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The Lighthouse is a nightmare. Horror movie can often be the result of a lifetime of two in isolation. Director Robert Eggers captures this image and brings it to its final consequences in a beautiful black-and-white reconstruction of the desolate lighthouse setting on a hard-to-reach island in the middle of the ocean in New England. Using a 1.19:1 screen format, as reminiscent of some 1930s German expressionist film, the movie shows the arrival of two guardians at the lighthouse to replace the old garrison: veteran Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and newcomer Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson). Wake acts as if he owns the place, holds the key to the entrance to the top of the tower and only he takes care of the light. At Winslow, less noble tasks are reserved, such as feeding the furnace and cleaning the latrines. The old lighthouse keeper has a scary speech, telling the new kid his old assistant went crazy. Soon we realize this "logic" of madness entering the narrative: Winslow’s erotic fantasies materialize in the form of a mermaid with her detailed anatomy displayed, but also the terrifying visions take over the narrative, to the point where we don’t know if what’s being exhibited is real or a product of hallucination. Completely altered, the two characters immerse themselves in an extreme intimacy where they dance, sing and almost kiss, but almost kill each other. In a lodging completely taken by the water, they wallow in the mud, and, with the length of the story (the film is 1h 50), we feel uncomfortable with the rawness of the images. The last fifteen minutes are taken by disturbing images, which sometimes resemble scenes of Buñuel. At this time, the intimacy, very similar to a play, opens to an iconic aesthetic, where archetypal images with mythological inspiration lead to a tragic end to which the hero who dared to steal the fire from the gods was subjected.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire includes itself in that category of films that go beyond the script and acting and is consolidated as a work of art. Clair Mathon's exquisite cinematography anticipates scenes through sketches on paper and canvas textures. Anyone who is in a hurry to draw conclusions about the plot should be attentive to the words of Marianne (Noémie Merlant) to her students in a portrait painting class: “Take time to look at me.” A student brings to the ambiance a screen that was in stock: it is the story we are going to watch. Sometime in the 18th century, Marianne crosses a bay in a boat driven by rowers towards the coast of Brittany. Her materials fall into the sea, the men do not move, and she jumps into the water to retrieve them. She arrives at her destination, wholly soaked and tired. The artist's mission is, in one week, to paint a portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), the second daughter of a wealthy merchant. The painting must be sent to the appreciation of a suitor in Milan who may if he likes, marry the girl. Héloïse's older sister does not seem to have agreed to this fate and chose to kill herself. The younger sister's strategy is different: she refuses to pose for the portrait. Therefore, Marianne should do the painting from memory, presenting herself as a chaperone, assisted by the maid Sophie (Luàna Bajrami). The two young women start walking together and exchanging experiences. At the end of the week, Marianne reveals that she is a painter and shows the painting to Héloïse, who rejects for considering it lifeless. The painter feels extremely frustrated and ends up burning the painting and asking for another week to complete the work. What follows is a love story. Marianne explores all the intimacy of Héloïse, and she surrenders with calm pleasure. There is no space for male conventions. Lovers know that they cannot change their destinies, but they discover that there is room for desire. And for art. #thomas #review

1917 came, in a way, to supply a shortage of films about the First World War, since the last primary production about the conflict was made in 1930 ( All Quiet on the Western Front , by Lewis Milestone, filmed 12 years after the end of the war). Therefore, the work of screenwriter and director Sam Mendes brings up a faithful report, as if it were a documentary, about a dividing line on the way nations face each other. Away from the technological apparatus of modern productions, 1917 still bears similarities to the barbarian wars. Roger Deakins' cinematography in the form of a seemingly unique single-take puts the viewer within the scene, following the action with only a few steps, which has a distressing and sometimes asphyxiating effect. The feeling of walking inside the trenches is incomparable. In an eschatological and desolate setting, a story of obedience, dedication, and perseverance is told. On April 16, 1917, two British battalions are about to fall into a trap that could result in the death of 1600 soldiers. Allied aviation (which had not yet adapted weapons on board) carried out an aerial survey showing that the Germans simulated a retreat to ambush the British. Without being able to communicate about the trap, the Allied Command decides to send two cables to the so-called Nobody's Land. One of them, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), is the brother of a lieutenant who is in one of the threatened battalions. The other, Schofield (George MacKay), is chosen by pure chance. The duo's adventure takes place in real-time, among the friendly trenches, until it reaches the unknown dangers of No Man's Land. They proceed through an abandoned German underground bunker. Accidents happen between a scenario of horror and destruction. As if to remind us that this is a war movie, and not just horror, shootings, persecutions, and stupid deaths occur. Gradually, tiredness gives way to despair, until we, side by side with the characters, begin to doubt the success of the mission. #thomas #review

