​It’s easy to dismiss The Shape of Water as that light fantasy movie about bestiality between a human woman and male frog-man.  Even its Best Picture win doesn’t stop the jokes at its expense.  In the spirit of accuracy, the dismissive stance is a factual statement, in that interspecies sex does indeed happen, but the fish-man also chomps on a finger.  Why isn’t The Shape of Water the finger-chomping movie?  Joyful director Guillermo del Toro’s most commercially and critically successful work deserves better than late-night jokes, because under its outre logline is a stunning and endlessly enjoyable film that reserves its greatest sympathies for cripples, bastards, and broken things (to borrow a phrase from George RR Martin) at the end of the conservative and stilted pre-60’s era.  If that happens to include a lonely yet horny frog-man, then so be it.

The standard image of the phoenix rising from the ashes is that of the majestic creature soaring straight up, powerful and reborn with vigor to spare.  Christian Petzold’s searing masterpiece invokes the phoenix in direct opposition to such an image.  The rebirth that the film revolves around, in which a woman thought dead in the Holocaust returns to post-war Berlin, is tentative and guilt-ridden, bruised and scarred.  There is no spreading of wings, because how could there be?  Petzold engages in the myth of the phoenix particularly in how badly people want it to be true, that someone could experience trauma and immediately get back to their life.  Like the best films surrounding the atrocity of WWII, Phoenix has little patience for that kind of romanticism, but it also avoids becoming a nihilistic dirge.  Petzold, along with frequent collaborator Nina Hoss, finds ugly truths alongside powerful demonstrations of resilience, a cohabitation that is the essence of 20th century history.

Phil discusses some big plot points for Avengers: Infinity War below the break.  If you are metaphorically Captain America pushing back against the Thanos fist of spoilers, stay away.

​The Revenant made Alejandro Gonzalex Innaritu into a dominant Oscar force.  It gave him his second consecutive directing award after the previous year’s Birdman, putting him on a pedestal with other back-to-back winners John Ford and Joseph Mankiewicz.  Who knows how cinematic history will remember any individual working today, but where Innaritu lands in comparison to those two is an interesting thought experiment.  Ford is someone who mastered the Western and added immeasurable scope to his films while also communicating intimacy in his most famous shots, particularly his iconic end to The Searchers.  Mankiewicz had some successes, particularly in All About Eve, but he’s also got his name on some huge blunders like Cleopatra and isn’t a guy that people think of first when rattling off the great directors of the era.  Based on the thinness of the films that brought Innaritu his wins, it seems somewhat obvious that Innaritu will end up more like Mankiewicz.  An exemplar of the maxim that Oscar wins aren’t given to the Best of something, but the Most, Innaritu’s The Revenant is a series of dares and tricks that becomes punishing and ostentatious and unnecessary long before its overlong runtime expires.  

Greta Gerwig, queen of indie cinema, has been in a dozen films about tentative young women trying to figure out the next steps of their lives.  The best of these, like Frances Ha and 20th Century Women, balance a light tone with serious introspection, while the worst, like Greenberg and Lola Versus, devalue Gerwig’s character as either a prop or a caricature.  Having taken part in so many versions of that particular archetype, Gerwig is uniquely suited to turn back the clock to 2003 and make her own film about the kind of person some of her characters might’ve been in their teenage years.  By also turning the protagonist into a rough approximation of herself, Gerwig can also construct a deeply specific coming-of-age story with an anti-indie sensibility.  For all the focus on the titular Lady Bird in Gerwig’s immaculate directorial debut, she’s only one grounded and affecting character in a film packed with them.  No props or caricatures here, just love for everyone that graces the screen and a film that is impossible to not fall for.