Minimizing Max

I’d gotten to the point of writing off the-remains-of-HBO as a vital streaming channel, but recently MAX has seemed worth a look.  Let me start with a re-recommendation of Flow (MC-87), recent winner of the Oscar for best animated feature (review buried in this round-up).  And express gratitude that the channel’s dilution in quality is balanced by its incongruous TNT offerings of live playoff games with my Cleveland Cavaliers and Guardians, which I would not be able to watch otherwise.  The channel’s current strategy of trying to emulate an old-time network in programming a little something for every kind of viewer, and subsuming the prestige aura of HBO, has its compensations but doesn’t make it worth a continuing subscription.
 
In its third season, The White Lotus (MC-77) inherits the mantle of HBO flagship programs, and does not disgrace the heritage.  The show has achieved enough prominence to attract skeptics and haters, but creator Mike White continues to deliver.  I was initially disappointed with the move from Sicily to Thailand, but gradually won over to the new location.  Sure, the show is as formulaic as a luxury hotel chain, with similar types of clientele, and similar points of appeal.  One of the latter is certainly the casting.  This year we have Parker Posey, one-time indie It Girl, reverting to her roots to play a southern matron, with a sketchy financier husband and three grown children.  Also Aimee Lou Wood as the young girlfriend of Walton Goggins (Sex Education meets Justified? Yes, please!).  Carrie Coon highlights the reunion of a trio of old girlfriends.  The sense of place conveys a density of specification, all flavored by Mike White’s wryly jaundiced POV, somehow delivering a popular product with a highly personal touch.  [Update after last two episodes, as much as I can say without spoilers]  First off, Mike White has done it again, pulled off a perfect Rorschach Test of a series.  What you see in it is what you bring to it.  And all the actors I mentioned deliver fantastically to the end.  The last two episodes are like a dare and the payoff, in one long film.  Ep.7 is all prologue and the running out of string; and the lengthy Ep.8 winds it up and ties it all together, all centered on the Buddhist monk’s meditation at the start of the finale.  Are there loose ends and implausibilities? Sure.  Are there endings you saw coming or don’t want to see at all?  Absolutely.  (Oh, no!)  But the tension never lets up, while the laugh-out-loud lines and White’s punk wisdom shine through.  The long-ago weirdo of Chuck and Buck has found a popular formula without betraying his personal strangeness, and I wish him continued success with it.            
 
Hacks (MC-90) deserves continued success as well, and shows no drop-off in its fourth season.  Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder persist in their dance of repulsion and attraction, now as the first female late show host and as her head writer.  Both characters are well-established, and bonded together despite deep-seated differences, now situated in the world of a Hollywood tv studio, instead of Las Vegas or on a stand-up comedy tour.  The stinging repartee and showbiz satire remain.  I had to be lured into this series initially, but now I’m in for the long haul (or for as long a haul as I or it have coming).
 
MAX has new seasons of several apparently-popular series that I have no interest in (Last of Us, Righteous Gemstones), but one which induced me to come back for a second chance was Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal (MC-86).  I rather enjoyed his original series Nathan for You, which was thoroughly prankish, but really couldn’t take The Curse or this latest, which come across as mendacious and mean-spirited, not that I gave either an extended viewing.
 
MAX rotates through a surprising but inconsistent range of older and newer films, of which the recent standout is The Brutalist (MC-90).  Despite ten Oscar noms, I was dubious about Brady Corbet’s film for several reasons, not least the excessive length and insistence on theatrical viewing, but I stuck with it over the course of two evenings.  The film seemed bloated and artificial at times, but did have its compelling elements, even when accomplished actors were shoehorned into clunky dialogue.  The result has scope but a misguided breadth of attack.  Brutalism falls under the “less is more” school of architecture, but this film shows that sometimes “more is less,” too many themes piled on top of each other, just like the architectural project that is its centerpiece.  Oscar winner Adrien Brody plays a Hungarian refugee architect with a Bauhaus background who makes it from concentration camp to America after WWII.  Felicity Jones is his wife who arrives later from the Soviet zone.  Guy Pearce is the despicable plutocrat who becomes Brody’s equivocal patron, rescuing him from menial work only to subject him to insidious new forms of torture. It’s all impressive yet unconvincing, a sort of twisted remake of The Fountainhead.
 
I expected great things from Jesse Armstrong’s follow-up to Succession, the HBO original feature film Mountainhead (MC-66), but was mildly disappointed by this insta-movie, which lands right in the middle of the Trump-Musk hissy fit.  It’s informative and funny, but the underlying message (we are being ruled by idiot savants, with emphasis on idiot) is not exactly news.  Indicatively, the title seems effortful and perhaps a darling that should have been killed.  I get that Armstrong spent some time around tech-bros and was both amused and appalled by the way they talk, the jargon and the presumption.  But taking the Skarsgaard character from the series, multiplying him by four and sequestering the quartet in an ultra-deluxe mountaintop chalet in Utah, is too much to take straight.  But then the four are played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef and Corey Michael Smith, so the wittily witless dialogue is delivered faultlessly, with a remote Olympian perspective on the real-world problems of moving fast and breaking things.  Are these Masters of the Universe or Four Stooges?  By now we know.
 
I have little use for Clint Eastwood or courtroom dramas, so I was surprised by how satisfying Juror #2 (MC-72) turned out to be.  The 94-year-old tough-guy director is unexpectedly even-handed in telling the story of a murder trial where one of the jurors has good reason to argue the others into a not-guilty verdict, without divulging how he can be so sure the skeevy guy didn’t do it.  Nicholas Hoult is the sympathetic (?) title character, Toni Collette (whom I have followed ever since Muriel’s Wedding) is the prosecutor, and J.K. Simmons is among the deliberating jurors, along with the rest of a competent cast.  Mixing a 12 Angry Men plot with a Hitchcockian pursued pursuer, the film arrives at something distinctively different from either, in a complex morality tale.
 
Colman Domingo first came to my attention as Bayard Rustin in the Obama-produced biopic Rustin, and now returns with Sing Sing (MC-83), earning Best Actor nominations for both.  Here he plays an inmate sent up the river for a murder he may or may not have committed, who seems to have achieved rehabilitation through deep involvement in a theater arts project with other prisoners (many “graduates” of the program play themselves in this recreation of real events).  Thoughtfully directed by Greg Kwedar, Sing Sing is inspirational and funny without glossing over the grim realities of prison life.  If you’re interested in the theme of this film – how an incarcerated convict can become human, in touch with his feelings again – I would also highly recommend the documentary Daughters (MC-85) on Netflix.
 
