Survival of the Fittest

 

PARIS, 13TH DISTRICT (A-minus) - Millennials pick their way through relationship thickets of modern Paris in Jacques Audiard's keenly observed and well-acted comic drama. The cast dives deep in the roles of disaffected millennials yearning for a connection.

Audiard ("A Prophet," "Dheepan") reveals a soft side, shooting in velvety black-and-white. He is blessed with both a smart script he co-wrote with filmmaker Celine Sciamma ("Girlhood") and Lea Mysius, and a few fantastic actors. Newcomer Lucie Zhang (below) is a revelation as Emilie, a witty, sensual under-achiever who brings in a new roommate/fuck-buddy, Camille (Makita Samba), who leaves his Ph.D program to run a friend's real estate business. He quickly moves out of Emilie's apartment and hires (and eventually seduces) Nora (Noemie Merlant, from Sciamma's "Portrait of a Lady on Fire"), a small-town transplant who dropped out of law school after being mocked mercilessly over her resemblance to a porn star. 

This sophisticated love triangle is actually a quadrangle, as Nora develops an online friendship with that porn star (they don't really look that much alike), drawing close (via computer chats) to tattooed Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth). This could have been quite messy, but Audiard juggles it like a pro, and somehow no one character gets short shrift. 

Camille could have been drawn with more depth; he recently lost his mom and now tutors his sister (a budding stand-up comedian who stutters), giving him shorthand character traits that don't feel fully earned. But Zhang's Emilie is layered and fascinating. She is a liberated young woman but hounded by doubts that she can achieve most of her goals merely through sexual seduction. Merlant, so memorable from "Portrait," imbues Nora with an intensity and anxiety that threaten to combust at any moment. The two women, rarely seen together, ground the film at opposite poles. 

The cast also revels in nudity and sex that feels both natural and intoxicating. The coupling is sometimes joyous and sometimes fraught. The carnal connections power a well-crafted plot. The ending was too neat for my tastes, but, overall, this is substantive storytelling

ATLANTIS (B) - As grim as a Bela Tarr slog, this film from last year imagines life in the near future, in the aftermath of a gruesome war with Russia in Ukraine. Until its final moments, this is about as bleak a depiction of humankind as you can present on screen.

Writer-director Valentyn Vasyanovych unspools a post-apocalyptic hellscape by telling the story of a veteran of the war, Serhiy (Andriy Rymaruk), who loses a buddy to suicide, leaves a smelting job to drive a water truck, and then falls in with a crew from a non-governmental organization that exhumes and identifies the war dead. The crew includes Katya (Liudmyla Bileka), a sad-eyed compatriot who helps him deal with his PTSD in this desolate terrain. 

Working with non-actors, Vasyanovych gives his world -- especially in light of recent news events -- a documentary feel. Some of the scenes are beyond ghastly. At one point, two men, in painstaking detail, peel the clothes off and analyze the rotted skeletal remains of a soldier who has been dead for at least a year; the realism is not for the squeamish.

The main problem involves an agonizingly slow opening half hour. (I considered walking out.) Like Tarr, Vasyanovych favors long static takes, as his unblinking camera allows a mundane event (a massive vat pouring molten slag down the side of a hill, e.g.) to play out in real time. If you're patient, you may grow to find some of these images transcendent. There are repetitive visual references to fire, as if mimicking this ravaged landscape's proverbial return to the stone age. At one point Serhiy runs a hose to a dumpster, lights a bonfire under it, strips to his briefs and submerges himself under the waters.

Vasyanovych bookends the film with scenes shot with an infrared camera. They represent the extremes of human behavior -- love and violence. It's a neat trick, and it offers a glimmer (but no more than a glimmer) of hope for the survivors navigating this gutted world.

BONUS TRACKS

The trailers:

R.I.P., William Hurt

 Handsome William Hurt died last month at 71. We return now to the height of his fame, in the 1980s, to revisit a pair of his films.

BROADCAST NEWS (1987) (A-minus) - A rare smart movie about TV news, this gem features William Hurt as just one cog in a three-person plot machine, doing great battle with Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks in an awkward would-be love triangle.

