Stray viewing IV

I begin this round-up with one of my favorite recent series, back for a fifth season on PBS and angling for a place among my personal all-time Top Ten.  Astrid (properly Astrid et Raphaëlle, IMDB) keeps getting better and better, as its popularity in France grants the show access and funds to explore more and more interesting Parisian locations, while losing none of its endearing character interactions or wide-ranging storylines.  After reading my personal essay on self-diagnosis of autism, a friend recommended this series, for which I’m especially grateful since I was unlikely to have discovered it otherwise.  The character of Astrid – an autistic woman who works as a criminal records archivist but is recruited by lead detective Raphaëlle to solve crimes together and become close complementary friends – continually offers me shocks of recognition and explanation.  Though there’s always a precipitating murder to initiate the storyline, there’s very little onscreen violence but plenty of forensics as various corners of the culture are explored (for example, the three episodes I watched most recently revolved around Buddhism, Aztec mythology, and Mormonism, respectively).  Not generally my sort of viewing, this particular mystery series is very much up my alley.  None of the actors were familiar to me but all of them are good, but preeminently the title pair of Sara Mortensen and Lola Dewaere, as compass and thimble respectively.  You don’t need to be Aspy to enjoy this series, but it certainly helps.  I have little interest in “solving” the cases (as little as Hitchcock with his “MacGuffins”) but I am interested in the worlds and ideas from which they emerge, and I admire that the end point is never sending the perpetrator to jail but coming to understand what led them to commit the murder, not just the motive but the reason.  The relationships between the title characters and with the rest of the crew are heartfelt and humorous, adding another level of pleasure to the proceedings.  Let me do for you what my friend did for me, and lead you to this hidden gem of a series, with the sixth season now showing in France and likely to come to PBS next January (assuming PBS finds a way to survive without the CPB).  In the meantime, there are forty binge-worthy episodes available with PBS Passport.
 
Softened up by Astrid, I sampled another PBS mystery with the come-on title of Bookish (MC-78), but couldn’t persist.  If you want to watch a series about a bookseller investigating murders, see The Lowdown with Ethan Hawke on Hulu.
 
The main appeal of The Great Escaper (MC-71, PBS) is the acting of nonagenarians Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson as a longtime couple, and one of the bigger disappointments is how poorly they’re matched by the actors who portray them as young lovers during WWII.  We know just how this pair looked at a younger age, and it’s nothing like the pair here.  In the popular British genre of true tales of little people triumphing over adversity or the system or just the odds of existence, this is a middling entry about a veteran of D-Day who goes AWOL from his posh nursing home to attend a 70th seventieth anniversary commemoration in France.  Weak tea, but inoffensive.
 
Maybe Niall Williams ought to stick to novels since his own screen adaptation of Four Letters of Love (MC-37) is such a limp affair, struggling to make the transition from page to screen. I was so fond of his novels This Is Happiness and The Time of the Child that I overlooked the Metacritic rating when I saw this film appear on Kanopy.  Turns out Celtic mysticism is easier to convey in florid words than actual images, however prettified.  Polly Steele’s film features Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne, and Helen Bonham Carter, not to mention great vistas of the northwest coast of Ireland, so how bad could it be?  Not very, but not very good either.  Ann Skelly is something of a find as a winsome colleen.  But on the whole, I’d recommend this film only if you’re pining for the shores of Donegal.  (It has subsequently turned up on Netflix as well.)
 
I don’t imagine you’re pining for the shores of Finland, but they are certainly the most appealing aspect of The Summer Book (MC-62, Kanopy), an English language adaptation of a Tove Jansson novel, about the relationship between a fading grandmother and a blossoming 6-year-old girl summering in a isolated island cabin, with a grieving widowed father between them.  The grandmother is played by Glenn Close, face carved out of granite, listening to birdsong and watching the light play on waves lapping against the shore, and blaze in midnight sunsets.  If you are in a contemplative state of mind, and responsive to gracenotes of nature, you may have the patience for this short but slow-moving film.
 
I’d never heard of Seagrass (MC-84) before it turned up on Kanopy, but rating and trailer induced me to watch this recent Canadian feature debut from writer-director Meredith Hama-Brown.  In British Columbia, a family goes on an island retreat, where the parents attend marital workshops and the children mingle seaside playing by age group.  Seemingly a memory piece set some thirty years ago, the film is most notable for the perfectly natural performances of the two adorable girls, roughly 12 and 6.  The mother is Japanese-Canadian and her recently deceased mother had been interned during WWII.  She’s grappling with grief and regret, as well as doubts about her cross-racial marriage.  The husband seems genial but clueless and inarticulate about feelings.  The retreat makes things worse rather than better, and the friction and anxiety filters down to the kids.  I understand the moodiness, but this film moves so slowly that it requires real patience to enjoy its virtues.
 
