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They’re all beautiful, exquisitely dressed and vapid, the foreigners who’ve traipsed across the Moroccan desert for a weekend of debauchery in “ The Forgiven .”

Regardless of their marital status, sexual orientation, or country of origin, these people are awful without exception. There’s not a redeeming one in the bunch, not one you’d want to spend time with—well, maybe Christopher Abbott , because he’s the hardest to pin down, and so his terrible traits aren’t quite so pronounced. He also looks quite dashing in a dinner jacket. It’s that kind of party—at least until they start doing lines of coke on the coffee table.

Writer/director John Michael McDonagh wants us to feel scorn as he satirizes the racism and classism of wealthy Westerners exploiting the Middle East as an exotic destination. They don’t view the locals as human beings, as a deadly accident will reveal, and they don’t have much time for the Moroccans’ feelings or traditions. They’re merely dipping a toe in this world and ignoring the damage they’ve left in their wake. And McDonagh, in adapting Lawrence Osborne ’s 2012 novel, uses their blunt dialogue as a cudgel as if their actions alone weren’t sufficient. There may not be much to these people, but they’re constantly declaring their emptiness in the most articulate ways.

“I like it here,” says Abbott as New York financial analyst Tom Day. “It feels like a country where a useless man could be happy.” Or as a celebrated Moroccan novelist played by Imane El Mechrafi puts it: “People disappear here. They just vanish.”

But in Ralph Fiennes ’ character, McDonagh presents the possibility for evolution and even redemption. By then, though, it may be too late.

Fiennes’ David and Jessica Chastain ’s Jo are a miserably married couple who’ve traveled from London to visit an old friend of theirs: Richard (a sneering Matt Smith ), who’s renovating a sprawling villa four hours outside Tangier with his American partner, a day-drunk named Dally ( Caleb Landry Jones ). We can tell quickly that their marriage is fraying from their bored expressions and the way they low-key bicker when David polishes off a bottle of white wine at the hotel. There’s no spark in this fight: It just feels like habit. (This is a very different husband-and-wife dynamic from the one Fiennes and Chastain shared in “ Coriolanus .”) So when they find themselves lost and confused during the long, nighttime drive to Richard’s remote estate—and accidentally run over an impoverished teenager selling fossils on the side of the road, killing him instantly—the trauma is certain to worsen that rift.

But first, David and Jo have a soiree to attend where they have to pretend that everything is fine. Other guests include Abbey Lee as an Aussie party girl who jumps in the pool in her sequined dress; Marie-Josee Croze as a sanctimonious French photographer who makes broad generalizations about Americans; and Alex Jennings as a British lord who arrives late with a posse of pretty, much-younger women in tow.

They are careless people, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald—until the boy’s father shows up from his village to make David care, at least. Ismael Kanater plays Abdellah in a performance that seems bravely quiet and stoic at first, almost stereotypical, but eventually he reveals a simmering sorrow and rage. Abdellah insists that David return with him to his home to help bury the boy, named Driss, as is their custom. David’s immediate reaction reveals his bigotry: “They might be f**king Isis for all I know.” But eventually he relents, with the intention of only being gone overnight and paying this family off—reluctantly—for their trouble.

From here, McDonagh (brother of Martin McDonagh , the writer of “ In Bruges ” and “ Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri ”) alternates between David’s journey toward forgiveness and the drunken antics back at the villa. As the guests trade bitchy bon mots between sips of their cocktails—and Jo enjoys a fun, sexy flirtation with Tom while her husband’s away—David learns from his exposure to this family and begins to accept the error of his ways.

One situation is just as superficial as the other, though. There’s precious little to any of these characters, and so the possibility that they might change at all because of this traumatic series of events feels unearned. Chastain is cool and glamorous as Jo, who had the foresight to bring multiple pairs of designer sunglasses for this weekend jaunt to the middle of nowhere. And having worked with the likes of Aaron Sorkin , Chastain clearly knows her way around this kind of muscular dialogue. But beyond her impeccable appearance and the fact that she used to be a children’s book author, we know nothing about her. There are no stakes when it becomes clear that Jo’s entire life is about to be thrown into flux; it’s more of a passing curiosity, like her dalliance with Tom.

McDonagh’s film is well-crafted throughout but ultimately has nothing fresh or insightful to say about the ugliness of white privilege. It’s like attending a weekend bacchanal and forgetting what happened once Monday morning rolls around, or perhaps not wanting to remember.

Now playing in theaters.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

The Forgiven (2022)

117 minutes

Ralph Fiennes as David Henninger

Jessica Chastain as Jo Henninger

Matt Smith as Richard Galloway

Caleb Landry Jones as Dally Margolis

Abbey Lee as Cody

Christopher Abbott as Tom Day

Marie-Josée Croze as Isabelle

Alex Jennings as Lord Swanthorne

Saïd Taghmaoui as Anouar

David McSavage as William Joyce

John Michael McDonagh

Writer (novel)

Lawrence Osborne

Cinematographer

Larry Smith
Elizabeth Eves
Lorne Balfe

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Wonderful film noir feels like something straight out of the 1940s..

An American writer (Jessica Chastain) and her British doctor husband (Ralph Fiennes) arrive in Morocco for an opulent party in “The Forgiven.”

Roadside Attractions/Vertical Entertainment

Not only are “The Forgiven” leads Jessica Chastain and Ralph Fiennes among our very best actors, they have a timeless quality that leads one to believe they’d be stars in any era. I can easily picture Fiennes in a supporting role in, say, “Casablanca” (1942), while Chastain would seem right at home in a picture such as “Gilda” (1946) or “House of Strangers” (1949).

Chastain and Fiennes are perfectly cast as a privileged married couple who might still love each other but clearly can’t stand each other in John Michael McDonagh’s dark and lurid Moroccan film noir “The Forgiven,” which is set in present day but if we take out the cell phones and a few other modern touches, this, too, has a timeless quality and feels like something straight out of the 1940s. It’s a wonderful movie about mostly terrible people who treat the death of a local boy as an inconvenience that interrupts their weekend getaway and must be dealt with, and what a bother the whole thing is — and it’s that kind of attitude that can lead to some dire comeuppances.

Shot on location in Morocco (with a six-month pause in production due to the pandemic), based on a 2012 novel by Lawrence Osborne and lensed in beautiful fashion by director McDonagh and cinematographer Larry Smith, “The Forgiven” begins with the American writer Jo Henninger (Chastain) and her British doctor husband of 12 years, David (Fiennes), sniping at one another as they embark on a trip to North Africa. David winces at Jo’s prattling and calls her “shrill,” while Jo calls David a “highly functional alcoholic” as he empties another bottle of wine and makes disparaging remarks about the tourists at a posh hotel where they’re biding time before setting out on a long, nighttime drive through winding desert roads in order to reach a lavishly renovated ksar in the High Atlas Mountains. This former village is now a kind of fortress/hotel owned by their wealthy and hedonistic friend Richard (Matt Smith), who with his outrageously awful boyfriend Dally (Caleb Landry Jones) is hosting an opulent weekend gathering.

By this time, we’ve also met a boy named Driss (Omar Ghazaoui), who, like many of the locals, carves out a living by digging up fossils, painting and mounting them and selling them to Westerners. With a drunken David behind the wheel in the dark of night, Driss steps in front of the Henningers’ car and is struck and killed. The Henningers arrive at the resort and almost casually inform Richard that there’s a dead body in their car. While David and Jo wash up and change and then indulge in a late dinner, Richard contacts the local authorities, who rule the boy’s death an accident. All will be smoothed out, it seems — until Driss’ father, Abdellah (Ismael Kanater), arrives at the gates of the resort and requests/demands that David accompany him and the boy’s body to their village. This seems fraught with peril — “they could be ISIS!” wails Jo — but David agrees to accompany Abdellah, along with the driver-translator Anouar (Saïd Taghmaoui), who will act as the go-between and perhaps peacemaker on this long and dangerous journey.

The crisp editing takes us back and forth between David’s journey, in which he begins to see the locals and their culture as more than just background scenery for his vacation, and the nonstop partying back at the lavishly appointed castle resort. Jo feigns worry over David while embarking on an openly flirtatious assignation with a sexed-up financial analyst named Tom (Christopher Abbott), eventually dressing up in a bondage outfit, snorting cocaine and getting down to frisky business with Tom. The out-of-control Australian model Cody (Abbey Lee) gets so wasted she wakes up in the desert, hundreds of yards from the resort, while a French photographer from the New York Times Style Section chronicles the debauchery while we’re pretty sure she thinks Richard and his friends are shallow, narcissistic fools. (She’s … not wrong.)

“The Forgiven” exists in a world where the Westerners might as well be Imperialists, as they flaunt their excessive ways in view of staffers and locals who follow an entirely different way of life. Thanks to the nuanced performances by the ensemble cast and the rich writing, certain characters who seem to be narrowly defined become something more complex as the story unwinds. From the moment of the accident, David says he’s sorry for what happened, but mostly because it’s such a damn imposition. That changes along the way. Whether or not there’s time and room for David to be forgiven — I’ll leave that for you to discover. Suffice to say “The Forgiven” holds us in its grips until the very last frame.

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Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain in The Forgiven, a strange watch, but never less than compelling.

The Forgiven review – Chastain and Fiennes light up darkly comic thriller

John Michael McDonagh’s mostly entertaining adaptation of Laurence Osborne’s novel offers an unusual mix of provocation and penance

T here’s an unusual, intoxicating air to writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s latest, and splashiest, film The Forgiven, a wrong-footing combination of crime thriller, dark comedy and shaggy hangout movie. It’s a strange watch – unsure of itself at times, hugely, bullishly confident at others – but one that’s never less than curiously compelling, a mostly convincing return to form after 2016’s underwhelming War on Everyone.

Like his younger brother Martin, McDonagh’s writing is often at its best when it’s at its most deceptively simple: two characters bitching and sniping, dialogue that swiftly goes from a delicate cut to a deep wound. In his adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s acclaimed novel, his pairing is a married couple: a Brit and an American in Morocco, bored of each other and of their surroundings. David (Ralph Fiennes) is an insufferable alcoholic, spouting awful, bigoted comments about minorities, much to the chagrin of his younger eye-rolling wife Jo (Jessica Chastain), along for the ride but barely awake for it. They’re headed out to the desert for a weekend-long party at an ostentatious estate owned by an eccentric gay couple (Matt Smith, on top-tier form, and Caleb Landry Jones). But there’s an accident on the way there: David hits and kills a local boy with his car. It was dark but David had been drinking and soon the party is interrupted by a dead body and a confusion over what to do with it.