James L. Brooks -- the TV writer from "Taxi" and "The Simpsons" and director of "Terms of Endearment" -- captures the zeitgeist of the Reagan '80s, most notably shoulder pads and existential angst over the unraveling of journalistic integrity. He pits Hurt's bubble-headed natural-blonde anchorman with Albert Brooks' neurotic curly-haired purist, with Hunter in the middle as the whip-smart, mentally hyper producer who runs rings around everyone.

When Hurt's Tom shows up, Hunter's Jane can't help being attracted to the shallow, dim-witted newcomer, even though Brooks warns her that he "personifies everything that you've been fighting against" in TV news. Tom is drawn to brainy Jane -- "as much as I can like anyone who thinks I'm an asshole." 

"Broadcast News" was perhaps one of the earliest films to subvert expectations of the classic romantic comedy, routinely taking things into territory you might not expect. Don't expect a clean narrative arc or a happy or neat ending. Bittersweet was the drug of choice at the time. Aaron and Jane are friends, but he's a nerd who can't hide his romantic yearnings for her. Jane is a complex character, more than just a wacky woman trying to balance her career with a desire to find the man of her dreams. Hunter is both fierce and adorable as she rides the roller-coaster of Jane's talents and emotions. (Extra credit for the casting against type of Jack Nicholson in an extended cameo as the pompous, dour senior anchorman.)

The secret weapon here is James Brooks' incisive, cynical and cheeky script. When a colleague tells her that it must be nice to always be the smartest person in the room, Jane sighs and mutters, genuinely, "No. It's awful." When Aaron tells pal Jane "I'll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time," you get the feeling that Jerry and Elaine from "Seinfeld" are taking notes. And Aaron goes on a diatribe against Tom, surmising that the devil will come not bearing a pitchfork but would take exactly that smarmy, seductive form:

He will be attractive! He'll be nice and helpful. He'll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation. He'll never do an evil thing! He'll never deliberately hurt a living thing. ... He will just bit by little bit lower our standards where they are important. ... And he'll talk about all of us really being salesmen. And he'll get all the great women.

And after another monologue, when he finally vocalizes his obvious love for Jane, Aaron quips: "How do you like that? I buried the lede!" Tom gets a few good lines in, too; he compares Aaron's flop-sweat anchoring performance to "Singin' in the Rain."

And James Brooks knows his way around a newsroom. This is a rare film that is smart -- even if satiric -- about journalism. His set-pieces revolving around deadlines -- especially a giddy scene of Jane talking to Tom through his earpiece to walk him through his first breaking-news event as an anchor -- are snappy and fun. He gets the little things right while expertly presenting the big picture. 

ALTERED STATES (1980) (B-minus) - Well, this one did not age well. Written (under a pseudonym) by the estimable Paddy Chayefsky ("Network") and directed by power-hitter Ken Russell ("The Lair of the White Worm"), Hurt takes advantage of his first major role, as a scientist who trips out in his watery sensory-deprivation tank.

The film charges out of the gates testing the viewer's credulity. Granted these are Harvard science wonks, but the dialogue is overstuffed, complicated and stilted, even coming from academic nerds. It is as if Chayefsky is over-excited by the possibilities of the human mind and he is too eager to shove all his ideas out there. Hurt and his co-stars are to be admired for making the interactions at least somewhat plausible. 

However, the idea here -- Hurt's Eddie Jessup gets high on his own supply and sits in his isolation box as his own test subject, wherein he begins to travel back to the beginning of time and somehow emerge as a hairy ape -- is patently silly. He has a suffering wife (played by Blair Brown) and two old pals who assist him, one skeptical ("Hill Street Blues'" Charles Haid, here in full Andy Renko hauteur) and one amiable (a remarkably hirsute Bob Balaban). 

The main problem is that this is first and foremost the Ken Russell show. He was never shy about splaying his excesses on the screen ("Tommy," "Valentino"), and here, at the dawn of the computer age, he splashes psychedelic images in machine-gun style, sometimes to inadvertent comic effect. Hurt gives it his all (his career would rocket the following year with "Eyewitness" and "Body Heat"), and it is oddly satisfying to see him practically lick his chops at the fresh memory of having rampaged through the streets of Boston and consumed a goat at the zoo. But, ironically, "Altered States" now stands as an argument for not traveling back in time.

