FILM ROUNDUP

KEITH UHLICH

Benediction (Dir. Terence Davies). Starring: Jack Lowden, Jeremy Irvine, Peter Capaldi. The eventful and often chaotic life of English poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden when young, Peter Capaldi when old) makes for a perfect fit with the elegant, emotionally turbulent aesthetic of writer-director Terence Davies. This is the British auteur’s most explicitly queer film since his early autobiographical shorts Children, Madonna and Child and Death and Transfiguration, one that mixes catty barbs (describing Sassoon’s work, a character suggests it has moved from “the sublime to the meticulous”) with crestfallen visages (as in his Emily Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion, Davies uses digital morphs to show the horrific toll the years can take on human flesh). Lowden and Capaldi are both superb embodiments of the two poles of Sassoon’s life, which pit the passions of youth against the Passion of Christ—fertile ground to mine for the Catholic-raised Davies. As with all the director’s work, the tragic arc of the subject’s existence somehow manages to be elating, rapturous despite the copious ruts. [PG-13] HHHH1/2

Crimes of the Future (Dir. David Cronenberg). Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart. Nobody makes a dystopian near-future quite as sexy as writer-director David Cronenberg. His latest skin crawler-cum-flesh tingler is set in a world desolated by climate change and other ills and focuses on Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), who has extraneous organs removed from his body as a kind of performance art. Caprice (Léa Seydoux), his partner in all senses of the term, supervises these congregational operations, while fangirlish bureaucrat Timlin (Kristen Stewart) vacillates between policing and reveling in Tenser’s act. Cronenbergian images and themes abound (you won’t soon forget the dancer with human ears sewn over his entire body). Though at heart, this is the tale of artists (Tenser onscreen, Cronenberg off) rediscovering their creative passions, a pair of spiritual rebirths to which the state of the world is entirely incidental. [R] HHHH Elvis (Dir. Baz Luhrmann). Starring: Tom Hanks, Austin Butler, Olivia DeJonge. Baz Luhrmann’s biopic of singer and musician Elvis Presley is a hollow shell of a movie, as gaudy and bombastic as one of the King of Rock-’n’Roll’s sequined coats without the benefit of a genuine superstar within. Austin Butler only adequately embodies Presley, overdoing the vocal twang and nailing a few of the signature moves, while still seeming like any random impersonator on the Vegas strip. As his nefarious manager Colonel Tom Parker, Tom Hanks goes more for

entertaining broke, leaning hard into the sort of cartoonish villainy that defined his murderous criminal mastermind in Joel and Ethan Coen’s remake of The Ladykillers. Parker is both Salieri and Mesmer to Elvis, forever in his shadow while still canny enough to pull the strings for maximum financial gain. That could be enough of a dramatic focus, but Luhrmann, as is his wont, throws everything possible into this particular stew, negating most of its flavor through visual, aural and thematic excess. Elvis is sad in this film, like really sad, bearing the burden of a nation’s ills on his flimsy shoulders (this is the kind of hyperactive production in which Robert Kennedy’s assassination and Sharon Tate’s murder happen within seconds of each other). Luhrmann makes him into a shockingly dour bore, less a hunk-a than a lump-a burnin’ love. [PG-13] HH Mad God (Dir. Phil Tippett). Starring: Alex Cox, Niketa Roman, Satish Ratakonda. Several decades in the making, stop motion pioneer Phil Tippett’s dark-and-dirty, mostly animated whatsit hits with a primal and potently personal force. Opening on the Tower of Babel and with a quote

from Leviticus, the film soon plunges us into a dialogue-free journey through what seems like hell. A gas-masked explorer known only as Assassin wanders this desolate landscape (where feeble, zombie-like creatures do a variety of pointless tasks) with an explosive suitcase. The destructive goal seems simple enough, yet Tippett eventually widens the scope, via some inventively gruesome means, to show that what appears to be a welldefined prison is anything but. There’s horror in this world, yes, but plenty of beauty as well, and one doesn’t devour the other so much as exist in a perpetually shaky balance (the film is perhaps best epitomized by a sequence in which an entire universe is created and destroyed within seconds). In approach, Mad God resembles the great Mamoru Oshii anime Angel’s Egg, with a bit more ribald humor and a Mad Hatter’s sense of improvisation that contrasts with Oshii’s more depressively rigorous temperament. [N/R] HHHH1/2 n

Mad God

Keith Uhlich is a NY-based writer published at Slant Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Time Out New York, and ICON. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. His personal website is (All (Parentheses)), accessible at keithuhlich.substack.com.