Her is about “the modern condition,” but not, importantly, in the strictly satirical sense: It tells us less about how we live than how we love. No such haziness exists in Bezucha’s stolid screenplay, which is closely drawn, often verbatim, from Watson’s scenes. His oldest son has adopted his God-fearing ways. The mother is morose over what is happening in her household. Rare is the person who welcomes unexpected visitors. Burnett had first come to attention with his 1977 UCLA thesis film, Killer of Sheep, a stark, black-and-white drama set in LA’s impoverished Watts neighborhood, in which the eponymous character (played with agonizing vulnerability by Henry G. Sanders) is a soul-deadened abattoir employee, drained of his joie de vivre by his social and economic surroundings. Soul! If technology ever was apolitical, those days are long gone. Into the new millennium, horror films have retained their power to shock and outrage by continuing to plumb our deepest primordial terrors and incarnate our sickest, most socially unpalatable fantasies. Bertino’s formalist brio prevents The Dark and the Wicked from entirely slipping into a coma of its own. Bertino pushes a funereal quality to its breaking point, which is very much the intention, however maddening. Charles Burnett bridges theatrical dialogue, portentous omens, and presentational acting with masterful grace. Joel attempts to fight the erasure in his own mind, and the film admits early on that it’s a fight he cannot win. Though the father appears ill, the matriarch (Julie Oliver-Touchstone) is convinced that his lifeforce is being sucked away by a demon or perhaps even the devil himself. Some people they wouldn’t even let in the house. The father is already essentially in a coma, and since the mother is apparently following suit, Louise and Michael are next to bear the brunt of what appears to be a contagious or even inherited trauma. Mad Max also has a distinctly Australian masculine tension that’s reminiscent of other outback-set classics such as Wake in Fright, as it’s concerned with the pronounced sexual repression and frustration of a predominantly male population that’s all dressed up in tight leather with little to do apart from mounting their bikes and revving up their big noisy engines. With his deeply political but unclassifiable debut feature, Med Hondo set out to establish a transformational presence for global African cinema and to accelerate the emergence of a new Africa. This implication of estrangement and marginalization bleeds into To Sleep with Anger, though Burnett has the daring to end it on an overpoweringly hopeful note. Despite the array of human rights’ infringements that it depicts, the film is not all doom and gloom—namely in its focus on Buolamwini and the actions of her “Algorithmic Justice League” to fight for government regulation of these technologies and to educate people about their potential pitfalls that gives Coded Bias an undercurrent of hopefulness. Somewhat less impactful are the scenes between Rosa and Momo. Flanagan increasingly pulls his punches out of love for his characters, while Bertino’s The Dark and the Wicked is so claustrophobically hopeless that it feels as if it’s already over by the time the opening title flashes on screen. Spirituality & Practice. Coded Bias touches on a wide array of AI-driven technologies that are inaccurately marketed as containing an egalitarian engine that power structures run by humans do not. Though one is entitled to lament the might-have-beens of Burnett’s career—and the hurdles that have played a role in that scarcity—it is equally salient to laud the body of work that he has created, of which To Sleep with Anger is a characteristically quiet, beautifully calibrated jewel. This preoccupation aligns Bertino with another rising American horror auteur, Mike Flanagan, though the former is growing more ruthless and austere with each production while the latter’s recent output is mechanically sentimental. The plots, which are nearly irrelevant, are always similarly primitive even by the standards of low-budget genre films: In a bombed-out future version of the outback, a vicious gang pisses off a brilliant highway daredevil, Max (Mel Gibson), and stunning vehicular mayhem ensues. (The gruffly charming Costner usually recedes into the background in the role of a skeptical but steadfast wingman.) Irrespective of the obvious flaws in their relationship, Kyle’s family also holds on to a vaguely grounded two-decade-old dislike for Marissa, and his mother (Talia Balsam) manipulates the emotionally oblivious Mike into thinking the best way of being Kyle’s friend is to once again break up his engagement. Such things are precious, and Gondry revels in that world in all its fleeting, flickering, ever-mutating joys. Bowen, Tobe Hooper is officially credited for having directed Poltergeist, but it’s co-scripter Steven Spielberg’s fingerprints that are all over this dark-mirror image of E.T. Momo’s exhausted foster parent, Dr. Coen (Renato Carpentieri), agonizes about the boy’s zest for trouble. Burnett has long been an independent filmmaker, and “To Sleep with Anger” was made outside the system. Harry gradually usurps Gideon’s home out from under him, which Burnett charts with haunting specificity. As in the The Social Network, Fincher is conscious of the explanatory clichés of the biopic and avoids them. Gideon is the retired patriarch of a middle-class African-American family; his wife Suzie teaches Lamaze classes for pregnant women. It’s not