The Platform is a violent and very obvious parable about the capitalist system. However, the way it is presented is more frightening as we try to convince ourselves of human kindness. And even when we expect the worst, what comes next succeeds in overcoming what has already been seen, in rawness and despair. The minimalist set design resembles a theater stage. Most of the scenes take place in a structure called The Hole, where cells for two people have a large central opening through which a platform with a table with food for the whole day descends daily. At level zero, there is a kitchen where a banquet is prepared daily with refined foods, delicacies, desserts, and drinks. This feast goes down intact to level 1 and then successively, in brief stops, to the lower levels. If each pair consumes a small portion of what is served, it is possible that there may be food for everyone. Of course, that never happens. Selfish, not only do the occupants of the upper cells eagerly devour more than they can handle digesting, but they smear the remains of food they cannot eat. Some justify their actions by remembering that, after a month, a shuffle occurs, and they can be transferred to cells below. The movie starts with Goreng (Ivan Massagué) waking up at level 48 alongside the old Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor). He brings the only object to which everyone is entitled: a Don Quixote book by Miguel de Cervantes. His cellmate has a knife that sharpens itself. Goreng's odyssey literally has many ups and downs until he meets Baharat (Emilio Buale), a black man who carries a rope with which he intends to reach level zero, without realizing that, doing so, he will need the help of people from above. Together, they intend to send a message to the Administration that, as said by a sage, “has no conscience” of what happens at the lower levels. Little by little, the two paladins will discover that practicing good, altruism and social justice is a far more inglorious and challenging task than they imagined. #thomas #review

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.

Nomadland , Chloé Zhao's movie based on the book of the same name written by American journalist Jessica Bruder, unfolds as if it were a documentary and raises some intriguing and topical questions: is there life after the ZIP is cancelled? And the most important: is it possible to live in a capitalist system without having property? Fern, the protagonist of the story, played with rare sensitivity by Frances McDormand, contradicts all expectations and conventions. After her life is "cancelled" when the city of Empire ends (which existed due to a gypsum mine that closed), the widow keeps her belongings in a deposit and decides to leave the world in her van, the Vanguard. Fern customizes the van with a bed, a small kitchen and a storage space with the memories of his "other life," such as his father's collection of dishes. Fern and Vanguard set off on the road, rejecting the "homeless" label but recognizing himself as houseless. Soon, they discover they are not alone and join a gigantic tribe that roams the country. Fruits of a decadent new capitalist order, they're the rejects of a lamê meritocracy: old or almost, more or less middle class and others who, of his, only have their cars. They are unemployed, retired with ridiculous salaries, out of work and victims of the real estate bubble. Lives mortgaged to an ideal each day more distant. Working exhaustive journeys through Amazon warehouses in exchange for parking money and a few bucks, Fern only watches and listens to people, most of them telling their real-life stories. Here are Linda May, Fern's best friend; Swankie, the kayaker and birdwatcher in her final moments of life; and the mixed prophet and spiritual mentor Bob Wells. Down the road, David Strathairn appears as Dave, a peaceful and lovely person who tries to win Fern's affection. She also likes her fellow traveller but somehow knows that this story of sleeping in the comfort of a bed is already something that doesn't concern her. In the end, she returns to Empire, which is no more.

