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.

Maxed out

I’ve been snarky about the devolution of HBO into Max, but have to admit that their diluted programming has worked to my advantage at times.  I’d been wondering how I could stream the MLB playoff games of my beloved Cleveland Guardians, when they all appeared on Max due to the Zaslov connection with TBS.  I still think the guy is a villain, but at least he did me this favor.
 
I figured I’d never again see enough of interest on Max to warrant an actual survey of their programming, but they recently featured a film I’d been looking for eagerly, The Boy & the Heron (MC-91), the latest from venerable animation master Hayao Miyazaki (and at 83, his last?).  I think of the heron as my spirit animal, as well as my sometime neighbor in an adjacent field, so I thrilled to the animated depictions of its flight, and was disappointed when, in a plot development that went right over my head, it was revealed to be a cartoon gnome in a heron costume.  Nonetheless the visual wonderments keep coming   The story is so deep into Miyazaki’s own personal mythology that it’s likely to be incomprehensible to the uninitiated – or to those who have abdicated their sense of wonder and power of imagination.  But the pictorial delights are available to all, frame by frame as artful as any animation ever, a dazzling painterly exhibition.  The premise of the film is highly autobiographical, a young boy who loses his mother in a WWII firebombing and goes on a convoluted quest to bring her back to life.  Many of Miyazaki’s themes and obsessions (such as flight) recur, in this fine summation of a prodigious career.
 
I credit Max for also reviving an old Studio Ghibli film about the firebombing of Japan, Grave of the Fireflies (MC-94) which I don’t feel capable of watching again, given its contemporary relevance to the children of Gaza and Ukraine, so I’ll just recommend this admirable work by copying my write-up when I showed it at the Clark sometime back:  “Directed by Isao Takahata, Miyazaki’s longtime collaborator, this sensitive, harrowing film depicts the impact of war on children, warranting comparison to all-time classic Forbidden Games. Two orphans, a boy and his younger sister, struggle for survival in the aftermath of the World War II firebombing of Japan, finding evanescent beauty in a terminal landscape. This sad and powerful masterpiece evokes the horror of war and the hope of humanity as well as any live-action film.”
 
Though Succession recently bumped The Sopranos from my personal list of the top ten tv drama series of all time, I watched the two-part documentary Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos (MC-86) not so much for HBO’s self-promotion as for my appreciation of director Alex Gibney’s track record.  And it worked for me on both counts.  I was interested to recall the epoch-making show, but moreover admired how well the documentary was put together.  It won’t lure me to revisit the entire series (aside from random episodes watched with a newbie, which do rekindle my appreciation) but offered an excellent recap and deep background on its creation, and especially the demons of its creator.  Gibney interviews (psychoanalyzes?) Chase on a replica of the set of Dr. Melfi’s office and uncovers the personal backstories, as well as the process, behind the show, which remains a watershed in the landscape of quality television.
 
The legacy of HBO lives on with the fourth and final season of My Brilliant Friend (MC-89), the adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s quartet of novels.  I raved about the first two seasons here, but was rather lukewarm to this finale, with a change of actors for all the characters, which is well-orchestrated but still disorienting.  The main problem is that the two lead characters, Lila and Lenu, have been leading separate lives, so that the harsh beauty and intensity of their relationship is not the center of the story.  Without their intimate exchange each character becomes harder to understand, though they do come together again in the final episodes, as Lenu returns to their Neapolitan neighborhood, which is show’s main point of interest.  Excess narration is also a problem – make a movie, don’t recite the book.  Still, I recommend the show as a whole, and the NYT’s lead TV critic wrote an insightful appreciation of the entire series here.  But if you feel 34 hours is too much to take for a dense and complicated Italian family saga, I would direct your attention to one of my favorite films, The Best of Youth, which clocks in at a mere six hours.  My write-up when I showed it to an appreciative crowd at the Clark is here.
 
Another prestige remnant of HBO’s pre-Zaslov era concludes with the third season of Somebody Somewhere (MC-88).  From the first several episodes, this series about a group of lovable Kansan eccentrics seems to be going out strong, so I stand by my previous recommendation.  This show is original, authentic, funny, and heart-felt, sort of the four legs of my appreciation for any film or tv.
 
I don’t recall anything of Seth Meyers’ stint at the SNL Weekend Update desk, but after seeing his standup routine Lobby Baby, I became a devoted follower of “A Closer Look” segments from his Late Night show.  Now he has a new performance piece on Max called Dad Man Walking (MC-84).  It’s not as finely honed as the prior piece, more just a sequence of literal dad jokes (his two boys are 8 and 6, his daughter 2), but he remains amusing and endearing, and good company for an hour.
 
Response to Alex Garland’s Civil War (MC-75) has been appropriately contentious, despite (or because of?) its denatured political stance and ambivalent take on the ethics of journalism.  The one thing everyone can agree on is that Kirsten Dunst delivers a knockout performance as a jaded war photographer.  Her expressed credo seems to be Garland’s as well, that sending back horrific pictures from a warzone will warn America of the dangers of internecine conflict.  But now she’s facing the failure of her efforts and growing numb to the adrenaline rush of action photography.  All around the warring States, social and physical structures are crumbling.  And the Dunst character joins three other journalists on a circuitous journey to the siege of D.C. by the secessionist Western Forces (that improbable alliance of CA, TX, and FL shows Garland’s indifference to actual politics in this variant on zombie apocalypse).  Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla) stands out as a very young woman who emerges as Dunst’s protégé.  Technically this is quite a well-made action film, with plenty of tension and horror, if not much meaning.
 
Love Lies Bleeding (MC-77) is like Thelma and Louise on steroids, literally.  This neo-noir thriller from Rose Glass is made watchable by the always-gripping Kristen Stewart and her new-to-me co-star Katy O’Brian.  The former runs a gym in the desert Southwest, and the latter is a body builder who stumbles in on her way to a competition in Las Vegas.  They soon fall in together through a mixture of lust, need, and circumstance.  Stewart is the alienated daughter of spooky local crime boss Ed Harris, and devoted sister of battered housewife Jena Malone, meanwhile introducing O’Brien to the toxic magic of steroids to enhance her chances in competition.  Complications ensue, and escalate to violence.  Hard to find a redeeming value in these proceedings, but they do elicit a grisly fascination.
 
I didn’t like Janet Planet (MC-83) as much as I expected or wanted to, given its setting in Western Massachusetts, Julianne Nicholson in the title role, and raves from trusted critics.  Most reviewers came to Annie Baker’s debut film with knowledge of her work as a Pulitzer-winning playwright famous for pauses and silences; I did not, and took some time to get on her wavelength.  It was not immediately obvious to me how steeped in cinema history her intentions were, how layered her frame of reference.  I read the film as mainly autobiographical, about an 11-year-old growing up near Amherst in the summer of 1991, in a close but freighted relationship with her single mother, and the lovers and friends who intrude upon them.  Zoe Ziegler plays the owlish, eccentric girl with a mysterious opacity.  The luminous Nicholson is subdued but subtly effective.  I’m sure a second viewing would reveal deeper connections between scenes of dollhouse play and puppet theater, and background signals from offhand dialogue, but it was mainly the specificity of mood and setting, established from the girl’s perspective, that registered for me.
 
Okay, so now I’ve maxed out on Max, but since my access remains free, I will keep returning to update the dwindling number of worthwhile new shows on that streaming channel.  For now, two postscript recommendations.
 