Life Is Short: A 'Lemon'

 

There's a fine line between quirky and stupid. We meet the lead character when he wakes up on the couch next to his blind girlfriend having pissed himself in his sleep. He gets more miserable and less charming after that. I bailed out when he started telling his girlfriend, who is determined to leave this horrible man after 10 years, all the ways he could maim or kill her instead of letting her leave. That's all I needed.

Upright Citizens Brigade hipster-doofus Brett Gelman is the star of this curiosity, which he wrote with his wife at the time, Janicza Bravo, who eventually shook him and did much better as a director with "Zola" last year. Maybe this exercise was a cry for help from a broken relationship. The girlfriend to Gelman's obnoxious theater director Isaac is played by Judy Greer, and I felt sorry for her having to endure this spectacle. The rest of the cast would usually be considered impressive, but they each are trying much too hard to be quirky or outre here: Michael Cera (rocking some wild curly hair); Gillian Jacobs, caught in a loop of thankless scenes; Jeff Garlin, really stretching himself by playing an agent (named Guy Roach, yuk-yuk); and Megan Mullally, doing a British accent for no apparent reason.

This is all dully absurd, and nearly halfway through there seemed to be no promise of a payoff. Apparently this schlub of a character goes on to date Nia Long. Whatever, dude. I like this capsule review from Jessica Kiang at the Playlist:  "Lemon is too in love with being oddball to really have any connection to the real, non-quirky world. And so while scene-by scene its absurdism can be drolly amusing, it never coheres into anything more than a series of sketches."

Title: LEMON (2017)

Running Time: 82 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  36 MIN

Portion Watched: 44%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 59 YRS, 4 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 78.8 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Read and went to sleep.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 55-1

Robert Forster Double Feature

 Robert Forster, who died in 2019, was a character actor for the ages. He had a couple of lead roles. He got noticed in 1969's cinema verite classic "Medium Cool." And we are forever fond of the campy monster movie "Alligator," which was written by noted director John Sayles. Let's revisit them both.

MEDIUM COOL (1969) (A) - Haskell Wexler, the celebrated cinematographer and documentarian, stepped up as a director to be noticed with his mix of fact and fiction that resulted from his fortuitous decision to make a movie on the streets of Chicago in the fateful year 1968. He took the germ of an idea from a novel (about a boy fascinated by the critters of the city) and turned it into the tale of a TV news cameraman/reporter, John Cassellis (Robert Forster), who befriends an Appalachian single mother and her son, who keeps a homing pigeon. 

An early scene is shot outside Kennedy headquarters shortly before RFK's assassination, setting the tone for the unfolding of events that would culminate in the protests and police brutality outside the Democratic National convention at the Amphitheater and in Grant Park across from the Conrad Hilton hotel. Wexler, wielding one of the cameras himself, shoots guerrilla-style, absorbing the actual events while his actors pass through the scenes, Zelig-like. 

Borrowing from the playbook of Jean-Luc Godard, Wexler expends much real estate on documentary-type subjects -- National Guard drills, an up-close romp at the Roller Derby, street scenes of poor transplants in the Uptown neighborhood. He knits his narrative throughout, including Cassellis' visit to a black household, hoping to do a follow-up story about a man who turned in $10,000 that he found, only to be confronted by the hosts who object to the white perspective the news channel perpetuates at the expense of minorities. The movie is peppered with polemical speeches.

Wexler (who would go on to work on such films as "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Bound for Glory" and "Coming Home") has a natural eye for both mayhem and beauty. A shot of the release of hundreds of pigeons is probably used in film-school classes. Cassellis holds the center as a restless foe of the system in his own right, bucking the bosses who are sympathetic to the police and the Man. Forster has a low-key charm that works especially well on the women around him, without coming off as a cad. He is tempered by Peter Bonerz (from the original "Bob Newhart Show") as the timid sound-man who partners with Cassellis. Also on hand is a raw Peter Boyle as a regular joe who runs a pistol range. 

The ringer here is Harold Blankenship as the 13-year-old boywho embodies the hardships and the hopes of the youth of the day. In Wexler's hands, this all comes together as compelling and urgent, and the Criterion restoration is bright and crisp. The visuals can be a distraction from the subversive tactics Wexler uses here as he not only toys with fact and fiction but also fictionalizes the facts he is given, creating meta moments that induce a heady swirl. 

