PETER HUJAR'S DAY (Ira Sachs, 2025, USA, 76 minutes)
I may have missed The Mastermind, but I had no problem getting to the Walter Reade Theatre in time for the 9:15pm screening of Ira Sachs' ninth feature, Peter Hujar's Day, about which I had heard good things since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
First, I stopped by the concession stand to fuel up on caffeine lest I nod off after my two-hour sleep. I was wearing the super-soft One Battle After Another t-shirt I picked up at the preview screening the week before, and the charismatic cashier was so tickled that he waived the cost of my cold brew. I swear it almost made up for missing the Kelly Reichardt film.
Though the pan-European Passages was a breakthrough for Sachs, a longtime New Yorker, I wasn't especially charmed by the central trio–or even the premise–despite my affection for all three actors, including Ben Whishaw, who plays American portrait photographer Hujar in the new film.
If anything, Whishaw felt like a third wheel in Passages, which may have been intentional, but Martin wasn't given the chance to be much more than an appendage to Franz Rogowski's temperamental director, though Josée Deshaies' cinematography was lovely and the sweaters were fabulous.
Left: a set photo by Ira Sachs that suggests a David Hockney painting
Peter Hujar's Day is a smaller, more experimental film--DP Alex Ashe shot it with 16mm Kodak stock, which seems appropriate for both era and subject--and it may not appeal to as many tastes, but it was more to my liking.
The film is the closest Sachs has come to docudrama, since most every word comes from the transcript of an interview arts writer Linda Rosencranz conducted with Hujar on Dec 18, 1974. During the Q&A, I don't recall Sachs mentioning that she published it as a book, but he did say that she had planned to interview several other artists about their day, but ended the project after speaking with Hujar and painter Chuck Close. I'm not sure why, but a recent Guardian profile makes it sound as if she simply lost interest. (Sachs did mention the book at the first NYFF screening on Sept 27.)
The versatile Rebecca Hall (Resurrection) plays Rosencranz, and she doesn't have a lot to do, but she does it well. That may sound like faint praise, but it isn't. She has to be present while Hujar is talking. Sometimes, she speaks, sometimes not, but she's always listening and reacting. Sachs could have cast a lesser actor, but I'm glad he didn't, since Hall, a fellow director, doesn't shrink in the sensual, unfiltered presence of her scene partner.
In the process of making the film, Sachs became friends with the now-91-year-old Rosencranz. Hujar, on the other hand, died from AIDS in 1987, which would also claim photographer friends David Wojnarowicz, with whom he had a close relationship, and Robert Mapplethorpe, who shared his interest in homoerotic portraiture. (At the Q&A, there were questions about Hujar's smoking in the film; he's never without a lit cigarette in his hand, which was probably true to life, but plays more alarmingly in 2025.)
Right: 1966 Peter Hujar portrait of Linda Rosencranz who he met in 1956
The 76-minute film is as much a profile of the photographer, at a particular moment in his life, as a showcase for the actor, who first won my heart in Todd Haynes' multi-persona Dylan depiction I'm Not There, in which he played French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, which struck me then--and now--as perfect casting. He would go on to play another brilliant, doomed poet, John Keats, in Jane Campion's Bright Star, a highlight of her fine career.
During the Q&A, I looked around at the audience, and noted a significant LGBTQ presence, which makes sense in terms of Hujar's overtly-queer work, in addition to the the fact that Sachs and Whishaw have often made or appeared in queer films, more so after Whishaw came out in 2013. (Near as I can tell, Sachs has been out since at least since 1996 when he debuted with The Delta.) The Whishaw contingent, in other words, was out in force.
Granted, Peter Hujar's Day isn't necessarily about being gay in the pre-AIDS 1970s; it's about one day in the life of a man who lived and thought like an artist, who knew every artistic New Yorker worth knowing, and who didn't make the money or find the fame he deserved during his abbreviated life.
Though Sachs opted not to include any of Hujar's photographs in the film, they're easy to find online, and they're quite extraordinary, especially his Old Hollywood-style portrait of Warhol Superstar Candy Darling, which Anohni would use for her 2005 Mercury Prize-winning album I Am a Bird Now.
I found the film touching, and I hope it spurs more interest in his work.
Left: full house at the Sept 29 screening of House of Dynamite
The last time I attended the New York Film Festival was in 2003, so I think it's fair to say it's been awhile.
This year, the 63-year-old festival began on Sept 26 and runs through Oct 13, but I was only able to catch four-days worth of films. I was mostly in town to see a play, Waiting for Godot with Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, and took advantage of the timing to add the festival to my itinerary. Still, I caught more features (eight) and fewer shorts (none) than in the past. The NYFF doesn't bundle shorts with features anymore; instead they programmed seven shorts packages, five associated with the more adventurous Currents section.
In 2003, I caught five features and four shorts: Denys Arcand's Academy Award-winning comedy-drama The Barbarian Invasions with Dominique Monféry's 58-years-in-the-making Destino, a Disney animated short co-written by Salvador Dalí; Johnnie To's PTU, a rousing policier, with Pascal Lahmani's mismatched WWII-era short From Head to Toe; Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant, a heartbreaking character study, with Charles Officer and Ingrid Veninger's experimental short Urda/Bone; and George Hickenlooper's Mayor of the Sunset Strip, a downbeat if engaging portrait of KROQ DJ and alt-rock tastemaker Rodney Bingenheimer, with Streetwise filmmaker Martin Bell's Twins, a documentary short made with his wife, photographer Mary Ellen Mark (both Hickenlooper and Mark have since passed away).
Right: Mehmet Emin Toprak (1974-2002) in Uzak, aka Distant
I missed 2003's opening night film, Clint Eastwood's Boston thriller Mystic River, which I caught later that year, but I made it to the closing night film, Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams, which screened at Avery Fisher Hall (since renamed David Geffen Hall).
