Blue Moon

Based on the life of acclaimed 20th century lyricist Lorenz Hart, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon has as much in common with one of the filmmaker’s scrappy, discursive gab-fests as it does a conventional biopic. Almost entirely confined to a tavern location, presented mostly in real-time and starring the director’s longtime leading man Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon is ostensibly about chronicling a night of small yet crushing disappointments near the end of Hart’s life in 1943. However, the loose dramatic framework (the film is short on actual incident) and the small captive audience of denizens hovering around the bar is an ideal venue for Hart to hold court and uncork a series of erudite yet tart monologues on the nature of art, romance, sexuality and disappointment. Written by Robert Kaplow (author of Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, which shares a similar theatrical milieu with this film), Blue Moon is rich in wordplay, period minutiae, and easter eggs that will no doubt tickle enthusiasts of mid-century pop culture. But where it parts ways with Linklater’s earlier, better films is that for all the words spoken aloud in Blue Moon, the film isn’t especially interested in a dialogue. The viewer is as captive to Hawke’s overwritten but convincingly stream-of-conscious musings as the gathered bar staff and upscale drunks. The film positions itself as a journey of self-discovery, but there’s scarcely any room for exploration or uncovering of ideas that don’t dovetail with its themes or the self-pitying disposition of its subject.

The setting of our tale is Sardis, the iconic New York City watering hole, on the occasion of opening night of Oklahoma! on Broadway. The musical, which through the prism of hindsight is proclaimed by all the film’s characters as an epoch-defining sensation that will “be performed by high schools for decades,” was of course written by the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. But before that was a thing, the Great White Way was ruled by Rodgers and Hart. The film picks up in the aftermath of Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), having tired of Lorenz’s (Hawke) unreliable work ethic — his heavy drinking, his sourness, his lack of focus and unwillingness to observe office hours — having taken on a new creative partnership that history tells us will consign his one-time librettist to an afterthought. Lorenz, having already caught Oklahoma! in previews, leaves the performance early to beat the cast and crew to the bar, which the film treats a little like crashing your ex’s engagement party. Lorenz isn’t just waiting to disingenuously congratulate his former writing partner; he is also anticipating the arrival of his much younger protégé Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), whom he claims to be madly in love with and with whom he hopes to consummate the relationship later that very evening. But this is a little confusing to both the audience and Sardis’ sympathetic barkeep Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), as Lorenz is quite obviously a closeted homosexual — he even repeatedly flirts with the flower delivery boy who brings the bouquet that Hart ordered for Elizabeth. 

It’s less a question of sexual fluidity — as Hart himself bawdily, somewhat nonsensically, quips: “a bisexual can jerk off equally well with either hand” — than self-delusion. In his late 40’s, balding, and diminutive in stature (the film uses a combination of smart blocking, casting tall actors opposite him and contorting his body awkwardly to give the impression that Hawke is all of five feet tall), not to mention being a barely functioning alcoholic who still lives with his mother, Lorenz is nobody’s idea of a lothario. And Elizabeth has clearly taken the measure of her mentor’s prospects as a physical lover, humoring him as one would a favorite uncle (Hart’s lechery never comes across as anything other than academic). Lorenz’s incessant fawning over Elizabeth and excessive praise of her arguable talents as a theater student are in stark contrast with the utter contempt with which he holds seemingly everyone and everything else. In advance of Rodgers’ arrival at Sardis, Hart pooh-poohs Oklahoma! as simplistic, populist dreck (demonstrating particular disdain for its inclusion of an exclamation mark in its title), dismisses much of his own body of work — including the film’s title song, which Lorenz bristles over everyone in the bar knowing the lyrics to — and seemingly has a bitchy rejoinder at the ready for anyone who offends his sensibilities as a lovesick malcontent. But he saves most of his disdain for what he would describe as overly sincere art that would serve to comfort rather than challenge audiences. As Hart himself muses, “who wants inoffensive art?”

