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On the eve of world war i, 'sunset' is gorgeous but opaque.

Ella Taylor

Sunset stars Juli Jakab as Irisz Leiter, a young woman in Budapest on the eve of World War I. Sony Pictures Classics hide caption

Sunset stars Juli Jakab as Irisz Leiter, a young woman in Budapest on the eve of World War I.

Some mighty fancy millinery plays a key role in the Hungarian film Sunset .

The hats are ornate and beautiful and way over the top, all of which might also be said of the paper-thin grandeur of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1913 as it teeters on the verge of collapse just before the outbreak of World War I. Budapest, the crown jewel of that empire, also teems with anarchists, cultists, con men, strongmen and all manner of unsavory types who reliably rush in to fill a social vacuum, all working under the radar of bourgeois decorum as the city feverishly prepares to celebrate a jubilee. We watch things fall apart through the vigilant eyes of a young woman in the eye of the storm, who may end up connecting the dots for us between fine millinery and toxic civilization. Then again, the film's director, Laszlo Nemes ( Son of Saul ) is not given to connecting dots — at least not so's you'd notice up front.

At an upscale hat store catering to the local rich as well as high-ups from Vienna — Budapest's rival in wealthy excess — we meet Irisz Leiter (Juli Jakab), an elegantly dressed stranger with piercing blue eyes, who arrives at the shop ostensibly looking for work. She gets a distinctly cool welcome from the owner, Mr. Brill, a smooth operator played by Vlad Ivanov, whom you may remember as the reptilian abortionist in the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days .

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When he hears that Irisz is the daughter of the store's previous proprietors, who perished there in a mysterious fire years ago, Brill tries to run her out of town. Irisz digs in her heels, so he switches gears and adds her to the team of gorgeous women he has hand-picked, seemingly to make hats for an upcoming royal visit from Vienna. They don't know it, but the girls are being groomed for something far creepier and more cultish than a party. The rot starts at the top, and adding to the mystery is a downtrodden Countess (Julia Jakubowska), whose dead husband may have been murdered by a brother Irisz never knew she had, who's either dead or spearheading a brewing insurrection in Budapest's dark netherworld.

Sunset is unsettlingly devoid of exposition, foreshadowing or any other tricks that flag where a complicated narrative might be going. If anything, Nemes means to immerse us in the stew of malignant ambiguity that threatens to engulf Irisz as she tries to unravel the tissue of secrets and lies that surrounds her parents' deaths. The film strands us with Irisz as her search leads her from one unreliable lead to another, the background always blurry and indistinct. A hand-held camera clings to her retreating back as she commutes between light and darkness, between the overripe opulence of the store, the streets bright with festive celebrants, and the dank corners of the city. There, a bearded mystery man tells Irisz, plans are afoot to make sure that "blood will flow in these streets."

Nemes can be relentlessly opaque, which at time makes the film a drag to follow. But there's method in his determination to leave us with nowhere to park our own affinities. He's showing us the soil in which fascism takes root, and in this sense Sunset operates as a kind of prequel to the director's 2015 Son of Saul , which confronts the horror of the Nazi concentration camps through the eyes of a Sonderkommando prisoner whose job is to rip valuables from the bodies of his gassed fellow Jews.

Sunset catches a moment when spreading unease and dysfunction threaten to tip over into apocalypse, a war without heroes. There's a touch of the fanatic or the avenging angel in Irisz, too, in her implacable refusal to give way or give up. Nemes is not one to announce parallels between then and now. But the movie's final scene makes it impossible not to see a warning in Irisz's implacable stare into the camera from a wartime dugout. The victim has, perhaps, grown into a radical leader. Only we don't know what kind.

Correction May 3, 2019

A previous version of this story incorrectly said that director Laszlo Nemes' movie Son of Saul is from 1915. It's actually from 2015.

‘Sunset’ Review: Light Fades on Empires and Evil in Scathing Historical Drama

By David Fear

László Nemes is a filmmaker who keeps his friends close and his cameras closer. The Hungarian director’s devastating 2015 debut, Son of Saul, distinguished itself not just by sticking right next to its main character but virtually breathing down his neck — the fact that our guide was a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, grimly trying to survive a waking nightmare, only heightened the effect. The actor Geza Rohrig’s face took up most of the frame’s real estate and blocked out the horror you could hear happening offscreen; it also made the sheer weight of the sorrow and the pity feel extremely personal. It was a first-person tour of hell, both aesthetically impressive at a distance and overwhelmingly immersive in the moment.

The stakes are nowhere near as high in Nemes’ follow-up, Sunset — how could they be, really? But there is life, glimpsed in the periphery as folks walk down a crowded street in Budapest in the 1910s, the Austro-Hungarian empire still in effect and World War I still waiting patiently on the horizon. And there is death, both the legacy of it and threat of it as an era of European history is about to come to a close. Most of all, there’s the same emphasis on putting viewers claustrophobically near the facial pores of a protagonist, a young woman called Írisz (Juli Jakab). It’s the surname of this person who’s returned to the city from some place far away, however, that startled residents are focusing on: Leiter. That’s the moniker on the millinery where she tries to get hired for a job and get face time with the current boss, Oszkár Brill (Vlad Ivanov). It’s a reference to her parents, the previous owners of this hoity-toity hat shop and who perished in a fire. And it’s become synonymous with Írisz’s brother, the boy who allegedly started that blaze. “It took me years to ensure that the name Leiter no one longer called to mind a killer,” Brill tells her, sternly.

Still, Írisz has come back to Budapest during the jubilee week, in search of her sibling and some answers. What she’ll find — and given that Nemes once again keeps his cameras either right over Jakab’s shoulder, a few feet in front of her or right up in her face, what we will find — is a decadent aristocracy high on its own exhaust fumes, a dangerously unstable mob, so many predatory men and an empire on the brink of decline but already neck-deep in moral rot. This is a movie that literally begins with a veil being lifted from someone’s eyes, and for as much as the filmmaker plays games with how much audiences know at any moment (we don’t even find out Írisz’s full name until close to a half hour into the 142 minute running time), he’s blessed us a work filled with reminders and revelations. Many are narrative-based, especially before mystery gives way to outright tragedy and then righteousness. Some involve the notion that, as history and the present keep engaging in a conversation we too often choose to ignore, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose . And other revolve around the fact that a certain type of arthouse cinema — the ambitious, vital, foreign-language kind that offers up both bleak outlooks and opulent period-piece production design — is still alive and well and occasionally showing up at theaters near you.

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It also underlines the idea that coming out of the gate with a film that instantly makes your name can sometimes count against you. If Sunset doesn’t hit with nearly the impact that Son of Saul does — and it doesn’t — his look back at the chaos before the storm solidly establishes Nemes as a major world-cinema voice. His notion of grafting you on to the perspective of the protagonist via extreme proximity no longer seems like a simple choice but a consistent sensibility: We are all culpable. (Give cinematographer Mátyás Erdély a hand and a cigar as well.) His ability to find actors capable of handling such close-up scrutiny and emotional heavy lifting is borne out by Jakab, who keeps things moving even when story strolls into confounding detours and dead ends; you leave feeling like her face means so much to the camera, to the filmmaker, to us. (A shout-out to Ivanov as well, Romanian cinema’s stalwart bureaucrat/bad guy.) When the heroine we’ve been doggedly following finally steps out of focus, we understand why it means something. A coda suggests Írisz is the ghost of old, dead Europe, slouching into a 20th century that will strip so much of it away. Evil hides behind pretty social facades and in plain sight. The sun has set on so many empires. It will continue to set on so many more.

