short film

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

The Cannes Film Festival is winding down, with the awards ceremony happening on Saturday. Amy Nicholson and Joshua Rothkopf have been there, watching as many films as they can. In a notebook dispatch from the fest’s first week, Amy covered many early titles, including Harris Dickinson’s directing debut, “Urchin,” Ari Aster’s “Eddington,” Dominik Moll’s “Dossier 137,” Sergei Loznitsa’s “Two Prosecuters” and Oliver Laxe’s “Sirât.” A second diary is live now, covering several films including Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest” and the directorial debut of Kristen Stewart, “The Chronology of Water.”

Josh spoke to filmmaker Lynne Ramsay about her long-awaited return with “Die, My Love,” a tale of the struggles of motherhood, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. So far the film has become the festival’s biggest acquisition, picked up by “The Substance’s” distributor Mubi for a reported $24 million.

Director Lynne Ramsay on the set of the movie “Die, My Love.”

(Kimberly French)

Ramsay spoke about working with Lawrence and Pattinson, who, besides being big stars, are committed performers as well.

“I think they were very willing participants,” said Ramsay. “There was a lot of trust. I try and create an atmosphere of trust and I just threw them into the fire. I did the sex scene on the first day. I thought it’s a risk. It’s either going to work or it’s going to be a disaster. But I could see there was chemistry. And when they arrived, I was getting them dancing. They were dancing together, synchronized. And it was fun. And then I think Robert was a little nervous, but then something just kind of broke the ice.”

Josh also spoke to director Ari Aster about “Eddington” and whether he set out to make his most overtly politically charged film to date with the story of a small town’s sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor (Pedro Pascal) sparring during the early days of the pandemic.

“I am just following my impulses, so I’m not thinking in that way,” said Aster. “There’s very little strategy going on. It’s just: What am I interested in? And when I started writing, because I was in a real state of fear and anxiety about what was happening in the country and what was happening in the world, and I wanted to make a film about what it was feeling like.”

‘The Sugarland Express’ and our Spielberg Summer

Michael Sacks, left, William Atherton and Goldie Hawn in the 1974 movie “The Sugarland Express.”

(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images / Universal Pictures)

We seem to be on the verge of a summer of Spielberg. After last week’s screening of 2002’s “Minority Report,” this Thursday brings a showing of Spielberg’s 1974 “The Sugarland Express” at the Academy Museum with a conversation with the film’s star, Goldie Hawn.

There are also multiple opportunities to see “Jaws” this Memorial Day weekend in celebration of the film’s 50th anniversary, including presentations at the Egyptian, the New Beverly, Vidiots and the Frida Cinema. The film will also play at the Hollywood Bowl on July 5, with a live performance of John Williams’ score by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“The Sugarland Express,” screening in a 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative, was Spielberg’s theatrical feature debut. As tempting as it is to view it for the seeds of what was still to come, the movie is a fully formed charmer all on its own.

Lou Jean Poplin (Hawn) convinces her husband (William Atherton) to escape from prison just a few months from being released because their son is about to be placed for adoption. When the pair wind up taking a police officer hostage, their journey across Texas becomes an unlikely pursuit involving the authorities and the media.

In an April 1974 review, Kevin Thomas called the film “dazzling, funny, exciting and finally poignant. … An increasingly disenchanted portrait of contemporary America.”

Thomas added, “Spielberg and his associates are trying for entertainment rather than profundity, and ‘The Sugarland Express’ is anything but heavy. But it is incisive as it is rapid, like the more optimistic vintage Capra films it brings to mind. … When all things are considered, however, one realizes it is Goldie Hawn who gives the film its focus and dimension, making Lou Jean at once very funny and very sad, quite real, and for all her intransigence, most appealing.”

