‘Dreamin’ Wild’ Review: Casey Affleck Hits a Melancholy Note in a Sweet Ode to Dreams Deferred

Guy Lodge Film Critic It takes a village to raise a child, goes the old saying, and at least in the figurative sense, Spanish director Pilar Palomero’s tremendous sophomore feature “La Maternal” shows that to be true. Before that can happen, however, pregnant 14-year-old Carla needs to get out of the village and into the city — specifically, to a Barcelona shelter for teenage mothers where the troubled adolescent finds the community and empathy her life has been missing all along. Female solidarity drives Palomero’s follow-up to the celebrated, similarly sisterhood-themed “Schoolgirls,” but without any glib girl-power sloganeering: A tough, unsweetened work of social realism built around an astonishing screen debut by Carla Quílez, “La Maternal” sentimentalizes not one detail of juvenile motherhood, truly earning its flashes of hope and grace.

Guy Lodge Film Critic At the height of his career, Czech-born composer Josef Mysliveček was the most prolific and sought-after figure in Italian opera, bound for immortal celebrity. Nearly three centuries later, his name isn’t forgotten to classical music scholars, but neither does it have anything approaching household status; the facts and records of his personal life, meanwhile, have largely been lost to history. Via a blend of free narrative speculation and exacting musical presentation, Petr Vaclav’s stately, sumptuous biopic “Il Boemo” seeks to restore a degree of iconic status to a talent latterly overshadowed by relative 18th-century contemporaries, albeit not with much swagger or modernity of its own: This is costume drama of a traditional, ornately brocaded stripe, a classical music lesson for classicists.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In the little-remembered 1950 noir “The Damned Don’t Cry,” Joan Crawford plays a Texan housewife whose grief for her late son spurs her to make a new life for herself in the urban underworld. Fyzal Boulifa’s exquisite new film of the same title is named expressly for that Crawford vehicle, but is neither a remake nor a direct homage. Rather, it remixes the narrative components of that film and others of its ilk into the kind of new-school-old-school heart-tugger — one might say tearjerker if its characters weren’t, true to its title, stoically dry-eyed throughout — that might have been designed for the shoulder-padded diva were she alive in 2022 and, perhaps more crucially, of Moroccan heritage. 

Massachusetts is the best state to live in for reasons its residents have always known: we’re smarter, healthier, happier, and all around better off than everybody else. We have the decency and common sense to shove most of our pro-fascist wingnuts toward the boondocks.

Guy Lodge Film Critic If you found yourself wide awake in the wee small hours with personal demons rattling in your brain, and you picked up the phone to share them with a patient, neutral stranger, Tessa Thompson’s measured, calming voice is more or less exactly what you’d hope to hear on the other end of the line. As Beth, a night-shift volunteer for a crisis helpline, the actor’s naturally gentle, benevolent presence is the chief asset of Steve Buscemi’s minor-key chamber drama “The Listener” — not that she has a host of elements to compete with in what amounts, on screen at least, to a one-woman show.  Thompson’s unforced credibility isn’t shared, however, by a flat, superficial script that treats an assortment of mental health ailments as quirky conversation fuel. Each anguished call that Beth takes, over the course of one long, dark night of assorted souls, is written less like a recognizable human exchange than as an actor’s heightened audition piece, and played out as such by a voice-only ensemble stacked with distractingly recognizable names. Though the global pandemic is only incidentally mentioned, “The Listener” plays in all aspects like a project conceived in the most self-searching and self-indulgent depths of the isolation era. It’s hard to imagine audiences wanting to enter that headspace now.

Guy Lodge Film Critic At the 1987 Conservative Party Conference in Britain, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher issued one of the most grimly memorable quotes of her career: “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.” For many of us, it’s a line that now sounds so archaically out of step with contemporary life as to be comical — that “inalienable right” wording ironically appropriated by many a queer-rights cause — though you need only look at Florida’s recent Don’t Say Gay bill to know that Thatcher’s sentiments live among us still. A frank, piercing debut from British writer-director Georgia Oakley, “Blue Jean” is a Thatcher-era period piece that crisply evokes that climate of politically propagated homophobia without preserving it in amber: It effectively puts the past in tacit dialogue with the present.

Zooey Deschanel and Casey Affleck are stepping out to support their new movie.

