It is long-standing practice that we here in the flyover states do not rush into our year-end list. We're still catching up with the 2019 releases, and some of them don't arrive here until January something.
Meantime, in the coming days, we will go back and revisit lists from earlier in the decade, including, for the first time, compiling our best of 2010, as we lay the groundwork for a best-of-the-decade list for the entire 2010s.
Expect a best-of 2019 list later in January. For now, here is a list of the year's releases that in 2019 earned a B+ or higher and will be vying for the top spot.
BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945) (B+) - This war-era Brit drama slowly peels away an illicit love affair that develops between two married people who meet randomly at a train station cafeteria. Claustrophobic with shadows and heavy with heaving locomotives, this classic noir takes its time letting an innocent dalliance eat away at the participants.
Celia Johnson (evoking a G-rated Phoebe Waller-Bridge) stars as Laura, who is bored with her crossword-puzzle-addled husband, Fred (Cyril Raymond), and two children, and thus is vulnerable to the simple charms of Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard). Soon they are meeting every Thursday, going on chaste dates but undeniably falling in love. Director David Lean helped adapt the Noel Coward play, and this one succeeds through its looping flashback structure and its powerful dialogue expounded through the inner voice of Laura in the form of her explaining the story to Fred.
The sympathy for Laura's emotional struggle comes off as surprisingly modern, as she is unafraid to bare her soul and explain her dilemma in urgent words. Johnson and Howard have strong chemistry even if their affair is not particularly passionate. Coward has injected droll humor through the surrounding cast of characters, in particular the cheeky dalliance between a ticket taker and the woman who runs the cafeteria, echoing the cheating couple. It's all very English and quite moving.
THE LETTER (1940) (B) - Bette Davis smolders and slithers as a woman who guns down the man who, by the looks of it, spurned her and ended their affair, thus setting up an underhanded scheme to use her wealth to cheat the Singapore criminal justice system. She claims it was innocent self-defense, but a letter in her handwriting suggests otherwise. So she uses her husband's wealth and exploits the weakness of their lawyer to game the system and secure a quick acquittal.
This Somerset Maugham story, directed by William Wyler ("Roman Holiday," "Ben-Hur"), seeks to lay bare the sins of the monied class. But it oddly demonizes the natives, especially the widow of the victim, a classic dragon lady (Gale Sondergaard). James Stephenson plays a frustrated stuffed shirt as the lawyer. Herbert Marshall is the husband in denial.
Davis holds it together admirably, and she was shooting deadly side glances decades before Susanna Hoffs was even born. Wyler uses arch angles and mood lighting in an attempt to create dread; he half succeeds. The dialogue (Howard Koch ("Casablanca") did the adaptation) is clever and sharp at times. If only the narrative itself had a little more zip.
BONUS TRACK "Brief Encounter" is imbued with the music of Rachmaninoff, and we couldn't help noticing the strains of Eric Carmen's "All by Myself" in the second movement of the Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor:
RAISE HELL: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MOLLY IVINS (B+) - This occasionally fawning but heartfelt documentary traces the journey of the bookish girl from East Texas who defied her roots and became a folksy liberal icon in the world of newspaper columnists and crusaders. Veteran documentarian Janice Engel (long ago she did a "Behind the Music" on Shania Twain) lets Ivins, who died in 2007, do a lot of the talking in file footage, much of it, refreshingly, from C-SPAN, bless her heart.
Ivins was a loner and a drinker who bounced around from newspaper to newspaper throughout her career, and her flaws are not swept under the rug, though they are, at times, treated with kid gloves. (Just how chummy was she with those sources in the Texas legislature back in the day, and how tough can you be on your drinking buddies?) Her habits catch up to her at the end, as the last decade of her life involved some rough health challenges.
But she soldiered on, and she was not only a refreshing voice but quite the prophet at times. Is there any doubt that she foresaw endless wars and a president more buffoonish than Dubya? Engel does a fine job of digging down to the origin story and then methodically chronicling the career. There are a few what-ifs at the end regarding an acerbic polemicist who burned out at age 62 and who is sorely missed.
LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE (B) - This is a choppy but affecting paint-by-numbers biography of the woman who was one of the key musical artists of the 1970s. As the title suggests, the film celebrates Linda Ronstadt and that indelible voice of hers.
