Surveying 2016 films

I’m so far behind in my commentary on new films that I’m going to take on the whole year at once, using Metacritic’s list of the hundred best-reviewed films of 2016 as an organizing guide, working my way down through the numerical ratings, but adding my own pluses or minuses to the ranking.  So far I’ve only seen half the Academy Award Best Picture nominees, so I’ll start with those.  [I’ll do a supplemental survey of late-arriving DVDs.]

My personal favorite was Manchester by the Sea (MC-96, NFX).  I was definitely predisposed toward it, being highly appreciative of Kenneth Lonergan’s previous films, You Can Count On Me and Margaret.  I avoided reviews and spoilers, and actually got out of the house to watch it, renewing my lapsed Images Cinema membership to see this, and the next two films, before any reached home video.  Now it’s out on Blu-Ray and I’ve seen it again, without the profound sense of surprise and discovery upon first viewing, but with a finer grasp of its artistry, just as riveting the second time around.  Lonergan’s film is sad and funny, harsh and lovely, all at once, and true as life itself.  He has a feel for the complexities of place and personhood, and perfect control of the story’s whiplash emotions.  Those emotions, either expressed or repressed, are rarely overt, though frequently overbearing.  For me the film calls to mind the T.S. Eliot line, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”  Any plot summary would be full of spoilers, and give the false impression of melodrama, or be superfluous if you’ve already seen the film.  All I can do is praise every technical aspect of the film, writing and direction, cinematography and editing, the music and above all, the acting.  Casey Affleck gets the role he was meant to play and makes the most of it, with suppressed affect but deep thought and churning emotion.  Superlative support comes from Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler, and Lucas Hedges, not to mention a host of peripheral characters.  The New England seacoast setting, and grief-inflected humor, hit all the right notes for me.  This is certainly my pick as the best film of the year, and moves Lonergan into the ranks of my most esteemed living filmmakers.

For Moonlight (MC-99, NFX), the most acclaimed film of the year, I have to enter a modest demurral.  I liked it a lot, but didn’t love it.  While appreciating the authenticity that director Barry Jenkins and writer Tarell McCraney bring from their own experience – in telling the story of a gay black youth growing up on the wrong side of Miami, following his life as he tries to create a space to be himself – I was not swept along with all the visual and storytelling choices.  Strong performances are contributed by the three actors who play the central character as boy, youth, and young man, and especially by Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monae as an unlikely pair of surrogate parents who take him in when his single mother descends into drug abuse.  The film is inventive and original, well worth seeing, but my preference for Manchester over Moonlight was predicated more on regional – rather than racial or sexual – prejudice, along with my own elder person taste, in discriminating the styles, preoccupations, and maturity of the respective directors.

Back in 2011, reviewing a not-so-good film with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, I made the prediction, “One of these days Ms. Stone will be in a decent movie, and she will be amazing.”  Well, La La Land (MC-93, NFX) is that movie at last, and she is indeed amazing.  But you don’t need me to tell you that, since by now she’s garnered an Oscar, while the movie itself came this-close.  I join the chorus of praise for Damien Chazelle’s resurrection of the movie musical, with nods to masters from Minnelli to Donen to Demy (but I do have to point to the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! (see below) as an even more impressive pastiche of lapsed Hollywood genres).  What’s notable about all three of these top films is the commitment and personal vision of directors who write for themselves.  Each of Chazelle’s films is obsessed with jazz, and the passion comes through.  Emma and Ryan are charmingly inexpert at singing and dancing, but pleasing in their naturalness, energy, and conviction.  From the razzle-dazzle opening – where an L.A. freeway traffic jam becomes an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza – to the extended wish-fulfilling fantasy ending, the film is flashy and exuberant, and director Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren earned their Oscars.  In fact, I wouldn’t have objected to this film as Best Picture, though I understand the political considerations that gave the award to Moonlight.

