Month: January 2026

TRAIN DREAMS

By Marc S. Sanders

Clint Bentley directs a script he co-wrote with Greg Kwedar, based on Denis Johnson’s novella, Train Dreams.  It’s a gorgeous looking picture that covers an early 20th century logger and railroad worker within the dense woods of Washington state.

Joel Edgerton is Robert Grenier, a bearded logger with an unknown background. The soothing voiceover narration from Will Patton tells us that Robert never knew his parents and is unsure of his exact age.  

Unexpectedly, he quickly falls in love with Gladys (Felicity Jones).  They envision an idyllic life together in a log cabin next to a peaceful lakeside.  They have a daughter and could not be happier.  Yet, during logging season, Robert must leave his family behind to cut down trees for industry supply of a quickly evolving western civilization.  He takes other jobs laying down railroad tracks that lend to the conveniences of transportation and shipping (before the reliance of air travel), including the logs he cuts down. His purpose is circular to a thriving country.

His committed work is not always pleasant.  As a means of revenge, a friend is gunned down right in front of him.  The casualness of the act is the most shocking element of this moment.  Still, there is no time to grieve.  

When he’s working on the railroad, he bears witness to the cruel treatment that others deliver to a Chinese immigrant.  He can not stand up to these behaviors.  He has money that needs to be earned.  So the work takes precedence.

A mentor and demolition expert (William H Macy) meets an unfortunate fate, as well.

Tragedy personally befalls Robert upon his return home following a job. Now, the man is left to resort to isolation where little human interaction exists among the wooded areas.

It’s hard to take your eyes off Train Dreams, now playing on Netflix, and one of ten films Oscar nominated for Best Picture.  The screenplay speaks like a Robert Frost poem.  That’s a compliment and a shortcoming for me.  Will Patton says so much when there’s not much to be said.  Rather, Bentley’s film works visually as you watch a concentrated Edgerton focus on his character’s hallucinations and especially the loneliness he endures in the second part of the film.  

Regrettably, this movie is also a little boring.  Sometimes it feels like I’m watching one of those short nature films you look at while in a museum that a documentarian provided.  When I’m a tourist, a ten minute film like this can show the trees getting chopped as they make their slow tumble to ground.  Frankly, when it’s too hot outside is when I go into these theaters to get some air conditioning and a quick snooze.  Train Dreams teeters on that experience.  

There’s no denying how solid the film is considering the subject matter.  Technically it’s very impressive with expansive forest fires and artificial trees masked as tall pines to demonstrate the sawing of hundreds year old barks.  When the camera is pointing up through the green leafed branches into the wide blue expanse of sky, you want to freeze frame and perhaps paint a scenic skyline.  Adolpho Voleso’s cinematography is rich in color.  Definitely worthy of recognition.

I found it interesting how much I took Robert’s perspective for granted.  He uses a floppy aluminum saw that is pulled and pushed to cut through the wood.  As he gets older, a fellow woodsman relies on an battery powered chainsaw, thus making Robert’s skills more obsolete.  

Later, he meets a woman (Kerry Condon) who has been recruited to oversee the treatment of the forests from a high-rise lookout post; she just might the coming of the forest rangers.  Robert only knew of trees from what was way over his head.  Now he can look down upon them.  The ending goes even further and demonstrates how Robert’s self-absorbed isolation held him back from keeping up with a developing age of technology like automobiles and airplanes, far beyond the trains that had been the faster way to travel along the tracks that he built.

Train Dreams is an interesting issue of a National Geographic that I’d never have picked up had the Oscars not given it some recognition.  Now that I’ve seen it, it’ll go back on top of the tall stacks of magazines in my grandmother’s basement.

GILDA (1946)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Charles Vidor
CAST: Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready, Joseph Calleia
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 90% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A small-time gambler hired to work in a Buenos Aires casino discovers his employer’s new wife is his former lover.


Admit it: we’ve all known a couple like these two: Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) and Gilda (Rita Hayworth).  They’re the kind of couple that inspire lifelong celibacy.  You see them together, and you think one of two things: “Why is SHE/HE with HIM/HER?”  Or, “Well, at least they’re saving two other people.”