Longtime collaborators Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman bring out big-time talking heads (Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Don Henley) and divvy up the archival footage; however, there are not many insights that go much beyond how nice Ronstadt was and how talented she was. Ronstadt narrates through voice-overs, and her Parkinson's is probably responsible for her not appearing on camera for the current interviews and for the stilted nature of her observations.
This pays workmanlike homage to a superstar who took chances and honored her roots. There are several particularly touching passages, but none more powerful than the final scene when Ronstadt finally appears on camera, flanked by musician family members, to shakily sing a classic cancione. It's both heart-warming and heart-breaking and is worth the price of admission right there.
Netflix offers a platform to two actresses making their feature debuts as writer-directors:
ATLANTICS (B) - At times mesmerizing, this tone poem about would-be migrants hemmed in by the Senegalese capital Dakar descends into horror mysticism in its second half, sacrificing some of the substance it builds up in its documentary-like first half. IMDb offers a concise plot synopsis: "In a popular suburb of Dakar, workers on the construction site of a futuristic tower, without pay for months, decide to leave the country by the ocean for a better future. Among them is Souleiman (Ibrahima Traore), the lover of Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), promised to another."
Ada is adrift herself after Souleiman and the men go off toward Spain, and she is often nagged by her posse of girlfriends, led by the spunky Dior (Nicole Sougou), who envy the opportunity to be the wife of hunky big-shot businessman Omar (Babacar Sylla). Mati Diop (co-writing with Olivier Demangel) gorgeously captures a mood of restlessness and longing, not unlike Bruce Thierry Cheung's Salton Sea slog "Don't Come Back From the Moon." But she is a little too taken with lingering shots of the moon and the tides, overdoing the gaze into the forbidding sea. But her intimate camerawork can be captivating.
The young actress Sane is a beguiling lead, and it is easy to ache along with her as the fate of Souleiman turns ominous and confounding. There was too much juju invoked, which undercut the crisp realism, but the film is arresting to the end.
THE BODY REMEMBERS WHEN THE WORLD BROKE OPEN (C+) - This extreme piece of Mumblecore traffics in real time but at a snail's pace as two indigenous women in Canada are thrown together after a crisis. I literally needed subtitles to interpret the mumblings of Violet Nelson as Rosie, a pregnant young woman who is found barefoot on the streets, bruised from the hand of her boyfriend. Aila (co-writer-director Elle-Maija Tailfeathers), coming from an IUD-implantation appointment at the gynecologist's office, takes Rosie home and vows to find her safe shelter.
Over the next 100 minutes, we will tail along with these two on this brief but tedious odyssey. Tailfeathers (collaborating with Kathleen Hepburn) creates a sense of urgency with a hand-held camera but undercuts that technique with inert stretches of dialogue that you wish she had edited down to create better drama. She is going for a specific hypnotic effect -- getting the viewer to suddenly realize that the roles of the women (white-collar Aila vs. working-class Rosie) may be slowly evolving (who, exactly, needs to be rescued here?). But the filmmakers seem trapped in a conceit that doesn't do their script any favors. Too often, despite the commitment of the leads and the powerful drama at its heart, this comes off like a stage rehearsal rather than a finished movie.
BONUS TRACKS The mesmerizing song over the closing credits of "Atlantics," Lizzy Mercier Descloux with "Nino con un Tercer Ojo":
Our title track, from Dobie Gray. Ah, those sartorial Seventies:
GORILLAZ: REJECT FALSE ICONS (B-minus) - This visual and aural collage brings to life the virtual Brit-hop band created 20 years ago by musician Damon Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett, but it's all quite an assault on the senses. The documentary spans the length of the "Humanz" tour in 2017-18.
Denholm Hewlett, apparently the offspring of Jamie, offers a fawning appreciation of the hard-working, highly creative founders of Gorillaz, and throws in a good number of collaborators who pass through the studio sessions and tour dates. But this is all too much and not enough at the same time. The animated characters fly past on the screen with little or no context. (I closed my eyes for brief stretches.) Songs are chopped into 30-second snippets. We lurch back and forth from studio to stage, sometimes out of chronological order.