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Review: ‘Sunset’ is László Nemes’ boldly unnerving follow-up to ‘Son of Saul’

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Where does an artist go after Auschwitz? László Nemes, the director of the implacably sinister Hungarian drama “Sunset,” has had to grapple with the question as few others have. He won an Oscar and nearly every international film prize under the sun for his 2015 feature debut, “Son of Saul,” which plunged the viewer into a grimly persuasive simulacrum of a Nazi death camp and, for its many admirers, delivered the last word on how a filmmaker should depict the unthinkable.

It may also have rendered an unshakable verdict on Nemes himself, whose obvious technical ingenuity had found its most imposing subject — but also, in a way, its most obvious. Whether they traffic in grim horror or dubious uplift, movies about the Holocaust have long since hardened into their own predictable subgenre. The radicalism of “Son of Saul” could be appreciated not just because it was so brutal and overwhelming, but also because it was so strange and destabilizing. It restored a vital element of disorientation to a story that had grown all too familiar.

Disorientation is even more the order of the day in “Sunset,” in part because its historical moment exerts far less of a grip on the collective imagination. This is an easier movie to watch than “Son of Saul,” insofar as we cannot hear the machinery of mass murder grinding away relentlessly off-screen. But its peculiar dramatic alchemy — the way Nemes places his mad formal audacity in service of a tangled, perversely withholding narrative — makes it a rather more difficult one to absorb.

Scholars of the waning glory days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire will have something of an advantage. We are in Budapest in the 1910s, a world of white-lace finery and horse-drawn carriages that is rivaled only by its sister city, Vienna, as the apex of European wealth and cultural refinement. The movie’s first image is of a 20-year-old woman named Irisz (Juli Jakab), her eyes hidden by the brim of an enormous hat she’s trying on at Leiter’s, a high-end milliner’s shop. The initial concealment of her gaze is telling; who this young woman is and what she wants are among the movie’s most persistent mysteries.

The first reversal arrives within minutes: Irisz’s surname is Leiter, and she has come not to buy a hat but rather to apply for a job at the shop that her parents owned years ago before it burned down, taking them with it. Leiter’s has since been restored to its old splendor, and its oily new proprietor, Oszkár Brill (the excellent Romanian actor Vlad Ivanov), clearly thought highly enough of the name to keep it. But Brill has no interest in hiring Irisz and sends her away, setting a pattern for the sneering hostility and paranoia she will receive from nearly everyone she encounters.

These strangers include the many pretty, petulant frowners who work at Leiter’s and various men who emerge to hiss cryptic warnings at Irisz (“You have awakened us!” “Blood will flow here this week!”) before vanishing back into the torchlit night. At one point, Irisz is accosted by a snarling coachman (Levente Molnár) at her hotel, but it will take more than a manhandling or two to deter her from her quest. Eventually, she finds out about a brother she never knew she had named Kálmán Leiter, whose violent reputation — he is said to have murdered a count named Rédey five years earlier — may explain the cruelty and suspicion that greet her at every turn.

By now it should be clear that Nemes, who wrote the script with Clara Royer and Matthieu Taponier, has little use for conventional explanations. But if individual scenes and subplots remain dauntingly opaque, the overall arc of “Sunset” is clear enough. As Irisz moves from bustling streets and afternoon garden parties into a shadowy underworld of crime and conspiracy, she is not merely chasing the truth about her patrimony; she is our witness to the last gasp of European high decadence before it vanishes into the bloody maw of World War I.

It’s a compelling thesis, though predicated less on supporting arguments than on dramatic feints and hallucinations, on scenes that either evaporate like smoke or strand the viewer in a thick cloud of metaphor. “Sunset” is maddening and mesmerizing. At every turn, Nemes uses his considerable formal powers — aided immeasurably by Mátyás Erdély’s restless handheld cinematography and László Melis’ eerily dissonant string score — to unmoor us from the usual trappings of story and character, to summon feelings of dread and displacement not yet fully registered by the narrative.

We follow Irisz all over Budapest without quite knowing exactly where she ends up or why: Where is this carriage taking her? Why is she being rowed, as if by Charon himself, across the Danube? We find ourselves sharing her state of heightened but weirdly decontextualized anxiety, trying to solve a puzzle that turns into an existential labyrinth. Stray tendrils of plot are dispensed through background chatter, much of it swallowed up by the steady cracking of whips, the neighing of horses and the steady chug-chug of approaching locomotives.

The visual scheme proves similarly elusive. Shooting on gorgeously dusky 35-millimeter film, Nemes and Erdély weave long, sinuous tracking shots around Irisz, often using the image’s shallow focus to isolate her at the center of the frame while Budapest becomes a teeming, seething background blur. In “Son of Saul,” this strategic blurring served a crucial if much-debated purpose, ensuring that Nemes’ skillful re-creation of Auschwitz did not devolve into an obscene, pornographic display.

“Sunset” is governed by no such moral or aesthetic logic, and its use of the same formal constraints can’t help but feel coy and mannered by comparison, at least initially. In time, the deeper meaning of that aesthetic, its principled insistence on drawing our attention away from the obvious, comes into focus. As one character notes, “The horror of the world hides beneath these infinitely pretty things.” He is referring to Leiter’s opulent wares, but he is also speaking to a more universal condition of human evil, the tendency of corrupt, exploitative societies to conceal themselves behind the trappings of luxury and glamour.

At times, the twisty contours of the plot are illuminated with sudden clarity, particularly those involving Count Rédey’s grieving widow (Julia Jakubowska) and the ugly truth about Leiter’s, which turns out to play a highly specific role in the city’s ruthlessly patriarchal order. In these moments, “Sunset” becomes, among other things, a movie about the abuse and subjugation of women in any era, in times of peace as well as war.

And in Irisz, it has a protagonist who doesn’t fight back against these oppressive forces so much as prove oddly, defiantly impervious to them. Sometimes immaculately dressed and coiffed, sometimes disheveled and veiled in sweat, Jakub gives a taciturn but unrelentingly physical performance, anchored by a gaze that confronts every fresh horror with both intense vulnerability and fierce determination. She teaches you to watch the movie by watching her; a single glance, registering some fresh information off-camera, is all it takes to send her on a sudden change of course.

The last time we see Irisz, in a long tracking shot that brings the movie’s thesis to a “gotcha!” close, she fixes the camera with a flinty stare that could be interpreted as a wink or a rebuke — or a revelation. This woman, you realize, is neither a troublemaker nor a victim; she’s more like an expression of conscience, a physical and spiritual emanation from a higher plane of moral intelligence. You never fear for Irisz in “Sunset.” You fear for the world she’s passed through and found sorely, tragically wanting.

------------

Hungarian and German dialogue with English subtitles

Rating: R, for some violence

Running time: 2 hours, 22 minutes

Playing: Laemmle’s Royal theaters, West Los Angeles

[email protected] | Twitter: @JustinCChang

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Movie Review – Sunset (2019)

April 30, 2019 by EJ Moreno

Sunset , 2019.

Directed by Lászlò Nemes. Starring Juli Jakab, Vlad Ivanov, Evelin Dobos, and Marcin Czarnik.

SYNOPSIS: A young woman searches the streets of Budapest, Hungary, to find the brother she never knew she had.

At times, Sunset reminds me of the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. Some scenes feel poetic, while others come off painfully methodic. At other times, the new film from Son of Saul director László Nemes is a bit tedious and complicated. There’s no chance to get lost into this period piece and just casually view it; Sunset leaves you too bewildered for anything like that. Is that a negative or positive trait? It’s still hard to tell, but that doesn’t take away from the sheer level of craftsmanship that went into this piece.

Sunset follows Irisz Leiter, played perfectly by Juli Jakab, as she attempts to re-enter a society she’s unfamiliar and uncomfortable with. The uptight culture isn’t always welcoming to Irisz as well, with her continually putting them off. She often inserts herself into situations or asks questions that no one wants to hear, but she is unmoved in her ways. With her parents recently deceased and no attachment to Trieste, she ventures into the darkest parts of 1913 Budapest in search of her disgraced brother.