In Halina Reijn’s Babygirl (MC-79), Nicole Kidman plays a dominating tech CEO with a hot theatrical husband and two young teen daughters (and no domestic help?!?).  She unleashes her inner kink with an intern at her company (Harris Dickinson), turned on by the chance to be utterly submissive and also to threaten her whole life, professional and domestic.  Wavering between sex comedy and erotic thriller, the film is a dazzling showcase for Kidman; while Dickinson is quite good, his character is hardly filled in.  Fair enough to privilege the woman’s POV, and fair enough to play with genre expectations, but this film lacks a dimension to win me over entirely, though I found it more satisfying than the somewhat-similar Blanchett/Cuaron Disclaimer.
 
Not only have I lost my appetite for the stomach-turning political news, but I’m becoming less likely to consume sociological documentaries.  Amidst a bunch of “reality” junk, MAX still has vestiges of HBO Documentaries.  I would normally have taken an interest in Night is Not Eternal (MC-87), about resistance to authoritarianism in Cuba and China, and Eyes on the Prize III (MC-88), but so far I haven’t been able to bring my attention to bear.
 
With its widely-mocked latest name-change back to HBO Max, this motley streaming channel lost a lot of its appeal for me when the Pacers ended the Cavaliers’ dream season.  Boo-hoo.  [Last minute update: Realizing the mash-up did not work, HBO and Discovery are going their separate ways.]

Net-flix-ations IV

For me, Netflix is like an old flame, where the deep decades-long relationship has cooled into occasional just-friends get-togethers.  I’m critical of how it has changed for the worse, more aware of its flaws than its virtues.  I ended my last go-round with the channel with a complaint about how they had unceremoniously dumped a series by one of my favorite living directors.  But after a season away, I found quite a bit worth watching on the service, picking up where I left off.
 
Hirokasu Kore-eda’s seven-part series Asura (MC-89) follows in the grand tradition of his earlier film Our Little Sister, which in turn drew on The Makioka Sisters and many of Ozu’s domestic dramas.  It follows four sisters: a widow who teaches ikebana, a mother of two teens who suspects her husband of dallying with his secretary, a demure librarian with a persistent suitor, and a brash beauty building up her boxer boyfriend (pow, pow, pow).  A series of events is precipitated when the librarian hires an investigator after seeing their father in the company of another woman and child.  Though based on a novel and tv series from more than forty years ago, and set in that period, this series was written by Kore-eda and is utterly characteristic of his work, with a profound understanding of the sister’s relationships with each other and with their respective partners.  Without surprising plot twists or dramatic incidents, or anything but calculated attention to everyday life, we come to understand this family and the people in it, to care for them and to be amused by their eccentricities and interactions.  Don’t miss this, though you’ll have to search to find it on Netflix.  Only now do I discover there was an earlier series by Kore-eda on the channel, The Makanai, with which I’ll catch up at some point.
 
I’ve been a big fan of Love on the Spectrum (MC-83), from its two Australian series through its three American seasons.  It’s the only dating show I’ve ever watched, and my enjoyment has not diminished.  I repeat my comment on the previous season: “Many types of autistic personality are represented, and I tend to relate to all of them in one way or another.  The show is respectful, funny, and endearing, and even you neurotypicals will enjoy dating anxieties and triumphs that ring a bell across many spectra.”  I can’t claim that you will love this show if you’re not on the spectrum, but I’m betting almost anyone would find it entertaining.
 
Stephen Graham is the creator of the four-part British series Adolescence (MC-91), about a 13-year-old boy accused of killing a classmate.  Besides writing and producing, he plays the boy’s father.  Apparently he recruited his A Thousand Blows co-star Erin Doherty to play the court-appointed therapist interviewing the boy in the standout third episode.  And also his director from Boiling Point, Philip Barantini, who seems to specialize in long one-take scenes.  Each episode is filmed in one sinuous, ever-moving take, a technique that sometime impresses and sometimes distracts.  The first starts with the police breaking into the family home and dragging the boy out of bed and down to the police station for booking.  The second follows two policeman investigating at the boy’s school, and the third has his interview with the therapist, while the fourth looks at the fallout for his parents and sister.  The subject is grim but the treatment is serious, with some exploration of the “manosphere” on social media.  Beyond the technical marvel of its filming, the series is well-acted and thought-provoking, and stands out from the generality of Netflix content.
 
Toxic Town (MC-84) is another British four-part series, in a vein they seem to love, about a true-life group of little people banding together to get theirs back from the powers-that-be (cf. Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office).  It was created by Jack Thorne, also a writer-producer on Adolescence, starring Jodie Whittaker and Aimee Lou Wood as two mothers who meet in the hospital where they both deliver children with birth defects.  Later it emerges there was a cluster of cases in this English Midlands town, caused by corruption around the clean-up of industrial waste after the steel mills shut down, with a group of mothers bringing a class-action suit.  This is the sort of morality play that I appreciate, with diverse people facing difficult choices, repeatedly inviting the viewer to ask, “What would I do in this situation?”
 
After re-watching Luchino Visconti’s classic version not so long ago, I was dubious about the new Netflix six-part series of The Leopard (MC-72).  How bastardized would it be?  The surprising answer is not at all.  Lush and sensual, this period piece about Sicily in the 1860s is also serious and smart (unlike some NFX offerings).  Written and directed by a pair of Englishmen, it’s the product of familiarity and affection rather than appropriation and exploitation, and Sicily’s tourism bureau got their money’s worth from supporting this production.  All the actors speak Italian, unlike Visconti’s set, where Burt Lancaster said his lines in English and Alain Delon in French, and everyone was post-dubbed (I’d be leery of NFX dubbing).  And the acting is quite good, notably Kim Rossi Stuart as the title character, the Prince of Salina, and Benedetta Porcaroli as his daughter, Bourbon aristocrats whose way of life is threatened by Garibaldi and Italian unification.   Like Asura, this series is a hidden treasure amongst Netflix’s international offerings.  And now I’ll have to go back and watch Visconti’s Leopard for the fourth or fifth time, and Senso too.
 
I gave short shrift to two new Netflix series that may have merit, but failed to grab me at first glance – Forever (MC-84) and North of North (MC-77).  Your call.
 
