The Best of 2024: How Does It Feel?

 

People keep asking me whether I've seen the new movie about Bob Dylan. I haven't, although there's a chance I'll sample it at some point out of morbid curiosity.

I'm not a fan of biopics, especially those involving lives I experienced in real time and people I once admired. It seems silly, for example, to watch Will Smith (a fine actor) pretend to be Muhammad Ali. And I've appreciated some of the work of Timothee Chalamet, but do I need to see America's Puppy do a karaoke imitation of the nascent folk-rock god? (For similar reasons, I don't need to see "Saturday Night" or "September 5.") Besides, Bob Dylan himself was the ultimate work of fiction; what's the point in fictionalizing a fiction -- or worse, trying to faithfully replicate it?

As I get older I get pickier and fussier. But I still believe in chapters, in turning the soil every few years. In recent year-end posts I've dumped on a lot of old favorites, as in the category below titled "It's Not You, It's Me." And so it can be refreshing to take a pass on familiar filmmakers and instead take on new favorites. 

For the past 10 years, no one has made movies like Sean Baker. His camera is agile (he shot 2015's "Tangerine" on an iPhone), and his characters are authentic, which helps bring out the humanity in groups like sex workers and poor people, without leering or wallowing in poverty porn. His "Anora," along with Jesse Eisenberg's "A Real Pain," showed a 360 command of moving-picture storytelling -- a fine touch for characters and dialogue and the pace of a narrative. They recalled some of the best of the American New Wave of the 1970s.

Some films below were debuts or were by directors whose work was new to me. "Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat" is probably a love-it-or-hate-it, two-and-a-half-hour deep dive and jive into the events in Congo around 1961. If I'd gone on a different night I might have walked out; instead, I gave myself to it and let it hypnotize me. It's one of five documentaries that made the Top 15.

It was also in 1961 (January) that Robert Zimmerman made his way to New York City, thirsting for fame. By 1965 he was a rock star. A decade later I discovered Dylan. It was fun to hop on the bandwagon and ride it into the '80s and '90s with him -- but it was a special treat to be able to sneak backward in time unearthing his catalog, scouring record bins and peeling away the layers of his personas. Nothing Hollywood produces can recapture that experience of discovering it for the first time. 

Maybe the kids will get a kick out of that era on the big screen and experience their own anthropological revelation, albeit in digital form. Maybe I'll see "A Complete Unknown" -- turns out, it is playing at the Guild Cinema the first weekend of March -- and perhaps I'll even like it. Am I an easy mark, after all? "Either I'm too sensitive, or else I'm getting soft."*

***

Below you'll find a ton of movies to sample, most from 2024, but some that hurtle you back decades. Where possible I point out where you can stream them (My main go-tos are HBO-Max, Mubi, Criterion, Netflix, and the library's free Hoopla.) Each film citation has a link to my original review.

THE TOP 15 of '24

  1. Anora. Sean Baker is the new master, and "Anora" is an assured, entertaining romp with a great cast. (In theaters.)

  2. Flipside. A journeyman filmmaker assembles his life's work into a moving visual collage and a profound rumination on the career paths we all take. (Hoopla/Criterion)

  3. A Real Pain. A pristine production by Jesse Eisenberg chronicles cousins revisiting their roots on a Holocaust tour of Poland, earning Best Screenplay. (Hulu)

  4. Bird. Andrea Arnold hits her peak and takes Best Director as she returns to her under-class roots alongside her 12-year-old avatar. (Mubi)

  5. Soundtrack to a Coup D'Etat. An inventive approach to a historical footnote. Let it wash over you, like a jazz performance would. (Kino Now)

  6. Between the Temples. Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane were exquisite in this melancholy tale of middle-aged gloom. (Netflix)

  7. Sugarcane. A harrowing exploration of the horrors brought by the Catholic Church on Indian schools in the 20th century. (Hulu)

  8. His Three Daughters. Sibling dynamics play out and recriminations blossom as the trio sit vigil for their dying father. (Netflix)

  9. How to Have Sex. An assured debut about the harrowing odyssey of a college girl seeking to lose her virginity. (Mubi)

10.  Terrestrial Verses. The quiet power of vignettes showing Iranians navigating their theocracy and bureaucracy. (Criterion)

