Oscar bait

Though different from all others, this is traditionally the season where Oscar contenders for “Best Picture” reach the screen, but this year, when the watchword is “unprecedented,” many are reaching the home screen rather than theaters, so I will be able to survey the candidates that much sooner.  Of those I’ve seen and reviewed already, I would include The Trial of the Chicago 7 on my nominating list, but probably not Da 5 Bloods (which is not even the best Spike Lee film of the year).  The film I am most eager to see and review is Nomadland, but until then I will add candidates to this post as I see them.  (I will do another post about other critical favorites, most of which are Oscar longshots, but will certainly be included on my best of the year list, such as the previously-reviewed First Cow and Never Rarely Sometimes Always.)
 
There’s no subject that Hollywood loves more than itself, so Mank (MC-79, NFX) is one of the frontrunners for the “Best Picture” Oscar.  And since that subject interests me, I enjoyed David Fincher’s well-made representation of Golden Age Hollywood, even while I wondered what’s in it for those without a similar obsession.  I also give Fincher points for his homage to his long-deceased father through filming the elder’s screenplay, and credit his portrayal of Herman Mankiewicz as the epitome of screenwriters who migrated from New York to Hollywood and created the talkies.  The inside-baseball is tasty, but it certainly helps to know a lot about the players, the game, and its history.  Many familiar characters parade across the screen, but few stand out on their own, without foreknowledge of the historical figures.  So this is a movie about the writing of Citizen Kane, with Kane-like flashbacks that untangle the film’s connections to Hearst and Mayer and Thalberg.  The emphasis on Upton Sinclair’s candidacy for CA governor on a socialist platform in 1934, and its undermining by a media campaign of disinformation and innuendo, gives the film a contemporary resonance.  Gary Oldman is persuasive as Mank, and so is the rest of the cast.  Recasting the black & white visual style of Kane and other Forties classics into widescreen HD video is a neat trick, but again most appealing to connoisseurs.  The character of Mank lives up to his reputation as the wittiest man in Hollywood, but we don’t get deep into his demons, or his relationships, except with Hearst consort Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), whom he betrays with his portrayal of Kane’s second wife.  I can’t imagine this film making much sense at all without a detailed memory of Citizen Kane itself, but it’s a pretty good prompt to trotting out that 80-year-old warhorse once again.
 
Chadwick Boseman’s final role makes him a lock for Best Actor, as a jazz trumpeter in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (MC-88, NFX), a sentimental posthumous choice, but well-deserved nonetheless.  Viola Davis also is an Oscar contender as the blues singing title character, in an appropriately monumental performance.  Before there was Bessie Smith, there was Ma Rainey, and August Wilson wrote this play about her in 1982.  Transferred to the screen and put in the context of the Great Migration, we first see Ma performing in a Mississippi tent, where the Black audience “know jes’ what she talkin’ ’bout.”  And next as part of an elaborate stage show up north, before coming to the main action, a recording session in Chicago.  Her backing band arrives long before Ma, much to the frantic anxiety of their white manager and the “race records” producer.  The band retires to a basement rehearsal room, and the quartet makes some marvelous verbal music, till the brash young cornetist with big plans and dreams of his own wails his featured solo, in a shattering performance by Boseman.  “The Mother of the Blues” arrives in an imperial huff, and the action moves upstairs to the recording studio, where she clashes with the white moneymen and her obstreperous young horn man.  The hot day gets hotter, till the dramatic climax.  George C. Wolfe is primarily a theater director, but I didn’t hold that against him in this adaptation, where the theatricality seemed thematically appropriate and conducive to the language, literary and musical.  This film will definitely rank among my Best of 2020.  I look forward to producer Denzel Washington’s further screen adaptations of August Wilson plays (after he directed and starred in Fences, also with Viola Davis).

