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Alex Ross Perry ("The Color Wheel," "Listen Up Philip") looks to bounce back from "Queen of Earth" with the tale of a young woman shaking up the lives of a bunch of Brooklynites, "Golden Exits."

A documentary made entirely from Russian dash-cam videos, "The Road Movie."

A documentary about the origins of the modern skyscraper, "Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan."

From Poland, a biography of the life of painter Zdzislaw Beksinski and his clan, "The Last Family."

A posthumous release from Abbas Kiarostami ("Like Someone in Love"), the contemplative offering "24 Frames."

Thomas Middleditch (HBO's "Silicon Valley") and Jess Weixler (TV's "The Good Wife") might be enough to lure us to this romantic tale of interconnectedness and coincidence, "Entanglement."
  

Doc Watch: Bright and Dark

JANE (B+) - This is a bright, upbeat found-footage piece that reveals Jane Goodall's pioneering field studies of chimpanzees in Africa starting in the early 1960s. The archival video, in tactile color, plays like a real-life Disney nature movie from that era. It was an era in which headline writers routinely referred to her looks, not above calling her "comely" in headlines.

The talented Brett Morgen ("Cobain: Montage of Heck," "The Kid Stays in the Picture") curates this found footage like a pro, crafting a fascinating narrative and building drama. The chimps become real characters, as we come to know them across generations through this groundbreaking study of their social interactions. We also watch, in wonder, as the chimps reveal the skill to use crude tools.

Goodall is calm and poised throughout her experience, raising her own child with famed wildlife documentary cinematographer Hugo Van Lawick, whom she met at the start of the project at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. She tutors research assistants. She interacts naturally with her hosts. We see her own life unfold before our eyes. We are transported to that place and that time, the camera close over her shoulder as she traipses through nature, and we are close enough that it seems we can reach out and touch that familiar ponytail. At other times, she just sits and observes, and we're lucky enough to do so too.

I CALLED HIM MORGAN (C+) - A surprisingly boring recounting of jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan and the woman implicated in his fatal shooting in February 1972. Talking heads -- mostly fellow musicians -- tell a sluggish tale of a junkie who seemed destined to meet a premature, messy end.

Helen Morgan, as one of Lee's old pals says, literally dragged Lee out of the gutter and rescued his career -- saved his life. But her jealousy over another woman sent her into a rage, and she shot him dead at a club. She served some time but was released on probation after pleading to second-degree manslaughter.

The shooting itself doesn't happen until about 20 minutes before the end of the movie. Before that point, the movie wallows in Lee Morgan's woes as a deadbeat drug addict wasting his talent away. We never see Helen -- she died in the mid-'90s -- but we hear her voice on cassette tape, from an interview recorded shortly before she died.

The problem here is that she rambles along telling stories that are just not that compelling. It may be that there just isn't a profound message to convey from the life of the jazz man. This is the second jazz documentary from Swedish director Kasper Collin; maybe it's time for him to move on to another subject.

BONUS TRACK
Lee Morgan with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers performing "Dat Dere":


 

This Year's Model

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (C) - Luca Guadagnino returns to the Italian countryside but he crashes and burns with his follow-up to "A Bigger Splash" -- ponderous James Ivory mush about a summer gay romance in 1983.

Armie Hammer plays Oliver, a bland preppy hunk invited to spend the summer as this year's research assistant to an art professor who spends the season in paradise with his wife and their pouty, brooding 17-year-old son, Elio (Timothee Chalamet from "Lady Bird"). Oliver sends a few signals Elio's way in the gay code of the unenlightened times and, after a few false starts, soon the bright young teen is tossing aside his girlfriend and chasing after Oliver.

Thus begins an endless string of flirtations, moody glances, horseplay and sappy cooings that would make tween girls roll their eyes. In fact, each guy has a woman on the side, but they treat the gals like the filmmakers do, as props. (One of the girls (Esther Garrel) is French, for no apparent reason.)

Michael Stuhlbarg, as the father-professor, does little more than read lines to advance the plot and pore over the daily Corriere della Sera with his espresso. His wife (Amira Casar) apparently inherited the mansion, where the couple also spends winter holidays. (The movie tries to make something of the family and Oliver being Jewish but it's not clear why it should even matter.)

