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Set in the "near future," James Gray's Ad Astra can tell a consistent and ambitious story that, despite the slowness of the narrative, holds attention to the end, and provides beautiful and surprising moments. However, the aridest image may be the close-up face of astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), famous for being the son of legendary space explorer H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) and perfect psychological balance. , never reaching a heart rate per minute higher than 80, not even when falling from a super antenna reaching the stratosphere. This perfectionism makes this official proud to accept all missions assigned to him without question and without allowing the wishes of her wife Eve (Liv Tyler) to interfere with her professional life, making only logical decisions. After recovering from the antenna crash, Roy discovers that the cause of the tower's unstable operation was a series of power surges caused by an antimatter device parked near the planet Neptune. According to the scientists, this lightning source could be the ship of the historic Project Lima that, 30 years ago, led a team of researchers to that location to investigate the existence of extraterrestrial life in the universe, captained precisely by McBride senior. The new mission of the ever-balanced military is to travel to planet Mars to convey a message to trace the whereabouts of his father, whom he thought had been dead for many years. On the way to the red planet, some setbacks happen (such as attacking space pirates on the moon) that seem introduced to attract fans of galactic battles or only to break the monotony of the movie, although exceptionally well done. When Roy finds himself in a position of being used as a bait to attract the attention of his father, who is supposed to be involved in an attack on Earth, his emotional and psychological balance is put to the test. However, his determination leads him to the presence of (his) creator. #gray #review

Phantom Thread is a delicate and crude film at the same time, as it deals with the execution of art, from the artisan weft to the final result, which, in the case of the film, are dream dresses that go beyond materiality, bringing secret messages and auguries literally filled in. His character Reynolds Woodcock is woven asymmetrically between an absurdly cordial and delicate perfectionist and an explosive, self-centered, and authoritarian personality. Between one affair and another, where the choice seems to focus less on passion and more on the aesthetics of the woman who accompanies him as a model, the couturier is assisted by his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville, high performance). She protects him from any external distractions, fixes his mistakes, dismisses his occasional companions, and keeps him protected in his predictable world. During one of his trips to the countryside, Reynolds allows Alma (Vicky Krieps) to enter his life. Alma, the Latin word for soul, is a waitress who animates that being so controlling and so controlled quickly becomes her muse, model, and, surprisingly, the great love of his life. When asked why he never married, Reynolds replies to Alma, "I make dresses," and recognizes himself as an incurable bachelor. When she goes to live in the house where the sewing studio also works, the girl soon realizes the symbiotic relationship between the brothers, and the romance seems doomed to the failure that has always characterized Reynolds' relations. When she is harassed by him, in a loving situation engendered by her, Alma knows that if she remains submissive, she must leave the house. To change the situation, she tries a solution that reveals a dark face that we will later discover is common to both. Or a metaphor to all conjugal relationships? Director Paul Anderson Thomas, who also does cinematography, seems to want to scan the characters' intimacy through close-ups that always show a peace that does not exist. #thomas #review

Pain and Glory is one of the most tender and delicate movies by director Pedro Almodóvar. Autobiographical, and with Antonio Banderas as his alter ego, the story deals with the glory of the past and the pains of the present. Film director Salvador Mallo (Banderas) becomes an elderly man and turns away from the profession, facing illness, depression and declining success. The movie begins with Salvador plunged, in the present, in a swimming pool. In silence and without breathing, it cannot be precisely said whether he is dead or alive. The fluidity of the water mixes with that of another water, that from the past, where the director, as a boy, accompanies his mother and her washerwomen colleagues in their work and in their songs. The movie's first narrative is between a Spanish director and an actor who became a star when he starred in his film Sabor (Flavor). The story, which could be Almodóvar's relationship with Banderas, is now relived with Banderas in the role of the diretor. A great Asier Etxeandia plays Alberto Crespo, the actor that Mallo hadn't talked to in 30 years because he thought the drug had hurt his performance. The relationship is remade, but the affections are tense, sharp, culminating in Crespo using the dragon (heroine) and Salvador asking to try the drug. What follows is a trip to the past where the director's mother (Penélope Cruz) is with him as a boy at a railway station where they will travel to meet her father in another city. Back in the present, a metalanguage exercise turns The Addiction into a confessional text from Salvador that is given for a theatrical presentation in the form of a monologue, by Alberto. During the performance, a man cries. In the dressing room, he reveals himself as Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the great love of Salvador's life, in a moving interpretation. With health increasingly poor, the director undergoes a definitive medical examination. Will there be salvation for Salvador (“savior” in Spanish)? The scene of the train station with the boy and his mother is repeated, no longer as a reminiscence, but another story. #thomas #review

