The Best of 2022: Time to Move It Along

 

Let's not complicate things. It was a fine year to watch movies in 2022.

There was much hand-wringing late last year about the decline of mid-budget, director-centric, "prestige" films, a supposed crisis for the movie industry beyond superhero sequels and Disney epics. ("We’re now seeing a grim future for 'cinema' at the movie theater," lamented this thoughtful essay.)

But below you'll find at least 20 very good (even great) movies that won't insult your intelligence, many of which did fine financially (and half of which screened at the independent single-screen Guild Cinema). The problem in 2022 wasn't the bottom dropping out of the market for quality movies; it was a lack of quality movies from the usual suspects who churn out "prestige" films. It's no wonder that it was an epic year for box-office bombs.

We skipped a lot of releases this year, and the main reason was that they looked like navel-gazing slogs, way too long in running time. The poster boy for that is Steven Spielberg, whom we gave up on years ago. His shlocky childhood reverie "The Fabelmans" weighs in at 2 hours 31 minutes. Another pampered storyteller, James Gray ("The Yards," "Ad Astra"), also mined his own childhood, though he managed to do it in just under two hours.

Maybe it doesn't pay to over-indulge mid-career filmmakers and hand them big budgets and unlimited run times. Alejandro Inarritu ("21 Grams," "Babel") has done great work -- "Birdman" was our favorite film of 2014 -- but his 2-hour 39-minute film about a filmmaker having an existential crisis, is no one's idea of a good time at the cineplex. James Cameron's "Avatar" (which we'd never see anyway) surpassed 3 hours, as did favorite son and the epitome of privilege, Damien Chazelle (a B-level director if there ever was one: "Whiplash," "La La Land"), with his repulsive spectacle "Babylon." Others that put us off with their content and/or time-commitment:

• "Everything Everywhere All at Once": Sensory overload-squared, it looked like 2 hours and 19 minutes of numbing mayhem.
• "Tar": Award desperation from Cate Blanchett, from a director (Todd Field) who graces us with his art only rarely; it clocked in at 2:38.
• The Whitney Houston biopic, from the hacks behind "Bohemian Rhapsody," running 2:24.  More voguing: "Elvis" (from the King of Excess Baz Luhrmann) ran 2:39, and the Marilyn Monroe biopic "Blonde" droned on for 2:47.
  
• "Triangle of Sadness," from the overrated Ruben Oestlund ("Force Majeure"), like "Babylon," featured a lot of bodily fluids spewing forth, though the studio managed to rein him in to a mere 2 hours, 27 minutes.
• We miss Jordan Peele's days in front of the camera, and a casual perusal of "Nope" (2:15) revealed another chore of a story to try to keep up with (like "Get Out").
• David O. Russell gets more and more insufferable; his latest, "Amsterdam," was a 2-hour 14-minute bomb.
  
• Me-Too morality play "She Said" looked like a sad stepchild of "All the President's Men," even if, at 2:19, it was 9 minutes shorter than Alan Pakula's masterpiece.
• Pulp Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook slowed things down for a chaste love story, "Decision to Leave," at a relatively snappy 2 hours, 16 minutes. 
• A couple of major disappointments (these we actually saw) from -- yet again -- mid-career auteurs were "White Noise" (Noah Baumbach, 2:10) and "Bones and All" (Luca Guadagnino, 2:10).
  

It was like a year-long "Heaven's Gate" contest.

Which isn't to say that we hold any animus toward mid-career auteurs. That's why it feels good to give our top spot this year to Martin McDonagh, who has bumbled a bit since 2008's "In Bruges" (like with "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri") but who put it all together with "The Banshees of Inisherin," a thoughtful, mature, adult story about two friends going through a break-up. It is smart, funny, nuanced, heartwarming and heartbreaking. And it runs only 1 hour and 54 minutes. McDonagh is a writer-director who gets out of the way of his cast and doesn't overstay his welcome.

Other mid-career filmmakers who are finding fascinating narratives and fresh ways to tell their stories include Europeans Celine Sciamma ("Petite Maman"), Jacques Audiard ("Paris, 13th District") and Joachim Trier ("The Worst Person in the World"). Though that's not to say, either, that popular pulpy movies can't be appreciated outside of the art-houses. You'll find "The Menu" and "Emily the Criminal" in our Top 20. "Top Gun: Maverick" (2:10) was a lot of fun on the Imax screen, and Ti West's hokey horror throwbacks "X" and "Pearl" were worth seeing on the big screen.

Meanwhile, of the 20 films below, 9 of them are debut feature films and documentaries. There are new voices out there, and we needn't go back to the well with old or middle-aged filmmakers whose excesses don't get reined in. (Films below from debut directors are marked with an *.)

There are good movies being made and distributed. If you can cut through the clutter from the pampered favorites of the mainstream, you'll find the gems.

