Hulu-ciné-shins III

A Real Pain (MC-86) is a real pleasure.  Is that too easy – a ready-made blurb?  Never mind – it’s the real truth.  And Jesse Eisenberg is a real filmmaker – writer, director, and star.  He’s paired with Kieran Culkin, in a performance that in ninety fleet minutes rivals his Emmy-winning role in Succession.  He too is the real deal, as well as being the title character, as it were.  Two once-close cousins, in many ways polar opposites, use a bequest from their beloved and recently-deceased grandmother to take a Jewish heritage tour of Poland, including the house where she grew up and the concentration camp she managed to survive.  The Eisenberg character is an anxious New York City digital ad salesman with a wife and young child, while Culkin from upstate is a rule-breaking ne’er-do-well who “lights up any room he walks into, and then shits on everything in it.”  The result is both funny and penetrating.  Highly recommended.
 
In fact, enough to make me seek out Eisenberg’s first film as director, When You Finish Saving the World (MC-61, AMZ).  Eisenberg does not appear in that film, but adapted it from his original audiobook of the same name, with a clear autobiographical impulse.  Finn Wolfhard reprises his role as a teen devoted to social media, and Julianne Moore is his disenchanted mother, a former activist comfortably settled as director of a shelter for women and children.  Theoretically she’s devoted to helping people, while lacking people skills and self-knowledge, and sometimes even common sense.  Moore is excellent in drawing out the ambiguities of her character and engendering ambivalent reactions in the viewer.  I appreciated the film’s unpredictability and unusual setting in Indianapolis, and the foretaste of Eisenberg’s skill, but my recommendation is muted.
 
Returning to Hulu, I did watch the rest of the first season of Rivals (MC-84) and may even come back for the second, now in production.  It’s an amusing, soapy, thoroughly-retrograde British boink-fest set in the Thatcher years, based on a Jilly Cooper novel.  The entertaining cast is led by David Tennant, as the ruthless upper-class owner of a TV station, who hires combative Irish interviewer Aidan Turner as headliner, and feuds with aristocratic ladies-man showjumper-turned-politician Alex Hassell.  There are a host of other bed-hopping characters, and it takes a while to sort them out, and to understand their quirks and machinations.  The characterizations are far from deep, but it’s all good dirty fun.
 
I get the NYT “Watching” newsletter but rarely find it attuned to my tastes, yet they highlighted the French limited series Everything is Fine (IMDB), which I would never have discovered otherwise.  It caught my eye for the presence of Virginie Efira, whom I’ve been talking up for a while (here, e.g.).  Not usually a fan of hospital shows nor sick-child narratives, I nonetheless gave this a chance and was fully engaged.  It’s really a family portrait centered on a girl with leukemia, including her parents and sister, aunt and uncle (plus partners), and grandparents, each having an individual response to the central focus, whether it’s despair or denial, happy talk or panic attack, lust or its opposite.  The cast is good across the board, and creator Camille de Castelnau endows the eight-part series with admirable authenticity, seemingly personal.  Skirting the maudlin, the show remains serious while allowing for humor, and gives each character believable complications.  You’re gonna have to take my word on this one, but I thought it was pretty darn great.
 
Say Nothing (MC-80) is a dramatized companion to the superb documentary series Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (MC-88, PBS) in telling the still-relevant story of The Troubles of the last century.  Based on the highly praised nonfiction book of the same name by Patrick Radden Keefe, it centers on the case of a widowed mother of ten who was abducted and murdered by the IRA on suspicion of being an informer.  Over the course of nine episodes, the series focuses on two teenaged sisters who were implicated in that crime, and also a bombing campaign in London, but flashes back and forth in time to take in decades of conflict, and Gerry Adams’ long journey from terrorist to peacemaker.  Lola Petticrew and Maxine Peake share the central role of Dolours Price, who goes from teen insurgent to prison hunger striker to semi-repentant informer (not to mention the wife of Stephen Rea, star of The Crying Game), but the rest of the cast is equally effective.  Created by Joshua Zetumer, the series is even-handed in detailing the rights and wrongs of both sides of the conflict, offering much food for thought.
 
Like almost all of the best tv series on Hulu, Say Nothing comes via FX (Abbott Elementary being the exception).  They’ve always had some older classic tv shows, but I just went looking for Friday Night Lights and it’s no longer there (Buffy still is!).  A new (old) arrival is the hilarious and seminal British sitcom Peep Show (IMDB), featuring a lot of future award-winners early in their careers.  It has been available elsewhere, but all nine seasons are now on Hulu and decidedly worth watching.
 
In the Summers (MC-83) is a Sundance award winner directed by Alessandra Lacorazza, an autobiographical first feature about two sisters visiting their divorced father in New Mexico.  Played by different actresses – well-matched and persuasive – at three different periods from grade school to college, the sisters have changing relations with their father, a substance-abusing heavily-tattooed party-animal living in a house inherited from his mother, the condition of which is correlative to his own.  The film is composed of elliptical moments and images, more than dramatic events or psychological probing, but it’s evocative of moods and feelings associated with family relations among difficult individuals.  Nothing is resolved, but an impression is made.
 
Ghostlight (MC-83), another Sundance fave, is a family affair -- with a real-life father, mother, and daughter playing the same.  It’s written and directed by another couple – Kelly O’Sullivan is an actress-turned-writer-turned-director with her partner Alex Thompson (see review of their earlier Saint Frances).  Keith Kupferer and Tara Mallen are the parents, and Katherine Mallen Kupferer is a real find as the teen daughter, all in suppressed mourning over the recent death of their son and brother.  The tight-lipped father begins to get in touch with his feelings through participating in a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet, and the daughter joins in for some family healing.  The film is funny and touching in a manner that seems authentic and true to its milieu.  The title meaningfully refers to “the single bulb left on in a dark theater.”
 
The Taste of Things (MC-85) is so, so French.  As food porn, it turned me off more than it turned me on (ugh, all those fish dishes!).  I’m immune to the fetishization of food preparation and consumption.  But as a film about an artist at work, this worked for me, especially when the artist in question is Juliette Binoche.  She’s the longtime cook (and sometime lover) of a noted gourmet, “the Napoleon of gastronomy,” played by her onetime partner Benoit Magimel.  And there’s a beautiful little girl who is a prodigy of the taste buds.  Lovely to look at, Anh Hung Tran’s film transpires in the heyday of Impressionism and through fields of wildflowers, as well as protracted scenes amid the copper pots of a country kitchen, along with glimpses of the boudoir.  I rarely quote other critics, but Ann Hornaday of WaPo simply nails it: “Binoche is so gifted, she no longer seems to act anymore: She just is, in all her serene confidence and physical charisma.”  The same could be said of this film.
 
Thelma (MC-77) is a feisty 93-year-old, as is June Squibb, the actress playing her with considerable aplomb.  Josh Margolin’s debut feature was a Sundance crowd-pleaser, with all that implies.  Cute and soft-baked, family-friendly, undemanding, with a recognizable cast and a relatable theme.  The thin script is enlivened by the authenticity of Margolin’s affection for his own grandmother, on whom the story is based, until it takes a comic action-hero turn.  She’s an independent senior scammed out of $10K, who decides to take the matter into her own hands, enlisting a confederate with a two-seat scooter on a mission into a seedy area of LA to retrieve her money, gun in purse.  Weightless but inoffensive.
 
I wish I could recommend Lee (MC-62), but this disappointing biopic about Lee Miller, the first feature directed by distinguished cinematographer Ellen Kuras, is undermined by a diffuse script with some misjudged twists.  Kate Winslet is predictably excellent as the title character, a Vogue model and artistic muse who became a wartime photographer and documented the discovery of German concentration camps after WWII.  The supporting cast is stellar, but underused.  For example, what is Josh O’Connor doing here and why wasn’t his character properly defined?  This is a film that didn’t do enough by trying to do too much, but it does provide the backstory for many of Lee Miller’s most famous pictures.
 