Stalwart indie filmmaker Bill Pohlad today premeres in Venice Dreamin’ Wild. His directing follow up to the critically acclaimed Brian Wilson film Love & Mercy also follows a music story, though one far less familiar. Casey Affleck, Noah Jupe, Zooey Deschanel, Walton Goggins and Beau Bridges star. When Donnie Emerson (played by Affleck and Jupe) was a teenager growing up on his father’s farm in Fruitland, Washington (population 791) he spent his days writing music and dreaming of becoming a music star. And everyone in the family became invested in that dream, including his brother Joe (Goggins) who became his drummer, and especially his father, Don Sr (Bridges). He mortgaged his farm to build a $100,000 recording studio, and more to help Donnie make and release his first record. It went nowhere and the bulk of the farm had to be sold when the loan came due. But 30 years later, the overlooked album was rediscovered by the music scene. Suddenly Donnie, who continued to struggle and write and play his music, had gotten a taste of his childhood dreams. But it comes with the guilt of failure that haunted him for years, and involves having to play the songs that meant something as a teen, but not as a 50 year old man who has evolved as a musician. And it is all true.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Gianni Amelio was in his late sixties when he came out as gay a few years ago. The announcement preceded the release of his documentary “Happy to Be Different,” which worked toward an overriding sunniness in contemplating the trials and challenges of being gay in Italy at various points in the 20th century. In turning to a gay-themed narrative project, Amelio narrows the focus and dims the mood: “Lord of the Ants” takes as its subject the gay Italian author Aldo Braibanti, and the social and legal opposition he faced over his sexuality in mid-1960s Rome. Solemn, stately and perhaps a little stifled, it’s the kind of queer statement you might expect from a veteran filmmaker who wasn’t until relatively recently out and proud, and is rather poignant for that.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Even the most solidly founded of marriages can be strained and shattered by the death of a child. For handsome, wholesome Japanese couple Taeko and Jiro, however, that tragedy shows up all the fault lines that were already in their young relationship, and that’s before living ghosts of the past show up for both partners. Koji Fukada’s “Love Life” unabashedly embraces melodramatic contrivance in its examination of modern middle-class love tested as much by social prejudices as by personal demons; it just does so with such pallid, polite reserve that its sentimentality never becomes transcendently moving. As such, this agreeable but overlong pic finds the Japanese writer-director still struggling to regain the form of his jolting 2016 Cannes prizewinner “Harmonium.”

Guy Lodge Film Critic Friendships can be as changeable and temperamental and outright dramatic as grand romances, though they tend to get a bland rap on screen — with friends, for most screenwriters, merely convenient constants, there to support protagonists through matters of supposedly more consequence. If substantial platonic relationship studies are rare, ones about men are rarer still. And if that comes down to a social convention rather than a cinematic one, that’s integral to the power and poignancy of Martin McDonagh’s searing “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a film that traces the tortured breakup between two best pals in remote rural Ireland with all the anguish and gravity of the most charged romantic melodrama — its high, unleashed emotions all the more startling in a world where men don’t speak their feelings.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “L’Immensità” is director Emanuele Crialese’s first feature film in 11 years, and only his fifth in a quarter-century: The gifted Italian, best known to international audiences for his splendid, richly felt Ellis Island immigrant saga “Golden Door,” has never been one for unconsidered or impersonal projects. At first glance, then, one might wonder what drew him out of hibernation for a film that, with its trim runtime and small-scale domestic narrative, belies a title that translates as “immensity.” This 1970s-set story of a 12-year-old navigating his gender identity while his mother battles mental health demons is too palpably pained and heartfelt to be called slight, but it’s sensitive and peculiar in ways that feel fragile — occasionally splintered and swamped by an elaborate setpiece, or the outsize star magnetism of arguably its secondary lead, one Penélope Cruz. 