THE TOP 20 of '22

  1. The Banshees of Inisherin: Colin Farrell leads the way in Martin McDonagh's most fully realized film. (This year's best screenplay.) (Stream on HBO)

  2. Petite Maman: Celine Sciamma perfectly executes a wonderful idea about childhood and our relationship with our parents. (Hulu)

  3. Apples*: A droll and melancholy rumination on self and memory. (Mubi)

  4. The Janes: A flawless documentary about the pre-Roe women who set up an underground railroad for those seeking abortions. (HBO)

  5. The Worst Person in the World: Another great movie from Joachim Trier (this year's best director), following along as a young woman (Renate Reinsve) searches for her purpose. (DVD)

  6. Corsage: A fascinating character study and feminist howl. (Theaters)

  7. Who We Are: A Chronicle of Race in America: An eye-opening polemic, simply rendered. (Netflix)

  8. God's Country*: A meticulously constructed and whipsmart back-country thriller. (DVD 2/28/23)

  9. Emily the Criminal*: A compact suspense film powered by Aubrey Plaza's magnetism. (Netflix)

10. The Menu: A fun, smart skewering of the rich and indulgent. (HBO)

11.  Aftersun*: Another debut feature, this one about a father-daughter reverie of a vacation from the '90s. (Theaters)

12. Queen of Glory*: A funny and heartwarming debut film about a young woman dealing with her eccentric immigrant family. (DVD)

13. My Old School*: A crazy-fun documentary about a con man, with a boost from re-enactments and Alan Cumming. (Hulu)

14. Fire of Love: "A fascinating slice of history wrapped in a love story." (Disney+)

15. A Love Song*: A simple, mournful love story featuring a couple of older actors.

16. Paris, 13th District: A keenly observed drama about Millennials navigating their way through relationships. (DVD)

17. Hold Me Tight: We almost walked out; and then we were floored by Mathieu Almaric's narrative daring. (Mubi/Kino Now)

18. Compartment No. 6: Another fascinating young woman, this one sharing space on a train with a rough Russian. (DVD)

19. Let the Little Light Shine*: An inspiring documentary about kids and parents fighting the system to keep their high-performing high school open. (PBS-POV)

20. Playground*: One of the most harrowing, emotionally wrenching movies you can imagine about school life for little kids. And it's only 72 minutes long. (Mubi)

 

JUST MISSED THE LIST

• A quietly affecting story of a boy searching for his father, The Box.
• Tim Roth, compelling as a depressed rich guy, in Sundown.
• Another debut feature, about a teen yearning to escape her small village, Murina.
• A fun fling about actors preparing a film project, Official Competition.
• Cooper Raiff ("Shithouse") pulls off his sophomore effort, Cha Cha Real Smooth.
• A strong debut feature about family dynamics, Hit the Road.
• A luxurious drama about a mother helping her young daughter obtain an abortion, Lingui, the Sacred Bonds.
• The ragtag group road trip movie from Hirokazu Kore-eda, "Broker."
  

 

MORE TOP DOCS

• Moonage Daydream
• Attica
• Accepted
• A Most Beautiful Thing
  
• Sr.
• Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
• Riotsville USA
• Live at Mr. Kelly's
  
• Cow
  

TOP PERFORMANCES

• Mia Goth, manic in both "X" and "Pearl."
  
• Colin Farrell, backed by wonderful character actors, in "The Banshees of Inisherin."
• Aubrey Plaza, riveting and at her peak in "Emily the Criminal" (with a big assist from co-star Theo Rossi).
• Penelope Cruz, deliriously loopy in "Official Competition."
• Vicky Krieps, powerful in "Corsage."
• Adam Driver, the grown-up in "White Noise."
  
• Renate Reinsve, captivating in "The Worst Person in the World."
• Little Josephine Sanz in "Petite Maman."

 

THE LEFTOVERS

Some 2021 films we caught up with:  "Mass" -- a stunning examination of grief among two sets of parents -- would have made our top ten of 2021 had we seen it in time. ... Paulo Sorrentino turned in a fine, workmanlike job going back to his childhood for the gorgeous and heartwarming "Hand of God."

Wayback Machine:  We ventured to the '60s and '70s to further explore the catalogue of Jack Lemmon, including Billy Wilder's "Avanti." ... We paid tribute to the late Peter Bogdanovich, screening "What's Up Doc," and William Hurt ("Broadcast News"). ... We revisited John Sayles' labor masterpiece, "Matewan." ... We finally braved the mediocre "Godfather 3" and then cleansed our palates with the epic originals, Parts 1 and 2. ... We traveled to France in the '80s for "Loulou" and "36 Fillette." ... There was the Robert Forster double feature, "Medium Cool" and "Alligator." ... And we bade au revoir to Jean-Luc Godard (part of a continuing series).

 

 

GUILTY PLEASURES

• It was easy to overlook the corniness and Tom Cruise-ness and just enjoy the rote storytelling and visual extravaganza of "Top Gun: Maverick."
• Ti West went back in time for some quality horror parodies, and he was lucky to have Mia Goth as his star, in both "X" and "Pearl."
• Jeff Baena gathered some of his stars from 2017's "Little Hours" and got pleasantly silly again with Alison Brie in "Spin Me Round."
  

