NYT poll of the century’s best TV

When the New York Times published a poll of the “100 Best TV shows of the 21^st Century,” I enjoyed comparing their list to mine.  We agree on #1 Breaking Bad and #2 The Wire (though I include #27 Better Call Saul in the top tandem).  My quirky #3 Rectify does not appear on their list, and my quirky #4 Buffy the Vampire Slayer was disqualified as dating from the previous century, as was HM The Sopranos.  My #5 Justified comes in as their #83, but my #6 Deadwood does better at #24.  My #7 Friday Night Lights is their #14, but my #8 Borgen is absent.  My #9 Mad Men and #10 Succession are their #3 and #4.  Among my Honorable Mentions are #20 The Crown, #96 Halt & Catch Fire, and Doc Martin (not ranked though I do note that Netflix has just started an American remake).  Among current contenders, I’m avidly following Slow Horses #62.  Some other favorites lack the longevity to make my list.
 
But I primarily wanted to use the NYT list to answer a reader’s query about my highest-ranking half-hour comedies, which seem to come in pairs.  Comedies are more period dependent than dramas, so I don’t include last-century favorites going back to the likes of Mary Hartman or Mary Tyler Moore, but only include shows on the Times list.  Leading off with the era-defining dark comedies (or “sad-coms”) #4 Fleabag and #91 Catastrophe, I have a decided preference for British series, followed up with the seminal series #60 Peep Show and #63 The Thick of It (more than its American reincarnation as #7 Veep; just as I enjoyed the British version of #16 The Office and never watched an episode of the American at #11).  Not on their list, but among my very favorites is Mum, which stands in for other UK favorites like The Detectorists or Gavin & Stacey or W1A. The American series that I love for that sort of wit, warmth, superior acting, and personal authenticity is #82 Better Things.  Recent heartland shows like #76 Somebody Somewhere and #87 Reservation Dogs also offer more than jokes and calculated laughlines.  Similarly, #50 Parks and Recreation stands out for its emphasis on character over laughs (while #8 30 Rock seems more standard sit-com).  That sort of depth certainly describes #74 The Bear, which layers its humor with drama, and even #75 Ted Lasso, which lays on the sentiment.  There may be other favorites that slip my mind (e.g. where’s Silicon Valley, perhaps the most topical of all?  And perhaps I should find a place for Nurse Jackie? Stop! – this is madness.).  Anyway, these are my picks from the Times list.  They stand out in memory for the eagerness with which I looked forward to each new episode or new season.  Feel free to add your recommendations in the comments.
 

Documendations 2026

Frederick Wiseman is widely acknowledged as the most important sociological documentarian ever, making legal briefs intended not to prove a case, but to provide voluminous eye-witness evidence through selective and coherent objectivity.  He died recently, just after his 96^th birthday, leaving a legacy of more than three dozen outstanding films.  They have often been hard to come by, but now Kanopy has virtually all of them readily available through its free library service, a wonderful chance to catch up with some of the greatest documentaries ever made.  That prompts me to collate a partial career summary, eventually to be posted in the right-hand column.   In this forthcoming survey, I start with his first film Titicut Follies, which I had never seen because it was banned for so long, followed by his second, High School, which made me a fan for life way back when.  Then I copy over reviews of his films that I’ve written here over the past twenty years.  And as long as Kanopy keeps offering them, I’ll visit or revisit other titles from the previous three decades.  But that’s history, so to speak, now let’s get on with a survey of recent documentaries of note. 
 
Starting with this year’s Oscar nominees, including winner Mr. Nobody Against Putin (MC-80, Kanopy), a rare ground-level inside look at increasing authoritarianism in Russia.  The title hero is events coordinator (and incidental videographer) at a high school in the hinterlands.  Always the provider of a “democracy space” in the school, he plans to resign when war propaganda is imposed upon the school, but then makes contact with a Danish filmmaker seeking footage from inside Russia.  So he remains and compiles coverage that must be sent to the government to demonstrate compliance, making copies to smuggle out.  The militarization goes so far as in-school demonstrations by the Wagner Group.  Former students go off to fight in Ukraine and come back dead. The film could do with more on-site footage and less direct-to-camera commentary by Mr. Nobody, but remains a valuable document, though nowhere near as impressive as the similarly-themed My Undesirable Friends, which I raved about in this round-up.
 
The Perfect Neighbor (MC-83, NFX) is a hard watch, for multiple reasons – it documents a horrible crime, and does so almost entirely through police bodycams and CCTV footage.  In Geeta Gandbhir’s film, that is enough to tell a tale of racism and bad policy, without narration or commentary of any kind.  A lower-middle-class neighborhood is overrun by a joyous interracial crowd of children playing in an empty lot, with a cranky old Karen continually calling the cops on them for no legitimate reason, a familiar story on several grounds, made much more dangerous by Florida’s stand-your-ground law (remember Trayvon Martin?).  There are probably a lot of reality-tv cop shows using bodycam footage like this (though I’ve never watched a single one), but this Sundance-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary is gripping and upsetting to good purpose.
 
Alabama Solution (MC-90. HBO) is similarly a hard watch, and similarly to good purpose.  It’s a new documentary from Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans) and relies on contraband cellphone footage from inmates in a brutal Alabama prison to confirm the inhumanity that goes on behind closed doors, and reminds us of the argument of 13^th that prison as a form of involuntary servitude is just slavery by another name.
 
I reviewed fourth nominee Come See Me in the Good Light at the end of this round-up, and will keep looking for the fifth, a currently unavailable Iranian film Cutting Through Rocks.
 
Cover-Up (MC-85, NFX) is an entertaining and instructive profile of the preeminent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, which interweaves his personal life with the major stories he broke, from My Lai to Watergate to Abu Ghraib to Gaza.  Directed by Laura Poitras (Oscar-winner for Citizenfour) and Mark Obenhaus, a pair with whom Hersh is skeptical and prickly but quite open, even about the occasions he was taken in by a source.  The film charts a history of government cover-ups that is more relevant than ever.  Hersh, approaching 90, is still an indefatigable straight shooter who admits he’s not invariably right, but keeps uncovering government and especially military deceit, even before Trump and Hegseth took that to a whole new level.
 
New Yorker at 100 (MC-tbd, NFX) may have been just a centennial celebration, basically a promo for the magazine, but as a subscriber for half of those hundred years I loved it.   Going behind the scenes and matching faces to bylines, seeing into the process behind my weekly fix, made this an engaging and informative feature.
 
Can’t recall what led me to Susan Glatzer’s 2016 documentary Alive & Kicking (MC-77, NFX), but this exploration of the subculture of swing dancing was certainly a toe-tappingly enjoyable experience, if you’re in the mood for such.
 
I went on break with Netflix before I got around to watching several other intriguing documentaries, which I may see eventually and insert comment here: Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (MC-82), Apocalypse in the Tropics (MC-82), Power (MC-72), and The White House Effect (MC-79).
 
We complete this round-up with documentaries appearing on PBS, starting with Remake (MC-93) on POV, new from one of my very favorite filmmakers, Ross McElwee.  Partly because we are exact contemporaries, I have followed and relished his very personal films from Sherman’s March through Bright Leaves (my review here) and beyond.  So I watched this heralded return with great anticipation and attention – fully rewarded.  All of Ross’s films are of a piece, one long multi-chapter visual essay, a song of himself through portraits of his kith and kin.  More interrogations than celebrations, wittily edited and penetratingly narrated, dense with humor and heartbreak, his films are well thought out and honestly expressed.  I hope this won’t be his last film, but it feels like a summa.  All of Ross’s virtues are apparent here, along with anguished self-questioning as he tries to come to terms with the death of his 29-year-old son, from an overdose of fentanyl.  The film becomes a memorial to Aidan, incorporating the son’s own films along with his appearances in McElwee films over the years.  It’s also a memorial to memory itself, how to live with it and without it.  Charleen, who has been a fixture from the beginning, now has no recollection of making films with Ross, but she’s still that character.  As usual the title is a sly misdirection, which runs like a thread through the film, as Hollywood puts a remake of Sherman’s March through development hell (to be feature film or tv series or sitcom?), in counterpoint to the real hell of not being able to save your own child.  This is a noble effort to remake the past through filmic remembering.
 
