For convenience, economy, and
consumer guidance, I’ve taken to organizing my composite reviews by streaming
channel, but sometimes I stray from the channels of the moment, so under this
rubric I’ll catch some films or shows that I can’t let pass without comment.
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (MC-89, PBS) is spectacularly good in so many ways, so what do I praise first? The sheer spectacle of it all, I guess, but one must begin with Mark Rylance in the lead role of Thomas Cromwell – just watching his subtle facial expressions makes for six hours of top-notch viewing, so much thinking and feeling, as well as scheming by a master lawyer in a lawless time. Damian Lewis offers excellent support as Henry VIII, and the rest of the cast is equally effective. Screenwriter Peter Straughan has a better original to adapt in Hilary Mantel’s novel than he did in winning an Oscar for Conclave, and accomplished tv director Peter Kosminsky works well with the impeccable BBC design team to recreate the Tudor era. Mantel and Rylance conspire to make Cromwell a sympathetic and worldly-wise character. Henry and his six wives are an oft-told tale, but this series offers a unique and convincing perspective. It certainly helps to brush up on the history, since this version assumes at least a Cliff-Notes degree of familiarity with the characters and action. The sense of time and place is immersive, and the political maneuvering persuasive and enlightening. The series carries a special lesson in autocracy for an American audience at this freighted moment. I intend to watch this over again, already well into another look at its preceding series, both rich in every sense.
I’m extremely judgmental about films and shows derived from the life and work of my favorite novelist (see here and here), and Miss Austen (MC-73, PBS) passes the sniff test. In this case, the Miss Austen portrayed is more Cassandra than Jane, and the plot revolves around why the elder sister destroyed many of the younger’s letters, less out of primness than sororal solidarity. This series adapts one of Gill Hornby’s fan fictions about the Austens, and she’s clearly pretty scrupulous in her imaginings. Aisling Walsh is an accomplished director (Maudie). The surviving Aunt Cassy is well played by Keeley Hawes, whose reading of Jane’s letters triggers flashbacks, in which Patsy Ferran makes a highly-credible Jane, witty and “wicked,” and Synnove Karlsen an endearing Cassy. This series has all the virtues of BBC period pieces, especially acting and historical design, with few of the vices.
The new David Mitchell comic mystery Ludwig (MC-78) was enough to draw me back to Britbox for a month. Not to slight costar Anna Maxwell Martin or writer Mark Brotherhood, both excellent, but this is Mitchell’s show. As “Ludwig” (cue the Beethoven soundtrack), he’s a famous “puzzle-setter,” but in real life the reclusive (probably “on the spectrum”) twin of a Cambridge DCI who has abruptly disappeared. Martin as the latter’s wife, and the former’s childhood friend, calls him to come and impersonate his missing brother, so they can decode the message he left. Mitchell always plays a character who is uncomfortable in his own skin, perpetually feeling like an imposter, so the role fits him like a glove. While looking for clues in his brother’s office, he’s roped into a murder investigation, where his puzzle-solving skills deduce the culprit. He proceeds to solve one murder after another, and quite likes the game and the admiration gained by solving one per episode, while the mystery of his missing brother threads through all six, not so much resolved as used to tease a second season, which I’d definitely be up for. Meanwhile, I take this opportunity to re-re-recommend David Mitchell’s earlier series Peep Show, Upstart Crow, and Back.
I have a fondness for British sitcoms like Gavin & Stacey (MC-79) and wrote about the show here. It ran 2007-10 and returned for a Christmas special in 2019, and again for an explicit finale in 2024, now on Britbox. Show creators and stars James Corden and Ruth Jones certainly conjured up the spirit of the original series in this feature-length follow-up, cleverly resolving the various storylines. I also enjoyed the cast farewell bonus episode (fun to see them out of character, especially Nessa), almost as much as the one for Doc Martin. I urge you to give a look to both of these long-running and beloved British series.
With great timing, a series I’d been searching for just turned up on Britbox. Motherland (MC-70) was originated by Sharon Horgan (of Catastrophe and Bad Sisters) but she doesn’t appear in it, with the aforementioned Anna Maxwell Martin in the comic lead role of an overstressed working mother, Diane Morgan (aka “Philomena Cunk”) as her sardonic sidekick, and Lucy Punch as the alpha mom of the group, as they congregate at the schoolyard gates or in local tea shops. At first the show seemed a little broad for my taste, but once the characters and situations were established, funny enough to bring me back for two further seasons. This series is worth looking into if you’re a fan of British comedy, but if you’re a newbie, the nonpareil on Britbox is Mum, which I can’t recommend often enough.