I watch very little on Prime Video, but I made an exception for Challengers (MC-82).  I’d started watching on a plane, and was glad to revisit and finish this tennis-cum-sex love-triangle, featuring three hot and talented performers:  Zendaya (whom I had not seen previously), Josh O’Connor (who has become an actor I will watch in almost anything) and Mike Faist (who impressed as Riff in Spielberg’s West Side Story).  They meet at a national juniors championship, where she is a budding superstar, and they are doubles champs who vie for the men’s singles title and her favor.  There’s a heavy homoerotic vibe as Zendaya becomes a point of contention greater than any tournament trophy.  The narrative is sliced and diced, the camera work is wild if mostly effective, and a loud techno soundtrack pulses the action and overrides the dialogue at points.  Nonetheless Luca Guadagnino’s enjoyable film is carried by its stars, its energy, and its humor.
 
Also on Prime, Aubrey Plaza was enough to draw me to My Old Ass (MC-74); only afterwards did I find out that the writer-director Megan Park was someone I had praised for her debut film, The Fallout.  In fact, Aubrey is not very prominent as the title character, the shroom-materialized 39-year-old avatar of the 18-year-old main character played charmingly by Maisy Stella.  Also charming is the setting on a Canadian cranberry farm, in the summer before “Elliott” leaves for university in Toronto.  The age-exchange set-up is hardly unique, but is handled with surprising authenticity, as both Elliotts learn from each other in making sense of their life.  Comic and caring, this film is very likely to surprise and delight. 

Hulu-ciné-shins II

Having decided to stick around on Hulu for an extra month before their subscription rates went up, I bundled it with Disney+ to catch up with a few recommended shows, which I’ll cover at the end of this post. 
 
My first order of business was to see what the fuss was about with Shogun (MC-85) and its massive Emmy haul.  The spectacle is undeniable, but most of the way through the meter of my appreciation kept fluctuating between Game of Thrones and Wolf Hall on the dial of dynastic dramas, with my decided preference for historical accuracy over D&D fantasies of swords and sorcery.  By the end, however, I was completely won over by Shogun, as show creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo prioritized political intrigue over big battle scenes, and an unexpected character moved to the center of the story.  We start in 1600 with an English mariner (Cosmo Jarvis) leading a Dutch ship to Japan, hoping to horn in on the Portuguese trading monopoly.  He is captured by a one of five regents (Hiroyuki Sanada) vying for control of the country in the name of the underage heir to the throne.  One of the ladies of the warlord’s entourage (Anna Sawai) is enlisted as translator.  The latter two deservedly won Emmys for acting.  Most of the dialogue is in Japanese with subtitles, while Portuguese is rendered in English.  It takes a while to get one’s bearings, historically and culturally, but in the end the series is both serious and sensuous, sweeping and intimate, intricate and powerful.
 
Shows like this -- along with other FX series and older classics like Buffy, Friday Night Lights, and Freak & Geeks –   rank Hulu (no ads!) as one of the most essential streaming services, even at its escalating rate.  Don’t get stuck year round, but put it in lead rotation with Netflix, Max, and Apple for maximized streaming value.
 
So I was looking around for more stuff to watch on Hulu, before pausing my subscription again, and there was (there were?) Babes (MC-72).   Don’t know about you, but I was a big fan of Better Things while never seeing the appeal of Broad City.  This film is directed by Pamela Adlon but written by Ilana Glazer, who stars along with Michelle Buteau.  So Adlon’s feature directorial debut lacks the personal authenticity of her groundbreaking series, and relies more on New York-ish Millennial shtick.  It’s not bad, if you like that sort of thing, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it.
 
A NYT recommendation and a slew of César nominations led me to The Animal Kingdom (MC-69), a strange hybrid of a film by Thomas Cailley.  It’s a creature feature about a pandemic disease that is turning humans into strange animal hybrids.  Most of its César wins came in special effects and cinematography.  But it’s also an intimate family drama, with the mother having transitioned and been sent away, while the son is beginning to show signs as well, and the father is bending all his efforts to save both.  I’ve never had much use for magical realism, but there were enough real-world reverberations here to keep me watching, without really buying into it all.
 
On the other hand I was totally drawn into the historical recreation of The Promised Land (MC-77), a quasi-Western set in the wilds of Jutland in the 18^th century.  Mads Mikkelson superbly personifies a military veteran who wants to establish a colony on the untamed heath.  Jerked around by indifferent or maniacally hostile aristocrats, he persists in efforts to make the land livable by cultivating a new sort of crop, potatoes.  In harsh conditions, he is assaulted by bandits, gypsies, and the local lord, but persists in his efforts to extract a livelihood from an unforgiving wilderness.  He also attracts the interest of a bereaved peasant woman, a young gypsy girl, and a high-born woman held in near-captivity by the evil lord.  Beautifully shot by Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, and embodied by the stonefaced Mikkelson, this is a masterfully involving frontier drama.
 
As I’ve noted before, if you bypass Hulu’s homepage, you can find some interesting documentaries and foreign films on the channel.  Based on reviews, and my memories of selling her books back in the day, I looked into The Disappearance of Shere Hite (MC-83) and was decidedly impressed by Nicole Newnham’s documentary (she co-directed Crip Camp).  I remember Hite as a controversial figure, maybe an attention hog, but the film reveals her as something of a feminist heroine.  While a doctoral student in social history at Columbia, she made a living by modeling, but was activated by the women’s movement and her own disgust at misogyny.  She dropped out and became a sexologist in the vein of Kinsey or Masters & Johnson.  Hite was a creature of many faces, so the film is an engaging visual archive, among other attributes.  Far from reveling in her notoriety, Hite fled from it, going into exile and renouncing her U.S. citizenship.  This film does a very creditable job of recuperating her reputation as an icon of female liberation.
 
The first thing I checked out on Disney+ was Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (MC-82), in order to sample a cultural phenomenon of which I was wholly ignorant.  Watching with subtitles, the first thing that struck me, besides the gargantuan spectacle, was the utter banality of her lyrics and the unmemorable drone of her music.  Unwilling to journey through time with her, I fast-forwarded through her eras but found the latest as unappealing as the earliest.  Thanks for the Kamala endorsement, Taylor, but no thanks for your singing.
 
Despite my distaste for sequels, I quite enjoyed Inside Out 2 (MC-73), as Pixar returns to the story of Riley and her personified emotions, with a new quartet of them added as she turns 13.  It wasn’t as good as the original, but pretty good anyway.  As an exploration of one girl’s puberty, it lacks the personal authenticity of another Pixar film, Turning Red (reviewed in another Hulu/Disney round-up here).
 
There’s a kinetic quality to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (MC-58) that made it a good accompaniment to stationary cycling, and it has Phoebe Waller-Bridge and the still appealing Harrison Ford to make all the hugger-mugger watchable.  (Bonus: much of it takes place in Sicily.)  Though my son went on to become an archaeologist like (and unlike) Indy, I didn’t admire the first movie and didn’t see any of the sequels till this finale.  Watch this only if you enjoy hilariously insane chase sequences.  The point is lost on me, but I did laugh out loud on occasion.
 
Since Happy Valley and Gentleman Jack, I’ll take a look at any series from Sally Wainwright, confident that it will center and empower female characters in a distinctive way.  Renegade Nell (MC-70) fills that bill, and does a good job of rendering England in 1705, but as a Disney show this one has an element of fantasy that prevented me from engaging fully.  I found the first episode not without its charms, but once I clocked to seven more episodes of 40+ minutes, I skipped to the last, which didn’t make me miss the stuff between.
 