Like Sara Dosa’s Oscar-nominated Fire of Love (reviewed here), her latest film Time and Water (MC-76, Hulu) melds archival footage with a personal dimension and a spirit of natural wonder.  Formerly the subject was volcanoes, now it’s glaciers – complementary places of fire and ice.  And now the focus is on the Icelandic writer and archivist Andri Snær Magnason, whose grandparents were among the first to do photographic treks deep into the glacial wilderness.  When a small nearby glacier starts to “die” (i.e. shrink and stop moving), he starts filming his family compulsively, as a means to arrest time. The theme of his ruminative narration is just what the title announces, with an ecological warning attached, wonderfully enhanced by nature footage old and new, along with history, myth, and folklore.  Near the end, Magnason has his 96-year-old grandmother Hulda sit face-to-face with his teen daughter Hulda and they calculate that the girl will be 96 in the year 2104.  Will there be any glaciers in Iceland by then?  Viewed right after the McElwee, this movie reminded me of his highly personal but widely ramifying approach, and also of a similar Norwegian film called Songs of Earth (which I raved about here).
 
Back to PBS, The Librarians (MC-83) has a much tighter focus than the recent (and excellent!) Free for All: The Public Library (IMDB, PBS), speaking more to the moment than the illustrious past.  As school librarians in Texas are targeted by the so-called “Moms for Liberty”, they emerge from the shadows as front line defenders of freedom of thought and expression.  Outraging and inspiring at the same time.
 
The same might be said about Natchez (MC-80), where a Mississippi town revived itself by becoming a sentimental showcase for antebellum society, and then had to come to terms with the historical truth that the elegant lifestyle was built on the backs of slaves, who needed to be introduced into the sanitized narrative.  Makes for an involving chorus of voices from both sides of America’s great divide.
 
Besides Independent Lens and POV, another worthy PBS documentary series is American Masters, and the latest is Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (MC-82).  Sasha Waters’ film beautifully details how a solitary queer girl suffered familial abuse and came out of my neck of the woods, the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, to find herself with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister at Steepletop (just over the mountain from the Berkshires), then to discover a creative community in NYC, including the Village Voice photographer with whom she would spend decades together in Provincetown.  In which time Mary Oliver went from mostly ignored to widely adored as a poet, as recounted here by a dazzling array of talking heads.  With an enticing combination of simplicity and depth, an eye for the lessons of nature, and keen perception of the linkage between attention and love, Mary Oliver returned the beauty of the world by which she’d been saved.  And this film works as both celebration and introduction.
 
Becoming Katharine Graham (IMDB, PBS) shows how this shy debutante became one of the most powerful women in America at a time when such was decidedly not a thing, as shown in many photographs where she was the only woman in the room.  One of the most interesting interviewees is Warren Buffett, a friend who schooled her in business after her bipolar husband committed suicide and she had to take over running the Washington Post.  Also notable that it was actually her father who bought the paper in the first place, and subsequently installed her husband as publisher.  The Pentagon Papers and Watergate, and labor problems in the printing trades, are all subjects of enduring interest to me, as is the women’s lib movement, with Gloria Steinem another prominent interviewee.  Directed by George and Teddy Kunhardt, the scions of a family dynasty of documentarians, this film is solid and involving, if not especially revealing, and the constant music is intrusive.  It’s a long way downhill from Katie to Jeffy – R.I.P WaPo.  So much for The Post and All the President’s Men, two of my all-time favorite films.
 
Some Ken Burns collaborators made the worthy three-part documentary series Henry David Thoreau (MC-tbd).  Anyone who watches will have the key to my other blog, “Thoreauly Yours,” once you know the proper Concordian pronunciation of our hero’s name.  I had no quibbles with the accuracy of the series, except that the first episode used a lot of photography from much later in the 19^th century to illustrate relevant themes.  They would have been well-advised to use period appropriate paintings or illustrations.  Subsequent episodes are more scrupulous in pictorial representation, and offer a fair if familiar portrait of one of my guiding lights.  I didn’t learn anything new, but you might, and the show is nice to look at.
 
For more documentaries (if you can stand it), see my upcoming round-up of Criterion Channel offerings.  And I may soon have some exciting news about a documentary in the making, or “donkeymentary” as the working title has it.
 

Stray viewing V

We’ll begin with the stray-est of stray viewing - on Paramount+.  Also the newest, and one of my top recommendations, the third and final season of Colin from Accounts (MC-85), a charming series from down under, written by and starring Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer, a real-life married couple who have a genuine understanding of the pathos and humor of real-life relationships.  The first season went from their meet-cute to finally getting together, the second followed their living together to the point of a black-out marriage proposal.  The third begins with them re-meeting three years later, each in separate relationships but somehow still meant for each other.  She’s returned from her medical residency, and he’s gone through a rough patch that forced him to sell his Sydney brewery to a venture capitalist.  Neither has really met their match, but the situation is sticky all round.  Rarely has a cast of difficult people in cringeworthy situations been so authentically appealing, both funny and truthful.   
 
I rarely watch anything on Prime Video, but when Metacritic rounded up the best new shows of the year so far, on top was Bait (MC-85), so I gave it a try.  Riz Ahmed created and stars in this rambunctious series of six 25-minute episodes, nominally a comedy but with a lot on its mind.  He’s auditioning to be the next James Bond, goes blank while filming, but then blows up on social media, mainly in controversy over the prospect of a “Paki” playing the oh-so-English hero.  Things start weird and keep getting weirder, e.g. his main interlocutor is a severed pig’s head with the voice of Patrick Stewart.  But amidst the rush are telling tales not just of the lures and dangers of celebrity, but the private and public concerns of former Commonwealth immigrants to Britain.  A heterogeneous stew, but a rapid-fire watch.
 
Another Amazon production that surmounted my indifference was Sheep Detectives (MC-72), a mild and amusing creature feature in the vein of Babe.  Instead of one CGI pig, here there’s a whole flock of uncanny sheep with celebrity voices.  And live-action stars like Hugh Jackman and Emma Thompson deliver cameos.  There’s a not-very-mysterious murder mystery and some semi-sophisticated humor that may take this film out of the category of kids’ film, but it straddles genres for widest audience appeal, which managed to include even me.
 
Now that HBO has been thoroughly minimized (with worse to come when the Ellisons actually take over), Rooster (MC-68) stood out for a familiar cast, plenty of amusing banter, and a setting that I find quite congenial, a small liberal arts college in New England.  And yet its “meh” quality seems indicative of HBO’s descent into mediocrity, compared to something like FX’s The Bear, with which it shares a similar but much less effective climax, here derived from an old movie and not authentic feeling.  Still, Steve Carell is easy to like, Charly Clive is something of a find, and Danielle Deadwyler is an excellent actress in a role too small for her, as is Connie Britton.  But in the end, it’s just a sitcom, and I won’t return for the second season that’s so blatantly set up.
 
Having watched that without too much annoyance from ads on HBO, I thought I’d try to finish the final season of Hacks (MC-87), but I just couldn’t hack it.  Seems that with ad-supported streaming, the more popular the show, the more ads (I’ve noticed that John Oliver’s show is never interrupted.)  I wasn’t loving this series finale as much as previous seasons, anyway.
 
What I was loving - quite to my surprise – was Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (MC-86, P+).  Even more than the director’s biopic Elvis, this documentary gives me a newfound appreciation for a singer who was never really a favorite of mine.  There’s a goldmine of recovered footage, both concert and offstage, with a focus on his long Vegas residency in the 1970s, songs frequently (and absorbingly) edited together from different time periods.  Elvis was certainly a more sophisticated and thoughtful musician than I realized, as well as an energetic and engaging performer.  There is no hint of the drug-fueled decline that led him to die sitting on the toilet at 42.  Luhrmann’s razzle-dazzle suits Elvis’s rattle-and-roll, and redeems his memory for the less-than-faithful.
 
As a confirmed Janeite, I can be severe about some Austen adaptations, but it didn’t take long for The Other Bennet Sister (MC-80, Britbox) to win me over in its brisk ten half-hour episodes.  Authentic period flavor makes this fanfic more than tolerable, and Ella Bruccoleri is winsome in the titular role of Mary, the most mocked and maligned of the sisters in typical tellings of the family history.  It took me a while to realize that the Ruth Jones who plays Mrs. Bennet was actually “Nessa” (“What’s occurin’?”) from Gavin & Stacey, which compounded the delight.  Like her sisters before her, and like any Regency rom-com heroine, Mary finds herself facing a choice between two men, the congenial good match vs. her heart’s desire.  Nonetheless, the characterizations seem as authentic as the costumes and settings, which stretch from Mrs. Darcy’s Pemberley to Mrs. Gardiner’s London and a subsequent sojourn in the Lake District.  The latter lady is superbly embodied by Indira Varma, who overturns my usual objections to de rigueur DEI casting.  I also enjoyed the parlor game of calling out the Austen novels (and adaptations) from which the bits and bobs of the story are culled.  Entertaining and endearing.
 