I finally caught up with Robot Dreams (MC-87), an Oscar nominee for animated feature last year.  At first the animation struck me as simple and childish, but Pablo Berger’s film is neither.  It’s sophisticated both visually and emotionally, and full of old movie references.  It’s a soulful time capsule of NYC in the 1980s, with the Twin Towers still dominating the skyline.  The residents in the many street scenes are a vast assortment of animals, from an octopus as a sidewalk drummer to a bull as a policeman.  Dog is the main character; feeling lonely, he orders and assembles an Amica 2000 robot to be his best friend.  The robot takes to the role with gusto, and the two enjoy many outings in the city, to the joyous strains of Earth Wind & Fire’s “September,” until at Ocean Beach on the last day of summer the robot rusts in place and the beach is closed before Dog can return to extricate it.  They spend the long winter in wordless dreams of reunion.  You’ll have to watch to find out what happens, but this film is a treasure.
 
Here I must mention another wordless animation with animal characters, which could not be more different in style.  I watched it on the same night as the previous, so I’ll include it here, since I won’t be doing a MAX round-up any time soon.  Flow (MC-87) is a Latvian film nominated this year for both animation and international feature Oscars, and worthy of either or both.  It already has a case full of trophies for its blend of realistic yet magical animation, majestically beautiful.  After a devastating flood wipes out the human race, a black cat joins with a friendly labrador, a capybara, a ringtailed lemur, and a secretarybird in search of a safe harbor.  Not a word is uttered, but the animals all exhibit characteristic behaviors and personalities, as they face various trials on their “incredible journey.”  Wonder-full!
 
An Oscar nominee for best documentary feature, Sugarcane (MC-90) investigates the attempt by colonial powers to subjugate Indigenous peoples, specifically Canada’s attempt to “solve the Indian problem,” by wrenching children from First Nation communities (of which Sugarcane is one) to abusive residential schools run by the Catholic Church.  Something similar happened to Aboriginals in Australia and Native Americans in the U.S., all of it horrifying in retrospect.  The filmmakers and the community literally dig into the history of one such school in British Columbia, exhuming unmarked graves and histories of sexual abuse, infanticide, and suicide, among everyday cruelties.  Directed by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, this film is both an exposé and an exercise in truth and reconciliation.
 
Sly Lives (MC-77) is rather like an appendix to Questlove’s great concert film Summer of Soul (reviewed here), which prompted the question “Whatever happened to Sly Stone?”  This new film seeks to answer that question.  The first half is exhilarating as it shows just what Sly and the Family Stone represented during a five-year period around 1970 – with its blend of soul and rock, male and female, black and white – and the second is depressingly familiar in charting the corrosive effects of fame and drugs.  His downhill slide is depicted, but balanced by the commentary of Black musicians who followed in his footsteps, in a mix of jubilation and consternation.
 
I got stuck with another month of Disney on coming back to Hulu, and the only new thing I wanted to see was Beatles ’64 (MC-78).  I frequently talk about films as time capsules, and this documentary is exactly that, neatly positioning the Beatles’ first American tour as the cultural antidote to JFK’s assassination a few months before.  The film is a live-wire compendium of footage shot during those two weeks by the great documentarians Albert and David Maysles; television coverage of performances on the tour; and retrospective comments by the Beatles themselves and assorted superfans.  All the older footage is beautifully restored.  Sadly, older feet cannot be so restored, but they can be set to tapping.
 
I willingly stick with Hulu on a continuing basis, since its programming ranks with the best streaming channels and because its flexible policy allows the subscriber to pause the account for 1 to 12 weeks and reactivate at will.  But you need to know what you’re looking for on the channel, since the homepage and interface do not do justice to the breadth of offerings on Hulu, which for me is second only to Criterion, and a step ahead of the rest of the streaming pack.  Case in point – just as I was about pause my subscription, I saw that Hulu is poised to offer multiple-Oscar nominee Anora within the next month, along with other films on my must-watch list, so I’ll append another short post before pausing Hulu again.
 

Under the Kanopy

Over on Kanopy, the library-based alternative to Criterion, I found a new film I was very eager to see, The Old Oak (MC-69), reportedly Ken Loach’s final film.  And a fine swan song it is.  The title is the name of the surviving pub in an old mining village near Durham, where the mine shut down years ago, and in 2016 Syrian refugees are being bussed in to reside in vacant houses.  Dave Turner plays the depressed pub owner who is helping to get them settled (a former union man who is a proponent of solidarity rather than charity), and first-timer Ebla Mari superbly embodies the soulful young woman with whom he forms a platonic bond.  She’s an aspiring photographer who learned English in a refugee camp and speaks for her mother and younger brothers, with their father still imprisoned by the Assad regime.  There’s a Greek chorus of down-at-heels pub dwellers, undoubted Brexit voters who resent the newcomers, but who have a valid point about their own abandonment by the powers-that-be once the mine shut down.  Loach remains a progressive social critic, but allows himself a final expression of hope in the collective strength of the powerless joining together.
 
Also on Kanopy, Martin Scorsese follows up his “personal journeys” through American and Italian film with Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (MC-83), in which he relates his intimate appreciation for the films of The Archers, the partnership between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.  He doesn’t just survey their Forties string of masterpieces from Colonel Blimp through I Know Where I’m Going and Black Narcissus to The Red Shoes, but also recounts his early viewings as a sickly child stuck at home and struck by seeing them on a small b&w tv, and his ultimate appropriation of some of their techniques in his own distinguished films, not to mention the close personal relationship he developed with Powell.  This documentary is excellent as an introduction to The Archers’ work or a reminder of their greatness, either way a prompt to watch these classic films, most available on the Criterion Channel.
 
Another Kanopy find was Aisha (MC-81).  The title character, a Nigerian woman seeking asylum in Ireland, is movingly played by Letitia Wright, a revelation to me but apparently already a star in the Marvel universe.  She’s hard-working and kind, but perpetually jerked around by the system.  A security guard in her group home, played by the always-accomplished Josh O’Connor (whose lower-class Irish accent requires captions more than her Nigerian inflections), takes an interest in her and tries to help her navigate the rocky road to permanent resident status.  Frank Berry’s film delicately follows the reticent arc of their relationship, in addition to documenting the harsh realities of immigrant life.
 
I’m always up for a new Virginie Efira film, so I was happy to see Just the Two of Us (MC-65) pop up on Kanopy’s new releases.  Perhaps you would need to share my (and the French film industry’s) infatuation with her to really like this film; or my attachment to strong, independent actresses in the mold of Barbara Stanwyck; or fondness for Sirkian “women’s picture” melodramas.  Valerie Donzelli’s film may be marketed as an erotic thriller, but it’s really a portrait of a marriage gone wrong.  We witness the first spark between Efira and co-star Melvil Poupaud burst into hot romance and quick marriage, and follow step by step as she begins to realize her husband is a domestic abuser, subtly at first and then overtly.  Efira has a double role as twin sisters, also alluded to in the title, but her husband breaks that bond to maintain exclusive control.  Tension is ratcheted up, but the violence is more emotional than physical.
 
