Tasting the Apple

Back on AppleTV+ for another taste of their offerings, I follow up on my previous surveys here and here and here.  It’s definitely a channel worth sampling from time to time, though hardly capacious enough to maintain a year-round subscription.

Ted Lasso (MC-73) may have become a bit bloated by the third season, its half-hour episodes effectively doubling in duration, but retained many of its charms (see earlier reviews here and here).  By now the show was predictably unpredictable, and somewhat insufferable in its incessant would-be life-lessons, but still with a score of appealing characters, and a steady stream of witty pop cultural references.  The on-pitch action was certainly more impressive with a bigger budget.  But the show concluded with curtain call after curtain call, which outlasted my ovation and detracted from my retrospective enjoyment.  I won’t review plot developments or character resolutions, but just exemplify my equivocations in one scene.  In the penultimate episode, Ted’s mother shows up unexpectedly and she’s played by the mother from Freaks & Geeks, of blessed memory.  But she’s too much for Ted, and at dinner in the pub, he flees her presence to go pretend to take a turn at pinball; Mae the pub owner sees him frozen there and goes over to recite an entire Philip Larkin poem without acknowledging its source, which would have been all right if she had just quoted the famous first line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” but as an appropriation just goes on too long (like a concluding bit filched from The Sound of Music).  High-spirited and good-spirited as it remained, I was not sorry to see it end.  Some spin-off series seems inevitable, but won’t be a much-watch for me, my English football enthusiasm having turned to Welcome to Wrexham.

I was looking forward to the second season of Swagger (MC-79), as I said after the first, and it did not disappoint.  Creator Reggie Rock Bythewood could easily have called this series Love & Basketball, if his talented wife Gina Prince-Bythewood hadn’t already made a great film of that name.  But maybe he’d reverse the terms, since Swagger’s most distinctive feature is the authentic and immersive quality of its on-court action, which is not at all to depreciate its Friday Night Lights model as a family and community drama.  Most of the characters return from the first season, having leapt from 8^th grade to senior year, winning several championships in the interval and now at a lily-white prep school vying for a national high school championship.  Again the show is resolutely topical, about issues involving young athletes such as college recruitment and endorsements (this my first encounter with NIL revenue for amateurs – “Name Image Likeness”), as well as tokenism, mass incarceration, social media, and various forms of abuse.  Earnest but not sappy, offering life lessons without hammering them home, continuously engaging, this show is a hidden treasure.  I urge you to discover it, if you’re any kind of hoops fan, or even if you’re not.  
 
As my approach to bookselling has narrowed, I no longer pay attention to bestseller lists, so when Brie Larson (whom I’ve looked for since Short Term 12, not to mention her Oscar-winning turn in Room) led me to the Apple adaptation of Lessons in Chemistry (MC-68), I had no idea of how popular the novel was till I saw its 240,000 ratings on Amazon.  I suspect people invested in the book may have had more quibbles with this 8-part series than I did.  My only negative observation is how alarmingly thin Brie Larson has become (how does she play a Marvel superheroine with those twig limbs?  I don’t know, being a dedicated avoider of the MCU).  Here she plays a brilliant, unnervingly candid chemist, derailed from a Ph.D. by her adviser’s sexual assault.  She winds up as a lab tech, who develops a close working and eventually romantic relationship with the research institute’s star chemist.  After several surprise developments, she finds a new career as the host of a television cooking show.  Larson’s committed authenticity surmounts any questions of plausibility in the twists and turns of the story, which delve into sexist and racial attitudes from the Fifties, nicely articulated in a manner reminiscent of Mad Men.  The series’ concluding episode removed any reservations I may have had about its diffuse approach, by resolving the various strands convincingly.  My rating would be substantially higher than Metacritic’s average.
 
Turning to films, Flora and Son (MC-76) is John Carney’s third attempt to recapture the magic of Once, and one more tale of Irish music (and relationship) making comes close.  This time the players are a divorced young mother and her delinquent teen son.  Eve Hewson makes her troublesome character appealing, and so does Joseph Gordon-Levitt as her online SoCal guitar teacher, who literally steps through her laptop screen for a romantic duet.  Meanwhile music provides an avenue of connection with her grumpy son.  Once more, melody brings people together in unexpected harmony.
 
Two canny conmen confront each other in The Pigeon Tunnel (MC-79), Errol Morris behind the camera and David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) in front, sparring around the elusive truth of the latter’s life, as a spy and bestselling novelist, but particularly as the son of another conman.  Derived from Cornwell’s memoir of the same title, and based on a recollection of his sketchy father, the metaphor is driven home by dramatization and repeated imagery, to complement the “interrotron” interviews with Cornwall in a library of mirrors, piecing together shards of truth and make-believe.  The beguiling web-weaving includes illustrative clips from film & tv adaptations of le Carré novels.
 
I was induced to give Fingernails (MC-63) a look by the presence of Jessie Buckley, along with Jeremy Allen White and Riz Ahmed, but nothing could induce me to watch to the end of this inert treatment of a ridiculous premise.
 
Before letting Apple lapse, I’ll be starting the third season of Slow Horses in December (my rec for first two here) and hoping for an early streaming release date for Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. 
 
HBO has been demoted to Max by media villain David Zaslav and is no longer a good streaming channel (let alone essential - you can always watch John Oliver on YouTube), so it’s only worth a postscript here.  It’s unlikely that HBO documentaries will sustain their former quality and range, most reduced to celebrations of celebrity.  Case in point: Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (MC-72), which could have been another My Dinner with Andre, as Brooks and director Rob Reiner, friends for sixty years, talk over his career at an empty restaurant table.  There are many enjoyable tv & movie clips and the occasional personal revelation, but a surfeit of encomia from other comedians.  I’m a fan myself, and happy to revisit his success, but it would have been better to let the man – and the work – speak for himself.  And a roast would be more fun than repeated toasts.
 
Alexandra Pelosi may derive some celebrity from her mother, but she continues to carve out a good career with highly personal documentaries.  In The Insurrectionist Next Door (MC-tbd), she visits and directly confronts convicted J6-ers to find out what was on their minds when they stormed the Capitol and how they feel about Trump now.  The film is amusing and instructive, if ultimately dispiriting.
 
On the upside, HBO is now running a second season of Julia (MC-76), which pairs interestingly with Lessons in Chemistry in chronicling the development of cooking shows on early tv.  It also pairs with Happy Valley to demonstrate Sarah Lancashire’s range.  The first season took me by surprise, but the second seems more wobbly, unsure in its focus and purpose, but still engaging and amusing.  By the fourth episode, when the second season of The French Chef goes into production, the show seemed to regain its mojo and now I look forward to the rest.
 
One further postscript: PBS seems determined to correct my impression that their documentaries are losing some luster.  On POV, they just released Aurora’s Sunrise (MC-79), a multi-layered film about the Armenian genocide of a century ago, but with an upsetting contemporary relevance.  It’s the story of a teenager who remarkably survived the massacres to make her way to America, where she became a celebrity and starred in a lavish Hollywood film that spread word of the catastrophe.  The film recreates the story through beautiful, if horrific, animation, while intercutting surviving footage from the epic silent film and interviews with the refugee in old age.  It makes an edifying double feature with Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (reviewed here).
 