I was tempted by The Mission (MC-74) because of directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, who made the estimable documentaries Boys State and Girls State. Its theme is a variant on Grizzly Man, where a young man embarks on a foolish solo journey into certain danger and never returns.  Rather than a bear, he confronts an indigenous people on an island near India, who want no contact with the outside world, especially not some guy in the grip of an illusion of bringing the message of Jesus to benighted savages.  The film is a very mixed bag, telling its story through John Chau’s original footage and diaries, interviews with people close to him, old movie clips and animated reenactments, but it holds together pretty well.  Chau’s mix of sincere devotion and delusion is unpacked, as well as the cultural colonialism it represents.
 
There’s no accounting for the tastes of different generations, but a concert film that appealed to me infinitely more than Taylor Swift was Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (MC-77), a rockin’ retrospective if I ever saw one.  Director Thom Zimny has long association and a deep visual archive to work with, following Bruce’s script just as the band followed his set playlist on this tour, meant as a summing up and definitive final statement, encompassing their 50-year history together (though the 10-year rift in the middle is never mentioned).  This post-Covid world tour was E Street’s first time performing together in six years.  The film demonstrates how the show takes shape and then takes it to the people, in huge venues around North America and Europe.   The spirit of the live shows, current and past, is conveyed in a layered way; rather than recording a single performance, the film itself works through the themes of the playlist.  Moments of mutual celebration may offer intimations of infomercial, but the authenticity comes through in the band’s drive to “Prove it All Night.”  Rock on, brothers.  And let me catch up with a couple of more recent Bruce albums I seem to have missed. 
 
Now I’m going to pause Hulu for up to 12 weeks, and when back, will certainly drop the Disney+ add-on.  But I’ll return to watch the new season of Abbott Elementary and possible more of the recent British series Rivals (MC-84), plus whatever new and surprising shows may turn up on the channel, when you know what to look for and where.

Hulu-ciné-shins

I welcomed a return to Hulu for the opportunity to finish the third season of Welcome to Wrexham (MC-77), and also the most recent few episodes of Abbott Elementary (MC-83).  Abbott continues to provide enjoyment in the outmoded tradition of 22-minute sitcoms like Parks & Recreation.  Wrexham, however, continues to find new directions to explore in the relationship between sports and community.  The show might have begun as a seeming attempt to cash in on the appeal of Ted Lasso by two Hollywood stars who buy an ailing Welsh soccer team.  But while Rob McElhenny and Ryan Reynolds provide an amusing throughline to the story, they happily recede into the background of the overall proceedings, which range far and wide.  The third season has fewer but longer episodes, with no diminishment of interest and enjoyment.  I eagerly anticipate the fourth.
 
But the big lure back to Hulu was of course the third season of The Bear (MC-87), which did not disappoint but did not satiate either, something of a comedown from the highs of season two.   It’s clearly a transitional season that stretches out and accommodates other characters’ stories, while remaining fixated on the inner struggles of main character Carmy (Jeremy Allen White).  Show creator Christopher Storer allows himself to go on whatever tangents he chooses, usually to good effect but with more angst than joy.  Carmy’s maniacal pursuit of culinary excellence begins to seem deranged, and Claire Bear’s absence unbearable.  Syd’s (Ayo Adebiri) future with the restaurant hangs in doubt.  The rest of the staff have their moments (Tina’s especially welcome), but this season mostly serves as a tease for the next.
 
The eight-part series Under the Bridge (MC-70) proved substantially better than its overall MC rating, even though true crime dramatizations are not generally my thing.  For me the draw was Lily Gladstone, but I’ve liked Riley Keough in other things as well.  I was reminded of the Toni Collette-Merrit Wever pairing in Unbelievable.  Based on a nonfiction book by Rebecca Godfrey (played by Keough), the series is set on Vancouver Island, where a group of mean girls are responsible for the death of one of their number, a rebellious 14-year-old whose strict parents are from India.  Gladstone is a First Nations policewoman who was adopted in infancy by the white police chief, and formerly a close friend of the Keough character.  Backgrounding the whodunit aspect, the series flashes back and forth in time and between characters, painting a broad picture of an insular community coming to terms with familial trauma of various kinds, grounded in teen bullying and infected by racism.  Consider this series a sleeper for listing among the best TV of the year.
 
With Origin (MC-75), Ava DuVernay tries to split the difference between Selma and 13th, and winds up with an ungainly hybrid that falls short of either, and would have worked better as a four-part docudrama like her When They See Us.  Presumably she wanted to bring Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents to a wider audience than any documentary could draw.  She thus makes Isabel herself (well-played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) the center of a somewhat melodramatic story, and proves yet again that a writer working on a book is not a gripping cinematic enterprise.  The acting is generally good, and the research travelogue and historical re-creations are mostly effective, but they go together awkwardly, and at 2:20 the film is either too long or not nearly long enough.  Still, the argument that caste is more significant than race in the marginalization and persecution of different peoples – such as American Blacks, German Jews, and Indian untouchables – is worth pondering
 
Though hardly an auteur, Roger Michell made a lot of enjoyable films, from the 1995 Persuasion through Notting Hill and beyond – his final feature, The Duke (MC-74), adds to that list.  Based on the true story of the 1961 theft from the National Gallery of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington – by a retired bus driver from Newcastle – this comedy-mystery stars Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, and revels in contrasts of class, caste, and region, with Michell’s light hand rather than the agitprop of a Mike Leigh or Ken Loach.  The two stars, and a good supporting cast, deliver a delightful tale of gumption and comeuppance.
 
Though you wouldn’t know it from Hulu’s home page, they surprisingly continue to have some new and impressive foreign films, despite takeover by Disney.  The latest example is La Chimera (MC-91), Alice Rohrwacher’s acclaimed film centered on a British archaeologist in Tuscany.  Now, my son is a British archaeologist whose career started on an Etruscan dig (he’s currently digging in the Republic of Georgia), but he’s nothing like the one played by Josh O’Connor, who is a grave-robbing scoundrel and a lost soul, though not without redeeming qualities.  Like an archaeologist, Rohrwacher excavates buried artifacts and seeks to explain ancient enigmas from surviving fragments.  If you’re not willing to dig with her, don’t bother to join her expedition.  Her cast offers committed support, led by Isabella Rossellini.  From the get-go, you don’t know where this film is going or how it’s going to get there, but you feel in the sure hands of a filmmaker who knows what she wants to say and can find some means to say it, even when the meaning is not immediately clear.  Oddities abound, but sense is made, as we put the disparate shards back together, with a deep grounding in film history.  The quest may be chimerical, but it’s rooted in a magical reality.
 
I read that Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (MC-80) was reverse-engineered from a desire to highlight the remarkable architecture of some of Tokyo’s public lavatories.  If so, mission accomplished.  But so much more is accomplished in this mostly-silent portrayal of a toilet cleaner (a remarkable Koji Yakusho, awarded Best Actor at Cannes) going about his daily rounds.  His mysterious backstory is filled in with a few clues and encounters, but the collections of books and cassettes in his spartan apartment suggest that he was once something quite different, having chosen (or resigned himself to) a limited and regimented existence.  Nonetheless his face registers quiet delight with that existence, and a genial response to other isolated people.  Hard to make this sound like something you might want to watch, but believe me, it's profoundly humanistic and heartening, and deserving of its Oscar nomination for Best International Feature.  I enjoyed the largely-English music soundtrack as much as the Ozu-inspired filmmaking.
 