A Little Prayer (MC-86) had been on my watchlist for so long that I don’t remember why I put it there.  Probably for lead David Strathairn, whom I’ve always followed since we were at Williams together, though our paths never crossed; I particularly admired his films with fellow Eph John Sayles.  Probably didn’t connect writer-director Angus Maclachlan to his Junebug screenplay, but maybe I saw some link to Ramin Bahrani or critical comparison to Ozu.  At any rate I’d been looking for the film since its Sundance debut three years ago.  Then it suddenly turned up on Kanopy (now on AMZ as well), and I watched it immediately.  When my reference points are the series Rectify and the films of Kenneth Lonergan, you may surmise that I loved this film.  Strathairn is at the top of his game, as owner of a metal manufacturing plant in Winston-Salem, and Jane Levy matches him in appeal as simpatico daughter-in-law.  His own son and daughter are double trouble however, and his wife no prize.  Where did he go wrong as a father?  Was it when serving as a captain in Vietnam, or sending his son to fight in Iraq, which led the boy off the straight and narrow?  The son now works for his father, and has taken to drinking and sleeping with the boss’s secretary(!).  With everyday problems of regular life, Maclachlan lets us peep in and infer all that is going on under the surface.  The film begins and ends with extended tracking shots down a leafy suburban street, suggesting that we’re being drawn into just one domestic drama out of so many.  But the heart of this film lies in the gospel singing that wafts through the neighborhood in the early morning, which only father and daughter-in-law seem to appreciate.  And then there’s the lesson of a Moravian graveyard.  This film is grave and deep, but also warm and funny.
 
In a less polished way, the same could be said of Maclachlan’s previous film, Abundant Acreage Available (MC-68), also on Kanopy.  It has the great advantage of starring Amy Ryan (whom I’ve loved since she was Beadie in The Wire), who begins the film by burying her father in the post-harvest tobacco field of their NC farm.  She loves the land, but her brother loves Jesus and wants to get off the farm.  Three elderly brothers wind up camping on the land, which is where they grew up.  Complications ensue, interspersed with beauty shots of the landscape.  Not as great as his subsequent film, but highly watchable.
 
Francois Ozon is known as France’s most prolific director, thought of as a successor to Chabrol.  I haven’t seen the majority of his work, but In the House stands out as a gem.  And now I’ll add When Fall is Coming (MC-74), an autumnal reverie centered on veteran stage actress Hélène Vincent, as a well-off grandmother enjoying her country home and garden in Burgundy.  She’s looking forward to a visit from her adored grandson and troublesome daughter.  The placid surface is broken by mischance, and things get worse from there.  Turns out no one is quite what they seem, and subtle twists in the tale keep occurring, in a meditation on chance and design, innocence and culpability.  Beautiful and engaging, Vincent and the film keep revealing new ambiguities and complications.  Ozon propounds rather than solves a mystery.
 
Thus I was led to another Ozon film on Kanopy, Summer of 85 (MC-65), apparently an adaptation of a YA novel that the director loved when young.  Set on the shores of Normandy, it’s the swoony story of two (extremely attractive) teenage boys who meet and mate after a sailing accident, and have a six-week affair that changes both their lives.  In some ways as touching as Heartstopper, this is of course a darker affair, haunted by death and mystery, despite the sunny seaside setting.  From now on, I’ll make more of an effort to keep up with Ozon’s films.
 
How Are You? I’m Alan (Partridge) (IMDB) marks the return of Steve Coogan to the iconic character he’s been playing for more than three decades, a clueless and abrasive radio and tv presenter, downwardly mobile from the BBC.  This time out, he’s hosting a program that purports to be about British mental health, but as is invariably the case, it’s all about him.  I’m a longtime fan of this other Steve, so this show was just my cup of tea and plate of crumpets.  It just debuted on BBC last fall, so it was a surprise to see it reach Kanopy before Britbox.  So my takeaway tip for library card holders is to sign up for Kanopy (or Hoopla) if your library offers it.
 
Hedda (MC-70, AMZ) just eked out my MC benchmark, and stars two actresses who have attracted my interest in the past, Tessa Thompson and Nina Hoss (eye-opening in Christian Petzold films).  Never had much use for Ibsen and never read or saw Hedda Gabler, and Nia DaCosta’s film won’t increase my appreciation, though it does have some virtues of its own.  Some of the transpositions clearly work, most especially one of the central male characters becoming Hoss, a gain on several grounds.  Presumably the original was not set in 1950s Britain, in a manor house where academics and bohemians mingle, a well-designed but rather implausible scene, with entitled general’s daughter Hedda as hostess and shit-stirrer.  Worth a look, but hardly must-see.  
 
I’m not so concerned about HBO disappearing into Paramount+ after its previous devolution into Warner Discovery, and demotion into “stray viewing.”  But at the moment HBO Max boasts, among the lame reality shows, some of the most acclaimed films of the year, led by Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (MC-95).  Now, the only one of PTA’s films that I remember actively liking is Inherent Vice (can’t remember as far back as Boogie Nights), so I guess mine is a minority voice (was surprised to find out Battle was based on another old Pynchon novel). There are always things to admire in his films, but I’ve never tuned into his wavelength, and this does not change that.  I went in cold, wanting to form my own impressions, and it took me a long while to realize I was watching a comedy.  I’d imagined the film had a serious political intent, about the highly relevant topic of immigrant deportations and the persistence of violent “revolutionary” cadres.  I never got over that feeling of dislocation when stoner dad Leonardo DiCaprio started running around in his bathrobe to recover his abducted daughter (Chase Infiniti, a real find).  Benicio del Toro is his “sensei” and provides welcome wit.  Out of four acting Oscar noms (from thirteen in all), those two have some validity, but the other two are cartoonish portrayals by Sean Penn (in a premonition of Greg Bovino) and Teyana Taylor as a Black radical Amazon.  Full disclosure: I watched this film over several nights of stationary cycling, so didn’t give it my undivided attention.  Don’t take my word for it, but instead see this Best Picture winner for yourself.
 
