Gareth Higgins on COYOTE VS. ACME

The release of Coyote vs Acme could be dramatized in the movie, far-fetched enough as it is to fit exactly within the confines of this deliriously entertaining cartoon-live action hybrid. Completed years ago and shelved for “business” reasons, a grass roots campaign to get the movie released has succeeded, and a movie about the little guy confronting a Goliath of industry - and winning - has ended up doing the same thing in real life. One of the most magnificently ridiculous premises gives birth to one of the smartest comedies in years, a hilarious nostalgia trip that also says something about the world we’re living in right now.

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NOTE: This review contains significant spoilers - you may wish to watch the movie before reading further.

After Love is a quiet gem of a film that lingers in the mind long after viewing, as it asks us to consider - and reconsider - what we know about our closest relationships. How well can we ever know another person? How i…

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Gareth Higgins on SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY

The Marvel films are generally critic-proof, with rare exceptions; even so, the enormous box office success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, now one of the ten most financially lucrative films of all time, has exceeded expectations. Those statistics must be read through the lens of knowing that movie tickets are more expensive than they’ve ever been, so the top ten films aren’t necessarily the ten that have been seen by the most people. And the near-limitless availability of content really does mean that it is difficult for a movie to be a cultural event: listening to the score for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial yesterday I was reminded that the impact of that film 44 years ago was rare for the time, and rarer now. Christopher Nolan makes films infrequently enough that they can reliably stir up a cultural discourse, and it’s a good thing that Oppenheimer and The Odyssey have made such an impact - companion pieces as they are in an exploration of the philosophy of manhood, aggression, integrity, and war. It would be good if Brand New Day could do the same, because it’s not only one of the most entertaining comic book films, but a genuine step forward in the representation of what it means to be a hero. (Other worthy choices are Iron Man 2, Wonder Woman 1984, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Hulk, Black Panther, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the 1978 Superman, and Joker: Folie à Deux; if you want to go beyond DC and Marvel then we should include the glorious camp of Flash Gordon and Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, and the genuine social commentary of RoboCop.)

We pick up Peter Parker (Tom Holland, who I think feels utterly at home in the role) having finally learned how to manage the burden of his gift. Having antennae that pick up any nearby crimes-in-progress can be a huge interruption; but he is mightily helped by developing an app and a police partner (played by the wonderful Liza Colón-Zayas from The Bear, whose busy kitchen and psychological terrain seems a far more stressful working environment than New York law enforcement). Peter still saves the day, but now apparently only once a day; he’s grieving his Aunt May (thankfully Marisa Tomei shows up in dream sequences to reassure him - and us), and he’s trying to navigate a way toward reminding his true love MJ (Zendaya, whose every career choice continues to prove herself to be the actor of her generation) that he exists. Such is the professional risk of being a world-moving hero, for sometimes spells must be cast to make everyone forget who you are; or at least that’s what happened at the end of the last Spider-Man film, No Way Home, which itself was a remarkable reimagining of the myth of redemptive violence, a rare film that asked what villains might actually want after they’ve gotten what they think they needed.

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Kathleen Norris on HONEYMOON IN VEGAS

I have long suspected that my opinions of films have much to do with the circumstances in which I’ve seen them. I recently rewatched a comedy that delighted me when I first saw it on its release in 1992, Honeymoon in Vegas. I enjoyed it then for reasons that had more to do with the promise of an air-conditioned theater than the film itself. I saw it with my husband on an exceptionally hot day in Bismarck, North Dakota. We had just driven the 130 miles from our home in South Dakota in a car with no air conditioning, and after being wind-blown by dry heat for several hours the idea of sitting in a theater to watch a movie - any movie - was irresistible. It wasn’t just the heat that was wearing on us; we were in Bismarck for medical tests that had us both on edge.

So - what better time to watch a supremely silly comedy starring James Caan, Nicholas Cage, and Sarah Jessica Parker, in cool comfort? Nicholas Cage excels at playing desperate men, and this film sets him up beautifully with a terrific cameo of Anne Bancroft hamming it up as his mother. When Jack (Cage) visits her in the hospital, she asks him to promise that he’ll never marry, because “no girl could love you like I do.” Then she suddenly dies, giving Jack a phobia about committing to marriage. His work as a private investigator catching adulterers convinces him that marriage is a disaster. But his girlfriend Betsy (Parker), an elementary school teacher who is fond of children, wants to marry and start a family. Still haunted by dreams about his mother, Jack holds off until one night he says to her: “let’s just do it, let’s fly to Vegas and get married tomorrow.” As he points out in a voiceover, if they had gone to City Hall in Manhattan the next day there would be no story. But Vegas, including a lovesick gangster, a rigged poker game, and a host of Elvis impersonators, provides all the story we need.

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This is an age of trauma, by which I don’t mean that there’s more suffering to go round - indeed there’s convincing evidence that the average person is experiencing less violence and oppression, and that more people care about more people than ever before. What I do mean is that a word coined in the late 17th century to refer to physical wounds, and evolving by the late 19th century to include psychological damage has become so utterly mainstreamed that it risks losing its heft.

That kind of pendulum swing is typical, and what matters most is to not lose sight of the gain achieved through a deeper understanding of how pain affects the mind as well as the body. It is now not uncommon for people to talk on headline news about emotional anguish, for people to talk to therapists about their memory-wounds, and for stories to be told about the legacy of conflict, not merely its ending. Sometimes those conversations are well-resourced by genuine knowledge about what is real, and wisdom about what to do with it - well, it might be true to say that that’s actually what conversation is for.

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Kathleen Norris on THE DEMON AI

With all the news coverage about the promise and perils of AI, including a good dose of paranoia about its effects on the human race, I wasn’t surprised to find two recent science fiction films that effectively demonize AI. I suspect that a new genre of such films is on the horizon.

Both Per Aspera Ad Astra and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (above) are enjoyable entertainments, lacing a serious subject with a good dose of comedy. The former is a Chinese film set on a space ship traveling through deep space to a distant planet in order to conduct agricultural research. It contains every cliché in the book: people hibernating in capsules for a long sleep, a malfunction requiring astronauts to make a space walk to repair the damage, the sudden appearance of meteorites that endanger them and the ship, dastardly villains, and the self-sacrificing gesture of a hero attempting to save the mission and people’s lives. But the film is also wildly inventive.

The hundreds of workers on the ship are enduring their sleep with the help of a new virtual reality system called “Good Dreams” that allows them to create their own dream worlds. We don’t learn until much later why one worker, Xu Tianbiao (Dylan Wang) suddenly wakes and begins roaming about. He’s a cheeky guy, sassing LM, the AI system controlling the ship, when it speaks to him and warns him that by bringing organic material on board (a flowering plant in a small pot) he has committed a serious violation. This guy doesn’t take anything seriously, until he witnesses an explosion that endangers the ship’s power supply, and realizes that he has to wake the captain, Lee Simeng (Victoria Song). She, in turn, decides to wake the chief technology officer.