Adam Driver held my attention as Ferrari (MC-73), as did Penelope Cruz as his wife, but Shailene Woodley is largely wasted as the other woman.  Michael Mann’s busy film does not come close to the recent Ford v. Ferrari in making motor sports the least bit interesting, but a 1000-mile cross-country race does allow for an engaging travelogue through Italy (minus the fatal car crashes).
 
I was misled by the title of The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat (MC-55) to think it was the origin story of the great Motown singing group.  And somewhat misled by a NYT recommendation, though in the event I did not regret watching, in appreciation of the stories of three middle-aged Black women, arriving in the same week that one of their number was nominated for President.  Fine actresses tell a rather formulaic and box-checking tale, spanning three decades of Sisterhood.  I was also misled by the mismatch between the younger and older actresses, though each was pretty good in her own right, led by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Uzo Aduba, and Sanaa Lathen.
 
Older movies tend to move from one streaming channel to another, but several I was interested in seeing again recently showed up on Hulu.  The Big Lebowski (MC-71), despite the charm of Jeff Bridges as The Dude, does not rank with the better Coen brothers’ films, but Say Anything (MC-86) certainly holds up as John Cusack’s breakthrough film and as Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut.  Slums of Beverly Hills (MC-68) was mixed up in my memory with the slapstick of Bette Midler’s Down & Out in Beverly Hills, but I watched to see a teenaged Natasha Lyonne, and was impressed with Tamara Jenkins’ debut feature based on her own teenage years, which she would follow up at decade intervals with the excellent films The Savages and Private Life.
 
Abbott Elementary meets Sex Education in English Teacher (MC-83), moving from elementary school in Philly to high school in Austin, and from ABC to FX so the “fucks” are flying.  Brian Jordan Alvarez is the creator and star, in the mold of Quinta Brunson of Abbott (though gay as all get-out) – he also has a crush on a hunky Black fellow teacher.  The ensemble of E.T. is not as engaging as that of A.E. so I’m not sure how long I will persist in watching, but it’s not without its sitcom laughs.
 
Hulu is proving stickier than I expected.  Emmy awards are a devalued currency, but it caught my attention that Shogun won 18 (!).  I’d gotten 20 minutes into the first episode when I decided the show was yet another GoT clone, which I didn’t need to see.  On second approach, I wonder whether it might turn out to be more on the order of Wolf Hall.  We shall see – and I shall report.
 
For a while I’ve been intending to pause my Hulu subscription and wrap up this survey.  But now I intend to re-up for another month, with the Disney+ add-on, so I’ll break off here and come back with a sequel.

Britbox and the scrapbox

[Sorry for rogue underlining that I couldn't fix in first two paragraphs.]

A Britbox special offer paved the way for me to complete my survey of Jane Austen adaptations, starting with the ne plus ultra of Pride and Prejudice (Wiki), starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, and a host of players just perfect in their roles.  In six episodes, this series has plenty of room to breathe; it’s quite true to the text and its innovations are well judged, exemplified by putting the oh-so-famous opening line into Lizzy’s mouth, thrown off as a sarcastic riposte to her mother (a horrifyingly comic portrayal by Alison Steadman).  Susannah Harker is a perfect Jane Bennet, and the relationship of the sisters is touchingly similar to that between the writer Jane and her sister Cassandra, though they both remained maiden aunts.  After thirty years, the series has been restored digitally to a pristine quality that makes settings and costumes look like new, quite a contrast to my initial viewing, from a VHS tape made by my mother off the original broadcast.  Whatever your own pride or prejudice, I defy you not to enjoy this rendition.

 
I followed up by revisiting two versions of Persuasion.  Roger Michell’s from 1995 (Wiki), starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds, remains my favorite by far, second only to the much more expansive P&P, and tied with the contemporaneous S&S.  The 2007 version (Wiki) seems barely adequate now that my original moment of being smitten by Sally Hawkins (as Poppy in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky) has passed, since the rest of the production does not come up to her level.
 
Whilst on Britbox, I took another look at Romola Garai as Emma (Wiki) in a 2009 BBC series that definitely takes liberties in opening out the book, but is not as misleading as some latter-day Austen adaptations and imitations.  Romola plays Emma believably but somewhat broadly; Jonny Lee Miller is good, if a little too hunky, as Knightley; but Michael Gambon is perhaps the best Mr. Woodhouse.  The period design is pretty reliable, with well-placed emphasis on domestic architecture, and the supporting actors are adequate if not memorable.  Going more for the comic than the ironic, the only thing this has over other versions of Emma is the amplitude of four episodes, but it does not come close to the pitch-perfect richness of the 1995 P&P.
 
To complete my survey, I returned to the 1940 Pride and Prejudice (Wiki) starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, who both perform okay in a ludicrous MGM production that puts the “costume” in “costume drama.”  With no taste for verisimilitude, appropriate Regency design, or fidelity to Austen’s text or tone, the film plays for broad domestic comedy and goes for a mid-Victorian look, with absurd leftovers from the Gone with the Wind shoot.  The “Golden Age of Hollywood” attempts literature but reduces it to abject formula.
 
Finally, as I was about to close the book on Austen, I noticed that Hulu was also now offering the canonical 1995 P&P, plus a follow-up that I had never seen, a 2008 BBC/Andrew Davies adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (MC-79).  We’re halfway to Bridgerton here, as this two-part series opens with a “tasteful” sex scene with little reference to the book.  If Davies’ stated aim was to make viewers forget the Emma Thompson version, this was a woeful failure, with not one of the performers being more memorable than the film’s, though Dan Stevens does a good job imitating Hugh Grant.  But – E.T.>Hattie Morahan, Kate Winslet>Charity Wakefield, Alan Rickman>David Morrissey, Greg Wise>Dominic Cooper.  Nonetheless, I enjoyed watching this Bronte-like take on our dear proper Jane, and was eventually won over by Morahan’s performance in contrast to dear Emma’s. 
 
This deep immersion in Janeite lore certainly revealed the limited circumference of her world, and the repeated reliance on certain types and tropes, but also the consummate artistry of her self-described “fine brush on two inches of ivory,” and penetrating wit about the personalities within her purview.
 
So in sum, the Austen adaptations to watch are the Jennifer Ehle P&P, the Amanda Root Persuasion, the Kate Beckinsale Emma, the Emma Thompson-Kate Winslet Sense & Sensibility, the Frances O’Connor Mansfield Park, and the Felicity Jones-Carey Mulligan Northanger Abbey, with Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship as a bonus.
 
Also on Britbox, Stonehouse (MC-77) follows in the tradition of the successful Hugh Grant series A Very English Scandal, dealing in three hour-long episodes with the feckless peccadillos of a real British politician.  The title character is played enjoyably by Matthew Macfadyen, in a manner much like his performance in Succession, with his real-life spouse Keeley Hawes as the long-suffering wife.
 
Flying to and from the U.K., I sort-of-watched some so-so films on which I will report briefly.  Wicked Little Letters (MC-58) boasts Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, two must-see actresses as far as I’m concerned, and a host of familiar British faces, including Anjana Vasan, the star of We Are Lady Parts.  Billed as a “black comedy mystery,” it’s mainly a cozy BBC-worthy visit to an actual seaside hamlet a hundred years ago, where two neighbors start out as friends but wind up as courtroom adversaries.  But, oh those two.
 