I’m less keen on British mystery series, but I made an exception for Sherwood (MC-87), which is not so much a police procedural like Law & Order (the UK equivalent may be Line of Duty, though I confess to never having watched a single episode of either) but more a collective portrait of a divided community (like The Wire, though not quite in that league). Show creator James Graham infuses the series with an in-depth feel for his native Nottingham and delivers well-rounded characters in intricately interwoven plots. The second series connects with but moves on from the first, the only problem being less Lesley Manville. David Morrissey returns but has left the police for a social service position, though he is drawn back in as a gang war heats up. Effectively acted and produced, this series has been renewed for a third season, and has an added fillip of interest for me, as my son interviews for a position in the archaeology department of the University of Nottingham.
Nickel Boys (MC-91, MGM+) has to be one of the least likely Best Picture nominees in Oscar history (unless voters just heard it was like Moonlight and didn’t even bother to see it). I didn’t read the Colson Whitehead novel on which RaMell Ross based this idiosyncratic, imagistic exercise, so I can’t speak to the film’s fidelity to the text, or its underlying intelligibility. I wasn’t on board with the film’s primary stylistic kink, shot mostly in first-person POV, so we don’t even see the two boys who are the main characters, until they meet and see each other at a segregated reform school in early-Sixties Florida. And that’s far from the only stylistic kink, from the old-fashioned aspect-ratio to the eccentric camera angles to the associative editing with old movies like The Defiant Ones or news footage of civil rights protests and moonshots. While often hypnotically mysterious, the approach is also frequently opaque and incomprehensible. It’s an experimental film dragged out to well over two hours, whose primary allegiance seems to be to the filmmaker’s ingenuity rather than the social reality it seeks to engage. The two boys are well-played by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, but they are frustratingly never seen together. Anjanue Ellis-Taylor has the most satisfactory role as one boy’s grandmother. So did Ross get in the way of the material, or did he add another dimension of artistry? I don’t know, you’ll have to decide for yourself.
I was drawn to In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon (MC-80, MGM+) as much by prolific director Alex Gibney as by the subject of the documentary, and both delivered. I gather this started as documentation of Simon recording his Covid-era album Seven Psalms, and grew to a 3½ hour retrospective of his entire career, half with Art Garfunkel and half on his own. I was more engrossed by the resonant historical parts than the artfully interspersed scenes of the recording process, which more than anything reminded me that I have no idea how music is actually made. But I know what I like, and back when I listened to music more avidly, Simon & Garfunkel were often on my turntable. (Now I’ll have to listen to the new album on Spotify.) Though I draw a blank on most music of recent decades, I do enjoy documentaries that revive old favorites or latterly introduce me to underappreciated artists of my own cohort, like Leonard Cohen or Tom Petty.
Look, I read the Russell Banks novel on which Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada (MC-65, Kanopy) was based, no easy task in itself, but I can’t imagine that anyone who hasn’t read the book could make heads or tales out of this film, which just compounds the bewildering swings of a dying old man’s recollections. The dying old man, however, is Richard Gere, and his younger wife is Uma Thurman, so one is assured of some watchability, through a complicated scheme of flashbacks and fabulations. Gere plays a distinguished documentarian who has consented to being filmed by some former students, not to accommodate them, but to make an on-camera confession to his wife about the manifold sins of his former life. He abandoned two former wives and children and evaded the draft during the Vietnam War, before achieving respectability in Canada. In his drugged, near-death state he loses the thread, and so does the viewer, but some old sins and harsh truths get told, as is the rule in Schrader’s work.
There are a lot of films out there about bonding between humans and animals, both documentaries and dramatizations, and Every Little Thing (MC-74, Kanopy) is a decent entry among the docs, following author Terry Masear’s relationship with hummingbirds. In addition to writing a book about them, she’s turned her Hollywood Hills home into a hospital and sanctuary for the birds, which are lovely to watch in slo-mo flights, accented by time-lapse sequences of the blooming flowers that attract them. Sally Aitken’s film is low-key, slow-moving, and somewhat padded to feature length, but worth watching in the right frame of mind.
