18 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
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For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town UA/LIONS GATE/SHUTTERSTOCKIn Robert Altman’s sardonic adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s “The Long
Goodbye,” from 1973, Elliott Gould plays the private eye Philip Marlowe as
a shambling New York ironist, transplanted to Hollywood in a rumpled suit
and a vintage Lincoln Continental. (It screens on Nov. 23, at Metrograph,
introduced by Noah Baumbach.) The quasi-spoof, written by Leigh Brackett
(who also adapted Chandler’s “The Big Sleep,” three decades earlier), shat-
ters its façade of humor with a relentless onslaught of violence—much of
it targeting women. The drama begins when Marlowe helps a friend, Terry
Lennox ( Jim Bouton), leave the country for Tijuana. When Lennox is found
to have killed his wife, Marlowe is charged as an accessory to murder; the
resulting intrigue entangles him in the flaying marital conflict of a famous
writer (Sterling Hayden) and his heiress wife (Nina van Pallandt), and also
in the misogynous cruelty of a gangster (Mark Rydell). Altman offers a
detective story befitting the heyday of Ingmar Bergman: the unleashing of
pent-up passions leads not to liberation but to destruction.—Richard BrodyINREVIVAL
Dark Waters
The director Todd Haynes’s artistry is hardly
detectable in this environmental thriller, yet the
film, based on a true story, nonetheless offers a
stirring and infuriating story of brazen corpo-
rate indifference to employees, neighbors, and
the world at large—and the obstacles faced by
those who challenge it. Mark Ruffalo stars as
Rob Bilott, a Cincinnati lawyer who specializes
in defending companies in Superfund-related
lawsuits. When a West Virginia farmer, Wilbur
Tennant (Bill Camp), shows evidence that the
local DuPont plant is poisoning his herd of cat-
tle, Rob defies opposition within his firm and
takes the farmer’s case—which proves to be as-
toundingly wide-reaching. The script, by Mario
Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan, empha-
sizes Rob’s painstaking detective work in chem-
istry, public health, and regulatory law—and the
personal price that he pays in his decades-long
battle against corporate stonewalling and delays.
Edward Lachman’s textured cinematography
suggests intimate overtones absent from the
plot. With Tim Robbins and Bill Pullman, as
principled attorneys, and Anne Hathaway, as
Rob’s attorney wife, Sarah, who holds the family
together.—R.B. (In wide release.)
Doctor Sleep
The prospect of a sequel to “The Shining” (1980)
is not to be scorned. The urge to discover what
happens in the long wake of a movie is often
acute, and Stanley Kubrick’s hypnotic work offers
no exception; who could resist a return to the
Overlook Hotel? Moreover, Stephen King has
written a follow-up to his original novel, and it’s
that new book, published in 2013, which forms
the basis of Mike Flanagan’s film. Ewan McGre-
gor plays Danny Torrance, whom we last saw as a
petrified little boy and who has, unsurprisingly,
grown into an alcoholic adult. Yet his telepathic
powers remain intact, and, after teaming up
with a teen-ager named Abra (Kyliegh Cur-
ran), who possesses similar gifts, he sets about
tracking down a murderous gang, headed by
the rakish Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson).
The whole plot feels curiously random, and the
pace is perilously cautious, but Ferguson, espe-
cially, brightens the gloom.—Anthony Lane (Re-
viewed in our issue of 11/18/19.) (In wide release.)Ford v Ferrari
Cheerful, robust, and well oiled, the latest film
by James Mangold fulfills the plain promiseof its title. In the nineteen-sixties, Henry
Ford II—played with gusto by Tracy Letts—
decides to beat Ferrari at its own game by
designing a car that will triumph at the twenty-
four-hour race at Le Mans. This ludicrous
plan is put into effect by Carroll Shelby (Matt
Damon), the upbeat Texan who oversees the
project, and Ken Miles (Christian Bale), the
lugubrious British driver behind the wheel.
Bright and gutsy though the racing sequences
are, the movie is not really about automobiles;
it’s a multiple-character study that happens
to barrel along at high speed, and much fun is
to be had from the clash of the various egos,
fender to fender. With Caitriona Balfe as Ken’s
wife, Mollie, who, true to the spirit of the
story, takes no nonsense.—A.L. (11/18/19) (In
wide release.)Varda by Agnès
For her posthumously released final film, Agnès
Varda (who died in March, at the age of ninety)
revisits her career in a work of multilayered
self-portraiture. It’s anchored by two recent
public appearances; in the first, at an opera
house, she makes bold thematic associations
that connect ideas in her films—in particular,
the fusion of documentary and fiction—and
dives deep into memories that illuminate them.
Clips of movies are intertwined with archival
interviews and new staged sequences, includ-
ing a playfully earnest one featuring a camera
dolly in an open field, where she interviews
the actress Sandrine Bonnaire. In the second
part, an outdoor discussion, Varda defines a
dividing line in her career that threads into
this movie—her discovery, around 2000, of
miniature video cameras, which enabled her to
work more spontaneously and to become her
own central onscreen character. The result is a
grand, warmhearted testament to her lifetime
of creative connections, her art of self-trans-
formation, and her relentless transformation
of the art of cinema itself. In French.—R.B.
(In limited release.)Within Our Gates
Oscar Micheaux’s bold, forceful melodrama,
from 1919—one of the oldest surviving features
by a black American director—unfolds the
vast political dimensions of intimate romantic
crises. Evelyn Preer stars as Sylvia Landry,
a young black woman in a Northern town
who suffers a broken engagement. She heads
home to the South and becomes a teacher in
an underfinanced school; while fund-raising in
Boston, she meets an ardent doctor (Charles D.
Lucas) and a philanthropist (Mrs. Evelyn),
who help with the cause. With a brisk and
sharp-edged style, Micheaux sketches a wide
view of black society, depicting an engineer
with an international career, a private eye with
influential friends, a predatory gangster, de-
voted educators—and the harrowing ambient
violence of Jim Crow, which he shows unspar-
ingly and gruesomely. Micheaux’s narrative
manner is as daring as his subject matter, with
flashbacks and interpolations amplifying the
story; a remarkable twist regarding Sylvia’s
identity, slipped in at the end, opens up a nearly
hallucinatory historical vortex. Silent.—R.B.
(MOMA, Nov. 23, and streaming.)