When typing out the plot, it feels so simple to explain. But the viewing experience is everything but simple. Disorientating is the first word that comes to mind as you don’t often really know what’s happening to Irisz and why this story is taking such bizarre turns, but Juli Jakab plays it so well, and László Nemes is such a skilled filmmaker that it somehow works by the time credits roll. That’s not to say I still don’t have questions after viewing – yet to figure out why they had that scene where it felt like Charon was rowing Irisz across the Danube- but that’s the beauty of a film like this. It’s about the entire viewing experience and how it made you feel, what it made you think about after; it’s not just about strange little moments or little flaws sprinkled throughout it.

With such a strange film, it’s not going to work for every viewer. Even if you enjoy this type of film, it takes the right mindset to go through a movie like Sunset . This piece is light on dialogue and heavy on history, which takes a certain level of willingness to watch. Cutting down the runtime or going for less long takes could make this pill easier to swallow and make it a bit more accessible. While the film is enjoyable and quite the experience, trying to recommend this to someone isn’t an easy task.

What stands out among all the bold artistic choices as one of the most positive is the adventurous camerawork. The entire film is about taking the viewer away from the “God’s eye” of these events and placing you right into the action, that’s spelled out entirely in the visuals of the film. All of the warmly-lit hand-held work from cinematographer Mátyás Erdély makes you feel like you right there with the characters. The atmosphere feels lowkey with nothing feeling too grand, and Erdély captures that so well.

If she’s immaculately dressed or covered in sweat, Juli Jakub’s performance is the center of the camera’s focus and the viewer’s attention. The beauty of her performance is also how she’s written and how the film depicts Irisz. She isn’t a perfect character, by no means a stereotypical feminist. Irisz is raw, unfiltered, and the viewer is asked to follow her as she figures it out along the way. It’s refreshing to see a character know she doesn’t have all the answers, knows she’s the odd person out, but refuses to let it hinder her journey of self-discovery.

As previously mentioned, recommending Sunset to just any viewer is a daunting task. That doesn’t mean the movie isn’t worth a watch as this is another striking entry from Lászlò Nemes. The last film from Nemes, Son of Saul , handled its subject with tact and such polish, and all of that was thrown out for Sunset . It’s a little messier and a little edgier, and all the better for that.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

About EJ Moreno

EJ Moreno is a film and television critic and entertainment writer who joined the pop culture website Flickering Myth in 2018 and now serves as the executive producer of Flickering Myth TV, a YouTube channel with over 27,000 subscribers. With over a decade of experience, he is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic who is also part of the Critics Choice Association and GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics.

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‘sunset’ (‘napszallta’): film review | venice 2018.

A young woman becomes an eyewitness to the destruction of civilization in Laszlo Nemes’ ('Son of Saul') symbolic epic 'Sunset' ('Napszallta'), which is set in pre-war Budapest.

By THR Staff

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Depicting civilization on the brink of catastrophe as the 20th century begins (the setting is 1913 Budapest, one pregnant year before World War I), director Laszlo Nemes’ sophomore film Sunset ( Napszallta ) weaves a fascinating atmosphere of menace around stalwart young heroine Irisz (Juli Jakab), but its heavy symbolism and penchant for creating unresolved mysteries drives it far from the poignancy of Son of Saul , which launched Nemes’ career with the Cannes Grand Prix, a Golden Globe and the 2016 Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

Clocking in at almost two and a half hours and shot with a growing intensity that demands the audience’s full engagement, it will be a tiring, frustrating watch for many. The strong critical support that bolstered Son of Saul ’s brilliant career is unlikely to repeat itself here.

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Another consideration is the apocalyptic subject itself, which could be argued to be ever-timely (aren’t we always on the eve of destruction?) but has much less hold on the popular imagination — outside the comic book renditions — than the Nazi concentration camp of the first film. Though Nemes pumps the anxiety level high in both stories, pre-war Budapest remains an abstraction that doesn’t touch the heartstrings.

Undeniably, Sunset is an impressive piece of filmmaking, and from a technical point of view it stirs memories of the boldly shot Hungarian cinema revival of the 1960s. The spirit of Stanley Kubrick certainly haunts the film. Nemes ends with a startling homage to Paths of Glory and the master’s long p.o.v. shot of Kirk Douglas stalking through the trenches as shells burst overhead. There is also a whiff of the creepy masked sex party in Eyes Wide Shut when, in her fearless and foolhardy way, Irisz gatecrashes a pair of aristocratic gatherings to see for herself the horrors she is told not to look at.

But what exactly are these horrors? Raids by outlaw bands, shootings and whippings take place chaotically in the dark or offscreen. The screenplay, penned by Nemes and Son of Saul co-writer Clara Royer along with editor Mattieu Taponier, appears to deliberately blur the meaning of these scenes, privileging atmosphere and letting the viewer’s imagination supply the rest.

In a postcard Budapest ruled by Francis Joseph’s Austro-Hungarian empire, the city is booming and now rivals Vienna, we are told. Irisz Leiter (Jakab) arrives in town after resigning her job as a milliner in Trieste. Her eyes calm and her bearing regal, she applies for a job making hats in the fashionable Leiter hat store that her parents once owned, before they perished in a fire and left her an orphan. Throughout the film, Irisz and those around her make so much of her name that one wonders if the Leiters were Jewish, casting a dark shadow over the burning of their shop. But this is never explicitly stated in the film and remains only a possibility.

The store’s new owner Oszkar Brill (authoritatively played by Cristian Mungiu’s regular actor Vlad Ivanov) makes a lame excuse and denies her a job. But Irisz is not a woman to be shaken off lightly. She throws away the first-class train ticket he offers her back to Trieste and turns back to the city, determined to investigate the rumor she has heard from a servant that she has a brother, and he is the devil incarnate.

Eventually Brill takes her on at the store under the jealous gaze of his favorite young manager, Zelma (Evelin Dobos). Ordered to remain on the premises, she slips the leash constantly to follow up clues, putting herself in one perilous situation after another. At one point she sneaks into the palace of the half-mad Countess Redey (Julia Jakubowska), whose cruel husband her brother is supposed to have killed. She sees the countess’ back has been scarred by the whip.

Even worse is the fate awaiting the girl from Brill’s store who is “chosen” by the decadent aristos to bring the Princess’ hats to the palace. Eventually Irisz discovers the sickening fate of the milliner Fanni, one of the chosen ones.

Rather repetitively, in the second half of the film she goes dashing off in trams and carriages to look for her phantom brother, who is reported to be the ruthless leader of a band of outlaws who are bent on burning down the hat store and destroying the civilization it represents. She witnesses a strange ceremony at the end of the tram line but is denied entrance to a guarded building reserved “only for men.” Warned to go home after she is almost gang raped in a terrifying scene, she jumps off the tram taking her to safety and comes back for more. In the end, Irisz seems to leave the flesh-and-blood world behind her and becomes the wide-eyed symbol of human determination to bear witness at all costs.

The story is told entirely from her viewpoint, which becomes more pronounced as we trail behind her in the long tracking shots without cuts that Nemes prefers. Jakab projects dignity and determination far beyond her years. Her boyish face and androgynous body are those of a modern fashion model, and they come in handy later in the pic when she is forced to masquerade as a boy.

All the other actors seem like ghosts from a dream. Lenser Matyas Erdely, who shot Son of Saul , again privileges Nemes’ stylish signature of short focus close-ups of faces and blurred background figures, reinforcing the film’s feeling of dream and nightmare.

Both Laszlo Rajk’s production design, filled with smoke, dust, crowds, horses and confusion, and Gyorgyi Szakacs’ costumes are quite stunning, dusting off the period and giving it an unfamiliar, modern look. The pretty shop girls, for example, are uniformly thin and flat-chested, making them very graceful and stylish in lace dresses and high collars.

