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Werner Herzog’s ‘Into The Inferno’ Is A Red Hot Return To Form — Telluride Film Festival Review

“Into the Inferno”

Werner Herzog, the singularly solemn-voiced German auteur who has been a major force in world cinema for almost 50 years, has forged his legend by laughing at death. A prophet of darkness and a showman who would bungee jump into hell so long as he could come back with the footage to prove it, Herzog has survived everything from the lifeless tundras of Antarctica to the impassably dark jungles of Peru; from the burning oil fields of post-war Kuwait to the raging anger of his best fiend, Klaus Kinski.

And yet, for all of the suicidal adventures that he’s survived with a droll smile, film’s ultimate daredevil seemed to have met his match when he was discovered by an upstart tribespeople known as “millennials.” Galvanized by the genius of “Grizzly Man” and tickled by Herzog’s affectless nihilism, a new audience of moviegoers glommed on to the filmmaker’s unique persona and submitted it for the internet’s selective appropriation. And Herzog, a serial self-mythologizer whose visionary genius is only matched by his flair for branding, couldn’t have been happier to embrace it — by the time he was commissioned to make a documentary about our digital future, he was already threatening to become more meme than man. But maybe, his awe-inspiring new film suggests, that was part of Herzog’s plan all along.

“Into the Inferno” is about volcanoes, but it really doesn’t matter. Every Werner Herzog documentary is ultimately about the same two self-contradictory things: The impermanence of human existence, and the myth of Werner Herzog. The hypnotic, hilarious, and deeply humbling “Into the Inferno,” a quasi-sequel of sorts to 2007’s “Encounters at the End of the World,” offers a staggering amount of insight into both subjects.

“Into the Inferno”

Netflix

Volcanoes are a natural point of interest for Herzog, and he shoots their molten plumes of hot lava with the same loving fondness that someone else might film their newborn child. He’s absolutely mesmerized by these lakes of primordial fire, by their power to erase entire continents like God’s own Etch-a-Sketch, and — most of all — by how the people who live in their shadows respond to such monolithic reminders of their pitiful place on this planet. Accompanied by charming Cambridge volcanologist and co-director Clive Oppenheimer (whom we see Herzog meet in some unforgettable b-roll from the shoot of “Encounters”), the teutonic legend travels a lap around the world, hopping from an island off the coast of Australia to Iceland, Ethiopia, and even the misty mountains of North Korea. And yes, the hermit kingdom is such a perfect canvas for Herzog that it’s tempting to think he made this movie just so he could contrive an invitation.

What do volcanoes dream about? Herzog’s voiceover narration (which is actually under-used, for a change) doesn’t say those exact words, but you can all but hear him thinking them. “Into the Inferno” stares into these liquid abysses with the director’s signature sense of morbid wonderment — he fetishizes their destructive power, but he’s more interested in the living than the dead.

Herzog’s ethnographic films often sidestep exploitation because of his gift for sniffing out the kookiest, most stimulating characters, and his latest feature is no exception. We meet an Aboriginal chieftain whose brother literally speaks to the volcano spirits (we’re told the spirits emit a burst of magma to light the man’s cigarette). We meet an Indonesian carpenter who’s working on the construction of a Roman-Catholic church that’s meant to be shaped like a dove but looks more like a chicken. We meet the world’s greatest fossil hunter, and also the severely warped Berkley professor who found him.

All the while, Herzog’s attention drifts where it wants, often lingering on people and places that have only a tenuous connection to the film’s supposed subject. Herzog shoots first, and asks how the footage might be pertinent to his project later; “Into the Inferno” often feels scattered and listless as a result, but this tactic is also responsible for so many of the movie’s most perfect moments.

In true Herzogian fashion, of course, the most interesting character of all is Herzog himself, even though he only briefly appears on camera. Known to tweak the facts if they better facilitate his search for “the ecstatic truth,” Herzog seems to play things as they lie this time around, but his worldview is inescapable, and his words have a way of coming out of other people’s mouths. Oppenheimer often seems like an unwitting accomplice (albeit a happy one), encouraging his interview subjects to narrativize nature in a way that repositions themselves as fleeting characters in their own stories, tears in the rain.

