of “homesickness” about how life was back then and that special moment that unified thousands during that three-day strand. It only contrasts “Things We Said Today” and the poem. The connection between lyric and verse may occasionally be an arbitrary choice. This makes the documentary suffer from a distancing aimlessness that undermines its narrative cohesion. I get that Ujică wants to immerse us in this setting by showing footage of people wandering through New York doing their daily activities until the festivities arrive. Yet, it dilutes the documentary’s emotional impact a notch. Well, that is until the last few minutes. 

The viewer is challenged to interpret the fluid interplay between form and content more psychologically to see how we respond to our own present-day nostalgia. McCartney’s final lyrics are: “Someday when we’re dreaming, deep in love, not a lot to say; then we will remember things we said today.” And like so, TWST ends on a touching note. As fans come together to sing the Beatles’ tunes, a liberation of nostalgia and fulfillment spreads across Shea Stadium. This is represented by the butterflies enclosing and popping out of their chrysalis cases. It is like a transformation of the narrator’s remembrance. And the resulting image is striking; that alone makes the documentary worth watching. 

Grade: B-

Director: Uwe Boll
Writer: Uwe Boll
Stars: Gino Anthony Pesi, Kristen Renton, James McMenamin

Synopsis: Follows a NYC police officer along with his rookie partner Angela, as they have a rough day while living the dangerous, and routine job of being a cop in the city.

Whether you want it to happen or not, infamous filmmaker Uwe Boll has made his grand return to the world of movies. First, via an extended cameo in Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, in which he recounts the time he boxed critics who constantly trashed his films (this really happened, by the way) and then tells all of his haters to “fuck off!” in a social media video for Angela’s (Ilinca Manolache) Bobita avatar.

It remains the year’s best scene – and cameo – as it playfully mocks Boll’s legacy in cinema through the filmmaker’s self-deprecating appearance. Jude isn’t a hater and actively respects Boll’s “resilience and his capacity to face and go on even if some people say ‘well, we don’t like what you’re doing.’ But he keeps doing it,” as he said in a recent interview with Eric Marchen.

Now, Boll is back in the director’s chair with First Shift, his first fiction film since 2016’s Rampage: President Down. I could sit here and tell you that the film is bad and take pleasure in vilifying it (as most critics do, apparently) for being nothing more than a poorly made, exploitative cop drama. For sure, its janky editing from Ethan Maniquis (one of Robert Rodriguez’s closest collaborators) does make the viewing experience discombobulating.

It’s also a bit hard to discern exactly where the story is going when it constantly parallel cuts between the film’s main plot thread involving NYPD Detective Deo Russo (Gino Anthony Pesi) and his new partner Angela Dutton (Kristen Renton) on their first shift, and three (!!!) other storylines on an old man collapsing in a grocery store, mobsters involved in a double homicide, and a woman convincing her lover not to commit suicide as he has locked himself in the bathroom.

But there’s something inherently entertaining about watching a Uwe Boll movie so I can’t possibly bring myself to bash his filmography, which contains a wide array of genre works such as Postal, BloodRayne, House of the Dead, In the Name of the King, and, my personal favorite, Assault on Wall Street (unironically! Dominic Purcell is an underappreciated talent). 

Honestly, churning out that many movies in as little as ten years is quite impressive, and I guarantee that no one who spent decades completely lambasting Boll’s body of work has made as many movies as him. Like Jude said, “What sets him apart is that he has many, many films. He has a big oeuvre and a quantity of films. That makes him different.”

First Shift is no Postal, but it’s decidedly Uwe Boll, filled to the brim with grisly violence, flashy photography (though nothing beats the kinetics of House of the Dead’s cemetery shootout), and as much politically incorrect humor as possible, such as in a scene where Russo has had enough of Angela’s ‘wokey dokey’ progressive politics. Of course, if you already hate Boll, this probably won’t change your mind. But if you find something in Boll’s resilience to overcome the many tomatoes thrown at him, perhaps you’ll find some respect in a ‘comeback’ like First Shift.

