"The Lost City of Z" is the adventure film to see this year.

The Lost City of Z, directed by James Gray, depicts the life of the English adventurer Percy Fawcett (played by Charlie Hunnam). In the early 1900s, Fawcett embarked on several expeditions to South America in search of an alleged Amazonian civilization which he called “Zed.” The Lost City of Z, which is a classic adventure tale punctuated with humanism, is a meditation on exploration, masculinity, empire, and, ultimately, humanity. The film juxtaposes the supposed savagery of ancient tribes of Amazonian people with the supposed civilization of the Victorian English, and shots of their starched suits and tea services and their stuffy meetings in stuffy rooms frequently fade into vistas of humid jungles and the winding Amazon, where Fawcett and his team of fellow adventurers (including Costin, his right-hand man, who’s played by Robert Pattinson, concealed beneath a great bird’s nest of a beard) encounter people who’ve seldom, if ever, observed white flesh before.

Gray paints a vivid picture of the post-Victorian English world and all its political and social problems, without succumbing to preachiness. Or, perhaps it is a new kind of preachiness, one that feels more palatable than direct soapboxing. When Fawcett’s wife Nina (Sienna Miller, giving a fine, tough performance) asks to come along with Percy on his second voyage, he lectures her on a woman’s role in the family (in this case, to stay behind and pick up the pieces if he never comes back) and on women’s inherent physical inferiority, unconvinced by his wife even after she’s born him three children. Nina relents. Gray isn’t telling us what to think, but he’s conscious of the wrong-headed thinking of the period.

And the allure of male power and the lies of empire remain a dominant force in the world even today. But part of Gray’s talent as an artist is his ability to depict humans in all their complexity. On the third, fateful voyage, Percy’s now-grown son Jack accompanies him, and when they realize they may never return to England, a kind of mystical peace sweeps over Percy as he reflects on the deeper implications of their journey: they’ve left all the silly, superficial machinations of society behind and have discovered something primally beautiful and true: the inherent mystery of life, and the immutability of destiny.

Gray has a healthy love for the adventure genre, and he provides the usual touches we’ve come to expect from these movies (going all the way back to Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines): the bugs, the storms, the snakes, the raging river, as men seemingly travel back in time to confront some kind of mystical destiny. In one scene, the men are forced to jump out of their raft to avoid the sharp arrows being fired at them by natives, only to be accosted by a school of piranha. As I think back upon this scene, what strikes me most is Gray’s elegance even in the midst of something as frightening as this moment. Those arrows swoop down like little rockets: he shows us just how terrifying it would be to face a shower of pointy spears coming down on you; and yet, Gray resists the urge to sensationalize this moment. (In my mind, I couldn’t help thinking of that 1978 horror movie, Piranha, which probably added to the tension.)

The intensity lasts but a minute, and then they’re back on the raft, back on their long, long journey into the unknown. These moments of sensationalized terror, which would be the high points of an Indiana Jones movie, are not the focal point of Z. The thrill of discovery drives Fawcett on, despite the man-eating fish and the spear-throwing natives and the bugs and the starvation.

But within that act of discovery is the deeper realization that, as Fawcett says in the movie, the world is unknown to us; there is so little that we really know, so much left undiscovered. The obsessive need to understand everything is probably folly, and probably arrogance, as Gray’s film shows us often: Fawcett himself is a man dogged by feelings of inadequacy (his father was a notorious drunkard that left a blight on the family name); we see him in the beginning of the film rounding up a bunch of Irish soldiers as they hunt for a sleek, impressive buck in the woods; It’s Fawcett’s gun that kills the animal dead, but at the party of Irish and English military personnel, Fawcett’s excluded from the honorary table with the big dogs, because he’s from a bad family.

It’s English class snobbery which initially compels Fawcett into the South American jungle, even though his smart, independent, and loving wife Nina knows she may never see him again. Each time he comes back to England is like a dream: another child has been more, each of them discovering their father like some phantom, whom they’ve only heard about. When Jack, the eldest boy, by now an adolescent, who’s watched his father go off on multiple failed missions to the Amazon, jeers, “You’re a failure!” and Percy strikes him, we’re stunned, but not surprised. Empire is nothing but the perpetuation of fatherly dominion taken to the macro level, and we can imagine a million English fathers experiencing similar feelings of dissatisfaction and failure in turn-of-the-century England.

The Lost City of Z recalls Martin Scorsese’s difficult but unforgettable film, Silence, the story of two 17th-century Jesuit priests searching for their mentor, a priest who left for Japan (where Christians are being killed for refusing to denounce their faith) and has never come back. These young priests confront their own doubts as they search for the man who gave their faith its meaning. Both of these films examine the dangerousness of inquiry: When Percy Fawcett argues for the existence of an ancient civilization in South America, he rattles the calcified hearts and minds of the old fogies at the Royal Geographic Society, threatening British religion with British rationality.

