I could not say it better

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

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

Tech update

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

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

Bedrock hits paydirt

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

Premium channels?

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

Doing the Hulu again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MUBI, maybe

I was just about to sign up for a week’s free trial of the Mubi streaming service, in order to see a specific film (Decision to Leave, reviewed here), when I saw an ad offering an introductory special of 3 months for $1, so I jumped at that, and then looked around to see what else was to be seen on the channel.
 
Alcarràs was a place to start (MC-85), the title of Carla Simón’s multiple-award-winning film a Catalan region in northeast Spain, where it centers on an extended family running a peach farm.  After Summer 1993, Simón again brings attentive observation to a cast of nonprofessional actors, especially children, in rural conditions.  I love the way she puts you into the middle of the story without preamble or introduction, letting the details of the relationships among the three generations emerge organically, captured by a ceaselessly roving camera.  Beyond the family itself, and the intimate details of harvesting peaches, there are reverberations from the wider world, after their peach orchards are threatened with displacement by a solar farm.  I was thrilled by this quietly realistic, deeply sympathetic film, the antithesis of a “thriller.”
 
Mathieu Amalric directs but does not appear in Hold Me Tight (MC-82), which is held together by a commanding performance from Vicky Krieps, playing a mother coming to grips with the loss of her family – husband, pianist daughter, and treehouse-dwelling son.  Her coping mechanism is to project herself into alternate realities, where the family is reconfigured in various ways, in kaleidoscopic shifts of light and perspective.  It’s meant to be confusing, to reflect the protagonist’s own confusion, and succeeds wonderfully, helped by lovely cinematography and music, and fine performances all round.  A mystery to be experienced rather than solved.
 
Playground (MC-86) is the bitterly ironic English title of the Belgian film Un monde, where a schoolyard becomes a battleground, a world of its own where characters are forged in fire, and bullying is contagious.  In Laura Wandel’s debut feature as writer-director, the Dardenne brothers have found a spiritual sister.  For 72 piercing minutes, the frame is filled by the face of a 7-year-old girl as she confronts first grade and its attendant agonies.  Sometimes the camera circles around and we follow her, seeing her narrow world from her waist-high perspective.  From any angle, Maya Vanderbeque delivers a profound and astounding performance.  She’s Nora, who starts out clinging to her slightly older brother, but gradually becomes his protector in turn, and then his antagonist, as juvenile violence gets passed around like the flu.
 
Mr. Bachmann and His Class (MC-89) is an outstanding documentary.  Director Maria Speth is like a kinder, gentler Frederick Wiseman, and over the course of 217 minutes she follows an inspired teacher and his class of sixth graders through a school year.  In an industrial town in Germany, the class is a polyglot mix of recent immigrants with those born there of immigrant parents, all “guest workers” from countries ranging from Morocco to Azerbaijan.  The teacher is quite a character (from the generation just after the ’68ers), and the kids are a charming mix of personalities and backgrounds.  The time it takes to know them never drags, and is ultimately quite uplifting, as well as funny and penetrating.
 
The Polish film Corpus Christi (MC-77) was an Oscar nominee a few years back, and I found it worth watching, in a Bressonian sort of way.  It’s handsomely directed and features a lead performance of startling intensity, as a paroled convict who impersonates a village priest and finds his calling.  The actor’s eyes are magnetically strange, and well-adapted to either dissipation or elevation, intoxication or enthusiasm, violence or ecstasy.
 
The Irish film Rose Plays Julie (MC-83) is a #MeToo era revenge thriller – moody, enigmatic, and smoothly-made – but not something that gripped or held me.
 
Sicilia! (1999) is a quirky minimalist film, static and stiffly declamatory, about a son of Sicily returning for a visit after many years away.   I wouldn’t have watched if I weren’t currently immersed in reading and viewing about my ancestral homeland.  Given that particular interest, and the diversion of a stationary bike, I had the patience to sit through its odd 66 minutes, but I wouldn’t advise anyone else to.
 
Mubi also revived the Taviani brothers’ Padre Padrone (1977), about a Sardinian shepherd boy, and in the midst of digging into my imaginary identity as an Italian peasant, I took another look.  However it may have looked back then, I found it unwatchable today, its bare-bones neorealism laced with bawdy humor.
 