While another film would preoccupy itself with the murkiness of that dilemma, Osborne and McDonagh make the refreshing decision to move on with believable speed, for authorities to be called and for the consequences to be dealt with. It leads to a split, for David and Jo to spend the majority of the film apart as David is made to return to the family home of the dead boy and whatever potential vengeance that might follow while Jo drunkenly lounges around the extravagant home, welcoming the respite. It’s a brief shame as before they’re ripped apart, it’s fun to watch them expertly tear strips off each other, that familiar back-and-forth couple banter that’s maintained the same rat-a-tat rhythm that used to be flirtatious but has soured into a lived-in nastiness. It’s a dynamic that Jo then replicates in part with a fellow guest (Christopher Abbott), who she unashamedly flirts with, closer to her age and devoid of David’s gnarliest qualities, if not entirely so for that would be dull. David’s quest is escapist in a far less enjoyable way but insists upon him an important humbling, a perspective he’d been missing and a delayed realisation of place within the world for someone who had become so dangerously unmoored.

McDonagh’s hit-and-miss film is clearly an adaptation of a far more expansive and detailed novel (themes and supporting characters come and go with swiftness, sometimes frustratingly so) and we end up craving more rather than less (one wonders what a limited series would have looked like). The conflict between the debauched westerners turning a remote desert estate into a garishly lit orgy of strong cocktails and sexual energy (Abbey Lee’s drunk party girl is a hoot) and the locals either quietly working for them or watching with disdain from afar is spiky but pleasingly underplayed, an accepted post-9/11 tension that ultimately puts the former in the realm of wrong, even if some of them wouldn’t see their dismissive and disrespectful behaviour as cruelly ostentatious. There’s a wonderfully crass scene of fireworks, unintentionally timed for maximum awkwardness, that plays brilliantly, as does a quick impactful moment of an employee glumly throwing away an entire basket of pastries after breakfast.

Chastain, a talented actor but one who can too frequently feel miscast, is on fire here, slinking around with a drink in hand and a line of coke to be snorted, flirting and quipping her weekend away, allowed to have actual fun for once rather than the misery she’s usually lumbered with. She has a believably fresh and sexy chemistry with Abbott (even if some of their lines could do with an added zing) and equally easy to buy chemistry with Fiennes, both managing to show a sort of resigned love between their barbs (at times, she’s almost as callous as he). Fiennes is an effectively odious version of a type that often appears in both McDonagh brothers’ work – crass and offensive – veering between Islamophobia to homophobia within the sip of a dirty martini, but his foulness is met with a range of comeuppances, from local boys throwing rocks at his head after a foul rant to something far darker.

As the final act beckons, The Forgiven is perhaps, frustratingly, not quite the sum of its many parts. While the wild tonal shift between drunken excess and hollowing grief can be well-balanced and contrasted, at other times it gives the film a niggling unevenness, not helped by a rather repetitive and plain score that intrudes upon certain scenes and robs them of emotion. The film’s strange scrappy indefinability is both its blessing and curse. We’re left with pieces, interesting on their own and sometimes together, but not quite enough to complete the puzzle.

The Forgiven screened at the Toronto film festival and is released in the UK on 2 September.

Toronto film festival 2021
First look review
Toronto film festival
Jessica Chastain
Ralph Fiennes
John Michael McDonagh
Comedy films

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International Edition

Review: It’s no privilege to watch Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain bicker in ‘The Forgiven’

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Halfway through “The Forgiven” — a fussy dark comedy nestled in a sedated yet grim spiritual journey — David (Ralph Fiennes) visits the village of the Morroccan kid he murdered with his car a few days earlier. While David sulks in his victim’s humble home, his wife Jo (Jessica Chastain) parties at a lavish desert villa just a few miles away, surrounded by the bitchy elite. This is a movie that wants to skewer the rich in two ways: through David’s facing his distasteful actions and his hedonistic friends revealing their worst selves. Neither tones ever cohere.

Adapted from Lawrence Osborne’s same-titled novel, in the early going, writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s sleepy satire, “The Forgiven” reminds one of Roberto Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy.” The curmudgeon David, an alcoholic doctor recently sued by a patient for a botched diagnosis, and his younger wife Jo, a children’s book writer, bicker their way through a road trip to the luxe villa of their wealthy friend Richard (Matt Smith) and his loud, spoiled boyfriend Dally (Caleb Landry Jones).

Searching for Richard’s isolated home, the couple drive aimlessly through the Sahara. As David speeds around a dusty curve, a local boy named Driss (Omar Ghazaoui) jumps into the road and is killed by David’s car. When they arrive at Richard’s place, Jo is shaken; David is detached, nearly angered by the inconvenience. Though Richard pays off the local police, the boy’s father appears the next day. In order to atone, he requests that David accompany the boy’s body to be buried in their village while Jo remains behind. Faced with few options, David ignores the dangers — in his disgusting words: “They could be ISIS” — and relents.

Through this tragedy McDonagh aims to elucidate the callousness of colonialism: It’s telling that Richard’s other guests — a jaded French photographer (Marie-Josée Croze), a British Lord (Alex Jennings) and a philandering American financial analyst (Christopher Abbott) who eyes Jo — reside in countries with imperialist pasts. The local servants overhear their tasteless conversations concerning the bestiality of Moroccans; they witness these debased white folks consume their cultural food and artifacts as they toss around nasty barbs (thankfully the servants do get small bits of revenge). For those who enjoy viciousness, the scenes may offer a biting, cathartic release. To others, the runway for such diatribes will be short.

Ralph Fiennes and Matt Smith in "The Forgiven."

David and Jo’s verbally combative relationship adds to the barbed tone, but Fiennes and Chastain feel as though they’re acting in different movies. He’s a stiff-upper-lip Brit and she’s aping Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Red Desert.” The two styles create a kind of friction, which work in tandem, but struggle to catch fire in scenes where they’re apart, particularly for recent Oscar winner Chastain.

She’s stuck at the party, which plays as background to David’s repentant sojourn through an alluring yet decaying desert landscape. His gruff exterior begins to fade as he learns more about Driss through his grieving father (a visceral Ismael Kanater). The family subsidizes their income by digging for fossils in the desert and selling them to the West. There’s a blood diamond aspect to this economic system that favors the poverty stricken populace risking their lives to sell off their natural treasures to conniving Westerners. And a sober David begins to see his own role.

While “The Forgiven” isn’t concerned with making David a better person — rather to get him to fully grasp his guilt — McDonagh’s methods can’t distinguish the film from the long list of stories about white folks learning lessons at the expense of brown people. There may have been higher ideals in mind, but “The Forgiven” fails to gracefully reach them.

'The Forgiven'

Rating : R, for language throughout, drug use, some sexual content and brief violence Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes Playing: In general release July 1

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The Forgiven movie review: this dark comedy is determined to wipe the smile off your face

You can see what drew Ralph Fiennes to film-maker John Michael McDonagh. To judge by their work (specifically The Constant Gardener and Calvary), the pair share a fascination with passivity and self-destruction. Both themes are present with bells on in this Morocco -set comedy that’s determined to wipe the smile off your face. As a portrait of a hell on earth, The Forgiven makes every bit of the globe seem sulphurous.

Sozzled, erudite, non-PC British plastic surgeon, David Henninger (Fiennes; superb), is married to beautiful, if directionless, American, Jo (Oscar winner, Jessica Chastain ; hardly stretched, but very watchable). The couple’s wealthy friends, Richard and Dally (Matt Smith and Caleb Landry Jones; fab), have a mansion in the desert that’s perfect for debauched parties. On their way in the car to one of these events, David and Jo are involved in an unfortunate incident; they kill an Arab teenager called Driss (Omar Ghazaoui).

A few hours later, David’s cracking deliberately offensive jokes with Richard and Dally’s guests. He’s a coy bad boy, both electrified and disgusted by the attention his misbehaviour attracts (he’s terrified of becoming a vain old fool; he’s even more terrified of seeming old hat). His groan of dismay, when he’s criticised for making an “outdated” Oprah reference, is one for the ages.

Anyway, he thinks he can get away with murder. But he’s wrong. Driss’s nomad father, Abdellah (Ismael Kanater), arrives and demands that David make amends, by attending Driss’ funeral. Somewhat implausibly, David agrees. He leaves with Abdellah and Abdellah’s mate, Anouar (the sublime Said Taghmaoui). Meanwhile, Jo stays behind and proceeds to wear shoes and dresses so OTT they deserve their own memes.

All this time the gags just keep on coming. Swipes are taken at Prince Andrew and Johnny Depp. The Guardian newspaper and films about refugees get mocked. And even serious pronouncements launch quips. Hamid (Mourad Zaoui) the calm and resourceful Moroccan who manages Tom and Dally’s estate, delivers a typically profound aphorism. Instead of agreeing with him, an admiring local says, “You should have a Twitter account!”

The images are often as jolting as the jokes. At one point, Dally strikes Buster Keaton-ish poses for a series of photos. The latter break the fourth wall (we consume them as separate artefacts) and are properly good. The woman taking the photos is a progressive French journalist, Isabelle (Marie-Josee Croze) and she’s staying at the house along with a young, “edgy” Arab female director, Leila (Imane El Mechrafi), who’s on the lookout for funding.

We’re given a sense of how these creatives will frame the time they’ve spent with Richard and Dally. It’s easy to despise rich hosts and donors, but isn’t it hypocritical to eat their food and/or take their money? With the help of talented British cinematographer Larry Smith (the whole film looks stunning), McDonagh keeps changing the lens through which we view privilege.

Things take a turn for the earnest in the last act; Anouar becomes a frustratingly diffuse character and old-fashioned words like “decent” and “honourable” get bandied about. Ah well. At least the film’s take on alcohol never gets wishy-washy. Stiff drinks are a killer. Life can be hard to enjoy while sober. McDonagh dances on the edge of that paradox right to the end.