Albarn and friends too often mug for the camera, hyper aware of the cameras following them around. We get repetitive visuals, like the pre-show huddle that gets referenced at least a half dozen times. It's all a jumble, and maybe the kids (though most Gorillaz fans, at this point, aren't so fresh-faced) need the hyperactive jangle to keep them from fidgeting too much with their phones in their plush cineplex seats. I would have preferred longer, more in-depth studio sections alternating with a few extended concert pieces in the vein of "Stop Making Sense."
In the end, it is difficult to appreciate the musical expertise of Albarn and the visual genius of Hewlett, and that's a shame
BONUS TRACK A highlight is Peven Everett. Here he is with his cartoon pals, Noodle and 2-D, in "Strobelite":
KNIVES OUT (A-minus) - In some ways, this star-studded whodunnit is the ultimate entertainment one could expect at a cineplex. When reviewing his early film "Looper," we said of Rian Johnson that he "reminds me of Danny Boyle in his facility with storytelling and his elegance with visuals." We discovered him with "Brick," his 2005 debut, an offbeat high school crime mystery. Here, he emerges from a "Star Wars" stint with a call-back to Agatha Christie, the twisted tale of spoiled offspring of a wealthy mystery novelist bickering over their inheritance after his apparent suicide (or was it ... murder?!).
Even at a sweaty 130 minutes, Johnson rollicks around, pulling juicy performances from his enthusiastic players. Jamie Lee Curtis, once a screaming teen, is now matronly but still as playful as she was in "A Fish Called Wanda." Michael Shannon plays against type as a dweeby conniver. Chris Evans, a veteran of superhero movies, comes off as a young, glib Alec Baldwin. Toni Collette offers a silly airhead. Lakeith Stanfield does exasperation well as a detective overshadowed by an old-school private eye played by Daniel Craig, with an exaggerated Dixie drawl.
They all orbit around Ana de Armas as Marta, the nurse of the patriarch (Christopher Plummer), whose roots from South or Central America provide a running gag among the Waspy descendants who couldn't have been bothered over the years with actually getting to know her. She anchors the film while the others dance playfully around her. The jokes land with just the right balance of familiarity and zing.
Family dynamics drive the narrative. The twists and turns are worthy of a gifted mystery writer. Even if you figure it all out fairly early, it's a joyride tailing Johnson as he bops around toward the finish line. Johnson tries to both subvert and pay homage to classic mystery romps, a vintage that has been scarce since the '70s and "Wanda," which by the '80s had seemed almost quaint.
BONUS TRACK The Rolling Stones appear over the closing credits with a deep cut from "Exile on Main Street," "Sweet Virginia":
With the impending release of "63 Up," we go back to the beginning and review the previous entries in Michael Apted's foundational sociological study of a cohort of Brits born around 1956 and revisited every seven years. Part I is here. We skip "35" and jump to the most important life cycle, ages 35-42:
42 UP (1998) (A) - This might be the apex of the series, as we meet up with the gang after they have just passed through a person's most crucial seven-year phase. Apted shows great command in juggling his narrative, and he and his subject have achieved a level of both comfort and antagonism that truly brings out the various personalities. The director weaves everyone together at the end with a rare quasi-political inquiry to each one about their views on the challenges of their class boundaries. He also asks them to assess the role of this film series in their lives.
Tony again is one of the stars, as he escapes the East End for life in the suburbs, with a vacation place in Spain, giving him a bit of distance with which to further dis the people of color who now populate his home neighborhood. (He also engages in an awkward discussion, in front of his wife, of the infidelities that threatened to ruin his marriage.) Jackie shocks with a sudden brood of boys; Lynn's health declines; and their working-class pal Sue is single again and wistful about her outlook. Symon and Paul lean on strong spouses (Symon remarried since "28 Up's" explosion of children), and a third person finally finds a life mate. Two men are reunited unexpectedly.
One of the most powerful vignettes of the entire series involves Nick, still teaching in America, returning to his family farm to reconcile with his parents and brothers; his appreciation for both the beauty and bleakness of the bucolic setting has a strong emotional pull. Apted builds to Neil again as his finale, and there is relief that not only is Neil still alive and not completely mad, but that he has finally found a purpose. It is the perfect crystallization of Apted's project, and this would have been a fitting climax to the series if it had to end prematurely.