The filmmaker was there, along with stars Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, and Benicio Del Toro–two of whom are now starring in P.T. Anderson's One Battle After Another. This was in the pre-smartphone / pre-digital camera days–for me, at any rate–so I have no photographic proof of any of this.
As for Iñárritu's jigsaw-shaped film, a popular screenplay structure at the time, I wasn't crazy about it–the last film of his I truly enjoyed was Amores Perros, his 2000 directorial debut–but I was impressed by the performances, Penn's especially, and spotting Lou Reed in the audience was a nice bonus.
Sean Penn would go on to win an Oscar for Mystic River, which also received a nomination for Best Picture. This year's opener wasLuca Guadagnino's After the Hunt with Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, and Andrew Garfield. It sounded too much like something I had seen before, so I wasn't too sad to miss it, not least since every Guadagnino film interests me less than the one before, despite the fact that I loved 2015's A Bigger Splash, his idiosyncratic update of Jacques Deray's La Piscine, which actually betters the original in some respects, especially the character of Penelope (Dakota Johnson taking over from Jane Birkin), who becomes a more fully-rounded human being.
Left: I was there! Del Toro, Watts, Penn, and Melissa Leo at the 41st NYFF opening night
This year's closer is Bradley Cooper's Is This Thing On? with Will Arnett and Laura Dern, which looks like a less ambitious, if possibly more enjoyable film than Maestro, his misbegotten Leonard Bernstein biopic, though I quite liked his American take on A Star Is Born, more for Lady Gaga's warmhearted performance than anything else.
This year, I purchased tickets for four films in advance, a fairly arduous process, as it turns out, though I have no memory of the 2003 ticketing process. It took nearly two hours this time around to complete my order, in part because I lost my place in the queue and had to start all over again. By the time I got in, every other film I wanted to see was sold out online.
Members of Film Society at Lincoln Center surely have better luck online through pre-sales, but I don't live in New York, and nor can I afford to visit as often as I would like, so a membership wouldn't do me much good.
Right: ticketholder line for the second screening of the Bruce Springsteen biopic--the Boss didn't show up for this one
Fortunately, NYFF holds tickets at the door for each screening, and I got to each one super-early, which meant a lot of standing around, but also a lot of fun people-watching–it's New York, after all–and the opportunity to chat with fellow filmgoers.
The sellouts turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I left Seattle ridiculously early Sunday morning in order to get into NYC well before the 6:15pm screening of Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind, but the plane was late, JFK was a mess, and my shuttle made a lot of stops on the way from Queens to Manhattan–yet no stops on the way back.
By the time I checked into my Lower East Side Airbnb, the film had already begun. I'm glad I didn't waste money on a ticket I wouldn't have been able to use, not least since they start at $30 for new films and $20 for archival releases. Considering that Reichardt had to cancel her Seattle appearance with First Cow, due to Covid-19, I fear I'm forever fated to miss her.
More information about the 63rd NYFF at this link. Images from me (House of Dynamite screening and the line for Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere at Alice Tully Hall), Film Society at Lincoln Center (Distant and 21 Grams photocall), and Posterati (NYFF 41 poster signed by Junichi Taki).
Lucile Hadžihalilović's The Ice Tower, in which a fairy tale becomes real, opens with kaleidoscopic shapes, like icycles made from crystals or the shards of a mirror, dancing across an indigo sky to an enchanting ondes Martenot score (I assumed it was a theremin until I read otherwise).
Even before a narrator (Saint Omer's Aurélia Petit) describes The Snow Queen's castle in voiceover, the French filmmaker, who wrote the screenplay with Geoff Cox (Evolution, Earwig), has conjured up a heightened atmosphere, something that could be said about all of her feature films to date, starting with 2004 Frank Wedekind adaptation Innocence.
She then focuses on the rosy-cheeked face of Jeanne (22-year-old newcomer Clara Pacini), a dreamy, yet resourceful 15-year-old gazing at a snow-covered mountain in the Swiss Alps in 1970. There's no castle or tower in sight, but the image in her mind comes from the 19th-century book, Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, that she reads to her foster sister, Rose (Cassandre Louis Urbain), every night before bed.
Jeanne is the oldest of several orphans all sharing the same overcrowded, if cozy-looking cottage. She's restless and unhappy, and the film has barely begun before she takes off, by walking, climbing and hitchhiking, to the nearest, not-so-close town. It's a somewhat treacherous journey, complete with potential predator, but she arrives intact and no worse for wear.
Her journey ends, momentarily, at an open-air ice rink, where she's mesmerized by Bianca (Valentina Vezzoso), a long-limbed skater of great skill, but after everyone leaves, she's alone in the dark with no place to go.
From the way cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg (The Taste of Things) shoots this sequence, echoing Dario Argento's late-night dreamscapes, Jeanne could be Little Red Riding Hood wandering through a town rather than the woods, not least because she's wearing a red jacket.
Jeanne finally finds a storage room in which to sleep, though she wakes to room-temperature snow floating through the air and the sight of the glittering, white-garbed Snow Queen (Marion Cotillard reuniting with the director 20 years after Innocence) through a peep hole, but what seems like a dream is real–the building houses a soundstage. Jeanne has seemingly manifested Andersen's tale.
Before too long, she reveals herself to a crew member, who allows her to explore the backstage area. To another, she claims to be an extra, and finds herself in the film, but what sounds like pure wish fulfillment plays as sufficiently believable, though I wouldn't say that verisimilitude has ever been one of Hadžihalilović's top priorities. Notably, her partner, Gaspar Noé (wearing a hairpiece), plays the film-within-a-film's director, and I don't think it's completely coincidental that the maker of a film starring Argento, 2021's Vortex, actually resembles the Italian actor/director in this one.
As for Cotillard, she may not have been a star when she first worked with Hadžihalilović, but since then she's modeled for several French designers, graced the covers of numerous fashion magazines, starred in nearly two dozen English-language films and over 30 French ones, and won most every award, including an Oscar for 2007's La Vie en Rose. I've never heard that she's difficult, but she's as famous in real life as the fictional Cristina.