MUBI dipping

Through inadvertence I wound up with an additional month of the subscription channel MUBI, a distant third behind Criterion and Kanopy as a place to find offbeat, classic, and international fare.  MUBI doesn’t have the monthly churn of curated collections that Criterion has, but they are currently offering an Almodovar retrospective, for example.  I started my survey here, but I don’t expect MUBI to be a regular in my rotation of channels.
 
They did have one new offering that I’d been seeking for years, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004, MC-86).  Thom Andersen’s long documentary essay on the portrayal of the city in Hollywood movies is intelligent, provocative, and entertaining.  From well-known films like Chinatown, Double Indemnity, and Blade Runner to oddities like Kiss Me Deadly or a Laurel & Hardy short, he uses clips to illustrate the history of the city and its architecture, and the attendant mythmaking.  With a strong if not altogether convincing point of view, it’s a highly illuminating anthology about urban development.
 
Mubi also had a recent French film that I was happy to discover, Other People’s Children (MC-80).  Writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski has clearly been to school on the films of Rohmer and Truffaut, so she’s swell in my book.  Virginie Efira is a striking actress, previously unknown to me but apparently a major star in France, and I can certainly see why, luminous and radiant being words that come to mind.  She’s a 40ish middle school teacher, veteran of several relationships but looking for another, hearing her biological clock tick.  (Her gynecologist is played by Frederick Wiseman in an eponymous cameo, hilarious if you recognize him.)  Meeting a likely candidate at guitar class, she soon encounters his 4-year-old daughter and after a rocky start develops a close relationship with the child.  Meanwhile she advocates for a troubled favorite student, and follows her younger sister through an unexpected pregnancy.  This film is full of life as it is lived, given a special glow by subtle and big-hearted creativity.
 
In search of more Virginie Efira, I watched Sybil (2019, MC-59), though both the title character and Justine Triet’s film are a bit of a mess, and less than the sum of their parts.  She’s a therapist who wants to suspend her practice and return to the writing career she abandoned after publishing one book.  She reluctantly takes on one desperate new client, an actress played by Adele Exarchopoulos, who’s making her first film while pregnant from her leading man, who happens to be married to the director.  Her story becomes grist for the therapist’s book, and they become so enmeshed that the shrink has to accompany the actress on location, to the volcanic island of Stromboli.  A bunch of other stuff is going on, comic or melodramatic, but not much of it makes sense.
 
I found several other Efira films over on Kanopy, including In Bed with Victoria (2016, MC-58), also directed by Justine Triet, and also rather muddled, but not entirely lacking in interest.  Here she’s a single lawyer with two young daughters, and a trainwreck in both her professional and romantic lives.  Her travails are neither comic nor dramatic enough to hold the film together, and her character is similarly mixed.  But Efira remains a pleasure to watch.
 
On the upside, in An Impossible Love (2018, IMDB), adapted by Catherine Corsini from Christine Angot’s autobiographical novel of the same name, Efira credibly ages over forty years, from ingenue to grandmother.  The story is narrated by her grown daughter, and tells of their relationship over the years, from the romance that produced her through each of their tangled relationships with the mostly-absent father in question.  It’s an absorbing and provocative story, impeccably handled all round.
 
Best of all was The Sense of Wonder (2015, IMDB), which seems to be a Kanopy exclusive, but well worth seeking out.  Eric Besnard was not a filmmaker I’d even heard of before, but he certainly charmed me at first look, with Virginie Efira at her most delectable and a lovely setting on an organic pear farm in a beautiful region.  She’s a young widow with two growing children, and the bank threatening her home and livelihood.  She has a chance encounter with a mysterious stranger, who is something of an autistic savant (Benjamin Lavernhe rather more believable than Dustin Hoffman was in Rain Man).  We know where this is going, but we have a beautiful time getting there, full of wondrous imagery.  (Kanopy may well be free with your local library card.)
 
Back to recent Mubi offerings, Pacifiction (MC-75) attracted my attention with a slew of French film awards.  Directed by Albert Serra, it’s set in picturesque widescreen Tahiti and centered on the French colonial administrator played by Benoit Magimel, in a parable of paradise under imperial control.  The film is languorously paced, enigmatically dramatized, and overlong at 164 minutes, but intrigue and setting kept me watching all the way.
 
Everybody Loves Jeanne (Mubi), except maybe herself, as she sinks into depression in this pleasant enough French rom-com.  Jeanne (Blanche Gardin) has just lost her mother to suicide and her innovative do-good business to mishap and bankruptcy.  She is bedeviled by an inner voice of anxiety and self-reproach, crudely but amusingly animated by writer-director Celine Devaux.  In Lisbon to sell her mother’s flat to stave off financial ruin, Jeanne’s immobilized except for a couple of flirtations that may lead her up from the depths.
 
Passages (MC-79) is a new Mubi production from director Ira Sachs, about an unconventional love triangle.  In what seems like a scathing self-portrait, Franz Rogowski plays an arrogant, self-obsessed film director – married to Ben Whishaw – who falls into a relationship with a woman (Adele Exarchopoulos), heedlessly doing damage all round.  The sex is graphic but the motivations are mystifying, as everyone suffers from the director’s whims and confusion.  Hard to see the appeal, of the main character or of the film.  Not altogether bad, but not good either.
 
On Mubi there are numerous films well worth seeing that I have already seen, so my round-up is skewed.  The service is worth dipping into from time to time, but not retaining on a continuous basis.
 

Back to Netflix

After six months without Netflix, I’d built up a substantial list of shows to watch, which warranted resuming subscription for a month or two.  After my previous drop-by, here’s the new stuff I found worth watching. 
 
Starting with a trio of stand-up comedy specials:  Hannah Gadsby: Something Special (MC-tbd) lives up to its subtitle, as she ventures from unpacking trauma and difference (autism and queerness) to recording wedded bliss (having married her producer), without losing her biting wit and superb timing.  John Mulaney: Baby J (MC-74) takes a darker turn, telling the tale, soberly if not somberly, of his rehab stint after an intervention by his friends (mostly other comedians); he shows off his finely-honed impressions and self-banter while delighting the audience in Boston and at home.  Mae Martin: Sap (MC-75) follows up on their excellent Netflix series Feel Good with a well-done, piquantly-androgynous set of comic reflections – or campfire “snowglobes” – as a poster child for gender fluidity.
 
So many of my favorite half-hour shows from 2022 have returned as good or better this year, and Netflix has two of them:
 
Never Have I Ever (MC-81) completes its four-year run with high school graduation, and does so with honors, confirming my initial enthusiasm.  The finale is more about fan-service than revelation, but I consider myself well-serviced, like Devi and her friends at Sherman Oaks H.S.  For me, one word sums up this semi-autobiographical series from Mindy Kaling – endearing.  I binged the 10-episode final season in two nights, gratified but not overstuffed, amused if not surprised.  It’s all sprightly, intelligent, and well-portrayed.
 