That warmed me up for another French-language exploration of mating habits, The Nature of Love (MC-80), written and directed by the Canadian Monia Chokri.  The philosophical rom-com is a rare amalgam, and on the scale that runs from my personal favorite Eric Rohmer to a crowd-pleaser-that-doesn’t-please-me such as The Worst Person in the World, this one edges over the line toward the latter.  The unknown-to-me performers are all appealing enough, but the main character’s alternation of her classroom lectures to seniors on various philosophers’ definitions of love, her unexciting long-term relationship to a decent well-off guy, and her steamy Lady Chatterley interludes with the workman renovating their lake house in the country, fail to come together in a mutually satisfying way.  The social comedy with friends and relatives comes off best, but neither the romance nor the comedy of the woman’s quandary really landed with me.   
 
Turning back from romance to politics, here are several highly-praised films that I found on Kanopy:
 
Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border (MC-90) is a punishing but rewarding film about the immigration crisis on the wooded, swampy border between Belarus and Poland.  We follow a group of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan as they become helpless pawns in a geopolitical conflict, pushed back and forth by paramilitary units on both sides of the barbed wire.  This documentary-like film, brilliantly shot in black & white, is an immersive experience, bearing witness to all-too-prevalent human misery.  (And eliciting uncomfortable reflections on what’s about to happen on our own southern border.)  We follow a three-generation family group from their hopeful arrival by plane in Belarus, with arrangements to cross over into the E.U. to seek asylum with relatives in Sweden, joined by an “auntie” who speaks English and has money to offer bribes along the way.  Step by step, all that is stripped away, reducing them to the “animals” they are accused of being.  Their fates interweave with two other stories, of a border guard with some compunction about the mandated brutality, and a psychologist who joins up with a group of activists who provide what help they can to the refugees.  Thankfully, the film reaches some final gestures of ambivalent hope, or it would be just too dark to bear.  This caps Holland’s long, distinguished, international career in film and tv direction, but she’s not done yet, currenting shooting a film about Franz Kafka.
 
Too much of a good thing.  That’s how I would characterize Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat (MC-91), an Oscar nominee for Best Documentary.  It’s a vital retelling of a nearly-forgotten episode in C.I.A. “diplomacy” – the assassination of Patrice Lumumba -- weaving together disparate themes in an effective manner, which is undermined by some stylistic innovations and a cavalier disregard for chronology.  Rather than voiceover, quotations are typed out on screen, with tiny citations that are impossible to take in, which adds to the visual jumble.  The basic juxtaposition of global Black liberation and American reaction around 1960, with performance clips of a variety of Black jazz musicians, does yield context for Louis Armstrong’s CIA-backed blackwashing tour of Africa at the time.  And examinations of Cold War ideology – embodied in Allen Dulles’ pipe-smoking smugness and Khruschev’s desk-pounding at the U.N. – are well-served by bringing in the commentary of Malcolm X on Third World decolonization and racialism.  A lot is covered, from the Suez crisis to the Congolese civil war, but the viewer must supply their own timeline to make sense of the sequence of events.  Lumumba himself remains an enigma, but Belgian director Johan Grimonpriz amply documents not just the Belgian mining concern that fomented division in the former colony, but the American pattern of undermining the elected leaders of other countries for its own political, economic, or strategic interests.
 
Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano (MC-79) won lots of awards and nominations last year, but I was daunted by the grim subject matter and delayed watching.  The story of two teenage cousins leaving Senegal in pursuit of some dream of Europe is hard and dark, rife with exploitation and savagery at every turn, but also heroism and endurance.  From endless bus rides to a brutal truck ride to treks on foot across a trackless expanse of desert to a perilous boat ride with Sicily as the goal, the boys are expressively depicted, subject to trials and torture graphically rendered.  It’s definitely a tough watch, but sure to engender compassion for the fates of so many immigrants worldwide, at least by those capable of compassion.  The end may seem improbable, but this true story was the germ of the film, along with the documentary testimony of actual immigrants.  
 
Are you ready for a three-hour Vietnamese film about death, faith, and immortality?  It took me a while to get there, but I was grateful for the experience.  Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (MC-94) is certainly a rarified taste.  I admired filmmaker Thien An Pham’s debut feature for its stylistic audacity, but did not always muster the patience he requires.  Still, so much of the film is beautiful and magical, verging on spiritual, that I didn’t mind the longueurs and the enigmas, many of which resolve if you’re willing to wait and pay close attention.  The story (and the camera) weaves its way back and forth in time and space, light and dark, dream and waking.  It follows a young man from the countryside, morally adrift in Saigon, who is forced by family tragedy to return to his home village, in a wandering and wondering search for lost connections.  The viewer is compelled to face the same question as the character, “What exactly is happening here?”  Not to mention, where is this going and when will it end?  These three hours are slow (and puzzling) to be sure, but worth the journey.
 
How about an under-two-hour Swedish film about death, faith, and immortality?  Hilma (MC-61) is a lot easier to watch, and it’s even in English, as most of journeyman director Lasse Hallstrom’s films have been.  This biopic of the belatedly-celebrated painter Hilma af Klint is sort of a home movie for him, as she is well played by daughter Tora Hallstrom in younger years and wife Lena Olin in later years.  It’s a lush period piece (incorporating old color footage of Stockholm street scenes) that does justice to the artist’s amazing story and her work.  She can be called a credible precursor to both Kandinsky and Pollock in painterly abstraction.  Her purity of vision prefigured her eventual resurrection.  Kanopy also offers the documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (MC-78), which got my enthusiastic recommendation here (scroll down to end of that post).  
 
Having just watched Emilia Perez, I took the opportunity to watch Jacques Audiard’s previous film, Paris, 13^th District (MC-76).  If he was channeling Baz Luhrman in the newer film, he seems to have been bent on updating Eric Rohmer in the earlier.  You can probably guess which I prefer.  This black &white sexual roundelay of young people, set in an unglamorous section of the French capital of love, recalls several Rohmer films and has a decided nouvelle vague feel.  It also benefits from the writing assistance of Céline Sciamma, and her star from Portrait of a Woman on Fire, Noémie Merlant.  We follow our four lead characters from bed to bed, as the connections shift.  Tastefully sexy, the film is deliciously humorous and deftly characterized – just what one wants from a French rom-com in the age of Tinder.
 
Finally on Kanopy, there’s One Life (MC-69), a perfectly decent Schindler’s List Lite, in which a British stockbroker organizes an effort to get hundreds of refugee children out of Czechoslovakia before the outbreak of WWII, with his effort memorialized by a television program with the survivors in the 1980s.  He’s played by Johnny Flynn in the flashback sequences and Anthony Hopkins in the latter time frame.  Not a bad film, but nothing new or particularly revealing.  Striking how many of the films covered in this post deal with refugees and immigrants from a European perspective.
 
Besides these new releases, Kanopy has a huge back catalogue of films and tv shows, foreign and domestic, classic and recent.  If you have a school or public library card, it’s worth checking to see if it gives free access to Kanopy.  It’s even worth the effort to acquire a qualifying library card.  Start here.
 
[DVD addendum]  Getting a mammoth boxed set of Elia Kazan films from the library, I watched two I had never seen, from the beginning to the climax of his career as film director.  Kazan has made some of my favorite films, from On the Waterfront to Splendor in the Grass, but somehow I managed to miss his first, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Wiki), about an Irish-American family in Williamsburg in 1912.  After a prodigious career in NYC theater, this uncharacteristic assignment was the first film he directed.  Some traces of stage acting remain, but by the end more trust in the camera begins to emerge.  Peggy Ann Garner is more natural than most child actresses of the time, and won a special Oscar, as did James Dunn as her father, a good-hearted but alcoholic singing waiter.  Dorothy Maguire has the thankless role as the spoilsport drudge of a housewife, with Joan Blondell as her spirited sister.  Very watchable, on the whole.
 
