Charlie Kaufman’s inventive, solipsistic narratives have consistently left cinephiles spellbound since he collaborated with Spike Jonze to reify Being John Malkovich in 1999. Through his screenplays for both Jonze and French filmmaker Michel Gondry, Kaufman earned a reputation few screenwriters attain. His distinct voice leapt off the page and manifested itself as a palpable entity onscreen. It has been seven years since Kaufman tried his hand at directing with Synecdoche, New York, and now he has discovered yet another fresh method through which to present his meditations on the intricacies and significance of human interaction.

Anomalisa is a claustrophobic stop-motion adventure that echoes much of the text present in Synecdoche, but funnels it through a decidedly less convoluted portal of expression. The great majority of the film takes place in a hotel, cleverly and relevantly titled “The Fregoli,” in which businessman Michael Stone (exceptionally voiced by David Thewlis) spends the night before giving a speech about the customer service industry. Like all of Kaufman’s protagonists, he is insatiably dissatisfied with his life, which he feels is despairingly mundane. The city of Cincinnati, in which the imaginary hotel is located, reverberates with blandness. Everyone Michael encounters seems to be repeating the same tired taglines. They insist he try the famous chili and proclaim he absolutely must see the zoo. Unsurprisingly, Michael has zero interest in either suggestion.

In terms of design, Kaufman, in collaboration with Duke Johnson, has cultivated an ability to frame his material so it’s both creative and digestible. With Anomalisa, Kaufman finds inspiration on a smaller scale, but manages to maintain an active imagination within the boundaries of his aesthetic. He and Johnson meticulously craft the architecture of The Fregoli to sculpt the oppressive impression of isolation in the mind of their audience. One paranoid dream sequence in the film’s second half is particularly impressive. Like past projects, his recent venture into animation once again ruminates on how banal and unfulfilling our lives are. Anomalisa, perhaps even more so than Synecdoche, is obsessed with the idea that nothing in life is truly concrete outside of one’s intrinsic awareness of the self. Nothing occurring within our lives is obtainable outside of the fact that we are able to think and perceive. Labeling Kaufman as a nihilist would be inaccurate. He affirms that life can be meaningful, but only in fleeting moments. If anything, he’s a miserablist, creatively trapped in his bleak interpretation of human existence.

Many viewers will relate to his desolate conclusion and find solace in his art, but the thesis that long-term happiness is essentially unachievable registers as unforgiving as opposed to illuminating. The brief moment of joy shared between Michael and a woman he encounters at the hotel, Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is undermined by a final lament that deconstructs the daunting image of its true value. These fleeting moments Kaufman illustrates become memories, and they, in navigating a dark and inhospitable world, are what we must cling to. Our survival is ensured not by genuine satisfaction, but by an image of it. After all, isn’t a memory just an image of a prior experience? According to Anomalisa, the experiences that form these memories are few and far between, and the majority of days we walk the earth, we will inevitably fail to encounter such happiness. In a world where aging couples can maintain a romance that began a half-century earlier, and where parents can lovingly watch their children develop into young men and women, the ideas underneath Michael’s existential crisis register as possessing little truth in the grand scheme of things. It’s not times of happiness that are ephemeral, but times of sorrow. Kaufman does sporadically use dry wit to assuage the misery of his conceit, and the intricacies of his aesthetic exhibit remarkable craftsmanship. But anyone with a generally positive disposition toward life will find very little insight in Anomalisa’s pervasive cloud of existential darkness.

Originally published on November 17th, 2015 as part of our AFI Festival coverage.

Quentin Tarantino’s last few films have crept closer to cinema’s theatrical roots. Sequences occur in contained rooms, recalling the claustrophobic, object-driven narrative environment established by the physicality of the stage. These scenes are dominated not only by the director’s trademark dialogue but also by an assured language of compositional details, which guide our eyes through the frame and divulge information with a meticulous sense of craft. Tarantino’s detractors are bothered by his compulsion to bloat his works with references to cinema’s long, colorful history, as well as an occasional penchant for comically distorting his vested tone. But after recently having the opportunity to re-watch Inglourious Basterds, it became clear that the work overall was more significant than the handful of lame gestures that prevented me from outright embracing it. A filmmaker calling attention to himself is often irritating, especially when he uses dialogue to inject his own opinion of what he’s created. But this isn’t, and shouldn’t be, anything but an unfortunate stumble along a journey that’s far more complex and rewarding than the singling-out of that gesture would imply.