In a March 1973 report from the set, Hawn spoke to reporter Jeff Millar. She said it took a year after the film “Butterflies Are Free” to find another project that excited her as much. “I flipped when I saw this one,” Hawn said. “It’s a different kind of role for me. She’s aggressive. She’s a leader, she’s comical. But she’s still a plain country girl.

“I guess the most exciting thing is the director,” Hawn continued. “I’d never met him, but everybody knew about him, you know? ‘Oh yeah, you’re going to do a picture with Steve Spielberg. The bright young guy who’s coming up…’”

In comments that bring to mind his recent film “The Fabelmans,” Spielberg, 25 at the time, told Millar, “I’ve been making pictures in 8mm, 16mm and 35mm since I was 15. This is the fourth year I’ve had that Directors Guild of America card. I’ve been directing in television since I was 21.”

Of the movie, he added, “I wanted to shoot in Texas because it’s so big. I’m very into Americana — and Texas is a lot more Americana to me than, well, Kansas or Andrew Wyeth.”

Points of interest

Susan Sontag’s ‘Duet for Cannibals’

Adriana Asti, left, and Susan Sontag making their 1969 film “Duet for Cannibals.”

(Susan Wood / Getty Images)

In 1968, Susan Sontag, already a well-known and deeply influential writer and critic, was invited to Stockholm to make her first movie. The result was “Duet for Cannibals,” a darkly comedic satire of bourgeois values focused on two couples. The film plays at Vidiots on Wednesday.

In May 1973, Kevin Thomas wrote about the film when it had a few screenings at an art gallery and restaurant near LACMA, noting that it “demonstrates Susan Sontag is as gifted a filmmaker as she is a critic and philosopher.”

Thomas concluded, “Sontag illuminates human potential, with emphasis on its bent for destruction yet capacity to endure to a breathtaking fullness. In this bravura example of a work of art that achieves maximum of means, Susan Sontag proves she is a critic who can practice what she preaches.”

‘How to Get Ahead in Advertising’

Richard E. Grant in the movie “How to Get Ahead in Advertising.”

(Janus Films)

Writer-director Bruce Robinson followed up his cult hit “Withnail & I” with 1989’s “How To Get Ahead in Advertising,” a bitter satire of commercialization and the media. Richard E. Grant plays rising advertising executive Denis Dimbleby Bagley, who, while suffering an ethical crisis over the impact of his work, develops a boil on his neck that begins talking to him. The film will play in a new restoration at the Los Feliz 3 on Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday.

In a May 1989 review, Sheila Benson called the movie “a strange piece, to be sure. It’s cruel, funny, knowing, never less than biting and occasionally brilliant. Pure fury seems to have driven Robinson to it. … There are problems in creating something as simultaneously funny and unlovely as a talking boil. It’s possible that some audiences will lose interest once they learn that the effects are good but minor; the boil, even when grown to full manhood (boilhood?) isn’t a patch on ‘The Fly.’ But then, this isn’t that sort of movie. This is a blistering broadside, a warning for the safety of our souls.”

In a set visit by Bart Mills published around the film’s release, Robinson, then 43, did an interview from his office at Shepperton Studios outside London.

He said it was his own disillusionment at “the constant stream of disinformation the media and the politicians give us” that inspired the story. “This is the kind of anger I feel all the time. All the time. It’s intolerable. The only thing that saves me, that keeps the electrodes off my head, is that, thank God, I’m allowed to make a movie about it.”

Yet, Robinson added, “I don’t believe the cinema can change anything. It’s not a teacher, it’s an entertainer. I enjoy finding a comedic way to exploit my burning rage.”

The short films of Charles and Ray Eames

The title frame for Charles and Ray Eames’ 1955 short film “House: After Five Years of Living.”

(Eames Office, LLC.)

On Wednesday, the Philosophical Research Society and the Charles and Ray Eames Foundation will host an evening celebrating the famous creative duo. There will be a program of seven of the Eames’ shorts, including 1955’s “House: After Five Years of Living,” 1964’s “Think” and likely their best-known film, 1977’s “Powers of Ten.”