Jeanne becomes intrigued by her ambiguous relationship with Max (German actor August Diehl, who appeared with Cotillard in Robert Zemeckis's 2016 spy thriller Allied). She watches Cristina watching herself in rushes, and imitates the way she smokes. Cristina catches her in the act, and asks what she finds so fascinating. Jeanne cites the Snow Queen's power and immortality. Cristina, however, sees the Queen as lonely, which may be how she sees herself–and how she sees Jeanne, too.
Just as the opening sequence proves disorienting, I couldn't always tell when Jeanne was dreaming that she was exploring the grounds of the Ice Tower or just exploring a set. As the director confirmed to Indiewire's Ryan Lattanzio, "At some point, the idea of blurring the border between the dream and reality was the purpose of the film." Though Jeanne starts out as part of an ensemble, she ends up playing a unique character who looks like a younger version of the Queen with similar silvery makeup and platinum blonde hair.
As they get to know each other, it isn't clear if Jeanne wants to be Cristina, finds her desirable, or sees her as a mother figure–Cotillard's oldest child is around the same age--but Cristina seems to see her younger self in Jeanne. All of these things can be true, and for a time, Cristina helps to make her threadbare life more comfortable, though it's clear there will be a cost.
The cost, when it arrives, is both inappropriate and disturbing, and Jeanne takes it as a sign that it may be time to go. Along the way, Hadžihalilović reveals what happened to her mother, though I don't recall any mention of a father. Then again, fathers leave little impression in Hadžihalilović's work, if they appear at all (this takes extreme form in 2015 sci-fi oddity Evolution, in which women conceive without the aid of men).
In the end, Cristina is a wolf in chic clothing, even if the director drew primarily from a different fairy tale. There's no woodsman, however, as in Kelsey Taylor's PNW-set To Kill a Wolf, a more grounded take on Little Red Riding Hood (if you missed the summer screenings, Taylor and cinematographer Adam Lee return to town this fall at SIFF Film Center).
Jeanne is on her own. If she sees herself in Cristina, and if Cristina--who also grew up in a foster home–sees herself in Jeanne, it isn't too late for one of them to start anew.
Life, on the other hand, imitates art, since The Ice Tower is a smaller, more idiosyncratic film than those, like Michael Mann's Public Enemies or Christopher Nolan's Inception, with which Marion Cotillard has come to be associated during her post-Academy Award career.
Like Pacini, she's very good here, and the experienced actress and the ingenue work well together. Cotillard next appears, alongside Ornella Muti and Django legend Franco Nero, in an Italian adventure from another European master of the fantastique: Bertrand Mandico.
From Innocence through The Ice Tower, Lucile Hadžihalilović has placed women at the center of her work, especially young women trying to make sense of a world that does not always have their best interests at heart. It makes her films suspenseful and even a little scary, but these aren't horror movies; they're coming-of-age pictures made with great empathy and imagination, and this is surely one of the most beautiful she has made.
Headline note: French author Charles Perrault originated Little Red Riding Hood in 1697 before the German-born Brothers Grimm revived it in 1812.
The Ice Tower opens in limited release on Fri, Oct 3. No Seattle dates yet, but I'll update this post once it becomes more readily available, whether by theatrical engagement, home-video release, or streaming platform. Images from Yellow Veil Pictures (Marion Cotillard and Clara Pacini in and out of character) and Penguin Random House (2000 edition of The Snow Queen).
Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction
Will no longer be so damn relevant
And women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane
On Search for Tomorrow
Because black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day
The revolution will not be televised
-Gil Scott-Heron, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"
Leave it to PT Anderson to take a text set in the 1980s–Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland–and update it to the 2020s without missing a beat.
In other words, One Battle After Another, his 10th feature, doesn't recreate Reagan's America, but rather Trump's America, and everything about it feels up to the minute, because one directly leads to the other, and most of the action takes place in California and Mexico (in 2014, Anderson adapted Pynchon's comic noir Inherent Vice, also featuring Benicio del Toro).
Notably, there are no direct references to Trump, so he has no grounds to sue Warner Bros for defamation, but that's never stopped him before.
The film, a multi-genre affair, starts as a love story about two revolutionaries before shifting to a love story, of a kind, about a father and a daughter. (At 162 minutes, it may be long, but not as long as 1999's Magnolia, which clocked in at 188 minutes.) As the film begins, Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his wife, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, who knocked me out in A.V. Rockwell's debut, A Thousand and One), are living the life of left-wing freedom fighters in the Southern California of the 2000s. They deal with guns and incendiary devices, but they're not generally violent towards their enemies–of which there are many.
Their French 75 compatriots include Deandra (Regina Hall, effectively understated), Mae West (Alana Haim from Licorice Pizza), Laredo (Wood Harris), and Junglepussy (Shayna McHayle, reuniting with Hall after Andrew Bujalski's great Support the Girls). The nicknames and code phrases, like "Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction,"are a means of protection. Pat, for instance, is also known as Rocketman, though McHayle's alter ego isn't fictional–she's been rapping as Junglepussy since 2012.
You could argue about the effectiveness of the French 75's tactics, which involve a fair amount of property destruction, but their concerns about the rights of immigrants and pregnant people seem pretty reasonable. To Anderson, they may not be heroes per se, but they're definitely not villains.
They're a committed, if dysfunctional unit centered around Pat and Perfidia, who have an intensely sexual bond, not least because violence turns Perfidia on.
She's always up for a fuck, but especially when a bomb is about to go off in their vicinity. Pat loves his wife, but he isn't quite so reckless. When he finds out she's pregnant, though, he's thrilled.
Pat has no idea, however, that her life has taken a turn. It starts when she encounters Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, also from Licorice Pizza), a rabid right-winger, during a migrant-rescue operation at the California-Mexico border, and sexually humiliates him, after which he becomes obsessed. Later, during another operation, he corners her in a public restroom, where he makes a deal: she gets to go free, but only after servicing him. Penn has never played a character less appealing what with his lascivious leering, cock-of-the-walk gait, and Hitler Youth haircut.