Composer Laszlo Melis racks up the tension with frantic violin strains that are most effective.   Production companies: Laokoon Filmgroup, Playtime Cast: Juli Jakab, Vlad Ivanov, Evelin Dobos, Marcin Czarnik, Levente Molnar, Julia Jakobowska, Christian Harting Director: Laszlo Nemes Screenwriters: Laszlo Nemes, Clara Royer, Matthieu Taponier Producers: Gabor Sipos, Gabor Rajna, Francois Yon, Nicolas Brigaud-Robert, Valery Guibal Director of photography: Matyas Erdely Production designer: Laszlo Rajk Costume designer: Gyorgyi Szakacs Editor: Matthieu Taponier Music: Laszlo Melis Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition) World sales:  Playtime

142 minutes

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Tom Mix and Wyatt Earp team up to solve a murder at the Academy Awards in 1929 Hollywood. Tom Mix and Wyatt Earp team up to solve a murder at the Academy Awards in 1929 Hollywood. Tom Mix and Wyatt Earp team up to solve a murder at the Academy Awards in 1929 Hollywood.

• Blake Edwards
• Rod Amateau
• Bruce Willis
• James Garner
• Malcolm McDowell
• 42 User reviews
• 21 Critic reviews
• 1 win & 2 nominations total

• Alfie Alperin

• Cheryl King

• Nancy Shoemaker

• Victoria Alperin

• Christina Alperin

• Captain Blackworth

• Chief Marvin Dibner

• Dutch Kieffer

• Marty Goldberg

• Michael Alperin

• Spanish Dancer

• (as Cástulo Guerra)
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• Trivia Although the plot is mostly fiction, Wyatt Earp and Tom Mix were real-life friends. After Earp retired from law enforcement, he and his wife drifted around, eventually setting in Los Angeles, where he and Mix met. Mix tried to get Hollywood to produce a movie about Earp, but they weren't interested. Earp was hired as a technical consultant for movies starring Mix and William S. Hart . When Earp died in 1929, Mix and Hart were his pallbearers.
• Goofs When Tom Mix chases down the Stagecoach after the driver is shot, the reins go through a "window" into the stagecoach so a stunt driver can control the team.

Wyatt Earp : It's all true, give or take a lie or two.

• Crazy credits The final frame of the picture freezes, and the following text appears: "And this is how it really happened. Give or take a lie or two."
• Connections Featured in Siskel & Ebert: Shakedown/Stormy Monday/Sunset/Two Moon Junction/White Mischief (1988)
• Soundtracks Black And Tan Fantasy Performed by Duke Ellington and the Duke Ellington Orchestra (as Orchestra) Courtesy of RCA Records

User reviews 42

• Dec 15, 2005
• How long is Sunset? Powered by Alexa
• April 29, 1988 (United States)
• United States
• Bell Ranch, Santa Susana, California, USA
• Cecchi Gori Group Tiger Cinematografica
• Hudson Hawk Films Ltd.
• ML Delphi Premier Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $16,000,000 (estimated)
• May 1, 1988

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 42 minutes
• Dolby Stereo

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Sunset review – murky Hungarian drama

László Nemes loses the plot in this story of a young woman seeking her way in the world

A hat is a covering for the head; whether decorative or practical, by its very nature it obscures. Appropriate, then, that this prettified, disorienting second feature from Hungarian film-maker László Nemes (known for 2015’s Oscar-winning Son of Saul) takes place in a millinery.

In Budapest, a year before the start of the first world war, 20-year-old orphan Írisz Leiter (Juli Jakab) arrives at the hat shop her parents once owned, looking for a connection to her past. Leiter’s has been taken over by the slick, bearded Oszkár Brill (Vlad Ivanov), who insists there are no positions for our behatted heroine, and so Írisz must find a family connection elsewhere. When she hears a rumour that she might have a brother named Kálmán, she sets about finding him – a trickier task than it sounds, given that he’s disappeared after supposedly (and brutally) murdering a count. Decadence, a dismembering, secret societies, not to mention the hats: on paper, the film’s plot sounds baroque, but its tone is severe.

Írisz investigates a palace later invaded by anarchists, hitches rides with dodgy coachmen, finds she is nifty with an oar; her delicate features and paranoid breathlessness disguise a keen survival instinct. Her search for Kálmán is admirably dogged but increasingly difficult to follow as Nemes introduces characters without clarifying how they might relate to one another.

If this withholding was a dramatic device that built to a revelation, fine, but he is more interested in creating an atmosphere of sludgy terror. This is emphasised by Mátyás Erdély’s intimate, handheld cinematography; the camera stays close to Írisz, fixing on the back of her neck and swirling around her as violence and sexual threat loom out of focus at the edge of the frame. The film’s formal qualities obscure Nemes’s intentions instead of illuminating them. It’s all too vague to function effectively as either a commentary on the build-up to the Great War or as the story of a woman looking to find her place in a city predicated on rigid, gender-determined hierarchies.

• Drama films
• The Observer
• World cinema
• László Nemes

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The Unexpected Delight of “Sasquatch Sunset”

By Richard Brody

In movies as in life, never assume. One of the joys of being a film critic is encountering surprising work from filmmakers whose habits seemed all too ingrained. Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” a spectacular fantasy from a director whose previous films were realistic, is one such splendid surprise; another is Bruno Dumont’s “Li’l Quinquin,” a flamboyant three-hour-plus feature that marked a decisive break with his earlier, more dour work. “Sasquatch Sunset,” a new movie by the independent filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner, offers the same kind of unexpected delight. This scruffy but finely nuanced drama follows an unusual group of characters: four Sasquatches—mythical beings better known singly, as Bigfoot—making their way through the forests of the Pacific Northwest in the course of a year. For the Zellners, the film’s sincere attention to the practicalities of its characters’ lives represents a major departure and a great advance. Their portrayal of the Sasquatches’ wanderings is a fictional form of cinematic anthropology, showing how the creatures cope with the elements, with the looming presence of humans, and with the deeper mysteries and energies of life—including the rising of consciousness itself.

The Zellners, who are brothers, have been working together for nearly three decades. They’ve built a career dramatizing near-absurdities, whether grim or merely eccentric, with earnest intensity. (They directed three episodes of “The Curse,” a satire of reality TV.) In their 2012 feature, “Kid-Thing,” a neglected child connects with a woman trapped at the bottom of a well. In “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter,” a Japanese woman who believes that the movie “Fargo” is a documentary travels to America in search of that tale’s buried ransom money.

The brothers have long had mythic simians in view: in 2011, their short film “Sasquatch Birth Journal 2,” a clever four-minute goof depicting a female of the species giving birth unassisted, played at Sundance. Their work until now has depended on keeping straight faces while telling tall tales, but in “Sasquatch Sunset” they approach a still taller tale with a seriousness that drives out parody, and the movie thrums with palpable pleasure arising from their own sense of wonder and curiosity. They’ve previously bent reality to fit their fantasies; now, in trimming fantasy to resemble reality, they display a deepened artistic purpose.

The four Sasquatches don’t speak; they only grunt and howl, as if lurching toward language. They’re bearded and covered in brown-gray fur, which is sparser on their chests and stomachs; their skin is thick and wrinkled. These looks are achieved not by way of motion capture (as in the ongoing “Planet of the Apes” franchise) but with costumes and makeup, which, amid tangles of fur and crusts of dirt, leave the performers’ faces discernible. The Zellners recruited four notable actors—or, rather, three and a ringer—to endow these difficult mime-like parts with potent individual personalities. Riley Keough portrays the group’s only female, who’s raising a lively and inquisitive young Sasquatch, played by Christophe Zajac-Denek. The pensive and mild-mannered member of the group, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is subordinate to its apparently senior member, portrayed by the co-director Nathan Zellner. If not a famous actor, Zellner is certainly an experienced one (largely in the brothers’ own films), and he brings psychodramatic authority to the role of the foursome’s alpha male—essentially a Sasquatch directing Sasquatches, with the power and the peril that such leadership entails. (The four Sasquatches have no identifiable names; I’ll call them by their respective actors’ first names.)