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‘The Forgiven’ Toronto Film Festival Review: Ralph Fiennes And Jessica Chastain In Searing Adult Drama Set In Moroccan Desert

By Pete Hammond

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David Henninger (Fiennes) and his wife Jo (Chastain), a children’s author, are driving to spend the weekend at the elaborate and remote Moroccan villa (Willem Smit’s production design is aces) of their friend Richard (Matt Smith) and his gay lover Dalley Margolis (Caleb Landry Jones). Other kitschy guests will also be partying with no abandon there for the housewarming party of this renovated ksour in the middle of nowhere. Before they can arrive, David, not a terribly friendly man and a functioning alcoholic, gets drunk and winds up carelessly running over a young local man named Driss (Omar Ghazaoui), killing him. Not knowing what to do he takes the body to the house. Although a tragedy, this incident does not seem to dampen the mood, and is ruled an accident by authorities, perhaps favoring those with wealth vs those more expendable?

As the guests, a bourgeoisie bunch if ever there was one, go about their merry games, we get an ugly view of privileged western society where, despite outward appearances, they all seem to be dead behind the eyes if you ask me. There is also attractive American Tom Day (Christopher Abbott), party girl Cody (Abbey Lee), photographer Isabelle Peret (Marie-Josee Croze) and more drifting in and out of frame. The focus is primarily on David and Jo, he a lost cause and she potentially a decent person, if overdressed in evening gowns for the occasion, caught up in a dying marriage.

Things heat up considerably when Abdellah (an excellent Ismael Kanater), the father of the dead boy, arrives to identify the body. In a rare moment of remorse over causing this loss of a young man’s life, accident or not, David somewhat reluctantly agrees to accompany Abdellah and his group to the outer desert in order to bury the boy. Is this his version of atonement? It certainly adds a unique layer of tension to the story as he sets off in the car with this Muslim father of the boy he killed. Their interactions on the journey are the strongest part of the film.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…Jo opens up and shows emotional vulnerability as she falls into bed with Tom, ratcheting up the stakes when David returns, if he returns. We don’t really know how this will play out, and that is what kept me engaged right up to the very last moment.

In a directorial flourish I have never quite seen before, every single credit, including all the music cues and crew members, roll by at the beginning of the movie. McDonagh clearly has his reasons for that but it is disconcerting to say the least. I actually thought the link I got to watch the gorgeously shot movie (cinematography is by Larry Smith) was somehow unspooling backwards. I almost called the support line. Ultimately what McDonagh has wrought is a look into ourselves no matter what class we are in, and he clearly wants it to end with no ambiguity on that matter. Fiennes as a thoroughly unlikable man manages through his exceptional acting talent to show us how David may have a decent human buried deep inside. Chastain, who received the Actor award at TIFF today, is having quite a festival with The Eyes of Tammy Faye also premiering here this weekend on top of the HBO debut Sunday of her limited series Scenes From a Marriage. She brings extra dimension to a basically good woman who is trying to find any spark of life left in her. Smith, best known for The Crown, is perfectly cast as Richard, while Jones’ character is a little too weird to ever let the actor take it out of first gear. Best of all is perhaps is driver Anouar, as played by Said Taghmaoui, with genuine wisdom and smarts well above his pay grade. This is a rare and thoroughly adult drama offering much to think about.

Elizabeth Eves, Trevor Mathhews and Nick Gordon are producers. The production companies listed are House of Un-American Activities and Brookstreet Pictures. The print I saw was fronted by the Focus Features logo, but the title is being sold at TIFF. CAA is the sales agent.

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‘The Forgiven’ Review: Jessica Chastain and Ralph Fiennes Scorch in a Debaucherous Class Satire

Ryan lattanzio, deputy editor, film.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Vertical Entertainment and Roadside Attractions releases the film in theaters on Friday, July 1.

If the vision of Jessica Chastain in a sleek LBD sniffing coke and then vigorously bedding Christopher Abbott during a bacchanal in Morocco stokes your flames, then John Michael McDonagh ‘s “The Forgiven” is the movie for you. “I wish I wasn’t so worried,” she says before jubilantly downing another line of white powder. She wishes she were more worried about her husband, played by Ralph Fiennes, a selfish doctor who, during their now-derailed vacation stay at an old-time friend’s deliciously depraved party in the desert, has run over a Muslim child and failed to cover it up. She wishes she cared that he’s now been carted off to the boy’s Berber village in middle-of-nowhere North Africa to do penance by the kid’s father, and where he could possibly be hung and quartered. Will she miss him at all?

Working from a novel by Lawrence Osborne, “Calvary” and “The Guard” director McDonagh treats his ensemble — and it’s an impressively cast one, including Matt Smith and Caleb Landry Jones as the oddly well-matched dandy hosts — like insects under a magnifying glass. With wide lenses and a detached, chilly reserve courtesy of DP Larry Smith, the English-Irish director and screenwriter seems wholly amused by tearing asunder a Dionysian display of the rich and bored, gathered for a debaucherous jamboree in the neocolonized North of Africa.

The cold front foaming between icy-chic, lissome children’s author Jo (Chastain) and her boorish, ruddy husband of 12 years David (Ralph Fiennes), an alcoholic doctor in a pressed linen suit, is immediate upon the film’s opening frames amid a stylish credits sequence that unfolds backward in blood-red lettering across the screen. After a boat’s journey to Morocco — “L’Afrique!” he exclaims as they hit the shore — the bored, disdaining vibes between the pair recall the bad vacations of Michelangelo Antonioni and Roberto Rossellini from the outset. As he reaches for another bottle of wine, David calls Jo “shrill,” and she calls him “a high-functioning alcoholic.” Their marriage is over, just not over.

They’re in Morocco to see Richard (Smith) and Dally (Landry Jones), a hedonistic twosome who’ve arranged a lavish fete at their renovated ksar (once a fortified village now turned into a palatial party pad) in the High Atlas Mountains, and it’s a party scaled for the end of the world. But on their way to the celebrations, deep in the snaking crevices of the mountains, with David careening and fully lubricated at high speed, a terrible accident ensues: They hit and kill a young boy who steps out into their streaking path.

The film is, from there, careful to parse out the particulars of just what went down at impact, with McDonagh teasing the encounter in pointed flashbacks throughout the otherwise forward-moving film. Harried and disheveled, Jo and David make it to the ksar anyway, and promptly start imbibing among Richard and Dally’s clown car of mixed company — a financial-analyst lothario Tom Daly (Abbott), a jittery Australian model (Abbey Lee), and a très French New York Times Style section photographer (Marie-Josée Croze) among them. It’s a motley crew that McDonagh will set out to skewer, with varying degrees of attentiveness, for the next two hours.

Questioned by local police, David is predictably oblivious to his stake in the crime that occurred. “It was as if he didn’t understand the speed of a car,” he says of the dead boy (whom we later learn, through repeated attempts by the ksar staff to give the poor kid a name, is called Driss). At the imperious gates of the ksar soon arrives Driss’ father Abdellah (Ismael Kanater), who requests David’s presence at his village to honor the boy’s life and atone for the killing. “What the fuck? They could be ISIS!” snaps Jo. Nevertheless, David is worn down into submission, and shuttled off in a crummy Jeep to meet whatever his fate might be.

His absence for the remaining festivities allows Jo to unzip into hair-down sensuous freedom, and Chastain is gamely having the time of her life in this role. She strikes up a rapport with Tom in witty exchanges that crackle with old-timey (if occasionally overwritten) charm. “We should get out of the sun before we start to bleed,” he says. “I don’t bleed easily,” she replies. And later, “I think men need sluts,” she says. “I think women need to be sluts,” he says, before the two end up making out on a sunchair in the presence of the other guests, wasted and indifferent to her adultery.

The vibratory chemistry between Chastain and Abbott is the film’s greatest appeal, whether on a coke bender or dirty dancing in a kind of psychosexual sandwich moment between the posh party hosts. “There you are!” Jo says into the mirror, electrified after a night of rigorous, cheating sex — a line you can see coming from the sky as Chastain marvels at her own unwound reflection. Jo’s freefall into realizing her marriage is a sham feels undercooked relative to the movie’s broader treatise on the disintegration of Western mores when taken out of their element, but Chastain makes such a fashionable descent thrilling to watch. Her performance brings to mind a more unhinged spin on Jeanne Moreau in Antonioni’s “La Notte,” another woman unpeeling herself from a lousy husband during a bleak sojourn that never stood a chance at healing a marriage.

But amid the film’s hedonistic party sequences and jittery coked-out banter — hell is a room full of French, American, and British people on uppers — a far meaner moral streak cuts through McDonagh’s lengthy, sprawling movie. Back at Driss’ village — one outfitted with no amenities of a post-historic century — David faces the tribunal of the boy’s family. There’s also the matter of Driss’ accomplice in what turned out to be an attempted robbery gone wrong. As punishment for participating in Driss’ death, the father makes the boy promise to do whatever he asks, which we know will eventually not bode well for the defiantly unremorseful David down the line.

A more reined-in version of his character from “A Bigger Splash,” Fiennes plays the sort of moneyed, arrogant arsehole he so excels at, making David hardly sympathetic but never less than compelling. No one else could have played this role. David slowly forms a fraught bond with one of his escorts, Anouar (Saïd Taghmaoui), in a touching near-finale moment that almost approximates something like redemption for the guilty David. But the cast’s standouts turn out to be Smith and Landry Jones, who hover along the edges of the film in outré regalia that wouldn’t find them out of place as loony side characters in a Shakespeare romp.

Shot on location in Morocco, “The Forgiven” smacks of the kind of project wrought from the constraints of the pandemic — an arid, isolated desert setting; an intimate cast and crew — but McDonagh was already in production on the film before Covid hit. The film nevertheless acquires an eerie end-times vibe, a raucous Boschian, fuck-it-allness juxtaposed against a grimmer, slimmer tale of the West and the East colliding, and the West facing up to its sins of the past. The sun-bleached vistas of the ksar make for a jutting contrast to the hand-to-mouth existence of the locals, who by Muslim edict seem to accept their bleak reality while the greedy white visitors clamor for decadent fulfillment. While this nasty film seems headed toward a conclusion where the rich win and the status quo is maintained, that’s abruptly shattered by a violent climax that assures that no one on either side of the divide is left without a bloodstain.

“The Forgiven” world premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.

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The Forgiven Review: Ralph Fiennes & Jessica Chastain Lead a Superb Morality Play

A wealthy couple (Ralph Fiennes, Jessica Chastain) kill an Arab teen en route to a desert party in The Forgiven.

An elitist white couple runs over an Arab teen on their way to a lavish desert party in Morocco. The Forgiven skewers the debauchery and arrogance of wealthy interlopers while contrasting the impoverished lives of the desperate locals. It is a barbed morality play laden with dark humor and uncomfortable truths. Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain lead a superb ensemble in a thoughtful film. They bring surprising likeability to distasteful characters with little redeeming qualities. The narrative passes cold judgments but spreads the nastiness evenly.