Guy Lodge Film Critic While waiting to pick up five-year-old Leila from judo practice, personable 40-ish schoolteacher Rachel introduces herself to another parent as Leila’s stepmom, before backtracking to awkwardly correct herself. Later, when a kindly stranger on a train remarks on the resemblance between the two, Rachel doesn’t bother clarifying, merely accepting the benign compliment. Her relationship to Leila is both unremarkably simple and complicated by an absence of clear language for it: She’s dating the girl’s father, and the attachment between woman and child has grown perhaps stronger than the relationship on which it depends. It’s the kind of delicate everyday situation that rarely occupies the centre of a film, and in the superb “Other People’s Children,” writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski negotiates it with warm intelligence and compassion.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Rather like the arc of the moral universe, “Argentina, 1985” is long, but bends toward justice. Effectively dramatizing the country’s landmark Trial of the Juntas, history’s first instance of a civilian justice system convicting a military dictatorship, Santiago Mitre’s broad, sprawling, heart-on-sleeve courtroom saga may draw from the same nightmarish period of history that has informed much of Argentine cinema’s most essential, haunting works — from 1985’s Oscar-winning “The Official Story” to last year’s “Azor” — but eschews any subtle arthouse stylings for a storytelling sensibility as robustly populist as anything by Sorkin or Spielberg. Small wonder, then, that Amazon Studios has boarded a film clearly aiming to be both a domestic smash and an international crossover hit — buoyed by the reliable star power of Ricardo Darín, his signature suaveness tempered by a walrus mustache and boxy ‘80s frames as Julio Strassera, the dogged prosecutor who took on this charged, against-the-odds case. Though a warmly received premiere in competition at Venice will set it on the right path, “Argentina, 1985” is, appropriately enough, a people’s film about people’s justice, balancing tear-jerking historical catharsis with touches of droll domestic comedy, and set to draw crowds on enthusiastic word of mouth.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Six decades into a career of over 40 films, the last thing you might request of a new feature from 92-year-old documentarian Frederick Wiseman is that it surprise us. Yet after a run of expansive, richly process-oriented observations of mostly American institutions and communities, his new film, “A Couple,” upends expectations of his work in what feels an almost mirthfully perverse number of ways. For starters, it’s laser-focused on just one person, not a heaving collective of human labor and activity. It’s short — very much so, in fact, barely stretching past an hour. Also, lest we be burying the lede, it’s not a documentary. Wiseman’s first ever narrative feature sees him collaborating with French actor-writer Nathalie Boutefeu on a biopic of sorts: a portrait of Leo Tolstoy’s anguished wife Sophia, dramatizing her marital dissatisfaction and psychic pain with with a lyrical, literate ear.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Just before director Christopher Nolan’s upcoming “Oppenheimer” plants a fixed image of Ted Hall in the popular imagination, along comes Steve James’s sensitive, studious documentary “A Compassionate Spy” to preemptively set any records straight. Unpacking the life and work of the prodigious teenage Manhattan Project physicist who passed key information about the endeavor to the Soviet Union — cuing an adulthood dogged by suspicion and secrecy — the film demonstrates its director’s characteristic nose for strong material and knack for gripping, straightforward storytelling. If the filmmaking is more televisual than in James’s best work, with its flourishes limited to some unnecessary dramatized passages, that should be no impediment to “A Compassionate Spy” commanding a sizable audience on multiple platforms. 

Guy Lodge Film Critic The political activism of pop stars is, as a rule, on the restrained side. Those who make their allegiances clear still tend to keep all factions in their fanbases sweet by limiting divisive rhetoric, or filtering their politics through broadly palatable humanitarian causes; those who speak a little more frankly still risk the wrath of the public, the internet and their record labels alike. Yet for Ugandan singer Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu — better known to his adoring fans as Bobi Wine — there’s both everything and nothing to lose by getting a little more directly involved in national politics than most such celebrities would dare. Entering a presidential election against corrupt, long-ruling incumbent Yoweri Museveni is, he knows, both a folly and a necessary symbolic stand — a certain path to honorable defeat that “Bobi Wine: Ghetto President” documents with angry urgency and bitter gallows humor.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Gigi & Nate” begins with two leaps. The first is out of terror, when Gigi, a capuchin monkey at a sad-sack roadside petting zoo, tries to steer clear of her “caretaker.” The second is the sweet leap of boy-joy that 17-year-old Nate Gibson takes off a rocky ledge and into a pond. In this amiable, if unnecessarily manipulative, movie about the human-animal bond — as well as the different forms resilience can take — that fateful second leap will lead the young man and the monkey to each other.Gigi is rescued by a woman who works for an organization that provides service animals to people with disabilities.

Black Lightning actress Charlbi Dean has died at the age of 32 following a sudden illness.The star died in New York on Monday 29 August, however an exact cause of death has not been confirmed.The up and coming star has a starring role in this year’s dark comedy The Triangle of Sadness, where she played Yaya, one half of a model couple who are invited on a trip on a yacht for the ultra-wealthy, before things head downhill. In a recent Instagram post, Charlbi’s partner Luke Volker wrote how “proud” he was of his girlfriend for the role in the Palme D’Or winning film.

Casey Affleck is a busy guy — that’s why you didn’t see him at his big brother Ben Affleck‘s wedding, OK?!