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.