When Perfidia loses her cool during a stickup, and shoots a security guard, Lockjaw makes another kind of deal, but she has her limits, and disappears into the ether, leaving Lockjaw without his secret girlfriend and Pat with a newborn named Charlene (soon to become Willa). Granted, Perfidia never warmed up to her baby daughter. Accustomed to having her husband to herself, she didn't appreciate the way Pat doted on her all the time.
From there, Anderson skips ahead 16 years to father and daughter living in a Pacific Northwest sanctuary city called Baktan Cross--the film was originally titled The Battle of Baktan Cross--where Willa (Presumed Innocent's Chase Infiniti) attends high school and Pat, now known as Bob, smokes pot all day, his revolutionary days long behind him. The two aren't close, though Willa is buoyed by the idea that her long-absent mother was a hero, unlike her layabout father, who has neglected to tell her that Perfidia turned rat before disappearing ("perfidia" is Spanish for treachery or wickedness).
One Battle After Another is the kind of film that takes the occasional break to allow you to catch your breath before revving up again. Just as Pat and Perfidia are constantly on the run in the first half, when Lockjaw tracks them down, Bob and Willa hit the streets with assistance from Bob's French 75 associates--Deandra above all--and a very good movie becomes truly great.
Though Hall has the least showy part of all, Deandra is the most heroic character, because she's fast, efficient, empathetic, and fiercely loyal. She isn't especially talkative, but Licorice Pizza cinematographer Michael Bauman often focuses on her eyes, and Deandra's face always has a story to tell.
With apologies to Teyana Taylor, who gives it her all, the father-daughter dynamic marks the point at which I became more emotionally invested, and Infiniti holds her own with DiCaprio in peak form. She holds her own with Penn, too, whose Lockjaw catches up with Willa after she and Bob get separated.
Compared to stockbroker Jordan Belfort in Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street or actor Rick Dalton in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Bob is a shambling mess of a man to the extent that the entire film almost plays like an anti-pot PSA--with the possible exception of the pot-growing nuns who show up towards the end--but it's where Anderson locates most of the humor. The sequences between DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro as a zen sensei and migrant protector, especially, crackle with odd couple energy.
The less-funny parts involve the treatment of Mexican immigrants–though they have fiendishly clever ways to avoid the authorities thanks to production designer Florencia Martin's Rube Goldberg-like constructions–whereas Lockjaw longs for acceptance from a white supremacist organization, the Christmas Adventurers, that plays like a joke–especially Kevin Tighe's old codger–except it's one we now live with on a daily basis.
Law & Order's Tony Goldwyn, who always looks like a smooth motherfucker, is exceptionally well cast as one of the Christmas leaders; especially ironic since this dedicated Christian Nationalist is played by the member of a rather famous Jewish family (Tony is the grandson of movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn).
Each character plays into a turbo-charged satire about the rise of fascism in America and the attempts of a desperate citizenry to fight back. There's no perfect way to overhaul a corrupt system, but the French 75 give it a go.
In adapting Vineland,a novel with which he's long been enamored, Anderson changed most everything, except the basic plot, locations, and characters--he even changed the names. More than that, though, he made it a film about race. Bob, for instance, is a white man surrounded by powerful Black women. ("My child comes from a whole line of revolutionaries," Starletta DuPois's Grandma Jennie explains.) Willa even looks a little like PT Anderson’s partner, Maya Rudolph, might have looked at the same age.
I'm not saying that One Battle After Another is autobiographical, though Anderson and Rudolph do have three daughters, but I'm not saying it isn't.
That said, it is, without a doubt, a tribute to the badassery of Black women.
One Battle After Another opens everywhere on Sept 26. Images: the IMDb via Warner Bros (Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, Taylor and Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Infiniti and Regina Hall) and Columbia College Chicago, Infiniti's alma mater (Infiniti, a kickboxing instructor, in karate pose).
–Paul Laurence Dunbar, excerpt from "Compensation" (1905)
Part I: The History of the Release
Until earlier this year, thanks to a limited run from Janus Films, I hadn't heard of Compensation, Zeinabu irene Davis's uniquely beautiful and profound take on the silent film. In 2000, the Sundance Channel made it available for subscribers, and then in 2021, the Criterion Channel did the same. Criterion also programmed her other narrative feature, 1991's A Powerful Thang, and three shorts--Crocodile Conspiracy, Cycles, and Mother of the River--but I wasn't a subscriber at that time, though I am now.
Outside of subscribers to those channels and visitors to Maya Cade's Black Film Archive, though, Compensation has languished in obscurity largely because the film, which Davis finished shooting in 1993, disappeared from view almost as soon as it entered the world in 1999 (in 2026, Cade, a former Criterion strategist and Library of Congress scholar, will take the helm of Milestone Films, a specialist in lost films from marginalized voices).
After one somewhat critical review in influential trade publication Variety in 2000, theatrical distributors failed to stake their claim, despite the fact that Compensation was named Best First Feature at that year's Spirit Awards, among other accolades.
Variety's Joe Leydon, who wasn't completely dismissive, described it as "indifferently executed" and pronounced its "theatrical prospects [as] weak." By contrast, Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times, proclaimed it "a small, quiet, enchanting film," but his kind words were, apparently, not enough.
Over the years, I've often written about films that didn't get their due until after their makers had passed. I don't believe it's a coincidence that many of them, like Jessie Maple's directorial debut, Will, and Christina Hornisher's sole feature, Hollywood 90028, were made by women, people of color, or both in the case of Davis--except she's alive and well. Though she hasn't made another narrative feature, she and her entire family contributed to the refurbishing of Compensation, including daughters Desti and Maazi with husband and screenwriter Marc Arthur Chéry, who assisted with the color correction and descriptive titles–alongside Hard of Hearing filmmaker Alison O'Daniel (The Tuba Thieves)–that make her film shine brighter than ever.