Turning to film, the standout among recent Netflix offerings is I’m Still Here (MC-85), a recent Best Picture nominee that took the Oscar for Best International Feature, with Fernanda Torres nominated for Best Actress.  She’s the subtle heart and soul of the movie, as a mother of five whose husband is disappeared by Brazil’s military junta in 1971.  He was a former congressman returned from exile, and we see the family living an enviable life by the beach in Rio, and herein early scenes director Walter Salles conjures up memories of Alfonso Cuaron’s marvelous Roma.  But men in plain clothes come to take away the father, and then the mother and one of the older daughters.  The girl is released the next day, but the mother is held in isolation for two weeks.  The father is never seen again, though the government denieddenies ever taking him.  It took decades for the truth of his torture and murder to be revealed, with the family left in painful doubt for the duration.  The film is based on the youngest son’s memoir and celebrates the mother’s decision to go to law school at 48 to fight the dictatorship.  Fun fact: in a final sequence from 2014, the elderly mother is played by Torres’ own mother, who was nominated for Best Actress in 1998 for Salles’ Central Station.  This film seems like a cautionary tale for our own political moment – it can happen here, perhaps already is happening.
 
The panache of Pedro Almodóvar does not translate in his English-language adaptation of the Sigrid Nunez novel The Room Next Door (MC-70).  He directs Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton to speak clunky lines in an uninflected manner, perhaps meant to reflect the seriousness with which he is approaching the delicate subject of euthanasia.  Former war correspondent Swinton is dying of cancer and asserts her right to refuse treatment and die on her own terms, enlisting longtime writer friend Moore to keep her company on her final journey, staying in the “room next door” until the day of her choosing.  The film displays many of Almodóvar’s virtues, but is strangely flavorless.  I was drawn in by the subject and the stars, but did not engage in any deep way.
 
The Outrun (MC-72) is most notable for the compelling lead (almost solo) performance of Saoirse Ronan, in this tale of addiction and recovery, as adapted with deep authenticity by director Nora Fingscheidt and Amy Liptrot, from the latter’s memoir of the same name.  The film swings back and forth, in place and time, between the protagonist’s wild, drunken life in London, where she is studying biology, and the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, where she came from, and returns after drying out.  She divides her time between her separated parents, a bipolar father and a mother who escaped into evangelical religion, before going to spend a winter alone on the remotest of the islands.  The contrast between the urban party scene and the desolate, frigid seascape is driven home in alternation, and accented by documentary or animated excursions into the protagonist’s studies.  The elliptical and nonlinear presentation takes a good deal of piecing together by the viewer, but it’s all concentrated in Saoirse Ronan’s face, demeanor, and hair color.  She’s amazing and makes this film well worth the effort it takes to watch, both for grimness and eccentricity.
 
As “Nonno” to my grandchildren, I felt compelled to give a look to Nonnas (MC-57).  It certainly has a weak and cliché-filled script, with every beat predictable, but I sort of appreciated seeing NYC from an ethnic Staten Island perspective, and there were a lot of familiar and welcome faces (e.g. Linda Cardellini and a virtual Sopranos reunion).  Supposedly based on a true story about a guy (Vince Vaughan) who opened a restaurant as a memorial to his mother and grandmother, there is very little reality here (after The Bear and other “hell kitchens,” it’s hard to swallow four seventy-something women cooking for eighty and then dancing around the restaurant) but a few laughs and some comforting truisms about food and family.
 
One piece of generic Netflix programming that appealed to me for personal reasons was Britain and the Blitz (MC-tbd).  Seemingly inspired by Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, this film colorizes old documentary footage effectively, and adds interviews and narration, this time for WWII instead of WWI.  One of the characters illuminating the English homefront in 1940 is a 17-year-old girl.  As it happens, my mother was a 17-year-old girl under the Blitz, so this personalized, on-the-ground approach to the very familiar story of the Battle of Britain worked for me.
 
I’d been thinking of re-watching American Graffiti (MC-97) when it turned up on NFX, but the VHS-quality of the streaming deterred me from watching.
 
Reliable stand-up performers return to NFX with new routines in Mike Birbiglia: The Good Life (MC-tbd) and Sarah Silverman: Postmortem (MC-tbd), both solid but not their very best.  So all this was certainly worth a month’s subscription to Netflix, but I’m ready to pause the channel again.

Cinematic credo

I wanted to add the following to my profile on this page but it didn’t fit, so I’ll just read it into the record here, for anyone who might wonder whether we share compatible tastes:
 
I am a cinephile of a bygone generation, back when film could be construed as the preeminent art form of the mid-20^th century, and not just one of the multitudinous ways we are “amusing ourselves to death.”  I attend to cinema for much more than entertainment, though I’m never averse to being entertained.  I am drawn to domestic dramas, relationship comedies, workplace observations; explorations of nature, history, or community; and films of social conscience, especially with a strong documentary component.
 
As a rule, I don’t care for action or fantasy films, horror or sci-fi, and have limited appetite for crime and punishment, mystery and suspense.  I abhor franchises, most “blockbusters,” anything like a theme park ride, and almost anything based on a comic book or video game.
 
My criteria for what to watch jumps off from the MetaCritic rating (usually >70 for film, >80 for tv), followed in turn by director, performers, setting, story, subject, nationality, and sometimes period.  I’m fine with subtitles, and frequently watch with captioning when the English is accented or otherwise hard-to-hear.  I have no problem with B&W films, vintage or new, and I like to watch old films, sometimes for aesthetic and sometimes for historical or personal reasons.
 
Francois Truffaut remains my all-time favorite filmmaker, with Eric Rohmer a close second.  My favorite active American director is Richard Linklater, but there are plenty of others that I follow avidly.  My taste runs to Brits like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, and lots of foreign language directors – I’d categorize it as high middlebrow.
 
Though I’ve spent uncountable hours of my life watching movies, I have to confess that it’s been almost a decade since I set foot in a theater, so my focus is solely on streaming video, with an occasional DVD from ILL.  So I’m usually talking about films that appeared in theaters six months ago, give or take.  If not six decades ago.
 
My dual aim is to amuse readers and alert them to the best film and television to arrive lately on various streaming channels.  My hope is to guide viewers to programs of quality that might have otherwise escaped their attention.

P.S.  The NYT  just released a poll for "The Best Movies of the 21st Century" and though I've seen all but a small handful, my list would be totally different, so be forewarned that my taste must be quite distant from the generality of viewers.

