A lovelorn soul, a genie — or in this case Djinn — trapped in a bottle, three wishes. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least far back as the early 16th century when Antoine Galland began regaling eager listeners with the stories of Aladdin and his Magic Lamp. Certainly the cautionary tales of wish fulfillment date back even further. Storytelling has long been a cornerstone of the human existence and George Miller (Babe: Pig in the City) is hoping filmgoing audiences are still hungry for such tales with his new film Three Thousand Years of Longing.

Alithea Bonnie (Tilda Swinton) is a mousy narratologist, spending her days studying the seemingly lost art of storytelling and her night alone in quiet contentment. Aloof, but happily and by choice she tells herself, a carefully crafted narrative of her own isolation. A world of instant gratification and information overload has convince Alithea that she studies a lost art. Who needs a fantastical tale to explain what science long ago solved? Still, as Alithea shuffles through the doldrums of her life she is tormented by physical manifestations of the very myths and fantasies she studies. Fiction helps her to both explain away her own misery and ignite her combustible imagination. 

Colorful and frightening fantasy overcomes Alithea during a lecture in Istanbul, knocking her out. Upon coming to she decides to explore a bazaar and purchases a small glass bottle. Unbeknownst to our skeptical narratologist, her discovery contains the very essence of story and wonder; a mythical Djinn (Idris Elba) waiting to offer her any three — but no more — of her heart’s desires. An expert in tales, Alithea is skeptical of such offers that sound too good to be true so instead of rattling off wishes, the studious woman and logic defying genie engage in an exchange of their own histories. 

Story is at the very heart of Three Thousand Years of Longing, much as it is the core of nearly all human existence. While Alithea is right about modernity hushing our need for stories to explain the mysteries of science, the power of oratory has not died with the ascendence of the iPhone. What technology has done is commoditize storytelling to a degree unseen prior.  Much of what Miller explores in his first film since 2015’s Fury Road is how the fictions we weave are a part of us and necessary to mask our insecurities as well as inspire us to strive for more. 

Elba’s Djinn spends most the film recounting his own arduous journey into the bottle that found Alithea, a myth tracing its own origin. Supposedly a creature of superior memory, much of the Djinn’s recollection is emotion and feeling. His lifetime of longing and attempts to reach out for love have imprisoned him, ultimately landing his cage and its key in the hands of a woman who has buried her desires so far down that she is convinced that her own solitude is bliss. The pair present a perfect dichotomy. Science and Story, longing and abstinence, truth and fantasy.

Eventually Alithea makes her wishes, but that is hardly the point. Miller wisely sets aside the things that we’ve all seen in the Disney version and instead gives voice to the stories that exist only within the fluidity of fairytales. He focuses on the folly of lovelorn genies, the ruthlessness of power mad tyrants and anyone else whose love story never got told. It’s the intangibility that matters, maybe such narratives can no longer explain why the Earth circles the sun, but they may be the only thing that can explain why people are so driven and easily duped by love. 

Although meditative in parts, Three Thousand Years of Longing is anything but restrained. Without boasting the same high octane propulsion of Fury Road, Miller’s latest is still visually captivating in its own right. Over the top CG and blurred outlines give the artifice of fantasy and a dynamic camera breathes fresh life into age old tales. Even in the moments of stillness Swinton and Elba command the screen to a degree that keeps the whole film captivating. 

Pulled altogether, Three Thousand Years of Longing is a massively entertaining story about storytelling told by one of our most bombastic storytellers. Even as we can know the world more exactly we still need imagination to see what it and we can still become. 8/10

All eyes on me. We live, now more than ever, in an attention economy. If you can’t catch someone’s eye immediately then they’re on to the next. Swiped left, scrolled up, you’re awash in ever expanding sea of content, marooned by whatever the newest outrage or shock is. No longer does the world focus on the work, the craft, it’s all spectacle, all the time. The appetite for attention is voracious and to quell it requires pushing beyond the boundaries of safe and natural. Spectacle for the sake of spectacle can be dangerous, Jordan Peele recognizes that with his third feature, Nope, he just can’t quite push that message through the artifice of his own attention grabbing blockbuster.

