The Photograph (Stella Meghie, 2020)

For every prestige picture or blockbuster that swallows up the discourse on diversity and representation in the commercial film industry, there's an un-bespoken retinue of also-rans made by those who are just humbly hecking out their filmmaking careers. Stella Meghie, a Canadian-born writer-director, has three pictures already under her belt, her best yet known being the young-adult romantic drama Everything, Everything (2017). Her latest is The Photograph, another romance, this one starring Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield as a formulaic pair of professional urban middle-class lovers whose brief fire risks being snuffed out by the calls of career opportunity and their own personally guarded natures. Both of them photographers, the archivist Mae and the journalist Michael's bittersweet love affair is juxtaposed with the story of Mae's late mother, a photographer in her own right, whose own ambition and drive tragically pull her away from closeness, both as a lover and mother.

Meghie's work here notably avoids scenes of explosive outburst or histrionics. Not sedate, her drama instead suggests the feeling of a fleeting jazz. Her and cinematographer Mark Schwartzbard's emphasis on soft lighting and warm palette is invaluably complemented by the moody electricity of Robert Glasper's original score. The resulting combination is a sensual effect, one that exceeds the typical decadence of the boiler-plate romantic drama. It's rare to find a film of this type that is not so concerned about jerking tears or sewing quirky comedy relief. Instead, The Photograph seduces the spectator with a cool, confident resiliency that somehow never subtracts from its simultaneous functioning as a generational drama, the story about "love lost" between not only Mae and Michael, but also between Mae and her mother. The reason the film works, even in its own modest way, is that Meghie is able to give expression to just enough of a sympathetic alienation that the temptation of "love conquers all," the wish-fulfillment of everything working out with that one right person, feels like a pertinent salve, rather than just a Bachelorette-style prize.

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Stonewalling (Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka, 2021)

I can't help but recall Hirokazu Kore-eda's recent disappointment Broker when watching Stonewalling , the latest feature drama from collaborators Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka. Though Stonewalling is not a quirky, sentimental road movie, it is bounded to Broker by the shared theme of illicit adoption. An independent Chinese production, there will be those who argue that the narrative of Huang and Otsuka's film is far too particular to the on-going consequences of the "one-child policy" of the People's Republic (abolished in 2015) to create such a flat juxtaposition between the films. While this may be true to a certain extent, and while Stonewalling is certainly a very different film than Broker , there's no getting around how the timing of both films paints a common tableau of just one aspect of contemporary life in southeast Asia that transcends apparently sweeping distinctions of political history, systems, and policies. The reckoning that both Broker ...

An American Band

Ryan Worsley's Stand By for Failure , a documentary chronicling the history of the southern California experimental sound collective Negativland, saw its east coast premiere at the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art (PhilaMOCA) on Thursday, following its first ever screening on November 12th at the Other Cinema in the band's origin city of San Francisco. Playing to an audience of only eleven individuals (including myself and the MOCA's sole staff member and digital projectionist), sporting no copyright protection, and composed of some 56 years of audiovisual material, Worsley's film straddles a fine line between conventional band-doc and its own avant-garde remix, in keeping with both the style and ethos of its subject. Negativland formed between the years 1979 and 1980 from the unlikely friendship of two eccentric Concord high schoolers, Mark Hosler and Richard Lyons, and a semi-reclusive 34-year-old named David "The Weatherman" Willis. Building upon ...

Company Ink

The last time actor Javier Bardem and writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa crossed career paths was for Loving Pablo , a paint-by-numbers biographical drama about Pablo Escobar that was sorely beneath either artists' talents. It was made all the more disappointing when held up as a belated reunion for performer and auteur, doomed to be contrasted with their first collaboration, Mondays in the Sun . That 2002 film, selected by the Real Academia de Cine Español to be Spain's submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 76th Academy Awards, saw a still-emergent Bardem leading an ensemble cast in a class-conscious drama that followed the experiences of a group of middle-aged former dock workers who find themselves chronically unemployed in the wake of a violent labor action. Now, however, de Aranoa and Bardem come together once again for a project befitting the combination of the former's restrained filmmaking and the latter's magnetic screen presence. Except this t...

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