Net-flix-a-tions V, part 2: Films

Over the course of a half-year, a lot of good films find their way to Netflix, and this is a report on the most recent notable arrivals.  Notable at least to someone with my approach to cinema (for which, see here).
 
Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague (MC-76) is in many ways disguised autobiography, or biopic as manifesto.  In recreating the production of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Linklater celebrates a style of filmmaking – personal, freeform, direct, spontaneous – that he has practiced himself for decades.  The acting across the board has great verisimilitude, with many of the key figures of the French New Wave getting look-alike walk-ons.  It certainly helps to recognize all the names as they are introduced with captioned portraits, but even without that, the excitement of a transformational cultural movement and moment shows through.  These guys (and a few gals like Agnes Varda) knew they were changing the history of cinema and enjoying themselves doing so.  I’ve always been a Truffaut partisan and found Godard arrogant, self-important, and morally suspect, and this film does nothing to change that, while granting his revolutionary impact.  So I gave Breathless another look, liked it better after Linklater’s retelling, but would still rank Godard well behind Truffaut, Rohmer, Varda, and other New Wavers in my personal estimation.
 
Some directors take ten years between films, but Linklater is the type who can either make a film over the course of a dozen years (Boyhood) or release two new films at the same time.  Blue Moon (MC-78) came to Netflix only after it garnered Oscar noms for Ethan Hawke as best actor and Robert Kaplow for original script, which tells the story of Lorenz Hart on the opening night of Oklahoma! – for which Rodgers had replaced him with Hammerstein as lyricist.  Now I’m on record claiming that both Linklater and Hawke are the very best of their generation in their respective roles, so it’s no surprise that I liked this movie.  But even I was surprised by how much I liked it, ranking it with the best work of both, together and apart.  In contrast to the previous film’s style of filmmaking, Blue Moon is virtually theatrical, precisely scripted in a one-location, near-real-time experience.  Here Rick travels from Parisian streets in 1960 to a Broadway bar in 1943.  Believably playing a balding man five feet tall is the least of Hawke’s attainments in the role of “Larry” Hart, as he utters a nonstop spiel of hopes and lies, barbed opinions and witticisms, savoring each turn of phrase. He’s well supported by Andrew Scott as Richard Rodgers, Bobby Cannavale as Sardi’s bartender, Patrick Kennedy as fellow drinker E.B. White, and Margaret Qualley as Hart’s dream girl, in what can only be called a Broadway hit show.  With the proviso that I haven’t seen Hamnet yet, this may be my favorite film of 2025.
 
Train Dreams (MC-88) has gone from Sundance hit to multiple Oscar nominee. This lovely but sad film follows the life of one man, quietly but movingly played by Joel Edgerton, from his early days as an itinerant logger in the Pacific Northwest before the Great War, up into old age in the Sixties, a stretch of time that is both long and short, beautiful and horrific.  The incursions of technology into the wilderness and the persistence of racial violence are interwoven into the story.  Over that span, two women break through the taciturn reserve of Edgerton, Felicity Jones as his adoring wife, and Kerry Condon as a forest ranger who shares his history of isolation and loss, and provides a bit of wisdom that resonated with me, “the world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.”  Clint Bentley is happy to acknowledge Terrence Malick as an influence (Days of Heaven in particular), but has formed a close working relationship with Greg Kwedar, working together on scripts (here adapting a Denis Johnson novella), and swapping seats in the director’s chair.  Keep an eye out for this pair.
 
Netflix has another film with multiple Oscar noms in Frankenstein (MC-78), but of course Guillermo del Toro is less to my taste, though I did like Pan’s Labyrinth.  This creature feature was a chore to watch (over several sessions of stationary cycling), but not without some admirable attributes.  Impressive in all technical aspects, the film is well-served by Jacob Elordi as the Creature, and gothicized by Oscar Isaac as the title character and Mia Goth as the woman between them.  Del Toro is both respectful and committed to this story and to the Victorian period he’s placed it in, but I have a hard time engaging with creature features and scenery chewing.  Give me real life every time.
 
Writer-director Rian Johnson continues his playful but profound engagement with genre in Wake Up Dead Man (MC-80), the third of his “Knives Out” series of throwback mystery features.  Poker Face, his comic mystery series with Natasha Lyonne, also falls into that category.  So he knows how to entertain with humor, suspense, and something more.  All-star casts help.  Daniel Craig returns as the Southern gentleman detective, here paired with the very reliable Josh O’Connor as a junior priest at an upstate NY church where a murder has occurred.  Josh Brolin is the head priest and Glenn Close is the indispensable church lady, with a handful of familiar parishioners as suspects.  The convoluted mystery is rather a throw-away (or “macguffin”) and the proceedings drag on twenty minutes too long, but the atheistic detective and the conflicted young priest have some provocative discussions about faith and fact, conjecture and belief, doubt and proof.
 
Cillian Murphy was only one of the reasons I felt compelled to watch Steve (MC-65).  Since hitting the big time with Oppenheimer, he’s made two small, serious films about troubled juveniles “in care,” both with director Tim Mielants and co-star Emily Watson (Small Things Like These reviewed here).  Steve heads a school for delinquent and disturbed boys housed on a derelict rural estate in 1996 Britain.  On one given day, with a tv news crew on hand, all sorts of shit hits the fan, the aggro emotions matched by frenzied filmmaking; long, long traveling shots through the chaos mix with video news interviews and surreal interludes.  Needless exposition and excess complication undermine immediacy, and the film doesn’t really hold together or add up, but with good acting among the youths and staff (Tracy Ullman a standout) it didn’t wear out its welcome for me.  Our man Cillian keeps those uncanny blue eyes heavily lidded in this outing, as a closet alcoholic coping with his own trauma while dealing with one crisis after another.
 
In Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (MC-73), the main character played by Camille Rutherford won me over in the credit sequence, as she dances around the bookstore where she works – the famous Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, no less.  This first feature from writer-director Laura Piani enters a crowded corner of the shrinking rom-com ballroom, but emerges on to the dance floor with charm and distinction, much enhanced by the piquant portrayal of Ms. Rutherford.  She’s angular, androgynous, and acerbically funny, but blocked in life, love, and writing.  A randy coworker submits a sample of her work and wins her a residency at the posh home of some Austen descendants, including a Darcy-esque literature professor who has little use for his ancestor.  Will she wind up with one or the other, or neither?  The dialogue is not exactly Rohmer-esque, but does give the familiar interactions a certain Gallic tang.  I’m a confirmed Jane-ite, but more from a writerly Eng-Lit perspective than a romance angle, so this offshoot suited me fine.  Some might find it too Austen-ish, others might find it not Austen-ish enough, but like Goldilocks I found it just right.
 
I’ve never been a fan of the adept action director Kathryn Bigelow, not even The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty, so I didn’t expect much from the divisive House of Dynamite (MC-75), but I found myself more in agreement with the raves than the dismissals.  This tale of nuclear apocalypse is more a workplace drama than an explosive disaster movie.  We follow an array of government officials on their way to a normal workday, which takes an unimaginable turn when a missile is launched from an unknown place but headed for the American Midwest.  The credible look of various secret locations initially made me think the film must have had the cooperation and even endorsement of the DoD (oh, excuse me, the DoW), designed for military recruitment.  But no, you wouldn’t want any of these jobs, certainly not those of Idris Elba or Tracy Letts or Rebecca Ferguson (new to me but veteran of many films that I would never see).  The clever script by Noah Oppenheim revisits the 18-minute duration of the missile’s flight from three different but interlocking vantage points, getting more propulsive in each iteration.  We watch game theory and ultra-technology and human error drive toward apocalypse, in this pulse-pounding “entertainment” that kept me pumping away on a stationary bike.  There are few laughs in this Dr. Strangelove, it’s too breathless for that.
 