ALLIGATOR (1980) (B+) - This one is still a hoot. Forster stars as a beleaguered police detective who is convinced he saw a giant alligator in the city's sewer system. Turns out, a baby alligator had been flushed down the toilet years earlier (remember the urban legend?) and grew to massive size on a diet of pets disposed of by a pharmaceutical company testing a synthetic growth hormone. 

The prolific John Sayles cut his teeth as a screenwriter for this and another post-"Jaws" cash-in ("Piranha") while trying to establish indie cred as a director of such touchstones as "The Return of the Secaucus Seven," "Matewan" and "Eight Men Out." His humor is dark, and his dialogue crackles -- especially the banter between Forster's David Madison and the scientist who becomes his love interest, Marisa Kendall (a droll Robin Riker). Toss in Michael Gazzo ("The Godfather Part II") as the harried police chief, and you've got an ace team going all-in on a silly, gruesome tale. 

 

My favorite part of the movie continues to be the running commentary on Madison's thinning hair, a topic he is particularly sensitive to. Sayles finesses such smart comic elements with a good measure of bloody gore, all mixed to camp perfection. Other character actors -- Bart Braverman, Henry Silva, comedian Jack Carter -- sink their teeth into broad roles as various adversaries for the monster.

The cliches get ticked off here -- Madison lost a partner at his last job, and here the chief is going to ask for his gun and badge -- and the story glides along amid the mayhem. Forster is an engaging leading man, and he leads this crew with a wink and a sly grin. It's raunchy fun.

Doc Watch: That '70s Drift

 

POLY STYRENE: I AM A CLICHE (B) - This moody documentary studies the rough life of Poly Styrene (nee Marion Elliott), who made a splash in the late '70s with the short-lived punk/new wave band X-Ray Spex. It was created by her daughter, Celeste Bell, and Paul Sng as an homage to the singer-songwriter who died a decade ago at age 53 after long struggling with mental illness. The film itself has a bit of a personality disorder, unsure as to how to frame the biography.

But it's often a compelling story. Poly Styrene, with her teenage braces and outlandish outfits, was a powerful force, with a voice as brassy as Joan Jett's and a talent for writing catchy hooks, some with roots in the songs of R&B girl groups. The first hour is straight backstory charting the rise and fall of Poly Styrene from dabbling in ska and reggae to an epiphany at a Sex Pistols show and a record deal in 1977, giving her a megaphone for her rants against a plastic society. She seemed to be triggered by her first trip to New York and the city's visual onslaught of bright lights and consumerism -- and getting slipped some drugs that sent her into a tailspin. (She also seems to have been affected by the recent birth of her daughter.)

The structure of the documentary can be troublesome. We often see Bell staring off into the distance or flipping through the 2018 book about Poly Styrene, as if this were a mere infomercial. Bell's narration can be distracting; she has the energy and cadence of a heroin addict. And most of the talking heads appear only in voiceover (a COVID issue?), and those voices tend to run together, as a result. But in the end, this can be a moving character study by a daughter who was neglected as a child by a mother misdiagnosed at first and then hooked by Hare Krishna and other mysticism. Despite the rocky production, a powerful personal story emerges.

MR. SOUL! (B+) - The niece of Ellis Haizlip pens a refreshingly clear-eyed valentine to her uncle, the guiding force behind the groundbreaking PBS show "Soul!", which celebrated black culture in the late '60s and into the '70s before getting shut down as part of President Nixon's crackdown on public-affairs programming.

The tale unfolds leisurely, at first not necessarily centered on Ellis Haizlip, who was a producer of the show who eventually stepped into the role of host, bringing an untrained and awkward authenticity to the proceedings. The show dug deep into arts and politics, with guests ranging from Louis Farrakhan to the poet Nikki Giovanni to the mother of prisoner George Jackson. Some of the performances, especially the musicians and dancers, are refreshingly raw and even outre. We see Rahsaan Roland Kirk play three saxophones at once. We get urgent renderings by Al Green ("Let's Stay Together") and Stevie Wonder ("Superstition"), and incendiary polemics from the Last Poets. (There's even a snippet of a 15-year-old Arsenio Hall performing a magic act.)

