Net-flix-ations III

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (MC-83) brought me back to Netflix for its day of release, and brought Nick Park and Aardman Animation back to their glory days, with the return of the wacky inventor and his canny canine companion.  Animation has moved largely to CGI over the past two decades, but Aardman retains their handmade quality in malleable clay figures on custom-built sets.  The nonstop wit remains, in tiny details and sweeping cinematic scenes, as well as the endearing relation between the title characters.  Wallace’s invention of a garden-gnome odd-job robot threatens to come between them, until Gromit solves the problem, as he usually does.  A diamond-heist villain returns to raise the stakes and provide wild action sequences.  Love the canal boat chase sequence!  Perhaps this wouldn’t be a bad intro to W&G, but I advise starting with their string of Oscar-winning shorts from the 1990s.
 
Writer-director Nathan Silver breaks out of the indie ghetto with Between the Temples (MC-83).  I can imagine the elevator pitch, “It’s A Serious Man meets Harold and Maude – picture Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane as the leads.”  And lead they do – to quite a funny and touching mélange of satire and romance.  He’s a cantor who lost his voice when he lost his wife, in a fall on the ice of upstate NY.  Living in his “moms’” basement, in desperation he goes into a bar, has some unfamiliar drinks, gets into a scuffle, and is rescued by an older woman in similarly desperate straits.  She turns out to be his grade school music teacher, and soon asks the cantor to prepare her for a long-denied bat mitzvah, which becomes a redemptive bond between them.  Carol Kane is marvelous in the role, and Schwartzman inhabits the skin of the schlubby cantor.  Shot and edited in a jagged style that can be hard to watch but ultimately conveys an effective intimacy, this film includes a lot of good Jewish jokes, verbal and visual, and a fair share of heartfulness.
 
I Used to Be Funny (MC-74) is definitely the Rachel Sennott show, as she plays her character, a stand-up comedian in Toronto, both before and after a traumatic event, which is arrived at circuitously in the back-and-forth narrative.  First-time writer-director Ally Pankiw honed her chops on the excellent Mae Martin series Feel Good, and maintains the balance of comedy and drama here, working in a number of contemporary themes.  A good and honest effort, this film is watchable but not unmissable.
 
Cunk on Life (MC-75) offers more of the same after Cunk on Earth (reviewed here).  Not much to add other than I laughed a lot, continuing to enjoy Diane Morgan’s portrayal of clueless tv presenter Philomena Cunk, and the assorted British academics she pranks with ridiculous questions.  Not sure which to recommend – Earth was a well-structured series of six half-hour episodes, Life is a 71-minute potpourri of afterthoughts.  Best to watch both.
 
I wasn’t pre-sold on A Man on the Inside (MC-75), but recommendations from two couples who are fellow shoppers for a retirement community, plus its inspiration by the celebrated Chilean documentary The Mole Agent, were enough for me to give it a try.  Which I never did to creator Mike Schur’s previous series The Good Place or Brooklyn Ninety-Nine (though I was very fond of his co-creation Parks & Recreation).  So I was somewhat surprised by how much I liked this gentle comedy-mystery about aging.  Ted Danson holds it all together as a retired engineering professor and recent widower, who’s hired by a private investigator to go undercover into a well-appointed San Francisco old-folks home to solve a series of thefts, and incidentally to interact with a variety of staff and residents.  While funny at times and moving at times, the clincher here is truthfulness of characterization.  The series doesn’t overstay its welcome in eight roughly-half-hour episodes, but I’d have to be lured back for further seasons, which are already teased.
 
With its 13 Oscar noms outweighing my suspicion that it was not my sort of film, I took a look at Emilia Perez (MC-71).  And my conclusion was – that it’s not my sort of film, but nonetheless has some redeeming qualities.  Largely, the cast of women who collectively won Best Actress at Cannes, and particularly Oscar nominees Zoe Saldana and Karla Sofia Gascon.  The latter plays a Mexican drug lord who transitions into the eponymous female activist trying to ameliorate some of the violence he was responsible for in the past.  The former is a brilliant but underappreciated lawyer who is recruited as consigliere.  Jacques Audiard’s film is a wild mix of genres -- musical, thriller, melodrama – which was enough to keep me watching, but less than enthralled or convinced.
 
