Monthly Archives: August 2025

  • Sinners

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ryan Coogler (2025)

    In Get Out (2017), Jordan Peele’s use of a horror-movie framework to dramatise African-American victimisation and exploitation felt original and exciting.  Peele’s repetition of the formula in Us (2019) and Nope (2022) was increasingly unsatisfying.  He hasn’t yet directed another feature; in the meantime, another Black writer-director, Ryan Coogler, has taken over where Peele left off.  Nope worked science-fiction and Western elements into the mix; Sinners, although predominantly vampire horror, is being acclaimed as a ‘genre mash’, thanks to its period setting – the early 1930s – and time-hopping musical aspects.  The three Peele pictures also paid diminishing returns in terms of box-office receipts, but all made money and Sinners, released in April this year, has fared well commercially, too:  Wikipedia currently shows total receipts of $366m against a $90-100m budget.  Whereas Peele’s Nope, although widely admired by critics, didn’t equal the >90% fresh rating of its two predecessors on Rotten Tomatoes, Sinners’ fresh rating is right up there with Get Out’s:  at the time of writing, Coogler’s film has 405 reviews and 97% are positive.  I liked Coogler’s debut feature, Fruitvale Station (2013), and he did a decent job on the formulaic Creed (2015).  I avoided his next two pictures, Black Panther (2018) and its sequel Wakanda Forever (2022), on the grounds that a Black Marvel superhero was liable to be as boring as any other kind.  But I maybe would have enjoyed Coogler’s Black Panther films more than I enjoyed his latest.  Sinners makes for turgid viewing; that it’s also sometimes baffling doesn’t make it any less turgid.

    Michael B Jordan, who has appeared in all of Coogler’s features, stars in Sinners as identical twins Elijah and Elias Moore, known respectively as Smoke and Stack.  They fought in World War I and spent the 1920s working in organised crime in Chicago.  Now it’s 1932 and the Moore brothers return to their home town of Clarksdale, Mississippi with the aim of opening a ‘juke joint’.  Sluggish as the first half of Coogler’s narrative is, Smoke and Stack accomplish their objective remarkably quickly.  After a short prologue, Sinners mostly comprises events ‘One day earlier’, and through the night that follows.  On arrival in Clarksdale, the twins, with money they stole from Chicago gangsters, buy a disused sawmill from Hogwood (David Maldonado), who also happens to be the local Ku Klux Klan leader.  The very same evening, the juke joint opens.  The performers there include the Moores’ cousin, seventeen-year-old Sammie (Miles Caton), a sharecropper who dreams of a career as a blues musician, despite the stern injunctions of his pastor father (Saul Williams) that blues are the devil’s music; Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a veteran harmonica player and pianist with a drink problem; and singer Pearline (Jayme Williams), with whom Sammie is instantly smitten although she’s married.  The Chinese-American husband and wife Bo and Grace Chow (Yao and Li Jun Li), who run a local store, supply the joint’s food and drink and run the bar there, with the help of Smoke’s estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku).  Cornbread (Omar Miller), another sharecropper, is on bouncer duty.  The clientele includes Stack’s ex-girlfriend, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), even though she’s only just buried her mother – the woman who cared for the orphaned Moore twins when they were young but who, as Mary angrily complains to Stack, they lately ignored.

    The timeframe and vampire drama of Sinners, as well as the moral hierarchy of its characters, seem to be inspired by the cult horror-action movie From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), directed by Robert Rodriguez but written by, co-starring and influenced by Quentin Tarantino.  From Dusk Till Dawn also features criminal siblings, a bank robber (George Clooney) and his psycho brother (Tarantino), who, like Smoke and Stack, seem nasty pieces of work until they come up against the vampires.  I don’t recall who survives, who dies and who persists as one of the undead in From Dusk Till Dawn but it seemed to be over much more quickly than Sinners – even though there’s not a vast difference in their running times (108 vs 137 minutes).  Two main factors slow up and weigh down Coogler’s film.  First, the characters at the juke joint, with the qualified exception of Annie, are irritatingly slow on the uptake that there are vampires in their midst.  (Whenever someone ventures outside the building, they’ll almost certainly have been ‘turned’ by the time they set foot back inside.)  Second, the twins’ backstory and various other dramatis personae inflate it with racial history ‘significance’, although this viewer struggled to make sense of what that adds up to.