Some people thought Ari Aster’s Eddington (MC-65) was robbed of a BP nom, but not me.  It’s another attempt to shoehorn political themes into a comic thriller, even less successful than the previous film.  I turned it off when the shoot-em-up began.
 
Rose Byrne got acting nominations for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (MC-77), so I stuck with this updated “diary of a mad housewife,” but like the cycling it accompanied, it was kind of a chore to get through.  Rather telling that I found HBO’s prestige programs only worth watching while I was doing something else.  And the rest of the channel is so much worse (apart from John Oliver).  David Ellison will just complete the destruction that David Zaslav wrought.
 
Talk about stray viewing – somehow Hamnet (MC-84) wound up on Peacock, where it was blessedly uninterrupted by commercials after the opening string of them.  Based on a book I read but don’t remember very well, directed by Chloe Zhao and starring Jessie Buckley, both particular favorites of mine, with Paul Mescal as Shakespeare, whom I don’t mind either, my expectations were raised too high.  While I appreciated the period look and spirit of the film, I found it rather drawn out and lugubrious, and kept comparing it to the same story’s treatment in the David Mitchell series Upstart Crow, which was satirical as well as moving, in telling how the dead son became the title character of the play.  Still, Zhao’s work is beautifully made and impressively redolent of the era, and Jessie gives it her all, from witchy sexy joy to maternal grief.  There is, however, a limit to my appetite for emotionalism, and this film more than sated it.  I have yet to pick my own favorite for Best Picture of 2025, but so far I haven’t seen an Oscar nominee that stands out, with Train Dreams for me a weak frontrunner.  Blue Moon seems more worthy than any of the nominees I’ve seen.
 
When MUBI had another of their generous offers, I signed up primarily to see The Mastermind  (MC-80).  For me, writer-director Kelly Reichardt sometimes clicks (Wendy and Lucy, First Cow) and sometimes doesn’t (Showing Up).  As the semi-true story of an art thief in 1970s Massachusetts, this had many points of interest for me, not least because the recently ubiquitous Josh O’Connor plays the lead.  He’s no “Thomas Crown” and his affair is an ill-planned, low-key heist of several Arthur Dove paintings from the “Framingham Museum of Art” (Worcester, irl).  O’Connor tends to come across as sympathetic, even when playing Prince Charles, so it takes a while to realize what a dead-ender this guy is, ruining a relatively comfortable life, with a wife and sons and well-off parents, by planning and poorly executing a half-baked scheme to rob a local public institution.  There is humor and pathos in his comeuppance, but little sense of how he got to this point, besides the boundless ego that kicks off the “Me Decade,” while Vietnam and American streets burn on TVs in the background.  Of course the title is totally ironic, and one of the best laughs in this rather deadpan film.
 
Though he came out of the eastern suburbs of Cleveland a few years after me, I have not followed the career of Jim Jarmusch assiduously, but I have seen and mostly enjoyed a lot of his films, with a special shoutout to Paterson (my rave here).  So the MUBI exclusive Father Mother Sister Brother (MC-76) caught my eye.  As an icon of hipster indie cred, Jarmusch can enlist A-list talent in his quirky little dramas, often putting several short stories together in a film.  Here the first features Adam Driver (title character of Paterson) as dutiful son of scoundrel dad Tom Waits, another Jarmusch regular, in a setting very reminiscent of the Berkshires.  In the second, the mother is Charlotte Rampling, having her two grown daughters, Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps, to tea in a Dublin townhouse.  In the third, two twins – thirtyish brother and sister of color – reunite in Paris for a last visit to the vacated home where they grew up, the apartment of their gallivanting parents who’ve just died in a plane accident.  As the title suggests, this anthology film is all about the connections and disconnections of family, knit together by recurring tropes in different circumstances, with the inaction beautifully framed and the silences quite eloquent.  Some will find it inexpressive, some will find it penetratingly lifelike.  Some will laugh, some will lament, some will doze off.  I liked it a lot, but not Paterson-level.
 
I’ve lately become a Virginie Efira completist, so I took the opportunity to catch up with Madeleine Collins (MC-64), and again she does not disappoint.  Reviews reference Hitchcock or Chabrol, but the suspense element is muted, and the only violence is emotional.  Which gives Ms. Efira a chance to demonstrate her range, as a professional translator leading a double life, with a conductor husband and two growing sons in Paris and a partner with a preschool daughter in Geneva.  The juggling of identities begins to wear her down and fray her nerves.  The film’s title and opening sequence make no sense until the onion is fully peeled.  I wouldn’t recommend you go out of your way to see this, but I would advise watching almost any Virginie Efira film you come across.
 
MUBI has lately ventured into tv series with some success, and the latest is the Spanish romantic dramedy The New Years (MC-tbd), which follows a pair who meet on the first day of 2015, coincidentally the 30^th birthday of both.  Each of the following nine episodes jumps ahead exactly one year, tracing the arc of their relationship.  The pair are extremely attractive, and there tend to be protracted though tasteful sex scenes, at least in the early episodes.  I’m enjoying it as an accompaniment to stationary cycling, and will report back in sixty miles or so.
 
[I’ll continue to sample MUBI offerings until my latest special offer runs out, but I want to get this post up to make the case for Astrid, one of my most confident recommendations.]

Net-flix-a-tions V, part 2: Films

Over the course of a half-year, a lot of good films find their way to Netflix, and this is a report on the most recent notable arrivals.  Notable at least to someone with my approach to cinema (for which, see here).
 
Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague (MC-76) is in many ways disguised autobiography, or biopic as manifesto.  In recreating the production of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Linklater celebrates a style of filmmaking – personal, freeform, direct, spontaneous – that he has practiced himself for decades.  The acting across the board has great verisimilitude, with many of the key figures of the French New Wave getting look-alike walk-ons.  It certainly helps to recognize all the names as they are introduced with captioned portraits, but even without that, the excitement of a transformational cultural movement and moment shows through.  These guys (and a few gals like Agnes Varda) knew they were changing the history of cinema and enjoying themselves doing so.  I’ve always been a Truffaut partisan and found Godard arrogant, self-important, and morally suspect, and this film does nothing to change that, while granting his revolutionary impact.  So I gave Breathless another look, liked it better after Linklater’s retelling, but would still rank Godard well behind Truffaut, Rohmer, Varda, and other New Wavers in my personal estimation.
 
Some directors take ten years between films, but Linklater is the type who can either make a film over the course of a dozen years (Boyhood) or release two new films at the same time.  Blue Moon (MC-78) came to Netflix only after it garnered Oscar noms for Ethan Hawke as best actor and Robert Kaplow for original script, which tells the story of Lorenz Hart on the opening night of Oklahoma! – for which Rodgers had replaced him with Hammerstein as lyricist.  Now I’m on record claiming that both Linklater and Hawke are the very best of their generation in their respective roles, so it’s no surprise that I liked this movie.  But even I was surprised by how much I liked it, ranking it with the best work of both, together and apart.  In contrast to the previous film’s style of filmmaking, Blue Moon is virtually theatrical, precisely scripted in a one-location, near-real-time experience.  Here Rick travels from Parisian streets in 1960 to a Broadway bar in 1943.  Believably playing a balding man five feet tall is the least of Hawke’s attainments in the role of “Larry” Hart, as he utters a nonstop spiel of hopes and lies, barbed opinions and witticisms, savoring each turn of phrase. He’s well supported by Andrew Scott as Richard Rodgers, Bobby Cannavale as Sardi’s bartender, Patrick Kennedy as fellow drinker E.B. White, and Margaret Qualley as Hart’s dream girl, in what can only be called a Broadway hit show.  With the proviso that I haven’t seen Hamnet yet, this may be my favorite film of 2025.
 
Train Dreams (MC-88) has gone from Sundance hit to multiple Oscar nominee. This lovely but sad film follows the life of one man, quietly but movingly played by Joel Edgerton, from his early days as an itinerant logger in the Pacific Northwest before the Great War, up into old age in the Sixties, a stretch of time that is both long and short, beautiful and horrific.  The incursions of technology into the wilderness and the persistence of racial violence are interwoven into the story.  Over that span, two women break through the taciturn reserve of Edgerton, Felicity Jones as his adoring wife, and Kerry Condon as a forest ranger who shares his history of isolation and loss, and provides a bit of wisdom that resonated with me, “the world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.”  Clint Bentley is happy to acknowledge Terrence Malick as an influence (Days of Heaven in particular), but has formed a close working relationship with Greg Kwedar, working together on scripts (here adapting a Denis Johnson novella), and swapping seats in the director’s chair.  Keep an eye out for this pair.
 
Netflix has another film with multiple Oscar noms in Frankenstein (MC-78), but of course Guillermo del Toro is less to my taste, though I did like Pan’s Labyrinth.  This creature feature was a chore to watch (over several sessions of stationary cycling), but not without some admirable attributes.  Impressive in all technical aspects, the film is well-served by Jacob Elordi as the Creature, and gothicized by Oscar Isaac as the title character and Mia Goth as the woman between them.  Del Toro is both respectful and committed to this story and to the Victorian period he’s placed it in, but I have a hard time engaging with creature features and scenery chewing.  Give me real life every time.
 
Writer-director Rian Johnson continues his playful but profound engagement with genre in Wake Up Dead Man (MC-80), the third of his “Knives Out” series of throwback mystery features.  Poker Face, his comic mystery series with Natasha Lyonne, also falls into that category.  So he knows how to entertain with humor, suspense, and something more.  All-star casts help.  Daniel Craig returns as the Southern gentleman detective, here paired with the very reliable Josh O’Connor as a junior priest at an upstate NY church where a murder has occurred.  Josh Brolin is the head priest and Glenn Close is the indispensable church lady, with a handful of familiar parishioners as suspects.  The convoluted mystery is rather a throw-away (or “macguffin”) and the proceedings drag on twenty minutes too long, but the atheistic detective and the conflicted young priest have some provocative discussions about faith and fact, conjecture and belief, doubt and proof.
 
Cillian Murphy was only one of the reasons I felt compelled to watch Steve (MC-65).  Since hitting the big time with Oppenheimer, he’s made two small, serious films about troubled juveniles “in care,” both with director Tim Mielants and co-star Emily Watson (Small Things Like These reviewed here).  Steve heads a school for delinquent and disturbed boys housed on a derelict rural estate in 1996 Britain.  On one given day, with a tv news crew on hand, all sorts of shit hits the fan, the aggro emotions matched by frenzied filmmaking; long, long traveling shots through the chaos mix with video news interviews and surreal interludes.  Needless exposition and excess complication undermine immediacy, and the film doesn’t really hold together or add up, but with good acting among the youths and staff (Tracy Ullman a standout) it didn’t wear out its welcome for me.  Our man Cillian keeps those uncanny blue eyes heavily lidded in this outing, as a closet alcoholic coping with his own trauma while dealing with one crisis after another.
 
In Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (MC-73), the main character played by Camille Rutherford won me over in the credit sequence, as she dances around the bookstore where she works – the famous Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, no less.  This first feature from writer-director Laura Piani enters a crowded corner of the shrinking rom-com ballroom, but emerges on to the dance floor with charm and distinction, much enhanced by the piquant portrayal of Ms. Rutherford.  She’s angular, androgynous, and acerbically funny, but blocked in life, love, and writing.  A randy coworker submits a sample of her work and wins her a residency at the posh home of some Austen descendants, including a Darcy-esque literature professor who has little use for his ancestor.  Will she wind up with one or the other, or neither?  The dialogue is not exactly Rohmer-esque, but does give the familiar interactions a certain Gallic tang.  I’m a confirmed Jane-ite, but more from a writerly Eng-Lit perspective than a romance angle, so this offshoot suited me fine.  Some might find it too Austen-ish, others might find it not Austen-ish enough, but like Goldilocks I found it just right.
 
I’ve never been a fan of the adept action director Kathryn Bigelow, not even The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty, so I didn’t expect much from the divisive House of Dynamite (MC-75), but I found myself more in agreement with the raves than the dismissals.  This tale of nuclear apocalypse is more a workplace drama than an explosive disaster movie.  We follow an array of government officials on their way to a normal workday, which takes an unimaginable turn when a missile is launched from an unknown place but headed for the American Midwest.  The credible look of various secret locations initially made me think the film must have had the cooperation and even endorsement of the DoD (oh, excuse me, the DoW), designed for military recruitment.  But no, you wouldn’t want any of these jobs, certainly not those of Idris Elba or Tracy Letts or Rebecca Ferguson (new to me but veteran of many films that I would never see).  The clever script by Noah Oppenheim revisits the 18-minute duration of the missile’s flight from three different but interlocking vantage points, getting more propulsive in each iteration.  We watch game theory and ultra-technology and human error drive toward apocalypse, in this pulse-pounding “entertainment” that kept me pumping away on a stationary bike.  There are few laughs in this Dr. Strangelove, it’s too breathless for that.
 
I felt I owed it to Kate Winslet to watch her first directorial effort Goodbye June (MC-54), a family affair in which she gathered a sterling cast to film a script written by her son.  Helen Mirren is exceptional as the dying matriarch June; her husband Timothy Spall, her daughters Winslet, Toni Collette, and Andrea Riseborough, and son Johnny Flynn all live up to their accomplished past work.  Watching an old lady die over the course of a few weeks, while her family visits in different groupings, is probably not your idea of entertainment, but watching such a troupe of performers elevate the material of a young man’s memories of his grandmother’s passing, as captured by the daughter/mother in-between, has an authenticity that overcomes any schmaltz or obviousness (such as a nurse named Angel).  The Metacritic rating seems prejudiciously low.
 
Jay Kelly (MC-67) looks (and sounds) just like George Clooney, likewise an aging megastar but more of a hollow shell, just a string of popular movies and adoring fans, underappreciated assistants and neglected family.  But he is George Clooney, so in this Hollywood self-satire Noah Baumbach goes a lot easier on him than many of the director’s troubled protagonists.  But the film’s sympathies are with Adam Sandler as the star’s enabling manager, who neglects his own family in selfless and thankless service to his client and friend.  The New Wave insider vibe is enhanced by all sorts of film references, and an incredible series of cameos by the likes of Greta Gerwig (Baumbach’s wife, and a superstar herself by now), Billy Crudup, Laura Dern, Jim Broadbent, Riley Keough, Emily Mortimer (who also collaborated on the script), and more.  Less acerbic than usual (and less harsh in satire than, say, The Studio), Baumbach is the cinemaniac he’s always been, and always of interest to me; after all, he named his first-born son Rohmer.
 
Actors, subject, and a NYT critic’s pick overcame the substandard Metacritic rating for me to watch The Lesson (MC-62).  I didn’t regret that, but wouldn’t turn around and recommend it, unless you are similarly drawn in.  Daryl McCormack is a young writer who gets a lucky (?) gig as tutor to the son of one of his favorite authors (Richard E. Grant), on a posh British estate.  The family, including the art dealer mother (Julie Delpy), is under the pall of an older son’s death.  Nothing is quite as it seems, but the suspense and surprises are nothing special, so you would need your own hook to make it worth watching.  Perhaps the estate’s Monet-worthy gardens might do it for you.
 
Since The Bear, I’ve had a bit of a thing for Molly Gordon, so Oh, Hi! (MC-62) surmounted less than glowing reviews to earn my attention.  Ms. Gordon stars and also gets story credit with writer-director Sophie Brooks.  We join her on a weekend excursion Upstate with recent boyfriend Logan Lerman.  They seem well-matched in humor and romance, until it comes out that for her it’s a relationship and for him it’s a situation.  The story then takes a quasi-Misery turn as she tries to keep him captive long enough for him to realize how desirable she really is.  As you can imagine, that is not the best way to win his heart.  Or maybe it is after all.  I’m not telling, but am saying that I quite enjoyed this rom-com with a thriller twist.
 