Most of the movie focuses on Deo and Angela getting to know one another, and it’s not half-bad. Sure, some of the dialogue don’t feel particularly human (such as in a scene where Angela pressures Deo to reveal his past life, with non-stop uses of ‘why?’ being thrown at him), but the chemistry between Pesi and Renton is palpable enough, with the latter stealing the show as First Shift’s best performance. Her personality is quite attachable, and it’s not hard to care more for her than it is for her male counterpart (whom we see meticulously putting on his shoes, his watch, his belt with his badge on, and then slowly making his protein shake in the film’s very long, very tedious opening credits scene).

Still, Pesi manages to sell the character with his eyes, which makes us peer into his tormented psyche. He can reconnect with himself and perhaps soften up a little with Angela when he has to care for a dog, arguably the movie’s most human moment. None of these scenes are played cheaply, and his final conversation with the dog owner (played by Willie C. Carpenter) feels genuinely heartfelt. With scenes like these and rock-solid chemistry at the heart of First Shift, it’s not a disaster and certainly not unwatchable garbage. There are plenty of worse, more expensive films out there that take the audience members as complete fools (*coughsAlienRomuluscoughs*) and suckers them into buying a ticket for nothing more than blatant consumerist fodder that garishly resurrects dead people so the audience can artificially point and clap at a screen.

As deeply flawed as it is, Boll’s filmmaking always feels sincere, even if he’s offended many people (including flipping off audience members after the Kickstarter campaign for Rampage: President Down failed) throughout his career. He always tries to do something creative with his camera, especially in the supermarket collapse, even if it doesn’t work. So many filmmakers nowadays are seemingly afraid of trying. However, Boll has always found unconventional ways to create movement, even if the cinematography here is frequently overexposed and lacks any perception of space.

The rest of the movie isn’t particularly good, and many of its moving plot threads don’t go anywhere. In fact, this entire 89-minute picture can be summed up as patient worldbuilding in which we see two cops on their shift while a mob war is on the brink of starting, from the looks of its rather well-composed scene featuring Garry Pastore as what will likely be the franchise’s big bad. Oh yeah, Boll wants to make First Shift his next big franchise, ending the movie à la Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 with a short glimpse of First Shift: Part Two. Honestly, I’d much rather see Boll go all out with Postal 2 than another First Shift movie, especially when his style feels remarkably restrained here and not much in service of the film’s uneventful story.

But Boll already has another movie in the can, the migrant thriller Run (also starring Renton), and more in the works. Of course, many don’t want him to return to filmmaking, and his movies are always regarded as some of the worst ever made, which will make this particular comeback interesting in the eye of this critic who always had an appreciation for Boll’s no-nonsense demeanor and fearlessness of telling everyone he doesn’t like to “fuck off” (“and fuck you also,” as he remarkably jabs in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World). 

Is First Shift any good? Not really. Does it matter? Not really – Boll’s name will forever be etched in the “history of cinema.” His desire to continue making movies even if audience members don’t want him to (in 2008, a petition urging Boll to retire from moviemaking garnered over 1 million signatures) should honestly inspire as many as possible to continue doing what they love. Sure, First Shift isn’t a good movie and will likely be crucified by critics. But it’s also one of Boll’s most respectable works that wants to patiently reward the audience for sticking with its characters for an all-out event in Parts Two and Three. I doubt it will happen but it’s funny to see this much confidence realized nonetheless. I’d be lying if I said it isn’t fun to see Boll back in front (in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World) and behind the camera again after he tipped his hat and walked away from that world during Rampage: President Down’s post-credits scene.

With First Shift, Uwe Boll seems to be having fun. So should you. 

Grade: C-

Director: Tina Mabry
Writers: Gina Prince-bythewood, Tina Mabry, Edward Kelsey Moore
Stars: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Sanaa Lathan, Uzo Aduba

Synopsis: Follows a trio of best friends known as “The Supremes” who, together for decades, have weathered everything through marriage and children, happiness and blues.

Unfortunately, films that are divided between two timelines rarely make a fair link between both. How can they? When times like the ‘60s are a myriad of flipped bobs, satin dresses, local teen gathering spots, hand-written menus, vintage jukeboxes, and soda fountains while the ‘90s have…the characters growing older and more period-accurate chic. In The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, costumes and set design thrive where narrative and tonal shifts fail. It’s like two entirely different films glued together, that even great performances from both the teen and mature cast can’t save its face.

