Dracula

Radu Jude is aiming for nothing less than the grand finale of vampire movies with his Dracula, and as a Romanian, why shouldn’t he lay claim to his heritage? This sprawling three-hour epic opens with a parade of A.I.-generated Vlad the Impalers telling us to suck their cocks. If you don’t find that funny, consider this the modern-day equivalent of the scene where the locals warn the protagonist to turn back before it’s too late: the film remains in a similarly vulgar and hyperbolic mode throughout.

Dracula is structured as a series of dialogues between an A.I. image generator and the pretentious filmmaker wielding it to make the best Dracula films that no effort can buy. (Within the world of the film, everything except these framing conversations between the filmmaker and the app are treated as if they were A.I. even when they’re not, perhaps to justify Jude’s frequent shifts into iPhone footage.) The film vaults between self-contained episodes that are nominally A.I.-generated variations on Dracula stories, and a more extended storyline where two failed actors playing vampires at a cheap bar performance decide they’re bored of getting chased around at each show and decide to escape the act for real during the part where they get a minute’s head start to run away. Unfortunately, at least one audience member really does have eyes in the back of his head by virtue of having them painted on his bald skull, and the emcee decides they should be killed for real as deserters. All’s fair in Jude movies, where it’s not enough to do your job well — you need to let the management take your blood and be damn well grateful for it. The real-life inspiration for the Dracula mythos, Vlad the Impaler, gets the kind of backhanded praise from a local tour guide that seems to have become increasingly popular in the era of contemporary fascism, where slavery wasn’t that bad and Vlad was killing poor people who didn’t want to work.

One could spend an entire review simply covering all the events that happen in Dracula, as they frequently defy description. If you’ve ever found the Stoker or any of its adaptations to have a lumpy and episodic structure, this might be the only time when a Dracula story benefits from embracing that. The cast features over 100 actors and is generally game for anything, including taking on multiple roles. An early rendition of the Popeye the Sailor theme song takes the ribald qualities of the Fleischer shorts to a jaw-dropping extreme, and the film generally rivals Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn for sexualized bombardment. The use of A.I. imagery tends to be broken out for shorter interludes that typically depict images that really would be impossible to conjure up otherwise, and somehow manage to look even worse than you’d expect. F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and its public domain status gets hijacked to make commercials, which is probably a more intellectually honest form of grifting than syncing it up to Radiohead and adding light show effects. Michael Snow’s early-digital cartoon *Corpus Callosum finally gets the spiritual sequel it deserves when the underpaid effects workers for a video game go on strike against Vlad the Employer, and are devoured by what they’ve created. A Romanian vampire novel gets adapted in (what else?) deliberately chintzy fashion, in the one stretch of the movie that courts tedium for being too restrained rather than too excessive.

For all its shock jock effects, Jude’s commitment to excess and not settling down means the movie is materially coherent by virtue of explicitly being about contemporary incoherencies, and its points are being expressed in a way that no one else has quite done before. If anything, the film explicitly makes its thesis quite clear: the vampires sucking the life out of everything for their own selfish needs are fundamentally capitalists, that indictment certainly includes the ugly plagiarism machine they created that is A.I., and therefore the film itself really is a Dracula for our current times. A noted Andy Warhol enthusiast, Jude almost certainly had Paul Morrissey’s Warhol-produced anti-capitalist classic Blood for Dracula on his mind, and perhaps the more obscure Batman Dracula directed by Warhol himself. The vampire is a collision of pop culture symbols in the Warhol and an impotent landlord in the Morrissey, and no one can say Jude just used those two metaphors here.

