Movies to watch in August

August is the month when you can find out about the films that you have been hearing about all year but have not had time to watch. Here are the main ones, in my opinion. They can be found on the platforms, sometimes they are included in the subscription, sometimes they can be rented on request.

Babylon. Directed by Damien Chazelle. With Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva

An elephant in a room in the middle of a party. Orgies. Medicine. All the madness of the prehistory of the new world: the film industry. Nostalgic, haunting, precise Damien Chazelle (Obsession, La La Land, First Man) learned everything there was to know about the birth of Hollywood, pioneering space exploration for the filming of the first films, on the hill, the “other” Far West, with movie cameras instead of rifles. He analyzed every moment of the real aesthetic and cultural Big Bang that affected the entire last century. There are dozens of references to real events, even if Chazelle chose to tell the era (very long, from the 1920s to the 1950s) through imaginary characters, albeit inspired by the mystery of the real protagonists. Three hours of film, some really impressive scenes, a lot of brilliance, and an amazing soundtrack (by Justin Hurwitz, Chazelle’s regular collaborator) that is the actual script of the film, not the obvious dialogue and plot without much verve. Babylon is brilliant, dynamic and, yes, long. But it’s worth it. Have fun finding director Spike Jonze and Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea in supporting roles.

Secrets of the island – Banshee Inisherina. Directed by Martin McDonagh. Cast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon.

A country comedy, a spooky dance, a metaphor for war, a film about depression? A bit of it all, you choose the aspect you prefer in this new film from the director of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and In Bruges. The protagonists of In Bruges (Farrell and Gleason) also return as two friends living on a small Irish island. We are in 1923, in the distance there is a civil war, and in Inisherin everything is about the same as always. In particular, Padraic (Farrell) visits his friend Colm (Gleason) every day at the same time and they go to the pub together. Until the day Colm stops opening the door for him. Why? We do not know. As soon as I saw this, it made me very angry. But then I thought about it again: this is one of those movies that just because it’s so violent and sadistic, stays in your head. The sudden rupture of this friendship is like the inconsistent interruption of many things that happen in life, this is the meaninglessness of reality, this is the eternal deceit of ambition. McDonagh takes this from afar and there are too many scribbles in the script, but he definitely has a lot to say.

All Everywhere All At Once. Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Hai Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis

This quirky, recent Oscar-winning feature is being directed by two 30-year-old video clip filmmakers who are encyclopedic moviegoers, and I think they love and are very inspired by the world of Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, The Orchid Thief, She). They certainly have their own talent for postmodern stylization, the likes of which have not been seen for a long time. Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn, a Chinese immigrant to America who runs a laundry with her husband, Waymond (Ke Hui Quan). Dissatisfied, frustrated, always furious, struggling with bills that don’t add up, Evelyn also has a relationship that can’t be called dysfunctional, which is an understatement, with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) and her elderly father (James Hong), two extremes. poles of every integration dispute. Evelyn is in the middle, she’s tired of everything and everyone. The film’s first act centers on a run-in with bureaucracy as our heroes go to report for their unpaid taxes to a monster clerk played by an unrecognizable Jamie Lee Curtis. This is where the bullshit starts. We will see Evelyn again in a series of parallel universes and lives, where she becomes a singer, a chef, a movie star. Quotes abound in a sort of visual hodgepodge that creates havoc. Maybe it’s a blunder, maybe it’s the movie of the year. Judge for yourself.

Eight mountains. Directed by Charlotte VanderMeersch and Felix Van Gröningen. Alessandro Borghi, Luca Marinelli, Filippo Timi, Elena Lietti.

It won the David di Donatello Award for Best Film as well as Best Cinematography, Adapted Screenplay and Sound. Based on the novel by Paolo Cognetti, it tells the story of a long and deep friendship between two boys, one from the mountains and the other from the city. Borghi plays the first, and for this he took lessons to learn how to milk cows, herd cattle and make cheese. He has also learned to speak like a mountaineer from the Aosta Valley, and as a Roman from Rome, he manages to inspire confidence. The royal friendship between Borghi and Marinelli, whose careers have blossomed together since Don’t Be Bad (2015), gives Eight Mountains a very authentic flavor. Shot between Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, it was no accident that it was the first real cinematic success since the pandemic: it is a film that literally makes you breathe, joyfully and calmly.

Weirdness. Directed by Roberto Ando. With Tony Servillo, Ficarra and Picone, Giulia Ando.

Four David di Donatello Awards: Best Set Design, Best Costumes, Best Original Screenplay and Direction. Strangeness tells about a trip to Sicily by Luigi Pirandello, now settled in Rome. We are in 1920, and the playwright arrives at home for a “worldly” date: the birthday of Giovanni Verga. But the death of the old nanny makes him change his plans a little. Pirandello, who tries to remain incognito like today’s celebrities who give out fake names at hotel receptions, finds himself befriending two undertakers who run a very rude amateur theater troupe in their spare time. The meeting and its many “strangenesses” will ignite Pirandello’s genius and seem to give him the idea for his perhaps most important, by far better known play: Six Characters in Search of an Author. theatre, the friction (but also blending) between high culture and low culture and unites the prestige of Toni Servillo and the popularity of Ficarra and Picone.