David (Fiennes) and Jo (Chastain) Henninger arrive in Tangiers for a remarkable weekend getaway. David's childhood friend, Richard (Matt Smith), and his lover Dally (Caleb Landry Jones), are throwing an elaborate costume party at their luxurious desert villa. David drinks constantly while mocking the tourists. A bored Jo snipes at his crude behavior. They rent a car for the long trek to the remote bash.

David drives drunk through the dark and dusty night. He doesn't see Driss (Omar Ghazaoui) waiting for them at the turn. At the party, the guests cavort with glee. Their every whim catered by vigilant servants. The couple's arrival with a dead body causes a stir of whispers. Richard calls the authorities to validate David's version of the story. The boy's death was an unfortunate accident.

The plot thickens with the arrival of Abdellah Taheri (Ismael Kanater) in the morning. He wants the body of his son and to address the man who killed him. Abdellah demands that David honor tradition and accompany him to bury his only child. Richard warns it's the smart course of action instead of angering the nomads. Jo is shocked when David reluctantly agrees. They each have separate desert awakenings as the frivolity continues in David's absence.

Exploring Characters in The Forgiven

Adapted from the novel by Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven begins by exploring the characters' worst attributes. A great scene has Dally complaining to Richard for inviting the Henningers. They cannot let a smashing soirée be ruined by such a lamentable event. The guests want to drink, dance, frolic, and do narcotics with an eye-watering assortment of young harlots. A dead body is such a buzzkill . The hosts are ecstatic when David has to leave. The fun commences unabated. Jo's guilt evaporates as a sleazy lawyer (Christopher Abbott) takes interest.

David's journey with Abdellah juxtaposes the carnal wonderland left behind. He gets a taste of the hardscrabble existence under a blistering sun. The nomads work from "dusk till dawn" digging for fossils. It's the only thing they have of any value. David doesn't know Abdellah's motives but slowly begins to empathize. The film then incorporates the perspectives of the servants at the party. They watch in disgust at the hedonistic display. Everything goes against their Islamic value system.

Director/writer John Michael McDonagh ( The Guard , Calvary ) doesn't paint everyone with the same crude brush. Matt Smith, fantastic in his supporting role as Richard, acknowledges that his workers despise him. He's a homosexual and an infidel. His head servant, Hamid (Mourad Zaoui), fundamentally disagrees with Richard's lifestyle but isn't defined by hatred for westerners. He simply has no other choice for employment opportunities.

Related: Exclusive: Johnny Flynn Pulls Double Duty in The Score

Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain in The Forgiven

Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain live up to their vaunted acting status. David and Jo undergo significant transformations. The killing forces introspection. The difference being one partner leaves their comfort zone. David's idea of suffering never included a real understanding of poverty. Conversely, Jo drops her inhibitions and embraces unbridled freedom. She steps out of David's shadow to find herself.

I laughed much more than expected given the serious subject matter. McDonagh touches many thorny topics with incisive wit. He gives his banner cast the chance to explore the dirty underbelly of their characters. They can grow, or not, in light of tragedy. The Forgiven's climax illustrates this choice. Audiences will have to decide whose self-discovery was more constructive.

The Forgiven is produced by House of Un-American Activities Productions, Brookstreet Pictures, LipSync, Film4, Head Gear, Metrol Technology, and Assemble Media. It will be released theatrically on July 1st from Roadside Attractions and Vertical Entertainment.

‘The Forgiven’ Film Review: Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain Find Humanity in Some Nasty People

There’s a lot of despicable stuff going on in this efficiently nasty drama from John Michael McDonagh, the Irish writer-director of “The Guard” and “Cavalry”

This review of “The Forgiven” first appeared when the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2021.

A dark and dirty morality play where nobody’s very concerned with morals, John Michael McDonagh’s “The Forgiven” takes some extremely questionable behavior and makes it as intriguing as it is off-putting. There’s a lot of despicable stuff going on in this efficiently nasty drama from the Irish writer-director of “The Guard” and “Cavalry,” but in the hands of McDonagh, Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain, you may actually find yourself caring for these people more than they care for themselves.

The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2021, is a timely piece of work based on Lawrence Osborne’s 2012 novel — it may focus on first-world problems, but that doesn’t stop it from delving into issues of white privilege, colonialism, casual racism and the conflict between the West and the Arab world.

But it doesn’t let anybody off the hook. When the film begins, married couple David and Jo Henninger (Fiennes and Chastain) are making their way from Casablanca to a lavish villa in the High Atlas Mountains, where their friend Richard is throwing a lavish weekend bash for a select group of well-heeled friends. If David and Jo were ever a passionate and loving couple, those days are clearly in the past, replaced by a quiet disdain that lurks behind every comment.

“Why am I thinking harpy ?” David asks when Jo gives him one too many instructions in the car. “Why am I thinking shrill ?”

“Why am I thinking highly functioning alcoholic ?” asks Jo.

“I always thought the highly functioning part should cancel out the alcoholic part,” he says with a shrug — though he’s hardly functioning when he gets behind the wheel in his usual state of intoxication, gets lost and then accidentally hits and kills a teenage boy who steps onto the dirt road, ostensibly to sell fossils to the rich tourists.

No sooner has this happened than the film cuts away to the party David and Jo are trying to reach. McDonagh, whose black sense of humor lurks well below the surface in “The Forgiven,” is messing with us: He sets up the plight of his protagonists, then veers off and forces us to endure a soiree for dissolute rich folks, where everybody seems bored and nobody’s having any fun.

Richard, the host (Matt Smith), is a gay Brit who seems vaguely bemused by and vaguely blasé about the idea of throwing a big party in his fortified enclave in the wilds of Morocco; Dally, his partner (Caleb Landry Jones), is an American who seems to compensate for the disdain that the Europeans feel for him by defaulting to a transgressive decadence designed to amuse himself and offend as many other people as possible.

This is not what you’d call a fun group, and the casual contempt they seem to feel for the Moroccans who wait on them is matched by the unspoken contempt the North Africans feel for these idle rich twits.

When David and Jo finally arrive, they fit right in. Richard warns them that when the police arrive to investigate the boy’s death, they’ll need to cooperate “and seem overwhelmingly contrite.” He pauses. “We can do that, can’t we?”

David sighs. “If it’s absolutely necessary,” he says. Later, he’s even blunter with Jo. “I hate to say it,” he says, “but the kid is a nobody.”

But he has to face not only the police, but the nobody’s father, Abdellah (Ismael Kanater), who insists that David accompany him back to his village to bury the boy. Is it a custom, as the father insists, or a shakedown, or something more sinister? David doesn’t know, but he puts on his white suit complete with pocket square, fills an envelope with 1,000 Euro and heads off with Abdellah, while the party continues in his absence.

In fact, the partiers pick up steam in his absence — especially Jo, who responds to her husband’s absence by doing more drugs and more flirting and then more than that. While David is learning that the dead boy’s father is far from the country rube he was expecting to buy off with an envelope of cash.

In a way, “The Forgiven” sinks into its chronicle of appalling behavior; if it can get wearying to a viewer, it’s clear that the appalling folks are pretty fed up with themselves, too, though not to the point where any of them really want to change. Fortunately, McDonagh has the right people to find nuance in roles that could feel caricatured: Fiennes and Chastain could locate the humanity in a stone but could also leave us feeling ambivalent about a saint, and they manage to find rich nuance in sly insults, in screaming fits and in everything in between.

The notion of forgiveness takes on greater import as the film goes on, but the characters are on very different paths — toward the end, David seems ready to accept some responsibility, while Jo’s the one who snaps, “That’s all in the past — the important thing is now , isn’t it?”

But she’s wrong: The past is important too. Dark and unsettling, “The Forgiven” doesn’t ask us to like its characters, but it forces us to watch as privilege begins to shatter and people for whom everything feels inconsequential have to deal with consequences.

“The Forgiven” opens Friday in U.S. theaters.

The Forgiven

3 out of 5 stars
Recommended

Time Out says

Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain are caught up in culture-clash jeopardy in this reflective Sahara-set drama

He’s a boozy Chelsea society doctor, she’s a little-regarded children’s author. Their marriage could be in its death throes. What better idea to revive it than schlepping out to the Sahara for a weekend of partying with their ‘friends’, a filthy rich gay couple in show-off mode at their renovated fort. Unsurprisingly, it does not go well. Barrelling along barely signposted desert roads in the dark, they hit and kill an Arab boy who steps out to try and hawk them some fossils. It’s a tiresome irritation for that struggling couple, the Henningers (Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain), but they can always evade such scrapes with hard cash – until the bereaved father arrives at their destination and demands an act of contrition. Does Fiennes’s fiftysomething ex-public schoolboy have it in him to feel anything for the Berber family’s loss?

Adapted from Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel of the same name, this is evidently a story with literary influences, not least Paul Bowles’s ‘The Sheltering Sky’ (filmed to decorative, if somewhat empty effect by Bertolucci), where the bourgeoisie confront their empty souls in the blazing Sahara.

There’s no doubt the rich material here has a grisly fascination, its two-hour running time held together by the looming realisation the inscrutable Arab patriarch might be planning to extract a deadly payback. For writer-director John Michael McDonagh, though, the challenge is to find some useful moral wiggle room within the story's seemingly binary opposition between entitled moneyed whites and ill-fated desert tribespeople. If our minds are already made up that these wealthy interlopers are worthless scum then what keeps us watching?

If our minds are already made up that these wealthy interlopers are worthless scum then what keeps us watching?

Where McDonagh felt entirely at home in Ireland’s troubled landscape for The Guard and Calvary , his first two features, he’s not as at ease here. The vast landscapes are magnificent, yet the movie sags when we have to spend time with the relentlessly superficial revellers. Fiennes is absolutely on-the-mark as the flinty medic facing his own journey of self-discovery, yet he’s matched all the way by Ismael Kanater’s gnomically reflective Berber dad and Saïd Taghmaoui as his disarmingly amiable sidekick. The Arab characters’ musings on their challenging lives are the heart of the movie, not bearing ill will against the absurdly fortunate Eurotrash, but judging everyone by how they deal with their individual circumstances. It’s absorbing fare, until we cut back to his wife and the hedonism, which is exasperatingly shallow by comparison.