    The character who apparently kicks off the vampire contagion is Remmick (Jack O’Connell), an Irish immigrant first seen taking shelter with a Klansman (Peter Dreimanis), who’s Hogwood’s nephew, and his wife (Lola Kirke).  Remmick, who is being pursued by a Choctaw vampire hunter (Nathaniel Arcand), turns the KKK couple into vampires before the three of them fetch up outside the juke joint.  In the meantime, they’ve sung and danced to the folk tune ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’.  (Part of Remmick’s Celtic musical heritage, yes, but did his bites transmit that heritage to the Klan pair?)  Remmick offers Smoke and Stack, in exchange for entry to their joint, money plus musical entertainment.  Although suspicious Smoke turns them away, he and Stack almost immediately realise they need cash so Mary exits to negotiate with Remmick on the twins’ behalf.  (Why, though, when she’s so pissed off with Stack?)  When she returns, now a vampire herself, Mary seduces Stack and, once they’re in bed together, bites him fatally.  Cornbread, who temporarily deserts his post to go for a pee, is next on Remmick’s list; others follow.  By this stage, Sinners would be turning into quite a familiar horror movie if not for the growing band of vampires’ striking ethnic heterogeneity – African Americans, mixed-race Mary (she ‘passes’ as white), Chinese Americans, Irish, redneck white supremacists …  (This calls to mind ‘the Tethered’, a feature of Us that I couldn’t fathom:  while their name connoted slavery, their make-up was multi-ethnic.)

    Remmick tries but fails to tempt those not yet turned to join the vampire company, claiming it’s a passport to freedom from persecution.  Ostensibly chief villain of the piece, he’s surely not to be believed yet vampirism in Sinners does appear to transcend ethnic difference, enough at least for Klansmen in earthly life to be unworried by being members of the same undead community as Blacks.  There follows an interminable battle in the juke joint between the human survivors and the vampires, in which nearly all the former are killed except Smoke and Sammie, who make it through to the sunrise that incinerates all the vampires but Mary, who has escaped, and, though this isn’t revealed until much later, Stack.  As in the film’s prologue, Sammie, guitar in hand, stumbles into his father’s Sunday morning church service, while Smoke confronts Hogwood and numerous Klan sidekicks.  He spectacularly shoots them all dead – Tarantino/Django-style, except that Smoke also takes a bullet and dies from the wound.  Sammie, still ignoring his father’s pleas to renounce sin-aka-blues-music, heads off to Chicago to make his fortune.

    In an epilogue that begins midway through the film’s closing credits, Coogler fast-forwards to 1992.  Sammie (Buddy Guy), now an elderly and revered blues musician and owner of a Chicago blues club, is visited there by undead Stack and Mary, wearing 1990s clothes and hairdos.  Mary doesn’t speak a word; Stack might as well not have, for all I understood what he said.  This finale does, though, serve to confirm the centrality of music in Sinners.  The film begins with animated images on the screen and a voiceover, which, more than anything that follows, makes a connection between cultural groups all of which will figure in the vampire army:

    ‘There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future.  In ancient Ireland, they were called Filí.  In Choctaw land, they called them Firekeepers.  And in West Africa, they’re called Griots.  This gift can bring healing to their communities, but it also attracts evil.’

    Sammie emerges as his community’s conjuror.  He and his blues singing draw ‘spirits from the past and future’ to the juke joint:  an around-the-world-across-the-years musical montage features Chinese opera, Bollywood dancing, Alvin Ailey ballet, mariachi players and hip-hop.  Sammie ‘also attracts evil’, in the form of Remmick.  When he announces that Sammie is the prize he’s really after at the juke joint, Remmick seems to mean two things.  He hints at the appropriation of the blues by white popular culture (‘I want your stories and your songs’).  By saying that he means to use Sammie’s skills to summon the spirits of his own ‘lost’ community, Remmick also seems to assert Irish victimhood, and suggest what impelled the Irish exodus to America.