11. We Were Famous, You Don't Remember. A pristinely rendered history of the '80s heartland band The Embarrassment (a band you almost certainly do not remember). (Night Flight Plus)

12. Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary. As much fun as you can have reminiscing about the softer side of rock from the mid-'70s to the mid-'80s. (HBO-Max)

13. Problemista. More delightful whimsy from the gloriously inventive mind of Julio Torres. (HBO-Max)

14. My Old Ass. A sweetly Canadian gem about our youthful choices and our adult regrets. (Amazon)

15. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. "This sprawling, raunchy, rollicking black comedy, ostensibly about hyper-commercialization, captures the zeitgeist of our crude, unraveling modern culture." (Criterion)

JUST MISSED THE LIST

• The hodgepodge philosophical exercise "The Arc of Oblivion"
• Ken Loach unspools another heartfelt drama, "The Old Oak" (Hoopla)
  
• The subtly effective slow burn, "Teachers' Lounge" (Netflix)
  
• More gals comically behaving badly, "Babes" (Hulu)
  
• The inventive animation of "Flow" (In theaters)
  
• The simmering psycho-suspense of "Babygirl" (In theaters)
  
• The modern Mumblecore comedy "Free Time" (Hoopla)
  
• Daisy Ridley carrying the off-kilter black comedy "Sometimes I Think About Dying" (Mubi)
  

 

MORE TOP DOCS 

• BS High. A highly engaging study of a scam artist. (HBO-Max)
  
• Martha. An intriguing by-the-numbers portrait of better-living guru Martha Stewart. (Netflix)
  
• Dusty & Stones: A classic fish-out-of-water buddy flick.
  
• MoviePass MovieCrash: In this doc about a well-known con job, "the narrative is fascinating from beginning to end." (Netflix)
  
• Smoke Sauna Sisterhood: "It's as if an entire nation of women is exfoliating and expiating all of their hopes and sins." (Mubi)
  

 

TOP PERFORMANCES

• Nicole Kidman going deep in the psychological jangle of "Babygirl."
• Yura Borisov is the secret weapon in "Anora." And then Darya Ekamasova shows up as the icy mother-in-law.
  
• OMG, Mia Goth in "Maxxxine" and Esther Povitsky in "Drugstore June."
  
• Elizabeth Olsen stands out as she co-stars with Carrie Coon and Natasha Lyonne in "His Three Daughters."
• Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin are perfect road buddies in "A Real Pain."
• Barry Keoghan is all soul, and he melds with newcomer Nykiya Adams in "Bird."
• Comic welterweights Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane lived up to their billing in "Between the Temples."
  

 

GUILTY PLEASURES

• "Deadpool and Wolverine" pulverized us with its wordplay and the charm of Ryan Reynolds. (Disney+)
  
• "Maxxxine" completed the trilogy by director Ti West and star Mia Goth that started with "X" and "Pearl." (HBO-Max)
  
• "Hit Man" was a surprisingly effective misdirection from Richard Linklater. (Netflix)
  
• "Drugstore June": Esther Povitsky is hilarious as a would-be social-media influencer who endures a series of micro-agressions. (Hulu)
• Our sole Holy Crap of the year goes to the psychotic mess that was "The Substance." (Mubi)
  

 

THE LEFTOVERS

Some 2023 films we caught up with:  "A Thousand and One," about a mother fighting for custody of her son, would have cracked our top 12 if we had seen it in 2023 (Hulu) (Hat-tip: Tamara). ... Then there was the haunting sci-fi psych-out "The Five Devils" (Mubi); a mesmerizing personal memoir about family and reconciliation, "Sam Now" (Criterion); a belated release of a 1998 film from Cauleen Smith, which turned out to be her only feature, "Drylongso" (Criterion). ... We couldn't make it to the one-third mark of "Oppenheimer"; "The Holdovers" was too derivative for its own good. ... "Chile '76" was "a chilling lesson in defying both the political system and social castes" (Hoopla), and at three hours, "The Delinquents" was a fascinating character study (Mubi).