Stray viewing

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

Movies on MUBI

I couldn’t pass up an offer of 3 months for $1, and I had a backlog of Mubi films to look into, so I’m going run through a double handful here, dutifully starting with The Substance (MC-78), recently up for five Academy Awards.  I knew I wouldn’t like it, having no use for horror films – and I didn’t.  But I must confess to making it maybe halfway through before giving up on the gore.  Coralie Fargeat’s direction is striking and kinetic, if shallow as a cosmetics commercial.  She’s got style, if no substance.  Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are not without appeal as twisted doppelgangers, but really, who needs this?
 
I wonder if my less-than-enthusiastic response to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster (MC-79) reflects the fact that it’s nearly unique in his work for not being written by himself – or that I broke up my viewing over two evenings (I consider set and setting an unspoken but determinative factor in film evaluation).  It’s certainly in his wheelhouse – cute kids in dire straits.  Is this 5^th grader being abused by his teacher, or is he abusing a classmate, or is something else altogether going on?  We take three cracks at the story, with overlapping narrative from three different perspectives, giving Kore-eda opportunity to display the empathy for which he is renowned.  Everyone has their reasons, no single view is complete.  Where does the truth lie, when seen from different angles?  Who is the monster?  What is a monster?  I don’t mind a maze of mirrors, but this one had a bit too much obscurity for me.  For similar theme and setting, I prefer The Teachers Lounge (reviewed here).  Nonetheless, Kore-eda remains the living Japanese director most worth watching.
 
I might have skipped Buddy (MC-76) as a likely sap-fest about human-canine connection, until I saw it was directed by accomplished Dutch documentarian Heddy Honigmann, whose Forever put her forever on my must-watch list.  This film follows six service dogs and the owners who rely on them, from a blind equestrienne to an Afghan War vet with PTSD.  The dogs are amazing in their attentiveness and their abilities, and the people love the animals who allow them a life they couldn’t have otherwise, not to mention being handsome and cuddly.  Sweet without being saccharine.
 
While much of Mubi programming has an “eat your spinach” vibe for me, Crossing (MC-83) was an unexpected gem found there.  It follows a retired Georgian schoolteacher who has promised her dying sister that she will find her banished trans niece and bring the outcast back from Istanbul to Batumi.  She teams up with a young male layabout, who has learned some English on YouTube, to navigate the border crossing and all the further crossings in the film, especially the ferry across the Bosporus.  Their story finally interweaves with that of two street urchins, and a trans woman completing her legal training and serving as advocate for the marginalized.  All five roles are well-acted and the street-level introduction to Istanbul is impressive.  Writer-director Levan Akin was born in Sweden to Georgian parents, and previously made an auspicious debut with And Then We Danced.  You know, to tell the truth, I like spinach when it’s this well-prepared.
 
That led me to another film about an older Georgian woman, Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry (MC-tbd), in which a 48-year-old solitary virgin shopkeeper has a brush with death and then immediately embarks on an affair with one of her deliverymen.  She’s a prickly, enigmatic character who rebels against her carping so-called friends, and a hard-looking woman transfigured by something like love.  These two films remind me of an even better one about a mature Georgian woman striking out on her own, My Happy Family, and you can read my rave here.
 
Oscar-nominated, The Girl with a Needle (MC-82) by writer-director Magnus von Horn is a stylish black & white historical horror film, about a sensational crime in Denmark a century ago.  But approached without that knowledge, one doesn’t know where the film is going, while remaining transfixed by the acting and the visuals.  Will we follow a young woman into the lower depths like the Zola adaptation Gervaise or take a turn into something like Freaks, or something else altogether, possibly Vera Drake or Broker?  Maybe all of the above, with a bit of Gothic fairy tale thrown in.  It’s all quite dark, grim, and suspenseful, in no way casual entertainment but highly artful and ponderable.
 
Close Your Eyes (MC-85) is a film for hardcore cinéastes, the first in 30-odd years from Victor Erice, best known for Spirit of the Beehive.  The little girl in that film returns fifty years later in this one, which seems largely autobiographical.  It follows a director who hasn’t made a film in twenty years, since his friend and star disappeared in the middle of filming.  The remaining reels of that historical drama open and close this film.  An “unsolved mysteries” tv program seeks the director’s involvement, which leads him to delve into remaining evidence, his own memories, and dialogues with former associates.  In the last third, one mystery is solved, but another is propounded.  At almost three hours, the film is too long, but continuously involving, meticulously filmed, and particularly suited to those well-versed in the history of cinema.
 
In hardly more than an hour, Mati Diop’s documentary Dahomey (MC-85) takes a lot in -- and makes a lot out of the story of the return of artifacts from that centuries-old West African kingdom, appropriated by France around 1900, to the present-day nation of Benin.  The film has much to say about colonialism and cultural appropriation (but almost nothing about the old kingdom’s militaristic involvement in the slave trade).  The statues themselves get to speak, in their journey from darkness to darkness, from museum storage to shipping crate to new home.  Also speaking are a symposium of Beninese college students, with many different perspectives on the appropriation and return of these cultural artifacts, and what they mean for the present day.  This film is a poetic and pictorial window on a little-known country.
 
A Still Small Voice (MC-80) is a documentary by Luke Lorentzen about a palliative care chaplain in training at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC, and about the benefits and costs of empathy.  It follows a formerly Hasidic woman, who questions the existence of God but is committed to reducing, in one way or another, the mental anguish of those confronting death.  Shot in a manner reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman, but lacking the scope and scale as well as the incisive, lawyer-like editing, this film is emotional and thought-provoking, but inconclusive.  Intimate but ultimately opaque, this is a worthy document that does not quite redeem the pain involved in watching it.
 
Mubi had a new collection of recent Irish films, and I took a flyer on A Date for Mad Mary (IMDB), about a young woman with anger issues, just out of a stint in prison for assault, who’s being ghosted by her longtime best friend.  She’s supposed to be the friend’s maid of honor, but has been denied a plus-one, because she’s not likely to find a suitable date.  Her search for said date makes for this modest but funny story.  Entertaining for its brief length, with a winning performance from Seana Kerslake, this is not a film I’d go out of my way to recommend.
 
