I. 

[T]he picture opened for the New York public at the Liberty Theatre, with a top admission price of two dollars a seat [approximately $65 in 2025]. The motion picture had taken its place on a parity with the drama.

— Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights

II.

This film aspires to dream of a world that transcends hate. It is an abject failure, and the work of cinema that I respect the least. 

– Cormac Jones

III.

One crude but unquestionable indication of his greatness was his power to create permanent images. All through his work there are images which are as impossible to forget, once you have seen them

…

He was a great primitive poet, a man capable, as only great and primitive artists can be, of intuitively perceiving and perfecting the tremendous magical images that underlie the memory and imagination of entire peoples. All these… have a dreamlike absoluteness which, indeed, cradles and suffuses the whole film

...

All these images…have a sort of crude sublimity which nobody else in movies has managed to achieve

— James Agee

Three Reasons: Michael Cimino

A fast-moving, Citizen Kane-style investigative biography of the man, Price of a Vision (2022), has reignited my fascination with Michael Cimino, black sheep of ‘New Hollywood’. The financial disaster of his masterpiece Heaven’s Gate (1980) is often credited with ending a golden age of creative freedom for major Hollywood filmmakers that began in the mid 1960s* — analogous to the death of the hippie movement with Ronald Reagan’s election that same year. In lieu of reading that book I watched The Sunchaser (1996), Cimino’s last film and an unintended swan song. He was only 56 when he directed it, and lived another 20 years, but could never get the next project off the ground before his death. He lived his final years as a hermit in Beverley Hills, rejected by the town that had once showered him with Oscars for The Deer Hunter. He must have felt secure in the company of D.W. Griffith, Erich Von Stroheim and Orson Welles, geniuses who shared a similar fate.

In the style of Criterion, who undertook the 2012 restoration of Heaven’s Gate with Cimino’s assistance before his passing, here are three reasons to love Cimino, the man and his films.

Male ethnologist

Cimino’s films are a voracious investigation of male humanity in all of its protean forms — nation, class, profession, race, age. He’ll follow the yuppie L.A. surgeon or the Pennsylvania steel worker all the same. There is therefore no “pet” milieu, landscape or social type that Cimino's films return to again and again, like PTA with 20th-century Southern California, John Ford with the dust and towering rocks of Monument Valley, or Scorsese with his bickering urban hoodlums. Incidentally, Cimino passes through all three of these in The Sunchaser alone, alongside a hundred other forms, other modalities. His incredible range in subject matter makes his relatively small filmography appear much greater than it is, a cinematic tromp l’oeil. Other filmmakers with a comparable ‘mosaic’ of humanity — Altman, Kubrick, Hawks — took 15, 30, 50 films to achieve the impression Cimino did in eight.

A painter's eye

His far-ranging explorations of humanity don’t feel like shallow tourism, either. Everything Cimino’s camera captures gives the impression of a deep, earthy appreciation; its representation is always “correct.” There is a quote from the painter Cezanne: “the day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.” Cimino, himself a painter and notorious perfectionist, was one of those poets whose work would trick even the Plato of Ion: everything he presents in his films has, whether illusory or not, a lived-in, researched quality, as if he truly knew that prop, setting, or actor before he filmed it. In The Sunchaser, when Cimino films the graceful turn of a surgeon’s sports car pulling into work, or a sticker of Tweety Bird on his daughter’s rain-soaked umbrella, there is an assuredness and an originality to these details that makes us believe in the phenomenology of a careerist big-shot or a young girl. It’s unsurprising to hear from Cimino’s collaborators that he would drive around with them for hours showing landscapes he wanted to use in his films, when the moment was just right for it, like a painter deliberating his colours.

Transcendence

Hollywood cinema, for the sake of commerciality, always belongs to classifiable genres. It is up to the director’s talent whether their film stays in this generic fencing, giving at best minor pleasures through the competent execution of surface-level action, or jumps the fence and expresses something deeper about what it’s like to be human, which is where the real aesthetic experience begins. Cimino is firmly in the latter camp. Despite his avowed admiration of the 1940s’ ‘anonymous’ craftsman-directors, he was never content to simply fulfill a genre. He always must find a way to lift his films into the sublime. His formula for this is to create a violent dialectic between disparate cultures — American and Vietnamese (The Deer Hunter), American and Chinese (Year of the Dragon), White and Indian (The Sunchaser) — so as to reveal beneath them an ultimate human dignity that renders our differences (over which we fight, yell, kill) trivial. It’s people who are at the centre of these films, not politics or semiotic games of genre. That’s film-nerd stuff. This was always the insistence of Cimino, the painter and architect who adopted the cinema on a whim and created some of its greatest masterpieces.