Almost exactly the same could be said about Heartstopper (MC-81), whose first season I wrote up here.  All the characters at a British secondary school have returned for another year, continuing to explore romantic and gender questions.  Though even sweeter and considerably less raunchy than Sex Education or Never Have I Ever, this high school series represents Ron DeSanctimonious’ worst woke nightmare, a festival of LGBTQ+ antics and anguish.  This season expands to ten episodes, which allows more room to introduce parents, and to spread a school trip to Paris over several eps.  Across the board, the performers are charming and truthful, funny and insightful.  Don’t miss this, if you’re looking for warmth and humor.
 
Another returning favorite kept me on Netflix for an extra month: the fourth and final season of Sex Education (MC-78).  At first I thought the actors were getting a bit too old for their characters - and the premise a little too stale - to sustain the verve and tartness of earlier seasons (see here and here), but they were all still good company.  And by the time the series ended - in an absolute orgy of acceptance, forgiveness, and love - all my reservations were retracted. and this positively therapeutic show cemented a place among my all-time favorites.  Funny, touching, and wise, as well as fully woke, this series finale sticks the landing, gratifying and instructing, neatly resolving the stories of a score of engaging characters.  Don’t let the title or the graphic antics put you off, this show reveals a lot of heart, body and soul.
 
I was well-prepared for Cunk on Earth (MC-82), having watched Cunk on Britain via YouTube.  So I was aware of Diane Morgan’s longtime Borat-like portrayal of Philomena Cunk, the aggressively ignorant presenter for a BBC-like mockumentary series, interviewing real British academics who are in on the joke and advised to respond to her as a naïve child, sometimes playing along but sometimes simply dumbfounded.  Having done British history, here she takes on the story of civilization from cave painting to social media, presenting real history in a comically clueless manner.  Charlie Booker is the showrunner, which led me to give his Black Mirror another try, only to find nothing of interest.
 
Similarly, a prodigious haul of Emmy nominations led me to sample Beef (MC-86).  I watched half of the episodes while stationary cycling, but couldn’t be bothered to watch the rest.  I appreciate the ethnic focus on Asian-Americans as much as anyone, but the SoCal lifestyle does not engage me at all, and I couldn’t connect with any of these characters or their situations.
 
Love at First Sight (MC-55, NFX) is the generic title of a generic rom-com that is raised to a measure of authenticity by the performance of Haley Lu Richardson (a favorite of mine since Columbus, and if you want to see a really good film, watch that).  This film leaves out the first part of the title of the source novel, The Statistical Probability of …, but weaves the theme of statistics throughout a story about a chance meeting on a plane from New York to London, where an NYU student will attend the wedding of her divorced father (Rob Delaney) and a Yale graduate student in statistics (Ben Hardy) is returning for his mother’s memorial service, happening on the same day.  This involves a lot of hectic transportation around picture-postcard London, and a lot of un-statistical coincidence.  It’s all attractive and humorous, and presumably predicated on Netflix’s success with Emily in Paris, which I have no intention of watching.  This is all about Ms. Richardson for me.
 
Netflix usually bankrolls a few high-quality films per year, to give some prestige to their firehose of “content,” but they’re a long way from the broad availability of their DVD-by-mail days.  That said, Metacritic’s list of the top movies on Netflix still retains a lot of great films, but just a few I hadn’t seen already.  Here are #38, #22, and #11 in order.  
 
Andrea Riseborough deserved her unexpected Oscar nod for best actress in To Leslie (MC-84), in a performance that was both heartfelt and cringeworthy, all-out and nuanced at the same time.  The film was worth a look for that alone, but turned out to have other virtues as well.  Like a Texas dive-bar country-music song brought to life, it tells of a woman down on her luck, homeless and dissipated, after winning a lottery and then blowing the money on drugs and booze, abandoning her teen son in the process.  Marc Maron plays a motel manager who has been there and done that, and gives her a job and place to stay, as well as some hard-earned wisdom, on the long and difficult road to recovery.  Experienced tv director Michael Morris makes his feature film debut, creating a sense of place and community with minimal means.
 
Happy as Lazzaro (MC-87) had been on my list to watch for some years, but I finally got around to it after seeing an intriguing short by filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher.  Needn’t have bothered, since the film’s magic-realist approach did not resonate with me, even when the subject was Italian peasants, of considerable interest to me these days.  In a fragmented viewing, I never engaged with characters or story, despite the obvious care that went into the production.

Cousins (MC-91) is a lovely film from New Zealand, dense with life, following the destinies of three Maori girls from childhood to the death of one of them, each played at different ages by three different actress, all excellent and extremely well-matched.  That is essential since the story moves back and forth in time, allowing the viewer never to lose the thread of the individual and collective stories in a hundred minutes of free-flowing transitions.  One of the girls is taken away from the family, after her mother dies and her father goes back to England, and is adopted from her “home for desolate girls” by a wicked old bag.  Another flees an arranged marriage, and becomes a lawyer fighting for indigenous rights and looking for her long-lost cousin.  The third stays in the community and becomes a matriarch.  This is a film I never would have caught up with if not for the well-deserved Metacritic rating.
 
Acquired at Sundance, Fair Play (MC-74) puts a female twist on The Wolves of Wall Street, but as an unpleasant tale about unpleasant people it lacks the glossy-trashy bite and wit of, say, Succession.  Nonetheless, I watched Chloe Domont’s debut feature till the disorienting conclusion, a testament to the acting chops of Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich, both new to me.  They play a would-be power couple of horny hedge-fund financial analysts, disrupted when she is promoted ahead of him, leading to ugly fights and uglier sex.  This makes for characters you wouldn’t want to know in an environment you wouldn’t want to enter, and yet somehow you can’t look away.
 
Turning to documentaries, the highlight for me was Bill Russell: Legend (MC-81).  Sam Pollard follows up his excellent MLK/FBI with another winner, about one of the biggest winners of all time, a big man completely worthy of 200 minutes of celebration.  Winner of 2 NCAA championships, an Olympic gold medal, and 11(!) NBA rings, he is sometimes forgotten in the GOAT controversy between Michael and LeBron, but this program refreshes his claim, as many of today’s stars testify to his transcendent greatness.  It’s a real trip to watch all that 1950s hoops footage, especially when Russell in the NBA went from only-black-on-the-court to leader of the all-black championship Celtics.  This at a time when the Red Sox were the last team in MLB to have a black player, which in truth was more reflective of Boston racial attitudes, as Russell found out when he moved his family into a white neighborhood.  Always his own man, literally standing tall, he became even more of a civil rights activist, as this documentary makes clear.
 
I was similar engaged with Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song (MC-70), about a song that has a claim to be the GOAT, based on the way it has permeated the culture in being reinterpreted by countless different performers, many represented in this film.  Not bad for a song his record company refused to release.  In parallel, the film tells the story of Cohen’s life from Montreal beginnings to late career renaissance, after years in a Buddhist monastery and a fleecing by his business manager.  I think it was the 2006 documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man that ignited my latter-day obsession with the singer-songwriter, but this film makes a nice bookend to it.
 
Mostly, my musical tastes froze back in the Seventies, so I am always up for a film that revives some of my old favorites, and Travelin’ Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall fills the bill.  It weaves a history of the band around footage from a London concert on the very day the Beatles broke up, making CCR officially the most popular rock band in the world.  John Fogerty and company can still get me moving, not dancing but pedaling a stationary bike.
 