The film is about three women, as they transition into adulthood during the ‘60s. Eventually, they reap the bitter outcomes of a prejudiced adulthood, dictated by racism, misogyny, and generational trauma in the ‘90s. Odette  (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is the salty, sassy outspoken gun-blazing girl of the group, Barbara Jean (Sanaa Lathan) is the traumatic survivor of physical abuse -an underdeveloped storyline that could’ve had a major impact on the film had it been further explored- and Clarice (Uzo Aduba) is the passionate, driven artist, with big hopes and dreams for a future crushed by unfair, discriminative treatment of talent.

The film succeeds in creating a bond between the three leads. All the actresses playing the characters in both stages have done a seriously great job. But acting alone can’t save the film’s melodramatic inconsistency, not to mention how some side stories have taken trite storytelling routes that are less compelling than they intended. 

One of the highlights of the film is a criminally underdeveloped storyline, and that’s Barbara Jean’s trauma bonding with Ray (Julian McMahon), both two abused kids who find each other at a moment in time when they are slowly starting the healing process from the trauma. They are an interracial couple, Ray is white, and Barbara Jean is black, but their similarities overshadow their differences. This has been the most interesting storyline in the film other than the bond between the three women and their unexpected friendship, and it deserved a spotlight, a bigger opportunity to be explored and stretched further, given more complex dimensions and deeper analysis.

Another underdeveloped element in this period-piece drama is Earl’s restaurant itself. This magical place where all the troubled and the weary seek refuge, Uncle Earl (Tony Winters) being this surrogate father figure to all the young ones, and yet the place gets the least attention in the movie. The set design is wonderful, but the place is not touched on to become another iconic film cafe or restaurant, which film buffs hunt and immortalize in writings and social media. It could’ve used a lot of personalization work to make this fictional place even more iconic.

Now for one of the most fun parts of the film, costumes. Costume designer Whitney Anne Adams excels in crafting a varied difference between the ‘60s ambitious girl trying to craft her sense of style and identity to the ‘90s woman reveling in luxury but also in grounded wisdom of a woman who has known for long who she is and the sacrifices she had to make to reach the stage she is in. Bright colors mature into jewel tones, but a color palette for a particular character stays with them, and slight changes reflect their shifting journeys, good or bad.

The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat is a cozy movie that relies too hard on nostalgia bait, but where it thrives in performances it lacks in world-building and narrative consistency. It is a fun watch, but for it to be an endearing homage to ‘90s black melodramas like Soul Food and Waiting to Exhale, it would have benefited from a more compressed runtime, and fewer events taking place throughout its course.

Grade: B

Director: Nathan Silver
Writers: Nathan Silver, C. Mason Wells
Stars: Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Dolly De Leon

Synopsis: A cantor in a crisis of faith finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher re-enters his life as his new adult Bat Mitzvah student.

Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) couldn’t have bumped into Carla Kessler (Carol Kane) at a better time. Lying on his back on what was undoubtedly a slush-covered barroom floor, having just received a sucker punch to the eye from a rude fellow bar-dweller who didn’t appreciate Ben’s penchant for Mudslides and/or uninvited confrontation, she might as well have been sent from above. Sure, it could have just appeared that way due to his vantage point, but Carla’s coming to the rescue opened an unforeseen door for Ben. A cantor at the nearby Temple Sinai, he’d recently lost his ability to sing thanks to an undefined incident that sounds an awful lot like a nervous breakdown in the wake of his late wife’s untimely death. (She was drunk and slipped on the sidewalk, cracking her head open and bled to death; gruesome, yes, but the way Ben describes it later in the film makes it sound as though it carried all the emotional heft of one dropping a watermelon at the supermarket.) In one fell swoop, Carla extends her hand and pulls Ben ever so slightly out of his rut. What a difference a day – or an unexpected encounter – makes.