I felt I owed it to Kate Winslet to watch her first directorial effort Goodbye June (MC-54), a family affair in which she gathered a sterling cast to film a script written by her son.  Helen Mirren is exceptional as the dying matriarch June; her husband Timothy Spall, her daughters Winslet, Toni Collette, and Andrea Riseborough, and son Johnny Flynn all live up to their accomplished past work.  Watching an old lady die over the course of a few weeks, while her family visits in different groupings, is probably not your idea of entertainment, but watching such a troupe of performers elevate the material of a young man’s memories of his grandmother’s passing, as captured by the daughter/mother in-between, has an authenticity that overcomes any schmaltz or obviousness (such as a nurse named Angel).  The Metacritic rating seems prejudiciously low.
 
Jay Kelly (MC-67) looks (and sounds) just like George Clooney, likewise an aging megastar but more of a hollow shell, just a string of popular movies and adoring fans, underappreciated assistants and neglected family.  But he is George Clooney, so in this Hollywood self-satire Noah Baumbach goes a lot easier on him than many of the director’s troubled protagonists.  But the film’s sympathies are with Adam Sandler as the star’s enabling manager, who neglects his own family in selfless and thankless service to his client and friend.  The New Wave insider vibe is enhanced by all sorts of film references, and an incredible series of cameos by the likes of Greta Gerwig (Baumbach’s wife, and a superstar herself by now), Billy Crudup, Laura Dern, Jim Broadbent, Riley Keough, Emily Mortimer (who also collaborated on the script), and more.  Less acerbic than usual (and less harsh in satire than, say, The Studio), Baumbach is the cinemaniac he’s always been, and always of interest to me; after all, he named his first-born son Rohmer.
 
Actors, subject, and a NYT critic’s pick overcame the substandard Metacritic rating for me to watch The Lesson (MC-62).  I didn’t regret that, but wouldn’t turn around and recommend it, unless you are similarly drawn in.  Daryl McCormack is a young writer who gets a lucky (?) gig as tutor to the son of one of his favorite authors (Richard E. Grant), on a posh British estate.  The family, including the art dealer mother (Julie Delpy), is under the pall of an older son’s death.  Nothing is quite as it seems, but the suspense and surprises are nothing special, so you would need your own hook to make it worth watching.  Perhaps the estate’s Monet-worthy gardens might do it for you.
 
Since The Bear, I’ve had a bit of a thing for Molly Gordon, so Oh, Hi! (MC-62) surmounted less than glowing reviews to earn my attention.  Ms. Gordon stars and also gets story credit with writer-director Sophie Brooks.  We join her on a weekend excursion Upstate with recent boyfriend Logan Lerman.  They seem well-matched in humor and romance, until it comes out that for her it’s a relationship and for him it’s a situation.  The story then takes a quasi-Misery turn as she tries to keep him captive long enough for him to realize how desirable she really is.  As you can imagine, that is not the best way to win his heart.  Or maybe it is after all.  I’m not telling, but am saying that I quite enjoyed this rom-com with a thriller twist.
 
Shih-Ching Tsou has been working with multiple-Oscar-winning filmmaker Sean Baker for more than twenty years in various roles, and with Left-Handed Girl (MC-77) takes the director’s chair solo for the first time (with Baker garnering three other credits himself), telling a personal story of three (or four) generations of women.  A single mother with two daughters, one around 20 and one about 5, returns to Taipei after some years away.  She opens a noodle shop in a night market, and one of the film’s considerable virtues is following the five-year-old running through the vibrant, almost-kaleidoscopic market.  There’s a grandmother, and two aunties as well, with all kinds of feminine interaction amongst them.  Men are mostly beside the point, whether they’re dealing out damage or decency.  Like Tangerine this was shot on iPhones for extraordinary immediacy, and like The Florida Project it centers on an amazing performance from a young girl.  As usual with this pair of collaborators, this is an intimate, sympathetic street-level look at underclass lives, which finds shards of hope and joy in the rough and tumble of life.
 
That calls to mind another Taiwanese-American director, Alice Wu, whose The Half of It (MC-74) missed my last Netflix round-up.  As with her earlier Saving Face (MC-65), I enjoyed the rom-com perspective of a young Asian-American lesbian.  In a takeoff on Cyrano, a brainy highschooler writes love letters for a lunky football-playing neighbor to the girl she has a genuine crush on.  Pleasantly personal.
 
Before I go on hiatus with Netflix again, I will include several of their programs in a round-up of documentaries, but before that I’ll another make another “Stray viewing” post to cover programs on PBS, Kanopy, MUBI, and HBO Max.

Net-flix-a-tions V, part 1: Series

No longer as devoted to Netflix as I was for two decades or more, it’s been six months since my last round-up, and I have plenty to catch up with.  Buckle up, this is going to be a long two-part post that will remain open till I pause my subscription again next month, after squeezing all the latest juice out of Netflix – but still rooting for them to overcome Ellison and Trump in the acquisition of WarnerDiscovery.
 
One of the new Netflix shows I was eager to come back for was Death by Lightning (MC-80).  I grew up a few miles from President James Garfield’s memorial tomb, and followed him from Ohio to Williams College – one of my favorite bits of historical trivia is that his intended destination when he was shot in the DC train station was a meeting of Williams alumni in NYC.  My own obsession with American history runs from 1840 to 1860, so I knew relatively little about the election of 1880, and how Garfield was drafted for the Republican nomination after giving a rousing nominating speech for someone else, eventually emerging as a compromise candidate between deadlocked factions.  The convention takes up most of the first of four episodes and was one of the more convincing depictions of politics on film that I have ever seen.  Acting is excellent across the board: as Garfield, Michael Shannon gives his most sympathetic portrayal, Matthew McFadyen plays his deranged assassin Guiteau (reminiscent of his role in Succession), Nick Offerman plays roistering VP Chester Arthur, and Betty Gilpin is Mrs. Garfield.  Other familiar faces don flamboyant beards and believably inhabit Gilded Age pols.  Sets and costumes also evince authenticity, which the dialogue sorely lacks.  Sometimes it pushes contemporary parallels, which is allowable and even welcome, but often it lacks any sense of period speech, hitting a low point when the demure First Lady screams the F-word.  One thing I do know about the era is the Oneida Community, and I took umbrage at a flashback that reduced it to slapstick, as a fuckfest where Guiteau alone couldn’t get laid.  But my viewing partner was on Wikipedia through much of the series, confirming most of the salient details, so the whole is far from braindead.
 
Suranne Jones and Julie Delpy are actresses who have earned my admiration over multiple projects, so their presence overcame the lackluster reception of Hostage (MC-62) to earn my viewing attention – and managed to sustain it through five episodes.  They play British PM and French Prez respectively, who approach as adversaries but act together when an international crisis develops.  I have a hard time distinguishing this from the other British political thrillers (esp. Slow Horses) I’ve been watching lately, but despite the leads it’s relatively lacking in plausibility and humor.  (Neither lady leader is a patch on Denmark’s PM in Borgen, also on Netflix, among the very best tv series ever, with the kicker that the postscript fourth season is all about an international crisis over Greenland.)
 
Steven Knight is a busy man, churning out captivating historical dramas, best known for Peaky Blinders (which has a feature-length follow-up coming in March) and more recently, A Thousand Blows.  House of Guinness (MC-72) is of a piece, featuring impressively atmospheric period recreations of Dublin and Connacht in the post-famine era and solid acting all round, with an anachronistic punk rock soundtrack.  Like an Irish Succession, it follows four siblings vying for control of the legendary brewery after the patriarch’s death.  Anthony Boyle is the eldest and most familiar, with the ubiquitous James Norton as the establishment’s heavy-handed enforcer.  There’s a mix of fine ladies and Fenian Pre-Raphaelite beauties, as the family business navigates between Protestant evangelicals and Catholic revolutionaries.  I was satisfied with the cliffhanger conclusion after eight propulsive episodes, but would welcome a sequel.
 