Given that Dracula himself frequently emerges as the sole compelling character in both the Stoker novel and many of its adaptations, it’s the actor playing Dracula on the run from the mob who emerges as one of the two most pitiable characters — he wanted to be a stud but is just an old monster who almost everyone wants dead. The other is from the film’s most mysterious story, one of two to feature no vampires. While Dracula does feature a prior vampireless tale in the form of a farmer whose harvest turns into a crop of penises, the loud vulgarity made it a match with all the prior fanging and banging. This more subdued episode is a brief tale about a garbageman dealing with everyday bullshit, operating on a more intimate scale that throws all the prior bombast into a new light. When even the next generation probably isn’t going to be our saviors and has its own vampiric tendencies, what’s left? Might as well wrap it up. The parade of Draculas Jude has conjured up via a parade of different means are ridiculous but real threats to us all, and since they’ve already gotten their hands on everything, does it really matter how ridiculous it is that A.I. can’t depict them. — ANDREW REICHEL

Anemone

How refreshing it is to see a debut film. Movies by established directors, even directors one likes, carry the burden of expectation. “Every movie is born innocent,” Richard Brody once wrote, but no movies are more innocent, or more filled with the fresh air of potential, than ones by first-time directors. Equally crushing, then, is the realization that the director in question just doesn’t have it — no wit, no touch, no unique style. Such is the experience of suffering through Ronan Day-Lewis’ debut feature Anemone, co-written by and starring his dad, acting all-timer Daniel Day-Lewis. 

It starts innocently enough. Folksy drawings hint at the wounded history which serves as Anemone’s background in a horizontal scroll under increasingly urgent guitar — simultaneously whimsical and polemical. But there’s nothing more to it: the film that follows is just as opaque, building relentless portent and never, not once, fulfilling the promise such portent anticipates. In an unholy riff on Jeff Nichols, Andrea Arnold, and that corner of TikTok that does Skins edits, Day-Lewis ladles elemental omens, dime-store impressionistic imagery, and pretentious hard cuts to evade the filmmaker’s prerogative of telling an actual story.

What story there is concerns former soldier Ray Stoker, living in isolation away from society, and the son, Brian, he’s left behind. He’s sought after by his brother Jem because Brian — who Jem has been raising along with Nessa, played by Samantha Morton in a long-suffering maternal role that wastes her immense talent — is going through an emotional crisis. Occasionally, Day-Lewis will cut back to town where Brian mopes around, but there’s very little to connect the movie’s parallel tracks, and Day-Lewis kneecaps any narrative trajectory with his structure: he elides beats and withholds information, pausing to drop steamy exposition dumps only when the viewer can’t possibly follow along any further.

Anemone reeks of fresh-out-of-film-school starter kit ambiguity. Over here, make sure to place a comically huge fish in a river, floating with a big gash on its side. Don’t forget to suspend a woman above Ray’s bed — our hero’s got to be haunted by something — and you must feature a beast that looks like a Patronus from Harry Potter, you simply must. Day-Lewis makes a litany of annoying decisions here: it’s annoying to have Ray say “let’s play some tunes,” then play canned electronic music over his and Jem’s dancing; it’s annoying to put a hole in Ray’s house and pull out from it into the vast woods, only to have that hole disappear in the next shot; and when the opening notes of “Moonlight Sonata” waft in, that’s it — the try-hard sensibility has grown exasperating to the point of no recovery, the magical realist sheen completely unconvincing. Anemone wants to hit with the shoegazey force of a My Bloody Valentine record, but it lands with the obnoxious thud of a Donda 2: self-important and half-baked.

Yet Daniel Day-Lewis in a misfire is better than no Daniel Day-Lewis at all. Even in noble failures like Gangs of New York or conventional fare like My Left Foot, he lights up the screen, and it’s impossible to deny the beguiling thrill of seeing him for the first time in years. He re-enters with a keen sense of self-awareness, too: it’s no coincidence that after an introduction done in complete silence, his first line is “fuck off.” Day-Lewis is so good, he sells trite sob stories about wartime trauma and pointless diatribes against abusive priests, clearly written to satisfy his hunger for scenery-chewing monologues. His work here proves that a great actor really can be handed scraps — in fact, strangely enough, hand himself the very scraps — and turn them into gold. He plays Ray with ruddy enthusiasm, evincing mirth, cold-blooded wrath, and deep sensitivity within moments of each other and sincerely earning them.