I credit Mubi with offering my first chance to see a Maltese film, Luzzu (MC-78), an absorbing update on the traditional Sicilian fisherman of Visconti’s La Terra Trema, now under threat from climate change, EU regulation, and globalized container shipping.  A young fisherman, with an ailing infant and a leaky luzzu (painted wooden boat) inherited from his father and grandfather before him, is tempted toward corruption by desperation.  Maltese-American Alex Camilleri, a first-time writer-director, beautifully renders the watery light of the Mediterranean, despite the scarred industrial landscape, in an impressive neorealist film that debuted at Sundance.
 
So there are definitely good films on Mubi, but they tend toward the esoteric, and not enough of them to warrant a continuing subscription, though you may want to drop in and give it a try sometime.  It’s either a feature or a bug that their policy is to add and subtract a film each day, so at any given time they’ll have a lot of films I’d highly recommend (such as, at the moment, Amour and The Rider), though I didn’t have the urge to see them again during this trial subscription.

Film award wrap-up for 2022

Now that the Oscars have been handed out, I return to finish my survey of 2022’s award-worthy films (see here for my comments on the most-celebrated Everything Everywhere All at Once and other notables).
 
Given the people involved, I was highly disposed toward Women Talking (MC-79, AMZ).  Sarah Polley is one of my favorite active directors (Away from Her, Stories We Tell) and with this film she took the screenwriting Oscar for adapting Miriam Toews’ novel of the same name.  Jessie Buckley and Claire Foy are two actresses I will always watch, and here are even exceeded by Rooney Mara.  The inestimable Frances McDormand produces and contributes a cameo.  Ben Whishaw honorably represents the lone male in the cast, a sympathetic school teacher taking minutes, as the oppressed and illiterate women of an isolated religious community respond to the depredations of the dominant males. They gather to decide whether to leave en masse or stay and fight for liberation.  This deeply wrenching but beautifully made film, based on an extreme and even freakish case, pairs nicely with She Said as an indictment of the malign power of male sexual violence against women.  The film’s constrained circumstance and colorless palette reflect the women’s lives, but so does the subdued beauty and poise of the portrayals.
 
Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO (MC-85, CC) is a beautifully-rendered donkey’s-eye-view of the world, wild with magic and mystery, intimate with fur and flesh, visually dazzling and emotionally resonant.  Part lovely nature documentary, part grim fable of animals in a human world, this film may not satisfy every taste, but I definitely vibrated to its wavelength.  Criterion offers the streaming premiere, and a retrospective of Skolimowski films.  (I was not re-engaged by Deep End, though it was oh-so-1968.)
 
Argentina 1985 (MC-78, AMZ) garnered a number of awards and nominations, and it was a history lesson that I appreciated (especially now that the U.S. itself is under threat of an authoritarian coup), as an elected government puts on public trial the leaders of the military junta that had ruled with an iron fist over the previous decade, with thousands tortured and “disappeared.”  Ricardo Darin is excellent as the real-life reluctant prosecutor, who is hung out to dry professionally, and has to rely on a young law professor and a bunch of students to build the case by interviewing hundreds of witnesses, and selecting the most compelling to offer courtroom testimony.  Santiago Mitre’s film is an effective legal drama, with a wider frame of reference than whodunit? - a modern-day Judgment at Nuremburg in holding the powerful to account.
 
Worlds away from what I would typically watch, I gave Top Gun: Maverick (MC-78, AMZ) a chance based on award nominations and top ten selections.  Wow, what a piece of crap!  It lacks any of the things that lure me to films, except the pleasure of laughing at its formulaic predictability, strictly by the numbers.  A routine Tom Cruise vehicle, written by committee, souped up to Mach 10, though supported by a decent cast and competent direction.  More effective as a video game simulation than as any sort of human drama.  Like the Reagan-era original, it’s one big recruiting ad for the Air Force, without a shred of political context or any unexpected turns of character.  This film seemed especially egregious to me after having recently watched Twelve O’Clock High, a 1948 film that was less jingoistic and infinitely more realistic and truthful about the stresses of aerial bombing runs.
 
Decision to Leave (MC-84, Mubi) is one of those films that demands a second viewing, but nonetheless is dazzling at first look, prismatic shards of narrative pieced together in an artfully-composed mosaic.  Chan-Wook Park’s romantic thriller could be construed as Basic Instinct meets Vertigo, but is very much his own thing.  In fact, it’s pretty hard to construe at all for much of its length, but it’s a virtuoso performance all round, from acting to cinematography to editing to settings to turnabouts of plot and character.  An insomniac Korean detective develops an obsession with a beautiful Chinese woman who’s suspected of murdering her Korean husband.  And the story spins off from that, in whirlpools of mystery and deception, into which the viewer feels compelled to dive and lose all sense of direction.  I may have more to say on second look, but I was certainly led into this film more deeply than I expected.  (Could have used Pachinko's innovation of subtitling in different colors for different languages.)
 