Shih-Ching Tsou has been working with multiple-Oscar-winning filmmaker Sean Baker for more than twenty years in various roles, and with Left-Handed Girl (MC-77) takes the director’s chair solo for the first time (with Baker garnering three other credits himself), telling a personal story of three (or four) generations of women.  A single mother with two daughters, one around 20 and one about 5, returns to Taipei after some years away.  She opens a noodle shop in a night market, and one of the film’s considerable virtues is following the five-year-old running through the vibrant, almost-kaleidoscopic market.  There’s a grandmother, and two aunties as well, with all kinds of feminine interaction amongst them.  Men are mostly beside the point, whether they’re dealing out damage or decency.  Like Tangerine this was shot on iPhones for extraordinary immediacy, and like The Florida Project it centers on an amazing performance from a young girl.  As usual with this pair of collaborators, this is an intimate, sympathetic street-level look at underclass lives, which finds shards of hope and joy in the rough and tumble of life.
 
That calls to mind another Taiwanese-American director, Alice Wu, whose The Half of It (MC-74) missed my last Netflix round-up.  As with her earlier Saving Face (MC-65), I enjoyed the rom-com perspective of a young Asian-American lesbian.  In a takeoff on Cyrano, a brainy highschooler writes love letters for a lunky football-playing neighbor to the girl she has a genuine crush on.  Pleasantly personal.
 
Before I go on hiatus with Netflix again, I will include several of their programs in a round-up of documentaries, but sooner I’ll another make another “Stray viewing” post to cover programs on PBS, Kanopy, MUBI, and HBO Max.

Net-flix-a-tions V, part 1: Series

No longer as devoted to Netflix as I was for two decades or more, it’s been six months since my last round-up, and I have plenty to catch up with.  Buckle up, this is going to be a long two-part post that will remain open till I pause my subscription again next month, after squeezing all the latest juice out of Netflix – but still rooting for them to overcome Ellison and Trump in the acquisition of WarnerDiscovery.
 
One of the new Netflix shows I was eager to come back for was Death by Lightning (MC-80).  I grew up a few miles from President James Garfield’s memorial tomb, and followed him from Ohio to Williams College – one of my favorite bits of historical trivia is that his intended destination when he was shot in the DC train station was a meeting of Williams alumni in NYC.  My own obsession with American history runs from 1840 to 1860, so I knew relatively little about the election of 1880, and how Garfield was drafted for the Republican nomination after giving a rousing nominating speech for someone else, eventually emerging as a compromise candidate between deadlocked factions.  The convention takes up most of the first of four episodes and was one of the more convincing depictions of politics on film that I have ever seen.  Acting is excellent across the board: as Garfield, Michael Shannon gives his most sympathetic portrayal, Matthew McFadyen plays his deranged assassin Guiteau (reminiscent of his role in Succession), Nick Offerman plays roistering VP Chester Arthur, and Betty Gilpin is Mrs. Garfield.  Other familiar faces don flamboyant beards and believably inhabit Gilded Age pols.  Sets and costumes also evince authenticity, which the dialogue sorely lacks.  Sometimes it pushes contemporary parallels, which is allowable and even welcome, but often it lacks any sense of period speech, hitting a low point when the demure First Lady screams the F-word.  One thing I do know about the era is the Oneida Community, and I took umbrage at a flashback that reduced it to slapstick, as a fuckfest where Guiteau alone couldn’t get laid.  But my viewing partner was on Wikipedia through much of the series, confirming most of the salient details, so the whole is far from braindead.
 
Suranne Jones and Julie Delpy are actresses who have earned my admiration over multiple projects, so their presence overcame the lackluster reception of Hostage (MC-62) to earn my viewing attention – and managed to sustain it through five episodes.  They play British PM and French Prez respectively, who approach as adversaries but act together when an international crisis develops.  I have a hard time distinguishing this from the other British political thrillers (esp. Slow Horses) I’ve been watching lately, but despite the leads it’s relatively lacking in plausibility and humor.  (Neither lady leader is a patch on Denmark’s PM in Borgen, also on Netflix, among the very best tv series ever, with the kicker that the postscript fourth season is all about an international crisis over Greenland.)
 
Steven Knight is a busy man, churning out captivating historical dramas, best known for Peaky Blinders (which has a feature-length follow-up coming in March) and more recently, A Thousand Blows.  House of Guinness (MC-72) is of a piece, featuring impressively atmospheric period recreations of Dublin and Connacht in the post-famine era and solid acting all round, with an anachronistic punk rock soundtrack.  Like an Irish Succession, it follows four siblings vying for control of the legendary brewery after the patriarch’s death.  Anthony Boyle is the eldest and most familiar, with the ubiquitous James Norton as the establishment’s heavy-handed enforcer.  There’s a mix of fine ladies and Fenian Pre-Raphaelite beauties, as the family business navigates between Protestant evangelicals and Catholic revolutionaries.  I was satisfied with the cliffhanger conclusion after eight propulsive episodes, but would welcome a sequel.
 
Despite raves, I could never get into BoJack Horseman, but was immediately grabbed by Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s new animated dramedy series Long Story Short (MC-89). It’s a Jewish family’s collective biography, covering forty years in non-chronological order (except for the rapid-fire title sequence, which is worth watching repeatedly, to get the arc of those forty years, with slight changes foreshadowing the focus of each of ten episodes).  The whole show is fast, furious, funny, and ultimately moving.  The very authentic family drama is punctured and punctuated by an avalanche of laugh-out-loud lines and gestures.  To appreciate the humor, it helps to have grown up surrounded by Jews, but I think many of the family dynamics will ring bells for all backgrounds.  All the voice acting is spot on, and the animation by Lisa Hanawalt seems simple and cartoonish but reveals surprising depth and dimension.  Thankfully, we won’t have long to wait for the second season.  It will be enough to bring me back into the Netflix fold, when I have strayed again.
 