    Miles Caton, already well known in the US as a musician, does well in his acting debut.  For me, though, Caton’s speaking voice – surprisingly deep and thus a kind of counterpoint to teenage Sammie’s naivete – was more remarkable than his singing, musical as that is.  Michael B Jordan’s CGI-enabled dual performance is disappointing.  Smoke wears a blue cap and Stack a red fedora (I think that’s the right way round):  once circumstances remove the headgear, Jordan’s characterisations become even less distinct.  He shows his acting quality chiefly in his scenes with Hailee Steinfeld and, especially, Wunmi Mosaku.  It’s not a strong competition but Mosaku’s Annie is the film’s most arresting and persuasive character.  Annie is deeply invested in Hoodoo lore and practices (she’s the opening voiceover).  She talks of ‘mojo bags’ and ‘haints’ (ghosts or spirits), believes her Hoodoo observances protected Smoke and his brother on the field of battle and in the criminal underworld, though Smoke points out they weren’t enough to prevent the death of the couple’s infant daughter (which seems to have caused the rift between him and Annie).  Like Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo is a naturally imposing presence; unlike Mosaku, Lindo tends to assert his authority on screen, so that he seems to be overacting, though that’s less of a problem here than it was in his larger role in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (2020).  Even as a vampiric wrong ‘un, Jack O’Connell is more humanly alive than most other members of the Sinners cast.

    Ryan Coogler’s film, in conjunction with the largely enthusiastic reception of it, depresses me.  The film is pretentious yet simple-minded.  It’s essentially a vampire movie that lacks the dramatic energy traditionally associated with the genre.  The confused ethnic elements make it heavy going; the musical ones don’t supply much of a lift because they, too, seem to be making a point.  At the same time, Coogler isn’t above primitive sentimentality – a (reprised) shot of the grave of Smoke and Annie’s child, for example.  Much of the press reaction to the film strikes me as disingenuous though it’s also understandable.   In today’s richly grim political climate, the racial history dimension of Sinners largely disarms liberal-minded criticism.  It seems that it’s no longer possible to sympathise with the thinking behind a piece of cinema and still be honest enough to admit to defects in the finished product.

    5 August 2025

     

  • Amadeus

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Miloš Forman (1984)

    Amadeus was Peter Shaffer’s big one, for several reasons.  As usual, his two protagonists represent conscientious order versus intractable otherness – the conventionally civilised character struggles to control an opponent whose culture or natural aptitude is beyond him.  In The Royal Hunt of the Sun, it’s the Spanish conquistador Pizarro pitted against the Inca king Atahualpa; in Equus, the professional expertise of an emotionally desiccated psychiatrist takes on a teenage patient’s aberrant but ecstatic allegiance to a horse god.  So why is Amadeus the big one for Shaffer?  In Miloš Forman’s film version at least, because of the lavish period setting, late-eighteenth-century Vienna (though with Prague standing in).  On screen or stage, because the context of the contest involves high art:  the adversaries are Antonio Salieri, court composer to the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, and Mozart.  Although Shaffer plays fast and loose with the true history (or what’s broadly accepted as the true history) of this pair’s relationship, the enterprise is helped by an historical fact invaluable to his purpose – the middle name of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

    That name introduces a third reason why Amadeus stands out from Shaffer’s other work.  Atahualpa, the horse-worshipper Alan Strang in Equus and Mozart are all inspired – or appear so to the men whose nemesis they will be.  (Shaffer’s principals were always male until he wrote the more light-hearted Lettice and Lovage in the mid-1980s.)  Whether or not a play’s spokesman for rationality is also a religious believer – Pizarro is, the psychiatrist Martin Dysart isn’t – that rationality is a limitation, but Amadeus takes things further.  Shaffer’s Salieri writes music for the greater glory of God.  It’s only when Mozart comes to town that he realises the mediocrity of his own work compared with the younger man’s.  Wolfgang isn’t just, as his middle name suggests, ‘loved by God’:   he writes sublime music with such facility that he might be taking dictation from the divine.  At the same time, he’s personally contemptible – boastful, childish and lewd, a flagrantly undeserving recipient of God’s favour.  The practising Christian Salieri is so appalled by this injustice that he has it in not only for Mozart but for God, too:  the musical genius who may be God’s instrument is also Salieri’s means of getting his own back on God.  In the film, after seething in public, Salieri lets rip in the privacy of his own home.  Throwing his wooden crucifix into the fire, he ends a lengthy imprecation with a warning to the Almighty – ‘I will hinder and harm your creature on earth as far as I am able – I will ruin your incarnation!’

