Catch-up catch-all

Back again.  So much for staying current -- got to give it another try.  I thought about giving up on film commentary, foreseeing little likelihood of my return to film programming, but somehow found a reason to keep going.  Even if I’m never back in business at the Clark, I may have a role in programming at a revived Mohawk Theater in North Adams.  And I still have to justify in some way all these hours I spend watching movies.

Having once again regained the urge to write about film, I’ve got four months of viewing to catch up with.  I’ll do so conversationally, mostly in double-feature pairings, in roughly descending order of my recommendation.  One advantage to my delay in writing about these films is that they sort themselves out, into the pictures that linger in the memory and those I have to work to remember at all.

Another advantage is that the year-end critical consensus has been tallied, and I can reference the FilmComment critics poll of top fifty films of 2015, and the Metacritic compilation of Top Ten lists to rank the thirty most admired films of the year (plus my usual link to MC numerical tabulation of critical ratings).  So my opinions are offered in the context of more general evaluation, and I know what I need to see before finalizing my own annual ranking.  As I write, the Oscar nominees have been announced, and I’ve not seen any of the supposed “Best Pictures,” but nonetheless have seen a lot -- too many -- of the year’s releases.

Two of my favorites from 2015, not prominent on the other lists, are about tortured contemporary artists, biopics with a difference, portraying writer David Foster Wallace and songwriter Brian Wilson.  I’m more a fan of Wallace’s nonfiction than fiction, but I loved The End of the Tour (MC-82, NFX), admired the way Jason Segel improbably disappeared into the persona of DFW, and enjoyed the subtle push-pull of admiration and antagonism in Jesse Eisenberg, as the Rolling Stone writer doing a profile of DFW at the peak of his reclusive renown.  James Ponsoldt is a director who seems to get better with each film, here following three films examining alcoholics with one about a lucid but fragile recovering alcoholic.  This film offers a snapshot in time, of the author confronting his ambivalent fame, implicitly revealing the self-doubt that would lead to his suicide, but more importantly demonstrating his sensibility in an oblique but seemingly authentic manner.  Like My Dinner with Andre, it makes more than you could imagine out of two guys talking.

Love & Mercy (MC-80, FC #29, NFX) was another film I went into with reservation, but came out with commendation, convinced by stellar performances and subtle storytelling.  Paul Dano, in his best performance by far, plays Brian Wilson in his ’60s Beach Boy heyday, and dependable John Cusack plays him in drug-addled despair and eventual comeback in the ’80s, an unlikely combination that works remarkably well, under James Pohlad’s direction.  In episodes of the later period, which are interwoven in the editing, Elizabeth Banks as future wife saves Cusack from the clutches of nefarious therapist Paul Giamatti.  While this may be the authorized version of the musician’s life, it remains convincing in its portrayal of the thin line between madness and creativity, and excels in its detailed portrayal of genius at work in a recording studio.

Like almost everyone else, I truly enjoyed the latest Pixar animation, Inside Out (MC-94, FC #9, MC #4, NFX), in which director Pete Docter follows Up with an insightfully mind-blowing film for all ages, subtle and spectacular, funny and moving, more true to life than all but the best live-action.  There are two planes of narration: the “real” world, where an 11-year-old girl named Riley makes an unhappy move from Minnesota (where hockey’s her delight) to San Francisco; and the world inside her head, where five basic emotions control her memory and motivation.  For a long time, Joy (Amy Poehler’s voice, as infectious as Leslie Knope’s) has predominated, but now Anger, Fear, and Disgust take turns at the controls, while it’s Sadness who has to save the day.  The visualization of mental terrain is dazzling and witty, the pace never flags, laughs and tears go hand in hand.  See it to believe it.