Not long after this year's theatrical release in February, which followed the premiere of the 4K "rejuvenation"--Davis's preferred term–at last year's New York Film Festival, Criterion announced a video release, and it's out now.
Right: Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1890 / Ohio History Connection
In addition to the black-and-white film, it offers several special features, including the panel discussion at the premiere with Davis, Chéry, and other collaborators. Sadly, cinematographer Pierre H. L. Désir Jr., who appears on the commentary track, passed away prior to the premiere of both film and video. His work throughout is really quite tremendous.
Part 2: The Rejuvenated Release
Compensation opens with the 1905 poem from Chicago laureate Paul Laurence Dunbar from which it takes its title combined with Reginald R. Robinson's ragtime piano score, followed by a series of still photographs depicting The Great Migration set to ambient sound (which has been enhanced since 1999). It's a remarkably effective way to reproduce the 1900s on a modest budget, not least because Davis took great care in selecting images from eight archives, including those of Gallaudet University and the Chicago Historical Society. (Gallaudet, an educational institution in Washington DC geared towards Deaf students, is the subject of Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim's stirring Apple TV+ documentary Deaf President Now! about a student-led push to hire the school's first Deaf president.)
The prologue precedes a silent-film sequence featuring two young ladies, elegantly dressed in white, relaxing under an umbrella by the shores of Lake Michigan in 1906; Davis will return to this beach throughout the film. The music continues, but the dialogue plays out as title cards embellished with Haitian and Kenyan iconography (Davis studied playwriting in Kenya).
If the entire mise-en-scène brings to mind Julie Dash's dreamy 1991 meditation Daughters of the Dust, it's no coincidence. LA Rebellion filmmakers Dash and Killer of Sheep's Charles Burnett served as two of Davis's mentors at UCLA Film School, and both served as crew members on the 1986 short, Crocodile Conspiracy, that accompanies the new release.
A young woman named Malindy (Michelle A. Banks) reads and converses with her younger companion, Tildy (Nirvana Cobb), by way of a chalkboard on which the two write out their words.
Malindy, like the actress, is Deaf. Davis discovered her through a performance of Waiting for Godot she and Chéry attended in St. Paul, Minn., and knew she had to not only cast her, but reconfigure the film around the performer. Banks rewards the director's faith with a sympathetic and occasionally playful performance. Malindy comes across as proud, intelligent, and confident.
After Gallaudet University segregated in 1905, and kicked out its Black and Indigenous students, Malindy returned to Chicago, where she works as a dressmaker. She meets Arthur (Exhibiting Forgiveness's John Earl Jelks), a Mississippi migrant and mandolin player who works in a meatpacking plant, during one of her trips to the beach. He's intrigued, but when he finds out she's Deaf and communicates by writing, he confesses that he doesn't know how to read. She offers to teach him, and a tentative relationship ensues.
None of this happens right away; there is some resistance on Malindy's part, but she finds out soon enough that Arthur is a good-hearted soul. He just hasn't enjoyed the same economic and educational advantages as her.
Then, something surprising happens. If you haven't seen the film or heard much about it, you may want to stop reading. I had no idea what was coming, and found it pretty delightful.
Davis sticks with the B&W 16mm film stock, but opens on a shot of the Chicago skyline in the late-20th century as the music builds to a more forceful percussive score from master drummer and multi-instrumentalist Atiba Y. Jali. The Rogers Park locations remain much the same, but it's the 1990s, and the world moves at a faster pace.
Davis returns to the beach, but this time she introduces Malaika (also played by Banks); most everything else has changed.
Malindy was a Deaf woman living in a hearing world, but Malaika, a printer and graphic artist, lives in more progressive times. She and her friends communicate using American Sign Language. She isn't as isolated as Malindy, but she's just as protective of her person. Neither woman feels incomplete without a man, and both are resistant to male advances. It goes unspoken, but it's possible that hearing men have tried to take advantage of them. When Malaika meets Nico (also played by Jelks), a children's librarian, she rejects him at first. In both guises, he comes across as a little goofy.
Malaika's first impression appears as a thought bubble: "This brother ain't got no good sense." To Nico's credit, he's as persistent as Arthur, though neither man is a pest. He senses that the attraction is mutual, but he'll have to prove his worth. Like Arthur, he's eager to communicate with this self-possessed young lady, and doesn't view her deafness as an impediment.
Without telling her, he signs up for ASL lessons, and because Malaika didn't share his name, her hearing sister, Aminata (K. Lynn Stephens), doesn't realize he's one of her students. On the contrary, Malaika's friends and family worry that a hearing man is the last thing she needs--a fear Malindy's mother had about Arthur--and when Nico tries out his newfound ASL skills, she's quick to correct his errors, but it's clear she's otherwise quite thrilled.
Both couples have their challenges.
Even as Nico is learning to speak Malaika's language, she often hangs around with Bill (Christopher Smith), a dancer who is also Deaf. If anything, she's even closer to him than to her girlfriends. One day, Nico drops by Malaika's apartment to find the two dancing to Chicago house music, and he watches awkwardly until they ask him to join them. If two of the dancers can't hear the music, all three can feel it, respond to it, and vibe with each other. My only complaint is that Davis cuts away too soon--the scene is so mesmerizing, I wanted more.
Malaika and Nico also attend a performance in which Bill moves with grace and athleticism to a musical version of Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem. To my mind, he's coded as gay, though Davis never spells it out in so many words.
If the sequences set in the 1990s aren't silent, she uses subtitles for the signed dialogue and artfully-placed open-captioned titles to describe music and sounds for Deaf and Hard of Hearing viewers. Though I've seen plenty of films about Deaf characters, it's often seemed as if they were aimed more at hearing audiences, not least when Deaf actors have been excluded.
Since 1986, Marlee Matlin has been the exception that proves the rule, and Davis has cited Children of a Lesser God, the film for which Matlin won the Oscar for best actress, as one of the inspirations behind her conception, though the hearing director was a pioneer, too, for building a film around a Deaf character, hiring Deaf actors, and making the film as accessible as possible for Deaf audiences. (Deaf actress Shoshannah Stern's documentary, Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, which premiered at this year's Sundance, comes to PBS's American Masters on October 14.)