Hell or High Water (MC-88, NFX) will remind you of many films without ever seeming like anything other than itself.  It’s classic, yet of the moment.  Something you’ve seen a million times, but there’s nothing quite like it.  Two brothers go on a bank robbing spree in hardscrabble West Texas, and a Ranger tracks them down.  A familiar story, to be sure, but in Taylor Sheridan’s script, David Mackenzie’s direction, and Giles Nuttgens’ cinematography, it is something to see, as if for the first time.  Violent yes, but so much more – witty and pointed, beautifully structured and designed, and impeccably acted from top to bottom.  Chris Pine and Ben Foster are the brothers, the former showing a lot more than his dreamboat blue eyes, and the latter releasing the suppressed energy that underlies all his performances.  Jeff Bridges is the Ranger, indolent but canny, racist but funny, utterly in command while showing no effort at all.  This being the Trumpian Wild West, everyone has a gun and an itch to use it, the banks are the enemy, the land has been stolen many times over, and poverty gets passed down like a disease.  After the inevitable shootout, the film resolves itself in a quiet scene of open-ended menace and something oddly like reconciliation.

Given the back-loading of quality in the film year, early release Love and Friendship (MC-87, NFX) spent most of 2016 as my favorite film, and still ranks among the best for me.  I’m an unabashed Janeite, but not always happy with what the movies have done with Miss Austen.  In this case, Kate Beckinsale in the lead role carries all before her.  Kate is Lady Susan, “the most accomplished flirt in England,” of the eponymous novel by a teenage Jane (the film appropriates the title of another piece of her juvenilia).  Whit Stillman outdoes himself in adapting his trademark comedy of manners to Austenite dress.  Along with Kate, he brings over Chloe Sevigny from The Last Days of Disco, and freed both from his own autobiography and the constraints of the official Austen canon, he lets rip with a rollicking tale of romance and the cash nexus.  But Kate, oh Kate, you are the essence of our dear Jane, so deliciously witty, and so wicked to boot.  (It’s worth mentioning that twenty years ago, she was a perfect Emma.)  Good sharp fun all round.

So that’s my top five so far from films of 2016 -- click through to read my brief takes on more than fifty others.

Two admirable Asian films, whose ratings I would reverse:

Park Chan-Wook is not my Korean cup of tea, so The Handmaiden (MC-84, NFX) is the first film of his that I’ve watched all the way through.  The kink and the gore are held in check here, the visuals are stunning, the performers enthralling, and the twists of the tale gobsmacking.  Though this bewildering long-con film is lushly set in the 1930s, when Korea was under Japanese occupation, it’s adapted from a Victorian-era fiction by Sarah Waters called Fingersmith (NFX), which was also adapted by the BBC in 2005, with an early appearance by the always-engaging Sally Hawkins.  Suffice it to say the literary pornography and the lesbian romance are much more explicit in the Korean version – which is bolder, brighter, and more beautiful – but the English version definitely has its Masterpiece Mystery charm.  Submit to either, and prepare to be surprised.

Hirokazu Kore-eda is precisely my Japanese cup of tea, and Our Little Sister (MC-75, NFX) confirms his place as the prime inheritor of a great national tradition of cinema.  Samurai aside, this tradition is domestic and familial.  I happened to see his new film the day after I showed The Makioka Sisters at the Clark as the opener to a “Colors of Japan” film series, and the family resemblance was perfectly evident.  Four sisters confront the issues of marriage and matchmaking in the absence of parents, through seasons of cherry blossoms and fall foliage, alternating between modern dress and kimonos, each sister beautiful and affecting in her own way.  This film – like the sisters, most of the time – is modest and quiet, yet deeply moving and humorous in an Ozu-like way.   Definitely one of the year’s best.

Three films for which my enthusiasm did not rise to the level of Metacritic’s numerical rating:

As with Moonlight, but from a distaff perspective, there’s plenty to pull for in The Fits (MC-90, NFX), both the film and its young African-American protagonist.  Written and directed by Anna Rose Holmer, it stars Royalty Hightower as an enchanting 11-year-old tomboy, who hangs out with her brother in the boxing gym of a Cincinnati rec center, where she is enticed by the acrobatic female dance troupe that also practices there.  The title refers to a mysterious (and metaphorical) epidemic of hysterical fits that sweeps through the girls.  The film itself is slight but suggestive, an admirable microbudget effort.

The eponymous Little Men (MC-86, NFX) are two middle-schoolers from divergent backgrounds, who are thrown together, and then separated, by the Brooklyn real estate market.  As with Ira Sachs’ earlier Love is Strange, the dislocations of gentrification lead to emotional turmoil, as well as humorous juxtapositions.  The boys are played by Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri, and their friendship – or romance? – is complicated by the landlord-tenant relationship of their parents, Greg Kinnear and an underused Jennifer Ehle on one side, and single-mother Paulina Garcia on the other.  The acting is all good, and the direction effectively observational, but in the end I found the story’s lack of resolution unsatisfying.