The event will also include a panel discussion moderated by programmer Alex McDonald including the Eames’ grandson Eames Demetrios, art director Jeannine Oppewall and the creative pair of Adi Goodrich and Sean Pecknold, known as Sing-Sing.

Writing about the enduring influence of the Eames in 2012, David L. Ulin said, “In our age of constant contact, it’s almost impossible to step away from the workplace even when we’re off the clock. And yet, if the Eameses have anything to tell us, it’s that we can — must — aspire to a higher integration, in which work should not only feed our stomach but also, and more importantly, our souls.”

In other news

Rolf Saxon accepts another ‘Mission’

Actor Rolf Saxon, photographed at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York.

(Justin Jun Lee / For The Times)

Fans of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise are in for a real surprise when they see the new sequel “The Final Reckoning,” which opens this weekend. Actor Rolf Saxon, who had a memorable turn in the first film in 1996, is back with a surprisingly large role in the new film.

Saxon’s character of CIA analyst William Donloe was sent to a radar station in Alaska after his computer station got hacked by Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in one of the series’ signature set pieces. In the new film, it turns out Donloe has been in Alaska the entire time and now may have vital information for the Impossible Mission Force.

The new film brought Saxon to caves in the English midlands and, most spectacularly, Svalbard, an archipelago off the northern coast of Norway.

“This was in many ways a dream job,” says Saxon. “The people I’m working with, the thing I’m working on and the places I got to go to work — it’s just like, what would you really like to do? Here it is.”

My extended feature with Saxon goes live a little later this afternoon. Stay tuned.

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

This year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival launched this week. The winner of last year’s Palme d’Or, Sean Baker’s “Anora,” went on to win five Oscars including best picture. Numerous other Cannes premieres from 2024, such as “The Substance,” “The Apprentice” “Emilia Peréz” and “Flow,” went on to successful awards season runs as well.

This year’s lineup features many titles we could be talking about all year long, including Lynne Ramsay’s “Die, My Love,” Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind,” Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme,” Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” Ari Aster’s “Eddington,” Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” and Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest.” The festival will world-premiere the feature directing debuts of Kristen Stewart and Scarlett Johansson, with “The Chronology of Water” and “Eleanor the Great” respectively. Read all of our coverage as it unfurls right here.

The festival also saw the premiere of Christopher McQuarrie’s “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” the fourth movie he has made in Tom Cruise’s venerable action-espionage franchise. Amy Nicholson was at the film’s world premiere, writing, “Cruise is the reason audiences will, and should, see “Final Reckoning” on a large and loud screen. His Ethan continues to survive things he shouldn’t. … Yet, what I’ve most come to appreciate about Ethan is that he doesn’t try to play the unflappable hero. Clinging to the chassis of an airplane with the wind plastering his hair to his forehead and oscillating his gums like a bulldog in a convertible, he is, in fact, exceedingly flapped.”

‘Minority Report’ in 35mm

Samantha Morton and Tom Cruise star in the movie “Minority Report.”

(DreamWorks LLC / 20th Century Fox)

As audiences prepare themselves for the upcoming release of “Final Reckoning,” folks may want to revisit not only other films in the “Mission: Impossible” series but also other titles from the now nearly 45-year career of Tom Cruise.

On Sunday, the Egyptian Theatre will have a 35mm screening of 2002’s “Minority Report,” which paired the star with director Steven Spielberg for the first time. Adapted from a novella by sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick and set in 2054, the story finds Cruise as an officer for a “pre-crime” unit that uses clairvoyant humans to stop crimes before they occur. When he discovers possible faults in the system and finds himself accused of a crime he has yet to commit, Cruise must go on the run.