The irony of Gilda is that they’re not even a legitimate couple, at least not for very long.  The fact that the movie sees fit to give them a semi-happy ending fits more with the period when it was made than with the characters themselves.  Watching them go off together at the end feels…off.  I know there are exceptions to this rule (see Bound [1996], spoiler alert), but this film noir fairly screams for a tragic ending of some kind, appropriate to the genre.  Instead, the two leads get off the hook just a little too easily, for my money.

But I’m jumping ahead.  In case you didn’t know, Gilda is the 1946 seamy/steamy film noir that forever turned Rita Hayworth into a Hollywood sex symbol.  Humphrey Bogart turned down the lead role (that went to Glenn Ford instead) because he figured, with Hayworth on the screen, no one would be looking at anyone or anything else.  He wasn’t kidding.  From the moment of her iconic entrance to the film (hair flip…“Me?”), Hayworth dominates every moment she’s onscreen, as effortlessly as Monroe, Dandridge, or Loren, assisted by those legendary Jean Louis gowns and costumes.  Especially the famous “Put the Blame on Mame” number, with the slinky black strapless “sleeve” dress, and those long black elbow-length gloves that she peels off ever so slowly…

The story!  Right, the story…

Johnny Farrell is a low-rent gambler in Buenos Aires who is hired by casino owner Ballin Mundson – one of the weirdest character names ever – to watch over his operations while he tends to other business in and around post-war Argentina.  One day Mundson returns from a business trip with a new wife: Gilda, whom he married after a whirlwind one-day romance.  Gilda is as tempestuous as they come, brazenly flirting with Johnny in front of her new husband, who can’t help but wonder why Johnny seems so icy towards her…

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out Johnny and Gilda knew each other a lifetime ago.  Their chance meeting in a foreign country ranks right up there with Ilsa wandering into Rick’s Café Américain in North Africa: unlikely, but it makes for a helluva story.

Glenn Ford holds his own in the film as the scruffy, no-nonsense enforcer who can more than hold his own in a fistfight, but whose physical prowess can’t compete with the psychic hold Gilda still has on him.  Of course, the fact that Gilda mercilessly pokes and teases Johnny indicates she’s just as fixated on him.  It’s easy to see how this material could almost become a standard-issue rom-com, but Gilda is made of darker stuff.  Look at it from a certain angle, and there are hints that Johnny and his boss, Mundson, might share a relationship that goes beyond employer/employee, that Gilda knows this, and is using that knowledge to stick the knife even deeper into Johnny’s stomach, just to watch him squirm.

So, Gilda becomes a psychological battle of the sexes, evoking The War of the Roses at times.  Gilda tosses off some zingers that would have made Mae West blush.  (“If I’d been a ranch, they would’ve named me the Bar Nothing.”)  Johnny gets off a couple of his own.  (“Pardon me, but your husband is showing.”  …and, “Statistics show that there are more women in the world than anything else.  Except insects.”)  In between zingers, the plot moves on in the background, but it’s only a clothesline on which to hang the arguments between Gilda and Johnny.  In that respect, it’s like a John Wick film: you’re not there for the plot, you’re there for the action.  It’s entertaining as hell, don’t get me wrong, but they are so good at being despicable to each other that I found myself hoping they DIDN’T wind up together.  Talk about a match made in hell.  Do they deserve each other?  Discuss.

Gilda robustly lives up to the film noir tradition, in style, substance, and story, RIGHT up until the last two or three minutes, when the darkness gives way to the major-chord strings of “happily ever after.”  For that, I personally can’t call it perfect.  But holy black strapless gown, Batman…as they say at Passover, for that alone we should be grateful.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

By Marc S. Sanders

Blanche Dubois emerges from the steam of a New Orleans bus depot.  She looks worn and lost, but she once felt confidence in the glamour she evoked in and out of her family’s Mississippi estate called Belle Reve.   Now, with the aid of a chivalrous Navy shipman, she’ll board A Streetcar Named Desire to visit her sister Stella and her husband Stanley Kowalski.  The estate is no longer owned by the Dubois family, and Blanche has given up being a teacher.  Blanche will be staying in the French Quarter ground floor apartment for quite some time, though no one knows how long.  Her life is stuffed in a large trunk with some fashionable suitcases in tow, and an infinite variety of colorful storytelling.

Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize winning play was a smash on Broadway and though it is checkered with, at the time, questionable topics ranging from mental illness to domestic abuse and rape, it was a smash hit on Broadway.  Other than Jessica Tandy, the majority of the play’s cast was hired for Elia Kazan’s film adaptation.  Marlon Brando, not yet a box office star, is the brutish and sexually appealing Stanley Kowalski, arguably one of his top five best performances.  Kim Hunter presumed her role as Stella, the meek wife against Stanley’s hulking build.  Karl Malden played Harold “Mitch” Mitchell.  Hunter and Malden won Oscars for their performances.

Vivien Leigh was the top billed actor, replacing Tandy, in the Oscar winning role of Blanche.  Leigh is working very hard throughout the course of the picture with long winded rants about what became of her teaching career and Belle Reve, along with her tales of conquests with all sorts of men.  At times she reaches into her trunk for the guise of a southern genteel lady with enormous amounts of experience behind her.  

Stella is concerned with her older sister’s behavior, but tolerant if it brings her comfort.  It’s clear that Blanche is not well.  

As he tries to uphold his drunken control over Stella while hosting Mitch and the guys for nightly poker games, Stanley is only agitated by Blanche’s intrusion.  He sees through all of his sister in law’s stories and is certain, as a husband to Stella, he has earned the right and proper possession of whatever monies and assets were collected from the ownership transfer of Belle Reve.

As the rundown two-bedroom Kowalski apartment is intentionally small and cramped, Kazan’s film often operates like a stage play.  There are some editing tricks like weaving echoed voices and triggering sounds to stimulate Blanche’s paranoia, along with a sleepy soundtrack to deliver a quiet, sticky, muggy jazz ambience, normally associated with the Square.  Even in the black and white photography of the film, you don’t have to try looking for the perspiration on Stanley and Mitch’s shirts and brows.  The heat also works towards Blanche’s moments of delusion.  

Early on, I had problems with Vivien Leigh’s portrayal.  She’s talking a mile a minute and had I not read Williams’ original play ahead of time I’d be listening to her with no idea of what she’s talking about.  I realize that’s the point, however.  When Blanche arrives, Stella is as confused because her sister is going off in so many fast-talking directions all at once.  Kim Hunter’s Stella is trying to keep up but fails to stay with Blanche.

Even though, his portrayal has been satirized too often (“STELLA!!!!”), Marlon Brando gives one his best performances.  He’s a giant on screen with a stylish, messy, short mousse-soaked hairstyle and t-shirts that adhere to his large torso.  This performance is unforgettable. Kazan’s set up of the apartment has old junk strewn about the place, but Brando can easily find a prop to vent his frustration or deliver frightening in-your-face anger and tantrums. As patterned mentality so often demonstrates, Brando is very skillful at turning his animalistic behavior into false regret and whiny need for his wife Stella to embrace his hulking mass and stay with him. As long as Stella comes back and holds him, he can carry on with his abuse and dominance. I never joke about Brando’s famous scene. It’s raw and natural. For Stella’s sake, it’s also terribly offensive and inappropriate. Yet, that’s Stanley. Marlon Brando knew that too well.

Elia Kazan had artistic challenges with this film.  Religious boards were insisting Warner Bros remove the film from distribution.  The studio’s compromise was to edit the film to appeal to organizations and general audiences. To his dismay, Kazan was unable to deliver the Final Cut as he envisioned.  At last, however, the film company recanted that order and in the late 1980s. Kazan’s original picture was released as intended.  

So interesting to watch Tennessee Williams’ story unfold for everyone to see.  As Stanley is a former Marine, I believe Williams was striving to show the never discussed diagnoses of PTSD.  Compared to today’s standards, the violence primarily committed by Brando’s character is nothing alarming and yet it builds tension every time he’s on screen.  To a movie going public, this is unfamiliar territory.  

Kazan deliberately made the set of the apartment smaller as filming persisted. This tactic evoked a cramped and claustrophobic lifestyle for Blanche and Stanley under one roof.  Making it smaller and smaller as the making of the movie went on, showed the troubled characters feel more pressured and inhibited, trapped among each other’s poisons. The characters cannot help but live practically on top of each other.  The tension amplifies with each passing scene until it all comes to a shocking boil.