But waking people from their cherished dreams is not easy process. It requires both Xu and Lee to enter the dream of the sleeper, adopting identities that fit that world. This leads to some wild scenes that owe a debt to The Matrix and Quentin Tarantino, but the violence that ensues is less gory than cartoonish. It’s a dream, after all.

It’s when the two must wake the software engineer that the real trouble begins, as he’s been plotting to take over and manipulate everyone’s dreams. As people are rousted from sleep it’s amusing to see who they have been in their dreams; everything from cowboys to Roman centurions. Soon we learn that the software guy is merely a pawn of the true villain, LM. It is seeking ultimate control over the human beings on the ship and its mission. It wakened Xu because it needed to better understand rebellious eccentrics like him. As Xu and the captain struggle to defeat LM, we get lots of drama, even a little romance, until LM is reduced to cursing, “Tricky humans.” We can only hope.

Per Aspera, Ad Astra is a fun, goofy film. But goofiness reaches new heights in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Yet for all its absurdities the film is also serious, addressing topical issues: the need to establish safeguards for AI while we still can, the over-dependence on cell phones that distracts us from what matters most, and virtual reality headsets that can lead people to spurn human relationships in favor of artificial, seemingly perfect ones.

Sam Rockwell is superb as a cynical, self-described “man from the future” where AI has evolved into a super-intelligence that has all but destroyed humanity. He tells patrons of Norm’s Diner in Los Angeles that he’s on his 117th trip there, to enlist help in finding a 9-year-old boy who is creating a powerful version of AI. The goal is to install safeguards that will protect humanity from a calamitous future. One patron in the diner scornfully says that he looks homeless, and when Rockwell replies, “I come from the apocalypse,” we realize that we’re in a wacky and less violent version of The Terminator.

Rockwell is supported by a terrific cast. Juno Temple is moving as Susan, a mother whose teenaged son has died in a school shooting. We learn that these shootings have become so common that a thriving industry has developed to clone the victims. At The Clone Store an anxious, doubting Susan is swayed by a faux-sympathetic, creepy sales pitch by Blaise (Dino Fetscher). Michael Pena is outstanding as Mark, a high school teacher terrorized by his students when he asks them to read Anna Karenina. Among the film’s funniest scenes are of mobs of teenagers chasing him, having been turned into zombies by their cell phones. (I imagine that many parents can relate.) One poor woman (Georgia Goodman) enlisted for the group was at Norm’s just because she wanted a milkshake and is bemused to find herself engaged in dangerous heroics. Haley Lu Richardson steals the show as Ingrid, a performer at “princess parties” who lost her job because she’s severely allergic to electronic devices, and a child using an iPad caused her nose to bleed on a little girl’s birthday cake. She also lost her boyfriend to a virtual reality device. We receive the backstory for Rockwell’s character late in the film, and it adds both emotional resonance and a great plot twist.

After being chased, shot at, and facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles the group reaches the spooky “AI boy,” who already seems more machine than human. After a dramatic struggle, they succeed in downloading the safety control, and a happy ending seems in store for everyone. But if humans are tricky, AI may be even trickier, as it’s designed to give people what they most desire, even if it’s a lie. In the film’s last scene, “the man from the future” and Ingrid, a glint in her eye, realize they must return to Norm’s, and employ a new way of preventing the AI apocalypse. Their first task is getting people to look up from their cell phones.

Per Aspera, Ad Astra (2026, directed by Yan Han, written by him and Channing Huang, Dalin Liu, Peisi Ma, Chen Xu). On Netflix.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026, directed by Gore Verbinski, written by Matthew Robinson). Streaming on Hulu; for rent on several platforms.

Gareth Higgins on A Sudden Flicker of Light and The Film Talk

For over two decades I’ve been in near-constant conversation with my friend Jett Loe about the art and meaning of movies; we started recording these conversations early on, before podcasts were really “a thing”, and while we took a few years off in the middle, it’s quite lovely to have an evolving record of thoughts about movies & meaning.

I’m going to start posting episodes here at Soul Telegram, and hope you enjoy them.

My feeling with cinema is always a mingling of what it’s about and how it’s about what it’s about (I’m paraphrasing Roger Ebert, likely with a different emphasis); currently reading David Thomson’s striking new revisionist history of the movies A Sudden Ficker of Light (whose gorgeous cover image is above) is provoking me even further in that direction. Thomson is disturbed, for instance, by how The Godfather - an unquestionably brilliantly-crafted film - has, for some people, become merely an exercise in delicious style, rather than a genuinely horrifying morality tale about what happens when self-orientation overcomes the alternatives. He believes that the Corleone saga laid the foundations for The Sopranos, another magnificent work of art (when looked at in a certain light); but that the way the audience came to love Tony Soprano dulled our judgement, and ultimately paved the real-world way not for people who acknowledged their feet of clay, but who could get away with stamping on everyone else because they were also lovable rogues. This is, of course, only one side of the coin: the Kieślowski’s Short Film About Killing helped end the death penalty in Poland, Kramer vs Kramer evoked empathy for family separations, 12 Years a Slave and The Underground Railroad still haven’t exhausted their work toward helping some of us understand the need for repair, and some of us to feel seen in our ancestral wounds. Movies aren’t good or bad, but they are something, and that somethign deserves to be taken seriously. That’s what we try to do here at Soul Telegram, and The Film Talk too.

You can find The Film Talk here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/TheFilmTalk. Recent episodes include an overview of Steven Spielberg’s career, the wonderful documentary Natchez: Exposing the Myth of Southern Charm, a retrospective conversation about Field of Dreams, and more…

And Finally, a Note to Subscribers

We’ve been writing and sharing Soul Telegram for over five years now, and we hope that our conversation about movies & meaning connects with the beauty and challenges of your own lives. We’re grateful for your support, and glad to participate in sharing what we hope is a bit of cinematic shelter in times of such great uncertainty. We haven’t increased our subscription price in those five years, and we have decided to do so now to help further support the work. From our next issue, the price for monthly subscriptions will rise to $7, and for annual subscriptions it will be $75; at the same time we want to reiterate that if you benefit from what we share in Soul Telegram but can’t afford a subscription, just reply to this email to let us know, and we’ll provide a free six month subscription.

We consider this a gift exchange in the spirit of friendship; we appreciate the opportunity to write about cinema and how it can help us live better, and we hope that in whatever we can, what we share here can help you too.

Gareth Higgins on THE ODYSSEY

The first question many people are asking about The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s truly epic adaptation of Homer, is how faithful it is to the original. My answer begins with a gentle push back on the premise of the question: how much does it actually matter if something is faithful to a prior text? To call upon another ancient teacher, Hippocrates shifted the common understanding of disease as having physiological rather than otherworldly roots, and we gave his name to an oath that should guide anyone in a position of authority (though it was actually others who coined the idea of do no intentional harm); yet he also believed that illness could be attributed to four humors which don’t actually exist. Relying on what Hippocrates thought is not going to help clear a common cold, not to mention more serious conditions; but extrapolating from the core ethical notion associated with him could serve us well, even if he didn’t write it. There’s value, of course, in getting as close as possible to historical information about the story of Hippocrates, but biographical data doesn’t exhaust meaning.