That’s a statement of purpose the film has no real desire to interrogate nor upend. The audience for something as insular and outwardly snooty as Blue Moon is undeniably limited; however, within that narrow spectrum, the film is as much nostalgia-fueled comfort food as something like Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night was. The film is quite literally “playing the hits” for a certain segment of theater enthusiasts (the in-house piano player frequently regales the attendees with performances of staples from the Rodgers and Hart songbook like “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” and “Isn’t It Romantic?”), and its catty witticism and withering burns of popular literary figures and dramatists have been designed to elicit knowing chortles from the intelligentsia. As are its parade of “if you know, you know” celebrity cameos who parade through Sardis, and Blue Moon can’t resist the compulsion to elbow the viewer in the ribs lest they miss how clever the filmmakers are. When Hart notices the quiet gentleman sitting in the corner is none other than the novelist E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), it’s not enough for the men to engage as peers in respectful conversation about heartbreak and legacy. No, instead White has to volunteer that he’s struggling with the new children’s book he’s been obligated to author about a precocious mouse (Lorenz naturally suggests he name the character “Stuart,” which White enthusiastically scribbles down). When Hart is introduced to the aspiring director George Roy Hill, he advises that stories of friendship are so much more rewarding than romances (small blessings that Lorenz doesn’t then add “and it’d be great if one of the buddies doesn’t know how to swim but also doesn’t mention it until he has to jump from a tall cliff”). And between this and Maestro, filmmakers really need to retire the “young Stevie Sondheim” gag. 

What Blue Moon has going for it is Hawke, who’s front and center in nearly every frame, giving a performance that’s equal parts tortured and effervescent. We know from the film’s prologue (and, again, history) that Hart will have drunk himself to death in only a few months, and that weighs over moments like Lorenz cajoling Eddie into keep pouring him whiskey. Hawke gets to deliver many a flourishy speech on, say, the conflict between sincerity and satire — a major bone of contention between Hart and Rodgers, with the latter innocently failing to see the harm in creating something that makes people laugh and cry — but it’s clear how much he’s wielding cynicism as a shield in both his professional and personal life. Hart is a hopeless romantic (emphasis on hopeless) prone to quoting Bogart’s line from Casablanca: “no one ever loved me that much.” For as loquacious as Hart is, he’s helpless to silently listen (in enthrallment even) when in the presence of Qualley’s Elizabeth, hanging on her every word and nonverbally registering that he never really stood a chance with her. For all its prickly dishiness, Blue Moon is ultimately a rather heart-on-its-sleeve affair, and Hawke exemplifies that wounded heart. The character is desperate for acceptance from beautiful people like Rodgers or Elizabeth, yet is destined to be rejected (to the point of inviting it). 

But whereas Linklater has made an entire career dramatizing characters shooting the shit in a way that gradually reveals themselves, Blue Moon is a different animal. Kaplow’s screenplay, superficially high-brow though it may be, announces its intentions at every turn, robbing the film of spontaneity or discovery. Its ornate, flowery dialogue — every spoken line feels hand-polished and preserved under museum glass — renders the film hermetic to the point of being airless, and all this with the film working backwards from the its bittersweet final scene (which functions as both a callback to Hart’s commentary on his own work as well as another homage to Casablanca) and revealing that Lorenz’s disdain for sincerity to be rather toothless. Surprise: the man who wrote some of the most enduring love songs of all-time is a giant squish, who channeled a lifetime of heartbreak into his work. Blue Moon is pleasant but familiar, like an old sweater or dog-eared book. It’s urbane, warm, and a little classy. But it’s also, most damningly, inoffensive through and through.  — ANDREW DIGNAN

What Does That Nature Say to You

After nearly half a decade of putting out two movies per year, Hong Sang-soo has slowed from a full-on sprint to a jogger’s pace, releasing a single 108-minute film in 2025 (although another is reported to be in post-production). Some of us follow Hong with a nearly religious devotion, lapping up each and every film — no matter how small, no matter how short — with dogmatic delight; others dip toes into the rushing river of the director’s tireless output only occasionally. The beauty of Hong is that either approach works: you can check in or out anytime you’d like. He’s always doing his thing, and the movies always meet you where you’re at — so long as where you’re at has good food and drink.

Hong’s latest essayistic missive What Does That Nature Say to You continues his fine tradition of spinning deceptively simple yarns set around characters (superficially) enjoying the company of one another, a setup that allows him to easily fold in his insatiable curiosity about life. Poet Donghwa drives his girlfriend Jun-hee from Seoul to visit her parents in the country, and, through a series of digressions, finds himself roped into staying for dinner with Jun-hee’s family. Hong standby Kwon Hae-hyo does great work as Jun-hee’s father Kim Oryeong, goading Donghwa with drinks and cigarettes up onto the small mountain they live under to politely interrogate him while Jun-hee and her sister Neung-hee commiserate inside.