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is considered to be a masterpiece of German Expressionism. Filmed in 1920, the action takes place in several bizarre scenarios that are two-dimensional projections of surrealistic sketches, with crooked walls, pointed doors, and endless stairs. The set designer Hermann Warm does not appear in the credits. At the beginning of the movie, the protagonist Francis (Frederich Feher) tells frightening reminiscences to an older man who says ghosts torment him. The story is shown through flashbacks that took place in the German city of Holstenwall, also recreated in sharp and irregular scenarios. A variety fair is being held at that location and, among the various attractions, a man named Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) announces the presentation of the somnambulist. This young man has been sleeping since his birth, 23 years ago. Lying in a coffin, Cesare (Conrad Veidt) will wake up and answer any question from the audience. Provocatively, Alan (Hans Heinz von Twardowski), a friend of Francis' asks when he will die. Cesare's answer (“At first dawn!”) is terrifying and prophetic because the boy dies. Suspicious, Francis watches over the somnambulist's coffin. However, his fiancee Jane (Li Dagover) is kidnapped the next morning. Some people see Cesare carrying the unconscious girl in their arms and pursue him. Francis denounces Caligari to the police, but he runs away, followed by the boy until he hides in a mental hospital, where he is none other than the director. Aided by the team of doctors and the police, Francis discovers an ancient manuscript and the director's diary, in which he describes his long wait for a sleepwalker to be able to put him under his command and commit a series of murders. When Francis finished telling his interlocutor about the arrest of the mad doctor, we realized that the ambiguity shown by director Robert Wiene was not restricted to the scenario. Still, the plot itself suffers some final distortions that make the movie even more terrifying. #thomas #review

Babel is not about the separation of peoples due to language diferences, as shown in the biblical account. Director Alejandro Iñárritu builds a plot that crosses stories of people visiting foreign lands and interfering, with banal acts, in the culture of the people. It is not a matter of not understanding different languages, since, in one way or another, everyone ends up understanding each other. What you see, in the stories that intersect, are not problems in speech, but in listening. Some misunderstandings follow. Sometimes with tragic consequences. Without spoilers, the stories in the movie are as follows: a Japanese businessman (Kôji Yakusho) goes hunting in Morocco and gives his guide a rifle as a gift. This man sells the gun to a friend, who needs to kill some jackals that threaten his goats. The two Moroccan boys, who graze the goats, decide to test the rifle and shoot a bus hitting an American tourist (Cate Blanchett). The world media claims it was a terrorist act. The tourist's husband (Brad Pitt) calls home and asks that his children's nanny (Adriana Barraza) stay with the children and not go to a wedding in Mexico. But she will. In Japan, a police officer seeks information from the businessman who donated the gun but ended up getting involved with his teenage daughter (Rinko Kikuchi). She is deaf and dumb, has gone through the tragic loss of her mother and is having difficulties in dealing with her sexuality. The four stories, well-marked by the precise cinematography of Rodrigo Prieto, should not have any connection between them. They all act in good faith, with great intentions, but by small mistakes, none of them criminals, everything goes wrong. The end of the movie takes place in a Tokyo skyscraper and is representative of the communication problems that characterize Babel. The Chieko girl experiences the pain that led her mother to kill herself. The father arrives and seems to understand that the daughter's pain is not being unable to hear, but the pain of not being heard. #thomas #review

Carnal Knowledge is rightly considered Mike Nichols' best work. It can be said that it is a chronicle that sensitively reflects the patterns of sexuality, focusing on the feelings and desires that led to the so-called sexual revolution of the 60s. At the beginning of the movie, two friends, Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel), argue in the dark to the Moonlight Serenade arrangements. They talk about loving and being loved and about the type of women they would like to have by their side: sexy without being a prostitute, intelligent, understanding, tall and with big tits. The inseparable friends go to a college mixer, a closed party where boys and girls met at American campuses in the 1940s. There they discover what can be the "dream woman" of both: Susan (Candice Bergen), who is "given" by Jonathan to Sandy. The latter, however, fails to take the initiative with the girl. Susan starts the conversation with Sandy, and they are soon dating. Although shy, the boy tries to advance in caresses and, when the girl agrees with some advances, he tells everything to his friend Jonathan, including that Susan finds him sexy. It's the password for him to make an appointment with his friend's girlfriend. Susan meets Jonathan, the two soon get involved and have sex. As usual, Jonathan runs to tell his friend about his first time (of course, he doesn't reveal his partner's name). This fact makes Sandy obsessed with the idea of having sex, and Susan, reluctantly, gives in to the boy's wishes. Now it's Jonathan, in love with Susan, who despairs because he wants Susan to reveal to Sandy that she was having an affair with him. She doesn't want to hurt her boyfriend's feelings, doesn't tell anything, and forbids Jonathan to do so. They break up, and Susan and Sandy end up getting married. Jules Feiffer's screenplay is purposefully economical and polarized as if to characterize the childlike way in which the two friends treat women. After this prologue, the story follows the experiences of Jonathan and Sandy for about two decades, showing their disappointments, separations, and insecurities. #thomas #review