For all the good things that happen in Compensation, bad things happen, too. There's none of the drug use or gun violence often associated with big-city stories, but like any decade, the 1900s and 1990s had their perils, particularly for Black people. If Malaika and Nico have it better than Malindy and Arthur in many ways, both couples face challenges they won't be able to overcome, and the foreshadowing begins right from the start: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the son of formerly enslaved persons, was dying from tuberculosis when he wrote "Compensation." The Dayton, Ohio poet and novelist, who counted Frederick Douglass among his many admirers, died in 1906 at 33.
In that sense, the film hews to the form of a silent-era melodrama in which an indomitable white heroine, often played by Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish, withstands every kind of calamity. It's hard not to wish for happier endings–since there are two in this case–but it wouldn't be the same film otherwise. Compensation is about seizing the moments that make life worth living.
In comparing past and present reviews of the film, I found a striking difference: audiences now are considerably more receptive to and appreciative of Davis's ambitious entwining of love stories that reflect evolving movements around the rights of women, Black people, and people with disabilities. Lisa Kennedy, for instance, made it a Critic's Pick at The New York Times, Robert Daniels gave it four stars at RogerEbert.com, and in 2021, The New Yorker's Richard Brody stated, quite plainly, "Compensation is one of the greatest American independent films ever made."
From today's perspective, Davis's concerns don't seem radical necessarily, but though rooted in the realities of the past, her film really was ahead of its time. More recent ventures like Todd Haynes's double-era Wonderstruck and Sian Heder's Oscar-winning CODA feature Deaf characters played by Deaf actors--like Marlee Matlin as a choir singer's mother--but Compensation stands alone, even in 2025, for centering a Black protagonist.
In addition to the invaluably rejuvenating efforts of Janus, Criterion, and The UCLA Film and Television Archive, which has done yeoman's work in revitalizing the key works of the LA Rebellion, the National Film Registry selected Compensation for preservation just last year, ensuring that Zeinabu irene Davis's remarkable labor of love will never be lost or forgotten again.
Compensation is available from The Criterion Collection on Blu-ray and DVD. Images from the IMDb (Michelle A. Banks, Nirvana Cobb and John Earl Jelks along with the Chicago skyline), Afterglow (Zeinabu irene Davis on the set), Dayton Daily News (John Laurence Dunbar / Ohio History Connection), DVD Beaver (opening title card), MoMA (Banks and Jelks), Criterion Forum (Jelks, Banks, and Christopher Smith), and Janus Films (Banks and Jelks).
This is a revised version of a 2019 City Pages review. The Minneapolis alt-weekly came to an end in 2020, and the entire site disappeared some time afterward.
Elton John Biopic Rocketman Is an Extravagant Jukebox Musical with Heart--and Sex
Elton is leaving tonight on a plane. Photo provided by Paramount Pictures
Rocketman is biography as surreal, impressionistic musical. It shouldn't work, but it does. Beautifully.
As an Elton John fan of long standing, I was cautiously optimistic when the artist first announced the project in 2011. That was seven years before Bohemian Rhapsody racked up almost a billion dollars to become the highest-grossing music biopic of all time, and eight years before Rami Malek won the Oscar for his toothy turn as Queen frontman Freddie Mercury.
John and his production team considered Ewan McGregor, Guy Pearce, and Justin Timberlake, but ultimately decided on Tom Hardy in 2013. I was doubtful the buff, swaggering actor could pull it off, but was eager to see him try. Though Malek lip-synced his way through Bohemian Rhapsody, the idea was for Hardy to do his own singing, except everyone—Hardy included—agreed that he wasn't up to the task. He dropped out and Taron Egerton, the fresh-faced kid from Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman series, signed on. (Elton John appeared with him in 2017's Kingsman: The Golden Circle.)
This seemed like a step back, especially after Egerton's 2018 Robin Hood failed spectacularly with audiences and critics, mustering a measly 15 at Rotten Tomatoes. But Dexter Fletcher previously directed the 29-year-old Welshman in his third feature, 2015's Eddie the Eagle, so they had already established a working relationship. In retrospect, it appears preordained, even if the opposite is true. A Hardy Rocketman would've been a more intense affair, but Egerton brings a welcome buoyancy to the role (though Hardy as butch-era Freddie Mercury really would've been something).
Right: Taron Egerton in 2015's Kingsman
Before he steps into it, Matthew Illesley and Kit Connor acquit themselves nicely as the young Reginald Dwight, a piano prodigy with a disinterested father (Luther's Stephen Mackintosh), a distracted mother (a virtually unrecognizable Bryce Dallas Howard), and a supportive nan (the delightful Gemma Jones). Once Reg reaches adulthood, Egerton takes over.
In real life, Elton took his stage name from Elton Dean and Long John Baldry. In the film, a certain Beatle inspires the surname, a move that plays more as a nod to the friendship that produced John Lennon's 1974 hit "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night" than to the historical record, but then Rocketman is billed as a "real fantasy." That gives Fletcher, who completed Bohemian Rhapsody after Bryan Singer's ignominious departure, license to slice and dice the truth in a way that's less egregious than in a literal-minded venture like his previous one.
Fletcher got his start as an actor, and not just any actor: blessed with full lips and thick, wavy hair, he played the title role in groundbreaking queer filmmaker Derek Jarman's 1986 Caravaggio. (Jarman was also the director who introduced his otherworldly co-star, Tilda Swinton, to the world.)
Among Fletcher's 107 acting credits, his most Rocketman-relevant include 1976's kiddie musical Bugsy Malone, Mike Leigh's 1999 Gilbert and Sullivan docudrama Topsy-Turvy, and the 1998 Vaughn-produced Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (also with Stephen Mackintosh).