The portrait of Ellis Haizlip (gentle, soft-spoken but intense) unfolds organically, as plenty of talking heads are present to fill in any blanks. Ashford and Simpson (who don't seem to have aged since the '70s) are among those who speak fondly of Haizlip, who gave many entertainers their early break. Haizlip's journal entries are voiced by actor Blair Underwood. The consensus is that Haizlip was broad-minded and adventurous when booking guests, a keen cultivator of black culture -- or, as one observer notes: "Ellis was a gardener."

Obscure, charming anecdotes from little-known acts come back to life.  One member of a trio recalls, 50 years later, that he was so nervous backstage before going on "I had to chew on a button." It is details like that which make this a coveted time capsule.

BONUS TRACKS

From the opening shots, the trippy "Germ-Free Adolescents" from the debut by X-Ray Spex:

And the urgent howl of "Oh Bondage Up Yours":

In Search Of ...

 Two from Scandinavia:

COMPARTMENT NO. 6 (A-minus) - Juho Kuosmanen -- finally following up the winsome story "The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki" -- produces another pairing, this time a Finnish woman traveling from her recent home in Moscow and sharing a train compartment with a wild Russian as they head to a town near the Arctic Circle. Here he and Andris Feldmanis adopt a novel by Rosa Liksom.

It focuses on Laura (though I don't remember the character's name being used), played by Seidi Haarla (who resembles a young Jennifer Saunders), who had been shacking up with Irina (Dinara Drukarova), an older woman in Moscow apparently known for her penchant for nomadic female "lodgers" who come and go with regularity from her bed. Laura will slowly realize that this separation isn't really temporary as she'd hoped (Irina bailed on the trip at the last minute).

Instead, she is distracted by Lhoja (Yuriy Borisov), a boorish hard-drinking miner who is headed to the same town where Laura wants to visit some coastal petroglyphs. Kuosmanen shoots half the film on the train, mostly in the cramped compartment, but Lhoja takes Laura on a few jaunts during stopovers, and she grows to enjoy the mindless fun. Lhoja evolves from downright menacing to borderline charming and deserving of a hug.

Haarla has a wide, expressive face and an impressive emotional range. Kuosmanen's visual style is rapturous. He finds beauty all along the rails, and he celebrates the smidgens of growth that Laura experiences on her rather quixotic and subconsciously therapeutic hero's journey. No shot is wasted in an efficient and moving narrative. 

MEMORIA (C+) - Meh. Tilda Swinton is fascinating to watch for more than two hours, but this film falls short of profundity while straining the patience of viewers with its static shots and lazy narrative. Swinton plays Jessica, a Scot traveling in Colombia, who is awakened one night by an unusual sound, a thoongg that leaves her discombobulated. 

Jessica spends the rest of the film trying to track down the origin of the sound, which eventually starts dogging her (and apparently only her), including during a restaurant outing with her sister. She finds a sound engineer who is able to approximate and replicate the noise -- for all the good it does her. 

This new-agey search for cosmic meaning comes from the mind and camera of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a Thai filmmaker best known for the indie darling "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives," which didn't seem compelling enough to seek out a decade ago. Like the Taiwanese master Tsai Ming-Liang, Weerasethakul is partial to long static shots where little or nothing happens. In Tsai's films, those excruciatingly long takes capture organic human behavior and lead to true insights; but in "Memoria," it just feels like the director is simply dragging things out -- a quarter past two hours, in fact.

It helps to have Tilda Swinton in nearly every frame. As usual, she is fascinating to watch, especially her negligible reactions to the events around her. Unfortunately, there's little payoff from the story. Especially ho-hum is the out-of-left-field ending, which feels like a cheat.

BONUS TRACK

Somehow, "Compartment No. 6" makes Roxy Music's "Love Is the Drug" sound fresh and urgent as it plays over the striking, colorful opening credits. Close your eyes and lend it an unbiased ear.

Bash and Pop

 We caught the latest tour by Guided by Voices during a trip to San Francisco, making it the 7th city that we've seen the band in.*

Robert Pollard and his band of big-league bashers attacked the Great American Music Hall on O'Farrell Street in San Francisco last week. As is often the case, ever since the Guided by Voices "farewell" tour of 2004, he brought a gun to a knife fight -- unleashing a bruising arena-rock sound in a boutique old theater. 