Besides wide-ranging and free with a participating library card, Kanopy has a menu system that is quite conducive to discovering unsuspected titles. For me, one such was She Came to Me (MC-53), a new film from Rebecca Miller (Arthur’s daughter), whose films I inevitably like much more than their MetaCritic rating. Her plots tend toward the fanciful, mixed in genre but anchored in emotional truth and excellent acting. And this one is no exception, a combination of rom-com and relationship drama with an artsy veneer. Peter Dinklage is a blocked opera composer, Anne Hathaway his therapist-turned-wife, and Marisa Tomei a revelation as a tugboat captain with whom he has a brief but consequential affair. His teenage stepson is in love with the daughter of his compulsive wife’s housekeeper, and their young love is the foil for all the grown-ups’ obsessions. This is screwball with a screw loose, romance with a twist and something on its mind. In the right mindset, it’s an oddity that delivers modest delight. More of Miller and Tomei, please.
I don’t watch much on Prime Video, but I took look at Étoile (MC-69, AMZ) based on its ballet theme and it’s being made by the couple who created Gilmore Girls, from which this series derives its rapid-fire patter. The production values are quite spectacular, centered on Lincoln Center and the Paris Opera, as the two fictional ballet companies, led by Luke Kirby and Charlotte Gainsbourg respectively, swap headliners as a promotional gimmick. The dance scenes are impressive, and the trademark comic repartee is relentless. I watched three of the eight hour-long episodes, and then came back for the final two, enjoying them all but confident I wasn’t missing much in the gap.
I’m leaving this post where it started, in the court of Henry VIII, but in A Man For All Seasons (MC-72, dvd) Cromwell is the villain and More is the hero. Now I’d love to make it back to the new Frick Museum to see again the Holbein portraits of the Thomases More and Cromwell side by side, for yet a third view of the contrast between these two characters. I remember how much I identified More with my father, by appearance but also by his all-time favorite film. The Zinnemann/Bolt version has Paul Scofield as More and Leo McKern as Cromwell, leaving little doubt as to who’s the good guy (though McKern does look more like the Holbein portrait). Watching this faux-Shakespearean spectacle sixty years after release, on a twenty-year-old DVD, I was struck by the enormous sense of progress represented in Wolf Hall. Technically spoiled by high-definition, I found the quality of the DVD image laughable, and compared to the period-perfect verisimilitude of the lighting and décor of the later production, the earlier looks much stagier, especially the declamatory style of the actors, with Mark Rylance infinitely subtler and more veristic in his portrayal of Cromwell. As is Damian Lewis as Henry, instead of a roarer like Robert Shaw, who might have been too influenced by Charles Laughton in the role of the king.
Coming soon: round-ups of newly re-anointed HBO Max, Netflix, and Criterion. Watch this space.
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (MC-89, PBS) is spectacularly good in so many ways, so what do I praise first? The sheer spectacle of it all, I guess, but one must begin with Mark Rylance in the lead role of Thomas Cromwell – just watching his subtle facial expressions makes for six hours of top-notch viewing, so much thinking and feeling, as well as scheming by a master lawyer in a lawless time. Damian Lewis offers excellent support as Henry VIII, and the rest of the cast is equally effective. Screenwriter Peter Straughan has a better original to adapt in Hilary Mantel’s novel than he did in winning an Oscar for Conclave, and accomplished tv director Peter Kosminsky works well with the impeccable BBC design team to recreate the Tudor era. Mantel and Rylance conspire to make Cromwell a sympathetic and worldly-wise character. Henry and his six wives are an oft-told tale, but this series offers a unique and convincing perspective. It certainly helps to brush up on the history, since this version assumes at least a Cliff-Notes degree of familiarity with the characters and action. The sense of time and place is immersive, and the political maneuvering persuasive and enlightening. The series carries a special lesson in autocracy for an American audience at this freighted moment. I intend to watch this over again, already well into another look at its preceding series, both rich in every sense.
I’m extremely judgmental about films and shows derived from the life and work of my favorite novelist (see here and here), and Miss Austen (MC-73, PBS) passes the sniff test. In this case, the Miss Austen portrayed is more Cassandra than Jane, and the plot revolves around why the elder sister destroyed many of the younger’s letters, less out of primness than sororal solidarity. This series adapts one of Gill Hornby’s fan fictions about the Austens, and she’s clearly pretty scrupulous in her imaginings. Aisling Walsh is an accomplished director (Maudie). The surviving Aunt Cassy is well played by Keeley Hawes, whose reading of Jane’s letters triggers flashbacks, in which Patsy Ferran makes a highly-credible Jane, witty and “wicked,” and Synnove Karlsen an endearing Cassy. This series has all the virtues of BBC period pieces, especially acting and historical design, with few of the vices.