Monster's Ball is an excellent movie about violence, not just the episodic one portrayed in the news, but the intimate violence of each one of us that reflects social violence that repeats patterns of domination and is justified by the very tradition of historical errors that commits. Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry are the protagonists like Hank and Leticia, inhabitants of a small town of Georgia in the 1990s. The two have nothing in common, except that Hank is the policeman who electrocuted her ex-husband in the electric chair (they didn't know at first about the connection). The terrific script by Milo Addica and Will Rokos does not label anyone, and neither "softens" the characters' reputation. They do, not what they should, but only what they can do. Hank repeats his father Buck (Peter Boyle), a racist police officer who has a significant influence on him even if he is attached to a walker. The same does not happen with his son Sonny (Heath Ledger), a friend of black boys and in a way similar to his mother and grandmother, who could not endure the family "disease." Leticia is a clumsy waitress, an alcoholic, an unbalanced mother, and is about to lose her home for not paying the rent. When she takes her son Tyrell (Coronji Calhoun) for his last visit to his father, Lawrence (Sean Combs), who will be executed the next day, no longer shows any affection. By coincidence, the characters are in a moment of mourning for both. They have sex, but, contrary to what appears on the screen, it is about pain relief, two people trying to remove for a few moments everything that weighs on them. That's it. From this point, they start a relationship marked more by psychological sanity than by love. There is no redemption in Hank's attitudes, only divestment in prejudice. External affects no longer seem to change both. Director Marc Foster manages to make a perfect cut in the final scene in which Leticia discovers the relationship between Hank and the ex-husband's execution. #thomas #review

American Factory is a 2019 documentary about a GM automobile factory that was shut down in 2008. Six years later, the facility was purchased by a Chinese billionaire who rehired part of the former employees and a further contingent of 200 Chinese workers. The directors of this movie, Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, were at the first event when they made a documentary. The facility purchase by Chinese Cao Dewang represented a relief for the community and a resumption of the motion picture. In the beginning, everyone is optimistic: "chairman" Cao hopes that the Americans will see the Chinese more positively. He also hopes that they can work in harmony with the 200 Chinese workers who came as coaches. Chinese workers take classes on American culture and are amazed to learn that their colleagues can joke about the president. Americans are frightened by the Chinese's "patriotic" dedication but are content with their (reduced) paychecks. Gradually, this attitude towards work shows an irreconcilable cultural difference. Fuyao's productivity in China depends a lot on the "reification" of employees in that country (communist?), In addition to long working hours and an absolute disregard for work accidents. In an attempt to minimize the resistance of American employees to this style of management, local managers are sent to China to observe the form of work in that country. The growing frustration, with the low wages and with the increase of the injuries at work, leads some employees to seek affiliation with the United Auto Workers, union organization that Dewang loathes even with the closing of the factory in retaliation. Fuyao executives pay a millionaire amount to "consultants" to clarify about the harmful effects of the union movement, and unionization does not happen. The historic class warfare is called into question when a communist entrepreneur bars the unionization of capitalist employees. #thomas #review

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood was directed by Quentin Tarantino, but it is not a "Tarantino movie." It's better than that: great comedy, fine acting, and a late 1960s Hollywood review that counts as a declaration of love. It does not mean that Once Upon a Time... is conformist or just nostalgic. It's also all that, but it brings a broad re-reading of reality, which the movie calls a fairy tale, but we could call it subversion. This undermining can be seen clearly in the relationship between the two male protagonists, a decaying Western TV icon, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), and his stunt, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). They have in common an unconditional love relationship, of the kind existing only in fairy tales, or as stated in the movie, Cliff is "more than a brother, but less than a wife". The movie is set in 1969 and, in addition to the male protagonists, it brings back to life the actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), under a much more romantic vision than the real Sharon, victimized by a tragedy. Here, she falls in love with Los Angeles, goes to the movies to watch a film in which she made an appearance. The plot follows its own rhythm, which may explain its 161 minutes. Several side stories overlap, but they never get to be what we expect of them, with thriller scenes falling apart without anything happening. It's not a movie about actors' stories. It's a movie about making movies and acting in movies. The agent Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino) convinced Dalton to leave the TV industry, and go to Rome to make spaghetti westerns. Booth splits between his duties at the friend-boss-brother's mansion and the trailer, where he lives with his pitbull Brandy. When at last the so-called "Manson family" enters the scene to carry out their crimes, it is not a big moment, but an extra set, which follows its logic, and here, a Tarantinesque sense. In the end, those who died in real life receive Rick Dalton for a drink and talk excitedly. Like people who leave the cinema.