Code of Silence (MC-80, Britbox) bids fair to do for deafness what Astrid is doing for autism, with a “disabled” young woman using her special ability to help detectives solve crimes.  In this case, a police cafeteria worker is called in for lipreading on surveillance videos and proves invaluable in trying to prevent a suspected jewel heist.  In this Canterbury-set series (already renewed), the deaf woman who proves to have a special gift is Rose Ayling-Ellis, in a wonderful portrayal of the main character.  She’s particularly convincing, but the rest of the cast is good as well, and the way the story spins out over six episodes is continuously interesting.  In the international glut of police procedurals, this sticks out as distinctive and involving, with a unique point of view.  If the Brits can do this, why bother with pallid remakes like Patience?
 
One Brit you can count on is Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Gentleman Jack, etc.) and her latest series is Riot Women (MC-83).  Garage band stories among the gals are as common as they ever were with guys, but this one ranks right up there with We Are Lady Parts for its novel perspective.  These ladies are mostly menopausal and “seeing red” in one way or another. Joanna Scanlan plays the mother hen of the group, but Rosalie Craig is electrifying as the flame-haired lead singer belting out her punk-style rage.  Ms. Wainwright is the bard of Yorkshire, and this series shares that setting, in six hour-long episodes with a second season already in the works.  She always has a distinctive female perspective, and while this show is both funny and moving, it seems to cover the gamut of what a women’s consciousness-raising session might discuss.  To me that’s a good thing, and this show is certainly among my strongest recent recommendations.  All these women, actors and creators, are a riot to listen to, and rate your attention.
 
New on Britbox during a current subscription offer was the police procedural Gone (MC-77), not generally my bag but worth a look.  A six-episode fictionalization of a true crime book, the story is of moderate interest, as the steely headmaster of a posh old boarding school is suspected of murdering his wife.  But it’s the acting that kept me interested, with the ubiquitous and usually-stoic David Morrissey (typically on the other side of the law, cf. Sherwood) given the chance to emote.  I take note of two actresses new to me for future reference:  Eve Myles as a sympathetic detective, and Emma Appleton as the anguished daughter.  Adequate collections of types at a modern police station and antique school complete the extensive cast.  Above average, if you like this sort of thing.
 
Britbox is the repository of many films and series I have relished in the past, but it’s a channel I dip back into only on favorable occasions.  This time around, very fond memories of Twenty Twelve and W1A led me to an episode of Twenty Twenty Six, but this retread could not compete either with the previous two series, or the actual 2026 FIFA World Cup then in progress.  I did glom on to Tracey Ullman’s Show (IMDB), and though the topical satire of this decade-old sketch comedy series is a trifle dated (and very British), Tracey certainly knows how to put on a show and is an impersonator extraordinaire.  I kept coming back for more until the subscription special ran out.  I’d been meaning to take a look at the highly-praised Belfast cop show Blue Lights, but that will wait for another go-round.
 
We were getting AppleTV on a similar two-month special through Prime Video, but it was too soon for the latest season of Slow Horses and none of their new shows stood out for me.  Not that long ago, I was calling the channel “Applelicious” but on this go-round I found little to my taste.  Their productions have variety and polish, but like red delicious tend toward the bland and mushy, of genres that I do not find piquant or appealing.  Most popular lately has been Widow’s Bay (MC-78).  Like so much on the channel, it’s not too painful to watch but not my favorite viewing, so I have no regrets about giving up on it early (and all those Emmys won’t make me go back and finish).  The same applies to Margo’s Got Money Problems, Lucky, Sugar, and Silo.  For old times’ sake, I’ll watch the reboot of Ted Lasso until this month runs out, but then I’ll wait till the coming season of Slow Horses is complete before I go Apple-bobbing again.
 
Kanopy (or Hoopla, depending on your local library) is a valuable free streaming service, which frequently surprises with new and hard-to-find films, as well as their diverse stock of classic films and tv.  Recently three on my watchlist popped up in quick succession. 
 
The Croatian semi-documentary Fiume o morte! (MC-85) is both fascinating and funny.  It tells the story of the occupation of the Adriatic city now called Rijeka - a hundred years ago it had the Italian name of Fiume - by proto-fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio (which I first learned about in the excellent Mubi series Mussolini: Son of the Century).  Initially welcomed and supported by Il Duce in ovo as the opening shot of the Fascist revolution, D’Annunzio’s takeover was suppressed within a year by Mussolini in his consolidation of power, leaving behind an incredible archive of ten thousand photographs.  They form the backbone of the film, which is fleshed out by current Croation residents of the city, recruited off the street by the filmmaker, with or without any recollection of the historical episode (the city has been part of “eight or nine countries” in the interval), including eight baldies who play the would-be dictator at different points in the film.  The incongruity of staging events from more than a century ago with nonactors in a modern city setting is amusing, but the interpolation of photographs of the scenes being reenacted gives the film multiple levels to work on, and offers an instructive present-day lesson in how fascism comes to power.
 
The Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin made my must-watch list early on with Head-On and The Edge of Heaven, but subsequently fell out of my purview till Amrum (MC-76) turned up on Kanopy.  It’s properly called “A Hark Bohm film by Fatih Akin,” with Akin working with the older filmmaker on a memory film of his childhood in Germany at the end of WWII, eventually taking over as director before the elder man died (he’s glimpsed in the film’s final shot).  On the titular island, just off Germany’s north coast, the waning days of the war are just a rumor till the radio announces Hitler’s death.  The protagonist is a 12-year-old boy (Jasper Billerbeck in a very winning performance), evacuated from Hamburg to his mother’s ancestral home in a small old whaling community, while his Nazi apologist father fights to the last gasp.  When his mother suffers postpartum depression, more from Hitler’s suicide than the birth of her fourth child, the boy goes on a convoluted quest for the only thing she is willing to eat, white bread with butter and honey.  This brings him into contact with many elders in the community, from whom he learns much about his family, and the final days of a war that seems both distant and all-too-close.  Appropriately, Akin is more subdued and scenic than usual in this subtle story of an awakening conscience.
 
Kanopy had an Akin film that I had missed, so I caught up with In the Fade (MC-65), another collaboration with Hark Bohm.  It’s a fact-based story of a neo-Nazi bombing in Germany, which centers on a sterling performance by Diane Kruger, whose husband and son are killed in the blast.  A tripartite structure goes from police investigation to the trial (an interesting glimpse inside a German courtroom) to a revenge plot (which divides viewers), but Kruger is convincing throughout.  She and the film did win some awards, but not my personal recommendation.
 
For me the presence of two reliably great actors, Toby Jones and Lesley Manville, overcame the sub-benchmark MC rating and led me to watch Mr. Burton (MC-61) as soon as it appeared on Kanopy.  Jones is the title character, a theater person consigned to teaching literature at a Welsh high school during WWII, who takes under his wing a promising student, the son of a drunken miner, both named Richard Jenkins.  Eventually, the more-or-less-homeless young man moves into the boarding house where Mr. Burton lives, run by “ma” (Manville).  Together they get him into Oxford and onto the stage, Richard along the way taking Burton’s last name.  In the role, Harry Lawtey is rather better as the deep-voiced Shakespearian actor than the comically oafish young man, but Jones and Manville are marvelous as usual, the story is largely true, and the filmmaking is serviceable.  At the end, I went straight to re-watching Becket, my favorite film back in high school.  And followed up by tracking down My Cousin Rachel, Richard Burton’s first Hollywood film (a not-too-bad quasi-remake of Rebecca). Then, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (decidedly dated, but titillating as celebrity couple self-exposure).
 
I wouldn’t go so far as to call Ex-Husbands (MC-65) a find, but it does represent one of the many niches filled by Kanopy, worthy independents that never got much notice.  It was probably Griffin Dunne in the lead that made me check it out, and he does not disappoint as a sixty-something Manhattan dentist who is being unwilling divorced.  His father left his mother in their eighties, and the impending marriage of his elder son (the ubiquitous James Norton) is no sure thing.  But a bachelor party organized by the younger son is going forward anyway, at a White-Lotus-type resort in the Yucatan.  By chance or scheme the Dunne character is staying nearby, and crashes the party in the most genial way imaginable.  This is a sophomore writing and directing effort from Noah Pritzker, who probably got a second chance because of the money associated with his name, but earned it with this earnest and endearing family dramedy.  Won’t make your day but won’t waste your time.
 
Speaking of unique finds, Wild Rose (MC-80) was the film where I first connected with the incandescent talent of Killarney’s own Jessie Buckley, now so widely recognized.  My initial rave is here.  I was delighted to re-watch this tale of a hardscrabble Glaswegian country singer yearning for Nashville with someone who had missed it.  So I’ll close out this omnium-gatherum with a strong recommendation for this breakout from a superb singer and actress – and for Kanopy as an addition to your streaming options.  (A final note before posting:  As an example of the range and quality of Kanopy offerings, I’ve just started watching the aforementioned Blue Lights (MC-82) on that channel, and so far I seem likely to echo the “universal acclaim.”)
 