Saturday Night (MC-63) is a hectically-paced 90-minute run-up to the debut of Saturday Night Live in 1975, a show destined to die a chaotic early death that has somehow endured for 50 years.  I approached Jason Reitman’s film with some skepticism but was won over by its fast-paced recreation of a seminal moment in TV history.  Most of the central cast is unfamiliar (though Rachel Sennott is becoming better known), but surprisingly reminiscent of the original characters.  The currently familiar faces (e,g, Willem Dafoe, J.K. Simmons, and Nicholas Braun) are all in hilarious cameos.  Maybe you had to “be there” at the creation to appreciate this fond and funny retelling, but it certainly got a marginal “thumb up” from me.
 
With this month of Netflix, I watched the second season of Top Boy (MC-86) from British TV in 2013.  When I return for future months, I’ll go on to the three subsequent seasons produced by Netflix.  For now, all I’ll say is that this UK clone of The Wire is not humiliated by the comparison, at least as far as the drug dealing storyline goes.  It will be interesting to see if the remaining seasons broaden their focus, in the way that The Wire did so memorably.
 
Netflix was once, back in DVD days, the be-all and end-all of viewer choice, and then had a brief phase of throwing money at all kinds of content providers, including genuine auteurs, but now has settled into an algorithmic content-provider that does not rank among the top three (or five?) streaming channels for quality.  As of now, I’m cancelling until they give me a solid reason to renew.
 
Speaking of once-substantial streaming channels that have really given up on producing or offering outstanding content, there’s Amazon Prime.  Hard to find much worth watching there (plus having to endure commercials), but I was drawn to The Road Dance (MC-54) by its setting in the Outer Hebrides a century ago, then put off by its low Metacritic rating.  But casually browsing one time, I thought to give it a try, and surprisingly watched the whole film.  The location, already familiar from the writings of Robert Macfarlane, was indeed appealing, as was the unfamiliar lead actress, Hermione Corfield.  Both were pretty as a picture, and enough to keep me watching all the way through a rather familiar melodrama of love, sex, childbirth, and war.

P.S.  On the day my Netflix cancellation took effect, I read a NYT rave about Asura (MC-89), a new Japanese series on the channel.  It had been out for three weeks, and if I had known that it was directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, a particular favorite of mine, I would surely have watched immediately.  Despite its vaunted algorithm, Netflix never even showed me the title, in the endless scroll of its home page, let alone recommend it to me based on my past viewing.  Critics already anointing the series as the best of 2025 may induce Netflix to give the show more visibility, but its unceremonious dumping says something about the economic imperatives of what the channel is pushing.  Despite my ragging on Netflix, there is a ton of worthwhile viewing there, if you dig for it amid what’s dumped on you.  You need to know what to search for, and that’s a service I aim to provide.

Counting on Criterion

With a bargain annual subscription, I don’t feel the need to pause the Criterion Channel during months when I’m not that deep into watching their offerings, because I’ll always have plenty to catch up on when I turn my attention that way.  After a season when political, baseball, and basketball races consumed so much of my viewing time, I returned to some serious cinematic exploration.
 
We’ll start with some of Criterion’s recent “Exclusive Premieres,” and then survey the monthly collections that I have recently dipped into.
 
After his Oscar-winning Drive My Car, I put Ryusuki Hamaguchi on my list of must-watch directors.  First, I tracked down his earlier films Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Happy Hour.  And now Criterion offers his latest award-winner Evil Does Not Exist (MC-83).  To tell the truth, I had some problems with the beginning and the ending, but in-between I was as usual entranced by his work.  A long tracking shot upwards through a forest canopy makes for a very extended credit sequence, and what follows are protracted scenes of a solitary rural workman sawing wood and then collecting water from a stream, which seem designed to school the viewer in patience and attentiveness, but do pay off handsomely later in the film.  It makes sense that this film started out as a short to accompany a musical score by Eiko Ishibashi, then developed into a feature.  When dialogue actually starts, it bursts out like an action movie, as locals debate the prospect of a new glamping project that will impact the very nature of their community.  With his usual evenhandedness, Hamaguchi turns villains into sympathetic characters, with seeming heroes resorting to highly-questionable behavior.  Watching this, be prepared to wait for the light but expect darkness to descend.
 