It’s probably too much to ask Ronan to meet his father’s caliber from the jump, and there are moments, mostly at the beginning, that do suggest a burgeoning creative voice: he shows Ray and Jem sizing each other up, giving each man his own set of rituals to follow, and allowing us to see how they intersect (or don’t). It’s patient and responsible, but much like George Costanza, Ronan had everything to gain by being impatient and irresponsible, doing the exact opposite of what his instincts told him to do. Maybe he’ll beat the sophomore slump — there’s nowhere to go but up. — ETHAN J. ROSENBERG

The Secret Agent

In the opening title scroll of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, the Brazil of 1977 the film takes place in is announced as “a time of great mischief.” The words are placed over a desolate landscape: a road cutting between fields, a decrepit gas station with a body lying in the parking lot, and a yellow VW Beetle pulling in. The man in the car almost panics upon seeing the rotting corpse covered in cardboard, but the sweating station owner runs out to stop him and tell him it’s okay — it happened a few days ago and they told the police, but they haven’t come yet because it is Carnival. A pair of highway patrolmen pull up to the gas station, disembarking to interrogate the man in the Beetle. The driver notices a spot of blood on the policeman’s shirt as he’s being asked to show everything in his car is up to regulation. The policeman clears him, and asks for a donation to their fund. The man has no more money and instead offers the rest of his cigarettes before going on his way.

The man in the car is Marcelo (played elusively by Wagner Moura), who’s on his way to Recife for reasons unknown as of yet. When he gets there, he hides out at Doña Sebastiana’s (Tânia Maria), in a massive compound filled with equally ambiguous refugees from at home and abroad, including a couple who say they had a falling out with all sides in Angola, implying a political bent. The Secret Agent, beyond the genre implications of its name, is brilliantly slow to play its hand. Before the film makes explicit what its specific political aims are, Filho’s project spends most of its runtime living within the milieu of an unspoken political repression, one of constant police encroachment on civil life and looked over by portraits of President Ernesto Geisel, himself a retired general who would start to usher in openness to Brazilian society during the military dictatorship that started back in 1964 and would endure until the mid-’80s.

The Secret Agent is Filho’s first period-set fiction film, richly texturing itself in the decor, fabrics, and especially dagger collars. This emphasis on detail itself is prodded in the film, with the director’s framing being open to how this is a work of reconstruction, a sometimes futile effort in suffusing memory of a time with archival material in order to create a kind of living, breathing filmic archeology. Or, at least, that attempt has its limits, as people die, are killed, or forget what happened outside the margins of a newspaper. Filho takes us digging, anyways, through the form of a thriller, as if the popular cinema of the time overtakes the feeling of day-to-day reality. For instance, the Cinema São Luiz (featured previously in Filho’s 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts, looking at his native Recife through his memories of its movie theaters) in The Secret Agent is playing Jaws, a poster of which frightens Marcelo’s son to the point of obsession, constantly thinking about and drawing shark attacks. Meanwhile, the local (and corrupt) chief of police, Euclides (Robério Diógenes) is pulled out of Carnival — still covered in makeup and confetti — to examine a severed human leg that has been found inside a shark. The Secret Agent is at once a film about genre, while also playfully, and at times shockingly, letting itself slip into it.

Sometimes these genre elements read as euphemistic. There is one departure from realism in particular that won’t be spoiled here, but suffice it to say that it’s not a coincidence that a pulpy sequence of public violence that is laughed at in the newspaper is preceded by a scene where Euclides and his corrupt cops make an inference that they are going for a “ride” that night. We rarely get to see what the police actually do, only getting references to their bacchanalian cruelty, like when they see a headline saying how Carnival has claimed 91 lives, which they grinningly emphasize to each is only so far. But the genre elements in The Secret Agent slowly build and build, like the at-first subtle split diopter shots that get more severe and stark as the film progresses, until things ultimately explode into the kind of violent thriller the name promises.