The Hateful Eight is Tarantino’s most confined feature yet, which initially calls into question his use of the 70mm format. Upon first blush, the decision registers as an arbitrary homage to the golden age of American Westerns. While it is that to some degree, it’s also a method to capture minuscule details in the expressions and appearances of each duplicitous character.

The film begins in the early stages of a Wyoming blizzard as John Ruth “The Hangman” (Kurt Russell, channeling The Duke) nears the end of a journey to collect his reward, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Along the way, they encounter two stranded individuals who Ruth reluctantly adopts as passengers. The first man is the clever and cruel Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a bounty hunter we learn fought in the union army during the Civil War and the closest thing the film has to a lead character. The second scoundrel to be happened upon is Chris Mannix (a viscerally animated Walton Goggins), who identifies himself as the newly appointed sheriff in the town of Red Rock, where the entire ensemble is headed.

The four arrive at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a cramped, one-room lodge where they meet the remaining faces that make up the titular hateful eight. Bruce Dern’s Sanford Smithers was a Confederate general during the war. He has made the trek to Wyoming in the twilight hour of his life hoping to learn how his son was killed. John Gage (Michael Madsen), is a reserved, weathered cowboy who is almost certainly hiding something. Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth, chewing scenery in the best possible way) is a sly Englishman who claims to be Red Rock’s new hangman. Last but not least is Bob (Demián Bichir), the suspiciously gauche steward purporting himself as an employee of Minnie, thus the caretaker of the haberdashery in her absence.

It’s easy to argue that the narrative in which characters trapped in an inescapable setting are driven to face one another has been cinematically exhausted in decades prior. But Tarantino’s perspective on popular hatreds harbored throughout American history is strangely essential and unpacked with a necessary dose of self-awareness. He illustrates the tight-knit relationship between prejudice and contempt by procuring a tonal delirium punctuated by comic terror. Underneath lines of dialogue, which are programmed to register as humorous, lie disturbing implications about who our characters are and what they represent. At first, animosity is personified only through verbal slander. When tensions begin to rise, Mobray decides to split the room in half, sending Confederate sympathizers to one corner and supporters of the Union to the other. Later on, as viewers familiar with the sensibilities of Tarantino would predict, this animosity is emulated through the graphic mutilation of flesh. The segregation, however, isn’t the first instance in which folly manifests itself physically.

A percentage of those who see The Hateful Eight will be crushed by the weight of unflinching cruelty that man is capable of. But the film, circumventing all expectations, has the audacity to end on a note of coarsely drawn optimism. We’re shown the worst sensibilities of the soul through bloodied eyes, and as the tumult begins to dissipate, it becomes clear that someone’s hatred eventually had to be compromised. In a sea of gore with no redemption in sight, a subconscious shift in mindset embodies what is perhaps the most vulgar step toward progress ever captured on film.

Quentin Tarantino‘s really got his hands full, huh?

Following the director’s recent comments regarding police brutality—“I’m on the side of the murdered,” he said at a New York City rally on Oct. 24th—police unions across the country, including the Border Patrol and the Fraternal Order of Police, have called for a boycott of all Tarantino films, including his upcoming snowy western The Hateful Eight.

Tarantino’s been defending his stance on the issue, claiming he’s “not a cop hater.” The murder of a New York police officer, Randolph Holder, just a week before his appearance at the controversial protest, didn’t help quell the fiery national debate that quickly erupted around the director’s comments.

Fighting tooth and nail for his right to speak publicly against police brutality is surely the last thing the widely beloved director was planning to do in the final weeks leading up to his eighth feature film, but a shiny nugget of good news has arrived today in the form of a new, awesome trailer for The Hateful Eight.

The movie’s had a rough road—if you remember, it almost didn’t get made at all when the script was leaked to the public by one of star Bruce Dern‘s people (that bastard!). Tarantino scrapped the project in a fit of rage, but thankfully for us he changed his tune. Perhaps most members of law enforcement won’t be coming out to watch the film in “glorious 70mm” this Christmas like the rest of us, but maybe the latest trailer will compel some of them to show up in disguise.