One technical note:  Netflix had been a reliable streaming service since inception (while Amazon Prime and HBO had various glitches that have been remedied) but now it’s the most problematic, not just slow to load and buffer, but prone to freeze and require re-booting of Roku device (and not just on mine).  So I’m more than content to pause my subscription (Netflix now offers a one-month pause in lieu of cancelling and then resubscribing – not as good as Hulu’s choice of 1-12 weeks), and come back in a month for the final season of The Crown and new list of other viewing, on which I will report.

This & that

This is a potpourri of recent films, that is a sampling of documentaries, and the other thing is a tv update.
 
Theater Camp (MC-70, Hulu) is a delightful trifle starring childhood friends Ben Platt and Molly Gordon (both co-wrote and she co-directed), in a mockumentary loosely based on their own experiences .  Gordon recently shone as The Bear’s girlfriend (and Ayo Edebiri also shows up here, though underused), and all the performing kids are just terrific, energetic and genuinely talented.  Fast-moving and funny, the film makes a serious case for the camp as a place where all kinds of misfit children come together to find a home homier than home.  Whatever the film’s flaws or gaps, they’re overwhelmed by its fleet gusto and warm feeling.
 
I enjoyed Emily (MC-75, Kanopy) for Emma Mackey’s portrayal of the wildest Bronte, especially seen back-to-back with her Maeve in Sex Education.  And I appreciated Frances O’Connor’s feel for the period - having turned writer-director after starring in Mansfield Park (1999) - and her passionate projection into the lives of the characters.  While not averse to imaginative leaps, such as a plot redolent of The Scarlet Letter, I was thrown out of the film by a few egregious falsehoods, persnickety English major that I am.  Still – the moors, the Victorian mores, the period clothes and settings, the ecstasies and agonies of love and creation – it all works well.  But it might have been better if it had been bit more scrupulous as a biopic, or somewhat wilder as an appropriation of the past by the present (on the order of Dickinson).  Instead, it’s somewhere in the muddled middle.
 
A Thousand and One (MC-81, AMZ) won a big prize at Sundance this year, and was certainly worth watching, if not a revelation.  The feature debut of writer-director A.V. Rockwell has a lot to recommend it, starting with the lead performance by Teyana Taylor, as an ex-con single mother trying to raise a son in Harlem, in the years around the turn of the millennium.  A tangled tale, with a strong sense of time and place, and sympathy for the trials of the underclass, it somehow ends up as less than the sum of its parts, but certainly a promising start to a Black woman’s directorial career.
 
Recently I was lamenting the paucity of new documentaries on PBS, but that seems to be turning around (Biden funding after Trump beggaring?), starting with two offered on American Experience, dealing with long-ago efforts to put the task of racial balance on the backs of schoolchildren, North as well as South.  The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi’s Schools (PBS) is a personal memoir of being in the first class to belatedly desegregate the schools in the rigidly segregated town of Leland, incorporating the testimony of many classmates and teachers.  The Busing Battleground (PBS) recovers the “the decades-long road to school desegregation” in Boston, almost as horrific as it was in the Deep South.  Both are well-made and well-balanced films with continuing relevance.
 
Though racism is the “American dilemma,” Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (MC-87, PBS) shows that the sins of segregation are by no means unique to this country.  What race is in the U.S. has been overshadowed by religious hatred through much of history, all going back to the initial inherited trait of tribalism – us vs. them.  This potent 5-part series recounts just how awful The Troubles were, while Ireland’s subsequent history demonstrates that such ingrained antagonisms are neither inevitable nor eternal.  It’s a timely reminder of the evils of sectarianism and partisanship.
 
Bad Axe (MC-82, Hulu) is an intimate family portrait with a wider resonance, historically and politically.  At the beginning of the Covid shutdown, filmmaker David Siev returns to his hometown, the small rural Michigan town of the title.  His Cambodian refugee father and Mexican-American mother run a popular family restaurant, and in the stress of the pandemic the eldest sister returns from Ann Arbor to take charge, and the younger sister postpones her post-college life to pitch in.  This is a home movie in every sense, compiled from a rich family archive and a prying camera eye on domestic and social stresses.  There are kitchen scenes that recall The Bear, and ugly confrontations between BLM protestors and masked neo-Nazi armed militia.  The filming can be helter-skelter, but the material is effectively edited to tell the story of America in 2020, and the rending of our social fabric, from a very particular but emblematic perspective.  This makes an authentic exploration of family as “haven in a heartless world.”
 
I paused my Hulu subscription after the superb finale of Reservation Dogs and will return once the extremely-promising second season of Welcome to Wrexham is complete, but I renew my recommendation for both, even if Hulu is raising its rates (easily combatted by toggling subscription on and off).
 
The third season of Starstruck (MC-83, HBO), composed like the first two of six swift episodes that add up to a feature-length rom-com, confirms the piquant appeal of show creator and star Rose Matafeo.  Her on-again, off-again affair with the action movie star played by Nikesh Patel seems to break off for good in the opening montage, but fate seems determined to bring them together again.  How they figure out their future, together or apart, transpires against the backdrop of a comic company of friends in London.  Not sure how this series could continue, but I will certainly give a look to whatever Ms. Matafeo does next.  (As good as this show is, I take this occasion to lament the banalization of HBO into MAX, which is no longer worthy of continuous subscription.)
 

I could not say it better

Until she disappeared behind the Time Magazine paywall, Stephanie Zacharek was the film critic I relied on most, but her forthcoming cover profile of Martin Scorsese was free, and the clip below illustrates that she is still the most reliable of guides for someone like me:

There are still many of us who see the past, present, and future of film as a continuous, regenerative strand, who find pleasure in the filmmaking of the past even as we harbor hopes for its future. If you think that way, you might imagine everyone does. But the reality is more dismal. Content is king, and entertainment billionaires want to keep shoveling it our way, at the lowest possible cost to themselves. In their eyes, we’re no longer moviegoers—a word that, in 2023, has a painfully romantic ring to it—but consumers of content, and the consumers have spoken: They want art on their own terms. Their fandom must be served. Both moguls and audiences are leaning into their worst impulses... [T]he very idea of movie artistry is in crisis, and it doesn’t look as if it’s getting better anytime soon. Scorsese is worried about that, and if you care about movies, you should be worried too.

Tech update

Please note that while I resent the recent re-design of the Metacritic website, to enhance their selling of ads, and regret that clicking on the links that I add to my reviews of new film and tv may in some cases lead you straight to a pre-trailer commercial, I will nonetheless continue to include that more-info linkage for all the useful material that resides there.  (Wikipedia entries are also useful, but contain too many spoilers.)

Also note that if Cinema Salon has not been a trusted website on your device, the URL will now transfer automatically to an https// address.