 

IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME

(Well, maybe this time it is you)

• Noah Baumbach, whose movies we've chronicled for more than a quarter century, was out of his depth in the big-budget attempt to adapt Don DeLillo, "White Noise."
  
• Claire Denis scored with Juliette Binoche the last time they teamed up ("Let the Sunshine In") but they bombed together with the tedious "Both Sides of the Blade."
  
• Andrew Bujalski made us start to question his entire Mumblecore oeuvre after his latest fumble, "There There."
• Steven Soderbergh's work was just OK in "Kimi."
• Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("Delicatessen," "Amelie") underwhelmed with the cluttered "Big Bug."
• Luca Guadagnino has two of the great films of the past 15 years ("I Am Love" and "A Bigger Splash") but he made the worst movie I saw in quite a while, the story of young cannibal love, "Bones and All."
  

COMING ATTRACTIONS

Here are a bunch we wanted to see but didn't get the chance:

• Jafar Panahi's latest, "No Bears," not arriving here until late February.
• Sarah Polley's latest, "Women Talking."
• The documentary about photographer Nan Goldin, "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed."
• The documentary "Dear Mr. Brody."
  

Join us in 2023 as we track down those titles and more of the finest movies you wouldn't otherwise think of watching.

Deconstructing Video Memories

 

AFTERSUN (A-minus) - Newcomer Charlotte Wells films this childhood reverie as if reflecting it off the surface of a lake, shimmery and, at times, distorted. That's probably how she remembered or imagined a similar vacation trip to Turkey with her divorced father circa the 1990s.

Little Sophie (Frankie Corio) wields a camcorder during their hotel stay, and Wells intersperses these "found" images into her own fictional narrative, and it's never clear whether any of Sophie's memories are entirely accurate. It's a clever device -- is the adult Sophie (whom we see just a few glimpses of in a modern, drab domestic existence) remembering or misremembering? Is this her brain, triggered by video snippets, firing off neurons? Her dad eventually died at some point; is she trying to reconstruct her favorite memory?

Sophie and her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), are not that far apart in age, and they get mistaken for brother and sister. He can be a goofball (his wrist is in a cast at the beginning of the movie), and he amuses his daughter at times but also worries her. Meantime, Sophie, 13, is growing curious about boys and sex, still innocent but on the brink of womanhood. Their fetching bond is reminiscent of Sofia Coppola's similarly ruminative "Somewhere" from 2010.

Wells chops up the narrative a bit. Dialogue -- laden with thick accents -- sometimes passes by too quickly to catch. That seems like an intentional attempt at disorienting the viewer, jangling the senses. Confusion or misperception is the point at times. Meantime, Corio and Mescal make for a winsome pair.

THREE MINUTES: A LENGTHENING (B) - Filmmaker Bianca Stigter works with Glenn Kurtz, who found his grandfather's vacation movies from summer 1939 in Poland and turned the journey of discovery into a book. Stigter takes between 3 and 4 minutes of film footage from the grandfather's hometown and uses clips and stills from it as her only images, over 70 minutes, to conduct a microcosmic study of the town's inhabitants, most of whom would be captured months later and perish in the Holocaust.

As gimmicks go, it's a fascinating exercise in video discipline. Stigter plays scenes over and over again. She zooms in to the granular level. She hunts for clues of identification. She finds at least one of the kids in the video, and we hear him, 80 years later, tell stories about the others and the village. Stigler doesn't show him, because she is faithful to her concept, which is to show only the images from the video, and it's frustrating to not indulge in one of the great joys of documentary viewing, which is to compare how someone looked then and now. (His face will flash by in the credits.)

The forensic work by Sigter and Kurtz, which recalls the endless analysis of the Zapruder film following the Kennedy assassination, is fascinating at times. (They get an assist from Steven Spielberg's Film and Video Archive.) The restoration crew takes the blurry image of a sign above a shop and reconstruct it, finally finding the family name of the grocers who operated the store. 

Frankly, the second half starts to drag -- not just the repetition, but also the rote recitation of some of the horrors that befell the town with the Nazi invasion by December. Watching the images recur and play out in different rhythms can be hypnotic, though. If you have the historian's gene, you might be rapt throughout; if not, the first 20 minutes might be enough.

BONUS TRACK

"Aftersun" has a subdued retro soundtrack. Corio charms with a monotone karaoke reading of R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion." Here's the original:

The trailers:

Let Her Eat Cake

 

CORSAGE (A) - Vicky Krieps is a sight to behold in a period-piece crie-de-coeur about the 19th century Austrian Empress going through a mid-life crisis after turning 40. It is a feminist howl about caging women because they are beautiful and casting them aside as they age. Because it takes place 145 years ago its point is particularly poignant.

Krieps, who stumbled a bit last year in the fine "Hold Me Tight," captures the angst and mischief of Empress Elisabeth (Elise or Sisi), in a loveless marriage with the cranky Emperor Franz Josef (Florian Teichtmeister) since she was 16. That's not much of a bother to Elise, who has a crush on her riding instructor and runs off for a romp with a cousin in Hungary. She's fine with Franz Josef cavorting with a younger mistress. Elise made two heirs, a boy and a girl, so her job is done.

