Lately released

Ambiguity is my friend, so I welcome the opportunity to include two categories under this heading.  Here are some stragglers from 2019 that have become available lately, and also some films or shows that have just come out on streaming, now that the whole production and release schedule has been upended by the pandemic.  So this post runs through the recent release of the superb Netflix series The Queen's Gambit, but not as far as the fourth season of The Crown.
 
I’m a proponent of the distinctive but always divisive filmmaker Terrence Malick, but even I turned against his last several films, as ponderous and self-involved.  But for me A Hidden Life (MC-78, HBO) marks his return to form, even if that form calls on the viewer’s patience in a way that grates on many, even critics I usually agree with.  This one squeezes into my top ten films of2019.  At first it seems a departure for Malick to be making a film about a pious Catholic farmer in the Austrian Alps at the start of WWII, but the subtext of relevance to contemporary America soon becomes clear, as the farmer resists Hitler and the Nazis, at great cost to himself and his family.  Given the setting, and the feel for the land that runs through all of Malick’s work, the cinematography here is beautiful, though perhaps over-reliant on fisheye lenses.  (Would have fit nicely with the “Epics of the Soil, Toils of the Earth” film series I programmed for a Millet exhibition at the Clark two decades ago, which included Malick’s wonderful Days of Heaven.)  As usual, he relies on fragments of narration and shards of action rather than character development and scene construction to advance his story, which is based on actual letters between the couple who inspired the story.  It was useful not to know the true story while watching the film, so that all the searching philosophical questions – of faith and morality, politics and prudence, community and individual conscience – are open-ended.  The actors are almost all German, and mostly unfamiliar, but the narration and most of the dialogue is in English.  Oh yeah, it’s almost three hours long, but worth the time if you can stand (and sit) it.
 
Renee Zellweger certainly earned her accolades, including the Best Actress Oscar, for Judy (MC-66, Hulu).  Her portrayal of Judy Garland, in the year before her death at 47 from a drug overdose, is riveting and absolutely credible to me, though the film that surrounds the bravura acting and singing is not so compelling.  Director Rupert Goold effectively showcases the star, but doesn’t fill in much around the edges of her performance.  No subsidiary character makes much of an impression, and that’s a shame when Judy’s minder for a final London run is played by Jessie Buckley!  If only she’d been able to show a little of the Wild Rose beneath her prim schedule-keeper, but all she gets to do is gaze on the star, going from skepticism to admiration.  Judy Garland was no icon for me, but there were a number of ways in which my mother resembled her, so I found this film transfixing in its singular focus, though otherwise uninspired.

Fred Rogers is having a posthumous moment, perhaps as the antidote to Fred Trump’s damaged son, with the well-made feature A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (MC-80, dvd) following hard on the heels of the worthy documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (MC-85).  In Marielle Heller’s film, Mr. Rogers is played by another famously nice guy, Tom Hanks, and the impersonation is instantly believable.  Matthew Rhys is a cynical investigative journalist who is assigned for his sins to write a short profile of Mr. Rogers for an Esquire feature on “Heroes.”  He immediately goes looking for the feet of clay, but instead finds himself molded by Fred’s soft and pliable nature, in the process coming to terms with his difficult father, played by the always-welcome Chris Cooper.  Heller neatly weaves together three levels of representation: the near-factual reality of the situation, the on-set production of Mr. Rogers PBS show, and the animated world of puppets and toys that the show inhabits.  She also combines humor and heart into a pleasing and affecting lesson in learning to control your difficult emotions, and reaching a place of peace, kindness, and forgiveness.

Reading about a forthcoming film that I am extremely eager to see (Ammonite, set in 19^th-century Lyme Regis and starring Kate Winslet and Saiorse Ronan), I saw references to director Francis Lee’s previous debut film, God’s Own Country (MC-85, Kanopy), a 2017 Metacritic “Must-See” that I wasn’t able to track down till now.  The short take on this film is “Brokeback Mountain on a Yorkshire farm,” but it’s very much its own thing, and grounded in its own reality.  The film starts rough, with the hungover lead Josh O’Connor puking into a toilet, and proceeds to a tumble that is decidedly dirty, but winds up becoming tender, while remaining tough and true.  He’s the disaffected son of disabled sheep farmer Ian Hart, also living with grandmother Gemma Jones.  While his high school friends have escaped this harshly beautiful landscape for uni in the city, he’s stuck with responsibility for the farm, which he evades desperately with binge drinking and anonymous gay sex.  A migrant Romanian farm worker comes to stay for lambing season, and demonstrates a gentler approach to animality, in strikingly realistic scenes that reflect the director’s own experience growing up on such a farm.  The evocative cinematography is by Joshua James Richards, who’s made a name for himself with The Rider and other Chloé Zhao films (their forthcoming Nomadland has a Metacritic rating of 98!).  All round, this film is grimly beautiful and emotionally satisfying.
 