    Back on general release in cinemas, Forman’s Amadeus, for which Peter Shaffer wrote the screenplay, begins with the elderly Salieri’s attempted suicide, after which he’s committed to a psychiatric hospital.  Whereas all the other patients seen there are lying in or wandering about a corridor, Salieri (F Murray Abraham) has his own private room, complete with piano.  A Catholic priest (Richard Frank) comes to hear his confession.  Salieri, obsessed with the idea that he killed Mozart, is more than ready to shout his guilt from the rooftops so a confession might seem surplus to requirements but his interview with Father Vogler is the narrative’s framing device.  Salieri recalls the events of more than thirty years ago, which are shown as flashbacks. Every so often, Forman cuts back to the hospital room to allow Salieri to reflect on the events just dramatised.

    Forman’s modus operandi is clear from very early in the conversation between Salieri and Vogler.  Salieri asks if the priest knows who he is.  Vogler says no but that doesn’t matter because all men are equal in the eyes of God, a remark that prompts an emphatically meaningful look from Salieri, who then moves his wheelchair towards the piano.  He plays a melody; the priest doesn’t recognise this or the next one that Salieri plays; the pianist explains he was once the most famous composer in Europe and wrote both pieces.  Next, he plays the start of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; Vogler’s eyes light up, he even hums along – ‘I didn’t know you wrote that!’  Marked pause before Salieri acidly replies, ‘I didn’t’.  (You’d think Vogler’s seeming not to know that Mozart wrote it would be some consolation to Salieri but never mind …)  This exchange takes an age to get through but things are even worse in the imperial palace flashbacks.  Most of the actors deliver their supposedly humorous lines with excruciating deliberation, squeezing each syllable for the last drop of wit.  The emperor himself (Jeffrey Jones) is relatively easy on the ear; among his courtiers, the worst offender, against stiff competition, is Count Orsini-Rosenberg (Charles Kay).  These overdone cartoons of vanity and prejudice make the film itself ridiculous.

    Then there’s Mozart (Tom Hulce).  We’re introduced to him in a palace buffet room, where Salieri is getting himself a sneak preview and taste of the elaborate confectionery arrayed on a long, large table.  (Amadeus won eight Oscars.  If there’d been an award for best food, it would have been nine.)  Enter Mozart and Constanze Weber (Elizabeth Berridge), his landlady’s daughter who will become his wife.  They scrabble about on all fours under the tablecloth, pretending to be cat and mouse, although the first shot of Constanze is designed to foreground her partly exposed breasts so the effect isn’t very murine.  Then ‘Wolfie’, as Constanze calls Mozart (to these ears, an unhelpful echo of the 1970s BBC sitcom Citizen Smith), launches into potty-mouthed verbal ingenuity.  He jokes to Constanze that they’re in a place where people talk backwards, instructs her to ‘Sra-I’m-sick’ and ‘Tish-I’m-tee’.  This, and much of what Mozart will say over the next two hours or more, is accompanied by a high-pitched whinny of a laugh.  It’s meant to be infuriating, especially to Salieri, but it’s annoying chiefly because Tom Hulce is so obviously putting it on.  (A put-on laugh can be annoying too, of course, but I doubt that Hulce’s is meant to sound false.)