If Rocketman is hardly an arthouse proposition like Todd Haynes' multifaceted Dylan portrait, I'm Not There, it's better than most music biopics, and not so much for what it has to say—it's a fully authorized motion picture, after all—but for the visual flair Fletcher brings to it. Elton doesn't just sing; he floats, flies, blasts off into space, even communes with different versions of himself. It's tempting to compare it to Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, though it never gets that dark, not even during the depths of Elton's drug-alcohol-sex-food addiction, but characters break into song at key moments just as they break into dance at key moments in Fosse's autobiographical fantasia.
Other possible references include Pasolini (the nightmarish disco sequence), Ken Russell (the "Pinball Wizard" sequence…among others not directly connected to Tommy), Baz Luhrmann (the way songs fit the mood or theme rather than the year), and possibly even Liverpool laureate Terence Davies, since Reg's family congregates at the local pub like so many of Davies' working-class families over the years—families that often included gay sons.
If Egerton, who sang Elton's "I'm Still Standing" in the animated feature Sing, isn't a great vocalist, he's unforced and engaging. That may sound like faint praise, but he does justice to Elton's '70s catalog, and that's no mean feat. I had to suppress the urge to sing along to every lyric, a temptation filmgoers of a certain age may find impossible to resist.
If the comparisons between Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman already feel like overkill, the filmmakers have only encouraged them by working manager John Reid into both scenarios--and by casting compact, dark-haired Game of Thrones actors for the roles; Aiden Gillen (Littlefinger) for the former and Richard Madden (Robb Stark) for the latter. After Reid, a seductive, Machiavellian figure in Madden's precise portrayal, the most significant person in John's on-screen life is songwriting partner Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell). While Elton is shopping around for a record deal, music publisher Dick James (a hilarious Stephen Graham) by way of A&R man Ray Williams (Charlie Rowe) brings the two together.
In Lee Hall's script, we're meant to believe that John and Taupin never had a single argument, which is patently untrue (Elton to The Guardian: "We've had arguments"), but the actors sell the partnership wonderfully.
Bell, the more seasoned performer, nicely underplays his scenes, thus confirming that the more conventionally attractive Taupin wasn't meant for the stage, though his affection for Elton is never in doubt. Nor is his concern when his partner goes off the rails. It's a totally idealized relationship, though their composer-lyricist chemistry speaks for itself through the quality of the 24 John-Taupin songs featured in the film, from "The Bitch Is Back" (sung by Elton as a 10-year-old) to "I'm Still Standing" (sung by Elton as a thirtysomething). Hall wrote Billy Elliot, the 2000 movie that made then-14-year-old Bell a star, and knows how to write to the actor's strengths; he would go on to work with Elton on the musical version of that film.
Rocketman is less skittish than most major-studio features about gay sex. While the PG-13 rated Bohemian Rhapsody took a judgmental view of homosexuality, particularly in the Cruising-style sequence with Freddie and a bit of rough trade at a shadowy gas station, Rocketman earns its R rating with a sunlit sex scene set to "Take Me to the Pilot" in addition to a few other tasteful same-sex sequences (all of which were excised when the film opened in Russia). As Elton told The Guardian in May, "Some studios wanted to tone down the sex and drugs so the film would get a PG-13 rating. But I just haven't led a PG-13 rated life." Granted, if the sex was straight, the MPAA would've been more lenient, but the ratings board's double standards regarding gay vs. straight sex and male vs. female nudity are well known.
The R rating allows for a more honest look at Elton's life than that of the neutered Freddie Mercury; it's also just one of the reasons why Rocketman won't sell as many tickets or win as many awards as Bohemian Rhapsody.
Once Elton gets clean, the film, which uses a group therapy session as a framing device, is over. Unlike biopics about Buddy Holly, Selena, and other artists who didn't even make it to 25, there's no tragic death to wring the audience's tears. In strictly dramatic terms, Elton made the mistake of neglecting to die before he got old (though his suicide attempts indicate that he made a valiant effort). The now 72-year-old, still-touring artist would, instead, keep going, and doing all of the things Freddie wouldn't get a chance to do: marrying his partner (artist manager and CEO David Furnish), raising children, and receiving a knighthood for his charitable efforts.
If there's no real tragedy here, and the film doesn't exactly rewrite the rules of the music biopic, it's exhilarating in a way so many others have tried and failed to be. At the very least it gives us the moment when Elton, clad in a bathrobe, sits down at the piano in his childhood home to sing a song while he and Taupin are bunking with his mother and stepfather. There are no glitter sunglasses, no sequined jumpsuits, no backup dancers clad in colorful outfits. "I hope you don't mind that I put down in words," Elton sings clearly and plainly, "How wonderful life is while you're in the world." Taupin steps into the room, and from the way his face lights up, it's clear that he knows exactly who Elton, in that moment, is singing about. He proceeds to give his friend the kind of look any of us would be lucky to receive even once in our lives. If that was the only thing Rocketman gave us, it would be enough.
Rocketman is available on Blu-ray and DVD through Paramount, in addition to the usual pay operators. Images: ABC News (Taron Egerton in Kingsman), Fandom (Bryce Dallas Howard and Gemma Jones), Empire (Egerton, Richard Madden, and the press), and YouTube (Egerton and Madden get close).
Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing isn't a film noir–it's an action movie, a thriller–but it's based around the noir trope of the ordinary joe who gets in over his head. Waaay over his head. And not because he's done anything wrong, but because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because he was associating with the wrong people. In this case: every one of those things. When the antihero's fortunes take a turn, which happens immediately after the film begins, the downturn accelerates from bad to worse to hellacious.
Granted, Henry "Hank" Thompson (a never-better Austin Butler, last seen mostly looking cool in Bikeriders) is hardly perfect, but he doesn't mean anyone any harm. He's his own worst enemy, and he knows it, but he's also a relatively young dude who doesn't realize how good he has it--until he starts to lose it all--because he's so focused on what he doesn't have.