One Night in Miami… (MC-83, AMZ) is another adaptation of a play, and another reason for a possible reversal to #OscarsSoBlack.  Regina King directs her first feature, in an adaptation of a play by Kemp Powers (who also was co-writer and co-director on the Pixar animation contender Soul).  It’s a fictional rendering of a real event, the night in February 1964 that Cassius Clay took the heavyweight crown from Sonny Liston, and later met with his friends Sam Cooke and Jim Brown in Malcolm X’s hotel room.  The one-act play that is enacted there is skillfully book-ended by a bit of backstory and foreshadowing on each of the characters.  The acting is excellent and the dialogue is resonant, both of that time and of this, on subjects like Black power and the purposes of celebrity.  Leslie Odom Jr. is persuasive as Sam Cooke, just as he was with Aaron Burr.  Aldis Hodge embodies Jim Brown’s glowering strength, so familiar to me from his glory days in Cleveland.  Eli Goree fits the bill, physically and in youthful exuberance, as Clay-about-to-be-Ali.  Kingsley Ben-Adir has been praised for his Malcolm, but I thought his smooth performance lacked some of the fire and steel of the original, though admittedly this film catches him in a period of doubt, between disillusionment with Elijah Mohammed and the revival of his mission in Mecca.  Each of these characters was a hero to me at the time, and I never quibbled with the veracity of their portrayal in this very satisfying film, even if some events are telescoped or transposed to this one night.
 

Even though there are several Oscar winners involved, no one is talking about an Oscar for Let Them All Talk (MC-73, HBOm), and rightly so.  Meryl Streep is always a pleasure to watch, but this film is unlikely to garner her 22^nd Best Actress nomination.  She plays a highly successful and entitled novelist, crossing on the Queen Mary 2 to accept an award in England.  For company (or material?), she invites two old college friends she hasn’t seen in decades along for the cruise.  Neither Dianne Wiest nor Candice Bergen will be in line for another Oscar nom, but it was nice to see those actresses as well, at their (and my) advanced age.  For further support, Meryl has nephew Lucas Hedges to help out and advance the plot, such as it is.  Steven Soderbergh is not in line for another Best Director Oscar either, but does deserve some credit for continued innovation in his restlessly inventive career.  He shot the film in two weeks, essentially as a one-man crew with an advanced digital camera, allowing the actors to improvise within a story outline.  One of the best aspects of the film was his roaming all over the abovedecks/belowdecks aspects of a luxury liner.  But the many attractive elements of the film do not coalesce into a compelling or revelatory – or even very entertaining – story.  Long ago, I made an Atlantic crossing on the original Queen Mary, more or less in steerage, but it was fun to see the modern version, even if the cruise, like this movie, is “a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again.”

Another film that Meryl tries to save, and may even turn into a garbage “Best Picture” nom, is Ryan Murphy’s The Prom (MC-55, NFX).  I’m rather surprised to have watched it, and even more surprised not to have hated it.  La Streep is joined by Nicole Kidman and James Corden, as failing Broadway performers who try to burnish their careers by taking up a cause.  Which turns out to be a lesbian teen (Jo Ellen Pellman) who wants to take the date of her choice to her high school prom (adapted from a real news story, but for Pence-ive reasons moved from Mississippi to Indiana).  Inflated from stage to screen, the production certainly has energy and polish, and a bit of heart, or at least a paper cut-out of one.  The message of inclusivity and acceptance is hammered home, but with a smiley face.  There have been a number of admirable adaptations of Broadway shows this year, but this one does not fall within the dress circle.

Speaking of unlikely candidates in the Oscar hunt, another I was surprised to watch, and liked more than expected, was Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (MC-68, AMZ).   Yes, it’s mainly an exercise in gross-out humor, but it also works as sharp satiric documentary with many laugh-out-loud moments.  We all know about Giuliani’s performance in the film, but Pence was also pranked by Borat, as were assorted other right-wing gatherings.  Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat looks somewhat more impressive after seeing his Abbie Hoffman in Trial of the Chicago 7.

