My Review of A Straightforward Boy (1929) directed by Yasujiro Ozu

This is a 14 minute excerpt of Ozu’s first of his kids comedy films. It is basically his adaptation of the short story The Ransom of Red Chief by O. Henry. It plays into what you expect of the screwball comedies of the era and looks very unlike an Ozu film as we think of them today.

My Review of Malcolm X (1992) directed by Spike Lee

 Happy 100th Birthday to Omaha, Nebraska's own El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, better known to the world as Malcolm X. Few figures have become so influential without being able to be co-opted by the establishment—though it is not because folks haven't tried. James Baldwin details in his book The Devil Finds Work how Hollywood tried to get him to write a watered-down screenplay for an aborted adaptation of X's autobiography which thankfully Baldwin pulled out of. In 1991 Hollywood tried to do another adaptation with Norman Jewison at the helm, but Spike Lee caught wind of this and was able to take control of the project and make the greatest biographical film of all time and possibly Denzel Washington's greatest starring role.

This movie saw the last team-up of Spike Lee and his legendary cinematographer Eric Dickerson and it is their crowning achievement. All of the Lee/Dickerson signature shots are here in top form and all set pieces are absolutely beautiful. Nearly the whole 40 Acers stable of actors & crew. Ruth E. Carter wardrobe design is so accurate that you would've thought she was there. We get supporting actors like Delroy Lindo who has been keeping busy in 2025 is shows that he has been an expert character actor for a long time. Angela Basset plays Betty Shabazz like she was born for the role. Hell, even Spike Lee does a good job and shows why he is the best acting-director. But obviously there is one actor who shines above the rest...

Denzel Washington was no rookie before this film and this not his first Spike Lee film, but I still don't think any role he has played has been better and more important than this. Honestly, I don't know who else could've rise to the occasion to play this role other than Malcolm X himself. Quite a few people have played Malcom X in movies and television since Denzel, but none get the role as dead-on accurate as he does. He said that he spent hundreds of hours listening to as many speeches and footage of Malcolm that was available and it shows. I don't know of anyone in a film biography more take on a role so completely as Denzel Washington did and he truly makes me forget that I am watching an actor whenever I watch this movie.

I don't know what else is there to be said. Spike Lee made the best biographical film adapted from the greatest autobiography ever written. It is a three-act epic of the life of a man who has influenced countless people (including myself) into a more in-depth pride of themselves and their Blackness. I don't know what else to say but to quote from Ossie Davis' eulogy of him: 

"Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves...However we may have differed with him – or with each other about him and his value as a man – let his going from us serve only to bring us together, now."

My Review of Tokyo Story (1953) directed by Yasujiro Ozu

 When I tried to review Seven Samurai it was a nerve-wrecking undertaking because not only was it one of the greatest films of all time, but one of my personal top 5. While this is also a masterpiece film, I feel less pressure so I can critique a little easier. This film came early on in Ozu's legendary postwar run, but is rightly hailed as him at the height of his powers. He takes all the themes and feelings close to him and, with his top lieutenants Chishū Ryū and Setsuko Hara in top form (along with an incredible performance by Chieko Higashiyama), made his defining statement on life in modern Japan. I can't say it is a film I watch often, but it is one that sticks with you with its crushing sadness.

The generation conflict reaches its balance here. We get the look at both parents and children being mutually put-off by each other with the exception of the youngest daughter and war -widowed daughter-in-law. Besides them, all of the other kids come off as absolute villains. Of course, the father is also shown to not be a saint either (once again Chishū Ryū is playing a character way older than him). Hara as the daughter-in-law is a solider here—both for her in-laws in the movie and Ozu as an expert actress. Kyoko Kagawa (an actress who was an Akira Kurosawa/Kenji Mizoguchi main-stay) is used as the audience surrogate as the youngest daughter. She is the obvious future that this movie can maybe-optimistically point to.

Setsuko Hara in the foreground; Yasujiro Ozu at the far right.

I personally prefer the happier bittersweet film Early Summer (1951) when it comes to Ozu family dramas, but I can't deny the reason this is considered by the usual critics as one of the greatest films ever made. After watching The Only Son (1936) before re-watching this film and I am amazed at how much Ozu re-used some of the same locations shot-for-shot. Surprisingly, there is a panning shot in this film—though it is a short one as this movie has shaped what most people think of when they think about Ozu films. It is fairly melodramatic for an Ozu film, but it works in all the right ways. 

I doubt I will watch this film too many more times given how soul-crushing it is even when compared to other sad films, but I am glad to have watched it at least twice. 

My Review of The Only Son (1936) directed by Yasujiro Ozu

 Ozu's first sound film is a look at a family on the brink following The Great Depression. Despite the end of feudalism and the beginning of capitalism (and imperialism) in Japan following the Meiji Restoration—not everyone benefited equally as the modern class structure replaced the feudal one. We follow a poor single mother working in a factory to provide for her son all the way to his adulthood and the trials that the two deal with over the course of the film.

While the film begins during the Taishō era (1923) in a country village in the middle of Japan, it quickly time-skips to 1935 Tokyo in the middle of the Great Depression. The son has moved to Tokyo and got a job as a school teacher, but the Depression wiped out his earnings just as he became a husband and father. When his mother decides to visit him in Tokyo, she is shocked and (he ashamed) to see him and his family living in the ghetto in destitution. We spend the rest of the film watching both mom and son try to make sense of it all.