Stuhlbarg does pull off a touching (if overly mannered) monologue at the climax of the film, but he also suffers through a critical scene at the halfway mark of the movie, the point where things quickly go downhill. Stuhlbarg is hanging with Oliver, pontificating as they catalog slides of classic statutes of male nudes (subtle, eh?). "Hence their ageless ambiguity," Stuhlbarg intones, perhaps stifling a Groucho waggle of his eyebrows (wink-wink, nudge-nudge), "as if they're daring you to desire them." Green light engaged.

Chalamet is fairly riveting throughout, his soft features and gaunt sensuality undercut by a biker's sneer and a jock's gait. Elio is a brilliant boy -- he reads voraciously and transcribes classical music into sheet music. Who wouldn't find him appealing? But he spends too much of the movie moping, and a final extended shot of him expressing his emotions as the credits role is intended to be one for the ages, but it goes on so long that it verges on the silliness of a "Police Squad" spoof.

In fact, the tone is off the whole film, which lasts an interminable 2 hours 12 minutes. It's as if Guadagnino reshuffled some scenes from "A Bigger Splash" -- like courtyard dinners with friends, full of snappy high-brow conversation and sexual innuendo -- but he misplaced his ability to craft a coherent, compelling narrative. Storylines here seem like they are caught in a loop. Elio likes to touch Oliver and then smell his own fingers, or he huffs Oliver's clothes, to dramatically savor what he knows is likely only a six-week romance. There is an inordinate number of glimpses of feet. Elio also has a solo moment with a piece of fruit, in a scene that nods to "American Pie," except here it's laughable instead of funny. In another inadvertent parody, when we finally get around to a sex scene between Elio and Oliver, just as things heat up in bed, Guadagnino does a slow pan out the bedroom window and settles solemnly on a big leafy tree, as if he were modestly directing soft-core porn for HBO. ("Blue Is the Warmest Color" this ain't.) The Ivory of the screenplay is, of course, the man from the famed Merchant-Ivory movies of the '80s, a time when it was dignified to adapt E.M. Forster novels, so the shadings here are not much of a surprise.

As things drag on, the men play cat and mouse, but once they finally go all in, they sneak around -- it's the early '80s after all -- though you get the sense that no one besides their girlfriends would care much about the homo-erotic happenings, not even Elio's apparently enlightened and supportive (indulgent?) parents. The men romp through the gorgeous countryside -- Oliver dapper in his crisp shirts, short shorts and white socks, a uniform of the era -- gamboling about while a couple of smarmy Sufjan Stevens songs bleat in the background. Hammer's Jon Hamm impersonation gets stale quickly, and you wonder what a dynamo like Elio sees in such an empty vessel, a discarded statue.

"Call Me by Your Name" might have been a heartfelt novel, but it's a jumble of bad ideas on the big screen, a serious misstep following the best film of 2016.

BONUS TRACK
Our title track, sort of -- Elvis Costello with the appropriately descriptive opening track from "This Year's Model":


  

Waist Deep

MUDBOUND (C-minus) - I doubt the filmmakers would be offended if I pointed out that this is wretched storytelling. Dee Rees, who told a compelling rough tale with "Pariah" in 2011, gets downright vicious in this depiction of race relations in Mississippi around World War II.

But it's all wrapped in a trite package -- a well-meaning white family (with a virulently racist patriarch) running a farm with a noble black family. Each family sends a man off to war, and those who stay behind to work the soil interact at arm's length. Upon their return, the two men miraculously flout the rules of segregation to bond over their psychological hellscapes. You know one of them will pay for that.

Very little works here. The relentless rain makes everything bleak and, yes, muddy. The cast is dull. Carey Mulligan, surprisingly, lacks a certain depth to pull off that depleted, defeated southern wife and mother. Mary J. Blige is a mere prop as one of the numb narrators. Jason Clarke is a cipher as Mulligan's lunkish husband. Garrett Hedlund isn't much more than a pretty boy as his brother, who goes off as a bomber pilot. Jason Mitchell seems a little too green and fresh-faced as the returning war hero who dares challenge the white establishment upon his re-entry.

Rees fumbles flashbacks and bumbles through scenes of war. She shows no nuance in planting a seed of desire between Mulligan's Laura and Hedlund as her brother-in-law. The overall level of quality is that of an old soap opera. The accents are so thick and the dialogue so fleeting that I had to watch this with the subtitles on.