Like me an ethnic loner as a student at Williams College, Kazan mined his immigrant background in America America (Wiki), telling the largely true story of his uncle, who emigrated as an ethnic Greek from Turkey (eventually bringing Kazan over from his birthplace Istanbul, as a child with his parents).  In widescreen B&W, with more than a hint of neorealism in its depiction, the film follows our young hero (?) from Armenian massacres in Anatolia to rug merchants in Istanbul to slave labor in order to purchase passage to America, and final arrival in the promised land of dreams.  Cinematographer Haskell Wexler and editor Dede Allen help Kazan make his favorite and most personal film, and certainly one of his best.

Net-flix-ations III

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (MC-83) brought me back to Netflix for its day of release, and brought Nick Park and Aardman Animation back to their glory days, with the return of the wacky inventor and his canny canine companion.  Animation has moved largely to CGI over the past two decades, but Aardman retains their handmade quality in malleable clay figures on custom-built sets.  The nonstop wit remains, in tiny details and sweeping cinematic scenes, as well as the endearing relation between the title characters.  Wallace’s invention of a garden-gnome odd-job robot threatens to come between them, until Gromit solves the problem, as he usually does.  A diamond-heist villain returns to raise the stakes and provide wild action sequences.  Love the canal boat chase sequence!  Perhaps this wouldn’t be a bad intro to W&G, but I advise starting with their string of Oscar-winning shorts from the 1990s.
 
Writer-director Nathan Silver breaks out of the indie ghetto with Between the Temples (MC-83).  I can imagine the elevator pitch, “It’s A Serious Man meets Harold and Maude – picture Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane as the leads.”  And lead they do – to quite a funny and touching mélange of satire and romance.  He’s a cantor who lost his voice when he lost his wife, in a fall on the ice of upstate NY.  Living in his “moms’” basement, in desperation he goes into a bar, has some unfamiliar drinks, gets into a scuffle, and is rescued by an older woman in similarly desperate straits.  She turns out to be his grade school music teacher, and soon asks the cantor to prepare her for a long-denied bat mitzvah, which becomes a redemptive bond between them.  Carol Kane is marvelous in the role, and Schwartzman inhabits the skin of the schlubby cantor.  Shot and edited in a jagged style that can be hard to watch but ultimately conveys an effective intimacy, this film includes a lot of good Jewish jokes, verbal and visual, and a fair share of heartfulness.
 
I Used to Be Funny (MC-74) is definitely the Rachel Sennott show, as she plays her character, a stand-up comedian in Toronto, both before and after a traumatic event, which is arrived at circuitously in the back-and-forth narrative.  First-time writer-director Ally Pankiw honed her chops on the excellent Mae Martin series Feel Good, and maintains the balance of comedy and drama here, working in a number of contemporary themes.  A good and honest effort, this film is watchable but not unmissable.
 
Cunk on Life (MC-75) offers more of the same after Cunk on Earth (reviewed here).  Not much to add other than I laughed a lot, continuing to enjoy Diane Morgan’s portrayal of clueless tv presenter Philomena Cunk, and the assorted British academics she pranks with ridiculous questions.  Not sure which to recommend – Earth was a well-structured series of six half-hour episodes, Life is a 71-minute potpourri of afterthoughts.  Best to watch both.
 
I wasn’t pre-sold on A Man on the Inside (MC-75), but recommendations from two couples who are fellow shoppers for a retirement community, plus its inspiration by the celebrated Chilean documentary The Mole Agent, were enough for me to give it a try.  Which I never did to creator Mike Schur’s previous series The Good Place or Brooklyn Ninety-Nine (though I was very fond of his co-creation Parks & Recreation).  So I was somewhat surprised by how much I liked this gentle comedy-mystery about aging.  Ted Danson holds it all together as a retired engineering professor and recent widower, who’s hired by a private investigator to go undercover into a well-appointed San Francisco old-folks home to solve a series of thefts, and incidentally to interact with a variety of staff and residents.  While funny at times and moving at times, the clincher here is truthfulness of characterization.  The series doesn’t overstay its welcome in eight roughly-half-hour episodes, but I’d have to be lured back for further seasons, which are already teased.
 
With its 13 Oscar noms outweighing my suspicion that it was not my sort of film, I took a look at Emilia Perez (MC-71).  And my conclusion was – that it’s not my sort of film, but nonetheless has some redeeming qualities.  Largely, the cast of women who collectively won Best Actress at Cannes, and particularly Oscar nominees Zoe Saldana and Karla Sofia Gascon.  The latter plays a Mexican drug lord who transitions into the eponymous female activist trying to ameliorate some of the violence he was responsible for in the past.  The former is a brilliant but underappreciated lawyer who is recruited as consigliere.  Jacques Audiard’s film is a wild mix of genres -- musical, thriller, melodrama – which was enough to keep me watching, but less than enthralled or convinced.
 
Saturday Night (MC-63) is a hectically-paced 90-minute run-up to the debut of Saturday Night Live in 1975, a show destined to die a chaotic early death that has somehow endured for 50 years.  I approached Jason Reitman’s film with some skepticism but was won over by its fast-paced recreation of a seminal moment in TV history.  Most of the central cast is unfamiliar (though Rachel Sennott is becoming better known), but surprisingly reminiscent of the original characters.  The currently familiar faces (e,g, Willem Dafoe, J.K. Simmons, and Nicholas Braun) are all in hilarious cameos.  Maybe you had to “be there” at the creation to appreciate this fond and funny retelling, but it certainly got a marginal “thumb up” from me.
 
With this month of Netflix, I watched the second season of Top Boy (MC-86) from British TV in 2013.  When I return for future months, I’ll go on to the three subsequent seasons produced by Netflix.  For now, all I’ll say is that this UK clone of The Wire is not humiliated by the comparison, at least as far as the drug dealing storyline goes.  It will be interesting to see if the remaining seasons broaden their focus, in the way that The Wire did so memorably.
 
Netflix was once, back in DVD days, the be-all and end-all of viewer choice, and then had a brief phase of throwing money at all kinds of content providers, including genuine auteurs, but now has settled into an algorithmic content-provider that does not rank among the top three (or five?) streaming channels for quality.  As of now, I’m cancelling until they give me a solid reason to renew.
 
Speaking of once-substantial streaming channels that have really given up on producing or offering outstanding content, there’s Amazon Prime.  Hard to find much worth watching there (plus having to endure commercials), but I was drawn to The Road Dance (MC-54) by its setting in the Outer Hebrides a century ago, then put off by its low Metacritic rating.  But casually browsing one time, I thought to give it a try, and surprisingly watched the whole film.  The location, already familiar from the writings of Robert Macfarlane, was indeed appealing, as was the unfamiliar lead actress, Hermione Corfield.  Both were pretty as a picture, and enough to keep me watching all the way through a rather familiar melodrama of love, sex, childbirth, and war.

P.S.  On the day my Netflix cancellation took effect, I read a NYT rave about Asura (MC-89), a new Japanese series on the channel.  It had been out for three weeks, and if I had known that it was directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, a particular favorite of mine, I would surely have watched immediately.  Despite its vaunted algorithm, Netflix never even showed me the title, in the endless scroll of its home page, let alone recommend it to me based on my past viewing.  Critics already anointing the series as the best of 2025 may induce Netflix to give the show more visibility, but its unceremonious dumping says something about the economic imperatives of what the channel is pushing.  Despite my ragging on Netflix, there is a ton of worthwhile viewing there, if you dig for it amid what’s dumped on you.  You need to know what to search for, and that’s a service I aim to provide.

Counting on Criterion

With a bargain annual subscription, I don’t feel the need to pause the Criterion Channel during months when I’m not that deep into watching their offerings, because I’ll always have plenty to catch up on when I turn my attention that way.  After a season when political, baseball, and basketball races consumed so much of my viewing time, I returned to some serious cinematic exploration.
 