I don’t go out of my way to watch teen sex comedies, but good reviews have been luring me to quite a few recently.  Pen15 (MC-86, Hulu) is another – a Metacritic rating in the 80s and a brief too-silly sampling did not induce me to watch the first season, but when the second garnered an average up into the 90s, I gave it another shot.  The show really starts to click halfway through season one, in the 5^th or 6^th half-hour episode, and runs brilliantly into its second, with seven pre-pandemic episodes now released, with seven more to come.  Written by and starring Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, playing versions of themselves twenty years ago, as 7^th graders in 2000.  There are two lead-in gimmicks, the pair impersonating 13-year-olds among a cast of actual middle-schoolers, and cultural name-checking in the era just before 9/11.  The portrait of female friendship is delightful, as girls become women, and the horrors of puberty are treated with honesty and humor.  Maya and Anna, both as characters and creators, are engaging and empathetic, and go for authenticity more than jokiness.  Maya is the short dark one, with a Japanese mother played by her real mother.  Anna is the tall gawky blond, somewhat more self-possessed, but stressed by her parents’ marital difficulties.  Truthful and funny, thoughtful and stylish (direction by Sam Zvibleman), with characters that make for enjoyable company, this is an entertaining show that probes for something more.  (If you don’t believe me, check out this New Yorker review that came out a day after I wrote mine.)

Another tale of two teenage girls who mean everything to each other, Never Rarely Sometimes Always (MC-91, HBO), is directed by Eliza Hittman, who certainly has an unsettling talent.  All three of her films deal with underage sexual abuse in way that is never overt or sensational, but always troubling – very quiet real-life horror films.  In each we are deep within the experience of an at-risk protagonist, sharing her (or his) limited viewpoint, without context or connection.  Those the viewer is obliged to bring, through an act of attention, amounting to love, for these appealing and vulnerable children.  This time it’s a 17-year-old girl in a backwater PA town, affectingly played by Sidney Flanigan, who finds herself pregnant, and desperate to take care of the problem without telling anyone.  Her only confidante is her cousin, well-matched by Talia Ryder.  Together they bus into New York City, with a destination in mind but with no plan and no clue.  Most of the film takes place on buses or subways, or in the stations of same, interspersed by visits to clinics and offices, where the medical and social workers are sympathetic and helpful, but incapable of grappling with all the dysfunction in the poor girl’s life.  Shot with documentary immediacy, the film is somehow tedious yet all-consuming, like the girl’s plight.  Her name is Autumn but the springtime of her life is blighted by abuse.  We begin with a high school throwback talent show, where she delivers a tragic rendition of a Sixties pop tune that sets the tone for the entire film, which finally centers on the scene where the title takes on an overpowering resonance.

One more film about the sexual travail of teen girls tends to fall between the stools of comedy and tragedy represented by the two previous, and is therefore not a must-see.  Yes, God, Yes (MC-71, NFX) is neither funny nor heart-wrenching enough to stand with them, but it is a glimpse into the same era as Pen15 from the perspective of a parochial school girl, appealingly played by Natalia Dyer.  The film is written and directed by Karen Maine, and seems autobiographical, but innocuous and undistinctive.  The 16-year-old girl has been turned on by the sex scene in Titanic, but doesn’t know what to do with the feelings aroused.  Her Catholic school education isn’t enough to suppress those feelings, so she goes on a weekend retreat where instruction in chastity can’t compete with the sexual shenanigans in the summer camp-like setting.

I’m a believer in documentary as the essence of film art, but here I comment on several brand new ones that don’t qualify as art but do offer useful information and analysis.  Agents of Chaos (MC-79, HBO) is a two-part, four-hour examination of Russian meddling in American politics from the ubiquitous and highly-skilled Alex Gibney. Conveying an immense amount of information and commentary in a highly-digestible form, this series covers trolling, hacking, Wikileaks, and the strange mutual seduction of Trump and Putin.  It tells the story of what the Russians did to us, giving the deep backstory on how their techniques were tried and tested in Ukraine, and after the successful takeover of Crimea, they looked around to see where else such could be applied, and lo and behold, our 2016 election.  But even more, it tells the story of what we did to ourselves.

 
So a useful companion piece is The Social Dilemma (MC-78, NFX), directed by Jeff Orlowsky who also made the excellent Chasing Coral.  I didn’t really need to be reminded of the dangers of social media, but it was gripping to hear so many contrarian voices coming out of the tech industry itself.  When one of the guys who invented the “Like” button tells you to beware of it, that’s a telling argument.  And there are many similarly informed arguments made in this film, interspersed with examples of social media’s malign effects on a fictional family.
 