In a just world, so obviously not in this one, the shoo-in for the Best Documentary Oscar would be Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall (MC-88, PBS).  He’s already been given an honorary Academy Award for career achievement, but none of his forty-plus films has won, so he keeps churning them out at the age of 90, and this portrait of his hometown of Boston is one of his very best.  The notorious Brutalist building of the title provides the focus of the film, but its scope is the entire city.  And here let me tip my cap to Wiseman’s longtime cinematographer John Davey for the photo essays that separate the various segments devoted to indoor scenes and meetings – his feel for the city is remarkable.  This is the street-level Boston that I know.  More than any other Wiseman film I can think of, City Hall has a star, a main character that we come back to again and again.  Appropriately enough, it’s Mayor Marty Walsh, mostly unknown to me heretofore but a hero to me henceforward.  Son of Irish immigrants, former labor leader, recovering alcoholic, dedicated public servant, he’s plain-spoken and seemingly authentic.  Like Lori Lightfoot in Steve James’ similar – and similarly great – portrait of Chicago, City So Real, Walsh emerged as an unlikely progressive candidate in a crowded field, but now he’s into his second term after a landslide reelection.  Needless to say, I learned all this elsewhere, since Wiseman’s approach is always to throw the viewer into the scene without explanation or identifiers, and just let the matter at hand unfold in something like real time.  That’s why this film runs to 4½ hours, too long a sit even for me, but easy to break up into bite-sized segments.  If you’re familiar with Wiseman, you know what to expect, because his method never varies, patient fly-on-the-wall observation, and subtle editing to make a statement without assertion.  If you’re not, many of his films, all portraits of places and institutions, are shorter and more accessible than this, and most are available through Kanopy, if you have access through your library.  Catch up with City Hall on PBS.org till 1/20/21, by which time Marty Walsh may be President Biden’s Secretary of Labor.

P.S. (1/17/21):  Biden did name Walsh to the Labor post, but as you know, other stuff has been going on down in D.C.  I’ve rounded off this post by inserting one more likely Best Picture nominee, and will begin another post when the actual nominees are named, to culminate when I actually get to see Nomadland.

Taking a small axe to a big tree

Safe to say that the most towering achievement in filmmaking this year is Steve McQueen’s highly-personal “Small Axe” series of five films, now appearing on Amazon Prime, about the experience of West Indian immigrants to the UK (the so-called “Windrush generation” brought over after WWII, and its progeny).  This is a remarkable and creditable way to use the clout of his Best Director Oscar for 12 Years a Slave.  The series takes its name from a Bob Marley song, and could be taken to mean a small insular community taking on the institutional forces of racism and bias.
 
Mangrove (MC-90), like Stonewall, refers to both a place and a movement:  a small Trinidadian restaurant in Notting Hill, and the uprising of a marginalized community in response to police brutality.  After a loud but peaceful protest against official harassment, which turned violent when the police attacked, the Mangrove Nine were charged with “riot and affray.”  The first half of the movie follows the restaurant becoming a community center, and attracting the attention of some racist cops (pardon me, bobbies), and the second half is taken up with the Old Bailey trial of the protestors, reminiscent of, but an interesting contrast to, the contemporaneous Trial of the Chicago 7. 
 
Lovers Rock (MC-95) takes a totally different tack, portraying one night’s house party in the 1980s era of the eponymous musical genre, which bridged reggae with Motown and foretastes of hip-hop.  Not welcome in British pubs and clubs, new immigrants from the Caribbean mingle with the children of an earlier generation to celebrate their distinctive sound and the mixing culture it evokes, both sensuous and rocking.  The film puts you right in the middle of the dance floor, participating in the ecstasy and the passion for 70 intense minutes.  Also on Prime is the documentary The Story of Lovers Rock, which fills in a lot of background and context, especially on the Janet Kay song “Silly Games,” which features so prominently in the McQueen film.  After the doc, I watched the party film again, with another whole level of appreciation.  It’s a profound revelation as well as a visceral experience.
 