Is it more accurate to call Gasoline Rainbow (MC-80) a faux-documentary roadtrip, or a low-rent direct-cinema American Graffiti?  Or maybe it’s a twisted sequel to Reservation Dogs, which actually follows the group of teenage friends to the Pacific Coast?  Or a counterpart to the excellent skateboarding documentary Minding the Gap?  Bill and Turner Ross have established an admirable reputation, but after watching their films out of due diligence, I’ve never yet managed to come up with anything to say about them.  This one follows a lightly-fictionalized mixed fivesome of friends just graduated from high school, who set off together with no plan but to cross the state of Oregon from their nowheresville town to the ocean, with a little help from friends along the way.  Not without merit, but a little shapeless for my taste.
 
With its eye-opening MetaCritic rating, I gave a chance to Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World (MC-95), but even for me it was too long and too much of a chore to watch all the way through, another esoteric Romanian film for very sophisticated tastes.  Just so, I would recommend Mubi only for those in search of the offbeat, and only for an occasional trial subscription.  For my earlier round-ups of the channel’s offerings, see here and here.

Peacock preens

Most of the time I don’t see the point of Peacock as a streaming channel, but several Oscar-nominated films brought me back for a month’s subscription.
 
Despite its eight nominations, I had a limited and ambivalent response to Edward Berger’s Conclave (MC-79), based on a Robert Harris novel, of a sort I would never read.  I appreciated the look inside the Vatican, but Roman Catholic ritual has never seemed so ridiculous.  Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci are their excellent selves as two cardinals who are not interested in becoming pope, but leery of the leading candidates for one reason or another.  Isabella Rossellini is a welcome but underused presence.  The politics of the deliberations are sketched in, but the focus remains on personalities and process, and the airing of dirty laundry, rather than probing of issues.  The preposterous machinations are twisty enough and the cinematography opulent enough to keep one watching, even after it becomes clear that this is in no way a serious film.
 
Is Wicked (MC-73) wicked good or wicked bad?  It’s not for me to judge, having no familiarity with the Broadway musical, and little attachment to its Oz-ian precursors.  Two things I can say for sure: it ain’t no Barbie (lacking the wit and personal touch), and it’s way too long (and only Part One!).  Where the dance numbers by director Jon Chu for In the Heights seemed anarchic and energetic, here his stagings seem cluttered and clunky, overwhelmed by an excessive budget, lost in a lavish land beyond the rainbow.  This may give some people what they want, but I was more bemused than amused or enthused.  We can all agree that Cynthia Erivo is great, and that Arianna Grande is . . . something.  There are definitely a plenitude of “Oh wow” moments, but not all of them are the good sort.  So call me a curmudgeon on this one, but you may enjoy it.
 
The well-received Dreamworks animation Wild Robot (MC-85) has considerable visual appeal but is too busy and too sentimental to compete with Robot Dreams or the latest Wallace & Gromit adventure in the field of recent animated robot capers.  While its characterizations of many wild animals are impressive, they’re not a patch on the Latvian Oscar-winner Flow.  A service-minded robot washes up on a remote island, where she soon machine-learns the languages and manners of the local fauna, and takes under her “wing” an orphaned young gosling that imprints on her, as well as finding ways to help all the other species.  The other three “cartoons” I can recommend for viewers of any age, but Wild Robot seems to target grade schoolers and push a message of being nice and taking care, though not without some visual pleasures and tear-jerking moments.
 
Edie Falco rarely disappoints, and she was the main reason I gave a look to the unheralded I’ll Be Right There (MC-66).  She probably formed a relationship with director Brendan Walsh on her outstanding series Nurse Jackie, and the well-written lead role here seems ideal for her, so sympathetic, funny, and true.  She’s a divorced woman in upstate New York, with two problematic adult children, a problematic mother (the always-effective Jeannie Berlin), a problematic ex-husband, and two problematic lovers, one male and one female.  It’s a lot, but she seems up to it, and does not really mind being on call for so many people in need.  But maybe she should take a moment to consider what she needs?  The title may seem nondescript, but is in truth highly descriptive.   Consider this a worthwhile sleeper, you may not need to see it, but it’s a brisk and engaging film.
 
One Peacock show I’d earmarked to watch was the return of We Are Lady Parts (MC-84), whose second six-episode season might have been even better than its first, which is saying something.  Nida Manzoor’s series about a punk band of British Muslim women of varying ethnicity is comic and serious in equal measure, each of the women of distinctive type and individuality, and each given her due this season.  The music is hilarious and intense, and the exploration of diversity and sisterhood pointed and moving.  Over recent years, I have become a big fan of many English sitcoms, and this ranks with the best, and stands out for its novel perspective on life in the UK.
 
With The Americas (MC-60), the BBC Natural History Unit visits the Western Hemisphere and swaps out David Attenborough for Tom Hanks as narrator.  The spectacular but now-familiar wildlife footage remains a draw, though Attenborough’s eco-warnings are replaced by warm-and-fuzzy stories that anthropomorphize and denature the wildness they explore, not quite Disney but not exactly real world either.  Nothing against Mr. Hanks, but this series is blander than it ought to be, with no overarching narrative.
 
Peacock has a whole sub-channel celebrating the 50^th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, including the entire run of the show.  I feel like I was present at the creation, so to speak, but my attention to the program has waxed and waned over the years, more recently being piqued by YouTube clips that my grown son urged watching, especially of Kate McKinnon.  I missed the tenures of many cast members who later went on to become favorites of mine, like Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers.  SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night (MC-72) is a quartet of documentaries about the production of the show.  At least two of the roughly hour-long segments are well worth watching: “Five Minutes,” which matches cast members’ initial audition tapes with their own later commentary; and “Written By: A Week Inside the SNL Writer’s Room,” which describes the pressure cooker of putting on each week’s show.
 
While I still consider Peacock a third-tier streaming channel, there’s enough worthwhile viewing to subscribe for a month from time to time.  And don’t miss We Are Lady Parts.  I’ll be back sometime after the second season of Nathasha Lyonne’s Poker Face comes round.

Hulu postscript

I stuck around on Hulu an extra month to see Anora (MC-91), which won Sean Baker four Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Editing) and eponymous lead Mikey Madison (of Better Things!) Best Actress.  Social realism meets screwball comedy in this story of a sex worker with a will of iron more than a heart of gold.  Her name means “honor” or “grace,” but she prefers to go by Ani.  Brooklyn through and through, she works – very competently – in a high-toned Manhattan strip club.  Because she spoke Russian with her grandmother, she is assigned to the callow young son of a Russian oligarch, and enters a dream world of wealth and privilege in her home borough.  On a wild, drug-fueled vacation in Las Vegas, the two get married.  But consequences ensue, and her Cinderella story turns sinister.  The oligarch’s wife sends three Armenian thugs to break up the marriage, but they are no match for Ani, who makes common cause with them in going on an all-night search for her fleeing boy-husband.  Sean Baker upscales the diverse energy of his marvelous indie evocations of marginal lives in Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, achieving mainstream acceptance and then some.
 