We’ll start with some of Criterion’s recent “Exclusive Premieres,” and then survey the monthly collections that I have recently dipped into.
 
After his Oscar-winning Drive My Car, I put Ryusuki Hamaguchi on my list of must-watch directors.  First, I tracked down his earlier films Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Happy Hour.  And now Criterion offers his latest award-winner Evil Does Not Exist (MC-83).  To tell the truth, I had some problems with the beginning and the ending, but in-between I was as usual entranced by his work.  A long tracking shot upwards through a forest canopy makes for a very extended credit sequence, and what follows are protracted scenes of a solitary rural workman sawing wood and then collecting water from a stream, which seem designed to school the viewer in patience and attentiveness, but do pay off handsomely later in the film.  It makes sense that this film started out as a short to accompany a musical score by Eiko Ishibashi, then developed into a feature.  When dialogue actually starts, it bursts out like an action movie, as locals debate the prospect of a new glamping project that will impact the very nature of their community.  With his usual evenhandedness, Hamaguchi turns villains into sympathetic characters, with seeming heroes resorting to highly-questionable behavior.  Watching this, be prepared to wait for the light but expect darkness to descend.
 
On the other hand, Catherine Breillat is not a director who attracts my interest, but I was willing to give Last Summer (MC-75) a try, and I didn’t regret it, mainly for the lead performance of Léa Drucker.  She plays a lawyer who deals in sex abuse cases, but finds herself in an explicitly-illegal affair with her 17-year-old stepson.  This “Summer” is hot but more dry than wet.  We may wonder “what does she think she’s doing?” but the actress somehow retains our sympathy despite the filmmaker’s rather unpleasant intentions.  Is that ambivalent enough for you?
 
Here (MC-92) follows an ambling man at an ambling pace, but this Bas Devos film certainly arrives at its chosen destination.  It’s slow, but short and sweet – at first I didn’t get it, but eventually I loved it.  He’s a Romanian workman on construction sites in Brussels, about to go home for a vacation, uncertain whether he will return, clearing out his refrigerator to make soup for a round of friends.  She’s a Chinese academic working on a doctoral thesis about mosses.  They’re both very reticent, but the connection is elemental, in the fugitive greenery of a concrete jungle.  The visual and sound design are precise and evocative, the performers attractive and engaging, the film a delicate but delicious concoction.
 
Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (MC-80) derives from a Henry James novella, but in a mélange of genres that don’t generally appeal to me, from sci-fi to stalker film, and the trailer suggests an outright horror film.  Nonetheless, Léa Seydoux holds it all together and makes the extended runtime tolerable, as she and her counterpart George MacKay meet and hesitantly woo in three different timeframes: 1910 Paris, 2014 California, and a 2044 dominated by AI.  Surprised to see the film come in at #5 for 2024 in Film Comment’s critics poll, I was not immune to its appeal and its inventive visual sense, but I’m not tempted to a second viewing to make more sense of it.  It was enough to spend 2½ hours in the seductive company of Ms. Seydoux.
 
It's been almost a decade since I set foot in a movie theater, but if there’s one film I would have preferred to see on a big screen, it’d be Songs of Earth (MC-85).  I’d take my typical front-&-center seat and just immerse myself in its sights and sounds.  Margreth Olin invites us to spend a year in the company of her elderly parents amidst the remote farming village where her family has lived for hundreds of years, set among the glacial glories of a Norwegian fjord.  And she rewards us with a sublime evocation of a transcendental landscape, literally following the footsteps of her 84-year-old father to wondrous sights, macro and micro, animal and mineral, especially with exquisite drone footage, through a cycle of seasons beautifully orchestrated by natural and musical sounds.  The father’s wisdom and the parents’ enduring relationship, embedded in a long history of place and people, rounds off this superlative film.  It’s a delightful cinematic treat for any viewer in a contemplative state of mind, an armchair journey to the ruggedly beautiful top of the world.  This is the sort of offering that makes the Criterion Channel indispensable.
 
Chicken for Linda! (MC-84) is a French animated film about a mother and child trying to recall the dead husband and father by making his favorite dish, chicken with peppers.  This being France, they are thwarted by a general strike that means no chicken is available, which leads to a caper and a police chase, among other raucous goings-on.  The slight premise is enlivened by simple hand-drawn animation in a busy Fauvist color scheme, along with musical numbers.  The look is highly distinctive, the story somewhat scattered, but nonetheless funny and touching.
 
Though Iran has largely suppressed its internationally-acclaimed filmmakers, a new voice emerges with Terrestrial Verses (MC-83) by a directorial pair who compiled this clever satirical amalgam of nine minimalist vignettes that illuminate the constraints imposed by the fundamentalist regime.  The effect is both maddening and hilarious, as some unseen functionary confronts a hapless petitioner with a roundabout rationale for why their request cannot be granted, whether it be naming a child or obtaining a driver’s license or getting a job or retrieving a dog.  We are put in the position of the unseen, unsympathetic official staring balefully at a citizen trying to understand the ever-shifting rules of the game.  Nobody gets beaten with a truncheon, but everybody gets beaten down, in an outrageous manner that is often laugh-out-loud funny.
 
The only streaming channel that comes anywhere close to having as many exclusive premieres of off-beat excellence as Criterion is MUBI, but the latter is worth only the occasional month’s subscription, while Criterion has enough depth and variety with its back catalogue and monthly collections to warrant an ongoing annual subscription.  Watch for a month’s worth of MUBI coming up.
 
Having fallen for Fallen Leaves, I’ve been on the lookout for earlier films by Aki Kaurismäki, and Criterion offered The Other Side of Hope (MC-84).  By now I’m familiar with his minimalist deadpan style, and receptive to the heart and humor that underlies it, which leads to “humane” as the epithet most commonly applied to the director.  This film tracks a Syrian refugee who arrives in Helsinki as a stowaway, and also follows a haberdashery salesman, who leaves his job and his wife to take over a sketchy restaurant.  The two stories eventually interweave, with interludes of Finnish street musicians between scenes.  Stylized the film may be, but it’s also an honest exploration of issues of immigration and reaction.
 
Turning to recent month-by-month collections on Criterion, I gravitated to “Lionel Rogosin’s Dangerous Docufictions,” but I think you’d need to have my lifelong interest in documentaries and predilection for neorealism to join me in seeking out the 1956 classic On the Bowery (Wiki).  In the tradition of Robert Flaherty, Rogosin does stage scenes with non-actors, but the film is a fascinating time capsule of NYC, redolent of the boozy breath of the Bowery’s denizens, in a portrayal of the desperate sorrows and fleeting joys of an outcast life.  Black Roots (Wiki) is an intriguing time capsule from 1970, a perspective on Black culture at the time, with street portraiture of Black faces, intercut with conversations among a group of Black activists and musicians.  That was so resonant an example of politically-engaged, no-budget filmmaking that I glanced at several more Rogosin films, but did not stick with any of them.
 
“Hitchcock for the Holidays” collected 19 of the maestro’s films, a great chance to take in a number of classics.  The one I was most eager to see again was Shadow of a Doubt (Wiki), highlighted by the performances of Theresa Wright and Joseph Cotton as “Charlie” and “Uncle Charlie,” the small-town niece gradually turning from adoration to suspicion of her worldly namesake.  With a minimum of violence, this humorous suspense film holds up with Hitchcock’s best, whom I’ve always admired as an artisan and entertainer, but rarely felt an affinity for as an artist.  Not sure how long this collection will linger on Criterion, but it’s a great opportunity to sample all the phases of Hitchcock’s career.

