Hello folks, and welcome back to the Week in Review. Today I’ve got a sprawling pile of movie reviews for you all, ranging from classics of horror and suspense to some poignant and beautiful modern dramas. The movies were fantastic this week, quite frankly, and I feel like as I dive further into the film canon, I’m only discovering new horizons of genres and directors I’m eager to explore. I’ve got plenty of movies to cover and far too many rambling thoughts about each of them, so let’s not waste any more time, and dive into this mountainous Week in Review!

This week I continued my journey through Alfred Hitchcock’s catalog with The Birds. The Birds builds slowly, with its whole first hour featuring just a quick, glancing strike or two by its titular villains, and its narrative mostly focusing on a prank-happy young newspaper heiress named Melanie Daniels, who’s found herself strangely smitten with a lawyer (Mitch Brenner) she meets at a pet shop. Hitchcock almost seems most comfortable when his characters are suffering from extreme dramatic irony, which naturally creates a sense of suspense and anticipation all throughout this film’s first half – but structural effect aside, I was also impressed by how genuinely compelling The Birds’ first half was as a pure character drama.

I’ve written before about how many stories with a second-act twist are undone by the frail substance of their pre-twist narrative, and Hitchcock seems to be a master of just the opposite. Like in North by Northwest, Melanie Daniels feels like a fully realized person long before the film’s central conflict emerges, making the film feel like a genuine invasion on normalcy, rather than just a world where monsters exist.

And when the birds actually do attack, Hitchcock pulls together a thrilling series of setpieces that dance between action and horror, using the ever-unnerving image of birds crowding together overhead to keep the audience feeling perpetually hunted. The Birds taps into much of the same horror appeal as a zombie movie, elevated by Hitchcock’s consistently astounding cinematography, as well as a script that breathes life into the whole population of the town under attack. A few of the cuts that attempt to overlay footage of birds over footage of the town don’t really hold up, but on the whole, The Birds is still a fantastically realized and generally gripping horror film, featuring one of the best home invasion sequences I’ve ever seen.

I also ended up seeing Joker at last, which I’m glad I only watched after The Discourse had largely dissipated. It’s frankly a little strange to me that Joker became such a cultural lightning rod, because comments by its creators aside, it’s ultimately a pretty familiar sort of character study. Todd Phillips’ cinematography is quite strong, but Joaquin Phoenix absolutely steals the show, and offers one of the most convincingly abused performances I’ve seen. Phoenix is so riveting that it was almost paradoxically hard to feel bad for his character; Arthur Fleck does not lead a happy life, but Phoenix is so good at portraying him that my response was more frequently “at last, some good fucking food” than “oh no, this is so sad.”

Though I suppose that feeling was also facilitated by the film’s structure. Joker takes the aimless, pathetic life of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, and actually provides this film’s Bickle with motives and goals that are genuinely relevant to his life. Bickle raged at a world that had no place for him; in contrast, Fleck has genuine reason to believe his father is a great man, and actually serves as a catalyst for large-scale social unrest. It’s a more simplistic choice, and this is a more simplistic film, but also a more traditionally “entertaining” one.

I can’t really see the argument for Joker being “irresponsible” or “toxic” in its thematic perspective; frankly, that argument seems largely based in some modern audiences’ distressing tendency to claim any art that shows people doing bad things without clear consequences is morally unacceptable. If anything, Joker felt like another entry in 2019’s well-stocked “fuck the rich” catalog, except centered on a man who’s so ignorant and confused that he can’t really tell where to direct his anger. And frankly, that itself seems like a common and understandable feeling in our modern world. Individuals being oppressed by our system don’t necessarily know who specifically is responsible, they just know their lives are thankless and difficult and they think they ought not to be that way, particularly when the rich are telling us how great we have it. Joker felt too unfocused and indulgent of its protagonist to strike with total weight, but it was still a satisfying experience, and goddamn can Joaquin Phoenix act.

I also watched Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, which basically let Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller prove their genuinely substantial dramatic chops over the course of a familiarly Baumbachian family crisis. All of Baumbach’s films seem to in some way be about his own childhood – they’re mostly family dramas centered on wealthy, artistically gifted parents whose egos and fraying relationships end up filtering down to the lives of their kids. In The Meyerowitz stories, both Sandler and Stiller, along with their sister Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) are living in the shadow of their father, a moderately successful sculptor (played by a convincingly intolerable Dustin Hoffman).

Sandler and Stiller are both terrific in this film; they both benefit from a strong script, but they also both fully inhabit the consequences of their father’s actions in their every movement, and each of their respective personalities is able to take great advantage of the specific style of energy they bring to their usual comedic roles. Sandler’s wilting demeanor and unerring faith in his father’s legacy are heartbreaking; Stiller’s prickly, fragile pride feels like a vase stranded half off a shelf, just waiting to fall and shatter. Their moments of mutual honesty flash between ugly and heartwarming, while always feeling sincere and keenly attuned to the nature of families. It’s not a revelatory film, but it’s a thoroughly effective one, and it’s a delight to see these actors fully embrace such intricate and impactful characters.

The week’s most emotionally devastating experience was undoubtedly Shoplifters, a 2018 drama by acclaimed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda. I’d never seen any of Kore-eda’s work before, but he’s renowned for making subtle, beautiful, and devastatingly acute family dramas, so it seemed like I was clearly missing out. And having watched Shoplifters, I can confirm that Kore-eda is a true master, that I’ll probably have to watch all of his films, and that I’m almost certainly going to cry every time.

Shoplifters is a story about a makeshift family of poverty-stricken strangers, who survive via the pension their “grandmother” still receives, various odd jobs, and plenty of shoplifting. The most immediately striking things about Shoplifters are its beautiful but understated cinematography, which uses the natural angles and alleyways of their home to create striking compositions, as well as the profoundly naturalistic script, and the tremendously convincing performances the main cast (even the remarkably talented children) bring to that script. And beyond its consistently marvelous aesthetic features and utterly unvarnished, true-to-life conversations, Shoplifters compassionately explores painful questions of what truly defines a family, and how our closest bonds are shaped by the economic circumstances of our lives.

While watching the second half of this film, I was consistently reminded of that iconic conversation from Parasite, when the poor Kim family reflects on how rich people are “so soft and kind,” unscarred by the pain of truly having to scrape to survive. Every member of Shoplifters’ family is scarred by their circumstances, and yet the moments of joy they find together feel desperately genuine. Shoplifters provides no easy answers, only complex questions and poignant, fully realized human moments. An absolute triumph of a film.

And lastly, I also watched the original The Evil Dead, which was… fine? Honestly, the only things that really grabbed me about this film were the fun makeup work, and Sam Raimi’s inconsistently inspired direction (goddamn does the man love monster perspective shots, as well as Resident Evil-style “we have no fucking clue what’s in front of the protagonist” angles). Other than that, the film is one long series of ultimately repetitive jump scares, without much to really cling onto beyond the urgency of each new jump and subsequent chase around the cabin. I’m glad I saw it, since it’s undoubtedly one of the horror essentials, but it didn’t really offer the craft to feel timeless or exciting in the way something like Friday the 13th or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre still does.