Stanley Kowalski and Blanche Dubois are a dangerous cocktail of different abnormalities clashing together with a helpless Stella caught in the middle and a shy, introverted Mitch looking in the wrong direction for a healthy dose of companionship.  These characters are very complicated with sudden shifts in mood and behavior.  Often, Kazan will have the characters emerge from dark voids into straight up-close frames.  One moment characters feel like they’ll pet you.  Other times, they look like they’re about to strike. Kazan strategically knows how to use the dark shadows of black and white photography to emote an assortment of personality.  It’s amazing, and something much more overt here than on stage or within the script.  Even when Blanche takes advantage of a young man who arrives on the Kowalski doorstep, we see the animal instincts of the woman about to pounce on innocent, unsuspecting prey.  Since it is often challenging to comprehend Blanche’s actions and rambling dialogue it’s all the more shocking to witness how she takes advantage of the young man when no one else is around.

The palpable discomfort of A Streetcar Named Desire upholds Tennessee Williams’ famous play.  Exploring the film in present day, his work defies changes in culture and mutual treatment because people are much more open and less remorseful about their sins.  Statutory rapes committed by teachers are reported nearly every month.  Alcoholism has never changed since the addiction first occurred long before this was a movie.  Here, the disease serves as a fuel to engines of tempers and weaknesses. 

Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams knew what buttons to push, resulting in an ending that still feels too hard to accept.  During the epilogue of the story, two strangers appear at the Kowalski home.  Who could they be and what are their intentions?  

For 1952, all of the gratuitous natures of the characters seem extreme and disturbing.  Tame compared to any kind of material coming out in 2026, following Presidential administrations where sex is weaponized and psychological research has been researched with viable proof for specific ailments.  Kazan’s film with Williams’ script seems pioneering.  How many other storytellers were going this far with their projects?

A Streetcar Named Desire will always be a classic passed down to future generations.  It’s fair to say that other than the black and white cinematography, very little of the film feels outdated.  Sadly, much of what is shown is authentic to details of domestic violence with smashed dishes, broken radios and torn t-shirts.

Tennessee Williams never explores why these people are this way.  Instead, he demonstrated that people are this way, and outside stimulants will only exacerbate personal challenges.  

A vehicle, such as a city streetcar trolley, of any form or embodiment will deliver a fly in an ointment.  People have all kinds of ways to respond thereafter, and some will never be able to find that vehicle to drive them back towards a peaceful salvation.  That is the sadness of A Streetcar Named Desire.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

By Marc S. Sanders

Not one of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films are alike.  In each picture, the characters speak differently.  They specialize in areas completely separate from anything else.  The porn industry is a far cry from oil drilling for example, and neither has any commonality with that of independent American revolutionaries, as featured in One Battle After Another.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Pat Calhoun, a determined underling of a revolutionary band known as the French 75. Their will is to free illegal immigrants from a California fenced lock up, or plant mild explosives in government buildings or rob banks as modern day Robin Hoods.  It’s all one battle after another. Each mission seems to be executed more for the excitement and thrill, rather than any kind of just cause.

Together with Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, and yes, that is the character’s name, Perfidia Beverly Hills) he bears a daughter named Charlene (Chase Infinity).  Though Pat wants to assume a new identity and settle down, Perfidia opts to continue with her purpose.  When she is apprehended, she is persuaded to disclose the whereabouts of her fellow comrades.  In exchange, Perfidia is granted witness protection. Exactly, who and what did the figurehead of one Perfidia Beverly Hills stand for?

One Battle After Another carries a long prologue that sets up all of these characters.  Once they go in different directions, Anderson’s film jumps forward sixteen years later when Charlene is an optimistic teenager yearning to be a regular student at public school.  The school dance is on her mind. Her father Pat is paranoid of her being out and does not take kindly to the kids she’s hanging with. Despite the weird makeup and piercings, there’s really nothing wrong with them. At least Charlene is not so apt to take any of her dad’s paranoia seriously.

Colonel Stephen J Lockjaw (a great character name for an antagonist), played by Sean Penn, carries an intimidating, militant focus.  He leads the charge against the French 75.  He ensures capture or death in the field to halt their activities.  His vice, though, is specifically his obsession with Perfidia.  Yet, the tryst he shared with her can never be revealed if he is to pass the recruitment test for entry into the very exclusive, white supremacist organization known as The Christmas Adventurers Club.  