 
Similarly, in the “Pre-Code Columbia” collection, the one I wanted to see again was the standout 1932 film Forbidden (Wiki), directed by Frank Capra and starring Barbara Stanwyck.  Perhaps I was not quite as enamored of this as when in the throes of putting together my career summary of Stanwyck, but it’s still worth recommending.  She’s excellent as usual, and Adolphe Menjou very good as the ambitious politician with whom she has a lifelong secret relationship, but Ralph Bellamy is an irritant as the newspaper editor who makes trouble for them.
 
In an Ida Lupino collection I caught up with The Hard Way (Wiki) in which she plays a hard woman who rises from hardscrabble roots by ruthlessly stage managing the career of her talented younger sister (Joan Leslie), and lifts this film above the usual run of show biz backstories (this one supposedly based on Ginger Rogers’ bio).  Lupino referred to herself the “the poor man’s Bette Davis,” and Davis reportedly regretted passing up this role after she saw Lupino’s performance.  That was from 1943, but I watched three more of her films, all from 1941, and each confirms her actor-father’s judgment that she was “born to be bad,” a characterization she managed to escape by becoming a director herself.  In High Sierra (Wiki), opposite Humphrey Bogart, and The Sea Wolf (Wiki), opposite John Garfield, she plays thinly-veiled prostitutes on the run.  Returning to her British roots in Ladies in Retirement (Wiki), she’s a Victorian ladies companion, who turns to murder in desperation to keep her two “peculiar” sisters out of an institution.  All are watchable if you get pleasure from old Hollywood studio movies, but none is an unmissable classic.
 
I’ve always been averse to a simpering quality in the sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Haviland, but each of them did some good work outside of their routine performances, probably having to do with the quality of director they were working with.  Fontaine shows some surprising wit in Frenchman’s Creek (Wiki), Mitchell Leisen’s adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier novel.  This Restoration-era costume drama set in Cornwall is shot in eye-popping Technicolor and was in 1944 the most expensive film Paramount had ever made.  It’s sort of bodice-ripper in which no bodices are ripped, as Lady Dona’s romance with a French pirate seems rather chaste.  It’s all quite lush and absurd, a fitfully-amusing piece of wartime escapist entertainment.
 
Film history is my history, in more than one sense, and among the pleasures of seeing or re-seeing American movies from my younger years is being reminded of -or introduced to - the culture of the period.  But the main draw for Angel Face (Wiki), an Otto Preminger film noir from 1953, was Jean Simmons as the eponymous femme fatale.  Robert Mitchum is aloof and impassive, too tough to be taken in, but still caught in her web of intrigue.  Leon Ames steals the show as a fancy lawyer who knows how to play the jury for a not-guilty verdict.  This film has an amusing backstory as Howard Hughes’ revenge on Simmons for cutting off her hair to spite him – check out the stiff wigs she was made to wear all the way through.
 
One appeal of the Criterion Channel derives from its genetic connection with TCM, which provides retrospective window into 20^th century English-language film, and by now even those of the 90s are “oldies.”  Here are a couple of former favorites I was happy to revisit, both by directors who were among “10<50,” my film series at the Clark on its 50^th anniversary, celebrating the best directors under fifty.
 
Alexander Payne first broke through with Election (MC-83), which deserves inclusion on any list of the best films about politics, albeit about a student government contest in Omaha, Nebraska.  Reece Witherspoon was great as a go-getting high schooler, and startlingly young in retrospect.  Matthew Broderick was also first-rate as the teacher she bedevils.  The film holds up for hilarious satire, but seems even more incisive about the nature of our politics.  And Payne continues to make good films, up through The Holdovers so far.
 
Cameron Crowe followed up Say Anything with the equally-endearing Singles (MC-71), before hitting an early peak with Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, whose success he has not come close to matching since.  Singles follows a group of Seattle twentysomethings in the early grunge era, and boasts winning performances from Campbell Scott, Bridget Fonda, Matt Dillon, and Kyra Sedgwick.  Crowe’s period rom-com has a notable authenticity when compared to something like Reality Bites, where Ben Stiller wastes the likes of Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke.
 
Speaking of Hawke, another 90s film that seemed worth another look was Gattaca (MC-64), one of the rare sci-fi films that I remember liking.  And it’s certainly the pairing of Hawke with Uma Thurman - whom he would soon marry - that gives the film luster.  Along with Jude Law, some notable cameos, and the overall theme of genetic engineering.  Not sure Andrew Nicoll’s film held up on second look, but it’s certainly worth a first.
 
Going back to earlier collections, I watched some films that may have rotated off the channel by now.  Having found surprising depth in Linda Darnell, I thought to give another unfamiliar Forties star a chance.  I’m afraid I still can’t see the appeal of Gene Tierney, but I found Leave Her to Heaven (Wiki) quite interesting nonetheless.  Shading noir into Sirkian Technicolor melodrama, it offers lavishly photographed vacation spots in New Mexico, Georgia, and Maine, with Tierney insanely (indeed murderously) jealous of husband Cornel Wilde (hard to imagine all round).  One of the most popular films of the immediate post-WWII era, this is a (sometimes inadvertently) entertaining cultural time capsule.
 
The continuing relevance of the Scopes trial was highlighted in reviews of Brenda Wineapple’s recent book about it, Keeping the Faith.  So when Criterion’s collection of “Courtroom Dramas” included Inherit the Wind (Wiki), I gave it another look.  Written as a parable of McCarthyism in the 1950s, this play was filmed by Stanley Kramer, famous at the time for his middlebrow liberalism, and stars Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow’s stand-in, Fredric March as William Jennings Bryan’s, and a nondancing Gene Kelly as the acerbic journalist H.L. Mencken’s.  They’re all quite good, and the dramatized issues of militant fundamentalism seem up to the minute, even though the trial happened a century ago.
 
In the same collection, I was attracted by the cast of Runaway Jury (MC-61) even though it was directed by a guy I never heard of, and based on an author I’ve never deigned to read, even while selling lots of his books back in the day – John Grisham.  But John Cusack, Rachel Weisz, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman? – sounds like a must-see.  Unfortunately, no.  That group can keep you watching, but nothing else about the film seems at all plausible.  And given the continuing relevance of mass shootings, this legal drama about the culpability of gun manufacturers is tissue-thin.
 
That may be a downbeat end to a celebratory survey, but you can bet I’ll be back with further explorations of Criterion.  I’ll break off here and return soon with surveys of new releases on Kanopy and on Netflix, with Mubi on the horizon.
 

Bushels of Apple

I think it’s fair to refer to AppleTV+ as the new HBO, not having the most product in the pipeline, but what’s there is “cherce” (cf. Kate Hepburn in Pat and Mike).  My previous round-ups are here and here.  Some of their headliners do not appeal to me, but we’ll start with new seasons of three series I really like.
 
Sharon Horgan, as writer and lead actress, has been a must-watch for me since Catastrophe, so I was eager to see Bad Sisters (MC-76) come back for an unexpected second season (first reviewed here).  It did not disappoint, but I’m glad that Horgan considers the Garvey sisters’ story now complete.  The five of them were a delight from start to finish, but it’s good to know when a series has reached its limit.  Seasons one and two echo back and forth nicely, but another death for the sisters to confront collectively would have to be a manufactured mystery, and not the organic development of these two.  Season two returns most characters and adds several well-portrayed new ones.  The brilliance of the characterizations and comedy remain, as well as the attractive Irish setting.  I would draw a strong contrast between this and an anemic comic mystery series like Only Murders in the Building.
 