In both fiction and “non-fiction” alike, Herzog has always marveled at man’s inability to submit to his own limitations and irrelevance, reckoned with nature’s indifference to his plight. He has laughed at — but never mocked — the comically lopsided odds of life on Earth. He sympathized with Aguirre’s quixotic death march for El Dorado, he rejoiced when Fitzcarraldo brought opera to the jungle. And when, at the end of “Into the Inferno,” an islander grows so confounded by the local volcano that he starts a cult predicated on the idea that a mystical American G.I. will descend from the heavens with bubblegum and Cadillacs for the native people, Herzog hears him out. He’s drawn to people who can’t accept their own insignificance, because he’s one of them. One of us.

Grade: B+

“Into the Inferno” premiered at the 2016 Telluride Film Festival. It will open on Netflix on October 28th.

Telluride Review: ‘Lost in Paris’ Does For Slapstick What ‘La La Land’ Does For Musicals

Slapstick artists Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon follow up "The Fairy" with this charming ode to Tati and Chaplin.

“Lost in Paris”

No modern comedy group has shown as much commitment to resurrecting the spirit of classic slapstick than Brussels-based husband-and-wife comedy duo Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon. They have performed for decades, but only brought their talents into feature-length filmmaking in the last 10 years, with films like the wordless “Rumba” and “The Fairy” showcasing their commitment to a humor otherwise absent from contemporary cinema. Their lanky figures are ideal vessels for deadpan visuals that mine territory ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Jacques Tati. “Lost in Paris,” their fourth effort (and first without co-director Bruno Romy), continues that earnest commitment to the genre by tapping into the material’s appeal without reinventing it.

Abel and Gordon have yet to produce a full-bodied work with more originality than references, and “Lost in Paris” doesn’t move the needle in that regard. But it’s another charming doodle that does justice to their brand of studied humor. The pair blends storybook visuals with a stream of clever gags and oodles of pathos to deliver an infectious romance almost too eager to please at every turn.

Fiona’s a walking punchline from the moment she gets to town, wandering the streets with an oversized red backpack sporting a tiny Canadian flag, but the humor turns melancholic when she finds her aunt’s apartment empty and she has nowhere to go. Things only get worse: she tumbles into the Seine on more than one occasion, loses her passport and her cash, and gains a pesky stalker in the process. That would be Dom (Abel), a Chaplinesque tramp who lives by the river and instantly falls for Fiona after he comes across her missing belongings. But even after offering his assistance to find her missing aunt, she’s mortified by his grimy, streetwise ways, although his persistence pays off.

“Lost in Paris” becomes a gentle romance about awkward loners with a shared tendency for disaster-prone antics, but the flimsy plot of “Lost in Paris” provides an excuse for Abel and Gordon to unleash their visual humor, which at best mimics Tati’s ability to turn the surrounding environment into a character itself. The couple’s initial courtship begins in one of the more prolonged and effective sequences, a clumsy pas de deux at a seaside restaurant where blaring music causes everyone in the room to bounce together to the same beat. Elsewhere, tangents include the disastrous effect of a wayward fishing line, and a cigarette that burns through a newspaper to create a peephole as Dom spies on Abel at a diner. There’s also a few moments of terrific comic suspense, including the threat of an incinerator and a wayward ladder at the top of the Eiffel Tower. No matter its wandering trajectory, “Lost in Paris” remains unpredictable until the bittersweet end.

Riva, meanwhile, lands a few nice moments as she wanders in and out of the story, finding romance of her own and causing trouble with a naughty smirk — a world away from her masterful, late-period turn in “Amour.” But she’s generally more of a prop than a full-fledged character, and the movie doesn’t give her much in the way of substance. (Her best scene, a tap dance bit with a former flame, seems to have involved a body double.) Yet Riva’s character, at once a bundle of confused senility and eager to stir up trouble as she wanders the streets, at least makes sense within the confines of this lightweight story. “Lost in Paris” struggles more with maintaining the wacky logic of its two leads, particularly as it relates to Fiona’s developing attraction to Dom despite his constant missteps.