Coming back, comfortably provided with better screen and headphones, I overlooked poor reviews to watch Bob Marley: One Love (MC-43), which I liked well enough, but nowhere near as much as the 2012 documentary Marley. Kingsley Ben-Adir makes a credible reggae star (more so than as either Malcolm X or a Ken), and Lashana Lynch is good as Rita Marley.  Director Reinaldo Marcus Green does what he can with a script by committee and under Marley family supervision, which does not venture far beyond the usual rock musician biopic tropes.  But the film does revive a lot of kick-ass music.
 
High over the Atlantic, I also got halfway into popular recent films Anybody But You and Challengers – do not need to see more of the former, but may look to see the rest of the latter when I can.
 
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (MC-63, AMZ) is better than its Metacritic average would suggest, as you might expect of a film that stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Toby Jones, and Andrea Riseborough, with narration by Olivia Colman.  Will Sharpe’s off-kilter tale relates the life of eccentric late-Victorian artist Louis Wain, whose hugely-popular pictures of cats are credited with changing their cultural image from feral ratcatchers to household pets.  The film is all over the place, narratively and stylistically, but well-designed, and grounded in the touching if tragic romance between Cumberbatch and Foy.  Not nearly as twee as it might have been, absent the admirable acting.
 
Ethan Hawke has carved out a commendable career for himself, so I ignored poor reviews to watch his directorial effort Wildcat (MC-55, Kanopy), starring his daughter Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor.  She also plays characters in fragments from some of O’Connor’s stories, in a literal interpretation of their autobiographical impulse.  Laura Linney plays her mother, in real life and in the stories.  A lot of actors prove willing to pitch in on another actor’s film, so there are several well-known cameos.  And the overall look of the film, with its period recreations, does not bespeak a strained indie budget.  So I respond to this film as I’ve responded to the work of its subject – interesting, but not really hitting me where I live.  Still, a pretty good attempt at making a biopic out of the solitary life of a writer.
 
After this potpourri, next up will be a lengthy survey of recent offerings on Hulu.

Second-tier streaming channels

My own impressions of the evolving business of streaming, and the cut throat competition for market share and profitability among channels and services, were given a top-down perspective in a recent NYT analysis.  Personally, I’ve become quite methodical in managing subscriptions to minimize cost and maximize worthwhile viewing options.
 
To find HBO under this heading is surprising, but as MAX it has certainly devolved into a channel that is only worthwhile for free, or for the occasional month.  The slogan used to be “It’s not TV, it’s HBO,” but now it should be “It’s not HBO, it’s just TV.”  Which is not to say it’s worthless, but lacking an identity, and not worth a continuing subscription (though I continue to piggyback on a friend’s cable subscription). 
 
I confess to availing myself of Max’s incongruous live sporting events on occasion, and I’m a dedicated fan of John Oliver (who alternatively is easy to watch on YouTube).  And credit where it’s due – the third season of Hacks (MC-86) lived up to, and even exceeded, expectations.  MAX also offers a Hannah Einbinder comedy special, Everything Must Go, which confirms her ability as an actress, but is not quite as funny or appealing as the character she plays on Hacks.  The channel’s current flagship program, House of the Dragon, stands absolutely no chance with me.  I did give Lance Oppenheimer’s Ren Faire a chance to grab me . . . and it didn’t.  Established fondness for two performers led me to a couple of films in a line-up that has been MAX-imized
 
I responded to Am I Okay? (MC-72) with “Yes, you are – not great, but just fine.”  This is Tig Notaro’s directorial debut, in tandem with her wife Stephanie Allynne, and she also delivers an amusing cameo.  Dakota Johnson plays a 32-year-old near-virgin, a diffident would-be painter but current receptionist at a swank LA spa, who belatedly realizes her erotic tendencies lean toward women.  Her long-time best friend (Sonoya Mizuno), a much more confident professional woman, tries to coach her love life but with little success, and then is promoted to a distant job, which leads to friction that proves liberating to the Dakota character.  Sweet and funny, with more than a hint of Tig’s dry humor, as well as Stephanie’s lived experience, though the script by Lauren Pomerantz is reputedly quite autobiographical.   
 
I responded to Men (MC-65) with “Aren’t they awful?”  Yes, but the woman they are being awful to is Jessie Buckley, so I decided to give Alex Garland’s film a chance.  And before the film goes off the rails in the third act, it gives her the opportunity to be her magnetic self, as well as painting a bucolic picture of the English countryside.  Her well-off character has rented a large old cottage for a healing getaway, after the ambiguous death of her husband, glimpsed in brief flashbacks.  This Covid-era nightmare turns from pastoral to horrific, as Jessie is threatened by a variety of men, all played by Rory Kinnear, with not-so-special effects.  The symbolism is laid on so thick it eventually becomes ridiculous, as the monstrous turns into a monstrosity.  Rarely have I been so engaged with a film, only to turn against it so vehemently in the last third.
 
Where HBO shows were once original and inspired, now they’re more like extruded product.  Likewise, the true-crime documentaries that have become a staple.  But HBO still produces some docs worth seeing, such as Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. (MC-81).  It’s an exploration as much as a promotion, since director Jamila Wignot does considerably more than recycle delightful footage from concert films like Monterey Pop and Wattstax.  Using an ample archival record of performance and studio scenes, mixed with newsreels and retrospective interviews, she tells the story of the Memphis counterpart to Motown, featuring Booker T. Jones, Otis Redding, and Isaac Hayes among many others.  In four hour-long episodes, the music business is situated in the context of race relations in the Sixties and Seventies and of an economy where the big fish devour the little fish, so the nostalgia is balanced by social critique, where the meeting of black and white is co-opted by green.
 
In the streaming channel shakeout now underway, Paramount+ is in the process of being sold and/or broken up, and consequently is offering a month’s free trial, perfectly timed for the new fourth season of my favorite Showtime series ever, Couples Therapy (Wiki).  Rather than beating the drum for this outstanding series yet again, I refer you to my previous comments.  I just love this show, it’s reality TV made real and comes with my highest recommendation.
 
So with a month to peruse P+, I came up with some other worthy viewing.  In a round-up of documentaries, I’ll write up Oscar-nominated Chilean film The Eternal Memory.  And I was happy to reacquaint myself with The One and Only Dick Gregory (MC-79), a notable figure of my younger days, in a documentary that gives equal weight to his comedy and his activism.  You’ll laugh and you’ll be inspired.
 
Reminded by Hit Man of how much I like Richard Linklater, I was happy to give a second chance to one that initially struck me as a minor disappointment, Everyone Wants Some!! (MC-85).  Lo and behold, I discovered it on P+, the house of disappointment.  But on this viewing, I found more to like, and missed less of what I like most about Rick.  This film pairs nicely with Dazed and Confused, taking his autobiography from the last days of high school to the first days of college.  It also marks the emergence of Glenn Powell, who flowered in Hit Man.
 
Next up I’ll return to the first-tier streaming channel Hulu, and also post my round-up of recent award-worthy documentaries.
  

Net-flix-ations

I was a devoted Netflix subscriber for more than twenty years (starting with DVDs by mail), but I’ve become rather disenchanted, finding their programming not worth more than a few months viewing out of a year, and their streaming quite glitchy.  Nonetheless, it’s worth returning occasionally to salvage a few winners out of their nonstop flood of mediocrity.

Baby Reindeer (MC-88) is the most buzzworthy of new Netflix shows (and thankfully, it’s no Squid Game or Bridgerton, or any of that ilk).  Many’s the comedian who turns “their” worst traumas or embarrassments into a routine, and there are quite a number who have spun out impressive solo performance pieces.  But I credit Richard Gadd for digging deep and developing a 7-episode series about his interactions with a woman who stalked him, an older man who abused him, and a trans woman whom he loved, but not as much as he hated himself.  Very dark, but quite funny, with a message about empathy that transcends the seamy material.  He also enlists actors who make the most of their roles, notably Jessica Gunning and Nava Mau.  Though he narrates and stars himself, it’s telling that he enlisted two women directors to split the episodes, for something other than a guy perspective on his experiences.
 
