Butler's Cinema Scene

Nicolas Cage

“SPIDER-NOIR” (Prime Video)

“Spider-Noir” is such a promising variation on the usual superhero tropes that I probably stuck with it longer than it merits.

Oren Uziel’s 8-part miniseries gives us Nicolas Cage as Ben Reilly, a down-on-his-luck private eye in Depression-era NYC who is also a web-slinging crime fighter.  

Or was.  Ben burned out and hasn’t done the Spidey-thing for several years.  Maybe it has to do with the fact that his costume consists of a  Sam Spade-ish trench coat and a Spy-vs-Spy fedora…not exactly the ideal duds for aerial acrobatics.

Anyway, Ben is a crotchety font of sardonic bad vibes, full of amusing too-weary-to-be-a-tough-guy banter. I loved getting to know him.

But the sad truth is that “Spider-Noir” ran out of compelling  ideas after the first two or three episodes.  I lost interest.

The plot?  Well, turns out the Big Apple is suddenly inundated with crooks flashing all sort of superpowers. Their origin story — and Ben’s — leads back to German experiments on Allied POWs during the Great War.

Ben must return to his Spider persona to battle this army of mutants, which is led by crime boss Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson, a good actor stuck here with comic book villainy).  There’s a love interest in the form of nightclub singer Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), but that fizzles in the absence of any erotic chemistry between Cage and Li.

There are a couple of nice supporting perfs by Jack Huston as a mutant undergoing a crisis of conscience, and from Karen Rodriguez as Ben’s long-suffering Girl Friday.

The real heroes here are production designer Warren Alan Young and cinematographers Darran Tiernan and Peter Deming, who give the series a ravishing look that reminds of “Ripley.”  Prime Video has done something quite wonderful by allowing viewers to choose between color and black-and-white versions of the show.  I much prefer the shadowy, atmospheric B&W, which perfectly captures the atmosphere of film noir classics from Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Anna Maxwell-Harris

“STAR CITY”  (Apple+)

For several seasons “For All Mankind” has given us an alternative history of the U.S. space program, beginning with the early Mercury missions and moving on to the moon landings.  

But whereas in real life NASA reined in its explorations for nearly nearly 40 years, in this version we race on to establish bases on the moon, on Mars, and on asteroids being mined for rare minerals needed back on Earth.

The series appears to be scrupulously scientific in its approach. What makes it really interesting, though, are the ways we carry our human foibles with us to the stars.  Science advances.  Human nature…not so much.

One of more disturbing aspects of “For All Mankind” is its notion that the Soviet Union, far from breaking up, became more controlling than ever.

This notion is taken to the limit in “Star City,” a companion piece that follows the space race from the Russian POV.

Star City is the newly-built, top-secret complex where the Soviet space program does its work.

Rhys Ifans stars as the Chief Designer, determined to expand the USSR’s grasp of the cosmos even when he runs afoul of a stifling party apparatus. His main nemesis is a uniformed security official (Anna Maxwell-Harris) whose dedication to the Party is such that she will kill even a famous cosmonaut who runs afoul of the rules. Not even national heroes are safe.

“Star City” is a vast canvas that pits scientific outreach against the controlling interests of a police state.  We’re talking about hidden microphones in every apartment, neighbors who inform on neighbors, contraband records of American pop groups that can get you permanently exiled to a Siberian work camp.

Despite this downer premise, the series gives us a whole slew of interesting characters, many of whom we end rooting for despite their country’s soul-sucking repression.

Peter Capaldi

“CRIMINAL RECORD” (Apple+)

Peter Capaldi first hit the radar of cineastes as the goofy/gangly  sidekick in Bill Forstythe’s “Local  Hero” (1983) and over the last 50 years has racked up numerous film and TV appearances, including a 43-episode  stint as Dr. Who. 

A few years back his career shifted from charming to chilling…he was a prison inmate with possible supernatural abilities in 2022’s “The Devil’s Hour,” and puts his gray hair and cadaverous  features to good use in “Criminal Record,” playing a Brit police detective who may be as evil and conniving as the killers he goes after. (Nowadays he reminds me of John Carradine’s Dracula…a role he really ought to tackle.)

Cush Jumbo (“The Good Wife,” “The Good Fight”) stars as June Lenker, a cop who stumbles across evidence suggesting that a man doing life in prison for murder is in fact innocent. The cop who put together the case is Daniel Hegarty (Capaldi), an old wolf on the force (meaning possibly racist and misogynist) who isn’t  happy with this young woman questioning his arrest record.

Circumstances force June and Hegarty to work together…and she can never be sure that he isn’t planting little mines to explode in  her lap.

Paul Rutman’s series covers two seasons (in the second our heroes take on a right-wing conspirators who plan to use stolen military detonators to blow up London landmarks), but the scripts also find time to delve into the characters’ personal issues.  Hegarty has a twentysometing daughter with a heroin  habit, while June finds her devotion to the job taking a toll with her live-in boyfriend and teenage son from a failed marriage.

Jumbo makes for an intriguing protagonist (she has just enough foibles to keep her from being a goody-goody) and Capaldi keeps us wondering about where his loyalties lie.

| Robert W. Butler