Despite raves, I could never get into BoJack Horseman, but was immediately grabbed by Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s new animated dramedy series Long Story Short (MC-89). It’s a Jewish family’s collective biography, covering forty years in non-chronological order (except for the rapid-fire title sequence, which is worth watching repeatedly, to get the arc of those forty years, with slight changes foreshadowing the focus of each of ten episodes).  The whole show is fast, furious, funny, and ultimately moving.  The very authentic family drama is punctured and punctuated by an avalanche of laugh-out-loud lines and gestures.  To appreciate the humor, it helps to have grown up surrounded by Jews, but I think many of the family dynamics will ring bells for all backgrounds.  All the voice acting is spot on, and the animation by Lisa Hanawalt seems simple and cartoonish but reveals surprising depth and dimension.  Thankfully, we won’t have long to wait for the second season.  It will be enough to bring me back into the Netflix fold, when I have strayed again.
 
The next three series in this round-up share an identical Metacritic rating (beneath my benchmark of 80), which says something about the current state of Netflix programming.  The firehose of content is not about offering the very best but delivering the good enough across a wide range of audiences.
 
Wayward (MC-71) is the one that appealed to me, based on Mae Martin’s previous Netflix series, Feel Good, a clearly autobiographical lesbian rom-com among the stand-up set in London.  (Also, her own stand-up special SAP.)  Martin has returned to her native Canada, for a dramatic series that also seems based on personal experience, about a restrictive school for troubled teens.  This one is set over the border in Tall Pines, VT, with Toni Collette in fine form as the mercurial headmistress (and leader of a cult modeled on Synanon, not to give too much away).  As well as writing, Martin plays an androgynous cop named Alex, whose wife is pregnant, paternity not specified.  The couple moved back to her hometown from Detroit, Alex leaving the police there for reasons that go unspoken but implied.  Mae/Alex is apparently transitioning (a bit of pillow talk concerns whether their stubble is coming in), and happy to show off their good-looking top-surgery.  Alex meets and befriends two girls who’ve been sent to that school by parents who don’t want to deal with them, and then begins to trace the history of 18 cold cases of youths who ran away from the school over the years and were never heard from again.  Seemingly trying to fill a teen-horror genre niche, the eight-episode series runs too long and tries too many twists of the tale, but the personal aspects, and the effective acting that filters down from the stars to the teens, make it a worthwhile watch for most of its length.  
 
I’m a sucker for shows about writers, so I gave a look to The Beast in Me (MC-71) despite the title and the woman-in-jeopardy trailer.  Never a fan of The Americans or Homeland, I didn’t expect much but was willing to give Claire Danes a chance to convince me.  The show met my expectations – and one episode was plenty.  Similarly, I felt no compulsion to watch more than a couple of episodes of the second season of Man on the Inside (MC-71).  I thought the shift in scene from old folks home to college campus, and the addition of Ted Danson’s wife Mary Steenburgen to the cast might revive my interest, but found the shtick had lost its novelty.
 
Netflix frequently imports shows which had success on other channels and a recent one I want to highlight is This is Going to Hurt (MC-91), which I reviewed here.  Another series that deserves repeated mention as one of the best of 2025 is Asura (reviewed here), which led me to an earlier series by Hirokazu Kore-eda, The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House (MC-70).  I’m one episode into it, and will report back here if I get through before this month’s subscription runs out.

Applelicious

With the HBO premium brand sinking into the muck of Max (and eventually into Netflix or Paramount), AppleTV (sans +) seems poised to take on the label – “It’s not just tv, it’s Apple.”  They don’t try to cater to every taste, though they do offer portals to other channels, plus pay per view.  Never having entered the Apple universe through computer or phone, I don’t rate the channel in my top tier (my last round-up was a year ago), but as the home of Dickinson and Pachinko (my personal favorites among other popular Apple hits) it will always have merit in my eyes.  In justifying recent subscription price increases (though with frequent special offers), their own programs cover a reasonable range, and even those that don’t click for everyone have plausibility and polish, and not just the expediency of “content.” 
 
The Emmy haul of The Studio (MC-80) is testimony to that.  I’ve followed Seth Rogen since his teenage debut in Freaks & Greeks, but I never imagined he had this in him, to win Emmys for writing, producing, directing (with his longtime partner Evan Goldman) and starring in a comedy series.  And maybe even deserve them!  Goes to prove that being stoned all the time is no impediment to creativity, or should I say creative insanity?  This is a cringe-comedy Hollywood satire that starts with pedal to the metal and never lets up.  Rogen plays a professed cinephile who lucks into the job of studio head, where he continually must let commerce trump art in the making of movies, as he oscillates between macher and nebbish.  Catherine O’Hara plays his mentor and deposed predecessor, Bryan Cranston is his corporate boss, and there is a never-ending string of supporting players and celebrity cameos.  Mixing strains of Altman’s The Player and the HBO series Entourage into a blend all its own, this hybrid series delivers on both hilarity and authenticity.  And it takes advantage of shrinking cameras to make extended shots that roam all over the studio lot or other settings (such as Las Vegas in the two-episode finale of the first season – with another in the works), to a percussive score that ratchets up the pandemonium.  My enjoyment was certainly enhanced by the witty takes on the business of filmmaking, but there’s enough wild slapstick to entertain the uninitiated.
 
And now Apple has Vince Gilligan, creator of my favorite series of all time, the combo of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.  His new Pluribus (MC-86) returns to Albuquerque and brings back the delightful Rhea Seehorn, one of the stars of Saul.  I wasn’t stoked by Gilligan’s turn toward sci-fi, but by the third episode I realized that the series was really a parable about A.I. and became fully engaged.  Still, the series is underpopulated and slow moving, as an encryption from space makes humans join into a hive mind, with only a dozen exceptions around the globe.  Seehorn is one, a popular romantasy writer who loses her partner in the transition, and then all the people of the city depart when she rejects the no-longer-human “peace, love, and understanding” shared by all the others.  Now I’d sign up to watch “Kim Wexler” read the phone book, but this was a bit languorous for me and I was quite disappointed that it didn’t end with the 9^th episode, but expects to go on for three more seasons.  As with Severance, I don’t think I’ll have the patience or interest to persist.  Still, this has many of virtues of Gilligan’s two hits, but leans more into his origins on The X-Files (which I never watched).
 
Another established favorite is Slow Horses (MC-79).  In the 5^th season, some people missed the shoot-em-up climax but I appreciated the greater emphasis on wit and humor.  This series is one of the most reliable pleasures on the tube these days.  I wrote about previous seasons here, here, and here, and it’s all still true.  Top-notch writing derived from Mick Herron’s “Slough House” series of MI5 spy novels, and stellar acting from Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, on down through the rest of the sterling cast list, plus propulsive storytelling (with the inevitable chase scenes on foot), make for a sure-fire hit series, which shows no sign of slowing down.
 
All three of these shows are very inventive, verbally and visually, with superb acting and high-quality production.
 
Apple doubled down on Mick Herron with Down Cemetery Road (MC-71), from an earlier series of his books, which shares the combination of humorous characters, relentless action, and similar plot reliance on government cover-ups.  Not to mention top-flight acting, here with Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson in the lead.  They were enough to make me give a look-see, and I was immediately hooked when the whole show began at the Ashmolean Museum and included all sorts of Oxford sights that I could recognize.  Later episodes go to London and an island north of Scotland, but the settings are always of interest.  The “mystery” is rather vague and the twists and turns not particularly worth following.  But performances, wit, and action make the series quite palatable for anyone who can’t get enough of the writer or stars.
 
Mr. Scorsese (MC-84) is another top-notch series.  Marty is still active, thank goodness, though with emeritus status among great American directors, but this loving retrospective, a five-part documentary portrait, transcends the limitations of the genre, because it’s directed by Rebecca Miller (Arthur’s daughter), another filmmaker for whom I feel a strong affinity.  She goes well beyond the standard clip-reel-cum-talking-head-commentary, not just with archival documentation but by inducing the hyper-analyzed maestro to “take the couch” throughout, achieving something like a five-act (morality) play.  It helps to have seen all his films at least once, but I sense this bio-doc could reward some who have seen few or none.  The greatest director of my generation and background deserves the attention of all viewers.  His fifty-year career also spans a lot of cultural and political history.  But what do I know? – I’m totally infatuated with this program, and eager to revisit some of Scorsese’s films with this autobiographical background to the thematic inspirations and proximate circumstances of their making.
 
