“Anna” is a guilty pleasure, delivering just enough cheese/sleaze to satisfy a viewer’s baser instincts but wrapping it all up in a clever storytelling style that keeps us on our toes and guessing.
I didn’t realize until watching the final credits that this spy thriller was written and directed by French icon Luc Besson…but I should have guessed. “Anna” is basically a remix of Besson’s 1990 hit “La Femme Nikita.”
Both films center on a young woman recruited by a spy agency and trained as a ruthless assassin specializing in seduction and mayhem.
This time around our heroine is the Russian orphan Anna (Sasha Luss), a loner who becomes one of the KGB’s most relentless killers while working as a fashion model in Paris. Besson’s plot finds her undertaking a host of dangerous missions, often disguised by wigs.
What’s intriguing is the film’s structure. After each kill the film flashes back to reveal that what we assumed about the mission was in fact wrong, that there were hidden intentions and meanings that shot right by us. With this setup what might otherwise be just a series of violent encounters instead triggers jaw-dropping revelations.
The supporting cast ain’t bad, either. “Anna” counts two Oscar winners on its roster: Helen Mirren is a delight as the chain-smoking cynical Russian spymaster who controls Anna’s life; Cillian Murphy is a CIA agent who tries to turn our girl to America’s interests. And Luke Evans is just fine as the Anna’s field handler.
I was initially unimpressed by Luss’s turn as Anna…pretty but vacant. Over time, though, one realizes that Anna is playing a long con on everyone…the Russians, the Americans and especially the audience. She’s revealing to each of these demographics only enough about herself to keep her plans in play.
Smart girl.
Hans Zimmer
“HANS ZIMMER: HOLLYWOOD REBEL”My rating: B (Netflix)
60 minutes | No MPAA rating
Checking out composer Hans Zimmer’s IMDB page is pretty mind-boggling. The two-time Oscar winner has scored some of the seminal films of the last 40 years:
“Gladiator,” “Dune,” virtually all of Christopher Nolan’s movies, “Thelma & Louise,” “A League of Their Own,” “The Lion King,” “Muppet Treasure Island,” “The Thin Red Line,” the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, “Black Hawk Down,” “The Last Samurai,” “The Da Vinci Code,” “The Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, “Kung Fu Panda,” “12 Years a Slave,” “Hidden Figures,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “Dune,” “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Not to mention a ton of documentaries and a little TV show called “The Simpsons.”
Francis Hanly’s “Hans Zimmer: Hollywood Rebel” can’t really explain Zimmer’s astonishing productivity and creativity (“superhuman” doesn’t seem too hyperbolic), but it does provide in a neat, one-hour session an intriguing overview of the man’s life and career.
What struck me most about the German-born Zimmer’s work is his reliance on atmosphere and rhythm over melody. Some of my favorite movie scores (Jerry Fielding’s work on “The Wild Bunch,” for example) are less about delivering tunes than creating a sonic background reflecting the emotional tenor of the scene.
This is what Zimmer does so well, often working alone at a keyboard/synthesizer to create sonic landscapes that only later are performed by a full orchestra (or not…Zimmer excels at mimimalist arrangements as well).
The man appears to be unflaggingly good natured, if dangerously obsessive about his work. His grown children describe him as an absentee father, though in recent years he’s been working to make up for lost time.
His coworkers and the directors he’s composed for — James L. Brooks, Stephen Frears, Ron Howard, Barry Levinson, Steve McQueen, Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, etc. — can’t wait to team up with him again and again.
Kingsley Ben-Adir
“BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE” *My rating: B(Apple+)
107 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
I never saw “Bob Marley: One Love” in the theater. This may have been an OK thing, since I would have missed half the dialogue, which is delivered in a thick Jamaican/Rasta patois.
So let’s hear a round of applause for streaming service captioning.
Reinald Marcus Green’s film (it was written by Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers and Zach Baylin) is essentially hagiographic, but still compelling.
We get the essentials on Marley’s brief but impactful life…his conflicts over the white father he never knew, his Jamaican nationalism (during the violent 1976 national election he was the target of an assassination attempt), his embracing of Rastafarianism (if you’re going to go whole hog into religious silliness, that’s the coolest option), his prodigious ganga consumption.
Marley is played by Brit actor Kingsley Ben-Adir, who doesn’t resemble Marley all that much but who nails his body language and stage presence. Lashanda Lynch is fine as his wife and backup singer Rita Marley (and she has a terrific third-act eruption confronting her husband over his infidelities).
But the real star of the show is the music itself. It’s just one damn great song after another; Marley was reggae’s greatest tunesmith and lyricist, laying down spectacularly produced tracks that are yet to be equalled.
“MANHUNT” (Apple +): A largely overlooked but crucial moment of American history gets an almost microscopic examination in “Manhunt,” a gripping and immersive dive into the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and its aftermath.
Created by Monica Beletsky (“Fargo,” “Friday Night Lights”), this seven-episode series focuses on Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies), Lincoln’s Secretary of War who, as the show begins is celebrating the defeat of the Confederacy and looking forward to implementing his boss’s reconstruction program in the South.
When Lincoln is assassinated near the end of Episode One, it becomes Stanton’s obsession to find the killer and uncover a conspiracy that might lead directly to Jefferson Davis, the former Confederate President now in federal custody.
The assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth (Anthony Boyle, doing a 180 from the selfless bomber navigator he played in the recent “Masters of the Air”), spends nearly two weeks on the run, determined to reach Richmond VA where, he is sure, he will find shelter and a hero’s welcome. Aside from his rampant racism, Booth’s salient characteristic is his ego…he’s a matinee idol despite lacking the acting chops of his more famous brother Edwin. Killing a President seems to him a pretty good way of achieving immortality.
As a history lesson “Manhunt” will be, for most viewers, a revelation.
Killing Old Abe was just one facet of a plan to bump off the major figures in the Lincoln administration. The killers missed most of their targets; eventually several individuals were convicted and hanged.
Though battlefield hostilities had ceased, a Confederate government in exile in Canada continued its attempts to manipulate events in the U.S.
Lincoln’s Veep, Andrew Johnson (Glenn Morshower), won a place on the ticket because his conservative credentials might draw voters dubious about Lincoln. It worked and Lincoln won re-election; with the President’s death, though, Johnson took over and jettisoned the former administration’s ambitious plans to bring hundreds of thousands of former slaves into American society.
The dismayed Stanton prophetically protests that the result will be a permanent underclass.
Menzies, perhaps best known as the sneeringly vile villain of “Outlander,” is spectacularly good as Stanton, creating a character whose conscience pushes him to act even when his body is breaking down (an asthmatic, he outlived Lincoln by only two years). When Johnson attempted to replace him on the cabinet, Stanton barricaded himself in his office for nearly three months to prevent the transfer of power.
Lincoln (Hamish Linklater) is prominently featured only in the first episode, but is seen in flashbacks throughout the production. Getting more screen time is Lili Taylor as his widow, Mary Todd Lincoln.
The series revels in some of its minor characters, like Oswell Swann (Roger Payano), a freed black man who for a price guided Booth through a swamp; Mary Simms (Lovie Simone), an enslaved woman who became a key witness in the trial of the conspirators, and Boston Corbett (William Mark McCullough), a former drunk turned Union soldier and religious fanatic who fired the shot that killed Booth.
Indeed, the series has been extremely well cast, the one big mistake being Patton Oswalt as a self-serving “detective” helping track down the killers. Despite a luxurious beard, I kept expecting him to crack wise.
Matthias Schoenaerts, Kate Winslet
“THE REGIME”(Max): As a black comedy about fascistic populism “The Regime” could hardly be more timely.
Yet it nevertheless wore out its welcome well before reaching its eighth and final episode.
First, the good stuff: Kate Winslet is at the top of her game as Elena Vernham, the chancellor of a small Eastern European country whose outward charisma covers a host of insecurities (mold in the palace…eek!!!) and a casual brutality inherited from her late father, a former chancellor whose ghastly corpse resides in a glass coffin.
In the first episode we are introduced to Corporal Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts). a thug who eagerly butchered a group of striking workers and now finds himself promoted to the position of Chancellor Verhnam’s body guard. It doesn’t take all that long for the dead-eyed Zubak to find his way into the boss’s bed and a position of real power.
We’re given a handful of nervous advisers whose main job is to keep the Chancellor from doing anything too ruinous while trying to ensure their own survival (sounds lot like the Trump White House), and a chief of household (Andrea Riseborough, looking even more androgynous than usual) whose young son the childless Verhnam insists on raising as her own.
At its best, “The Regime” (it was created by Will Tracy) bears a close kinship to the savage political satires of Armando Iannucci (“The Death of Stalin,” “Veep,” “In the Loop”).
Problem is, once having set up its premise, the show seems stuck in a loop, hitting the same notes over and over with few variations. Thank heaven for Hugh Grant, who shows up midway as a sardonic former chancellor now residing in one of Verhnam’s prisons.
Production values are high, and the acting solid enough that I stuck with it. Still, I hoped for more.
“SASQUATCH SUNSET” My rating: B (At the Screenland Armor)
89 minutes | MPAA rating: R
“Sasquatch Sunset” arrives with a reputation: Apparently at early screenings it set near-records for audience walk-outs,
Well, screw those guys.
I found this bizarro fantasy from sibling filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner to be pretty damn wonderful, a sort of comic tragedy with no dialogue, a jaw-dropping matter-of-factness when it comes to bodily functions, and a cast of players so hidden behind fake hair and prosthetics that they are unrecognizable.
Unfolding in the what appears to be the forests of the Pacific Northwest (the luscious cinematography is by Mike Gioulakis), this is the story of a family struggling to survive.
Our protagonists are Papa Sasquatch (Nathan Zellner) and Momma Sasquatch (Riley Keough) and their two boys (Jessie Eisenberg and Christopher Zajac-Denek). They live a nomadic life, always in search of food.
Initially “Sasquatch Sunset” mimics nature films (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it’s like the “Dawn of Man” sequence of “2001: A Space Odyssey” blown up to feature length). The camera captures these shaggy hominids foraging, interacting with other wildlife (elk, skunk, badger, cougar), and employing branches to construct temporary lean-tos for sleeping. They also horse around. Recreational play is part of their daily existence.
They don’t talk, exactly, but they do communicate through grunts, moans and shrieks.
Periodically they will use heavy logs to pound in unison on tree trunks. This is their version of jungle drumming; they hope to make contact with others bigfoot clans. Alas, their messages elicit no response. Perhaps they’re the last of their kind.
The National Geographic aspects of the film are often in counterpoint to a thick current of humor running throughout.
There’s a slapstick encounter with a turtle, and much emphasis on bodily functions. (Like the great apes, the sasquatch throw their own feces at interlopers.)
Papa Sasquatch is particularly amusing. He’s a hirsute Homer Simpson with a taste for fermented berries and psychedelic ‘shrooms. When his amorous advances are angrily rejected by Momma Sasquatch, he becomes fascinated by a log featuring a seductive-looking hole. (Thus cementing his genetic kinship with human males.)
About halfway through, though, the mood darkens. We discover that the Sasquatch bury their dead, leaving little abstract sculptures of bent twigs on the grave in tribute.
And it comes as something of a shock when our hairy heroes encounter a tree marked by a huge red X in spray paint. Later they will angrily tear up a human campsite (but not before gorging themselves on Cheetos). And their minds are completely blown when they stumble across a roadway winding its way through the woods.
There’s no plot to speak of, just a series of episodes. But over “Sasquatch Sunset’s” brief running time we come not only to recognize these animals as individuals with their own personalities, but as representatives of a much larger struggle between survival and extinction. There might just be a lesson there for the rest of us.
Patricia Highsmith’s charming/creepy con man Tom Ripley has been a favorite of filmmakers ever since the character first saw the light of print in 1955.
Over the years he’s been portrayed by Matt Damon, Barry Pepper, John Malkovich, Alain Delon and Dennis Hopper, among others.
So I approached writer/director Steve Zaillian’s new adaption on Netflix with a few misgivings. What could this 8-part series possibly bring to the table that I hadn’t already encountered in all those other movies?
Silly me.
This is now officially my favorite Ripley of all. Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott is both seductive and repellant in the title role, deftly sliding between charm and creepiness, between superficial warmth and a near-reptilian indifference.
But sharing star billing is the series’ use of Italian backdrops, captured in black-and-white footage so jaw-droopingly rich that you want to linger on every frame, soaking up the unerringly “right” compositions and mesmerizing interplay between light and dark.
In fact, cinematographer Robert Elswit just might singlehandedly make b&w a thing again. The format has the almost mystical ability to capture and magnify textures ranging from worn marble to fabrics. This “Ripley” is more than a crime story or a personality study…it’s a freakin’ sensory adventure.
(Elswit uses only a brief moment of color…it’s at the end of Episode 6. Look for it.)
The plot is pretty much as you remember it. In the late 1950s New York scammer Tom Ripley is recruited by a rich man to seek out the wayward son who has decamped to Italy.
Ripley barely knows the young fellow he’s supposed to bring back to the States, but at the very least he can spend a couple of months living high on the old man’s money.
His target, Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), is a wannabe writer and painter who has a taste for the expensive things — like the original Picasso on his villa wall — that a plebe like Ripley can only dream of.
In fact, our man soon realizes he isn’t satisfied with being Dickie’s drinking buddy and traveling companion…Ripley wants to take over Dickie’s life, to actually become Dickie. Which will of course necessitate the real Dickie disappearing.
Dakota Fanning, Johnny Flynn, Andrew Scott
Two of the series’ episodes are devoted to depicting separate murders and Ripley’s coverup efforts. Zaillian has filmed these with virtually no dialogue, studying Ripley’s efforts to clean his messes and hide the evidence in practically microscopic detail.
Along the way he ratchets up the tension to painful levels…time after time it looks as though Ripley is going to be found out…and like a cat he somehow always lands on his feet. Whether by luck or strategic thinking, he always turns the odds in his favor.
“Ripley” is pretty much a one-man show, and Scott is nothing short of hypnotic. You find yourself rooting for Ripley against your good judgment; there’s perverse pleasure (and in several instances sardonic humor) in watching him run circles around everybody…including us viewers.
It’s not entirely a one-man show. Dakota Fanning is effective as Dickie’s girlfriend, whose almost instant dislike of Ripley may put her in his cross hairs. Eliot Sumner has some fine moments as Freddie, Dickie’s fey friend, and Maurizio Lombardi is quite wonderful as the Roman police inspector wrapped up in Ripley’s wild goose chase.
“CAROL DODA TOPLESS AT THE CONDOR” My rating: B- (At the Glenwood Arts)
100 minutes | MPAA rating: R
One of the more obscure outliers of modern American social history gets examined in “Carol Doda Topless at the Condor,” a documentary that succeeds more in recreating a bygone era than in coming to any definitive conclusions about its central figure.
Carol Doda (she died in 2015 at age 78) was, for a decade or so beginning in the mid-1960s. a household name. She was famous/notorious for dancing topless at the Condor Club in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.
Doda was not a stripper. Or even an exotic dancer. She did a standard go-go routine with the difference that she was nude from the waist up.
This was in an era when even burlesque stars wore pasties; by freeing the nipple one might claim that Doda opened the door to a whole new approach to public nudity.
Whether she intended to do so or was just in the right place at the right time is one of many questions Marlo McKenzie and Jonathan Parker’s film leave unanswered.
The film does a nice job of establishing how San Francisco became “the off-season Vegas,” a nightlife center offering tourists a plethora of jazz and comedy clubs that earned the town the nickname “Baghdad by the Bay.”
Carol Doda was a waitress at the Condor Club. But she delivered drinks with a wiggle and exuberant dance movies while wearing a white leotard. Eventually the club’s owners suggested that she might do her dance from atop the grand piano on the bandstand.
At the same time fashion designer Rudy Gernreich was introducing his topless swimsuit (or monokini); Doda and her bosses decided to up the ante by having her dance in the breast-baring outfit. Result: standing-room crowds and queues around the block.
Ere long Doda was making her entrance on a specially rigged piano that lowered from a hole in the ceiling with the star performer already on top and gyrating. And she began beefing up her modest bosom with silicon injections.
Overnight virtually every club in town went topless. The cops responded with a city-wide raid; Doda and her fellow topless dancers prevailed in court and as a result San Francisco became the first city to recognize the legality of topless performance.
“Carol Doda Topless…” eschews narration and instead relies on dozens of talking-head snippets featuring Doda’s old bosses, fellow dancers, even bartenders at clubs where she worked.
There are also a handful of female scholars attempting to establish Doda’s place in the feminist continuum, and they are wildly contradictory. Was Doda exploited or was she a canny exploiter? Was she a photo-feminist? And if so, deliberately or accidentally?
The film employs lots of footage of Doda being interviewed, but it’s just about impossible to pin down her personality. For a woman who nightly bared it all, she was remarkably shy.
“I want to be in show business and I don’t know any other way than showing my bosoms,” she says at one point. In another interview she calls her act “another form of art, like a nude painting or statue.”
So who was this woman? There are hints that she came to San Francisco after a failed marriage, leaving behind one or two children. The movie raises the idea that Doda developed serious health problems as the result of her regular use of silicon injections to maintain her breasts, but never comes to any conclusions.
In interviews she could be self-effacing, but there’s no evidence that irony played a role in her act. She was a naked lady dancing. Period.
Doda never discussed her personal life; even women who worked with her for years knew little about her. She is alleged to have had a liaison with Frank Sinatra; thereafter she preferred young men…one commentator suggests that guys barely out of their teens were more malleable and less troublesome.
In later life, when the topless bookings dropped off, Doda sang with a heavy metal band, did phone porn, developed her own line of face creams and opened a boutique specializing in intimate wear (apparently she would look at a female customer and know immediately what design and size of bra would be appropriate).
Ultimately we’re left with the sense that Carol Doda wanted desperately to be a star despite her lack of conventional talent, and had the insight or blind luck to find the one way to get there.
An unintended consequence of the rise of streaming services is that the once-ubiquitous Western has been pulled back from the brink of extinction.
The oater is, if no longer the box office giant of old, at least widely available over the Net. What’s more, filmmakers are making new Westerns.
Granted, most of them are cheap, indifferently acted and recycle the same old revenge plot…which makes an aberration like “Butcher’s Crossing” that much more remarkable.
Directed and co-written by Gabe Polsky, “Butcher’s Crossing” is nothing less than a landlocked Moby Dick, a tale of obsession and madness on a sea of grass.
Our Ishmael is young Will Andrews (Fred Hechinger), an Easterner who has dropped out of college to pursue his dreams of adventure in the Wild West.
Now, a decade after the end of the Civil War, Will has arrived in the ramshackle Kansas burg of Butcher’s Crossing determined to hook up with a party of buffalo hunters so he can experience the wonders of this new world first hand.
Will finds himself financing a hunting expedition under the leadership of Miller (Nicholas Cage, with shaved head and untamed beard).
A veteran buffalo hunter, Miller claims to have years ago discovered an isolated valley in the Rockies absolutely jammed with bison. And not the raggedy leftovers being brought in by other hunters; these are prime animals, Miller claims. Their skins will bring top dollar.
There are two other members of the party. The one-handed cook Charlie (Xander Berkeley, unrecognizable) is an old coot whose religious mania may be an indicator of more serious psychological problems.
And then there’s Fred (Jeremy Bobb), a surly skinner who prepares the hides to be hauled back to what passes for civilization.
For all his outward show of competence, Miller is an unsettling risk taker, leading his party into the heart of Indian country (they don’t encounter any natives but come across the gruesome remains of a fellow who did) and choosing a route which has them running dangerously low on water.
Eventually they reach the hidden valley in the mountains. And it’s exactly what Miller promised.
He starts shooting…and won’t stop. Not when they have harvested three times as many skins as they can haul out. Miller appears to be on a quest to kill every last buffalo.
Which is bad enough from an ecological standpoint, but it also delays the group’s return to Kansas. Trapped by an early snowstorm, they’re stranded until spring, short on provisions and with inadequate shelter.
Under these circumstances the worst in men comes out.
The screenplay by Polsky, Liam Satre-Meloy and John Williams is spare and economical. And while the film cannot overcome a meandering last act that left me wanting more, the journey to get there is gripping and harrowing.
The acting is solid without making a big deal of things. One half expects Cage to slip into full eye-rolling mode to depict the madness of this prairie Ahab, but he never overplays his hand. In fact, his quiet menace is far more intimidating than angry histrionics.
As our young hero, Hechinger is mostly placed in the position of observer. Yet I was particularly impressed by the way this kid is drained by months of fear and deprivation. He starts out frat boy and ends up practically an old feller.
Special kudos to cinematographer David Gallego, whose images of a largely uninhabited landscape are mesmerizing (the film was short largely on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana), and to editor Nick Pezzillo, who creates some hallucinogenic montages reflecting the characters’ mental and emotional deterioration.
The production values are solid, from the equipment carried by the party to the wrangling of the bufalo…if I didn’t know better I’d say some of these big shaggies can actually act.
(One small complaint…when will Hollywood realize that there exists in Kansas no town from which you can view a mountain? Just sayin’.)
Finally, the film doesn’t address the near-extermination of the American bison directly…although the opening and closing credits do feature old photos of piles of buffalo bones and bales of skins. The filmmakers have enough faith in their audience that they saw no need to preach — and it pays off.
It’s been so well done that you’re compelled to keep watching, but along the way “Asphalt City” will have you wondering just how much ugliness and trauma an audience is expected to take.
Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s third feature is a grim, gritty and existentially challenging study of a young man going slowly bonkers. But that isn’t immediately clear.