The next two films in the series depict the contrasting life arcs of two real individuals.  Red, White & Blue (MC-84) follows Leroy Logan (powerfully portrayed by John Boyega) as he leaves behind a career as a forensic scientist to enter law enforcement, on an unlikely quest to reform institutional racism from within.  In counterpoint, his father determinedly pursues his day in court after being beaten by a pair of bigoted cops on a bogus parking violation.  Two strong Black men who can’t see eye to eye despite their deep bond.  Only when seeing the character’s name listed as a consultant in the closing credits did I realize that this was the true story of a real-life superhero.
 
Similarly, it was only after watching Alex Wheatle (MC-77) that I learned that the title character would become the prize-winning author of numerous YA novels, even an MBE.  An outcome hard to imagine after the dire story of his beginnings in foster “care.”  His story intersects with other Small Axe films when at 16 he’s a founding member of a “sound system” like that in Lovers Rock, and at 18 he’s incarcerated for participation in the Brixton riots of 1981.  This is the slightest film of the series, but still packs a punch.
 
Education (MC-88) is short as well, and a bit more didactic, but also rings with an implicit autobiographical authenticity, about a preteen boy who is bright but dyslexic.  As a West Indian, he is shunted aside into a school for the “educationally subnormal,” which is just a dumping ground.  But his sorely overworked mother takes up his cause and becomes an activist, for a group providing supplementary schooling for those underserved by the government, something McQueen himself benefited from.  So this concludes a cycle of films about institutional racism with an affirmation that a small axe can chip away at a big tree, and hope to take it down.
 
Each film works in its own right, but collectively they become a masterwork.  [Closed captioning strongly recommended for all of them, since the patois is hard to penetrate.]
 

Amazonia

One thing I notice about an all-streaming diet of film and TV, is that channels take turns in my attention, then fade into insignificance, only to rebound at some point.  Technically, I’ve always found Prime Video the most glitchy of channels, but it seems to be buffering better lately.  And coincidentally, I’ve been finding a lot to watch.  Including a double-feature of recently released “Amazon originals.”  Sound of Metal (MC-81, AMZ) was not a title likely to attract me, but the Metacritic rating caught my eye, and the presence of Riz Ahmed (of The Night Of) lured me in, along with the theme of deafness.  He plays the drummer in a punk-metal duo, on tour in their deluxe RV, when suddenly, if not surprisingly with all that banging and screeching, he loses his hearing.  As a recovering addict he is lucky to find a treatment center that specializes in adaptations to the challenge of hearing loss, where he learns more than he bargained for.  Darius Marder directs his first film, co-written with his brother, in a manner that feels close to home and deeply involved in its topic.  With a lot to say, but not needing to underline its points, counting on the viewer to put the pieces together.  The sound design is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the film, as it passes from acutely clear to subjectively muffled to electronically mediated and back again, in a way that continuously advances the story and the viewer’s understanding of the condition.  Believe me, you don’t have to be a heavy metal music fan to appreciate this film’s deep dive into silence.
 
On the other hand, Allan Ball’s Uncle Frank (MC-58, AMZ) underlines its points to its own detriment.  Half-good, or maybe even two-thirds, this film devolves into stagy formula at the end, after beginning with a fresh approach to the relationship between an intellectual teen girl bursting out of the confines of her patriarchal South Carolina family, and her uncle who has escaped into a literature professorship up north.  Their bond is sketched in nicely, and played exceptionally well, by Sophia Lillis as the niece and narrator, and Paul Bettany as the uncle, both very appealing and convincing, which I guess are my two main criteria for acting.  So I enjoyed their interactions as outsiders at a family gathering, and then again when she goes to college and their paths cross in NYC, where she finds out that he is gay, with a partner of ten years.  So far, so good, but then they all wind up back in the viper’s bosom of the SC family, and thereafter every scene seems obligatory and not convincing.
 
