The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc

The Fashion of Joan of Arc

Carl Dreyer’s 1928 French silent La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is one of the greatest films-- French, silent, otherwise-- ever;  Luc Besson’s 1999 The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc is possibly one of the silliest-- French, epic, otherwise-- and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Such is progress.

Dreyer’s film is an astonishingly spare work, essentially a hundred and ten minutes of gigantic close-ups strung together and little else. No fat nothing extraneous-- each shot adds to the film’s sense of inevitability, each cut (1,500 of them) accelerates momentum. Besson’s at two hours and twenty minutes has little meat-- as if Besson had tossed in everything learned in grade school but stopped before freshman year. Dreyer’s has the courage of a consummate artist with an idea of what he wants to present to the world;  Besson’s has the courage of a consummate hack, piling special effect upon special effect in the hope that heat and pressure would build inside his digitally enhanced big-budgeted compost heap and ignite to yield a vision.

Nightjohn (Charles Burnett, 1996)

The fruit of the tree of knowledge

Charles Burnett's Nightjohn (1996)-- about the perils of slaves learning to read in the early 19th century South-- succeeds in transforming the for-the-whole-family TV-movie (Hallmark Channel produced, Disney distributed) into something more unsettling (screened this for my students back when I was teaching at-risk youths, and one of the most common responses was: "This was on the Disney Channel?").

"Wuthering Heights" (Emerald Fennell, 2026)

Doddering Heights

(WARNING: story and plot twists discussed in explicit detail!)

Wouldn't condemn Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" for taking liberties with Emily Bronte, but would condemn the film for making such weak tea out of her novel.

Agreed the Byronic protagonist should be darkskinned-- though every Heathcliff in most every adaptation has been white (Olivier, Fiennes); agreed taking out Hindley is a grievous wound (combining the man who adopts Heathcliff with the man who most hates Heathcliff makes for a veddy confusing character); agreed cutting out the novel's second half truncates much of the story's power (though most every version including the classic 1939 William Wyler adaptation does just that)-- Fennel coulda woulda shoulda but didn't and if we hew to the principle that adaptations must have leeway for the art to breathe life in another medium then she didn't haveta.

What I do find unacceptable is the softening of the main characters. Emily's Catherine to put it bluntly is a bitch, Emily's Heathcliff a sonfabitch, and their relationship has a strong whiff of incest about it (implied but never stated that Heathcliff is likely Mr. Earnshaw's bastard child-- and Catherine likely his half-sister). I'd even object to Fennell's turning Nelly (Hong Chau) into an underhanded villain, tho there are hints here and there-- the crucial scene in the novel when Heathcliff eavesdrops (why didn't Nelly warn Catherine?) comes to mind. I've heard criticism that the whole course of the novel depended on such a little thing-- a man listening and leaving at just the right moment-- but truth of the matter is anything could have split the two up: a punch in the gut, a slap in the face, a trivial spat. Catherine and Heathcliff are what you'd call 'compelling'-- characters you'd love to read about in a gothic novel but hell to actually live with day to day. They're so stubborn they'd find the slightest excuse to fight; they're their own worst enemies. Shifting the blame on Nelly as Fennell does absolves them of what they've done to each other, lessens the tragedy of their relationship.   

Hamnet (Chloe Zhao, 2025)

To mourn or not to mourn

Chloe Zhao's latest-- adapted by Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell from O'Farrell's well-regarded 2020 novel-- is a tearjerker, most people will agree. The question one might ask: does it earn our tears, or are we overindulging?

Saving Private Ryan vs The Thin Red Line

Battle of the Best Pictures: The Thin Red Line vs. Saving Private Ryan

Spielberg is master of a narrow emotional range, that of a child in suburban America. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET the Extraterrestrial, even parts of Jaws, Poltergeist, the underrated 1941 all reflect this. More, he has the child's pleasure in toys, and in motion for the sheer pleasure of motion. His films move, and that is no small thing; they are “movies” in the fullest sense.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia Dacosta, 2026)

The numbing of the beast

Saw The Bone Temple and thought it far better than the first movie. No, I'll go further: in my book the best by far 28...Later movie to date. No, I'll go even further; best film of the entire franchise, and yes I haven't seen the as yet nonexistent third installment-- calling it here and now, a year or so early. 

No-- backtrack. I'll go even further than that: Bone Temple is the first movie in the entire franchise that I actually like. 

It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi, 2025)

We have ways of making you talk

Give Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi this much credit: he shoots what he sees. Intrigued by the look on a young girl's face, he made The Mirror (1997), about a child acting in a film production and the sudden plot twists she introduces in both the film and her life. Seeing how women are treated in Iran, he made The Circle (2000), a series of interlinked stories about different women, and Offside (2006), about a group of young women determined to see the World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain-- even if women are banned from attending. 

The Circle, Offside, and the crime drama Crimson Gold (2003) helped earn Panahi a 6-year prison sentence and 20-year filmmaking ban; he responded with This Is Not A Film (2011), and the surreptitiously shot Taxi (2015). He was arrested and imprisoned again in 2022 for following up on the arrest of a fellow filmmaker, and his response is this film-- about former prisoners and how they react when meeting their former prison interrogator.