The crucial question for A Complete Unknown (MC-70) is whether you can believe Timothée Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan, and for me the surprising answer was a resounding yes.  He’s an opaque character, in keeping with the film’s title, but inhabits the music in a way that is fully satisfying.  Edward Norton is an earnest, kindly Pete Seeger.  As Joan Baez, new-to-me Monica Barbaro nails the voice more than the look, in an effective performance.  Elle Fanning is fine in the thankless role of Dylan’s early Sixties girlfriend.  James Mangold, an accomplished director who has been down this road before with Walk the Line, stages all with confidence.  The film runs from Bobby Zimmerman’s teenage arrival in NYC to the moment he went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, offering convincing renditions of so many songs to which I can mouth along the words.  TC as BD goes from nobody to somebody, and needs to shield himself from celebrity (and affection?) in order to remain obstinately his own obsessive person.  This film should work for all but Dylan superfans or the utterly indifferent, a great companion to the Scorsese documentary No Direction Home.    

I’ve never read Clare Keegan, but the film adaptation of her novella Small Things Like These (MC-82), along with the even better adaptation of The Quiet Girl, suggests that she is a writer who can do a lot with a little.  And Cillian Murphy is an actor who has proved that he can do a lot with a little, here playing a coal merchant in 1985 Ireland who begins to pry into the local “Magdalene Laundry,” the abusive “refuge” for unwed girls and “fallen women” run by the Catholic Church for centuries.  Emily Watson is creepily even-tempered as the steely Godmother of the institution, someone inadvisable to cross.  But the Murphy character has five young daughters of his own – along with a conservative wife unconcerned with matters that are “not our business” – with flashbacks to his own history as an illegitimate child.  His conscience will not let him close his eyes to what he has seen, and Tim Mielants’ film paints an effective portrait of the small Wexford town in which his moral quandary plays out.  I certainly prefer films about moral quandaries to action films, and Murphy has an appealing and revealing inwardness that suits the story.  Too bad his moral decision ends the story without revealing its costs or outcome, but otherwise this is a deeply involving film.

It's been a decade since I ran film programs at the Clark, but I still have an eye out for art-adjacent films, and thus Exhibiting Forgiveness (MC-82) had been on my watchlist since initial release.  So its eventual appearance on Hulu constitutes a further feather in the channel’s cap.  I did not realize going in that writer-director Titus Kaphar was in effect making a docudrama about his own paintings.  That takes balls or brass or something, but he pulls it off.  With a large measure of support from his avatar, André Holland, who delivers a sensitive performance, along with singer Andra Day as his wife and Anjanue Ellis-Taylor as his mother.  While watching I wondered who made the paintings for the film, and only later realized that the film was made in order to tell the backstory of the paintings.  It works either way, because the film carries enough dramatic weight on its own, so that it’s not merely a gloss on the paintings but a layered story of its own, about coming to terms with an abusive, crack-smoking father.  This movie is much more than an act of self-promotion, and I would have been happy to show it at the Clark.

 

As usual with Hulu’s interface, you need to dig deep to discover that they cycle through a lot of worthwhile older films from month to month.  This time through, I gave Sideways (MC-94) another look.  Always impressed with Alexander Payne, his recent The Holdovers and repeat viewing of his early classic Election sent me back to re-evaluate this midcareer peak, which I remember liking less than many.  Lo and behold, my opinion twenty years ago, in the very first month of Cinema Salon, is exactly what I thought this time around, so here is that old link.
 
Seeking to squeeze the last ounce of value out of an extra month on Hulu, I gave a chance to Eileen (MC-72).  I was ambivalent about director William Oldroyd’s previous film, Lady Macbeth, but I predicted great things for Thomasin McKenzie after Leave No Trace.  The setting in the near North Shore of Boston in the winter of 1964 was also interesting, but the actors’ accents are studied and variable rather than convincing.  McKenzie as the title character plays the drab 24-year-old daughter of a dissolute former police chief, who works in a juvenile prison where Anne Hathaway arrives as a psychologist with a Harvard Ph.D.  She’s absurdly glamorous, but we may be viewing her through the eyes of the smitten Eileen.  For a while I assumed this film was headed in the direction of Carol, but then there’s a genuinely shocking twist, and then another, and it becomes a different sort of film altogether, which left me dangling and feeling somewhat cheated.
 
The new Hulu tv series A Thousand Blows (MC-78) is reminiscent of Steven Knight’s previous series Peaky Blinders, but with a healthy dose of Harlots added.  Two Jamaican immigrants to 1880s London fall in with a female ring of thieves intent on moving up from pickpocketing and smash-and-grab to a major jewel heist.  Boxing is the corollary side-story, so prepare for some brutal bare-knuckle bouts.  Despite anachronisms and unlikelihoods, the world-building is dense enough to deliver a Dickensian sense of historical plausibility.  Erin Doherty is the leader of the gang, and Stephen Graham is her protector and suitor, an East End pub proprietor and muscle-bound boxer (suffering from ’roid rage avant la lettre).  Malachi Kirby is the Jamaican boxer with big West End dreams.  With multiple story lines, I wondered how they would wind up the series in six episodes, and the answer is they didn’t, just teasing a second half to come.  I may be back for it, or I may have seen enough.  We’ll see.
 
Gotta be suspicious of a tv series that began as a podcast, but the presence of Michelle Williams was enough (along with the FX label) for me to sample Dying for Sex (MC-82) before my month of Hulu expired.  And it greatly exceeded expectation.  As Molly, Williams is as soulful and funny as one would expect, embodying a woman with Stage 4 breast cancer who is determined find out who she is and what she likes before dying.  Surprisingly, Jenny Slate is equally soulful and funny, as the friend who accompanies her every step of the way; she plays Nikki Boyer, the originating podcast co-host and now writer and producer for the show.  The eight half-hour episodes are as much about friendship as sex and death (and oh yes, childhood sexual abuse), and pretty frank about all of them.  Sissy Spacek as Molly’s mother is a bonus, as is Rob Delaney as the “neighbor guy” with whom she explores her kinks (which also seals the comparison with Catastrophe, high praise as far as I’m concerned).  The supporting cast is notably fine as well, with Esco Jouley earning a shoutout as the palliative care death doula.  The series adeptly walks a fine line between raunchy humor and seriousness, with an almost documentary feel for life and death at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC, as well as some outré sexual practices.  Watch it if you want to have truthful fun with some touchy subjects.
 