* This, like all histories that attribute some paradigm shift to a single figure, is quite reductive. You only need to glance at contemporaneous boondoggles from Scorsese (New York, New York), Coppola (One From The Heart), Altman (Quintet) and Bogdanovich (At Long Last Love) to reach the conclusion that, if indeed the studios were frightened by the monomaniacal excesses of certain high-profile directors into specializing in impersonal, commercially safe blockbusters, Cimino is not the only one to blame.

Luke Cihra

Casualties of War (1989): As is typical of De Palma, it begins with Hitchcock, specifically Vertigo (1958): a Vietnam vet nodding off on the San Francisco streetcar sees the lookalike of a peasant girl he saw murdered during the war. He (Michael J. Fox) falls back asleep and has a "bad dream" recapitulating this sorry episode in American history, when young soldiers stole away a Vietnamese girl in the night for sick pleasure and shot her after she had served a purpose. The protagonist is the one character in his company who protests against this, but by a kind of Faustian tie to his nation (he detests his comrades' actions, but is afraid to lose his privilege as an American by rebelling against military hierarchy) he proves impotent in stopping it. 

If the mark of De Palma's best films is his self-contained visual sequences, often wordless, of stylistic bravura that imbue each shot or camera flourish with an eternity of tension, this film has to be considered disappointing. Its lasting impression for me is mostly declamatory arguments about ethics between sweaty actors standing around in jungle brush. I didn't know De Palma could be so self-serious. The film's constant need for audience identification in the form of Michael J. Fox's guilty, head-shaking liberal moral-compass is a surprising blunder for a veteran filmmaker – perhaps driven by fear of a negative reception from the American public. It didn't work either way: the movie was not a hit.

Score: 2.5/5

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007): A seething, Karamazovian melodrama by octogenarian Sydney Lumet about two unhappy white-collar brothers whose scheme to rob their parents’ jewelry store goes horribly wrong. The father relentlessly investigates the crime in the aftermath, unaware that he is looking for his own children. As some Letterboxd reviews note, the script seems indebted to the Coen Brothers’ post-modern crime stories of flawed, unremarkable people from generic American milieus interconnected in violent webs of monetary greed. The ugly, “gooey” quality of the image, thanks to its 2000s digital intermediate process, also helps its resemblance to the Coens’ contemporaneous films, No Country for Old Men (2007) and Burn After Reading (2008). What I prefer about Lumet’s film is that these flawed characters are still treated with an air of tragedy as opposed to disdain, as humans with some subtlety, some moral centre, some emotional and behavioural modulation, as opposed to the alienating caricatures that pervade much of the Coens’ work (No Country is an exception), whose clumsiness and stupidity is something to be sneered at. Compare William H. Macy’s character in Fargo to Ethan Hawke’s in this, for example. I like humanist art.

What makes the film great is not just the acting, which one would expect with this director and these performers, but wise old Lumet’s Polanski-like ability to contain abysmal, demonic suffering and evil in benign forms — an interrogative fist balled on a table or stones poured on a glass coffee table. Unlike Polanski, however, Lumet has a greater emotional range, balancing the abyss with the touching: the sad image of Hawke and Hoffman in the latter’s office, laughing in daylight over their doomed plans as Hoffman sits perched on his desk like Mephistopheles, will not be forgotten by this viewer.

Where the film is less successful is its structure: the film is told non-linearly, alternating between the perspectives of multiple characters before, during and after the robbery. While I understand the vision of this — the robbery happens early on and the rest of the film is essentially a dirge for these characters — the film loses some of its tension through this discursiveness and is not as riveting as it could have been. The editing transitions between perspectives also are unaccountably chintzy. These are fitting flaws for Lumet, a talented director but not one free of failure throughout his career.

Score: 3.5/5

Blackboard Jungle (1955): An idealistic war veteran-turned-schoolteacher (Glenn Ford) takes work at a vocational school in inner-city New York. His class of teenage boys is dysfunctional and violent: on his first day, a student pelts a baseball at his head, and he prevents a rape in the library after-hours. The older faculty seem resigned to let this situation continue. On the school’s halls are hung army recruitment posters. 

The film is mostly recognized today as a relic of 1950s American anxiety about juvenile delinquency. However, as the director-writer himself stated, its point is not really an exploitation of social issues, nor a documentary look at inner-city schools (the exteriors are filmed on MGM’s backlot) as it was received at the time. At its core, it is simply a well-filmed play about a man trying to bring knowledge to a resistant mob. (The numerous allusions to Christ made throughout the film aren’t a coincidence.) Richard Brooks, who began in the theatre like many good Hollywood directors of that time, brings out the excellence of his actors with blocking, framing, and camera movement that is always finely tuned to the emotional gridlock and power dynamics between adults and youth. For the most part, it’s good drama, although at times the filmmakers’ keen civic conscience does becomes too visible and results in preachiness. The climax sees one of the delinquent students incapacitated by a classmate jousting an American flagpole against their chest. There is little sarcasm to be found in this moment, that’s just how the movie is. The anarchic energy of Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” played over the opening credits announces a more subversive film that never really arrives.