Abel and Gordon are much better at prolonged jokey setups than narrative coherence, but that speaks to the pastiche they’re committed to offering. Notably, “Lost in Paris” premiered at the Telluride Film Festival at the same time as “La La Land,” a sugary nostalgia trip that salutes antiquated musicals in much the same way that “Lost in Paris” pays tribute to another discarded genre.

While “La La Land” recreates the spectacular canvas of classic Hollywood productions, “Lost in Paris” operates on a more restrained scale. The filmmakers use obvious green screen effects, and swap fancy camerawork for clever angles and playful choreography. Rather than reinventing the wheel, Abel and Gordon keep turning it with their own intimate touch.

Grade: B

“Lost in Paris” premiered at the 2016 Telluride Film Festival. Oscilloscope Laboratories will release it theatrically in 2017.

‘Bleed For This’ Is A Boxing Movie With Too Much Heart, Not Enough Soul — Telluride Film Festival Review

Miles Teller packs a punch, but this is a mediocre addition to a genre that's clearly on the ropes

“Bleed For This”

“Southpaw.” “Hands of Stone.” “Grudge Match.” Hollywood churns out so many mediocre boxing movies these days you might be fooled into thinking that they’re profitable. Only superhero fare is so consistently familiar and obvious, so quick to dilute the unique spirit of their heroes into a generic swirl of big victories that leave you feel like you’re standing in place.

It’s easy to understand why filmmakers are consistently drawn to them — what better way to test and celebrate a character’s spirit than to watch them take a thousand punches to the face? And yet — as a confidant tells Vincenzo Edward Pazienza at the start of Ben Younger’s disposable “Bleed for This” — “Will can only take you so far.” If you’ve ever seen a boxing movie before, you don’t need me to tell you that the true story of “The Pazmanian Devil” is going to prove that guy wrong. And if you’ve never seen a boxing movie before, please don’t start with this one.

He’s also something of a paradox. On one hand, Paz packs a hell of a punch — on the other, he’s hits even harder as a punchline. Embodied by an absolutely ripped Miles Teller (who channels the same jocular determination that defined his performance in “Whiplash”), the kid is a no-nonsense teetotaler who lives to train and trains to fight, a guy who monastically approaches the sweet science like it’s a religion. He’s also a guy who shows up to a weigh-in wearing a cheetah-print thong, and spends the night before the biggest match of his career betting at a blackjack table and sprinkling his leftover chips onto the naked body of whatever groupie he’s pulled in for the evening.

“Bleed For This”

Open Road/Magna

The film begins in 1988 — as you can tell by the holy trinity of big hair, bad accents, and an endless sea of Tab cans — and Paz is past his prime and about to be put out to pasture. Enter Kevin Rooney, a personable trainer who was recently fired from Mike Tyson’s team on account of the fact that he’s a discrete alcoholic. Winsomely played by Aaron Eckhart (almost unrecognizable with a tire around his gut and a Windex shine where his hair used to be), Rooney knows what it’s like to be counted out. Paz, for his part, is about to learn that lesson the hard way — his neck is snapped in a high-speed car crash, and a rigid metal “halo” is drilled into the pugilist’s thick skull in order to refasten his brain to his body. Everyone tells him that he’ll never fight again, that he may not even walk. But he’s the Pazmanian Devil! He’s not going to let the basic facts of human anatomy get in his way! Besides, if boxers actually bothered to listen to their bodies, they’d never get a word in edgewise.

Cue montages. Cue ups. Cue downs. Cue extreme close-ups of Teller’s trembling, amusingly mustached upper lip as he struggles to lift his first weight. Cue people telling Paz no, and Paz telling them off. Cue scenes of our hero sanctifying himself through trials of masochistic pain (he considers sedatives a drug, so he’s wide-awake when the doctor unscrews the halo from his head). Cue lines of concern like “You’re all in all the time!,” and another heaping pile of the uniquely American ideology that backbones so many of our sports movies: You can achieve your dreams, but only if you turn your life into a nightmare.