In anticipation of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (MC-73) I went back and rewatched High and Low, one of my favorite Kurosawa films.  Probably not a good idea, because then my appreciation for Spike’s joint followed the trajectory of his title, from the soaring heights of his aerial credit sequence to such depths that I couldn’t bear to watch all the way to the end, as he left behind the inspiration of Kurosawa’s masterpiece to ride his own hobby horses and in-jokes.  He grabbed me with bird’s eye views of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn over the bridge, so different from when I lived in the neighborhood a half-century ago, but tagged on so many undisciplined postscripts that I had to FF to the end.  Spike’s self-referential approach is mirrored in Denzel Washington’s self-importance, but we’re a long way from Malcolm X here, with this musical entrepreneur known as the “best ears in the business.”  The rest of the acting is indifferent at best, even Jeffrey Wright struggling with an underwritten role.  Though Lee begins with some of Kurosawa’s fluid camerawork, his chase scenes are self-indulgent rather than expressive (e.g. a subway car full of Yankees fans chanting “Red Sox suck!” or a Puerto Rican street fair).  Not without its pleasures, but still ultimately a disappointment to high expectations.
 
Though Paul Greengrass has descended from the heights of Bloody Sunday and United 93 into franchise thrillers, he’s a director who is always worth a look, and The Lost Bus (MC-64) fits the bill, in a docudrama about the Camp Fire that wiped out Paradise CA.  To quote some of my previous reviews, “his style is composed of visual shards in dynamic mosaic,” with “on-the-fly, you-are-there-in-the-middle-of-a-shitstorm filmmaking.”  The Hollywood angle pairs Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrara (shades of Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in this opposite to Speed) as bus driver and teacher trying lead a bus full of schoolchildren through a maze of encircling fire to the evacuation center where their parents wait anxiously.  We also watch CalFire officials making impossible decisions about fighting the fire versus applying all resources to saving lives.  As a sidelight, McConaughey’ mother and son play those roles in this film.  Enveloping describes the film as well as the wildfire, the experience is edifying even if the dialogue is uninspired. 
 
As for F1 (MC-68), I managed to make it almost a quarter of the way through this 155-minute barrage of commercials, based on the charm of Brad Pitt and a few other players, but the tired storytelling and the utter boredom and waste of Formula One racing compelled me to quit.
 
I probably would have missed the documentary Come See Me in the Good Light (MC-81) if my daughter hadn’t been familiar with the poetry and persona of Andrea Gibson.  Filmmaker Ryan White followed them and their partner and fellow poet Megan Falley from an ovarian cancer diagnosis to the brink of death and one final sold-out spoken word performance, where it’s no surprise to see look-alike Tig Notaro introducing them, and also getting a producing credit.  This portrait of a loving creative genderqueer couple facing a difficult medical journey has many layers, the poetry and the humor offering relief from the grim progression of the disease.  Besides Tig, I’m reminded of a book I just finished and enjoyed immensely, Alison Bechdel’s Spent: A Comic Novel, another celebration of gender fluidity, and the emotional bonds between all kinds of matings.  This film about dying is anything but grim.
 
It would be a bigger mistake to skip AppleTV altogether than to subscribe on a year-round basis.  Though I’ve squeezed out all the juice, I look forward to the next show that will drag me back onto the channel.

More of MUBI

Except for special tastes, MUBI is overpriced at $15 per month, but frequently offers specials, and through Amazon Prime I just got a two-month subscription for $4.  I had only one must-see film of theirs on my list, but encountered little trouble finding others.  The channel is a worthy haven for the offbeat, but only worth the occasional month’s subscription.  Here I return for a follow up to my last go-round.

Eephus (MC-83) is a baseball film like no other.  I’m not sure how someone who has not “been there, done that” will respond to this film, but as one who played sandlot ball in a small Massachusetts town around 1990, this resonated for me on a profound level.  You can also approach Carson Lund’s film as an idiosyncratic indie with a bunch of unknown faces, but two hilarious cameos, Frederick Wiseman and “Spaceman” Bill Lee.  Most of the humor is deadpan but occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.  Like most beer league baseball, it’s slow and pointless, as a mixed bag of players congregate for mysterious (to outsiders) rituals of male bonding.  The game comes as a last call for many, as their ballfield is being torn down after this picturesque October day, to make way for a new school.  Their unwillingness to let the game end turns ridiculous but poignant.  The baseball itself is not actually believable, but perhaps the players’ ineptitude is.
 
The pairing of Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal was enough to make me overlook the indifferent Metacritic rating of The History of Sound (MC-63), and this film by Oliver Hermanus turned out much better than expected.  Maybe there’s more objection to straight actors playing gay lovers now than there was with Brokeback Mountain twenty years ago, but both these actors have done so admirably in the past and do so here.  In Boston at conservatory in 1917 - Paul a scholarship singer from Kentucky, Josh a well-off orphan from Newport - they meet in a bar and bond over a love of folk music, but separate when the war comes.  After the war, Josh invites Paul up to Maine to go on a backcountry expedition to record rare folk songs on wax cylinders and sleep together con-tentedly.  Again they part, and Paul goes on to a singing career in Europe, but never gets any reply to his many letters, eventually leaving it all behind to go in search of Josh.  Chris Cooper narrates from the beginning, and in the end emerges as the older Paul, now a distinguished musicologist.  Among the film’s many virtues are the various song performances.  Pay more attention to the favorable reviews than to the spoilsports.
 
Of course, MUBI has lots of worthy films that I’ve already seen, but in searching around I found one rare favorite that I want to highlight, the photographic documentary Finding Vivian Maier (MC-75).  I never got a chance to show it at the Clark, when the auditorium shut down for renovation, but I did strongly recommend it here.
 
Another unique documentary is Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (MC-83), in which a group of Estonian women meet and get naked – emotionally as well as physically – in a shed where meat gets smoked, and go through a variety of traditional sauna rituals and sororal revelations.  Director Anna Hints captures the experience in lovely pictures of sculptural flesh and drifting smoke, with occasional sprints into a nearby pond or visitations by ancestral spirits.
 
As we Boomers reach old age (and refuse to leave the stage), we (or me at least) are seeing a lot of films about dementia.  In recent years we’ve had the pleasure (?) of seeing the likes of Julie Christie, Julianne Moore, Glenda Jackson, and Anthony Hopkins lose their minds on film.  (And the political pain of watching two presidents lose theirs in office.)  Familiar Touch (MC-87) is a semi-documentary first feature from young filmmaker Sarah Friedland, about an 80-year-old woman with dementia, as she is moved from her home to a care facility.  Most of the people in the film are residents of the actual location (a “geriatric country club” in Pasadena), but the lead is accomplished actress Kathleen Chalfant in a deep and delicate performance filled with humor and heart.  The film itself is tender, sweet, and serious, though ultimately heavy in implication.  As a young person’s imaginative reflection on the experience of old people, Friedland’s debut puts me in mind of Updike’s first novel Poorhouse Fair, which portends more awards for this writer-director’s career.
 
I’m not sure how Lingui, the Sacred Bonds (MC-83) wound up on my list, but I’m glad it did.  It’s the first film I’ve ever seen from Chad, even though writer-director M-S. Haroun has made a half-dozen well-received films before this.  It follows a 30-ish single mother and her 15-year-old daughter, as they struggle through a maze of patriarchal strictures to make sure the girl does not suffer the mother’s fate of expulsion and shunning.  The mother maintains them by laboriously extracting wire from old tires and weaving it into coal stoves, which she roves the streets of the capital to sell.  Outside of political and religious rule, the communal impulse of the title allows the pair to find the help they need from other women.  The documentary and pictorial elements of this compact film enhance the folkloric force of the story, as does the acting and the farflung location.  I recommend it to anyone with the patience and curiosity to seek it out.
 