Wayback Machine: We finally gave a proper write-up to an all-time favorite, Lynne Ramsay's "Morvern Callar" with Samantha Morton (Amazon). ... We took a trip to the Aughts to explore the roots of Mumblecore; and we reveled in the 2009 documentary "Anvil: The Story of Anvil." ... "The Big Easy" is still a rollicking good time; we went back to 1934 for "It Happened One Night"; the 1953 Argentine classic "The Black Vampire" was the best of the Guild Cinema's summer film-noir festival (Criterion). ... We discovered a perfect nugget about the scrappy staff of an alt-weekly, "Between the Lines" from 1977 (Criterion/YouTube). ... The Coen brothers were in their prime with 2008's "Burn After Reading." ... And we dared to bring our modern sensibilities to "Blazing Saddles." (Most of those were via DVD.)

R.I.P: We gave a sendoff to TV legend Norman Lear by screening "The Night They Raided Minsky's"; on the music front, we were shaken by the death of the epic engineer Steve Albini; and we devoted three posts to double features in memory of the great Gena Rowlands. (Expect a similar tribute to David Lynch in the coming months.)

 

IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME

(Well, maybe this time it is you. 

Some of our favorites let us down.)

 

• How do you make Julia Louis Dreyfus unwatchable? "Tuesday" figured it out.
  
• Jacques Audiard swung for the fences and hit a solid double with the frustrating "Emilia Perez."
• Wim Wenders bored us with his Boomer shtick in "Perfect Days"
  
• Diablo Cody wrote the embarrassing horror rom-com "Lisa Frankenstein"; we went on Valentine's Day and walked out.
  
• A quartet of films from newer filmmakers that were so sluggish and uneventful that we pulled the plug early (because Life Is Short): "Here" (not the Tom Hanks movie); "Mother, Couch"; "Janet Planet"; and "Evil Does Not Exist."
• "I Used to Be Funny" took Rachel Sennott and a great first act and botched it all.
  

COMING ATTRACTIONS

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

• About Dry Grasses
• Union
• Slow
• Hard Truths
  
• Close Your Eyes
• The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
• The Idea of You

Join us in 2025 as we track down those titles and more of the finest movies you wouldn't otherwise think of watching.

BONUS TRACK

* - "If You See Her, Say Hello":

 

Doc Watch: The Haunted Past

 

PICTURES OF GHOSTS (B) - Brazil's Kleber Mendonca Filho ("Aquarius") takes a sentimental journey to his hometown of Recife to curate a fond nostalgia trip celebrating the origins of his love of film. He too often assumes that we'll be as wistful as he is when it comes to the movie houses of his youth.

Filho also spends the first third of this exercise wallowing in memories of his breakthrough feature "Neighboring Sounds," which he shot in his childhood home. It makes for a slow, unfocused start. (We bailed out of that meandering movie right before the halfway mark.) It isn't until he moves on to an archeological study of the seaside town's once-stately movie palaces that "Pictures of Ghosts" takes hold. 

 

Through archival footage we meet a veteran of one of the projection booths, who has since died. Now, recent footage shows the projection booth stuffed with merchandise, including stacks and stacks of kitchen mixers in their original packaging. Filho finds footage of his young self sweeping the lobby of the cinema where he works.

Filho divides this into three parts, each introduced by a peppy classic song. Otherwise, his camera wanders, dreamlike. We catch snippets of Carnival celebrations, old clips of men performing capoeira. Filho narrates with a ethereal delivery. Now in his 50s, he reminisces about how Recife used to be known for its combination smell of "tide, fruit and piss." Everything here comes off as bittersweet and fleeting.

DAHOMEY (B) - Alice Diop offers up a somewhat pompous but heartfelt chronicle of the repatriation of 26 works of art pillaged by France and returned to the people of Benin. Too often she takes art into the realm of artificial, with stylistic flourishes that might strain too many viewers' patience.

On the positive side, this is barely an hour long. Diop's camera is still and reverent in multiple scenes of the art pieces being prepared for shipping and then getting unboxed. Perhaps she intends for that to come off as sterile and numbing. She holds her establishing shots a few beats longer than you'd expect. Overall, there's just something off about the timing.

It isn't until the second half that things pick up with an extended scene of mostly young people in Benin having a debate about what the return of the art means: Is this something to be celebrated? How should it be displayed -- in an elite urban museum or out among the people? Do the pieces even have any meaning to the current residents? It plays out like a more interesting version of Frederick Wiseman's process documentaries.