The new David Mitchell comic mystery Ludwig (MC-78) was enough to draw me back to Britbox for a month. Not to slight costar Anna Maxwell Martin or writer Mark Brotherhood, both excellent, but this is Mitchell’s show. As “Ludwig” (cue the Beethoven soundtrack), he’s a famous “puzzle-setter,” but in real life the reclusive (probably “on the spectrum”) twin of a Cambridge DCI who has abruptly disappeared. Martin as the latter’s wife, and the former’s childhood friend, calls him to come and impersonate his missing brother, so they can decode the message he left. Mitchell always plays a character who is uncomfortable in his own skin, perpetually feeling like an imposter, so the role fits him like a glove. While looking for clues in his brother’s office, he’s roped into a murder investigation, where his puzzle-solving skills deduce the culprit. He proceeds to solve one murder after another, and quite likes the game and the admiration gained by solving one per episode, while the mystery of his missing brother threads through all six, not so much resolved as used to tease a second season, which I’d definitely be up for. Meanwhile, I take this opportunity to re-re-recommend David Mitchell’s earlier series Peep Show, Upstart Crow, and Back.
I have a fondness for British sitcoms like Gavin & Stacey (MC-79) and wrote about the show here. It ran 2007-10 and returned for a Christmas special in 2019, and again for an explicit finale in 2024, now on Britbox. Show creators and stars James Corden and Ruth Jones certainly conjured up the spirit of the original series in this feature-length follow-up, cleverly resolving the various storylines. I also enjoyed the cast farewell bonus episode (fun to see them out of character, especially Nessa), almost as much as the one for Doc Martin. I urge you to give a look to both of these long-running and beloved British series.
With great timing, a series I’d been searching for just turned up on Britbox. Motherland (MC-70) was originated by Sharon Horgan (of Catastrophe and Bad Sisters) but she doesn’t appear in it, with the aforementioned Anna Maxwell Martin in the comic lead role of an overstressed working mother, Diane Morgan (aka “Philomena Cunk”) as her sardonic sidekick, and Lucy Punch as the alpha mom of the group, as they congregate at the schoolyard gates or in local tea shops. At first the show seemed a little broad for my taste, but once the characters and situations were established, funny enough to bring me back for two further seasons. This series is worth looking into if you’re a fan of British comedy, but if you’re a newbie, the nonpareil on Britbox is Mum, which I can’t recommend often enough.
I’m less keen on British mystery series, but I made an exception for Sherwood (MC-87), which is not so much a police procedural like Law & Order (the UK equivalent may be Line of Duty, though I confess to never having watched a single episode of either) but more a collective portrait of a divided community (like The Wire, though not quite in that league). Show creator James Graham infuses the series with an in-depth feel for his native Nottingham and delivers well-rounded characters in intricately interwoven plots. The second series connects with but moves on from the first, the only problem being less Lesley Manville. David Morrissey returns but has left the police for a social service position, though he is drawn back in as a gang war heats up. Effectively acted and produced, this series has been renewed for a third season, and has an added fillip of interest for me, as my son interviews for a position in the archaeology department of the University of Nottingham.
Nickel Boys (MC-91, MGM+) has to be one of the least likely Best Picture nominees in Oscar history (unless voters just heard it was like Moonlight and didn’t even bother to see it). I didn’t read the Colson Whitehead novel on which RaMell Ross based this idiosyncratic, imagistic exercise, so I can’t speak to the film’s fidelity to the text, or its underlying intelligibility. I wasn’t on board with the film’s primary stylistic kink, shot mostly in first-person POV, so we don’t even see the two boys who are the main characters, until they meet and see each other at a segregated reform school in early-Sixties Florida. And that’s far from the only stylistic kink, from the old-fashioned aspect-ratio to the eccentric camera angles to the associative editing with old movies like The Defiant Ones or news footage of civil rights protests and moonshots. While often hypnotically mysterious, the approach is also frequently opaque and incomprehensible. It’s an experimental film dragged out to well over two hours, whose primary allegiance seems to be to the filmmaker’s ingenuity rather than the social reality it seeks to engage. The two boys are well-played by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, but they are frustratingly never seen together. Anjanue Ellis-Taylor has the most satisfactory role as one boy’s grandmother. So did Ross get in the way of the material, or did he add another dimension of artistry? I don’t know, you’ll have to decide for yourself.