The next three series in this round-up share an identical Metacritic rating (beneath my benchmark of 80), which says something about the current state of Netflix programming.  The firehose of content is not about offering the very best but delivering the good enough across a wide range of audiences.
 
Wayward (MC-71) is the one that appealed to me, based on Mae Martin’s previous Netflix series, Feel Good, a clearly autobiographical lesbian rom-com among the stand-up set in London.  (Also, her own stand-up special SAP.)  Martin has returned to her native Canada, for a dramatic series that also seems based on personal experience, about a restrictive school for troubled teens.  This one is set over the border in Tall Pines, VT, with Toni Collette in fine form as the mercurial headmistress (and leader of a cult modeled on Synanon, not to give too much away).  As well as writing, Martin plays an androgynous cop named Alex, whose wife is pregnant, paternity not specified.  The couple moved back to her hometown from Detroit, Alex leaving the police there for reasons that go unspoken but implied.  Mae/Alex is apparently transitioning (a bit of pillow talk concerns whether their stubble is coming in), and happy to show off their good-looking top-surgery.  Alex meets and befriends two girls who’ve been sent to that school by parents who don’t want to deal with them, and then begins to trace the history of 18 cold cases of youths who ran away from the school over the years and were never heard from again.  Seemingly trying to fill a teen-horror genre niche, the eight-episode series runs too long and tries too many twists of the tale, but the personal aspects, and the effective acting that filters down from the stars to the teens, make it a worthwhile watch for most of its length.  
 
I’m a sucker for shows about writers, so I gave a look to The Beast in Me (MC-71) despite the title and the woman-in-jeopardy trailer.  Never a fan of The Americans or Homeland, I didn’t expect much but was willing to give Claire Danes a chance to convince me.  The show met my expectations – and one episode was plenty.  Similarly, I felt no compulsion to watch more than a couple of episodes of the second season of Man on the Inside (MC-71).  I thought the shift in scene from old folks home to college campus, and the addition of Ted Danson’s wife Mary Steenburgen to the cast might revive my interest, but found the shtick had lost its novelty.
 
Netflix frequently imports shows which had success on other channels and a recent one I want to highlight is This is Going to Hurt (MC-91), which I reviewed here.  Another series that deserves repeated mention as one of the best of 2025 is Asura (reviewed here), which led me to an earlier series by Hirokazu Kore-eda, The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House (MC-70).  I’m one episode into it, and will report back here if I get through before this month’s subscription runs out.

Applelicious

With the HBO premium brand sinking into the muck of Max (and eventually into Netflix or Paramount), AppleTV (sans +) seems poised to take on the label – “It’s not just tv, it’s Apple.”  They don’t try to cater to every taste, though they do offer portals to other channels, plus pay per view.  Never having entered the Apple universe through computer or phone, I don’t rate the channel in my top tier (my last round-up was a year ago), but as the home of Dickinson and Pachinko (my personal favorites among other popular Apple hits) it will always have merit in my eyes.  In justifying recent subscription price increases (though with frequent special offers), their own programs cover a reasonable range, and even those that don’t click for everyone have plausibility and polish, and not just the expediency of “content.” 
 
The Emmy haul of The Studio (MC-80) is testimony to that.  I’ve followed Seth Rogen since his teenage debut in Freaks & Greeks, but I never imagined he had this in him, to win Emmys for writing, producing, directing (with his longtime partner Evan Goldman) and starring in a comedy series.  And maybe even deserve them!  Goes to prove that being stoned all the time is no impediment to creativity, or should I say creative insanity?  This is a cringe-comedy Hollywood satire that starts with pedal to the metal and never lets up.  Rogen plays a professed cinephile who lucks into the job of studio head, where he continually must let commerce trump art in the making of movies, as he oscillates between macher and nebbish.  Catherine O’Hara plays his mentor and deposed predecessor, Bryan Cranston is his corporate boss, and there is a never-ending string of supporting players and celebrity cameos.  Mixing strains of Altman’s The Player and the HBO series Entourage into a blend all its own, this hybrid series delivers on both hilarity and authenticity.  And it takes advantage of shrinking cameras to make extended shots that roam all over the studio lot or other settings (such as Las Vegas in the two-episode finale of the first season – with another in the works), to a percussive score that ratchets up the pandemonium.  My enjoyment was certainly enhanced by the witty takes on the business of filmmaking, but there’s enough wild slapstick to entertain the uninitiated.
 
And now Apple has Vince Gilligan, creator of my favorite series of all time, the combo of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.  His new Pluribus (MC-86) returns to Albuquerque and brings back the delightful Rhea Seehorn, one of the stars of Saul.  I wasn’t stoked by Gilligan’s turn toward sci-fi, but by the third episode I realized that the series was really a parable about A.I. and became fully engaged.  Still, the series is underpopulated and slow moving, as an encryption from space makes humans join into a hive mind, with only a dozen exceptions around the globe.  Seehorn is one, a popular romantasy writer who loses her partner in the transition, and then all the people of the city depart when she rejects the no-longer-human “peace, love, and understanding” shared by all the others.  Now I’d sign up to watch “Kim Wexler” read the phone book, but this was a bit languorous for me and I was quite disappointed that it didn’t end with the 9^th episode, but expects to go on for three more seasons.  As with Severance, I don’t think I’ll have the patience or interest to persist.  Still, this has many of virtues of Gilligan’s two hits, but leans more into his origins on The X-Files (which I never watched).
 