Carla just so happens to be Ben’s old music teacher; she’s now retired and seems to spend a fair amount of time frequenting said bar’s karaoke nights, where she belts to an empty back room. In addition to his cantor duties, Ben teaches the temple’s bar and bat mitzvah class – “That is very modern,” Carla says when she comes to the synagogue one afternoon in hopes that she might be able to join the class. You see, she never had a bat mitzvah when she was a girl, and she wants to fulfill that dream now, despite being 70. After refusing initially, Ben warms up to the idea and agrees to teach Carla en route to her very belated yet much-deserved Jewish rite of passage. In turn, she helps de-ice Ben’s cold, closed-off heart with her natural warmth, as the two form an unlikely, mutually-beneficial friendship that carries Nathan Silver’s whip-smart, quip-heavy Between the Temples on its back with ease. 

That’s not to say that Silver’s starriest film to date – the filmmaker, who is one of independent cinema’s most prolific workers, has made a number of small features over the course of his 15-year career – doesn’t have plenty of other elements that help make it one of the year’s most delightful releases. There’s John Magary, Silver’s regular editor, whose work here feels like the Energizer Bunny got control of Final Cut Pro and turned in a choppy, sprightly masterclass. Behind the camera sits Sean Price Williams, who shot the film on 16mm and was so clearly the cinematographer here that I clocked his involvement even before the credits rolled. And, of course, there’s the rest of its cast, an ensemble chock-full of pitch-perfect character actors like Caroline Aaron and Robert Smigel, not to mention Dolly De Leon, who plays one of Ben’s moms (Aaron plays the other). 

Still, it’s the partnership of Schwartzman and Kane that really allows the film to flourish. Both actors have enjoyed accomplished careers, though it’s almost a stroke of genius to pair one actor who is currently enjoying a sustained heater with another whose best roles looked to have been behind them. Schwartzman – who appeared prominently in Asteroid City, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes in 2023, and has parts in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, and Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, all of which release later this year – is having something of a renaissance as a performer, as if it took 20 years for directors not named Wes Anderson to recognize his chameleonic range and startlingly-powerful screen presence, both of which manifest here into what is undoubtedly one of Schwartzman’s best performances to date. Kane, meanwhile, is better known for her parts in films like Dog Day Afternoon, Annie Hall, When a Stranger Calls, and The Princess Bride, but her turn as Carla seems as though it could inspire a self-revival of its own, a la Ke Huy Quan, perhaps. Of course, Between the Temples is hardly of a similar scale as Everything Everywhere All At Once, but casting directors would be smart to cash in on Kane’s vibrant work here.

And that duo’s chemistry is a must, given that Between the Temples might otherwise feel a bit grating in its comedy and style, both of which never let up. There’s something to be said for a film that commits so hard to its visual uniqueness that it becomes definitive for the crew behind its making; the same could be said for Price Williams’ 2023 directorial effort The Sweet East, which he also shot. But whereas that film’s story felt like a narrative representation of its camerawork – choppy and chaotic without a semblance of the necessary order that films need to feel intentional – Between the Temples manages to use technique to amplify its charm. 

Shot entirely in Kingston, New York, a town of roughly 24,000 people, the film feels as intimate as the bonds it portrays. Following the death of his wife, Ben lives with his mothers, who are important donors to the church. Rabbi Bruce (Smigel) is a regular at the Gottlieb’s for dinner, and when his daughter Gabby (Madeline Weinstein) comes to town, it’s a foregone conclusion to everyone but Ben that they’ll get together. In the words of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, “The nice thing about living in a small town is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else does.”

This is Silver’s calling card. It has been since his 2009 debut The Blind – a little-seen New England-set drama about a frustrated married couple – all the way up to Between the Temples, the kind of effort that will undoubtedly afford him a bigger scale should audiences continue to turn up to see it. (The film crossed $1 million domestically after having spent just over a week in theaters; it can’t have cost more than a few hundred-thousand dollars to make.) But it would serve as a reasonable shock if Silver suddenly set his sights on something massive, other than continuing to cast bigger names in his films, with Schwartzman, Kane, and De Leon now serving as benchmarks. 