Likewise, I’m not sure what led me to Falcon Lake (MC-71), but this find is definitely a keeper.  Canadian actress-turned-director Charlotte Le Bon situates her first feature on an isolated lakeside cabin in Quebec, and it’s très bon.  The mood suggests a teen slasher film, ridiculously played up in the trailer, but the film itself delivers a sensitive portrayal of adolescent desire.  A 13-year-old boy and 16-year-old girl are thrown together, even to the point of sharing a tiny bedroom, when their parents vacation together.  She’s a dark-browed Goth-in-the-making, he’s a dewy-eyed youth contending with puberty.  Forced into contact, they begin to find some common ground, and a mutually satisfying exchange of fantasies and fears.  A casual betrayal leads to disenchantment and break-up, with untoward consequences.  I’ll say no more, except that despite some trappings of a horror film, this story is grounded in real life with humor and sympathy, well-acted and beautifully shot.
 
MUBI has been in film production and distribution for a while, but now they’ve branched into tv series, with two estimable efforts.
 
Mussolini: Son of the Century (MC-74) rests on the bravura performance of Luca Marinelli in the title role.  He schemes and struts and spouts, often turning to the camera to explain what’s going on.  Starting from a place of extensive ignorance, I learned a lot about the rise of fascism in Italy after WWI, and had no trouble drawing the intended parallels to our own historical moment.  I’ve never admired Joe Wright’s films, but here he finds a subject that suits his over-the-top style, all pomp, no circumstance, a sort of frenetic factual phantasmagoria.  Got to give him credit as a Brit directing an 8-hour tv series in Italian without giving himself away.  This story of a bombastic buffoon’s rise to power follows in a tradition that runs from The Great Dictator through A Face in the Crowd to The Apprentice.  Both the humor and the razzmatazz seem appropriate to this serious and highly relevant subject, as the fascist impulse revives here and abroad.  The series concludes with a twist as Il Duce escapes his most difficult moment and consolidates absolute power at the beginning of 1925, when Marinelli turns and leans into the camera for one triumphant blackout word, which serves as an alarm bell to the rest of us.
 
I stumbled through Hal & Harper (MC-82), Cooper Raiff’s self-indulgent 9-episode series about a pair of siblings clinging together through dysfunction, mainly for Lili Reinhart’s performance as his sister.  Also Mark Ruffalo as their depressive father.  In writing, directing, and starring as one of the title characters, even as a first grader in classroom flashbacks, Raiff may have taken on more than he can chew, but does display a variety of talents.  My main complaint is the fractured time scheme, with continual jumps back and forth in a way that seems more annoying than illuminating.  The business of adults playing children among real children worked for PEN15 and might have worked here without the temporal whiplash.  When there was an episode that did stay in one time frame, I began to notice the jagged editing and the mostly-grating background music, and began to think it was a generational thing.  Nonetheless, Raiff demonstrates considerable sincerity and humor in celebrating the resiliency of family relationships.

Dip into MUBI when they have one of their special offers, and you will find plenty of interesting stuff to watch.

Stray viewing III

My devotion to Astrid et Raphaëlle (and hope for January arrival of season five) led me to look for another “Walter Presents” program on PBS.  The general opinion seemed to be that the next best (aside from murder mysteries) was the Danish series Seaside Hotel (IMDB), so I gave that a try.  I liked it enough to finish one season of six episodes, but felt no urge to persist through all ten, in much the way that Downton Abbey or Call the Midwife held my interest only for a limited time, as opposed to something like Doc Martin that attracted me for the long haul.  Set in a remote inn on the wild shores of Jutland, the establishment is run by a mismatched couple, with four maids (one of whom is the endearing main character) waiting hand and foot on a half-dozen well-to-do guest families.  The only outside character of any importance is the hulking hunk of a young fisherman nearby.  The first season occurs in the summer of 1928, and subsequent series go through WWII, apparently with most of the same characters.  The setting is very nice and the acting is good, with a mix of comedy, drama, and romance, but as far as tv from Denmark goes, this is no Borgen, but rather an intelligent, well-made soap opera with a touch of French farce.  [P.S. That said, my partners’ appetite for this cheese Danish exceeded mine, so I remained willing to sample occasional evening episodes, watching most of five seasons, without wearying of the characters.  The sixth season follows a gap of years and a shuffling of characters, and my interest waned a bit.  This series found a successful formula and stuck with it; highly watchable but hardly essential viewing.  The story beats are very predictable, but the treatment is appealing.]
 
By itself, “Walter Presents” justifies a bargain annual subscription to PBS Passport, but given the obvious value yet precarious state of public television, I intend to double my contribution at renewal.  I’m currently immersed in the latest Ken Burns documentary The American Revolution (MC-80), learning stuff and loving the visuals, and will report when I’ve made it through all twelve hours.  [Follow up: this had the stately pace of the Ken Burns brand, but focused more on military campaigns and less on the making of the constitution than I expected.  It demonstrates that we’ve always been a divided country, but not how we managed to come together in the first place around a founding idea.  I’m much less familiar with the campaigns of the Revolutionary War than those of the Civil War, so I appreciated all the battle maps.  I also appreciated the concerted effort to include Blacks and Native peoples in the story, and much of the artwork was of particular interest, though many repeated shots padded the length.  My biggest takeaway was the realization that the War of Independence was really the first Civil War – are we on the brink of a third?]

 
HBO and Hulu are two once major streaming channels that have suffered quality-wise under their corporate overlords.  While they once deserved their own round-ups, at this point they get lumped in with stray viewing.
 
Sorry, I’m just not certain what I think about Sorry, Baby (MC-89, HBO), even after watching it twice.  Repeat viewing speaks to being intrigued, but I remain somewhat baffled and leave it up to your judgment (of course I always leave it up to your judgment, but you know what I mean).  Writer, director, and star Eva Victor is obviously a well-rounded talent and an interesting character.  And I could certainly relate to the New England college campus setting.  Victor plays a graduate student and literature teacher whose thesis is about the short story form, and the film itself takes the form of five short stories out of chronological sequence.  The second episode gives the backstory of elided trauma, and the others show the various sequelae.  There’s a lot of deadpan humor, but also depression and panic.  I’ll certainly pay attention to whatever Victor does next, but I don’t feel that she precisely hit the bullseye on this maiden effort.  I’d put her in a category with Miranda July – provocative, witty, but not entirely comprehensible, to me at least.
 
As Auden says of Austen, Materialists (MC-70) aims to “describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,” but fails to bring Jane’s sparkling wit to the task of revealing “frankly and with such sobriety / The economic basis of society.”  Or at least, of dating in contemporary NYC.  Dakota Johnson intrigues me, having caught my eye in The Lost Daughter but earning my derision for Persuasion (as bad as KK in P&P).  Of course I’ve never seen any of the Fifty Shades movies nor her Marvel incarnation).  I recently learned that she’s the daughter of Melanie Griffith and the granddaughter of Tippi Hendren, and I try to read that Hollywood genealogy in her face. Here she plays a high-end Manhattan matchmaker, who admits that she knows about dating but not about love, and it's all about perceived value.  She submits to wooing by rich guy Pedro Pascal as a confirmation of her own value, though deep down she values Chris Evans, the broke actor she dumped some time back, a far cry from his Captain America (or so I’m told).  Director Celine Song follows up Past Lives with a rather compromised effort to make a serious rom-com, sacrificing some of the authenticity of her first film while not really delivering the pleasures of genre.
 
One last film to check out on HBO.  I read that Weapons (MC-81) was a horror film for people who don’t like horror films, so I gave it a try.  I got maybe 15 minutes in before the first jump scare, then called it quits.
 
For what remains of once-exceptional HBO series, I’m not up to the task of watching Task (MC-77) right now, but since it stars Mark Ruffalo and has the imprimatur of my brother for its Philly-DelCo local credibility, I’ll probably get around to watching at some point.  If so, I’ll insert comment here.
 