The Lost City of Z ponders these questions with poetic grace. Gray isn’t dogmatic or pedantic: he cares deeply for these characters, as he cared for Marion Cotillard’s prostitute in The Immigrant, a woman who went to confession and wondered if God could ever forgive her for the things she had done to help get her sister out of Ellis Island. Z goes one step further, in a sense, by wondering if we can dismantle our own beliefs and still look around us with a sense of dazzled wonder at the world, even though our own smallness becomes increasingly obvious. In James Gray’s films, the answer is yes. Or as Nina Fawcett puts it, “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.”

Co-starring Tom Holland as the grown-up Jack Fawcett; Angus Macfayden as a wealthy British explorer who betrays Fawcett and his men; Edward Ashley, Ian McDiarmid, Franco Nero, and Harry Melling.

An Evening with John Waters

John Waters still has it: that gleeful transgressiveness that makes him one of the most delightful personalities working in entertainment today. Nowadays, Waters does a lot of touring (because making movies has become almost impossibly expensive). Last night, Waters came to Jacksonville and treated a sold-out theater to a live commentary of his 1994 film Serial Mom, the deliciously nutty Kathleen Turner vehicle, in which she plays a suburban Baltimore housewife who becomes addicted to murder. The event was held at Jacksonville’s beloved independent movie theater, Sun-Ray Cinema, as part of their inaugural Sleeping Giant film festival.

Sun-Ray Cinema has been working hard to bring a vibrant film culture to the city of Jacksonville, and last night was a reminder that they’ve more than accomplished their goal. All this weekend, movie-goers can attend a variety of eclectic film programming at Sun-Ray, ranging from new release features and documentaries to repertory films, including Serial Mom, Donnie Darko, and the Herschel Gordon Lewis exploitation classic Blood Feast. (You can check out the festival’s website for more information about the schedule for this weekend.)

Of course, the pièce de résistance of any event is the appearance of John Waters, the Prince of Puke, the Pope of Trash, the Duke of Dirt. A man whose movies have delighted and enraged movie-lovers (and movie-haters) for decades. (Also, have you read his books? They’re fantastic.) Waters appears in a bright-orange-red suit with a red tie (he has always possessed a sense of fashion daring), and suddenly I’m ashamed for coming to this event in a t-shirt and shorts like some cretin; where is the reverence that our self-called “Filth Elder” deserves? In fact, I’m amazed Sun-Ray Cinema patrons didn’t burn incense, and imbibe the elements (a single leaf of arugula, which is what John Waters says he would have for his last meal, were he ever given the death penalty), for this movie-goers' mass, a sacred night in any psychotic cinephile's calendar. But I digress.

As the production logo appeared, Waters remarked, “That company [Savoy Pictures, which financed Serial Mom] is out of business. Probably partly because of this movie.” The audience laughed; we cheered every time a familiar name appeared on the screen: Kathleen Turner, Ricki Lake, and of course, the Dreamland players, performers who’ve been working in John Waters’ movies for years, such as the great Mink Stole, and more recent Dreamlanders like Patty Hearst (playing a jury member here). As the names of longtime collaborators behind the camera appeared, Waters spoke fondly of them: the now-deceased costume designer Van Smith, production designer Vincent Peranio, and his longtime friend and casting director Pat Moran, who’s made a name for herself in their native city Baltimore. These people are part of a cult that any self-respecting Waters fan wishes he or she could belong to. 

John Waters was seated in the front of the auditorium, illuminated under a slightly green spotlight, the perfect color for a man like Waters, who made his reputation with offensive, naughty, “sick” movies like Multiple Maniacs (1970) (recently re-released in theaters and now on Criterion Blu Ray and DVD), Pink Flamingos (1972), and of course, his more mainstream films Hairspray (1988) and Cry-Baby (1990). 

I was just a kid when I accidentally discovered John Waters, in a book about midnight movies; at the time, I was obsessed with Night of the Living Dead, another cult classic, and read any book which even mentioned that movie; after reading and re-reading the chapter on Night, I began exploring the rest of the book, which contained chapters on films such as El Topo, Eraserhead, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and of course, Pink Flamingos, opening my eyes to a film world I never knew existed. 

Who is this man? I wondered. Part of me was deeply alarmed. But the other part of me was fascinated. Like most suburban kids of the 80s and 90s, I bided my time until I was able to seek these movies out. 