The beauty of Between the Temples is twofold: In how it positions recognizable faces in a small dramedy about coming together to find happiness when such an emotion was thought to have been left behind long ago, and in its gloriously-witty way of telling a story that all of us – devoutly-Jewish or not – can understand, and perhaps have even lived out in our own way. Who among us hasn’t laid down in the middle of the road and begged for a garbage truck to run us over in a fit of self-deprecation? Silver successfully argues that such a desire is fine, as long as you eventually get up and ask the driver for a ride so that you can keep living your life. Lord knows what might await you just around the corner.

Grade: B+

Director: Victor Erice
Writer: Victor Erice, Michel Gaztambide
Stars: Manolo Solo, Jose Coronado, Ana Torrent, Petra Martínez, María León, Mario Pardo

Synopsis: A Spanish actor disappears during the filming of a movie. Although his body is never found, the police conclude that he has suffered an accident at the edge of a cliff. Many years later, the mystery returns to the present day.

The most fascinating thing about Víctor Erice isn’t that he has directed just four feature films during his 50-year career. It’s that, without question, each one of them warrants the much-coveted, overused “masterpiece” distinction, and that it doesn’t feel even remotely overdone to award any of them such a status. For that to be the case, Erice’s films would have to be inflated in some way themselves, works that encroach upon themselves with their pompous dramatics and their unearned flair. Those words shouldn’t — and can’t — be used in relation to Erice, for his filmmaking is never anything but… well, gentle feels — and is — too trite a word, so let’s call it unobtrusive. His cinema is of a style that one might go so far as to call “fly on the wall”-ish, but even that doesn’t do his unassuming-yet-intimate skill justice. Erice is as gifted an observer as he is a storyteller, so much so that you almost forget he wrote and plotted out the same observations he films himself; only the finest auteurs can achieve such a thing. 

So it’s no wonder that Erice’s first film in 31 years, the magnificent, gentle Close Your Eyes, is littered both with astonishing images and spellbinding lines, the likes of which led to multiple murmurs and audible “whoas” from audience members at this critic’s screening. It’s also no surprise to see the epic film’s director continuing to build off of the motifs that made his earliest works so lauded. In Close Your Eyes, Erice takes a meticulous and gradual approach to dissecting the meaning of memory, the beauty and pain that often come linked to our strongest relationships, and how art – specifically cinema – can often serve as a bridge between the two. In The Spirit of the Beehive, his 1973 debut, Erice depicted a young woman’s fearful obsession with the original Frankenstein film from 1910; the titular monster’s actions terrify and haunt the girl, but they also strengthen her bond with both her sister and her community. Erice’s sophomore feature, 1983’s El Sur, centers on a teenage girl whose relationship with her father has become strained due to his own drifting, something she only recognizes as a necessary means to an end when she sees him going to the movies alone, an act he feels might reconnect him to a long-lost love. 

His third film, a documentary from 1992 called The Quince Tree Sun ( also known as Dream of Light), follows the Spanish painter Antonio Lopez and his painstaking efforts to paint a tree. Lopez wants his portrait to be perfect; for whatever reason, he can’t seem to properly capture the tree in all of its beauty. His connection to his art never wavers, but the frustrations remain all the same. Lopez battles an array of weather conditions, which change the tree’s appearance, all while contemplating his own mortality. In all but explicit terms, he wonders, “How much time might I have left to tell this story?”

Another question that comes to mind while watching The Quince Tree Sun: What might time itself be doing to this story? One can’t help but think that Erice might have felt a similar way while writing Close Your Eyes, a story that has evidently been gestating for years – decades is probably more likely – yet feels appropriate coming just months after the filmmaker turned 84. He may not be the most well-known octogenarian auteur working today by mainstream standards, but he’s reached a similar point to the likes of Martin Scorsese in his cinematic journey as he finds himself reckoning with an accomplished career by examining what he’s left on the cutting room floor over the years. Not only are there scripts and frames littered about, but there are partnerships and memories abound, two things that can both define a life and complicate it. 

In Close Your Eyes, which Erice co-wrote with Michel Gaztambide, said reminiscence takes form in the film’s first 20 minutes, as it begins with a scene from a film-within-the-film called The Farewell Gaze. Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado), Gaze’s star, plays a not-quite-detective who is brought to a French chateau to fulfill the last request of a dying man named Mr. Levy (Josep Maria Pou): He wishes to see his daughter, who was taken from him long ago, one last time before he passes. He notes that she is the only person in the world who looks at him uniquely, and her gaze is a sensation he covets as his clock ticks. Arenas’ character, Mr. Franch, must go to Shanghai to retrieve her. It’s a simple set-up, an adventure-adjacent drama about retrieving something that was lost so that total peace can be obtained. It feels a lot like a film Erice might once have made himself. 