In a review at the time, Kenneth Turan wrote that the film “finds Hollywood’s preeminent director more convincingly at home with unapologetically bleak and unsettling material than he was with Kubrick’s ‘A.I.’ ‘I wanted to make the ugliest, dirtiest movie I have ever made,’ Spielberg told cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and there’s little doubt he’s succeeded. … But the road to self-knowledge can be an uneven one, and as impressive as this disturbing, even haunting film can be, it does not feel all of a piece.”

Turan added, “A word must be said for Cruise. Though his is the starring role, it is in some ways a thankless one, needing him to be the tireless turbine that powers this expensive cinematic machine and nothing more. It’s not the kind of work that wins awards, but without Cruise’s intensity almost willing our interest in Spielberg’s unrelentingly dark world, ‘Minority Report’ wouldn’t have nearly as much life as it does.”

More ‘Old Man’ films from ‘You Must Remember This’

Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen on set of the movie “Rich and Famous” in 1981.

(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

The American Cinematheque has a series underway to celebrate the recent season of the podcast “You Must Remember This.” A few months ago, I featured an interview with the show’s writer, producer and host Karina Longworth to talk about “The Old Man Is Still Alive,” a season examining the late careers of filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Vincent Minnelli, Billy Wilder and others who had enjoyed decades of success only to find themselves floundering amid the cultural changes happening in Hollywood during the 1960s and ’70s.

The Cinematheque series, playing Tuesdays throughout July at the Los Feliz 3, features some of the most intriguing titles from that podcast, many of them rarely screened and all worthy of the reappraisal Longworth invites. This Tuesday will be Howard Hawks’ 1965 film “Red Line 7000,” about young stock car racers.

In a published transcript from the episode covering Hawks, Longworth said the film was “a bizarre, low-budget experiment that grafts Hawks’s longstanding interest in gender warfare onto a semi-documentary sports movie about low-rent race car champions, starring a very young, very hot James Caan. Hawks’ ’60s romantic comedy, ‘Man’s Favorite Sport?’ could have been made in the 1930s and ’40s as basically the same movie. The same goes for each of the other films he made in his last decade as a filmmaker, none of which took place in contemporary America, except for ‘Red Line 7000.’ ‘Red Line 7000’ is a movie that could have only been made in 1965.”

Kevin Thomas reviewed the film on Nov. 26, 1965, writing, “‘Red Line 7000’ takes off like a streak of lightning, zooms through a thicket of romantic entanglements and winds up a winner at the finish. … Plenty of action plus a cast of attractive unknowns assures another success for veteran director Howard Hawks.”

That will be followed on May 27 by a 35mm screening of George Cukor’s 1981 “Rich and Famous,” starring Candice Bergen and Jacqueline Bisset as friends who become competitive over their literary careers. Noting Pauline Kael’s withering New Yorker review of the film, Longworth added, “What Kael sees as reason for derision, I see as worthy of praise.”

Thomas spent time on the set while the film was in production. Cukor told him, “It’s a great pleasure to read a really good script. And with such wit and style. It’s very contemporary and devastatingly accurate, with a bold, impertinent wit and gaiety. There are two extraordinary parts for women, and the man has a good one, too. So it’s up to us to make it work. I don’t think wit is the coin of the realm right now — it’s ‘Star Wars’ and all that.”

In an October 1981 profile of the film’s writer, Gerald Ayres, who also did Adrian Lyne’s 1980 “Foxes,” the writer says of Cukor, “He put bite and energy into it. His work survives so well because of that squeeze of lemon he puts in his films.”

James Coco and Dyan Cannon in the movie “Such Good Friends.”

(American Cinematheque)

On June 17, there will be a screening of Otto Preminger’s “Such Good Friends,” a satirical dramedy about middle-class sexual escapades starring Dyan Cannon (nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance) that featured a screenplay worked on by the likes of Joan Micklin Silver, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion with Elaine May receiving final screen credit under a pseudonym.