For the first 45 minutes the film employs a semi-documentary style (handheld camera, a cacophony of screams, the almost constant shriek of ambulance sirens) to sink us neck-deep in the daily grind of Ollie Cross (Tye Sheridan), a new EMT for the NYC Fire Department.
Along with Cross’s partner, the much more experienced and disturbingly cynical Rutkovsky (Sean Penn), we are almost immediately thrown into the chaos of a shooting in a housing project. It’s a scattered, splattered dreamlike (or, more accurealy, nightmarish) collage of pulsing gore, angry voices and intimidating gestures.
Basically the first half of the movie is a rapid-fire montage of what Cross and Rutkovsky endure daily: Heart attacks, overdoses, the ugly fallout of physical mayhem. A bedsore-riddled patient in a cheap nursing home. A body discovered after weeks in fly-infested apartment.
Many of the people they serve speak no English and are antagonistic whenever anyone in a uniform shows up. Like the middle-aged female junkie brought back from the edge who cusses out her saviors for not letting her out of the ambulance to score.
“We cant save everyone, not even with all the toys and the training,” Rutkovsky tells the newbie.
The screenplay (by Ben Mac Brown, Shannon Burke and Ryan King) doesn’t provide Cross with much respite in his off-duty hours. He sublets a beyond-shabby room in a China Town tenement; he’s hoping to save enough money for medical school…if he can pass the entrance exams.
About the only calming element in his world is a young single mother (Raquel Nave) he meets at a dance club; the mostly wordless scenes between the two are frankly intimate, but the effect is less eroticism than lyrical escapism. For a minute, anyway, Cross can forget the horrors of his workday.
After 45 minutes “Asphalt City” tones down the frantic editing and bobbling camerawork and settles down enough to dig a bit into its characters.
Rutkovsiy introduces the kid to a woman (Kathleen Waterston) who wryly identifies herself as “the most recent ex-wife and mother of his only child.” Indeed, in the presence of his young daughter the grizzled Rutkovsky is all gentleness and loving language.
A couple of segments stand out for their fierceness. In one Rutkovsky loses it and attacks a surly wife beater; in another the pair frantically work on a young woman (“True Detective’s” Kali Reis) found in a blood-soaked bed. She has given birth to what appears to be a dead baby. Plus she used heroin to try to dull the pain of labor.
Slowly it dawns on us that Cross is losing it. Initially he sees himself as a good guy (out of uniform he sports a flashy red jacket with angel wings embroidered on the shoulders), but no one could remain unaffected by the daily diet of anger and anger’s bloody fallout.
“We carry the misery and nobody gives two shits about it,” observes one of the EMTs.
Indeed, among the paramedics the most effective retirement plan seems to be suicide.
“Asphalt City” ends on a more-or-less upbeat note, but not before pushing its young protagonist into primal scream territory.
Along the way it delivers a few notable surprises.
Mike Tyson (yes, that Mike Tyson) is absolutely believable as a tough/weary NYFD chief in charge of the EMTs.
Michael Pitt (where’s he been for the last decade?) is astonishingly good as a soul-dead paramedic perfectly happy to deny treatment to a wounded drug dealer — if the creep dies in the back of an ambulance it would be a public service.
And there’s a small army of performers (I’m guessing relatively few of them are professional actors) who are devastatingly effective as the New Yorkers our heroes encounter on their runs.
In its last 20 minutes “Asphalt City” flirts with pretentiousness. But by then it’s earned our trust.
The female-centric actioner “Damsel” is, in a weird way, a twisty homage to “The Princess Bride.”
Except that whereas the title character that 1987 classic was an imperiled beauty who relied on brawling menfolk for a rescue, in “Damsel” it’s the princess who kicks ass.
Bonus points: Robin Wright, who of course played Princess Buttercup back in the day, is this time around cast as a beautiful/evil queen in the classic Disney tradition.
“Damsel” stars Millie Bobby Brown as a fairy tale princess who singlehandedly takes on a fire-breathing dragon. Brown became a near-household word for her work (beginning at age 12) in the “Stranger Things” series, had a supporting role in “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” and proved quite charming as a Victorian-era teen sleuth in “Enola Holmes.”
One hopes that some day soon she will tackle a role commensurate with her talent. But for now we’ll have to be content with lightweight diversions like this one.
Brown’s Elodie is the daughter of the provincial Lord Bamford (Ray Winstone) who rules a fairly inhospitable region of the film’s Middle Earth-ish world. Bayford’s realm is always on the verge of starvation/bankruptcy, so when a marriage proposal arrives from a much more wealthy kingdom he jumps at the chance to benefit his people by marrying off Elodie.
In due course Elodie and Prince Henry (Nick Robinson) are wed in an elaborate ceremony in the crazily ornate castle lorded over by Henry’s Mom, Queen Isabelle (Robin Wright).
Elodie finds herself falling for Henry…until she finds herself falling literally down a chasm into the dragon’s lair. Seems that Isabella’s family has for centuries been placating the dragon with sacrificial virgins…Elodie discovers the remains of earlier brides as she navigates a labyrinth of tunnels and chambers.
“Damsel” plays something like a “Die Hard” parody, with Elodie overcoming her panic to get down to the task of evading and hopefully eliminating the great beast. Think of the dragon’s mountain lair as a Medieval version of a high-rise office building.
Despite some gruesome fiery deaths, this film from director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo may be too sanitized for hard-core action fans. The ideal audience appears to be young girls, who will glom onto the sword-waving heroine while overlooking some of the more creaky plot points.
No biggie, but a decent enough way to pass a couple of hours.
Even as a fair-weather sports fan I was aware of the NFL’s New England Patriots in the Belichick/Brady era…at least enough to hate them whenever they squared off agains my Chiefs.
But the new 10-part documentary miniseries from Ron Howard’s production company is just about the perfect way to experience 20 years of superlative football.
Not that the series whitewashes the Pats’ history. Spygate and Inflationgate are both prominently featured (those were, of course, scandals in which the team was accused of cheating). An entire episode is devoted to Aaron Hernandez, the tight end who could not outrun his unsavory past, was convicted of murder and died in prison.
There’s the looming presence of coach Bill Belichick, whose genius as a football strategist was nearly overpowered by his surly personality. Even team owner Robert Kraft (the rare multimillionaire who seems to be a be a genuinely good guy) is forced to admit that “my coach is a pain in the tush.”
And then there’s Tom Brady, who was picked up so late in the draft that just about everybody else already had gone home, and nevertheless became the greatest quarterback of all time. Much of his success was the result of unrelenting hard work and discipline…he’s got an ego, sure, but by series’ end I felt stirrings of affection for the guy.
For a Chiefs fan “Dynasty” is a doubly fascinating experience, since it dovetails uncannily with the emerging Patrick Mahomes/Andy Reid storyline. In both cases it’s a perfect pairing of coach with player; the difference, as far as I can tell, is the elements of toxic masculinity/competitiveness that eventually pushed Belichick and Brady apart are largely missing from Arrowhead’s environment.
Or so one hopes. We shall see.
Ken Watanabe, Anson Elgort
“TOKYO VICE” (Prime):
Gangster yarns are always tasty. Stories about the Yakuza, Japan’s infamous underworld, are even better, with a patina of samurai ethos plastered over the mayhem.
“Tokyo Vice,” based on the memoir by American journalist Jake Adelstein, has the added oomph of plopping us down in a foreign culture and exploring it (or at least certain aspects of it) in almost microscopic detail.
Anson Elgort (Tony in Spielberg’s “West Side Story”) stars as Adelstein, a recent college grad from Missouri who in the 1990s became the first foreign reporter on a major Japanese newspaper.
Accustomed to American-style journalism, Adelstein often finds himself stymied by the regimented way of doing things in Japan, especially the ingrained awe of authority.
(Example: Adelstein visits a crime scene and views a mutilated body, but when he reports about the ”murder” he is chastised by his editors; in Japan they must wait for the police to officially declare a murder has occurred before the word can even be printed.)
“Tokyo Vice” is crammed with interesting characters. The ever-great Ken Watanabe plays a crime-weary detective who becomes the reporter’s secret ally on the police beat. Rachel Keller plays a rebellious American farm girl (from Utah, no less) whose dream of running her own Tokyo nightclub are compromised by the crooks who provide funding. Rinko Kikuchi (the tortured teen in “Babel”) is Adelstein’s immediate handler on the newspaper, an unusual gig for a woman and one that requires her to always defer to the men in the room.
And then there are the heavies, the Yakuza warlords and their henchmen. I’m not familiar with any of these actors, but they have been cast with a keen eye for their striking physical characteristics and ability to exude intimidation.
Kaya Scodelario, Theo James
“THE GENTLEMEN” (Netflix):
There is a good Guy Ritchie, the jokester/genius who gave us funky Brit crime capers like “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch.”
And there is a bad Guy Ritchie, as evidenced by his intolerable short-attention-span takes on Sherlock Holmes.
“The Gentleman” is good Guy Ritchie…in spades. He created the series (it’s inspired by his 2018 film of the same name, but with some major changes) and wrote and directed several episodes.
Theo James stars as Eddie Horniman (really? Horny Man?), who returns from service in His Majesty’s army to find his Pater dead; what’s more, the old man’s will jumps over the doped-up older son Freddy (Daniel Inge) to make Eddie a Duke and sole inheritor of the estate.
Eddie quickly discovers that the only thing keeping the manor afloat is an underground (literally) marijuana factory. Seems the previous Duke was in cahoots with an imprisoned drug kingpin (Ray Winstone) and his coolly beautiful daughter (Kaya Scodelario), providing a safe space to grow and process the weed.
Being a good guy, Eddie starts laying plans to extricate the family from this criminal enterprise.
Yeah. Good luck with that.
What makes ironically-title “The Gentlemen” fascinating is the slow corruption of our leading man.
That and a small army of great performers delivering arrestingly eccentric characters.
Joely Richardson plays Eddie’s mother, who at first seems a font of entitled obliviousness but eventually is revealed to be much more on the ball. Vinnie Jones is the family’s uber-loyal gamekeeper. Giancarlo Esposito is as an American billionaire determined to buy the estate. Pearce Quigley is scarily memorable as a Bible-quoting gangster whose beard and brutality are strictly OId Testament.
“The Gentlemen” effortlessly juggles hilarity and grotesque gruesomeness. It may not be “important,” but it sure is fun.
Whatever your takeaway on the latest season of “True Detective,” it’s pretty obvious that Kali Reis is the show’s breakout star.
Reis is a professional boxer (holding several WBC titles) of Cherokee and Nipmuc ancestry. In the Max series she plays an Alaska state trooper working with Jodi Foster’s burned-out police chief to solve a mass murder — and, not coincidentally, to discover the truth behind the disappearance of a Native American woman.
It’s a pretty great gig for an acting newcomer. If you want to understand how Reis landed the job, took no further than her little-seen 2021 drama “Catch the Fair One,” now on Hulu.
In her acting debut Reis is more than just acceptable. She’s mesmerizing. Add to her performing chops the fact that she co-wrote the screenplay with director Josef Kubota Wladyka, and it’s easy to spot what the “True Detective” producers saw in her.
“Catch the Fair One” is essentially a revenge melodrama, but that description doesn’t do it justice.
The depth of the characterizations, the aura of tragic inevitability, the way in which horrible acts are made even more unsettling because they’re presented in such a matter-of-fact, non-exploitative manner…all these add up to a truly gripping and gut-twisting movie experience.
Trying to find another movie to compare it to, I keep turning to 1973’s “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” a crime drama so effectively rooted in semi-documentary reality that it has few peers.
In “Catch…” Reis plays Kaylee, a Native American woman whose life was upended by the disappearance a few years earlier of her younger sister, Weeta.
Kaylee’s road has been one big pothole. She’s only recently kicked a drug addiction. She trains incessantly at a mostly-male boxing gym where she’s ready to both dish out and absorb punishment. She sleeps in a woman’s shelter with a razor blade in her mouth.
Mostly she feels guilty. Weeta and Kaylee’s mother, Jaya (Kimberly Guerrero), is an activist who runs support groups for abused Native American women. Weeta was her hope for a better future; Kaylee is the black sheep who delivers nothing but disappointment.
Getting wind of a sex trafficking operation in their rural, snowbound neighborhood in upstate New York, Kaylee comes up with a dangerous plan…she’ll allow herself to be recruited into the prostitution ring in the hope of picking up Weeta’s trail.
It’s a desperate, last-resort move, and even a woman toughened by years of pain and abuse is horrified and terrorized by what she encounters.
If the film has a mesmerizing leading lady, it also has a firm hand behind the camera. Wladyka proves himself a master of mood…the film is a slowly-tightening vise of suspense and anxiety. Practically Hitchcockian.
And yet there’s nothing here that says, “Look at me, Ma.” No dramatic or visual grandstanding…which makes the yarn’s dark underbelly all the more disquieting.
“Frida,” the new doc from Ron Howard’s production company, is an eye-enchanting and soul-stirring experience. It is among the best documentaries about an artist I’ve ever seen.
Here’s what makes it so special…director Carla Gutierrez completely blows off the usual art history approach. There are no critics discussing Frida Kahlo’s work or her impact on contemporary culture.
Instead this is an intimate bio told in Kahlo’s own words (and those of her closest friends and family). As Frida (voiced by an actress reading from the artist’s own diaries) relates events from a colorful life, the screen lights up with arresting images.
Half the film consists of archival footage and still photos of Frida and her world, often colorized to create a dreamlike effect. The other half is made up of brilliant animation sequences in which her paintings come to sinuous life (these sections were overseen by animation creative director Sofia Inés Cázares).
The results are seductive and haunting.
If her painting style would eventually be categorized as surrealism, Frida’s writing is brutally realistic about her personal life.
Even so, at times her prose achieves the beauty of minimalist poetry. Describing her early yearnings for a physical relationship with a classmate, she begins by stating “I think everything that gives pleasure is good,” and then follows up that thought with a string of seductive words: “breath,” “scent,” “armpit,” “love,” “abyss.”
(By the way, most of the film’s dialogue is in Spanish with English subtitles. This only reinforces the illusion that we’re being confronted by Frida herself.)
As a teen she was involved in a Mexico city bus accident that left her in pain for the rest of her life. The incident was also responsible for her becoming an artist… laying for months on her back in a body cast, the girl was going mad with boredom. Frida’s mother created an overhead easel the patient could reach and hung beside it a mirror, The teen began doing self portraits…and never stopped.
Frida’s two marriages to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera comprise one of the 20th century’s great love stories. Rivera (again voiced by an actor, reading from the artist’s memoir) admits to being a selfish womanizer. Frida was an intensely sexual person who enjoyed relations with both women and men (Rivera, a font of machismo, was turned on by the former, infuriated by the latter).
To a large extent this doc is the story of how Frida emerged from the shadow of her world-famous spouse and found her own visual voice.
Much of this transpired in the early 1930s when the couple were living in New York City and Frida had little to do while Rivera worked on mural commissions.
If her stay in the U.S.A. honed Frida’s art, it only solidified her leftist inclinations…she was absolutely dismissive in her rejection of American capitalism, which she found soulless, and the shallow affectations of the ruling class. For all its poverty and unrest, she much preferred her native Mexico.
The cumulative effect of ”Frida” is overwhelming. Staring for almost 90 minutes at photos and films of the woman and her self-portraits, listening to her voice thoughts that most of us keep to ourselves, one gets the uncanny feeling of having actually met her.
But it’s more than that. By film’s end you may find yourself in love with this woman.
“WOMAN IN THE WALL”(Paramount+): Brit thesp Ruth Wilson has been so good in so many varied roles (“Mrs. Wilson,” “Luther,” “The Affair”) that it’s easy to take her for granted.
But her lacerating work in “The Woman in the Wall“ cuts so deep that viewers cannot escape the madness at the core of her compelling/prickly character.
Wilson plays Lorna Brady, a middle-aged resident of a small Irish burg where she’s regarded as a local oddity. Lorna lives alone, is prone to epic episodes of sleepwalking (one morning she awakens on a country road surrounded by sheep) and is majorly depressed, the result of a long-ago encounter with the Magdalene Sisters.
The Magdalene system, of course, was the Church- and state-sanctioned enterprise which for more than a century in Ireland took in unmarried pregnant girls and put them to work as laundresses. These unfortunates were usually disowned by their scandalized families; most gave their children up for adoption and many lived their entire lives as Magdalenes in circumstances approaching slavery.
Wilson’s Lorna is haunted by the traumas of her youth. She is anti-religious and anti-authoritarian and so angry she cannot see straight.
And sad. God, is she sad.
“The Woman in the Wall” follows Lorna’s quest to discover what happened to the child she birthed decades earlier, but it’s mixed in with a murder mystery.
A priest once involved with the local Magadelene laundry is found murdered. Suspicion quickly falls on Lorna, whose hatred of the sisterhood is local legend.
Investigating is a police detective from the big city, Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack), who, as fate would have it, was himself born to one of those fallen women and adopted by a loving family — but not before living several years in an orphanage about which he still has Dickensian-level nightmares.
Lorna and Colman form an unlikely alliance; even though she’s a prime suspect in the murder, the cop feels a kinship because of their shared horrors.
But we know something about Lorna that the other characters don’t…Lorna has had a fatal encounter with a former Magdalene nun, whose body she deposits behind the wall of her parlor.
Shades of Edgar Allan Poe!
Well, the dead woman’s heart doesn’t beat so loud you can hear it, but Lorna, consumed by guilt and fear, is nonetheless pushed to the edge of sanity.
Truth be told, the titular woman in the wall is one of the few elements in the series from creator Joe Murtagh that feels forced and phony. It’s too melodramatic and coincidental by half.
The rest of the show, though, is a brutally honest look at one of Ireland’s recurring bad dreams (hardly a year goes by without some new horrifying revelation about the now-defunct Magdalenes) and the fallout that continues to upend lives.
One leaves the series feeling that some small mysteries have been solved, but that true accountability for decades of abuse may never arrive.
But watching Ruth Wilson do her thing almost makes all the trauma worthwhile.
Donald Glover, Maya Erskine
“MR. AND MRS. SMITH”(Prime): Poised between dark humor and pulse-pumping action, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” is so watchable that for most of its first season you may not notice it’s really not going anywhere.
Or anyway it sometimes seems it’s going nowhere. Just wait until Episode 8.
This is just the latest spinoff of a concept — a marriage of two deadly assassins — that began with a 1996 TV series starring Scott Bakula and Maria Bello and was resurrected as a 2005 feature with real-life items Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
Our happy-ish couple are John and Jane (Donald Glover, Maya Erskine) who are recruited by a massively secret espionage operation, are ordered to marry one another and become John and Jane Smith (they don’t even know each other’s real name) and are regularly sent off on missions that test not only their secret agent skills but their marital tolerances.
Glover (who produced the series) and Erskine are hugely watchable, and the fact that they represent racial minorities gives “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” a little extra oomph in the sociological fallout department.
Here’s the weird thing…although they are given a posh Manhattan townhouse and a big salary, John and Jane know next to nothing about their employers. They communicate with their boss — they call him Hi-Hi — exclusively through the internet.
Nor are they told why they’re doing what they’re doing. No time for ethical hair-splitting. Just get the mission over with, go home and heat up the bedroom with post-homicidal passion.
Most of the episodes in Season One are placeholders, adhering to a similar setup and essentially repeating the same notes with different supporting characters.
Keeping things interesting is an impressive array single episode co-stars (Sharon Horgan, Alexander Skarsgard, Billy Campbell, Sarah Paiulson, Parker Posey, Ron Perlman, John Turturro, Paul Dano).
And with each episode we get a few more intimations about just what our amoral lovers have gotten themselves into. Apparently the only way to get a divorce in this world is with a well-placed bullet.
The season climaxes with the niftiest episode yet, in which the Smiths turn their weaponry on each other, not realizing they’re being set up by powers unseen. And smack dab in the middle is a great stretch of dialogue in which the title couple, under the effect of a potent truth serum, finally come clean with each other, laying bare the essentials of their greasy little hearts.
It all ends on a cliffhanger, but even if we don’t get a Season 2, this one is worth checking out.
It’s just about impossible to describe Andrew Haigh’s deeply moving “All of Us Strangers” without either giving away the film’s big reveal or making it sound like a half-baked dive into armchair psychology.
Yet “…Strangers” got under my skin unlike any other film of 2023. It’s a downer…but we walk away from its all-consuming sadness with filled with hope for our capacity for love.
Andrew Scott, the “hot priest” of “Fleabag,” stars as Adam, a lonely writer living in a London high-rise so recently opened that there’s hardly anyone else in the building.
One fellow resident who does catch his eye is Harry (Paul Mescal); they spot each other during a fire drill and Harry almost immediately shows up at Adam’s door with a bottle and a too-eager desire to be let in.
Nothing immediately comes of Harry’s advances (both men are gay), but over the course of the next week the two strike up a relationship that moves quickly from the physical to the romantic.
Meanwhile the screenplay by Haigh (adapting Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers) tosses a head scratcher into the mix.
One day Adam boards a train and gets off in a suburb where he is reunited with his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy)…an impossibility since (a) Mom and Dad appear to be the same age as their son and (b) we have already learned from Adam’s conversations with Harry that his parents died in a car crash when he was a young teen.
Jamie Bell, Andrew Scott, Claire Foy
What’s happening? Well, apparently Adam has constructed a fantasy world in which he can receive the parental love denied him in reality. In this world he can touch and be touched. He can reveal to his parents his homosexuality (Dad is cool with it; Mom is a bit slower to get on board). He can take comfort in the warmth of his boyhood home.