As Franch leaves Levy’s home, which he named “Triste el Roy” (or, “The Sad King,” a nod to his favorite chess piece), to set out on his journey to find his client’s child, the frame freezes. Erice then transports us from 1990, when The Farewell Gaze was being filmed, to Madrid in 2012, where the film’s director, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), is visiting a television station to meet with the producers of a show that investigates unsolved mysteries. The enigma in question? Arenas walked off set after shooting the aforementioned scenes and never returned, causing Garay’s film to go unfinished. Arenas’ body was never found, leaving Garay and others with a bevy of questions, from “What led Julio to disappear?” to “Where has he gone?” From this point on, Close Your Eyes becomes a two-pronged procedural of sorts – Miguel’s quest to figure out whatever happened to his star and friend; and a psychological journey that may help Miguel understand his past, present, and future as he ages, encounters people from his filmmaking days, and reckons with what became of his life after The Farewell Gaze fell apart. 

“I lost my best friend, and I lost my movie,” Miguel says at one point, a line that might send a lesser work into a territory that is far more fitting of the “procedural” label. The same goes for a more pointed reference to Julio that comes up during a conversation between Miguel and Arenas’ daughter, Ana (Ana Torrent, who starred in Erice’s first film just over three decades ago): “His movies will always be there… But what about him, as the person he was?” And while Close Your Eyes does see Miguel embark on a search for clues that may lead him to his long-lost friend, or at least reveal the truth about his disappearance, Erice is less interested in the mystery of Julio’s whereabouts than he is in what it means for Miguel. Solo’s performance is a remarkable balance of stoicism and pain, as he plays Miguel as a man who seems to live a simple life yet whose primary dreams were all-but ripped from his clutches when his final production fell to bits. Now, he passes the time by fishing, petting his black lab, and enjoying some late-night drinks and jokes with his eclectic neighbors. It’s not the life he imagined he’d lead, but it’s one that, until Julio reentered his mind, was all he needed.

When Close Your Eyes’ central mystery is solved roughly two-thirds into the film, Erice doesn’t take a sharp turn down Sentimentality Highway, instead opting to go even deeper into why Julio’s disappearance has long-tormented the rest of the film’s characters, even if most of them were unwilling to acknowledge how close to the surface it had risen despite remaining beneath. Much of this is thanks to Coronado’s layered turn as Julio, a man we see take multiple forms over the course of the film’s near-three-hour runtime. Without revealing too much about what has, indeed, happened to Julio, it’s safe to say that Coronado’s work is some of the most stunning, emotionally-complex acting of the year, the kind that would rebut an idea that Miguel’s projector pal Max (a fantastic Mario Pardo) raises late in the film: “Miracles haven’t existed in the movies since Dreyer died.” 

The same could be said for Close Your Eyes itself, a work of miraculous technicality at times – Valentín Álvarez’s cinematography switches from 16mm film (when we’re watching The Farewell Gaze) to a gray, digital tint that doesn’t dull the picture so much as it represents Erice’s own recognition that times, they are a-changin’ – that always remains a stunning stroke of narrativization. Somehow, it manages to rival Erice’s earlier efforts, but perhaps that was always inevitable given that the film is so clearly an examination of self. It’s a more sentimental reckoning than something like The Irishman or Killers of the Flower Moon, but no less stirring in its recognition of an artist’s past triumphs and missed opportunities. If Erice feels he has squandered chances aplenty over the course of his career, the fact that audiences have been able to witness the four masterworks he’s offered in 50 years is enough of a gift to last a lifetime. After all, people come and go, but cinema lives forever. Thank goodness that Close Your Eyes falls in the latter camp.

Grade: A

Director: Claude Schmitz
Writers: Claude Schmitz, Kostia Testut
Stars: Olivier Rabourdin, Louise Leroy, Kate Moran

Synopsis: A private detective forced to face the ghosts of his past when his niece asks him to investigate her father’s death.