It wasn't the best sound that night, but it's a toss-up as to whether it was the venue's shortcomings or the band's insistence at turning things up to 11 for every song. They also tested the patience of the audience by jamming for nearly three hours, boldly mixing new songs in with the canonical. The wait, though, was well worth it, for an encore than concluded with these four horsemen of the apollardclypse: "Echoes Myron," "Chasing Heather Crazy," "Teenage FBI" and "Glad Girls." (And ... mic drop.)

GBV charged out of the gate by alternating new songs with classics from Pollard's ridiculously vast catalog. Pollard has fully embraced this version of the band, which has been pumping out several albums a year for the past five years or so, and he celebrates the recent songs as much as the old ones.

"The Disconnected Citizen," from last year's disc "It Can't Be Them ...," was given the vaunted spot directly after the concert anthem "A Salty Salute," and it has a jaunty "As We Go Up We Go Down" bounce suitable for "Alien Lanes." Similarly, the new track "Excited Ones" would not be out of place on the crunchy late '90s album "Mag Earwhig," the disc that introduced him to guitarist Doug Gillard, who to this day stands off to Pollard's left as both his motivating and moderating force. 

Gillard always gets the spotlight in concert for "Mag Earwhig's" propulsive "I Am a Tree," and you can tell that Pollard has a special fondness for that album, and rightfully so -- it's his White Album following on the heels of his perfect mid-'90s trilogy**, the equivalent of GBV's "Rubber Soul," "Revolver" and "Sgt. Pepper." Last week we were treated to three "Mag" tracks, including the shimmering "Jane of the Waking Universe" (a victim of the shoddy sound system) and, early in the show, a spirited rendering of "Not Behind the Fighter Jet."

"Re-Develop," a sweeping prog shanty from the newly released "Crystal Nuns Cathedral," has the potential to inspire future audience sing-alongs. One of the strongest new songs is the jittery "Dance of  Gurus."

Halfway through the 50 songs that were performed, the band settled into a groove with the pure pop nugget "The Best of Jill Hives," and an especially heartfelt rendering of "Twilight Campfighter." Afterward, Pollard explained the extra verve in his vocals: the friend who had come up with that puzzling title/inspiration (even Pollard still scratches his head over its meaning) died a year ago. Seven of the last 10 or so songs before the encore, most of them recent cuts, might stump all but the most diehard fans. We were then eagerly rewarded with the requisite "Game of Pricks" and "I Am a Scientist," two songs that never get old.

As Pollard gets ready this fall to apply for Medicare, he hasn't lost the thrill of fronting a swaggering rock band pounding out endless pop nuggets. 

-----

* - The other 6 cities, in order, are Chicago multiple times in the '90s and early '00s; San Diego and Los Angeles (and Chicago again) on the 2004 "farewell" tour; Portland when the classic lineup reunited in 2010; and more recently a New Year's Eve show in Brooklyn (2016) and a refurbished smelting plant in Atlanta (2018). If you count the 2017 Growlers' Beach Goth festival as Long Beach instead of L.A., then it's technically 8 cities total.

** Three perfect albums in a row: "Bee Thousand," "Alien Lanes" and "Under the Bushes, Under the Stars."

Inadvertent Double Feature: Frankie Five-Angels

 

In a bit of random serendipity, we watched two movies at opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum back to back: "The Godfather: Part II" and 1980's "Alligator." Both featured the raspy-voiced character actor Michael V. Gazzo.

Gazzo portrayed the pivotal Corleone capo Frank Pentangeli (below, right), the would-be turncoat who testifies before a Senate committee seeking to bring down Michael Corleone in the "Godfather" sequel. Six years later he hammed it up in the cliched role of the beleaguered police chief trying to corral a rogue detective (played by Robert Forster) and save the town from a giant rampaging reptile. 

Gazzo fell back on a lot of TV work in the '70s and '80s before he died in 1994 at 71. I had no idea that he made his bones as a writer. In the 1950s, he wrote the play "Hatful of Rain," which was turned into a film a decade later, and the screenplay for Elvis Presley's "King Creole."

In the coming days, we will have reviews of both of the original "Godfather" movies and a double-feature tribute to Forster.

New to the Queue

 It used to go like that ...

Andrea Arnold ("Fish Tank," "American Honey") takes a break from intense dramas to make an intense documentary down on the farm, "Cow."

A documentary about the beloved feathery-haired one-hit wonders from Norway, "A-Ha: The Movie."

A chronicle of a man who has given his ubiquitous music away for no compensation, "Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeod."