One Day (MC-76) has some of the appeal of Normal People, in charting over time the relationship between a young, mismatched sort-of-couple.  And has the appeal of Amika Modi, who made such an impression in This Is Going to Hurt and here makes a refreshingly diverse rom-com heroine.  Her foil is Leo Woodall, who is certainly cute, and charming when he wants to be, but lacks soulfulness of a Paul Mescal.   They meet at graduation in Edinburgh in 1988, and each of the 14 more-or-less half-hour episodes shows them coming together (or apart) on that date in succeeding years, in differing places and situations.  They go through various humorous and dramatic changes, beyond the question of will they or won’t they, until a swerve into Love Story territory (“Love means always having to say you’re sorry”).  It’s a satisfying binge, if not an indelible experience.
 
Just before I paused Netflix back in January, I had read a glowing New Yorker profile of Jacqueline Novak and her one-woman performance piece Get on Your Knees (MC-tbd), so when I resumed NFX that was one of the first shows I watched.  As you might expect, a 97-minute aria on blowjobs is raunchy of course – but in an intellectual, highly-literary way, you understand – delivered with manic energy and stinging wit.  As lascivious as the topic may be, she stalks the stage in torn jeans and a gray t-shirt, and goes for something much deeper than titillation.  Feminist to be sure (though who am I to say?), and oh yes, it’s funny as hell, for anyone not turned off by the subject matter. 
 
Another female comic that kept me laughing was Rachel Feinstein with her Big Guy comedy special.  The title is what her outer-borough firefighter husband calls her, and with telling impersonations she delineates the cultural clash between a daughter of lefty Jewish intellectuals and the family of her working-class Catholic husband.
 
I stuck around on NFX long enough to see the latest from Richard Linklater, probably my favorite filmmaker over the past thirty years.  Hit Man (MC-82) returns him to Bernie mode, in a true-ish crime comedy based on a Texas Monthly article, with some hot romance added.  Hot indeed in the pairing of Glenn Powell and Adria Arjona.  He’s a mild-mannered psych/philosophy teacher, whose electronics hobby leads to part-time police work with a surveillance team, which in turn leads him to take on the role of a hit man in sting operations.  She is one of his targets, clearly seeking murder for hire, but also lovely and sympathetic.  He lets her go with a bit of kind advice, they meet again by chance, sparks fly, shit hits the fan.  Linklater and Powell, who collaborated on the screenplay, are both Austin TX boys, but shifted the setting to New Orleans, to good and witty effect.  The script gives Powell ample opportunity to show off his acting chops as well as his abs, as he takes on a different hit man persona for each potential client.  Ms. Arjona also has ample opportunity to shape-shift, and give off what I thought of as some Barbara Stanwyck energy.  With so much to delight, I’m not inclined to put forward my quibbles with the ending, but I am inclined to update my woefully out-of-date Linklater career summary [now done].  Score one for Netflix.  And check out this recent NYT interview, through which my temperamental and intellectual affinity with Linklater is highlighted, and in which he neatly ties the ending to his recent documentary Hometown Prison.
 
Nyad (MC-63) boasts a fully-committed performance by Annette Bening as the title character, and a highly-engaging one by Jodie Foster as her coach and right-hand woman, both Oscar-nominated and enough to make the film worth seeing.  Bening does not soften the rough edges of a questionable character on a chimerical quest (to swim from Cuba to Key West), but the film is based on Diana Nyad’s celebrity memoir and feels compelled to conform to all the conventions of the sports film.  Foster humanizes the proceedings and justifies the final realization that an individual’s accomplishment is really a team achievement.  Made by the directing pair of the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo, the film is not superlong, but sometimes seemed as arduous and prolonged as the swim itself.
 
In a similar vein, The Novice (MC-85) follows a hardworking freshman as she tries to crack the varsity rowing team at an elite American university.  It’s obvious that first-time writer-director Lauren Hadaway knows whereof she speaks, and brings long experience as a sound designer to her maiden effort.  Visuals and music conspire to turn competitive sport into something like a psychological horror movie.  Isabelle Fuhrman is excellent as a presidential scholar who works obsessively to overcome her own feelings of not being good enough, which take her down dark paths of self-harm, relieved only by occasional moments of relief and beauty on the water.
 
I take note of two excellent documentaries now appearing on Netflix, though I’ll save comment for a forthcoming round-up of stand-out nonfiction films: Four Daughters (MC-80) and To Kill a Tiger (MC-88).  Netflix is not the invaluable resource it once was, but it still has some high-quality offerings. 
 
Since I stuck around on Netflix for an extra month to see Hit Man, I was finally able to follow up on a friend’s recommendation to watch Top Boy (MC-85), the UK’s answer to The Wire.  So far I’ve only seen the four-episode first season, will definitely watch more and report back.

Criterion of judgment

[First, a procedural note:  For films of the past quarter-century, I generally link to their Metacritic pages as the best portal for more information, including trailers, cast lists, and reviews.  For older films, I link to their Wikipedia pages, with two advisories: the Plot section is always rife with spoilers (if that matters to you); and for trailers and such, there’s always a direct link at the bottom to the film’s IMDb page, among other useful links.  So you never have to take my word alone on whether a film is worth seeing.]
 
Before I get started on another long celebration of the Criterion Channel, I want to highlight the next best streaming source for wide-ranging classics old and new, foreign and documentary, film and tv, namely Kanopy, which is available free through participating libraries, academic or public.  You’ll see the channel cited frequently as the place I found a film, sometimes when available on another channel that I don’t have a subscription to, and sometimes when I haven’t been able to find it any other place at all.
 
Such as four Eric Rohmer films that follow up nicely on one of my previous Criterion roundups, which led with the revival of Rohmer’s “Tales of Four Seasons” from the 1990s, and now Kanopy popped up with two of his “Comedies & Proverbs” from the 1980s, and two other anthology films from the same period.
 
First off, The Aviator’s Wife (Wiki), not remembered as one of my favorites, but this time around I appreciated the Rohmeresque irony of the title character never appearing in the film, and I took to Marie Riviere as l’autre femme more in the context of her other roles for Rohmer over the years.  It can all seem quite inconsequential unless you are attuned to his wavelength, with its everyday blend of eros, humor, and philosophic insight.  As much as Truffaut, Rohmer was a “man who loved women,” though perhaps less of a libertine and more a fond aesthetic admirer of youth and beauty.
 
It wasn’t till the final scene that I definitely remembered seeing Boyfriends and Girlfriends (Wiki), yet another amorous roundelay among young people looking for a proper mating.  Whether in Paris or various vacation venues, Rohmer is always attentive to architecture and environment, and this time it’s a newly-built satellite city around Paris, and a shifting group of young professionals.  This film is delightful, even if not memorable, in the long frieze of Rohmer’s portraits of desiring and desirable young people.
 
Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (Wiki) was definitely new to me, a country-mouse/city-mouse story of two young women who meet in the countryside and then room together in Paris, in four discrete episodes of understated humor.  This print seemed to be substandard, but the film itself is very much of a piece with Rohmer’s other work, and I was happy to see it.
 