I’ve never been able to share the general critical enthusiasm for the films of Arnaud Desplechin, and that remains true with his latest, My Golden Days (MC-87, NFX).  For me he’s just too tricky and self-indulgent.  Mathieu Amalric is always worth watching, and the younger actors in the flashbacks to the Eighties (and what seems to be the director’s youth) are good as well, but there are too many loose and dead ends.  Truffaut is an evident inspiration, but I have for these characters nothing like my affection for Antoine Doinel et al.  Which is not to say I regret seeing it, but merely that I was quick to forget it.

Two close-to-home ensemble comedies with the same rating, one a slight disappointment, the other a pleasant surprise: 

I’m a big fan of Richard Linklater and of baseball, so I expected more from Everybody Wants Some!!  (MC-83, NFX).  It’s a pleasant autobiographical time capsule, as Rick relives his days as a Texas college ballplayer and (like the previous film) captures many touchstones of growing up in the Eighties.  Which, of course, are not my touchstones.  The second exclamation point is certainly ironic, but this remains a bro-centric angle on the world.  It all takes place on the first weekend of the school year, in a jocks’ residence that is definitely an “animal house.”  Country, disco, metal, punk – as long as there’s music, and girls to chase, these guys are dressed for action and ready to go.  Drunk or stoned, crazy or sane, they are athletes from ballfield to dancehall to bedroom.  The cast is mostly unfamiliar but appealing, and decent ballplayers to boot.  The film is affectionate, funny, and not as dumb as it seems, but still not up to the very high bar of Linklater’s previous work.

Don’t Think Twice  (MC-83, NFX) follows another tight-knit group in a situation that plays as autobiographical.  Mike Birbiglia writes, directs, and plays the leader of a Manhattan improv-comedy troupe called the Commune.  Keegan-Michael Key is the star of the group, even though it shouldn’t have one, according to the three guiding rules of improv, and of life (the title is one of them).  When he is recruited to an SNL clone on tv, the Commune begins to come apart.  Gillian Jacobs is his self-doubting, true-believing girlfriend, who becomes the film’s pivot, as the group develops problems, individually and collectively, onstage and off.  This film merits high points for authenticity and rueful humor.  Much of it seems improvised, though the authorial voice comes through clearly in lines like, “Your 20s are all about hope, and your 30s are all about how dumb it is to hope.”

Three foreign films also share a high rating, but a lukewarm reaction from me:

Rams (MC-82, NFX) certainly earns points for novelty.  How many films have you seen about Icelandic shepherds?  Well, you’ve probably seen a few about feuding brothers who are forced by circumstance to acknowledge their bond, their bone-deep familiarity.  This clear-eyed film fable is – like the landscape – bleak and beautiful, with a chilly humor warmed by scant fellow feeling.  Grave and glacial, it plays like Cain and Abel transported above the Arctic Circle and scripted by Samuel Beckett.  But I was able to enter the spirit of this film more than the next two.

I have a limited appetite for weird, and The Lobster (MC-82, NFX) was more than I could swallow.  Giorgos Lanthimos, now in English but still foreign to me, is not a director on my wavelength, surreality not a key I’m attuned to.  But I find Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz generally appealing, so I gave this a try. Watched half of it with bemusement, but FF>>ed through the rest.

Another well-regarded film that had me fast-forwarding was Embrace of the Serpent (MC-82, NFX), though maybe it was just my mood or heartbeat at the time.  I usually have patience for ethnographic documentaries, but this black-&-white re-creation of two expeditions into the Amazon failed to keep my attention.   Thirty years apart, the same shaman – last of a tribe that was wiped out by rubber plantations – serves as guide first to a German explorer, then to an American ethnobotanist in search of a fabled hallucinogen.  I found it hard to follow, but maybe the fault was mine

Over any of those three, I would recommend The Innocents (MC-78, NFX), set in Poland in the wake of WWII, in a French-occupied zone.   Anne Fontaine directs this beautifully-shot and well-acted adaptation of the experience of a young female Red Cross doctor, an atheist radical from Paris, who is summoned by a frightened young nun to a Polish convent, where nuns who were raped by “liberating” Russians are now starting to give birth.  In a cloistered world where even a sympathetic Mother Superior is ruled by shame and fear, these births must be kept secret, and something done about the babies.  Against the backdrop of serene daily rituals of singing and praying, these young women’s lives are roiled by moral and spiritual quandaries that make for absorbing viewing.