Serial Mom is one of John Waters’ best films. Waters himself said last night that it is his best-made, “because we actually had enough money.” Even though his early, guerilla films possess a certain magical lunacy that can never be reproduced, the fact that Serial Mom had an actual budget, and the fact that it came later in Waters’ career, after he had learned so much more about not only the craft of filmmaking but the business of filmmaking, means we are seeing an artistic mind at its peak. All of the transgression is here, but merged with an eye for detail that finally has the means to reach its fullest expression. 

We see Waters’ artful eye in the construction of the first murder scene, when Beverly Sutphin runs over her son’s high school math teacher (after a conference in which he criticized her son’s obsession with horror movies and suggested she was a bad mother). This scene has a demented rhythm all its own as the camera cuts between Turner’s maniacal rage, the spinning wheels of her blue station wagon (a hilarious concept for a murder car), and the terrified expression on the teacher’s face right before he’s squashed to death like a cabbage that’s fallen off a produce truck. His chewing gum falls out of his mouth as Mrs. Sutphin skids away, a visual gag that reinforces her character's bizarre sense of moral outrage: She hates chewing gum. Earlier in the movie, she asks a detective to remove his gum before entering her home; it’s an offense (like not brushing your teeth or wearing your seatbelt) that will get you killed in Serial Mom.

Indeed, Beverly is dictated by her own feverish, psychotic sense of morality. When people break her code, she exacts severe punishment, and the more Beverly plays executioner, the more she likes the power it gives her. Is she insane, or simply more consistent than the rest of us? Beverly’s son Chip, played by Matthew Lillard, works at a video store (the real-life Video America, a now-defunct store in Baltimore), which gives him easy access to trashy horror movies. But Beverly doesn’t find his obsession with gore flicks the least bit troubling. It’s the self-righteous assholes, like the stodgy customer who refuses to rewind videotapes, that piss Beverly off. And Beverly isn’t someone to wait around for the slow-burn effects of the justice system, or Karma. Beverly beats the video store customer to death with a leg of lamb while she’s watching the musical Annie. (“That [Annie] cost us $40,000 dollars,” Waters observes; “It was worth it.”) In a John Waters movie, capital punishment is reserved for people with bad taste in movies. 

What makes Serial Mom so great is two things: its wickedly sharp depiction of suburban American culture (and how suburban people really are insane, only their madness disguises itself as banality), and its ingenuous attack on suburban American morality. The morals of suburban America enshrine blandness, safety, and cleanliness above all things; any thought or desire which transgresses against these values is deemed a dangerous, infesting disease; and enjoying even the slightest bad behavior (like Beverly getting a kick out of making obscene phone calls to her prudish yet Tourette's-inflicted neighbor Mink Stole), can lead to greater and greater crimes. 

Today, Serial Mom is more relevant than ever, in this age of fake news and Trump’s politics of chaos. (The caption at the beginning of the movie assures us that the events of the film are completely true; Waters laughs to himself, saying, “People actually believe this.”) In the big courtroom scene at the end of Serial Mom, Beverly defends herself against accusations of murder. Beverly fools the judge and the jury, even the media, although her family knows, deep down, that she’s completely bonkers. When the not-guilty verdict is announced, Beverly beams across the courtroom at her husband, played by Sam Waterston, whose face is a such a perfect blend of relief and horror that the audience erupts in giddy laughter. 

By the end of the night, my face hurt from laughing, and I felt a remarkable sense of relief. I think everyone in the theater did. Serial Mom is the kind of movie we desperately need more than ever, because it gives us permission to laugh at (and criticize) the ridiculousness of our own world. John Waters, and his movies, have always provided a visceral liberation from the constraints of reality. I suspect they always will.

Jordan Peele's smart, scary "Get Out" taps into a terrifying world of white devils.

Get Out, a savvy, unpredictable comic-horror film written and directed by actor and comedian Jordan Peele of Key and Peele fame, opens on a stately suburban neighborhood at night, where a young black man is walking to a house, feeling disoriented in an ostensibly white neighborhood. Cinematically speaking, of course, this neighborhood feels familiar, as though Peele had found and recaptured the same shooting locations of John Carpenter’s Halloween, a film which subverts the cozy banality of suburbia and turns it into a venue for nightmares: the big houses and the maze-like streets lined with tall, massive trees. Carpenter introduced the Boogeyman into this otherwise safe place as a dangerous outside force disturbing the peace; in Get Out, the Boogeyman isn’t a stranger, but a resident, and the silence isn’t the presence of peace, maybe just the absence of life.

Jordan Peele possesses a keen understanding for how the horror genre works, and his nods to John Carpenter continue in this scene as an ominous (white) car sidles up next to the unsuspecting young man, and we know, instantly, that the driver of this car is a threat. “Not tonight,” the young man keeps saying, feeling nervous and instinctively expecting trouble, and redirecting himself, away from the car. But it’s already too late. The director’s use of visual trickery, not to mention his talent for building suspense, give us a pleasurably tingly feeling. Thrillers work best when we feel we’re in the hands of a capable filmmaker, and with Get Out, Jordan Peele proves himself more than capable.