I was also eager for an unexpected second season of Pachinko (MC-87).  I liked the first season so much that I read the book, and wondered how they would come back for more.  And the series returns impressively, if not quite the revelation of the first go-round.  This saga about a Korean family living in Japan continues to span generations, following the matriarch from youth to old age in rapid time shifts.  The second season’s time frames switch between WWII and the end of the Japanese boom years in the 1980s.  There’s a new dance & music opening title sequence in a Pachinko parlor that rivals the Emmy-winner of the first season, and almost all the characters recur.  I renew my strong recommendation for this outstanding series.
 
The fourth season of Slow Horses (MC-82) was fully expected, but fully satisfying nonetheless.  These adaptations of Mick Herron’s Slough House spy novels are at the apex of franchise entertainment.  Stylish and kinetic, well-acted and well-shot, with welcome characters and attractive English settings (mainly London), these MI5 thrillers stand well above the typical run of British mystery series.  Count on many foot chase scenes and a final shootout, but also count on canny characterizations and a continuous current of humor.  Gary Oldman, Jack Lowden, and Kristin Scott Thomas remain to lead a stellar cast through its familiar yet still intriguing paces amidst the underbelly of spycraft.  Now we can expect more of such pleasures from two further seasons already in the works.
 
Alfonso Cuarón has made some great films, so I forgive him for Disclaimer (MC-70).  I wouldn’t mind if he had consumed a couple hours of my life for this potboiler, but 350 minutes over 7 episodes?  Give me a break.  I want at least half that time back.  He suckered me in with Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, teased me with Lesley Manville and a totally new look for “Borat.”  Then served up a total turd of a climax, which only made me recollect the mendacities of the preceding episodes.  A sad comedown for the creator of Y Tu Mamá También (the memory of which is cheapened by this takeoff) and Roma (a masterpiece of personal authenticity that shames this sham of a story), and many other worthy films in-between.  A lot of talent gets wasted here, and it’s sad that this is the sort of teleplay that can get financed these days, with resources that could have produced three deeper and more truthful films.
 
Apple also offers some feature films of interest.  With Fancy Dance (MC-77), I came for Lily Gladstone but came away impressed with Native American writer-director Erica Tremblay’s feature debut, after she had worked on some episodes of Reservation Dogs.  The film addresses several topical concerns, such as the disappearance of indigenous women.  Gladstone is the sister of one such, trying to search for her, while taking care of the 13-year-old niece endearingly played by Isabel Delroy-Olson, whose great hope is to be reunited with her mother for the grand Pow Wow that gives the film its name.  Gladstone resorts to some petty crime and enlists her niece in various cons to get by, until the authorities displace the child into the custody of a distant white grandfather.  The aunt abducts her in turn for a fraught road trip back to the Pow Wow.  The finale is gratifying in its own way, but hardly resolves all the issues raised by this promising film.
 
From the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave to the even-better Small Axe series of films, Steve McQueen has made some great cinema, but Blitz (MC-71) does not fall into that category.  There are some bravura visuals (which despite widescreen color and CGI effects have nothing on the great Humphrey Jennings documentary Fires Were Started), but the story is conventional, almost folkloric and sometimes decidedly Dickensian, about a child undergoing trials as he tries to make his way back to his mother.  She’s played by Saoirse Ronan, which is a plus, but the biracial boy did not impress me as he did some commentators, though he did give McQueen the opening to show some cracks in the myth of British solidarity under attack.  There are other good performances, but nothing to raise the film out of the ordinary, which is a disappointment from a director of this stature.
 
On a night when I didn’t want to strain my brain, I was happy to be entertained by George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the “cleaner” comedy Wolfs (MC-60), as each lone wolf is called into a messy matter that may harm Amy Ryan’s election as D.A. and they are compelled to work together while repelled by their very similarities.  The rapport of the leads is well-honed and it’s enjoyable to spend time in their company.  Nothing consequential, this is a lightweight entertainment that might hit the spot on a given night, if you haven’t already OD’ed on buddy comedies or this particular pair.
 
If you’re into nature documentaries, Apple has a notable new entry, The Secret Lives of Animals (MC-tbd) in ten half-hour episodes, true to the BBC brand but with Hugh Bonneville doing his best David Attenborough imitation. 
 
With lots of time left on my Apple free trial, I will no doubt have some postscript to this round-up.  But for now, I conclude my survey with Bread and Roses (MC-79), a film about Afghan women mounting resistance after the Taliban returned to power.  It’s mainly composed of cellphone video by the women themselves, so the film has immediacy, but little shape or coherence.  What comes across is how strange a place Afghanistan is, and how dire is the plight of women returned to a fundamentalist rule that deprives them of education, work, and even basic freedom of movement.
 
A second season of Colin from Accounts (MC-85) was enough to make a brief special offer from Paramount+Showtime seem worthwhile.  If, like me, you are a confirmed devotee of Catastrophe, then you owe it to yourself to seek out this Australian odd-couple comedy, created by and starring real-life couple Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer.  He is the 40ish proprietor of a Sydney brewpub, she is a 30ish medical intern.  Colin is the dog who brings them together and keeps them together.  Their coworkers and families fill out the roster of kooks who populate the show, as it oscillates between cringe comedy and authentic relationship drama, doing justice to both and remaining both wildly funny and fondly truthful.
 
Looking around for anything else to watch on P+, all I could recommend are some already-seen shows such as Couples Therapy and Freaks & Geeks.  But I was enthusiastic enough about the final season of the HBO series Somebody Somewhere that I was eager to see more of Bridget Everett, and P+ had her Comedy Channel cabaret act Gynecological Wonder (IMDb), which is infinitely raunchier, and hilariously shocking in its exuberant naughtiness.  Wondering whether the understated portrayal of the series or the raucously uninhibited comedy act was closer to her real personality, I watched some YouTube interviews that confirmed my impression that her routine was inspired by Bette Midler, as a consciously self-freeing effort to bring out a different side of her personality.  This may be too over-the-top for many, but I heartily recommend Somebody Somewhere for everybody.

In fairness P+ has added a lot of very good movies lately, but none I hadn’t seen.  They did have one offbeat film I couldn’t find elsewhere:  The Eternal Memory (MC-85) is the second Oscar-nominated documentary from Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi (The Mole Agent, recently fictionalized into the Netflix series Man on the Inside).  This one follows the struggle (and reward) of a long-time relationship, as one of the partners is gradually succumbing to Alzheimer’s.  He was an undercover journalist during the Pinochet regime and spent much of his subsequent career trying to prevent those years of dictatorship being memory-holed.  His second, younger wife is an actress who became culture minister in a later democratic administration, and now she tenderly cares for him as his mind slips away, in a medical drama that is also a love story and a political metaphor.
 

Net-flix-ations II

After several months off Netflix, I had plenty to keep me watching for a month back on.  First off and probably best of all was Azazel Jacobs’ impeccable His Three Daughters (MC-84).  The writer-director is not a name that registers for me, but this affecting and amusing film will send me looking for his other work.  Though tightly scripted, it’s primarily carried by the three superb actresses who play sisters gathering in their father’s NYC apartment as he lies in his bedroom under home hospice care.  Carrie Coons is the bitchy older sister coping with her grief by berating the other two, and her teenage daughter by phone.  Elizabeth Olsen is the youngest, a Deadhead who has moved west and dotes on her toddler daughter.  Natasha Lyonne is the middle daughter, brought into the family with her mother, when the father married again after his first wife died.  A wake-and-bake stoner devoted to sports gambling, she’s the one who has been living with and caring for their ailing father up to these final days.  The film moves out of the tight constriction of the apartment only when the older sister forces the middle one to smoke her blunts outside.  Coons and Olsen are excellent, but Lyonne is flatly amazing.  In the last quarter-hour the film takes a surprising turn from kitchen-table drama into transcendent fantasy, but remains fully satisfying.
 