The Empress was a real figure (though the story here is fiction) and quite the celebrity, said to be one of the great beauties of Europe during that era. Here Elise is fidgety, unfulfilled. She starves herself to fit into her impossibly tight corsets (thus the title). Obviously, she is confined by more than just her undergarments. To get out of official duties, she will fake a fainting spell or send out an assistant masked by a veil to take her place at yet another public event. She fences, she smokes, she cuts off the locks she is famously known for and even gets a tattoo. She is entranced by the novelty of moving pictures.

She is a free spirit, and she yearns to live a life beyond that of a pretty figurehead. But she has been conditioned since she was a child to think of her self as just an object to be beheld. She tells the riding instructor that she loves to watch him look at her. It is her raison d'etre. That is the mini-tragedy here; she is trapped in her own myth and struggles to break free from the conventions. She aches to break out as a modern woman, and, frustrated, she takes it out on one of her assistants, blocking the servant from pursuing marriage with a true love.

Writer-director Marie Kreutzer, who has had a fairly undistinguished career until now, assembles this story masterfully, with insightful dialogue, spare storytelling and compelling imagery. Krieps is in full command, and Kreutzer lets her explore this unique character, an anomaly living a pampered life in a cruel world. Kreutzer adds inspired touches as little jolts for the viewer -- she has characters perform quaint versions of modern songs -- "Help Me Make It Through the Night" on ukelele and a lovely harp version of the Rolling Stones' "As Tears Go By."  The technique will probably remind you of Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" -- which used original recordings of pop and punk songs -- but "Corsage" is at the opposite spectrum from Coppola and Kirsten Dunst's shallow and ironically hip royal biography. This film offers authentic emotions and realistic relationships, a true polemic about the era. It's also not as flip as "The Favourite."

Everything works here. Just try to take your eyes off Krieps. She is magnetic, and her performance is as daring as her restless character is. Her suffering is quiet but compelling.

BONUS TRACKS

Here is Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night," often covered, here by Willie Nelson:

 

Here is Marianne Faithfull with the Rolling Stones' "As Tears Go By":

 

Over the closing credits, Soap&Skin with "Italy":

New to the Queue

 "It's going to be a bright, bright sunshiny day ..."

A woman discovers her dead husband's alternate family, a ferry ride away, in the debut feature "After Love."

A documentary about the family who, for generations, has run the iconic Laemmle cinemas in Los Angeles, "Only in Theaters."

This mother-son battle looks a little sloppy but we'll give the benefit of the doubt to Jesse Eisenberg's writing-directing debut, "When You Finish Saving the World."

A contemplative documentary about the sole resident of an island off Nova Scotia cataloguing its flora and fauna, "Geographies of Solitude."

BONUS TRACK

Our title track, Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now," which we used to have on 45-rpm, but it skipped, and one of us fell asleep while it was playing, and it skipped and skipped and skipped so much it left a big white groove in the vinyl:

Now & Then: Andrea Arnold's Character Studies

 The recent documentary "Cow" gives us an excuse to delve deep into the oeuvre of Andrea Arnold, two movies at opposite ends of her resume, connected with apt titles. 

COW (B+) - Wow. How now. A dairy cow at the center of this unnarrated documentary encapsulates the adage "Life's a bitch, and then you die." Ow.

Luma is a lumbering beast who is put through her paces on a daily basis, hooked up to a milking machine. We see her give birth twice. Each time, the calf is immediately weaned from her and separated from her. (The mother's howl at one point is reminiscent of the grieving orcas in "Blackfish.") She herself is another machine on the farm. At times we get to follow the calf, whether engaging in childlike play or getting her nascent horns burned out of the top of her head.

But Luma is the star. Or the tragic hero. Her saga calls to mind last year's "Gunda," a similar documentary, about the travails of a sow with a huge litter of piglets. Luma endures her indignities, but she eventually has trouble moving because of what appears to be a highly inflamed udder.

Andrea Arnold has spent her career in feature films exploring the desperate lives of drudgery lived by the underclass in foundational films like "Fish Tank," "Red Road" and "American Honey."  Here she echoes those themes involving a lack of free will as she embeds her camera on this pleasant little farm in Scotland. The workers are barely seen or heard, although we do get to listen along to the random pop tunes that are piped into the cow barn (Billie Eilish; Angel Olsen's "Unfuck the World"; even the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York"). The camera elbows in close to the animals and tails them around every inch of the farm.

At one point, Luma and the other adult bovines are allowed to traipse outdoors to a field. We watch them eat and sleep and stare blankly into the breeze and the sun. It appears to be a rare treat, which makes the cruelty of the daily drudgery seem even more painful to endure. You can tell yourself that these are just dumb animals who exist to clothe and nourish us, but just try not to feel at least a little guilty watching poor Luma get through the workday.

MILK (1998) (B) - Arnold's early 11-minute short is a haunting examination of a mother's grief. Hetty (Linda Steadman) has suffered a miscarriage, and she skips the baby's funeral, rashly choosing to take a road trip with a stranger, a young man she meets randomly. 