for nothing that Henry is made to have no voice, as Hardcore Henry’s unbelievably precise choreography of action seeks to tap into a universal feeling of powerlessness. This point is made explicit in Killer of Sheep’s opening shot, when we see, in close-up, the face of a small, frightened-looking boy who is being lectured by a stern offscreen father figure on the importance of fighting back against bullies in order to be a real man. In showing how algorithms figure into China’s social credit system, in which individuals are tracked and evaluated for their trustworthiness, Kantayya captures a dystopia straight out of Orwell’s 1984, which is unsurprisingly referenced throughout Coded Bias. While the two are pedaling their way up a mountain in the French countryside, Mike confesses to Kyle that he’s been sleeping with the former’s fiancé, Ava (Judith Godrèche). Marsh, Long before Robert Zemeckis re-envisioned the 1960s as the era America gave itself over to stupidity (to the delight of Rush Limbaugh’s dittoheads nationwide), he blasted the 1980s back into the 1950s with Back to the Future. While Fincher brings a past society rich in political implications to vivid life, he has virtually no governing interest in making us feel for Mank as a human. The only difference is that Westerners are mostly oblivious to the biases and harmful effects of AI. As a drunk says to Alex (Malcolm McDowell) right before taking a vicious beating: “I don’t want to live anyway! When he asks Rosa to take Momo in, she’s hardly overflowing with motherly generosity, which isn’t surprising given that she recognizes him as “that little shit” who stole her purse at the start of the film. Deeply humane but spare in its emoting, The Life Ahead avoids shifting into a more sentimental gear even as Rosa’s spells of confusion worsen. The movie seemed well-done but too long when I saw it January at the Sundance Film Festival. Given its twilit suburban adventures and encroaching security forces, the story exudes a superficially classical sensibility, recalling Starman and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Instead, she’s transplanted into the body of the Butcher via a haunted Aztec knife that he plunges into her shoulder. Trouble is his middle name, and he revels in spreading mistrust and discord in the household. But they’re united by their fearlessness in breaking down boundaries and thrusting us into worlds beyond our own. Following a shot of Harry’s body still moldering in the doorway, Burnett cuts to one of the boy honking away. Bowen, In 1922, Wilfred James (Thomas Jane) initially scans as a broadly brutish characterization given by an actor looking to disrupt his handsomely aloof image, following a cinematic tradition of expressively filthy, monosyllabic and flamboyantly antisocial characters such as Daniel Plainview and Karl Childers. When the demons appear in the film, and in terrifyingly fleeting glimpses, Perkins understands them to spring from the deepest chasms of human despair. To Sleep with Anger refers many times to the notion of the “the right thing happening for the wrong reason,” and there are accompanying references to superstitions and tall tales linked to Gideon, Suzie, and Harry’s generation. if he was a friend, he would stop irritating people. Adam Wingard leans real heavy on 1980s—or 1980s-sounding—music in the grandly, outwardly wounded key of Joy Division, and he accompanies the music with visual sequences that sometimes appear to stop in their tracks for the sake of absorbing the soundtrack. Nichols was forthright about the motives of his protagonists, but cagey about whether their causes were worth believing in. That's what Harry does. Rosa finally agrees to house him once her well-honed negotiating skills have secured her a decent monthly stipend for his care. These great horror films are currently streaming on Netflix. Midway through the film, Suzie, perturbed by Harry’s devious and divisive behavior, questions him on the quality of his friendship, to which Harry calmly retorts with a riddle: “Like that boy next door playing his horn . Undoubtedly some viewers will pick up on a seemingly subversive impulse in the film, given that the story hinges on granting the slasher’s archetypical “last girl” the almost superhuman powers of her eternal pursuer. The Academy is the very distillation of the system. This image fades into another of Gideon’s feet, now bare, as he sits on a tree stump in his garden, seemingly awakening from a dream. To Sleep with Anger is a 1990 drama film written and directed by Charles Burnett. One won’t learn of the Algonquin Round Table from Mank, though it’s alluded to, and an amusing pitch meeting involving von Sternberg and Hecht is even funnier if one knows that Hecht previously co-wrote a picture for the director—1927’s Underworld—that’s the sort of genre fare that von Sternberg appears to want to transcend in Mank. Ballard may have been right that literary sci-fi has provided all the interesting themes and ideas for which sci-fi in general has become known, but he failed to grasp how cinema has expanded our understanding of sci-fi by pricking at our collective visual consciousness. With his sharp tongue and profound alcoholism, Mank gradually works his way toward a fate of sitting in a cabin, ailing, essentially alone, penning a screenplay that’s probably intended as a form of revenge against those who rejected him over the years, while also serving as a Proustian expression of longing over lost days and unrealized promises.