The Hateful Eight stars Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Demian Bichir, Tim Roth and Michael Madsen. Here’s the official synopsis:

Set six or eight or twelve years after the Civil War, a stagecoach hurtles through the wintry Wyoming landscape. The passengers, bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and his fugitive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), race towards the town of Red Rock where Ruth, known in these parts as “The Hangman,” will bring Domergue to justice. Along the road, they encounter two strangers: Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a black former union soldier turned infamous bounty hunter, and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), a southern renegade who claims to be the town’s new Sheriff. Losing their lead on the blizzard, Ruth, Domergue, Warren and Mannix seek refuge at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a stagecoach stopover on a mountain pass. When they arrive at Minnie’s, they are greeted not by the proprietor but by four unfamiliar faces: Bob (Demian Bichir), who’s taking care of Minnie’s while she’s visiting her mother, is holed up with Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), the hangman of Red Rock, cow-puncher Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), and Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern). As the storm overtakes the mountainside stopover, our eight travelers come to learn they may not make it to Red Rock after all…

The Hateful Eight drops on Christmas Day, but only in the 70mm format. It releases wide on January 8th on all formats.

With Welcome to Me, director Shira Piven and star Kristen Wiig ride a fine line. It’s a depiction of mental illness that manages to make you laugh without ever being offensive, and it’s by far Wiig’s most thought-provoking performance to date. She plays Alice Klieg, a small-town woman obsessed with television and showbiz (she worships Oprah on a daily basis on VHS tapes she’s memorized word for word). When she wins 85 million bucks in a lottery, she grabs her dream by the throat, throwing oodles of cash at a local broadcast company to produce and beam out her very own show, “Welcome to Me.” She’s mentally unstable, though, and when she quits her psychiatric meds, she begins to wobble off the rails, a full-on train wreck surely on her horizon.

In her sophomore feature, Piven’s crafted a film that’s deceptively elegant in its earnestness; a comedy on the surface, a piercing observation piece at its core. In a press roundtable interview, I spoke to Piven about the film’s subtleties, Wiig’s performance, and the tricky business of portraying mental illness on-screen.

Mental illness are stigmatized in society. How did that affect your approach?
If your main character is mentally ill, you have to tread lightly and very sensitively. For me, there are two things that come to mind. One is, it’s important to separate the person from the diagnosis. Two, [you have to be] really respectful and never laugh at the mental illness or the person, exactly. There’s a lot of humor in this movie, but me and Kristen felt that we want to laugh because the situation is absurd. Alice is a real person in a real world. I love her and I love the script because she’s someone who we recognize. I feel like we all know Alice, or we are Alice in some way. We have to give her dignity. I also think, on a social level, it’s more and more important that we become more open about mental illness, that it’s not stigmatized and marginalized.

I think we’re conditioned to accept portrayals of mental illness in movies a certain way. They’re often caricatures. Kristen doesn’t do that here, though, and I don’t think many other actors have the skill required to walk the fine line she does here.
Yeah, I think it really is a fine line. I sometimes like to call her performances a little bit death-defying, like a high-wire act. But it’s also how we cut the performance together in the edit room; creating a performance for film is a tricky business, and it’s a collaboration between the writer, the performer and the director. I feel like if you take all the things I said into account of being respectful of the mental illness and treating the script with sensitivity and allowing the actress to be who she is, hopefully the collision of those things will come out well. I think it’s so funny at moments—Alice is hilarious—but she doesn’t know she’s hilarious. She’s just living her life. We laugh in recognition.

For me, it was important to cast an actress with a basic comic center. I feel like she lives and breathes in that comic center, but she also has a vulnerable side. She can go to those dark places, darker than I imagined she could as an actress.

Darker than you intended?
Not intended, but she goes to places in this movie she’s never gone before. So I’m not gonna say, “Could you audition for me and show me that you can go there?” She did it so honestly and beautifully.

Was Kristen in mind for the character?
The script wasn’t written with her in mind, but she was my first choice. There were a lot of ideas floating around for actresses, and initially I thought a lot about Joan Cusack. She was kind of a muse for this character in my mind. I think Joan and Kristen have similar sensibilities. There was a boardroom scene where Joan Cusack, Kristen Wiig, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Wes Bentley and James Marsden are all together, and it was really fun. They were excited to work together.

I like that Alice has a distinct look: her fanny pack, the way her apartment is decorated. When did that vision come together?
The fanny pack was in the script, but I had this vision of how she should look. Kristen and I agreed on the heart of the character, but we didn’t necessarily agree on how she looked at first. I think Kristen thought Alice would look a little more realistic and plain, and I felt Alice was a little bit of a heightened character. I didn’t want her to play her in a heightened way, but I saw her in colorful dresses that might be from the ’40s or the ’50s. I felt like she shopped in thrift stores. The costume designer, Susan Matheson, agreed with me. “She would shop in Palm Desert thrift stores! She’s a desert flower!” She came up with this orange terrycloth dress. Kristen was eventually won over by these ideas and embraced them.