Another established favorite is Slow Horses (MC-79).  In the 5^th season, some people missed the shoot-em-up climax but I appreciated the greater emphasis on wit and humor.  This series is one of the most reliable pleasures on the tube these days.  I wrote about previous seasons here, here, and here, and it’s all still true.  Top-notch writing derived from Mick Herron’s “Slough House” series of MI5 spy novels, and stellar acting from Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, on down through the rest of the sterling cast list, plus propulsive storytelling (with the inevitable chase scenes on foot), make for a sure-fire hit series, which shows no sign of slowing down.
 
All three of these shows are very inventive, verbally and visually, with superb acting and high-quality production.
 
Apple doubled down on Mick Herron with Down Cemetery Road (MC-71), from an earlier series of his books, which shares the combination of humorous characters, relentless action, and similar plot reliance on government cover-ups.  Not to mention top-flight acting, here with Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson in the lead.  They were enough to make me give a look-see, and I was immediately hooked when the whole show began at the Ashmolean Museum and included all sorts of Oxford sights that I could recognize.  Later episodes go to London and an island north of Scotland, but the settings are always of interest.  The “mystery” is rather vague and the twists and turns not particularly worth following.  But performances, wit, and action make the series quite palatable for anyone who can’t get enough of the writer or stars.
 
Mr. Scorsese (MC-84) is another top-notch series.  Marty is still active, thank goodness, though with emeritus status among great American directors, but this loving retrospective, a five-part documentary portrait, transcends the limitations of the genre, because it’s directed by Rebecca Miller (Arthur’s daughter), another filmmaker for whom I feel a strong affinity.  She goes well beyond the standard clip-reel-cum-talking-head-commentary, not just with archival documentation but by inducing the hyper-analyzed maestro to “take the couch” throughout, achieving something like a five-act (morality) play.  It helps to have seen all his films at least once, but I sense this bio-doc could reward some who have seen few or none.  The greatest director of my generation and background deserves the attention of all viewers.  His fifty-year career also spans a lot of cultural and political history.  But what do I know? – I’m totally infatuated with this program, and eager to revisit some of Scorsese’s films with this autobiographical background to the thematic inspirations and proximate circumstances of their making.
 
In anticipation of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (MC-73) I went back and rewatched High and Low, one of my favorite Kurosawa films.  Probably not a good idea, because then my appreciation for Spike’s joint followed the trajectory of his title, from the soaring heights of his aerial credit sequence to such depths that I couldn’t bear to watch all the way to the end, as he left behind the inspiration of Kurosawa’s masterpiece to ride his own hobby horses and in-jokes.  He grabbed me with bird’s eye views of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn over the bridge, so different from when I lived in the neighborhood a half-century ago, but tagged on so many undisciplined postscripts that I had to FF to the end.  Spike’s self-referential approach is mirrored in Denzel Washington’s self-importance, but we’re a long way from Malcolm X here, with this musical entrepreneur known as the “best ears in the business.”  The rest of the acting is indifferent at best, even Jeffrey Wright struggling with an underwritten role.  Though Lee begins with some of Kurosawa’s fluid camerawork, his chase scenes are self-indulgent rather than expressive (e.g. a subway car full of Yankees fans chanting “Red Sox suck!” or a Puerto Rican street fair).  Not without its pleasures, but still ultimately a disappointment to high expectations.
 
Though Paul Greengrass has descended from the heights of Bloody Sunday and United 93 into franchise thrillers, he’s a director who is always worth a look, and The Lost Bus (MC-64) fits the bill, in a docudrama about the Camp Fire that wiped out Paradise CA.  To quote some of my previous reviews, “his style is composed of visual shards in dynamic mosaic,” with “on-the-fly, you-are-there-in-the-middle-of-a-shitstorm filmmaking.”  The Hollywood angle pairs Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrara (shades of Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in this opposite to Speed) as bus driver and teacher trying lead a bus full of schoolchildren through a maze of encircling fire to the evacuation center where their parents wait anxiously.  We also watch CalFire officials making impossible decisions about fighting the fire versus applying all resources to saving lives.  As a sidelight, McConaughey’ mother and son play those roles in this film.  Enveloping describes the film as well as the wildfire, the experience is edifying even if the dialogue is uninspired. 
 
As for F1 (MC-68), I managed to make it almost a quarter of the way through this 155-minute barrage of commercials, based on the charm of Brad Pitt and a few other players, but the tired storytelling and the utter boredom and waste of Formula One racing compelled me to quit.
 
I probably would have missed the documentary Come See Me in the Good Light (MC-81) if my daughter hadn’t been familiar with the poetry and persona of Andrea Gibson.  Filmmaker Ryan White followed them and their partner and fellow poet Megan Falley from an ovarian cancer diagnosis to the brink of death and one final sold-out spoken word performance, where it’s no surprise to see look-alike Tig Notaro introducing them, and also getting a producing credit.  This portrait of a loving creative genderqueer couple facing a difficult medical journey has many layers, the poetry and the humor offering relief from the grim progression of the disease.  Besides Tig, I’m reminded of a book I just finished and enjoyed immensely, Alison Bechdel’s Spent: A Comic Novel, another celebration of gender fluidity, and the emotional bonds between all kinds of matings.  This film about dying is anything but grim.
 
It would be a bigger mistake to skip AppleTV altogether than to subscribe on a year-round basis.  Though I’ve squeezed out all the juice, I look forward to the next show that will drag me back onto the channel.