Steadman is riveting as the broken woman, whose residual lactation gives the film not only its title but its gripping ending. In this brief running time, we'll never know if this is a one-time fling or if Hetty is headed toward a destructive mourning period. Arnold wisely lets her character's devastation run its course, mixing a bit of danger with melancholy.

Nothing Like a Good Book

WHITE NOISE (B-minus) - It's often a neat trick adapting a novel to the screen. It's not like Don DeLillo's '80s novel White Noise is impossible to translate to cinema; but Noah Baumbach just doesn't have the ear and the eye for this particularly attempt. The result is a sloppy, choppy undercooked film that drags past two hours.

First things first:  Adam Driver remains undefeated. Last time he knocked out Scarlett Johansson in Baumbach's "Marriage Story"; this time he TKO's Greta Gerwig, as they play a couple who have a blended family and who must guide their brood through an environmental crisis (a mysterious "airborne toxic event"). Driver leans into the lead character Jack (which he styles as J.A.K.), a Hitler studies professor at an elite college, lumbering behind a middle-age paunch and peeping suspiciously from behind blue-tinted eyeglasses. He somehow nails the unique cadence of DeLillo's dialogue and wonderfully unfurls the exasperation of Jack among both his colleagues -- including a chipper Don Cheadle as a pop-culture academic -- and his precocious, ever-curious children.

Gerwig, however, can't find the right pitch as Babette, who has turned to the experimental drug Dylar to fend off her existential fear of death. A critical scene in the second half cripples the movie, as Babette breaks down while confessing the Dylar mystery to Jack, and Gerwig, beneath of bundle of '80s curls, blubbers and stammers in a desperate search for authenticity. It's a rare misstep for her. I much preferred the natural ease of May Nivola as the youngest daughter, a sage counter-balance to Jack's elusive, shape-shifting parental theories of the world and this crisis. The couple's kvetching about death becomes tone-deaf to the point where I started to wonder, "What are Greta Gerwig and Adam Driver so worried about?"

But this is Baumbach's baby, and ultimately his fault.  He flails with a big budget, well outside of his normal indie-intimate comfort zone. For the first time, he offers us grand fireball explosions and hectic car chases and manic mob scenes, and it's all a messy melange of cinematic styles. You can find elements of Wes Anderson's whimsy, Steven Spielberg's gummy morality tales, Brian DePalma's suspense, and Robert Altman's overlapping line readings. The latter style is the only one Baumbach nails occasionally. He even spends a good seven minutes or so presenting an absurdly choreographed musical number in a supermarket over the end credits (to a thumping LCD Soundsystem romp). Who kidnapped Noah Baumbach and replaced him with Baz bleedin' Luhrmann? (A hat tip to the crew who stocked the colorful, pristinely organized supermarket, an important '80s symbol of American culture for DeLillo. The endless credits list 61 names in the production's Art Department alone. Remember that era's generic-brand packaging?)

Baumbach's devotion to DeLillo is admirable.  He picked at the author's themes but failed to fully explore them. As the movie unfolds, a viewer can sense Baumbach having to hack away chunks of the novel in order to adapt it -- like a jet dumping fuel -- yet, somehow the movie still feels at least 20 minutes too long. 

DeLillo is nothing if not a keen observer of male-female relationships, especially the verbal dance between man and woman. But the dialogue spreads across a page differently than it falls on our ears. Driver is best at slipping around the nuance of lines that can sound stilted when read aloud. He gives it a droll delivery and figures out a way to create a fully realized character. Of the demise of an obese colleague, Jack marvels at the enormity of the event and casually intones: "To be so enormous, then to die."

You want to cheer for the cast and crew past the halfway point, but then everything falls apart in the final third of the movie. What is a winding diversion in the novel becomes an absurd, tedious head-scratcher of a final reel on the screen. Our patience quickly dwindles, the plot thread unravels, and Baumbach has lost his way, trying to corral too many moving parts. Over-indulged with an estimated $80 million budget, he sprays ideas all over the place and loses touch with the simplicity of a great author's subtle rendering of a fascinating story.

BONUS TRACK

The LCD Soundsystem finale, "New Body Rhumba," at the ol' A&P:

Doc Watch: The Perils of Success

 

ACCEPTED (A-minus) - In his full-length documentary debut, Dan Chen embedded himself for years at a unique Louisiana college-prep school and lucked out when the school was exposed for exploiting its mostly black student body and fudging transcripts to get them into elite universities. He wisely gains the confidence of several students, enabling him to present a patient, balanced view of the school.

The TM Landry prep school, named for the couple who founded it, was widely celebrated in the media for its success rate, as indelibly rendered in viral videos of students going crazy on college-selection day. Founder Michael Landry mixed "Lean on Me" aphorisms with a near-religious zealotry, driving his kids (through extreme boot-camp tactics) to stressful dedication, mainly in acing college-placement exams. The tuition was relatively affordable and the curriculum was virtually non-existent, but the students were compelled to succeed, at all costs. 