Obviously Mom and Dad don’t exist anywhere but in Adam’s head. Yet so spectacularly convincing is Scott, so quietly desperate is his need for affection, that we end up buying into his delusion. And as delusions go, this one is pretty damn seductive.
At the same time the Adam/Harry relationship is deepening…at one point Adam takes his new boyfriend out to meet the folks, only to be confronted with an unoccupied house. Harry quite naturally gets a little creeped out.
“All of Us Strangers” is forever whiplashing us between the real and the imagined. It probably shouldn’t work, but the players are so astoundingly convincing that we find ourselves believing despite the craziness.
And is it really craziness? “Strangers…” isn’t into psychoanalyzing Adam; that sort of real-world attitude is at odds with the film’s near-poetic approach.
The moral here: We humans need love. Even if we have to invent it. There’s madness there, but a kind of nobility, too.
“EXPATS”(Prime Video): The arrogance of Western culture gets toasted and roasted in “Expats,” a six-part miniseries about rich foreigners living lives of miserable affluence in modern-day Hong Kong.
Created by Lulu Wang, “Expats” is repellant to about the same degree as her “The Farewell” was warm and life-affirming. At least a half-dozen times while watching this series I turned to the Missus and asked aloud: “Are we supposed to like anybody in this show?”
Given that, why bother? Well, because the damn thing has been so well acted, that’s why.
From its first episode one might conclude that “Expats” is a mystery waiting to be solved.
American couple Margaret and Clarke (Nicole Kidman, Brian Tee) reside in a posh mountaintop high-rise overlooking the city. Both geographically and emotionally they seem to be above it all.
Except…they are each tormented in their own individual ways in the wake of a staggering loss. Months before their youngest child, Gus, was snatched off the street.
“Expats” isn’t about the search for Gus, whose fate is speculated on but never solved. Rather, Wang probes the mentality of rich white folk who live privileged existences in a foreign country.
It’s not pretty.
Among the various characters are Margaret and Clark’s neighbors, a spectacularly dysfunctional pair played by Soraya Blue and Jack Huston. There’s the young Korean American woman (Ji-young Yoo), a party girl who was supposed to be watching Gus when he vanished.
If the series was devoted only to these arrogant (inadvertent and otherwise) strangers in a strange land it would be rough going.
Happily we also eavesdrop on the lives of Hong Kong teens (some of whom are risking prison by protesting mainland Chinese governance of the city). And the final episode spends time with the Filipino cooks, housekeepers and sitters who have left their own children behind to tend to the offspring of their wealthy employers.
Well made, but not exactly a heart warmer.
“MASTERS OF THE AIR” (Apple+): More like “Masters of Cliche.”
My anticipation was high upon learning that the same folk who brought us the brilliant WWII miniseries “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific” were turning their attention to the flyboys who carried out bombing missions over Europe.
The first couple of episodes of “Masters of the Air,” though, were borderline unwatchable. It was as if the writers had immersed themselves in every old movie ever made about the subject and were determined to copy them.
This result was dialogue neck deep in creaky cliches. I wanted to throw something heavy at my TV.
The good news is that “Masters of the Air” gradually loses its aw-shucks Andy Hardy attitude and gets into the horrifying meat and potatoes of aerial combat. Once off the ground, the show becomes a gripping survival drama…terrifying, even.
One can only come away in awe of the kids (some of the pilots were still in their teens) who rode these thin metal tubes through skies filled with flying shrapnel, blasted away at German fighter planes, all the while freezing their asses off in unpressurized compartments. (I cannot imagine a more horrifying gig than manning a ball turret on the belly of one of these flying fortresses.)
As time goes by one cannot even be assured that lead characters played by the likes of Austin Butler (“Elvis”) and Callum Turner (“The Boys in the Boat”) will return from their ghastly missions.
(Three-fourths of U.S. airmen were killed, seriously injured or became POWs. Their average age of death was only 23.)
My advice: Start with Episode 3. But brace yourself.
Most of what we call science fiction is in fact science/fantasy. But “For All Mankind” is sci-fi in its truest sense. The show, which recently dropped its fourth season, offers an minutely detailed alternative history of the space race.
In this version the Soviets get to the moon first and the Americans must play catch-up. Communism more or less flourishes with a repressive regime in Moscow still railing against capitalism well into the 21st century. Al Gore is elected President; so is a woman—a closeted gay woman.
(“For All Mankind” sees women as key figures in the space program. One could almost call this feminist sci-fi.)
Meanwhile astronauts and scientists from all countries are working to explore the vastness of space, with international colonies established on the moon and Mars. Of course, our conflicts as human beings don’t magically go away when we relocate to distant planets. There are labor issues, rebellions, sabotage.
Basically the series explores where we might be now if only we hadn’t put space exploration on the back burner.
The special effects are utterly convincing and the science completely plausible.
I’m especially impressed at how well certain characters — an original NASA flyboy played by Joel Kinnaman, a genius engineer/supervisor played by Wrenn Schmidt — age over the course of several decades.
The series deals not only in space exploration but in the lives of its many characters. There are failed marriages and affairs. Generational disputes. Political gamesmanship.
The has led some to complain that there’s too much soap gumming up the science. I must disagree…our humdrum human foibles do not evaporate just because we are confronted with the vastness of space.
Throughout, the series never abandons the idea of real science. No laser guns, shape-shifting aliens or woo woo transcendentalism. Just people designing and making machines that reflect the real possibilities of our technology, imaginations and capacity to hope.
Naomi Watts, Tom Hollander
“FEUD: TRUMAN CAPOTE VS. THE SWANS”(Hulu): For its second season (the first, in 2017, focused on the antipathy shared by Bette Davis and Joan Crawford during the filming of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”) Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” concentrates on writer/raconteur Truman Capote.
Set in the 1960s and ‘70s, “Capote and the Swans” delves into the novelist’s relationships with a half dozen or so society wives, women married to powerful movers and shakers who, from the outside anyway, appeared to live lives of pampered opulence and studied hautiness.
Capote (portrayed by Brit Tom Hollander with a helium-and-molasses voice and fierce attention to his character’s fey mannerisms) calls his gal pals “the swans” because, he says, they seem so graceful on the surface, while below the water line they are desperately paddling.
These ladies who lunch are portrayed by the likes of Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Chloe Sevigny, Calista Flockhart and Demi Moore — all of whom appear to be having one hell of a good time mining the bitchiness.
Not that it’s all fun and games. For all their affluence these women are fairly miserable, saddled with philandering hubbies and thankless children. The openly gay Capote becomes their best friend, shrink, confidant and shoulder to cry on.
“I play the part. It’s all a performance,:” he admits in an unusually honest moment. “They pick men who are rich but cannot act.”
Of course Capote —his creative juices dried up — also betrays these women by turning his intimate knowledge of them into a scandalous novel…thus the feud of the title.
Now I’m only halfway trough the season, but the fourth episode, “Masquerade 1966,” is so freaking good — and so beautifully sums up what the series is about — that it’s practically a stand-alone experience.
John Robin Baitz (who has scripted the entire series) has come up with a brilliant idea. He tells the story of Capote’s famous Black-and-White Masked Ball (one of the most memorable if overhyped society events in Manhattan history) by using “found footage” reputedly made by documentary giants Albert and David Maysles.
The entire episode — directed by the great Gus Van Sant — is shot with handheld cameras and captured in grainy black-and-white and in a classic square frame. The Maysles Brothers not only observe the preparations with fly-on-the-wall intimacy, but conduct interviews Capote and with the Swans…each of whom is convinced that she will be the secret guest of honor to be named at the big event.
Clearly, they can’t all be queen for a day, but master manipulator Capote knows how to exploit each woman’s insecurities and desires to his will.
The result is 60 minutes of absolutely brilliant television.
“THE ZONE OF INTEREST” My rating: B+ (In theaters)
105 minutes | MPAA ratin: PG-13
In its own perverted way, Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” is a sick parody of that heartwarming musical “Meet Me In St. Louis.”
Both films are about families living idyllic and comfortable lives, and what happens when the father of the clan must for his job relocate to another city.
What makes Glazer’s film so deeply twisted is that the family in question is that of Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of the notorious Auschwitz death camp.
When we first encounter the Hoss family they are picnicking on a sun-dappled hillside beside a beautiful river or lake. They swim, bask in the sun. Reduced to their old-fashioned bathing outfits, there’s no way of knowing that Poppa is a high-ranking Nazi officer.
They return to their home, a comfortable modernist abode with a greenhouse and a huge walled-in garden with its own swimming pool.
As we observe the mundane day-to-day life of Rudolf (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller, an Oscar nominee this year for “Anatomy of a Fall”) and their brood, little ripples of uneasiness creep in.
Occasionally we can hear gunshots. A distant smokestack belches black clouds. And now and then we can see over the wall or in the gap between buildings the familiar shape of the tower over the camp’s main gate.
Talk about the banality of evil!
Sandra Huller
Rudolf goes to work each morning like any other breadwinner…only usually in a uniform of the Reich. He comes home for lunch. He reads his children bedtime stories.
We never actually see what goes on beyond the wall, but in one painfully haunting scene Rudolf sits down in his study to discuss an expansion of the camp with a couple of architect/engineers from Berlin. They talk about product flow and increased production without ever acknowledging that their job is to kill their fellow human beings as efficiently as possible.
Meanwhile Mother Hedwig goes about her business of making the perfect home. She has help…every now and then someone arrives from the camp with a cart full of clothing, jewelry and household objects for Hedwig to pick from. We don’t need to be told that these were confiscated from Jews marching to their deaths.
For that matter, Hedwig has several quietly efficient and utterly deferential young women working as maids and cooks. One can only assume that they are inmates given a reprieve to serve their Teutonic masters.
As written by Glazer (“Under the Skin”) from Martin Amis’ novel, “The Zone of Interest” is less about plot than dispassionate observation. Most of what unfolds is utterly commonplace: Hedwig’s mother comes for a visit. Hedwig plans improvements for the garden. Rudolf enjoys an after-dinner smoke on the porch as the sun goes down.
Only late in the film does a real crisis develop: Rudolf is to be transferred and Hedwig puts her foot down. She loves her home and refuses to move after all she’s done to make this the perfect place to raise their kids.
The unspoken subject of “The Zone of Interest” is the human capacity to compartmentalize, to spend evenings contentedly nurturing one’s children and to spend days murdering the children of others.
It starts out with such promise that the last episode was almost bound to be a letdown.
Yet there are moments in Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling’s “A Murder at the End of the World” that have struck with me for weeks.
Young true-crime writer Darby (Emma Corrin) is one of a dozen international movers and shakers invited by an eccentric tech billionaire (Clive Owen) to spend a long weekend at his latest brainstorm, a luxury hotel in the snowy wastes of Iceland.
Among the guests is Darby’s old flame, the graffiti artist Bill (Harris Dickinson). A decade earlier Darby and Bill were young lovers working to identify a serial killer who had left a trail of dead women across the Southwest…their adventure became the basis for Darby’s first best-selling book.
As the title implies, one of the guests is murdered. There’s a blizzard which keeps the local authorities from reaching the scene. Another guest dies mysteriously. Then another.
The setup is basically post-modern Agatha Christie. With the exception of Darby, everyone’s a suspect (at least until they’re killed).
But the mystery aspect of “A Murder…” is far less interesting than the extended flashbacks of a young Darby and Bill cruising around in an old car trying to identify a killer who has eluded capture for years. There’s a lovers-on-the-run sadness and fatality percolating through their relationship; it’s both tender and troubling. Not to mention an undercurrent of dread.
Holding it all together is Corrin, much praised for her work as the young Princess Diana on Netflix’s “The Crown.” Her Darby is the daughter of a rural county coroner much more at home at an autopsy than a pajama party. She’s intellectually strong, but there’s an intriguing fragility to her physical and emotional selves. It’s a haunting performance.
Ron Livingston (top), Anja Savcic and Will Sasso
“LOUDERMILK”(Netflix): Addiction has long been the stuff of lacerating drama. But comedy?
Without having any info to back up my suspicions, I’m going to declare that “Loudermilk” could only have been made by people intimately familiar with addiction and recovery.
It’s as if the show’s creators (Peter Farrelly and Bobby Mort) jotted down every outlandish story ever shared in AA meeting and built a subversive comedy around them. It’s authentic. It’s weirdly touching.
And it’s funny as hell.
Ron Livingston gets what may be his finest role since “Office Space” as Sam Loudermilk, a fairly miserable example of humanity who runs an AA meeting in a Seattle church.
Sam is dour and cynical. A former rock critic who only listens to vinyl, he’s contemptuous of just about everyone else’s taste in music. He refuses work that requires a degree of responsibility (mostly he polishes the floors at a downtown bank). He loves picking fights, whether it’s with a lady in line at the coffee shop or the priest who gives Sam’s motley collection of alkies a place to gather.
Beneath the bitterness, though, he’s genuinely concerned about keeping his charges on the straight and narrow. It’s just that sometimes it’s hard to tell.
“Loudermilk” is on one hand a sort of pervy family sitcom. Sam shares an apartment with two other recovering addicts, his sponsor Ben (Will Sasso), who is secretly back on the sauce, and the twenty something Claire (Anja Savcic), who exudes millennial irony for the two old creeps with whom she is housed.
Over the course of three seasons other members of the AA group come to the fore. Usually these digressions are insightful and amusing. An exception is a long-running subplot about a glowering ex-cop who declares himself the tough-love sponsor of an ineffectual advertising copy writer; thing is, the writer isn’t an addict at all. No matter. Now he’s got this big thug watching his every move. Don’t be surprises when in the middle of their story arc these two characters vanish without comment.
For the most part, though, “Loudermilk” is so eye-rollingly good that I’m amazed I’d never heard of it before. I find that it debuted in 2017 on the AT&T Audience Network…yeah, that explains it.
I’ve never been a big fan of Japanese anime. After about 40 minutes my eyes glaze over and I lose interest…largely because the human characters in anime seem so stiff and visually uninteresting. (Not to mention those semi-creepy big eyes.)
But here we have human figures that look, move and express facial emotions pretty much like live actors would. Place them in impeccably rendered environments and you’ve got magic.
The title character is Mizu, a blue-eyed outcast born of an unknown European interloper and a Japanese mother. Mizu becomes a self-trained samurai whose quest for revenge puts this skilled fighter on a collision course with a brutal British adventurer (voiced by no less than Kenneth Branagh) planning to use Western weaponry to overthrow the shogunate.
Oh, yeah…the series has a major plot twist which I won’t reveal here.
“Blue Eye…” is populated with archetypes clearly inspired by pop culture. There’s a fugitive princess slumming with the lower classes (“The Hidden Fortress,” “Star Wars”). Mizu’s sidekick is a handless small town oaf with dreams of heroism (very much like Sam in the Ring Trilogy). There’s an ancient blind sword maker (George Takai) who becomes a mentor to our heroes (nobody is actually addressed as “Grasshopper,” but you get the idea).
References to the cinema of Akira Kurosawa abound. Mizu’s physicality — tall, almost painfully thin, astonishingly graceful — is clearly patterned after Kyuzo, the swordsman portrayed by Meiji Miyaguchi in “Seven Samurai.” The Season One finale is an extended battle sequence mirroring the castle siege in “Ran.”
“Blue Eye Samurai” is a story that could have been done in live action…had anyone the money to undertake such a massive project. But things are made affordable when you only have to paint a picture of a castle instead of building one.
Of all there is to admire in this series, I believe it’s the action sequences that most grabbed me. I kept thinking of the term “blood ballet” that was used to describe Sam Peckinpah’s handling of mayhem in “The Wild Bunch.” “Blue Eye Samurai” lives up to that description.
Cord Jefferson may have just made the season’s most impressive directing debut with “American Fiction,” a whip-smart dramady that savagely satirizes the racial assumptions that keep us apart while exploring the experiences that make us all the same.
When we first meet novelist/teacher Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) he’s conducting a lit class on Southern writers. A young woman (white) protests that any mention of the “n” word makes her so uncomfortable she cannot function.
Shoots back Monk (who is black): “I got over it. You can, too.”
For that justified but arrogant retort the curmudgeonly Monk finds himself on mandatory leave until things cool down.
Monk is that rarest of individuals, a race-blind American. A snob at heart, he’s most comfortable in an ivory tower; soon he’ll be straddling a cultural fence.
His prose style is polished and too academic for popular tastes. If Monk wants success, advises his sympathetic agent (John Ortiz), his writing needs to be “more black.”
Thing is, Monk is disgusted by the new black fiction. Particularly appalling is a reading by best-selling author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), whose new novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto he dismisses as a pandering amalgam of racial cliches.
Traces Ellis Ross, Leslie Uggams
The clever conceit at the heart of Jefferson’s screenplay (co-written with Percival Everett) finds the frustrated Monk writing a deliberately bad novel about ‘hos and players under the nom de plume Stagg R. Leigh.
Thing is, his satire of terrible African American literature becomes the most popular thing he’s ever produced, with publishers and critics (all white) proclaiming it a modern masterpiece. This even after Monk, hoping to scuttle the project, insists that the title be changed to Fuck.
Desperately in need of the cash the book will generate but but determined to keep his academic reputation, Monk creates a life for the non-existence Stagg R. Leigh. The writer, he decides, is an ex-con currently on the run from the law (a fabrication that allows the “fugitive” to turn down all offers of in-person media interviews). That last invention may be one too many…to Monk’s dismay the FBI launches a national manhunt for the criminal turned celebrity.
The film’s bleakly funny passages set in the world of publishing (and, later, movies) are interspersed with more somber interactions between Monk and his long-estranged family. So there’s an effortless back-and-forth between dark humor and everyday trial and tribulations.
Monk’s sister (Tracee Ellis Ross) has long been taking care of their aged mother (Leslie Uggams) and now expects the essentially antisocial Monk to take over. Things are complicated by the fact that Momma is quickly sliding into dementia.
Their brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) is no help; he has recently left his wife and is devoting himself to exploring life as a gay man.
Monk finds himself in a romantic relationship with the nice lady who lives across the street from Mama’s (Erika Alexander) and is even sucked into participating in the late-in-life wedding of the family’s long-time cook and housekeeper (Myra Lucretia Taylor).
All of this slowly opens up Monk’s long-ignored humanity. Like it or not, circumstances may force him into becoming a good person. But he’s still too ashamed to let loved ones know that he’s Stagg R. Leigh.
“American Fiction” ends with one of the more mind-blowing tricks in recent cinema. Basically the filmmakers turn the movie into a choose-your-own adventure experience, offering three different resolutions to Monk’s story and allowing viewers to settle on the one that seems most appropriate.
It should come off as a gimmick, but instead it feels just right.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” delivers such a unique vision, so elaborate a palette of visual wonders, so much wickedly sly humor that one is willing to forgive a padded running time and a draggy third act.
Although its literary sources are obvious enough (“Frankenstein” is a biggie; so is “Candide”) the film’s wondrously weird sense of self is unlike that of any movie I can think of.
And it gives Emma Stone, the star of Lanthimos’ “The Favourite,” the role of a lifetime.
Here she plays Bella, a grown woman who behaves like an infant.
“Her mental age and body are not quite synchronized,” explains Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), the hideously scarred eccentric whose home/laboratory is populated with bizarre animal hybrids (like a duck with a dog’s head).
Godwin — Bella addresses him as “God” — views his ward as both his daughter and as an experiment. He will educate this blank slate, raise her to be a reflection of his own genius.
Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone
He tolerates her childlike misbehavior (Bella routinely smashes dishes and plates just for the thrill of noisy destruction), having determined that she has an incredibly high learning curve.
In just a matter of weeks she goes from syntax-twisted baby talk to more-or-less full sentences.
Sometimes she stares in birdlike fashion off into space (reminds of Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein); at other times she devotes all her faculties to examining (and often destroying) some new object in God’s cluttered abode.
Now would be a good time to mention the astounding production design courtesy of Shona Heath and James Price. “Poor Things” begins in London circa 1900 and later moves to the Continent, but historical accuracy is jettisoned in favor of a sort of Gaudi-inspired steampunk ethos. The picture is filled with weirdly shaped and decorated rooms, bizarre ships (both seagoing and aerial), and city environments that ooze fanciful theme park artificiality.
The sumptuous photography by Robbie Ryan (“American Honey,” “The Favourite”) embraces both crisp black and white and pastel-infused color, and his frequent use of wide-angle lenses captures a visual warp that nicely echoes the gnarly subject matter.
The great joy of “Poor Things” lies in watching Stone’s Bella blossom into her own person.
She’s abetted along the way first by Max (Rami Youssef), a sincere medical student hired by God to be Bella’s companion, teacher and possible husband, and later by unprincipled lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who spirits Bella away for a European debauch and introduces her to the wonders of sex. (Or, as she calls it, “furious jumping.”)
(Ruffalo’s comic performance falls just short of mellerdramer mustache-twirling; his depiction of Duncan’s selfish pomposity is hugely amusing, and almost makes me forget his terrible turn in “All the Light We Cannot See.”)
Bella learns and grows. Initially she moves with the jerky tentativeness of a newborn colt; before long she’s doing a funky dance of her own creation. Her vocabulary blossoms.
Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo
What doesn’t change is her singular outlook. Her intellect rockets right past societal norms. She has no filter and so invariably utters the truth in situations which call for discretion.
She even develops a sense of empathy and is distraught at the plight of the urban poor she discovers on her sojourn (this passage is a nifty parody of the Buddhist legend in which the privileged Prince Siddhartha ventures from his palace to discover for the first time the plight of his aged and diseased subjects).