“If he wasn’t dead, I’d be filing for divorce.” So says Shelby (Kate Moran) with a scoff as she tells Gabriel Laurens (Olivier Rabourdin) about the shady behavior her late husband – and Gabriel’s identical twin – François (also Rabourdin) exhibited in the lead-up to his death. As we learned earlier in Claude Schmitz’s The Other Laurens, François was killed in a car wreck, although his daughter Jade (Louise Leroy, making her big-screen debut in style) isn’t so sure that’s the full story. It helps that her uncle Gabriel, despite having become estranged from his brother years ago, is a private investigator. Fueled by conviction and confusion, Jade seeks Gabriel’s help; thankfully for The Other Laurens, her hunch has some weight to it, and it might just start with her mother. “If he wasn’t dead, I’d be filing for divorce.” Say, isn’t it a bit easier to tidy up a rich man’s assets when he’s in the ground as opposed to seated in a defendant’s seat?

As serious as this all sounds, Schmitz’s longest feature to date – his other films, including 2018’s excellent Carwash, barely scratch the 80-minute mark – is delivered in a vein more akin to the work of the Coens, and not just due to its crime backdrop, a plot device their films tend to prioritize. The Other Laurens certainly contains a good mystery, but it’s special due toits dry, deadpan humor, its grainy, 70s-style vibe (thanks in large part to Florian Berutti’s cinematography and Thomas Turine’s pulsating score), and its ensemble, a troupe of actors that enjoy varying amounts of screen time yet all make meals out of their performances. Such is especially the case for Rabourdin and Leroy, the unlikely duo that Schmitz tracks throughout the film as they search for the truth behind Jade’s father’s death.

That truth is far from easily-uncovered, as it involves deceit after deceit, drug deals gone awry, and one particularly menacing motorcycle gang that, given what they get up to behind closed doors, makes The Bikeriders’ Vandals look like the Teletubbies. No matter the opposition, Gabriel seems a capable opponent, a chameleonic figure who spends much of the film unwillingly morphing into the brother he left behind so long ago. It’s not that the life François led was unenticing; he was a real estate tycoon whose French chateau would make for a killer one-episode locale in a prestige HBO drama. But his brother’s old orbit is something Gabriel intentionally fled after his own life unraveled, and returning to it caused him to endure a black hole-esque pull into a dark world that he never meant to take part in. 

Of course, this is precisely what Schmitz hopes for the audience to latch onto, a blending between the two brothers that lends itself to an increasingly-captivating narrative thread surrounding identity crises and complex familial dynamics, a series of psychological battles that cause Gabriel to agonize over his past more than he already has. That Jade sees directly through him makes for something all the more compelling: An intermittent battle of wits between youth and experience. The author Robert Fulgham once wrote, “Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.” Jade certainly listens, but her gaze is her real superpower. 

The Other Laurens is far more successful as a two-hander, a relationship-centric mystery involving Gabriel and Jade than it is a massive caper with an endlessly plotty scheme and an even bigger cast. That’s helped along by the fact that Rabourdin and Leroy play well together, a duo that screams juxtaposition in their respective appearances and mental makeups. Rabourdin is captivatingly stoic and massive, qualities he evidently has as a performer but wasn’t necessarily able to access as a supporting player in Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer, also from this year. That Rabourdin, playing a private eye, is opposite Leroy, who inhabits a spry teen that seems to court danger wherever she goes, certainly aids matters. 

Yet it stands to reason that Schmitz might be just as capable of spinning this film’s web no matter who he was working with. The Other Laurens is a film that prioritizes its whirlwind of a premise to a fault at times, but commits to selling it nonetheless. By the time it touches down at its perhaps-inevitable conclusion, the fact that we’ve arrived at our predetermined destination matters far more than the turbulence that was prominent along the way. Bumps in the road are called bumps for a reason, after all; if we saw them as roadblocks, we’d spend all of our time going in circles. The Other Laurens occasionally flirts with that dangerous fate, but that it lands the plane in the end is enough of a gift to walk away appreciating the ride.

Grade: B-