Oh, one last-minute postscript, over on PBS: I remain no fan of Masterpiece Mystery, but occasionally a favorite actor will induce me to watch a series.  Such is Marble Hall Murders (IMDB), the third and final series starring Lesley Manville as a mystery book editor who finds herself solving real life crimes.  Manville is always worth watching, and each of the series (Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders are the others) has the novel gimmick of doubling up murders, one fictional and one “real-life,” with the same actors appearing as different characters in each strand.  This last series seemed like the best of them to me, but then I’m not really a judge of the genre.
 
What I usually go to PBS for are documentaries, and a lot will appear in an upcoming post on “Documendations 2026,” along with another lengthy round-up of Criterion Channel offerings, both already well in progress.

Hulu-ciné-shins V

Hulu was another streaming channel that had gone downhill in my estimation, but then I discovered they had retained their high-quality foreign movie niche (mostly Neon releases), and I had the opportunity to watch without a paid subscription, so I leapt to catch all five Oscar nominees for Best International Feature.  Hulu now combines with Disney+ and ESPN in one of the more attractive streaming packages that have proliferated lately, so it became worthwhile to pay the seven-buck surcharge for no-ads.  Also, to refrain from demoting Hulu into “stray viewing” and to retain its individual heading.
 
Most timely of all, enough to make it required viewing, is the latest from great Iranian director Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident (MC-91), winner of the top prize at Cannes last year.  He was on hand to accept in person, after twenty years in prison or under house arrest, banned by the regime from travel or filmmaking, though that did not keep him from making a handful of smuggled-out features in secret.  This latest was also made in secret, to avoid the censors, but is more scripted and less spontaneous and documentary-like.  The camerawork is more careful, with both comedy and thriller elements compounding the depth of the moral and political quandaries addressed, as a group of formerly imprisoned dissidents gather to determine the identity and fate of a suspected torturer that one of them has kidnapped.  I’ve long derived a sympathetic view of the Iranian people from its humanistic neorealist filmmakers (not to mention the Iranian girl who sat next to me in homeroom sixty years ago), most of whom have gone to prison or into exile.  I wonder how they feel under assault by Bibi and Donny, and whether the militant mullahs will emerge even stronger, after this ill-advised and chaotically-planned attack.  [Written just after the initial assault, but posted when we’re already many months into the quicksand, formerly known as a quagmire.]
 
Also from the troubled Middle East, The Voice of Hind Rajab (MC-81) is a Palestinian film that is hard to watch but very well made, mixing elements of documentary and drama, as Kaouther Ben Hania did earlier with Four Daughters.  The title character is a 5-year-old girl trapped with six dead relatives in a car in Gaza.  Her call for help is directed to the Red Crescent in Ramallah on the West Bank, where the whole office mobilizes to coordinate safe passage for an ambulance that is eight minutes away from the girl.  Going around in bureaucratic circles, two men and two women take turns on the phone, either consoling the girl or yelling at officials.  The girl’s voice comes from actual recordings which segue into the reenactors, who are all excellent.  This is not an angry political film but a deeply disturbing look at the civilian consequences of the destruction in Gaza -- Israel or the Jews are barely mentioned, they’re just a given to deal with -- it’s more a procedural of humanitarian workers on the front lines, a timely but nearly unbearable lesson.
 
Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value (MC-86) was nominated for the Best Picture and eight other Oscars, winning Best International Feature.  Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgaard, and Elle Fanning all received acting nominations.  This is a film about filmmaking, and I generally appreciated Trier’s “Oslo trilogy.”  I watched attentively but felt that either I or the film was missing something.  I never knew whether Skarsgaard’s Nordic old guard director was a good guy or not, a manipulator or just a damaged dude of a dad doing his best.  Is resentful daughter Reinsve merely overwrought or genuinely traumatized?  Her sister seems to have turned out all right (Inga Lilleaas was also nominated in this role), and their relationship was really the highlight of the film for me, though there are many elements at play here.  The often drunk and absent dad returns to his family home (a major character in itself) after his estranged wife dies, planning to make a film there about his mother’s traumatic death on those very premises when he was a schoolboy.  And now he wants his daughter to play his mother.  What would his psychotherapist wife have made of that?  The film makes a pleasing puzzle of it, and I’m sure I would discover more of the pieces on a second viewing.  When the stage actress daughter flatly refuses the role without looking at the script, the director recruits a young American star with Netflix backing to make the film; Elle Fanning is marvelous as a miscast actress trying to take on a role not meant for her.  There are time leaps and scene jumps aplenty, layers within layers, so attention is required.
 
I’ve seen several of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s films without actually writing out his name, but The Secret Agent (MC-91) changes that, as he becomes someone to keep an eye on.  It was shut out of its four Oscar noms, but certainly deserved consideration, including Wagner Moura in the centerpiece role.  He’s a dissident academic in hiding from the ruling junta of Brazil in 1977.  Assisted by a team of resistors, he gets a new identity and job in Recife and a place to stay in a house full of refugees of one sort or another.  That’s the director’s hometown, and the familiarity shows through. (His previous film Pictures of Ghosts was a documentary about Recife and the movie theaters of his youth, which figure into this feature as well.)  KMF luxuriates in the time and place, within a steady widescreen frame filled with as much detail, wit, and feeling as it can hold.  Beautifully shot, flavorfully acted, this film echoes political thrillers of its era, but definitely has a mind of its own.  The turns of the tale require some patience (and tolerance for gore) to wind to conclusion, but the eye and mind of the director reward going with the flow.
 
Oliver Laxe’s Sirat (MC-84) is grueling and full of unpleasant surprises (to say the least), but somehow so mesmerizing that I made it all the way through.  We’re immediately thrust into a rave on the Moroccan desert, where a father and young son are looking for their disappeared daughter/sister.  They fall in with a group of five headed to another rave in the desert.  Their white-knuckle trip into the mountains is reminiscent of the classic thriller The Wages of Fear, and that’s hardly the only danger they face.  There’s a flooded river and an ongoing military campaign.  Suffice it to say the trip does not go well, but we come to know and care about these unusual characters and their unfortunate fates.  But the long slow shots of the two buses driving, day and night, through a vast wasteland, with the nonstop beat of techno music, begin to take on a mythic quality all their own.
 
Park Chan-wook is not my sort of director, but I have admired a couple of his films, so I gave a chance to No Other Choice (MC-86) but when the murders started halfway through, I had no other choice but to turn it off.
 
The trailer suggested The Tale of Silyan (MC-84) was a nature documentary about an odd human-stork bond, and it is that, but also a lot more.  Only after viewing did I realize that it was directed by Tamara Kotevska, who also made my favorite documentary of 2021, Honeyland.  Likewise this is set in rural North Macedonia, where farmers struggle with middlemen who refuse to pay a fair price for the fruits of their labors.  The local village has the largest colony of storks in the country, and the title refers to a legend about a boy who’s banished by his father and turned into a stork.  But the legend – and the beautiful imagery of storks in flight or in their huge nests, making their weird clackity-clacks out of bent-back necks – is really just a frame for a story about the economics of farming and of emigration, not quite up to Honeyland, but highly watchable.
 
With many scenes shot at nearby Hancock Shaker Village, I felt a certain proprietary interest in The Testament of Ann Lee (MC-80), as if it were local lore.  My reaction was mixed, and so was the film – it could have gone further toward veracity of historical recreation or toward highly-stylized operatic drama, but wound up somewhere in the muddy middle.  Amanda Seyfried was good in the title role, and Mona Fastvold’s direction had a lot going for it, but too often my reaction was “Wait, that’s not right” or “Wow, that’s annoying, please stop.”  I’m glad they never made a movie out of Hamilton but only a filmed performance, because as a theater piece it doesn’t raise any such expectations for reality.  Go theatrical and you can dance as wild as you please, but in delivering a conventional narration of one historical figure’s life, you elicit resistance to fanciful interpretations and the filmmaker’s urge to make Mother Ann a hero for today.  One could take her message of simplicity and equality seriously, if only there weren’t so much flailing around and droning on.   
 