 

Halfway through the movie, the bombshell drops, in the form of a New York Times expose of Landry's belligerent personal behavior and his habit of lying on students' college applications. If his egotistical motivations are not apparent in the first half, they are laid bare in the second half. When he shuts out Chen from filming, the director leans more heavily on four well-spoken and conflicted students, who are foundational characters throughout the movie. 

Chen has the perfect ending in his back pocket -- the college essay of one of the students, Alicia (above), presented in a dramatic reading. It perfectly captures the complexities of the issue and the underlying bigotry of treating these kids as both special and needing a foot on the scale to help them. Chen weaves in the college-admissions bribery scandal of 2019, providing nuance and shading to the dynamics of class and privilege at work in higher education. He wisely avoids judgment and instead turns at the end to these wise teenagers, who don't need a crutch to prove how smart and level-headed they turned out to be.

KURT VONNEGUT: UNSTUCK IN TIME (B) - This is a serviceable documentary about the famed author, with plenty of video interactions with him over the decades. Unfortunately, the filmmaker, who spent nearly 40 years on the project, makes it too much about him and his odyssey.

Robert Weide seems like a nice, talented guy, but I don't care one whit that his wife got sick or that he won an Emmy for directing "Curb Your Enthusiasm." What I wanted to know about was the life of the unique writer and humorist. There's no reason that Weide's selfish detours should be allowed to drag this out to more than two hours.

Weide developed a deep friendship with Vonnegut, and that does pay dividends. (We see intimate notes and hear mundane voicemails from over the years.) So do interviews with the author's two daughters, who still seem a bit scarred, 50 years on, from Vonnegut finding sudden fame and leaving their mother. Like most of the topics here, Vonnegut's abrupt turn toward the spotlight -- and the effects that had on those around him -- feel a bit glossed over. 

But we do get plenty of Vonnegut here, and that's the point. Weide has fun with graphic flourishes -- he honors the chain-smoking Vonnegut by enhancing still photos with animated wisps of smoke. One does wonder, though, if Vonnegut is all that dynamic a subject, outside of the printed page and a few of the speeches he is seen giving. Many of the casual interactions on camera are not very compelling. But this covers most of the bases, for hardcore fans and newcomers alike.

New to the Queue

 Apres le deluge ...

The latest from director Hirokazu Kore-eda ("Shoplifters"), a road trip movie, "Broker."

Vicky Krieps ("Hold Me Tight," "Bergman Island") commands center stage again, this time as an independent-minded Austrian royal in "Corsage."

A documentary about the half-century writing/editing relationship between LBJ biographer Robert Caro and former New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb, "Turn Every Page."

Something is telling us that there is stupid, guilty fun to be had in the "Chucky"-style horror film, "M3GAN."

Godard Lives: The Mid-'60s

 In this occasional series, every once in a while we will view and re-view the films of Jean-Luc Godard, who died in September 2022.

BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964) (A) - This iconic black-and-white low-level gangster flick feels like not only the height of New Wave '60s cool but also like the beta testing of slacker irony. Two hipster doofuses get together with the ultimate manic pixie dream girl to attempt a two-bit robbery at the flat where the young woman lives.

But the trio waste time and don't really plan the heist, just sort of ad-libbing as they go. They have a hollowed out joie de vivre. They banter and philosophize. They dash through a museum. They have their own (iconic) hipster dance at a smoke-filled jazz club. They are rebels without a care, yet they feel weighted down by life. 

Jean-Luc Godard, working with his regular cinematographer of the era, Raoul Coutard, has a facility with the camera that can be mesmerizing. The camera glides in every direction to capture not just the motion of the actors but the cadence of each scene. It is like a master-class in moviemaking.

Anna Karina is charming as innocent Odile, fending off the oafish advances of Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur). Even though some of the classic scenes have been hallowed in cinematic history, there still exists a vibrant film churning to its offbeat narrative. It's funny and bittersweet and confounding at times. Godard's rambling narration betrays his love-hate relationship with America and its culture. He's at the top of his game.

2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER (1967) (B+) - Godard gets more political with this surly story of a housewife who works the streets to make ends meet. It falls during Godard's sumptuous late '60s phase of primary colors and counter-culture extremism. Here the predominant colors are blue and yellow, which appear together over and over, mainly in the outfit of the main character, Juliette (Marina Vlady), who boasts Russian roots.

One day she drops off her screaming child at a day-care center near her suburban Paris home and then goes off to earn money through sex work. Godard tosses a lot of concepts at us -- he frequently cuts to construction sites, and he parodies ads for consumer products, both of which suggest he is taking aim at postwar capitalism. Juliette's husband is a ham-radio fanatic who follows LBJ's war in Vietnam. 

Godard narrates in hushed tones, expounding on some of his philosophical themes. Just like with his last films of the past two decades, I find it hard to follow, and not just because he sometimes traffics in non-sequiturs. I know rudimentary French but not nearly enough to follow along without subtitles; I wonder if it is richer to merely listen and understand while paying attention to the visuals on the screen as opposed to having to do all that and read subtitles. Something gets lost in the multitasking, I'm sure.