49 UP (2005) (B+) - This is perhaps the most formulaic of the films, as our cohort settles into middle age (most of them, in fact, look older than 49) and into a contented resignation as to their lot in life. For the most part, those lives seem to be quiet, fulfilling ones. This is encapsulated by Suzy, who seems to finally have achieved an inner peace and reconciliation with her former self, suggesting that her arc is now complete and she's ready to coast from here on out.
Stuffy John returns, mainly to pitch his charity work in Bulgaria. Neil is spotted driving a car. Tony continues to rail at the evolution of the ethnicity of the East End, seemingly oblivious to the irony of the British invasion he has helped lead into a Spanish resort town, with plans to open an English pub there. Jackie spars with Apted over his depiction of her, and Suzy and Andrew wistfully explain the toll experienced by opening up their lives (and their pasts) every seven years. The always-interesting Nick offers a plot twist
As summed up by Bruce -- the former missionary now teaching at a posh school -- 49 is a time to realize that childhood fantasies of extraordinary careers won't materialize, but rather, "ordinary life and family life takes over" and "I think we just sort of live without our dreams."
PAIN AND GLORY (B) - Pedro Almodovar returns with this late-in-life meditation on a constipated creative process. Antonio Banderas is wonderfully grizzled and weary as Salvador Mallo, the writer-director's altar ego. Mallo is suffering physically (serious back pain, headaches) and mentally as he drifts along in limbo.
Almodovar uses flashbacks to childhood to connect, literally, with his inner child, and it would not be an Almodovar film if we didn't get wistful scenes with his mother, played here in gauzy memory moments by Penelope Cruz, lovely and luscious, as always. Salvador also recalls the hunky teen handyman who seems to have sparked both his sexuality and creativity. Back in the present, an old flame looks up Salvador after seeing a stage revival of one of his works, and they share a tender moment. Meantime, another old comrade gets Salvador to trade up from his prescription opiods to heroin. And here's where "Pain and Glory" drags. It traffics in just one too many tropes -- mommy issues, stifled artistic expression, childhood sexualization, and junkie behavior.
Banderas virtually sleepwalks through this, seemingly oblivious to the colors and resonant images that Almodovar surrounds him with. It's all an alluring package, but like Salvador during most of this film, it feels hollow on the inside.
SYNONYMS (B) - This in-your-face screed follows Yoav (newcomer Tom Mercier), a damaged former Israeli soldier searching for comfort in Paris, renouncing everything that preceded his self-imposed exile. Upon his arrival, he is robbed of his backpack and clothes, left naked in a bathtub, symbolizing a literal rebirth. He is discovered by a neighboring couple, Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), who both are instantly drawn to Yoav's animal magnetism.
But Yoav is a wild, unpredictable stallion. He stalks the streets of Paris, his mind racing with French translations, often a string of synonyms, which gives us the film's title. The camerawork is jumpy and overly intimate, as if the camera operator elbowed the Dardenne brothers out of the way to get even closer over the shoulder of the subject. Throughout, Yoav is barely suppressing a rage that he gives occasional flashes of in his interactions with others.
Written and directed by Nadav Lapid (with Haim Lapid), who gave us the original version of the disturbing "Kindergarten Teacher," this one is a challenge, due to the prismatic narrative and the fuming of Yoav. Halfway through, you might wonder what the point is. And then Lapid doubles down on Yoav's degradation and PTSD, as when Yoav humiliates himself for a porn photographer who keys in on the auto-anti-semitism. (Mercier, from the start, displays his goods in full-frontal nudity, an apt example of his truly raw performance.)
Lapid ends things with a scene of Yoav trying to break down a locked door. It's an obvious metaphor that bookends the bathtub birth. Does this story add up? Hard to say. It's haunting, nonetheless.
BONUS TRACKS "Synonyms" has an alluring soundtrack. There's this, Ernie K.. Doe's "Here Come the Girls":
And in a flashback, soldier Yoav destroys a target with machine-gun fire to the balletic lilt of Pink Martini's "Je ne Veux pas Travailler":
AMERICAN FACTORY (A-minus) - With incredible access, Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert chronicle a Chinese company's retooling of a former GM plant in Moraine, Ohio, for the purposes of making auto glass. The culture clash is captured in fine detail.