It takes a while for the numbing sameness of “Bleed for This” to sink in, as Younger (“Boiler Room,” “Prime”) once again displays his gift for leaning into a formulaic film with the enthusiasm of someone who’s never watched one before. He endows the early passages of this story with an intriguingly muted tone, muffling Paz’s ordeal so as to make it feel more intimate and less mythical. Younger brings a purely functional approach to the boxing scenes, which are so flat that even the climactic fight feels like a sparring match, but he deserves a ton of credit for finding a different way to shoot a car crash, for not placing the camera inside the vehicle and ambushing viewers with a sudden collision the way that almost every movie has since “Adaptation.” It sounds like a small detail, but that moment epitomizes the outsized impact of the film’s few genuine grace notes.

But every original drop of “Bleed for This” is lost in a sea of cliché and convention, and Younger seems totally incapable of separating the singular verve of his protagonist from the hackneyed arc of his defining ordeal. It’s maddening to see the spark of solidarity that welds Paz and Rooney into such close partners, only to then have the movie look in the other direction.

Ditto the relationship between the boxer and his increasingly conflicted dad, which is shoehorned into a story that would much rather stare at Paz as he cringes his way through the well-worn paces of the hero’s journey. Teller is appreciably committed to the character, but he’s only given one note to play, his full-bodied passion wasted on a movie that would rather win on points than go for the knockout.

As with so many of the movies from which it cribs, the moral of “Bleed for This” is that determination alone can rescue you from the depths of despair and deliver you to the finish line, that talent isn’t half as important as tenacity. That may be true in the movies, but it’s seldom the case in real life — it may be true in making a film, but it’s hardly ever the case in making them good.

Grade: C

“Bleed For This” premiered at the 2016 Telluride Film Festival. It opens in theaters on November 23.

Telluride Review: ‘Maudie’ Is A Paint By Numbers Love Story

Sally Hawkins' charming lead performance can't save this true love story from feeling as naïve as its namesake.

“Maudie”

A tender but mawkishly simple melodrama about a handicapped painter who falls in love with a misogynistic orphan in Depression-era Nova Scotia, “Maudie” would be impossible to take seriously if not for the fact that it tells a true story. Of course, just because something actually happened doesn’t make it any easier to swallow the sight of it on screen. Despite charming performances from Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, this saccharine romance — which pities its characters as much as they pity each other, and often veers perilously close to “The Other Sister” territory as a result — rings a bit false from start to finish.

Afflicted with a severe case of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis that finds her holding her right arm to her ribs like a bird with a broken wing, Maud Dowley (Sally Hawkins) tells people that she was “born funny,” emitting a little giggle after almost every sentence as if to prove the point. Her affliction doesn’t seem to get in the way of her painting, but it’s been murder for her potential — a small town in the 1930s was a tough place to be a woman, and even tougher for a woman whose own family regarded her as an invalid. So, when the local curmudgeon posts an ad looking for a live-in housekeeper, it’s easy to understand why Maud jumps at the chance to assert her agency.

What Maud doesn’t know is that her reluctant new employer, an orphaned fish peddler who lives in a musty shack so small it seems fit for a fairy tale, might be less of a curmudgeon than a sociopathic son of a bitch. Played by Ethan Hawke (whose growly, mealy-mouthed performance seems pitched somewhere between “Beauty and the Beast” and “Sling Blade”), Everett Lewis is a violent, misanthropic loner who only sees life for the pain it inflicts upon the people who’ve been forced into it.

When Maud parks herself in a corner of the house and begins to paint a childlike fresco of birds and animals on the rustic old walls, Everett hits her. Later, after they’ve gotten married and Maud has become semi-famous as one of the premiere figures of the Naïve Art movement, Everett relents. When Maud describes herself and her new husband as “an odd pair of socks,” it comes across as a characteristically adorable way of describing an abusive domestic situation.

Despite having all the makings of a Lars von Trier movie, “Maudie,” with its folksy score and beatific views of the raw Canadian countryside, soon thaws into an aggressively cute saga about how people only need each other in order to live a rich life. Working from Sherry White’s wildly uneven script, Walsh introduces major developments just as quickly as she brushes them aside — the film spends almost as much time on adorable shots of Everett pushing Maud around town in a wheelbarrow as it does subplots about its heroine’s shocking past.