On the other hand, Catherine Breillat is not a director who attracts my interest, but I was willing to give Last Summer (MC-75) a try, and I didn’t regret it, mainly for the lead performance of Léa Drucker.  She plays a lawyer who deals in sex abuse cases, but finds herself in an explicitly-illegal affair with her 17-year-old stepson.  This “Summer” is hot but more dry than wet.  We may wonder “what does she think she’s doing?” but the actress somehow retains our sympathy despite the filmmaker’s rather unpleasant intentions.  Is that ambivalent enough for you?
 
Here (MC-92) follows an ambling man at an ambling pace, but this Bas Devos film certainly arrives at its chosen destination.  It’s slow, but short and sweet – at first I didn’t get it, but eventually I loved it.  He’s a Romanian workman on construction sites in Brussels, about to go home for a vacation, uncertain whether he will return, clearing out his refrigerator to make soup for a round of friends.  She’s a Chinese academic working on a doctoral thesis about mosses.  They’re both very reticent, but the connection is elemental, in the fugitive greenery of a concrete jungle.  The visual and sound design are precise and evocative, the performers attractive and engaging, the film a delicate but delicious concoction.
 
Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (MC-80) derives from a Henry James novella, but in a mélange of genres that don’t generally appeal to me, from sci-fi to stalker film, and the trailer suggests an outright horror film.  Nonetheless, Léa Seydoux holds it all together and makes the extended runtime tolerable, as she and her counterpart George MacKay meet and hesitantly woo in three different timeframes: 1910 Paris, 2014 California, and a 2044 dominated by AI.  Surprised to see the film come in at #5 for 2024 in Film Comment’s critics poll, I was not immune to its appeal and its inventive visual sense, but I’m not tempted to a second viewing to make more sense of it.  It was enough to spend 2½ hours in the seductive company of Ms. Seydoux.
 
It's been almost a decade since I set foot in a movie theater, but if there’s one film I would have preferred to see on a big screen, it’d be Songs of Earth (MC-85).  I’d take my typical front-&-center seat and just immerse myself in its sights and sounds.  Margreth Olin invites us to spend a year in the company of her elderly parents amidst the remote farming village where her family has lived for hundreds of years, set among the glacial glories of a Norwegian fjord.  And she rewards us with a sublime evocation of a transcendental landscape, literally following the footsteps of her 84-year-old father to wondrous sights, macro and micro, animal and mineral, especially with exquisite drone footage, through a cycle of seasons beautifully orchestrated by natural and musical sounds.  The father’s wisdom and the parents’ enduring relationship, embedded in a long history of place and people, rounds off this superlative film.  It’s a delightful cinematic treat for any viewer in a contemplative state of mind, an armchair journey to the ruggedly beautiful top of the world.  This is the sort of offering that makes the Criterion Channel indispensable.
 
Chicken for Linda! (MC-84) is a French animated film about a mother and child trying to recall the dead husband and father by making his favorite dish, chicken with peppers.  This being France, they are thwarted by a general strike that means no chicken is available, which leads to a caper and a police chase, among other raucous goings-on.  The slight premise is enlivened by simple hand-drawn animation in a busy Fauvist color scheme, along with musical numbers.  The look is highly distinctive, the story somewhat scattered, but nonetheless funny and touching.
 
Though Iran has largely suppressed its internationally-acclaimed filmmakers, a new voice emerges with Terrestrial Verses (MC-83) by a directorial pair who compiled this clever satirical amalgam of nine minimalist vignettes that illuminate the constraints imposed by the fundamentalist regime.  The effect is both maddening and hilarious, as some unseen functionary confronts a hapless petitioner with a roundabout rationale for why their request cannot be granted, whether it be naming a child or obtaining a driver’s license or getting a job or retrieving a dog.  We are put in the position of the unseen, unsympathetic official staring balefully at a citizen trying to understand the ever-shifting rules of the game.  Nobody gets beaten with a truncheon, but everybody gets beaten down, in an outrageous manner that is often laugh-out-loud funny.
 