Bedrock hits paydirt

Back with another diary of Criterion Channel viewing, this one prompted by their offering a series of films that I had been looking to re-see for a long time, Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, a major payoff on my charter subscription.  The only filmmaker with whom I feel more affinity than Rohmer is Truffaut.  From his Six Moral Tales through Comedies & Proverbs to this series from the 1990s, his films could be characterized as romantic comedies, each following attractive young people in erotic and philosophic roundelay.  (Even historical or literary adaptations like Perceval or The Marquise of O or The Lady and the Duke don’t stray too far from that template, though they depart from his documentary-inflected style.)
 
In A Tale of Springtime (1990), a philosophy teacher has lent her Paris apartment to a friend but can’t bear to stay at her boyfriend’s place while he is away.  In this drifting state, she meets a young music student, who offers her a place to stay.  The girl then tries to match the teacher up with her father, to get rid of the girlfriend the daughter doesn’t like.  As with most Rohmer films, the question is will-they-or-won’t-they? and the philosophic answer is not to let the quest for true love be derailed by simple sexual attraction.
 
A Tale of Winter (1992) was one I had not seen before, and ironically starts with a sequence of a blissfully sensual seaside summer interlude.  Before the man departs for a possible job abroad, the woman gives him her address to stay in touch, but in the stress of departure writes it wrong.  Five years later, the woman is living in Paris with her mother and the daughter of that mating, working as a hairdresser and having an affair with her boss, while also living with a brotherly librarian who loves her, between whom she has to choose.  She wavers as she retains hope for a surprise reunion with the father of her child.  You’ll have to see the film to find out whether her hope is rewarded, or maybe not if you know Rohmer – either way, this ranks with his best.
 
In A Summer’s Tale (1996), a mopey mathematician/musician is vacationing by the sea in Brittany, hoping to meet up with a girl he’s pining for, while she’s off touring with other friends.  While wandering disconsolately, he meets up with two women with whom he flirts indecisively.  One is Amanda Langlet (so radiant as Pauline at the Beach), a red-headed ethnologist who approaches him with ironic distance, and the other is a dark-haired hottie who is prescriptive with potential boyfriends.  Then his maybe-girlfriend belatedly arrives, and he’s faced with a Paris-like choice among three beauties.  How will he choose his Helen?  This reputedly autobiographical tale reveals the answer.
 
Autumn Tale (1998) lived up to my memory as the best of the group, and one of Rohmer’s absolute greats.  Rather than his pervy old guy preoccupation with the sex lives of young people, he reunites two of his earlier young stars, Béatrice Romand and Marie Riviére, now approaching middle age.  The former is a winemaking widow, who believes she has no time for romance.  Her friends come up with elaborate matchmaking schemes, which intersect at a wedding where two potential suitors are present.  Rohmeresque complications unravel to delightful effect, in this golden-hued tribute to the lifelong potential for love.
 
Criterion always includes an exclusive selection of new films, most recently the Dardenne brothers’ latest, Tori and Lokita (MC-79).  NYT critic Manohla Dargis aptly characterizes their films as “suspense thrillers about moral conscience,” and this one has a real-world “Mission: Impossible” vibe (though I’ve never actually seen any of those movies), as two migrant children from Africa try to make their way through the underbelly of Belgian society.  The 12-year-old boy has papers but the 17-year-old girl he claims as his sister does not (she saved him on the boat crossing).  As is typical with the Dardennes, the nonprofessional actors are completely convincing.  This pair works as a team for an illegal weed dealer, in total subjugation, but they’re resourceful and committed to each other, even if utterly powerless.  One’s fears for them are thoroughly grounded, and the despair fully earned – another profoundly upsetting film from one of the world’s great filmmaking pairs.
 
Godland (MC-81) is an Icelandic film about a Danish Lutheran priest trekking across the island to found a colonial church late in the 19^th century.  The primary character is the country’s wild landscape, from glaciers to volcanoes, from wide marshy wastes to rock-strewn hillsides.  Rather than widescreen imagery, director Hlynur Palmason uses a narrow 4x3 frame for long slow pans around spectacular 360-degree views. The clergyman is an unattractive character, and makes an antagonist of his native guide, even as his church is being built in a Danish outpost, where a village wedding forms the film’s centerpiece.   It calls up echoes of other great period films, from The Emigrants to McCabe & Mrs. Miller, as well as god-haunted Nordic directors like Dreyer and Bergman.
 
The Innocent (MC-69) is a pleasant enough French rom-com pretending to be a heist film.  Louis Garrel writes, directs, and stars, with an able assist from Noémie Merlant, but the result evaporates in the mind afterward.
 
One film that epitomizes why I’ll keep my Criterion subscription above all others is Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (MC-81), which I’d been searching to see from the minute I heard about it.  Suddenly it turned up on CC and proved as entertaining as I had imagined.  Directed by Gottlieb’s daughter Lizzie, it’s a touching and funny bromance between an author and his editor, both of whom are at the very pinnacle of their profession.  The film fills in the backstory of the author of monumental biographies of Robert Moses and LBJ, and of the chief editor at Knopf and the New Yorker among many other accomplishments, two literary NYC boys who met their match.  Instead of a climactic gunfight, we peep through the door to see the two octogenarians sitting next to each other with pencils in hand and a tall stack of typescript in front of them.  Thrilling!
 
Mia Hansen-Love’s latest film, One Fine Morning (MC-86), is not yet available on Criterion (I got a DVD on ILL), but the channel gave me the chance to see one of hers that I seem to have missed, Things to Come (2016, MC-88), so I take this opportunity to celebrate her Rohmer-esque oeuvre.  I really liked Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love, Eden, and Bergman Island.  As the daughter of two philosophers, Hansen-Love’s work is intimately personal, if not altogether autobiographical.  You always feel that she knows whereof she speaks, and her finely-detailed films look to comprehend rather than over-dramatize ordinary life. 
 
One Fine Morning centers on the marvelous Léa Seydoux as a young widow looking after a 7-year-old daughter, a father suffering from a neurodegenerative disease, and an aged grandmother, while working as a public translator.  She has no time or attention for romance until she meets an old friend (Melvil Poupaud) who sparks a flame, and their affair adds another level of complication to her life.  So the film is split between her efforts to find an appropriate nursing home for her philosopher father, and stolen moments with her married lover.  Like real life, the film has no settled resolution but many lovely (and some painful) moments.
 
I hate to say it, but Things to Come may have been too subtle for me.  I couldn’t remember seeing it, I couldn’t find any review of it here, and no memories were sparked by this viewing, until the very last scene, which remained something of an open-ended enigma to me, though understandable in retrospect.  This is characteristic work from Hansen-Love, with an outstanding performance by Isabelle Huppert, as a sixtyish philosophy teacher whose settled life begins to unravel strand by strand.  She’s confronted by a new generation of students, abandoned by her husband and her publisher, plagued by her mother’s aging, and ambivalently estranged from the protégé (Roman Kolinka) whom she visits twice at his anarchist commune in the mountains.  Nonetheless she is quietly piecing together a new life, out of her disappointments.
 
While at it, I caught another of Hansen-Love’s films, which came out in 2018 but just reached streaming.  Maya (MC-62, AMZ) might be marked down for whiffs of colonialism or pedophilia, but I didn’t consider it any sort of letdown for her, displaying all her trademark virtues in a different context.  A French war correspondent (Kolinka again), just released from captivity by ISIS, seeks recovery by returning to his abandoned childhood home in Goa, a coastal state in India.  His godfather runs a tourist hotel, and has a beautiful teen daughter, with whom the journalist forms a tentative relationship, while also exploring the country where he grew up as the son of a diplomat and an absconding mother.  So Hansen-Love’s usually intimate approach is complemented by some exquisite sightseeing in this colorful would-be romance.
 