But consistency is what this portrait does best. “Maudie” shares the modesty of its namesake, her aversion to sadness, and the satisfaction she took from simple pleasures — not once does it try to explain the interest in Maud’s childlike paintings, or justify their value. Walsh doesn’t even bother to provide context when President Nixon orders a few of them to hang in the White House, her film as uninterested in the news as Maud appears to be, herself.

Through it all, she just wants to keep staring out the small window of her house and painting what she sees on its walls. There’s something touching to the idea that her house is her canvas, her home life her masterpiece. But that notion is insufficiently explored in a film that strains for sweetness at the expense of truth — a film that feels as cut off from the reality of its characters’ existence as its characters were from the world beyond their window. Only during the film’s final moments does its nebulous sense of inauthenticity begin to assume a clear shape, as director Aisling Walsh can’t help but cap things off with a splash of archival footage.

Watching that short documentary clip of Maud and Everett sitting inside the frigid 12’ x 13’ hut they shared for more than 30 years, and seeing for yourself just how accurately the movie recreated their lives together, it feels as though “Maudie” is a counterfeit painting that’s determined to compare itself to the singular work of art it’s been trying to forge. The film wants to celebrate the simple life, but it doesn’t want to commit to what the simple life entails. It moves too fast to explore the tedium, to make us feel why these two rejects embraced each other, and that lack of support lets Hawke and Hawkins’ rich portrayals slowly unravel into a mess of affectations. Despite the clear sincerity of its efforts and the palpable sensitivity of its craftsmanship, the movie is so focused on what made its central relationship sweet that it almost completely overlooks what made that relationship matter.

Grade: C-

“Maudie” premiered at the 2016 Telluride Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

Watch: ICYMI, here's Eleven from 'Stranger Things' rapping Nicki Minaj's verse from 'Monster'

There is literally nothing this kid can't do. Well, except swear on live TV (but then that's probably a good thing).

In case you missed it yesterday, the kids from Netflix's 'Stranger Things' continued their world domination tour by appearing on Fallon and we were all treated to their myriad talents while they played about with silly string. Andwhile 'Dustin'/Gaten Matarazzo may be the singer of the group, it's 'Eleven'/Millie Bobby Brown who really surprised us by bringing her A-game and rapping Nicki Minaj's verse from Kanye's 'Monster'.

And she was really good.

Stephen Merchant confirmed as host for the one-off Crystal Maze episode

As we reported yesterday, The Crystal Maze is making a glorious return to our screens in the coming months - for a single episode for Stand Up To Cancer.

The early word was that the former Doctor Who and Death-Eater, David Tennant, was approached to take on the role of host, however it's now been confirmed by Channel 4 that Stephen Merchant will be hosting. In a statement, Merchant said that he was "a huge fan of the original series" and that he was honoured to take part.

"Richard O’Brien and Ed Tudor-Pole leave big shoes to fill, but I have size 14 feet, so I’ll do my best," said Merchant.

Here's hoping he's got smoking jacket and a harmonica ordered, because it isn't The Crystal Maze without them. What's more, the one-off episode will be filmed in London at The Crystal Maze Live Experience, which has recreated the entire set from the '90s

No air date has been set for the one-off episode, however it's expected to take place before the end of the year

Watch: South Park celebrates 19 years of the show with epic (and extremely NSFW) season 20 promo

It wouldn't be South Park if it wasn't extremely offensive to everyone now would it?

If you'd asked us to guess, we'd never have said that 'South Park' had been around for 19 years, but with the 20th season about to debut there's no denying the staying power of the show that's changed TV comedy irrevocably. In fact, that's exactly what Trey Parker and Matt Stone have celebrated with the new 'By The Numbers' promo for the upcoming season, which recounts just how many different times and ways the show has taken shots at everyone and everything.

And to say that it's jarring would be a massive, massive understatement.