To get to that fascinating debate, you have to make it through the first half, and you must get acquainted with the gravelly voice meant to embody the central piece, a statue of a king, as if it were narrating its own journey back to its homeland. The gimmick never really works. The dialogue spills over into pretentiousness; at one point, toward the end, it intones, "Within me resonates infinity." Get me rewrite! 

BONUS TRACKS

A sampling of songs from "Pictures of Ghosts," starting with Tom Ze's "Happy End" from 1972:

 

From 1977, macho Sidney Magal with "Meu Sangue Ferve por Voce":

Filho has fun with a cabdriver as they enjoy the sweet sounds of Herb Alpert's 1979 smooth-jazz hit "Rise":

Now and Then: Parenting 101

 We catch up with the latest from Andrea Arnold and a short she made 22 years ago.

BIRD (A) - Andrea Arnold -- returning to her working-class roots and a coming-of-age theme she has patented -- comes into her own as a visual storyteller with this crushingly authentic tale of a week in the life of a 12-year-old girl navigating poverty and finding her path. 

Nykiya Adams stars as the adolescent Bailey, who is told that her father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), barely an adult himself, plans to marry his girlfriend of three months, Kayleigh (Frankie Box), in exactly a week. Bug also has a teenage son that he had at 14 from another mother. That half-brother of Bailey's, Hunter (Jason Buda), is pining for his girlfriend, Moon, who will end up pregnant, pitting Hunter against her parents. 

But it is Bailey who is the center of the story. She is frustrated living in squalor with Bug along with Kayleigh and Kayleigh's toddler daughter, and she defiantly resists committing to wearing the ugly bridesmaid outfit picked out for her and impetuously cuts her beautiful locks short. She also meets an odd duck named Bird (Franz Rogowski), whose gentle qualities could be considered spiritual, if not magical. Early on he spends days perched on the roof of a nearby building, birdlike. 

Bailey is a caretaker -- she looks out for another set of three half-siblings that live nearby with their mother -- and an explorer who strives toward adult adventures. She also helps the naive Bird hunt down the parents who abandoned him when he was young. 

Arnold grounds this in the grimy world of the British underclass. Bug is a dreamer whose latest get-rich scheme is to sell the slime from a toad as a hallucinogenic. He discovers that the creature is more likely to produce the valuable slime if Bug plays mainstream music as opposed to the punk that he and his pals grew up on. It makes for a wonderful soundtrack, ranging from the urgent Fontaines D.C. to the elevator calm of Coldplay, with many singalongs featuring his bro pals. 

Arnold is in command of the visuals at every turn. You may shudder at how genuine the enveloping poverty and menace is. She invents unforgettable images -- whether it's Bird perched on that roof or Kayleigh curled up in bed assuring Bailey that she'll survive her first period or the handheld camera that races along with Bailey and Bug on their adventures. And then there is the fantasy and whimsy that comes out of nowhere, a stark contrast to Bailey's reality, as Bird eventually lives up to his name. 

It's hard to catalog all the elements that Arnold juggles and mixes into a moving narrative about human connection grounded in the natural and supernatural worlds. I wanted to knock a half-grade off for the fantasy elements, but I have to admit that Arnold is working at an elevated level. "Bird" is a wonder.

WASP (2003) (B+) - Zoe is a harried mother of four young children, including a baby, who yearns for a love life. is gruff and broke, prone to conflicts with the neighbors; several times her daughters complain that they haven't eaten a meal in days.

When Zoe (Natalie Press) meets an old beau, Dave (Danny Dyer), on the street, four little ones in tow, she lies and tells him that she is just babysitting, and she makes a date at the pub that night. She drags the kids along to the date, making them kill time outside while she flirts inside with Dave.

Twenty-six minutes is a perfect amount of time to play out this arc, as if it were an episode of a dark sitcom. The wasp of the title shows up to bookend the film. In the first instance, Zoe frees it out a window of their flat; the second appearance presents a bit of peril that brings events to the boiling point. 

Press is compelling as the overburdened still-too-young mum who cleans up super-cute for her date at the pub, and while you yearn along with her in sympathy, her recklessness is alarming, and you might tsk along with the neighbors. Arnold's camera nervously flits about her and the kids, jangling the viewers' nerves along with Zoe's. 

BONUS TRACKS

Let's delve into "Bird's" soundtrack. Here is "A Hero's Death" from Fontaines D.C.:

 

Coldplay's "Yellow" recurs during multiple karaoke scenes as a sort of anthem for the toad crew:

 

And, from a pivotal point near the film's climax, "Lucky Man" by the Verve:

R.I.P., David Lynch

 

David Lynch died last week at 78, having altered the way we look at movies. After much meditation, we have settled on a tentative lineup of re-viewings of his best films. Like we did with Gena Rowlands last year, we will revisit some titles and offer a retrospective in the coming weeks.

Meantime, here is a favorite David Lynch moment. From the projection loft of the Guild Cinema, it's the notice Lynch sent out to accompany "Inland Empire" (which we probably won't screen again) as a friendly instruction to those projecting his film:

 

I Know What You Did ...

 

LAST SUMMER (B-minus) - Ah, those lazy days. Catherine Breillat, one of the touchstones of modern French cinema, phones in a familiar story of forbidden love -- here it is a professional woman who sleeps with her teenage stepson. It's an idea that's been trite for decades and almost a parody of porn searches.

Lea Drucker ("The Blue Room," "Two of Us") stars as Anne, a lawyer who is shown at the beginning of the film successfully litigating a rape case on behalf of the victim and then finalizing arrangements for a teenage girl to gain custody under her father, who looks a bit sketchy. She is impeccably dressed, with soccer-mom hair; she would be considered "According to Jim" hot. She doesn't think much of her dumpy husband, Pierre (Olivier Raboudin), a beefy guy who is constantly whining about his own corporate job.

 

Enter Theo (Samuel Kircher), a troubled teen whom Pierre has ignored most of the kid's life. Theo joins the household that also includes the couple's pair of adopted little girls. It takes about half of the 104-minute film for Anne and Theo to start to hook up. I know the heart wants what it wants, and bizarre couplings happen all the time, but there is something improbable about Anne, a composed, successful woman, falling for a cipher of a teenage dropout. Breillat's camera likes to linger on Theo as he smirks and broods. Kircher comes from the Timothy Chalamet school of scrawny disaffection. (During one lovemaking session, Anne marvels to Theo, "You're so thin.")

Breillat seems fascinated by the faces of these three people during various bouts of sex -- first the husband as he conducts an obligatory servicing of his wife; then Theo, who doesn't seem to be much more skilled at the art; and then Anne, late in the film, as she achieves what apparently is the quietest, most subtle orgasm imaginable. The connection between Anne and Theo just never seems real.

That's not the only disconnect between the narrative and modern life. Anne is rarely seen working, even though she likely has a job that is much more demanding than her husband's. When Anne's sister catches her and Theo making out, there are few meaningful repercussions from that revelation. In one scene, Breillat lingers on a car trip coming home from the beach with Theo and the girls, and we get an extended spin of a Sonic Youth song from 35 years ago, a sharp reminder that Breillat is stuck in the past. This feels like a cable TV movie from that pre-millennium era, and despite a provocative tactical move by Anne at the movie's climax, none of this feels weighty enough to matter.

BONUS TRACK

Sonic Youth, "Dirty Boots"

Fast Forward Theater: Pride of Frankenstein

 

THE APPRENTICE (C+) - When I was a kid, movies like this -- by-the-numbers biographies of celebrities -- were shown on TV as "The Movie of the Week." They were the products of hacks, and they brought a surface-level presentation to their subject. The performances rarely rose above the measure of playing dress-up, with simplistic imitations.

This theatrical release from a pair of journeymen -- director Ali Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman -- harks back to that era with its subject, which explores the origins of Donald Trump as a businessman in the 1970s and '80s. The production values here also echo that previous era. This looks like it was shot on repurposed videotape.  

 

We gave it 30 minutes before we started zipping through a few scenes. Trump wooing his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova), with his riches (and his later sexual assault when he had grown bored with her). The drunken escapades of brother Freddy (Charlie Carrick). Any scene with a young version of weasly ratfucker Roger Stone (Mark Rendall). There is so much here that is not interesting.