The Two Popes is a movie based on a play by Anthony McCarten, who wrote the script, and spends much of his 125 minutes in dialogues between two popes, a phenomenon that has not happened since 1414. Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce play Benedict XVI and Francis I, shortly after the election of the former, and when then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio went to Rome to request his resignation without knowing that the pope had already summoned his presence. The encounter between two very different men is an instant of mutual provocation, where Bento openly questions Bergoglio's progressive thinking and complains about the criticisms he makes of his papacy. For the German, the Christian faith depends on the stability that the Argentine sees as leniency with historical crimes. Although he makes excerptions on Ratzinger's election as a replacement for John Paul II, and also on Bergoglio's past and mundane life (with the beautiful cinematography of Uruguayan Cesar Charlone), these are shallow and serve only to contextualize the dialogue between the two saints priests. "I don't agree with anything you say," — says an authoritarian and accusing Benedict XVI to a respectful but firm Bergoglio. There is a tendency in Fernando Meirelles' direction to portray the Argentine cardinal as a redemptive figure, able to face his fallibility with humility and whose accession to the papal throne may usher in an era of significant changes. However, what could appear as a manipulation of the script is entirely supplanted by the magnificent performance of the two protagonists. Pryce is friendly and fun, like the image that Pope Francis I gives us. But this performance is a gift given by Hopkins' economic performance. For this reason, it is credible to change the perspective of Bento's plans, almost portrayed as a villain, as a brilliant theorist and attached to his ghosts of the past. When the real popes appear on the screen, Pryce looks like Francis, but Ratzinger looks like a caricature of Hopkins. #thomas #review

A Woman Under the Influence is a masterpiece of John Cassavetes and presents a woman who, so influenced by the people around her, can be a faithful portrait of most women we know. She doesn’t seem half-crazy because she’s influenced, but the symptoms are often the only way out to a person who wants to be whatever her husband wants her to be. So is Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands), who sends the three children to their mother’s house to spend a romantic night with her husband Nick (Peter Falk), a construction team leader. The evening doesn’t happen because they are forced to work overtime at night, but he "compensates" his wife, taking the whole team home at seven in the morning to have Mabel prepare spaghetti for them. Although, privately, Nick and Mabel are a passionate couple, in public, the thing doesn’t work, especially for her, who, while trying to please everyone, udergoes some manic episodes. Nick sees these symptoms with censorship, and he scolds her, not for what she could do, but for what her friends might think of her. It's no different with her children: she loves them so much and in such a way that she behaves as if she were also a child. She waits for the children to return from school and always holds parties to do whatever they want. This shocks the neighbor who considers "strange" the way of Mabel. Under pressure from everyone, Nick decides to commit his wife to a mental institution. In his absence, he takes care of the children: on a day off, he takes the children out of school to practically forces them to go to the beach with him. On the way back, in the back of a truck, he gives them some beer, and they sleep. When Mabel is discharged, Nick thinks it is a good idea to invite a few dozen friends to welcome her but ends up expelling those who are not family, making dinner with a dozen family members, resulting in more tension. In the end, people leave, including us, movie viewers. However, doubt and anguish remain: what is this normalcy that is sought?

My father is a disturbing film and an unprecedented interaction for many people who go to the movies. By "breaking the fourth wall," a more common experience in the theater, playwright Florian Zeller, which debuts in the cinematic direction, creates a break that could confuse but thrills and enchants, mainly by the performance of Anthony Hopkins. The story is bland but uncomfortable. It's the question of what to do with a loved father when he starts to enter the process of dementia. To stand by his side as our lives fade away or to put him in a shelter and outsource emotion and gratitude? To make matters worse, the situation is seen by the eyes of the elderly, which does not give us much reliability. When we are introduced to Anthony (the character has the same name as the actor), we come across a powerful and refined octogenarian father. His daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) arrives at his apartment in London. She's worried because her father kicked out her most recent caretaker, accusing her of stealing her watch. Anne says she will need to hire another caregiver, as she is moving to Paris to pursue a new relationship, which leaves Anthony greatly distressed. Anne goes and, as soon as he sees her crossing the street, Anthony hears a noise and discovers a strange man in the apartment (Mark Gatiss, who we will never know who he is). After an argument, in which the man insists that Anthony is his guest, Anne returns but is no longer the middle-aged daughter we know, but another woman (Olivia Williams). She confirms to her father that she is divorced, and the man disappears. If we pay attention, we will see that it is not even the same apartment as Anthony. More production design tricks will emerge by the end of the movie. An angrier version of Anne's husband, perhaps the real one (Rufus Sewell), imposes Anthony his most significant humiliation. But there is a sure consistency in what he says: his father-in-law is sick, and staying in the house will not do any good. In the end, Anne's father is with a person who does not know who he is. He complains that he is "losing his leaves." The watch remains on the wrist.