Here's what we know about the new characters joining Season 2 of Stranger Things

Now that Netflix has officially confirmed that the second season of Stranger Things is a go, we can now start wildly speculating about what's going to happen next.

There's been a few hints and nods about what's in store from the Duffer Brothers and Shawn Levy in the interim, but we now have something concrete from the showrunners themselves. A casting breakdown was obtained by THR that details three new characters for the series, called Billy, Roman and Max.

Max is described as "a tough and confident 13-year-old female whose appearance, behavior and pursuits are more typical of boys than of girls in the era. She has a complicated history and a difficult relationship with her stepbrother, Billy, that's made her protective of her past and generally suspicious of those around her. She's also good on a skateboard, which she uses to get around pretty much everywhere."

You'll recall in the teaser for Season 2 that the very first episode was called Madmax - so we're guessing the first episode will specifically introduce Max and her stepbrother, Billy.

According to the casting sheet, Billy is "a super muscular, overconfident 17-year-old. He's so captivating and edgy that there are rumors flying around that he killed someone at a school he attended in the past. Billy steals peoples' girlfriends, is a drinking-game pro and drives a black Camaro. But his violent and unpredictable nature shows itself to those closest to him, especially to ones who are younger than he is."

So he's basically early Steve on steroids? Cool.

The final and most mysterious character is Roman, who we really can't piece into the story at all. The character's gender hasn't even been specified, as its described as "a male or a female of any ethnicity between the ages of 30 and 38. After growing up homeless with a drug-addicted mother, he or she suffered a great loss at an early age and has been seeking revenge ever since. Roman is ultimately an outsider who doesn't understand how to connect with people."

It's hard to know who exactly they'll cast for any of these roles. What made the show so captivating the first time around was meeting these new talents and the show benefits from that, as well. Sure, Winona Ryder was an exceptional choice to play Joyce Byers and David Barbour is just fantastic as Chief Hopper and, yes, Matthew Modine was great as the creepy Dr. Bennett, but it doesn't specifically need to cast recognisable actors in these roles.

It'd be cool, sure, but it's not truly necessary. If they're going to go throwback casting, they need to get Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton or Lance Henriksen in for something. Who do you think should be cast in the second season?

Let us know in the comments!

Rugbai Beo: Leinster v Benetton Treviso TG4: 7.00pm

Live coverage from the RDS Arena as Leinster host Benetton Treviso. After a disappointing end to last season's campaign which saw them lose to Connacht at the final hurdle, Leo Cullen will be looking to regroup his side and start the new season with a commanding win. New signings Robbie Henshaw, Niall Morris and Ian Nagle are all in the squad for the game against the Italians. (Kick Off: 7.35pm)

The kids are going back to school, Electric Picnic is almost here, and The Late Late Show is back this Friday night - it's safe to say, summer is over, but at least you've got a decent enough Late Late Show lineup to get you through.

First up, there will be some genuine honest-to-God Hollywood stars on the show, and from our own shores too. Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan will be in to chat about their upcoming World War II movie Anthropoid, as well as their popular TV shows Peaky Blinders and The Fall, and of course Jamie Dornan's role in the 50 Shades movies.

Besides all that excitement though, Ryan will honour some of our Olympic champs we became so taken with the last few weeks. That does of course mean Cork's O'Donovan brothers will be in to chat to Ryan about their silver medal success in Rio and they're glittering homecoming to Skibbereen earlier this week.

Fellow silver medalist Annalise Murphy will also be talking about her success in Rio, while Ryan will also chat to boxer Michael Conlon, who became part of one of the biggest upsets in Ireland’s Olympic history when he failed to qualify for a medal in a fight he (and many others) felt that he clearly won.

As we all know, the Olympics was marred in controversy for Ireland pretty early on. Ryan talks to Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport Shane Ross who found himself in the eye of the storm when he travelled to Rio after news broke of the ticket touting scandal. Minister Ross will give viewers his unique insight into what went down in Brazil, the questions that need to be answered and how he’s going about getting those answers

‘Nocturnal Animals’ Review: Tom Ford’s Ambitious Second Feature Is a Two-Hander With Bite

The fashion-designer-turned-director makes an impressive play for the big leagues.

