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.

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.