Air – History of the Great Leap Forward. Directed by Ben Affleck. Cast Matt Damon, Bel Affleck, Viola Davis, Jason Bateman, Chris Messina.

In 1984, one Sonny Vaccaro convinced Michael Jordan’s mother to sign a sponsorship deal with Nike, which was apparently a minor fact, but which would determine the future of the sport and the marketing applied to it. This is what Ben Affleck’s film tells about, in which the director himself and his friend Matt Damon starred, who is the real protagonist in the role of (a symphony of disgusting shades of beige) Vaccaro. There are a lot of great directing and writing ideas, starting with Michael Jordan never being seen or heard from, he’s just a (really long) shadow next to his parents. The mother is played by a huge Viola Davis, who has too few scenes, it’s a pity, but the best line of the film is: “A shoe is just a shoe until my son puts it on.” This movie is not about basketball or Michael Jordan. Air is a film about capitalism, about personal branding before the term was coined, and about stubbornness and loneliness. It is the loneliness of men, understood as males, that is so tragically comical in their striving to always want to win, to want to win everything.

The return of Casanova. Directed by Gabriele Salvatores. Tony Servillo, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Natalino Balasso, Sara Serraiocco, Bianca Panconi.

I must say right away that I have a bias in favor of all films about cinema, or in any case, where the game between reality and (creation) fiction is constantly intertwined, blurring the boundaries. Here, in addition to cinema, literature also enters the equation, and through literature, the myth of Casanova, already told several times in films, in theater, in songs and in many works. So, each link leads to another, and it’s a lot of fun, almost a sudoku of quotes. Salvatores takes Arthur Schnitzler’s novel The Return of Casanova, in which the character of twilight, depressed, increasingly aware of the nearness of the end and the exhaustion of his seductive potential. At the same time, there is a director who is making a film based on The Return of Casanova, who is equally experiencing a moment of crisis, balancing, debriefing. Young directors are a new step forward, personal life can no longer be reduced to superficial relationships. You have to make commitments, you have to become adults, really adults. The themes are brutal, but Salvatores’ performance is light, graceful and, let me use the somewhat old-fashioned adjective, Mozartian.

Emily’s Crimes (Emily the Criminal). Directed by John Patton Ford. Aubrey Plaza, Theo Rossi, Gina Gershon

The first work written and directed by a director with a defiant name: John Ford, damn it! And having Patton as a middle name makes it even more difficult. The protagonist Aubrey Plaza confirms the skills shown in the White Lotus series, but here she does much more, besides having a more complex and interesting character on her hands than the intellectual wife of the new rich man. Here’s Emily, a poor art student (I still have a huge college debt to pay off), doesn’t seem to have a family or anything on her back, she’s a horsewoman, delivering food to and fro, to offices where hurried people don’t go attention. I don’t even see her. She, of course, is a good girl, but somewhere in her lies a piece of the “black soul”, which fate willingly recognizes. One day, a colleague takes her with him into the world of cloned credit cards (the film takes place several years ago, in the pre-chip era), a slick and secretive business run by a certain Yousef (good and kind, who emigrated from Lebanon) and from his brother (less good and less good). When Emily is seriously trying to quit crime, the only “job” offer she gets is an unpaid internship. Talk about America as a land of opportunity is zero. He has no choice, Emily. He starts taking big risks, more and more. The film becomes a kind of cynical thriller about the world of work, about young women, about the possibility (or not) of earning it, about blinding consumerism.

TAR. Directed by Todd Field, Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlan, Mark Strong.

Lydia Tar, a conductor as excellent as her ambition and as powerful as her talent, does not exist. This is the director’s idea. Let’s imagine that there really is a woman who permanently conducts the most prestigious orchestra in the world (the Berliners), and imagine that this broken glass ceiling cost her not only the effort (that famous double effort that all women have to go through to reach high positions), but it also cost her soul. And it’s that Lydia is a monster, a manipulator, even a molester, worthy of being “erased”. Fortunately, Field’s film is not an indictment of “cancellation culture” or #metoo drift. Of course, the fact that Lidia is being replaced after the cancellation by a male colleague with a clean but very small record makes us think about that risk. Better importunate geniuses or virtuous half-socks? Let’s hope we never have to choose, I say, in life. In fact, the film touches on these issues only in the last act. The first two, terribly dark and definitely long, are something else. I’m an extraordinary character study for Blanchett’s champion skills. His Lydia is so perfect in every nuance that we think she is inspired by a real life character. She is a neurotic, a perfectionist, a sadist, an absolute narcissist. It is the tragic mask of success, it is insatiable greed, it is prizes that are never enough, applause is never loud enough, appropriations that are always legitimized by the pride of those who feel like demigods.