Eventually her adventures lead to a stint in a Paris brothel where she succinctly identifies what each customer needs (men are so pathetically transparent) and delivers with a minimum of fuss, becoming rich in the process. (It’s not that Bella is immoral; she’s utterly amoral.)
Eventually the yarn returns to London where we learn of Bella’s origins and her life as the wife of a thuggish noble (Christopher Abbott). Happily, her world-expanding experiences have prepared her to deal even with the most rampant and institutionalized chauvinism.
For its first 90 or so minutes “Poor Things” is like a birthday party in which every minute delivers a new present to unwrap. It’s a cinematic feast that just keeps on giving.
But things start to bog down in the Paris section…Lanthimos aims for raunchy laughs, with lots of nudity and cartoonish coupling (the easily offended should steer clear). But after a while the film starts to repeat itself. Yeah, yeah, we get it. Men are swine or arrested adolescents. The effect could be had in a fraction of the time it’s given here.
In fact, “Poor Things” would benefit hugely from some tightening. Less is more.
Nevertheless, the movie is a fantastic achievement. And you leave with a newfound sense of respect for the artistry and adventurousness of Emma Stone.
Mahershala Ali, Ruth Scott, Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke
“LEAVE THE WORD BEHIND” My rating: B- (Netflix)
138 minutes | MPAA rating: R
The latest from writer/director Sam Esmail, creator of TV’s mind-twisty “Mr. Robot,” has been getting equal parts love and hate from Net-dwellers.
I’m stuck in the middle.
It’s an end-of-civilization movie, sort of, with a family from the Big Apple (Mom and Dad are Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke) retreating to a rental home on Long Island for a little R&R, only to find the world falling apart around them.
Cell phones stop working. Cable TV goes out. The Internet is down.
There’s still running water and electricity…but for how long?
And then there’s the huge oil tanker that has run aground on a nearby beach and the passenger airplanes that are dropping out of the sky.
The highways are impassable (in one haunting scene dozens of driverless Teslas pile up in the roadway in a suicidal demolition derby) and the local deer seem to be suffering from a mass psychosis.
Emotions accelerate when the owner of the rental house (Mahershala Ali) shows up with his surly college-age daughter (Ruth Scott). Mom immediately becomes suspicious of these interlopers, especially since Ali’s high-powered businessman brings with him vague reports of a mass terrorism event.
What’s it all about? Keep guessing. Like Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” which it resembles on many levels, “Leave the World…” isn’t about providing answers. Its emphasis is on the reactions of the characters, who respond to undefined threats by turning on one another.
To say that the film delivers an ever-tightening sense of dread is an understatement. The acting is about as good as what you’d expect from such a high-powered cast, but I was especially taken with Farrah Mackenzie as the couple’s daughter, a tweener with the face of a 35-year-old and a need to see the final episode of “Friends” that transcends even the end of the world.
Joel Fry, Roy Kinnear
“BANK OF DAVE”(Netflix)
107 minutes | PG-13
Dave Fishwick is the real-life George Bailey (the character played by James Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life”).
More than a decade ago Fishwick, who runs several van and recreational vehicle dealerships in northern England, decided to create a small bank for local residents whose loan applications had been rejected by the established financial institutions.
Over the years Fishwick had found that whenever he loaned money to needy citizens, they invariably paid him back. Often with interest although Fishwick, a wealthy fellow, didn’t ask for that.
So why not make it official?
“Bank of Dave” stars Roy Kinnear as the irrepressible and astonishingly altruistic Dave, and Joel Fry as the young London attorney who comes to the boonies to help him overcome the many legal hurdles in his path.
Because the world of British banking was, until Dave Fishwick, a closed shop. No new bank charters had been approved in more than 150 years, and the powers that be — represented here by Hugh Bonneville as a titled (and entitled) elitist — didn’t want a guy like Dave offering an alternative to their tight-fisted and probably corrupt monopoly. They were ready to play dirty.
Fishwick’s story was the subject of a three-episode Brit documentary back in 2012. Now, under Chris Foggin’s workmanlike direction, this David-and-Goliath fictitious version delivers a whole lot of feel-good.
There’s a subplot in which the lawyer falls for an idealistic M.D. (Phoebe Dynevor), lots of colorful locals who ooze community and a self-help ethos, and even an appearance by Def Leppard, the famous hair metal rockers who gave a free concert to raise startup money for the Bank of Dave.
None of this is terribly surprising dramatically, but “Bank of Dave” sucks you in.
Sandra Huller
“ANATOMY OF A FALL” My rating: B+ (Rent on Prime, Apple+, etc.)
151 minutes | MPAA rating: R
A man plummets to his death from an upper story of his house. His wife is charged with his murder.
That’s the setup examined with procedural detail in “Anatomy of a Fall,” but this description barely scratches the surface of writer/director Justine Triet’s methodical drama.
The body of Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) is discovered by his vision-impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) lying below a balcony of the family’s chalet in the French Alps.
The cause of death is a blow to the head, but whether Samuel suffered the injury in the fall or was struck on the noggin before going down cannot be determined. There’s a chance this was a suicide.
The authorities, though, charge Samuel’s wife Sandra (Sandra Huller) with his murder.
At least half the film unfolds in a courtroom where Sandra’s attorney (and one-time flame) Vincent (Swann Arlaud) struggles to counter the grim portrait of his client painted by the aggressively, red-gowned prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz).
It’s not like the state doesn’t have a lot to work with.
Sandra is a German whose grasp of French is tenuous enough that she asks that the trial court to be conducted in English. So that’s pissing off the jingoists in the courtroom.
She’s a successful novelist who may have borrowed/stolen the idea for her last book from her husband. She is admittedly bisexual.
Most damning of all, Sandra is emotionally aloof. Is she an unfeeling cold fish? Or is she simply reluctant to air her innermost feelings for public consumption?
On the other hand, Samuel was despondent over his own failed career and his responsibility in the unexplained accident that led to young Daniel’s blindness. He was toying with his meds. He may have attempted suicide by pills a few weeks earlier.
In the film’s most dramatic passage the prosecution plays a recording of a family argument made by Samuel shortly before his death (we see it unfold in flashback). It’s brilliant stuff, with Samuel arguing from his emotional viewpoint and Sandra rebutting with cool (and infuriating) rationality.
A verdict is finally reached, but even then we’re left wondering just what happened.
The acting is off the charts. Huller (“Toni Erdmann” and the upcoming “The Zone of Interest”) exudes sexual, moral and emotional ambiguity. It’s not like we like her, but we are definitely invested.
Young Garner is astonishingly fine as the blind son, while a border collie named Messi gives a jawdropping perf as Snoop, the family pooch. The dog is so good that director Triet often films from his vantage point just a couple of feet above the floor.
In the same way that the novels of John LeCarre epitomized Cold War espionage, the spy stories of Mick Herron nail the rudderless amorality of our current situation.
In Herron’s Slow Horses series (read them…they’re the best spy novels EVER) the enemy is not so much the Russkies or Jihadists as it is the power-hungry politicians and behind-the-scenes manipulators who would bend Britain’s espionage apparatus to their own twisted ends.
Going in I doubted that a TV adaptation could match the wonders of Herron’s prose, but I’ve been proven wrong. “Slow Horses” is utterly captivating…hilarious, infuriating and suspenseful.
And it offers Gary Oldman at his absolute best. Oldman’s Jackson Lamb is a disheveled, flatulent alcoholic who after a career as a field agent has been demoted to lead Slough House, a dead end posting for spies who have screwed up.
Lamb is unrelentingly cruel to his loser minions (the show is a veritable cornucopia of inventive insults), but he remains a master spy, and even from the bitter exile of Slough House (whose inhabitants are contemptuously dismissed as “slow horses”) he has the brains and inventiveness to run circles arounds his corrupt “betters.”
This perf has “Emmy” written all over it.
Our main “good guy” is River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) who came to the service as the grandson of a legendary spy master and shamed his family by flunking a training test in a very public way.
But all of the horses have their own morosely funny backstories (substance abuse, hacking, gambling) which are examined over the show’s three seasons (there’s at least one more to go).
And as their nemesis we have the magnificent Kristin Scott Thomas as Diana Taverner, second-in-command of His Majesty’s spy service and determined to move into the top slot by any means necessary.
Sebastian Manicalco, Omar J. Dorsey
“BOOKIE” (MAX):
The same sort of freewheeling capitalism-on-steroids energy that propelled HBO’s “Ballers” is a big factor in “Bookie,” a drop-dead funny half-hour comedy about a couple of LA oddsmakers who aren’t nearly tough enough for their chosen line of work.
Danny (standup Sebastian Manicalco) is more or less joined at the hip with Ray (Omar J. Dorsey). Danny is the brains of the outfit; Ray, a former footballer, provides the muscle.
Only problem is they’re all bluff…basically they put on a threatening show, but panic when it comes to actual violence.
Which means that the degenerate gamblers who owe them money are always squirming out of paying up. (Charlie Sheen appears in several episodes, portraying a smarmy gambling addicted version of himself.)
It’s sort of a criminal version of the “Odd Couple.” Danny and Ray spend WAY more time with each other than with their womenfolk, have their own zinger-heavy language, and share a dread of taxes, responsibility and 9-to-5 jobs.
The revelation for me was Maniscalco’s performance. He was really good in his brief turn as Crazy Joe Gallo in Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” but that didn’t prepare me for the superb timing and subtlety of expression he displays in every episode of “Bookie.”
This is laugh-out-loud stuff.
Brie Larson
“LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY” (Apple+)
Oscar-winner Brie Larson makes a rare trip to the small(er) screen to embody the alluring/austere heroine of Bonnie Garmus’ best seller.
Her Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist who, alas, is the wrong sex. The series begins in the 1950s and the chauvinists who run the big research lab where she works cannot see Elizabeth doing anything more challenging than making the perfect cup of coffee for the “real” scientists.
Her prickly personality doesn’t help. Elizabeth doesn’t flirt, is indifferent to the usual standards of femininity and has been cursed with the need to speak truth to conventional manliness, even when not in her best interest. She suffers from a form of social autism.
But love finds her in the form of nerdy Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman), the firm’s top chemist, who becomes her lover and lab partner.
Fired when she becomes an unwed mother, Elizabeth ends up at a local TV station where, in a page from the Julia Child playbook, she becomes a sensation with an afternoon cooking show that breaks down recipes to their molecular basics. (She’s a chemist, after all.)
Covering nearly 15 years, “Lessons in Chemistry” carries not only a strong protofeminist message, but deals with the growing Civil Rights movement (Elizabeth lives in a predominantly black neighborhood).
There’s a huge supporting cast, but this is essentially Larsen’s show…she takes a stand-offish, brittle character and somehow makes her inspirational and aspirational.
“Fellow Travelers” is the gay “The Way We Were” — an epic intimate romance spanning decades and peppered with political and cultural landmarks.
Not to mention the most graphic sex scenes this side of Pornhub.
Remember when straight people used to wonder just what it was that gay guys did to each other in the sack?
Wonder no more.
Ron Nyswaner’s 8-part adaptation of Thomas Mallon’s novel centers on the on-again, off-again obsession shared by the charismatic and impossibly handsome Hawk Fuller (Matt Bomer), a rising star in the U.S. diplomatic corps, and mensch-y Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey), a naive newcomer to D.C.
Hawk and Tim meet in the early ‘50s just as the government’s ranks are being cleansed of homosexuality by right-wing Sen. Joe McCarthy (Chris Bauer) and his Machiavellian sidekick and closet queer Roy Cohn (Will Brill).
The romance intermittently continues through Hawk’s marriage to a Senator’s daughter (Allison Williams) and Tim’s stint as a seminarian and anti-war activist.
Throughout the two men remain unlikely bedfellows…Hawk is an unapologetic hedonist skilled at hiding his homosexuality, while Tim is an idealist who outs himself fairy early on.
But like they say, you can’t choose who you love.
The yarn stretches into the 1980s, the Harvey Milk assassination and the rising AIDS crisis. At the same time the show’s mood shifts from furtive paranoia to proud self-acceptance.
Periodically the drama switches to the experiences of Marcus Gaines (Jelani Alladin), a black gay journalist chafing under the yoke of self-suppression.
Acting and production values are off the chart. But I wonder about the show’s time-bending narrative, zapping back and forth across the years. Sometimes it seems like obfuscation for the sake of obfuscation.
Still, “Fellow Travelers” packs a huge emotional wallop.
Natasha Lynne, Benjamin Bratt
“POKER FACE”(Peacock):
A little Natasha Lyonne goes a long way. After a while that Runyon-esque verbosity and self-referential hipness can wear thin.
“Poker Face” solves the problem by having its star appear deus ex machine-style halfway through every episode to solve a murder.
The premise: Charlie Cale (Lyonne) is on the run after crossing a casino-operating crime family. She’s persona non grata at the tables because she has been blessed/cursed as a human lie detector. She knows when another player is bluffing.
Each episode starts out with a different murder in a town into which Charlie has washed up.
One episode is about the members of a has-been punk rock band (Chose Sevigny is the snarling lead singer) who kill their drummer so they can claim writing rights to his song.
Another finds a woman and her brother-in-law murdering the husband, the founder of a Deep South barbecue empire who is threatening everything by going vegan.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a soulless white-collar criminal holed up in a snowbound motel in the Rockies and covering up a hit-and-run death.
Each situation is set up well before Charlie stumbles into the scene to solve the crime with her psychic ability. And to make matters even more interesting, she’s being followed on her cross-country flight by a mob enforcer (Benjamin Bratt).
“Poker Face” employs creative storytelling (just about every episode has an extended flashback to show us how we got to where we are) and the repartee from Lyonne is often screamingly droll.
David Hyde Pierce, Sarah Lancashire
“JULIA” (MAX):
The single best performance I’ve seen in recent months belongs to Brit actress Sarah Lancashire, who so fully embodies famed TV chef Julia Child that it’s less acting than alchemy.
Geeks for Brit TV know Lancashire as a lesbian headmistress in “Last Tango in Halifax” and as a long-suffering small-town cop in “Happy Valley,” both solid perfs but only an appetizer for the gluttonous feast that is “Julia.”
Now in its second season, “Julia” (created by Daniel Goldfarb of “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) is a deep dive into Child’s life, from the very creation of her TV show on a small Boston station to her worldwide fame.
But it’s as much about the private woman as it is the public icon. Her marriage to former CIA guy Paul Child (David Hyde Pierce) is examined on almost a molecular level.
And while Lancashire absolutely nails Julia’s mannerisms and vaguely ridiculous vocal patterns, what really blew me away is that her Julia is — wait for it — a sexual creature.
Middle-aged love is viewed here not as a joke but as a celebration. Who’d have figured?
There are plenty of sideshows reflecting the political and social ethos of the late 50s and early 60s.
Robert Joy and Fran Kranz are the station drones who give Julia a chance.
Isabella Rossellini is Julia’s traditionalist writing partner for the famous cookbook; Fiona Glascott is their editor, while Judith Light is both touching and infuriating as a doyen of publishing now circling the drain.
There are plenty more strong supporting players, especially Bebe Neuwirth as the Childs’ widowed best friend.
I used think of Julia Child as a sort of comic relief. But clearly there was a lot more to the lady.
Less a wrestling movie than a Greek tragedy in Spandex, “The Iron Claw” is based on the real story of the Von Erich brothers, a family of professional grapplers who came to prominence in the 1980s.
Writer/director Sean Durkin is way less interested in the ring action (although there’s plenty of it nicely staged) than in presenting a portrait of family dysfunction so complete that the first thing we hear in the voiceover narration is that the clan is cursed.
Literally.
Our main protagonist is Kevin Von Erlich (Zac Efron, pumped almost beyond recognition), who like his three brothers has been raised by their father, Fritz (Holt McCallany), to excel at the family tradition.
Back in the day Fritz was on his way to a wrestling title, but claims it was denied him by the “bastards” who run the business. Now he’s determined that one — or better still, all — of his boys wear the big belt. (Among with ambition the boys have inherited from Dad the “iron claw,” a skull-squeezing wrestling move.)
Initially the Von Erichs’ life on a ranch outside Dallas seems semi-idyllic. There’s farm work, endless hours pumping iron in the home gym, big family dinners and church on Sunday.
The boys — Kevin, Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), David (Harris Dickinson) and Mike (Stanley Simons) — revere their father and want nothing more than to please him.
Over the course of a decade their dedication will prove itself more than dangerous. It’s deadly.
The film has been superbly acted (other cast members include Maura Tierney as the uber-religious mother and Lily James as the veterinary student who falls hard for Kevin) and despite the raucous acrobatics of the fight scenes the overwhelming mood is one of ever-tightening desperation and sadness.
Not a happy story, but beautifully done.
Teo Yoo, Greta Lee
“PAST LIVES” My rating: B(For rent on Prime, Apple+, etc.)
105 minutes | PG-13
Astonishingly delicate and quivering with emotional possibilities, Celine Song’s “Past Lives” wonders what would happen in childhood sweethearts met up many years later.
In the film’s opening scenes, set in South Korea, we are introduced to Nora and Hae Sung, 12-year-olds whose platonic friendship might over time become something more.
But Nora’s parents emigrate to Canada. Twenty years later the grown Nora (Greta Lee) lives in NYC with her husband Arthur (John Magaro). Their lives are settled and largely uneventful.
And then word arrives that Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) will be visiting the Big Apple and would like to reconnect.
It’s a setup rife with erotic possibilities, most of which writer/director Song keeps on the back burner. “Past Lives” is much more about its characters’ emotional interiors than physical betrayal.
Off the bat it’s obvious that while Nora has achieved a level of mature sophistication, Hae Sung is stymied in a sort of sad adolescence. He still lives with his parents and is indifferent when it comes to a career.
Apparently he’s lived two decades in “what could have been” mode.
The film is mostly conversations between the two old friends as they walk around the city.
Arthur, meanwhile, is trying to stifle his anxiety that he might lose his wife…his alienation is heightened by his inability to participate in their intimate conversations in Korean.
“Past Lives” is one of those films in which nothing seems to happen, while emotionally all sorts of stuff is going on. The performances are really terrific, with Teo Yoo creating a portrait of sweet longing so heartbreaking you want to give him a hug.
Good but not great, the new musical version of “The Color Purple” is a largely faithful adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning novel.
But what does it say that while watching it I was constantly reminded of Steven Spielberg’s 1985 non-musical version? Weirdly enough, the original film feels fresher to me than this new iteration.
The reason for this can be summed up, I believe, in two words: Whoopi Goldberg. Goldberg was so fantastically good, so consummately entertaining as the long-suffering Celie in the original that by comparison the musical’s Celie — “American Idol” winner Fantasia Barrino in her feature film debut — seems a bit meh.
Not bad, just meh. This Celie is always having things happen to her; she is more a pawn of fate than a discernible personality.
That’s not an issue with other members of the virtually all-black cast: Tara P. Henson’s Shug Avery, a lusted-after bluesy songstress, or Colman Domingo’s Mister, a study in toxic/stupid chauvinism, or Danielle Brooks’ Sofia, who tragically learns that her strong-willed independence is problematic in a white man’s world.
The story covers nearly a half century and Kris Bowers’ songs reflect most of the salient black musical styles of the era, from solo-guitar Delta blues to work chants, big band blues shouting, gospel, cakewalks and proto-soul. These numbers work fine within the framework of the story, but none struck me as particularly earworm-worthy. I didn’t go home humming them.
The production values offered by director Biltz Bazawule and his design staff are first-rate, as is the staging of most of the musical numbers. They are the film’s highlights.
In its final moments this “Color Purple” hit some of the emotional notes I’d been looking for…it took a while to get there.
Callum Turner (center)
”THE BOYS IN THE BOAT” My rating: B(In theaters)
124 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
Let’s admit upfront that George Clooney’s “The Boys in the Boat” is a superficial drama densely packed with sports-movie cliches.
This makes it no less enjoyable.
For one thing, the cliches — training montages, a romantic subplot, the “big game” — are applied to the world of crew racing, the details of which most of us are ignorant.
So the film — a slightly fictionalized version of Daniel James Brown’s best-seller —immerses its audience in an exotic sport in which individual excellence and ambition must be subservient to the group effort.
When you’re rowing with eight other guys you do NOT want to stand out. It means you’re the broken cog in the well-oiled machine.
Mark L. Smith’s screenplay is set in the months leading up to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Our nominal hero is Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), a pennyless University of Washington student who lives in a burned-out car in a Depression-Era homeless encampment in Seattle; he tries out for crew simply because it offers its rowers three squares a day and a roof overhead.
We learn the punishing sport along with Joe and his crewmates, most of whom never are developed beyond a first impression. Only a couple stand out.
Coxswain Bobby Moch (Luke Slattery) is a small guy capable of bullying/coaxing his muscled rowers to greatness. (Since coxswains don’t row, every pound they add to the load is a liability.) And there’s Don Hume (Jack Mulhern), the crew’s strongest member but so painfully shy his friends aren’t sure he can speak.
Somewhat more fleshed out is Coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton), desperate to end his reputation as an also-ran in the crew world, and perhaps George Pocock (Peter Guinness), the old fellow who designs and builds the boats and becomes a sort of philosophic mentor to Joe.
There is considerable inspirational speechifying, and many an observation about rowing being more poetry than sport.
But if the characters are barely developed, the boys’ David-and- Goliath story and the care with which Clooney and Co. recreate the crew world are utterly captivating.
Cheer yourself sick.
Suleika Jaouad, Jon Batiste
“AMERICAN SYMPHONY” My rating: A- (Netflix)
104 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
Jon Batiste is a brilliant musician.
He’s an even better person.
That’s the takeaway from “American Symphony,” a documentary that originally was to chronicle Batiste’s efforts to write an orchestral piece but became about something far greater.