Let’s make some sweet music:

Sing Street (MC-79, NFX) falls somewhere between John Carney’s previous films, the sublime Once and the disappointing Begin Again.  Returning again to the evergreen template of The Commitments, the new film revisits the teenage rite of forming a band and declaring your musical allegiances.  It seems autobiographical, even if it isn’t, homing in on the musical and stylistic choices of a group of boys in mid-1980s Dublin.  The result is energetic and appealing, if not exactly ground-breaking.

American Honey (MC-79, NFX) is also dependent on its music choices, from the title song right on through.  Sasha Lane is a revelation as a beset teen escaping her narrow life by joining a van full of teenagers, who somehow fund a life on the road by selling magazine subscriptions.  The crew is run by slightly-older Shia LaBoeuf and Riley Keogh, and the heartland travelogue is directed by Englishwoman Andrea Arnold with a foreigner’s fascination, alongside the equally foreign mores of today’s outcast youth.  It’s all a trip, but a long and strange one, full of anthropological interest but devoid of proportion and purpose.  I’m too old to recommend the film, but not too old to watch it.

Riley Keogh, a Kristen Stewart look-alike and granddaughter of Elvis, is also featured in Lovesong (MC-74, NFX), as a dissatisfied young mother with an absent husband, who is visited by her free-spirited friend from childhood, played by Jena Malone.  They also hit the road, somewhere in rural Pennsylvania.  Will they or won’t they?  And what is it that they will or won’t do?  Jump ahead three years and Riley is attending Jena’s wedding in Tennessee.  The attraction is still there, so why is the wild one settling down?  They bond again, but what’s next?  This is not the movie to tell you.  So Yong Kim directs (too much in love with dialogue overlapping scenes) and Alex Lipschultz produces (remember that name, my daughter’s fella).  

Two cracks at Philip Roth, one better than expected, the other much worse:

Roth’s novels are infamously hard to adapt, but filmmakers keep trying.  The relative success of Indignation (MC-78, NFX) may owe something to the modest reverence with which James Schamus (in his first directorial effort after three decades of producing) approached the late, slight novel.  Or maybe because I hadn’t read the book beforehand (though that did nothing to redeem The Humbling (MC-59, NFX), with a mismatched Al Pacino and Greta Gerwig).  Anyway, this film is a pretty good re-creation of Newark and a small Midwestern college in the early 1950s.  Logan Lerman is convincing and appealing in the lead, and Sarah Gadon also, as his troubled first girlfriend.  The result is an authentic period piece of a distant America, funny and fierce, which might have been even better without the literary framing.

Excess reverence for the original novel, one of my favorites, makes American Pastoral (MC-43, NFX) pretty much unwatchable.  The miscasting of Ewan McGregor in the central role is compounded by handing him the directorial reins for the first time.  The whole proceeding is tone-deaf, and out of touch with its period.  Again the literary frame – with narration by Roth’s usual stand-in, Nathan Zuckerman – is pointless and distracting.  And all the performances are off, one way or another.

I’ve always been fond of Ewan McGregor, but talk about miscasting, in Last Days in the Desert (MC-67, NFX), he plays Jesus – yes, you heard that right – and also Satan, as the latter tempts the former during forty days in the wilderness.  Despite normally-reliable direction from Rodrigo Garcia and cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki, I can’t in truth remember a single bit of this film.  Nor do I wish to.

Two films about chess and children, not to be confused with the doc about a racehorse:

Kids competing, in any sort of sport or contest, is getting worn out as a film subject, but Mira Nair’s directorial touch and documentary background overcome Disney/ESPN sponsorship to create a truthfully winning tale of triumph over adversity in Queen of Katwe (MC-73, NFX).  It follows a fatherless Ugandan girl as she comes under the spell of chess, and the gently impassioned tutelage of David Oyelowo, meeting some resistance from her hard-pressed mother, Lupita Nyong’o.  Madina Nalwanga is an absolute delight as the determined girl making her way from the slums of Kampala to international chess championships.  One of the film’s nicest touches comes in the closing credits, when each of the main actors is joined by the real person he or she is portraying, to confirm its wish-fulfilling authenticity.