Not sure what led me to Steven Soderbergh’s 2017 film Logan Lucky (MC-78), probably the lead quartet of Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, and Riley Keough, but I was happy to go along for the ride.  Only intermittently have I admired Soderbergh’s films, and I certainly wouldn’t watch any Ocean’s 11 sequel, but this variant of cast and setting made one more fast, furious, and funny caper film palatable.  Here we’re racing back and forth over the West Virginia-North Carolina border.  Tatum is a former football star turned unemployed coal miner.  Driver is his brother, a bartender who lost his forearm in Iraq.  Keough is their multitalented hairdresser sister.  Craig is the con they break out of jail to bust into a vault beneath the Charlotte Motor Speedway, during the running of biggest race on the NASCAR circuit.  You’ll have no time to question plausibility as the jokes and complicated action speed by.
 
Rez Ball (MC-69) is Hoosiers-meets-Reservation Dogs, with a dash of Swagger and even Friday Night Lights, so I was bound to enjoy it.  Three of those are multi-season series, however, so Sydney Freeland’s movie is slimmed down considerably, in telling the story of a Navajo team competing for the New Mexico high school basketball championship, making the proceedings rather compacted, and somewhat predictable, in racing from tragedy to triumph.  But the performers are appealing and convincing, the on-court action plausible in this brisk but satisfying hoops flick.
 
Though Netlix is the province of “meh,” there are finds to be made.  For The Peasants (MC-61), ignore the mediocre Metacritic rating and focus on this review.  The film attracted me because of the title, since I’ve been working on an essay titled “Embracing My Inner Peasant.”  These peasants are Polish rather than Sicilian, but pretty much the same deal.  I was immediately drawn in by the animation style, composed of forty thousand individual paintings overlaid on live action, evoking Brueghel, Millet, Van Gogh and many others.  Later, I found out this film is by the makers of the equally impressive Loving Vincent, DK and Hugh Welchman.  It’s adapted from an early 20^th century Nobel Prize winning novelist, grimly folkloric and reminiscent of Hardy’s Tess.  A beautiful young girl is betrothed to the richest farmer in the village, while she is actually in love with his married son.  Not a prescription for happiness on any side.  First she is the envy of the village, and then the villainess against whom they turn.  Formulaic to be sure, but moving and beautiful.
 
All I knew about The Teachers’ Lounge (MC-82) going in was its Oscar nomination for best international feature, but soon I was fully held by the suspense German-Turkish filmmaker Ilker Çatak engenders.  And also by the lead performance of Leonie Benesch.  She’s a dedicated teacher new to a middle school where a cycle of thefts has put teachers and students on edge, with the music continuously contributing to the agitated mood.  Accusations are made, ethical questions are raised, the teachers’ lounge is divided and the students rebel against authority.  The idealistic Benesch character has a strong moral compass that keeps getting spun around, as she navigates rough waters with her students and other staff.  Doing the right thing just makes more trouble, as a multi-ethnic community is undermined by distrust.  The rising tension makes ordinary days in an ordinary school into an extraordinary event, and a provocative film.
 
I respect Denzel Washington’s family project of filming the plays of August Wilson, and I liked Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom as films, but for me The Piano Lesson (MC-69) was a bridge too far, or a lesson I could not take.  Adapted and directed by Denzel’s son Malcolm, and starring his son John David, the film is graced by the performances of Danielle Deadwyler and Samuel L. Jackson, but lacks coherence and conviction, with a literalness that forecloses metaphorical depth.  There are some impressive moments, notably when four men recall their time in Parchman by singing a chain gang song, but the whole fails to satisfy.
 
As for Netflix series, Heartstopper (MC-81), one of my favorites, returns undiminished for a third season (and sets up a fourth).  Like a kinder and gentler Sex Education, it follows the romantic explorations of a bunch of British teenagers, diverse in race, gender, and orientation.  Lots and lots of kissing, with cute animated butterflies and sparks enveloping the couple, until this season when they start to get down to business, but in a sweet and honest way.  Besides the will they or won’t they of several queer couples, lead characters Charlie (Joe Locke) and Nick (Kit Connor) have to cope with the former’s rehabilitation stint for an eating disorder and OCD (Hayley Atwell and Eddie Marsan are welcome additions to the cast as his advisers), and the latter’s choice of where to go to uni.  Highly recommended.
 
The title of the popular rom-com series Nobody Wants This (MC-73) is ironic in ways beyond the intended.  I certainly didn’t want any more of it, after three mercifully brief episodes.  This is the essence of Netflix pipeline product.  If Fleabag struck gold with the Hot Priest, how about a Hot Rabbi meeting cute with a sexy podcasting shiksa?  Leave out authenticity and raw feeling, our audience doesn’t go for that.  Get a few midlist “stars,” familiar faces from other popular tv shows.  Just keep the jokes and the LA lifestyle porn coming for 20-some minutes an episode and they’ll be satisfied.  Binge it all like a bag of chips or a box of chocolate.  I’ve had my fill.
 
Similarly, I gave short shrift to Penelope (MC-79), watching the first two episodes and the last of eight.  Megan Stott stars as a 16-year-old girl, first seen at a silent rave, who hears the call of the wild, and spontaneously ventures off into the Pacific Cascades (which do provide visual interest throughout).  She heads out (hobo-like on a train!) after a $500 spree on camping supplies, which still leaves her unprepared for life alone in the woods.  Her learning process and encounters with other forest dwellers read more like a YA fantasy than a genuine encounter with the wild.  If you want to see a real teen girl struggling to survive in a state of nature, then watch the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta.
 
There can’t be many films that contain and elicit as many tears as Daughters (MC-85), a documentary by Natalie Robison and Angela Patton, about a Date With Dad program run by Patton that allows girls to visit their incarcerated fathers for an in-person dance, after weeks of preparation.  This multiple-award winner is poignant and revealing, focusing especially on four Black girls of differing ages and relationships to their absent fathers, but also the prisoners’ preparatory group counselling sessions in which they get a rare chance to share feelings.  The dance itself forms the center of the film, followed by subsequent scenes of its lingering effects on the girls and men.  Implicit in all of it are the harsh effects of mass incarceration on the Black community.
 
Months back, after the Oscars, I started a post on the Best Documentary nominees, but I’ve been slow to watch them all, so here I’m going to tardily tack on my comments for a couple that appeared on Netflix, and are also focused on daughters.
 
Four Daughters (MC-80) is a Tunisian film about a single mother with four grown daughters, two of whom have been “devoured by the wolf,” i.e. Islamic jihad.  There’s direct-to-camera testimony and reminiscence by the mother and the two remaining daughters, but also an actress to play the mother in too-painful reenactments and two more to play the missing sisters, all of whom mingle in a pleasantly meta manner.  Visually and narratively inventive, Kaouther Ben Hania’s film covers many issues, motherhood and sisterhood, tradition and modernity, repression and expression, trauma and recovery.  Ultimately it ends up as a group portrait of a sextet of very appealing women.
 
There are no tigers in To Kill a Tiger (MC-88) except metaphorical in the sense of traditional Indian village mores, which dictate that the appropriate resolution for rape is to force the girl to marry her rapist.  The father of a 13-year-old gang-raped at a wedding refuses to go that route, and pursues jail time for the three boys involved, despite threats on his life and family.  Filmmaker Nisha Pahuja, an Indian-born Canadian, earned her Oscar nomination.  Both father and daughter showed courage, in the actions they took and the access they allowed, in a triumph of justice over shame and entrenched attitudes.
 
Now I’m pausing Netflix for a month, but will return in January for the new Wallace & Gromit film and maybe the Top Boy seasons that I’ve been meaning to watch for some time.  Next up will be updates on AppleTV+ and Criterion Collection offerings.