“Nocturnal Animals”

Gather round, fashionistas, because I have news for you. For his follow-up to 2009’s “A Single Man,” Tom Ford hasn’t just made one film – he’s sort of made two. “Nocturnal Animals” is an impressively ambitious effort, one part mean Texas thriller, one part middle-age melodrama, and makes for a meta-textual riddle that is almost as pleasurable to reflect on as it to actually watch.

Let’s take it slow. Amy Adams (her again!) plays Susan Morrow, a Los Angeles high society maven with a successful art gallery and a failing marriage. While distant husband Armie Hammer jets between L.A. and New York for business (and, you know, business), Susan lounges in their beautifully adorned house, contemplating her many pieces of modern art, and wondering where it all went wrong.

She gets a pretty helpful hint once she receives a soon-to-be published manuscript from her soon-to-be first ex-husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal, seen only in flashback). The book, titled “Nocturnal Animals” and dedicated to her, turns out to be violent potboiler set in West Texas. She starts reading, and then…

Jake Gyllenhaal is Tony Hastings, a family man taking an overnight drive through West Texas, wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter (Ellie Bamber) in tow. The three encounter a bunch of rednecks on an empty stretch of highway and their harrowing encounter soon leads to tragedy. Later, Tony joins forces with chain-smoking lawman Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon – the film’s gruff M.V.P.) to track those baddies down and bring them to justice.

The film is evenly split between both the timeline (“real world” versus “book world”) and genres (melodrama versus thriller) giving both Gyllenhaal and Adams a wide range of notes to play. The “real world” moves back and forth in time, with Adams convincingly pulling off an eager twentysomething and her jaded shell twenty years later. Gyllenhaal has the somewhat sadder part, playing a man who loses everything not once but twice, and the reliable actor nails it in both registers.

“Nocturnal Animals” is perfectly simple in scene-to-scene but nigh impossible to get an overall hold on because it’s never clear to what extent we’re meant to take any of it “seriously.” On one level, Ford really does try to make a straight-ahead Jim Thompson style potboiler, and he goes whole hog detailing that muscle car and Marlboro world. Ford’s work in never farcical or glib in those early confrontations between Tony and the roadside bullies. The slow build-up to the violence is genuinely frightening and it genuinely works.

But then, we know the Texas section’s ideas about weakness, and notions of what it takes to be a real man, are not entirely “on the level” either. They’re not the themes Ford wants to explore, but the one of his characters does. So many “real world” flashbacks end with someone questioning Edward’s manliness, deriding him as weak. We learn how Susan left him; we see his heart break in real time.

So how much of the Texas story’s leathery machismo is the film’s critique of what these days folks are calling “fragile masculinity”? Is the film a riff on the Peckinpah’s “What does it take to be real man” question, or is it a giant goof on “what kind of man would even ask that question to begin with”?

Hell, we can take it a step further when we realize that the present-day Edward never appears in the film. We only see him in flashbacks or as Tony, the character in the book. In short, we only ever see him through Susan’s perspective. And wait, isn’t that actress Ellie Bamber, making her way from the “book world” to play Susan’s daughter in the “real world”? So then, how much of the Lone Star stereotypes and wounded machismo are projections on Susan’s part? Do they tell us anything about Edward, or just animate Susan’s guilt and Left Coast disdain?

Like a riding a Mobius strip or opening a box of Pringles, once you start with these questions you just can’t stop. And Ford does little to resolve the inquiry by offering some baseline reality from which to calibrate the woolier elements. Susan’s story is just as outlandish the story she’s reading, often set to composer Abel Korzeniowski’s Technicolor-melodrama score and occasionally scathingly funny. By the point Laura Linney shows up, with a bouffant hairdo bigger than a lion’s mane and a string of pearls each the size of an apricot, to sternly tell Susan that “you always turn into your mother” (she plays her mother), we’ve gone full camp.

Which does make you wonder how much the two narratives are meant to reflect each other in a meaningful way, and how much is playful genre dress-up. Though, in sum total, it doesn’t really matter, because really, who better to play dress-up than designer turned full-fledged film director Tom Ford?