When the reckoning comes for the two proud but damaged war veterans, Rees unleashes a truly horrific scene in which clownish Klan hoodlums bind and torture Mitchell's character, forcing Hedlund to watch in agony. It is reminiscent of the savage scenes in "12 Years a Slave," which I walked out of four years ago. Yes, it is important to remember the past so as not to repeat it and we must deal with our nation's original sin, but society really needs to stop fetishizing World War II, the segregated South and the horrors of racism. There have to be other ways to tell these stories besides the play-acting of the lashing of black flesh.

The worst part of this exercise is that nothing much is revealed or freshly conveyed about that time in American history. There is no vision (it's based on a novel), no leadership of production, and no standout performances. It's a rehash. It has pretensions of epic storytelling, but it is cliched and hollow.
 

From the Vaults: The Deadline Dash

DEADLINE USA (1952) (B) - Humphrey Bogart is fantastic as a beta version of Ben Bradlee, a gruff editor rallying his news staff in the face of an uphill challenge. Bogart is Ed Hutcheson, a hard-nosed newsman whose paper, the Day, is chasing a big story about corruption while the staff has been informed by the family owning the paper that the operation will close in three days.

Hutcheson's first thought is that he will finally be free from the journalistic rat race and will have time to win back his estranged wife, Nora (Kim Hunter). But he's got ink in his veins, and when one of his reporters gets beat up by mobsters, he is determined to nail down the story before the Day calls it a night.

Legendary writer Richard Brooks ("Key Largo," "Elmer Gantry," "In Cold Blood," "Blackboard Jungle") pens a zippy script that captures the jangly repartee of a classic newsroom. It is almost heartbreaking, well into the 21st century's decline of newspapers, to hear an editor back then lament the decay of the news game. Bogie gets to sink his choppers into this speech ripping on the readers:

It's not enough any more to give 'em just news. They want comics, contests, puzzles. They want to know how to bake a cake, win friends, and influence the future. Ergo, horoscopes, tips on the horses, interpretation of dreams so they can win on the numbers lottery. And, if they accidentally stumble on the first page... news!

He is surrounded by a strong cast, which also includes Ethel Barrymore as the out-voted family matriarch who has a winning rapport with Hutcheson; Hunter as the conflicted news widow; and Audrey Christie as a scrappy gal reporter. Ah, those good ol' days of the newspaper game.

LE NOTTI BLANCHE (1957) (B) - Marcello Mastroianni flashes an awkward charm as Mario, a man new to the town of Livorno who meets a shy young woman looking forlorn on a bridge. Natalia (Maria Schell) is yearning for another man, whom she met a year ago and with whom she hopes to reunite.

Luchino Visconti mixes new wave realism with claustrophobic sets to create a suffocating world of longing and heartache. Natalia is kept under nun-like conditions, with her skirt literally pinned to that of one of the old ladies she lives with. She resists Mario's advances because she pines for a man who is unlikely to return. (We see their courtship in flashbacks.)

Mastroianni and Schell dance a tender pas de deux. Mario rejects the advances of another woman, snubbing the sure thing in favor of the fantasy of rescuing the weepy wounded bird.

Visconti, a neorealist auteur, adapted the story from Fyodor Dostoyevski's "White Nights." (His other adaptations include "The Stranger" and "Death in Venice.") The centerpiece here -- and presumably the reason the film ranks high in the canon -- is a jaunt to a bohemian dance club where the couple join the hipsters in a modern jig to a classic American blues-rock song. What the movie lacks in enduring drama it makes up for in archival treasures.

BONUS TRACK
The dance scene featuring Bill Haley and the Comets' "Thirteen Women":



And how about a cover version by the Fuzztones?


 

Life Is Short: Of Biblical Proportions

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries can be found here. 

Title: THE SON OF JOSEPH
Running Time: 113 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 40 MIN
Portion Watched: 35%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 55 YRS, 1 MO.
Average Male American Lifespan: 76.7 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Went to bed and read from Elvis Costello's memoirs.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 100-1

My first foray into the work of Eugene Green did not go well. I meant to see "La Sapienza" a few years ago, and that might have softened me up for this arch, oblique morality play about a high school boy hunting down his biological father.

Actors robotically exchange lines made up of unnaturally simple declarative sentences. Characters pile up -- for example at an antiseptic cocktail party -- without a way to discern which ones we need to care about. Mathieu Amalric ("Chicken With Plums") and Maria de Medeiros ("Pulp Fiction") seem wasted.