I might have canceled my Hulu subscription to protest Disney muzzling Jimmy Kimmel, but I was in the middle of a 12-week pause and they wouldn’t accept a cancellation, so I was stuck for another month.  On the upside, I could then watch one new FX series I really wanted to see, The Lowdown (MC-86), starring Ethan Hawke and created by Sterlin Harjo (of Reservation Dogs!!), a throwback private-eye drama set in Tulsa OK.  Gotta love it because here the P.I. is a constantly-vaping bookstore owner and part-time muckraking journalist.  I once had a book buying gig in Tulsa, so I enjoyed clocking familiar sights.  Hawke is for me the premium American actor of his generation, with the most interesting career choices from his teen years on.  He sinks his teeth into this role with relish.  Ryan K. Armstrong is delightful as his 13-year-old daughter, and many familiar faces fill roles large and small, as Hawke dives into the misdeeds of a rich local dynasty.  There’s quite a bit of Chinatown here, Jim Thompson’s work is a major plot reference, and dashes of Chandler or Hammett and their cinematic progeny are everywhere.   The settings seem authentic, and the country music accompaniment is great, not that I recognized much of it.  This also reminded me of another FX series, Justified, which is among my all-time favorites.  The eighth (and final?) episode makes a perfect ending, with several climactic scenes shot at the Philbrook Museum (where I worked) and Leonard Cohen on the soundtrack, but I would surely be eager for more.
 
A rave review in The New Yorker last year put Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point (MC-72) on my watch list, and this month it came round to Hulu.  I’d rank my own enthusiasm at about the level of the Metacritic rating.  This is the product of a collective of recent Emerson College grads (who also made Eephus), here directed by Tyler Taormina.  It follows a holiday gathering some twenty years ago of a large Italian family on Long Island, but it’s no competition for the Christmas dinner episode of The Bear.  There are authentic moments of memory amidst the hurly-burly, but no overarching story emerges, though the first half centers on the siblings’ argument over whether to move grandma to an old folks home, and the second on a teenage granddaughter’s wild and/or mild night out with friends.  Some of the humor is entirely too deadpan, nothing seems very consequential, and little is resolved, but I suspect many might enjoy this upside-down Xmas family festival.
 
My favorite active American director Richard Linklater has two new films just out, but as I wait for the opportunity to see them, I took a look at one I haven’t seen since its initial release, School of Rock (MC-82).  It just turned up on Hulu and was as crowd-pleasing as I remembered.  Jack Black is manic and over-the-top, but still appealing.  It’s the kids, however, who make the film, as well as constituting the eponymous musical group that vies for a band competition and rocks their way into your heart.  Linklater is almost unique in his ability to range between popular entertainment and serious filmmaking.
 
I’d been looking for The Apprentice (MC-64) for so long that I assumed Trump had somehow blocked its distribution, but then it turned up on Prime and some other free-with-ads channels.  I found Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn highly believable, and the portrayal of The Donald as a young-ish man on the make fit right in with my own observations and preconceptions.  The settings are credible as well.  And the main thesis – that Cohn was the source of the Trump playbook of attack, deny, and never admit defeat – is undeniable.  It underlines the right-wing progression of the Republican party from McCarthy to Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich and through Cheney’s Bush to the brink of Trump’s fascism.  Iranian director Ali Abbasi has enough distance to walk a fine line between humanizing and demonizing the monster who rules us these days.  Unless you’ve already had too much of the attention hog dominating our public discourse, you’re likely to find this film entertaining and edifying, if also horrifying, for its masterful performances and sleek surfaces.
 
After enjoying Sarah Solemani’s performance in Him & Her and looking up her other credits, I saw she had written and starred in a series with Steve Coogan, another favorite of mine.  So I put Chivalry (IMDB) on my look-for list, and it finally turned up on Kanopy, in a breezy six episodes that only added up to feature length.  It’s a post-#MeToo satire on Hollywood with some amusing cameos.  Coogan is a loutish producer who must bring in feminist indie director Solemani to salvage a French misogynist’s film.  I still like both of them, but this seems a misfire, needing some third writer to salvage the series.
 
All to Play For (IMDB) caught my eye on Kanopy by headlining Virginie Efira, as they have many of her films, which I have been following assiduously, starting here.  She is predictably virtuosic as the single mother of two boys, who loses custody of the younger son after he’s burned in a cooking accident while she was at work in a bar.  She seems to have a good if somewhat loose relationship with her children and with two similarly unmoored brothers, but as her behavior becomes increasingly extreme, you have to wonder whether some fundamental instability is coming through, or whether she’s being driven insane by the child welfare system.  Don’t expect the film to decide that for you, but Efira’s natural warmth and empathy tilt the question her way.  Writer-director Delphine Deloget’s debut feature, properly translated from French as “nothing to lose,” benefits from her documentary background and suggests she may be a name to look for in the future.
 
I’ve got a lot more viewing to look for in the future, so come back here for reports on what I’ve been watching, next covering Mubi and AppleTV, and then a long-deferred return to Netflix.

Criterion of choice

The Criterion Channel is my most essential streamer (aside from YouTube perhaps), and the only one for which I have an annual subscription, so I don’t mind going a month or more without watching any of their films, but I always have a lot to catch up with when I do.  I’ll start with some of their new exclusive releases, and proceed to recent collections that explore corners of cinema history.
 
Vermiglio (MC-85) is a sad and lovely, funny and touching film set in the Italian Alps in the last year of WWII.  Filmmaker Maura Delpero returns to the village of her just-deceased father’s childhood to recreate the era and setting, drawing on her documentary (and painterly) background and inspired by great Italian neorealists like DeSica and Olmi, in the most immersive portrait of peasant life since the latter’s supreme Tree of Wooden Clogs (also on Criterion, and due for yet another look).  Eight surviving children live with their teacher-father and always-pregnant mother on a farm in a remote Alpine village, but the film concentrates on three sisters who share the same bed.  The youngest is the brightest, whom the father intends to send away for further schooling.  The middle daughter is most religious but struggles with her emerging libido.  The oldest is immediately attracted to a handsome Sicilian stranger, who has deserted the army with an older cousin of hers.  Her story emerges slowly and delicately as the focus of the film, which gradually reveals layer upon layer with an exquisite touch, as the mountain landscape progresses from deep winter through spring and into autumn.  Don’t miss this, if you have the patience and the eye for acute, subtle, and heartfelt filmmaking.
 
All We Imagine as Light (MC-93) is the second feature from the young Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia.  The first was a hybrid documentary-drama about film school protests against PM Modi, and the second maintains a similar balance in the story of three hospital workers from the provinces now living in Mumbai.  The “city symphony” is one of her influences (plus Satyajit Ray obviously, but Fellini also, and the “New Waves” of various nationalities) and this portrait of the teeming, polyglot metropolis in monsoon season is very strong.  The three main characters are introduced serially: a senior nurse whose husband left for work in Germany shortly after their arranged marriage and hasn’t been heard from since, a young nurse in love with a Muslim boy and fending off suitors proposed by her distant parents, and a widowed cook being evicted for construction of a luxury high-rise only to find she has no rights without a husband.  In the second half of the film, the cook returns to her native seaside village with the help of the two nurses.  The pace of the film changes, and we get closer to the women as they get closer to each other, while modernity recedes into folklore.  Inventive and very well-acted, this is a film of multiple pleasures, mysteries, and surprises.
 
Wikipedia characterizes Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia (MC-83) as a “black comedy thriller,” which only requires the additional word “gay” to be an adequate description.  A baker of indeterminate age, say thirtysomething, returns to his home village in the south of France, when the mentor to whom he apprenticed dies.  He looks innocent enough, but is he angling to take over the boulangerie or to sleep with the widow?  He moves into the room of the dead man’s son, who used to be his friend but is now his adversary.  He wanders around some of his old haunts among the autumn hills (slightly reminiscent of the Berkshires, in the exquisite cinematography of Claire Mathon) and drops in on old acquaintances.  What is he up to, whose bed will he wind up in?  And why does that mushroom-hunting priest keep showing up everywhere?  The mystery unfolds but does not resolve.  It’s hard not to imagine that Guiraudie went to school on Pasolini’s Teorema.
 