When he was in high school, Hank had a shot at a professional baseball career–until a car crash took that dream away from him forever. Not to give too much away, but I suspect that Aronofsky--or Charlie Huston, who adapted the screenplay from his own novel--is an animal lover, because the four-legged creatures in the film make out pretty well, while the two-legged ones don't (a hungry creature inadvertently sets the crash in motion).
Hank's regret is understandable, not least when the director reveals the extent of the damage, but the accident wasn't really his fault. I mean, it was, but his attempt to do the right thing at the time went spectacularly wrong. If he wasn't completely sozzled then, his life now revolves around booze.
The "now" of the film: 1998. Mr. Stop and Frisk himself, Rudy Giuliani, is Mayor, and the Twin Towers dominate the skyline. Hank works at a bar on the Lower East Side (an unrecognizable Griffin Dunne, who navigated a nightmarish New York 40 years before in Scorsese's After Hours, plays his boss), he has a hot girlfriend, Yvonne (tiny, smoky-eyed Zoë Kravitz), who works as an EMT, and he checks in regularly with his SF Giants-obsessed mother (a voice on the telephone). He's also a functional alcoholic.
If Hank keeps drinking, his functioning will surely suffer, and Yvonne may strike out for greener pastures, but for now, he's holding it together, for the most part–aside from the Requiem for a Dream-like nightmares in which he's back behind the wheel of an out-of-control car in the middle of nowhere. He's less than thrilled when his punk-rock neighbor, Russ (Doctor Who's Matt Smith with towering mohawk and cockney patois), sticks him with his bitey tabby, Buddy (Tonic the Cat), when he leaves for the UK to visit his ailing father, but with Yvonne's encouragement, Hank takes him in.
Car crash and alcoholism aside, this could almost be the start of a romantic comedy until two Russians (Nikita Kukushkin and Yuri Kolokolnikov), who come looking for Russ, beat the shit out of Hank instead. Russ has something they want, and he has no idea what it is, but others will come looking for the same thing, including a tough-talking Puerto Rican (Benito A. Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny), a sarcastic cop with a yen for Kosher delicacies (Regina King), and two Hasidic henchmen (a perfectly-matched Liev Schreiber and Vincent D'Onofrio), equally capable of extreme sadism–they like to remove the eyes of their victims–and charming sweetness, a trait inherited from their beloved Bubbe (Carol Kane, capping off a run of great Yiddish-speaking roles going all the way back to Joan Micklin Silver's 1975 Hester Street).
Like recent NYC thrillers, from Benny and Josh Safdie's Uncut Gems to Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest, our protagonist races all over a gentrifying city to solve the mystery, to stay alive, and to keep his loved ones from harm.
As with Oscar Isaac in the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, he has a cat with him all the while. As cat daddies go, Hank transforms, over the course of the film, from disinterested--and even cavalier--to gold-metal material.
Just as the Safdies turned to electronic composer Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, to keep things moving in Gems, Aronofsky turned to British post-punkers Idles, who offer my favorite score of the year next to Young Fathers' quasi-psychedelic work for Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later (Rob Simonsen wrote the instrumental tracks; Idles performed everything).
The band's bass-heavy sound is perfect for the scuzzy, darkly humorous tone the director establishes, and that includes their heavy, slowed-down cover of Junior Murvin's reggae classic "Police and Thieves," which arrives at the opportune time and plays like the Clash's 1977 cover on Quaaludes.
The diegetic songs by other artists serve mostly as ironic counterpoint, none more so than Magnetic Fields' "The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side," which premiered on 69 Love Songs in...1999, but no matter. Hank doesn't "have wheels" and won't be taking anyone "for a ride," since swearing off cars after he once destroyed one. (If you're expecting to hear Jane's Addiction's "Been Caught Stealing," however, you’ll leave disappointed.)
Left: Sean Gullette on the Lower East Side
I won't say how things end, but it's everything Aronofsky's last film, 2022's divisive The Whale, was not. The director has had a rollercoaster career since his 1998 debut, Pi–also set in the Lower East Side–which impressed me with its originality and striking imagery. I'm not sure I understood it all, but it left me dazzled anyway.
Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, The Wrestler, and Mother! also offered plenty of razzle dazzle--I haven't seen The Fountain or Noah--but the unrelenting gloom of The Whale made me think he'd lost his way.
In comparison, his ninth feature filmplays more like an exercise in genre than an artistic statement, which may sound programmatic–and to some extent, it is–but as darkly comic New York thrillers go, it's a total blast.
Though I was impressed as anyone by blond, blue-eyed Austin Butler in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, a counterintuitive casting choice that paid big dividends, he's never impressed me more than he does in Caught Stealing, in which he gives a more relaxed performance in a film that is anything but relaxing.
For what it's worth, I've been a fan of the actor since the CW's shockingly good Sex and the City prequel The Carrie Diaries, in which Butler played Carrie Bradshaw's more sexually-experienced love interest. In Aronofsky’s film, he plays a version of that character after all of his dreams have died; still young, still sexy, but on the precipice between a decent, if unspectacular life and a tragic one.
Beyond the running, the fighting, and the fucking, Hank loves his mom (who gets a reveal at the end), learns to love a cat, and cries without seeming hapless or pathetic--Charlie Huston's pitiless screenplay combined with Darren Aronofsky's dynamic direction gives him a lot to cry about.
Like the movie star he has become, Butler also manages to look good, even when he looks bad, if you know what I mean, and his transformation at the end pushes that idea to the extreme in ways both hilarious and ingenious.
In a manner of speaking: punk rock (and a cat) saves Hank's life.
Caught Stealing opens in Seattle on Fri, Aug 29, at the Meridian, Pacific Place, the Varsity, and other area theaters. Images from the IMDb (Austin Butler and Tonic the Cat in the flesh and on the poster, Butler and Zoë Kravitz, and Butler and Matt Smith) and Artisan via Rotten Tomatoes (Sean Gullette in a screen shot from Pi's 25th anniversary re-release trailer).
Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is President of the Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