Score: 3/5

Something quite different from Brooks’ Hollywood stylization is Der Lehrerzimmer (2023), which was nominated for the Best International Language Film Oscar. As opposed to the transparent, "democratic" mise-en-scene of classical Hollywood, this director has opted for a suffocatingly parochial visual combo of a 1.35 aspect ratio and shallow depth of field. Blackboard Jungle depicts its environment as a literal battlefield, while Der Lehrerzimmer, with a touch of Kafka, depicts public school as a bureaucratic nightmare creating blind abuse and pain between student, parents, and teachers. 

A wave of unsolved thefts is being investigated by the faculty at a German public school. One young teacher, taking matters into her own hands, secretly records her unattended jacket in the teachers’ lounge to catch the thief. She gets what appears to be the blouse sleeve of a front-office lady rifling through her belongings. However, the woman's face is not shown in the footage, and due to several strategic blunders by the faculty she is able to deny culpability and press charges against the school. At stake in the ensuing conflict is the ruin of the young teacher and the accused woman’s bright young son, Oscar, who is in the teacher’s class and whose mind is unsettled by the whole affair.

To me the film has three glaring issues. The first is a lack of visual imagination. The second is the lack of transcendence in the story: the director, wanting to avoid sensationalist cliché, makes the film’s crisis rather humdrum. I don't see why this can't be a valid idea, but here it does not come off successfully, and the film has a bit of a ‘so what’ feeling. By the end – spoilers – the kid has to switch schools and maybe there’s a lawsuit incoming. Big deal. Thirdly, the modernist soundtrack is overused as a crutch. I was reminded of fellow German Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which also overuses its soundtrack to give a sense of dramatic unity that isn’t really there.

Score: 2/5

Aftersun (2022): A feeble navel-gazer in the vein of A Real Pain (2024), films that dress up their weakness as cinema with sentimental depictions of depression, trauma, and familial issues, in a desperate bid to resonate with their audience. For people who watch cinema to see themselves depicted on screen, these films tick all the boxes: reading their positive Letterboxd reviews feels like sitting through a series of therapy sessions. 

Aftersun is a woman's recollection – through video recordings, memory, and imagination – of the resort holiday she went on with her dad when she was 11 just before, we're led to assume, he committed suicide. This story-inside-the-story is a kind of coming-of-age mixed with a ghost mystery. On one hand there is Sophie's own experience of the holiday, as a girl who wants to act mature but doesn't yet comprehend her queer sexuality; on the other hand, there is her imagined experience of the holiday for her dead father, who she believes was quietly struggling with depression. Each look, gesture, and spoken phrase by the father, perceived naively by the young Sophie, becomes a gnomic clue to his fate. These two themes are intertwined by Sophie's limitation in understanding the pains and desires hidden in the recesses of the mind – her sexuality as a child, now her father's torment – that don’t emerge until later, or maybe never, like scuba goggles at the bottom of an ocean. Visually, Wells tries to express this idea through a lot of insipid symbolism, such as the aforementioned googles, or toothpaste spat on a bathroom mirror in private anger that lingers after the father walks out of frame (please...). The story is supposedly based on Wells' own childhood – to add another layer of sentimentality – but a sense of punctum in the images, that poignant 'prick' of certain images from our youth that makes them stick in our heads years later, is rarely achieved. For the most part it just looks like another A24 movie – more Instagram-like than usual due to its fragmented, stream-of-consciousness form that is ready-made for a "cinematography compilation". What makes the film watchable is its two lead actors who create a realistic and charming simulacrum of a father-daughter relationship.

Score: 2/5

Challengers (2024): I thought of Raging Bull, with some Liberty Valance sprinkled in – the two films probably entering my mind for their flashback structure. A punk and a dandy vie for the same woman, the latter eventually gets her but the former haunts them. This is the Ford aspect. The Scorsese aspect extends to the flashy style meant to portray the intense psychology of an athlete, the repetitive dramaturgy, and the idea of containing the film inside a New Rochelle, New York Challenger event, like Jake LaMotta in his dressing room about to recite Shakespeare to old ladies at the Barbizon Hotel.

The theme of this film, as has been well said by everyone, is a trio who inextricably complete eachother through aggressive, sexualized rivalry; "hitting a ball with a racket," as the characters repeatedly disparage tennis, is merely a convenient medium for their passions. I should say that the third, much less admirable film this reminded me of is The Substance: sex, repetition, the blaring lack of subtlety, the way it feels too fast and too long at the same time. The difference is Fargeat's visual choices and direction of actors are horribly vulgar and academic, whereas Guadagnino's are competent and watchable. 