Being that this is an early Ozu film, things are a bit different from his post-WWII films. Form-wise, not only do we get tracking shots, but a full on fantasy/dream sequence at one point. Theme-wise, the big issue causing the conflict is not postwar Westernization, but the Depression itself. A lot of the generational conflict in Ozu's prewar films after 1929 comes from the economic down-turn.

The main appeal of this film is that it is the rare Ozu family drama where it is an adult son who is the focus rather than a daughter or child-son. He never did this again after the success of Late Spring (1949), but in the prewar films we get to see Ozu experiment a little. While the ending here does foreshadow the ending of Late Spring—it is made even more pitiful in hindsight knowing that our characters would not have a peaceful future, but a bloody one to look forward to.

My Review of Pickpocket (1959) directed by Robert Bresson

 I read Crime and Punishment back in 2012, but have seen its influence pop-up everywhere. I recently re-watched Le Havre (2011) whose police officer is borrowed from C&P. Of course one of the most famous adaptations of the novel is Pickpocket (1959). The protagonist Michel is as much an edgelord as C&P's Raskolnikov, but with the trademark emotional detachment that of Robert Bresson's "models" (his term for actors). Michel's god-complex inspires him to become a pickpocketer. The antagonist here—like in C&P—is a detective whose character is a one-to-one adaptation of Dostoevsky's Porfirey and he is always a step ahead of Michel while trying to convince him to give-up his life of crime. Michel's love interest Jeanne is a marked improvement on C&P's Sonia as she can counterbalance Michel without trying to aggressively confront him and she makes up for Michel's lack of humanity. 

The cameo scene of the real-life pickpocket-turned-sleight-of-hand artist Henri Kassagi is my favorite part of the whole movie. Kassagi's character teaches Michel how to pickpocket more effectively and they later team-up with another accomplice to pull more daring pickpocket operations. This features half the background music in the entire film (another trademark of Bresson).

This is one of, if not the most critically acclaimed of Bresson's films and it really is him as he reached the height of his powers. It is the full introduction to 60s Bresson and is the lead-in for the French New Wave that would start right after this movie was released. While I still hold The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) as my favorite Bresson film, this is still an incredible movie that influenced so many movies after it (and not just Paul Schrader's).

My Review of Through the Olive Trees (1994) directed by Abbas Kiarostami

 This is Abbas Kiarostami-ception reaching its peak as at one point we see the actor who played Kiarostami in And Life Goes On (1992) being directed by another actor who is playing "current" Kiarostami in Through The Olive Trees (1994), who are both being directed by the actual Kiarostami
(who makes a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in the movie). This is some peak-Iranian New Wave. This movie is our finale of the Koker Trilogy and takes us behind the scenes of the interpersonal drama happening during the filming of And Life Goes On (1992).

This big contention is that two of the actors in one scene of ALGO were involved in a dispute where the guy—Hossein Rezai (what is it with Kiarostami and dudes named Hossein?)—wants to marry the girl—Taherah Landanian—playing his wife, but her family is firmly against it. This causes problems for for Kiarostami as she is ordered not to talk to Rezai and this brings filming to a halt. Such a story would be a sub-plot for in most films, but is the main thrust of this film. Hossein Rezai is a traicomic character in the style of that other Kiarostami-Hossein: Hossein Sabzain of Close Up (1990). While Sabzain's unrequited love was cinema itself, Rezai's unrequited love is Tahereh who is a bit naïve and vain and not average from what we see of her—yet Rezai really keeps you rooting for him, however hopeless his quest feels The open-ended ending reinforces that it was the journey, not the destination, that this film is highlighting as we bring our journey through Koker, Iran to a close.

And touching back on that, through-out this film we have had Babak Ahmadpour and his brother as side characters. Babak starred in the first film of the Koker Trilogy and the search to find out if he was alive after the 1990 earthquake in Koker was the whole reason for the second film in the trilogy. After confirming that he is still alive in the first 15 minutes of this film, the overall-plot moves on from him rather seamlessly and you would not know how important he was to Kiarostami's canon if this was the only film in the trilogy you had watched. Life Goes On, indeed!

My Review of American Fiction (2023) directed by Cord Jefferson

 I am so glad to finally be able  to have seen this movie. As a Black bibliophile and cinephile this movie taps into two lanes. A movie which is a direct satirical attack on institutionalized racism in the book publishing industry. It is also the story of a man from an upper-middle class New England family that has just about fallen-apart as he tries to get another lease on life and career.

American Fiction (2023) (and the novel it is based on) really hits at how white liberals are gate-keeping the depictions of African-Americans in contemporary literature (and cinema) and the harm that it does when we don't get to showcase the diversity of our stories. Parallel, or in the micro, our protagonist Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is a Black novelist who does not write about contemporary Black pathologies aka "hood" literature, but more intellectual, high-art and bourgie novels. He comes from a prosperous Black New England family that has grown apart and in-decline. And then things grow worse—leading to him making choices that help his career, but betrays his morals and ethics (but again—makes him a lot of money). This movie takes a quietly cynical, but clear-eyed and satirical look at some very down-to-earth realities that people deal with and it does not give any of the characters—save two—a truly happy ending.

All of the main and supporting cast are excellent! Jeffery Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Sterling K. Brown play the three siblings at the heart of the story flawlessly. Erika Alexander was the perfect love interest who was too good for Monk (and lawd—this woman is still as beautiful as she was on Living Single). I felt like Issa Rae was born to play her character similar to the character Beyoncé played in Dreamgirls (2006). Leslie Uggams seems to have moved into the character roles that Diahann Carroll used to play in her later years. This was a good film from Cord Jefferson and I am curious to see what he does next.