Film award candidates for 2021

Entering into the season when most award-worthy films tend to be released, I initiate this open-ended post to cover the year’s best films.  Aside from a few films from early in the year that were included in the last awards cycle (such as Quo Vadis, Aida? and The Father), and also the concert documentary Summer of Soul, the only movies I’ve seen so far that are candidates for my top ten of the year are CODA, Rocks, and In the Heights.  This ongoing post will canvas others, as they are released.
 
Rebecca Hall comes from a family of theatrical royalty, and after a substantial acting career, makes an admirable transition to writer-director with Passing (MC-85, NFX), an adaptation of a novel from and about the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.  Well-made in every respect, with a surprisingly personal relevance for the director, this multi-layered film stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as former friends who happen to meet in the tea room of a swank midtown hotel, where they both are passing for white.  Ms. Thompson’s character is down from Harlem for a day of shopping, where she is the well-off wife of a doctor, well-known in Black cultural circles.  Ms. Negga has assumed a white identity and married a wealthy bigot unaware of her parentage.  Each is trapped in her own way, while perilously navigating a segregated society, and being conscious of the box their ambiguous status has put them in.  In lustrous black & white and an old-fashioned aspect ratio, this is an accomplished period piece with great contemporary resonance, about crossing the “color line” amid questions of identity and intersectionality.
 
I’d say Andrew Garfield is in line for some award consideration for his bravura turn in Tick, Tick… Boom! (MC-74, NFX) as Jonathan Larson, the young composer/playwright of the hit musical Rent, a rock update of La Boheme, which opened the day after he died suddenly of an undiagnosed heart condition, and went on to win major awards and run for twelve years on Broadway.  Lin-Manuel Miranda directs this tribute to the missing link between Sondheim and himself, with verve and compassion.  It’s based on a one-man show created by Larson, after the flop of a musical he worked on through his twenties, and before Rent.  I cannot claim any antecedent familiarity with this story, music, or lyrics, but was quite carried away by its exhilaration and intensity.  This musical pairs nicely with the recent film adaptation of In the Heights, Miranda’s own precursor to Hamilton.  It made me take a look at the 2005 movie adaptation of Rent, which was not nearly as satisfying.
 
Will Smith is not an actor who’s ever been on my radar, but I wouldn’t argue with his front-running status as Best Actor in King Richard (MC-76, HBO Max), a movie that was considerably better than I expected.  Despite Smith’s star power, it seemed odd to foreground the troublesome father’s story in the saga of Venus and Serena Williams (though perhaps their status as executive producers explains this tribute to their dad), but Reinaldo Marcus Green’s direction makes it all pay off, with Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton hitting winners all over the place as the young girls, and flashing winning smiles.  Aunjanue Ellis provides a nice balance as their mother.  Without becoming a lecture in CRT, the film conveys a moving sense of what it meant for the girls to cross the color line into the pale-faced world of tennis.  It climaxes in the pro debut of Venus at 14, with Serena waiting in the wings.  The tennis scenes are highly credible (to a non-fan), but the heart of the story comes from the family relationships between mom and dad and the five girls, bred to succeed in their chosen professional fields as much as the younger girls were groomed to be tennis stars.  This film pleases the crowd without pandering to it, and I was happy to follow all of the back-and-forths.
 
I have to enter a minority report on The Power of the Dog (MC-88, NFX).  Jane Campion’s last film (Bright Star) was among my favorites of its year, but this one won’t be, even though I just saw it referred to as the Best Picture frontrunner.  No, I’m sorry.  This chamber piece set in the wide, wild West (New Zealand credibly standing in for 1920s Montana) continually reminded me of one of my very favorite films, Days of Heaven, and every time it did, I responded, “Nope, not as good.”  Campion’s adaptation and direction struck me as heavy-handed, the symbolism laid on with a trowel, every step preordained right up to the big twist at the end.  Still, the scenery is spectacular, and the acting is good, if overdetermined.  Benedict Cumberbatch is the seeming villain, cast against type, a hardcore cowboy who never washes and even sleeps in his chaps.  Jesse Plemons is his apparently more civilized brother, who wears a coat and tie even on horseback, though he prefers his automobile.  When the bad one insults a boarding house widow-woman and her gay waiter son, the good one falls for her; no surprise there, since she’s played by Jesse’s real-life partner, Kirsten Dunst.  Motivations and personal history remain murky, but these actors do make intriguing if not altogether credible characters, as does Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy.  Much is telegraphed, but twists and turns are manufactured, while souls remain unexplored, the players moved around like chess pieces.  Tense and intense, pretty as a picture, still this film was missing something for me.  Though lush, it struck me as airless.  Went back and watched The Piano, saw all of Campion’s virtues and none of her flaws, totally satisfying in a way this new film wasn’t.
 

My Name is Pauli Murray (MC-73, AMZ) makes an excellent case that we all should know the name of this civil rights pioneer and patron saint of intersectionality.  I’m pulling for this film by Betsy West and Julie Cohen (directors of RBG) to be nominated for Best Documentary Feature.  Murray’s influence runs from Eleanor Roosevelt to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the film repeatedly emphasizes that she was out in front of many more celebrated heroes of the movement, whether in bus protests or lunchroom sit-ins, legal strategies or establishing Black studies departments, and finally and most surprisingly, as one of the first women ordained as an Episcopal minister, as well as one of the founders of NOW, even though she/they self-identified as male.  It’s an amazing life, and the film offers an excellent mirror on the times, and how much has changed for the better because of activists like Pauli Murray.

It seems that Aaron Sorkin is becoming a divisive figure.  The Metacritic range on his latest, Being the Ricardos (MC-60, AMZ), runs from 100 to 25, with broad swaths of green, yellow, and red ratings.  Me, I fall into the green.  This film won’t follow his Trial of the Chicago 7 into my best of the year list, but I certainly enjoyed it.  Having grown up with I Love Lucy on the tube, I was put off and then intrigued by Nicole Kidman’s incongruous turn as Lucille Ball, and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz.  The rest of the cast is good as well, and Sorkin’s dialogue has its usual zing.  The script conflates a number of actual events into one imaginary week, as an episode of America’s #1 TV show goes from table read on Monday to filming before a live audience on Friday.  Meanwhile Lucy is outed for having sentimentally registered as a Communist in 1936, announces her second pregnancy, and begins to suspect her husband of cheating.  The behind-the-scenes story of producing a hit show was most interesting to me, as was the exploration of Lucy’s creative process and Desi’s producing prowess.  The film is very busy, but continually engaging.

 
Another film I would rank somewhat above average is Don’t Look Up (MC-49, NFX), which I found entertaining in a grim way, if rather too long and scattershot.  Writer-director Adam McKay has a good track record at making serious stuff funny and funny stuff serious, and this film is halfway good.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays an astronomy professor and Jennifer Lawrence is one of his doctoral students, who discovers a comet that he calculates to hit the earth in an extinction event just six months hence.  With the aid of one concerned civil servant, they approach the clueless Trump-like President (Meryl Streep) with the urgent news, which she chooses to sit on and “assess.”  Whether the comet is a metaphor for climate change or Covid or any other existential threat, it is fodder for a lot of satire of our divisive politics and vapid pop culture, some of which hits and some of which misses, but overall goes on too long.  Less would be more, fewer targets would make the aim straighter.  Mark Rylance is rather uncanny as tech mogul with all the answers and none of the solutions, and Cate Blanchette is almost unrecognizable as a Fox-y news host.  And so on and so on, till the big one hits.