Vlady is compelling as a modern woman having an average day -- shopping for clothes (stripes, stripes, everywhere!), going to the carwash, etc. She and others sometimes break the cinematic artifice and address the camera, ad-libbing under Godard's goading. Juliette's attitude is refreshing. It's as if Godard's sexual voyeurism, 55 years later, has taken a long feminist journey toward empowerment of a typical sex worker; what might have aged poorly has begun to age well again. (The sex is not erotic but rather boring or absurd.)

Her husband and children fade into the background during most of the film, mainly bookending her narrative arc to drive home the blandness of domesticity. It is a very French attitude to assert your individuality and not be defined by the role of mother and wife 24/7. Juliette's routine existence is bold, daring, and colorfully rendered.

BONUS TRACKS

Previous takes on Godard's oeuvre:

• Contempt
• Masculin Feminin
• Goodbye to Language
  
• Film Socialisme
• The Image Book
  

Now and Then: A Julia Roberts Double Feature

 We thought it would be random fun to pair the latest Julia Roberts romp with a first-time viewing of one of her earliest endeavors, from 1988.

TICKET TO PARADISE (D+) - If you are one of those people -- and I know you're out there -- who wishes that popular culture had stopped permanently at the beginning of the fourth season of "The Brady Bunch," then have I got a movie for you. Upgrade the parents to George Clooney and Julia Roberts, and send the clan to Bali instead of Hawaii and you get the dipshit plot of this pathetic rom-com.

Clooney and Roberts are David and Georgia Cotton, longtime exes who despise each other (at least at the beginning, if you catch my drift) but form an alliance to try to block their daughter, Lily (Kaitlyn Dever, adrift), from blundering into a marriage with someone she just met (a seaweed farmer in Bali; go with it) on what was supposed to be a brainless post-grad adventure before joining a law firm. Clooney and Roberts -- who at any given moment could break into classic Tracy-Hepburn repartee -- are given zippo to work with here, courtesy of writer-director Ol Parker, the hack behind "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" and "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." 

Dever, along with her sidekick Billie Lourd, are given preposterous motivations and line-readings. Maxime Bouttier stands there looking pretty and muttering dumb lines as Gede, the hunky love interest. Gede and his extended family (the size of the clan is borderline offensive) live an improbably idyllic life along the island's beach as a perfect, honorable family of, yes, earnest seaweed farmers. (Newcomer Agung Pinda is one of the few bright spots as Gede's father.)

You can predict just about every twist and turn, each one telegraphed from miles away. Will David and Georgia's scheme blow up in their faces but somehow rekindle their long-curdled relationship? Please stop reading and go back to your '70s cocoon, if you have to even ask that question. 

It is difficult to understand just how tin-eared and flawed this movie is. Twice there are references to Lily having just gone to college for four years. Um, that's not how you become a lawyer. Look it up; there's the part where you go to law school for three years. Would you believe that someone comically gets bit by a snake? Then there's the gut-buster of David and Georgia ending up in adjoining rooms. (When her boyfriend drops by unexpectedly and the exes happen to have just awoken (chastely) hung over together in Georgia's room, the idiot plot requires her to run around back and pretend David's room is hers. But why doesn't David just sneak back to his own room, problem solved? Please, stop asking these questions.)

Ah, but it's Clooney and Roberts. They are fun to watch at times, especially during a sloppy game of beer pong as the Dad Rock of their youth plays at the club. But even two of the most charming movie stars of our day can't make sense of or bring life to this infuriating waste of pixels. It doesn't help that the movie is at least 20 minutes too long. You won't be blamed if you pause the film at anytime during the second half and remark, "I can't believe there's still 40/30/20 minutes left! What more do they need to steer to this to the insultingly obvious ending?" But then, most of us wouldn't bother watching this sad tale in the first place, unless there is a rip in the time-space continuum and it somehow gets released in 1972.

MYSTIC PIZZA (1988) (B+) - This sweet '80s film about the man-crazy staff at a small pizza parlor in Connecticut glides along on a few strong performances. The passage of time, though, requires some adjusting of modern sensibilities about dating, as these gals could have been the ones who put the Bechdel test on the map.

We get a pair of breakthrough performances from Julia Roberts as Daisy, the roughest and toughest of the three amigas, and from Lili Taylor as Jojo, who wavers over her engagement to lovable lug Bill (a very young Vincent D'Onofrio). Those two are offset by an off-key Annabeth Gish as Kat, who falls into a bland relationship with the married man from her baby-sitting gig. Conchata Ferrell (TV's "Two and a Half Men") bats cleanup as the gruff but wise proprietor with the secret pizza sauce.

This is all ably directed by journeyman Donald Petrie ("Grumpy Old Men") from a charming story by Amy Holden Jones ("Indecent Proposal"). The young women fall into those predictable '80s relationships (there always has to be one woman from the wrong side of the tracks falling for a douche in a Porsche), but Jones' story (along with the dialogue by Perry and Randy Howze, who never went on to do much else) gives the trio just enough personality and believability to make you care about them.