The movie begins in springtime and quickly addresses the inevitable, showing Riley and Nathan brusquely hooking up. Jesse and Christophe, holding hands, look on in fascinated awe—Jesse perhaps teaching the young Christophe the birds and the bees—while the couple, out in the open, displays no shyness. The Zellners imagine Sasquatch sex at an intermediate stage between animals’ functional reproduction and humans’ governing morality—fraught with feeling but not with shame. The result of this liaison is the eternal drama: Riley, scratching her genitals and sniffing her hand, determines that she’s pregnant, setting in motion the film’s overarching plotline.

The movie depicts a wide spectrum of Sasquatch life—the need for shelter, the varieties of play, the pleasures and pitfalls of eating newly discovered flora and fauna, the experience of grief and the rituals that it spawns, the Promethean hazards of intellectual curiosity, the trouble sparked by lust. In doing so, it reveals admirable conceptual audacity, skirting the constant risk of silliness. It’s often funny, but it’s no comedy, except to the extent that ordinary life is filled with incongruities and weird surprises. When funny things happen to the Sasquatches, the species’ naïveté pushes the humor toward danger, as when Christophe kisses a turtle that then bites his tongue and won’t let go, or when Nathan rages with horny delusions while standing in uneasy proximity to a cougar. The movie comes by its sweetness naturally, in the inherent cuteness of such ingenuousness—which is also the secret weapon of children and animals, of reality-TV celebrities (whether horrible bosses or selfish spouses), and even of documentary subjects (the rich and the famous who come off as ordinary people). In the Zellners’ other films, the action seems fabricated to yield images of twee idiosyncrasy—a woman trudging through snowy fields while wrapped in a quilt, a pioneer unloading a miniature horse from a crate on a beach—but there’s nothing contrived about the action or the images here, which feel like logical yet spontaneous discoveries about these four mysterious characters and their hidden world.

“Sasquatch Sunset” shows no humans but is haunted by the possibility of contact with them. Its neorealism demythologizes the cryptids, presenting them as just another endangered species whose fragile existence is made all the more poignant by its similarities to human society. (After a viewing of this movie, the nickname Bigfoot comes off like a slur.) The cast’s blend of choreographic precision and uninhibited animal energy is at the core of this authenticity; the actors’ mastery of their crudely expressive gestures conveys delicate emotions, and their grunts and hoots possess the dramatic flair and nuance of dialogue. What the movie offers, in effect, are baby pictures of the human race, and it respects the opacity of the primal experience that such infancy implies. Even as the film abounds in behavioral details, rendering its four protagonists’ personalities in sharp outlines, it never presumes to know too much about them; the movie shows what Sasquatches are like without assuming what it’s like to be a Sasquatch.

Though it’s not established that Riley is Christophe’s mother, she at least acts like a devoted one—he seems like an adolescent, but she’s still nursing him, and she also plucks the bugs from his fur (and eats them). When the newborn comes, she caresses and nurses and (when necessary) rescues it; wandering with the group while carrying the baby, she exhibits a keen alertness to hidden dangers. The tenderhearted Jesse has an incipient mathematical mind—gazing at the stars, he tries to count them but has only two numerals (“euh” and “ah”). His thoughtfulness converges with his communal spirit: when he finds a nest with four eggs, he picks it up and exerts himself to discern whether there are enough of them for each Sasquatch in his group. This effort is quickly rendered obsolete when the gruff, hulking Nathan, whose appetites are matched by his arrogance, relieves him of the nest and eats the eggs himself, leaving Jesse to look forlornly at his empty hand.

That gesture is one of many psychologically resonant moments that endow “Sasquatch Sunset” with its outsized power; it suggests the dawn of human-style imagination, the capacity to inwardly evoke an absent object. The finest such touch involves Christophe, who takes a step of Sasquatch imagination that amounts to a giant leap for Sasquatchkind. When the trio can’t find Nathan, Christophe searches for him in a distinctive way—he holds a hand in front of himself and, like a ventriloquist, has it talk to him in inchoate squeaks, to which he responds. It’s a breathtaking dramatic metaphor for the birth of thought, the awareness of consciousness as something like an other that’s also part of oneself.

With consciousness comes melancholy, which is induced for the Sasquatches by mounting clues of human proximity—a tree with a painted red “X,” a paved road, a well-appointed but unpeopled campsite. The Sasquatches move from defiant contempt of these artifacts’ strangeness (they mock and defile the road with piss and shit) to a growing recognition that the world they’ve discovered, complete with its rusting hulks of metal machinery and its inhospitable expanses of asphalt, is inimical to their survival. It’s only in a final shot of calculated theatricality that the Zellners tip their hands that the entire project is, after all, not just a work of fiction but a thoroughgoing fantasy. Here, they reveal the greatest danger that humans pose to Sasquatches: not the reasoned belief that they don’t exist but the mythologizing certainty that they do. ♦

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For audiences attuned to the Zellners' utterly unique wavelength, Sasquatch Sunset offers a moving -- if often inscrutable -- look at our relationship with the natural world.

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Movie Review: Should you watch ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ about a family of Bigfoots? Not yeti

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg in a scene from the film “Sasquatch Sunset.” (Bleecker Street via AP)

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, and Nathan Zellner in a scene from the film “Sasquatch Sunset.” (Bleecker Street via AP)

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg and Christophe Zajac-Denek in a scene from the film “Sasquatch Sunset.” (Bleecker Street via AP)

Jesse Eisenberg attends the premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at Metrograph, Monday, April 1, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Jihae Kim attends the premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at Metrograph, Monday, April 1, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

The Octopus Project’s Yvonne Lambert, Josh Lambert and Toto Miranda, from left, arrive for the Texas premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at the Paramount Theatre during the South by Southwest Film Festival on Monday, March 11, 2024, in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Jack Plunkett/Invision/AP)

Christophe Zajac-Denek attends the premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at Metrograph, Monday, April 1, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Christophe Zajac-Denek, David Zellner, Nathan Zellner and Jesse Eisenberg, from front left, arrive for the Texas premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at the Paramount Theatre during the South by Southwest Film Festival on Monday, March 11, 2024, in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Jack Plunkett/Invision/AP)

Emily Meade attends the premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at Metrograph, Monday, April 1, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Riley Keough in a scene from the film “Sasquatch Sunset.” (Bleecker Street via AP)

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Do you reckon Sasquatches snore? C’mon, you know the answer, deep down. Of course, they do. They snore and eat noisily and pick bugs out of each other’s fur and then eat those bugs, noisily.

What else do Sasquatches do, you wonder? One of the wildest movies of the year — or the century, for that matter — suggests they mourn, cuddle, bury their dead, enjoy throwing rocks in rivers, make art and wonder if they’re alone in the world.

Even so, “Sasquatch Sunset” from filmmaking brothers David and Nathan Zellner , is a bewildering 90-minute, narrator-less and wordless experiment that’s as audacious as it is infuriating. It’s not clear if everyone was high making it or we should be while watching it.

Nathan Zellner, Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough and Christophe Zajac-Denek play a makeshift family of four Sasquatches, lost in hair suits and prosthetics and communicating only in grunts, snorts and howls. They also pee a lot.

