Human Flow,
“Human Flow” begins with an image of the open sea — vast, neutral, almost calming. Into the frame slips a handful of overloaded zodiacs, bright orange life jackets singling out the children among the passengers who have spent days adrift. As the boats land on the beach, the cool neutrality of the image shifts to hectic chaos. Director Ai Weiwei toggles back and forth between the enormity of an unforgiving planet — scenes shot with drones show vast processions of refugees trickling across dusty landscapes, or tent cities that stretch beyond view — to always coming back to Earth, and hard.
In finding his balance, Ai Weiwei has made something beautiful: “Human Flow” is neither indulgent nor pedantic, but clear-eyed in its view of the enormity of the crisis. More than 65 million people are now displaced across the planet, a figure with no near equal in human history.
Midway through “Faces Places,” a delightful, artful road trip by French New Wave master Agnès Varda and photographer/muralist JR, a curious railway worker asks what the point is of plastering a giant photo of human toes on a train.
“The point is the power of imagination,” Varda replies with a smile — although anyone who sees this lovely travelogue will require no explanation, only a large screen to better take it all in.
Varda, 88 at the time of filming, and JR, 33, make quite the amusing pair as they travel through the French countryside, visiting mostly small towns (and a couple of large cities) to create oversized photos of the people they meet.
They get on like an old squabbling couple as they roam through France, passing fields of lilac and sunflowers. JR drives a van resembling a giant Polaroid camera, which dispenses large-format photos from within, later to be attached as murals to walls, trains, water towers and other public objects.
The road trip turns melancholy, even heartbreaking, when they attempt to visit Varda’s old New Wave accomplice JeanLuc Godard at his home in Switzerland and find less than they’d hoped for.
“Faces Places” also functions as a career summary for Varda, whose eyesight is fading. Clips from such landmark works as “Cléo from 5 to 7” and “The Gleaners and I” are worked into the enterprise, as are examples of her photography.
People doubted Gerwig’s filmmaking ambitions, since she’s best known as the loveably daffy star of such modern amusements as “Frances Ha” and “Mistress America.” She went ahead anyway and has made “Lady Bird,” one of the funniest and most heartfelt movies of 2017, a film that gets inside the outsider feeling of growing up.
It’s no accident that Saoirse Ronan’s title rebel in “Lady Bird,” a Gerwig-inspired character, chooses Stephen Sondheim’s “Everybody Says Don’t” as her cheeky audition for a high school musical.
Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson feels under siege, from her dyed red hair, her stubborn adolescent acne and her misfortune of living with her cash-strapped family in Sacramento, Calif., in 2002.
Her frazzled mom (Laurie Metcalf), annoying older brother (Jordan Rodrigues) and inquiring school principal (Lois Smith) are all on her case. Only her dad (Tracy Letts) seems to be on Lady Bird’s side — and he’s fighting a bad case of depression, humbled by unemployment and embarrassed by his perceived failings as a breadwinner.
Lady Bird also has the pesky problems of an affordable college to choose and virginity she’s eager to lose, the latter with the assistance of her shy boyfriend Danny (Lucas Hedges) — or is she really more interested in the inscrutable slacker Kyle (Timothée Chalamet)?
Ronan is a riot as the wilful Lady Bird, a kid trying hard to turn “nope” into hope. She’s sure to court Best Actress consideration, one of many potential kudos for this 2017 highlight.