No Bears (MC-92, CC) is intelligent, layered, and filled with humanity, as expected of the great Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has spent more than a decade in prison or under house arrest, banned from making films or leaving Iran, but nonetheless making four internationally-acclaimed films.  Like his son’s similarly excellent Hit the Road (reviewed here), this was filmed at the highly-fraught Turkish border, where people-smuggling is a major business.  Of necessity, the father continues to star in his own films, in a blend of person and persona.  Here he is directing a film, by laptop through a remote and inconstant connection, set in a town just over the uncrossable border.  Two storylines interweave: the film within the film depicting a couple of Iranian exiles trying to make their way to Europe; and Panahi’s encounters with the folk of a small nearby village where he is hiding out, part ethnographic study, part self-satire.  To appreciate this film it helps to have familiarity with the interrelated world of Iranian neorealism, where films and directors are in conversation with each other, and also helps if you’re patient with uncertainty and open to different ways of being and seeing.  It may seem random as it proceeds, but all fits together in the end.

 

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (MC-70, AMZ) is a film I never would have watched without the presence of Lesley Manville, and she is predictably great in a so-so movie, about an English house cleaner and widow who dreams of owning a Dior gown.  It’s a silly 1950s fantasy, as preposterous as Mary Poppins, but Ms. Manville somehow grounds it in psychological reality.  A flimsy contrivance, but not badly made overall, with the oddity of Isabelle Huppert playing essentially the role that Manville herself played in Phantom Thread, plus a sly allusion to her role as Princess Margaret in The Crown, two more substantial productions.

You’re kidding me, right?  The Fabelmans (MC-84, dvd) is one of the best films of the year?  What a sad year 2022 must have been in film.  The novelty here was Steven Spielberg telling his own story in more direct form than he’s been telling in films from E.T. on.  But in terms of introspection, he’s no Truffaut or Bergman, and he’s mining no great material here in writing his own touched-up script, instead of oh, say Lincoln’s.  Spielberg has made some pretty great films, but also some real stinkers, based on the material he’s working with.  He’s a technician, not a visionary.  Or to see it through his eyes, more like his electrical engineer father (Paul Dano) than his ethereal artistic mother (Michelle Williams, in one of her least natural performances).  But instead of looking through the lens of personal insight, he sees his life through the lens of Hollywood movies before his, looking for a smooth surface rather than hidden depth.  Instead of increasing authenticity, he relies even more than usual on phony sentiment.  Though a lot of people see it differently, I kind of resent Spielberg taking up two and a half hours of my time with his movie-fed, movie-fied memories.  I’d be gentler if the film were an hour shorter, tighter, and/or more profound.
 
In compiling my lists of the best films and the best television of 2022, I couldn’t help but notice a disparity in my enthusiasm.  I couldn’t contain my TV list to ten, while struggling to find ten new films I was really excited about.  But I can offer my provisional best of the year list, in reference to Metacritic’s tabulation of hundreds of critics’ top ten lists, yielding an overall Top 30.  In my list, I append the general Metacritic rating for reference to their informative annual ranking.  I’m still tracking down a number of films as they arrive on streaming channels, and will continue to add reviews to this compilation. 
 
These are the leaders in the clubhouse, so to speak, with some likely competitors still unseen:  Tár (92), Happening (86), Women Talking (79), Everything Everywhere All at One (81), Hit the Road (90), No Bears (92), EO (85), The Banshees of Inisherin (87).  Still to be seen, expected to make list: Aftersun (95), The Quiet Girl (89), One Fine Morning (85).
 

Documenting documentaries

I’m spinning this off my film awards season survey (with update soon to follow now that Oscars have been awarded), in order to cover well-received documentary features from the past year.  Navalny took the Academy Award, more for political than aesthetic reasons, and I endorsed its importance here.  But I start this survey with two other HBO documentaries that were also nominated.
 
Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (MC-90, HBO) is several films in one, and only one aspect of it is weak.  The review of photographer Nan Goldin’s career holds up nicely, and her family story (especially the suicide of her beloved older sister) is telling, and so is her ACT-UP activism during the AIDS era, which decimated her artistic community.  But the frame of the story is her post-addiction campaign against the Sackler family’s art-washing of their predatory Oxycontin manipulations, which strikes me as more performative than provocative, enacted for the camera rather than for real-world results. The Oxy subject is better handled in another HBO doc, Alex Gibney’s The Crime of the Century.
 
All that Breathes (MC-87, HBO) is another film that goes in many directions at once, mostly effective but raising more questions that it can answer.  It’s about brothers who run a hospital for injured birds, mostly kites, in Delhi, and the environmental disasters they encounter on a daily basis, compounded by Modi’s Hindu nationalist attacks on Indian Muslims.  The elements of elegant nature photography are present, but they are more about kites scavenging in the world’s largest landfill, or rats overrunning their derelict neighborhood.  The brothers go about their business, inspired by the totemic role of kites in their religion, as the whole world seems to be falling apart around them, while they earnestly discuss the possibility of banishment, or nuclear war between Pakistan and India.  Despite the many layers of interest, I found this meditative and impressionistic film a bit snoozy.
 
Now that PBS documentary series other than Ken Burns have been cut way back, HBO is clearly the premiere venue for docs, and here are some others of note:  Master of Light (MC-81) is the engaging story of George Anthony Morton, a Black man from Kansas City who spent his 20s in prison, after taking the rap for his drug-dealing mother.  While incarcerated he took up painting, and when he got out studied classical painting at the Florence Academy of Art.  Director Rosa Ruth Boesten follows him back to KC where he paints portraits of his family that are both aesthetically appealing and psychologically healing.  Though I would have been happy to see more about Morton’s career in art, it’s edifying to spend time in company with him and his family.
 
The subject is Speaker Nancy, as portrayed by documentarian daughter Alexandra, in Pelosi in the House (MC-66), and this intimate profile just locked in my admiration.  Nancy Pelosi has always seemed an effective political leader but (or maybe, because) somewhat robotic.  This film puts flesh and feeling on the public figure.
 

Also new to HBO is the 2019 profile Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (MC-77), a fond and fine look back at a heartthrob with one of the memorable voices of my generation, from the Stone Poneys onward, as she followed the beat of a different drum through a varied and highly distinguished career.

Moonage Daydream (MC-83) was quite a different sort of music biopic for HBO.  I never paid any attention to David Bowie in his heyday, but in retrospect I can see his cultural significance.  Brett Morgen’s documentary is not a standard-issue primer on Bowie’s career, but a full-on 140-minute crash-course (with the emphasis on crash).  I don’t know when I’ve seen such a frenetically-edited film, with clips from dozens of classic films as well as Bowie’s artwork, animations, dancing, and acting, in addition to music videos.  Bowie’s own selective and ruminative narration brings some order to the kaleidoscopic chaos of the visuals, and grounds the whirlwind of his widespread artmaking.  When he performs one of his songs live, Morgen intercuts visuals from different eras and different Bowie personas, to highlight his continuous fervid re-invention.  It’s a lot, and could induce epileptic fits, but adds up to an admirable Cubist portrait. 

Fire of Love (MC-83, Disney+) was another Oscar nominee.  It’s the story of an intrepid French couple who annealed their love in flaming volcanoes all over the world, flirting with danger to get spectacular up-close footage of eruptions, until the one that killed them in 1991.  Though the impressive intimacy of their 16mm films has long been superseded by hi-def drone footage, they represent a remarkable feat and legacy, and the story of their relationship adds another dimension to Sara Dosa’s film.
 
Descendant (MC-87, NFX) is a good film about the last ship that illegally brought slaves from Africa to Alabama in 1860.  A rich man in Mobile bet another he could smuggle in slaves despite the long-time ban on international slave trade.  He succeeded, and then burned and sunk the ship Clotilda to avoid detection.  Though he and his family remained the dominant landowners in the area, after emancipation the Black people settled in an enclave known as Africatown, where their origin story became folklore until the recent discovery and raising of the ship, which led to community discussions of how the find might be memorialized and history rewritten.

The most interesting part of the previous film was the work of Zora Neale Hurston as anthropologist and filmmaker around 1930, when she was able to record and transcribe the account of last living survivor of the Clotilda (finally published as a book in 2018).  That led me to the recent “American Experience” documentary on PBS, Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space, which included much of her original footage, but moreover the whole inspiring and infuriating story of her life.  Highly recommended.