The only streaming channel that comes anywhere close to having as many exclusive premieres of off-beat excellence as Criterion is MUBI, but the latter is worth only the occasional month’s subscription, while Criterion has enough depth and variety with its back catalogue and monthly collections to warrant an ongoing annual subscription.  Watch for a month’s worth of MUBI coming up.
 
Having fallen for Fallen Leaves, I’ve been on the lookout for earlier films by Aki Kaurismäki, and Criterion offered The Other Side of Hope (MC-84).  By now I’m familiar with his minimalist deadpan style, and receptive to the heart and humor that underlies it, which leads to “humane” as the epithet most commonly applied to the director.  This film tracks a Syrian refugee who arrives in Helsinki as a stowaway, and also follows a haberdashery salesman, who leaves his job and his wife to take over a sketchy restaurant.  The two stories eventually interweave, with interludes of Finnish street musicians between scenes.  Stylized the film may be, but it’s also an honest exploration of issues of immigration and reaction.
 
Turning to recent month-by-month collections on Criterion, I gravitated to “Lionel Rogosin’s Dangerous Docufictions,” but I think you’d need to have my lifelong interest in documentaries and predilection for neorealism to join me in seeking out the 1956 classic On the Bowery (Wiki).  In the tradition of Robert Flaherty, Rogosin does stage scenes with non-actors, but the film is a fascinating time capsule of NYC, redolent of the boozy breath of the Bowery’s denizens, in a portrayal of the desperate sorrows and fleeting joys of an outcast life.  Black Roots (Wiki) is an intriguing time capsule from 1970, a perspective on Black culture at the time, with street portraiture of Black faces, intercut with conversations among a group of Black activists and musicians.  That was so resonant an example of politically-engaged, no-budget filmmaking that I glanced at several more Rogosin films, but did not stick with any of them.
 
“Hitchcock for the Holidays” collected 19 of the maestro’s films, a great chance to take in a number of classics.  The one I was most eager to see again was Shadow of a Doubt (Wiki), highlighted by the performances of Theresa Wright and Joseph Cotton as “Charlie” and “Uncle Charlie,” the small-town niece gradually turning from adoration to suspicion of her worldly namesake.  With a minimum of violence, this humorous suspense film holds up with Hitchcock’s best, whom I’ve always admired as an artisan and entertainer, but rarely felt an affinity for as an artist.  Not sure how long this collection will linger on Criterion, but it’s a great opportunity to sample all the phases of Hitchcock’s career.

 
Similarly, in the “Pre-Code Columbia” collection, the one I wanted to see again was the standout 1932 film Forbidden (Wiki), directed by Frank Capra and starring Barbara Stanwyck.  Perhaps I was not quite as enamored of this as when in the throes of putting together my career summary of Stanwyck, but it’s still worth recommending.  She’s excellent as usual, and Adolphe Menjou very good as the ambitious politician with whom she has a lifelong secret relationship, but Ralph Bellamy is an irritant as the newspaper editor who makes trouble for them.
 
In an Ida Lupino collection I caught up with The Hard Way (Wiki) in which she plays a hard woman who rises from hardscrabble roots by ruthlessly stage managing the career of her talented younger sister (Joan Leslie), and lifts this film above the usual run of show biz backstories (this one supposedly based on Ginger Rogers’ bio).  Lupino referred to herself the “the poor man’s Bette Davis,” and Davis reportedly regretted passing up this role after she saw Lupino’s performance.  That was from 1943, but I watched three more of her films, all from 1941, and each confirms her actor-father’s judgment that she was “born to be bad,” a characterization she managed to escape by becoming a director herself.  In High Sierra (Wiki), opposite Humphrey Bogart, and The Sea Wolf (Wiki), opposite John Garfield, she plays thinly-veiled prostitutes on the run.  Returning to her British roots in Ladies in Retirement (Wiki), she’s a Victorian ladies companion, who turns to murder in desperation to keep her two “peculiar” sisters out of an institution.  All are watchable if you get pleasure from old Hollywood studio movies, but none is an unmissable classic.
 