Just as I was thinking that we were past the era of Peak TV and that film had regained its primacy in quality viewing, I was blown away in quick succession (pun intended) by three great series, including this one and two whose reviews will soon appear in round-ups here, Wolf Hall: The Mirror & the Light and season three of The White Lotus.
 
I guess all this was enough to justify an extra month’s subscription, but now I’ll pause Hulu, probably till the return of Welcome to Wrexham in a month or two.

Hulu-ciné-shins III

A Real Pain (MC-86) is a real pleasure.  Is that too easy – a ready-made blurb?  Never mind – it’s the real truth.  And Jesse Eisenberg is a real filmmaker – writer, director, and star.  He’s paired with Kieran Culkin, in a performance that in ninety fleet minutes rivals his Emmy-winning role in Succession.  He too is the real deal, as well as being the title character, as it were.  Two once-close cousins, in many ways polar opposites, use a bequest from their beloved and recently-deceased grandmother to take a Jewish heritage tour of Poland, including the house where she grew up and the concentration camp she managed to survive.  The Eisenberg character is an anxious New York City digital ad salesman with a wife and young child, while Culkin from upstate is a rule-breaking ne’er-do-well who “lights up any room he walks into, and then shits on everything in it.”  The result is both funny and penetrating.  Highly recommended.
 
In fact, enough to make me seek out Eisenberg’s first film as director, When You Finish Saving the World (MC-61, AMZ).  Eisenberg does not appear in that film, but adapted it from his original audiobook of the same name, with a clear autobiographical impulse.  Finn Wolfhard reprises his role as a teen devoted to social media, and Julianne Moore is his disenchanted mother, a former activist comfortably settled as director of a shelter for women and children.  Theoretically she’s devoted to helping people, while lacking people skills and self-knowledge, and sometimes even common sense.  Moore is excellent in drawing out the ambiguities of her character and engendering ambivalent reactions in the viewer.  I appreciated the film’s unpredictability and unusual setting in Indianapolis, and the foretaste of Eisenberg’s skill, but my recommendation is muted.
 
Returning to Hulu, I did watch the rest of the first season of Rivals (MC-84) and may even come back for the second, now in production.  It’s an amusing, soapy, thoroughly-retrograde British boink-fest set in the Thatcher years, based on a Jilly Cooper novel.  The entertaining cast is led by David Tennant, as the ruthless upper-class owner of a TV station, who hires combative Irish interviewer Aidan Turner as headliner, and feuds with aristocratic ladies-man showjumper-turned-politician Alex Hassell.  There are a host of other bed-hopping characters, and it takes a while to sort them out, and to understand their quirks and machinations.  The characterizations are far from deep, but it’s all good dirty fun.
 
I get the NYT “Watching” newsletter but rarely find it attuned to my tastes, yet they highlighted the French limited series Everything is Fine (IMDB), which I would never have discovered otherwise.  It caught my eye for the presence of Virginie Efira, whom I’ve been talking up for a while (here, e.g.).  Not usually a fan of hospital shows nor sick-child narratives, I nonetheless gave this a chance and was fully engaged.  It’s really a family portrait centered on a girl with leukemia, including her parents and sister, aunt and uncle (plus partners), and grandparents, each having an individual response to the central focus, whether it’s despair or denial, happy talk or panic attack, lust or its opposite.  The cast is good across the board, and creator Camille de Castelnau endows the eight-part series with admirable authenticity, seemingly personal.  Skirting the maudlin, the show remains serious while allowing for humor, and gives each character believable complications.  You’re gonna have to take my word on this one, but I thought it was pretty darn great.
 
Say Nothing (MC-80) is a dramatized companion to the superb documentary series Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (MC-88, PBS) in telling the still-relevant story of The Troubles of the last century.  Based on the highly praised nonfiction book of the same name by Patrick Radden Keefe, it centers on the case of a widowed mother of ten who was abducted and murdered by the IRA on suspicion of being an informer.  Over the course of nine episodes, the series focuses on two teenaged sisters who were implicated in that crime, and also a bombing campaign in London, but flashes back and forth in time to take in decades of conflict, and Gerry Adams’ long journey from terrorist to peacemaker.  Lola Petticrew and Maxine Peake share the central role of Dolours Price, who goes from teen insurgent to prison hunger striker to semi-repentant informer (not to mention the wife of Stephen Rea, star of The Crying Game), but the rest of the cast is equally effective.  Created by Joshua Zetumer, the series is even-handed in detailing the rights and wrongs of both sides of the conflict, offering much food for thought.
 
Like almost all of the best tv series on Hulu, Say Nothing comes via FX (Abbott Elementary being the exception).  They’ve always had some older classic tv shows, but I just went looking for Friday Night Lights and it’s no longer there (Buffy still is!).  A new (old) arrival is the hilarious and seminal British sitcom Peep Show (IMDB), featuring a lot of future award-winners early in their careers.  It has been available elsewhere, but all nine seasons are now on Hulu and decidedly worth watching.
 
In the Summers (MC-83) is a Sundance award winner directed by Alessandra Lacorazza, an autobiographical first feature about two sisters visiting their divorced father in New Mexico.  Played by different actresses – well-matched and persuasive – at three different periods from grade school to college, the sisters have changing relations with their father, a substance-abusing heavily-tattooed party-animal living in a house inherited from his mother, the condition of which is correlative to his own.  The film is composed of elliptical moments and images, more than dramatic events or psychological probing, but it’s evocative of moods and feelings associated with family relations among difficult individuals.  Nothing is resolved, but an impression is made.
 
Ghostlight (MC-83), another Sundance fave, is a family affair -- with a real-life father, mother, and daughter playing the same.  It’s written and directed by another couple – Kelly O’Sullivan is an actress-turned-writer-turned-director with her partner Alex Thompson (see review of their earlier Saint Frances).  Keith Kupferer and Tara Mallen are the parents, and Katherine Mallen Kupferer is a real find as the teen daughter, all in suppressed mourning over the recent death of their son and brother.  The tight-lipped father begins to get in touch with his feelings through participating in a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet, and the daughter joins in for some family healing.  The film is funny and touching in a manner that seems authentic and true to its milieu.  The title meaningfully refers to “the single bulb left on in a dark theater.”
 
