The Old Oak is the new film from master British filmmaker Ken Loach, and at 87 years old, he has announced this is his last film.  Loach is a social realist filmmaker with a keen and passionate social conscience, and from the beginning of his career with his breakout film, Kes, he has championed the causes of the working classes with sensitivity, warmth, and brilliance. 

The most oppressed and vulnerable groups are always his film's subjects, and The Old Oak is set in an impoverished former mining town in Northern England, where jobs and income is scarce. It’s a town that reflects real situations in Northern England today, and when Loach and the filmmaking team visited such towns, they noted the economic desperation as well as the loss of public spaces: “in thesecommunities it was obvious that the infrastructure was disintegrating: shops boarded up, swimming pools, church halls, libraries . . . pubs that were lying empty or were pulled down.”  They are communities struggling not only with an economic loss but a loss of the spaces that represented home, identity, and community to them. 

The impoverishment in these real life communities has also meant outside landlords have bought up homes and resold them at low prices, often to those in even more desperate situations, including Syrian refugees who’d lost everything and were rehoused in Northern England. 

And it is these two kinds of communities, suddenly confronted with one another, that Loach depicts in his film with a cast of nonprofessional actors made up of real English villagers and real Syrian refugees: one group who had lost so much and another group who’d lost virtually everything to the ravages of war. 

Some members of the town bristle with racist resentments against the refugees, blaming the refugees for systemic problems the refugees have nothing to do with, while other members of the town welcome the newcomers with open arms.  And it is a pub at the center of the town called The Old Oak that becomes a locus for both fearful resentments and hope for the future: the pub's owner wants to open the pub to the newcomers and open a community space for them while some pub regulars feel the newcomers are intruders, threats to the space and to their very identities. 

The film is ultimately a wonderfully warm and hopeful film, not shying away from the pain of anti-immigrant words and actions, but offering hope that the worst of human instincts might also be overcome by the best of human kindness and community. 

I Saw the TV Glow is from director Jane Schoenbrun, with a second feature film after We're All Going to the World's Fair, their incredible debut.  In this new film, Schoenbrun continues to push the boundaries of the cinematic form in electrifying ways. 

It's a film about two outcast teens, Owen and Maddy, who bond and obsess over a TV show called The Pink Opaque (Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans will instantly recognize the parallels), and their relationship to the show and to each other becomes crucial in their identity formation.  Owen, in particular, seems to be living a stifled and suffocating existence, literally suffering from asthma but also having no vital connections to family or friends, and finding little that makes him feel alive -- except the TV show and Maddy. 

To say too much more about the film would betray the experience that the film should be, for the plot reveals are essential to that experience, but the film is also a great deal more than its mere plot, offering immense thematic richness as well as a profoundly affective cinematic encounter. 

Much like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow weaves a simultaneously unsettling and alluring dreamlike spell, tapping into fears, desires, and emotions, akin to the way a David Lynch film often operates, bypassing strict everyday logic and tapping into something much more primal through the use of image, sound, and music (and this film has an absolutely killer soundtrack, carefully curated by Schoenbrun, and with original music from Florist, Maria BC, Bartees Strange, Jay Som, Caroline Polachek, yeule, and Phoebe Bridgers). 

That is not to say the film is illogical -- it is, ultimately, quite clearly a film about the relationship betweens screens and identity--how screens are both transformative and limiting--and also, specifically, about the trans experience, something Schoenbrun has spoken about beautifully, as they do here in their interview with author-critic Willow McClay for Film Comment. 

But even to delve too deeply into the film’s reflections on trans identity would be to spoil the experience. As Esther Rosenfield notes in Little White Lies, "To discuss the film’s relationship to themes of transgender identity would be to delve too deeply into spoilers; I Saw The TV Glow is a film best experienced knowing as little as possible beforehand, and it is uniquely structured such that its plot only really begins at the halfway mark. But its bombastic depiction of the emotional distress which can accompany transgender life is among the most potent in cinema . . . It’s rare that a film attempting to tell a trans story – whether on purpose or accidentally – has any success. I Saw The TV Glow reaches even higher, and assuredly hits its mark."

Schoenbrun is undoubtedly one of our day’s most original cinematic artists. Don’t miss the chance to see their work on the big screen. 

In addition to an encore of The People’s Joker on Sunday (after its sold-out showing yesterday evening!), we’ve also got a nice slate of individual film events this week: 

First up is Toy Story 2, the second film in our Kid Pickford/Kid Pixar series, and arguably, the best of the Toy Story movies, although it equally shares a rare 100% on Rotten Tomatoes with the original Toy Story. It is, indeed, one of those unique sequels that not only lives up to its predecessor’s brilliance and charm but matches its energy and offers fresh delights for kids and adults alike. As Stephen Thompson wrote for the AV Club at the time, Toy Story 2 is a sequel that “gets everything right . . . a fresh, funny, sharply written story that effectively appeals to every possible demographic.”

We could, thus, not be more delighted to have this modern classic on Pickford screens for the first time -- and back on the big screen for its 25th anniversary. 

Toy Story 2 plays Saturday at 1:30 pm and Sunday at 10 am. 

Finally -- and I’ll have more to say about this next week -- Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel to the stupendous, Oscar-winning Mad Max: Fury Road, arrives at the Pickford Thursday with an evening screening before it officially opens on Friday, March 24.  

Director George Miller began this extraordinary saga of Mad Max films way back in 1979 with Mad Max, a scrappy indie film operating on a budget of just $300,000 (eventually grossing a box office of 29 times its budget and earning a spot in the 1979 Guinness Book of World Records for “most profitable film”).  And while Miller’s new film, Furiosa, now boasts a budget of some $168 million, Miller has stayed true both to the uncompromising vision at the heart of his indie roots and to wildly inventive and propulsive ride that has characterized the Mad Max world and so delighted audiences and critics with Fury Road. 

Critics got their first chance to screen Furiosa at the Cannes film festival this week, and it’s been a joy to read some of their delighted reviews:  

“A big, entertaining popcorn movie, told with a sense of adventure and play.... Furiosa aims to blow you away. And it does. To Valhalla and beyond.” ~Robert Daniels, Ebert 

“Furiosa is a jaw-dropping achievement. It’s a hyper-realistic vision of the apocalypse, a Greek myth made into an outsized blockbuster spectacle.” ~Hoai-Tran Bui, Inverse

Whether audiences love this one as much as its predecessor remains to be seen, but--with my apologies to Dune 2 -- Furiosa is, for me, THE rip roaring desert-movie of the year. 

See you at the movies, friends! 

Melissa