    When I saw the original National Theatre production of Amadeus in the early 1980s, the cat-and-mouse routine, performed by Simon Callow and Felicity Kendal, delivered one of the most gruesome bits of theatre I can remember and Callow throughout made Mozart immature in obvious, stagy ways.  Remembering that as well as watching Hulce in the role made me wonder if Shaffer’s Mozart has ever been played by an actor who charges the character with the degree of ruttish menace that it surely needs.  Shortly after that first encounter in the buffet room, Salieri discusses Mozart with the soprano Caterina Cavalieri (Christine Ebersole), who is Salieri’s protégée.  Soon afterwards, she’s starring in Il Seraglio.  Salieri watches from the audience and, as an old man, remembers bitterly his conviction that Mozart had got his hands on Caterina physically as well as operatically.  Hulce’s interpretation, lacking any suggestion of carnal intent or undertow, makes this hard to credit.

    Shaffer’s schema strangles at birth potentially more interesting aspects of the material.  The complexity of Salieri’s mixed feelings to see his own, relatively uninspired work better received by the tin-eared emperor than much of Mozart’s.  Mozart’s incomprehension of this and prideful certainty that his music is superlative – two sides of the same coin.  There’s also both too much and too little madness in Amadeus.  It’s Miloš Forman, rather than Shaffer, who is responsible for the surfeit.  Reviewing Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), whose action takes place almost entirely within a mental institution, Pauline Kael, though she had plenty of praise for the film, was uneasy about what she described as the director’s penchant for ‘faces that don’t take the light – thick features and muddled stares …’.  Although I don’t agree with Kael’s words in relation to the excellent Cuckoo’s Nest, they nearly anticipate Forman’s depiction of the hospital inmates in Amadeus.  These graphic images of imbecility and infirmity are doubly offensive:  even though the people supplying them are no more than a bunch of extras, Forman is eager to stress their grotesque appearance.  Salieri is incongruous in this madhouse company, even though Peter Shaffer keeps changing his mind as to whether Salieri is out of his.

    The audience must be meant to accept Salieri’s account of what happened decades back as accurate rather than deluded (in any case, the narrative includes plenty of sequences from which he’s absent).   At the same time, Salieri’s declared antagonism to God seems a kind of deranged hubris.  This is where there’s not enough madness – Salieri’s blasphemous quest isn’t extraordinary enough.  As an old man, he puts to the priest the rhetorical question, ‘What use after all is Man, if not to teach God His lessons?’ though he ends up telling Vogler that it was God, not him, who killed Mozart, and that God is indifferent to those He loves as well as those He despises (a bleak spin on the priest’s earlier assurance that all men are equal in the eyes of God).  In the meantime, Salieri’s revenge on God’s proxy relies on melodramatic tropes:  using the Mozarts’ maid Lori (Cynthia Nixon) as his spy in the household; appropriating one of Mozart’s compositions – the Requiem – as his own.

    By the time it reaches the closing stages, Amadeus is an increasingly familiar Hollywood biopic.  Mozart works himself to death putting together the Requiem and The Magic Flute at virtually the same time.  Constanze, disturbed by her husband’s erratic behaviour, leaves him temporarily, taking the couple’s little son with her.  With Mozart confined to bed, Salieri becomes his eager amanuensis for the Requiem.  He means to steal the manuscript but is thwarted by Constanze’s return and violently suspicious reaction to Salieri’s presence in her home.  As she and he argue, Mozart dies.  Conventional as this episode is, it’s very watchable.  Tom Hulce is easier to take once Mozart is too unwell to laugh.  The tension between his gratitude for Salieri’s help and Salieri’s anxious impatience to get on with writing the Requiem down is more touching and more chilling than what has gone before.

