[William] Oldroyd and his scenarist, Alice Birch, must think they are doing something far more complex, luring the audience into cheering for Katherine but making her acts of violence more and more awful until we’re revolted by her. But to what end? By making Katherine so evil, the movie falls into the old sexist shibboleths about scheming women, particularly sex-starved ones. Pugh, who bears an amusing resemblance to Miley Cyrus, gives a spirited performance that doesn’t shy away from her character’s villainy. But the distant, intellectualized approach keeps us from feeling any complicity with Katherine. She’s funny laughing at Anna’s shock at her open adultery, but Pugh is stuck with more of a conceit than a character. The source of Birch’s screenplay, a short story by 19th-century Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, has the robust wisdom of a peasant myth. How could anyone read that story, with its lush descriptions of nature and the horrified sympathy it accords its protagonist, and come up with this joyless, colorless movie?

If there were any justice in the world of film criticism, Oldroyd would be getting the accusations of racism that—wrongly, and in ignorance of the clear meaning of their films—Sofia Coppola is getting for The Beguiled and Ana Lily Amirpour for The Bad Batch. He has made all the characters who are the least deserving targets of Katherine’s violence black. (Sebastian is biracial, and Katherine’s maid and two other prominent characters are black.) I don’t know how many black people were in Northumberland in 1865, but in this movie, race is used for the sole purpose of heightening their victimization, and it’s ugly.

At Cannes and other film festivals, Lady Macbeth was acclaimed for its daring. But for an unapologetic celebration of devious women, Out of the Past and Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale are much tougher. As a portrait of a psychopath in the guise of dutiful wife, 1945’s Leave Her to Heaven has more punch. If an art-house film gets credit for what commercial movies have already done much better, then Katherine’s victims aren’t the only suckers here.

Oldroyd made his name as a theater director, and in his debut film he goes with his strengths. Lady Macbeth is largely confined to the plain, masculine house and its stables, and Oldroyd and cinematographer Ari Wegner show the grinding unsensuality of the place without resorting to the kind of overlong shots designed to make us literally experience her boredom.

They subtly establish a second protagonist, the maid Anna, who is even more cruelly abused by the old master (Christopher Fairbank) and later spies on Katherine and her stable-boy lover, Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), through a keyhole. From our modern, liberal perspective, it’s tempting to see Katherine’s revenge on the decrepit industrialist as payback for Anna’s humiliation as well as her own. When a photograph is taken of her beside the upright open coffin of the dead geezer — who has also brutally whipped the lowly Sebastian — we want to cheer.

Movies are games of moral relativism, though, and Lady Macbeth quickly turns its feminist heroine into something far more disturbing. It’s one thing for a woman to murder overpowerful white misogynists, another to shoot her husband’s horse, which whinnies in agony. And the movie’s racial overtones are thunderous. The perpetually traumatized Anna is black. A little boy who shows up midway through — Katherine’s husband’s adorable illegitimate child and ward — is of mixed race and excruciatingly vulnerable. Sebastian’s complexion is on the dark side, too, Jarvis being of Armenian extraction. When you introduce race, white feminism tends to fly out the window — as Sofia Coppola learned after a deluge of criticism for culling a black character from her remake of The Beguiled. Applause for having trained the female gaze on a demonic-female myth has quickly yielded to abuse for being a privileged white woman allegedly minimizing the horror of slavery.

Oldroyd and Birch make no such gaffes. The movie’s larger point — which I find irrefutable — is that some people who have been victimized for life are not just inclined to speak truth to power but to abuse what power they have over people with less of it. August Wilson knew that, which is why his plays resonate far beyond melodrama. So does Lady Macbeth. It eats into the mind with its vision of evil as a contagion that transforms victims into oppressors.

"Multitalented Japanese electronic music superstar Ryuichi Sakamoto crossed over into movies as both actor and composer in Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence in 1982," reads the Quad website series description. "Since then he has provided over 40 features and documentaries with his unique sound. On the occasion of async, his first album in eight years, which he has described as 'a soundtrack for an Andrei Tarkovsky film that does not exist,' we present eight of the best."

The site's Femme Fatale description reads: "Sakamoto’s reshaped version of Ravel’s 'Bolero' accompanies the virtuoso Cannes Film Festival-set jewel-heist setpiece that sets in motion a dreamy, sinuously crafted thriller that’s filled with surface pleasures and meta-cinematic tricks. Rebecca Romijn plays the titular thief, whose attempts to start a new life in Paris are complicated when she crosses paths with photographer Antonio Banderas."

Bilge Ebiri at The Village Voice posted a preview of the series yesterday:

When The Revenant got twelve Oscar nominations a couple of years ago, I was struck by the fact that Alejandro González Iñárritu's film wasn't nominated for best score, the one category it deserved to win. The mournful, ethereal music of Ryuichi Sakamoto was everything Iñárritu's overbaked pseudo-western wasn't — understated, evocative, and ultimately rousing.

The Revenant isn't screening in the Quad Cinema's short tribute to the Japanese composer, but some of Sakamoto's greatest work is. A classically trained pianist and ethnomusicologist, he had already achieved international fame as a member of the pioneering Japanese synthpop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra when director Nagisa Oshima hired him to star in and score the 1983 P.O.W. drama Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. His music for the film is at times playful, even bordering on pop — particularly in the catchy main theme — and at times discombobulating, almost atonal. The seesawing mood makes an ideal match for Oshima's heated, surreal tale of obsession and torment.