I’d answer yes to Is This Thing On? (MC-72), the new Bradley Cooper film starring Will Arnett and Laura Dern as a long-married couple in the throes of separating.  They are both excellent, and each companionable, in this middle-aged rom-com.  She’s a former Olympic volleyball player, now a suburban mom eager to go back to work as a coach.  He’s a finance guy (though the film is as indifferent to his work as he seems to be), who gets an apartment in the city.  Aimless, he wanders into the Comedy Cellar one night and enters a world he never knew.  Soon he’s working out his marital woes on stage, getting the hang of performing, and entering the community of stand-up in NYC.  In short, finding himself.  Cooper himself has a raucous supporting role, with a host of notable walk-ons.  Give this movie a chance, and you’re likely to be amused, charmed, and appreciative of its realism.
 
Of course I love The Boss, and I’m getting pretty fond of Jeremy Allen White, who plays him in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (MC-59).   Scott Cooper’s film focuses on the making of the album Nebraska and Bruce’s struggle with depression at the time, in an interval between initial success and mega-stardom.  Jeremy Strong plays Jon Landau, Springsteen’s longtime friend and manager.  Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffman are Bruce’s parents, in B&W flashback and color “present.”  There are dashes of live performance and dots of creative process to telegraph the struggle of plumbing emotion and conveying it through music.  How do you feel at the end of a day in the studio when you’ve just recorded “Born in the USA”?  But it’s hard to imagine someone who is not presold on this material getting much out of this film.
 
Twinless (MC-79) was a Sundance Audience Award winner that certainly won me over.  It’s written and directed by James Sweeney, who also stars along with Dylan O’Brien as a couple of guys who meet at a Portland OR support group for people who have lost a twin sibling.  Each begins to feel that they have met an understanding other, if not brother, and they grow close despite evident differences, one a gay wit, the other a bit of a macho dullard.  Twenty minutes in, the credit sequence comes up and a different sort of story emerges, with the odd-couple comedy taking on a sinister tinge, as the relationship goes through some changes.  A fringe character well played by Aisling Franciosi emerges into a determinative role.  Can’t say much more without spoilers, only that complications develop provocatively and resolve in a way that I found fully satisfying.  So long as Hulu keeps offering offbeat films like this (along with FX tv series), it’ll continue to be more valuable than its homepage would suggest.
 
You won’t often find me watching films in the yellow range of Metacritic ratings, but I made an exception for Freud’s Last Session (MC-48), primarily to see Anthony Hopkins incarnate the sage in his final days, right at the start of WWII.  Matthew Goode as C.S. Lewis was also a bit of a draw.  And I would gladly have watched them square off in the single set of Freud’s home office for the duration, but this film demonstrates every risk of “opening out” a stage play, and misses whatever point there might have been in the imagined confrontation between the “sex doctor” and the Christian apologist.  Lewis lived for decades with an older woman he called “mother” but probably slept with.  Freud’s daughter Anna has a lifelong devotion to a woman with four children, while both he and she deny the possibility of lesbian attachment.  There would have been plenty to talk about – including the incipient war – within the confines of Freud’s famous office, transplanted from Vienna to London, but this lame film dilutes them with pointless “show, don’t tell” tangents.  Interestingly, Hopkins played Lewis in a much better film, Shadowlands.
 
Again, you’d have to search to find most of these films on Hulu; its homepage remains rather a desert.  ABC network programming adds little besides the occasional Abbott Elementary episode, but FX shows are frequently worth watching, and so are occasional “Hulu Originals.” 
 
Such as Rivals (MC-85), now halfway into its split 6+6 second season, delivered with split-second wit.  A split-second is also how long it takes the characters – mostly Thatcher-era aristos and wannabes – to jump each other’s bones, in merry (and malicious) roundelay.  I eagerly await the remainder of this season, and would definitely be up for a third – I believe they have quite a series of Jilly Cooper novels to keep this posh soap opera going in its own naughty and satirical way.
 
Another British import, Alice and Steve (MC-66), attracted my attention for the most obvious reason, but also because Alice is played by the ever-watchable Nicola Walker.  In a sense it’s a spinoff of Rivals, as the creation of Sophie Goodhart, who wrote for that and Sex Education.  Jemaine Clement is Steve, a celebrity hair stylist and Alice’s long-ago lover but longtime best friend.  She’s been married to a nice guy long enough to have a nice teenage son.  She also has a 26-year-old daughter from a transient relationship, who moves back home after a break-up.  Difficulties ensue, with an ick-factor that will stop some viewers cold.  Call it cringe comedy, revenge drama, wrong-com, or whatever, I made it to the end.  Nicola is terrific in an all-out performance, and the rest of the cast keeps up, with a special shout-out to Marcia Warren as Alice’s mother.  Not a must-see, but a fine exemplar of the UK tradition of half-hour six-episode series.
 
From FX, the outstanding sports documentary Welcome to Wrexham (IMDB) just completed its fifth series (confusingly now on Disney+, with only the first on Hulu).  This is another show I’ve been proselytizing for season after season, and just as the Wrexham Red Dragon football club has been promoted “back to back to back” in UK soccer leagues – now in Championship and vying for Premier, the top of the pyramid – so has the show kept raising its game, in portraying the mutual love between a Welsh former-mining community and its team, which starts on the pitch but extends into many diverse corners of the town and its people.  Sign me up for more.  [P.S. And surprisingly, sign me up for more World Cup.  And if you want a spot-on review of Season Five, see here.]
 
We’ll wrap up this survey with the final season of another excellent FX series, The Bear (MC-83), which sticks the landing, earning a 10 on my scorecard.  To my mind, Christopher Storer and company kept a steady hand through five seasons, and kept their collective head (and soul, and angle of vison) in the whiplash of unexpected fame and then defeated expectations for some fans.  The are many characters here who earned our grace, and grateful appreciation for their service: Carmy, Syd, Richie, Tina, Marcus, Sugar, and the rest.  We’ve been through a lot with each of them, and wish them the best.  Sure, it’s insane to devote so much energy to the preparation and presentation of food, and even more insane to be driven to achieve recognition as the best of the best, but along the way this crew learned a lot about aspiration, teamwork, the trials and consolations of family, and the precarity of restaurant work.
 
Overall, I have to say that Hulu is back in my good graces, with ESPN Unlimited and Disney+ a worthy bonus, and I plan to keep my subscription going as long as I keep getting such a good deal.

  

Still more of MUBI

When the niche streaming channel MUBI had another of their generous offers, I signed up primarily to see The Mastermind  (MC-80).  For me, writer-director Kelly Reichardt sometimes clicks (Wendy and Lucy, First Cow) and sometimes doesn’t (Showing Up).  As the semi-true story of an art thief in 1970s Massachusetts, this had many points of interest for me, not least because the recently ubiquitous Josh O’Connor plays the lead.  He’s no “Thomas Crown” and his affair is an ill-planned, low-key heist of several Arthur Dove paintings from the “Framingham Museum of Art” (Worcester, irl).  O’Connor tends to come across as sympathetic - even when playing Prince Charles - so it takes a while to realize what a dead-ender this guy is, ruining a relatively comfortable life, with a wife and sons and well-off parents, by planning and poorly executing a half-baked scheme to rob a local public institution.  There is humor and pathos in his comeuppance, but little sense of how he got to this point, besides the boundless ego that kicks off the “Me Decade,” while Vietnam and American streets burn on TVs in the background.  Of course the title is totally ironic, and one of the best laughs in this rather deadpan film.
 
Though he came out of the eastern suburbs of Cleveland a few years after me, I have not followed the career of Jim Jarmusch assiduously, but I have seen and mostly enjoyed a lot of his films, with a special shoutout to Paterson (my rave here).  So the MUBI exclusive Father Mother Sister Brother (MC-76) caught my eye.  As an icon of hipster indie cred, Jarmusch can enlist A-list talent in his quirky little dramas, often putting several short stories together in a film.  Here the first features Adam Driver (title character of Paterson) as dutiful son of rogue dad Tom Waits, another Jarmusch regular, in a setting very reminiscent of the Berkshires.  In the second, the mother is Charlotte Rampling, having her two grown daughters, Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps, to tea in a Dublin townhouse.  In the third, two twins – thirtyish brother and sister of color – reunite in Paris for a last visit to the vacated home where they grew up, the apartment of their gallivanting parents who’ve just died in a plane accident.  As the title suggests, this anthology film is all about the connections and disconnections of family, knit together by recurring tropes in different circumstances, with the inaction beautifully framed and the silences quite eloquent.  Some will find it inexpressive, some will find it penetratingly lifelike.  Some will laugh, some will lament, some will doze off.  I liked it a lot, but not Paterson-level.
 