I knew going in that Matthew Heineman’s film would follow two tracks.
First, there is Batiste’s creative journey in writing and performing “American Symphony,” an opus not only for orchestra but for jazz musicians, operatic singers, chanting Native Americans, Hispanic folk artists…it’s a real kitchen sink approach.
And then there’s the second plot, centering on Batiste’s wife Suleika Jaouad, a musician and essayist who found herself battling the leukemia she had originally beaten years earlier.
The portrait of Batiste that emerges here is that of a deeply spiritual man who embraces compassion as a lifestyle, who after a day of rehearsing and arranging for his work’s debut at Carnegie Hall would spend the night at the bedside of his wife.
Watching I kept asking myself if under the same circumstances I could be so patient, caring and supportive.
Doubtful.
It’s not like Batiste is an incarnation of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. He gets exhausted. He admits to periods of depression. We see him having a texting session with his psychoanalyst.
But his innate goodness somehow always comes to the fore.
I cried easily and often watching “American Symphony,” a testament not only to human creativity but to humanity’s capacity for love.
It’s one of the best cinematic gift we’ll get this Christmas.
From the very first frame of “Maestro” we know that we’re in good hands.
Some movies are like that. They flow effortlessly, leading us into their visual and aural landscape. They know what they’re about. They have their own personalities.
Bradley Cooper’s film (he directed, co-wrote and stars in it) centers on the relationship of real-life composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein and his actress wife, Felicia Montealegre.
It was not your conventional marriage. Lenny (Cooper) was unapologetically bisexual. Five minutes into the film we see him waking up in bed with another man. At one point he addresses the new baby of friends, asking “Do you know that I slept with both your parents?”
But Felicia (Carey Mulligan), exhibiting a way-ahead-of-the-curve tolerance, buys into their partnership knowing the score. In her book, love is tolerant to a fault.
Here’s what I relish about “Maestro”: You can feel yourself falling in love as these two characters do. Their repartee is amusing, seductive, astonishingly honest. You want to be part of it.
And like Lenny and Felicia we’re so smitten that we don’t think about how difficult it will be to maintain a mutually satisfying equilibrium.
The acting? Holy crap it’s good.
Bradley Cooper
Cooper, with a bit of help from a prostethic nose, absolutely nails the Leonard Bernstein we recall. He’s got the vocal patterns perfect, and on the podium he exhibits the intense joy and bodily enthusiasm that made him the most identifiable conductor in the world.
But he’s just as effective as the private Lenny, a man who was about as matter-of-fact when it comes to sex as is humanly possible. The problem, of course, is that few of us are so hangup free.
Mulligan’s Felicia is his perfect match. She is utterly supportive of her husband and children, but as time goes on Lenny’s escapades start to wear. Mulligan has a few moments of transcendent fury.
Expect Oscar nominations for both.
For that matter, comedian Sarah Silverman is astonishingly good in the straight role of Bernstein’s sister.
Covering nearly 50 years of modern American cultural history, “Maestro” draws its musical score mostly from Bernstein’s compositions: “West Side Story,” “On the Waterfront,” “Candida,””Fancy Free,” not to mention samplings of various orchestral and choral works.
Yet it never becomes a “and-then-I-wrote…” musical biopic.
Lenny’s career is always there in the background, but its his relationship with Felicia (and later with his daughter Jamie, played by Maya Hawke) that provides the narrative and emotional spine.
Most of the film has been shot in gloriously rich black and white (Matthew Labatique is the cinematographer), with every frame meticulously composed for maximum effect. (Cooper reportedly has been working on the project for a decade; he has left little to chance, yet “Maestro” feels fresh and spontaneous.)
There are moments here that can leave a viewer in tears, both for our beautiful possibilities and for our inevitable shortcomings. In giving us the story of a great artist and his loved ones Bradley Cooper has tapped into the transcendent.
Can this really be only his second feature as director? There’s a sort of Orson-Welles-makes-“Citizen Kane” wonder and audacity at work here.
Let’s just give him an armload of Oscars and be done with it.
“See you in my dreams” takes on comedic/sinister possibilities in Kristoffer Borgli’s “Dream Scenario,” featuring Nicolas Cage at his most bleakly amusing.
Cage’s Paul Matthews is a bearded, balding, bespectacled professor of evolutionary biology at a small college. He’s bland and boring (it’s all the kids can do to stay awake in class); at home he is just tolerated by his marriage-weary wife (Jiulianne Nicholson) and their two teen daughters.
In other words, Paul’s a nobody.
Until, that is, total strangers report seeing him in their dreams. Initially this phantom Paul simply walks through or observes what’s happening to the slumbering citizens. Even in dangerous situations he doesn’t react…he’s as ineffectual in dreamland as he is in real life.
But as the phenomenon grows, Paul becomes famous. Thousands, nay, millions of people around the globe are encountering him while they snooze.
Paul tries to parlay his notoriety into a book deal (one advertising whiz kid wants him to somehow endorse a soft drink during his somnambulant visitations). But as time goes by there are disturbing developments. Dreamers report that Dream Paul has violently attacked them. Sexually assaulted them, even.
And suddenly, through no fault of his own, the dull professor is an object of hatred and disgust.
“Dream Scenario” frequently shifts from the “real” world to depictions of the characters’ dreams; by the time it’s over you may be guessing which is which.
This is only writer/director Borgli’s second feature after numerous shorts; he’s clearly a talent to watch for.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies
“YOU HURT MY FEELINGS” My rating: B (For rent on various streaming services)
93 minutes } MPAA rating: R
Nicole Holofcener, our foremost chronicler of contemporary angst, scores again with “You Hurt My Feelings.”
It’s a comedy about how people lie so as not to hurt each other’s feelings. And perhaps end up doing even more damage.
Our main characters are Beth and Don (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobia Menzies), New Yorkers with what appears to be an ideal marriage. She’s a writer seeking a publisher for her second book. He’s a clinical psychologist.
A big part of their marriage is offering mutual encouragement. Which also means never doing or saying anything discouraging…even if you have to fib about it.
So when Beth asks Don to read her new book, he’s full of praise. Phony praise, as it turns out. He just wants to be supportive.
Holofcener gives us a smorgasbord of characters —the couple’s twenty something son (Owen Teague), Beth’s sister and neurotic actor brother-in-law (Micheala Watkins, Trey Santiago-Hudson), her kvetching mother (Jeannie Berlin) and various of Don’s patients (David Cross, Amber Tamblyn, Zach Cherry) — most of whom muddle through by saying not what they think but what they think other people want to hear.
“You Hurt…” is often laugh-out-loud funny (nobody surpasses Louis-Dreyfus in the sarcastic putdown department) but ultimately makes a telling point: it’s virtually impossible to survive in this modern world without lying.
“ALBERT BROOKS: DEFENDING MY LIFE” My rating: B+(HBO MAX)
88 minutes | No MPAA rating
If you don’t already consider Albert Brooks (born Albert Einstein) a comedy genius, this documentary from Rob Reiner makes the point repeatedly.
Turns out that Reiner and Brooks were school pals and have been buds ever since; “…Defending My Life” is something of a valentine to Brooks’ eccentric and eclectic talents.
There are priceless clips of his early conceptual comedy (he was Andy Kaufman before there was an Andy Kaufman), scenes from the many movie’s he’s directed (“Modern Romance,” “Lost in America,” “Defending Your Life”) and of the acting he’s done for others (“Drive,” “Finding Nemo,” “Taxi Deriver,” “Broadcast News”).
A big chunk of the film is devoted to a conversation between Reiner and his subject…it’s like hanging out with a couple of good friends.
And there’s a small army of Brooks-loving celebs (James L. Brooks, Larry David, Judd Apatow, Tiffany Haddish, Jonah Hill, Conan O’Brien, Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Steven Spielberg) to give testimonials. Nobody seems to be kissing ass here…their sincere admiration is so genuine you could use it as a heating pad.
The star-crossed saga of Elvis and his child bride Priscilla Beaulieu has been retold so often that Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” will hold few surprises for Presley-holics.
What the film does offer is a dreamlike take on a teenage girl swept off her feet by the Earth’s most famous man. (Coppola and Sandra Harmon’s screenplay is based on Priscilla Presley’s memoir; Presley was a producer of the film.)
It was a romance destined to fall apart. The initially charming rock star became increasingly controlling and, after Priscilla gave birth to a baby girl, turned his back on the marital bed in favor of frat-house partying with his notorious “Memphis Mafia” of good ol’ boys.
In the title role Cailee Spaeny undergoes a remarkable physical and emotional transformation over the course of the film. Though virginal (Elvis wouldn’t consummate the relationship until marriage), her Priscilla isn’t entirely naive about the pitfalls in her path. In a sense “Priscilla” is a study of her painfully blossoming emotional maturity.
Brit actor Jacob Elordi doesn’t attempt an Elvis imitation so much as an approximation…and it pretty much works. Note that we don’t see Elvis performing any of his hits; instead the film’s soundtrack is heavy on other late-‘50s artists.
Michelle Williams
“SHOWING UP” My rating: B (For rent on various streaming services)
107 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt once again finds the perfect voice for her cinematic minimalism in Michelle Williams, here almost unrecognizable as a drabbed-down middle-aged artist.
When not performing administrative drudge work at an urban art school, Williams’ Lizzy devotes herself to her sculptures — foot-high ceramic statues of women caught in moments of expansive movement or somber contemplation. To the extent that the film has a plot, it’s about Lizzy preparing for a one-woman show at a small local gallery.
Mostly we eavesdrop on her life. She lives alone with a cat. (Is she straight? Gay?) Her best friend and landlord Jo (Hong Chau, an Oscar nominee for “The Whale”) is a fiber artist who is as outgoing and vivacious as Lizzy is dour and brooding.
Lizzy’s divorced mother is also her boss; her father (Judd Hirsch) is a well-regarded (and egotistic) potter, now retired. There’s also a schizophrenic brother (John Magaro) favored by their parents as a genius, though he’s unable to hold a job.
What we get here is a portrait of a woman as gray as the colorless clothes she favors, but nevertheless devoted to creating art, even though she’ll never make a living off it. At least she’s showing up.
And as much as “Showing Up” is a personality study, it is also an astonishingly lived-in depiction of a world whose inhabitants are devoted to creating. Anyone familiar with an art school environment will find the film almost a documentary experience.
Todd Hayne’s “May December” takes a lurid page from recent pop history and turns it into a troubling deep dive into bruised and battered psyches.
Set in moss-adorned Savannah, Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik’s screenplay centers on a visit from a Hollywood star.
Elizabeth Barry (Natalie Portman) has come to town to research a role in an upcoming film.
Specifically she’s here to interview and observe Gracie Yoo (Julianne Moore), the real-life woman she will be portraying.
When they first meet Gracie is hosting a raucus pre-graduation party for her college-bound twins and their friends. She’s obviously a perfectionist when it comes to wifely/motherly duties, but exhibits just enough world-weary Mom humor to soften her need to dominate every situation.
She appears determined to create a forced atmosphere of normalcy.
Right off the bat we notice something odd. There’s this guy, Joe (Charles Malton), about 20 years younger than Gracie who sometimes seems like a quiet servant. Is Joe her son? If so, isn’t that a rather disturbing kiss she plants on him?
What we quickly come to learn is that nearly two decades earlier Gracie and Joe were the center of a huge scandal. The then-36-year-old Gracie had an affair with seventh grader Joe. She ended up having his baby in prison; they married upon her release and now have three offspring (the oldest, born behind bars, is already in college).
And, yes, “May December” is clearly inspired by the story of the late Mary Kay Letourneau.
In a sense the film is a detective story, with Elizabeth interviewing participants in the sordid saga: Gracie’s blindsided first husband (D.W. Moffett) and emotionally burned-out adult son (Cory Michael SmithI), the pet shop owner (Charles Green) in whose storeroom the illicit lovers were found in flagrante delicto, Gracie’s supportive best friend (Joan Reilly).
Julianne Moore, Charles Melton
Outwardly, anyway, Gracie seems to have come through it all more or less intact. She claims to have “no doubts, no regrets.” She keeps busy baking cakes for friends and running her household.
But behind closed doors she is often weepy and anxiety-riddled, sobbing in the arms of Joe, who in her presence smothers his own individuality in order to give unquestioning support. Their dynamic is truly squirm-worthy.
Gracie —who is less than thrilled with Hollywood having another go at her story (some years earlier there was a tacky made-for-TV movie) — tells Elizabeth that it was 13-year-old Joe who seduced her, not the other way around.
“May December” is less interested in discovering who’s to blame than in examining the damage done. The film explores level upon level of these characters…just when you think you’ve got one of them pinned down they do something that requires a quick reassessment.
Among those under the microscope is Elizabeth herself. Ostensibly she’s our narrator/guide through this emotional minefield, but at some point we’ve got to ask if her show of friendship isn’t just another acting job. Clearly she’s determined to wring every bit of nuance out of Gracie’s story and to get there isn’t above creating collateral damage of her own.
In that regard “May December” is an indictment of show-biz duplicity and exploitation. Rarely has a film cast such a jaundiced eye on an actor’s process.
The acting is terrific. Moore and Portman, of course, are among our best film actresses.
But the film’s real discovery is Melton, a veteran of TV’s “Riverdale” (he’s also a K-State alum) whose Joe undergoes the most striking transformation. Initially he seems to have almost no personality; get him away from Gracie, though, and you find an individual trap between childhood and adulthood, struggling to come to grips with a troubled past.
“COMMON GROUND” My rating: B(At the Glenwood Arts)
195 minutes | No MPAA rating:
Exhaustive and a bit exhausting, the doc “Common Ground” makes an encyclopedic case for regenerative agriculture.
If that sounds like an earnest science lecture…well, it is, sort of. But the filmmakers (Joshua Tickell and Rebecca Harrell Tickell) knock themselves out working to keep our attention over nearly two hours, filling the screen with arthouse cinematography and a small army of familiar Hollywood faces (Laura Dean, Rosario Dawson, Donald Glover, Jason Mom, Ian Somerhalder).
Mostly, though, there’s an avalanche of information that will convince most of us that modern agricultural methods are taking us down the highway to hell. It’s time to change our ways.
The plot, if you will, consists of an opening section about the dangers of climate change that will leave most quaking in their boots, followed by examples of how we can turn the problem around and save ourselves and our planet.
We’re told early on that this is a movie about dirt. Well, soil to be more precise. “if the soil dies, we die.”
We meet Gabe Brown, a North Dakota farmer who is a champion of the new agriculture. A big beefy guy in coveralls, Brown is also an erudite spokesman, pointing out how his land — farmed to minimize the loss of topsoil to wind and water — looks like an oasis compared two that of his neighbor who uses conventional methods and ends up with huge patches of unproductive dirt.
The neighbor’s system, we’re told, is working to kill things, while Brown’s is working in harmony and synchrony with nature, creating profit while enhancing the ecosystem for future generations.
Over the course of the film the same theme is hammered home: no tilling , use cover crops that return nurtrients to the soil, eliminate or reduce chemical use, integrate animals into cropland (the animals eat weeds and fertilize with droppings — you don’t have to eat them but you need them to be grazing).
“Common Ground” reaches far and wide. There’s a section on Native American farming practices, on the contributions of black scientist George Washington Carver (who advocated the use of nitrogen-fixing cover crops to replenish soil) and of African women who, coming to his country as slaves, introduced crop seeds they had intentionally braided into their hair before the horrible sea voyage. That last one is a revelation.
A big chunk of the film is devoted to roasting Monsanto for promoting the cancer-causing herbicide glyphosate (sold commercially as Roundup). Particular attention is paid to the unfortunate fates of whistleblowers and investigative scientists and journalists who have dared challenge the chemical giant.
The bee die-offs? Yeah, that’s in here, too. Pesticides are the culprit.
We even get into the mechanics of the annual Farm Bill, which to date has barely acknowledged the existence of restorative farming techniques,
Factory farming of food animals is addressed. It’s an ugly business (don’t worry…no gross-out visuals here), but the film also points out that most of the new meat substitutes are crammed with plants grown with chemicals with names you can’t pronounce.
Woody Harrellson narrates a segment about hemp. No comment necessary.
if there are moments when the viewer feels manhandled by the unyielding crush of information, “Common Ground” does assert there’s hope.
Good-looking but off-putting, Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” is yet another examination of British class warfare.
Fennell, who made a remarkable directing debut a couple of years back with the female revenge dramedy “Promising Young Woman,” here mines a favorite plot of English iconoclasts, that of a lowly commoner “adopted” by his societal betters.
Our protagonist is the delightfully named Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), whose freshman year at Oxford is highlighted by a growing friendship with the beautiful, charming, rich-as-hell Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi).
It’s an odd pairing. Oliver, while a good student, is something of a blank-faced emotional drone, definitely not one of the handsomely entitled sort Felix usually runs with.
They meet when Oliver does an unexpectedly generous and apparently selfless favor for Felix, and the latter decides that maybe this working-class kid provides just the sort of down-to-earth genuineness lacking in his posh life.
Upon learning that Oliver’s father has died of a drug overdose, Felix suggests Oliver spend the summer with him at his palatial family estate, Saltburn. Good times.
“Saltburn” touches on most of the plot points and characters common to this sort of enterprise.
There’s a cousin (Archie Madekwe) who hates the low-born OIiver from the get-go; a sad, substance-abusing sister (Sadie Soverall) who offers sexual promise; the mother (Rosamund Pike), eager to prove her open mindedness (“I was a lesbian for a while…too wet for me”) by doting on the lower-class visitor; the father (Richard E. Grant) so rich he can spend his days on his collecting obsessions.
There’s also another visitor, the freeloading Pamela (Carey Mulligan), one of Mother’s friends but now wearing out her welcome. Upon learning she has died a member of the household observes: “She’d do anything for attention.”
Mining some of the same psychological landscape as “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Fennell’s film slowly reveals that the harmlessly bland Oliver is in fact a sort of emotional vampire (in one shocking scene he appears to be feasting on menstrual blood). In fact, he’s the human version of the cuckoo, a bird that takes over other birds’ nests, destroying their eggs and substituting one of its own.
Rosamund Pike
The results are unashamedly misanthropic. “Saltburn” satirizes the ruling class, but its avenging angel proletarian “hero” is no better than his titled targets.
Given the contempt and cynicism on display, the film is watchable enough; it certainly doesn’t hurt that most of the roles have been taken by beautiful people.
Not that Barry Keoghan is beautiful, exactly. In the right light his potato face exudes a sort of brute animal cunning; at other times he can seem almost handsome. It’s the perfect chameleonic approach to a shifty character like Oliver.
And the film ends with a sequence so perfect — a naked Oliver dancing rapturously through the halls of Saltburn — that I’m almost willing to blow off my reservations. A strong finish is always a good thing.
Athletic excellence and obsessive ambition are regular bedfellows, perhaps no more so than in this story of distance swimmer Diana Nyad,
Scripted by Julia Cox (from Nyad’s book Find a Way) and directed by Jimmy Chin and Eliizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, this,is a slow buildup to Nyad’s 2013 master achievement, a 110-mile solo swim at age 60 (sans shark cages and resting raft) from Havana to Key West.
It was her fifth attempt, earlier ones having been scuttled by unpredictable tides and unfavorable winds, jellyfish stings, low water temperature and sheer exhaustion creating a dissociative mental state not unlike a drug-free acid trip.
The film benefits hugely from its casting, Annette Bening makes of her Nyad an almost superhuman force willing to cajole, beg and borrow (if not steal) to get the funds for her expensive attempts, which required a motorized boat, kayaks and crew to man it all.
There’s more than a little stubborn craziness at work here (one must wonder at the masochistic elements of the sport), and the film in flashbacks offers details about the adolescent Diana’s sexual abuse at the hands of her Hall of Fame swimming coach.
In the present Nyad’s obsessions strain relations even with her best friend Bonnie Stoll (an excellent Jodie Foster), who puts her own life on hold to pitch in with the advance work and to accompany Nyad on her attempts (Stoll remains on the boat, feeding the swimmer thorough a tube but never touching her…that would violate the solo swim rules).
Viewers may wonder whether Nyad, who is openly gay, and Stoll were lovers. The film isn’t clear on that point and in the end it doesn’t matter. This is a film about friendship surviving just about everything life can throw at it.
Special nod also to Rhys Ifans for his portrayal of John Bartlett, a veteran Caribbean captain who piloted the escort ship on Nyad’s attempts, even as he was battling the illness that would kill him.
Colman Domingo
“RUSTIN” My rating: B (Netflix)
106 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington may have been the single most memorable moment of the Civil Rights era.
It wouldn’t have happened without Bayard Rustin, a gay black man of outstanding intellectual power and organizational ability.
The march was largely Rustin’s idea, and he certainly was its greatest facilitator, overcoming obstacles thrown up not only by the white establishment but by his fellow African American leaders.
Here Rustin is portrayed by Colman Domingo as an aggressive (and often aggressively off-putting) visionary whose dreams are forever being threatened by his gayness, a chink in his otherwise impressive social armor that his enemies found all too easy to exploit.
“Rustin” is an impressive recreation of a specific time and place. The script is by Julian Breece (TV’s “First Wives Club”) and Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”), while the insightful but unobtrusive direction is by George C. Wolfe (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”).
And talk about a supporting cast!!! Chris Rock as a doubtful Roy Wilkins, Jeffrey Wright as a sneaky Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, Glynn Turman as A. Philip Randolph, and Ami Ameen as Martin Luther King, Jr. Toss in Audra McDonald and CCH Pounder and you’ve got carefully applied star power almost everywhere you look…yet all provide just the right support for Domingo’s soul-stirring performance.