Why the filmmakers hired such starry actors instead of paying scale to some unknowns is puzzling. None of the Sasquatches do more than what could be called Method Chimpanzee — jumping up and down, whooping and growling. A group of real chimps would ding the quartet for overacting.

As an exercise in creating empathy for monsters, “Sasquatch Sunset” does an admirable job. In the first frames, when we see a loping Bigfoot in the middle distance — and then three more — it’s clear that they are telling this story, not the folks who usually capture them in shaky camera frames.

There are plenty of Sasquatches-are-just-like-us moments, like when one brings flowers to seduce another or two Bigfoots comfort each other after a death. Perhaps the most poignant moments are when they pound trees with sticks in unison, a rhythmic question that echoes through the valley. It’s a call, waiting for a response — anyone out there like us?

But then there’s a lot of gross-out stuff. We’ve mentioned the peeing, but it turns out that Sasquatches sneeze, procreate loudly and like to touch their genitals and then smell their fingers. They can also poo on demand and throw that poo to scare off predators.

One juvenile Bigfoot makes his hand into a makeshift puppet and talks to it — like a nod to the kid in “The Shining” — and another considers inserting his manhood into a small tree hole, like a prehistoric riff off that famous scene in “American Pie.”

Both things can be true, of course: Bigfoot can be disgusting and deep at the same time. But it’s not always clear what the filmmakers are going for here — satire, metaphor, sympathy, naturalism or gross-out comedy?

The Sasquatches reveal deeply human characteristics and may be stand-ins for our innocent pasts, a lost link in our evolution, showing the unrelenting violence of natural life or just the voiceless among us now. Or the filmmakers might just like the image of tossing poo.

Gorgeous vistas of pristine forests and misty valleys don’t help us figuring out when this all takes place but gradual clues emerge, including evidence of logging and a truly surreal bit at a human camping site, scored by the Erasure song “Love to Hate You.” But if the Zellners had an environmental lesson here, they shanked it.

There’s great music from The Octopus Project, veering from bright electric guitar noodles to sci-fi electronic dread reminiscent of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Stick through the roll of end credits and see one of the best credits ever in film: Sasquatch Wrangler. You don’t see that every day. You don’t see Sasquatch movies every day, either, but this is one you should probably let lope past you.

“Sasquatch Sunset,” a Bleecker Street release that lands in some theaters on April 12 and goes wider April 19, is rated R for “for some sexual content, full nudity and bloody images.” Running time: 89 minutes. One star out of four.

MPAA definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Online: https://bleeckerstreetmedia.com/sasquatch-sunset

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

Everything to know about ‘Sasquatch Sunset,’ the absurd Bigfoot movie

Jesse eisenberg and directors david and nathan zellner go inside the outlandish, uncomfortable process of grunting their way through this hairy cinematic tale.

“Sasquatch Sunset” is perhaps the weirdest R-rated family movie you’ll ever see. The art-house film from brother-directors David and Nathan Zellner (“Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter”) plays like a nature documentary for stoners who go to midnight screenings. Imagine being immersed in a family of primate-human hybrids through four seasons of their lives as they fornicate, defecate, mourn, experience terror and fight for survival in the idyll of their habitat deep in the woods of Eureka, Calif.

Maybe you’ve heard that it stars Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough — not that you would know it, since they’re covered in hairy prostheses the entire time. Or that the film, which hits theaters Friday, contains no human language, only grunts and yelps. Or that it features enough gross-out bodily functions that some audience members at the Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered in January, went racing for the door .

What you may not have heard, though, is that it’s a very funny and surprisingly moving look at an endangered species from their point of view as humanity encroaches. When I saw it at Sundance, audience members were falling out of their seats laughing and ran out of the theater yelping like sasquatches. This is a movie that, if nothing else, demands to be seen, at least so you can know where you stand on the love-hate divide. We spoke with the Zellner brothers and Eisenberg to answer all your burning questions. Sasquatch ahead!

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Wait, it’s r-rated.

Yes, for “sexual content, full nudity and bloody images.” You do see masturbation and plenty of sex, plus some death and dismemberment. David laughs just thinking about the MPAA coming up with that rating: “It’s funny because there’s no bad language, obviously. But the description for the R-rating I love because it’s, like, for full nudity — not partial nudity — but it’s all nudity of mythical creatures.”

Eisenberg, on the other hand, says he was “pissed off,” having been in plenty of violent movies that probably deserved an R but squeaked by without one. “It’s just frustrating because it limits the audience,” he says. “I really do think that the 13-year-old Jesse would have flipped for a movie like this. Young teenagers are just way more open, in my opinion.”

Why sasquatches?

The Zellners have been obsessed with sasquatch lore since they were kids, and even made a wordless Sundance short in 2011 called “ Sasquatch Birth Journal 2 ,” starring Nathan as a mama squatting in a tree to give birth. (He plays the alpha male sasquatch in this film.) Most Bigfoot films are family films or horror films from the perspective of the humans, “and the Bigfoot/sasquatch is relegated to the background as a sort of boogeyman,” David says. Instead, they wanted to make a big-hearted, 89-minute movie thoroughly immersed in the world of sasquatches that’s part drama and part slapstick comedy. “There’s so much in this film that if you saw your dog or cat do, it’s completely normalized,” David says. “But when you see these creatures with humanlike qualities, it suddenly becomes both much more uncomfortable and also hilarious.”

Where did they shoot?

The actors spent 25 days in the same Northern California woods where the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film was shot, launching the imagery of Bigfoot as we know it, along with generations of conspiracists. That area is also, coincidentally, the epicenter of Bigfoot sightings in the United States.

Why cast actors instead of, say, stunt people?

Eisenberg had the same question, and was confused when the Zellners, whom he’s known for years, handed him the script. He had just assumed they would go with pros who are great with physical movement. But within five pages, he says, he realized how emotional the film was, and how it would require actors who could pull off comic timing and body language that had to be funny and clear.

It’s also, let’s face it, a bit of a stunt to cast Keough and Eisenberg and then cover them in prostheses and fur. “Casting these names, and then you don’t see them — there’s an absurdity to that, as well,” David says.

Why is Jesse Eisenberg in this?

He’s not only in it, he’s a producer! As a millennial who lives in New York and is the child of animal rights activists, he says he relished a chance to reconnect with nature.

Plus, he immediately connected with the (nameless) beta male character he would eventually play. “If I were a sasquatch, this is who I would be,” he says. “I would be the one looking at the trees when I walk, not just somebody aggressively looking for their next meal. I would be the one who, when I’m asking the female to mate with me, I do it timidly and with a bouquet of ferns as opposed to the alpha, who just jumps in.” He was also touched by his character’s efforts to count privately in his spare time. He tries to get to five, but he can only ever get to four.

And what about Riley Keough?

The short answer seems to be that Eisenberg talked her into it. They worked together when she produced his 2023 movie “Manodrome,” about a bodybuilder who goes on a shooting rampage. Eisenberg knew she loves strange projects, and she had an opening in her schedule. “Riley’s one of these unusual actresses who feels more comfortable in extremis, is that the right phrase?” says Eisenberg. “She’s a wonderful, natural actor, but she feels more comfortable in roles that require some kind of extreme behavior.”

Her one request to the Zellners was that she get to be “the most feral,” she told Collider .

How did they nail the sasquatches’ movements and language?

The actors did what Eisenberg calls “sasquatch boot camp,” hiring a miming coach, Lorin Eric Salm, who studied under Marcel Marceau. First, they practiced movements on Zoom, such as grasping food with their hands rather than fingers. Then they spent months loping around their own homes. The first time they got together, “we were just rolling around on the floor of an office in Northern California, feeding each other ferns and throwing sticks at each other,” says Nathan. The goal was to make the species feel cohesive, like it wasn’t four different people’s interpretations of sasquatches.