I’ve always been averse to a simpering quality in the sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Haviland, but each of them did some good work outside of their routine performances, probably having to do with the quality of director they were working with.  Fontaine shows some surprising wit in Frenchman’s Creek (Wiki), Mitchell Leisen’s adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier novel.  This Restoration-era costume drama set in Cornwall is shot in eye-popping Technicolor and was in 1944 the most expensive film Paramount had ever made.  It’s sort of bodice-ripper in which no bodices are ripped, as Lady Dona’s romance with a French pirate seems rather chaste.  It’s all quite lush and absurd, a fitfully-amusing piece of wartime escapist entertainment.
 
Film history is my history, in more than one sense, and among the pleasures of seeing or re-seeing American movies from my younger years is being reminded of -or introduced to - the culture of the period.  But the main draw for Angel Face (Wiki), an Otto Preminger film noir from 1953, was Jean Simmons as the eponymous femme fatale.  Robert Mitchum is aloof and impassive, too tough to be taken in, but still caught in her web of intrigue.  Leon Ames steals the show as a fancy lawyer who knows how to play the jury for a not-guilty verdict.  This film has an amusing backstory as Howard Hughes’ revenge on Simmons for cutting off her hair to spite him – check out the stiff wigs she was made to wear all the way through.
 
One appeal of the Criterion Channel derives from its genetic connection with TCM, which provides retrospective window into 20^th century English-language film, and by now even those of the 90s are “oldies.”  Here are a couple of former favorites I was happy to revisit, both by directors who were among “10<50,” my film series at the Clark on its 50^th anniversary, celebrating the best directors under fifty.
 
Alexander Payne first broke through with Election (MC-83), which deserves inclusion on any list of the best films about politics, albeit about a student government contest in Omaha, Nebraska.  Reece Witherspoon was great as a go-getting high schooler, and startlingly young in retrospect.  Matthew Broderick was also first-rate as the teacher she bedevils.  The film holds up for hilarious satire, but seems even more incisive about the nature of our politics.  And Payne continues to make good films, up through The Holdovers so far.
 
Cameron Crowe followed up Say Anything with the equally-endearing Singles (MC-71), before hitting an early peak with Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, whose success he has not come close to matching since.  Singles follows a group of Seattle twentysomethings in the early grunge era, and boasts winning performances from Campbell Scott, Bridget Fonda, Matt Dillon, and Kyra Sedgwick.  Crowe’s period rom-com has a notable authenticity when compared to something like Reality Bites, where Ben Stiller wastes the likes of Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke.
 
Speaking of Hawke, another 90s film that seemed worth another look was Gattaca (MC-64), one of the rare sci-fi films that I remember liking.  And it’s certainly the pairing of Hawke with Uma Thurman - whom he would soon marry - that gives the film luster.  Along with Jude Law, some notable cameos, and the overall theme of genetic engineering.  Not sure Andrew Nicoll’s film held up on second look, but it’s certainly worth a first.
 
Going back to earlier collections, I watched some films that may have rotated off the channel by now.  Having found surprising depth in Linda Darnell, I thought to give another unfamiliar Forties star a chance.  I’m afraid I still can’t see the appeal of Gene Tierney, but I found Leave Her to Heaven (Wiki) quite interesting nonetheless.  Shading noir into Sirkian Technicolor melodrama, it offers lavishly photographed vacation spots in New Mexico, Georgia, and Maine, with Tierney insanely (indeed murderously) jealous of husband Cornel Wilde (hard to imagine all round).  One of the most popular films of the immediate post-WWII era, this is a (sometimes inadvertently) entertaining cultural time capsule.
 
The continuing relevance of the Scopes trial was highlighted in reviews of Brenda Wineapple’s recent book about it, Keeping the Faith.  So when Criterion’s collection of “Courtroom Dramas” included Inherit the Wind (Wiki), I gave it another look.  Written as a parable of McCarthyism in the 1950s, this play was filmed by Stanley Kramer, famous at the time for his middlebrow liberalism, and stars Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow’s stand-in, Fredric March as William Jennings Bryan’s, and a nondancing Gene Kelly as the acerbic journalist H.L. Mencken’s.  They’re all quite good, and the dramatized issues of militant fundamentalism seem up to the minute, even though the trial happened a century ago.
 
