Ricky Staub’s feature debut, Concrete Cowboy, continues the mission of bringing this storied subculture into the mainstream, casting Idris Elba as the unofficial leader of a group of Black urban riders and Stranger Things’ Caleb McLaughlin as his estranged son. The tradition of Black equestrianship goes back centuries, with historians now estimating that 25% of Old West cowboys were Black. They dance around each other, sometimes literally, and the film is a kind of dance, too: that agonizing, exciting waltz of uncertain courtship-of two people orbiting one another, feeling out the feelings between them, dropping and interpreting clues, inching ever closer together. Paced like an especially lazy summer, the film sidesteps conflict and subplot, devoting nearly all of its languid two hours and change to the tractor beam of mutual attraction, as its lovers-to-be trade signs, flirtatious gestures, furtive glances, stolen touches, and loaded squabbles. That’s about all there is to the story, a tale of gradual seduction adapted by James Ivory, one half of the costume-drama power duo Merchant & Ivory, from a novel by André Aciman. In Luca Guadagnino’s sensitive, sensual Call Me By Your Name, a bright teenage boy living in the picturesque Italian countryside falls into a passionate summer fling with an older man, the American graduate student who’s come to study for the season. But nihilists don’t put this much thought into endings. Their sometimes-fatalist outlook has seen them tagged as nihilists, a group they savaged as well as anyone in The Big Lebowski. Death haunts the whole thing, which builds toward the simultaneously hilarious and hushed “The Mortal Remains,” as satisfying and language-besotted a closer as the Coens have ever concocted. Set in a beguiling netherworld between unforgiving real-life grimness and heightened tall-tale pulpiness, the stories range from delightfully mordant musical slapstick starring Tim Blake Nelson to a heartbreaking gut-punch starring Zoe Kazan, to name just two standouts. But it’s hard to imagine breaking their six Western mini-movies into a Netflix “season,” because they complement each other so gracefully. Joel and Ethan Coen should be especially familiar, having contributed to Paris, Je T’Aime and faced assumptions that The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs was really supposed to be a TV series. Įveryone knows the old saw about anthology movies being less than the sum of their parts it’s a tale as old as the singing cowboy or the stagecoach ghost story. Soon, it’s revealed that their boat sank. But when Ada arrives there at the appointed time, she learns that Souleiman and a group of other men have set sail for Europe on a pirogue. The two lovers make plans to rendezvous that evening at their usual haunt, a seaside nightclub. Their relationship, though, is no more certain than his wages, as she’s betrothed to Omar (Babacar Sylla), a wealthy businessman who splits his time between Senegal and Europe, and who can provide Ada with a life of ease and comfort-which is to say, everything that Souleiman cannot. When first introduced, Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré), one of the construction workers of this building project, is agitating for three months of backpay when he and his compatriots are rebuffed, he turns to his lover, Ada (Mama Sané), for comfort. In Mati Diop’s Atlantics, discontent reigns over the port city of Dakar, where a futuristic high-rise towers like some cruelly conceived lighthouse. Going sentimental without losing his chilly craftmanship, he’s concocted something of singular power: a soulful mindfuck. That the twisty plot machinations of the backstretch actually facilitate the drama, rather than nullifying it, is a testament to what the director has accomplished. Director Denis Villeneuve underscores that point by using the language of cinema against his audience, hiding a secret in plain sight. Arrival, at its core, is about how language controls the way we process reality. But it’s also there in the tricky game the film plays with viewer assumptions, just as the original story played with tense. Some of that credit belongs to Adams, playing her cards close to the chest by making Louise (Amy Adams) a model of no-nonsense professionalism, the type who would naturally keep her heartache to herself. What’s truly remarkable about the film, though, is the way it conceals a small-scale human weepie in the folds of a big-scale mystery, sneaking up on you with the force of its feeling. Arrival is never less than gripping as a vision of person-to-space-squid communion.
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