Filho, in his constant withholding, though, makes the point. The film is about an exceptional case, a person whose story is endemic of an entire era, but the feeling persists for all the rest around Marcelo, involved with him or not. From the refugees to humble government registrars, everyone lives under the same oppressive, unspeakable umbrella. Filho emphasizes how different the world is now, how much life has ostensibly changed on the surface, how truly unknowable that moment might be given how much has been forgotten about it. Yet there is still some line running beneath it all — the movie house of his childhood might not be there anymore, but the roads still are, and from a world they didn’t even know was ruined they keep building a new life. — ALEX LEI

Landmarks

At the beginning of Lucrecia Martel’s first feature-length documentary, Landmarks, we’re presented with satellite images of Earth. From this zoomed out perspective, there are no countries, borders, or people within view, only water, land, and atmosphere clouding the globe. This simplistic view from outer space could allude to the “new frontier” that President John F. Kennedy was referring to in his “We choose to go to the Moon speech” or the “final frontier” from Star Trek, but what usually happens to wide, open, unmarked pieces of land? It’s a tale as old as time. They are surveyed, divided, and claimed, eventually mapped into ownership and transformed into resources. It doesn’t matter who was rightfully there first; it matters who can conquer and control the land.

Landmarks deals with the question of land ownership in Martel’s native Argentina on a micro and macro level. On one hand, the film is about the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, a member of the Indigenous Chuchagasta community in northwest Argentina’s Tucumán Province who was shot and killed while peacefully resisting eviction by a local landowner and two former police officers. On the other hand, the documentary chronicles Argentina’s historic attempts to silence its Indigenous communities at large. There is no question that Chocobar was murdered; there is literal video evidence after all, but his case was delayed nearly nine years. Martel, who found out about the murder on YouTube, and co-writer María Alché started communicating with historians and specialists in 2012. They subsequently researched land claim cases that involved deeds and property maps, and fought for funding.

Martel burrows deep into the fabric of the Argentinian judicial system during the 2018 trial. There is a noticeable difference in temperaments during the case. Chuchagasta members sit quietly, clearly pained by this traumatizing experience while the defendants Darío Luis Amín, Luis Humberto Gómez, and José Valdivieso take up space with their big personalities. They lean into their machismo attitudes as if the courtroom were a football pitch where the biggest and most dramatic performance wins favor from the referee. The trial very clearly functions as a microcosm of Argentina itself, where Indigenous communities like Chuchagasta are treated as second-class citizens and forced to navigate a system designed to exclude them. The most unforgivable aspect of this trial is that the three defendants are guilty, yet they claim they aren’t murderers. They act as if they should be absolved of their crimes simply because they owned a title to the land and were “home” when the murder occurred. The fact that there even is a trial says more about modern Argentina than any legal deed or document.

It’s common practice for documentaries to employ reenactments, but Landmarks takes this tradition one step further by including judicially administered reenactments that are not specific to the documentary. These exercises are less about discovering the truth — everyone already knows what happened — than about satisfying bureaucratic procedure. Their repetition of violence functions less as clarification than as a ritualized replay of the crime. The community has to witness the horror again. Martel and cinematographer Ernesto de Carvalho capture these reenactments with a birds-eye-view. They use drone shots, close-ups, and extreme wide angles to show the film viewer the absurdity of these reenactments, and thus reclaim a medium often wielded by local authorities. In doing so, they expose not only the violence, but also the racist rhetoric embedded in the judicial process.