Something that came to mind for me was that a personality like Alice wouldn’t need a cent of that 85 million dollars to be successful on Youtube. Was that in mind for the movie’s ending?
Yes, in a way. It’s funny, we found some interesting people on Youtube when we were in pre-production. There are some amazing Youtubers going off in a similar way to Alice. I hate to talk about the end of the movie because it’s so open to interpretation, but it goes back to James Marsden’s line when he says, “She wants to be televised.” And Gabe (Bentley) knows she’s found this form of expression, as narcissistic as it might be, so he gives her a camera.

I read that this was originally a TV pilot.
I think Eliot Laurence (the screenwriter) was hoping for it to be a Showtime or HBO series, but when I read it, I felt I was reading a screenplay. I felt obsessed with it being a movie. I didn’t even know if I was giving him good advice or not, but I said, “Would you like to rewrite this as a screenplay?” He was thrilled with the idea.

Could you talk about what it was like shooting the dog neutering scene?
The dog neutering was a little like life imitating art. We had a lot of meetings about dog neutering. [laughs] It was some big conundrum of how to do this. We had a vet tech on set who was advising us and brilliant prop people. The prop people got these amazing props that looked incredibly real, and Kristen had these delicate hands; she really did the surgery. The surgery looked really good, but at one point we had the vet tech—who had similar hands, amazingly—come in and do some of the really exacting surgical stuff. We had some taxidermy dogs we filmed. The dog wrangler, who was fantastic, said she could get Alice’s dog to play dead on the table, and she did!

I’ve been asking everybody about this because I’m kind of obsessed: I think not enough attention is given to actors who act with their bodies. When you see Academy Awards clips, they always show actors yelling in a small room, or crying. Kristen tells stories with her body very well. Can you talk about her physical performance?
That’s cool! Such a great observation. I love it. I come from a theater background, and on stage you can’t just be a talking head. Really good actresses have intense physical training. She’s very in her body. Even in the first scene when she’s watching Oprah, you can see her just leaning into the TV. One of my favorite physical moments was a scene where she’s listening to her theme song. She’s supposed to just be lying around, listening, but I thought it would be really great if she did that dancing we do when we’re alone in our apartment. I thought Kristen would be great at that. That was just delightful.

I think it’s really haunting the way she walks through the casino in that pivotal scene.
That’s an even better example, because she’s not doing movement, per se, but just owning the space she’s in in an incredible way.

Before Alice wins the money, she has a very scheduled existence. After she wins the money, she throws all that to the wind. Part of it has to do with the meds, but what about the money made her throw away her routine?
That’s where the teeny hint of fairy tale comes in. She has this lonely life, going to a convenience store to get her pudding and issue of O magazine. I think Alice is someone who fantasized about what she’d do when her ship came in. Her ship comes in, and she just goes for it, takes that leap off the bridge. Her apartment is still there, with her sleeping bag and the whole thing, but I think she takes that leap of faith. That’s what makes it a great story, in a way, because we all fantasize about that leap of faith, and she does it. She inspires people around her, and I think Gabe sees her just going whole-hog for what she’s going to do. Even though everyone’s trying to stop her and she unravels and it’s a big mess, it says something about the dangers of following that narcissistic path, but she’s also inspiring at the same time.

Was there any improvisation involved in the film?
There was a lot of improvisation. We definitely shot the script and got everything we wanted from the script. We didn’t use whole new setups for the improvisation, but we used the setups we were in and had them riff within it. I would throw lines or ideas out for an alternate moment, and Elliot would sometimes hand rewrites to Kristen. She trusted him so much because she really loved the writing. I think her prepared statement in the casino was one of those alternate takes he wrote on the fly. She and Tim Robbins improvised the banana moment.

Joan Cusack has one of my favorite movie voices of all time. I could listen to her talk all day. Tim Robbins, too. I love the way Joan says “baby” to Alice in studio.
I’ve known Tim since I was 24 years old and I’ve known Joan since we were 8 years old. They’re both kind of heroes of mine. They’re friends, but they’re both people who I creatively admire so much.

Do you think Alice and Gabe’s relationship goes anywhere?
I think people like Alice with borderline personality disorder who have relationships…they have to have a devoted partner. It’s an unpredictable roller coaster, and I think Gabe is limited in his own way. I think they’ve found a match in each other, but it’s always hard to say how it’s going to turn out. One of the great lines is when Gabe says, “I’ve been divorced twice. And by twice I mean three times.” We hope for them.