Amazed that such a film could begin with Disney’s Wonderland logo, I finally caught up with their recent mega-hit Frozen (2013, MC-74, NFX), which was more in the Disney Princess vein, with a few up-to-date twists to the old-fashioned tale, but did have some spectacular animated sculptural fun with ice crystals.  Another CGI feature I really enjoyed was Paddington (MC-77, NFX), in which only the title character of the Michael Bond books -- a Peruvian bear who comes to London in search of a home -- is animated (and voiced wonderfully by Ben Whishaw), from red hat to his magically realistic fur.  Sally Hawkins and Hugh Bonneville are the couple who take him in, and Nicole Kidman is the villainous taxidermist who wants to stuff him.  Paul King directs this veddy, veddy British production, again suitable for all ages.

Two emergent directors in world cinema were well-received in the past year, by critics and by me -- Christian Petzold from Germany and Asghar Farhadi from Iran – though neither delivered their very best work.  In Phoenix (MC-89, FC #8, MC #16, NFX), Petzold continues with Nina Hoss one of the great director-actress collaborations in cinema history, his fixation on her face definitely a communicable obsession.  I wouldn’t put their most recent in a class with Barbara and Yella, but it’s still remarkable.  Petzold makes movies about movies, as well as real life in real social situations, in spite of the stylization.  Phoenix references films from German Expressionism to film noir, Sirkian melodrama, Hitchcockian suspense.  The story is implausible -- about a survivor of the concentration camps looking for her husband in the ruins of Berlin after the war – but its implications -- not least in the transformations of Nina Hoss’ face -- are profound and far-reaching.  And it all sets up a final scene that justifies and transcends everything that went before.

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi made About Elly (MC-87, FC #27, NFX) before his Oscar-winning A Separation or The Past, made post-exile in France, but this earlier film wasn’t released here till 2015.  Again the cinematic point of reference is obvious -- this story of a woman vacationing with friends, who disappears and thereby transforms the lives of those left behind, owes something to L’Avventura, but is far from imitative.  Seven old friends, plus Elly, the acquaintance of one matchmaker, take a weekend excursion from Tehran to a derelict villa on the Caspian Sea.  Interactions and consequences ensue, ambiguous situations lead to levels of deceit and conflict in what seemed a tight-knit community.  There’s likely a political parable involved, but what sustains interest is suspenseful characterization and moral quandary.

Less noticed generally, but even more to my taste were two films set in Italy.  There’s also a hint of L’Avventura in La Sapienza (MC-74, FC #46, NFX), in which a Swiss architect tries to revive his love of the profession by taking a tour of Italy that focuses on the Baroque buildings of Borromini, which are made suitably magical by the cinematography.  He has a young architecture student in tow, to remind him of the ideals of his youth, as he refreshes his taste for building.  Meanwhile his wife, on her own quest for revival, becomes attached to the student’s sister.  Director Eugene Green, an American who has lived in France since the 70s, has a distinctively Bressonian style, involving the actors’ direct, impassive address to the camera.  He speaks up for mystical beauty in the face of rationalized design, favoring spirit over reason.  The title refers to a church of Borromini’s, but ultimately to wisdom and knowledge.  Maybe not for every taste, but I found this film oddly compelling.

I feel much more confident recommending Human Capital (MC-63, NFX), though it got middling critical reception here after great success in Italy.  Paolo Virzi directs -- and dissects class conflict, inequality, and unequal justice -- in this multi-layered, interlocking story.  A waiter at a private school celebration is run down on his bike afterwards.  Which attendee is responsible?  In three segments, from the points of view of three different characters, we eventually piece together the whole story.  For some reviewers it was too disjointed in style and tone, for others too tied up with a bow, but I found it satisfying throughout.  (One dissed it as American Beauty, Italian Style, but I can’t see anything wrong with that.)  Good to look at, satirical and dramatic, and well-acted overall, especially Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as the stunned wife of a wealthy hedge fund manager, whose son is the primary suspect in the hit-&-run, and Matilde Geoli as the boy’s girlfriend, not to mention Valeria Golino, a particular favorite of mine.