As is another recent “American Experience” offering, Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History.  Did you know that the ubiquitous board game Monopoly was created as an anti-capitalist exercise by a Quaker woman?  Nor did I, but found out that and many other fascinating facts in this lively and twisty tale.

Favorite TV of 2022 and all-time

Again jumping off from a Metacritic compilation of top ten lists, I review my own choices for the best TV of 2022, but not before commenting on welcome encores for two of my favorite series, which had me back onto AcornTV for a month.
 
Doc Martin (Wiki) gets an honorable mention on my list of all-time favorites, plus this year’s, as my particular exemplar of comfort viewing, having found a durable formula sustained through ten seasons over eighteen years.  The final season ended a great series on a high note, having shown remarkable continuity in its depiction of a seaside community in Cornwall.  Virtually all the village characters remain, ringing changes on well-known personalities, from Dr. Ellingham’s autistic lack of bedside manner through a dozen more.  Intelligent and funny, lovely to look at, with many medical mysteries unpacked, this entire series has my highest recommendation, for a broad audience.
 
Nearly matched by The Detectorists (Wiki), a fantastic half-hour comedy about the members of a metal detecting club in the east of Britain, featuring Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook, who also writes and directs.  After completing three seasons back in 2017, it returned with a movie-length Christmas special, about another uncovering of unsuspected treasure, under the verdant soil of the English countryside, and in the verdant soil of English comic acting.  Another of my picks to click with many sorts of viewers.
 
If you’re on Acorn, be sure to sample their Short Film Showcase, a series of ten short films, highlighted by performances from the likes of Sally Hawkins or John Hurt.  Each has its own merits, and they share the merit of being brief and distinctive.
 
Long cited as my favorite television show ever (and recently sampled yet again), David Simon’s The Wire has finally been outdistanced, in a photo finish, by the Vince Gilligan/Peter Gould tandem of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, which last year concluded its combined eleven-season run in perfectly dovetailed fashion, fitting together as neatly as the first two parts of The Godfather.  A new series of Borgen also solidified its place in my all-time list. 
 
[Click on “Read more” to see my brief round-up of the year’s best tv (with Metacritic rating for reference), and also my up-to-date all-time Top Ten list.]

The Pride of Peacock

Finally having an incentive to do so, I subscribed to the Peacock streaming channel for a month (the Premium Plus option to avoid ads), in order to watch some recent films, and to catch up with a few shows of interest.
 
I’m a sucker for movies about newspaper work, and She Said (MC-74) follows nicely in a distinguished tradition.  In advance the title struck me as bland, and some people found the movie so, but upon viewing I find the title perfectly emblematic of the film, leaving the storytelling entirely up to capable women, and erasing the prefatory “he said.”  Start with estimable NYT journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke the story that unleashed the #MeToo movement, and their film avatars Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan, reliably excellent.  As are Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle, as two of the women who come forward with testimony.  Rest of cast, and other credits, also up to the job of getting the story told.  With this film after I’m Your Man, I’m taking note of Maria Schrader as a director to watch.
 
Is the title character of Tár (MC-92) a “Rat” or the epitome of “Art”?  You’ll have to decide for yourself, though accomplished writer-director Todd Field and star Cate Blanchett - in a towering performance - offer plenty of evidence for any interpretation.  She’s a driven girl from an outer borough who’s raised herself into a "sacred monster" of music, a Leonard Bernstein-wannabe who has swept herself into the highest ranks of conducting, composing, and writing.  And into a position of cultural power, which she abuses unabashedly.  She’s conducting a live recording of Mahler’s 5^th symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic, while angling to make a young cellist her latest catch, casting aside earlier conquests, and sidelining her violinist wife and adopted daughter.  But does her deep and honest passion for music outweigh her more unseemly passions for control and exploitation?  The viewer cannot look away from either the horror or the exaltation of her quests.  Even without a background in classical music, this film immerses one in the subject and milieu, and leaves one with unanswered questions and yet deeper understanding.
 
James Gray’s autobiographical Armageddon Time (MC-74) is a highly-divisive film on which I come down on the “No way!” side of the divide.  Despite decent acting (from the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Ann Hathaway, and Jeremy Strong) and generally strong design, this story of Jewish coming of age in 1980 Queens struck me as an undigested and unconvincing memory-piece, with a resolution stolen from “The 400 Blows.”  In the background, we see Reagan being elected and get a foretaste of the future in the incidental characters of Fred Trump and The Donald’s sister (played by Jessica Chastain).  Centered on a not-especially-appealing 6^th grader who forms a bond with the film’s only black character, the story unfolds without great credibility or continuity, despite some believable moments.
 