All Shall Be Well (MC-82) is a delicate family drama set in Hong Kong and directed by Ray Yeung.  We are introduced to a loving lesbian couple who has been together for forty years, though never able to formalize their marriage.  One of them dies suddenly, and the other is left without legal standing.  Though their relationship has been fully accepted by the family of the deceased, each of her relatives has hope of economic relief from an inheritance, which qualifies their affection for the survivor.  Will she be evicted from her longtime home, so they can move up in the world?  How shall she respond?  Where do the rights and obligations of family lie?  This well-acted and gentle film raises many questions in a small compass.
 
The appeal of Caught by the Tides (MC-87) is decidedly specialized, as Jia Zhangke revisits his films from the past twenty-odd years, all starring his wife Tao Zhao, along with outtakes and documentary footage he shot along the way, and constructs a portrait of vast changes in China over that period.  Her character never speaks a word, but she has the expressive qualities to pull it off.  In the first segment, she’s a young performer in a difficult relationship with her manager.  In the second, he’s gone to work on the Three Gorges Dam project, and she goes searching for him, and observes the massive dislocation as millions of people are evacuated.  In the finale, shot during Covid, the pair meet again, having aged quite differently.  This simple summary is rather hard to discern in the process of the film, with its unrelated documentary scenes and unexplained transitions, but is subsumed in the examination of a generation’s worth of cultural change.
 
One facet of Criterion’s appeal is that I could immediately catch up with two other recent films of Jia Zhangke that I had missed, since I’ve no longer been programming films at the Clark.  Ash is Purest White (MC-85) and Mountains May Depart (MC-79) are all of piece with his latest, as time-spanning semi-documentaries centered on Tao Zhao.  Not only can I not separate the films in my mind, they tend to share scenes and outtakes from one to the next, which for a cinephile is part of the appeal, but I’m not sure how much a casual viewer could get out of his work.
 
Criterion had a collection ironically called “Fun City” about NYC in the 70s era when I was living in Brooklyn, and I was glad to see Dog Day Afternoon again, which inspired me to watch other old Al Pacino films.  His first, Panic in Needle Park, was also in the collection but too grim and predetermined for me to finish.  I also tracked down Serpico and Sea of Love for viewings that confirmed my positive memories of them.  In a timely coincidence, Paramount+ had a special offer and just cycled The Godfather films back into streaming availability.  They looked great and remain among the best films of all time, utterly familiar yet still impressive.  Same goes for Pacino.
 
Coincidentally, I also rewatched Pacino’s favorite film, The Tree of Wooden Clogs (IMDB), always secure in my short list of most significant films.  This semi-documentary portrait of peasant life in Lombardy at the end of the 19^th century never fails to have a profound effect on me.  As I wrote when I showed it at the Clark in connection with a Pissarro exhibition, “Crushingly sad but transcendently beautiful, this slow and patiently observed masterpiece is among the greatest films ever made.”
 
For another celebration of the difficult but lovely day-to-day lives of poor rural folk, turn to That They May Face the Rising Sun (AMZ, MC-81), from a distant but surprisingly related perspective, County Mayo in the 1980s.  That was shortly before I toured the area with my friend Kevin O’Hara (while we were working together on his book Last of the Donkey Pilgrims).  Writer-director Pat Collins’ adaptation of John McGahern’s final novel is quiet, deliberate, evocative, and reflective of his documentary background.  Barry Ward plays the McGahern character, a writer who has returned from London with his artist wife to his roots in the West of Ireland.  They farm with the help of neighbors, classic Irish characters who are always welcome for a meal or a drink.  Days pass, the season turns, the community gathers for weddings and funerals.  That’s it, and it’s more than enough – beautiful, truthful, and moving.
 
Returning to Criterion classics, Yojimbo (MC-93) was an Akira Kurosawa film that I’d never seen, and one of the first films I added to my CC list six years ago.  That’s the beauty of Criterion for me, it’s always there and always has something new or old worth watching or rewatching.  I can’t imagine a samurai film ever reaching the heights of The Seven Samurai, but this is a worthy entry in the canon, and actually Kurosawa’s most popular film.  Toshiro Mifune expands on his comic persona, as the lone wolf entering an isolated town riven by a feud between the silk merchant and the saki brewer, along with their hired thugs.  He offers his unbeatable swordplay as bodyguard (yojimbo) to each in turn, and plays them off against each other for his own advancement and amusement.  Kurosawa borrows from American Westerns, and then is borrowed from in turn, and this certainly paves the way for Clint Eastwood’s “man with no name.”
 
High and Low (MC-90) was one of my favorite Kurosawa films, and I gave it another look in advance of Spike Lee’s remake, Highest 2 Lowest.  Here he’s adapting an American police procedural, and bringing the impressive widescreen choreography of his battle scenes to an indoor setting.  Mifune plays a hard-nosed business executive whose son is believed to be kidnapped, with the police laboring mightily to track down the culprit and recover the ransom money.  He lives in a hilltop mansion that looks down on Yokohama, as the kidnapper looks back up at him vengefully.  Behind the dazzling direction are moral and social quandaries aplenty.  Let’s see what Spike does with his “joint.”
 
Another film on my CC list for six years was Kenji Mizoguchi’s Utamaro and His Five Women (IMDB) and it turns out I wouldn’t have shown it at the Clark, even if it had been available when I was surveying films to accompany an exhibition of Japanese prints.  This was made under postwar Occupation, before the director’s superlative films of the early Fifties, and does not approach their mastery, though it may be one of the most personal films from this painterly filmmaker/.
 
Filling in another filmography, I watched Robert Bresson’s penultimate film The Devil, Probably (IMDB).  His severe style produced several all-time classics (A Man Escaped above all) but this attempt to dissect the youth culture of post-1968 France is woefully misguided.
 
A Robert Altman collection featured one of his films that I had never seen.  He was an important maverick and innovator whose career is all over the map, from great to unwatchable.  Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (IMDB) is below the median line, but I still found reasons to watch it all the way through.  One was trying to figure out just why I’ve always found Sandy Dennis so unpalatable, but more satisfyingly seeing a so-young Cher and Kathy Bates, and Karen Black as a trans woman (in 1982!).  This is a filmed play that makes no attempt to hide its provenance, except for a few lame special effects.  Don’t bother unless you’re an Altman completist.
 
Director Bertrand Tavernier and star Nathalie Baye were enough to draw me to A Week’s Vacation (IMDB), and did not disappoint, even though the film struck me as warmed-over Eric Rohmer, about a thirtyish school teacher trying to get her bearings in love and work.
 
After watching the excellent Netflix series adaptation of The Leopard, rather than returning yet again to Visconti’s version, I re-watched his Senso (IMDB), an historical melodrama set in the period of Italian unification, as the Venetians seek independence from Austria.  Alida Valli is the patrician wife who throws away her life in a mad passion for the Austrian soldier played by Farley Granger (the dubbed American version was called The Wanton Countess).  It’s operatically over-the-top, like much of Visconti, but historically quite interesting, as well as lavish and deranged.
 
Criterion lists the films that will depart at the end of each month, which often prompts me to watch.  La Guerre est Finie (IMDB) was one such.  Director Alain Resnais and star Yves Montand made a big impression on me when I first saw this film, probably around the time I was dropping out of school, disillusioned with my studies in political economy.  I returned in two years to study literature, philosophy, and religion exclusively.  In the film Montand is a Spanish Communist in Parisian exile, still working to subvert Franco’s regime three decades after the Civil War and growing weary of fruitless political struggle.  It spoke to me then, and speaks to me now.
 
Criterion recently offered an excellent collection of films by the seminal documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, from Don’t Look Back to The War Room to Kings of Pastry.  One night it suited my mood to rewatch Monterey Pop (MC-77) and revisit the Summer of Love in 1967, when I was a 20-year-old college dropout.
 