I’ve lately become a Virginie Efira completist, so I took the opportunity to catch up with Madeleine Collins (MC-64), and again she does not disappoint.  Reviews reference Hitchcock or Chabrol, but the suspense element is muted, and the only violence is emotional.  Which gives Ms. Efira a chance to demonstrate her range, as a professional translator leading a double life, with a conductor husband and two growing sons in Paris and a partner with a preschool daughter in Geneva.  The juggling of identities begins to wear her down and fray her nerves.  The film’s title and opening sequence make no sense until the onion is fully peeled.  I wouldn’t recommend you go out of your way to see this, but I would advise watching almost any Virginie Efira film you come across.
 
MUBI has lately ventured into tv series with some success, and the latest is the Spanish romantic dramedy The New Years (MC-tbd), which follows a pair who meet on New Year’s Eve of 2015, coincidentally marking the thirtieth birthday of both.  Each of the following nine episodes jumps ahead exactly one year, tracing the arc of their relationship.  The pair are extremely attractive, and there tend to be protracted though tasteful sex scenes in the early episodes.  But thereafter, the story takes many turns from year to year, in a profoundly realistic tale of the progress of a relationship though a decade of change.  The standout for me was the episode where they are keeping house and both sets of parents come for a holiday meal, but each was marked by humor and authentic human interaction. Like real life, it sometimes requires patience, but if you pay attention it’s well worth your time.
 
As it turned out, enough new stuff appeared on MUBI for me to continue the subscription after the current special ran out.  Notably, My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow (MC-94!).  Though its 5½ hour runtime may seem daunting, rest assured that this up-close-and-personal documentary by Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet) is engaging throughout, as it follows a group of young female journalists and activists trying to navigate the increasing authoritarianism of the Putin regime, which has labeled them as “foreign agents.”  The film starts as Navalny returns to Russia and is arrested getting off the plane, and ends as the repression that has been growing for a decade tightens radically after the invasion of Ukraine.  The genuine drama is startlingly intimate, shot on an iPhone much like the tool of all the journalists themselves.  By the end all the principals (am I allowed to comment on how photogenic they all are?) have fled Russia before they’re arrested.  A “Part 2” is planned to follow these characters into exile.  This film is – unfortunately – highly instructive for Americans these days, while Trump tries to follow his buddy Putin’s playbook.  As a NYT critic suggests, this is the “most essential investment of time you can make” on a movie this year. “And yet it is not just ‘important’ or consequential — it is brilliant, riveting, vital, devastating.”  Amen.
 
My Father’s Shadow (MC-85) is the debut feature of Nigerian-British director Akinola Davies Jr., written with his brother Wale.  Two boys, aged 11 and 8, play and bicker in their rural home while their father, who works in Lagos and rarely returns home, gets ready to go back to the city.  The boys’ mother has gone to the village for the day, so the father decides to take the boys into Lagos for the first time.  It turns out to be the very day in 1993 when the military dictatorship annulled an election they had clearly lost.  The film combines memory piece, city symphony, and history lesson into an absorbing tale of father and sons.   
 
I took note of Aisling Franciosi in Twinless, which led me to The Nightingale (MC-77).  So how did this intriguing Irish-Italian actress wind up in Tasmania, covered in blood and starring in a film by Jennifer Kent, best known for The Babadook (which I never had the least interest in seeing)?  This film certainly does not stint on horror, but it’s more historical than metaphysical.  Aisling plays a young transported Irish convict in the 1820s, indentured to a vile British lieutenant, who wreaks unimaginable havoc on her life (very hard to watch, and there’s more).  She goes on a mission of revenge, enlisting a “blackfella” as guide.  Inevitably, he goes from “boy” to “Billy” to deep connection, non-actor Baykali Ganambarr delivering on all counts.  The story beats are rather familiar, albeit with a twist in perspective; violence and gore are prevalent and protracted, but the title performance and the lush Australian wilderness are well worth watching.  
 
World Cup fever may have led Saipan (MC-68) direct to streaming, but I glommed on immediately after my own personal indoctrination to football – as the world knows it – through Welcome to Wrexham.  Also lured by my longtime enjoyment of the star, Steve Coogan, and general fondness for things Irish.  A bit of useful context: this docudrama retells the story of Roy Keane, maybe the best Irish footballer ever, who walked out on the national team at the start of the 2002 World Cup, and became the basis of the Roy Kent character in Ted Lasso.  This film examines how the cock-up happened.  Coogan plays the team manager and Eanna Hardwick embodies the stone-faced, all-business team captain, as they battle through the Irish squad’s pre-Cup warm-up on the titular island, an opacity that would be completely clear to Irish folk who lived through the controversy.  Coogan plays it straight, but there are plenty of laughs in this comedy of errors and incompatibility, though very little actual soccer action.
 
La Grazia (MC-70) is the third film that director Paolo Sorrentino and actor Toni Servillo (euphonious name, isn’t it?) have made about Italian political leaders.  After playing the scoundrels Andreotti and Berlusconi, Servillo is now the necessarily-fictional President DiSantis, a jurist of great wisdom and probity (along with human weaknesses).  Sorrentino’s films are all explorations of his two great cities, Naples and Rome, the latter featured here, as in his Oscar-winner The Great Beauty.  Restraining his characteristic exuberance, this film focuses on moral quandaries, as the preeminent law scholar and esteemed politician goes into the last months of his term pondering a trio of decisions, a euthanasia law that his daughter (and closest advisor) is pushing, and two contrasting pardon applications.  Not without the occasional fanciful flourish, this film asks and debates serious questions of jurisprudence, while displaying what the title promises – grace.
 
I was lured into The Fall (MC-64) by the presence of Lee Pace (Halt & Catch Fire) and the film’s top rank in popularity on MUBI.  I’d never heard of director Tarsem Singh or his 2008 film.  Pace plays a 1920s Hollywood stuntman in hospital after an accident, bonding with a five-year-old Romanian girl recovering from a broken shoulder (whose appeal kept me watching) and telling her an ever-changing adventure story on demand.  To keep up, the filmmaker went to 18 countries, filming spectacularly in a triumph of location scouting.  The story is rather thin, and often compared unfavorably to The Princess Bride, but Bollywood might be another point of comparison.  I wouldn’t recommend this film unless you’re in the mood for a dazzling but nonsensical travelogue.
 
Elizabeth Sankey’s Witches (MC-70) is an interesting essay film that jumps off from her own postpartum depression into a larger consideration of women’s mental health and the connection to historical accusations of witchcraft and its depiction in popular culture, largely illustrated by clips from theatrical films.  The message about finding your own coven didn’t register with me as much as the game of naming which movies the clips came from as they rushed by.
 
Pompei: Below the Clouds (MC-87) is a Wiseman-esque documentary about Naples by Gianfranco Rossellini, shot in exquisite high-contrast black & white.  Without any narration or explanatory frame, his camera moves between aerial shots of fuming Vesuvius, and underground and underwater shots of antiquities buried by previous eruptions.  We spend time in an emergency call center and a Syrian ship bringing grain from Ukraine, also in the bowels of an archaeological museum and in tunnels dug by grave robbers.  Slow and meticulous, the film requires sustained attention but rewards it.
 
Last and least, I take note of The Sound of Falling (MC-90), the highly-praised German film that I couldn’t get through at this time, a difficult 150-minute film about four different quartets of sisters living in the same house over the course of a century, with unmarked transitions between time periods.  I don’t doubt the film rewards the concentration required to sort out sixteen-plus characters in four different timelines, but I didn’t have it in me at this moment, so I’ll save the film for my next sojourn on this channel.  
 
For many movie viewers, I’m afraid, “It makes you think” does not seem like an endorsement of a film, but it does seem like a description of much of MUBI’s programming.   So after getting the channel for three months at one dollar, I found enough of interest to stick around for two more at the usual $15 subscription rate.  In sum, MUBI is great for an occasional feast, but one doesn’t require a steady diet of it.  Look for one of their many special offers, and give it a try.

P.S. The day my subscription ended, MUBI happened to debut a movie I've been looking for on streaming since its initial release two years ago: Good One (MC-87).  So I'll be back on the channel sooner rather than later.