Martel has never shied away from depicting labor on screen. She records everything during the trial, including coffee service. In one montage, the banality of clerks shuffling papers is intercut with the delivery of cappuccinos and orange juices, which Martel folds seamlessly into the flow of the trial, as if they were as essential as the legal proceedings themselves. This attention to labor, especially who serves it and who drinks it, has long been central to Martel’s cinema. In La Ciénaga, domestic workers, who are all Indigenous women, maintain order amid the chaos of a crumbling bourgeois household while the owners of the estate refer to the young women as “savages.” In her short film Maid, Martel again approaches domestic labor with such seriousness that an ordinary housekeeping shift unfolds with the tension of a thriller. Martel insists on the dignity of everyday labor, and the Indigenous people who often take these jobs.

This undercurrent of labor places the Chuchagasta community within the larger scope of Argentinian culture. Indigenous communities have been relegated to the margins of labor, education, and everyday life, so much so that their image has almost effectively been excluded from Argentinian history. The job Martel takes on here is to correct this racist image through her nonfiction framing. Developing trust with Chuchagasta members took time primarily because Argentinian history is often written as fantasy and fiction that villainizes and scapegoats Indigenous communities, but Martel carefully cultivates a close rapport in order to negate said images. She uses the trial as a case study and then weaves montages of family photos, first-person interviews, and current footage of the community into the backbone of the documentary. These images and collective narratives situate Chocobar and his community in a new, necessary light. Martel, who archived every family photo and interview with permission, is effectively creating a new record with Landmarks that will hopefully counter the historical rhetoric that haunts Indigenous communities across Argentina to this day. — CLARA CUCCARO

Windward

Sharon Lockhart adds 12 more static master shots to her filmography with Windward, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t finding new ideas for how to craft them. Shot on Canada’s Fogo Island, Lockhart’s latest project once again finds her examining a local community of children at play in their particular locale, but one can’t be entirely sure of the ages. This is the most landscape-centric film Lockhart has ever made, and even a full-grown adult would probably look like an ant in these compositions. The rocky cliffs and beaches look terribly foreboding, the Atlantic Ocean just keeps pounding away at the shore, and of course the fields of bright green grass, dotted by the occasional tree or flower patch, are constantly being buffeted by the wind. That old Griffith line about modern movies lacking the wind in the trees certainly doesn’t apply here.

Lockhart’s use of static master shots may be building upon the tradition of Andy Warhol, Larry Gottheim, and particularly her mentor/sometimes-collaborator James Benning (who’s thanked in the credits), but her use of people, particularly children, in environments tends to set them apart from Benning. Her last film, EVENTIDE, took a single shot of people combing a beach during sundown, and turned it into the kind of choreography of bodies and lighting that looks improvised while clearly not being so if you think about how it was captured. The title Windward might be a small hint of a pun in this case: a documentary about the wind colliding into the makeshift wards Lockhart has gathered to perform their daily routines.

Windward’s fourth shot is probably the one that will be easiest to appreciate as a study in the tensions of how Lockhart makes docufiction without calling attention to the fiction. It’s a simple setup of someone flying a kite who was clearly positioned to form a deliberate composition, where the kite and its shadow on the cliffs dance in the wind in a way that you couldn’t predict even if you were there. Other shots use a single building in a more rural area as a focal point, with at least one case of the wind making even a building seem like it can move. Whenever the kids are playing by the water, the composition never stops changing: the ocean is rarely ever still, the kids tend to either bob around or avoid getting hit by waves, and one girl feeds a flock of gulls who were clearly happy to perform for a free meal.

Windward might not be the most specifically drawn Lockhart work in some respects, although her embrace of a more mysterious approach is both deliberate and suggests a striking variation in her typical palette. This is a landscape film before it’s a community film, and her approach usually skews toward the reverse. Whatever action is being done by the human figures in several shots is kept a bit mysterious by emphasizing how said actions are fundamentally a bit irrelevant when you’re on such a remote rock in the sea. The wind will wear down these kids much more quickly than the Fogo landscapes, but embracing the small visual impacts they can have simply by moving about is Lockhart’s ultimate act of generosity. — ANDREW REICHEL