The Taste of Things (MC-85) is so, so French.  As food porn, it turned me off more than it turned me on (ugh, all those fish dishes!).  I’m immune to the fetishization of food preparation and consumption.  But as a film about an artist at work, this worked for me, especially when the artist in question is Juliette Binoche.  She’s the longtime cook (and sometime lover) of a noted gourmet, “the Napoleon of gastronomy,” played by her onetime partner Benoit Magimel.  And there’s a beautiful little girl who is a prodigy of the taste buds.  Lovely to look at, Anh Hung Tran’s film transpires in the heyday of Impressionism and through fields of wildflowers, as well as protracted scenes amid the copper pots of a country kitchen, along with glimpses of the boudoir.  I rarely quote other critics, but Ann Hornaday of WaPo simply nails it: “Binoche is so gifted, she no longer seems to act anymore: She just is, in all her serene confidence and physical charisma.”  The same could be said of this film.
 
Thelma (MC-77) is a feisty 93-year-old, as is June Squibb, the actress playing her with considerable aplomb.  Josh Margolin’s debut feature was a Sundance crowd-pleaser, with all that implies.  Cute and soft-baked, family-friendly, undemanding, with a recognizable cast and a relatable theme.  The thin script is enlivened by the authenticity of Margolin’s affection for his own grandmother, on whom the story is based, until it takes a comic action-hero turn.  She’s an independent senior scammed out of $10K, who decides to take the matter into her own hands, enlisting a confederate with a two-seat scooter on a mission into a seedy area of LA to retrieve her money, gun in purse.  Weightless but inoffensive.
 
I wish I could recommend Lee (MC-62), but this disappointing biopic about Lee Miller, the first feature directed by distinguished cinematographer Ellen Kuras, is undermined by a diffuse script with some misjudged twists.  Kate Winslet is predictably excellent as the title character, a Vogue model and artistic muse who became a wartime photographer and documented the discovery of German concentration camps after WWII.  The supporting cast is stellar, but underused.  For example, what is Josh O’Connor doing here and why wasn’t his character properly defined?  This is a film that didn’t do enough by trying to do too much, but it does provide the backstory for many of Lee Miller’s most famous pictures.
 
I finally caught up with Robot Dreams (MC-87), an Oscar nominee for animated feature last year.  At first the animation struck me as simple and childish, but Pablo Berger’s film is neither.  It’s sophisticated both visually and emotionally, and full of old movie references.  It’s a soulful time capsule of NYC in the 1980s, with the Twin Towers still dominating the skyline.  The residents in the many street scenes are a vast assortment of animals, from an octopus as a sidewalk drummer to a bull as a policeman.  Dog is the main character; feeling lonely, he orders and assembles an Amica 2000 robot to be his best friend.  The robot takes to the role with gusto, and the two enjoy many outings in the city, to the joyous strains of Earth Wind & Fire’s “September,” until at Ocean Beach on the last day of summer the robot rusts in place and the beach is closed before Dog can return to extricate it.  They spend the long winter in wordless dreams of reunion.  You’ll have to watch to find out what happens, but this film is a treasure.
 
Here I must mention another wordless animation with animal characters, which could not be more different in style.  I watched it on the same night as the previous, so I’ll include it here, since I won’t be doing a MAX round-up any time soon.  Flow (MC-87) is a Latvian film nominated this year for both animation and international feature Oscars, and worthy of either or both.  It already has a case full of trophies for its blend of realistic yet magical animation, majestically beautiful.  After a devastating flood wipes out the human race, a black cat joins with a friendly labrador, a capybara, a ringtailed lemur, and a secretarybird in search of a safe harbor.  Not a word is uttered, but the animals all exhibit characteristic behaviors and personalities, as they face various trials on their “incredible journey.”  Wonder-full!
 
An Oscar nominee for best documentary feature, Sugarcane (MC-90) investigates the attempt by colonial powers to subjugate Indigenous peoples, specifically Canada’s attempt to “solve the Indian problem,” by wrenching children from First Nation communities (of which Sugarcane is one) to abusive residential schools run by the Catholic Church.  Something similar happened to Aboriginals in Australia and Native Americans in the U.S., all of it horrifying in retrospect.  The filmmakers and the community literally dig into the history of one such school in British Columbia, exhuming unmarked graves and histories of sexual abuse, infanticide, and suicide, among everyday cruelties.  Directed by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, this film is both an exposé and an exercise in truth and reconciliation.
 
Sly Lives (MC-77) is rather like an appendix to Questlove’s great concert film Summer of Soul (reviewed here), which prompted the question “Whatever happened to Sly Stone?”  This new film seeks to answer that question.  The first half is exhilarating as it shows just what Sly and the Family Stone represented during a five-year period around 1970 – with its blend of soul and rock, male and female, black and white – and the second is depressingly familiar in charting the corrosive effects of fame and drugs.  His downhill slide is depicted, but balanced by the commentary of Black musicians who followed in his footsteps, in a mix of jubilation and consternation.
 
I got stuck with another month of Disney on coming back to Hulu, and the only new thing I wanted to see was Beatles ’64 (MC-78).  I frequently talk about films as time capsules, and this documentary is exactly that, neatly positioning the Beatles’ first American tour as the cultural antidote to JFK’s assassination a few months before.  The film is a live-wire compendium of footage shot during those two weeks by the great documentarians Albert and David Maysles; television coverage of performances on the tour; and retrospective comments by the Beatles themselves and assorted superfans.  All the older footage is beautifully restored.  Sadly, older feet cannot be so restored, but they can be set to tapping.
 
I willingly stick with Hulu on a continuing basis, since its programming ranks with the best streaming channels and because its flexible policy allows the subscriber to pause the account for 1 to 12 weeks and reactivate at will.  But you need to know what you’re looking for on the channel, since the homepage and interface do not do justice to the breadth of offerings on Hulu, which for me is second only to Criterion, and a step ahead of the rest of the streaming pack.  Case in point – just as I was about pause my subscription, I saw that Hulu is poised to offer multiple-Oscar nominee Anora within the next month, along with other films on my must-watch list, so I’ll append another short post before pausing Hulu again.