Joanna Hogg's “Eternal Daughter”, Noah Baumbach's "White Noise”, Laura Poitras “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, Jerzy Skolimowski's “EO” and Hirokazu Kore-eda's “Broker” at Landmark Theatres, SIFF Cinema, Northwest Film Forum & The Grand Illusion: Dec 9 - Jan 6

The month of December sees titles from this year's Venice Film Festival, alongside latecomers from the Cannes and Toronto festivals continuing to arrive in Northwest theaters. Among the films from Venice, there are few more heatedly anticipated than Noah Baumbach's adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel, “White Noise”, and the Golden Lion award-winner from Laura Poitras, on the life, art and advocacy Nan Goldin, portrayed in “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”. The award winning film plumbs the heights and depths of the artist's life, and her later dedication to personal and social causes, on which she spoke at length with The Guardian, "Artist Nan Goldin on Addiction and Taking on the Sackler Dynasty". Other late arrivals from Cannes and Venice at SIFF Cinema include “Broker", the first of Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda's films set in Korea, Darren Aronovsky's rumination on the human condition, “The Whale”, and Jerzy Skolimowski's homage to Robert Bresson and Béla Tarr, told through its non-human protagonist, “EO”. The Skolimowski film has already garnered high placement on many films of the year lists, including the Los Angeles Times declaring, "‘EO,’ A Gorgeous Portrait of a Donkey, is the Movie You’ve Been Praying For", and Manohla Dargis' exuberant review for the New York Times, "‘EO’: Imagining the Lives of Other Creatures". Northwest Film Forum presents another recent entry in Korean director Hong Sang-soo's autobiographical meta-observations in the “Novelist’s Film”, and The Grand Illusion Cinema will screen Tilda Swinton in a haunting double role, as Joanna Hogg's “Eternal Daughter". This eerie tale of a "Double Tilda Swinton Haunts Joanna Hogg Ghost Story" follows on the heels of her two-part masterwork that topped many films of the decade lists, comprising "The Souvenir", and its second installment. Later in the month at the AMC theatres come the intimate portrait of childhood seen in Lukas Dhont 's “Close" and the most recent period drama “Corsage” from Marie Kreutzer. The latter, what Peter Bradshaw calls an austere and inventive film depicting, "A Cry of Anger from the Pedestal-Prison of An Empress". Concluding the month for a second run at SIFF Cinema, Charlotte Welles' masterful Cannes debut feature "Aftersun" returns to cinemas. This emotionally piercing film watches as a beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age "Luminous Father-Daughter Drama", that is both brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous. Also returning for a second run, Todd Field's classical music world drama "TÁR", in which "Cate Blanchett is Colossal as a Conductor in Crisis". Through the course of this exceedingly credible depiction of the classical music world, the life of a composer and conductor of a major German orchestra comes unravelled as her highly principled and equally duplicitous life is laid bare. In more ways than one, "In 'TÁR', a Maestro Faces the Music".

Darwyn Cooke's Golden Age of Superheroes & "The Lost Opportunity of The New Frontier" | Forbes

A decade has elapsed since the New 52 marketing campaign, and DC Comics continue to find themselves caught in the throes of the worst of flash-in-the-pan commercial gimmicks and redundant reboots. These have been rolled out as an endless cavalcade of corrective measures to adjust from the previous misguided realignment of their properties, only to find themselves back at square one, and with an ever-diminishing readership. All of this done at the imperative of their various marketing and editorial branches (beholden to Warner Brothers), over the benefits of trusting in their artist and writer teams to build substantial storytelling within their fictional universes. In the long term, this will be their loss. Readership will go where talent, creativity, and the rich rewards of artists who are invested in the depth and value of their work is not only appreciated, but the desired objective of the publisher. Over the last decade, the 'big two', being Marvel and DC respectively, have sacrificed the last vestiges of these values in an series of illusory market grabs, under the auspice of lining their pockets. But the numbers have clearly stated otherwise, with readership continuously down since the mid-2010s. But it needn't have been this way. DC Comics themselves had invested in talent and a number of artists and writers at the beginning of that decade, looking to enrich their enterprises with the vitality and energy of independent comics properties of the millennial cusp. Among them, the "The New Design Frontiers of Darwyn Cooke’s Comic Book Art", enhanced a small run of titles with their fresh graphic identity and a more modern, urban, adult sensibility. The Eisner Award-winning comic writer and artist was paired with another contemporary in his field, noir and crime comics author Ed Brubaker, for their bold revamping of the Catwoman character. This pairing was the result of Brubaker's critically hailed and Harvey and Eisner award-winning work on the police procedural comic "Gotham Central", and their shared passion from crime fiction and film noir, which Cooke spoke at length on in the 2007 "The Comics Journal: Darwyn Cooke Interview". Within a span of just a few years, both authors would then leave Marvel and DC, never to return to produce a major work for them, but instead finding longterm residency in the more fertile soil of independent publishers such as Image and IDW. Around this period, Cooke shared his views on where the industry had gone astray, "Darwyn Cooke Gets Honest about 'Before Watchmen'' wherein he detailed the disenfranchising environment of misaligned priorities being handed down by editorial and the overarching corporate bodies of Disney and Warner Brothers.