 

Stray viewing IV

[Updated through May]
 
I begin this round-up with one of my favorite recent series, back for a fifth season on PBS and angling for a place among my personal all-time Top Ten.  Astrid (properly Astrid et Raphaëlle, IMDB) keeps getting better and better, as its popularity in France grants the show access and funds to explore more and more interesting Parisian locations, while losing none of its endearing character interactions or wide-ranging storylines.  After reading my personal essay on self-diagnosis of autism, a friend recommended this series, for which I’m especially grateful since I was unlikely to have discovered it otherwise.  The character of Astrid – an autistic woman who works as a criminal records archivist but is recruited by lead detective Raphaëlle to solve crimes together and become close complementary friends – continually offers me shocks of recognition and explanation.  Though there’s always a precipitating murder to initiate the storyline, there’s very little onscreen violence but plenty of forensics as various corners of the culture are explored (for example, the three episodes I watched most recently revolved around Buddhism, Aztec mythology, and Mormonism, respectively).  Not generally my sort of viewing, this particular mystery series is very much up my alley.  None of the actors were familiar to me but all of them are good, but preeminently the title pair of Sara Mortensen and Lola Dewaere, as compass and thimble respectively.  You don’t need to be Aspy to enjoy this series, but it certainly helps.  I have little interest in “solving” the cases (as little as Hitchcock with his “MacGuffins”) but I am interested in the worlds and ideas from which they emerge, and I admire that the end point is never sending the perpetrator to jail but coming to understand what led them to commit the murder, not just the motive but the reason.  The relationships between the title characters and with the rest of the crew are heartfelt and humorous, adding another level of pleasure to the proceedings.  Let me do for you what my friend did for me, and lead you to this hidden gem of a series, with the sixth season now showing in France and likely to come to PBS next January (assuming PBS finds a way to survive without the CPB).  In the meantime, there are forty binge-worthy episodes available with PBS Passport.
 
Softened up by Astrid, I sampled another PBS mystery with the come-on title of Bookish (MC-78), but couldn’t persist.  If you want to watch a series about a bookseller investigating murders, see The Lowdown with Ethan Hawke on Hulu.
 
The main appeal of The Great Escaper (MC-71, PBS) is the acting of nonagenarians Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson as a longtime couple, and one of the bigger disappointments is how poorly they’re matched by the actors who portray them as young lovers during WWII.  We know just how this pair looked at a younger age, and it’s nothing like the pair here.  In the popular British genre of true tales of little people triumphing over adversity or the system or just the odds of existence, this is a middling entry about a veteran of D-Day who goes AWOL from his posh nursing home to attend a 70^th-anniversary commemoration in France.  Weak tea, but inoffensive.
 
Maybe Niall Williams ought to stick to novels since his own screen adaptation of Four Letters of Love (MC-37) is such a limp affair, struggling to make the transition from page to screen. I was so fond of his novels This Is Happiness and The Time of the Child that I overlooked the Metacritic rating when I saw this film appear on Kanopy.  Turns out Celtic mysticism is easier to convey in florid words than actual images, however prettified.  Polly Steele’s film features Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne, and Helen Bonham Carter, not to mention great vistas of the northwest coast of Ireland, so how bad could it be?  Not very, but not very good either.  Ann Skelly is something of a find as a winsome colleen.  But on the whole, I’d recommend this film only if you’re pining for the shores of Donegal.  (It has subsequently turned up on Netflix as well.)
 
I don’t imagine you’re pining for the shores of Finland, but they are certainly the most appealing aspect of The Summer Book (MC-62, Kanopy), an English language adaptation of a Tove Jansson novel, about the relationship between a fading grandmother and a blossoming 6-year-old girl summering in a isolated island cabin, with a grieving widowed father between them.  The grandmother is played by Glenn Close, face carved out of granite, listening to birdsong and watching the light play on waves lapping against the shore, and blaze in midnight sunsets.  If you are in a contemplative state of mind, and responsive to gracenotes of nature, you may have the patience for this short but slow-moving film.
 
I’d never heard of Seagrass (MC-84) before it turned up on Kanopy, but rating and trailer induced me to watch this recent Canadian feature debut from writer-director Meredith Hama-Brown.  In British Columbia, a family goes on an island retreat, where the parents attend marital workshops and the children mingle seaside playing by age group.  Seemingly a memory piece set some thirty years ago, the film is most notable for the perfectly natural performances of the two adorable girls, roughly 12 and 6.  The mother is Japanese-Canadian and her recently deceased mother had been interned during WWII.  She’s grappling with grief and regret, as well as doubts about her cross-racial marriage.  The husband seems genial but clueless and inarticulate about feelings.  The retreat makes things worse rather than better, and the friction and anxiety filters down to the kids.  I understand the moodiness, but this film moves so slowly that it requires real patience to enjoy its virtues.
 
A Little Prayer (MC-86) had been on my watchlist for so long that I don’t remember why I put it there.  Probably for lead David Strathairn, whom I’ve always followed, since we were at Williams together though our paths never crossed; I particularly admired his films with fellow Eph John Sayles.  Probably didn’t connect writer-director Angus Maclachlan to his Junebug screenplay, but maybe I saw some link to Ramin Bahrani or critical comparison to Ozu.  At any rate I’d been looking for the film since its Sundance debut three years ago.  Then it suddenly turned up on Kanopy (now on AMZ as well), and I watched it immediately.  When my reference points are the series Rectify and the films of Kenneth Lonergan, you may surmise that I loved this film.  Strathairn is at the top of his game, as owner of a metal manufacturing plant in Winston-Salem, and Jane Levy matches him in appeal as simpatico daughter-in-law.  His own son and daughter are double trouble however, and his wife no prize.  Where did he go wrong as a father?  Was it when serving as a captain in Vietnam, or sending his son to fight in Iraq, which led the boy off the straight and narrow?  The son now works for his father, and has taken to drinking and sleeping with the boss’s secretary(!).  With everyday problems of regular life, Maclachlan lets us peep in and infer all that is going on under the surface.  The film begins and ends with extended tracking shots down a leafy suburban street, suggesting that we’re being drawn into just one domestic drama out of so many.  But the heart of this film lies in the gospel singing that wafts through the neighborhood in the early morning, which only father and daughter-in-law seem to appreciate.  And then there’s the lesson of a Moravian graveyard.  This film is grave and deep, but also warm and funny.
 
In a less polished way, the same could be said of Maclachlan’s previous film, Abundant Acreage Available (MC-68), also on Kanopy.  It has the great advantage of starring Amy Ryan (whom I’ve loved since she was Beadie in The Wire), who begins the film by burying her father’s ashes in the post-harvest tobacco field of their NC farm.  She loves the land, but her brother loves Jesus and wants to get off the farm.  Three elderly brothers wind up camping on the land, which is where they grew up.  Complications ensue, interspersed with beauty shots of the landscape.  Not as great as his subsequent film, but highly watchable.
 
Francois Ozon is known as France’s most prolific director, thought of as a successor to Chabrol.  I haven’t seen the majority of his work, but In the House stands out as a gem.  And now I’ll add When Fall is Coming (MC-74), an autumnal reverie centered on veteran stage actress Hélène Vincent, as a well-off grandmother enjoying her country home and garden in Burgundy.  She’s looking forward to a visit from her adored grandson and troublesome daughter.  The placid surface is broken by mischance, and things get worse from there.  Turns out no one is quite what they seem, and subtle twists in the tale keep occurring, in a meditation on chance and design, innocence and culpability.  Beautiful and engaging, Vincent and the film keep revealing new ambiguities and complications.  Ozon propounds rather than solves a mystery.
 
Thus I was led to another Ozon film on Kanopy, Summer of 85 (MC-65), apparently an adaptation of a YA novel that the director loved when young.  Set on the shores of Normandy, it’s the swoony story of two (extremely attractive) teenage boys who meet and mate after a sailing accident, and have a six-week affair that changes both their lives.  In some ways as touching as Heartstopper, this is of course a darker affair, haunted by death and mystery, despite the sunny seaside setting.  From now on, I’ll make more of an effort to keep up with Ozon’s films.
 
How Are You? I’m Alan (Partridge) (IMDB) marks the return of Steve Coogan to the iconic character he’s been playing for more than three decades, a clueless and abrasive radio and tv presenter, downwardly mobile from the BBC.  This time out, he’s hosting a program that purports to be about British mental health, but as is invariably the case, it’s all about him.  I’m a longtime fan of this other Steve, so this show was just my cup of tea and plate of crumpets.  It just debuted on BBC last fall, so it was a surprise to see it reach Kanopy before Britbox.  So my takeaway tip for library card holders is to sign up for Kanopy (or Hoopla) if your library offers it.
 
Hedda (MC-70, AMZ) just eked out my MC benchmark, and stars two actresses who have attracted my interest in the past, Tessa Thompson and Nina Hoss (eye-opening in Christian Petzold films).  Never had much use for Ibsen and never read or saw Hedda Gabler, and Nia DaCosta’s film won’t increase my appreciation, though it does have some virtues of its own.  Some of the transpositions clearly work, most especially one of the central male characters becoming Hoss, a gain on several grounds.  Presumably the original was not set in 1950s Britain, in a manor house where academics and bohemians mingle, a well-designed but rather implausible scene, with entitled general’s daughter Hedda as hostess and shit-stirrer.  Worth a look, but hardly must-see.  
 