A decidedly variable viewing experience then, and not everyone will have the patience for it. Yet some might eventually come round to McDonagh’s determination not to make the Henningers essentially decent folk worthy of redemption, which would just have been too, too easy. Instead, The Forgiven takes the harder road, and actually proves more engrossing and haunting in retrospect than when you’re actually watching it. In an era of instant gratification, that, for all the film’s evident flaws, is still worth chin-stroking respect. In UK cinemas Sep 2

Cast and crew

Director: John Michael McDonagh
Screenwriter: John Michael McDonagh
Ralph Fiennes
Jessica Chastain
Caleb Landry Jones
Christopher Abbott
Saïd Taghmaoui
Fiona O'Shaughnessy

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The Forgiven review: A familiar journey worth making

Under the control of a less capable filmmaker, The Forgiven could have very easily been a boring film. It’s a testament to writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s talent that it’s not. As a matter of fact, while there are moments when The Forgiven edges toward tediousness, McDonagh’s ear for conversation and his impeccably written scenes keep the film moving at an involving pace for almost the entirety of its 117-minute runtime. That may come as a surprise, considering The Forgiven ’s subject matter.

An accident in the desert

An honorable journey, a weightless apology.

Set in Morocco, the film follows a group of rich elites as they come together to party in a desert compound over the course of one weekend. Their event becomes complicated, however, when David Henninger (Ralph Fiennes) and his wife, Jo ( Jessica Chastain ), accidentally run over a young Moroccan boy when he steps in front of their car while they are on their way to the film’s central party. When the dead boy’s father, Abdellah (Ismael Kanater), arrives to collect his son’s body, he demands that David make a journey into the Moroccan desert to bury his son with him. David, reluctantly, agrees.

From that point on, The Forgiven begins to follow two separate storylines: David’s journey into the desert, and the party that his friends and wife enjoy while he’s away. By focusing on both perspectives, McDonagh is able to effectively juxtapose the carefree, gratuitous celebration thrown by the film’s rich elites with the difficult emotional and physical realities of what life can be like for Morocco’s impoverished citizens. McDonagh uses that juxtaposition to turn The Forgiven into a quasi-social satire, but while the filmmaker’s observations are often precise and revealing in equal measure, they don’t amount to much in the end.

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The good news is that, even if The Forgiven ’s conversations ultimately end up going nowhere, they’re still deliciously fun to watch unfold. One of the film’s opening scenes sees Chastain’s Jo passive-aggressively call Fiennes’ David a “highly-functioning alcoholic” only for him to respond by saying, “I’ve always thought the ‘highly-functioning’ part should cancel out the ‘alcoholic’ part,” and that moment is an effective encapsulation of what every conversation in The Forgiven is like. The film’s characters constantly throw thinly-veiled barbs at each other, ironically acknowledging their faults without ever ceding an inch of ground.

McDonagh has always been good at writing dialogue, and he brings that skill in full force to The Forgiven . The film’s cast, which is made up of some of the best performers working today, doesn’t let the opportunity to sink their teeth into McDonagh’s words pass them by. Caleb Landry Jones and Christopher Abbott, for instance, winkingly chomp down on their lines and emphasize the absurdity of their characters’ actions more than any of their co-stars. It’s Matt Smith who ultimately proves to have the best ear for McDonagh’s dialogue.

As Richard Galloway, the gay man who hosts the party that throws Jo and David’s lives into disarray, Smith is delightfully, hilariously droll and nonchalant. His Richard is the most self-aware and unapologetic of the film’s elites, which is just another way of saying that he understands the distastefulness of his and his friends’ behavior but still delights greatly in taking part in their antics. A host with a love for provocation, Richard spends most of the film lovingly and slyly pointing out his friends’ hypocrisies to their faces, and Smith delivers every line with the same casual smirk and relaxed posture.

It’s Fiennes’ David who ultimately has to struggle with the most dramatic weight in The Forgiven though. Unlike Smith’s Richard, who happily stays in one lane throughout the film, David is forced to undergo an emotional and physical journey over the course of The Forgiven ’s story. At the start of the film, he is essentially the walking embodiment of white British privilege, but the more time that he spends with Abdellah, the father of the poor boy he killed as a result of his own arrogant recklessness, the more that David begins to feel the weight of his own existence.

Through his conversations with Abdellah’s right-hand man, Anouar (Saïd Taghmaoui), David grows to understand the severity of what he’s done. As a result, the character’s self-involved, sardonic demeanor is eventually replaced by an overwhelmingly grim sense of shame, and Fiennes, to his credit, plays David’s transformation beautifully. Fiennes has, of course, long been one of Hollywood’s most capable performers, but his assured, subtle work in The Forgiven serves as a potent reminder of that fact.

Unfortunately, David’s transformation from an uncaring rich elite to a man sympathetic to those he previously considered beneath him is one that we have seen a thousand times before. While the film does go out of its way to embrace the perspective of its Moroccan characters, it’s David’s journey that ultimately emerges as the heart and soul of The Forgiven — a fact that just makes his transformation feel that much more tired. The dull familiarity of his journey, in turn, robs the film of much of its dramatic weight.

Given how hard-edged and slickly sharp so much of The Forgiven is, it’s hard not to feel when you’re watching it that McDonagh is going to upend David’s journey with some kind of subversive twist. But that moment never comes. Instead, McDonagh brings the film’s story to a conclusion that doesn’t feel nearly as powerful or poetic as it should. It’s an ending that feels as though it’s meant to evoke the same misplaced brutality that McDonagh created at the end of his stunning 2014 drama, Cavalry , but it nonetheless fails to match the weight of that film’s ending.

That’s disappointing, considering how precise and observant everything is leading up to The Forgiven ’s lackluster conclusion. The film’s failure to bring anything new to a well-worn subject, therefore, makes it feel more like a collection of deservedly acidic observations than a searing or provocative morality tale. For some, that’s a sin that may be forgivable. But like a sincere apology that you’ve heard a thousand times before, The Forgiven tells a story that is, unfortunately, less than the sum of its well-made parts.

The Forgiven hits theaters on Friday, July 1.

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Cha Cha Real Smooth is one of the most open-hearted films you’re likely to see this year. To those who were lucky enough to see Shithouse, the first film from writer/director/star Cooper Raiff, that won’t come as much of a surprise. Raiff’s feature debut boasted the same vulnerable, proudly unashamed-to-cry attitude that’s present throughout all of Cha Cha Real Smooth. But while a lot of attention has been given to how willing Raiff is to wear his heart on his sleeve, it’d be a disservice to both Cha Cha Real Smooth and its predecessor to refer to them simply as “nice” films.

In Shithouse, Raiff deftly navigated one college freshman’s feelings of loneliness and uncertainty as he struggled to adjust to a life away from home. In Cha Cha Real Smooth, Raiff has fast-forwarded the clock, turning his attention to a young man (played, once again, by himself) who is in the midst of trying to carve out a new life for himself after college. Both films grapple with the kind of confusing emotions that bubble to the surface whenever one chapter of a person’s life ends, and while Raiff brings a heightened level of sensitivity to his characters' personal issues, he doesn’t shy away from the messiness of their inner lives.

In the busy world of Lost Illusions, corruption reigns supreme. Cities are cesspools of crime and debauchery. Fake news circulates like a virus, destroying lives and chipping away at the fragile democratic state. The high cost of living makes everyone scramble for their daily bread, sacrificing whatever ideals they have left just to survive. Nothing is for free, and everything, and everyone, has a price.

No, this isn't a movie about the state of things in 2022, but rather an adaptation of Honoré de Balzac's 19th-century novel that is just as relevant today as it was back then. That's due, of course, to Balzac's genius, but also to director Xavier Giannoli, who has made one of the year's best movies by infusing an urgency to what could have been a dreary, stuffy affair. This film moves, and unlike most bloated costume pics, it's interested in chronicling the gradual rot of the men and women beneath the heavy period makeup and fancy clothing. A hero's rise and fall

In 2019, Adam Sandler proved he still has what it takes to be one of Hollywood’s most versatile and charismatic performers with his performance in the Safdie Brothers’ adrenaline-fueled Uncut Gems. Not since 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love had Sandler played a character so different from his usual goofball archetype, and he earned some well-deserved acclaim for his turn as the film's self-destructive lead. But Uncut Gems did more than just reaffirm Sandler’s status as a more versatile leading man than his filmography would have you believe.

The film also offered the promise of being the first entry in a new chapter in Sandler’s career, one featuring more variety and legitimately dramatic stories from the Happy Gilmore star than viewers had seen in previous years. While it remains to be seen if that’s the direction Sandler’s career will ultimately take in the coming years, Hustle certainly seems to suggest that it might be.

Jessica Chastain And Ralph Fiennes in The Forgiven

‘The Forgiven’ Is That Ever Elusive, Provocative Mid-Budget Adult Drama

In a more just world, the opening of The Forgiven this weekend would be bigger news. The film comes from John Michael McDonagh ( The Guard , War On Everyone , Calvary ) — not to be confused with his younger brother, Martin, who did In Bruges but also Three Billboards — and stars an A-list cast that includes Ralph Fiennes, Jessica Chastain, Christopher Abbott, and Matt Smith. You’d have a hard time squeezing more awards and acclaim into its pedigree, but it’s not a Minion or a Thor, so you probably haven’t heard about it.

That’s a shame because The Forgiven is the rare adult drama that doesn’t feel like a museum piece. It lives and breathes, it teases and provokes, the kind of movie that seems designed to be discussed and fought over — in a world where adults might still do such things. John Michael McDonagh has always had an acid pen and a facility for quippy dialogue, but adapting here from Lawrence Osborne’s 2012 novel, it feels like McDonagh also has a solid narrative framework undergirding all that cleverness. And this is a filmmaker who perhaps could’ve benefited from more girding in movies past.

Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain play David and Jo Henninger, two rich assholes on their way to a Moroccan estate for a party thrown by two other rich assholes, Richard and Dally (Matt Smith and Caleb Landry Jones). David and Jo bicker their way through the storybook landscape, immune to its rugged beauty — she the hectoring wife, he the checked-out husband. At one point she calls him a “functioning alcoholic,” to which he responds “I’ve always wondered, shouldn’t the ‘functioning’ part cancel out the second part?”

It’s a comment I imagine McDonagh had in his notebook for some time. Their sniping seems to reach a fever pitch on a darkened desert road when David plows over a Moroccan teenager trying to get them to stop and buy some fossils.