I think I was unreservedly liking the film up to and including the scene in the motel room, where "the cards are dealt" irrevocably for the three characters, so to speak. Once the film is done building up its idea, the remainder felt like the same scene repeated fifteen times, of two characters having an interaction that is simultaneously resentful and horny. Gen. Z cinema is 'hockey romance' shot like Zack Snyder and it's beautiful.

Score: 2.5

Pearl (2022) is a young woman of German parentage living on a frugal Texas farm in 1918: her mother is a tyrant and her father is completely paraplegic from the Spanish Flu, such that he usually appears dead seated in his wheelchair. She is lonely, married to a doughboy from a well-to-do family who left her behind to enlist and fight overseas. Watching dancers in 'the pictures' is her escape from small-town banality; she pines to leave the farm and pursue stardom. Her mother disapproves and denies her her dream, along with her other private 'hobby', releases of libido and violence toward her father, livestock, and a scarecrow. The result of this is Pearl murdering her Teutonic parents, the bohemian film projectionist from France she has an affair with, and her All-American sister-in-law in the space of a day on "Powderkeg Farm." Her husband returns from Europe unscathed to find this scene.

Behind all of the psychology, which is what most people seem fixated on, the joke underlying the film is that more people died from Spanish Influenza than the First World War itself. In this sense the defining image is of a suckling pig fit for Norman Rockwell festering with maggots, or a man bleeding to death in his car with rolling green hills and a red picturesque barn in the background. Ti West is nowhere near a visual stylist, but he knows that he isn't, and films all of this with a solid simplicity that coheres with the wind-blowing-in-a-dead-cornfield atmosphere and raises him above most pretentious A24 directors.

West is a bit philistine, though, which can be rankling. His choice to ironically couch Pearl in a phony "old movie" tone is poorly executed and also historically inaccurate. The film's opening parodies colourful Hollywood fantasies like Oklahoma! (1955) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) as a reflection of Pearl's movie star dreams, before bizarrely revealing that the story actually takes place in 1918, so the scene makes no sense. He also seems to think that silent movies are inherently scary. Definitely a minor director, but I think this has warmed me to him.

Score: 3/5

Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

Rusalka were beautiful leaf-clad Siren-like femmes fatales spirits of the lakes of the northern Slavs. They enticed men to their watery graves and tickled people to death. – The Oxford Companion to World Mythology (2005)

I once read that Francois Truffaut thought a critic must see a film at least three times before reviewing it, or else issue an apology to his readers. For at least half of my first viewing of Leave Her to Heaven, my impression was guilt-ridden boredom at such splendid cinematography and scenographic detail being dropped on the floor like fine china by staid direction and a shallow script. This unusual pairing of Technicolor and film noir is about the near-ruination of a novelist, Richard Harland, by the voraciously possessive woman he marries, Ellen (Gene Tierney), who takes a romantic interest in him because he resembles her recently deceased father. Ellen coldly destroys those who get between her and her husband. Danny, the writer's polio-suffering younger brother whom he dotes on, is drowned in a lake. Later on, she throws herself down a flight of stairs to abort her unborn child, believing that the pregnancy is distancing her from Richard. When Richard finally decides to leave her, she kills herself and frames him, along with her sister who loves him, for murder, to ensure that he never replaces her. Her ploy is unsuccessful but Richard is imprisoned for two years.

It was during this suicidal act in the last 15 minutes where I started to suspect a film much better than I initially thought. Before, I had been following the plot too materially, as a shocking story of domestic murder. From the shot above, where Richard strains to unclasp Ellen's just-deceased hand from his, not knowing she is about to frame him from the grave, I realized a much greater, metaphysical power to the film. It is about a love that is so obsessive it scorns the mortal world and desires to overcome death: Ellen destroys the living (brother-in-law, sister, the child inside her, Richard, even herself) to resurrect the dead (her father's image, her tie to Richard). The sibling of this film is called Vertigo (1958). Hitchcock's film is better, however, because of the source of this love that aims to cheat death. Scottie's obsession comes from the desire to revive a lover and a romance that died prematurely; a very human sentiment taken too far becomes ghoulish and ultimately self-defeating. On the other hand, Ellen’s obsession is founded in a Freudian gimmick, the so-called Electra Complex, and is manifested in extremely sensational acts of violence, which cheapens the affair by comparison. She's unrealistic on purpose, in fairness to the film, I just find this less interesting than Hitchcock's approach. As I alluded to in the beginning, Ellen should be understood as mythological, as Tierney's expressionistic performance affirms. 

Understanding the film in this form, Stahl's mise-en-scene that seemed merely ornamental at first now carries an unmistakable weight of fatalism, ghostliness, and dread in every one of its meticulous constellations of light, colour, props, angles, and blocking. 

Score: 3.5/4