10 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
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For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town COURTESY THE CRITERION COLLECTIONThe unromantic melodrama “Diary of a Mad Housewife,” from 1970—the
last of six films on which the screenwriter Eleanor Perry and the director
Frank Perry collaborated before their divorce—is a horror story about
the agonies that a woman endures at the hands of men, in marriage and
adultery alike. (It’s streaming on the Criterion Channel.) The thirty-
something Manhattan couple Tina Balser (Carrie Snodgress) and her
husband, Jonathan (Richard Benjamin), live in comfort; he’s a corporate
lawyer, and she stays home to raise their two daughters. But Jonathan, a
social climber desperately concerned with appearances, is a hypercritical
fussbudget and a domestic martinet, and Tina seeks solace in an affair with
a brashly seductive novelist (Frank Langella) who turns out to be an ego-
centric misogynist. Snodgress, brisk and flinty, thoughtful and impulsive,
endows Tina with the energy and the wiles of hunted prey. The Perrys’
pugnacious vision of ambient emotional brutality is also diagnostic: sordid
scenes at cocktail parties and fancy dinners lay bare unchallenged social
and professional norms that suddenly loom before Tina like nightmares.
Her awakening is the struggle of the times.—Richard BrodyWHATTO STREAM
an amputated finger (a symbolic castration that
foreshadows romantic anguish); he is the sac-
rificial body, the virile hero whom the national
adventure turns old in real time.—Richard Brody
(Streaming on the Criterion Channel.)
Butter on the Latch
After a sudden Brooklyn breakdown—a freak-
out of vulnerability on the ambiguous edge of
art and abuse—Sarah (Sarah Small), a young
performance artist, heads to a rustic “Balkan
camp” in California with her friend Isolde
(Isolde Chae-Lawrence), to study folk music
and dance. There, the primal rhythms and
ancient spirits of tradition fuse with a deep
rural darkness and the magnetic pull of the
redwoods, ensnaring the women in a hypnotic
bond of desire and a terrifying artistic night-
mare. The friends’ erotic confidences veer
toward sexual rivalry when a tall and diffident
classmate (Charlie Hewson) arrives. Carrying
flashlights and wearing headlamps in the thick
foliage, Small and Chae-Lawrence convey
looming frenzy with an easygoing charm; the
hallucinatory videography, by Ashley Connor,
looks at faces and landscapes with penetrating
detail, evoking unseen realms and timeless
mysteries. The director, Josephine Decker,
seems to be filming in a state of permanent
sleeplessness; every image and sound has the
impulsive energy of a creation wrenched from
a void into which she would leap again joy-
fully. Released in 2013.—R.B. (Streaming on
the Criterion Channel.)James and the Giant Peach
Adapted from Roald Dahl’s surreal adven-
ture story, Henry Selick’s short, spiky movie,
from 1996, is pretty adventurous itself. James
(Paul Terry), a young orphan, goes to live with
a brace of loathsome aunts (Miriam Mar-
golyes and Joanna Lumley). His chance to
flee their Dickensian gloom comes with the
appearance of a magic peach in the garden:
he crawls inside, where he finds a posse of
insect friends, and travels by air and sea to an
improbably benign New York City. The film
opens and closes on live action, with rubberystop-motion animation in between. The bugs,
designed by the children’s illustrator Lane
Smith, are enlivened by voice-overs from,
among others, Richard Dreyfuss and Susan
Sarandon. The movie, like the peach, offers
a bumpy ride, and the level of invention dips
and soars without warning, but Selick’s feeling
for texture—for the climates of bliss and of
apprehension—is so sure that you gradually
come to relish the oddity of the whole en-
terprise. As a tribute to the cranky genius of
Dahl, the film is both fond and, in the best
sense, fruitful.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in
our issue of 4/22/96.) (Streaming on Disney+,
Amazon, and other services.)Our Beloved Month of August
Filming in and around the rustic village of
Arganil, the Portuguese director Miguel
Gomes turns a cinematic adventure inside
out. His meandering, bittersweet tale of a
family of musicians—father, daughter, and
nephew—is combined with a documentary
view of the region, and with the story of his
own whimsical yet poignant efforts to make
the movie with the help of local residents. His
attention to their habits and traditions—the
production of a newspaper, the blare of a radio
station, the town’s religious pageantry, and the
lore surrounding a long-ago crime—merges
with the sociology of cultural change. It’s all
brought to the screen with a painterly eye for
the surrounding landscape. The heart of the
story is the father’s romantic grief and his
daughter’s devotion to him; the musicians’
achingly sentimental balladry comes off as
an embodiment of their private dramas, as
does Gomes’s brand of personal filmmaking.
The result is a sharply modern film with an
astute and sincere populism. Released in 2010.
In Portuguese.—R.B. (Streaming on Kanopy
and DAFilms.)Sankofa
In Haile Gerima’s meticulous, urgent his-
torical drama, from 1993, a Black American
model named Mona (Oyafunmike Ogunlano)
poses for a fashion shoot at a castle in Ghana
where captive Africans were forced onto ships
for the Middle Passage. The castle’s spiritual
guardian (Kofi Ghanaba) calls Mona back to
the past—and not just metaphorically. She is
transformed into Shola, who is enslaved at a
sugarcane plantation in the American South.
There, the enslaved, despite the unspeakable
brutality that they endure, organize with cour-
age and care to transmit their history orally,
from generation to generation—and to rise
up against their oppressors. Gerima details
the complexity of the African diaspora with
an extraordinary cast of characters, including
Nunu (Alexandra Duah), a griot with meta-
physical powers; her light-skinned son, Joe
(Nick Medley), a favorite of the plantation’s
white priest; Shango (Mutabaruka), a West
Indian medicine man whom Shola loves; and
Noble Ali (Afemo Omilami), who’s forced to
serve as an overseer. With this cinematic bear-
ing of witness, Gerima presents the recovery
of history and the preservation of collective
memory as a crucial basis for vital art and
authentic culture.—R.B. (Streaming on Netflix.)