ANTEBELLUM and THE HUNT added to TrustMovies' "Best of Year" list

Having this week just caught up with (and been blown away by) ANTEBELLUM, I've got to add it to my best-of-year list, along with a movie I saw months and months ago, THE HUNT, which was, at the time of its originally-to-be-released date (fall 2019), considered too topical and provocative to hit theaters. Yeah, sure: Critical and public response to both movies are typical examples our current cancel culture at work. In fact, both films actually deal with the extremes of this idiot culture, via the ever-popular movie genre of the survival thriller. 

These two movies are first and foremost "entertainments" whose plots and themes just happen to be so timely and important that they grab the intelligent viewer on several levels and never let go.

Antebellum -- written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz -- actually doubles as a mystery whose complete solution does not unveil itself until literally the film's final shot -- which then has you immediately going back and back into what you've just seen to start piecing together those oddball fragments that didn't quite make sense at the time. Now everything fits. With most mysteries, the set-up and the mystery are a lot more fun than the conclusion and solution. Antebellum turns the usual expectation on its ear.

If you don't know much about the movie's plot, please keep it that way. This is the one film this year that was most undeservedly ruined by critics' (and audiences') spoilers. The opening scenes set in our Civil War, complete with traumatized slaves at work, are difficult to watch for their violence and injustice. Yet by the finale, this will have taken on such new and important meaning that the necessity to the film of this violent beginning increases tenfold. In fact, those would-be revolutionaries who attempted this week to take over Capitol Hill would undoubtedly applaud the sleazy scenario going on in Antebellum. The movie is that timely. 

Plus, it has Janelle Monáe (above right, with Kiersey Clemons, and further above) giving what is certainly her most important performance to date. Even more so than Get Out and Us, the movie brings to life the results, small and huge, of America's continued racism, while holding up a mirror to the way we lived then and live now. Why the American South has been allowed to purvey its constant memorializing and celebrating of its treasonous war appears even more ridiculous and stupid in our current times. Old habits die hard -- especially when they keep alive the economic policies and racism that have served the white elite so well for so long.

Not as exceptional nor quite as interesting a film is THE HUNT. Yet it's still special enough to make an end-of-year "best" list by demonstrating how a good genre movie can tackle important social themes while providing crackerjack entertainment. What dismayed many viewers seems to be the fact that this movie turned the table on the expected roles of hunters and victims. Yet this works wonderfully well by calling into question our seemingly current need for political correctness to dominate rational thinking.

The movie has a marvelous heroine in Betty Gilpin (below), who imbues her role with smarts, street-savvy and plain old physical strength and endurance. Directed by Craig Zobel from a screenplay by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof, the movie begins with a bang and never lets up on the pacing, thrills and suspense. Surprisingly, actors such as Emma Roberts and Ike Barinholtz are dispensed with quickly, which leaves the remainder of the film to Gilpin and, finally, Hilary Swank, as her nemesis.

One of the major points made by The Hunt is that class and economics, rather than race or racism, is causing our country's huge divide -- worth considering and exploring and then acting upon until something is really done about the disgusting wealth gap. Meanwhile, we've got this little movie to make its point in mostly breathtaking and breath-holding fashion.

If you haven't seen these modern-day political movies-cum-genre-films, stick 'em on your list ASAP. 

THE HUNT: Thomas Vinterberg's -- and one of the year's -- best & most unsettling films

Pedophilia is such a hot-button topic that few narrative films tend to go there. Documentaries do, particularly when the abuser is connected with The Catholic Church, an organization more than worthy of ridicule and disdain. The subject is most often used as the cheap hook for sex-and-violence television and/or cable fare. This is one reason, of many, that the new Danish film THE HUNT (Jagten) is so worthy of your time and attention.

In it, a little girl (an exactly-right performance from Annika Wedderkopp, above, right)-- exposed to a provocative sexual visual by one of her older brother's adolescent friends around the same time as she experiences a rebuff from a much-beloved teacher and friend -- puts two and two together and gets 22. She doesn't lie, exactly, but she deliberately connects things that were heretofore unconnected, and when all hell breaks loose from her original comment, she is practically forced by almost all the adults around her to stick by her "story" and in fact elaborate on it.

How this plays out in The Hunt may bring to the minds of many of us Americans the infamous McMartin case from the 1980s -- a near model of what not to do in investigating supposed sexual abuse -- not to mention the more recent documentary Capturing the Friedmans that investigates similar territory. The former case was shown to be concocted out of the loony-tune minds of sex-hysterics; the latter unfortunately, despite strong evidence of poorly-handled investigation by the prosecution, continues to mine its injustices.

The film begins with what looks like the Danish version of a Polar Bear Club late-fall swim (two photos above), and then we hop from the water to home, school and all around town, noting the charm and easy camaraderie of this seemingly tight little community -- which proves just as tight in its hatred for and closing out of the would-be pedophile, once the rumor begins to spread. Nothing in this story is particularly new, I grant you, but its telling could hardly be better in terms of pulling us into the fast-crumbling life of its protagonist, played by the brilliantly empathic and versatile actor Mads Mikkelsen (above).

We see example after example of former friends and associates turn away from this innocent man, and as awful as this is to witness, it is also quite believable, for as one of the accusers states, "Children don't lie." Of course they do, but this is another of mankind's fondest hypocrisies, and it's one that is especially difficult to sink. I am trying to think of another film that places us this thoroughly under the skin of an accused innocent, but nothing comes to mind.

You will hate the rotten townspeople on view, even as you cannot help but wonder if you would be doing the same thing under similar circumstances. You'll feel disgust at the way all this is handled -- by the school, the authorities, the parents. And yet how often, you'll wonder, does something very nearly the same happen?

As directed and co-written (with Tobias Lindholm) by Thomas Vinterberg (shown at left, of Submarino and The Celebration), the movie looks smashing, as well. The photography (by Charlotte Bruus Christensen) is alternately gorgeous and colorful, dark and drained, and the writing is so very much better than that of A Hijacking (another recent Lindholm film). Directorially, the movie is the most polished of Vinterberg's career.

The ability to make viewers' blood boil -- and yet allow them to understand precisely how and why this must occur -- is no simple task, and Vinterberg deserves high praise for achieving this so well. He's clearly on the side of our hero but he also understands the townspeople's fear and anger, and even better, he lets us into the mind and feelings of the young girl in question.

Part thriller, part character study, part moral-quandary movie, The Hunt works on every level. And its unsettling ending seems to me just right in a number of ways. Off-balance is how we live now.

The movie, from Magnolia Pictures and running a fast-paced 111 minutes, opens today, Friday, July 12, in New York (at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema and the Angelika Film Center) and in Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Royal and Playhouse 7). In the weeks (and months) to come, the film will open all around the country. To see all currently scheduled playdates, click here.