[Click on “Read more” for brief remarks on a score of older films that I’ve recently watched on the Criterion Channel.]

Premium channels?

Some streaming channels are offered as premiums, either for an additional charge (or parsimoniously by free trial) or as a bonus to other subscriptions.  HBO has transitioned into MAX, but I resist that name more than I would any trans individual’s, so it’s still HBO to me.  Meanwhile, Showtime now falls under the umbrella of Paramount+.  Amazon Prime is just an add-on to free shipping, and AMC+ is available both as add-on or stand-alone subscription.
 
[HBO/MAX]
 
I’ve been slow to comment on the grand finale of Succession (MC-92), despite moving it into my all-time Top Ten, my recommendation being superfluous, since everyone has either seen or heard about such a buzzy show, and already formed an opinion.  I thoroughly enjoyed this festival of schadenfreude, this mocking revenge on the 1%, well-made in every respect, from writing and directing to acting, music, and design.  (For a masterful dissection, see Andrew O’Hagan’s review in the NYRB.)  But I want to single out show creator Jesse Armstrong for particular homage.  He will certainly win his 4^th Emmy for writing this season, but I urge you to go back and watch his first series, Peep Show with British comedy duo Mitchell & Webb (plus Olivia Colman!).
 
The second season of Somebody Somewhere (MC-93) lived up to the first, and then some.  This group portrait of a circle of offbeat characters in a Kansas town is never too gross or too sweet, homegrown but wild and tart.  Get over fat-shaming or other types of prejudice, and just enjoy this show.
 
Reality (MC-83) is a novel docudrama with a timely resonance.  When the FBI showed up at Reality Winner’s door, they had a tape recorder which caught the search and interrogation in real time, and provided the script for Tina Satter’s film (adapted from her stage production).  Sydney Sweeney is superb at embodying Reality’s reality.  She was an NSA translator who blew the whistle on Russian interference in the 2016 election by passing a secret memo to the press, and wound up spending six years in prison for a one-page violation of the Espionage Act.  How many years do you think the Orange Menace will spend behind bars for all those boxes of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago?
 
As stand-up, Marc Maron: From Bleak to Dark (MC-90) lives up to its title, focusing on the death of his partner, the film director Lynn Shelton, extracting some hard-won laughs and wisdom from common woes.  I liked Sarah Silverman: Someone You Love too, but the real comedy gem on HBO is How To with John Wilson (MC-93), now in its third and final season of wayward autobiography, in which each episode jumps off from a How-To question – some common, some esoteric – in whatever direction Wilson’s offbeat personality and camera eye take him.  My brother clued me into Gary Gulman: The Great Depresh (MC-81, 2019), which I particularly enjoyed because he was so reminiscent of a close friend of mine.
 
[Showtime/Paramount+]
 
The return of Couples Therapy (IMDb) was enough to compel a look-in on Showtime, easily the best series I’ve ever seen on that channel (supplanting Nurse Jackie).    I’ve been pleased to see this show become something of a cultural phenomenon, highlighted by a New Yorker profile of psychoanalyst Dr. Orna Guralnik.  Each season there are four couples, of interesting ethnic and gender mixes, at whose weekly therapy sessions we sneak a peek in a mock-up of the analyst’s office, rigged with multiple hidden cameras.  It may not sound all that thrilling, but each 30-minute episode culls a lot of relationship drama (and humor) from all those 50-minute hours.
 
Rarely have I failed to “get” a movie as much as Aftersun (MC-95), either the film itself or the reactions of critics I trust.  I found most of writer-director Charlotte Wells’ stylistic flourishes quite irritating, in this story of a divorced dad and his 11-year-old daughter vacationing at a resort in Turkey.  As the dad, Paul Mescal was Oscar-nominated, but I found his performance … okay, but nothing like as persuasive as in Normal People.  As the daughter, first-timer Frankie Corio steals the show, but not enough to make it hold together in my view.  We get furtive glimpses of the character grown-up, at roughly the age of the father of her memories.  One can put the shards and pieces of this film together, like half-remembered vignettes of one’s own childhood, but the willful puzzle is off-putting, as are the askance angles and obscure, protracted, or pixilated scenes.  Perhaps I’d see more on a second viewing, which I am not inclined to endure.
 
Two other recent films on Showtime warranted a look.  Red Rocket (MC-76) is Sean Baker’s follow-up to Tangerine and The Florida Project.  If not quite in the league of those two, it remains a funny and insightful look at marginal lives.  Simon Rex plays an aging porn star, feckless but egomaniacal, who returns to his hardscrabble Texas town with tail between his legs, crashes with his ex-wife and her mother, and schemes to hook up with a jailbait teen at the local donut shop.  The ugly industrial landscape of the Gulf Coast is almost a character in this incongruously widescreen film. 
 
Similarly in A Love Song (MC-78), the landscape is a primary character, in this case a remote campground in Colorado, where a lonely widow is waiting in her camper for the possible arrival of an old flame, in a star turn by craggy-faced character actress Dale Dickey, eventually joined by Wes Studi.  Max Walker-Silverman’s debut feature is quiet and subtle, slow-moving and affecting in an economical 82 minutes.
 
[AMC+]
 
The culminating third season of Happy Valley (MC-93) was available on both AcornTV and AMC+.  Having caught up with the former channel recently, I took a month of AMC+ to watch the conclusion of that fantastic Sally Wainwright/Sarah Lancashire series about a Yorkshire policewoman, returning after seven years to complete its story.  I’m not generally a fan of British (or American) police procedurals, but this one is more fixed on characterization than solving crimes.  With this next to her series playing Julia Child, Lancashire begins to seem like an English Meryl Streep, able to inhabit any character.  James Norton adds complexity to his role as her sociopath adversary.  The plot is twisty, the suspense constant, the family relations complex, the wit a big plus, as is the bleakly beautiful location.
 
While on AMC+, I took the opportunity to watch Lucky Hank (MC-70), since it starred Bob Odenkirk and was based on a book I really enjoyed, Richard Russo’s campus comedy Straight Man.  Odenkirk is always watchable, this time as the chair of a college English department, and Mireille Enos is good as his wife, but the other faculty members tend toward caricature.  Some of the banter and situations are funny, but don’t go very deep.  And at eight 45-minute episodes, it’s stretched pretty thin.   
 
As with most films she’s in, Sally Hawkins is reason enough to see The Lost King (MC-64, AMC+), with actor/screenwriter Steve Coogan and director Stephen Frears striving to recapture the magic of Philomena, with another female quest based on a true story.  This one’s about the 2012 discovery and unearthing of the body (and reputation) of Richard III, refuting Shakespeare’s Tudor propaganda, largely due to the research and persistence of one determined woman.  As a nonprofessional she confronts academic and political resistance, and then is sidelined when her hunches prove accurate.  Like Hawkins’ character my daughter has ME, and my son is archaeologist in the U.K., so this inoffensive comedy drama pushed a lot of buttons for me, so I may have enjoyed it more than it strictly deserves.
 