Led by the spectrumy "Chairman" Cao, Fuyau Glass brings in a raft of Chinese employees, mostly to supervise what is perceived to be a lazy and entitled crop of American workers, many of who remember the heyday of earning around $30 an hour, now beavering away at $12 or $13 per hour. (In the '50s, '60s and '70s, Frigidaires were made there.) The candor on display is incredible. We see a Chinese executive lecturing a roomful of his countrymen on how to deal with (i.e., coddle) their spoiled American counterparts. Frustrations spill over on the assembly line.
For my money, the film spends too much time documenting a union organizing effort by the United Auto Workers, trying to wring drama from what looks from the start to be a fait accompli. Bognar and Reichert do best when they just let the cultural distinctions play out naturally. The Ugly American stereotypes can make you wince -- especially when a contingent of beefy-to-obese, under-dressed all-male Americans visit China, looking like frat boys at a corporate board meeting. They stare in awe at the efficiency of the Chinese workers. At a celebratory conference, we see sophisticated local entertainment involving impeccably choreographed dancing children and prim chanteuses singing traditional songs of inspiration, all of which gives way to the visiting goofballs jumping around to a recording of "YMCA."
The moral of the story is inescapable: It's only a matter of time before the Chinese eat our lunch.
TELL ME WHO I AM (C+) - This odd bit of victim porn is unexpectedly tedious and tawdry. A pair of 54-year-old twins tell their story (and spill their emotions on the screen): At age 18, one of them, Alex, suffers a bad motor accident, erasing everything in his memory except for recognition of his twin, Marcus.
Marcus teaches Alex how to cope again, all the while filling in Alex's memory about their childhood. Except that Marcus skips the part about them being abused by their parents. This film, from Ed Perkins, essentially serves as separate therapy sessions for the brothers. The story's arc is predictable, and it drags over 85 minutes, unspooling its secrets gradually and annoyingly. Re-enactments are coy and corny. Occasionally this is powerful storytelling, but too often it feels too personal and lurid.
With the impending release of "63 Up," we go back to the beginning and review most of the previous entries in Michael Apted's foundational sociological study of a cohort of Brits born around 1956 and revisited every seven years. To start this sporadic series, here are the first four:
SEVEN UP (1964) (A) - At 40 minutes, this special by Granada for British TV introduces us to 20 children (only 14 would return in subsequent episodes). The foundation is a quote attributed to Aristotle and St. Ignatius: "Give me the boy until he is 7, and I will show you the man." The idea is to examine a cross-section of postwar Brits, ranging from rich prep-school children to working-class kids. There are examples like the privileged John and Suzy at one plot point and scrappy East Ender Tony or somber fatherless Symon at the other. The hook here is an experiment to see whether any of these children will break free from England's rigid class restrictions.
Michael Apted was fresh out of college (15 years older than his subjects) and an assistant on this TV special; he would go on to direct the rest of the installments. We get to see these fresh-eyed children, many of them already quite well-spoken for their age, spout random observations and try to predict the future. Only time will tell if those predictions bear out.
The episode ends with a party comprising all of the children and then a romp on a playground where their inner selves play out. This final scene will provide the anchor for the future episodes, each subsequent film dissolving to black-and-white to remind us of those carefree days.
7 PLUS SEVEN (1970) (A) - Yes, teens are, by and large, not very interesting. But these children, at the end of the '60s, act as stalking horses for our own experiences or views of that age of the Beatles. Themes emerge in this episode. Apted is a good journalist, and he follows up on the earlier interviews with well-crafted questions.
We start to see deeper personalities emerge. We begin to see cracks in the psychological stability of a few of them, who are far too dour for a young teenager. Neil, a suburban Liverpudlian who was bright-eyed and cheery at 7 ("When I get married I don't want to have any children because they're always doing naughty things and making the house untidy."), will gradually emerge over the years as a deeply thoughtful, mentally unstable man. Paul, sad-eyed from the start, is still soft-spoken. Suzy is morose and uncooperative. We start to wonder about them all: How will they pursue happiness, and will they achieve it?
21 UP (1977) (A-minus) - Here we have young adults getting their first taste of disappointment. The British education system is highly tiered, and a failure to make it into Oxford can have a huge impact. Several participants fall short of their family's goals, though a couple of others show signs of achieving great success.
One of our favorites, the dilettante Suzy, is now a chain-smoking nihilist. Neil, having dropped out of school after barely a semester, is squatting and eking out an existence. Tony failed to make it as a jockey, and he's now training to be a cabdriver. The Oxbridge boys are sailing along. Jackie and Lynn are already married and playing to their working-class type.