Scoring diverse films, Sakamoto has revealed himself as surprisingly good at pastiche: His music for Pedro Almodóvar's High Heels (1991) is the noirest noir that ever noired. His traipsing boleros and Vertigo homages in Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale (2002) are unforgettable. (Also included in this retro is a rare 35mm screening of Volker Schlöndorff's 1990 The Handmaid's Tale, a first go at adapting Margaret Atwood's seminal novel.)

But I'd argue that Sakamoto's best work came in collaboration with Bernardo Bertolucci. An opera fanatic, the director often had lush, unabashedly melodramatic scores in his earlier pictures (think back to Georges Delerue's rhapsodic melodies for The Conformist, Ennio Morricone's sweeping marches for 1900, or Gato Barbieri's crashing jazz crescendos in Last Tango in Paris). He clearly connected with Sakamoto's ability to mix the lyrical and the ethereal, to nestle brisk compositions within stretches of melancholy ambience.

The series page includes the following description from Nashville Scene managing editor D. Patrick Rodgers:

For many years, Nashville Scene editor and Middle Tennessee native Jim Ridley was a constant fixture at the Belcourt. A true talent, Jim was an exceptionally gifted journalist and critic, respected for his work with the Scene, where he was a writer and editor for well over two decades.

In April, Jim died suddenly at the age of 50. But his passion for film, a passion that drove our arts community to greater heights and very directly played a role in saving the Belcourt from the brink of demise lives on in those of us who knew him and those of us who read him.

For the Belcourt’s Jewels and Jim series—named for François Truffaut’s 1962 masterpiece JULES AND JIM, one of Ridley’s longtime favorites—several of Jim’s friends, family members and fellow Belcourt-frequenting cinephiles picked out films that pay homage to the man. These are films that Jim loved, that you may have found him discussing as he held court in the Belcourt’s lobby late at night after a screening.

From Martin Scorsese’s MEAN STREETS to Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert documentary STOP MAKING SENSE, from Chuck Jones’s classic animated short “Duck Amuck” to Chia-Liang Liu’s 8 DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER, the Jewels and Jim series, like Jim himself, is all over the map. Some of these films are funny, some are dark, some are hopeful, and some are technically astounding. But every last one of them is an absolute treat, a gem picked by Jim, begging to be shown on one of the Belcourt’s screens.

Ed Gonzalez – Slant Magazine (US)

1. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
2. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
3. The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
4. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
5. Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002)
6. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)
7. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
8. This Is Not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi, 2011)
9. Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)
10. Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson, 2015)

Michael Koresky – The Film Society of Lincoln Center (US)

1. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
2. AI: Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
3. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
4. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
5. What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001)
6. The Intruder (Claire Denis, 2004)
7. The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2002)
8. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)
9. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
10. Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002)

Adrian Martin – Lola Magazine (Australia)

1. Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)
2. Lifeline (Víctor Erice, 2002)
3. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
4. Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, 2004)
5. Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (Peter Tscherkassky, 2005)
6. Un lac (Philippe Grandrieux, 2008)
7. Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2011)
8. A Vingança de Uma Mulher (Rita Azevedo Gomes, 2012)
9. Mia Madre (Nanni Moretti, 2015)
10. Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002)

Charles Taylor – The Yale Review (US)

1. Blue Is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)
2. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)
3. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
4. Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, 2010)
5. 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)
6. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
7. The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011)
8. Phoenix (Christian Petzold, 2014)
9. Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002)
10. Fantastic Mr Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009)

Stephanie Zacharek – Time Magazine (US)

1. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
2. Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, 2004)
3. Yi Yi: A One and a Two (Edward Yang, 2000)
4. Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)
5. Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009)
6. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)
7. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
8. Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002)
9. Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006)
10. Blue Is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)

Watch Drouet's video essay below:

A representative sampling of Sakamoto deep in the groove of his career comes with two films he scored for Brian De Palma, Snake Eyes (98) and Femme Fatale (02), both featured at Metrograph in a retrospective occasioned by the new documentary by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow. Poignant and neo-classical, Sakamoto’s scores for these two films stage a fine counterpoint to the director’s unrelenting cynicism.

De Palma’s noted cinephilia is evident in every detail of his work and his soundtracks are no exception. In Snake Eyes, Sakamoto’s leering, paranoid strings conjure some of Bernard Herrmann’s best-known scores for Hitchcock, while other cues sound more contemporary, with doses of reverb that add to the film’s oppressive claustrophobia. With a hurricane of near-Biblical proportions howling outside the labyrinthine casino setting, Sakamoto’s tasteful score affirms the film’s moral framework with ominous, weighted orchestral music underscoring the ham-fisted recurring image of a bloody $100 bill.

The score for Femme Fatale is also classically inclined with dashes of electronica in the secondary cues. Sakamoto’s creative re-working of Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” (which at the time was not in the public domain), unsubtly titled “Bolerish,” is a delicately patchworked composition that accompanies the film’s opening jewel heist and closing slo-mo sequence in Paris. Not unlike the film itself, Sakamoto’s piece is an immaculate collage of clever rip-offs and deferential references. “Bolerish” softens the march of the Ravel piece into a graceful saunter that crosses the classical standard with other familiar melodies: Gato Barbieri’s Oscar-winning title theme for Last Tango in Paris makes a passing appearance, while Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies” echo throughout. Sakamoto and De Palma have both described Femme Fatale as a “visual symphony,” and the prominence of “Bolerish” throughout the extended opening helps stage the heist sequence as the film’s grand overture. The essential pomp and plodding drive of the original “Bolero” remains in Sakamoto’s more serene version, controlling the pace (and supporting the refined atmosphere) of the Cannes-set jewelry heist.