Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
It's the time of year when the work of the world's leading filmmakers is pushed to the fore, all at once. Let's survey.
Blue Moon
Richard Linklater works in a minor key with this study of the lyricist Lorenz Hart, which takes place across a couple of hours at Sardi's the evening that Hart's old songwriting partner, Richard Rodgers, is enjoying the opening-night triumph of Oklahoma! with a new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein. (And if you don't think Hart is going to have fun ridiculing that exclamation point, stick around.) That's the concept of Robert Kaplow's screenplay, which fits Linklater's affection for narrative strictures. And part of the pleasure of watching Blue Moon is seeing how Hart navigates that moodily-lit space, talking up the bartender, piano player, and various others (the writer E.B. White happens to be in the bar that night).
But Blue Moon succeeds far beyond the level of an experiment, for this is a touching portrait of an artist. Larry Hart, beautifully embodied by Ethan Hawke, is one of popular culture's great sad romantics: short, bald, queer, drunk, and astonishingly gifted at the art of rhyming phrases both diamond-witty and lushly heartbreaking. Hart's torrent of observations here ranges far across the subject of art, whether lacerating Hammerstein's geographically inappropriate conjunction of midwestern corn with an elephant's eye or musing on the narrative sublimity of a half-erect penis. During all this, he's also trying to pitch Rodgers (Andrew Scott, with just the right amount of concern and coldness) on a new project, and convince a young protégée (Magaret Qualley) that he is in love with her—or trying to convince himself of that.
Thanks to a prologue, we know Hart is doomed; he won't survive 1943. This gives his soliloquies the quality of a valiant last gasp, a defiant parry against the messiness and disappointments of life. Which is perhaps what art is anyway. At one point Larry opines about the way that art can becoming "levitating" when it really clicks, and Ethan Hawke nails the sentiment so wonderfully that in that moment actor, filmmaker, and long-dead lyricist seem to be speaking in one passionate voice. (Hawke's turn as Chet Baker in the 2015 film Born to Be Blue is a good reference point here—not a great movie, but a performance fully committed to the all-or-nothing idea of the artist.)
Blue Moon should stay with you. It probably doesn't need its sly references to the future (the young Stephen Sondheim, who was mentored by Hammerstein, pops up to critique Hart's work), and there's a slight hitch in the way Hart's pitch to Rodgers for a new show—something epic about Marco Polo, with romance and songs—sounds pretty dubious compared to the way Rodgers and Hammerstein were about to re-write the definition of the American musical. But never mind that—like the curious, indeed ineffable (a word that gets parsed here) lyric to Rodgers & Hart's "Where or When," this film leaves behind melancholy traces that genuinely haunt.
Die My Love
When a movie sees things in a way you haven't quite seen before, it deserves notice, even if the film might be all over the place. And I'm thinking about the way Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love sees the night, in recurring scenes of people walking through the countryside in the star-filled wee hours. It doesn't quite look like the way film has created night before; I assume it's some kind of digitally-manipulated darkness, with a milky sort of illumination that one could believe is actually coming from stars and moon. Whether two people dancing or a woman toting a shotgun across an open clearing, it's an uncanny effect.
Ramsay's films often force us to see things in a new way (her previous, all the way back in 2017, was You Were Never Really Here), and this film is no exception. I don't know what to make of it overall, except that it is bursting with restless energy, and a spectacular showcase for Jennifer Lawrence, who plays a new mother trapped in a country house her husband (Robert Pattinson) has recently inherited. In this case, calling it a "country house" is akin to calling the Overlook in The Shining a "resort hotel." There's a lot more going on there. Don't get the idea that the film is somehow a sober study of postpartum depression, because it's far, far beyond that, and the way the home, the natural world, and marriage collide makes for a wild canvas.
There are things in the film that feel either unfinished (it would be interesting to know more about Pattinson's husband, whose devotion borders on masochism) or overdone (there's a lone motorcycle rider who speeds through various moments, as though embodying Lawrence's projections of escape). But as a movie-watching experience, Die My Love is one strong punch after another, completely untethered from 21st-century formula, audience expectations, or—for certain—the need to have a sympathetic protagonist. And yet you may feel sympathy anyway, because Jennifer Lawrence's blade-like accuracy goes far beyond the making of a movie villain.
December 5, 2025