Loss is a strange experience. Someone, or something close to you is suddenly gone, their existence extinguished and, yet, they still occupy the minds and stories of everyone who ever knew them. The life of a lost one “can keep unfolding itself to you” as Mr. McCarthy tells a grieving Greg in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. But what if the lost love one isn’t a person and what if all their memories could be explored, like a diary for those left behind. These ideas set the stage for Kogonada’s After Yang.

“Nuns, why’s it always gotta be nuns” exclaims Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) in a clear riff on the famous Indiana Jones lament. Except Drake is not staring down hundreds of pythons, he’s standing in a quiet Spanish church as a friendly Sister walks by. Hewing far closer to Spider-Man in National Treasure than Raiders of the Lost Ark, no scene in Uncharted better represents the gulf between what it wants to be and what it actually accomplishes. 

The world of film is undergoing a massive change. More women and people of color are getting the opportunities to tell stories than ever before. This progress has been slow, at times frustratingly so, but the direction is a good one. As film diversifies so has The Academy, again, often slower than we would like, but the change is evident. After the debacle that was #OscarsSoWhite in 2015, The Academy began its deliberate effort to diversify membership. Record numbers of women, people of color, young people and non-Americans have joined the ranks of Academy voters and the fruits of that diversification have finally begun to bear. Add to that continued change the advent of the Academy’s new digital screening portal, making it easier than ever for members to see eligible films. Not every voter makes time for every film, but with easier access, more may have done so this year

Ask just about anyone and they’ll tell you that they want to do the right thing. An instinct for altruism is natural but it doesn’t always come from the purest place. Plenty of times good deeds and kind words are as much about self preservation as they are about real impact. As the most insidious voices have grown louder in the the last few years, so too have the performative ones denouncing them. With his directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World, Jesse Eisenberg has a little fun with performative wokeness.

Nearly nine years have passed since the Coen Brothers wondered, on 700 screens nationwide, what their lives and art would be without each other. For as bleak and apocalyptic as their prognosis was, the simple fact remains, Joel and Ethan Coen are not Llewyn Davis. Of course the master filmmaking duo are individually talented, but if anyone needed the proof, The Tragedy of MacBeth, Joel Coen’s first solo effort is a visually stunning powerhouse.

This year I found myself optimistic as the film industry was, like most everything else, getting back to “normal.” Theaters prior to the pandemic were facing difficulty in staying relevant and finding innovative ways to keep seats filled. Heck, the most hype for movies in recent years could arguably be the AMC meme stock. But now, as we navigate life aside the pandemic, we are reminded again of the underlying fact that people love interaction with other humans and enjoy experiencing something together. Movies fall under this category and it was a major factor that weighed heavily on how I rated films this year. That personal human to human connection is something that simply can’t be beat. As the year went on more and more people, my friends included, returned to theaters and enjoyed one big blockbuster after another. We were able to laugh, to love, to cry, and every emotion in between. Best of all, we could finally experience all of this together again.

As I contemplate this year in film, I find it difficult to contextualize against previous years. Streaming options have expanded with Paramount+ and Peacock joining the fray in earnest and the result has been a race for content, revivals of long dead properties and some truly awful movies. Undoubtedly my average film from 2021 has been worse than previous years, but as with the product of any 365 day period, this year has given us a lot of really special filmmaking.

Can good satire exist anymore? The common consensus is that the medium died years ago when Trump and other prominent real life targets of satirical work grew so ridiculous that they were the joke already. Shows like Saturday Night Live have no ideas other than mimicry to the point that they literally hired a comic (the very funny James Austin Johnson) most famous for his impersonations of the former president to just do impressions. If satire really did die when Trump descended that golden escalator, why does Adam McKay keep making films that ignore that reality?