Maggie Gyllenhaal writes and directs, with intimacy and understanding, an adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel The Lost Daughter (MC-86, NFX).  Starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, two of my personal favorites, playing the same character, a professor of comparative literature, at different stages of her life, the result is magnetic and mesmerizing.  The film requires a certain suspension of disbelief and relinquishment of the urge for resolution, but the reward is substantial for following where it leads.  Colman is on a working vacation on a Greek island, where her serenity is disrupted by the invasion of a large and likely-criminal Greek-American family, with whom she becomes enmeshed and implicated.  She develops an especially tangled relationship with a lovely young mother (Dakota Johnson) and her little daughter, who together call up flashbacks to her own troubled mothering of two young girls.  Despite the transparency of Colman’s visage, the character of Leda remains a mystery, perhaps as much to herself as to the viewer.  The setting is a sun-kissed pleasure, and the supporting characters are well-played as the leads.  If you like a straight story line, clearly structured scenes, and intelligible motivations, you might lose patience with this film, but if you want to get up-close-and-personal with some enigmatic individuals, it will keep you riveted.
 
The Hand of God (MC-76, NFX), Paolo Sorrentino’s recollection of his Neapolitan youth in the 1980s, is highly watchable, if not especially deep or coherent.  The film has two patron saints: Maradona, the great footballer who signs with the Naples club and brings them a championship; and Fellini, whose Amarcord is an obvious model for this film, in its celebration of the filmmaker’s home town.  Sorrentino looks back with a skeptical fondness on the family and city from which he emerged, before embarking on his career in Rome, to be memorably fêted in his Oscar-winner The Great Beauty.  As a teen coming of age in an extended and chaotic family, the Sorrentino character pines for his lusty but troubled aunt, adores Maradona, and longs to become a filmmaker.  The film itself lunges between comedy and tragedy, in loosely strung-together vignettes animated by the power of personal memory.  It’s all quite lush and engaging, with a number of characters strikingly portrayed, if randomly episodic and overlong.
 
I’m not going so far as to call Michael Sarnoski’s Pig (MC-82, Hulu) a trough of swill, but I am aghast that so many saw so much more in this film than I was able to.  Nicholas Cage does well by a ridiculously-stylized character and storyline, about a reclusive ex-chef who lives off the grid in the Oregon wilderness, with only a truffle-snuffing pig for company.  The pig is kidnapped, and Cage is forced to return to the world of the high-end Portland restaurant business (with his matted grey hair sticking to dried blood on both sides of his face throughout) to get it back.  Whatever you were expecting, this film is something else, and not in a way that appealed to me.
 
The Tragedy of Macbeth (MC-87, AppleTV) is fascinating on many levels, a notable addition to an impressive roster of film adaptations (Welles, Kurosawa, Polanski).  Joel Coen, working without his brother Ethan but with his wife and frequent collaborator Frances McDormand – paired with Denzel Washington as the murderous title couple – crafts a brilliantly-atmospheric cinematic artifact in Academy-ratio black-&-white.   His De Chirico-style settings call up echoes of Bergman and Dreyer, German expressionism and American film noir.  Shakespeare’s text is pared down and delivered demotically rather than oratorically.  A walk-on character in the play is made central to the plot of the film, which has eerie contemporary echoes.  Though the leads deliver on their sterling reputations, the acting revelation of the film is Kathryn Hunter, playing all three of the weird sisters, plus another character.  This fog-bound chamber-piece should hold your attention throughout, as the oh-so-familiar lines are given a new twist.
 
The Tender Bar (MC-53, AMZ) sneaks in under this heading only because Ben Affleck might get some Best Supporting Actor nominations.  George Clooney’s direction of this fictionalized adaptation of a JR Moehringer memoir is an entirely middle-of-the-road affair, pleasant enough to see but rather tired and out-of-date in its attitudes about masculinity and the writing life.  Affleck is the affectionate bartender uncle of the effectively-fatherless main character, played by the delightful Daniel Ranieri as a kid, and by the appealing but light-weight Tye Sheridan as college student and neophyte writer.  This mildly-comic bildungsroman is not a chore to watch, but nothing we haven’t seen before.
 

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (MC-55, HBO), a feature remake of the 2000 documentary of the same name, is an unnecessary film, except for the unlikely title performance (and likely Best Actress nomination) by Jessica Chastain, who hereby proves that she can play anyone, prosthetics or no.  And Andrew Garfield adds another quality performance as Tammy Faye’s husband, the sticky-fingered televangelist Jim Bakker.  The script is rather thin on character insight and cultural/political relevance, and Michael Showalter’s direction comes across as indecisive and overlong, not sure whether to make the main character a figure of compassion or ridicule.  But the acting and overall design make this an easy-on-the-eyes, if unmemorable, watch.

With two Oscars under his belt, Asghar Farhadi may be in line for another with A Hero (MC-82, AMZ).  After making films in France and Spain, Farhadi is back in Iran, but as always he focuses on ordinary people facing a moral dilemma, and dealing with the justice system and cultural norms.  And as usual, he shifts the viewer’s sympathies from character to character, allowing no easy judgments.  The central character Rahim is out of debtor’s prison on a two-day leave, with a plan to use the purse of gold coins his girlfriend has found (in a fairy tale set-up to a highly realistic film) to get his creditor to release him.  The plan goes awry, and after a change of heart (or scheme?), Rahim tries to find the owner of the purse and return the gold.  Television and social media get hold of the story, and then take it in different directions, turning Rahim from hero to suspect.  Layers of family, community, and society are explored; characters remain naturalistic but elusive; you are left with your own doubts, and all the better for suspended judgment.  As the saying goes, “we are divided by our beliefs, but united by our doubts.”
 
Coming now to the end of January, I’ll close out this post here, and come back with a final round-up of the best films of 2021 as more of them reach streaming availability, with final awards given and my own preferences established.

Keeping up with the tube

[Updated through mid-November]

I have no taste for police mysteries, and revulsion from those dealing with the murder of young boys or teen girls, but a number of factors finally led me to Mare of Easttown (MC-81, HBO).  First off is Kate Winslet, who never disappoints.  Second was the semi-familiar location of gritty southeast PA.  Finally the Emmys, but more importantly the recommendation of a trusted friend.  Well, I wasn’t sorry to watch it, but I’m not going to turn around and recommend it to you, unless twisty murder investigations are your sort of thing, and then you don’t need my opinion.  Kate was predictably great as the beleaguered detective, and the rest of the cast was good too.  The sense of location and community was strong, with the interconnections of small town life front and center.  But the story was too much, too many threads, too many reversals, too many cliff-hangers – and yet many obvious attempts to subvert genre expectation as well.  A construct rather than an exploration, ultimately going for effect rather than authenticity, despite Kate’s inherent realness.  Made me wonder whether a writers room, with diverse voices, is inherently more creative than a single writer following the screenwriting manual and churning out the beats.
 
Though I am an ardent devotee of Ingmar Bergman’s version(s), the latest iteration of Scenes from a Marriage (MC-70, HBO) left me lukewarm, despite a masterclass in acting by Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac.  Hagai Levi explicitly adapts the original, but winds up closer to his Showtime series The Affair, rather than anything Bergmanesque.  I can’t recommend this unless you’re a fan of the stars, who have been friends since Julliard days, and are certainly suited to the lacerating intimacy of this series, which shares the pain, but does not dig as deep nor soar as high as its model.
 
Matters of attraction and affection among young people are the subject of two Netflix series that I enthusiastically recommend, one raunchy, one sweet, both consistently funny.  Sex Education (MC-83, NFX) can be quite explicit about the adventures of randy youth, always on the verge of being off-putting or embarrassing.  In fact, the pre-credit sequence of the third season’s first episode is rapid-fire non-stop sex amongst various members of the large and diverse cast.  But oddly, this series is in fact a subtle and honest exploration of relationships.  Gillian Anderson continues her great turn as the sultry sex therapist mom (now in delightful contrast to her Margaret Thatcher in The Crown), as son Asa Butterfield gets better (and worse) at advising his teen peers, now that he is getting some himself.  Though not with Emma Mackey, who plays his true love (it never runs smooth).  Still best friends with Nigerian Ncuti Gatwa, who has turned his bully into his lover.  And so many more characters, most of whom were introduced in the pilot episode, and have gone on to interesting character arcs over three seasons.  Beautifully shot and well-acted across the board, the show is funny and serious at the same time, befitting its one-hour format and eight-episode seasons.  Laurie Nunn continues as exemplary showrunner.  Come for the sex, stick around for the education.
 
Love on the Spectrum (MC-83, NFX) is an Australian reality-tv dating show with a twist that made it palatable to me.  The second season more than lives up to the appeal of the first.  Autistic people (the only category in which I consider myself “high-functioning”) are hilariously transparent in their relationships, quirky to be sure, but unsettlingly direct and indirect in their desires.  And the dates they go on paint a delightful picture of Sydney and environs.  It’s all quite charming and funny, and moving too.  Everybody needs somebody.
 
Uprising (MC-93, AMZ) is Steve McQueen’s documentary complement to his superb Small Axe series of films.  I may have to take a third look at Lovers Rock within the context that Uprising supplies, imagining that ecstatic house party scene being ripped through by fire and leaving 13 young people dead, and many others maimed by burns and memories.  The 1981 New Cross fire was a racially inflammatory event, with Blacks blaming a white supremacist firebomb, and the police putting together a story about some conflict among the partygoers.  The incident led to a massive protest, covered in the second hour, and eventually to the Brixton riots, subject of the third hour.  The Small Axe stories interweave with each of these events, as McQueen comes to terms with the formative events of his youth, and provides a very interesting counterpoint to American race relations (with a reminder that Reagan was only a pale imitation of Thatcher).  For someone unfamiliar with these events, it might even make sense to watch this documentary series before watching the Small Axe films, which you really should do [preferably with captions].
 
By now, Ken Burns is more brand manager than individual filmmaker, but he can definitely marshal the resources to make impressive documentaries.  The latest is Muhammad Ali (MC-88, PBS), which doesn’t skimp on the boxing gore, but embeds it within cultural history in a manner that justifies its eight-hour length over four episodes.  Clay/Ali was a figure of note through much of my life, generating considerable heat and light, and this ample documentation certainly proved to be an immersive time-travel experience for me.  Ali truly was “The Greatest,” a mythic and electric character of his time, notwithstanding the fact that his superlatives emerged from a grubby profession.  Whether associating with Malcolm X or The Beatles, Jim Brown or Sam Cooke, he seemed a central figure of American and global culture for a long time.

In the interest of completeness, I’ll mention two shows I couldn’t make it all the way through.  Not sure who decided that Maid (MC-82, NFX), the fictionalization of Stephanie Land’s bestselling memoir, warranted ten hour-long episodes – but they were wrong.  There was certainly enough material there to make a good movie, or maybe even a six-hour series, but padded out by the immersion in immiseration of a beautiful young white woman, with merciless piling on of bad luck and bad choices, the show’s good observations were overwhelmed by the implausibility of its plotting.  I somehow made it through five episodes, remaining unsure whether it was worth continuing; a change in the sixth suggested it might turn a corner, but that was immediately reversed by the compulsion to punish its heroine.  At that point, I watched some of the final episode just to confirm my sense that the makers had less concern for truth than so-called dramatic effect.  Margaret Whalley is decidedly watchable in the central role, but just how much of her watering dark eyes and trembling luscious lips are we supposed to endure.  The role of her wacky hippie mother is played by her insufferable real mother Andie MacDowell.  The rest of the acting is no better than okay, except for the maid’s three-year-old daughter, who is more real than most of the characters.  The setting in the Pacific Northwest is another attractive feature of the series, but not enough to warrant its length.
 
I’m not into sci-fi generally, but the hype and immediate streaming availability of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (MC-74, HBO) led me to give it a look.  That Metacritic score is a perfect balance between scores of 100 and scores of 50, and I would fall in with the latter group.  It’s hard not to be impressed with the look of this film, but equally hard to find any human interest in it.  I made it to the first big battle scene, before deciding it just wasn’t for me.
 
On the other hand, I grew up in a period when westerns were the dominant genre, and I’m receptive to many sorts of revival and updating.  So I made it all the way through The Harder They Fall (MC-68, NFX), a movie-saturated western with a twist – all the significant roles are played by Black actors.  And what a roster it is:  Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Lakeith Stanfield, Regina King, Delroy Lindo, and more.  Writer-director Jeymes Samuel channels Sergio Leone, Quentin Tarantino, and a host of others, while putting his own stamp on this delirious horse opera.  I liked the acting and dialogue; the widescreen cinematography, set design, and camera tricks; the music and humor – enough to tolerate even the video-game-like violence.  And the Black Panther-like appropriation of a typically-white genre made for a highly entertaining turnabout.
 
Sometimes it seems that intelligent romantic comedy is dying out as a genre, so I was pleased to be led to Love Life (HBO Max) by reviews that indicated the second season (MC-78) was much better than the first (MC-54).  Turns out the new season (of ten half-hours) is genuinely worthy of praise, but the first is not that bad either (especially if you find Anna Kendrick appealing – which I do).  Show creator Sam Boyd has no track record, but delivers a smart and engaging product, well-written and well-performed, with a real New York flavor.  Each season follows a different central character, as she or he sorts through the romantic possibilities of the metropolis.  The second centers on William Jackson Harper’s book editor, as he navigates the complexities of Black and interracial romance, with Jessica Williams as the female friend he turns to between his faltering relationships – they are both excellent.  In the first, Kendrick is a would-be gallerist, and has Zoë Chao as best friend, with a string of unsatisfactory men passing through her life.  Each season spans a decade of affairs and hook-ups as the protagonists negotiate the erotic opportunities of sex in the city.  Nothing startlingly new here, but a nice refreshment of the genre, especially from a different ethnic perspective.
 
I’m definitely enjoying HBO’s current flagship series Succession, now halfway into its third season (MC-92), and will have more to say when I see the rest.  If you’ve somehow missed the hullabaloo about this show, I refer you to my reviews of previous seasons [here and here], and also point toward the earlier writing of creator Jesse Armstrong on the British series Peep Show and The Thick of It, where he honed his talent for hilarious invective.
 
Another personal favorite well into its third season is Dickinson (MC-91, AppleTV+), which I will return to update in “Another bite of Apple” (just below) – and refer you to my comments on the first two seasons here.
 

Another bite of Apple

After my earlier survey of AppleTV+, I’ve re-subscribed to catch new seasons of two of my favorite shows, Ted Lasso and Dickinson.  [This post updated in December, through conclusion of the latter.]
 
Everything about the second season of Ted Lasso (MC-86) is bigger (longer episodes and more of them), and most of it is even better, and this season’s haul of Emmys is likely to be even larger than the 20 nominations and 7 wins earned by its first.  So you don’t need me to make a case for the show as “must-see tv.”  More amplitude yields more attention to subsidiary characters, in witty scripts braided out of pop culture, music and movies, and ornamented with hilarious cross-cultural jokes.  The second season ends with a number of reversals that struck me at first as somewhat abrupt and mechanical, but upon reflection seemed to fit within the overall arc established from the pilot on.  As Brett Goldstein says, in character as gruff Roy Kent, “Everyone has his fucking reasons” (tipping his cap to Jean Renoir).  He beat out three of his fellow supporting actors for the Emmy.  Meanwhile creator and title character Jason Sudeikis picked up a couple of statues, and Juno Temple edged out fellow supporting actress Hannah Waddingham.  So it goes without saying that the cast is great, the writing is both funny and touching, and this is a show you will want to watch, even if you don’t give a hoot about English football.  By the end, you’ll wind up agreeing with one of the endearing characters, “Football is life.”  Death too, and love, and everything in between.
 
The well-put-together eight-part documentary series 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything (MC-83) may not live up to its subtitle, but it certainly calls up the era for anyone who lived through it.  The music of that year may have changed nothing, but it was certainly reflective, and definitive, of popular culture and politics at the time, and I was decidedly engaged with its recollection, even artists who didn’t mean anything to me at the time.  It’s a curated cross-section of music in a specific period, post-hippie, pre-punk.  For the most part eschewing talking heads, the series combines performance with newsreel footage in a very effective way, with voiceover narration and commentary.  Eminently watchable, and more than simply nostalgic.
 
There are plenty of Sundance faves to which I remain impervious, but I totally fell for CODA (MC-75), accepting its formulaic elements and relishing its idiosyncrasies.  As in Lady Bird or Wild Rose, the key is the lead actress, in this case Emilia Jones, whom we root for to escape the trap of her marginal existence.  She is the teen Child Of Deaf Adults, who has all her life been their interpreter to the hearing world, helping out on their Gloucester MA fishing boat, and suppressing her own aspirations – to sing and to go away to college.  The acting is excellent all round, including Oscar-winner Marlee Matlin and other deaf performers.  Writer-director Siân Heder adapts a French film to a well-defined American locale, and achieves sentiment with more authenticity than sentimentality (though there is that).  She went to great lengths to portray ASL (extensively subtitled) and deaf culture as accurately as possible.  I’d wondered how they found a young woman who could both sing and sign fluently, but the British Emilia Jones deserves credit for months of studying both when she got the role (plus mastering an American, if not specifically North Shore, accent).  She’s definitely someone to watch for in the future.  Sure, the film is tailored to be a crowdpleaser, but in my view displays more truth than mendacity.  On this one, consider me among the pleased crowd.

I came to Velvet Underground (MC-87) more for the filmmaker Todd Haynes than for the musicians, who meant nothing to me in their heyday, or since.  Nor do I have a particular interest in the specific cultural moment of the Warhol Factory days.  Nonetheless I watched this distinctive documentary with interest, if not enthusiasm.  It was certainly evocative of an era and an aesthetic approach, but not really on my wavelength.

For a different sort of musical experience, also not on my wavelength, but recommendable nonetheless, watch Come From Away (MC-83), a popular Broadway musical about 9/11, from the perspective of the 7000 in-transit air travelers who were grounded for days in Gander, Newfoundland, doubling the town’s population in a matter of hours.  I don’t know what’s more commendable, the unexpected documentary quality of the script, taken from the words of actual “plane people” and residents, or the incredible staging, continuously in motion as the admirably diverse cast takes on a variety of roles, with a set of chairs standing in for bus or plane cabin, Tim Horton’s restaurant or seaside cliff.  It moves fast, remains deeply sympathetic and empathetic, and maintains a Celtic lilt to the nonstop singing and movement.  I read that the movie was planned to be filmed on location, but instead the play was the first to reopen on Broadway after Covid lockdown, and was filmed judiciously in front of an audience of 9/11 survivors and responders.  The movie was released on the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, and the play itself ends with the 10^th anniversary “reunion” of travelers and townspeople in Gander.  It recalls the feelings at the time of the horrific event, while still remaining an uplifting celebration of commonality.

Though I’ve never listened to a true-crime podcast, and never will, I gave a look-see to the tv adaptation of The Shrink Next Door (MC-61), because of its stars, Paul Rudd, Will Ferrell, and Kathryn Hahn.  Made it through three episodes of the limited series, but could not be bothered to continue, as the show failed to deliver the humor suggested by its cast, and did not offer anything more in its portrayal of a therapist taking over the life of his client for his own benefit.  Like therapy, it’s unconscionably protracted with no clear reward. 
 
[P.S. as of 12-24-21]  As much as I like Ted Lasso, there are two series on AppleTV+ that I truly love and want to urge upon you, even if your interest in the subject matter is not as intense as mine.  Either would amply reward a month’s subscription to the streaming channel.  I’ve repeatedly telegraphed my devotion to Dickinson, but there was another series that grabbed me from the get-go and never disappointed.
 
Swagger (MC-79) emerges from the experiences of NBA MVP Kevin Durant as a 14-year-old hoops star, which may seem a thin premise for ten hour-long episodes, but this series is eminently topical (Covid, BLM, abusive coaches, etc.) and takes in many storylines, familial as well as athletic, social and political too.  It’s a team effort in the best sense.  For a group selected primarily for authentic basketball skills, the acting is excellent across the board.  These are kids you really come to care about, led by Isaiah Hill as the Durant stand-in.  O’Shea Jackson Jr. is also good as the coach of a basketball team of 8^th-graders, which already has college scouts and shoe companies sniffing around.  Though there is so much else going on around it, the game coverage is excellent, with drone footage putting you literally in the middle of the action, where there’s never a cutaway from ball release to going through hoop.  All these shots are truly made.  This series rivals Friday Night Lights in making family and community the center of a well-made sports-themed show.  A taste for hoops helps, but there’s a lot more here of interest and appeal.  Created by Reggie Rock Blythewood, the series recalls Love & Basketball, the fondly-remembered 2000 film directed by his wife Gina Prince-Blythewood.  I found it satisfying in every respect.  Even when everybody is wearing masks for the final episodes, it only highlights how well the performers can act with their eyes and posture.  Here’s hoping it returns for a second season.
 
If I make exaggerated claims for Dickinson (MC-91), you may dismiss them as hyperbole, but I am truly hyper about this show – I feel part of an exalted fellowship while watching it.  It resides in my chosen period and place – mid-19^th-century Massachusetts – which the show approaches with irreverence but veracity.  The dialogue and music may be 21^st century, but the settings, costumes, and situations reek of authenticity.  The third season takes place during the Civil War.  Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Thomas W. Higginson, and others have cameos that are more fact than fantasy, comic but accurate (even Sylvia Plath – don’t ask).  Hailee Steinfeld remains terrific as Emily, and is well matched by the rest of the cast.  I can’t say that Emily was ever one of my favorite poets, my understanding of her verse is very hit or miss, but as a literary figure she’s the epitome of the anonymous recluse and therefore significant to me.  In Hailee’s portrayal, she also comes across as a woman of spirit and resolve, a dynamo rather than the pale lonely spinster of legend.  This show led me to fact-check by reading Martha Ackmann’s bio These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson, for a fascinating back and forth between historical fact and contemporary imagination.  Though a few episodes were a bit too imaginative for me, the same is true of Emily’s poems.  And if you’re unfamiliar with the first two seasons of Dickinson, check out my comments here.  For me, the only question remaining is just how high this series will rank retrospectively among my all-time favorites.

Back to basic Criterion

 
There have been times when months pass without my watching anything on the Criterion Channel and I begin to think about canceling my charter subscription, but then I’ll recall what a resource it is, and begin to find plenty to watch.  It definitely is one of the bedrock sources for streaming availability.  But I have to say, it might better to subscribe only intermittently, when there is something specific I want to explore, either director or performer, genre or theme, nationality or era.
 
Here I intend to catch up with brief notices of some of the old and new films I’ve watched in passing over recent months, and also to dig a little deeper into Criterion’s offerings, especially as some other streaming channels fall into Covid-delayed production.  I’ve been keeping up this list for a while, but will start this survey with a recent viewing that could easily have fallen under the heading of my recent post “Delving into mental health.”
 
John Cassavetes is more of a hero to younger independent filmmakers than he is to me, and I’ve never really undertaken a survey of his work, much of which is on Criterion.  I’m not even sure which of his films I’ve even seen.  In truth, I didn’t uncover any memories of having ever seen A Woman Under the Influence (1974, MC-88), generally taken to be his best film, earning a Best Director nomination, while his wife and star Gena Rowlands won a Best Actress nod.  It’s a peculiarly compelling piece of work, overlong and overwrought, but you can’t look away or guess what might happen next.  Rowlands goes well beyond tics and eccentricities to depict a young wife and mother fighting off psychic disintegration.  She’s beautiful and charming, perceptive and honest in her own way, at times a little scared and scary, but by no means is she the craziest person in this family, just a sensitive soul who is the bearer of others’ dysfunction.  At least that’s how I read it.  Peter Falk as the husband has his loving moments, but he’s an overbearing brute, a laboring man’s man.  His mother (played by Cassavetes’ mother) is the greatest cross that Rowlands has to bear, with scant help from her own mother (played by her real mother).  Three children are her refuge and her delight.  I appreciate the naturalism of the film, and the violence of its emotions, and Gena Rowlands is a wonder, but I find myself resisting the character of the director more than that of his characters.  He doesn’t seem like a guy I would want to know (an image perhaps derived from his role in Rosemary’s Baby).  I thought to take a look at a couple of his other films, but couldn’t get past ten minutes into either.
 
Fishing for titles on the channel, I paid attention to an email blurb on the most-watched movies of the month and noticed the unknown-to-me 1999 film Clockwatchers (MC-64).  Seeing that it starred Toni Collette, Parker Posey, and Lisa Kudrow, I needed no further recommendation.  With that cast, the Sprecher sisters – writer Karen and director Jill – could hardly go far wrong, but in truth they didn’t go far right.  Four temps work in the sterile, big-brother-ish atmosphere of a credit office, but find a fragile little community of their own.  Somewhere in the continuum between 9 to 5 and The Office (UK version), this film finds its modest little niche.
 
As if to show me what I’d be missing without it, the Criterion Channel recently brought out a new collection that suggested just how essential a subscription can be:  Art-House Animation.  Of the 32 films in the series, I’d seen six, liked them all, and reviewed them here previously:  Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001, MC-70) and Paprika (2006, MC-81), Persepolis (2007, MC-90), Waltz with Bashir (2008, MC-91), Chico & Rita (2010, MC-76), and Tower (2016, MC-92).
 
So I made big plans to watch and comment on the entire series, but then decided against a deep dive, though I may revisit the list from time to time.  There are only two I’ve gotten to so far, one the most recent and the other most recommended.  I was quite enamored of the painterly style of No. 7 Cherry Lane (2019, MC-72), the first animated film from longtime director Yonfan.  It’s a visually stunning portrait of Hong Kong in the late Sixties, when it was still a British colony, and nothing like the international trading city it would become.  But the protests against British rule prefigure the unrest over today’s takeover by Beijing.  The story is likely autobiographical, with a nod to The Graduate, about an English literature major who falls for a beautiful, willful girl he’s tutoring, and then discovers his true love in her mother, who derives an inner liberation from the films of Simone Signoret and erotic dreams of a Taoist nun.  Personally I’d never seen a Yonfan film before, and I can bet you’ve never seen an animation quite like this – swooningly sensual, nostalgically melancholic, mesmerizingly surreal, and very adult.
 
It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012, MC-90) couldn’t be more different.  Don Hertzfeldt’s crudely-drawn, low-def graphics combine with stark deadpan narration to tell the tribulations of Bill, an existentially distraught stick-figure neurotic.  Some love the dark humor of it all, you may hate it, I fall somewhere in-between.  Though I have to say, I stopped watching the collection after this – but I’ll give some others a try at some point.
 
Agnès Varda is always worth a watch and Criterion has nearly all of her work, ideal to discover or revisit.  I’ve written about her films before, and may some day put together a not-exhaustive career summary, if and when I go back and re-watch her earlier fiction films, in the context of her great late career as an autobiographical documentary essayist.   From her middle period, Mur Murs (1981) was a revelation, the possibly over-clever title (Wall Walls in French) unfolding into a bracing documentary about the mural traditions of L.A.  But there’s no denying the cleverness of her visuals in depicting the murals in juxtaposition both to the artists who painted them and the largely-black-and-brown community who live with, and are celebrated within, these painted landscapes.  (This film was an accomplished precursor to her acclaimed later documentary, Faces Places – Visages Villages in French.)  Documenteur (1981) was made at the same time in the same places, and actually features her 8-year old son Mathieu Demy, playing the son of the main character, a divorced Frenchwoman trying to make a go of it in the unglamorous precincts of the City of Angels.  Sensuous and probing, in the Varda manner, this short feature film does not have the impact of her major work.
 
A similar pairing occurred later that decade with Kung-Fu Master! and Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988), the latter a documentary profile of Jane Birkin, and the former a feature film written by and starring Jane B. with a teen Mathieu Demy as her love interest, and her teen daughter played by her real daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg.  Both films are curiosities, and dependent on the viewer’s interest in Ms. Birkin (from scandalous nude scene in Blow-up, through storied film, fashion, and music career, to the eponymous handbag).  They also are testaments to the friendship between the two women, and there must have been some difficult moments for Agnès serving as de facto intimacy counselor in love scenes between her friend and her own 14-year-old son, who is the master game player of the title.
 
A great find on the CC was Vittorio De Seta’s excellent series of ten short documentaries, made in wide-screen color in the late 1950s, set in Sicily and Calabria.  They depict a peasant lifestyle that goes back centuries, and gave me a vivid sense of my paternal ancestry.
 
Another documentary find was Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Earth (2020, MC-72), a further devastating case about humans as the predominant geological force of this era, horrifically beautiful in the same vein as Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (reviewed here), and continuing Geyrhalter’s career project from Our Daily Bread (review here).  Rather than adding ominous music or gloomy narration, with each depiction of the eight worldwide sites of massive earth-moving, he directly interviews the operators of the huge machines that move mountains, for one reason or another.  Most love the grit and power of their job, but have reservations about the impact of their work.  The film offers a paradoxical mix of wonder and horror in cautionary tableaux.
 
There were some Criterion exclusives that appeared among the best films of 2020 on Metacritic’s critics poll.  Personally, I was unimpressed by Bacurau (MC-82), an odd hybrid of political thriller and sci-fi from Brazil, and could not bear to watch Vitalina Varela (MC-86), so dark and slow, for more than a few minutes.  One CC “exclusive” that did make my 2020 list of favorites, Sorry We Missed You (reviewed here), I’d already watched at first opportunity on Kanopy.
 
Then there are older TCM-type films that balance CC’s exhaustive range of Janus Films from the golden age of cinephilia.   There were quite a few that filled in minor gaps in my vintage film viewing.  I note them in passing, just to fulfill the very earliest purpose of Cinema Salon, to record what I’ve seen so I don’t watch it again (unless I really want to). 
 
[Click on “Read more,” if you want to.]

New on the tube

I finished this post shortly before the Emmys were announced, but I have to preface my remarks with amazement and delight at the unprecedented result that almost all the awards went to shows that I heartily recommend.  (One I missed so far, but was about to watch on the recommendation of an old and trusted friend, Mare of Easttown, will be postscripted here soon.)  Essentially this is an addendum to my early round-up of the year’s best tv so far, catching up with some older shows and taking in some new ones.
 
The White Lotus (MC-82, HBO) has attracted a lot of attention this summer, and held mine through its six hour-long episodes.  Writer and director Mike White has crafted a perfect show for Covid-era production, set in an isolated high-end Hawaiian resort and bringing together a talented cast to interweave a number of individual stories in a manner that mixes satire with a bit of mystery.  Connie Britton, Steve Zahn, and Jennifer Coolidge are the best-known faces, but many others make a good first impression, most particularly Murray Bartlett.  The concluding episode has elicited negative observations from everyone I’ve talked with, and I was certainly ambivalent if not outright disappointed, but the show deserves credit for verbal and visual wit, and an engaging though narrow cast of characters, none very nice but all fun to watch and detest.  A soupcon of Succession, a smidgen of Big Little Lies, this series cooks up a tasty bit of HBO fare.  Mike White is adept at creating a faux reality-tv situation, and keeping the surprises coming.  His view of humanity comes through as bleak though not hard, the colonialist approach to anticolonialism leavened by humor and some distant sympathy for these strange creatures.
 
Of course, I have no objectivity about Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union (MC-72, HBO).  I love the guy, and I loved this documentary series, three episodes of more than 1½ hours each, from Peter Kunhardt.  The first episode details his life up to bursting on the scene with the 2004 DNC speech, and was the most visually interesting to me, for a rare view of the younger boy and man.  The second traces his campaign for the presidency, and effectively recreates the exhilaration and anxiety of his election.  The third looks at his time in office almost exclusively from the perspective of racial issues, after his election was supposed to initiate a post-racial era, only to elicit virulent and sustained backlash.  By then the film is mostly well-known news clips interspersed with commentary by a host of talking heads, most familiar and cogent, from Obama staffers like Axelrod and Jarrett, thoughtful writers like David Remnick, Jelani Cobb, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, critics like Cornel West and rivals like Bobby Rush, old friends and some who were lost along the way, like Jeremiah Wright.  This series is well-put-together, inspiring, and not as painful now that the Anti-Obama is in exile, and Barack’s sidekick Joe is now back in the Oval Office.
 
Can we ever have enough teen sex comedies?  Apparently not, especially when diversity, inclusion, and intersectionality are all the rage, taking new angles on a tired genre.  While waiting for forthcoming new seasons of Pen15 and Sex Education, I gave a look to Mindy Kaling’s Never Have I Ever (MC-80, NFX), whose second season of ten half-hour episodes has just dropped.  Having binged both seasons (not in the drinking game sense of the title), I can recommend this show with enthusiasm.  Kaling launched an open call for an Indian girl to play a character based on her own teen years, and struck gold with Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, a Tamil-Canadian ready to make a big leap from high school drama productions.  The character Devi is adorable and clever, if a bit devious.  She has two besties, Chinese-American drama queen and Afro-American robot nerd.  Her mother is a dermatologist, her glamorous live-in older cousin is getting a PhD in genetics at Cal Tech, her father has died recently but literally haunts her days and nights.  For boys, she has her Jewish brainiac adversary and her part-Japanese hot-jock-swimmer dreamboat.  And oh yes, Devi’s voiceover POV narrator is John McEnroe.  Mix and match, it’s all sprightly fun, and frequently touching as well.  I defy you not to enjoy this show.
 
Academic campus comedies were once my favorite genre of novel, so I was primed to enjoy The Chair (MC-73, NFX).  Sandra Oh stars as the newly-installed chair of the English department of a sub-Ivy-League university.  Maybe she was a diversity hire, or maybe the dean (David Morse) just wanted a woman to be holding the ticking time-bomb when it explodes.  Nonetheless, she’s passionate about her job as well as literature, though tasked with eliminating superannuated (i.e. my age) dead-wood profs as enrollment declines.  The chair is a tottering hot seat.  The new chairperson has a complicated relationship with the old chairperson (Jay Duplass), an academic superstar who is falling apart after the death of his wife.  Oh also has a complicated relationship with her adopted Latina daughter, and as a single mom relies on her Korean father and ne’er-do-well predecessor for child care help.  The actress Amanda Peet turns showrunner, and enlists a doctoral student as co-writer, and the creators of Game of Thrones as co-producers.  Daniel Gray Longino directs.  So the show has authenticity and polish, and proves both funny and topical about issues like cancel culture.  Its six half-hour episodes could be considered a long movie, or a down payment on future seasons, which I would be glad to watch.  I never regretted bypassing academia myself, but now I’m positively giddy about having avoided it. 
 
While this post is mostly about new tv, I’m including comments on some newly-streaming movies, though what’s the difference these days?  I expected Together Together (MC-72, Hulu) to be an amusing distraction, but found it to be substantially more.  Ed Helms is single man in his forties who decides he wants to be a father, and sets out to recruit a surrogate mother to carry his child.  He decides on a forthright woman of 26, played by the unfamiliar but delightfully offbeat Patti Harrison.  (After watching, I found out some of the character’s piquancy came from the actress being a trans woman – a thought that never occurred to me while watching.)  Many of the expected rom-com beats are avoided, in this story of two lonely people who find a common purpose in an untraditional relationship.  Written and directed by Nikole Beckwith, the film also includes some very welcome comic cameos, all the while going for truthfulness rather than laughs.
 

I certainly welcome more films written and directed by young women, but I can offer only a lukewarm endorsement of Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby (MC-79, HBO), a cringe-comedy of embarrassment starring Rachel Sennott.  She’s a college-age woman getting by through deception, fooling her family about her career plans while selling a “girlfriend experience” to older men.  Her parents insist that she go with them to sit shiva for a family member, which puts her in a situation in which strands of her past and present interweave to put her into a tight knot.  In 72 economical minutes, through which the Jewish family humor shades into horror, she confronts a host of bad choices in her young life.  It’s a promising debut for both creator and star, but doesn’t strike me as fully realized.

Looking again at Metacritic’s best tv of the year list, I noticed a show in the top ten that I had seen but somehow forgot to comment on at all -- the second season of This Way Up (MC-87, Hulu).  I suppose I gulped it all down in one night, and then moved on to something else, which is a shame because it was one of my favorite shows of the year.  Show creator Aisling Bea is great as she tries to put her life together after a stint in rehab, aided by Sharon Horgan as her tough-love sister, who has plenty of problems of her own - two manic but endearing Irishwomen out and about in London.  This is a show I strongly recommend to anyone who misses Fleabag or Catastrophe.

Mr. Soul! (MC-88, HBO) may not fit under this heading, as a 2018 documentary, but you must acquit me for offering a strong recommendation now that it has just turned up on HBO Max.  Ellis Haizlip was producer and host of Soul!, a WNET program that ran from 1968-73, a celebration of Black culture at a time when it was nearly invisible on TV, except in caricature.  His niece, Melissa Haizlip, has put together a film that places the groundbreaking program in the context of that era, featuring diverse creators from James Baldwin to Stevie Wonder.  Haizlip himself was an unusual and piquant character, but the focus is on the show, and the amazing array of talent that it presented, in an innovative format.  The film makes an outstanding counterpoint to the recent (and excellent!) concert documentary, Summer of Soul.  I urge you to watch both, even if – maybe especially if – you didn’t live through that era yourself.  
 
Christian Petzold is a great filmmaker, but if you’re not familiar with his work, the recent Undine (MC-75, Hulu) is not the place to start – it works best as a reprise from themes in his earlier films.  And it helps to know something about Undine as folkloric figure, a water sprite who takes human form to love a man (Neil Jordan made the estimable Ondine in Ireland).  Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski return from Transit (she seems to have replaced Nina Hoss as muse and fixed point around whom Petzold’s films revolve).  It’s possible to take the film as enigmatic or as merely muddled – half lecture on urban development in Berlin from Kaiser Wilhelm to reunification; half woozy, watery romance.  But all impeccably made, from acting to photography to music.  It’s possible to resist the myth and mystery of the story, and just revel in the film’s other elements, but in retrospect I find the whole more comprehensible than when luxuriating in its melodramatic yet realistic surface.  Of Petzold's films, I’d start with Barbara (MC-86), but many consider Phoenix (MC-89) his best.

In NYC Epicenters: 9/11-2021½ (MC-86, HBO), Spike Lee gathers a host of friends, family, and acquaintances to talk at length about all that New York has endured in the 21^st century so far, in four episodes of up to two hours each.  He mixes in news and documentary footage with clips from feature films shot in the city (incl. his own).  Spike is Spike – funny, obsessive, outrageous, self-indulgent but socially conscious.  Always making himself a center of attention, but with a humorous candor that makes his ego palatable, most of the time.  This series does not rise to the level of his great documentaries, 4 Little Girls and When the Levees Broke, but kept my interest throughout its extended length. The title is not just clunky but misleading, since the series works backwards from Covid to the fall of the Twin Towers (and even to archival footage of their rise).  It’s all a ramble through Spike’s mind and his feelings for his native city (and its sports teams), but compulsively watchable if not shapely or altogether coherent.
 
It was recently re-watching Spike’s Malcolm X (and the premonitory Do the Right Thing) that led me to re-read a 55-year-old pocketbook of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  And after One Night in Miami, I was definitely primed for Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali (MC-69, NFX).  Marcus Clarke’s documentary is based on a book of the same name, and the two authors figure among the talking heads that hold the story together, along with daughters and other family of the two men, plus assorted commentators.  But it was all that footage from the Sixties that really made the film an evocative experience for me, to see Malcolm and Ali in their heyday.  I look forward to similar sensations from Ken Burns’ forthcoming documentary series on Ali.
 
Being young in “this day and age” is foreign territory to me, but I still find it interesting to watch teen comedies with a different ethnic bent, and Reservation Dogs (MC-83, Hulu) fills the bill.  Made by, with, and about indigenous people, the series depicts a teen gang of two boys and two girls, who get into various scrapes with family and neighbors.  How many TV series are set in Oklahoma?  Show creator Starlin Harjo is a native, in both senses of the term, and strives for authenticity and representation.  The show’s capers didn’t win me over immediately, but by halfway through its eight episodes, I was hooked, invested in the characters and amused by the twists of their stories.  Deservedly renewed for a second season.
 
I’m not sure why I could tolerate the sheer silliness of The Other Two (MC-80, HBO) more than, say, Schitt’s Creek, but I did make my way through two seasons, though I would not wish to see any more.  It’s a jokey parody of contemporary culture, where I frequently don’t have the familiarity with social media to get the jokes.  Maybe the exploration of that foreign territory was enough to keep me watching.  The title pair are a gay struggling actor brother (Drew Tarver) and former dancer sister (Helene Yorke), who have to come to terms with the overnight success of their 13-year-old brother, who rockets to fame on the basis of a viral music video.  In the second season (which jumped from Comedy Central to HBO Max), their mortification is compounded when their mother (Molly Shannon) also becomes a daytime TV star.  Enough of the jokes land, and most of the performers are appealing enough, to make this show a painless time-filler, but not something I would recommend.
 
I’ve started the second season of Ted Lasso, and am enjoying it as much as I expected, but will save my comments for a future post on “Another bite of Apple.”
 

The last of last year

It’s always deep into the next year before I catch up with all the worthy films of the previous year, so this is my final mopping up of the films of 2020.

 
Clearly, a lot of people really liked Minari (MC-89, dvd), but I did not share the enthusiasm.  There were certainly some attractive aspects to writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s autobiographical film, about his Korean family’s move to a remote Arkansas farm in the 1980s, but the characters didn’t make sense to me and the story seemed constructed more than observed and recollected.  You know – cute kid, crochety grandmother, fighting parents, trial by water and fire, the immigrant’s take on the American Dream.  I won’t warn you away from this film, but I wonder whether you will find more in it than I did.
 
Same deal with Soul (MC-83, dvd).  There must be those who believe Pixar can do no wrong, but I definitely would have voted for Cartoon Saloon’s Wolfwalkers as the year’s best animated feature.  This was not Inside Out, with its canny simplification of personal psychology, but an unintelligible mishmash about souls (ghostlike blobs reminiscent of Casper) in transit to and from the earth.  It would have been so much better if the movie had stuck to the sense of soul music or soul brothers and sisters.  Perhaps Disney needed to save money, since the scenes in heaven were so much simpler in design than the dense and amazing depictions of NYC street life.  If only this film had stuck to terra firma.
 
Though technically a 2021 release, The Father (MC-88, AMZ) was among last year’s Best Picture nominees, and deservedly so.  And having seen Anthony Hopkins’ title performance, I’m less inclined to argue that Chadwick Boseman was robbed in the Best Actor category.  Though Florian Zeller is a first-time director of his own stage play, he makes it highly cinematic in depicting dementia from the inside, with a subjective view of the old person’s surroundings and acquaintances, the viewer experiencing a cognate dislocation and befuddlement.  Hopkins is spectacularly good at inhabiting the confused mind, and Olivia Colman is also good as his caring but pained daughter, with the bonus of Olivia Williams as her alter ego in the father’s eyes.  Imogene Poots makes an impression in a small role as the old man’s latest carer.  Really a masterful production all round, though not everybody’s idea of entertainment.  What a dementia film series you could have with this film, Amour, Away from Her, Still Alice, and even Elizabeth is Missing!
 
And I wouldn’t quibble about Vanessa Kirby’s Best Actress nomination for Pieces of a Woman (MC-66, NFX), belatedly watched after I was taken with her performance in The World to Come (both roles quite different from her younger Princess Margaret in The Crown).  Descriptions of the harrowing home birth that opens the film had kept me away.  The scene is indeed visceral and eviscerating, but doesn’t turn into a horror movie.  Seemingly shot in one long, long take with a gliding, probing camera, it has immediacy and presence, but doesn’t rub your face in it.  The couple who made the film, director Kornel Mundruczo and writer Kata Weber, seem to have an intimate acquaintance with the subject.  The rest of the film follows the aftermath month by month, as the couple (Shia LeBeouf is the husband) struggles to build a bridge from an aching past to a hopeful future, their life complicated by Kirby’s mother, played by Ellen Burstyn.  The film goes off on tangents with some other characters, and relies heavily on some metaphorical objects to tie its disparate pieces together, but Vanessa Kirby offers a memorable portrait of excruciating anguish and muted grief.  The familiar feel of the Boston settings is a plus, but not quite enough to earn my outright recommendation.
 
There are films that I resent because they’re just good enough to keep me watching in the hopes that the whole will take shape and come together, but then the end arrives, and I have to say, “Is that all you’ve got?  You drag me along this far, and give me nothing in the end.  Why were you wasting my time?”  Case in point:  The Nest (MC-79, Show).  In my view, this is the second time that writer-director Sean Durkin has buffaloed a lot of critics.  Jude Law and Carrie Coon are enough to draw one in, as he uproots the mixed family (with two nondescript kids) from America to London, in pursuit of a big 1980s financial score.  They wind up in an ancient mansion in the Sussex countryside, which seems sure to be haunted.  As the deal-making bro’s plans and boasts prove hollow, the marriage frays and the kids act out.  I won’t say where the story goes, not because that would be a spoiler, but because it doesn’t go anywhere at all.
 
Misbehaviour (MC-62, Starz) is no great shakes as a film, but the presence of Lesley Manville, Jesse Buckley, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw was enough to draw me in (I find Keira Knightley generally less enticing), and I didn’t regret sitting through this fact-based film about feminists disrupting the 1970 Miss World pageant in London, but it certainly pales next to Mrs. America.
 
I don’t know what to say about The Disciple (MC-83, NFX), except that it takes one into a very unfamiliar world of Indian classical music, and shows the travail of a musician who can’t quite measure up to the stringent discipline of the form.  It’s definitely a serious piece of work, but I didn’t really get a lot of it, either the film or the music itself, though I persisted throughout its enigmatic length.

One last lukewarm response to report, since I finally got to see News of the World (MC-73, dvd).  Directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks, this film had plenty to recommend itself, but not enough for me to do so in turn.  It seemed like an utterly conventional Western, revisiting familiar scenes but not making anything new out of them.  In 1870s Texas, Hanks is a Confederate veteran who pieces out a living as an itinerant reader of news, storytelling out of the papers and passing the hat in remote outposts.  In his travels, he comes across a doubly-orphaned girl (Helena Zengel), stolen from her German immigrant parents in a massacre by Kiowa, who were later massacred by soldiers.  They journey together through the desolate West, every scene reminiscent of earlier Westerns, to the utterly predictable conclusion.  It’s all quite well done, but why?  We see myth and counter-myth, with a reverse echo from present politics, but we get little sense of actual history.

 
That about wraps up 2020 films for me.  Going down the Metacritic Top 100, I don’t see any more that I am dying to see, but I do notice one that I want to add to my best of the year lists (this one or that one) – the documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, now available on the Criterion Channel as well as Kanopy.

Best tv so far this year

A mid-year review of Metacritic’s top-rated television shows is prompted by one I would have missed if not for the list, where it comes in #5.  Last Chance U: Basketball (MC-90, NFX) arrives after five seasons of the series that featured football, and was therefore the first to attract my interest, and subsequent enthusiasm.  If you love b-ball and/or films like the superlative Hoop Dreams, then you’re in for a treat.  Over the course of ten hour-long episodes, we follow the East Los Angeles College Huskies as they have a season to remember, vying for the Cali JUCO state championship.  The charismatic coach, insane when it suits his purposes and highly considerate of his players in calmer moments, needs the title to avenge earlier tournament losses.  His players need to showcase their talents for potentially moving up to Div. I, or even the pros.  A lot of agendas have to align for them to reach their goal.  The coach and both his assistants get a lot of screen time, with three or four players in particular followed throughout the season, on court and off.  Game action, as well as incidents in locker room and elsewhere, are sharply distilled.  Wrenching and joyous by turns, the 2019-20 season unfolds dramatically to its unforeseen anticlimax.  Though the team of filmmakers may lack the singular vision of a Steve James, they are highly adept at combining sports with human interest.  See this, if you’re into hoops at all.

 
So here I’m going to run down the Metacritic rating list, commenting on the urgency and warmth of my personal recommendation,
 
I’m certainly on board with the top-rated Bo Burnham: Inside (98), a brilliant and hilarious deep dive not only into the performer’s psyche but into the whole experience of social media and Covid lockdown. 
 
Romeo & Juliet (92) was good, but not that good, a theatrical experience that made the most of the shutdown of theaters.
 
After one episode, I decided that Underground Railroad (92) was not something I had to watch.  Then wondering whether I’d missed something, went back and started a second episode, but before long, decided I was right at first glance.  If you want to watch something profound about the Black experience on Amazon Prime, watch Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series instead.
 
Similarly, I was not grabbed by the characters or situations of It’s a Sin (91), and bailed after one episode.
 
Hemingway (88) was not a subject I cared to delve into, but the second season of Ted Lasso (87) will definitely warrant another month of AppleTV+.  After several shows that I sampled slightly or not at all, comes Elizabeth is Missing (86), not all that good but notable for the return of Glenda Jackson.
 
Clustered at a Metacritic rating of 85, I certainly endorse two British comedy series that are just back with strong second seasons, Mae Martin’s Feel Good and the newest Mitchell-Webb series Back.  Also the British psychological drama, Too Close.
 
I was moved by, but not ecstatic about, The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song (85), though I ran out of patience with Exterminate All the Brutes (83).  Among documentaries, I preferred Alex Gibney’s analytic series on the opioid crisis, The Crime of the Century (84).
 
There follow several shows of which I have no experience, but down at 81 (typically my threshold for “must viewing”) are two half-hour comedy shows that I found surprisingly entertaining and substantial, the second season of Dickinson (with Hailee Steinfeld as the young Emily) and the first of Hacks (with Jean Smart as a Joan Rivers-like comedian).
 
One more new tv series I highly recommend, absent a rating, is the second season of Couples Therapy.  So let’s see what the rest of the year will bring.