Notably, What Does That Nature Say to You was shot in 480p. The effect is jarring at first, but it conjures a lo-fi bedroom IDM feeling, like Grimes cooking up Visions on her laptop or Aphex Twin assembling his own synthesizers, and the images Hong produces under the constraints ring true. A tree artifacts ever so slightly in a digital breeze; Donghwa points his phone flashlight on a purple flower during a late-night walk; at lunch, there’s a plastic sheen that captures what it was like to stumble upon similar-looking movies on TV, or maybe an early LCD computer monitor, late at night in the mid-2000s. A frame might seem totally pedestrian at first, but the longer Hong holds on it, the more beautiful it becomes: much like the aimless conversations he films, a quiet profundity emerges. If he keeps it up, shot in 480p could be the next back-to-mono.

And like any filmmaker worth their weight should, Hong bakes the form into the function. Donghwa is myopic, and he keeps glasses around but rarely wears them. “I don’t mind if my vision’s a little blurry,” he says atop the mountain with Oryeong. “I’ve lived with it for so long… I didn’t realize my eyes were bad.” The conversation itself starts lilting into a slight blur, and the verdant leaves behind our interlocutors take hold of our attention, the intoxicating association with people reflectively sipping makgeolli together bringing to mind our own foibles and secret wishes. In a generously sentimental move, Oryeong departs, the camera pulls back to reveal more of the landscape, and our poet takes out his notepad to jot down some notes. Then, because Hong is often funnier than we give him credit for, Oryeong returns with more alcohol and we zoom uncomfortably close. The frame is dirtier, less carefully composed, as Donghwa is yanked out of his artistic reverie.

Delightful character moments don’t just happen atop the mountain, either. Throughout, we get an expansive sense of these people: they’re not quite real, but they’re interesting and involving, the way movie characters ought to be. Late in the film, the truth is outed and Donghwa is revealed to be kind of a bad poet. It’s a classic scene, basically a trope, but Hong delivers it in such an understated way that it can be tempting to accuse him of plausibility. There’s enough movie magic, though, to indicate he’s up to something else. Jun-hee’s mom Sunhee — herself a poet — steals a look at Oryeong, perfectly telegraphing skepticism about his talent. Angry they don’t see how deeply he feels, Donghwa drunkenly rambles about the poet’s job, which is to find connections and make juxtapositions. Oryeong shrugs that he probably gave Dongwha too much to drink, knowing full well he precipitated the breakdown. It’s not exactly how the conversation would go in real life — and all the better for it. Hong has twisted a common climax and remade it in his own image so that we may learn from it and use it as an opportunity to reflect on how we might react — or might have reacted — when meeting a partner’s parents for the first time. And yes, it all happens in a single, muddy, static shot.

Yet there are stretches here that test one’s patience. A long walk through a local temple threatens to drift onto the wrong side of contemplative, even as it gives us the first little splinters in Jun-hee and Donghwa’s relationship. But Hong’s secret sauce is stacking a deck of those moments, showing cracks between the couple; the movie wouldn’t be complete without them. We have no idea where the relationship will go or whether it will end — Hong lets us continue the arc in our minds. “Eat your fill,” Sunhee says late into the dinner. We do, veggies and all, and leave What Does That Nature Say to You newly inquisitive about the relationships in our own lives. — ETHAN J. ROSENBERG

Rose of Nevada

“All films are time travel films, and all films are ghost films,” said filmmaker Mark Jenkin at a post-screening Q&A for the New York Film Festival premiere of his new film, Rose of Nevada. This sentiment certainly applies to Jenkin’s films, preoccupied as they are with cycles that recur across time and past traumas that haunt the present. As with Jenkin’s previous films, Bait and Enys Men, Jenkin also commits a kind of technical time travel, as he shoots his films with 16mm Bolex cameras that must be hand-wound every 27 seconds and does not record live sound, so that the actors return for separate recording sessions months after the initial shoot to lay down their dialogue. (Filmmaker Rhayne Vermette also used Bolex cameras for the NYFF Currents selection Levers; just one more would make a trend). 

Rose of Nevada, written by Jenkin from a story he conceived with his collaborator and romantic partner Mary Woodvine (who also plays a key role in the film), sees Jenkin taking on time travel as his literal subject, and he delivers absorbing and surprisingly emotional results. Jenkin plays with familiar, even cozy genre codes of ghost stories and time travel sagas, yet also invokes the drama of industrial decline previously explored in Bait and the dread-infused narrative experimentation of Enys Men, all encapsulated within his singular aesthetic approach. Rose of Nevada, then, is at once a satisfying supernatural tale and a sui generis work from an utterly individual filmmaker.