So it is with The Odyssey, whose “accuracy” I’m not qualified to assess. But I do know something about life, and about movies, and about storytelling, and this movie, about this particular life, deserves sustained attention for what it says about storytelling. I’ve seen it three times in four days, and I’ll see it again, not because I “love” it, but because of what it loves. That beautiful idea, first shared with me by the critic Jeffrey Overstreet, is a good guide to thinking about art generally. This is true even if it’s not clear what the work loves; and in this case The Odyssey more than most films of its scale is eliciting hugely contradictory responses.

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I’ll watch any film the brilliant Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa makes, although I know that he’ll make me suffer along with the film’s protagonists, as he presents people struggling to make moral decisions in grim circumstances. I also know that some of his images will haunt even my waking hours. I’ve written about his My Joy, a strikingly joyless film about the collapse of human decency in today’s Russia, as well as the masterful In The Fog, about the the cruel manipulation of the civilian population during the Nazi occupation of Belarus in World War II. They demoralized people so thoroughly that they feared to trust each other, which brings me to Loznitsa’s new film, Two Prosecutors (above), set in 1937 during the height of what is now called Stalin’s “reign of terror.”

Much of the film takes place in a prison in a rural town, Bryansk, that holds both ordinary criminals and political prisoners accused of “anti-social behavior,” which at the time could mean almost anything. Loznitsa takes us through narrow hallways and dark stairwells at such a slow pace that the prison’s sinister and oppressive atmosphere sinks into our bones. The many scenes of barred gates and thick iron doors opened and closed by coldly indifferent guards creates such a sense of being trapped that I’m tempted to offer a trigger warning to anyone who suffers from claustrophobia.

We meet a young prosecutor, Kornyev, (a well-cast Alexandr Kuznetsov) fresh out of law school, who appears at the prison demanding to see a particular inmate. He knows he’s within his rights, but the fact that he has the prisoner’s name and cell number astonishes and disturbs the prison authorities, as this is information they have tried to keep secret. (How Kornyev obtained the information is a story in itself.) The officials make several attempts to discourage Kornyev from continuing with his quest, but finally allow him to visit the elderly inmate (portrayed unforgettably by Alexandr Fillippenko) whose cell is in the “special block” for enemies of the state. He shows the young prosecutor signs of torture on his body and tells him that many loyal Communist Party members like himself are being arrested and tortured until they sign confessions to crimes they didn’t commit.

This is dangerous knowledge to possess, and when it’s clear that Kornyev intends to act on it and launch an investigation, we fear for him. To believe in the rule of law during Stalin’s era (or Putin’s for that matter) can be fatal. But we accompany the young man as he sits uncomfortably in the cold, crowded carriage of an overnight train to Moscow, badgered by the tall tales and reminiscences of drunks as he attempts to get some sleep. He has assumed that the General Prosecutor in charge of the Soviet prison system will help him, and is willing to wait hours for an audience. Anatoliy Beliy is brilliant as the film’s wily second prosecutor, listening to Kornyev intently with a poker face. Improbably, he offers a glimmer of hope to Kornyev, an official paper that will prove to the prison authorities in Bryansk that he has consulted with the highest authority and can proceed with his investigation. He even buys him a train ticket in a first-class carriage. Kornyev is too relieved to be suspicious, and the rest of the film consists of the unfolding of cruel levels of betrayal that the naive Kornyev doesn’t see until it is too late.

Two Prosecutors rings true with memoirs of the Stalin era that I have read. In Nadezhda Mandelstam’s powerful Hope Against Hope she says that the two worst things about that time were the erosion of the capacity for hope, and the loneliness that set in when people become afraid to talk honestly to others, because you never knew who might betray you to the authorities. She herself managed a great feat of hope. Papers were routinely confiscated by the secret police, so after her husband Osip was arrested, she memorized his poems. He died in the gulag, probably in 1938, and in 1973, twenty years after Stalin’s death, her dedication reached fruition, when a volume of her Osip Mandestam’s complete poems was published in England.

I was struck by one small detail in Two Prosecutors. When Kornyev first visits the prison we see a group of grim-faced women standing outside the prison gates. Their presence is not explained, but they are waiting in vain for news of their husbands, sons, and brothers imprisoned inside. This occurred daily during Stalin’s reign, women waiting in long lines outside of prisons, to deliver packages containing letters, food, clothing, and shoes for their loved ones, not knowing if they had been moved to another prison or were already dead. The women were tolerated because the items they brought were useful, confiscated and regarded as bounty and shared by prison guards.

One day in the 1930’s the poet Anna Akhmatova stood with a large group of women outside the infamous Lubyanka Prison in Leningrad (now, thank God, known as St. Petersburg again). Her husband and son had been taken there and she was trying to get news of them. Another woman recognized her, approached, and whispered, “Can you describe this?” Akhmatova answered, “I can.” That story strikes me as the purest example of what art is for. It is to witness, and I’m grateful that filmmakers like Loznitsa are willing to answer the call.

Two Prosecutors (2025, directed and written by Sergei Loznitsa. Based on a novel by Russian physicist Georgy Demidov, who was imprisoned in the Soviet gulag from 1938-1958). Streaming on Criterion, for rent on Amazon and Apple+.

Gareth Higgins on CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

I imagine I’ll write about The Odyssey next week - Christopher Nolan’s film will be everywhere, and I’m excited to see it, but with the same nervous anticipation as I usually have for Nolan. He’s clearly one of the great cinematic visual stylists, soundscape-designers (and yes I know sometimes we can’t hear all the dialogue, but I think that’s part of the point - it makes us look more deeply at what’s happening on screen, and makes the movie feel more like real life), and stewards of time (Dunkirk’s three-story structure is far more innovative than was typically acknowledged, and Inception knows something about how dreams can feel much longer than the sleep that contains them), and he makes films that are intelligent and enormous, witty and thrilling at the same time - genre blockbusters with something to say. But there’s a bleakness about Nolan’s work that I find curious, and what matters most to me about his version of The Odyssey (and the version we need to see right now) is whether it will thread the needle between the myth of redemptive violence (wherein killing “cleanses” the world) and the myth of redemptive suffering (wherein some people - usually marginalized ones - are “cleansed” through being tormented). I want to see an Odyssey that honors the reasons why sometimes people feel the need to defend themselves, without enshrining the idea that violence is good.

I’ll check back in once I’ve seen it - for now, here are my thoughts on Interstellar - probably my favorite of Nolan’s movies, partly because it has the most heart.

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Gareth Higgins on ON THE WATERFRONT AS A VISION OF AMERICA

*Marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I’m posting an essay I wrote about one of the greatest American films from my book Cinematic States. Of course there are many things that On the Waterfront doesn’t speak of, and voices not heard in it (a true cinematic distillation of the USA would have to include Smoke Signals, Daughters of the Dust, Malcolm X, Nashville, Desert Hearts, A Thousand and One, Lone Star, and The New World). But On the Waterfront exemplifies a vision of the nation’s calling that gives me hope: the potentially transcendent creative struggle toward a people embodying equality, sacred worth, and interdependent stewardship of and with the earth.

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I finally bit the bullet, and watched a movie that has haunted me since I saw it in 1959, when I was eleven years old. To say that the movie traumatized me is too dramatic: there was nothing in it inappropriate for a child to see or hear. But in the 1950’s it was customary for childrens’ birthday parties to include going to a movie, and I sat through Disney’s The Shaggy Dog four times. When my family moved to Hawaii, we stayed for our first few nights on the Hickam Air Force base. I was thrilled to learn that the base had a movie theater, less thrilled to learn that The Shaggy Dog was showing there. While my older brother took my younger sisters to see it, I was spared a fifth viewing, but troubled by the notion that the film had followed me halfway across the Pacific Ocean.

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There’s a dangerous idea doing the rounds these days - that empathy is weakness, or even suicidal. It’s the latest iteration of cultural chauvinism and the kind of nationalism that confuses separatism with seeing patriotism as a cherishing of the gifts of a nation - which gifts are supposed to be shared with others.

I’ve grown up with the Irish capacity to not take ourselves too seriously, I’ve benefitted from rural Italian welcome tables, Burkino Faso rites of passage among the Dagaaba people, and US American visionary thinking; I’ve received gentleness and humility from Canadians, witnessed resilience in South Africa, and a sense of awe mingling with community in Aotearoa New Zealand. This all happened because the people I met from those places were willing to share what they had. They were willing to empathize with me.

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I have long resisted the popular genre known as “cozy murder mysteries,” usually set in quaint villages and featuring equally quaint amateur sleuths. The mystery stories of Agatha Christie are often included in this genre, but I don’t think that’s fair. Her mysteries have real bite, and she seemed to have recognized that the words “cozy” and “murder” don’t fit well together.

I resisted watching The Thursday Murder Club, fearing that I’d be subjected to murder made cute. But a friend recommended it, and when I saw that it had an outstanding cast, I decided to give it a look. I found a beautifully executed film, so well-acted that I didn’t mind that the plot was thin. I believe we still need movies like this, that offer pure entertainment when we aren’t looking for anything more.

The film is set in an upscale retirement home, Coopers Chase, an English manor house that recalls Downton Abbey. Helen Mirren plays Elizabeth, a retired British intelligence officer, who is the able leader of a group bent on solving cold murder cases abandoned by the police. She’s aided by a former labor organizer (Pierce Brosnan) and a retired psychiatrist (Ben Kingsley). A newcomer, a former nurse whose daughter has recently moved her into the home, is played by another British acting legend, Cecilia Imrie. Jonathan Pryce, an actor who adds class to any film he’s in, plays Elizabeth’s husband. She dotes on him, as he suffers from dementia, and she worries on his bad days when he’s hopelessly confused. But on his good days he’s able to play chess, and by happenstance Elizabeth finds him a young partner who proves pivotal to the film’s plot.

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Gareth Higgins on HEN & ANIMAL MOVIES

Hen (above) is one of the most honestly titled films, a chicken’s-eye view of the world. Directed by György Pálfi, set in Greece, it manages to take in everything from a critique of factory farming, family tension, human trafficking, profound courage, and the circle of life. Hen is something like Babe meets Andrei Rublev - it’s funny and beguiling, moving and confrontational. Like the best films about animals, it induces compassion for non-humans while mirroring our gifts and needs in their faces and dilemmas. It’s also one of the most imaginatively photographed movies - the camera often at ground level, scurrying as quickly as the hen (eight different poultry thespians stepped into the role). I’m not kidding when I say that some of the action in Hen is as gripping as any in Raiders of the Lost Ark; some of the social realism reminded me of movies like Ken Loach’s Kes; and some of the images will stay with me for a long time.

Here are ten great movies about animals, or movies that seem to be about animals but are really about humans:

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Kathleen Norris on SUMMER HOURS - GENTLE REALISM

I appreciate films like Summer Hours that tackle difficult subjects in a manner that is not over-dramatic. It’s hospitable filming, in that we witness relatable characters engaging with each other over matters that most of us will face one day. The issue of inheritance, and what to do with a beloved family home after parents die often splits family members into factions. Long-held resentments surface, creating bitterness that can endure for years. But director Olivier Assayas allows us to witness three siblings who are able to address their dilemma realistically, as adults whose love for one another is stronger than the pain of loss.

The home in Summer Hours is an exceptionally lovely one, a paradise for children. Its spacious, sloping lawn leads to a well-used pond, along with a forested area where, as the film opens, we see children engaged in an energetic game of hide-and-seek. Three generations of a family have gathered to celebrate the 75th birthday of their widowed matriarch, the elegant Hélène, who was the favorite niece of a noted artist named Paul Berthier. The house is full of his drawings and paintings, along with furniture, sculptures, vases, and porcelain tea sets created by him and his equally renowned friends. The two most valuable paintings in the home are by the renowned landscape painter Camille Corot. Hélène is concerned with maintaining Berthier’s legacy, and takes her son Frédéric (a moving, believable Charles Berling) aside to discuss plans for the artworks after she has died. She unrolls the last drawing that Berthier did, a view of the yard from the room they are standing in, and says that she wants him to have it. An uncomfortable Frédéric forces himself to listen to Hélène but clearly doesn’t want to think about these plans for the future.

This could be a set up for a hysterical battle royale with Frédéric’s two other siblings, Adrienne (a subdued but touching Juliette Binoche) and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier). But in this film we learn that the bonds of love, no doubt formed in summer childhoods spent in this beloved house, are enough to see them through the difficult decision to now let it go.

As happens in most families, over the years these siblings have drifted apart. Adrienne lives in New York where she designs furnishings for well-off clients. Jérémie, a business executive, has received a promotion that will involve moving his family to mainland China. Frédéric, a professor of economics, still lives in France, and is the most pained at the idea of selling the house. He would love to keep it so that he, his wife and children, and his siblings can continue to gather there in the summer. When the three meet with an attorney about settling the estate he snaps at Jérémie for so quickly finding a real estate agent for the sale, but Adrienne calmly suggests that they discuss this later.

The lawyer informs them that there will be an enormous tax bill unless they donate some of the artwork to the State, adding that the renowned Musée d’Orsay would like to take some of the art and furnishings for its collection. This is agreeable to the children, and Adrienne is well-suited to arrange for appraisers to come to the house.