When it’s over you’ll be convinced that Bayard Rustin should be a household name.
Tommy Lee Jones, Jamie Foxx
“THE BURIAL”My rating: B (Prime)
136 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Based on a real court case, “The Burial” is a David-vs-Goliath legal drama that offers juicy roles for Tommy Lee Jones and Jamie Foxx while dabbling in racial issues.
Jones’ Jeremiah O’Keefe is the operator of a regional chain of mortuaries. But debt has forced him into bed with a gigantic funeral home conglomerate that has been gobbling up little mom-and-pop operations. Now O’Keefe is looking for a legal cavalier willing to take on the big boys (the heavy here is a ruthless corporate raider played by the ever excellent Bill Camp).
O’Keefe’s search leads him to Willie Gary (Foxx), a cocky and flamboyant lawyer who fancies himself the incarnation of Johnny Cochran. Initially Gay isn’t interested in the funeral home case. He specializes in personal injury; moreover, he proudly views himself as an African American lawyer going to bat almost exclusively for African American clients.
But despite the cultural divide separating them, Gary and O’Keefe click on a personal basis. So much so that when Gary’s black associates bail on the case, he continues to work it virtually as a one-man show.
As effective as it is as a courtroom drama (Jurnee Smollett is very fine as Gary’s opposing counsel), “The Burial” is most satisfying as an examination of two men with vastly different life experiences who evolve into something more like a friends than legal allies.
Jones has so often played the grumpy hard ass that it comes as a revelation that he here is so vulnerable and, well, decent. Similarly, Foxx is terrific at revealing the individual behind the TV-ad bravado.
Like Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and any number of Shakespearean characters, Napoleon Bonaparte is one of those figures ever ripe for fresh cinematic reinterpretation.
I only wish I knew what incarnation director Ridley Scott and leading man Joaquin Phoenix were going for in their big, noisy, not-very-interesting “Napoleon.”
This is less viable drama than a 2 1/2-hour illustrated history lesson. The most memorable moments are several battle scenes that depict the grandeur/horror of Napoleonic-era warfare without ever evoking a genuine emotional response.
As for the drama, it centers almost exclusively on the relationship of Napoleon (Phoenix) and his Empress Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). Indeed, David Scarpa’s screenplay is essentially a two-hander. Virtually every other character (among them heavy hitters like Robespierre, Talleyrand, the Duke of Wellington and assorted European royalty) has been reduced to walk-on status.
So it’s a love story…sorta.
The film begins with the French Revolution and is basically a series of highlights of the Napoleonic legend, sometimes jumping years between scenes.
Phoenix’s Napoleon presents as a socially inept clod who just happens to be a military genius. He is bereft of charm or a sense of humor. Early on I found myself wondering if we were supposed to regard this Napoleon as being on the autism spectrum.
We see our protagonist on various military campaigns (Egypt, Austria, Russia) where he wins the hearts of his troops in spite of his personality (as long as he keeps producing victories he’s their guy). We see Napoleon use his grapeshot-loaded artillery to quell an urban uprising of Royalists, turning a crowd of protesting Parisians into so many mounds of ground round.
His military prowess gives him a foothold in the new Revolutionary government, first as one of three consuls leading France and then as emperor.
Vanessa Kirby, Joaquin Phoenix
Except that there’s little in Phoenix’s performance to suggest why anybody would even consider Napoleon as emperor material. He’s kind of a doofus and almost seems to have lucked into his imperial status.
Maybe the film is meant to be a Trumpian allegory about a numbnuts who ends up running a country. But that suggests a sense of satire found nowhere in the Scott canon.
Whatever sparks this “Napoleon” strikes come from the collision of our man with Josephine.
When we first see Kirby in the role she wears her hair in a sort of pixie cut (I’m guessing the look was the result of Josephine’s long imprisonment after her husband went to the guillotine) and exudes a feral feline sexuality.
You can see why the ham-fisted Nappie is attracted, though initially she appears unimpressed by his jackrabbit lovemaking technique. In fact, while he’s off fighting the Republic’s enemies Josephine is messing around with other fellas.
Vanessa Kirby
But over time they become a codependent team who trade insults as a prelude to copulation. Only problem is, Josephine is unable to give her emperor a son. But even after their divorce and Napoleon’s marriage to a more fertile female (I think there’s only one shot of this second wife in the whole picture) he continues to visit his original squeeze at the country estate to which she has been exiled.
“I wish I could quit you” might well be their motto.
That Phoenix is one of our finest actors isn’t up for debate. But here he can’t seem to wrap his head around his character, and as a result we’re all left in the dark.
Was Napoleon a power-hungry tyrant? Or was he devoted heart and soul to his country? What kind of ruler was he? (The film offers not a clue.)
Did he have any hobbies? Favorite foods? I’m grasping at straws here.
Like “The Duellists,” Scott’s first film and also set in the Napoleon Wars, this latest effort is an impressive physical recreation of a time and place. That sense is reinforced by a score made up almost exclusively of period music.
But the duties of physically creating the film seem to have left Scott no time to contemplate what he wants to say. This director has never exhibited a strong individual style, but here the absence of a point of view is maddening.
And why oh why has cinematographer Dariusz Wolski opted for a visual style so dimly lit that even scenes set in bright sunshine seem gray? There are no bright colors — at least in that regard the visual palette reflects the general joylessness of the overall enterprise.
Like Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and any number of Shakespearean characters, Napoleon Bonaparte is one of those figures ever ripe for fresh cinematic reinterpretation.
I only wish I knew what incarnation director Ridley Scott and leading man Joaquin Phoenix were going for in their big, noisy, not-very-interesting “Napoleon.”
This is less viable drama than a 2 1/2-hour illustrated history lesson. The most memorable moments are several battle scenes that depict the grandeur/horror of Napoleonic-era warfare without ever evoking a genuine emotional response.
As for the drama, it centers almost exclusively on the relationship of Napoleon (Phoenix) and his Empress Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). Indeed, David Scarpa’s screenplay is essentially a two-hander. Virtually every other character (among them heavy hitters like Robespierre, Talleyrand, the Duke of Wellington and assorted European royalty) has been reduced to walk-on status.
So it’s a love story…sorta.
The film begins with the French Revolution and is basically a series of highlights of the Napoleonic legend, sometimes jumping years between scenes.
Phoenix’s Napoleon presents as a socially inept clod who just happens to be a military genius. He is bereft of charm or a sense of humor. Early on I found myself wondering if we were supposed to regard this Napoleon as being on the autism spectrum.
We see our protagonist on various military campaigns (Egypt, Austria, Russia) where he wins the hearts of his troops in spite of his personality (as long as he keeps producing victories he’s their guy). We see Napoleon use his grapeshot-loaded artillery to quell an urban uprising of Royalists, turning a crowd of protesting Parisians into so many mounds of ground round.
His military prowess gives him a foothold in the new Revolutionary government, first as one of three consuls leading France and then as emperor.
Vanessa Kirby, Joaquin Phoenix
Except that there’s little in Phoenix’s performance to suggest why anybody would even consider Napoleon as emperor material. He’s kind of a doofus and almost seems to have lucked into his imperial status.
Maybe the film is meant to be a Trumpian allegory about a numbnuts who ends up running a country. But that suggests a sense of satire found nowhere in the Scott canon.
Whatever sparks this “Napoleon” strikes come from the collision of our man with Josephine.
When we first see Kirby in the role she wears her hair in a sort of pixie cut (I’m guessing the look was the result of Josephine’s long imprisonment after her husband went to the guillotine) and exudes a feral feline sexuality.
You can see why the ham-fisted Nappie is attracted, though initially she appears unimpressed by his jackrabbit lovemaking technique. In fact, while he’s off fighting the Republic’s enemies Josephine is messing around with other fellas.
Vanessa Kirby
But over time they become a codependent team who trade insults as a prelude to copulation. Only problem is, Josephine is unable to give her emperor a son. But even after their divorce and Napoleon’s marriage to a more fertile female (I think there’s only one shot of this second wife in the whole picture) he continues to visit his original squeeze at the country estate to which she has been exiled.
“I wish I could quit you” might well be their motto.
That Phoenix is one of our finest actors isn’t up for debate. But here he can’t seem to wrap his head around his character, and as a result we’re all left in the dark.
Was Napoleon a power-hungry tyrant? Or was he devoted heart and soul to his country? What kind of ruler was he? (The film offers not a clue.)
Did he have any hobbies? Favorite foods? I’m grasping at straws here.
Like “The Duellists,” Scott’s first film and also set in the Napoleon Wars, this latest effort is an impressive physical recreation of a time and place. That sense is reinforced by a score made up almost exclusively of period music.
But the duties of physically creating the film seem to have left Scott no time to contemplate what he wants to say. This director has never exhibited a strong individual style, but here the absence of a point of view is maddening.
And why oh why has cinematographer Dariusz Wolski opted for a visual style so dimly lit that even scenes set in bright sunshine seem gray? There are no bright colors — at least in that regard the visual palette reflects the general joylessness of the overall enterprise.
David Fincher’s latest is a minimalist epic about a contract killer who appears to have no personality whatsoever.
Despite all this, it is a wildly entertaining effort.
Michael Fassbender is our unnamed protagonist, whom we meet in an under-renovation apartment in Paris. He’s been there for days awaiting the arrival in the building across the street of his target. We don’t know who he’s supposed to kill. or why.
All we know is that the Killer exhibits an astonishing level of patience. He passes the time scanning the street through a scope and doing yoga.
In the film he says almost nothing. Well, that’s not quite true. In the first 30 minutes he gives us, in narration, a sort of primer on hitman etiquette. In this he is quite chatty, holding forth on the necessity of anticipation and the dangers of improvisation. As for the moral consequences of his actions… there’s no mention of that. Doesn’t seem to matter.
The screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, Alexis Nolent and Lucy Jacamon is astonishingly straightforward.
The Paris job goes wrong. The Killer flees to his palatial home base in the Dominican Republic only to find that rival killers from his employer have beat him there, torturing his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte) so badly that she’s in the hospital.
This calls for revenge. Quickly, methodically and implacably the killer goes about eliminating the threats against him.
Tilda Swinton
That means paying a visit to the crooked New Orleans lawyer (Charles Parnell) who hands out his deadly assignments, the Florida thug (Sala Baker) who beat up his girl, the thug’s New York-based co-killer (Tilda Swinton) and finally the impossibly rich mover and shaker (Arliss Howard) who ordered the Paris hit.
As I mentioned, the Killer rarely says anything. Not so most of his targets, who when facing death become remarkably loquacious. A lot of good it does them. (The only one as silent as the Killer is the hulking goon in Florida; the two of them have a mano-a-mano smackdown for the ages.)
Now this all sounds terribly grim, and it should be pointed out that “The Killer” is often slyly amusing. For example, our protagonist has a collection of fake identities (with attendant IDs, passports, credit cards and other documentation) in the names of classic TV sitcom characters: Felix Unger, Oscar Madison, Archibald Bunker, etc.
And then there’s the Killer’s clothing choices. In voiceover he announces that the whole idea is to be so freaking bland that nobody can remember you; for much of the film he wanders around looking like a suburban dad at Disney World.
There’s no moral to “The Killer,” hardly any plot and certainly no characters you’d want to actually meet (okay, maybe the girlfriend, but she got beat up protecting a man she knows is a murderer).
Nevertheless, it’s a fun ride precisely because of its menagerie of cooly calculating/brutal/smooth talking creeps.
It starts out like a misanthropic “Goodbye Mr. Chips” and ends like a pessimist’s take on “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
But before it’s over Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers” exhibits a humanist’s love of its characters. It’s the perfect Christmas movie for people who hate Christmas movies.
David Hemingson’s witty and ultimately moving screenplay unfolds over the holidays in 1970 at the Barton Academy, one of those posh New England prep schools where the rich send their errant and spoiled sons for an education in the classics and character building.
Despite a fabulous reputation, Barton achieves neither of those objectives. It’s basically a holding facility for entitled idiots, a fact all too obvious to Paul Hunham (Paul Giomatti), who has taught ancient history for 40 years to bored young adolescents he dismisses as hormonal Visigoths.
On this particular snowbound Christmas, the unmarried and spectacularly grumpy Hunham has been saddled with “holdover” duty. He’s must oversee a handful of students who will remain on campus until classes resume in the New Year.
Among these “holdovers” is the son of Mormons on missionary duty abroad, a Korean whose family can’t afford the plane ticket home, and a football Adonis has been banned from his family Christmas for refusing to cut his hair (the rebellious ‘60s have only just ended and the Vietnam War still rages).
And then there’s Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a smart kid with a chip on his shoulder the size of a manhole cover. At the last minute his recently-remarried mother informs Angus that she’s opted to dedicate her holidays to a delayed honeymoon. Surly teenage sons are not invited.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph
In addition to Hunham and his angry/disappointed/lonely young charges, we meet Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). who runs the school’s dining hall. Mary’s son Curtis grew up on the campus, studied there (free tuition for employees’ offspring) and, lacking the money for college, enlisted in the Army, dying in Vietnam.
It’s a setup rich with heart-tugging possibilities, all of which Payne and Hemingson avoid like the plague. The dialogue is sharp, bitter and often screamingly funny. The performances don’t beg our sympathy; quite the contrary, this is a prickly bunch of angry individuals. Unlikeable, even.
Yet over the film’s two-hour-plus running time (it actually seems much shorter) “The Holdovers” finds ways to reveal its characters’ pain, yearnings and fears without ever drifting into mushy territory. The approach is astringent, clear-eyed and sardonic.
If you’re not careful it can break your heart.
Here’s a prediction: Expect Giamatti to land an Oscar nomination for best actor; Randolph and Sessa should score in the supporting categories.
In the meantime, watch “The Holdovers” with someone you love. Better still, watch it with someone you’re not so sure about.
“Fingernails” unfolds in an alternate reality that looks a lot like America in the 1980s. No ubiquitous cell phones or laptops. Most of the cars are sedans, not SUVs. The TV sets are modestly proportioned.
Except that in this reality the films “Titanic” (1997) and “Notting Hill” (1999) are already classics (the latter a key title in the Hugh Grant Romance film festival).
And a special feature of this alternate universe is a process (allegedly scientific) that allows couples to test for romantic compatability. Ideally you want a score of 50%, indicating that a couple love each other equally. More often though, those tested discover that they’ve absolutely no future with their current squeeze.
And what do you have to sacrifice for this life-changing information? Well, in addition to paying a steep fee you must have one of your fingernails pulled out with pliers (sans anesthesia) so that it can be microwaved along with one yanked from your significant other. Apparently fingernails are terrific indicators of one’s emotional state.
Anna (Jessie Buckley) is the latest employee of the Love Institute, which not only conducts the fingernail tests but holds seminars and workshops and issues reports on what its researchers have discovered about romance.
Anna and her beau Ryan (Jeremy Allen White) did the fingernail test several years earlier and were told that they were a perfect match. Except that Anna is starting to get bored with the relationship (possibly Ryan is too nice and predictable). Anna hopes that by working as a counselor at the Institute she can gain insights into her own romantic sensibilities.
Her work partner is Amir (Riz Ahmed), and it doesn’t take a fingernail test to determine that Anna’s affections soon will be directed his way.
As written by Christos Nikou, Sam Steiner and Davros Raptis and directed by Nikou, “Fingernails” scores more points for quirkiness than for emotional heft.
And even the quirkiness is of the low-caliber variety. There are a couple of amusing moments but the film never quite jells as either comedy or romance. I was ready for it to wrap things up a good half hour before the end.
That said, I’m a big fan of Buckley (even with a ‘do that looks like it was styled with a weed whacker). Ahmed and White are solid as Anna’s romantic options, and Luke Wilson very nearly steals the film as the science-nerd chief of the Love Institute.
Forget about the fingernail test. When it comes to human emotions there are no absolutes.
Remember how dislocated and awed you felt after seeing the original “Terminator”?
How you started asking yourself questions about the immutability of time, about the possibility of changing the past or, even freakier, our own present?
That same sort of brow-furrowing mind massage is at work in the deep-diving Brit series “Bodies.”
Episode One sets up the tantalizing premise. In present-day London the corpse of a naked man is found in an all-but-abandoned alleyway. A police detective (Amaka Okafor) is stumped as to how he got there.
The scene then jumps to 1890s London where — WTF? — the same body is found in the same alley by a bearded and bowler-hatted police inspector (Kyle Soller).
But there’s more. In 1941, with German bombers paying nightly visits, yet another copper (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) stumbles into the same scenario.
And then, just when you think you’re getting a handle on it, the episode wraps up with the revelation that 30 years into the future another officer (Shira Haas) is dealing with the same body in the same crumbling alleyway.
Series creator Paul Tomalin (adapting Si Spencer’s graphic novel) takes his time setting up his reveals…before any big answers are dangled he explores societal conflicts like contemporary racism, anti-Semitism during the Blitz or the Victorian-era inspector’s desperately closeted homosexuality.
Along the way there are all sorts of tantalizing hints at a monstrously massive conspiracy, members of which invariably sign off with the superficially comforting/existentially disturbing line: “Remember, you are loved.”
Eventually the film focuses on Mannix (Stephen Graham), who exists in all of these time frames, though not always as an adult (in our present he’s a troubled adolescent). Basically he’s playing God with time…and thus with everyone on Earth.
There are several big holes here. The methodology of time travel isn’t explored..there’s this machine, but good luck figuring out how it got made and tested. And in one possible past/future the city of London is hit by a nuclear blast…it levels everything except that darned red-brick alleyway where the bodies keep dropping. Unlikely.
But the series’ slow-build momentum is such that you don’t dwell on these shortcomings, preferring to take in the big picture.
And that big picture will leave you juggling a score of metaphysical conundrums.
“THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER” (Netflix)
With “Midnight Mass” and “The Haunting of Hill House” writer/directorMike Flanagan shot to the top of the horror world, delivering slowly-unfolding creepfests that served as anguished meditations on the human condition while delivering multiple opportunities for great acting.
His latest, the 8-part “The Fall of the House of Usher,” is a step back, in part because just about everyone on screen is a truly horrible individual. Good luck looking for someone to empathize with.
Also, horror is much less scary when those threatened are evil bastards to begin with.
That said, the series is wildly successful in cannibalizing the Poe oeuvre, not just …Usher but most of his famous poems and short stories. No doubt as you read this some grad student is working on a thesis picking apart the series’ plethora of Edgar Allan Easter eggs.
The Usher family has become fabulously wealthy after developing an opiate pain killer that has addicted a good chunk of the population. (Yeah, they’re a thinly-disguised version of the Sacklers.)
At the top is Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), now in his early 70s and, thanks to several marriages, the father of six very spoiled, desperately corrupted offspring.
The series is so jammed with flashbacks, subplots and digressions that a flow chart might come in handy. Basically, in just a month’s time all of Usher’s despicable heirs will die in bizarre ways. The common thread is a mysterious woman (Carla Gugino) who serves as a sort of Angel of Death (if you gotta go, doing so at Gugino’s hands seems preferable).
The whole thing is a huge flashback, as the doomed Roderick relates his clan’s twisted history to the prosecutor (Carl Lumbly) who has been trying for years to bring down the Usher empire.
The “Dynasty”-sized cast is filled with familiar faces from the Flanagan repertory company, as well as newcomers like Mary McDonnell as Usher’s scheming sister and Mark Hamill as the Ushers’ creepy legal fixer.
Unlike “…Hill House” and “…Mass,” I never experienced fright watching “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and that lack of emotional connection percolates throughout the enterprise. There’s a certain intellectual attraction in observing how Flanagan structures his story and, as previously stated, you can spend the whole thing picking out Poe references.
“KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON”My rating: B (In theaters)
306 minutes | MPAA rating: R
More than any film I’ve seen in a decade, Martin Scorsese’s “Killer of the Flower Moon” has left me at a loss for words.
Sometimes that’s a good thing, suggesting a cinematic experience so overwhelming that it defies easy summation.
In this case it means I left the film with mixed reactions. It’s taken days to sort them out and I’m still struggling to come to a neatly encapsulated conclusion.
The setup:
“Killers…” is a lightly fictionalized version of David Grann’s superb nonfiction study of the notorious Osage murders of the 1920s. With the discovery of oil in Oklahoma, members of the Osage tribe who had been settled on this presumably worthless land became overnight millionaires.
This made them targets for predatory whites who often married Osage women. Frequently those women— and other members of their clans — died under mysterious or outright murderous circumstances, with the oil rights reverting to their white husbands. It took a major investigation by the fledgling FBI to uncover a cabal of conspirators behind the murders of at least 30 tribal members.
Scorsese’s film (co-written with Eric Roth) is noteworthy in that it isn’t really about solving a crime (the first federal agent doesn’t show up until more than two hours into the 3 1/2-hour film, and the audience knows who the bad guys are almost from the get-go). Its focus is split between one particular marriage. and a study of unapologetic corruption.
After serving in the Great War Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives in Oklahoma to work for his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), the most powerful white man living in the Osage Nation.
Robert DeNiro, Leonardo DiCaprio
Hale is a mover and shaker who has been among the Osage for so long he speaks their language fluently. He advises tribal leaders and maintains that the Osage are the finest people on the planet. But beneath his benevolent paternalism there’s sinister intent.
At his uncle’s urging, the slow-witted and morally anchorless Ernest marries Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman who, for all of her family’s wealth, is a nurturing, down-to-earth individual. They start a family.
But little by little Ernest is drawn into his uncle’s manipulative world. Early on he participates in the armed robbery of a wealthy Indian couple; before long he’s a middleman setting up the assassinations of individuals fingered by Hale. Among the targets are his own in-laws.