Pat has trained his daughter to respond to certain codes, and to be alert if a pocket device should ever light up as an emergency.  Ironically, Pat, now known as Bob, can’t even remember all of the code speak.  Too much pot smoking and laziness has numbed his senses.  Lockjaw has zeroed in on Pat, and particularly Charlene who actually may be his daughter.  It’s important he locate her because her skin color could compromise his reputation and his chances of joining the Club.

I was eager to see One Battle After Another when it was first released in theaters.  It had been getting very good word of mouth, and other than a few exceptions, I’ve been a big admirer of Anderson’s work.  Regrettably, in a comfortable Dolby theatre with the best sound system available, I could not help but fall asleep.  When I watched the film on HBO MAX, a few months later though I was exhilarated.

The film seems to start in the middle of an already long-winded story.  The prologue hops around from one mission of the French 75 to another and there is minimal character development.  None of the dialogue is special either. On a first viewing I think it’s challenging to piece together who is who, what they stand for, what they mean to one another, and what becomes of them.

When the script jumps sixteen years later, the picture serves like a straight out chase story with a callously cold “Javert” seeking out his “Jean Valjean” who hides with his adopted “Cosette.” The last two thirds of One Battle After Another seem to start an entirely new movie.  

A common tactic of Anderson is to rapidly swing his camera with a kinetic and urgent pace; minimal cuts.  This especially drives his film as the pursuit is depicted with fear, desperation and unintended comedy.  Poor Pat, or “Bob” cannot recall how to accurately reply to the code speak on the other end of a telephone line.  He’s separated from Charlene, and Lockjaw is figuring everything out beginning with discovering underground tunnels located in the rendezvous town that many former members of the French 75 have taken up shelter. Benicio Del Toro, as a karate instructor, is one of the people. He’s a mentor for young Charlene.

I’m not sure if Paul Thomas Anderson is trying to deliver any kind of thought-provoking message.  Though he associates Sean Penn’s character with white supremacists, I cannot naturally accept that Anderson is saying this gang of powerful, tuxedoed men of a wealthy one percent adhere to any political party or agenda.  As well, Anderson does not seem to be applauding the actions of Perfidia, Pat, or the French 75, whose mantra especially falls apart when an innocent casualty is killed by one member’s hand.  

One Battle After Another could simply be a blender mix of ideas with blind missionary work from all of these different sects.  None of these soldiers serve a greater good.  Their arguments only work to hammer back at whoever has disdain for the other.  No one is inspiring anything that will promise a better future for America.

As I write this review, it occurs to me that perhaps Paul Thomas Anderson demonstrates that whatever action people like Pat and Perfidia or Lockjaw commit, it’s all but defeatist. Eventually, the cause wisps away, but the battle must persist. The battle is all these people have and live to serve, not a resolution or even a conquest. Fight, accomplish, and now what’s next?

One Battle After Another is not Paul Thomas Anderson’s best work, though it is exciting to watch with outstanding editing as a car chase arrives near the end of the story. I cannot say I was taken with any of the performances. Penn and DiCaprio are living up to the demands of their characters but there’s nothing outwardly sensational in what they are doing here. I’m also perplexed by the raves that Del Toro is getting for this film. It’s a small role with little to do. I do not recall one moment of acting greatness, nor a memorable line from his part.

Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti deliver breakout performances, however. Infiniti, in the role of the daughter, shows vulnerability, and later strength, when the story calls for it. Watch the fear and drive when she reunites with DiCaprio’s character on a barren road in the desert. She’s got a real intensity in her eyes and expressions. Taylor seems like she’s a heroine yanked from a Tarantino picture. A really impactful performance whose biggest contribution is in the beginning of the film. Sean Penn is a good scene partner for her.

Released in 2025, One Battle After Another seems like it would be ripped from the everyday headlines of ICE activities, government protests, and the revolts against those missions. I feel like Anderson’s film only gives a small glimpse into these very complex worlds, though. Other pictures like Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Phantom Thread are much more expansive with their universes of unusual industries like pornography, Hollywood social stature and the demands of dress making artistry.

I guess I’m saying I really didn’t learn much from One Battle After Another. So, forgive for saying that I’m underwhelmed.