What’s remarkable about this film is the emotional power it elicits as we observe Adrienne, Jérémie, and Frédéric discuss the sale of the house. It’s obvious even to Frédéric that this must happen, but as the three address the painful reality there’s not a hint of cruelty in their conversation. They have empathy for each other and are even able to discuss Hélène’s failings as a mother without bitterness. They’ve long come to terms with the way she undermined their confidence as she showed more concern for Berthier and his art than for them. When they find that they can’t escape the air of melancholy that now surrounds them, they don’t attempt to. They focus on listening to one another.

The slow, gentle pace of the film makes that melancholy more real to the viewer: most of us can relate to the pain of losing places and objects that hold great sentimental value. It can feel like losing a piece of our childhood selves. I was glad to find this film ending on a refreshing note of joy. Now that the house is mostly empty, Frédéric offers it to his daughter Sylvie, a rebellious teenager, so that she and her friends can have one final weekend party. The cheerful young people arrive with sleeping bags, food, wine, and marijuana. Sylvie tells her boyfriend that her grandmother once spoke of her being able to come here in the summers with her own children. She sighs over this vanished dream and then happily runs, as she did as a child, through a field of grass and flowers.

Summer Hours (2008, written and directed by Olivier Assayas). Streaming on Mubi and Philo.

Gareth Higgins on TUNER

I’ve seen so many movies it’s hard for one to make an impression - that’s a tautology, I suppose, rather than a snarky judgement. Just as clichés don’t become clichés until they have been overused, the more movies you’ve seen, the more imagination the movie needs to display to not appear derivative.

Tuner (the feature debut of the Oscar-winning director of Navalny, featuring the most substantial role Dustin Hoffman has had in years), then, is quietly refreshing. The fact that perhaps the greatest US American screen actor is still making movies at 89 years old, and that his most recent one respects disability and makes a bit of a political statement about the unjust healthcare system is refreshing; and that the movie breezes along with a degree of imagination is to be welcomed. But despite accomplished directorial craft from Daniel Roher, a winning central performance Leo Woodall, and Hoffman getting to do more than have fun with an enlarged cameo, painting a small-but-perfectly formed character, it doesn’t entirely work.

A piano tuner with highly sensitive hearing who becomes a safe-cracker to pay his mentor’s healthcare bills, falling in love with an aspirational concert pianist isn’t the least creative premise for a film, and Tuner held my interest throughout. But two things detract from the experience (and Thomas Flight’s video essay Why The Movies Don’t Feel the Same Anymore (which I wrote about last week) helps explain why). The first is not Roher’s fault at all, and indeed he is clearly one of the filmmakers trying to make movies matter again; but the fact that I was watching Tuner on a TV, where it will be seen by the vast majority of its audience, amidst a sea of infinite content put it a disadvantage. It’s not likely that movies will regain their cultural position; we have lost the scarcity that made cinema-going not only special, but unique: a ritual and a civic experience, a contained narrative fleshed out over two hours or more, not competing with the handheld screens that every audience member has in their pocket, and which most of us start checking before the movie has even begun to end.

The other problem with Tuner, for me, is that its use of music seemed to owe more to the fact that the rights were available, rather than finding the “right” piece; Nina Simone’s Sinnerman is fantastic, but has apparently already been used in at least 20 movies, one of which - the delicious 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair - uses it in as similar context to Tuner. There are less recognizable - and presumably less expensive - pieces that would have brought an extra dose of originality to Tuner; and the final twist was too much of an absurd coincidence to take as seriously as the rest of the movie. But please don’t let that stop you watching it - movies like Tuner, not based on existing material, not about superheroes, and where the only special effect is the acting, are rare enough that they should be encouraged.

Gareth Higgins on NATCHEZ

I saw two movies this past week that illustrate both the limitations and continued possibilities of cinema: Natchez (directed by Suzannah Herbert, which PBS is streaming under the title The Myth of Southern Charm), and the critic Thomas Flight’s video essay Why The Movies Don’t Feel The Same Anymore. (The image above is from Days of Heaven, perhaps the movie I most wish more movies felt like.)

Natchez is marketed as a documentary, but that term needs to be interrogated. John Grierson, the person who first applied it to cinema, meant by it “the creative treatment of actuality”; but the range implied by that definition includes everything from a History Channel film about D-Day to the three-hour Chicago basketball masterpiece Hoop Dreams, Michael Moore’s agitprop Fahrenheit 9/11 and Godfrey Reggio’s meditative film about faces and landscapes Visitors. “Documentary” doesn’t feel adequately descriptive for Natchez; I might prefer to call it a cinematic essay about people trying to make sense of the world, some more consciously than others. Unobtrusively observational, Herbert’s camera reveals rather than announces the stories of several people in that extraordinary town, orbiting its previously lucrative and now in need of evolution “pilgrimage tours.”

Some folks come to see how the Old South lived, which for many appears to mean not much more than how Scarlett O’Hara lived; there are women co-hosting the tours who wear hoop dresses without paying much attention to how their previous owners achieved social standing in the first place. Rev Tracy Collins, a Black minister and tour guide, doesn’t let his guests get away with the sanitized version of city history that limits itself to discussions of silverware and “service”. The stories of enslaved people are indivisible from the stories of these mansions. Shocking and tragic is the racist language and supremacist demeanor of David, an elderly white homeowner, who comes close to self-caricature. Yet more tragic is the fact that as a gay man in a homophobic society he has surely experienced marginalization, but being oppressed is no guarantee of solidarity with others more oppressed than you. It would have been easy for Herbert to just let David make a fool of himself; but we also see the effects of a diminishing neurological condition on his movement and voice. He is not a figure of mockery, but of humane confrontation.

Herbert also allows another Tracy, a woman in midlife who says she never felt truly beautiful until she put on the hoop dress. Condescension becomes something more like hope when we see her begin to reflect on the whitewashing of her city’s history as one of the largest slave markets; we’re helped by witnessing the pathos, post-divorce, of her saying that she’d rather have peace than wealth.

The refusal to demonize anyone is mirrored by Herbert’s willingness to portray two of her “characters” as brave in ways that count more often than under the spectacular circumstances which cinema more typically considers heroic. Rev Collins is narratively paired with Deborah Cosey a Black woman who operates an inn from a house in which enslaved people lived, naming some of the ancestors who inhabited the place she now stewards. Cosey catching a tear in her voice before saying “They made these bricks, you know” is the cinematic moment of the year so far. It also should have been the last moment of the film, which in its current form ends with a memorial attended by a multicultural audience, making things feel a little too neatly wrapped.

But that’s a small complaint — everything in this film belongs in it, and some of it represents a reality that has rarely been portrayed with such clarity. The mayor of Natchez seems to be more enlightened about the common good value of telling the whole story, that facing history is good for everyone. So what if that means facing your own complicity in the terrible deeds of your forebears? If what you hold has derived from the kidnapping, torture, and murder of even one person, wouldn’t you want to consider how to participate in repair of that curse?

Of course the you in that question will mean different things to different people. Some folks reading this are heirs to the harm done, and have spent their lives trying to heal, offering grace to those who have not yet acknowledged the harm. Some are working toward the transformation of the story that says some lives are worth more than others, that individualism matters more than community, and the myth of the self-made person. And some of us are both survivors of inherited trauma and hold resources we did not earn.

I’d like a northern Ireland film like Natchez, where the kaleidoscope of identity and experience would be named humanely, without overstating the responsibility of today’s leaders for yesterday’s horrors, nor understating the impact of those horrors, nor the proportion of responsibility. Herbert’s film is my favorite of the year thus far, and an example of what Thomas Flight is reaching for when he talks about how the movies have changed, but also what is still possible.

Watch Flight’s video essay here:

So much cinematic craft is deployed merely for storytelling (or spectacle) that doesn’t require much attention; the Kuleshov effect — the way cutting between two or more images creates meaning — is a power worthy of the most spiritually mature filmmakers.

Andrei Tarkovsky said that “the aim of art is to prepare a person for death,” but not in a morbid or nihilistic way. He was reaching for a way of saying that the only way to truly experience life is to accept the inevitability of death — death as a holy thing, a way of not taking ourselves for granted, of overthrowing monstrous power-over narratives in favor of prioritizing the miraculous simplicity of sharing among people, place, and planet.

We live in an era when movies are becoming more like television and television more like movies, and in which, as Flight implies, Barbie and Oppenheimer may light up the box office not because of their content or meaning, but because of their marketing. We may not expect another Jaws or The Exorcist - never mind a Schindler’s List - to project genuine cultural impact from inside a theater. We may mourn the grain of celluloid projection, the scarcity that made a night at the movies something special, and particularly the sense that watching with a captive audience of fellow humans conveyed a communal moment. But there are two things we can do to respond. The first is to support spaces where the wonder of film is being treated as just that - theaters committed to showing off the great works of cinema past and present in the best possible form, on the biggest possible screen. And the second is to recognize that cinema has “died” before - when sound came in, when color came in, when the Production Code came in (and went out), when Hitchcock died, when VHS arrived, when DVD arrived, when streaming arrived. Opera was once a populist activity; then it became an elitist one; now you can see The Metropolitan Opera at your local cinema for less than the price of three hours in a Manhattan parking lot. Things change. Not always entirely for the better, but the fact that there’s a PBS “documentary” available to watch for free on YouTube, and which demolishes the lies told in the highest-grossing film ever made; the fact that there’s a guy out there - a true amateur - one who loves what he’s doing who will devote himself to keeping the flame alive? Maybe cinema is just pretending to die, this time, again.

Watch Natchez here:

Kathleen Norris on THE PITT

My husband once said to a doctor, “I never get colds. I only get life-threatening conditions.” This wasn’t a joke. Over the years caregiving for him made me something of a connoisseur of emergency rooms, knowledge that has come in handy with other family members and also on the rare occasions when I’ve sought treatment myself. I learned a lot about how ERs work, why everything takes much longer than you think it should, and why it’s so important to establish a good rapport with hard-working and often harried nurses. They need all the help they can get.

My husband became a big fan of ER when the television series began in 1994, but I didn’t care to watch it. In all of our emergency room visits my husband was receiving medication to help him cope with his troubles, but I was taking everything in while I was stone sober. I didn’t want to revisit the noise, chaos, and drama of the typical emergency room, even in fictional form. My ignorance of the show did occasion one amusing moment. I was browsing in my favorite bookstore and overhead two women clerks talking about a handsome man named George, who sounded like a great guy. They went on and on, singing his praises, until I finally asked, “Who is this George you’re talking about?” They replied, “George Clooney. ” I replied, “Who the hell is George Clooney?” They were shocked, and I realized that all the time I was spending in Benedictine monasteries had put a big dent in my knowledge of contemporary culture.

My husband died many years ago, but when The Pitt series began and received much critical acclaim I resisted tuning in. When I finally started watching the first season, I quickly became addicted. Medical professionals have praised the program for its accuracy, and I have found that it reflects my own experience of emergency room physicians and nurses. These are people who are experts at making a fast and accurate diagnosis of the conditions presented to them by often fearful patients. But at their best they also realize they’re treating human beings. The Pitt recognizes that, and does an excellent job of demonstrating that even small gestures of kindness can humanize the intimidating atmosphere of an emergency room. The show is fast-paced but slows down to an almost unbearable pace when the charge nurse is with a young rape victim, demonstrating both calm efficiency and compassion as she puts together a rape kit for the police. It’s an intense scene that makes the audience better understand the trauma of rape.

The Pitt is notable for holding up a mirror to American society and its dysfunctional health care system. We see a crowded entry room where people will wait many hours to be seen by a physician. We meet hard-working people with no medical insurance who can’t afford the medications they need stay alive, but make too much money to qualify for Medicaid. We meet parents who have refused to vaccinate their child against measles and then won’t accept responsibility for the brain damage caused by the disease. We meet a man whose rural hospital had closed, so his son had to drive him a long distance for the care that saved his life. We see obese people who are used to being judged and rejected, respond with tears when they realize the medical staff truly cares for them and will do all they can to help. We see young medical students who are tempted to judge patients being reprimanded by more experienced doctors and nurses.

In the first season I was especially moved by one scene in which a doctor grows frustrated at being unable to communicate with an obviously bright young patient, but another doctor recognizes that the man is autistic. She’s on the spectrum herself, and when she enters his room, she turns off the fluorescent lights, and engages him in a quiet conversation. It’s a moment of true healing, the medicine of another person knowing what someone needs, and being willing to be present and listen.

The second season shows the staff coping with a daunting variety of medical issues, including one unforgettable, harrowing scene of a woman giving birth while suffering from pre-eclampsia, which has put her life and that of her fetus at risk. But in this season we learn more about the personal struggles of the staff, especially the burnout that comes from laboring with intensity over long hours. The scene in which one intern flatly refuses to continue to work once her twelve-hour shift is done has created an online discussion among real world physicians who say that the current system that pushes nurses and doctors to work overtime is a danger to them and their patients. On The Pitt we see that some staff members have sought counseling and healthy outlets to cope with burnout. But the director of the ER, Dr. Robby (a wonderful Noah Wyle), while he knows his job is killing him, resists asking for help, and has everyone — his staff and the fans of the show - worried about him. In the season’s final scene, he has a moment of calm that we hope will lead to healing.

One of my neighbors is a emergency room nurse who has worked night shifts for years. She’s told she loves her job, because when she goes to work she has no idea what to expect. I’m grateful for people like her who are willing to step up and be present for people in a crisis. And I hope The Pitt will serve to gain more respect for the medical crews who work long hours, and are always there for us, ready to provide emergency care when we need it.

The Pitt is on HBO.

Sirāt is an astonishing and unforgettable film. The word sirāt is an Arabic term meaning a way, a path, and also the bridge between heaven and hell. We are warned at the film’s outset that this bridge is both narrow and razor-sharp, and the movie more than fulfills that definition. The film is also a powerful reminder of the way that film can bring us into a world we may know little about — in this case that of the techno-nomads who go from rave to rave in the Moroccan desert - and make us realize that we’re on familiar ground after all. Human compassion, which might be considered the star of this film, knows no boundaries. And we learn that a rag-tag group of tattooed, fierce-looking punk ravers might be just the people we need to provide it.

The film opens with people setting up huge amplifiers for a rave, and I laughed when I saw that they were placed in front of the most spectacular massif I have ever seen, an enormous cliff wall of red rock. Its strata speaks of many thousands of years of geologic time, making the human beings partying in front of them seem comically small. For this film’s first fifteen minutes there is no dialogue, just a persistent electronic beat and a view of people dancing to it, moving spasmodically, as if in a trance, each in his or her own world. I thought, uncharitably, if this movie did nothing else for me, it would convince me to never attend a rave. Thankfully, I was in for a surprise.

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We’ve all heard the adage live each day as if it were your last; and that is certainly a nice poetic idea. However, as the philosopher Roman Krznaric points out, they’re not necessarily practically effective. I understand the idea of not wanting to waste the time that has been given me, but if I found out now that I was going to die today, I think I might spend too much of the day panicking to get much else done. Far more resonant with the actual circumstances of our lives might be to imagine what we might do if we knew we had six months to live. What would you do with those six months? What would you give up? With whom would you spend your time? What would you no longer tolerate? Whom would you forgive, and whose forgiveness would you seek? What project would you complete? What would you do for, and with, others?

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As the world’s population ages, the dementia suffered by many elderly people is in the news. Scientists study causes and offer suggestions for how to avoid it, or slow down its progress, and filmmakers are naturally drawn to dementia’s dramatic possibilities. There’s even one thriller, Memory, in which Liam Neeson portrays a hit man whose increasing forgetfulness puts his life in danger. But most films on the subject focus on the upheaval that increased mental decline inflicts on family relationships. In The Savages we meet two siblings who are suddenly called upon to place their father in a nursing home. Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman are compelling as a brother and sister long estranged from one another and their curmudgeonly father. As they work together to help him they are forced to confront old wounds and gain a new perspective on their lives. Theirs is a sad story leavened by the comedy that inevitably surfaces even in dire situations.

In Still Alice Julianne Moore offers a moving portrayal of a Columbia University professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. We witness her attempts to memorize words and install personal questions on her phone that she tries to answer every morning. But the disease is relentless, and her husband and children cope in very different ways with her decline. We leave her in good hands with a daughter, an actor, who reads her mother a section of the play Angels in America and then asks her what it’s about. By this time Alice can barely form words and speak, but she replies, “love.”

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Gareth Higgins - THINKING ABOUT CINEMA AND SPIRITUALITY

You gotta say something with a movie. Otherwise, what’s the point of making it? —Martin Scorsese

Cinema is nothing if not light. In its most life-giving forms, it illuminates not only the characters, images, and stories on screen but also those of us who are watching. In our book A Whole Life in Twelve Movies, we reflect cinematic light on the life cycle of a human being, from before birth to after death.

The book is rooted in the idea that a great film is what results when humane wisdom and grace—and technical and aesthetic craft operating at their highest frequencies—kiss each other, and that great cinema is for everyone.

Whether you are a seasoned movie lover or a dabbler, a long-term contemplative or an entry-level mystic, we hope that you will find something meaningful here for your life’s journey.

We are inviting you to a kind of liturgy for experiencing images, sounds, words, and stories in a sacramental way. This takes conscious intent and a bit of ritual, and with that in mind, we’re offering some principles that can help you go deeper into movies.

Movies are best experienced without too much analysis, but keep in mind that a film is not only about what it’s about but, as Roger Ebert said, how it’s about what it’s about. A story may matter less than image, sound, and the invitation to let the film change you. That said, for narrative films with

“something to say,” consider the following questions as you watch:

Perspective

Whose point of view is being presented: who gets to speak, and who doesn’t?

Context and Consequences

How are motivations, actions, and consequences depicted? The portrayal of violence, close relationships, and societal change are three good examples of where this question can be useful. Does the movie move us to value life or to diminish it?

Learning

What did you not know before seeing this movie?

Inspiration

What do you want more of or less of after watching it?

Seeing

Cinema should be approached differently than literature or music. See movies with the best screen and sound and let your eyes wander. Who or what dominates the frame? Who is looking at whom? What colors and contrasts emerge? How does the light dance? What do you see?

Embodiment

Reflect on how a movie can embody its theme—Paterson (about a poet, above) has the rhythm of a poem; Requiem for a Dream (about desperation) feels like a nightmare; Into Great Silence (about a monastery) is like a meditation.

Origin

Knowing something about where the movie comes from can enhance or confuse. For instance, Godfrey Reggio has often said that he isn’t sure what his masterpiece, Koyaanisqatsi, is about, and Paul Schrader takes a more pessimistic view of his First Reformed than I do; but knowing that Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel were lovers before they were costars in The Pot-au-Feu deepened my engagement with that film’s sketch of love and loss. And Kathleen says that knowing director Hirokazu Kore-eda included both nonactors and professionals in After Life enhanced her enjoyment of the film.

“Facts”

A movie does not have to be “realistic” to be truthful.

You

Different people will respond in different ways to the same movie because no one carries the same story and perspective. There is no one correct response to a film. Just bring your open heart and curious mind, respecting how the movie began as someone else’s dream. Let it connect with your memories, hopes, pain, and possibilities.

And remember: Sometimes a movie is just a movie. It doesn’t have to have a “story” to be transcendent, and trying to make sense of it all can dilute the experience of watching. A movie is sometimes best enjoyed by allowing it to unfold, mingle with our subconscious, and take us out into the world of wonder and shadow with something new.

It’s worth noting that Soul Telegram and A Whole Life in Twelve Movies are, of course, not about everything that happens in a life but rather some of the stages and themes that usually occur as we age. It’s also not a comprehensive overview of cinema. We omit many films and themes that could easily be included, but we hope that our selection is a meaningful starting point. We are inviting you into a conversation about how to be and how to become. As the Indian American director Mira Nair says, it is vital that we try to “transcend our boundaries with the other”—to imagine the world through the eyes of people who have different experiences of life. Seeing ourselves mirrored by others enables us to grow and to feel less alone. With that in mind, we have consciously attempted to offer a range of movies from different parts of the world and perspectives.

Filmmaking is a collaborative art that emerged with the assumption that watching would be a shared experience. Even though how we watch movies has changed, there’s something inherently communal in engaging a film that has been viewed by people around the world.

Kathleen and I are both spiritual seekers, and we assume that if you’re reading this, you’re one too. And while she and I each come from a religious tradition, A Whole Life in Twelve Movies (and Soul Telegram) is intended for anyone open to how cinema can illuminate the spiritual path.

As spirituality is such a vague and ill-defined term, we want to make a brief statement about how we understand the word. One favorite definition comes from the Jesuit theologian Stephen Sundborg: “lived relationship with mystery,” to which we’d add, leading us to grow in the experience of union with love. A love worthy of the name is not at all vague but consists of concrete actions taken for the sake of the good. We believe that the films we’ve chosen reflect spirituality in this sense, answering our basic need for art that’s steeped in the mystery of life, offering hope without denying real human suffering.

A Whole Life in Twelve Movies imagines the arc of a life’s journey, from waiting to be born until after death, allowing us to explore how cinematic artists have pondered the meaning of existence. We hope to engage you in a conversation about how to take life seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.

But we suggest that with every movie you begin with the same three questions:

What do you remember most about the movie—what stands out for you?

What was a highlight for you, and what was a challenge?

What questions does the film raise for your own life or for the world as you see it?

*Extracted from A Whole Life in Twelve Movies: A Cinematic Journey to a Deeper Spirituality, published by Baker Books.

Kathleen Norris on ROGER EBERT, LIFE ITSELF

For many years Roger Ebert was my go-to movie critic, as I appreciated the way he often focused in a movie’s meaning. Life Itself is a remarkable documentary that begins as a conventional bio-pic about Ebert and ends up providing the most realistic depiction I’ve ever seen of the sacred stillness that permeates a hospital room when a loved one is dying. Ebert had admired the director and producer Steve James for years, giving his 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams (produced with Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert), about two young aspiring basketball players from inner city Chicago, four stars, and describing it as “a movie that shows what movies are for, [making] us think in new ways about the world around us.” When James approached him about making a film near the end of his life, after he’d endured drastic surgeries for throat and jaw cancer Ebert readily agreed.

We learn that even in childhood Ebert was dedicated to writing and publishing, creating a neighborhood newspaper that a he sold door to door. Later he edited the newspaper at the University of Illinois, and after graduating began writing a sports column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Ebert didn’t intend write about movies, but when the paper’s film writer left, he was assigned to the task. His first review was of The Graduate, and he says he benefitted greatly from stumbling into one of the greatest eras of American cinema. He was an early supporter of the emerging independent director Martin Scorsese. On seeing Scorsese’s first film Ebert predicted that the director would become an American Fellini. Scorsese, who is interviewed in the documentary, says that Ebert’s style of film criticism “made it possible for a larger audience to appreciate film as an art form,” and that he could do this because of his genuine love for film. Directors Werner Herzog and Ana DuVernay also offer comments about what Ebert’s work has meant to them.

We learn that the pairing of Ebert with Gene Siskel was considered a scandal in Chicago, as the Sun-Times was a working class newspaper and the Chicago Tribune appealed to the elite. That two journalists in Chicago were offering film criticism on television also upset highbrow critics in New York and Los Angeles, and for years those cities were the only markets that didn’t carry the program. We see outtakes of Ebert and Siskel growing exasperated with each other and trading potent insults. The two men eventually formed a grudging friendship, as they realized that their program needed both of them.

For years Ebert was a hard-drinking journalist, and formed no lasting attachments. That ended when he met businesswoman Chaz Hammel at an AA meeting. They were married for twenty-one years until his death. Chaz’s deep love for him is evident in this film, as she accompanies him through rounds of medical treatments and rehab. One scene in the film is extremely difficult to watch, as Ebert endures the suctioning of liquids from his lungs. But he remains in good spirits, and Chaz takes it all in stride.

It’s clear that Chaz is one reason Ebert found the strength, when surgery left him unable to eat and drink normally, or to speak (except through his computer), to use that deprivation to focus on his writing. He made his last blog post the day before he died, saying farewell and thanking readers “for going on this journey with me.”

I believe this film could help people understand and accept the harsh realities that come with cancer treatments and impending death. Chaz had agreed with Roger’s decision to stop having surgeries, but it was harder when he told her, “I’m beginning to feel trapped inside. I’ve had a beautiful life - you must let me go.” Her description of the serenity that descended on the hospital room as Ebert was dying rings true to my own experience, as I was fortunate to be with my husband when he died..

Full disclosure: Chaz and Roger Ebert became family friends when they discovered my father’s band, The New Orleans Jazz Band of Hawaii, that was then playing in a Waikiki cabaret five nights a week. When Roger became a fixture at an annual film festival in Honolulu, he would come to hear the band every night he was free. I have a cherished memory of having lunch with him and my parents at their senior living residence. Roger was in town to give a talk on Vertigo at the festival, but that afternoon he gave a free presentation to the seniors, many of whom remembered seeing the film in the 1950’s. We all received a great education in cinema as Roger showed clips and discussed Hitchcock’s framing of the shots.

Roger told us that he had tried to interest a filmmaker friend in making a documentary on my dad’s band, as it wasn’t only providing great music, it had become the center of a community of locals and tourists alike. My dad, the son and grandson of Methodist pastors, regarded his music as a ministry, and it showed. Roger regretted that he didn’t succeed in getting that film made, and so do I. I have a film running through my mind of couples who had clearly been dancing together for years doing the Balboa — a lively dance from the early 1930’s — to the band’s music. In the film we learn that Ebert loved the last lines of The Great Gatsby, and as I picture those dancers and hear my father’s music, those words from the novel seem appropriate: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Life Itself (2014; directed by Stephen James). Streaming on a variety of platforms, including Amazon Prime, Apple TV, tubi, Roku, and Hoopla.

I recently watched two films that boldly defy the conventions of documentary filmmaking. I found them absorbing, but I sense that some viewers might dismiss them as chaotic or even boring. Their structure may be loosey-goosey, but I believe they’re worth a look.

Pompei: Below the Clouds opens with a view of Vesuvius, the imposing volcano that looms over Naples. Clouds surround its peak, smoke comes out of vents, and soil shifts on a steep slope. We see the haunting forms of the people of Pompei, who were suddenly covered by hot ash when Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. Men, women, and children were preserved by the ash as they were attempting to run from the disaster, or embracing one another as the ash flow overtook them.

This film doesn’t dwell on them; it’s more concerned with the contemporary scientists who are excavating Pompei, explaining the pyroclastic flow, a cascade of hot gas, ash, and volcanic rock that buried the town nearly a mile deep over a twenty hour period. The curator of an underground storage facility housing artifacts recovered from villas in the ancient city says, “Here we enter eternity.” The statues are especially haunting: a young woman with an elaborate braided hairdo, a young man flexing his muscles. We gasp at the beauty of an elaborate mosaic floor. Looking over what she terms “the mysterious room,” the curator regards its assortment of uncatalogued items as evidence that, “time preserves everything, destroys everything, and then comes to us in an unexpected way.”

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