film roundup
ThsKimi Souvenir. Photo courtesy A24
Kimi (Dir. Steven Soderbergh). Starring: Zoë Kravitz, Erika Christensen, Rita Wilson. You could do worse for a Covid-era genre piece than Steven Soderbergh’s latest, an HBOMax exclusive that has style to spare and a story, penned by David Koepp, that feels like a mid’90s-thriller throwback. Zoë Kravitz stars as agoraphobic techie Angela Childs, who monitors the voice commands given by random consumers to their Kimis (this movie’s version of Amazon Echo). One night she hears what sounds like a murder and must overcome her fear of leaving her apartment during a pandemic, as well as several other obstacles, to report it. The initial stretch in Angela’s apartment is rather dull, despite Soderbergh’s attempts to jazz things up aurally and visually (he does make great use of noisecancelling headphone audio dropouts to put us more fully in his protagonist’s headspace). When Angela finally leaves home, the film becomes more engrossing, mainly because it leans hard into her paranoid perspective. It’s nearly enough to make you forgive the trio of Euro-trash villains who seem like they’ve been transplanted from a low-rent DTV thriller of another era. [R] HHH Nitram (Dir. Justin Kurzel). Starring: Caleb 12
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Landry Jones, Judy Davis, Anthony LaPaglia, Essie Davis. Caleb Landry Jones was rightfully awarded at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance in this disturbing character study, a dramatic re-enactment of the events leading up to the 1996 Port Arthur shooting massacre in Tasmania. Jones plays the burgeoning mass killer, nicknamed Nitram, whose spree is never shown onscreen. The film instead aims to demystify the tabloid elements of his life, particularly his affair with a Grey Gardens-like socialite (Essie Davis), which left him flush with cash upon the woman’s unexpected death. Director Justin Kurzel’s style isn’t exactly nitty-gritty verité. The sound design is frequently abrasive and the saturated coloring of scenes just a hair’s breadth removed from garish. It’s all dangerously, often thrillingly close to giallo. Jones’s untamed peculiarity is matched scene for scene by costar Judy Davis as Nitram’s mother, a steely woman who has made denial her defensive default mode. Davis’s world-weary opacity has rarely been utilized this effectively. [N/R] HHHH Petite Maman (Dir. Céline Sciamma). Starring: Joséphine Sanz, Gabrielle Sanz, Nina Meurisse. This gentle-to-a-fault fantasy from
KEITH UHLICH
French writer-director Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) stars sisters Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz as Nelly and Marion, two youngsters who strike up a friendship after crossing paths in the woods. Nelly is staying with her parents (Nina Meurisse and Stéphane Varupenne) at the family cabin, which they’re cleaning out after the death of her grandmother. Marion resides with her own mother in another cabin (one strangely similar to Nelly’s) where she is awaiting a hopefully life-saving operation. There’s a magical-mystical connection between the two girls that is revealed by midpoint, and which is a bit too Shyamalan-lite for this viewer’s taste. The low-key nature of the film works against it at moments and for it at others, though the Sanz siblings do appreciably bear the weight of the themes Sciamma is exploring, in particular the quite literal timelessness of generational kinship. [N/R] HHH The Souvenir: Part II (Dir. Joanna Hogg). Starring: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tilda Swinton, Richard Ayoade. Writer-director Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical followup to her 2019 feature The Souvenir is obvious where the former was opaque. That’s not necessarily a detriment, and it could even be seen as intentional since film student Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is herself artistically exploring the very real fallout of her relationship with older drug addict Anthony (Tom Burke, co-star of the first movie, who cameos here). The layers of aesthetic and thematic artifice are meant to be raw, ragged—a heady jumble of the poetic and the prosaic. What’s best here, though, are the moments that feel directly ripped from life, like a scene in which Julie accidentally breaks a piece of pottery created by her mother (Tilda Swinton). Despite the pair’s mild-mannered apologetics, the world seems to shift off its axis. Sequences of this sort have a lot more power than the increasingly meta ones on Julie’s various movie sets, though Richard Ayoade is tremendous fun as a flamboyant director modeled on Absolute Beginners helmer Julien Temple. [R] HHH n