An example of clunky dialogue includes the boy, Vincent, interacting with a hotel clerk. When Vincent tells the man that he arrived early because he wanted to make sure he wasn't late for his appointment, the clerk turns oracular: "If you're on time for your appointments, young man, you'll never succeed in life." OK. This one shares too many annoying qualities (French quirk) with the films of Bruno Dumont, the king of trying one's patience. For reasons that presumably become clear eventually, chapter headings are borrowed from books of the Bible.

This supposedly has a killer ending. Maybe I should have made this our third entry in Fast Forward Theater. I just didn't have what it takes.
  

Odd-Couple Buddy Road Movie

FOLK HERO & FUNNY GUY (B+) - This surprisingly authentic and effective buddy movie pits everyman Alex Karpovsky as a neurotic struggling comedian against gruffy pretty boy Wyatt Russell, playing a successful pop star.

The incongruous pair are believable as longtime friends whose fortunes have diverged. This is the inspired writing-directing debut of character actor Jeff Grace, and he's got a touching story to tell and a winning touch with his cast.

Russell's Jason is guarding against burnout by doing a low-key acoustic tour of the East Coast, and he invites Karpovsky's Paul to come along as his opening act, urging him to ditch his boring freelance life and finally pursue his stand-up dream. Things get complicated on the eve of the tour when they spot Bryn (Meredith Hagner) at an open-mic and Jason invites her to open, as well.

Grace avoids love-triangle tropes with this traditional set-up, and he keeps things loose with some apparent improv, including a winning exchange between the guys in the car listing their all-time favorite dude solo acts. (Karpovsky's parody of an imaginary Springsteen tale is particularly charming.)

Karpovsky (HBO's "Girls," "Supporting Characters") finds depth in this irascible loser, still reeling from getting dumped by his fiancee. ("That's why I don't date hot girls," a comedy-club pal (Michael Ian Black) tells him.) Paul stubbornly sticks with his dud of an amateur set, drawing crickets every time he tries his riff on e-vites. Russell ("Ingrid Goes West") brings playboy Jason down to earth, particularly with his own pathetic lovelorn maneuver that brings things to a climax. Hagner is wildly appealing as a three-dimensional character whose future does not depend on either of these two goofballs.

Melanie Lynskey and David Cross are perfect in second-half cameos, the latter as the passive-aggressive host of a community radio station morning show. Unlike Paul's shtick, the lines land cleanly here, and there is heart to spare. This one could sneak up on anyone.

BONUS TRACK
The soundtrack is rife with songs by Adam Ezra, as well as originals from Russell and Hagner. But as the credits hit, we're treated to this 1967 nugget from Brenton Wood, "The Oogum Boogum Song":


 

The Sword of Damocles

UNDER THE SHADOW (B-minus) - During the last days of the Iran-Iraq war, a woman in  Tehran strives to protect her young daughter during an exodus from the capital amid a bombing campaign. This debut feature from Babak Anvari devolves into a horror story about maternal instincts and the unremitting power of the militaristic patriarchy.

Then again, this could be just another scary movie about a little girl and her missing doll. Narges Rashidi stars as Shideh, a frustrated wife and mother who has been driven from medical school because of her activism in the wake of Iran's 1979 revolution. After her doctor husband goes off to war and her neighbors start fleeing the city (especially after an unexploded bomb crashes through the roof of the apartment building), Shideh is left alone with her daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), who has developed a serious fever that coincides with the girl's hysteria over losing her beloved rag doll.

Shideh's husband occasional checks in from the front lines by phone, a disembodied voice that sounds like it's coming from the afterlife. Dorsa insists that her mother has tossed away the doll, though there are ghost-like figures that swirl about the building who might have had something to do with the doll-napping. A creepy neighbor boy, too.

Shideh is a modern woman who prefers not to wrap herself in scarves to hide the body that she sculpts with the help of forbidden Jane Fonda workout VHS tapes. At one point, mother and daughter flee their building in fright and run into a couple of patrolmen who haul Shideh in for being scandalously uncovered. ("What are we, in Europe now?" one of them scolds.) Her detention at the hands of the theocrats is brief, and it's back to the haunted house.

Too much here is scattered, by-the-numbers spookiness and terror, somewhat reminiscent of a much tauter and scarier motherhood freakout, "The Babadook." There's not a plainly rational reason why Shideh won't take Dorsa to a safe place, besides the fact that she apparently doesn't want to hang out with her in-laws.