While on Prime, I noticed a BBC series from 2015 that I had never heard of, Life in Squares (AMZ).  This 3-part dramatic series on the Bloomsbury Group hit me right in the sweet spot, as I knew enough about the characters to take an interest but not enough to quibble with their representation.  The title comes from a Dorothy Parker quip that the group “lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles.” The focus is on the Stephen sisters, breaking out on their own in London after the death of their controlling father, largely from the perspective of Vanessa (soon to marry Clive Bell), though also following Virginia as she marries Leonard Woolf.  Vanessa is a painter, while her husband is a philandering art critic, so she falls in love with another painter, Duncan Grant.  Problem is, he’s gay, but that doesn’t stop them from having a daughter and living together for decades.  Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, and John Maynard Keynes hover in the polyamorous background.  That’s a lot of characters to keep track of, and two sets of actors to keep straight through time shifts, though all the acting is quite good, except for one bad switchover.  James Norton as the younger Duncan Grant is certainly the most recognizable face in the ensemble, but the older does not match well.  On the other hand, Vanessa Bell is well served by Phoebe Fox and later Eve Best.  Literate and plausible, plus attractively designed, this is a must for Anglophiles.
 
Another unexpected find on Prime was the Georgian film And Then We Danced (MC-68, AMZ), in which we follow a group of young dancers in Tblisi trying out for the national dance troupe.  For much of the past decade my archaeologist son has been digging and researching in Georgia, so I always take a look at notable films from there, to get an idea about where he spends most summers.  Traditional Georgian dance has always been male-centric, but over recent years has become more rigidly masculine.  That’s a problem for our protagonist, who is more flamboyant and expressive.  A new dancer arrives as competition, and also as an attraction that soon grows overt, a risk to them both in the repressive atmosphere of Georgian society.  The performers and performances are extremely engaging, and implicitly carry much of the dramatic weight of this fraught gay romance.  Dancing both professional and spontaneous is at the center of this film, and creates an exhilarating experience.

One last Amazon original to close out this post:  Sylvie’s Love (MC-75, AMZ).  Writer-director Eugene Ashe is no Douglas Sirk, or even Todd Haynes imitating Sirk, but he does a nice job of resurrecting the 1950s “women’s picture” melodrama, in style and subject matter, with the twist that almost all the characters are Black.  Tessa Thompson has the wattage and appeal to carry it off, and Nnamdi Asomugha (former NFL cornerback, I discover) is a pleasing foil as the jazz saxophonist who falls for her, as they meet and part, and meet and part, over the period of 1957-1962, which is evoked nicely in music, clothes, and décor.  So a lot to like here, but not so much to actually believe, with the story fabricated rather than evoked.  Still a satisfying throwback, with some novel elements.
 

 

It's a not-so-wonderful life

By the happenstance of streaming release, I saw a strange double-feature on a recent evening, and I replicate the experience with this nonsensical pairing.  First up was the Hulu original, Happiest Season (MC-68).  Now, I am no more drawn to the fantasy of holiday family reunions than I am to the reality of them.  So-called would-be “Christmas classics” are not a party I want to attend or a genre I want to watch, but when the couple going home for the holidays is Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis, maybe I’ll have a look-in.  In the event, they bring way too much emotional firepower to this piece of fluff, which descends into slapstick, also wasting Alison Brie and Aubrey Plaza in the process.  Clea DuVall moves behind the camera, and earns diversity points for making a lesbian romantic comedy, but fails to make use of the fellow actresses she was able to recruit, to deliver something more honest and searching.  And less reliant on the crutch of It’s a Wonderful Life.  The movie’s not a trial to watch, except for the missed opportunity – it could have been so much more.