But this departure was not before Darwyn Cooke delivered one unmitigated and great superhero property for DC, in the form of 2004's "DC: The New Frontier". The story, set in primarily in the 1950s, featured dozens of DC characters and drew inspiration from the Golden and early Silver Age period's comic books, pulp fiction, and cinema, as well as its structure from Tom Wolfe's non-fiction account of the start of the U.S. space program "The Right Stuff". As with much of Cooke's work, it also pulled from the gritty crime fiction of the era, particularly that of James Ellroy, due to the author's penchant for weaving fictional characters into the tapestry of his historic settings. In this way, the major DC characters are introduced in "The New Frontier" in the same manner as their original conception, but with a freshly postmodern outlook on the real world pre-and-post war era, and its social and political concerns. Detailed in Under the Radar's "Darwyn Cooke, Creator of Justice League: The New Frontier" interview, Cooke describes the book's accompanying visual style, which took inspiration from 1950s advertising, album cover, film poster and graphic art, along with the early Marvel works of Jack Kirby, and the 1960s Hanna-Barbera creations of Alex Toth. On the eve of Darwyn Cooke's untimely death in 2016, and the book's reprinting in a new deluxe edition, Forbes pop culture and comics writer Rob Salkowitz published his thoughts in "The Lost Opportunity of The New Frontier"; "Darwyn Cooke's masterpiece offered DC a way to embrace its brand-defining Silver Age legacy without seeming corny or outdated, and welcome new fans into the mythos without driving away long-time readers. The 2004 mini-series that sets the origin of the DC universe in the optimistic era of the early 1960s is not only a complete triumph of the superhero genre, but also a story that could have solved many, many problems for DC here in the 21st century. Instead, we got Zack Snyder's "Batman v. Superman". If the company had been looking for a reset button to bring in new fans without driving old ones away in disgust, "The New Frontier" could have been a useful starting point. Today it’s a curiosity. The Democratic National Convention of the early 60s recognized that, at a moment when competition is fierce, your brand is tarnished and the world seems to be going a different direction, there are worse strategies than to restate your ideals with vigor and hope, not fear and confusion. When a visionary gifts you with a path forward, you should take it."

Luca Guadagnino's “Bones and All” at SIFF Cinema: Nov 22 - Dec 15

Filmgoers familiar with the director's breakout 1980s period romance, "Call Me by Your Name", can attest to his artistry and the sumptuous, corporeal, physical attributes of, "Luca Guadagnino's Cinema of Desire". Among the array of sensory craft on display in the film, the soundtrack offers an almost baroque reinforcement of the Italian coastline's rapturous beauty. Yet, like the mildly feverish fantasia of "A Boy’s Own Desire in ‘Call Me by Your Name’", passions of mind and heart bear influence over the following tumult, sorcery, and inner and outer conflicts of his following remake of "Suspiria". This is both apparent in the film's sound design as well as the prominent role Radiohead's Thom Yorke is given in his score for the film. An audiovisual banquet, it also watches as a showcase for the cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, known for his award winning collaborations with Thai arthouse auteur, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. By setting his adaptation in a concretely placed sociopolitical setting, and a witchily uncanny eye for references within modern dance, Guadagnino's film offered a very different, and deeply melancholic, point of entry into the nightmare of The Three Mothers. And it is between these two points of reference that we find his Venice Film Festival shocker, with an aesthete's obsessive fixation on the sensory that Luca Guadagnino delivers his most sympathetic and carnal vision to date. This "extravagant and outrageous movie; scary, nasty and startling in its warped romantic idealism" as Peter Bradshaw calls it in the pages of The Guardian, delivers its viewers a, "Cannibal Romance that is a Heartbreaking Banquet of Brilliance". Enhanced by the talent of its cinematographer, Arseni Khachaturan, and another of Guadagnino's explicit choices in music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, this is  a very different tale about a flesh-eating compulsion than those that have been made popular in recent prestige television. Nor is it another young adult exploration of youthful rebellion, marginalization, or the outsider status of a subset of identity politics, contrary to what audiences might conclude from the casting of its young stars. It is instead a finely tuned fusion of genres, that finesse a deeply sympathetic perspective on the grotesque. In "Bones and All" Guadagnino has tangibly crafted a film that burns with a shame and brand of desperation, born of poverty and homelessness and the tragedy and ruthlessness of survival. Yet underlying these earthly concerns, is a dreamlike pull that somehow both nourishes and cleanses away the horror.