The language was simple: They just decided on some whoops and grunts that would correlate with certain actions or directives. “What they’re doing is very repetitive,” Eisenberg says. “Their lives are a harrowing tale of survival, but the activities they do are pretty similar day-to-day. Essentially, somebody finds a good berry and tells the others to come over.”

What was it like shooting in those costumes in the middle of the woods for 12 hours a day?

Physically, the experience was “excruciating,” Eisenberg says. They would spend two hours getting glue and prostheses and yak hair applied to their faces, and then slip into a tight, heavy suit. Eating lunch was too difficult, and specially outfitted bottles were required just to drink water.

The flip side “was wearing this gorgeous art project,” Eisenberg says. “You would be really exhausted and feeling claustrophobic to the point of thinking you’re going crazy, and then you would look at a mirror and just think, I am so lucky. ”

Did Nathan Zellner direct as a sasquatch?

Absolutely! Most of the time, it made sense for him to get into costume in the morning, even if he didn’t have a scene scheduled till the end of the day, “which makes for really interesting behind-the-scene pics,” he says.

How did the actors pee?

They were shooting in deep, deep forest and using portable restrooms. “We couldn’t wear our good sasquatch feet to the bathroom,” Eisenberg says, noting bathroom breaks involved complicated costume tweaks, such as taking off their feet and heads.

Luckily, he says, they didn’t need to go often because they were sweating so much. “Any kind of liquid we would drink would immediately pour down our bodies, hitting the industrial-sized amount of baby powder that was poured on our pants every morning to sop up the sweat.”

What happened when civilians stumbled upon the set?

Most of the people driving by were loggers. “Whenever we did come across anyone, they were very nonplussed,” David says. “It was like, ‘Oh yeah, another Bigfoot.’”

It did cross Eisenberg’s mind that the actors should wear orange vests when walking from their trailers to the set, “because if anybody’s going to get shot, its going to be the four people that look like sasquatch.”

Do you need to be stoned to enjoy it?

Eisenberg says no! “‘Sasquatch Sunset’ is actually the most interesting thing you’ll see in your life. So you could save your money and just go to it sober.”

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The Daily Iowan

Review | ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ is the pro-environment movie we need right now

There are experimental films, and then there is the Zellner Brothers ’ new release “Sasquatch Sunset.”

Released on April 19, the film adopts a pace and aesthetic not unlike those in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It follows a family of Sasquatches over a year as they navigate the North American wilderness, butting heads with everything from cougars to human encroachment to even one another.

If that premise sounds aimless, that’s because it is. “Sasquatch Sunset” is going for a documentary, slice-of-life kind of vibe, and although this approach mostly worked for me, I could see the film being very polarizing with wide audiences.

Still, part of me wishes it had leaned into the documentary aspect a bit more. During any given scene, I was constantly half-expecting voiceover narration to inexplicably appear, perhaps provided by David Attenborough . I think making the film a full-fledged mockumentary could have been interesting.

Viewers should mind the “R” rating before they consider buying a ticket. This is very much a film that wears its grime on its sleeve, and it doesn’t shy away from showcasing every single aspect of these Sasquatches’ lives in an intimate, sometimes brutal fashion.

I was surprised by how many jokes landed. Even though there was no dialogue, there were moments where the camera would suddenly cut to a reaction shot of one of the Sasquatches that left me and the rest of the audience in stitches.

Although it was used infrequently, the score was effective. It complimented the beautiful, almost mythic nature of the Sasquatches’ journey very well.

A case can certainly be made that the film’s central gimmick doesn’t sustain a feature and that “Sasquatch Sunset” would have worked better as a short film. Despite the short runtime, I felt my patience waning a few times throughout, but fortunately, whenever this happened, the film always picked up shortly afterward.

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The area of this film I most butted heads with was in its ending. The cut to credits caught me off guard, and it didn’t feel like the story was concluded. I would go so far as to say that the film ended just when it was getting interesting.

Mileage will vary for the individual viewer based on how much they can accept unorthodox filmmaking approaches, but despite my reservations, I enjoyed the film. It works as a contemplative story about the nature of life and existence and is perhaps the pro-environment movie we need right now.

“Sasquatch Sunset” is now playing in theaters.

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Review: ‘Sunset Song’ Shows a Woman’s True Grit

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By Stephen Holden

• May 12, 2016

The rolling green meadows and the radiant face of Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn), a bright, hard-working Scottish farm girl in Terence Davies ’s film “ Sunset Song ” fuse into a luminous vision of the land and the people tending it. The movie immerses you in the intoxicating beauty of the natural world, but it doesn’t ignore the hardships of the peasantry who toil day in and day out to raise crops and put food on the table.

“Sunset Song” is adapted from Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel, set mostly on the fictional Estate of Kinraddie in northeastern Scotland in the years before World War I, and considered a British literary classic. The movie, which has the look and feel of a magnificently illustrated historical novel, proceeds at a deliberate, meditative pace that rewards patient attention.

Its scenes of Scottish rural life in the early 20th century are gracefully stitched together by Chris’s voice-over reflections, which nudge forward a slow-moving story rife with everyday tragedy. The scenes of harvesting wheat with primitive equipment and caring for farm animals in a turbulent climate are a continual reminder that despite its beauty, life here is no idyll, and the rural community’s strict Puritanism frowns on frivolity and idle pleasure.

Mr. Davies has always been obsessed with time, memory and the fleeting moments of joy snatched from a grim existence, even if that beauty is discernible only in the imagination, as in his autobiographical 1992 film, “ The Long Day Closes .” That cinematic poem, set in Liverpool during the years after World War II, celebrates the life-sustaining power of retrospection as a bulwark against despair in a grimy industrial environment. All it takes to be transported from hell into a spiritual retreat is the sound of a romantic popular song on the radio that seems to emanate from heaven and that conjures a poignant yearning.

In “Sunset Song,” an opposite dynamic applies. A vision of the sublime is at hand in the unspoiled beauty of the countryside. But for people toiling with little respite, save for the occasional wedding or harvest celebration, recreational enjoyment is hard to come by.

Chris grows up in a family ruled by her squinty-eyed, pipe-smoking father, John (Peter Mullan), a tyrant whose word is law, and his silently suffering wife, Jean (Daniela Nardini), whom he worships while forcing her to bear more children than her body can take. John mercilessly beats his son Will (Jack Greenlees) for the smallest infraction. The young man flees the homestead — and Scotland — as soon as he’s able.

Movie Review: ‘Sunset Song’

The times critic stephen holden reviews “sunset song.”.

“Sunset Song” is the story of one woman’s true grit, told without sentimentality. In an earlier incarnation, shown at film festivals, much of the dialogue was hard to discern because of the thick Scottish brogues. The version being released in theaters is made better with subtitles.

It is also a story of dreams dashed. Chris, a dedicated reader, hopes to be a schoolteacher but is forced by family obligations to put aside those ambitions. She warily tolerates her father’s cruelty until he is weakened by a stroke, but even then, he tries to exert his iron authority.

A rhapsodic interlude follows when she marries Ewan Tavendale (Kevin Guthrie), a handsome local farmer who is besotted with her. But their happiness is cut short by the advent of World War I. Ewan and his friends are pressured by the community to enlist in the army. And rather than be denounced as cowards, they do.

The rhythms of “Sunset Song” are out of sync with the momentum of modern life. But once you fall in step with its solemn pace, the movie, with its soundtrack of traditional folk songs and hymns, capped with a mournful bagpipe elegy, becomes a sustained, moving reflection on the human life cycle at a time when e people were more in tune with the earth.

Over time, Chris metaphorically becomes the land on which she grows up and, like Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” recognizes it as the only thing that endures. (Unlike Scarlett, Chris is no vain, headstrong rebel.) Willful but modest, she adheres to prevailing customs: a “good girl” in the traditional sense, who relies on pluck and fortitude. Toughened by bitter experience, she becomes stronger, accumulating reserves of character and wisdom.