Minari is a beautiful film as any human life can be, but, as what happens with everyone else, dreams don’t always work out as they should. And this set of misadventures is told by the watchful eye of the six-year-old boy David (Alan Kim), a sort of alter ego of director Lee Isaac Chung. The story begins with the arrival of David and his family in the rural area of a small Arkansas town. He, his older sister, Anne (Noel Kate Cho), and his parents, Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Yeri Han), will live in a mobile home (with wheels) on an agricultural property with fallow land. While the expectation of harvesting typical Korean vegetables - to be sold to other Korean immigrants like them - is Jacob’s big dream, the idea deeply angers Monica who considers living in the middle of nowhere a threat to David’s health, that has murmur in the heart and cannot run or practice physical activities. The couple work in the morning on a local farm, sexing chicks, and return in the afternoon to take care of the house and prepare the future plantations. Jacob hires an aide named Paul (Will Patton), a Pentecostal who spends all his time praying and casting demons off the property. After several instances where the situation begins to become untenable between the couple, Jacob agrees to bring Monica’s mother - Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung) - to live with them. The arrival of this grandmother will introduce some cultural elements, but will add a delicious disorganization to the plot. Going to sleep in the same room, David and Soonja fell out, he because she does not act like the other grandmothers and spends the day cursing, watching wrestling on TV and "smells like Korea". The elderly woman says that her grandson does not look Korean (in fact he was born in the United States) and should, contrary to what he does, practice physical activities. Conflicts, unpleasantness and small tragedies follow and, in a way, we get used to the characters, as if we were part of the family.

The Worst Person in the World is a dramedy directed with brilliance and extreme sensitivity by the Norwegian Joachim Trier. In the opening scene, Julie (Renate Reinsve) smokes and fingers her cell phone at an anticipated time in Chapter 2 (there are 12 chapters plus a prologue and an epilogue). As in most of the movie, the protagonist is out of place. "I feel like a spectator of my own life," she says. After studying - and then becoming uninterested - in Medicine, Psychology and Photography, Julie becomes a bookstore clerk. At the age of thirty, all the expectations of youth suddenly turn into relentless imperatives of adult life: having a fixed job, children, stable relationship among other standards of the status quo. In this sea of uncertainty (is there any absolute certainty?), she meets Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a famous cartoonist who created a politically incorrect character. Ten years older than Julie, he soon proposes that the two not be together because their life priorities will always be mismatched. She agrees to leave, and he falls in love. The couple stays together. Aksel proves to be a good enough, understanding and fun partner, but there is something in the relationship that doesn't work, not for what they do, but for what they both are. This fact sometimes leaves Julie on the fringes of what happens, and she has enough courage to be ravishingly reckless and abandon the situation in search of personal happiness, which she doubts. In one of those moments when Julie is "out of context" (that initial scene), she walks through the streets and, entering a wedding party where she does not know anyone, meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). With the commitment not to betray their partners, they go beyond the moment's passion in a hilarious ritual of "allowed" intimacies. The chapters follow each other as a sometimes chaotic set of beginnings and endings, small victories and unexpected tragedies that, like any human life, is full of disappointments for the plans that, inevitably, are never fulfilled.

Whenever we go to the movies, we know beforehand that we will see a story where actors and actresses interpret situations that simulate real life. In Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog , this is precisely what happens, but the development of the characters is so perfect that we realize that they are playing roles not to reveal their realities, exactly as happens in the real world when we are not at the movies. The story is set in Montana, in the north of the United States, in 1925, which would be enough not to classify it as a western, although the rural vocation of the region provides the typical scenographic elements for cowboys, allied to beautiful landscapes that sometimes refer to John Ford’s movie The Searchers (1956), although recorded in New Zealand. The four main characters of the film are gradually being introduced. Among them, certainly, Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) is the most emblematic: a sexist farmer, he stands out for his rawness, besides an unusual skill with the knife, to castrate calves quickly and mercilessly. Phil’s brother, George (Jesse Plemons), is his opposite: always clean and well-dressed, he is a well-educated person who often tries to get around the awkward situations caused by the cruelty of his brother. In one of them, the "fatso" will console the widow Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst), who is crying after Phil treated his "effeminate" son Peter (Kodi Smit-Mcphee) with extreme rudeness, George ends up marrying Rose, but Phil does not accept the marriage, and the woman’s entry into the house, even with Peter’s sending to university, becomes a focus of tension between wife and brother-in-law. The situation only ends when Phil decides to establish an inexplicable connection with Peter. The meeting of the two men of (apparently) so different personalities brings reminiscences about Phil’s former mentor, the cowboy Bronco Henry, who died twenty years ago, and from whom the ranger keeps a napkin and a saddle. But the relationship with Peter will come to an unexpected end.