Taylor is the life force here. Her scenes burst with energy, and she and D'Onofrio are a winning couple. Roberts flashes those looks of hers, and you can just sense a charisma flowing beneath the surface. You want to roll your eyes at the innocence of a simpler time, but this crew draws you in to their sentimental saga.

Cries for Attention

 

PEARL (B) - If Ti West were smart (and he seems to be), he'd just keep making movies with Mia Goth and see where her manic verve takes him. Her face can fill a screen, and just watch her channel-surf through emotions at the drop of an "Action!" Goth was a revelation earlier this year in the tongue-in-cheek horror romp "X," and here she flies solo in the title role of that movie's prequel, "Pearl."

Goth, in heavy makeup, played a second role in "X" as the homicidal old lady living on a farm where Goth's other character and a film crew chose to shoot a porn film circa 1980. This prequel rewinds six decades to cruel Pearl's youth, during the flu epidemic of 1918. A teen, she yearns to be a dancer in the movies, but she is stuck down on the farm with her masochistic German mother and catatonic father, while her husband fights in Europe. 

Pearl likes to nip into town and sneak into the movie theater. She meets the projectionist, who shares with her his private stash of stag films, and Pearl is intrigued. (Her marriage seems loveless and/or arranged.) Those urges dovetail with her casual cruelty, which eventually graduates from farm animals to humans. 

Still starstruck, she conspires with her pretty blond sister-in-law to try out for a chorus line. All of this unfolds rather lethargically, as West takes his time building to the inevitable bloodbaths that will stamp Pearl as seriously disturbed. If you're patient, though, you will be rewarded with a sly spoof of classic horror films that nonetheless honors the genre's roots.

None of this would work without Goth, who is absolutely committed to the insanity and emotional intensity of this abused woman from a bygone era. Late in the film she unleashes a raw, intense expiating monologue that must run five minutes long and seems to be a single take. It is mesmerizing. She has the ability to nimbly cycle through expressions -- suggesting a range of emotions -- and to do so while tiptoeing along the high wire between comedy and tragedy. If it's as if Shelley Duvall could really act. Once again, Goth is worth the price of a movie ticket.

Postscript: Here's an interesting phenomenon. My date and I were clearly well above the average age in the theater, which was overwhelmingly made up of Millennials and Homelanders. Besides being quite fidgety, they rarely laughed. Granted, this is not a belly-laugh movie, but it's slyly, drily, darkly funny. Did the younger people not get the retro kitchiness of a horror spoof? Were they too invested in the emotional turmoil to be able to allow for humor at the same time? Did they just not think it was funny? That's an analysis for another day.

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (B) - This one is a throwback not only to old-fashioned star-studded murder mysteries but also to a time when you could count on a sequel falling short of the original. It's a pretty entertaining movie; it's just not as special as "Knives Out," about which we described writer-director Rian Johnson as "pulling juicy performances from his enthusiastic players." 

The original had a stronger cast and a sharper narrative structure. The original had Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, Lakeith Stanfield and Ana DeArmas. Here we get the B team: Edward Norton, Kate Hudson, Jonelle Monae, Kathryn Hahn and Leslie Odom Jr. I've never seen Hahn so flat and uninspired, and Norton is a fine actor, but he doesn't have the shoulders to carry the film as yet another tech bro who has invited his old pals to his private island compound for a murder-mystery party. And Kate Hudson always looks, to me, like Kate Hudson playing a role; here, she is a dim-witted online influencer a bit past her prime. 

In fact, each character seems to be an avatar for a societal ill begat from social media and tech culture. Thick-necked Dave Bautista (who?) is also a shallow online celebrity (pushing "men's rights") and Odom is a brainy scientist, while Hahn is a governor of questionable morality. Nobody here, including a mugging Daniel Craig reprising his role as famous Cajun detective Benoit Blanc, seems particularly connected with the material. It's as if Johnson stuffed a lot of ideas and plot tricks into his script (in particular a critical reset at the halfway mark) but failed to adequately translate it for his cast. A plot point involving a possibly ground-breaking new form of energy comes off as a kitschy ripoff of the old "Batman" TV show. (As for Craig's broad delivery of his fussy detective, I'd guess that Leslie Nielsen would have made a better James Bond than Craig makes a Frank Drebin.)

It's almost as if the Easter-egg cameo players had a lot more fun -- the scene with Serena Williams delivers one of the best gags in the film. (Another great joke involves Hudson's ditzy character misunderstanding the term "sweatshop.") Otherwise, staged during COVID, the movie fails to bridge gaps and bring everyone together on the same page. Monae grabs a lot of screen time as the scorned former business partner of Norton's billionaire, and she is skilled in a tricky role, but at times she comes off as trying too hard, her natural talent stifled.

Maybe Johnson had too big a budget and too much running time to play with, though even at 139 minutes, the movie zips along and is always entertaining. But when you trade Michael Shannon for a wrestler and Jamie Lee Curtis for Goldie Hawn's kid, you're not going to win a competitive match. It's all good fun, but it's missing the special spark of the 2019 original.

BONUS TRACK

The "Glass Onion" title track from the Beatles, which plays over the closing credits: