The latest film releases include Moana 2, Queer, Maria, and The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Weighing in are Alonso Duralde and Dave White, film critics and co-hosts of the movie podcast Linoleum Knife.
Moana 2
Eight years after the original, Disney is bringing back Auli’i Cravalho to reprise the title role and Dwayne Johnson as her mentor, Maui. In this sequel, Moana gets a call from her ancestors, which sends her on an adventure across Oceania.
Duralde: “The first movie is about young Moana off on a quest to save her people. And this time, a slightly older Moana is off on another quest to fulfill the ancestors’ desire, to find an island that would bring all of the ocean people together. Of course, a vengeful sea god does not want that to happen. So complications ensue.
Like the first movie, this is gorgeous to look at, the tropical splendor of the sea and the foliage and the fabrics of the Pacific Islands is very much on display. But it's a little bit of a retread. I think with Inside Out 2 earlier this year, Disney gave us a sequel that felt like they were expanding the world and going to new places, and this one just feels like a bit of a rerun.”
White: “It's disappointing to watch something that you know was written and created by people who really wanted to dig more deeply into characters and themes, and then almost certainly got the edges sanded off of it by the corporation. … Disney is not the most risk-taking and not meddling corporate entity, and that is what I believe sinks this. … If you were a child when you saw Moana, and you're a maybe older child now, you might want to see this. It's not enough, and that's a bummer.”
Queer
Luca Guadagnino channels William S. Burroughs in this adaptation of Burrough’s 1950s novella Queer. Daniel Craig plays an American expat in Mexico City who becomes infatuated with a younger man.
White: “It's about love, and the fear of love, and the specifically queer fear of the vulnerability that comes from that, very much more specifically, in a time when it was flat-out illegal to be us. So if you're looking for heavy plot, you can go somewhere else. But if you … want a very gorgeously crafted sensory evocation of non-heterosexual lives 70 years in the past, this is it. Daniel Craig is sorrowful and full of longing, and he deserves so much praise for his performance in this film.”
Duralde: “Burroughs himself is as hard to nail down as his literature, often in terms of what he was really about and his genuine desires. But I think he clearly poured a lot of himself in the work, and, Craig is definitely channeling that. I think hallucinatory is the key word here, because yes, eventually there is an ayahuasca trip, which I think Guadagnino captures in a way that few filmmakers have really nailed. … You have these moments where Daniel Craig is looking at Drew Starkey, and the two of them are sitting at the opposite sides of a table. But there's a shadow self where Daniel Craig can stroke his arm or touch his face, and it's about those repressed desires. It's about being a pre-Stonewall gay man expat in Mexico and constantly having to keep your own desires in check, as the movie captures really beautifully.”
Maria
This biopic centers on the opera soprano Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) and is directed by Pablo Larraín, who also helmed biopics about other complicated and famous women: Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana.
White: “Sometimes I think Pablo Larraín’s films are quite … beautiful to look at, but at times they also feel like they keep their subjects under glass, and that is occasionally to their detriment. So we wind up looking at his characters as though they were cordoned off in a museum, and those characters are actual people. His earlier films … they observed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Diana, women who were subject to very intense media scrutiny, just like Maria Callas was at the height of her fame. And his own approach is similarly intense, but it is also loving and reverential. And in the end, he gets at a version of her reality and humanity, and we are allowed to feel the melancholy of her life and the cage that she found herself in. Angelina Jolie is digging into this role in a way … like she understands quite well what it's like to live a life in public and be the subject of not just a lot of admiration, but also occasional condemnation. And I felt that sadness from her and the film. So I admire this movie for that.”
Duralde: “Angelina Jolie is singularly qualified to understand this woman and her life, and even contributes vocals. She is the voice of older Callas, who does not have the power she once had. So she's really putting it out there and putting it all into this performance. I also want to shout out cinematographer Edward Lachman, who just captures the operatic grandeur of this woman's imagination and of this woman's life in a way that is so potent. And even though this is a Netflix movie, if you can see it projected, you totally should.”
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
This family drama follows Iman, a lawyer in Tehran who is hired as an investigative judge for Iran’s Revolutionary Court. The filmmaker, Mohammad Rasoulof, is wanted by authorities in Iran and had to flee the country before the movie got released.
Duralde: “It's a movie about living in a theocratic dictatorship, whether that's Iran itself or within the confines of this family. Yeah, the father does get a job as an investigator, as part of the court system, which is clearly designed to execute dissidents. They give him a gun for his own protection. The gun goes missing, and it becomes this thriller. … Did the wife take the gun? Did one of the daughters take the gun? And the more desperate he is to get it back, because losing it would be a big black mark against him career-wise, the more his oppressive side comes out. And the fact that the petty tyranny that he has in this household — with his wife, with his children — becomes more evident and for them more unbearable. … It's a brilliant thriller that is also this political allegory. … You're not being given a sermon or a lecture about life in Iran. But you are getting that information while you're also holding your breath, trying to figure out where this story is going to go.”
White: “Mohammad Rasoulof lives in exile in Europe now, after spending time in prison and ongoing state persecution from the Iranian government. At one point, he was in jail with fellow filmmaker Jafar Panahi. And he decided to make this film secretly and then leave the country. So he has a lot of ideas he wants to communicate. And we can talk about this as an act of filming. We often have to also understand that it's not just a thriller. It's also an act of activism itself. Because of that, I think at times it's a little didactic. There's a sense of: I don't know how many more films I get to make here, so I have to lay this out plainly and loudly. And he does that. But you won't be disappointed. … It is an intense thriller, and it will leave you feeling a little breathless and a little roughed up by the time it's over, but it's definitely worth the experience.”