Grade: A-

“Nocturnal Animals” premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It will arrive in theaters on November 18

‘Dekalog’ Review: The Best 10 Hours You Will Ever Spend At The Movies

Thou shalt go see Krzysztof Kieślowski’s magnum opus, which looks more divine than ever thanks to Janus Films' 4K restoration.

“Dekalog”

Ten commandments. 10 episodes. 10 hours. When it first aired on Polish television in 1989, decades before long-form filmmaking would come to be regarded as the last bastion of auteurism, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Dekalog” was one of the most immense undertakings the cinema had ever seen. There had been longer works, and more lavishly financed ones — even when accounting for inflation, “Dekalog” would qualify as a micro-budget project — but the existential girth of Kieślowski’s magnum opus immediately made it feel like a monolith among molehills.

Even in the age of Netflix and “The Knick,” when directors are often responsible for delivering 600 minutes of footage at a time, Kieślowski’s epic still towers above the rest, and still seems somehow fuller than any of the similarly ambitious projects that have sprung up in its wake. It may not be the tallest building on the block, but — crammed with sex, death, love, murder, regret, reprisals, and enough moral fiber to earn the Vatican’s highest endorsement in spite of its many iniquities — it’s almost certainly the one most dense with life.

And yet, for a biblically-scaled film cycle so rich with irony that it seems to be chipping off the walls of the brutalist apartment complex where most of it takes place, perhaps the greatest irony of them all is that “Dekalog” is ultimately defined by its humility.

“Humility” may not seem like the most natural word to associate with a man who tended to think in trilogies, a storyteller who wouldn’t get out of bed to make a movie that didn’t look to poke holes in the very fabric of the universe, but Kieślowski was only so good at asking the impossible questions because he never attempted to answer them.

THe was obsessed with matters of everyday happenstance, drawn to the depth of petty details (see: the bee in “Dekalog 2,” or the fish in “Dekalog 10”). He was enchanted by chance, and utterly convinced that fate is the sum of the choices we make. His films argued that life cannot be solved, only accepted — if that became a solution in itself, then so be it. “Everyone has a story to tell,” someone observes in “Dekalog 8,” more than two thirds of the way through a film cycle which seems determined to prove that point as well as any work of fiction ever had. If, as Roger Ebert once wrote, “the movies are like a machine that generates empathy,” then “Dekalog” is one of the cinema’s greatest marvels of engineering.

here have been precious few filmmakers for whom bigger was truly better, but Kieślowski was one of them. Like a particle accelerator that needs a massive slab of real estate in order to find something the size of a single atom, Kieślowski’s 10-tiered epic uses a thousand tons of concrete and glass — and a cast of hundreds — in order to access something so small that it’s seldom been captured on film. In fact, it could be argued that Kieślowski was attempting to depict the feeling of smallness itself, using this untenably large project to help us locate ourselves on a cosmic scale.

It’s one thing to watch “For All Mankind” and recognize our place in a vast and indifferent universe, but quite another to see things on a granular level and grapple with the egocentricity of human existence, to dig into the narrow reality of our lives and appreciate how — for all of our laws and guidelines — we’re ultimately a planet of unsupervised children.

Inspired by the Ten Commandments but never the least bit didactic about their meaning, “Dekalog” is a far cry from the heavy-handed religious treaty suggested by its premise. In fact, while the subject of some episodes can be neatly assigned to a single line of Old Testament scripture, all of these stories — much like the man who directed them — are too dazzled by the sheer complexity of existence to pretend that life can fit within a rigid set of guidelines. The oppressive drabness of the housing development that shelves all of these characters on top of each other only serves to accentuate the strikingly ordinary nature of the dramas that unfold inside (and far beyond). Remember that self-immolating speech the fake Robert McKee delivers in “Adaptation?” You know: “Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind?” “Dekalog” proves his point

“Dekalog 4”

Describing the dictum that he set for himself and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Kieślowski once suggested that the episodes “Should be influenced by the individual Commandments to the same degree that the Commandments influence our daily lives.” Which is to say, very loosely.