    Mozart is desperate to take a break from dictation; Salieri is reluctantly forced to accept this and catnaps on a bed nearby.  Constanze’s unexpected return so takes him by surprise that he falls off the bed.  He scrambles up and hurriedly fastens the buttons on his waistcoat but gets them wrong.  Salieri’s comical dishevelment makes a welcome change.  At court, F Murray Abraham cuts a handsome, anguine figure.  Both there and in the hospital room, he handles his many lines dexterously.  Almost inevitably, though, given that he’s sitting down throughout the scenes with the priest, his accomplished acting is mostly acting from the neck upwards (with a few hand movements).  It’s a pleasure to see Abraham show another side when Salieri is made to look simply undignified rather than feel furiously humiliated.  The film’s best supporting performance comes from Roy Dotrice, whose natural playing of Mozart’s stern father, Leopold, is refreshing.  After Leopold’s death, his son writes Don Giovanni; Salieri cunningly perceives that the sinister Commendatore who reproaches Giovanni’s sinfulness is an expression of Mozart Jr’s self-reproach in relation to his late father.  Roy Dotrice resists making Leopold’s paternal authority overbearing.  It’s somewhat unaccountable that his son should resurrect him as an overpoweringly sinister figure – yet it’s psychologically persuasive, too.

    Although Amadeus isn’t a piece with great female roles, Elizabeth Berridge does well as Constanze.  In the much smaller part of Lori, Cynthia Nixon has an emotional authenticity that’s unusual in this film.  Barbara Bryne is almost unbearable as Constanze’s mother though it’s quite a good joke that the piercing stridency of a scolding she gives her son-in-law is presented as his inspiration for the (similarly unbearable) Queen of the Night aria in The Magic Flute.  Simon Callow is back for more, this time as Emanuel Schikaneder, an impresario and actor-singer who commissions Mozart to write The Magic Flute for Vienna’s popular theatre.  Callow gives Schikaneder an American accent – hard to see why when the cast is a mixture of Brits and Americans, and the actors’ nationalities don’t correspond with particular social levels in Viennese society.

    The operatic staging in the film, particularly the flamboyant kitsch excess that’s the trademark of Schikaneder productions, is spectacular, as are the interiors of the imperial palace, and an unending procession of ingenious costumes.  The production design is by Patrizia von Brandenstein and the costumes by Theodor Pištěk.  Both won Oscars, as did Forman, Abraham, Shaffer, and the make-up and sound teams.  Academy members decreed Amadeus the Best Picture of the year.  Accepting the award for Best Original Score for David Lean’s A Passage to India at the same ceremony, Maurice Jarre amusingly said, ‘I was lucky, Mozart was not eligible …’  Even so, he’s evidently why many people rate Amadeus so highly – as if the very use of Mozart’s music were a cinematic strength.  It’s remarkable how many of the favourable reviews, old and new, on Rotten Tomatoes invoke Mozart as the film’s transcendent virtue.  If you’re a fan, there must surely be many better ways of experiencing him than through Forman’s self-important movie.

    At the end of Amadeus, a hospital attendant (Brian Pettifer) comes to escort Salieri to the bathroom before his breakfast of sugar rolls.  (This sour man never loses his sweet tooth.)  Leaving his room, the patient declares himself, to the hapless priest, to be the patron saint of mediocrities.  As he’s wheeled down the corridor past the other inmates, Salieri makes a sign of the cross and blesses them:  ‘Mediocrities everywhere, now and to come: I absolve you all! Amen! Amen! Amen!’  It  must be assumed that Miloš Forman and Peter Shaffer have finally decided that Salieri is off his rocker because the benediction makes no sense otherwise.  The patients’ physical and mental deformities might be considered expressions of the obscene unfairness of God – which supposedly has impelled Salieri’s actions throughout.  But these staring, drooling, writhing or shrouded figures are too extremely unfortunate to be mediocrities.

    Before I went to this BFI screening, I honestly couldn’t remember if I’d seen the film of Amadeus before.  It seemed surprising if I hadn’t:  I was cinema-going very regularly at the time (the film was released in Britain in January 1985), especially to high-profile pictures.  Yet I could remember next to nothing about it and realised that I must anyway have seen clips on television over the years.  Not long into the 161 minutes, it occurred to me I had maybe walked out first time around but that kind of exit has always happened rarely enough to stay in my mind.  This time, as I stuck it out, I didn’t find it all coming back to me.  So I still don’t know if I’d already watched Amadeus in the cinema but I do know that I’ll never watch it again.

    31 July 2025

     

     

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