[Prime Video]
 
Amazon Prime is a different sort of premium channel, in that it comes as a premium for a free shipping subscription.
 
First off, I should note that Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, one of the best films of 2022, is now free on Prime, my comment is here.
 
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck team up yet again for Air (MC-73), in a generally entertaining film that may be taken as a two-hour commercial for Nike.  It can also be taken as a comedy that uses an unholy alliance of sports and business to provide a stage for a lot of engaging actors.  Affleck indulges in self-satire as the head of Nike, while Damon puts on weight and bland clothes as the scout who goes all in on NBA draftee Michael Jordan, after obsessively replaying his last-second shot for the NCAA championship (you know the one, NC vs Georgetown, 1982).  Jordan does not really figure in the film otherwise, as the negotiating focus is on his mother, played by the redoubtable Viola Davis.  I grudgingly respect Michael and his achievements, but it’s hard for me to get excited about a basketball shoe that has made billions.
 
Chinonye Chukwe’s Till (MC-79) is an honorable if somewhat Hollywood-ized retelling of the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Chicago-native Emmett Till, for whistling at a white woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi.  The film focuses on his mother Mamie, in a performance by Danielle Deadwyler that lifts the whole production out of pedestrian good intentions, though it may overstate her role in initiating the civil rights movement.  Certainly her decision to have his funeral in Chicago with an open casket, to show the manner in which he was brutalized, provided a galvanizing moment in the movement, presenting a graphic demonstration of the demonic force of racism, a legacy confirmed by the 2022 passage of the long-delayed federal Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Law.
 
Ticket to Paradise (MC-50) – George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Kaitlyn Dever, picturesque Australia standing in for Bali – what’s not to like?  Many were disappointed that this old-fashioned “comedy of remarriage” was not better than it was, but I enjoyed it more than I expected, perhaps because my expectations were low.  There’s a White Lotus vibe about the ritzy vacation location, but little of the wit and bite.
 
The Planet Earth team, fronted by David Attenborough, explores its native turf in Wild Isles (MC-83) which looks into various nooks and crannies of the British Isles, finding plenty of beauty and wonder.
 
Judy Blume Forever (MC-79) is a charming multidimensional portrait of the author most famous for the groundbreaking realism of her children’s books, which got them banned back in the 80s and even today, when they are quite tame by current standards of YA genres.
 
I leave it for you to discover which premium streaming channels are actually worth sampling.

Doing the Hulu again

While Hulu is no longer a staple of my streaming diet, I do find it worthwhile to toggle my subscription on and off several times a year.  I’ve highlighted their large back catalog of classic tv series, but also praised their selection of recent foreign films, which I feared would cease with their acquisition by Disney.  So I’ll start with a reassuring number of those.
 
The Quiet Girl (MC-89) is a sad and lovely Irish film about an adorable but neglected 9-year-old colleen with three older sisters and several younger siblings, a feckless father, and an overburdened mother.  She’s sent to stay on her mother’s cousin’s farm, where the Irish-speaking couple is still dealing with the grief and confusion of losing their young son.  Emotional defenses yield to mutual affection over the course of a summer, in this quietly moving and superbly acted film by first-time writer-director Colm Bairéad, which deserved its Oscar nod, and even more acclaim.  Exquisite and heart-breaking -- see it to believe it.  Could be my favorite film from 2022.
 
It’s odd for me to be as far from the critical consensus as with Saint Omer (MC-91), the Alice Diop film about a Senegalese immigrant to France accused of murdering her infant daughter.  Mostly in frontal real-time testimony or argument, seemingly taken from an actual trial transcript, the ambiguous motives for the admitted act are explored.  As a filmgoer I’m usually willing to eat my spinach, but I expect more nourishment than this film delivered.  Maybe my problem is that I am neither an immigrant nor a mother.
 
I have to recuse myself from judging Broker (MC-77) because I nodded off momentarily at several points, which may in itself be a judgment.  But in my somewhat-blinkered viewing, I have to say that great Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda failed to translate the sublime success of Shoplifters into this South Korean film about a similarly suspect “family” of lowlifes, in this case baby stealers who make off with an infant abandoned in a church’s “baby box.”  In attempts to sell the child, they are joined by his mother, who has worse crimes to worry about.  They are being followed and set up by a pair of investigators, two perpetually snacking women on stakeout.  I missed Kore-eda’s trademark warmth and humor in dire situations, and shockingly failed to feel much for his characters, so for me this does not join his roster of masterpieces.  (P.S.: To support the contention that “even Homer sometimes nods,” I caught up with another Kore-eda non-masterpiece, the odd and uncharacteristic Air Doll (2009, MC-67, CC), about a Pinocchio-like sex doll who yearns to be a real girl, with a charming lead and some touching moments but overall quite misguided.)
 
I went into Official Competition (MC-79) under the mistaken impression it was an Almadóvar film, because it stars Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas (along with the less-familiar Oscar Martinez).  Though made in Spain, it was written and directed by a group of unknown-to-me Argentines.  I enjoyed it as a send-up of the pomposities and idiocies of film folk, from producer to director to stars, as they rehearse a movie in cavernous empty modernist spaces, managing to take advantage of the Covid constraints of production.  It’s very much an inside game, delicious for cognoscenti, boldly designed and played, surprising and funny, but perhaps overlong.
 
I’m glad that Hulu still offers international films such as Both Sides of the Blade (MC-72), but it didn’t do much for me.  I’ve never really bought into the appeal of highly-esteemed director Claire Denis, but I certainly respond to the appeal of Juliette Binoche, so I was content to watch as she, playing a Parisian radio host during Covid, wavers in affairs with two men who are business partners.  Denis establishes a mood, but hardly constructs a story or delves into character.
 
Turning to recent English language films, I most enjoyed Rye Lane (MC-83), a brilliantly entertaining rom-com by Raine Allen-Miller, much in the walk-and-talk, getting-to-know-you vein of Before Sunrise (one of my very favorite films).  In this case, the well-met couple are Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson, two extremely appealing Black Britishers, and the neighborhood they perambulate is increasingly-hip South London, from galleries to open-air markets to karaoke bars.  It’s getting hard to find a first-class rom-com these days, but this one fits the bill.

I credit Richard Brody of The New Yorker for hipping me to Pinball (MC-64), which has gone largely unnoticed, but ranks as another first-rate rom-com, though as a faux-documentary it has the subtitle The Man Who Saved the Game.  Roger (played by Mike Faist, having made a splash as Riff in Spielberg’s West Side Story) is a fledgling writer in 1970s NYC, who turns his passion for pinball into a magazine article, then a book, and then a political mission to overturn the city’s ban on the machines.  The older Mr. Sharpe (Dennis Boutsikaris, familiar from Better Call Saul) is being interviewed for the “documentary” and steps into the frame with his former self to correct the filmmakers’ misrepresentations.  Crystal Reed is the delightfully different love interest.  This is the clever and amusing debut feature of the writer-director team “The Bragg Brothers,” of whom great things may be expected.
 