The yarn is thick with moral ambiguity. For even as he does his uncle’s murderous bidding, Ernest remains desperately in love with his wife. At some point he’s going to have to choose between love and his white family.
The film’s recreation of life in Oklahoma during this period is astonishingly authentic. Tribal customs, language and attitudes have been scrupulously researched and depicted. Some of the long shots of oil derricks and oil pools pocking the landscape are epic (Rodrigo Prieto is the cinematographer). Costuming and set decoration are impeccable. The late Robbie Robertson has created a haunting minimalist musical score heavy on native drums rhythmically thudding like a heartbeat.
My hangup is the film’s emotional neutrality. I get it, intellectually. But I felt more an observer than a participant.
Possibly it’s best to see the film without having read the book. That way the perfidy of the “killers” comes as a shocking revelation with attendant moral revulsion. Maybe I knew too much going into the experience.
More problematic is the focus on Ernest, a stupid, easily manipulated oaf. As played by DeCaprio he is resoundingly unempathetic, a spineless sort whose only redeeming quality is that he grows to love his wife despite his many sins against her family. (I can’t recall another major actor so willing to alienate his character from the audience, so there’s that.)
Were “Killers…” only, say, two hours long, Scorsese’s sheer filmmaking bravado might well compensate for our having to spend so much time with this thick hick. But the film’s butt-numbing length stretches matters out while diluting the dramatic impact — the movie’s trailers are more effective in this regard than the film itself.
Scorsese and Roth find some grim humor in the killers’ desperate machinations as the net closes on them (Jesse Plemons portrays the main Fed doggedly digging into the murders), but the film is largely humorless.
The saving grace in all this is Gladstone, a Native American actress whose most compelling previous performance was in Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Woman” from 2016. Her Mollie becomes the moral/emotional center of the film, a woman radiating empathy, quiet dignity, intelligence and a sort of stoic resignation as life piles on one tragedy after another. It’s damn near impossible to explain what she does here…it’s a kind of soulfulness rarely seem on the screen.
At the other end of the spectrum is DeNiro’s William Hale, a villain with a breathtaking ability to compartmentalize the conflicting aspects of his life. In public he’s everybody’s uncle and friend; behind closed doors Hale becomes an amoral master manipulator with an unquenchable thirst for wealth and power. Anyone smarter than the thick-headed Ernest would recognize his pervasive malevolence right off the bat.
Advance word on “Killers of the Flower Moon” has the film pegged as a masterpiece, perhaps the highlight of Scorsese’s illustrious career.
Well, it’s good. It’s got its moments. But in my opinion not enough to fill 3 1/2 hours.
When the Brit series “Gangs of London” premiered in 2020 on AMC it dished up the most graphic violence ever seen on mainstream cable.
Each episode was highlighted by at least one state-of-the-art fight scene…sometimes featuring firearms, often with bladed weapons, frequently with fists, feet and teeth.
We’re talking John Wick-level action choreography melded with a gruesome attention to the trauma inflicted on the human body. Sometimes balletic but mostly brutal. In the middle of the first season nearly an entire episode was devoted to the siege of a remote farmhouse by a small army of mercenaries…it was an astounding action set piece comparable to Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.”
“Gangs…” Season Two just dropped on Max and, if anything, it raises the ante on onscreen mayhem.
The premise is pretty much summed up in the title. Various gangs representing different ethnic groups (Pakistanis, Irish, Kurdish, etc.) vie for supremacy of the London underworld. The authorities are conspicuous in their absence…apparently standard-issue law enforcement is utterly ineffective in curtailing the carnage.
Our nominal hero is undercover cop Elliott (Sope Dirisu) who infiltrates the gang led by the demented mother/son duo Marian and Sean Wallace (Michelle Fairley, Joe Cole). The idea is to undermine the Wallaces from within, but to prove his loyalty (and to elude discovery) Elliott must participate in the gang’s reign of terror. He’s the closest thing we have to a moral authority, but even he has way too much blood on his hands.
This being a Brit production, the acting is top-notch. Season Two features the arrival of the loathsome Koba (Waleed Zuaiter), a platinum-haired enforcer from Georgia (the eastern European Georgia, not the American one) tasked with ending the infighting whether the warring gangs like it or not. Kidnapping and torturing the wife of an uncooperative gangster is all in a day’s work for this ruthless killer…Koba may be the year’s best heavy.
Season Two also raises tantalizing questions about “the investors,” a shadowy group of plutocrats (we never see them) who are the mob bosses’ bosses. I have to imagine that Season Three (now in production) will find Elliott exposing their Koch-level shenanigans.
Just about every aspect of “Gangs of London” works. The question is whether you can handle the series’ pervasive nihilism and unapologetic barbarity. Because no matter how you approach it, you’ll end up rooting for one of the bad guys.
“RESERVATION DOGS” (Hulu)
Apparently the world is made up of two kinds of viewers: Those who immediately recognized the genius of “Reservation Dogs” and those of us who discover it later.
When the show debuted in 2021 I gave it a go, but couldn’t slip into its distinctive vibe about slacker teens growing up hopeless on an Oklahoma Indian Reservation. There was something about the pseudo-amateurish performances that rubbed me the wrong way.
Or maybe it was some weird sort of white privilege. “Rez Dogs” has been written, directed and overwhelmingly acted by Native Americans, and it is unapologetic in unfolding from a distinctively N.A. point of view. To an old white guy it didn’t seem a good fit.
A friend, however, encouraged me start again, this time with Season Two. I did…and am eternally thankful for the recommendation.
Most of the Season Two episodes put one or more of the characters through an experience that is simultaneously universal and specifically Native American.
One features young Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) taking his first paying job…as a roofer. His experiences with the older crew members widen his perspectives and his growing satisfaction at delivering a good day’s work suggests his gentle shift toward maturity.
An entire episode is devoted to the death of the grandmother of Elora (Devery Jaccobs). Virually every major cast member shows up to pay their respects to the fading matriarch, and the interplay among them beautifully reflects the humor, loss and resignation experienced during such a pivotal moment.
Gay kid Cheese (Lane Factor) finds himself in juvie (he was visiting his weed-growing uncle when the cops arrived). And a handful of aunties travel to a Native American confab in a big hotel…it’s a chance to leave the rez behind, party like their old former selves and maybe snag a fine man.
The shows are funny, yes. The characters are periodically visited by the spirits of long-gone tribal members, like William Knifeman, a horse-riding, joke-telling warrior who is far more laid back than intimidating, and Deer Lady, a beautiful but vengeful creature who gruesomely settles scores with folk who have lived badly.
And in one absurdity-drenched segment straight arrow tribal cop Big (Zahn McClarnon) accidentally takes an acid trip and in the woods stumbles across a coven of white Oklahoma businessmen planning to seize Indian land.
But there’s a growing seriousness that comes to its full fruition in Season Three. The overarching theme has the kids little by little coming to terms with just what means to be Indian. Though they are acutely aware of the ridiculous elements of their existence (a touchy-feely session with a couple of wannabe New-Agey Native American gurus is simultaneously hilarious and creepy), these young people are developing a sense of community and discovering a new respect for traditions.
The last few episodes pretty much left me an emotional wreck. But you know what? The kids are gonna be alright.
“WINNING TIME: THE RISE OF THE LAKERS DYNASTY” (MAX)
You don’t have to know anything about basketball to become a big fan of “Winning Time,” whose two seasons chronicle the rise of the L.A. Lakers and provide a veritable smorgasbord of acting treats.
As in most sports sagas there are ups and downs on the court, but the game itself takes a backseat to the potent characters drawn from real-life personalities.
These outsized egos include team owner and dedicated Lothario Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly), his doting mother (Sally Field), charming/naughty court superstar Magic Johnson (Quincy Isaiah), Kareen Abdul Jabbar (Solomon Hughes) and coaches like Jerry West (Jason Clarke), Pat Riley (Adrien Brody), Paul Westhead (Jason Segel) and Jack McKinney (Tracy Letts).
Season Two spends a lot of time with the Lakers’ nemesis, Larry Bird (Sean Patrick Small).
As far as I can tell, the series sticks pretty close to the historic truth, although clearly the writers have had to invent what went on behind closed doors. I particularly love that the show is not in awe of its sugjects…there is a full panoply of human foible on display.
And the look of it all! Rarely have we seen a series which so consistently captures the visual and aural sensations of a past era, in this case the 1980s. The makers of “Winning Time” dig up old newsfilm and video, but they also employ (or masterfully fake) now-abandoned visual formats.
The result is a series that feels more like a time machine than a conventional TV show.
As a rule, political strongmen despise artists, dismissing them as dreamers and dissenters always threatening to infect the body politic with their decadence.
Thing is, given enough time the artists always have the last word.
Exhibit A is “El Conde (The Count),” a Chilean feature that informs us that right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet did not die in 2006, as is widely believed, but lives on as a vampire who sucks the life out of unsuspecting victims just as he sucked up the wealth of his country.
Written and directed by Pablo Larrain (who co-wrote with Guillermo Calderon), this batshit-crazy blend of horror and political satire plays out in an otherworldly, treeless landscape that has been magnificently captured in Edward Lachman’s sumptuous black-and-white photography.
Here’s the setup: The aged Count (Jaime Vadell) is slowly losing his marbles in a sort of sprawling ranch house that has seen better days. (It must be the only homestead on Earth that features a functioning guillotine.)
His wife Lucia (Gloria Munchmyer), his butler and (during the good old days) chief torturer Fyodor (Alfred Castro) and the Count’s four back-biting adult children have gathered in emergency session. They all fear that the world-weary old dictator will starve himself to death before they can figure out where he squirreled away his ill-gotten fortune.
To help sort it all out, the family has employed a forensic accountant, a young woman named Carmencita (Paula Luchsinger). What they don’t know is that Carmencita is a nun who has traded in her habit for street clothes. What’s more, she has orders to perform an exorcism on the evil old bastard.
Paula Lunchsinger
(Am I imagining, or are Luchsinger’s sharp features and boyish ‘do lit and photographed in such a way as to evoke memories of Falconetti’s Joan of Arc?)
While the characters deliver their lines in Spanish, the story is narrated by a female with an English accent. Initially this is puzzling…before it’s all over we’ll meet this woman face-to-face, confirming our worst fears about a once-powerful world leader. (Yeah, that’s kinda vague. But the late-reel reveal is too delicious to give it up here.)
In flashbacks we see how as a young soldier in the French revolution the Count developed a taste for blood (he actually licks the blade that beheads Marie Antoinette) and a hatred of revolutionaries and lefties in general. (How did he become a vampire? It will be revealed, but not here.)
Eventually he made his way to the Americas, became a ruthless military leader and took over Chille after a CIA-planned 1972 overthrow of Salvador Allende’s freely-elected socialist government. For more than 20 years Pinochet ruled with an iron hand, “disappearing” more than 1200 troublesome citizens and torturing countless others.
Gloria Munchmyer, Jaime Vadell
According to this film’s alternate history, when finally deposed and facing conviction for human rights violations, the Count faked his own death and retreated to his remote hideout.
Periodically, though, he dons his old caped uniform and glides through the night sky to Santiago to feast on humanity. These flying scenes are spectacularly dreamlike…even beautiful in a balletic way.
“The Conde” has a fine old time fiddling with the usual vampire tropes, and its gleeful indictment of reactionary politics and the pilfering that so often accompanies it is absolutely merciless.
There’s a built-in issue with the film…none of the characters — not even the undercover nun — is remotely likable. Everybody is greedy, scheming, corrupt. Or willing to be corrupted.
Thankfully the acting, the allegorical elements and the mind-blowing technical expertise (photography, locations, costuming, production design) are so inventive that there’s always something marvelous to wonder at.
The film would probably have benefitted from a tighter edit (lose 15 minutes and you might have a small masterpiece), but as it stands “El Conde” is a nasty miracle.
“THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR” My rating: A(Netflix)
37 minutes | MPAA rating: PG
At the risk of committing cinematic apostasy, I’d like to suggest that in the future Wes Anderson limit himself to short films.
I have come to this conclusion after viewing Anderson’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” 37 minutes of visual and aural bliss emphasizing all that is great about the Anderson style without ever wearing out its welcome.
Hanging around too long has been the major flaw of Anderson’s recent features like “Asteroid City” and “The French Dispatch,” quirky whimsy being an elusive thing to sustain over 90 minutes.
But “…Henry Sugar,” based on a short story by the late Roald Dahl, is a pure delight. the ideal marriage of material and presentational form.
It’s not so much an adaptation of Dahl’s yarn as a word-for-word recitation, with the cast members (familiar faces from the Anderson screen universe) speaking the author’s words directly to the viewer.
What’s it about? Well, it begins in the yellow cottage in which Dahl (Ralph Fiennes) does his writing. Dahl tells us the story of “The Man Who Sees Without Using His Eyes.”
Through a delightful series of interlocking flashbacks (stories within stories within stories…a familiar Anderson device) we follow Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley), who as a young man in the 1930s became a devotee of a holy Indian hermit and learned to identify objects — like playing cards — even though his eyes have been completely bandaged.
Ralph Fiennes
The adult Khan exploits this skill as one of the main attractions of a traveling vaudeville show. Along the way he becomes the obsession of a physician (Dev Patel) bent on understanding this phenomenon.
Eventually the yarn turns to wastrel Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch), an upperclass Brit ne’er-do-well addicted to gambling. Sugar finds a journal written by Khan in a fellow rich twit’s library, steals it, and studies it for several years with singleminded intensity..
Sugar wants to employ Khan’s remote viewing system to read the cards held by his fellow casino denizens. He pulls it off…only to realize that gambling is no longer thrilling when you know you can’t lose.
The story is oddball charming and even has a nifty moral to it.
And the presentational style is, well, beautiful. The film is awash in pastel eruptions, with sets that often resemble huge doll houses and at other times fold up or open out like gigantic pop-up books.
Before drifting away into ambiguity, Vasillis Katsoupis’ “Inside” serves as both a reasonably diverting escape tale and as a one-man acting showcase for Willem Dafoe.
It begins with a high-tech burglary. Dafoe’s Nemo (we only know the character’s name from the credits) is dropped by helicopter onto the roof of an NYC high rise. He makes his way to the penthouse, a sprawling living space that takes up the entire top floor.
The towering walls are covered with expensive modern art…and that’s why Nemo is there. The absent owner of this palace has a collection worth millions; Nemo and his confederates (we only hear them through the walkie-talkie he carries) have a shopping list of items to steal.
But it all goes haywire. The apartment’s security system is way more sophisticated than the robbers thought, and within minutes of arriving Nemo finds himself locked inside. His partners in crime sign off, leaving him to whatever fate awaits.
It’s kind of like Robinson Crusoe with a panoramic view of Manhattan.
Nemo’s desperate attempts to disarm the security system are disastrous. Over the course of his imprisonment the apartment’s damaged climate controls send the temperature soaring to 100 or dropping almost to freezing. Our man spends days sweltering in his skivvies, and then must bundle up in pilfered clothing as the temp plummets.
More bad news: His tinkering has rendered inoperable the in-house phone that otherwise could be used to call the front desk downstairs.
The apartment’s owner apparently turned off the utilities before leaving for an extended European vacation, so Nemo has neither running water nor gas with which to cook the few items he finds frozen in the fridge. Luckily a couple of tropical trees in a huge planter are periodically watered by tiny hoses connected to a timer, so Nemo strategically places cups and saucers to collect the daily spray.
He can’t even watch TV. The big set in the living room will only deliver feeds from security cameras around the building, so our man must find entertainment eavesdropping on residents and staffers — especially a pretty young maid he dubs Jasmine (Eliza Stuyck).
“Inside” chronicles in minute detail Nemo’s day-to-day survival regimen and his escape attempts, which include building a shaky scaffolding of cannibalized furniture in an attempt to reach a skylight 20 feet overhead.
Dafoe embodies the character’s physical and mental deterioration with virtually no dialogue. Nor are there flashbacks to tell us anything about Nemo’s past. Is he just a thief or is he also an art lover? (Would an art lover paint mustaches on the priceless portraits on the walls?) At one point he passes the time by drawing his own mural on a wall.
It’s all very minimalist and for at least its first half “Inside” is a gripping survival story.
But “Inside” wears out its welcome, slipping ever more deeply into improbability. Example: Nemo deliberately starts a fire, setting off sprinklers that leave him ankle-deep in water. Yet apparently the rest of the building is unaware of the deluge…I mean, wouldn’t all that water leak down to the floors below?
Perhaps the biggest bugaboo, though, is Katsoupis and co-writer Ben Hopkins’ decision to leave us hanging without a clear resolution. They probably thought of it as artful. I kinda felt like it was a cheat.
The people who made “Theater Camp” are, quite obviously, former child actors.
Which is why anyone who ever devoted a few formative months of their youth to singing, dancing and dreaming of stardom will find this film triggers a tsunami of fond memories.
For some that will be enough.
I wanted more.
Maybe it’s because “Theater Camp” — written by Noah Galvin, Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman and directed by Gordon and Lieberman —is a bit too much in love with its own mythology to bring out the knives.
I was hoping for “Waiting for Guffman”-level laughs.“ What I got was a bunch of narrative backstage cliches without the really biting satire that would lift the film from the modestly amusing to the truly memorable.
Here’s the setup: Joan Rudinsky, the long-time founder/director of Camp AdirondACTS (played in a prologue by Amy Seders) is hospitalized and in a coma. In her absence a skeleton staff overseen by her theatrically clueless son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) are struggling to keep their young campers occupied, fed and engaged in producing the summer’s penultimate show, a musical tribute to Joan.
The usual “types” are on display, with the central characters being Angelo and Sylvia (Ben Platt, Gordon) who fell in love when they were students at AdirondACTS and, since Angelo’s coming out, have been best buds.
Problem is, Sylvia seems to have marketable talents (she’s been asked to audition for a cruise show) while Angelo seems destined never to move beyond the camp. This makes for some tension.
Meanwhile the inept Troy is considering a buyout from the rival (and much more posh) summer camp across the lake. Also he’s getting romantically encouraging vibes from the other camp’s CFO (Patti Harrison).
There are some modest laughs here, but the approach is gentle and sweet, possibly the result of the filmmaker’s improvisational approach. The hoped-for avalanche of social comedy never materializes.
In fact, “Theater Camp” only really comes together in the last reel when the kids put on their big tribute to Joan and in classic movie fantasy fashion transcend amateurism to dleliver an inspired night of musical theater.
One of my all-time favorite documentaries is Werner Herzog’s 2011 “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” in which the eccentric filmmaker took a 3-D camera into a French cave to record the incredible wall paintings of animals rendered more than 30,000 years ago.
The makers of that art were clearly human, and as I noted at the time, “Cave…” is about nothing less than the birth of the human soul.
The perfect bookend to Herzog’s masterwork is “Unknown: Cave of Bones,” Mark Mannucci’s chronicle of the the almost decade-long exploration of the Rising Star cave system in South Africa.
Rising Star contains a treasure trove of bones belonging to hominids that lived between 250,000 and 300,000 years ago. They were small creatures with brains about the size of a chimpanzee’s. They are regarded as animals, not humans.
This newly discovered ancient species was dubbed homo naledi.
Early on we meet paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, an American-born South African in charge of the project. He, along with a couple of colleagues, becomes our narrator and guide into a mystery that stretches back to the beginning of our world.
The deeper explorers penetrated the cave, the more surprises they encountered.
Lee Berger
In a room so inaccessible that only the thinnest of scientists could squeeze through to it (Berger tells us up front that he’ll never see the place save on a video feed…he’s too hefty to make his way there) the team discovered the bones of one individual who had undergone special treatment.
His/her remains had not been abandoned on the cave floor. They had been deliberately buried. Moreover, the body had to have been carried or dragged up and down a daunting series of chutes, inclines and crawl spaces to get there.
Wait a minute. Burial implies a social system. It implies that these creatures had the emotional capacity to protect or honor the remains of a beloved individual. And it strongly suggests that homo naledi was contemplating an afterlife.
But weren’t these just, well, animals?
It gets better. The scientists discover a burial in which a stone had been placed in the deceased’s hand…a stone that apparently had been knapped to create a sharp edge and a pointed end.
In other words, a tool.
And cross-hatch patterns are found scratched into the cave wall. We call that art.
Unfolding as a kind of real-life mystery, “Unknown…” alternates terrific footage from inside the cave with talking head commentary from Berger and fellow primatologists Agustin Fuentes and John Hawks.
These guys are scientists. They deal in facts. They’re uncomfortable with metaphysical postulating.
And yet their worlds are rocked by the notion that 200,000 years before homo sapiens emerged there were creatures exhibiting human-like behavior: funerary rituals, tool creating, art making. Raising the question of just how we’re supposed to define the words “human being.”
Mannucci’s documentary is immeasurably aided by the use of animated sequences to suggest how homo naledi might have looked and moved. These black-and-white sequences are painterly, blurred just enough to give an idea of this ancient world without depicting details that might not be supported by the evidence.
The result is a haunting, unexpectedly moving dreamlike experience that leaves the viewer in quiet awe.
“HIJACK” (Apple+): I’d watch Idris Elba clean his ears with a Q-Tip. In “Hijack” he is but one member of an excellent ensemble delivering the year’s best nail-biter.
This seven-part miniseries unfolds in real time. Shorty after taking off from a Middle East airport, a British passenger jet is taken over by gunmen. Their motivations are unclear until late in the drama, but every episode cannily drops breadcrumb clues that we must sort through.
