Uncut Gems Directed by the Safdie brothers Its brilliance lies in Denis’s understanding that the difference between these two extreme polarities is really nothing at all. The movie is brutal and uncompromising, and, as it pushes out the other side of its provocations, tender and surpassingly humane. Frankenstein playing games of life and death with her crew’s precious bodily fluids-writhing naked in her ship’s metallic “fuckbox” splits the difference between the pornographic and the avant-garde without asking us to choose or giving us a second to catch our breath. Denis is not a shy artist: The image of Juliette Binoche’s witchy mad scientist-a distaff Dr. Not since Alien has interstellar travel been so gooey. No matter how far its characters get blasted into the outer-space equivalent of death row, they can’t escape themselves or transcend their flawed, gnarled, biological realities. With apologies to James Gray’s intermittently visionary Ad Astra, High Life stands as the downbeat science-fiction movie of the year, and also of this young millennium thus far. And the film’s lushness-in its costumes, camera work, and rambunctious physicality-confirms Gerwig as one of the most exciting filmmakers of her generation. But the independence and romantic ambivalence and steam engine of creativity that defines Jo March (a famished Saoirse Ronan) makes her feel precisely like a teleported Gerwig heroine. Sprawling, ambitious reconfigurations of classic literature is the sort of thing we’re not supposed to get anymore, and Gerwig, who has never appeared in or made anything that isn’t modern, would seem an unlikely auteur for movies of the kind. What better way to explore complex, urgent questions about power, money, and love than through Louisa May Alcott’s 150-year-old novel? Gerwig has vivisected the book, removing organs and rearranging their biological structure to create something newly vital. (And it is usually a man.) Writer-director Greta Gerwig has an answer for that. It’d make a helluva double feature with Marriage Story, or The Souvenir. But beyond the high-gore kills and self-hating political circumspection, Midsommar is a movie about ignoring what’s right in front of you-taking a partner for granted or refusing to look at your own ghoulish impulses. The rube Americans who visit, with hopes of sex and academia, pay the price for their touristic arrogance. The runic symbols and polygon temples and extravagant flower sculptures give the film a mesmerizing visual signature and nauseous energy-the commune is hell in broad daylight, The Truly Bad Place. Midsommar expands, to a hidden commune in Sweden with some archaic-er, barbaric-practices. His first film, the surprise hit Hereditary, was bound mostly to a family from hell. Aster is a dastardly filmmaker, a sadistic, hilarious creator of painful circumstance and unerring dread. Beautiful country, beatific people, an eerie calm all across the land-the perfect setting for madness. Like Dani, the lead figure in Aster’s second feature film, I too spent my summer in Sweden.
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