Speaking of magnetic actresses, the past year saw the definitive emergence of Alicia Vikander.  In Ex Machina  (MC-78, FC #34, MC #5, NFX), most of the time she’s only half there -- the other half transparent to her robotic innards – but she makes quite an impression with the part that’s there.  Ava is the creation of reclusive billionaire tech genius Oscar Isaac, and Domnhall Gleason is the employee summoned to give Ava the Turing Test, to determine whether the machine can convince the observer that she is human.  With Ms. Vikander, what do you think?  The two male actors are effective as well, as all three play games of cognitive cat and mouse.  With this nice piece of speculative fiction, Alex Garland successfully completes a rare novelist-into-screenwriter-into-director transformation, giving the film a sleek look and many intellectual twists, before descending to a genre denouement.

In Testament of Youth (MC-76, NFX), we see Alicia in the flesh.  Period flesh, well-covered, in James Kent’s traditionalist direction of this adaptation of Vera Brittain’s classic WWI memoir.  Alicia as Vera is headstrong and passionate, devoted to dreams of study at Oxford as much as to heartthrob Kit Harington (better known as Jon Snow).  When war comes and her love enlists, she gives up the academic career she longed for and goes to the front as a nurse.  The men of her generation are mown down, and she becomes a devout pacifist.  Leagues better than Downton Abbey, set in the same period, this film doesn’t escape the ghetto of British heritage productions, but Alicia Vikander assures its place near the top of that ilk.

Can’t really say the same for Far from Madding Crowd (MC-71, NFX), despite the endearing presence of Carey Mulligan as Hardy’s heroine Bathsheba Everdene.  Director Thomas Vinterberg makes the odd transition from Dogme 95 to Masterpiece Theater classicism, creating a film that is entirely too pretty.  Carey is certainly given more spunk and agency than was Julie Christie in John Schlesinger’s 1967version, where Bathsheba was more a flirt at the mercy of fate and men, but Julie will remain definitive for me.  Schlesinger’s film is more burnished monochrome than picture postcard, and has a superior trio of actors in Alan Bates, Peter Finch, and Terence Stamp.  In their respective roles, Matthias Schoenaerts is too impassive, Michael Sheen okay but not as impressive, and the other guy just a caricature of the dashing redcoat.  Still, as a sucker for adaptations of 19^th-century British novels, I enjoyed watching both versions back to back.

For modern romantic comedies, two stand out in my recent viewing, though of disparate generations.  I had forgotten the director of Results (MC-73, NFX) until the final credits rolled, where the name Andrew Bujalski explained why I’d found the film surprisingly intelligent and offbeat, and so authentic in its Austin TX setting.  Guy Pearce is the gung-ho owner of a fitness center and would-be lifestyle guru, Cobie Smulders is a personal trainer who works for him, and Kevin Corrigan is a depressed client from New York who just inherited a lot of Texas loot and wants to get into shape, learn how to take a punch.  This triangle plays out in ways, and in rhythms, you don’t expect, against the grain of rom-com conventions.  I can’t do better than A.O. Scott’s characterization of this small gem: “a beautifully played game of underhand slow-pitch screwball.”

Another rom-com that avoids many of the stupidities of the genre, I’ll See You in My Dreams (MC-76, NFX), comes courtesy of Blythe Danner, who convinces us that romance is ageless, and so is comedy.  Writer-director Brett Haley is well-served by his cast.  His leading lady showcases all her talents, including singing.  The salty chorus of widowed girlfriends features Mary Kay Place, Rhea Perlman, and June Sprigg.  Blythe’s pool cleaner crush is Martin Starr, growing well beyond geekdom, and her late-life flame is Sam Elliott, a silver fox if ever there was one.  It’s not immediately obvious how it will all turn out.  Relax and enjoy, you’re in good hands.

Having worked with a friend on a book about his travels in Ireland, I’m always eager to revisit Irish settings.  Ken Loach does the same, extending the story of The Wind that Shakes the Barley with Jimmy’s Hall (MC-63, NFX).  As I’ve already argued, “Loach is no slouch,” and though this film is not among his best, it’s well worth viewing, for the Irish countryside and the generally good acting from many unfamiliar faces.  What’s familiar is the didacticism of Loach’s (and screenwriting partner Paul Laverty’s) politics, as he demonstrates that a decade after independence from Britain, the Irish people’s opponents are the same, “the masters and the pastors.”  Jimmy had emigrated to America, met some success, but came back to Ireland when the depression struck.  Before, he had organized a community hall for education, arts, and entertainment, including dancing and debate.  Now the young people beg him to re-open the legendary gathering place, but the Powers That Be resist and defeat him.

The times and the types are quite different in What Richard Did (2013, MC-80, NFX), Lenny Abrahamson’s taut and effective precursor to Frank and Room.  The title character, an Irish prep school golden boy played with tremendous conviction by Jack Reynor, makes a very grave mistake, and the drama is whether he will own up to it, or instead, friends and family will allow him to exercise his inherent privilege and get away with it.

Staying in Ireland, we revisit the Troubles in ’71 (MC-83, NFX), which in turn led me to revisit the 1947 Carol Reed film Odd Man Out, starring James Mason as an IRA man injured and on the run through the Belfast night.  Here the man out and on the run is a teenaged British soldier, portrayed with great range of emotion by Jack O’Connell.  Yann Demange’s direction is immersive and on-the-fly, as O’Connell gets into one difficult situation after another, being chased by both sides after a botched mission.  The situation is specific, but the film comes off as a sadly universal parable of occupation and insurgency, rough stuff but with the ring of truth to it. 

It is, however, nowhere near as rough as O’Connell’s earlier film, Starred Up (MC-81, NFX), which had a reputation for brutality that kept me away -- until I wanted to see more of our boy Jack.  The title describes his situation, sent from a juvenile facility to an adult prison as punishment for bad behavior.  Fresh meat indeed! -- and you can be sure it gets pounded to pulp.  Even though his pa is in the same joint (Ben Mendelsohn, with his usual muffled menace), there’s no protection for the boy, and no give in him either.  A sympathetic anger management counselor (Rupert Friend) tries to befriend him, but is no match for prison bosses who only want to subdue the boy, make an example of him.  Frankly I would have been happy to have subtitles on David Mackenzie’s film, since I missed half the dialogue to unintelligible down-&-dirty British accents.  Nonetheless, Jack O’Connell is surely destined to be starred up, in an entirely different way.

Ben Mendelsohn shows a different side in the surprisingly delightful Mississippi Grind (MC-77, NFX).  This could have been another tired tale of two guys (Ryan Reynolds is the other, and shows himself more than just a pretty face) on a life-defining roadtrip, but directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck make it nimble, surprising, and well-grounded in real locations (and local music!).  In fact, the inspiration for the film came when they were shooting Sugar, and making Iowa seem like a field of dreams to a young pitcher from the Dominican Republic.  They decided to return to the area for this light-on-its-feet travelogue, following the Mississippi River down to New Orleans.  Mendelsohn and Reynolds are two compulsive gamblers, one pathetic and one blithe, who team up to hit every big casino on the river, on their way to a high-stakes poker game in the Big Easy.  You may think you’ve seen this movie before, but you’re in for some surprises, especially from two actors at the top of their two-handed game, and two directors as well.

I confess this “double feature” pairing only reflects that I happened to watch both in the same evening, and found both so much better than I expected, but nonetheless there’s some geographic proximity to Slow West (MC-72, NFX), and oh yes, Ben M. turns up again in a small role.  As does the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender, as a bounty hunter who takes under his wing, for good or ill, a teenage Scottish laird in search of the peasant girl he loved and lost, when she and her father fled from murder charges to the Wild West.  First-time writer-director John Maclean’s film is a landscape-loving, people-despising mash-up of the Coen brothers’ True Grit and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, with a dash of Wes Anderson, and a host of other offbeat approaches to the Western genre, with New Zealand standing in prettily for 1870 Colorado.  All this yields an intriguing mix of whimsy with walloping action scenes of frontier violence.

That does it for films that I can confidently recommend.  Click through for comments on another two dozen recent films, among which you may find a number to your taste.

Most highly regarded are two intimate films about a street life of prostitution and drugs.  Set in L.A. on Christmas Eve, Sean Baker’s Tangerine (MC-85, FC #17, MC #12, NFX) captures the zeitgeist in multiple ways, being shot on iPhones for total mobility, and marking this moment of transgender emergence with raw energy.  Two luxuriantly profane and flamboyant transsexual streetwalkers strut their stuff and shoot off their mouths, while gradually revealing layers of character and condition, from one’s plaintive singing of Doris Day’s “Toyland” (“little boy and girl land”) to the other’s insane but genuine love for her pimp.  Noisy, tacky, dirty, in your face -- this film could easily be off-putting, but winds up warm and funny.  You might even call it life-affirming.

 

Can’t go quite so far with Heaven Knows What (MC-75, FC #21, NFX) -- the streets of New York are definitely meaner.  There’s a hint of redemption in the fact that the star of the film, Arielle Holmes, is enacting her own memoir of mad love and homeless junkiedom, but other than that, it remains awfully bleak.  Directors Ben and Joshua Safdie present an unvarnished and all-too-authentic view of life on the street for young addicts, but truthfully it’s hard to watch and not especially edifying.

To forestall mix-up between singular and plural, I note that Tangerines (MC-73, NFX) is from the Republic of Georgia, Oscar-nominated as Best Foreign film.  I watched it primarily because my son is an archaeologist who spends summers digging in the Caucasus, but the film is less location-specific than a universal anti-war parable, set amidst ethnic strife after the break-up of the Soviet Union.  Two Estonians remain behind in contested territory, hoping to get in the title crop, before one militia or another takes over.  They wind up with two wounded survivors in the house, one Georgian, one Chechen, for a chamber piece balanced on a powder key.

Another rare film to reach these shores lately from Eastern Europe (aside from Romania) is White God (MC-80, FC #49, NFX).  Hungarian Kornel Mundruczo’s film is most notable for his direction of dogs, individually and in large packs, without any CGI special effects, in this parable of canine payback for ill-treatment from humans, those supposed best friends.  A young girl’s beloved mutt is taken from her – non-purebreds are taxed, but her father, in reluctant custody, refuses to pay – and the dog is forced to endure as much brutality as the protagonist of Call of the Wild.  But he’s as smart a dog as Caesar is an ape (of the planet thereof), so he escapes to freedom and calls other abused dogs to his side (wordlessly well-acted), for rampages through a fearfully deserted Budapest.  A more un-Disney animal picture can hardly be imagined – this journey is bitingly credible -- but filmed with exceptional attention to animal rights and human wrongs.

Shifting gears, we see two low-budget independent films in the sci-fi genre, more accurately labeled speculative fiction.  Both play like extended episodes of The Twilight Zone, blowing your mind without blowing up stuff.  Z for Zachariah (MC-68, NFX) has a post-apocalyptic premise – one remote valley (looks like West Virginia, but filmed once again in New Zealand) has somehow escaped the radiation that wiped out most of humanity.  A young woman (Margot Robbie as a preacher’s daughter, in a wonderful blend of innocence and sensuality) ekes out a living on her family farm, seemingly a sole survivor.  Finally, a single man in a hazmat suit (the always impressive Chiwetel Ejiofor) makes his way into her valley.  As “A is for Adam,” the first man, this may well be Zachariah, the last man.  He is older, black, and an atheist, but the two form a bond that may start humanity over again.  He’s also an engineer and handy around the homestead.  Is this Eden all over again?  A snake enters the garden in the form of another male survivor (Chris Pine), maybe a better match for the young woman.  Craig Zobel directs this three-handed morality play with subtlety and surprise.

The best I can say about Coherence (MC-65, NFX) is that James W. Byrkit tries to do a lot with a little and succeeds at some of it – gathering eight actors in a single location over five nights, giving them a provocative premise, and then seeing what everyone can come up with.  The eight are thirtysomething Californians, and their dinner party turns into something very strange when a passing comet creates an anomaly, which darkens every other house in the neighborhood, except one.  Scouting parties determine that the other house is a duplicate of this, with the same eight people in it.  So the actors get to play two versions of themselves, as the people of the two houses begin to mingle with mysterious effect.  This film aims for a mind-bending spot somewhere between Rod Serling and Luis Bunuel – it misses, but not by much.

Next up are two psychological thrillers.  The Gift (MC-77, NFX) strikes me as closer to the French model (cf. With a Friend Like Harry) than Hollywood’s (think of Gone Girl’s gore).  It’s twisty rather than shocking, making you think as well as jump, revealing characters’ insides instead of their viscera.  Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall portray an attractive and engaging young couple who seem to have it all, even if it all seems a bit hollow.  Their lives are thrown off kilter by an acquaintance of Bateman’s from high school, who begins to stalk them ominously.  He’s played by Joel Edgerton, who also wrote and directed, with surprises beyond the manufactured jolts of the genre.  I won’t say more, but will recommend this to those who like that sort of thing.

The Falling (MC-71, NFX) is more in the vein of British Gothic, set in a girls’ boarding school, where an epidemic of fainting and other hysterical behavior breaks out.  Maisie Williams (GoT’s Arya) is the ringleader, having lost her best friend to the forces of sex and death.   Carol Morley’s film follows in the steps of Picnic at Hanging Rock and Heavenly Creatures in displaying the preternatural power of sympathetic relationships among teenage girls, and evokes phenomena such as the Salem witch scare and Pentecostal writhings and glossalia.  It holds the attention but does not linger in memory.

Here come two oddities that some people liked a lot more than I did.  Director Peter Strickland is steeped in a genre of filmmaking that is almost totally unfamiliar to me, known as “Euro-sleaze.”  In The Duke of Burgundy (MC-87, FC #37, MC #30, NFX), he willing embraces an absurd, melodramatic, sexualized storyline, but gives it layers of psychological complexity.  In this he is aided immeasurably by the presence of Sidse Babett Knudson (my reason for watching in the first place, Danish PM in Borgen!).  As an older entomologist, she projects power in the role of dominant partner in a lesbian S&M fantasy with a younger student, while also vulnerability as the actually-submissive partner in these lush erotic fantasies, punctuated by photographs of beautiful insects pinned to displays.  All very sensual, if more or less senseless to me.

Though not nearly as senseless as the quest of the title character of Kumiko the Treasure Hunter (MC-68, NFX), a young Japanese woman going crazy as a member of a uniformed secretarial pool, who becomes obsessed with an old VCR tape of Fargo, specifically a scene where a character buries some money in the snow.  Played by Rinko Kikuchi, she believes the treasure is still there, waiting for her to discover.  Making off with her boss’s credit card and bidding a poignant farewell to the dog who is her only companion, she flies to Minneapolis with almost no idea of where she’s going or how she’s going to get there, and with no English to guide her.  Like the current tv series Fargo, this film by David and Nathan Zellner speaks to the strange lingering power of the Coen brothers’ film.  As Kumiko’s situation becomes more and more dire, her mania becomes more and more florid, to a predictable yet unpredictable end.

In Trainwreck (MC-76, NFX), Amy Schumer presents herself as a drunken sexpot, but a damn good time.  She wrote the script, and stars as “Amy,” bringing energy and verisimilitude, as well as humor, to the role.  Judd Apatow directs, reminding one of how great Freaks & Geeks was, but also how he lacks discipline in his feature films, all of which run too long and invariably have a sentimental streak underlying the raunch.  Bill Hader plays Amy’s latest sexual conquest.  Tilda Swinton as her boss, Brie Larson as her sister, and LeBron James as Hader’s best friend deliver terrific cameos.  I loved this movie when LeBron said, “It’s all about bringing a title to The Land,” though non-Clevelanders may find other parts of the movie more endearing.  Whatever, you’ve got to give Amy credit for giving it her all.

I’m less inclined to dole out credit to Greta Gerwig in Mistress America (MC-75, FC #42, NFX), the latest product of Noah Baumbach’s fixation on her.   I have to admit grudgingly that this was a good performance, however immune I may be to Ms. Gerwig’s charms.  She’s a trainwreck of a different sort, with manic energy high-wiring over an abyss of panic -- a 30-year old who’s all over the map, and nowhere at all.  I’m more susceptible to Lola Kirke, her younger sidekick, not as innocent as she seems.  There are definitely layers in this film, but Baumbach doesn’t really have the pace to do screwball, too downbeat a sensibility.  Nonetheless I liked the New York vibe, the vast sense of possibility vs. the shortness of time, the knowing view of the writer’s duplicity.  A marginal thumbs up, but I’m beginning to doubt I will every like a Baumbach film as much as his first, The Squid and the Whale.

I mention two films, for refined tastes, because of their ready availability on Netflix.  I found both worth watching, but I’m aware that the average viewer wouldn’t.  In the French-Canadian film Tu Dors Nicole (MC-79, NFX), the title character is sleeping through the summer after graduation.  She’s alone in her upper-middle-class home with her parents away, until her older brother moves back in with his rock band.  Stéphane Lafleur directs airily but not aimlessly, in exquisite b&w, with bits of whimsical surrealism; and Julianne Côté is a pleasure to watch as she does nothing, aside from a few misdirected spasms of energy. 

I’m not sure what the title Queen of Earth (MC-78, NFX) refers to, but Elizabeth Moss is certainly the queen of this movie, though Katherine Waterston is a worthy pretender.  Alex Ross Perry’s film inevitably calls up Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, intensely focused on the faces of two women together in an isolated retreat, one or the other on the verge of madness.  The story flits between bitter humor and horror, never letting the viewer settle into a simple sense of what’s going on; time is fractured, as well as friendship and identity.  Questions are raised, but answers are not forthcoming.  This is for viewers with patience and a willingness to be mystified.

Now we’re into the stretch of this round-up that exists mainly for the sake of completeness, in remembrance of unmemorable films.  In the vein of handsomely mounted period pieces, I give short shrift to three so-so films made palatable by well-regarded performers.  Bill Condron’s Mr. Holmes (MC-67, NFX) has Ian McKellen in the title role, as Sherlock at 93, losing his marbles but trying to hang on to enough of them to solve one last case.  It has a pleasant setting, mostly in rural England, and not a whole lot more to say for itself.  Woman in Gold (MC-51, NFX) has Helen Mirren, a true story of the recovery of a Klimt painting after Nazi theft, and not much more to say for itself.  I found A Little Chaos (MC-51, NFX), with an identical Metacritic rating, to be a little better.  It has Kate Winslet as a landscape designer who gets a job at Versailles, and the recently-deceased Alan Rickman as Louis XIV (he also directed).  On the other hand, it has the stolid Matthias Schoenaerts as head designer Andre Le Notre, into whose overly-formalized life and art Kate brings some of the title quality.

Again worthy of mention because of streaming availability, here are two foreign films that I’m going to have to work to remember.  Oh yeah, A Borrowed Identity (MC-73, NFX), that’s the one about a Palestinian boy who gains admission to an Israeli science academy and falls in love with a Jewish girl, and also forms a bond with a terminally-ill Jewish boy and his mother.  Director Eran Riklis adapts two autobiographical novels by Sayed Kashua, starting in the 1980s and carrying the character through two good actors, in a generally good cast.  The film has moments of humor and hope, while acknowledging the intractability of Arab-Israeli relations – decent, but not unmissable.

Similarly with Two Lives (MC-62, NFX), a German-Norwegian film about buried family histories.  It’s 1990 and a middle-aged woman is living in Norway with her mother (Liv Ullmann), as well as her unwed daughter and child.  These four generations are about to be torn apart by an old secret.  The woman was born of her mother’s wartime affair with an occupying German soldier, taken to a German orphanage, and in 1969 fortuitously reunited with her family.  After German reunification, the files are opened and litigation ensues, as well as old lies revealed.