All In: The Fight for Democracy (MC-78, AMZ) involves two women whom I definitely admire: political activist Stacey Abrams and filmmaker Liz Garbus.  So I was happy and inspired to watch it, but can’t claim to have learned much from this solid civics lesson, though I do recommend it to anyone who is not well-versed in the history and tactics of voter suppression.  (I favored Stacey over Kamala for VP, as a forceful and committed speaker if nothing else, but I have to shamefacedly admit she’ll need to do an Oprah and lose some weight before she’ll be a viable national candidate.)

It’s hard to believe that Alex Gibney is an individual and not a consortium of documentary filmmakers, because he’s just out with another: Totally Under Control (MC-80, Hulu).  This timely film, released in a rush before the election, covers the federal government’s role in the coronavirus disaster, focusing not so much on Mafia Don’s personal idiocies, but instead, with a deafening chorus of whistleblowers, on the administration’s ideological and political calculations, which crippled the government’s response.  If you start with the premise that “government is the problem, not the solution,” you clear the field for the grifters and grafters to profit while the public suffers.  Make money for your friends and allies, instead of taking the steps necessary for public health in a pandemic.  This film lays the whole thing out step by sickening step.  If you can bear to relive it, this will give you a new and fuller perspective.

From documentary to docudrama, in the realm of the just-released, I have to enter a strong recommendation for The Trial of the Chicago 7 (MC-76, NFX).  Written and also directed by Aaron Sorkin in his trademark rat-a-tat, walk-&-talk style, with a minimum of dramatic license but an all-star cast, this is a film that is true to the time depicted, and to our own.  Referring to one of the (many) defining events of my young adulthood, I was alert to the film’s relation to my own memories, and in spite of a few dissonances found it entirely convincing.  Little things threw me off at first, like the respective heights of Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) as Abbie Hoffman and Jeremy Strong (Succession) as Jerry Rubin.  But any mismatches were soon overcome by outstanding acting.  By Mark Rylance (Wolf Hall), for example, as William Kunstler, or Eddie Redmayne (Theory of Everything) as Tom Hayden, all part of a pageant of familiar characters played by familiar and welcome actors (including Frank Langella as the judge and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the prosecutor).  Witty and true to life, this film works as both history and entertainment.

One more well-received – and artful – new documentary to cite:  Dick Johnson is Dead (MC-89, NFX).  I found Kirsten Johnson’s highly-praised directorial debut Cameraperson to be unwatchable, and this follow-up to be indescribable, but definitely watchable in its uniqueness.  It’s a portrait of her psychiatrist father, who is gradually succumbing to the dementia that has already taken her mother.  She moves him from their old home in Seattle to her apartment in Greenwich Village, where she enlists him in a film project revolving around fantasies of his death by various accidents, along with tongue-in-cheek yet deeply-felt enactments of his funeral and arrival in heaven.  Good-humored in its attempts to forestall grief, and charming in its title character, whom we see through his 86^th birthday, as well as in the filmmaker’s affection for him, this documentary may be hard to figure but not hard to like.

In passing, let me offer a firm shrug of the shoulders to Flesh and Blood (MC-75, PBS).  I’m far from a regular viewer of Masterpiece Mystery, but the presence of Imelda Staunton led me to give this a try.  And indeed she is the best, if not the only, reason to watch this derivative ensemble piece.  As is typical of British tv, the ensemble’s acting is quite good, led by Francesca Annis (best remembered as Lady Macbeth in Polanski’s Macbeth) and Stephen Rea (think back to The Crying Game) as two widowers getting together much to the anxiety of her children, and the sweet but intrusive neighbor (Imelda).  This four-part series follows the Big Little Lies template of starting with an apparent murder without revealing the victim, and also in its reliance on coastal scenery and luxurious surroundings.  In this case, the White Cliffs of Dover and adjoining beaches are featured prominently.  So it’s not a hardship to watch by any means, but hardly expands one’s horizons.  (A side note: these days I’m rarely able to make a distinction between programs shot on film vs. hi-def video, but with this one I was constantly aware of the latter’s visual deficiencies.)