For me, Linoleum (MC-80) falls into the category of interesting misfire, giving off a comic sci-fi vibe before turning into something totally different in its final scene.  Writer-director Colin West’s film is clever and ultimately quite moving, with fine actors led by Rhea Seehorn and Jim Gaffigan, but might have benefited from another hand, an eye from outside.  If you like films that are baffling till a final plot twist, then this might appeal to you.  [Spoiler alert!]  All the film’s enigmas and inconsequentialities are resolved by the perhaps-insufficiently-telegraphed ending, where we find out the foregoing was all transpiring in the mind of a dying man with dementia.  Maybe it would help to know that going in.
 
Buried on Hulu you can also find some highly-rated documentaries, most recently Riotsville USA (MC-82) and Hold Your Fire (MC-82).  The former focuses on archival footage of a mock town created in the Sixties for military training in response to civil disturbance, largely racialized, but drags it out with polemical narration.  I do wonder, however, if the military is now similarly training to combat white supremacist violence. 
 
The latter is also racially based, about a Dog Day Afternoon-like standoff in 1973 between NYC police and four Black men holed up in a sporting goods store from which they were attempting to steal guns.  In Stefan Forbes’ extremely effective film, thriller-like yet reflective, the hostage negotiator emerges as the hero, but many voices are heard and a multi-dimensional perspective on the event emerges, with wider implications.  Despite identical MC ratings, Hold Your Fire is an immeasurably better film in exploring the legacies of civil unrest.
 
Moving to FX-on-Hulu original series, I start with two new seasons of shows that made my best of 2022 list, a reboot of one from my all-time top ten, and a sleeper likely to make my list for 2023, which cumulatively are keeping me subscribed for longer than expected.
 

There was a question about the second season of The Bear (MC-92) – how could they keep up the pace?  The pace of a fast-food restaurant, the pace of the performances and direction, the pace of family dysfunction.  The genius decision of show creator Christopher Storer was to tear it down and start all over again, with the phoenix-like emergence of a new restaurant, and with a broader canvas of characters and situations.  As the NYT critic noted, the first season was a foxhole war story set in a kitchen, and second is a sports story set in a kitchen, all about a team training together for excellence, and to be their own best selves.  All the former players return, with broader roles, along with a host of new characters, many cameo-ed by startlingly-familiar faces (word must have gotten out that this was a show to be part of.) Appropriately, this season starts with the title card “Part Two,” since it’s clear they were conceived as a totality (with much more to come, we hope).  The show is as fast-paced and funny as Succession, but with a much warmer heart despite the family craziness, which rings all sorts of bells for this Italian-American.  I found the whole series well worth a second look, to unpack some of the situations and dialogue that go flying by.  Two particular grace notes are the music choices and the interludes of Chicago sights, enhanced by drone footage in the second season, plus a side trip to Copenhagen.  See this one, if you possibly can.

The much-acclaimed third season of Reservation Dogs (MC-95) is currently underway.  By the final update of this post, I’ve seen all of the series except the final two episodes, and feel confident proclaiming its greatness.  The fact that it’s an all-Indigenous production just adds spice to the depth of its characters and intricacy of its storytelling in presenting a portrait of a community.  The ethnic difference is illuminating, but the feelings are universal.    Funny and penetrating, like The Bear, this is a show that requires attention and rewards a second viewing.  [Prior seasons of these two shows reviewed here.]
 
In my all-time Top Ten of TV series, Breaking Bad took the #1 spot by coming back as Better Call Saul, and both Deadwood and Borgen cemented their places with subsequent revivals.  Sorry I can’t say the same about Justified: City Primeval (MC-79).  Detroit is prime Elmore Leonard territory, but doesn’t have the flavor of Harlan County.  Timothy Olyphant scores again as Raylan Givens, even if inserted into a story that is not his, but this time his adversary is a straight psychopath without the charm of Walton Goggins as alter-ego.  No Joelle Carter as the woman between them, and as the teen girl in the story Olyphant’s daughter is no match for Kaitlyn Dever.  But the missing secret sauce may be the originating showrunner Graham Yost, rendering this series just another reasonably well-made cop show and not a justifiable reboot.  (Here’s where I left the series back in 2015.)  And now I’ve grudgingly watched to the end, resenting the betrayal of one of my favorite shows, and the criminal misuse of the appealing actress from another (Adelaide Clemens of Rectify).  This is a limited series in every sense of the word, and I won’t be back for more, even with the teasing conclusion.  Let’s let Raylan retire in peace, and not traduce his memory any more.
 
After a number of Emmy nominations, and announcement of a second season arriving in September, I caught up with Welcome to Wrexham (MC-75), which I had imagined to be a pale imitation of Ted Lasso, with American stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny buying a Welsh soccer team.  Many of the pleasures are the same, true, but this documentary series is definitely its own thing – imaginative, funny, and moving.  I never expected to watch all 18 episodes, but I did and now look forward to the second season.  With variable runtimes of 20-47 minutes, each episode marches through the season but branches off into different personalities and situations, with the two stars providing a through line but fading into the background of many different characters, all exploring the passions of British football in a manner that was more engrossing than I could have guessed going in.  After one episode, the second season promises to build upon the first in must-see fashion.

Two more Hulu original series were made watchable by their lead actresses.  Kathryn Hahn, always so likably unlikable, is at the center of Tiny Beautiful Things (MC-73), based on the sort-of-memoir by Cheryl Strayed - subtitled Advice on Life and Love from “Dear Sugar” - in which her life unfolds in comic but pointed counterpoint to her advice column for the lovelorn.  Also with Merritt Wever, this spinoff from the book and film Wild passes the time enjoyably enough but is not worth seeking out.

 
Likewise, Beth Powley anchors A Small Light (MC-83), a worthy but uninspired retelling of the Anne Frank story from the perspective of Miep Gies, an employee of Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber) who helped the family survive in hiding.  It’s a quality television production, but short of cinematic in approach.
 
Disney+ happened to be a cheap add-on to Hulu for one month, so I took the opportunity to watch the latest Oscar-nominated Pixar animation, Turning Red (MC-83), a fairly broad metaphor for a Chinese-Canadian girl getting her period, as she turns into a giant red panda whenever her emotions are stirred.   Domee Shi breaks ground as the first solo female director for Pixar features, following her Oscar-winning success with the short Bao (also on Disney+), and proves a compelling new voice.
 
I also enjoyed Rise (MC-74), the story of how Giannis Antetokounmpo and his brothers completed a long journey from Nigeria through Greece to NBA stardom.  Well acted, with credible hoops action, it shows how the sweet Freak became Greek, and went on to become one of the most admirable of sports stars.
 
Aside from a couple of shorts, I didn’t find much else new to see on Disney+.  After checking out the trailers, I couldn’t bring myself to watch either the highly-regarded Andor or Wakanda Forever – just not my thing.  But if you ever choose to bundle Disney+ with Hulu, don’t miss Hamilton or the Beatles’ documentary Get Back.  The ad-free option of Hulu itself certainly warrants a month’s subscription now and then, and it’s easy to pause for up to 12 weeks at a time and recover it whenever you want.