In the same collection, I was attracted by the cast of Runaway Jury (MC-61) even though it was directed by a guy I never heard of, and based on an author I’ve never deigned to read, even while selling lots of his books back in the day – John Grisham.  But John Cusack, Rachel Weisz, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman? – sounds like a must-see.  Unfortunately, no.  That group can keep you watching, but nothing else about the film seems at all plausible.  And given the continuing relevance of mass shootings, this legal drama about the culpability of gun manufacturers is tissue-thin.
 
That may be a downbeat end to a celebratory survey, but you can bet I’ll be back with further explorations of Criterion.  I’ll break off here and return soon with surveys of new releases on Kanopy and on Netflix, with Mubi on the horizon.
 

Bushels of Apple

I think it’s fair to refer to AppleTV+ as the new HBO, not having the most product in the pipeline, but what’s there is “cherce” (cf. Kate Hepburn in Pat and Mike).  My previous round-ups are here and here.  Some of their headliners do not appeal to me, but we’ll start with new seasons of three series I really like.
 
Sharon Horgan, as writer and lead actress, has been a must-watch for me since Catastrophe, so I was eager to see Bad Sisters (MC-76) come back for an unexpected second season (first reviewed here).  It did not disappoint, but I’m glad that Horgan considers the Garvey sisters’ story now complete.  The five of them were a delight from start to finish, but it’s good to know when a series has reached its limit.  Seasons one and two echo back and forth nicely, but another death for the sisters to confront collectively would have to be a manufactured mystery, and not the organic development of these two.  Season two returns most characters and adds several well-portrayed new ones.  The brilliance of the characterizations and comedy remain, as well as the attractive Irish setting.  I would draw a strong contrast between this and an anemic comic mystery series like Only Murders in the Building.
 
I was also eager for an unexpected second season of Pachinko (MC-87).  I liked the first season so much that I read the book, and wondered how they would come back for more.  And the series returns impressively, if not quite the revelation of the first go-round.  This saga about a Korean family living in Japan continues to span generations, following the matriarch from youth to old age in rapid time shifts.  The second season’s time frames switch between WWII and the end of the Japanese boom years in the 1980s.  There’s a new dance & music opening title sequence in a Pachinko parlor that rivals the Emmy-winner of the first season, and almost all the characters recur.  I renew my strong recommendation for this outstanding series.
 
The fourth season of Slow Horses (MC-82) was fully expected, but fully satisfying nonetheless.  These adaptations of Mick Herron’s Slough House spy novels are at the apex of franchise entertainment.  Stylish and kinetic, well-acted and well-shot, with welcome characters and attractive English settings (mainly London), these MI5 thrillers stand well above the typical run of British mystery series.  Count on many foot chase scenes and a final shootout, but also count on canny characterizations and a continuous current of humor.  Gary Oldman, Jack Lowden, and Kristin Scott Thomas remain to lead a stellar cast through its familiar yet still intriguing paces amidst the underbelly of spycraft.  Now we can expect more of such pleasures from two further seasons already in the works.
 
Alfonso Cuarón has made some great films, so I forgive him for Disclaimer (MC-70).  I wouldn’t mind if he had consumed a couple hours of my life for this potboiler, but 350 minutes over 7 episodes?  Give me a break.  I want at least half that time back.  He suckered me in with Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, teased me with Lesley Manville and a totally new look for “Borat.”  Then served up a total turd of a climax, which only made me recollect the mendacities of the preceding episodes.  A sad comedown for the creator of Y Tu Mamá También (the memory of which is cheapened by this takeoff) and Roma (a masterpiece of personal authenticity that shames this sham of a story), and many other worthy films in-between.  A lot of talent gets wasted here, and it’s sad that this is the sort of teleplay that can get financed these days, with resources that could have produced three deeper and more truthful films.
 
Apple also offers some feature films of interest.  With Fancy Dance (MC-77), I came for Lily Gladstone but came away impressed with Native American writer-director Erica Tremblay’s feature debut, after she had worked on some episodes of Reservation Dogs.  The film addresses several topical concerns, such as the disappearance of indigenous women.  Gladstone is the sister of one such, trying to search for her, while taking care of the 13-year-old niece endearingly played by Isabel Delroy-Olson, whose great hope is to be reunited with her mother for the grand Pow Wow that gives the film its name.  Gladstone resorts to some petty crime and enlists her niece in various cons to get by, until the authorities displace the child into the custody of a distant white grandfather.  The aunt abducts her in turn for a fraught road trip back to the Pow Wow.  The finale is gratifying in its own way, but hardly resolves all the issues raised by this promising film.
 