In that we’re like passenger Sam Nelson (Elba), a heavy-hitting corporate negotiator flying back to his native London. Nelson isn’t a man of action. No kung fu, no fisticuffs. He’s a thinker who places himself between the hijackers and the terrified passengers in an effort to prevent what looks increasingly like a high body count.
“Hijack” unfolds not only in the air, where we meet all sorts of passengers — as in John Ford’s “Stagecoach,” they represent all aspects of humankind, good and bad —but also on the ground as the British authorities, air traffic controllers and anti-terrorism experts try to stave off a worst-case scenario in which the air liner is shot down by military jets.
Perhaps the show’s deeply satisfying complexity is the result of a seven-person writing staff who keep coming up with new and intriguing twists. Meanwhile directors Jim Field Smith and Mo Ali make the most of the yarn’s claustrophobic elements.
With its real-time delivery “Hijack” is the perfect one-day binge.
Timothy Olyphant, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
“JUSTIFIED: CITY PRIMIEVAL” (Hulu): More Raylan Givens? YES, PLEASE.
Timothy Olyphant reprises his signature role as U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens in this eight-parter (too short, but still) that finds our Kentucky-bred lawman working a case in Detroit (as gritty in its own way as coal country).
Nearly 16 years have passed since we last saw Raylan, and if anything he looks sexier than ever. Maybe it’s because he’s now older and a bit wiser, long divorced and traveling with his teenage daughter, who is way too cocky for her years. (She’s played by Olyphant’s real-life kiddo Vivian…the apple didn’t drop far from this tree).
The villain this time around is Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook), a seductive/terrifying good ol’ boy who likes to preen in his tidy whities. Early on Mansell kills a judge and steals his little brown book of bribery. The idea is to blackmail the “respectable” folk listed in this incriminating volume.
Toss in Mansell’s grudge match with the local Albanian ganglord (Terry Kinney), his affair with a fortune-hunting casino cocktail waitress (Adelaide Clemens, suggesting the good girl she played in “Rectified” has gone bad), and an uneasy partnership with a dive bar owner (Vondie Curtis-Hall), and you’ve got plenty of nerve-shredding action.
But there’s more, with our boy Raylan finding a sympathetic soul in Mansell’s criminal attorney, winning played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. It may be the year’s most unexpected and satisfying TV romance.
Oh…and the final episode ties up loose ends with a coda that damn near rivals the final sendoff of “ Six Feet Under.”
Matthew Goode as Robert Evans, Miles Teller as Al Ruddy
“THE OFFER” (Paramount +): The making of 1972’s “The Godfather” was every bit as gripping as the film itself…at least according to this 10-part miniseries which, we’re told, was inspired by Al Ruddy’s experiences while producing the film.
Miles Teller plays Ruddy, whose track record (“Hogan’s Heroes,” a motorcycle movie) hardly seemed up to adapting Mario Puzo’s best-selling Mafia novel to the big screen. Basically Ruddy learned the hard way, putting out daily brushfires (budget problems, location hassles) and finding himself aligned with real-world mobster Joe Columbo, who initially opposed the film as being anti-Italian and later padded the production’s payroll with his non-working “workers.”
Teller provides a solid center to the film, but the real fun comes from a small army of supporting players who chew the scenery with relish: Matthew Goode as studio head and ladies’ man Robert Evans, Giovanni Ribisi as frog-voiced Joe Columbo, and Brit character actor Burn Gorman as Charles Bluhdorn, the Austrian owner of Paramount and the very image of a capitalist martinet.
Though they have cannily cast actors who sound (and sometimes look) like stars Al Pacino and Marlon Brando, the series’ makers don’t try to re-enact moments from the actual movie. But frequently we watch the faces of crew members as they oversee a scene being shot, and their awestruck expressions make it clear that movie magic is being captured.
For most viewers “The Offer” will be a huge package of surprise revelations. Director Frances Coppola (an excellent Dan Fogler) had to fight off numerous attempts by the studio brass to fire Pacino (he was deemed too short, too actorish). The production barely scraped together enough money to send a skeleton crew to Sicily.
And according to Ruddy’s telling, he was held captive by thug “Crazy” Joe Gallo who demanded money from a production that had none left.
For movie geeks “The Offer” is a total pigout. And the highest praise is that as soon as you’ve finished it you can’t wait to watch the original “Godfather” one more time.
I’m pretty late to the Barbie party, having only just recently caught Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.”
Given that I’m playing catch-up, this is less a straightforward review than a collection of observations about what has become a major cultural phenomenon.
You needn’t be a past or present Barbie doll owner to enjoy the movie, but it sure helps.
The screenplay by Gerwig and significant other Noah Baumbach draws endlessly from the 60-plus-year history of Barbie, going so far as to resurrect as characters discontinued dolls like pregnant Midge, “Ken’s buddy” Allan (an hilarious appearance by Michael Cera as the lone wimp in a sea of muscled Kens), Video Girl Barbie (with a tiny TV screen embedded in her back) and even Sugar Daddy Ken (???).
As someone unfamiliar with all the Barbie permutations, I still found these characters amusing. But I can only imagine the giddy joy experienced by little girls (now women) who retain fond memories of these long-lost inhabitants of the Barbie universe.
The film is undeniably diverting and occasionally even moving, and packed with visual and aural jokes. But it cannot — in my opinion — live up to all the hype that has been generated since it hit the theaters.
In fact, I found myself becoming bored in the picture’s central section. For all the diverting eye candy and well-aimed jokes, the characters are still defined by their “doll-ness.” They are commercial objects, and as such remain essentially artificial rather than fully formed.
Within the limitations imposed on them, our Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) are able to suggest a dawning emotional and intellectual depth. But I was never able to accept them as fully human.
There is, however, one moment that almost brought me to tears.
In the film’s central passage Barbie and Ken are transported to contemporary Los Angeles. There are plenty of jokes about doll world/real world culture clash.
But in one brief but throat-lumping scene, Barbie sits at a bus stop next to a white-haired old lady. She stares at the senior citizen for a moment and then says with near-reverence: “You’re beautiful!”
So much going on in just two words. There are no old people in Barbieworld, of course. The filmmakers could have played this encounter for laughs. But instead of being frightened or repulsed by this vision of mortality, our heroine is awed by the human truth exhibited by one old lady waiting for her bus.
Now that’s a GREAT movie moment.
“Barbie” has it both ways.
The film is a wicked satire of all that the Barbie franchise stands for; at the same time, it is never mean spirited. In fact, it’s a celebration. A balancing act for the ages.
Ryan Gosling is going to win an Oscar.
One bit of hype is absolutely true: Gosling is spectacularly entertaining as the shallow, preening Ken. It is a great comic performance that isimultaneously generates uproarious laughter while subtly suggesting a dawning consciousness.
The conservatives are right to be terrified.
The film is an incredibly effective parable about female empowerment, as Barbie (all the Barbies, actually) gain self-awareness.
Moreover, “Barbie” dives headfirst into political commentary when the Kens establish a Taliban-ish patriarchy over Barbieland. One of the film’s major themes is that of female desire (spiritual, not sexual) butting heads with male oppression.
Whether this constitutes man-bashing is in the eye of the beholder. Our friends on the right seem to think so.
I’m on board with the film’s point of view; even so, there were moments when it felt like Gerwig and Co. were endlessly rearguing their case. The phrase “beating a dead horse” comes to mind (an appropriate choice, given that a key manifestation of the Kens’ newfound toxic masculinity is an obsession with galloping stallions).
The film feels padded.
Most of what I found problematic about “Barbie” would have shot right past had the movie been, say, 90 minutes long instead of two hours. Better too short than too long.
The execs at Mattel (owners of the Barbie franchise) are either geniuses or idiots — not sure which.
“Barbie” is full of jabs at corporate culture, going so far as to cast Will Farrell as the bumbling president of Mattel.
How the hell did the screenplay get a pass from the company’s bigwigs? Since when have corporations developed a sense of humor…particularly self-satire? Like, making fun of their own products?
In the end it doesn’t matter. By serving as the butt of the filmmakers’ jokes, the corporation has found itself in the midst of a marketing bonanza. No doubt in the wake of all this sales of all things Barbie have gone stratospheric.
Notwithstanding a transformative performance from funny guy Zac Galifianakis and solid work from his three leading ladies, Apple+’s “The Beanine Bubble” left me wondering just what message its creators wanted to send.
Part cautionary tale, part character study, part historical recreation, this feature debut from directors Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash manages to entertain even while spreading itself so thin that there’s a gaping hole in its middle.
“The Beanie Bubble” is based on the real-world rise and fall of Ty Warner, a designer whose plush Beanie toys made him a multi billionaire in the 1990s. The Beanies weren’t just huggable animal toys for the kiddies…by some weird quirk of mass psychosis and greed they became unregulated investment instruments. Customers snatched up each new Beanie character with the dream of re-selling the dolls at an immense profit.
Kind of like crypto before crypto.
Galifianakis, Geraldine Viswanathan
The screenplay by Gore and Zac Bissonette (the latter the author of a best-selling nonfiction study of the Beanie Baby phenomenon) borrows its basic form from no less a cinematic landmark than “Citizen Kane.” Like Orson Welle’s masterwork, this is a study of an enigmatic individual through the eyes of those who knew him…in this case three women key to Warner’s personal and private life. (We’re told that while fictional, these three characters are based on real women in Warner’s past.)
Moreover, the film assumes a twisted timeline, darting back and forth between incidents that covered more than a decade. The tale could easily have been told chronologically; the choice to slice and dice the narrative may have been seen as a way of keeping the audience on its toes. I frequently found it confusing.
Elizabeth Banks portrays Robbie, a working class gal who under Warner’s tutelage grows from auto repair shop employee to high-powered entrepreneur. She not only partners with Warner to build the Beanie brand, she becomes his lover (despite having a physically handicapped husband whom the film conveniently forgets). Thing is, their “partnership” was never formalized, so that when the inevitable breakup arrives, Robbie has no legal standing.
Sarah Snook, Galifianakis
The second woman in Warner’s life is Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), a teen who rejects her parents’ dreams of a medical career to sign on as a part-time receptionist at Warner’s Ty Inc. Maya is a smart cookie who immediately sees the possibilities of marketing Beanie toys through a new invention called the Internet. She’s also the one who realizes that Beanie fans are using newfangled sites like ebay to resell the toys for huge profits, thus creating a market that Ty Inc. may cannily manipulate by limiting the kinds and numbers of new toys manufactured.
Both Robbie and Maya, in their retelling of events, claim that Warner is an insecure child-man, a decent enough designer but a short-sighted businessman, and that it was their innovations that led to the company’s success. (If customers rioting at toy stores can be considered a success.)
Like Robbie, Maya is financially screwed by Warner, who keeps her on at minimum wage despite her obvious value.
And both women make the case that once they left the company, Warner ran it into the ground, culminating with the burst of the so-called Beanie Bubble that left hundreds of thousands of “investors” holding the bag.
The third voice in all this belongs to Sheila (“Succession’s” Sarah Snook), the single mother of two young girls who finds herself falling for the charmingly boyish Ty Warner. The guy seems too good to be true…and of course he is.
Holding it all together is Galifianakis’ flamboyant turn as Warner. Despite his outrageous pastel suits and effeminate edges, this is not an overtly comic character. But he is wildly entertaining, overflowing with infantile enthusiasms and, once you get past the shiny package, some dark interior rumblings.
It’s a tough gig. Yeah, there’s plenty of business for an actor to sink his teeth into, but ultimately the Ty Warner we get is the one the three women want us to see. Galiafanakis has to make his character come alive within the limitations imposed on him by his three narrators.
For those accustomed to Galifaniakis going for the big laugh, be aware that he here keeps himself on a short leash. This may be his best effort yet at pure acting. He loses himself in the role (there were times when I forgot it was him). But at heart his character remains something of a maddening mystery.
And the Netflix actioner “Blood & Gold” spends more than 90 minutes wiping up the floor with Hitler’s odious henchmen. It’s like Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” without the nods to arthouse sensibilities.
Directed by Peter Tornwarth (who co-wrote the screenplay with Stefan Barth), this Czech-lensed bloodbath owes more than a little debt to the traditions of spaghetti Westerns. The eccentric soundtrack sounds like something found in the effects of the late Ennio Morricone, there’s a big emphasis on hidden treasure (as in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”) and the film’s scuzzily-bearded leading man, Robert Masser, has perfected the Eastwood squint.
Hell, the film even begins with a hanging.
In the last days of WWII German deserter Heindrich (Masser) is run down by his comrades and left dangling from a tree. He’s cut down by Elsa (Marie Hacke), who brings him to the farm she shares with her mentally-challenged brother Paulie (Simon Rupp).
Elsa and Paulie are no lovers of the Reich; their father was taken away for voicing anti-Hitler sentiments.
Roy McCrerey, Alexander Scheer
As fate would have it, Heinrich’s former unit — led by the imperious and hideously scarred von Starnfeld (Alexander Scheer in maximum Prussian asshole mode) and his sadistic sergeant (Roy McCrerey) — have decamped to a nearby town. They’re searching for a fortune in gold bars purportedly owned by a Jewish family arrested some years before. They’ll tear the place apart to find the treasure.
In this they will have competition from a couple of local good ol’ boys and the scheming mistress (Jordan Triebel) of the burg’s pompous/cowardly mayor.
Not to mention the havoc wreaked on the swastika-bedecked crew by Heinrich, Elsa and Paulie, who are motivated not by greed but by revenge.
So there’s not a lot of substance or subtext here. But this show doesn’t need it.
Thorwarth, whose last film was the nifty vampire-on-an-airliner effort “Blood Red Sky,” is a wiz at staging terrific sequences which push the limits (without ever going too far over the top) of believable mayhem. I’m tempted to rewatch “Blood & Gold” just so I can fast forward to the action scenes.
Christopher Nolan’s monumental and astoundingly dense “Oppenheimer” is a study in contradictions.
It starts with contradictions of one man — physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), who led the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic weapon and later wondered if he’d done the right thing — but throws an even wider net.
Such as: The contradictions between scientific inquiry and the fear of what we might discover. The contradictions in the rules we live by, when we bend them and when they stiffen.
The three-hour film follows the creation of the atom bomb, but while that provides the plot it isn’t really what “Oppenheimer” is about. Looming over it all is the fallout (not the radioactive kind) of that literally earth-shaking moment in history.
We’re talking about big moral questions and writer/director Nolan presents them in all their maddening complexity, without telling us which side we’re supposed to take.
“Oppenheimer”is less an emotional experience than an overwhelmingly intellectual one. I can think of no other film in recent years that left me thinking so long and hard about the questions it raises…and the answers it cannot give.
Long a lover of warped time lines (“Memento, “ anyone?), Nolan here cuts back and forth between several of them.
Of course there’s the race to beat the Nazis in making an atom bomb, with Oppenheimer creating a small city from scratch in the New Mexico desert so that his scientists and engineers (and their families) can work in secure isolation for as long as it takes (more than two years, as it turned out).
Another timeline centers on a 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearing, a McCarthy-ish kangaroo court called to determine if Oppenheimer — by now a critic of America’s Cold War policies — should be stripped of his high-level security clearance.
And then (in black-and-white footage) we witness the 1959 Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr., in a career-high performance). Strauss is the former AEC chair and Eisenhower’s nominee for Secretary of Commerce. Many of the questions aimed at him concern his relationship over the years with Oppenheimer, whose reputation by this time is marred by the widespread belief that he was a Communist sympathizer.
Robert Downey Jr.
Nolan’s screenplay deftly weaves together these threads, and while we may not at first understand just what is going on (why so much emphasis on Downey’s Strauss, surely a minor figure in all this?), the setup pays off with a last-act revelation that most viewers won’t see coming.
At the heart of it all is Cillian Murphy’s brilliantly contained portrayal of Oppenheimer. What’s amazing about all this is that Oppenheimer was not a demonstrative character — he wore a mask of scientific calm and reason. Yet Murphy’s eyes suggest all that’s churning in that head.
Only after the film is over does the viewer realize he’s been totally sucked in by a performance that ignores the usual big actorish moments.
Instead he is quietly intimidating. Oppenheimer is a genius who taught himself Dutch in six weeks so that he could present a lecture on molecular physics in the audience’s language. He’s not a great mathematician or lab guy, but he sees/imagines what others cannot.
He’s arrogant. Gently dissing young leftists he advises that to really understand Das Kapital it should be read in the original German.
He’s a moral puzzle, described as “a dilettante, womanizer and Communist,” yet he’s a man whose conscience will not leave him alone.
I’m not sure I’d even like J. Robert Oppenheimer…but he was precisely the man America needed at the time.
Getting far more stirm und drang screentime are the women in Oppenheimer’s life. Florence Pugh plays Jean Tatlock, whom he meets in a gathering of college Commies and with whom he maintains a sexually-charged relationship even after it’s obvious she’s slipping into mental illness.
And then there’s Mrs. Oppenheimer, played by Emily Blunt. For much of the film Blunt seems little more than window dressing, but in the third act she becomes a fireball of righteous indignation when her husband’s patriotism is questioned.
Matt Damon is terrific as Gen. Leslie Groves, heading up the project’s military component. Groves is a mix of old-school discipline and pragmatism…he was willing to waive objections over political purity to get the brains he needed.
Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon
Then his job is to keep a lid on scientists whose natural inclination is to share information, not compartmentalize it. There’s not much humor in “Oppenheimer,” but Graves’ cat-herding frustration provide most of it.
There are dozens of other speaking roles here, some taken by familiar faces who may have only limited screen time. Just a few of them:
Oscar winners Rami Malek, Casey Affleck and Gary Oldman (the last as President Harry Truman). Josh Hartnett. Jason Clarke. Matthew Modine. Tony Goldwyn. James Remar. Kenneth Branagh. Tom Conti (as Einstein!!!). Dane DeHaan. Kansas City’s own David Dastmachian.
Nolan masterfully keeps all these balls in the air. His accomplishment is doubly impressive because “Oppenheimer” has so few look-at-me-ma moments. Very few directorial flourishes.
But those he does indulge in are woozies.
Early on Nolan delivers almost abstract visions of swirling sparks and dividing cells to suggest the workings of Oppenheimer’s imagination.
The buildup to the detonation of the first atomic bomb outside Los Alamos is a tension-packed slow burn. The emphasis isn’t on the nuts and bolts of making the bomb, but on the nervous anticipation of Oppenheimer and his crew.
Would it work? Would it, as some members of the team suggest, start a chain reaction igniting Earth’s atmosphere and killing everything?
We already know the answers, but audiences nevertheless will be on the edge of their seats.
And in the midst of a rowdy, patriotism-drenched celebration of the end of the war, Oppenheimer looks out over his audience of cheering colleagues and imagines their faces dissolving in the heat of a nuclear blast.
It’s an image that says more than pages of dialogue.
“Oppenheimer” is the ultimate yes/but experience. For every argument it presents there pops up a counter argument. Was it immoral to drop the big one on civilians? Would it have been better to sacrifice 500,000 American lives in an invasion of Japan?
Those who want to be spoon fed answers will find “Oppenheimer” frustrating. Tough. The film tells us the world doesn’t work like that. Black and white is rarely that.
“War Sailor” is a clunkily literal title for a sublimely moving experience.
This mini-series (presented on Netflix in three parts, although it played theatrically in its native Norway as one epic film) is a celebration of sacrifice. Sometimes it’s almost too much to take.
During WWII thousands of Norwegian merchantmen stranded at sea by the Nazi invasion of their homeland continued to move food, weapons and other materiel vital to the Allied cause. One in six died, the victims of German U-boat attacks.
Writer/director Gunnar Vikene celebrates their almost unfathomable suffering by concentrating on the experiences of two men, Alfred (Kristoffer Joner) and Sigbjorn (Pål Sverre Hagen), longtime friends who in 1939 ship out as mates on a freighter.
Alfred leaves behind a young wife, Cecelia (Ine Marie Wilmann), and three children, including young Magdeli, who is so sure her father will never return that she tries to hide the documents he needs to board ship.
Sigbjorn, on the other hand, is a rather sad fellow, a bachelor who experiences family life vicariously. He’s a sort of uncle to Alfred’s kids.
Pål Sverre Hagen
“War Sailor” contrasts the misadventures of the two men with the wartime experiences of Cecelia and the children.
It’s not all heroics for our protagonists. In fact, heroism is in short supply. As men without a country Alfred, Sigbjorn and their fellow Norwegians suffer a form of indentured servitude. They want to stick it to the Nazis, yes, but they’re in the demoralizing position of sitting ducks. If attacked they cannot fight back.
Small wonder they consider going over the side of their boat when it docks in New York City, where it will be hard for the authorities to find them.
Meanwhile in occupied Norway, Alfred’s family must watch as a U-Boat facility is constructed just a few blocks from their home; as a result they will endure the terrors of air raids as the Brits try to blow up the submarine base.
One wonders if filmmaker Vikene wasn’t inspired by Homer’s “Odyssey.” There’s plenty of terror and action, while the subtext is always of a men wanting to return to their wives and loved ones.
Ine Marie Wilmann
“War Sailor” offers some of the best ensemble acting seen in recent years. It’s been perfectly cast down to the smallest role, and the players are so effective that every few minutes one has to resist the temptation to stop the show for a little recovery time…the fear, angst and loneliness of these characters (as well as some moments of selfless brotherhood) can push audiences to an emotional edge.
No kidding. It’s that good.
And the technical production is outstanding. I cannot imagine how much it cost to produce this spectacle, nor can I figure out which effects are CG and which are actually unfolding in front of the camera. Whatever the case, the show perfectly balances the universal with the deeply personal.
Butler's Cinema Scene 