The title of Jenkin’s film refers to a mysterious fishing boat that has just returned, unmanned, to the port of an economically depressed fishing town in Cornwall. The boat had been lost decades prior after an accident that devastated the local community — the crew was killed, and a guilt-wracked survivor who stayed ashore died by suicide soon after — and the boat’s owner cobbles together a small crew to go out to sea once again. Liam (Callum Turner) is running away from an undisclosed past he’d like to forget, and Nick (George MacKay) is a struggling father and husband who takes the job in the hopes of fixing his leaky roof. When they return to shore, Liam and Nick find they have somehow been sucked back to 1993, when the town’s fishing industry was still thriving, and that they have taken on the identities of two of the crew members. Liam, with few attachments, accepts his new reality, but Nick fights against it, creating conflict both within himself and within the still-intact community. 

Jenkin’s usage of 16mm Bolex film creates an aesthetic that is at once vivid and grainy. Rich colors abound in a flickering frame, suiting both the supernatural qualities of the narrative and, in the present-day scenes, the fishing town’s state of terminal decline. Jenkin indeed engineers constant collisions between naturalistic drama and fanciful horror tropes; for instance, within a cast of largely grounded performances, Woodvine’s and Francis Magee’s performances as an eerie old woman and a swarthy sea captain, respectively, would be right at home in a Val Lewton-produced B-horror film of the 1940s. Jenkin balances character-based drama, genuine dread, and playful humor for much of the film — a potentially risky tonal and narrative concoction that, because of its expert execution, allows the audience to dial in rather than alienating them — yet as the film progresses, he also finds an increasing number of opportunities to dig into the complex emotional landscape inherent in the narrative, with MacKay’s performance serving as the true emotional tether. 

Nick, a loving father and husband barely keeping his head above water, is a sympathetic character from the start, and MacKay consistently brings his inner turmoil to the surface through his expressive performance. What becomes clear as the film progresses is that Nick has been caught in a thorny moral quandary: all he wants is to return to his wife and daughter, yet he has also been tasked by some unseen force to alter a tragic history. MacKay is visibly anguished for much of the film, his face contorting in different permutations of terror, despair, and anxiety as he struggles to accept his new reality. (Turner, giving a relaxed, charming performance peppered with darker subtext, acts as an effective foil.) It’s a deeply committed, invariably effective performance that provides the film with emotional weight that pays off in the film’s subtle, poignant conclusion. 

Rose of Nevada is richly crafted all around. In addition to directing, writing, and shooting the film, Jenkin also served as its editor, composer, and co-sound designer with Ian Wilson, and contributed a keen sense of temporal rhythm and an intricate and tense soundscape in these capacities. Production designer Felicity Hickson and costume designer Jo Thompson’s designs are rigorously detailed, forming an immersive environment in both timelines. Jenkin’s film, ultimately then, proves to be a rare achievement on every level: crafted with both precision and uncompromising artistry, imbued with narrative pleasures and provocative ambiguities, and revolving around a pulsating emotional core, Rose of Nevada transcends the limited space-time of the cinema and follows the viewer into waking life.  — ROBERT STINNER

Levers

Rhayne Vermette’s Levers functions, in part, as a collective portrait of a community caught in limbo: when the sun is inexplicably blocked out globally for 24 hours, residents of the Canadian province of Manitoba endure the long day of darkness, then try to process the aftermath of this mystery when the sun rises the next morning. The film itself also occupies a sort of stylistic limbo. Levers is nominally a narrative film with a concrete dramatic situation, characters, and interweaving plot strands, but Vermette dispenses with most of the expectations of narrative cinema, and instead connects a series of images and episodes, with limited dialogue, while only loosely attending to narrative and temporal logic. Vermette has expressed discomfort with her work being slotted into an “experimental” category by critics and festival programmers (the film premiered in TIFF’s Wavelengths program, and is currently playing as a Currents selection at the New York Film Festival), but it’s true that Levers will appeal more to viewers seeking aesthetic experimentation than conventional narrative satisfaction. 

Vermette shepherded Levers with idiosyncratic tools and working methods. She shot the film, alongside Ryan Steel, Heidi Phillips, and Kristiane Church, on apparently “broken” 16mm Bolex cameras, and led the cast and crew through a collaborative filmmaking process, exemplified by the end credits which list each contributor alphabetically, rather than in order of their role’s perceived importance. Describing the film’s production, Vermette noted that “it’s chaotic, because I love chaos and surround myself with chaotic people, which is intended as a compliment.” 