On the other hand, let me offer a big thumbs up for The Queen’s Gambit (MC-78, NFX).  At times, whoever at Metacritic is assigning rating numbers to reviews seems rather prejudicial.  The reviews for this Netflix limited series are mostly raves, and so is mine.  So many good things about it, with my only quibble that the seven episodes might better have been cut to the canonical six (there’s a reason why a sonnet has 14 lines), or expanded indefinitely.  Written and directed by Scott Frank, from a novel by Walter Tevis (The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Color of Money), with vast sweep to go with psychological insight, the series revolves entirely around the transcendent performance of Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon, the chess prodigy who goes from Kentucky orphanage to World Championship match in Moscow.  With production values to rival The Crown, the story spans the Sixties, with the focus on the chessboard, though tournaments in Mexico City, Las Vegas, Paris, and the Soviet Union are convincingly rendered, and Beth certainly registers the changes in style through the decade (cf. Mad Men).  Outstanding acting all round, but special mention has to go to Marielle Heller – the estimable director of A Beautiful Day... (see above) – as Beth’s adoptive mother who goes from mad housewife to confidante of her gifted daughter, and to Bill Camp as the reclusive orphanage janitor from whom she learns the game.  The boys and men that Beth humbles on her climb up the ladder of chess mastery are also well portrayed.  I’m no more a chess player than I was a billiards player, but the variety of ways and places that the game is cinematically depicted keeps the viewer leaning in and hanging on the action.  But it all comes down to the stunning looks and bewitching gaze of Anya Taylor-Joy, as she navigates the perils and promise of her chosen obsessions.

Emma. (MC-71, HBO) is likewise graced by Anya T-J and likewise undervalued by Metacritic.  I feel quite proprietary about Jane Austen, and quite severe about some pop culture appropriations of her novels.  Anya can’t supplant Kate Beckinsale as my favorite Emma, but rockets ahead of Gwyneth Paltrow and Romola Garai.  In Autumn de Wilde’s directorial debut, she starts out in Wes Anderson or Marie Antoinette territory, with an arch, pastel-toned, anachronistic approach, but soon settles into quite faithful adaptation, with good performances all round, hitting all the high points of the story.  Bill Nighy is amusing as Mr. Woodhouse, and Johnny Flynn makes a believable Knightley, and other familiar faces from British TV admirably fill out the subsidiary roles.  The settings and costume design are delightful, as expected, justifying the punctuation that announces the film as a period piece.  All round, quite satisfying to Janeites and newbies alike.

The next section of this composite review is a follow-up to my “Black films matter” post.  First off, The 40-Year Old Version (MC-80, NFX).  Radha Blank wrote and directed, as well as starring in, this highly but not totally autobiographical – self-aware and serio-comic – take on the Black artist’s life.  Besides the nod in the title, this black & white (in several senses) film takes after She’s Gotta Have It and Manhattan, but is distinctively its own thing.  In fact, like its creator, the film is many things: social satire, romantic comedy, personal catharsis, document of NYC street life and art-making spaces.  Possibly too many things, with a run-time over two hours, but consistently entertaining and thought-provoking.  The character Radha was formerly cited as a “30 under 30” playwright, but has since failed to have her work produced and gets by teaching a high-school drama class.  She finds a new outlet in the world of hip-hop, where spitting rhymes becomes a vehicle for truth.  Personally, I’m too old to have ever made the transition from R&B to Rap, but this film suggests I may be missing something.

Time (MC-94, AMZ) is a powerful collaboration between two strong Black women, director Garrett Bradley (award winner at Sundance this year) and subject Sibil Fox Richardson, who goes by Fox Rich as a New Orleans businesswoman, motivational speaker, mother of six boys, and tireless advocate for her husband Rob, incarcerated at Angola on a no-reprieve 60-year sentence.  They were both arrested for a desperate and hapless armed robbery attempt; she took a plea bargain for 12 years and was out in 3½, he went to trial and was subjected to punitive retribution.  So Fox has to raise her boys without a father and hold her tight-knit family together through two decades.  One thing she does is take a wealth of home movies, which make up a good portion of the film.  Bradley is the daughter of two painters, and takes an artistic, associative approach to the material, mixing her own footage and Fox’s into a fluid amalgam, a meditation on the many meanings of doing time.  This film makes a highly-personalized companion to Ava DuVernay’s more comprehensive documentary 13^th, advancing the case for mass incarceration as the new slavery.

Driving While Black: Race, Space, and Mobility in America (MC-92, PBS) offers abundant history and context to the many dimensions of DWB, from the days when slaves weren’t allowed to leave the plantation, to the rise of Jim Crow and the KKK terrorizing Blacks who wandered into White space, to the segregation of transport, to the development of the automobile and The Green Book, through the decimation of black neighborhoods by interstate highways, all the way to the horrifying results of way too many white-on-black traffic stops these days. This comprehensive and well-put-together informational documentary by Gretchen Sorin and Ric Burns makes a valuable contribution to the current vital public conversations on the legacies of racism.