Like most of Mr. Davies’s films, “Sunset Song” makes you see the world through his sorrowful eyes. He is a die-hard romantic, whose acute sensitivity to the passage of time conveys a bittersweet awareness of the fragility of beauty, which, for him, is synonymous with melancholy. What we call the present is really the past. Life is only what we remember, and all of us are soon forgotten. And yet, there’s that music in the air from a faraway place.

“Sunset Song” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for sex scenes, nudity and violence. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

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Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough wear the fur in ‘Sasquatch Sunset’

David and nathan zellner deliver a wordless film about wayfaring beasts.

After “Sasquatch Sunset” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, one of the challenges facing the film’s marketing team had to do with its trailer. Specifically, could the advertisement depict Sasquatch genitals, or would the images be labeled as nudity?

It’s a fair question. The film, which follows a wayfaring Sasquatch foursome, contains a great deal of nudity, if you count bulging, furry suits adorned with dangling zoological private parts as nudity. Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough are among the actors enclosed in these costumes, but if I hadn’t known that, I would never have been able to identify them, no matter how hard I tried.

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Directed by filmmaking brothers David and Nathan Zellner, “Sasquatch Sunset” opens at dawn. Mist hangs over mountain woodlands. Thick trunks shoot skyward. An ethereal score plays. The Sasquatches (played by Eisenberg, Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek, and Nathan Zellner) first appear in a long shot as hulking masses traversing the expanse. Suddenly, the music cuts out and we’re introduced to the Sasquatches in a series of static shots, as the members chew on dead grass, pick bugs out of their fur, and copulate.

The film, which is divided by intertitles into four seasons, continues throughout in a similar vein, quietly observing the four individuals in work, play, and rest as if they were the subjects of a nature documentary. The mood is by turns peaceful and farcical. At one moment, the group’s solemn trek through the mountains occasions a triumphant score. In the next, a Sasquatch tries to give a tortoise a kiss only to have the animal clamp down on his tongue. The snapping turtle refuses to let go until a fellow Sasquatch gives its shell a tug.

Consistently weird and frequently wonderful, “Sasquatch Sunset” uses its high-concept premise to consider a host of themes: collective living, coexistence with nature, longing stirred by seclusion. It’s a wordless film, as the Sasquatches only communicate in grunts and gestures. But they clearly make up a cohesive species and, beyond that, a community. Merely to behold the precise body language, habits, and vocalization patterns of this original genus is worth the price of admission.

On paper, the whole thing might sound a little slow or precious, but the movie rarely feels so. What makes it work is the filmmakers’ attention to detail. As the seasons change and the Sasquatches roll on through the hills, every scene is carefully staged to move the story forward, either by tracing small through-lines — such as one Sasquatch’s struggle to count to any number past three — or by introducing existential stakes that the Sasquatches must confront as a team.

The Zellner brothers shot on location in redwood forest using only natural lighting, and the film’s vistas are stunning. (The cinematographer is Mike Gioulakis.) The movie’s attention to flora and fauna adds to the sense that the idea behind “Sasquatch Sunset” was not conceived randomly, but rather as an idiosyncratic means of conveying conservationist themes. Throughout the film, there is a growing sense that the Sasquatches’ habitat is changing for the worse, and that this particular family may be among the last of its kind; the group regularly commits to a ritual in which they bang rhythmically on trees and then pause to listen for a response that never comes.

The story builds to catastrophe at several points, but only its climax hits with stop-you-in-your-tracks emotional power. Most of the time, the Sasquatches meet obstacles with clear eyes, addressing each crisis in the moment and then leaving it behind to chug on forward. For a Sasquatch — for any endangered species — what more can you do?

SASQUATCH SUNSET

Directed by David and Nathan Zellner. Written by David Zellner. Starring Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Christophe Zajac-Denek, Nathan Zellner. Boston theaters, Coolidge Corner, Kendall Square, suburbs. 90 minutes. Rated R (Sasquatch nudity). In English, but mostly grunting.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, 'sunset' sheds no new light on heist genre.

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I am bemused by what a movie expects us to accept on faith. Consider the opening sequence of "After the Sunset," a diamond heist movie. Woody Harrelson plays Stan, an FBI agent who is a passenger in an SUV; he holds a briefcase that contains a precious jewel. After the driver gets out of the SUV, the thief Max ( Pierce Brosnan ) uses a PDA to assume control of the vehicle, backs it up at high speed and speeds away from the FBI security escort. On a side street, it halts in front of a garage door, and a semi truck pushes it sideways through the door, which slams shut behind it, and Stan is relieved of the jewel and foiled again by his longtime arch-enemy.

Very good. But now think some more. Max's partner in the heist was Lola ( Salma Hayek ), who disguised herself as a bearded squeegee guy at a stoplight, using her squeegee to read the bar code on the SUV window so Max could key in the vehicle on his PDA. Very good. But why did he need to know the vehicle identification number, when he manifestly had already customized the vehicle? After all, it contains the remote controls he is manipulating. Even the best-equipped SUVs don't come loaded with equipment allowing them to be driven automatically by PDAs. We're distracted from this logic by the obligatory scene in which Lola rips off her whiskers and wig, looking of course perfectly made-up underneath.

All very well. But hold on: Did I say Max was on a rooftop? Yes, because that's how he can look down and see the SUV that he takes control of. Excellent. Except, what happens after the SUV turns the corner and races down the street and turns another corner? How can Max still see it? How does he know where to steer it? How come it doesn't run through a crosswalk containing a baby carriage, two nuns with six orphans, and a couple of guys carrying a sheet of plate glass? And how could they be sure the SUV would stop exactly in front of the open garage door, especially since Brosnan can't see what's happening? Maybe it was remote-controlled, too.

The movies are never more mysterious than when they show us something that is completely preposterous and get away with it. Not one viewer in 100 will ask the questions I've just asked, because in movies like this we go along with the flow. And this whole movie is flow.

"After the Sunset" is skillfully made, but it's not necessary. I can think of no compelling reason to see it during a time when your choices also include " Sideways ," " Ray ," " The Polar Express ," " The Incredibles ," " Primer ," " Vera Drake " and " Undertow ." On the other hand, should you see it, the time will pass pleasantly.

The actors are good company. Pierce Brosnan and Salma Hayek hurl themselves into their roles -- but gently, so nothing gets broken. She's in full plunging-neckline-in-the-sunset mode. Woody Harrelson has the necessary ambiguity to play the FBI agent's love-hate relationship with Max. Don Cheadle has fun as the American-born Bahamian gangster who wants to become Brosnan's partner in stealing a precious diamond from a cruise ship. Naomie Harris is intriguing as a local cop. The locations are sun-drenched, and there are enough plugs for the Atlantis resort hotel so that we know the cast enjoyed their stay on the island.

But what, really, is "After the Sunset" other than behavior circling cliches? The heist itself, with its entrance through the ceiling, etc., is recycled from other films. However, the method by which Max establishes his alibi is clever. I can't describe it without giving away too much, but should you watch the film, ask yourself (1) if there's really enough time to do what he does, and (2) how likely it is that a non-diving FBI agent would agree to come along with a couple of thieves on a midnight scuba expedition to an old wreck?

The subplot is the old standby about the crooks who pull off one last job and plan to retire. Of course the woman is in favor of this, but the man grows restless and misses his old life. The same thing that happens to Max happened only last week to Mr. Incredible. The female lead always gets the thankless task of trying to talk the hero out of doing what he obviously must do, or there would be no movie. "Now the challenge is to find joy in simple things," Lola tells Max. "After the Sunset" is a simple thing, so we could start there.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

After the Sunset (2004)

Rated PG-13 for sexuality, violence and language

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