This is the first feature-length entry (100 minutes), as Apted begins to refine the template of weaving together each of the participants while mixing in their backstories so that the subsequent movies can stand alone.
28 UP (1984) (B+) - By the fourth episode, a familiarity sets in; the '80s present a drab, depressing backdrop; and we are presented with the inevitable: plenty of marriages and kids, even from ones we would not have expected. People at 28 are not as interesting; they are starting families, launching careers, thinking that they are fully formed adults. They are distracted by the process of becoming the person they think they are supposed to be.
Apted tweaks the format here, separating the subjects into individual vignettes. This works for some but not for others. The penultimate subject is Neil -- now a full-on drifter finding shelter on the Scottish coast -- who gets extended time to philosophize about his lot in life as he struggles to keep his wits about him. Jackie and her two mates exhibit some of the first snippiness with Apted, chastising him for emphasizing their class status.
The length has now grown to two hours, fifteen minutes, and suddenly Apted's editing skills are tested. Still, there's no denying the power of the storytelling here and the heft of the cinematic history in the making.
BONUS TRACKS The iconic closing segment that gets repeated at the end of each film:
When the children in "Seven Up" attend a party together, they dance to the Beatlesque sound of the Monotones, "What Would I Do":
Michael Apted ("56 Up") returns for the ninth installment of his indispensable generational profile of British boomers, "63 Up."
Celine Sciamma ("Girlhood," "Water Lillies") ventures back to the 18th century for a tale of forbidden love, "Portrait of a Lady on Fire."
Rian Johnson ("Brick," "Looper") assembles an all-star cast for a ribald whodunit, "Knives Out."
The Safdie brothers ("Good Time") recruit Adam Sandler for their latest pulp thriller, "Uncut Gems."
A legend of film criticism gets the documentary treatment, "What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael."
Then there's the career summation of the work of Agnes Varda, who died in March, "Varda by Agnes."
We'll keep expectations low for the environmental polemic from Todd Haynes ("Carol") and starring Mark Ruffalo, "Dark Waters."
Two indigenous women in Canada go through a harrowing experience in the debut feature "The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open."
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.
It has been 20 years since Martin Scorsese has made a fresh, compelling feature film ("Bringing Out the Dead"). He returns to familiar ground now with what may be his final mafia movie, "The Irishman." Please, let it be not only his swan song but also the last one for the storied quartet of over-the-hill wise guys, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel and Joe Pesci.
The main problem is that the movie is dull. De Niro's main character, like De Niro himself, is not too bright or interesting. Who cares about some low-level hitman whose path will eventually intersect with Jimmy Hoffa's? And what is Pacino trying to capture here with his sloppy inconsistent "accent" as Hoffa (who was from Indiana).
Scorsese's use of de-aging CGI is not as distracting as feared, though it's odd to see 70-year-old men lurching around with young faces. (The signature obtrusive soundtrack is a sloppy pastiche of oldies, kicking off with an uninspiring "In the Still of the Night.") Pesci and Keitel manage to eke out a few memorable moments (in the first third, at least). Few actors other than Keitel can spit out a line like "Now is not the time to not say." Pesci is a quiet gem, and maybe that is because he has been semi-retired for 20 years and hasn't worn out his welcome. Ray Romano has a couple of fine understated scenes as a mob lawyer. Bobby Cannavale eats steak.
This thing of ours, the mob movie, has been played out, it's safe to say. If "Goodfellas" came along now, I probably wouldn't bother. The golden era began with "The Godfather" and ended with "The Sopranos," and both of those projects were about family, not about randomly "painting houses" (blowing out someone's brains on a wall). What's the point of "The Irishman"? An elegy for what once was? And why such a downer? There are movies that sound in a minor key and then there are risible dirges like this. And it all moves at a numbing snail's pace.
Shall we all move on, gentlemen?
Title: THE IRISHMAN Running Time: 210 MIN Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 70 MIN Portion Watched: 33% My Age at Time of Viewing: 56 YRS, 11 MOS. Average Male American Lifespan: 78.7 YRS. Watched/Did Instead: Watched a repeat of Weekend Update on "SNL" and went to bed. Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 75-1