Director Jacques Audiard ("A Prophet," "Dheepan") teams with writer Celine Sciamma ("Girlhood," "Portrait of a Lady on Fire") for a drama about millennials hooking up, "Paris, 13th District."

Nicolas Cage is in on the joke in the meta adventure "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent."

A documentary from Sergei Loznitsa ("State Funeral") about the Nazi genocide in Ukraine during World War II (and the aftermath), "Babi Yar. Context."

An offbeat relationship drama from Germany, "The Girl and the Spider."

Now and Then: Joachim Trier

 We take a look at the latest from Norwegian director Joachim Trier, and then cycle back to the beginning of his loose trilogy about young people coping, which also includes the dire "Oslo, August 31st."

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (A-minus) - Director Joachim Trier, writing with his regular partner Eskil Vogt, doesn't miss a step here as he takes on a fanciful excursion with a young woman searching for purpose while she tries on careers and relationships over a few years in Oslo.

Renate Reinsve is magnetic as Julie, the young adult who is in no hurry to settle in or settle down. Early on she drops out of medical school to become a photographer and a writer, and she falls for an older man, Aksel, a crass comic book artist. He is played by Anders Danielsen Lie, the star of the two previous films in the trilogy, "Reprise" and "Oslo, August 31st." By the end of this exercise, he will threaten to steal the film with one scene that halts the whirlwind and injects a profound monologue about life itself.

But until then, Trier -- like before, working in chapters and chronological loops -- lets Reinsve explore the depths of a fascinating young woman. Julie will move on from Aksel after she crashes a party and meets Elvind (Herbert Nordrum, pictured above) and engages in a mini "Before Sunrise," testing to see how many intimate moments they can share without it technically counting as cheating on their partners. It will take a second meet-cute for this to turn into a relationship.

The rest is an adventure best experienced fresh and untainted. There will be a believable psychedelic trip, an insightful moment from a passing stranger, family issues, an illness, and a life-altering decision for Julie to make. This wouldn't work without a master behind the camera and a bold performance that creates a character you can't look away from, right up until the bittersweet, perfect final shot.

REPRISE (2008) (A) - A buddy movie for the ages, Trier follows the divergent paths of childhood friends who dream of being acclaimed cutting-edge writers on the Oslo scene, just like their Salingeresque local idol. Anders Danielsen Lie is riveting as Phillip, who suffers a psychotic break after he is first to publish a successful novel. Doe-eyed Espen Klouman Hoiner is the straight-laced Erik, who is set adrift after his best pal slips away intellectually and emotionally.

Trier and Vogt made their debut with this deeply moving buddy movie, surrounding Phillip and Erik with a bunch of wise-ass prepster pals, borrowing from the '90s ensemble work of Whit Stillman and Noah Baumbach in tolerating snotty 20-somethings. Here the interactions among the satellite friends are subtly rendered, allowing individual quirks to peek through and capturing the little ways in which young men banter with each other and also gossip behind each others' backs.

Trier deftly walks a fine line between deadpan humor and at-times crushing emotional scenes. His secret weapon here is Viktoria Winge at Kari, the woman who unwittingly inspired Phillip's breakdown and then must endure his attempts to put things back together. In her film debut, Winge has a Bjork-like innocence but a sophisticated approach this to painful relationship. (They have a meet-cute at a concert featuring one of the buddies who belts out his band's signature tune, "Finger Fucked by the Prime Minister.")

Hoiner as Erik, who now must work in the shadow of his successful friend, creates a charming bumbler with seemingly no clue how to handle a girlfriend, a rejected novel, or the eventual interactions with that idol. Trier brings the boys back together at the end for a wedding, and everyone still feels a bit fragile, as if Phillip and Erik are figuring out how to navigate the next phase, now that they've finally emerged into true adulthood.

BONUS TRACKS

From an early scene in "Reprise," the young male brooder's go-to music, Joy Division, with "New Dawn Fades":

And the boys disrupt a boring party by blasting Le Tigre's "Deceptacon":

"Worst Person" has a head-spinningly eclectic soundtrack, from Billie Holiday to techno, that never interferes with the story. There is a particular "Garden State"-ish slant on sensitive singer-songwriters from the '70s, like Harry Nilsson's "I Said Goodbye to Me":