In The Dark Horse (MC-77, NFX) from New Zealand, the chess teacher (Cliff Curtis) and the children are Maori, but the game is once again a lifter-up and a leveler, where skill and passion matter more than wealth or background.  Curtis is a former chess prodigy derailed by bipolar disorder, who finds order and purpose in infusing a group of teenagers with his love of the game.  His nephew in particular gets caught between the guidance of Curtis and his gang-leader brother.  This film has as much grit as uplift, but it’s gripping enough to recommend.

Horses can be underdogs too, and in the documentary Dark Horse (MC-75, NFX), so are the thoroughbred’s owners, a consortium of working-class folk from an erstwhile coal-mining town in Wales.  The thrilling succession of races and mishaps that brings the outsider horse all the way to the Grand National is compounded by the humorous cross-section of stakeholders.  Louise Osmond’s film proves very well put together and winning in all the right ways.

Two takes on the same tale:

Speaking of confusables, I would definitely switch the ratings on another pair of related films, Florence Foster Jenkins (MC-71, NFX) and Marguerite (MC-76, NFX).  Marguerite is a fictionalized French transposition of the real Florence Foster Jenkins, an American heiress and musical anti-prodigy.  Catherine Frot is good as the French title character, but I’d already lost my heart to Meryl Streep as FFJ in Stephen Frears’ biopic.  The French version is darker in every respect, muddled and overstuffed, though not without its merits.  The American version is brighter and funnier, more compact and intelligible, and just when I though it would descend into slapstick, it shows depth and heart.  Hugh Grant is a highly sympathetic scoundrel as FFJ’s enabling husband, and Simon Helberg adds well-played comic notes as her piano accompanist.  And only Meryl gets to utter the classic line, “People may say I couldn't sing, but no one can ever say I didn't sing,” which I would be happy to have as an epitaph.

Two quirky divas:

I discovered two things from Maggie’s Plan (MC-76, NFX).  One, I find Greta Gerwig more palatable when she is not being directed by a guy who is infatuated with her.  Two, I have an odd affinity for writer-director Rebecca Miller.  I was not aware of her role in this film until the final credits rolled, but along the way I’d felt in the hands of a sensibility that I could relate to, taking amusement from what amuses her, taking an interest in what interests her.  And she certainly is able to attract the best performers, here including Ethan Hawke (in casting that’s a bit on the nose) and Julianne Moore (in an out-of-left-field performance).  Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph contribute to the loose- knit ensemble.  The proceedings are both shambolic and over-planned, but the result is rather pleasing.  And the setting amongst the would-be young intelligentsia of New York, from the New School and Greenwich Village to Columbia uptown, was catnip to me.

Tilda Swinton has been a muse to several directors, including Luca Guadagnino in I Am Love, which worked for me, and stars for him again in A Bigger Splash (MC-74, NFX), which did not work nearly so well.  She plays a Bowie-esque rock star who feigns losing her voice, so she can retreat to an Italian island with her new boyfriend, Matthias Schoenaerts.  Their idyll is invaded by an over-the-top old lover and record producer, Ralph Fiennes, who just won’t shut up, and flaunts a young beauty in tow, Dakota Fanning, who purports to be his long-lost daughter.  The foursome mixes it up in revels and flirtations, delighting in deluxe pleasures, and digging under each other’s skins.  The lifestyle porn is ladled on thick, but the characterizations and the mysteries do not go deep.

Manly men and their big machines:

Aside from making a government regulatory commission the villain, Clint Eastwood keeps his politics out out of Sully (MC-74, NFX), but still loves the idea of tough men doing a tough job.  As a procedural, his film is clear and immersive, and as a character study of an unassuming hero, it has the great advantage of having Tom Hanks play the pilot who landed a plane in the Hudson River after a bird strike, with no loss of life.  Hanks gives Sully's straight-arrow character more dimension than this just-the-facts rendition of a true story might otherwise have had.  Aaron Eckhart as co-pilot contributes some humor, but Laura Linney as wife had nothing to do but wait by the phone.  Still, I found this Eastwood effort strangely satisfying.  (Neither the presence of Tom Hanks nor the exotic setting of Saudi Arabia redeems A Hologram for the King (MC-58, NFX), an all-over-the-map comedy to which Tom Tykwer gives little direction.)

In Deepwater Horizon (MC-68, NFX), Peter Berg tells another all-too-familiar story of working men in extremis, less like a documentary and more like an extreme action movie, with lots of explosions and fireballs.  Mark Wahlberg is the can-do man's-man who is our witness to the oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, Kurt Russell is the rig's honorable captain, and John Malkovich is the hissable villain of a BP executive. The film is tidily put together, a disaster film with its wits about it, even when the shit hits the fan, awestruck simultaneously at human ingenuity and courage, as well as our capacity for destruction.  

Two bouts of instant nostalgia for President Obama:

Southside with You (MC-74, NFX) retells the funny and endearing story of Barack and Michelle's first date.  I remain infatuated with the Obamas, so of course I enjoyed this romantic comedy, as Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter deliver plausible yet inventive performances as the first-couple-to-be,  It doesn't hurt that Richard Tanne's film recalls one of my all-time favorites, Before Sunrise, just two young people walking and talking themselves into love..

Barry (MC-72, NFX) goes back further, to when our man was a junior at Columbia, with a white girlfriend, trying to decide who he was and what he was going to do with his life. Devon Terrell is also good at inhabiting the familiar figure, long before he was familiar.  Here he's callow but engaging, and the film a bit more didactic, but it's good to know that there's a Michelle in his future.

Two independent subversions of studio stereotypes:

I’m more enthusiastic than the consensus about the Coen brothers’ latest film, Hail, Caesar! (MC-72, NFX), sharing their fun in imitating all sorts of Hollywood genres: the Biblical epic, the Gene Kelly musical, the Esther Williams aquacade, the backlot melodrama, not to mention screwball and noir elements.  Maybe it doesn't all hold together, but the parts are excellent, with the Coens' wry but serious mix of sincerity and satire.  If you're familiar with 1950s Hollywood movies, this is a trip down memory lane that you'll be delighted to take.  Can't quibble with the star power.  Josh Brolin is the studio fixer who introduces us to all the others: the dimwit action star George Clooney, the all-singing all-dancing Channing Tatum with lots of secrets, the curvaceous mermaid Scarlett Johansson, the twin gossip columnists played by Tilda Swinton, etc.  The Metacritic range on this one runs from 100 to 25, but I lean way toward the higher rating.

I'm less enthusiastic than many about Captain Fantastic (MC-72, NFX).  Written and directed by Matt Ross, it kept me engaged till a specific point about two-thirds of the way in, then had me scoffing by the end.  Viggo Mortensen lives with a motherless brood of six, off the grid in the wilds of Oregon, with a home-brewed philosophy of hippie rebellion, survivalist rigor, and lefty ideology.  The kids are all well-played, and submit to their unorthodox parenting with wit and commitment.  The film is intelligent, funny, and thought-provoking, until it crosses a line into implausible sentimentality.

Three solid foreign films, if you like that sort of thing:

Terence Davies' adaptation of the classic Scottish novel Sunset Song (MC-72, NFX), set in the years leading up to WWI, is beautiful and gritty at the same time, in love with the land but less so with the people who populate it.  Leisurely and old-fashioned, but without false nostalgia, the film requires subtitles.  Agyness Deyn is most engaging as the young woman we follow to maturity, with Peter Mullan as her abusive father, and Kevin Guthrie as her husband, whom the Great War also drives to abuse.  But her spirit and her attachment to the land bring her (and us) through.

Summertime (MC-72, NFX) is a lesbian romance set in the 1970s ferment of Women's Liberation in France.  Izia Higelin is a farm girl who goes to work in Paris, where she meets and falls in love with professor and activist Cecile de France.  A family crisis sends her back to the farm, where the city woman follows, setting up a culture clash as well as a fraught clandestine relationship.  For the farm girl, it becomes a choice between the woman she loves and the land and family to which she is inextricably bound.  Catherine Corsini's direction holds the contending emotions in frank and sexy balance.