I’m not so concerned about HBO disappearing into Paramount+ after its previous devolution into Warner Discovery, and demotion into “stray viewing.”  But at the moment HBO Max boasts, among the lame reality shows, some of the most acclaimed films of the year, led by Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (MC-95).  Now, the only one of PTA’s films that I remember actively liking is Inherent Vice (can’t remember as far back as Boogie Nights), so I guess mine is a minority voice (was surprised to find out Battle was based on another old Pynchon novel). There are always things to admire in his films, but I’ve never tuned into his wavelength, and this does not change that.  I went in cold, wanting to form my own impressions, and it took me a long while to realize I was watching a comedy.  I’d imagined the film had a serious political intent, about the highly relevant topic of immigrant deportations and the persistence of violent “revolutionary” cadres.  I never got over that feeling of dislocation when stoner dad Leonardo DiCaprio started running around in his bathrobe to recover his abducted daughter (Chase Infiniti, a real find).  Benicio del Toro is his “sensei” and provides welcome wit.  Out of four acting Oscar noms (from thirteen in all), those two have some validity, but the other two are cartoonish portrayals by Sean Penn (in a premonition of Greg Bovino) and Teyana Taylor as a radical Black Amazon.  Full disclosure: I watched this film over several nights of stationary cycling, so didn’t give it my undivided attention.  Don’t take my word for it, but instead see this Best Picture winner for yourself.
 
Some people thought Ari Aster’s Eddington (MC-65) was robbed of a BP nom, but not me.  It’s another attempt to shoehorn political themes into a comic thriller, even less successful than the previous film.  I turned it off when the shoot-em-up began.
 
Rose Byrne got acting nominations for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (MC-77), so I stuck with this updated “diary of a mad housewife,” but like the cycling it accompanied, it was kind of a chore to get through.  Rather telling that I found HBO’s prestige programs only worth watching while I was doing something else.  And the rest of the channel is so much worse (apart from John Oliver).  David Ellison will just complete the destruction that David Zaslav wrought.
 
[Late HBO addition] Okay, I’ll admit that Timothee Chalamet has It, and that Josh Safdie knows how to direct a propulsive movie, but I can’t go along with raves over Marty Supreme (MC-89), the story of an unrepentant hustler without the charms of a Paul Newman.  Granted this is a vivid portrait of an American type, but such psychos are wearing thin.  Marty’s game is ping pong rather than pool, and deranged confidence in himself is his superpower as well as his kryptonite.  It was worth watching a YouTube video that delineated the facts vs. fictions of this portrait of a real person, because you can’t really get a grip on the character from this made-up helter-skelter passage through his early days.  The acting is mostly good, the ping-pong and other action scenes impressive, but this is a character I’d want nothing to do with in real life, and not so much in film either.  And none of the other characters have particularly redeeming qualities.  It’s all very fast and fierce and funny, but doesn’t go anywhere except a sentimental copout ending.
 
Talk about stray viewing – somehow Hamnet (MC-84) wound up on Peacock, where it was blessedly uninterrupted by commercials after the opening string of them.  Based on a book I read but don’t remember very well, directed by Chloe Zhao and starring Jessie Buckley, both particular favorites of mine, with Paul Mescal as Shakespeare, whom I don’t mind either, my expectations were raised too high.  While I appreciated the period look and spirit of the film, I found it rather drawn out and lugubrious, and kept comparing it to the same story’s treatment in the David Mitchell series Upstart Crow, which was satirical as well as moving, in telling how the dead son became the title character of the play.  Still, Zhao’s work is beautifully made and impressively redolent of the era, and Jessie gives it her all, from witchy sexy joy to maternal grief.  There is, however, a limit to my appetite for emotionalism, and this film more than sated it.  I have yet to pick my own favorite for Best Picture of 2025, but so far I haven’t seen an Oscar nominee that stands out, with Train Dreams for me a weak frontrunner.  Blue Moon seems more worthy than any of the nominees I’ve seen.
 
As proclaimed in my Cinematic Credo, my two primary criteria for film selection are Metacritic rating and director, but there are actors and actresses who can nudge a film into “must-watch” and two of them are in Midwinter Break (MC-60, Peacock), namely Lesley Manville and Ciaran Hinds.  And it was certainly worth my time to observe them as an older couple trying to revive their marriage with a trip to Amsterdam (also enjoyed vicarious tour).  But the story is slight, with a weight the film is not strong enough to carry, and the direction is workaday, so I can’t recommend this unless you share my longtime affection for the stars.
 
I can understand that readers of Helen Macdonald’s acclaimed memoir H is for Hawk (MC-63, Kanopy) might find Philippa Lowthorpe’s film lacking in interiority, and those not enamored by nature documentaries might find the laborious process of training a goshawk somewhat tedious, but I would rate this film well above Metacritic.  It’s mainly about two characters: one is played by Claire Foy, whom I’ve admired since she was Little Dorrit, and the other is an avian predator called Mable.  Cambridge academic Helen/Claire is devastated by the sudden death of her photographer father (Brendan Gleeson); she obsessively reverts to the bond of falconry that they shared, and abandons almost all human contact.  The connection between bereaved and bird is compulsive and compelling, if not fully revelatory.  This comfort animal is cold comfort, with only murder to calm her down, but Mable gives Helen a way to work through her grief.  The film is longish and inconclusive, but rewards attention.
 
I caught the recent film Nuremberg (MC-61) on a transatlantic flight (now on NFX), and was surprised at how good I found it, most particularly Russell Crowe’s unlikely portrayal of Herman Goering, making him not so much a sympathetic character but an understandable human.  Rami Malek is less convincing as the ambitious army psychiatrist who vacillates between admiring and despising Goering; Michael Shannon is serious and judicious presiding over the tribunal; writer-director James Vanderbilt is competent but hardly incisive.  What can I say? – excellent airplane viewing, with timely relevance. 
 
And interesting enough to send me in search of a famous film I’d never seen, Judgment at Nuremburg (IMDB, Tubi).  Why had I never seen it?  Though Stanley Kramer blew my pubescent mind with On the Beach in the era of duck & cover drills, within a few years I’d been instructed by Stanley Kauffmann and John Simon to look down on Kramer as a middlebrow, bien pensant, Oscar-bait director.  I didn’t include this film in my Burt Lancaster career summary, even though he gives an excellent performance as an “honorable” jurist on trial with other Nazi judges, in a later series of “truth & reconciliation” trials.  Spencer Tracy teams again with Kramer after Inherit the Wind, this time as the presiding American judge in a weighty courtroom drama with contemporary relevance.  He’s actually very good, and so are the Hollywood stars who troop through: Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Marlene Dietrich, and “Best Actor” Maximillian Schell.  Adapted from a play by Abby Mann, this film is thoughtful, gripping, and instructive in our current political situation.
 
The recent documentary Riefenstahl (MC-82, Kanopy) is another Nuremberg trial, in effect, as it subtly condemns “Hitler’s favorite filmmaker” in her own words and voice, despite her living to 101 and attempting assiduously to cleanse her name the entire time.  Unlike a previous excellent documentary from 1993, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, this film leaves no doubt about the Nazi complicity of this pathological narcissist.  Again, a lesson relevant to our own time.
 
I’m going to wrap up this overextended post the same way I began it, with special pleading for new seasons of highly-personal favorite series.  Watching very little “reality tv,” I assume most of it is totally fake.  But I take special interest in two that seem awfully genuine to me, if not unmediated.
 
I’ve followed Love on the Spectrum (IMDB) from its original three seasons in Australia through its four seasons in America, and I stuck around on Netflix long enough to watch what seemed to be the show’s culminating season, though it turns out they may push it with another.  My appreciation remains undiminished, and there are few shows I find so touching and entertaining.  I’ve hammered this recommendation home repeatedly, but if you haven’t taken me up on it yet, you don’t know what you’re missing.
 
Similarly, I’ve been harping on Couples Therapy (IMDB, P+) for five seasons now.  There is very little of interest on Showtime, and Paramount+ has become even worse under the Ellisons (the villains who axed Stephen Colbert), but if you ever find yourself within the confines of that ghetto, do not miss this show.  Each season psychoanalyst Dr. Orna Guralnik (New Yorker profile here) guides four diverse couples through a season of therapy, in a studio mockup of her own office, fitted with multiple hidden cameras.  Insightful, funny, sometimes scarifying, sometimes heartwarming, this show is recommended for anyone interested in the psychology of relationships.
 
International travel and NBA playoffs (not to mention political news) have distracted me from my general viewing and reviewing over the past several months, but I have two more round-ups in process (covering Mubi and Hulu), which will be posted soon.