Rich jerks mowing down impoverished locals in the roadway has been a handy inciting event in class fiction for some time now (not to mention reality ), from Bonfire Of The Vanitie s to White Tiger , but if The Forgiven ‘s skeleton feels familiar, the meat of it is unique unto itself. There’s the picturesque setting, this louche party in an outpost of privilege, the blasé Orientalism of all the guests, the resentful local household staff. If we were writing a highfalutin thesis, we could say The Forgiven is about “colonialism and the moral rot of the privileged classes.” But as with Succession, I suspect the draw is more the exotic settings, the absurd situations, the cleverly wicked characters, and the lack of moralizing. Who doesn’t enjoy venal characters behaving badly? I have to imagine The Forgiven is doing a lot of things Death On The Nile wanted to, without the corny genre trappings.

David, who is either the worst kind of rich old white guy or the most brutally honest kind, who alienates his peers by speaking plainly about the things they tend to cloister behind euphemisms and platitudes, eventually gets drawn into the family, legal, and cultural drama that naturally results from killing a boy in a foreign country — and a cultural minority boy in a foreign country at that. The Forgiven is a comedy of manners about a manslaughter.

Meanwhile, his wife Jo tries to enjoy the party, having a sort of holiday from her marriage as a way to rediscover her individuality while carrying on a flirtation with a finance guy dilettante played by Christopher Abbott. They have nice chemistry, and McDonagh excels at banter, always riding that line between clevered-up realism and A List Of Funny Things I Had In My Notebook That I Shoehorned Into A Script. Jessica Chastain is so much more fun when she’s not trapped in Aaron Sorkin competence porn mode. Much more fun to hear her coo “what’s the point of a prostitute who doesn’t do anal?”

These people are wicked partly because they’re emblematic of societal ills, sure, but mostly because they’re just bored . The Forgiven feels a little like Bret Easton Ellis meets Curb Your Enthusiasm. Credit to McDonagh for noticing the parallels.

The whole movie is a bit like that — while it certainly has a moral center, it’s refreshingly un-didactic, willing to let its characters be ethically complex without stapling them to a facile allegory. They’re shitty because we’re all shitty in our own special ways. The dead boy is from a tribe of Berber nomads, who eke out a living pulling fossils from the desert and selling them to westerners. “We don’t know why you want them, all we know is you’re willing to pay money for them,” explains one of their emissaries, played by the once again solid Saïd Taghmaoui.

The potential allusions here are obvious, from fossil fuels to anyone making a precarious living from a diminishing resource. The skill of McDonagh (or maybe Osborne’s novel, which I haven’t read) is to invite the audience to make those allusions rather than forcing one read onto us. Discussing such things used to be the fun part of collectively experiencing art, before it became a sort of scavenger hunt for previously introduced characters.

The Forgiven is about — and this won’t shock you if you’ve seen Calvary — guilt. How much guilt we owe personally for the criminal society we didn’t ask to be born into but nonetheless benefited from, and which forms of penance are constructive and which are just masturbatory rationalization. Few actors are better at this dance, between genuine introspection and the angry rejection of it, than Ralph Fiennes. This dance itself is something of a McDonagh specialty (both brothers, really) and if there was a lifetime achievement Oscar for best acting in McDonagh brothers’ films, Fiennes’ work here and in In Bruges would make him a lock. Aside from being excellent at shouting the word “cunt,” he’s authentically aristocratic (his birth name is Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes ) but also seems to genuinely enjoy necking the occasional pint of cheap lager (Wes Anderson has also exploited this characteristic, in less Anglocentric ways).

Both McDonagh and Osborne feel like they’re working through some things with this story. Fiennes has the perfect face to express them; sometimes wordlessly, other times vulgarly. Mostly, The Forgiven is the kind of naughty, knotty crowd-pleaser that used to dominate the cultural conversation, but now seems like a tribute act. Too bad. I think lots of people enjoy this kind of entertainment, when given half a chance.

‘The Forgiven’ is available only in theaters July 1st. Vince Mancini is on Twitter . You can access his archive of reviews here .

The Forgiven Review

02 Sep 2022

The Forgiven

The toxicity of white privilege and wealth seems to be having an on-screen moment. From Rian Johnson ’s upcoming Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery to HBO’s comedy drama The White Lotus to Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund’s Triangle Of Sadness , stories about the misdeeds and bigotry of the upper classes have become a mainstay of our cultural landscape. The latest work from John Michael McDonagh ( The Guard , Calvary ) treads similar ground, but with mixed results.

In The Forgiven , the über-rich live out a bohemian fantasy at a castle, or ksar, in the Saharan desert owned by distinguished couple Richard ( Matt Smith ) and Dally ( Caleb Landry-Jones ). As guests arrive for the weekend festivities — among them, ageing English bachelors, an American financial analyst, and an array of scantily clad women — the stage appears to be set for a spiky whodunnit. Instead, there is little mystery over who is responsible for the death of Moroccan boy Driss on the dunes leading to the fortress. Drunk and argumentative, guest David ( Ralph Fiennes ) hits him at full speed with wife Jo ( Jessica Chastain ) in the passenger seat. They arrive at the party with the unexpected gift of Driss’ limp body in the back.

Combined with a general lack of subtlety and a stiffness to the dialogue, there is a tiredness to the narrative which only grows more fatigued over time.

McDonagh is clearly aiming for caustic satire in a relentlessly crass and damning portrait of the guests’ responses to the killing as the party goes on, and of David’s racism, misogyny and prejudice in a social circle that enables him. But when does such a portrayal stop being an effective critique and start feeling like an enactment of those very same issues? The characters know nothing of the Arab world except their own stereotypes, but do the filmmakers themselves? The veil of comedy in this film feels a little too thin, a little too stretched. Combined with a general lack of subtlety and a stiffness to the dialogue, there is a tiredness to the narrative which only grows more fatigued over time.

As David is sent to repent with Driss’ father (Ismael Kanater) and helper Anouar (an excellent Saïd Taghmaoui) across the desert, Jo leans into all the treats of the luxe life — champagne, cocaine, even fellow guest Tom ( Christopher Abbott ). Her indifference towards her husband and the boy’s death is clear, no matter what her crocodile tears hope to suggest. It’s a less inventive role for Chastain to play, while Fiennes steps into the redemption arc with poise and depth. Still, what atonement is there to be found for these intolerable people, framed in pretty pictures by director of photography Larry Smith against stunning Moroccan vistas? The deliberate contrast between the ugliness of privilege and the beauty of the film’s slick luxury aesthetic is frustratingly superficial and predictable — only adding to the blandness of the narrative.

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‘The Forgiven’ Film Review: Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain Find Humanity in Some Nasty People

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A dark and dirty morality play where nobody’s very concerned with morals, John Michael McDonagh ’s “The Forgiven” takes some extremely questionable behavior and makes it as intriguing as it is off-putting. There’s a lot of despicable stuff going on in this efficiently nasty drama from the Irish writer-director of “The Guard” and “Cavalry,” but in the hands of McDonagh, Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain , you may actually find yourself caring for these people more than they care for themselves.

The film had its world premiere on Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it’s looking for a potential distributor. Certainly, it’s a timely piece of work based on Lawrence Osborne’s 2012 novel — it may focus on first-world problems, but that doesn’t stop it from delving into issues of white privilege, colonialism, casual racism and the conflict between the West and the Arab world.

“Why am I thinking harpy ?” David asks when Jo gives him one too many instructions in the car. “Why am I thinking shrill ?”

“Why am I thinking highly functioning alcoholic ?” asks Jo.

David sighs. “If it’s absolutely necessary,” he says. Later, he’s even blunter with Jo. “I hate to say it,” he says, “but the kid is a nobody.”

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Read original story ‘The Forgiven’ Film Review: Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain Find Humanity in Some Nasty People At TheWrap

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Screen Rant

The forgiven review: literary drama abandons its most compelling trait.

The Forgiven becomes too caught up in the bigger picture, and the intriguing puzzle pieces don't shine quite as much when all put together.

The Forgiven is a thematically ambitious film, something that plays in its favor while watching and becomes a point of criticism in retrospect. It positions its characters as sitting on a number of axes of difference — gender, sexuality, nationality, class, religion, age — that can at any point step in and determine how they relate to one another. Power imbalances are problematized, prejudices are aired, and the world is presented as a place defined by jagged edges that refuse to be sanded down. This makes for a compelling backdrop to a tense crime drama narrative that is fueled by gaps of knowledge the movie seems in no hurry to fill. As long as those gaps remain, they give space for small details to echo with meaning, but the impulse to resolve the story by its end diminishes its opportunity for impact. Given some time to think on it later, viewers might have trouble pinning down what it actually had to say about all those thorny subjects it seemed to be about.

Writer-director John Michael McDonagh's The Forgiven opens with two story strands that collide to leave the mess that ends up defining the film. In the first, wealthy couple David (Ralph Fiennes) and Jo (Jessica Chastain) travel through Morocco on their way to a weekend-long party hosted by friends Richard (Matt Smith) and Dally (Caleb Landry Jones). They bicker and drink, and end up having to drive through a barely marked desert road at night. In the second, two young Moroccan men, disillusioned with their lives digging for fossils to sell, determine to take more drastic action against the rich foreigners they know are convening at the noted gay couple's estate. In talking his friend into whatever they've planned, one of them flashes a revolver. David and Jo, lost, impaired, and arguing, hit one of the teens with their car when he runs into the road. They arrive at their destination, party in full swing, with his unidentified corpse in the backseat.

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The immediate aftermath then reintroduces a bifurcated structure. Richard's attempt to resolve what David claims was an accident through his local police connections is interrupted when the boy's father, Abdellah (Ismael Kanater), unexpectedly arrives to claim the body. His son's name was Driss (Omar Ghazaoui), and honor demands that David accompany him to their village for a proper burial. David, when informed by Richard that he has no preferable alternative, agrees to go despite reservations that they might have more than spiritual and financial restitution in mind. The movie follows both David's journey and Jo's time at the party, particularly her exchanges with Tom (Christopher Abbott), a fellow American who presents a sharp contrast to her cynical British husband. The David strand is alternately tense and touching, a grieving process tinted by the audience's uncertainty over everyone's true intentions, with the threat of physical violence always just on the horizon. Jo's, meanwhile, is a La dolce vita- esque portrait of the aimless upper class at play, complicated by their relationships to the Moroccan servants that seethe beneath their smiles.