Rendezvous in Paris (Wiki) details three separate anecdotes, in which different young characters meet up in a café, various parks, or the Picasso museum.  Each episode seemed fresh to me, even though I showed the third in my own anthology program at the Clark.  I’d almost recommend this as an introduction to Rohmer if you aren’t particularly familiar with his work, even before his acknowledged masterpieces.  If you like this, there’s plenty more where that came from.
 
While I was focused on other channels, Criterion accumulated several highly-rated streaming premieres.  First off, there was Our Body (MC-93), a Frederick Wiseman-like documentary about a French gynecological hospital, with one of 2023’s highest Metacritic ratings.  To tell the truth, for me it went from must-see to can’t-watch, given my squeamishness.  An admirable piece of work, but too much for my delicate sensibilities.
 
Then came two films high on my must-watch list.  Tótem (MC-91) is a dense and intimate family portrait as seen through the watchful, empathetic eyes of a 7-year-old girl.  It’s the birthday of her father, an artist who is dying of cancer.  With her, we are thrown into the maelstrom of an extended Mexican family, breaking down and re-forming around the tragedy of a beloved younger son.  The patriarch is a grumpy psychologist with his own medical problems.  Two elder sisters are putting on the party for their sick brother, but from clashing perspectives.  The central girl, Sol, has younger and older cousins, and a fascination for small living things around her, as she is told not to bother her father, who is resting up for the party.  In a tight frame, with long up-close takes, we follow as Sol begins to put together a picture of a family coping with the unstated presence of death in their midst.  Her mother drops her off in the morning, leaving her (and us) to spend the day trying to make sense of what is going on around her, and then the mother returns for the party and a stunning celebratory performance they have worked out together.  Lila Avilés has crafted a small film of major import, full of life under the shadow of mortality,
 
A new film from acclaimed Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is always an event, though sometimes a prospect of endurance more than enjoyment, so I spread the 3¼ hour running time of About Dry Grasses (MC-87) over several evenings.  It’s slow-moving and extremely talky, but decidedly interesting, Chekhov filtered through Antonioni.  Set in desolate, wintry Eastern Anatolia, it follows three teachers who wind up on this remote posting for differing reasons.  One is a discontented art teacher who seems to have an inappropriate relationship with a middle school girl.  He and his roommate each form a relationship with a woman from another school who lost her leg in a terrorist bombing (Merve Dizdar won Best Actress at Cannes).  The film moves from desolate widescreen landscapes to crowded dark rooms, with long takes, stationary camera, and extended conversations with very little resolution.  So – not for everyone, but riveting for anyone who can get on Ceylan’s wavelength.
 
I missed a dimension of Anselm (MC-82), since Wim Wenders’ portrait of Anselm Kiefer is meant to be seen in 3-D, but I still found it engaging, though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with the famous German artist.  There’s no narration and little speech altogether.  It’s mostly just Kiefer wandering around the large industrial estate where he produces and displays his art, in an installation as monumental as James Turrell’s Roden Crater.  For me it was enlivened by prior accounts from a friend who had visited both.  Kiefer is played as an 8-year-old boy in reenactments that convey what little is offered of his biography, and for later years there’s news footage of various sorts.  This documentary is reliant on how much interest and patience you bring to it.
 
Amanda (MC-81) is a privileged pain-in-the-ass post-adolescent, returned from college abroad and feeling stifled as she lazes about her parents’ mansion and tries futilely to connect with any other being, human or otherwise.  This is the debut film of Carolina Cavalli, and I appreciated its aura of authenticity as well as absurdity, sort of like a Milanese Lady Bird.  Amanda, a character made palatable by Benedetta Porcaroli’s portrayal, finally finds a best friend as aberrant and abrasive as herself, a match made in heaven, or some other place.
 
Unrest (MC-75) is an oddity that intrigued me, but seems unlikely to appeal to many.  The matter is significant, but the manner off-putting.  The story is set among Swiss watchmakers in the 1870s, when the engine of global capitalism is revving up, while the local workers strive to organize an anarchist commune, under the watchful eye of Pyotr Kropotkin.  The workers are primarily craftswomen doing incredibly detailed work, including placement of the all-important “unrest” wheel.  Much of the camerawork is off-center, from a security-camera-like distance where the viewer frequently cannot tell who’s speaking, among small figures crowded into a corner of the frame.  There are compelling close-ups of the painstaking work, some of the long shots privilege the natural background over the dialogue, and the viewer feels relief and impact when actually able to see the face of the person speaking.  But overall, all sorts of interesting notions about politics and economics, about timekeeping and working conditions, are adumbrated indirectly and offhand, some quite humorously.  The Swiss director keeps his distance even though (or maybe because) the subject is part of his family history.

Criterion always has one or more Noir collections running, with an unusual angle taken on 1950 Peak Noir, which includes noir-inflected classics such as Sunset Boulevard, In a Lonely Place, and Panic in the Streets, all of which I admired but didn’t feel the urge to see again.  What first caught my eye was a Barbara Stanwyck that I’d never seen before, and wanted to add to my career retrospective.
 
The File on Thelma Jordon (Wiki) remakes the story of Double Indemnity, with Stanwyck as the femme fatale luring a supposedly wised-up guy into becoming an accomplice to her own dastardly plot.  She is reliably great with whatever material she’s given, but Wendell Corey is no Fred MacMurray.  And I might have said that Robert Siodmak is no Billy Wilder, but instead I made a note to look for other films he directed, since this had a very distinctive look and style, even when saddled with a wooden male lead and a fairly nonsensical script.  It’s not among Stanwyck’s unmissable performances, but displays her characteristic quality work.  And served as an entrée into other viewing from one of my toddler years.
 
Joan Crawford is not among the old Hollywood divas that I’ve fallen for, but I gave The Damned Don’t Cry (Wiki) a try because it was supposed to reflect her own rise from rural poverty to stardom, and be loved in particular by her fans.  God knows it was campy enough to verge on self-caricature, but I had no conception that it was based on the same situation as Warren Beatty’s Bugsy – let’s just say Joan Crawford is no Annette Bening.
 
I’d watched a few films in a recent John Garfield collection, but didn’t catch The Breaking Point (Wiki) till it appeared in this 1950 collection.  A reworking of Hemingway’s To Have and To Have Not, this version is not highjacked by Bogie-Bacall chemistry as it pairs Garfield with Patricia Neal in a smaller but still effective role as a tramp.  Michael Curtiz directs with finesse, and Garfield demonstrates why he was a major star, anguished and soulful as a boat owner who must resort to smuggling, with mountingly disastrous results.   Within two years, hounded by HUAC, he would be dead of a heart attack at 39.
 
Caged (Wiki) has been called a “Camp classic,” but is something more than that, coming soon after The Snake Pit and leading to a whole subgenre of Women in Prison pictures (persisting all the way to Orange is the New Black).  It’s well-directed by John Cromwell, with a reasonable amount of verisimilitude and a pair of Oscar-nominated performances.  Eleanor Parker is surprisingly good in transforming from pregnant teen bride, jailed as accomplice to her husband’s fatal armed robbery, into a hard-bitten criminal in course of her sentence.  Hope Emerson plays the Nurse Ratchet-like prison matron, and Agnes Moorehead the reform-minded warden.  While not without its preposterous elements, the film is generally a serious-minded affair.
 
I’ve never really understood why some people consider Nicholas Ray to be a great director, and Born to be Bad (Wiki) does not change that.  And I’ve never seen much in Joan Fontaine, and her simpering mendacity here doesn’t change that.  Not quite bad enough to be good.