On the other hand, if Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You (MC-82, Kanopy) had been anything more, I’d have been pole-axed.  That’s no surprise, since Loach ranks high in my pantheon of directors, and never strays from troubling topics, this time the impact of the gig economy on gig workers, specifically a Newcastle family where the mother works as an on-call home health aide (or “carer,” as she refers to herself) without contract, benefits, or set schedule.  The father can’t find suitable work in the construction industry anymore, so becomes a franchisee in a package delivery company, where he has to buy his own van and does not get any wages but just a per-package fee for each he delivers, subject to penalties and chargebacks.  Their teen son is bright and artistic, but sees the economic dead end he faces, so acts out through graffiti and other gestures of rebellion.  The cute and also bright preteen daughter acts out the family stress by bedwetting.  It’s all pretty grim, but as usual with Loach the nonprofessional acting is remarkable, and the film’s social and moral argument delivered cogently and forcefully.  Painful to watch, the film reeks of reality and relatability, with the reward of deeper understanding of how the other half lives.

I’ve already written here about Loach’s career, but I am adapting and adding to that summary, to post with my other “career summaries” (in column to right, if you’re on a computer rather than a phone).  More and more, I think, those will become the focus of this blog.

Miscellanea

I have a number of recent films to review that I could add to prior thematic posts, whether related to Ethan Hawke’s career or the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, but I’ll collect them under this heading.
 
In Tesla (MC-67, Hulu), Hawke is the title character in a film by Michael Almereyda, as in their offbeat contemporary adaptation of Hamlet from 2000.  And like Almereyda’s recent Experimenter, it takes the biopic in a distinctive direction with experimental artifice, which works well sometimes but other times not.  As the inventor Tesla, Hawke is as recessive and inward as he was explosive and outward in The Good Lord Bird.  Kyle Maclachlan as Thomas Edison is his foil, and Jim Gaffigan as Westinghouse his partner in the “current wars” of electrical innovation.  Despite the artificial elements and elliptical storytelling, I did learn some things from this film, though the character of Tesla remains enigmatic and remote.
 
Bombshell (MC-64, Hulu) tells the story of the Fox News women who brought down Roger Ailes from his reign of sexual harassment and assault, in a film that suffered for some because the women themselves are hardly feminist heroines.  But with Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly and Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, plus Margot Robbie as a fictionalized composite character, it’s hard not to become invested in their fates.  John Lithgow plays Ailes, along with a stunningly top-drawer supporting cast.  Director Jay Roach has made a lot of comedies that I have not seen, but also political docudramas that I have liked, such as Recount (FL 2000), Game Change (Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin), and All the Way (Bryan Cranston as LBJ).  This one is highly watchable, if not totally satisfying, in its depiction of a toxic work environment at a toxic media company.
 
Miss Juneteenth (MC-73, Kanopy), the debut feature of writer-director Channing Peoples is deeply personal and closely observed, telling the story of a young single mother in Fort Worth, working two jobs and raising a teen daughter.  As a teen herself, she won the titular title, in an annual pageant celebrating the belated day in 1865 when Texas slaves learned that they were free.  She’d never been able to take advantage of the college scholarship attached, because she got pregnant with the daughter she is now grooming to take back the title, and the advantages she had forgone.  Both mother and daughter (Nicole Beharie and Alexis Chikaeze) are beautiful and talented enough to win any pageant, but each has her own dreams and desires.  Their conflict is gentle and affectionate but real, and situated in a community that is sketched in persuasively, in a film that prioritizes low-key truths over high drama.

To judge by movies, displacement by gentrification is almost as big an issue for the Black community as police violence.  After Blindspotting and The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Residue (MC-82, NFX) brings the concern back from the Bay Area to Washington DC.  Merawi Gerami’s film seems lightly fictionalized and deeply personal, about a young filmmaker returning from LA to write a script about the neighborhood he grew up in, only to find it taken over by yuppies, with the friends he knew vanished, in jail, or worse.  While the approach seems excessively arty, elliptical, and self-conscious at first, the impressionistic mix – of present tense, flashback memories, and dreams – begins to gather weight and substance, helped by solid nonprofessional acting all round.  A promising debut from a second generation filmmaker. 

At the intersection of #MeToo and BLM, we find the 12-episode comedy-drama I May Destroy You (MC-86, HBO), which I was finally prompted to watch when it emerged as the runaway leader in Metacritic’s compilation of top ten lists for the best TV of 2020.  The creator and star Michaela Coel is a thirtyish Brit of Ghanian descent, who based the series on her own experience of sexual assault.  A little bit Fleabag, a little bit Russian Doll, a little bit Ramy, so I can see the appeal, but feel that I have aged out of appreciation for the stresses of thirtyish hipsters in the social media era.  I was put off by the first episode, but persisted until I became intrigued by unexpected complexities, only to be quite put off again by the final two.   Coel plays the author of an internet-fueled samizdat hit, Chronicles of a Fed-up Millennial, and now has a contract for a real book, which she is struggling to write, and no wonder with all the partying, and preoccupation with social media (she makes an Instagram post in the middle of a doctor’s appointment).  She has a wild girl bestie from school days, and a gay friend obsessed with Grindr hookups, plus an Italian drug dealer boyfriend.  She wakes up from one wild night with a head wound and fragmentary memories of a sexual assault after her drink was spiked.  The series covers many different issues of sexual consent on its way to tidying up loose ends.  The energy and conviction of the performers carries the day, even when the story wanders.  But in truth, it won’t end up on my best of the year list.

And here’s an addendum to “Docs advice”:  You don’t have to be a longtime bookseller to appreciate D.W. Young’s documentary The Booksellers (MC-72, AMZ), but it certainly helps.  Antiquarian booksellers are a different breed from us humble retailers, but I can certainly appreciate their bibliophilia, collecting passion, and general oddity.  This film is well put together, and continuously entertaining in its low-key manner.  If you have a thing for books, or for collecting, or for odd sorts of people, then you will enjoy this movie.

Similarly, you don’t have to have lived through the Nixon years to be riveted and informed by Charles Ferguson’s excellent 260-minute recapitulation of Watergate (MC-73, Kanopy), but it does add an overlay of personal memory to the media record of the era.  (For example, my father died the day before the “Saturday Night Massacre.”)  Reports of breaking news back in the day are interspersed with retrospective interviews, and less happily, with staged recreations of Oval Office conversations that were caught on tape.  The unspoken comparison to the Trump administration was evident when the series came out in 2018, but even more so now (who can forget Roger Stone’s Nixon tattoo?).  The big difference is that back then Republicans with a conscience still roamed D.C., while today the species is extinct.  Another is that Nixon was smarter and more serious, and therefore even more stupid, than Trump.

One last film, entirely sui generis, falls under this heading, which I can’t recommend for the faint-hearted but also can’t ignore.  Beanpole (MC-84, Kanopy), which won an award at Cannes for its very young director Kantemir Balagov, is by any reckoning a tough but worthwhile watch.  Set in Leningrad after the end of war in 1945, it is a catalogue of PTSD and its various effects, anchored by astounding performances from two first-time actresses.  The pair, one extremely tall and startlingly blond (the Beanpole of the title), and the other small and red-haired, served in an anti-aircraft unit during the siege of Leningrad.  Beanpole was invalided out after a concussion makes her susceptible to catatonic seizures, and now works in a hospital for wounded vets.  Masha stayed with their unit all the way to Berlin, in search of revenge, but now returns to live and work together with her comrade.  Their relationship is very intense and complicated, almost incomprehensible, a mixture of affection, resentment, and terrible need.  I won’t describe any of the twists of the tale, but simply note the mastery of the filmmaking and its expressionist use of color in a drab and depressing post-apocalyptic setting.