Among TV series, one Peacock Original attracted my interest:  Poker Face (MC-84), an intriguing blend of Russian Doll and Knives Out, starring Natasha Lyonne and created by Rian Johnson.  She’s a wised-up drifter with a knack for finding her way into trouble - and one superpower, the ability to tell whenever anyone is bullshitting her.  So episode by episode, she runs into a lot of crime that she is uniquely positioned to solve.  The mystery is usually given away early, but the interest - and the humor - lies in how our little lady puts the whole story together, and metes out her own brand of justice before moving on.  Apparently modeled on Columbo, a show I never remember watching (nor Rockford Files or Murder, She Wrote, as other models cited) it’s witty and imaginative, and graced with any number of familiar faces showing up in each hour-long episode.  But crucially, the series has the beguiling presence of Natasha Lyonne, who has enchanted me since last millennium’s Slums of Beverly Hills and But I’m a Cheerleader.
 
Diversity is one of the great advances in recent sitcoms.  We Are Lady Parts (MC-83) is a case in point, a delightful romp about a group of British Muslim women, of varying ethnicity, who form the punk band of the title.  Written and directed by Nida Manzoor, with obvious autobiographical elements, it’s narrated by a shy and awkward Ph.D. student in microbiology, who’s a guitar virtuoso with performance anxiety and a hankering for “Bashir with the Good Beard.”  She’s the most endearing of a handful of engaging characters, each with her own piquancy.  All in all, too many good things to cram into six half-hour episodes, so look forward to the greenlit second season.
 
Two documentaries caught my eye on Peacock:  Most of the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965 passed through Lowndes Country, where 80% of the population was Black and not a single one of them was registered to vote.  After the SCLC Mississippi Summer of 1964, SNCC turned its attention to a grassroots effort in Alabama, a story very effectively told in Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power (MC-84).  Stokely Carmichael is a major player but local John Hulett is the hero of the piece.  The former first enunciated the slogan “Black Power” but it was a local initiative to oppose the Rooster ballot insignia of the white power structure with, instead of a Dove, the Black Panther image that was to become so famous when adopted in Oakland.  This is an inspiring and little told story of bootstrap progress.
 
Paper and Glue (MC-80) is a worthy sequel to the great Faces Places - even without the participation of dearly departed Agnes Varda - as it follows the large-scale photographic projects of French street artist JR, from a supermax prison in California to the border wall with Mexico, from the banlieues of Paris to the favelas of Rio.  In stunning examples of the social power of art, his building-sized portraits of local people build community through process and result, cooperation and representation.  Truly inventive and admirably engaged, this is work that gives art a good name.
 
So I definitely got my ten bucks worth of quality viewing out of a month of Peacock, but it’s likely to be many months before I have any urge to re-subscribe.

Return to bedrock

As indicated before, I’ve adopted a change in voice.  From hectoring “you” with friendly viewing advice, I’ve switched to talking to myself, mainly as a diaristic aide-mémoire, which is how I started out two decades ago.  Perhaps I should change this blog’s name to Cinema Soliloquy?  Now I address my remarks to nobody, because that is likely my readership.  Nonetheless, I invite intrepid souls with time on their hands to listen in.  So this is a quick whirl through several months of film viewing.
 
Though I have sometimes gone months without watching anything on the Criterion Channel, I’ve always considered my charter subscription not just a fee for service but an act of cultural patronage, because the Criterion organization is so important to the preservation of the history and diversity of cinema.  In a hard assessment of value for money in various streaming subscriptions, I recently converted to an annual subscription for Criterion, (amounting to $8.33 per month), while adopting an intermittent approach to Netflix and Hulu, as well as more specialized channels.
 
Having thus returned to basics, I actively looked for films to watch on the channel, and found much of novelty and interest.  Criterion has a massive back catalogue of Janus Films, the distributor of so many mid-century international classics, which formed the core curriculum of my education in film, but they also rotate in a lot of old Hollywood TCM-type titles, which fill in gaps in my viewing history.  They rotate thematic collections, and also have some streaming premieres of more recent films.
 
For another in my series of periodic diaries of Criterion Collection viewing (e.g. here, here, and here), click on “Read more.”