AFI Fest 2025: Days Three and Four

Overslept on Saturday and missed a morning screening of Herzog's Ghost Elephants (which should show up on Hulu early next year, looks like), and I have no tickets for this, the festival's final day, so let's just combine the last five films I saw into a single post.

Case 137 (Dominik Moll): 66

"You did your job well," someone tells Léa Drucker's internal affairs investigator toward the end of Case 137, "but what use is your job?" Reminded me of Sicario, not at all intensity-wise (it's absorbing rather than gripping) but as a similarly pessimistic portrait of a female cop who tries to do the right thing at every turn and gets swallowed up by a system designed to protect the powerful, not the vulnerable. (Based on an actual incident here.) Just watching her work is pure pleasure—this ranks among the most fascinatingly detailed recent police procedurals, hinging to a troubling degree (even though we see no abuse) on the omnipresence of security cameras in public spaces, as Bertrand and her team determine the suspects' likely movements based on glimpses from a variety of angles and locations (none of them the actual crime scene, though there's a whole spellbinding sequence that sees her spot a figure at a hotel window in one image and painstakingly work out who that person must have been, with galvanizing results that, as the figure in the window accurately and glumly predicts, ultimately make no difference). Nothing revelatory, you've seen this basic story many times (including its token attempts to incorporate aspects of the protagonist's personal life), but very solidly orchestrated. And depressing.

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: No potential ambiguity here—I'm just annoyed that they're going with Case in Anglophone territories, since "dossier" is an English word and Dossier 137 (the original French title) sounds much cooler.

La grazia (Paolo Sorrentino): 55

Quite sedate for Sorrentino, its most indelible moment (circled back to at the end) being an attempted conversation between Toni Servillo's weary President (of Italy) and a solo cosmonaut working on some space station or other; informed that the communication link isn't working and that the cosmonaut has no idea he's even on camera, the President declines to bail, preferring just to watch this lonely man drift in zero gravity. Typical of this filmmaker, it's at once overly blunt and remarkably effective...but less aggressive than usual, with only occasional jolts of electronic music and Italian gangsta rap boosting the film's energy to a Sorrentino-esque level. Other aspects, unfortunately, like the most egregiously symbolic dead or wounded horse since The Nest (in this case clunkily making the decision to sign a euthanasia-rights bill "personal"), are just big ol' eye-rollers. No surprise that Servillo's excellent as a committed political ditherer riding out the last few months of his term with his head kept as low as possible, but neither is one exactly taken aback by the film's gradual-summoning-of-courage/principle trajectory. I tend to prefer Sorrentino at his most outré, which is why my favorite of his films by some margin remains the one starring Sean Penn as Robert Smith of The Cure. This one's almost cozy.

Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper): 62

Is this thing...good?! Neither A Star Is Born Yet Fucking Again nor Does Prosthetic Nose Still = Oscar? appealed to me much at all, and I was initially put off by this third effort apparently being The Marvelous Mr. Maisel, right down to a protagonist whose first stand-up set happens by impulsive accident. (Didn't learn until afterward that the script was inspired by British comedian John Bishop, who actually did perform the first time just to avoid paying a cover charge.) Damned if it doesn't evolve into a sporadically insightful, refreshingly realistic portrait of a marriage gone stale, with Will Arnett and Laura Dern deftly exploring the murky boundary between romance and partnership. A few scenes play too much like couples therapy minus the therapist for my taste, and Cooper's onscreen comic-relief role really grates (knew that was gonna be him when some guy instantly fell on his face upon entering a room), but I very much appreciated the way that This Thing winds up undercutting what had seemed to be its moral, viz. that people need to be happy outside the marriage in order to be content within it. So gratifying that it's not made that simple. And while the central scene—Tess going on a date at the Comedy Cellar and seeing Alex use their relationship as material—is a big, dramatically convenient coincidence to swallow, (a) apparently that really happened to Bishop, and, much more important, (b) it's well worth it for the immediate aftermath, which isn't what one might expect. Hated the ending, though. Should've been Dern saying "Fuck!", hitting the column, adding "I'll think about it," and slamming the door, cut to black, roll credits. That would've been perfect, entirely in keeping with the film's ethos, and it was right there.

Olmo (Fernando Eimbcke): 65

Wasn't expecting to see Plan B among the roster of production companies, good job Brad. Eimbcke has such a distinctive comic sensibility—I'm confident that I could've ID'd Olmo as his work had I watched it blind. (Not literally blind, potential bozos.) It'd been too long, and I actually laughed out loud just at the double drop shadow on the title card (with both shadows quickly retreating, just to make it funnier; that probably doesn't make sense right now, but those who eventually catch Olmo will see what I mean). Narrative's typically low-key, one eventful day/night (sometime after 1977 but probably before 1980) on which two teen boys try to attend a party despite Olmo having been entrusted with the care of his immobile dad (who has multiple sclerosis); various droll hijinks ensue, the highlight being Olmo and his best friend lugging one of those shitty all-in-one stereo systems to the party and then performing, in unison, what they can manage of Travolta's "You Should Be Dancing" routine from Saturday Night Fever. Couldn't remember where I'd seen the actor doing phenomenal neck-up work as Dad before, smacked myself upon discovering that he was Leap Year's male lead. (Not the Leap Year with Amy Adams, potential bozos. Though those two films premiered within five months of each other, which was confusing at the time.) Less poignant than Club Sandwich, closer to Duck Season in spirit. Q: Why does Olmo's sister ask for his porno mag as her bribe? Just to deprive him of it, or are we meant to understand that she's queer (and not attempting to hide that from her family in the late '70s)?

Romería (Carla Simón): 51

One of those films that you quickly intuit is autobiographical, simply because anyone inventing the story from scratch would have endeavored to make it more interesting. To be fair, I've seen Summer 1993, to which Romería serves as a sequel of sorts (in that both are heavily based on Simón's life), hence knew some of the background...but I'd still argue that there's insufficient variety in this film's logy first hour, which sees the Simón alter ego meet many, many blood relatives for the first time (or for the first time since she was an infant) and quietly reflect upon how her life might have been different had her parents not both died of AIDS when she was young. And for me, at least, there's a repellent quality to the character having been renamed while still clearly being on Simón's own trajectory—the plot engine here involves acquiring a legal document that'll allow "Marina" to attend film school, and she spends the whole movie shooting camcorder footage. (I have the same issue with Hogg's Souvenirs. Fiction or memoir, pick one.) Just when I'd given up, however, Romería takes an unexpected, welcome swerve into magic realism, with Marina encountering her long-dead parents (in the physical form of Marina herself and her cousin, which makes all the nudity and sex in this part a tad creepy but never mind) and somehow witnessing their young lives, which are depicted as significantly less alluring than Mom's diary entries (played by Simón's mother's actual diary entries) suggested. Didn't make the first hour-plus retroactively less enervating, but pushed it just barely from thumbs down to thumbs up.