There’s something poetically comical about self-help jargon escaping the mouths of the world’s least qualified advice givers. Most recently Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler dispensed memorized wisdom while in the throes of sincere depravity. Now we have Alice Klieg, plagued by borderline personality disorder and well versed in Oprah-ese. Off and on on her medications, she spends her days in her color coded house watching hours of recorded talk shows, reciting along with their hosts all the life enhancing mumbo jumbo that daytime TV can offer. Kristen Wiig plays Alice’s mentally unsound and painfully awkward protagonist, and it’s because of her this film doesn’t end up feeling mean hearted, since Alice’s behavior make for some serious laughs at the expense of mental disease and the people who take advantage of an unwell woman. Because of Wiig’s charm and the line-toeing nuance of Eliot Laurence’s script, Welcome to Me explores the larger themes of self-medication and personal treatment and how artistry and imagination plays into finding a middle ground where one can at least live a satisfying life if not one defined as “normal.”

Alice lives a life of routine. She sleeps in a sleeping bag above her bed covers, her TV is not allowed to turn off and constantly plays a slew of her favorite Oprah episodes, and every day she buys herself a lottery ticket. One day her numbers match and her life is changed. Alice is functional enough to understand money can change your life. So, along with her best friend Gina (Linda Cardellini) she starts to have some fun. She moves into a penthouse in a Palm Springs hotel, buys herself colorful clothing, and treats her friends and family to expensive meals, among them her supportive gay ex-husband (Alan Tudyk). When she and Gina serve as audience members in an infomercial and Alice gets to be on stage in front of the camera, she finds a new high to achieve to. And with money, she doesn’t even have to try that hard.

Gabe and Rich (Wes Bentley and James Marsden) are the brothers who own the studio where Alice visited the informercial and their business is dying. When Alice marches in and lays down cash to buy herself a weekly two hour talk show, Rich agrees immediately, while Gabe seems to understand Alice’s demands come from someplace unhinged. And so Welcome to Me is born, much to the annoyance of the studio’s producers (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Joan Cusack). Alice’s terms are met in detail, so her show has her coming in on a swan, she spends portions of the show cooking low-“carbohydrant” meals (she’s convinced herself a high protein diet will aid in her therapy), and most awkwardly of all she directs elaborate reenactments of the most distressing and humiliating moments from her life in an attempt to get the last word.

It’s all quite hilarious, even if you aren’t sure at every moment if you ought to be laughing. And when Alice throws more and more money into the show to up its production value and glorify herself, her narcissism and blatant use of others starts to take its toll. Her downward spiral into her disease in the end is much grittier than expected, given the lightness up until then, but in that way it very effectively expresses the highs and lows of borderline personality disorder. It’s volatile and uncomfortable.

Wiig has proved she’s branching out past the safe humor of SNL, riding the dramedy line in such films as Hateship Loveship and The Skeleton Twins. Her deadpan sincerity to her roles adds the dramatic seriousness needed, but only in Welcome to Me do I feel we’re really seeing the vulnerability she’s capable of. Not to mention her ability to so quickly go from Alice’s hissy fit style hysteria when talking about past wrongs to calculated monotone-delivered speeches on reaching one’s personal potential. Her range has never been more evident.

Director Shira Piven, relatively unknown with only one other feature and a TV documentary under her belt, most proves her abilities in the performances of her actors, allowing their talent to play out. Bentley especially impresses as a shy and rather broken man who joins Alice in finding personal therapy. With its bright coloring and Gondry-esque TV set Piven’s world in Welcome to Me is a bit exaggerated, which may draw away from the gravity of Alice’s condition, but never seems to make light of it. Much like Alice’s zen-like therapist played by Tim Robbins, Piven creates a safe place to explore.

It’s not too far fetched to believe if we say our mantras and layer on the systems, something will catch and we may just fix ourselves. Its why those who buy one self-help book are the most likely to buy another. Welcome to Me touches on a need in all of us to try to reach some level of self-proclaimed normalcy as well as the innate need to feel accepted by others for all our flaws and quirks. Borderline personality disorder is mostly a heightened emotional state and a distorted sense of self-image, and I doubt there’s anyone out there who can’t identify to some degree with what Alice feels. Mental illness is no laughing matter, but therapy absolutely is, and this film’s strength lies in Alice as the face of what we’re all searching for—and that the seemingly-put-together life gurus just don’t imbue—someone searching for help who actually looks like they need it.