In an era when the horror genre seems mostly exhausted (sidetracked by countless demon possession thrillers and mostly forgettable remakes and reinventions), Jordan Peele has fashioned something unique: a racially tense thriller where the black guy is the victim-hero, a reinvention of the Jamie Lee Curtis character in Halloween. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya, giving a fine, perfectly measured performance), a Brooklyn photographer, has been dating Rose (Allison Williams), a rather typical, boring-ass white girl, for five months.

Nothing captures whiteness quite like the image of Rose, sitting in her bedroom, eating dry Fruit Loops in a bowl and drinking a tall glass of milk through a straw as “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” blasts from her earbuds and she looks up pictures of shirtless, musclebound black men on Bing (!). We may be wondering what Chris sees in Rose, until an incident with a police officer, who clearly exhibits hostility toward Chris, reassures us: Rose stands up for her man, and the policeman backs down. And now they’re off to the country to meet Rose’s family. But it’s clear from almost the moment Chris steps foot inside their secluded, perfectly manicured brick house that Mom and Dad (played by Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford with a chilling degree of restrained hostility) are shifty, that Rose has misjudged them when she assures Chris that “they are not racist.” After all, they voted for Obama: the new white proof against prejudice.

The parents are well-educated professionals: Mom is a shrink who specializes in hypnosis, and Dad is a neurosurgeon. But these learned white liberals, it turns out, are just as scary as any blue-collar white conservatives. Mr. and Mrs. Armitage have invited a bunch of old (and I do mean old) friends over for the evening, and these guests exhibit a creepy fascination with Chris: one old man asks him about his golf swing and waxes on about his love of Tiger Woods; one woman grips Chris’s bicep, gushing over his muscles. Another lady, standing beside her frail, oxygen-tank-carrying husband, asks an embarrassed Rose: “Is it true? Is it better?” (Meaning, the stereotype about black men in the bedroom.) Chris is a specimen, the embodiment of white fantasies of blackness, whether it’s the thrill of being ravaged by a “black beast” or the lust after his perceived physical and athletic superiority.

The Armitages have a pair of black servants: Walter and Georgina (played by Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel), and they are the Black Stepford wives, creepily cheerful and uptight, and about as formal in their speech as the Queen of England. Both Georgina and Walter walk around as if in a fog: she keeps house, he tends to the grounds, and they serve their “masters” with the utmost devotion, unless something upsets them, like when a tear rolls down Georgina’s cheek, and we know, although we cannot quite put our finger on it, that something has control of her, that the real Georgina has been captured and locked away, screaming and crying out, but unable to communicate the terrifying truth.

The same is true of Logan (LaKeith Stanfield), the only other black guest at the party, who’s the apparent husband of a white woman more than twice his age. Logan dresses and talks and walks like a prep school kid turned law student, studying for the bar in between bouts of pleasuring his lustful white cougar-woman. But when Chris snaps Logan’s picture, the flash of his phone triggers a violent, frantic outburst: Logan rushes at Chris with his arms outreached in agony, pleading with him to leave. Again it feels like the real “Logan” has been a prisoner all this time, momentarily freed, it seems, by the flash of a camera.

Peele uses all kinds of smart visuals and sounds to make us jump, and to paint suggestions in our minds: the flash of the camera, the sound of Catherine Keener clinking her teacup with a spoon (which puts Chris into a trance), the close-up shot of Georgina, a harried battle raging inside her mind between her true self and the brainwashed/hypnotized self: tears stream down her face as she locks into a smile, repeating “No. No. No.” But Peele doesn’t give in by explaining everything away. He’s planted enough clues, and plotted Get Out so masterfully, that exposition is basically unnecessary, and that’s the mark of a good director.

The premise behind Peele’s film is a canny metaphor for how white people have taken everything from black people. During their drive to the house in the country, a deer jumps in front of their car. After they have investigated the damage to Rose’s vehicle, Chris stares forlornly at the dying creature as it utters haunting cries. Right then, we know that this deer is Chris. Later, when he’s being held prisoner inside a wood-paneled game room with a retro television set, Chris stares at the glassy-eyed head of a buck mounted on the wall. That’s what Chris is to these people: a creature to be conquered, an assortment of valuable abilities and strengths to be harnessed, a commodity to be fetishized.

With Lil Rel Howery, who provides comic relief (and good advice, like the title phrase) as Rod, Chris's best friend, and a TSA employee; also featuring Caleb Landry Jones and Stephen Root. Written by the director.