From the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave to the even-better Small Axe series of films, Steve McQueen has made some great cinema, but Blitz (MC-71) does not fall into that category.  There are some bravura visuals (which despite widescreen color and CGI effects have nothing on the great Humphrey Jennings documentary Fires Were Started), but the story is conventional, almost folkloric and sometimes decidedly Dickensian, about a child undergoing trials as he tries to make his way back to his mother.  She’s played by Saoirse Ronan, which is a plus, but the biracial boy did not impress me as he did some commentators, though he did give McQueen the opening to show some cracks in the myth of British solidarity under attack.  There are other good performances, but nothing to raise the film out of the ordinary, which is a disappointment from a director of this stature.
 
On a night when I didn’t want to strain my brain, I was happy to be entertained by George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the “cleaner” comedy Wolfs (MC-60), as each lone wolf is called into a messy matter that may harm Amy Ryan’s election as D.A. and they are compelled to work together while repelled by their very similarities.  The rapport of the leads is well-honed and it’s enjoyable to spend time in their company.  Nothing consequential, this is a lightweight entertainment that might hit the spot on a given night, if you haven’t already OD’ed on buddy comedies or this particular pair.
 
If you’re into nature documentaries, Apple has a notable new entry, The Secret Lives of Animals (MC-tbd) in ten half-hour episodes, true to the BBC brand but with Hugh Bonneville doing his best David Attenborough imitation. 
 
With lots of time left on my Apple free trial, I will no doubt have some postscript to this round-up.  But for now, I conclude my survey with Bread and Roses (MC-79), a film about Afghan women mounting resistance after the Taliban returned to power.  It’s mainly composed of cellphone video by the women themselves, so the film has immediacy, but little shape or coherence.  What comes across is how strange a place Afghanistan is, and how dire is the plight of women returned to a fundamentalist rule that deprives them of education, work, and even basic freedom of movement.
 
A second season of Colin from Accounts (MC-85) was enough to make a brief special offer from Paramount+Showtime seem worthwhile.  If, like me, you are a confirmed devotee of Catastrophe, then you owe it to yourself to seek out this Australian odd-couple comedy, created by and starring real-life couple Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer.  He is the 40ish proprietor of a Sydney brewpub, she is a 30ish medical intern.  Colin is the dog who brings them together and keeps them together.  Their coworkers and families fill out the roster of kooks who populate the show, as it oscillates between cringe comedy and authentic relationship drama, doing justice to both and remaining both wildly funny and fondly truthful.
 
Looking around for anything else to watch on P+, all I could recommend are some already-seen shows such as Couples Therapy and Freaks & Geeks.  But I was enthusiastic enough about the final season of the HBO series Somebody Somewhere that I was eager to see more of Bridget Everett, and P+ had her Comedy Channel cabaret act Gynecological Wonder (IMDb), which is infinitely raunchier, and hilariously shocking in its exuberant naughtiness.  Wondering whether the understated portrayal of the series or the raucously uninhibited comedy act was closer to her real personality, I watched some YouTube interviews that confirmed my impression that her routine was inspired by Bette Midler, as a consciously self-freeing effort to bring out a different side of her personality.  This may be too over-the-top for many, but I heartily recommend Somebody Somewhere for everybody.

In fairness P+ has added a lot of very good movies lately, but none I hadn’t seen.  They did have one offbeat film I couldn’t find elsewhere:  The Eternal Memory (MC-85) is the second Oscar-nominated documentary from Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi (The Mole Agent, recently fictionalized into the Netflix series Man on the Inside).  This one follows the struggle (and reward) of a long-time relationship, as one of the partners is gradually succumbing to Alzheimer’s.  He was an undercover journalist during the Pinochet regime and spent much of his subsequent career trying to prevent those years of dictatorship being memory-holed.  His second, younger wife is an actress who became culture minister in a later democratic administration, and now she tenderly cares for him as his mind slips away, in a medical drama that is also a love story and a political metaphor.