Decades after Sydney Pollack shot footage of Aretha Franklin recording her 1972 gospel album Amazing Grace over two nights in a Los Angeles Baptist Church, that footage has been assembled into what I feel might be the greatest live music film. Not only is Amazing Grace technically masterful in terms of audio and visual quality, but the footage has been beautifully edited to convey the sensation of what it must have been like to be in the church audience on those nights, in the presence of perfection. Due to the way I felt while watching this film, I suspect that sensation was euphoria.
The Nightingale, about an Irish convict and an Aboriginal tracker hunting down a British officer in 19th century Australia, delivers an expertly crafted and devastating thriller about the trauma at the heart of this country’s settlement history. Australia has confronted its violent colonial past before in films from The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith to The Tracker, but the unflinching and unrelenting brutality and rage the permeates The Nightingale results in a breathtaking film that is bursting with urgency and fury, which is going to be very hard to forget.
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to a Hollywood that never was. By merging a fictitious story of a fading actor and his stuntman best friend with real life Hollywood personalities from 1969 – all against the backdrop of the growing presence of the Manson Family – Tarantino takes the classic ‘print the legend’ adage to a new extreme, delivering a film that is breezy and fun, but also sinister and ultimately extremely melancholic when reality sets in. Managing to be both sincere and ironic, it’s the auteur’s most ambiguous work to date.
The Australian Dream is an extremely accomplished documentary that unpacks a specific moment in Australia’s culture to tell a much bigger story about the nation’s psyche. The subject of the film is footballer Adam Goodes whose actions in calling out racism in sport led to a shocking backlash that revealed the country’s shocking attitude towards Aboriginal Australians. The film evokes a lot of pain and anger – as it should – but the film wisely allows critics of Goodes to dig their own graves while the voices of support ultimately deliver a message of defiance, awareness and reconciliation.
Midsommar draws from a variety of horror tropes to deliver an experience that is unsettling, humorous, traumatic and gleeful. A riff on folk horror and the tradition of arrogant American tourists abroad being preyed upon by the locals, Midsommar follows the fate of a grieving college student who travels to a Swedish commune with her less-than-supportive boyfriend as his academic bro friends. The creeping weirdness of the scenario deftly transitions into something more disturbing before then delving into borderline absurdity that’s both grotesque and exhilarating.
Posted by Thomas Caldwell 