Rashidi is a compelling presence, and the jumps and jips will keep you on your toes. If only it didn't feel as dated as the Iran-Iraq war during the videotape era.

BONUS TRACK
The trailer:


 

Beauty of the Beast

THE SHAPE OF WATER (B) - Sally Hawkins is a wonder as a love-starved woman during space-race America in this beautiful, lyrical fantasy from Guillermo del Toro. For a standard love story and cheeky period piece, it hits the right notes.

With a heavy does of cartoon villainry and a dash of idiot plotting, del Toro -- drafting the screenplay with Vanessa Taylor ("Divergent," HBO's "Game of Thrones") -- sculpts an epic ball of cheese that is surprisingly effective at times. Hawkins portrays Elisa Esposito, a mute cleaning lady at a military installation that is housing a top-secret project -- a South American fish-man that might be of use on Apollo missions.

Michael Shannon (who else?) is the big awful meanie who runs the program and gets a kick out of torturing the rough beast. Elisa can't bear the brutality, and she finds ways to get some alone time with the mute lunk and learn to communicate with him. (The most egregious of the plot devices that require the suspension of disbelief (besides the premise itself) is the fact that a key turn of events revolves around security cameras on the loading dock; yet no one pays attention as Elisa lugs a hi-fi into the secret room to play pop standards for her new beau while feeding him hard-boiled eggs and teaching him sign language.)

There's nothing deep about this romantic ideal or the notion of heartless super-powers exploiting the body of a less-than-human to gain an edge in world domination. It's all a big cartoon, but it is often an enchanting one. And del Toro knows how to churn a story along. He stuffs it too much with classic movie clips and swelling old 78-rpm standards, but he can't help himself, deep-diving into the derivative, it seems.

This being the early '60s, we get the requisite oppressed pals -- her lonely gay neighbor, Giles (a spry Richard Jenkins), and black co-worker Zelda (a sassy Octavia Spencer) -- a pair of borderline stereotypes who help her plot the rescue of the creature identified in the credits as Amphibian Man (Doug Jones). (Speaking of stereotypes, a disturbing choice around the climax of the film features a black man too meek, lazy or cowardly to defend his wife; it's a bizarre, if perhaps unintentional, slap at a culture.) Jenkins and Spencer are fine, and they know how to spit out a wry one-liner, but these characterizations are nothing new.

Del Toro doesn't tiptoe around the daintiness of the era or just dally in poodle skirts and Cadillacs. Elisa is a woman with a soul and a full range of desires. A worker on the overnight shift, she starts her work day with a furious bout of masturbation in the bathtub, racing against that pesky egg timer. (And she and Amphibian Man even get intimate at one point, with Elisa later filling in Zelda on the biological mechanics of the coupling.)

Shannon's character, Strickland, is quite the brute -- but one with some serious insecurities. Shannon gets a lot of mileage out of chomping on candy treats, and he really milks a running gag about the sketchy reattachment of two fingers (lopped off by the monster). Michael Stuhlbarg ("A Serious Man") does what he can with his role as a Russian spy with a conscience, but nothing here would give the cardboard cutouts of "The Americans" a serious challenge. Del Toro does manage to hit a few notes that echo in the Trump era. At one point, Stuhlbarg's character urges his handlers to steal and maintain the specimen rather than destroy it, so that Russia can study the creature and learn what makes it tick. "We don't need to learn," a military superior spits at him. "We need the Americans to not learn." Give it time, comrade.

As the clock ticks toward the two-hour mark, there is a race to save Amphibian Man by this rag-tag gang of society's outcasts. Give del Toro credit -- he's having fun with this mash-up. It's all a cartoon fairy tale, complete with a "happy" ending that provides one more brilliant visual flourish. If only we, too, could live happily ever after so easily.

BONUS TRACK
"The Shape of Water" was our annual Christmas Day Mainstream Movie. It falls smack in the middle of the rankings of our longtime tradition:

  1. Up in the Air (2009)
  2. Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004)
  3. Dreamgirls (2006)
  4. Charlie Wilson's War (2007)
  5. The Fighter (2010)
  6. American Hustle (2013)
  7. The Shape of Water (2017)
  8. La La Land (2016)
  9. The Wrestler (2008)
10. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
11. Young Adult (2011)
12. This Is 40 (2012)
13. Into the Woods (2014)