On the podcast, Longworth said of the film, “In the midst of a cultural moment that was obsessed with the idea of a sexual revolution but at the same time refused to acknowledge the ways in which that revolution mostly benefited men while imposing on women a whole new set of impossible standards, ‘Such Good Friends’ is the rare Hollywood movie of its time to portray the imbalance between men and women in terms of acceptable levels of desire and anger.”

A January 1972 Times profile of Preminger by Wayne Warga found the journalist tagging along to Preminger’s tastefully luxurious office on the Paramount lot (which the filmmaker would soon be losing), as well as to local TV appearances hosted by Tom Snyder and Regis Philbin. Cannon canceled a promotional tour for the film due to a dispute with Preminger and said for the record, “I have absolutely no words for him. I will come up with a word for him one day. It hasn’t been invented yet.”

Lola Falana and Roscoe Lee Browne in the 1970 movie “The Liberation of L.B. Jones.”

(American Cinematheque)

Other films in the series include Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 “Frenzy,” Billy Wilder’s 1964 “Kiss Me, Stupid” in 35mm, Vincente Minnelli’s 1962 “Two Weeks in Another Town” in 35mm and Stanley Donen’s 1967 efforts “Two for the Road” and “Bedazzled.”

Among the most exciting titles in the series is a 35mm screening of William Wyler’s 1970 “The Liberation of L.B. Jones,” starring Roscoe Lee Browne, Lee J. Cobb, Anthony Zerbe and Lola Falana in a story of a successful Black businessman who finds his life complicated by his wife’s affair with a local white police officer.

Longworth called the film “uncompromising and unforgiving,” adding that, “‘The Liberation of L.B. Jones’ feels like Wyler leapfrogging over the ’60s entirely, skipping straight from a nostalgic cinematic universe in which nothing very bad ever happens to a ’70s of disillusionment and failed ideals.”

In a review from the time of the film’s release, Charles Champlin echoed those sentiments when he wrote the film was “unsentimental, unsparing, unforgiving, also brutal, credible, powerful, deeply disturbing and depressing and superbly well-acted. It reaffirms — not that it needed reaffirming — the immense power of the film as a social document. It will enrage as few pictures this year will enrage, and we’ll all have to hope that truth is its own purgative.”

Points of interest

‘Going Down’

A scene from the 1983 Australian film “Going Down.”

(Muscle Distribution)

The first theatrical re-release from the new company Muscle Distribution, 1983’s “Going Down” from Australian filmmaker Haydn Keenan will play in a 4K restoration on Friday and Saturday at Vidiots. The film has never had a U.S. release until now and is just the kind of off-beat, undiscovered title the current rep-revival scene is set up to embrace.

“Going Down” is similar to the early Susan Seidelman films “Smithereens” and “Desperately Seeking Susan” for the way it serves as a snapshot of a specific time and place — the clothes, the décor, the music — as well as being a portrait of a series of personalities. Capturing the early ’80s alternative scene of Sydney, the film follows four young women (played by Tracy Mann, Vera Plevnik, Julie Barry and Moira Maclaine-Cross) as they are all trying to establish their own identities and launch their lives, while also making their way across the city to find an envelope of missing money.

U.S. premiere of Chung Mong-hong’s ‘The Embers’

A scene from Taiwanese filmmaker Chung Mong-hong’s “The Embers.”

(American Cinematheque)

This weekend American Cinematheque is launching a series on the Taiwanese filmmaker Chung Mong-hong, including the U.S. premiere of his latest film “The Embers.” Aside from writing and directing all of the films in the series, Chung is also his own cinematographer. The filmmaker is scheduled to appear in person at all the shows.

Writing about him in 2022, critic Carlos Aguilar called Chung “one of the most infuriatingly underappreciated storytellers of our time.” This series should help bring his work to a broader audience.

“Parking,” from 2008, tells the story of a man trying to win back his estranged wife and is screening in 35mm. 2016’s “Godspeed” finds a cab driver mixed up with a drug dealer, while 2019’s family drama “A Sun” was Taiwan’s submission to the Academy Awards.