Choosing to film using broken, obsolete cameras may seem like creating unnecessary obstacles for oneself, but Vermette clearly made the best possible choice for her film both technically and meta-textually. The images Vermette captures are saturated in deep, vivid color, and in the many scenes steeped in darkness, the contrasts between halogenic sources of artificial light and their pitch-black surroundings immerse the viewer in the inexplicable night the characters have been plunged into. Though temporally hazy, the film appears to be set in the 1980s, so the use of old equipment makes a surface-level visual connection to the past. Beyond this obvious link between content and form, though, there are deeper connections to be made: Levers depicts a community puzzling out how to live in a world that has proved it can suddenly break down without warning, and the often-stunning images Vermette and her collaborators craft from defective technology provide an implicit object lesson in excavating transcendence from decay. 

In keeping with the film’s collaborative production, Levers does not have clearly delineated leading and supporting characters; rather, a large ensemble of actors are featured in a loosely connected series of episodes. A few characters recur, though, and most notably a civil servant (Andrina Turenne), whose character arc most resembles a traditional subplot. Noticing odd occurrences — a streak of blood in the snow, a large rock of unknown provenance that has become a local news story — she investigates, taking actions like reviewing security camera footage and reviewing the contract information for a recently unveiled public sculpture that may be connected to the mysterious rock and the 24-hour blackout. Vermette, then, provides a few glimpses of what Levers could be as a more conventional narrative film — with references to detective, horror, and sci-fi films — but always pulls back, orienting the viewer’s focus away from mysteries that will not be solved and back toward the more ambiguous, strikingly composed glimpses of individuals in quiet states of flux. The unfulfilled flirtations with clear-cut storytelling may frustrate some hoping to decode Levers, or even to discern a plot, and at feature-length, attention spans may wander. But what Vermette and her collaborators have ultimately created is a near-unbroken series of images that generate their own intrigue, leaving viewers willing to engage with rich, subtle visions of darkness and light.  — ROBERT STINNER

The Razor’s Edge

The streets of Beirut are covered in red dirt. Mounds of earth make up barricades along the highway, cars duck around the man-made mountains as they amble down the road. The Lebanese Civil War has been raging for 10 years, and somehow Jocelyne Saab was able to make a fiction film in the midst of the wreckage. The Razor’s Edge follows a teenage girl, Samar (Hala Bassam), and her infatuation with an older artist, Karim (Jacques Weber). 

Samar initially stumbles into Karim’s life by being drawn to the house he has his studio in, an old pink mansion near the shores of the Mediterranean. Samar breaks in, wandering around the ghostly palace, looking at the pristine tiles laid about and flipping through books of postcard paintings. She runs around barefoot, accidentally stepping in an errant cloth full of black paint, leaving her print on an unfinished piece. Before slipping away, she steals a pocketwatch hanging in a grandfather clock.

It doesn’t take long for Karim to deduce Samar is the one who left the footprint, leading to a Cinderella-like scene where Samar turns her red-handed (well, black-footed) moment into a dance of girlish obsession, as she makes a whole circle of footprints on Karim’s painting. While Samar’s perspective is of a teenage romantic whimsy, Karim views her with a kind of admiration that also stands in for his view of Beirut and its people. Late in the film, one of Karim’s friends expresses how he’s given up on the city and will return to safety in Canada — Karim feels no inclination to give up on the place he has made home.

Karim is something of an interloper to the destruction, having to pull glass out of his bullet-holed windshield to see better, but he still has the choice to live in the destruction. Samar, on the other hand, was born in it. Beirut, to her, is a city of living death. Soldiers and gunshots are a fact of life, and when she wants to meet up with her best friend, they play amongst the rubble of a bombed-out stadium. The war has effectively closed off the world to her.

Still, Samar is able to dream with the ghosts. Most strikingly, there is a sequence in an abandoned movie house, where the projectionist has become a drunken sniper. Barefoot she walks amongst the broken glass, not a care in the world about getting cut or shot through a window. The place that once projected others’ dreams is now just another palace of death, haunted by the stories that once passed through it. Samar tries to make her own world, but is still trapped between the sea and the barricades, with her imagination not even able to reach as far as “the South,” where most of the heavy fighting is taking place.

The images of a bombed-out Beirut, sadly call to mind the present moment, when Israel invaded the country again in late 2024 after committing a heinous terror attack using pagers in an attempt to make life unlivable for the people of Lebanon. Having passed away in 2019, Jocelyne Saab would not live to know this, nor to see her debut feature The Razor’s Edge restored and revisited on the festival circuit (including its screening as part of NYFF63’s Revivals program). Yet Saab’s film, perhaps tragically, still has much to tell us about our present some 40 years on. As Karim says near the start of the film: “The dead have more to give us than we have to them.” — ALEX LEI