Nanni Moretti is a personal filmmaker in whom I have long taken an interest.  In Mia Madre (MC-70, NFX), he tells the story of a director making a film about a labor strife, but she is played by Margherita Buy, and Moretti himself plays her brother.  Their intellectual powerhouse mother is hospitalized, and the director is coming apart at the seams, especially stressed by her star, John Turturro in full-out "ugly-American" mode.  Though Fellini's 8 1/2 is an obvious inspiration, Moretti's work is clearly autobiographical and closely observed.  The unsignaled transitions from movie-within-movie to present reality, to memory, to reverie, take some getting used to, but this film wrings meaning and wry humor out of fraught situations.

Two supposedly heartwarming comedies about cranky old people:

Maggie Smith is The Lady in the Van (MC-70, NFX), and the only reason to watch this film, adapted by Alan Bennett from his memoir and play, and directed by Nicholas Hytner.  Alex Jennings plays the solitary writer (and his alter ego interlocutor), who allows the homeless old woman to park her van in his suburban London driveway for more than a decade, and thereby learns humourous and humbling lessons about life.

Though nominated for a foreign language Oscar, A Man Called Ove (MC-70, NFX) is little more than a Swedish sitcom about a loveable curmudgeon with a tragic backstory.  Meant to be sweet and heart-tugging, the characters come across as thin and unconvincing, and the story manipulative and familiar, aside from a few touches of Swedishness.

Two grim but well-acted family dramas:

Louder than Bombs (MC-70, NFX) is the third film I've seen by the Norwegian team of director Joachim Trier and writer Eskil Vogt, the first in English, and definitely a prompt to see more.  Here Jesse Eisenberg is an estranged son, who returns to the house of his father Gabriel Byrne and younger brother Devin Druid, for a memorial exhibition of war-zone photographs by their mother, played in flashback by Isabelle Huppert.  Each male deals with the grief of her passing in a different way, the situation complicated by the presence and forthcoming memoir of her journalist colleague David Strathairn.  This family drama is dense and unresolved, but well worth watching.

Glassland (MC-66, NFX) features Toni Collette as an Irish mother resolutely drinking herself to death, while her son Jack Reynor resolutely tries to save her.  Gerard Barrett's film is unsparing in its portrayal of alcoholism and family dysfunction.  Collette's life was destroyed when her husband left her 18 years before, after the birth of a Downs-afflicted child, whom she put into an institution and refuses to visit.  Reynor does the best he can to care for both his mother and brother, but it's a very tough job.  I won't lie, it's also a tough film to watch, but redeemed by committed performances.

Two strong women – or are they victims?:

Fascinating for its feminine angle on the typical Wall Street story – from female director, writers, actors, and even financiers – Equity (MC-68, NFX) is no Margin Call, but does offer an interesting inside perspective on women trying to make it in a man’s world.  It’s directed by Meera Menon, and stars Anna Gunn as an unapologetically money-hungry investment banker specializing in tech IPOs, with Sarah Megan Thomas as her VP and Alysia Reiner as a Justice Dept. financial investigator (the latter two share writing and producing credits).  The film is sleek and twisty, and no hardship to watch.

Also sleek and twisty, but definitely hard to watch is Elle (MC-89, NFX), where I break ranks with Metacritic and downgrade severely.  Isabelle Huppert is a great audacious actress, who gives this film much more credibility than it deserves, playing a video gaming CEO with a difficult past and even more difficult present.  Director Paul Verhoeven is one sick bastard, content to watch sexual (and emotional) violence with the impassive eyes of a black cat.  Sure there’s some social satire, and decent acting all round, but little plausibility and even less truth.  Watch this misogynist farrago if you feel compelled to, but don’t say I didn’t trigger-warn you.

Two jazz biopics with good lead performances, but not much else:

How convenient that two new films about jazz trumpet players wound up with identical Metacritic scores, each of which I watched primarily for the lead actor’s performance.  Don Cheadle writes and directs, as well as stars as Miles Davis, in Miles Ahead (MC-64, NFX), though the acting convinces more that the direction.  Ewan McGregor tags along as a reporter doing a Rolling Stone profile, while Miles spirals into drug-fueled mania.  Set mostly in the 70s, when Davis stopped performing (I happened to be at the free concert in Central Park where he signaled his retreat by failing to show up), the film is a ragtag but energetic accumulation of scenes.