In the midst of Jamie Lee Curtis’s late career renaissance, it was amusing to look back forty-plus years to an early film that aimed to lift her out of the teen horror genre.  In Love Letters (IMDB), she’s a public radio host who finds a cache of her deceased mother’s letters to a longtime lover, and tries to relive that experience by embarking on an affair with a married man.  Not great, but interesting as foreshadowing a long career.
 
I’ve long enjoyed the animations of Faith and John Hubley (as well as their daughter Emily) and showed a program of their work at the Clark way back when.  It was great to revisit some of them in this collection.
 
Last but far from least, I was mesmerized by the spectacle of Gerhard Richter Painting (MC-77).  I’ve been enamored of his scraped paintings since I encountered a whole wall of them at the Art Institute of Chicago some years back, and this film details just how they are made, along with interviews with the artist and visits to gallery exhibitions of his earlier (and quite different) work.  These paintings are different in method and style from Jackson Pollock’s, but similar in creating an immersive visual universe of their own.  Director Corinna Belz is an effective documentarian, and Richter is articulate about his artistic practice. Moreover, just watching the paint go on the canvas is a magical process.
 
I regret that a number of these films will have departed the channel by the time you read this, but may well return or turn up elsewhere.  This diverse sample of Criterion’s offerings demonstrates that there’s always something to watch on the channel for any serious film viewer, from the latest releases to the oldest classics, from hits to sleepers, from all corners of the world and all kinds of film artists.  When it comes to quality cinema, there’s no better value out there.

Peacock postscript plus

After my last Peacock round-up, I returned to the channel when enough new content warranted one month’s (overpriced) subscription.  The second season of Poker Face (MC-83) was the main draw, since I am a Natasha Lyonne “stan” (if that’s the word young whippersnappers use).  And it lived up to the first so well that I simply refer you to my earlier comments.  Stoner redhead Lyonne keeps solving crimes and dispensing justice using her bullshit-detector superpower, the cases secondary to the gravel-voiced humor and the witty appearances of guest stars.  The show was created by Rian Johnson, best known for the Knives Out films in the same comic-mystery vein.  Surefire light entertainment, clever and funny.  They do make them like they used to (e.g. Columbo in this case), but better.
 
My question about The Paper (MC-66) was whether, among creator Greg Daniels’ previous work, it would be more like The Office (which I never bothered to watch after enjoying the British version) or Parks & Rec (which I came to late but then watched religiously).  So I approached this series warily, but was won over by the time it was revealed that the main character hailed from Cleveland Heights, even though played by Irish actor Domnhall Gleason.  He was a supersalesman for Dunder Mifflin, which has been acquired along with the Toledo Truth Teller (toilet paper, newspaper – all the same business) by the conglomerate Enervate, which has made him editor-in-chief.  His second-in-command (and possible love interest) is played winningly by Chelsea Frei, and some of the other characters have their moments in these ten episodes, but not enough to make me eager for more seasons.
 
Steven Soderbergh is an accomplished director but not one of my favorites, nor is the James Bond-ish genre he’s working with in Black Bag (MC-85), but Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender are sure to be worth a look.  They play a married pair of spies conspiring to discover a mole in their division of British intelligence.  The “black bag” is where they put the intel they can’t share with each other, to maintain the trust of their personal relationship.  Fassbender is detailed to find the mole, but one of the five suspects is Blanchett.  Things get sticky and many psychological games are played, especially around the dinner table with the six main characters.  It’s all very sleek and swift and in good company – but instantly forgettable.
 
Ballad of Wallis Island (MC-78) is inoffensive but not really stimulating, with best performer Carey Mulligan given a truncated role.  This feature is an expansion of an earlier short created by the two leads, Tim Key and Tom Basden.  Key is a lottery winner living on a nearly deserted island (exquisitely shot in Wales), who has lured folksinger Basden there with a promise of a gig for a half-million pounds.  Key and his deceased wife were superfans of Basden’s former duo with Mulligan, and he wants to reunite them as a way to relive his marriage through a concert for himself alone.  The pair have their own feelings about the reunion, but they do harmonize nicely despite their differences past and present, while Key yammers nervously on.  Not a rom-com but a gentle portrait of fellowship, this film aims to please and mostly does.
 
I missed Housekeeping for Beginners (MC-80) when it was streaming on Hulu but found it afterwards over on Peacock (typical of how films are always moving between platforms).  How many Australian-Macedonian films have you seen?  This was my first, but maybe not my last.  Writer-director Goran Stolevski was born in North Macedonia but moved Down Under when he was 12.  Set among the lingering ethnic conflicts of the Balkans, this film follows a welfare worker who has turned her home into a lesbian and gay refuge, with a female Roma lover and her two daughters, a trio of young gender-fluid women, and a gay man who brings a Gypsy youth into the mix (he’s good at taking care of the firecracker preteen daughter).  As you can imagine, there are conflicts aplenty, but an unlikely but lively queer family emerges.  Stolevski throws us into the middle of this menage and lets us make sense of the chaotic household and its misfit inhabitants.
 
In similar channel-switching, Time (MC-81) was a Britbox series that I happened to catch in its brief run on HBO Max.  Two seasons of three episodes each look at prison life from a newbie’s perspective, and the effect is disturbingly you-are-there, adding dimension to the notion of “doing time.”  In the first series, Sean Bean is a teacher ushered into prison after he kills someone while driving drunk.  Stephen Graham is a prison guard compromised because his own son is in prison and threatened by a gang.  In the second, Jodie Whitaker is thrown in jail for “fiddling the lecky” (watch and find out), where she bunks with pregnant drug addict Bella Ramsey and infanticide Tamara Lawrance, each a well-drawn character.  Both series are persuasive and wrenching.
 
Most of the time I don’t pay any attention to Masterpiece Mystery on PBS, but a friend’s recommendation (confirmed by an 8.2 IMBD rating) led me to the French police series Astrid (et Raphaélle).  I started out dubious but was soon hooked and made my way through all four seasons on PBS (it seems a fifth has been broadcast in France).  I came for the portrayal of autism, stayed for the appealing characters and relationships, and tolerated the murder mysteries because the violence was minimal and the settings and motives always held interest, with subjects explored and not simply exploited.  The growing friendship between the two women is beautifully developed from season to season, with Sara Mortensen brilliant in her depiction of the autistic criminal records archivist Astrid, and Lola Delawaere brash and engaging as lead detective Raphaélle.  Each murder solved (emphasizing clever puzzle over grisly forensics) only brings them closer as they complete each other as “thimble” and “compass,” part of a congenial work family.  And each brings me closer to including this series among my all-time favorites.  (On the other hand, I watched one episode of the show’s pallid UK remake Patience, and was relieved of any impulse to watch more.) 
 
In the migration of films between channels, I caught up with The Truman Show (MC-90) somewhere or other, and it seemed as fresh and relevant as it was three decades ago.  What if your life were a sitcom, stage-managed by some overarching creator for the amusement of the multitudes?  Jim Carrey gives a career-best performance as Truman, Laura Linney as his wife gives a performance that foreshadows her sterling career, Ed Harris is maniacal perfection as the director of the show, and Peter Yates is also career-best as the director of the film.  Like Groundhog Day, this is a comedy with metaphysical implications.
 
Among the surprises on Kanopy, I found a British film that hadn’t even reached its official American release date.  Brian and Maggie (MC-73) was originally presented as a two-part series, but actually makes a tidy 90-minute movie, written by James Graham of Sherwood, directed by accomplished veteran Stephen Frears, and starring Harriet Walter as Margaret Thatcher and Steve Coogan as the journalist who befriended her and eventually brought her down.  I found it so engaging that I immediately went back and re-watched The Iron Lady (MC-52) to compare Meryl Streep’s Oscar-winning performance to Walter’s, interestingly different but both excellent (as was Gillian Anderson in The Crown). Thatcher’s political influence was (and remains) malign but both films humanize her malfeasance, and make it relevant to our own political moment.