Jojo Rabbit (Roman Griffin Davis) is a ten-year-old boy who lives in Germany in the late years of World War II. Therefore, it is understandable and very normal that his role model is a character considered heroic by the German nation of the time: Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi), who is even his imaginary friend. Of course, creating a caricature view of the Führer can be problematic within a current film. Still, director Taika Waititi conducts the narrative to superimpose fantastic and funny scenes with painful moments and extreme violence. Accustomed to a conscious and enlightened view of the barbarities of the Third Reich, we tend to call banality the treatment given to the pathetic Hitler. Actually, the apparent innocence of the German leader generates his strength, both for children and for infantilized crowds who idolize him as a good companion. Thus, Johannes tries to insert himself into the Nazi youth. Still, his pure and innocent nature does not adapt naturally to the culture of the destruction of the enemy that characterizes the ideology of the dominant culture at the time. However, bullying is mitigated by the ambiguity of the training camp commander, Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), who is sometimes ruthless and sensitive. When, after an accident with a grenade, Jojo is forced to stay at home, he makes a discovery that is the great twist of the film: his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), hides a Jew, the young Elsa ((Thomasin McKenzie), in an attic bedroom closet. The character's introduction creates tough questions for the kid, and liking the clandestine resident is the least of them. Suddenly, the aspiring Nazi becomes intimate in real life with a girl he thinks is a monster and begins to walk away from a monster he thinks is a friend. And what's worse, not being able to report her so as not to put your mother at risk. Naturally, history follows its course and everything that has to happen happens. The movie's end is somewhat melancholy without the contradictions that move it.

The Phantom Carriage is a 1921 silent movie that impresses with its consistency, soundtrack, regular use of flashbacks - a technique still recent in films - and special effects. Taken in double exposure, expertly recorded by the cinematography of Julius Jaenzon and director Victor Sjöström, they portray spirits detaching from the bodies. The story begins on New Year’s Eve with the kind SalvationArmy nurse Sister Edit (Astrid Holm) on her deathbed with pneumonia. Even in her last moments, she insists that she needs to see David Holm (Sjöström himself) because she wants to make sure she saved her soul. In the city cemetery, David, an evil man who abandoned his family for alcohol, drinks with two friends and speaks of his companion Georges (Tore Svennberg), who disappeared on December 31 of the previous year. We discover later that he actually died that day and that this occurrence subjects people to a curse. Whoever dies on the last day of the year must drive the chariot of death for the next twelve months. David discovers this in the worst possible way. When arguing with friends, he ends up murdered, and it is Georges himself, as the driver of the sinister vehicle, who transfers the curse to him. But before that, the former companion takes David on tour for all the mistakes made in the past. In a series of flashbacks, we witness all the drunkard’s torments to his family, to the point that his wife (Hilda Borgström) did not want to continue living. We also see all the suffering of Edit, who committed for a year to save the soul of the alcoholic, even getting infected by him with the disease that is taking his life. At the last moment, face to face with the spectre that will lead her to the world of the dead, the salvationist still tries one last miracle. The macabre film was watched by a child named Ingmar Bergman who, years later, would invite Sjöström to his film Wild Strawberries , coincidentally about death.

"No good movie is too long," said Roger Ebert, the greatest film critic ever. And this can be proven in The Irishman , Martin Scorsese's latest masterpiece, which, in its three-a-half hours of runtime, enchants, surprises, and provides the kind of experience that only great works of art deliver. Based on the book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt, the script tells the story of "the Irishman" Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), known for his involvement in the promiscuous relationship between American unions of the 1960s and 1970s and organized crime. In the literary work, Sheeran claims to have killed Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), the most outstanding union leader in the United States. With the freedom granted by Netflix, one of the film's producers, Scorsese weaves a collage of Sheeran's memories with slow scenes that serve as a guiding thread for the narrative: a long car trip with his friend Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and their wives, between Philadelphia and Detroit, for the wedding of Bufalino's niece. Lawyer Bufalino is a kind of mentor to Sheeran and was responsible for introducing him to the main bosses of the city's mafia, Felix DiTullio (Bobby Cannavale) and the "Gentle Don," Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel). Each character is introduced with a caption informing how their death will be. The narrative is a journey that begins in the 1940s and presents most of the episodes in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Although the critical element of the book is the death of the iconic president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union, the film focuses on the relationship between Sheeran, Hoffa (who disappeared and was never found), and Bufalino. At the film's end, the story returns to the nursing home corridor where the once-powerful "painter of walls" (a code used by the mafia to define professional killers) has just prayed with a young priest. Sheeran asks the religious man to leave the door ajar when he leaves, perhaps hoping for forgiveness from his daughters.