I was drawn to In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon (MC-80, MGM+) as much by prolific director Alex Gibney as by the subject of the documentary, and both delivered. I gather this started as documentation of Simon recording his Covid-era album Seven Psalms, and grew to a 3½ hour retrospective of his entire career, half with Art Garfunkel and half on his own. I was more engrossed by the resonant historical parts than the artfully interspersed scenes of the recording process, which more than anything reminded me that I have no idea how music is actually made. But I know what I like, and back when I listened to music more avidly, Simon & Garfunkel were often on my turntable. (Now I’ll have to listen to the new album on Spotify.) Though I draw a blank on most music of recent decades, I do enjoy documentaries that revive old favorites or latterly introduce me to underappreciated artists of my own cohort, like Leonard Cohen or Tom Petty.
Look, I read the Russell Banks novel on which Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada (MC-65, Kanopy) was based, no easy task in itself, but I can’t imagine that anyone who hasn’t read the book could make heads or tales out of this film, which just compounds the bewildering swings of a dying old man’s recollections. The dying old man, however, is Richard Gere, and his younger wife is Uma Thurman, so one is assured of some watchability, through a complicated scheme of flashbacks and fabulations. Gere plays a distinguished documentarian who has consented to being filmed by some former students, not to accommodate them, but to make an on-camera confession to his wife about the manifold sins of his former life. He abandoned two former wives and children and evaded the draft during the Vietnam War, before achieving respectability in Canada. In his drugged, near-death state he loses the thread, and so does the viewer, but some old sins and harsh truths get told, as is the rule in Schrader’s work.
There are a lot of films out there about bonding between humans and animals, both documentaries and dramatizations, and Every Little Thing (MC-74, Kanopy) is a decent entry among the docs, following author Terry Masear’s relationship with hummingbirds. In addition to writing a book about them, she’s turned her Hollywood Hills home into a hospital and sanctuary for the birds, which are lovely to watch in slo-mo flights, accented by time-lapse sequences of the blooming flowers that attract them. Sally Aitken’s film is low-key, slow-moving, and somewhat padded to feature length, but worth watching in the right frame of mind.
Besides wide-ranging and free with a participating library card, Kanopy has a menu system that is quite conducive to discovering unsuspected titles. For me, one such was She Came to Me (MC-53), a new film from Rebecca Miller (Arthur’s daughter), whose films I inevitably like much more than their MetaCritic rating. Her plots tend toward the fanciful, mixed in genre but anchored in emotional truth and excellent acting. And this one is no exception, a combination of rom-com and relationship drama with an artsy veneer. Peter Dinklage is a blocked opera composer, Anne Hathaway his therapist-turned-wife, and Marisa Tomei a revelation as a tugboat captain with whom he has a brief but consequential affair. His teenage stepson is in love with the daughter of his compulsive wife’s housekeeper, and their young love is the foil for all the grown-ups’ obsessions. This is screwball with a screw loose, romance with a twist and something on its mind. In the right mindset, it’s an oddity that delivers modest delight. More of Miller and Tomei, please.
I don’t watch much on Prime Video, but I took look at Étoile (MC-69, AMZ) based on its ballet theme and it’s being made by the couple who created Gilmore Girls, from which this series derives its rapid-fire patter. The production values are quite spectacular, centered on Lincoln Center and the Paris Opera, as the two fictional ballet companies, led by Luke Kirby and Charlotte Gainsbourg respectively, swap headliners as a promotional gimmick. The dance scenes are impressive, and the trademark comic repartee is relentless. I watched three of the eight hour-long episodes, and then came back for the final two, enjoying them all but confident I wasn’t missing much in the gap.
I’m leaving this post where it started, in the court of Henry VIII, but in A Man For All Seasons (MC-72, dvd) Cromwell is the villain and More is the hero. Now I’d love to make it back to the new Frick Museum to see again the Holbein portraits of the Thomases More and Cromwell side by side, for yet a third view of the contrast between these two characters. I remember how much I identified More with my father, by appearance but also by his all-time favorite film. The Zinnemann/Bolt version has Paul Scofield as More and Leo McKern as Cromwell, leaving little doubt as to who’s the good guy (though McKern does look more like the Holbein portrait). Watching this faux-Shakespearean spectacle sixty years after release, on a twenty-year-old DVD, I was struck by the enormous sense of progress represented in Wolf Hall. Technically spoiled by high-definition, I found the quality of the DVD image laughable, and compared to the period-perfect verisimilitude of the lighting and décor of the later production, the earlier looks much stagier, especially the declamatory style of the actors, with Mark Rylance infinitely subtler and more veristic in his portrayal of Cromwell. As is Damian Lewis as Henry, instead of a roarer like Robert Shaw, who might have been too influenced by Charles Laughton in the role of the king.
Coming soon: round-ups of newly re-anointed HBO Max, Netflix, and Criterion. Watch this space.