On Sunday, Chung will also introduce a 35mm screening of Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 “Stranger Than Paradise.”

Lars von Trier’s ‘Nymphomaniac’

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Jamie Bell in “Nymphomaniac: Volume II.”

(Christian Geisnaes / Magnolia Pictures)

On Wednesday, Brain Dead Studios will be screening both volumes of Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac” combined as a single 242-minute experience. The films were released separately but both tell a continuing story, as Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) recounts to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) the story of her sexual awakening and ongoing struggles as a sex addict. The cast also includes Stacy Martin, Shia LeBeouf, Jamie Bell, Mia Goth, Willem Dafoe and Uma Thurman.

When the films were initially released in 2014, I reviewed both “Volume 1” and “Volume II” separately. As I said at the time, “Few other filmmakers are capable of quite the same walloping power, though the film’s digressive, chaptered style gives it an offhand quality that asks for easy dismissal. Von Trier is such a masterful filmmaker that every new project comes on with the expectation and air of a totalizing masterwork, [creating] the unsated sensation of having too much and wanting more.”

In another piece I wrote that considered the films within Von Trier’s larger body of work (noting the filmmaker’s turn toward pranksterish provocations such as his now-notorious Cannes news conference appearances), I added that with the “Nymphomaniac” films, “he further questions both himself and his audience, asking what we want from cinema and what cinema is capable of giving us back. … What the ‘Nymphomaniac’ project may represent most of all is Lars von Trier burning down his own house, clearing a path to get out of his own way. Provocative in every sense of the word, stirring the loins, the head and the heart, the cinema of Lars von Trier is not to be dismissed. And that’s no joke.”

In other news

Summer movie preview

Mia Threapleton and Benicio del Toro in director Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme.”

(TPS Productions / Focus Features)

As part of our summer preview, the LAT published an interview wth Benicio del Toro, star of “The Phoenician Scheme.” Del Toro’s unpredictable screen presence has long made him one of my favorite actors and it is exciting to see him in a lead role. Wes Anderson wrote the part specifically for Del Toro, playing a 1950s industrialist tycoon known as Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda.

As Del Toro said to Carlos Aguilar, the actor couldn’t quite believe what he was reading in the script pages Anderson would periodically send him. “I didn’t know if it was going to be another film like ‘The French Dispatch,’ where my character ends and then another story rolls up,” he said. “Little by little, I understood that it was the whole thing.”

Allison Williams and an animatronic M3GAN in a scene from the movie “M3GAN 2.0,” directed by Gerard Johnstone.

(Universal Pictures)

Joshua Rothkopf spoke to Adrien Morot and Kathy Tse, the creative team behind Morot FX Studio, who along with several puppeteers, technicians and 15-year-old actor Amie Donald bring the film’s unnerving robot doll to life in the upcoming “M3GAN 2.0.” (Morot and Tse also won an Oscar for their work on “The Whale.”) The doll for the new film has been altered somewhat to keep up with Donald’s own growth.

“In my naiveté, I never quite understood just how much this was basically an elevated Muppet movie,” said the film’s director Gerard Johnstone. He added, “I thought, Why are we making something that looks like a toy when these guys can make things that look human? Wouldn’t that be really fun if we went further into the uncanny valley than we’ve ever gone before? And Adrien and Kathy were the perfect people to partner up with on that.”

There is also a handy list of 18 films to look forward to this summer, including Celine Song’s “Materialists,” Eva Victor’s “Sorry, Baby,” Darren Aronofsky’s “Caught Stealing,” Danny Boyle’s “28 Years Later,” James Gunn’s “Superman,” Zach Cregger’s “Weapons,” Joseph Kosinski’s “F1,” Akiva Schaffer’s “The Naked Gun,” Michael Shanks’ “Together” and Nisha Ganatra’s “Freakier Friday.”