The Forgiven is a movie that thrives on detail, and unfortunately, not everything interesting about it can be unpacked here. There are small creative choices that, on their own, speak volumes, such as Richard's nickname Dickie, which (in the context of Smith's charming performance) brings to mind The Talented Mr. Ripley 's patron saint of the idle rich Dickie Greenleaf. Small performance moments accomplish the same, ranging from Chastain's Jo briefly lashing out after a perceived slight from the staff bringing her breakfast to the way Fiennes' David downs a certain beer at a pivotal point in his journey. The way McDonagh's script withholds the truth of what happened that night on the road, while signaling to the audience that it's doing so, encourages viewers to notice these details, and the time spent interpreting them is stimulating.

By the end, however, The Forgiven becomes too caught up in the bigger picture, and the intriguing puzzle pieces don't shine quite as much when all put together. Jo's storyline may strike viewers as lacking in impact, and while this is part of the point of the foreigners' oasis, attempting to give her a growth arc anyway feels somewhat perfunctory. David's, meanwhile, seems too transformative, overly simplistic in a way that betrays the nuances in every other part of his journey. A good point of comparison here might be Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Lost Daughter , which also feels particularly literary in its allusiveness and ambiguity, but is far more successful at carrying that through to the end. It's the wish of this critic that The Forgiven had ended with the aforementioned beer, but as it is, the movie's coda does the rest of it a disservice.

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The Forgiven releases in theaters on Friday, July 1. The film is 117 minutes long and is rated R for language throughout, drug use, some sexual content and brief violence.

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The Forgiven Reviews

…McDonagh’s unwillingness to characterise the Moroccan characters beyond surly servants and mute witnesses feels very old-fashioned and insensitive…

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 13, 2022

There are plenty of squirm-worthy moments...of neo-colonial privilege...[b]ut there is...redemption in its later half...contrasting the wild life of privilege of the rich partiers against the struggle to simply live of the people whose land it truly is.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 3, 2022

The Forgiven takes the harder road, and actually proves more engrossing and haunting in retrospect than when you’re actually watching it. In an era of instant gratification, that, for all the film’s evident flaws, is still worth chin-stroking respect.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 3, 2022

This brutal clash of cultures forms the core of the drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 2, 2022

Despite giving us a couple salty strands of thematic jerky to gnaw on, The Forgiven is narratively and thematically messy. But Chastain and Fiennes elevate it to watchability.

Full Review | Nov 2, 2022

Comes closer to embodying the tragic futility of two irreconcilable cultures attempting understanding, rather than properly deconstructing it.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Nov 2, 2022

The film flits between tragedy, vengeance yarn and morality tale with an occasionally uneven tone, as if trying to weave two or three disparate stories into one.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 29, 2022

We’re never able to actually like David, although Fiennes is masterly in the way he portrays the character’s transformation.

Full Review | Sep 22, 2022

... A gathering of cartoon ciphers who seem to have been created solely to allow McDonagh access to his favourite anti-woke whipping sticks.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 20, 2022

While McDonagh’s direction is flawed – the pacing and tone are often all over the place – there is much to enjoy in The Forgiven, mostly the performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 13, 2022

Osborne’s 2012 novel observed this clash between jaded westerners and impoverished East with the sharpness of Evelyn Waugh, but on screen that sharpness turns brittle — the bon mots aren’t quite as devastatingly funny as everyone seems to think they are.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 12, 2022

John Michael McDonagh’s acerbic tragedy of manners and morals sees West meets East in a literal car crash of sloppy behaviour and messy intentions.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 6, 2022

Beneath the garishly brittle portrait of ghastly westerners lording it up in Morocco, there’s a low-key, brooding quality to this accomplished if somewhat inert screen adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s 2012 bestseller.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 4, 2022

With a starry cast and assured directoral hand It’s both a defective masterwork and minor misfire but one that packs a punch when required, and definitely warrants a watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 2, 2022

The stiffness in the writing and general lack of subtlety leave this feeling underwhelming and overwrought. As a moral fable, The Forgiven offers little genuine critique.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 2, 2022

Sees Fiennes deliver one of his finest performances...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 2, 2022

Do you like your humour wickedly dark, bordering on the unpleasant? Then The Forgiven could be the film for you.

Sharp dialogue and an excellent Ralph Fiennes provide the sparks to this slow-burning drama from John Michael McDonagh.

Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain are brilliantly loathsome but it’s a journey not everyone will want to take...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2022

It’s a compelling, tense journey even if it’s a pitiless one. Human nature doesn’t come out of this at all well.

Full Review | Sep 1, 2022

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Love Means Nothing in Tennis but Everything in “Challengers”

By Justin Chang

Zendaya holding two tennis balls with a tennis court in the background

A meal is never just a meal in a Luca Guadagnino movie; each bite is a prelude to a kiss, every feast a form of foreplay. In his shimmering melodrama “I Am Love” (2009), whose beauties range from the churches of Sanremo to the alabaster countenance of Tilda Swinton, the most ravishing image is a plate of prawns, passionately prepared and breathlessly consumed. Food is even more boldly eroticized in “Call Me by Your Name” (2017), which features suggestively oozing egg yolk and a memorably despoiled peach. And what of “Bones and All” (2022), which, being a cannibal romance, brings Guadagnino’s fixations with food and flesh to a gristly point of convergence? Let’s just say it’s his one picture that’s ideally viewed on an empty stomach.

“Challengers,” Guadagnino’s irrepressibly entertaining new movie, serves up a lighter repast—a post-horror palate cleanser, seasoned with generous sprinklings of sweat. It unfolds in the low-fat, high-energy world of competitive tennis, but even here the characters are very much what they eat (or don’t). Early on, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), a blond tennis champ mired in an early-thirties slump, passes through a kitchen stocked with fitness drinks, to be ingested on a schedule enforced by his wife and coach, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). Art is disciplined to a fault, and his regimen hints at a joyless caution that, in the eyes of a cinematic voluptuary like Guadagnino, already seems like defeat. By contrast, another player, the rakishly handsome Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), is dieting only because he’s flat broke. As he drifts from tournament to tournament, he looks so pitiably hungry that, at one point, a stranger kindly offers him half of her breakfast sandwich. But, as Patrick tears into his first meal in a while, his sheer gusto is its own sign of triumph; it warns us not to count him out.

The year is 2019, and Art and Patrick, both in need of a boost, are preparing to face each other in a Challenger tournament, the second tier of competitive tennis, in New Rochelle. The professional implications are minor, but the emotional stakes couldn’t be higher. Thirteen years ago, in happier times, Art and Patrick were best friends and doubles partners; then along came Tashi, a tennis prodigy with her own dreams of stardom. Both boys were smitten; Patrick wooed her first, but it was Art she married, pouring her talent and ambition into his career after injury derailed her own. “Challengers,” in other words, comes at you like an amped-up, Adidas-sponsored “Jules and Jim”—a funny, tempestuous, and exuberantly lusty story about how three athletic demigods see their destinies upended. And Guadagnino tells it the way he knows best, with a sometimes exasperating but ultimately irresistible surfeit of style.

We begin and end at that Challenger tournament, where the sun beats down on a spectacle of unrivalled hotness. The camera, commanded by the cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, seems to be everywhere at once, exulting in the glory of bared chests and sweat-matted leg hair. A thunderous techno score, composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, pulses and surges hypnotically beneath the action, never quite drowning out the men’s grunts of effort and release. In the stands, the spectators jerk their heads dutifully left and right, but the camera keeps finding Tashi’s gaze, fixed straight ahead. She alone sees past the individual strokes, and the over-all score, to perceive the deeper psychological game her boys are playing.

From this narrative baseline, the backstory tumbles out in all directions, sustaining a dizzying rally of flashbacks and flash-forwards across a decade-plus narrative span. The screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes, ingeniously employs the structure of a tennis match, elastic yet compartmentalized, to track the fluctuations of his characters’ fortunes. He pulls us back to game days at Stanford, then lobs us forward several years to a competition in Atlanta, with a number of battery-recharging stopovers at the New Rochelle match in between. It doesn’t entirely work; the ball-smashing cuts between time frames get repetitive, and the net effect, so to speak, is of weighty accumulation when a nimbler acceleration is called for. Still, like any skilled opponent, the movie keeps us off balance, revealing what happened beforehand with sharp narrative backhands.

In a flash, then, Art and Patrick are eighteen again, inseparable buddies with insatiable appetites. In one scene, they stuff their faces with hot dogs; later, one naughtily bites off the end of the other’s churro. If your innuendo alarm is going off, “Challengers” is just getting warmed up. So is Tashi, who bursts onto the scene as a Stanford-bound player, and whose brilliance on the court sets the boys’ hearts aflutter. Yet, as eager as they are to wield the racquets in their pockets, the triangle comes together slowly. A hotel-room flirtation seems headed in the promising direction of a three-way, but Tashi, a master of the tease, backs away at the moment of peak arousal. “I’m not a home-wrecker,” she declares, and we know instinctively what she means. In toying with Art’s and Patrick’s affections, she exposes a soft spot, even a hint of unspoken desire, in their rambunctious camaraderie.

That failed seduction isn’t the only instance of coitus interruptus. So effortlessly does Guadagnino establish a vibe of free-floating horndoggery that it takes a moment to realize how little actual intercourse there is in the movie. It scarcely matters. It would be hard to overstate what a glorious, no-fucks-given rebuke “Challengers” represents to the regrettably puritanical ethos that governs most mainstream Hollywood releases. If the movie makes little distinction between sex scenes and non-sex scenes, it’s because Guadagnino knows that people can’t be readily separated into minds and bodies. He sees his characters whole, libidos and all, and their every expression and gesture throws off a coruscating erotic energy. The effect isn’t titillating; it’s clarifying.

In sex, as in tennis, anticipation is everything. Watch how the director pokes his camera, with unconcealed thirst, into a men’s locker room, or plops Art and Patrick down in a sauna, as though cruising around for gay-porn scenarios that never materialize. But with anticipation can also come deflation; Guadagnino treats sex as a conversation, and any conversation can go south. In the movie’s most exquisitely modulated and carnally forthright scene, Patrick and Tashi begin to make love, only to discover, in the heat of an ill-timed argument, that their limbs and loins are far more in synch than their egos and athletic aspirations. The encounter ends abruptly, and the relationship soon follows suit. Not even love can trump their love of the game.