Not sure how I never saw a film as renowned as John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (Wiki), but I was happy to catch it at this late date, as the template for so many jewel-heist capers.  One of the epochal noir masterpieces, this crisply-made crime drama is dotted with memorable performances, from Sam Jaffe as the Germanic mastermind to Sterling Hayden as the muscle he recruits to Louis Calhern as the shady lawyer who bankrolls the operation and a startlingly young and magnetic Marilyn Monroe as his girl on the side.  Jean Hagan and James Whitmore are also effective in supporting roles.  Of course there’s the caper and its unraveling, but for me the character development impressed most, hardboiled but something deeper too.
 
I wrapped up this calendrical cross-section by watching an Alfred Hitchcock film that I hadn’t seen before, Stage Fright (Wiki).  His return from Hollywood to England is less a murder mystery than a comedy about stage acting, with Marlene Dietrich as a swan-like chanteuse (whose husband is the victim) and Jane Wyman as the acting student who takes on various real-life roles to try to clear her long-time friend (Richard Todd) of suspicion, while deceiving the police officer (Michael Wilding) who wins her heart.  The supporting cast is sterling, and the dialogue witty, though it’s not very stirring as a thriller.
 
Whoops, one more 1950 film that I’d never seen, Night and the City (Wiki), not to be confused (as I was) with The Naked City, which has Jules Dassin also moving to London, in the midst of being blacklisted in Hollywood.  Richard Widmark goes with him as a dreaming and scheming American, a tout scrounging around for money before trying for a big score as a wrestling promoter, where he runs into a rough crowd.  As with his earlier film about NYC and his later film about Cleveland (see below), Dassin demonstrates a distinctive, sometimes overwrought thriller style and relies on location shooting for his action scenes.  Considered too dark upon release, the film is now taken as an epitome of noir.
 
(N.B.  Many of the films in the “1950 Peak Noir” collection will depart the channel at the end of June, but many will return in other collections, or can be found on other streaming channels.)
 
While immersed in the era of Hollywood films around the time of my birth, I watched two other noirish films. Undercurrent (Wiki) is not what you expect from director Vincente Minelli or stars Katherine Hepburn and Robert Mitchum.  She’s a scientist’s daughter, falling for the businessman who buys his invention, only to discover he is not the man she imagined.  And the brother whom he despises (Mitchum) is the opposite of what he claims.  It’s all quite implausible, but not offensively so.
 
In The House on Telegraph Hill (Wiki), Valentina Cortese is another woman married to a man (Richard Basehart, whom she married in real life) who is not what he seems.  But then neither is she, having taken the identity of a friend who died in their displaced persons camp after WWII.  In this Robert Wise film, the couple comes together for highly mixed motives and goes to live in a scenic San Francisco mansion, where nasty business is afoot.  Another white knight emerges to save our beleaguered heroine, in this tale from back in a previous age when gaslighting was à la mode.
 
I also sampled a couple of films, new to me, in a recent collection called “Hollywood Crack-Up” containing American films from the 1960s depicting societal or psychological breakdown, from The Manchurian Candidate to Pretty Poison.
 
Uptight (Wiki) is a remarkable document, if not a good film.  Jules Dassin imports the plot of The Informer from Dublin in 1922 to Cleveland in 1968, about a Black Panther-like group instead of the IRA.  The film is colorful in several senses, and highly stylized, but I was particularly struck by some remarkable location footage in The Flats at the time I was working down there, and around the Hough neighborhood, from when I was driving through that area while the streets were occupied by the National Guard.  So I was willing to overlook the film’s declamatory staginess for that window back in time, as it opens with MLK’s funeral and surveys a cross-section of Black responses to the tragedy.  Frequently over-the-top and stereotypical, and hampered by the source material, this film is still a worthwhile time capsule.
 
Pressure Point (Wiki) has a surprisingly current resonance (post-Charlottesville, “very fine people on both sides,” and all the rest), flashing back from 1962 to 1942 as prison psychiatrist Sidney Poitier tries to treat an unrepentant Nazi seditionist, startlingly well played by pop singer Bobby Darin (“Somewhere across the sea . . .”).  Based on a case study in Robert Lindner’s The Fifty-Minute Hour, and well directed by Hubert Cornfield, it’s another evocative time capsule, speaking to the state of psychiatry as well as politics.  (And also hearkens back to Poitier’s doctor-treating-racist role in No Way Out, included in the “1950 Peak Noir” collection.)
 
Postcards from the Edge (1990, MC-71) has worn well.  Criterion had it in a collection of Shirley MacLaine movies, but I was most interested in Meryl Streep’s acting (and singing).  Mike Nichols directs Carrie Fisher’s story, based loosely on her relationship with her mother, Debbie Reynolds.  It’s a lively and funny Hollywood story, with many stars and stars-to-be parading through.
 
Criterion curates 4-8 new collections each month, so there’s always something new to explore in some depth.  (Which means some films leave each month as well.)  In June, there are new career retrospectives for the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Paul Schrader, and Céline Sciamma, each containing films well worth seeing or re-seeing. There are also clever thematic collections, which combine to make Criterion the one indispensable streaming channel, for which I have a charter annual subscription that comes to $8.33 per month.
 
In a previous compilation of Criterion reviews, I wrote at some length about my admiration for the filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love, and then on Kanopy I found her precocious first feature film All is Forgiven (MC-85), made in 2007 but not released in the U.S. till 2021.  What’s most impressive is how her distinctive observational style was established right from the beginning.  This is a bifurcated story about a bifurcated couple, earnest Austrian professional woman and French would-be poet, a layabout devoted to drugs and drink.  Inevitably they split up, and the mother forbids any contact between father and daughter.  Jumping ahead a dozen years, the girl is a senior in high school (played beautifully by the older sister of the young girl), and her cleaned-up father tries to reconnect.  Don’t expect resolution from Hansen-Love, but count on intimate exploration of everyday realities.
 
That leads me to two other films I caught up with on Kanopy, to use my “tickets” before they expired at the end of the month (with a library card, you get to watch a certain number of films and tv series per month).
 
I’ve recently been on the lookout for films starring Virginie Efira, so Revoir Paris (MC-71) caught my eye.  I didn’t know what it was about, or that the role had won her a César for Best Actress, but Alice Winocour’s film was well worth finding.  Directly inspired by Islamist terror attacks in 2015, it follows a survivor who struggles to piece together memories of the event after she had blacked out the experience.  Like a detective, she follows clues to recreate the story, and finds a measure of healing by communing with other survivors in solidarity.  The horrific event is sensitively handled, and other perspectives amplify the central character’s experience.  Politics aside, the film offers immersion in the psychology and sociology of trauma, and another striking performance by Efira, who makes any film she’s in worth your time.
 
The Royal Hotel (MC-77) is a witty misnomer for a godforsaken bar deep in the Australian outback, where two vagabond American girls wind up when their money runs out.  I’d been impressed by director Kitty Green’s #MeToo first feature The Assistant, and my summation applies equally to this film: “This is a horror story of everyday life, relying on suffocating detail and observation, rather than melodrama.”   This one also stars Julia Garner, along with Jessica Henwick, as the two women tend bar to earn money to move on, serving a virtually all-male clientele of miners, with sexual harassment a given and the threat of violence always present.  Subdued but tense as any thriller, the film suffers from a would-be cathartic ending, like waking up from a bad dream.
 
You can bet I’ll be back soon with another round-up of Criterion and Kanopy titles, but next I’ll be dipping back into Netflix and then Hulu for updates, with another round-up of recently acclaimed documentaries.