In Born to be Blue (MC-64, NFX), Ethan Hawk plays Chet Baker.  Here the drug of choice is heroin instead of cocaine, but the story is still about a life in shambles, despite transcendent talent.  Written and directed by Robert Budreau, the other difference is the West Coast focus.  In each film, there is a stunning black woman who is the musician's best chance for redemption, Carmen Ejogo for Baker and Emayatzy Corinealdi for Davis.  Neither film is likely to please aficionados, nor to interest the uninitiated.

Going mental:

The message of Touched with Fire (MC-62, NFX) overshadows the story, with the title taken from a nonfiction book by Kay Redfield Jamison, who actually appears in the film to enunciate her thesis, adumbrated in the book's subtitle, "Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament."  Luke Kirby and Katie Holmes are bipolar mental patients who convince each other to go off their meds and embrace their visions.  Writer-director Paul Dalio is clearly intimate with the subject, and the actors are convincing and appealing in their mania, not stacking the deck too much in connecting madness to creativity.

The only reason I looked at Joshy (MC-62, NFX) was that Thomas Middleditch (of Silicon Valley) played the title character.  There's no reason why you should, unless you're as avid for a hangover as these guys are.

Real-life heroes and/or villains:

As for Snowden (MC-58, NFX), I've never put him in a category with Daniel Ellsberg, and Oliver Stone is not a director that I esteem, but I found this film more satisfying than the ballyhooed documentary Citizenfour.  I'm still not certain what I think about Edward Snowden - whistleblower or traitor? - but after seeing Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance, both my knowledge and my sympathy are enhanced.  For once, Stone himself seems open to doubt, rather than purveying conspiracy theories.  His behind-the-scenes peek at the national spying apparatus seems convincing.

I'd like to recommend Race (MC-56, NFX), because it tells the story Jesse Owens, a hero in my hometown and around the world, for winning four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, thereby defying Hitler and racial stereotypes.  Unfortunately the film is well-meaning but ordinary, an uninspired attempt to inspire and uplift through sporting triumph, despite the plausible and appealing lead performance by Stephan James.

Prodigies and mentors:

One intellectual man mentoring another younger one is not exactly the stuff of cinematic drama, but two recent biopics did their stolid best to make a movie out of that relationship.  In The Man Who Knew Infinity (MC-56, NFX), Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel do manage to animate the characters of noted Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy and the passionately intuitive Indian immigrant Srinavasa Ramanujan, but this earnest film doesn't have the conviction to stay with them in realms of abstract thought, and but feels compelled to throw in tangential plots of a romantic or political nature. 

Genius (MC-56, NFX) is yet another uninspired attempt to inspire, with an all-too-respectful retelling of A. Scott Berg's biography of legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, focusing on his relationship with bombastic author Thomas Wolfe.  They are played manfully but inappropriately by Colin Firth and Jude Law respectively, and other Brits and Aussies are imported to play Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe's mistress and patron, the only American face belonging  to perpetually under-used Laura Linney as Perkins' wife.  The evocation of a bookish existence in depression-era New York was the aspect of the film I liked best, though the literary pretension was sort of laughable, even if right up my alley.  

Seriously pretentious:

I've got to give Tim Blake Nelson credit for trying to turn a philosophy lecture into a movie in Anesthesia (MC-55, NFX), and roping quite a cast into his personal ruminations.  Sam Waterson is the Columbia professor around whom the film revolves.  Glenn Close is his wife, Kirsten Stewart his troubled student, Nelson himself plays the professor's son, plus Gretchen Moll and Corey Stott et al. - all seeking meaning and connection in a world of suffering and distraction.  Frankly I was a sucker for it all, though I can't honestly recommend it for the casual viewer.

With Knight of Cups (MC-53, NFX), I’m afraid, style has hardened into mannerism for Terrence Malick.  I consider myself a big fan of his, but found his latest darn near unwatchable -- empty, repetitive, all show with no substance.  I managed to stay on board for To the Wonder, but I’m jumping ship with Malick’s latest recitation of his obsessive themes.  I liked him better when he took ten years between films.  For this positive history, take a look at the (forthcoming) filmmaker’s profile in “Pages” column to right.

I'll be back soon to wrap up my survey of 2016's notable films, including the best of animation and documentary.