Now we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.  Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (MC-74, NFX) struck me as a quite superfluous extension of the YA weepie genre best represented by The Spectacular Now or The Fault in our Stars, with a rather forced admixture of humor.  I liked Dope (MC-72, NFX) better, because it more successfully subverted expectation; this about a geeky hip-hop LA ghetto kid bound for Harvard, who gets involved in a comic caper with his two close friends.  Rick Famuyiwa’s film is energetic and funny, if not fully realized.

Two films about ordinary people becoming obsessed with investigating crimes made no mark on my mind at all:  Wild Canaries (MC-67, NFX) and Digging for Fire (MC-69, NFX).  They’re out there if you want to try, but don’t say I didn’t warn you away.  Lastly, and pretty much leastly, I mention Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (MC-74, NFX), which I caught up with belatedly and reluctantly, and found an absolute snooze, despite star power, special effects, and intellectual pretension.

Frankly, I’ve been watching too many new films of no great distinction, and will be adjusting my viewing habits to revisit more old classics.  It certainly paid off for me when I revisited two Truffauts, now in Criterion Collection on Blu-Ray.  Day for Night (1973, NFX, CC) definitely retains its exalted ranking among my personal favorites, but I probably couldn’t include it in my all-time Top Ten (which would be certain to have at least two Truffaut films).  It’s the most autobiographical film by my favorite (highly autobiographical) director, in which he actually plays himself making a movie.  It also captures the very moment in my own life when I most longed for filmmaking as a profession.  Every time I hear the pulsing music that accompanies the near-documentary footage of the filmmaking process, my own heart races.  This is the loveliest love letter to cinema ever made. 

I was also happy to confirm my esteem for The Soft Skin (1964, NFX, CC), usually taken to be a comedown for Truffaut after his first three films, but one that I love until the very end, which I still find inadequate.  Once again, to know the autobiographical elements behind the film (he was having an affair with Francois Dorleac, as he would later with her sister, Catherine Deneuve; the apartment of the protagonist was actually Truffaut’s at the time) only enhances my appreciation.  And once again, Criterion delivers the best dvd extras in the business.

Day for Night was famously the occasion of Truffaut’s break with Godard (see Two in the Wave), after the latter wrote a nasty letter in response, accusing the former of all sorts of dishonesty, not least for depicting the director (himself) to be the only person on set not sleeping with someone else.  Godard was no doubt peeved by the acclaim for Truffaut’s film in contrast to his own Tout Va Bien (1972, NFX, CC), also available from Criterion.  All I’ll say is when it come down to a contest between the two of them – on intellectual, moral, or aesthetic grounds – I’ll take Truffaut over Godard every time.

I also took a look at unseen films by two other directors associated with the French New Wave, but neither Love Unto Death (1984, NFX) by Alain Resnais, nor The Story of Marie and Julien (2003, NFX) by Jacques Rivette, came close to my favorites by either.  My memories of them are dim, and I’m not recommending either for any but the most committed cinephile, so I won’t say more.

To conclude this rambling survey, I note two films that show how far back I’ve had to go to catch up.  I was not able to offer a film series in conjunction with the Clark’s blockbuster summer exhibition on “Van Gogh and Nature,” but I did take the occasion to revisit two related films, flipping my relative evaluations of Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo (1990, NFX) and Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh (1992, NFX).  Under the influence of the exhibition, I now saw Tim Roth as way over the top with the artist’s madness, as if to show that he could chew more scenery than Kirk Douglas, while Jacques Dutronc was more credibly on the edge, leading a more normal life, or at least less berserk.  Ironically, the latter film is also much kinder to Theo.

Let me tip my cap to any reader who has made it this far -- hope you found some useful information in this slog, which will soon be followed by even more film commentary, for the dedicated viewer.