It is Tashi’s career-ending injury that spurs her second act, personal and professional, with Art. Somewhere along the way they have a daughter, but she’s a narrative afterthought; “Challengers,” like its characters, turns tennis into tunnel vision. As Art’s coach, Tashi is hellbent on his success, and he needs all her drive and smarts to direct him. Faist has as much live-wire physicality here as he did, as Riff, in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” (2021), but his rascally impulses have given way to an elfin sweetness, a melancholy grasp of his own limitations. For Tashi, Art is the boringly safe bet, the player and spouse who will never fall below or rise above a certain threshold. Patrick is the more gifted but far more volatile wild card, and O’Connor’s devilishly charming grin keeps finding ways to woo us—not that we’re the ones who need persuading.

This isn’t the first time that Zendaya has been stuck on the sidelines watching two men go at it. Scarcely two months have passed since the arrival of “Dune: Part Two,” which made her stand watch, in helpless horror, over a climactic and unsubtly homoerotic spectacle of male violence. The hand-to-hand combat in “Challengers” is juicier still, if markedly less bloody; no one gets stabbed, and the fate of planetary civilizations does not hang in the balance. Even so, Tashi’s tense gaze seems to contain a small cosmos of anguished possibilities. Is she wryly envisioning herself as the ball that Art and Patrick keep slamming over the net? Or perhaps she’s the trophy that one of them will hoist aloft—and, if so, does that make her the inevitable winner or the ultimate loser?

These are intriguing if somewhat dispiriting questions, and I doubt I’m alone in wishing that Tashi’s own athletic dreams hadn’t come to a premature end. My mind flashed back to the wanly likable “Wimbledon” (2004), which benched its female star, Kirsten Dunst, while ushering her male beau into the winner’s circle. Guadagnino has two men to usher, and the final stretch of “Challengers” smacks of both desperation and bravura as it pulls out stop after stop: suddenly, this sports movie becomes a gale-force disaster flick and a buddy comedy of remarriage. If the wrap-up feels overextended—right down to a closing twist that you’ll see coming several tennis courts away—you can hardly blame Guadagnino for falling so hard for his players, or for getting so entangled in the geometry of their desires. He lives to serve, and he wants the game to go on forever. ♦

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‘The Strike’ Review: Doc Chronicles a Battle to Halt Endless Solitary Confinement

JoeBill Munoz and Lucas Guilkey’s feature debut is an involving chronicle of inmates’ struggle against one California prison’s severe treatment policies.

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When California opened the Pelican Bay State Prison in 1989, it was considered a model of its “supermax” type, designed as a maximum security institution for “the worst of the worst.” At the time, the “War on Drugs” (then “three-strikes” laws) had greatly increased prison populations, resulting in overcrowding which escalated tensions between inmate factions. Pelican Bay was conceived to alleviate those problems by isolating the most troublesome wards of the state.

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This approach then provided a blanket excuse to place those individuals in “the SHU” (Security Housing Unit) … and leave them there. A half-dozen or so Pelican Bay veterans interviewed here include ones who remained in solitary for 10, 20, even 30-plus years. They describe such complete isolation as “a very intense mental battle.” One shares, “I had resigned myself to death in a windowless concrete box.”

In July 2011, there was a widespread first hunger strike to demand better conditions. Some requests were shamefully basic, including the right to have a wall calendar, a warm winter cap, one family photo and one phone call per year. (The facility’s remote rural location, just below the Oregon border, makes in-person visits rare.)

When that effort seemed to generate little real change, there was a second strike in 2013 — smaller in number, but more effective in gaining attention from outside reformists, media, and politicians. In the end, however, it was a lawsuit rather than legislators that forced change, leading some 4,000 inmates to be released from solitary. For some, that ultimately led to parole and a new start in society.

Brief, impressionistic reenactments attempt to convey something of this extreme prison life. But limited access and the film’s brisk, even slick tenor perversely make the grueling nature of solitary confinement (which some have considered a form of torture) a reality “The Strike” doesn’t render especially vivid. A few prior documentaries on the subject, like Nina Rosenblum’s 1990 “Through the Wire,” or dramatic depictions like Steve McQueen’s “Hunger,” have managed that better.

But Munoz and Guilkey’s emphasis is more on bucking the system, a process driven by the combined efforts of inmates, activists (including prisoners’ relatives), investigative journalists, and select politicians. We also hear from a number of current or former prison officials, and see videotape of an attempted negotiation session during one hunger strike.

The U.S. prison industry continues to boom, and many citizens see incarceration as a deserved dead end for “bad people,” never mind abstraction notions of human rights and rehabilitation. “The Strike” reminds that even within criminal justice, some degree of mercy remains relevant. Particularly outside the realm of lifers and death row, the goal shouldn’t be to crush individuals’ spirit until they can’t possibly re-enter civilian life. This well-crafted documentary makes a strong case for human contact as essential to human existence, even (or especially) among the incarcerated. Closing on-screen text, however, notes that about 120,000 American convicts are still currently estimated as being held in solitary confinement.

Reviewed online, April 26, 2024. In Hot Docs Festival. Running time: 86 MIN.

Production: (Documentary) A JoeBill Munoz, Lucas Guilkey production. (World sales: ROCO Films, Sausalito, Calif.) Producers: Munoz, Guilkey. Executive producers: David Menschel, Robina Riccitiello, Sandie Viquez Pedlow.
Crew: Directors: JoeBill Munoz, Lucas Guilkey. Camera: Victor Tadashi Suarez. Editor: Daniela I. Quiroz. Music: Chris Pattishall, Samora Pinderhughes
With: Faruq Salvant, Paul Redd, Michael Saavedra, Ernesto Lira, Dadisi Benton, Jack Morris, Michael Montgomery, Bob Ayers, Shane Bauer, Dolores Canales, Brian Parry, John Campbell, Scott Kernan.

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‘Guilt’ Review: When the Lights Go Out in Edinburgh

The final season of Scotland’s most notable TV drama, on PBS’s “Masterpiece,” is a suitably twisty and sardonic send-off for the battling McCall brothers.

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Two men in an industrial-looking warehouse setting, one with short gray hair and the other with dark hair pulled into a man bun, appear with worried expressions.

By Mike Hale

Contains spoilers for Seasons 1 and 2 of “Guilt.”

“Guilt,” a pioneering series in Scottish television — it was the first drama commissioned by the newly formed BBC Scotland channel in 2019 — has built an audience well beyond its borders. A melancholy tale of family dysfunction presented as a complicated crime thriller, it combines British regionalism with peak TV-style poker-faced comedy in a way that has made it a critical darling around the world.

Created and written by Neil Forsyth, “Guilt” has arrived in dense, lively four-episode bursts; the third and final season has its American premiere on PBS’s “Masterpiece” beginning Sunday. Each installment has been organized around a psycho-philosophical theme: first guilt, then revenge in Season 2, and now, as Forsyth described it in a BBC interview, redemption.

But the pleasure of the show does not come from diagraming its moral lessons (unless that’s your thing), or from unwinding Forsyth’s sometimes maddeningly convoluted plots, which entangle sons and daughters of Edinburgh’s rough-and-tumble Leith district with the city’s gangsters, cops and politicians.

What makes “Guilt” worthwhile is Forsyth’s knack for creating characters who work their way into our affections, less by their actions than by their unconscious, soul-deep responses to life in the grim confines of Leith and the promise of something better in Edinburgh’s more comfortable precincts.

At the center of the web are Max and Jake McCall (Mark Bonnar and the marvelous Jamie Sives), brothers with very little use for each other who become bound in a seemingly endless cycle of lies, danger and recrimination. It begins in the opening minutes of Season 1 when Jake, with Max in the car’s passenger seat, accidentally runs into an old man, killing him. Jake, a gentle soul with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music (he could have wandered in from a Nick Hornby novel), wants to call the police; Max, a rapacious lawyer with a near-sociopathic lack of empathy, says no.

This is the original sin for which the brothers are still paying. Covering up their hit-and-run homicide embroils them with the Lynches, a married pair of quietly vicious gangsters whom Max and Jake are both on the run from, and scheming to take down, across the show’s three seasons. While the brothers work together for survival, they are also at each other’s throats, taking turns ruefully betraying each other, leading to imprisonment, exile and worse.

Sives brings a natural soulfulness to Jake while also making his cold double crosses of his brother believable; Bonnar is just as capable given the inverse challenge, conveying Max’s venality, vanity and desperation for success (pegged to being abandoned as a child) while also making credible his rare flashes of sympathy.

But even more crucial to the show’s effect are the amusingly vivid characters who surround the brothers: Kenny (Emun Elliott), the formerly alcoholic, surprisingly capable investigator who serves as the show’s wobbly moral center; Stevie (Henry Pettigrew), the hilariously jumpy corrupt cop; Teddy (Greg McHugh), who fully communicates his ability to dispense extreme violence while rarely actually dispensing it; Sheila (Ellie Haddington), the deadpan black widow; and Maggie Lynch, the show’s motherly, ruthless big bad, with Phyllis Logan of “Downton Abbey” playing wonderfully against type.

(Even incidental characters have distinctive moments. In the new season, Anita Vettesse, as the girlfriend of a man who gets thrown from a great height, gets to deliver this memorable couplet: “There’s nobody better at keeping their head down than me. It’s probably my biggest talent, if I’m honest with you.”)

The first season of “Guilt” was a self-contained triumph. It offered a cleverly satirical structure — as Jake and Max’s cover-up rippled out, one character after another found his lot improved, or his aspirations stoked, in confounding ways — and a satisfying ending that sent Jake out of the country and Max, accepting that he had been sold out by his brother, off to prison.

The second season, in which Max was released and pursued his improbable campaign of revenge against the Lynches, was over-plotted and overwritten, full of action-halting speeches about life and Leith. And it suffered from the absence of Jake for more than half the season — Max’s fervor was not nearly as moving or entertaining without his brother there to react to it.

The brothers are together from the start of Season 3, which puts them at the lowest, most perilous point they have reached so far. And it is largely a return to form, a suitable send-off for the battling McCalls. Kenny, Teddy, Stevie and Sheila all return, and join Max, Jake, an honest cop (Isaura Barbé-Brown) and Kenny’s no-nonsense niece (Amelia Isaac Jones), in a coalition of the somewhat willing, to take on Maggie Lynch one last time. Forsyth has fully assimilated the lessons of the Coen brothers and the history of the caper film, and with an ending that lets in more sentiment than the show has previously allowed, he gives Jake and Max slivers of their Scottish dreams.

Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media. More about Mike Hale

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