Sebastian Stan provides a decent amount of depth -- as much as one can provide the squishy tabloid playboy of Koch-era New York -- and a subtle imitation of Trump. The only reason this is remotely watchable, though, is not for that performance, but for Jeremy Strong as the demonic Roy Cohn, the utterly amoral attorney who took Trump under his wing and turned the flailing real-estate scion into a soulless pirate. Strong truly seems possessed by the ghost of Cohn, his balloon-shaped head bobbing forward, his eyes probing for weakness like a junkyard dog's, so full of venom he almost stutters when he speaks. He spews faux patriotism and considers the Constitution to be a technicality. He drills Trump in his three rules of blitzkrieg power grabs: always attack; admit nothing and deny everything; and always claim victory, never admit defeat.

It's an incredible performance that is wasted in a pointless B-movie. Stan ("A Different Man," "Monday") also imbues his character with more gravitas than the man deserves. As the film progresses, you may appreciate Stan's ability to replicate Trump's sphincter-like vocal delivery, spouting empty aphorisms. It's a lived-in performance, and you want to offer him a washcloth and a bar of soap when it is over after a two-hour slog. Credit also to indie veteran Martin Donovan as the anachronistic Fred Trump, providing nuance to a lump of a character.

The familiar beats from Trump's biography -- his determination to build Trump Tower amid a downtrodden neighborhood, his hubris in pursuing a casino in Atlantic City -- are almost laughably sketched as if this were a middle-school book report. The dialogue is simplistic; it could have been written by Chat GPT. Occasional originality breaks through. When trying to foist a prenuptial agreement on Ivana, Cohn mocks her as she peruses it: "It's not the Magna Carta." When Fred Trump Sr. thanks Cohn for making his shallow son successful, Cohn intones, "I just fixed what others couldn't." 

Cohn, the self-loathing homosexual, will meet a fitting end, wasting away from AIDS, and all Trump knows to do is fumigate Mar-a-Lago after the dying man's token visit, with Trump then seizing on the opportunity to steal Cohn's playbook when plotting out The Art of the Deal with a ghost writer. 

It's all ghoulish stuff, and you wonder who this is for. The MAGA crowd won't believe any of this Hollywood commie propaganda. And how many sensible people will want to spend two hours with such a foul creature, even if it does mostly mock him -- portraying him as a lightweight when it comes to alcohol, and climaxing with him getting liposuction and scalp-reduction surgery. Cohn's influence is haunting. He created a Manchurian candidate, way back when the idea of Trump being president seemed like a harmless joke. In that sense, this is a horror film. Did the filmmakers realize that?

Fitting In

 

A DIFFERENT MAN (B+) - It's an interesting idea: What if you can cure your physical disfigurement but cannot overcome the personality defects that have held you back your whole life? That premise is somewhat successfully explored by writer-director Aaron Schimberg.

 

Sebastian Stan stars as Edward, a failed actor living in a dumpy New York apartment and suffering from neurofibromatosis, in which tumors enlarge and distort his face. After an experimental treatment, he undergoes a painful but full transformation -- a development around the one-third mark that strains credulity and undercuts the lived-in feel of the first 40 minutes.

Edward had befriended a new neighbor, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve from "The Worst Person in the World"), a self-professed unpublished playwright and alluring free spirit. When the old, recognizable Edward goes missing and the Sebastian Stan version shows up in his place, he claims that Edward committed suicide and he rebrands himself as Guy, who becomes a noted realtor and romeo to hot women. (More credulity-straining.) Flash forward a while, and Ingrid is in rehearsals for her first play -- titled "Edward" and based on the life of her former neighbor. Guy, unsuccessful at finding happiness as a Hollywood-level stud, auditions for the role of Edward -- unrecognizable to Ingrid -- and gets it.

That's a lot of plot development, and we're only halfway through the movie. Let's pause to point out some overall positives: the fine details of Schimberg's script, his ear for offbeat interactions (especially in seedy taverns), and the depth of his characterizations. "A Different Man" is often darkly and bitterly funny. Despite the hiccups of magical realism, it is possible to re-ground yourself each time into an often deeply moving story. Stan is believable as a man now unburdened by disfigurement but still hunched in the shoulders due to the weight of his world -- not just his deception of a woman he aches to be with but also his continued feelings of crushing inadequacy. 

This is drawn out once we meet a new rival, Oswald (David Pearson), a man with neurofibromatosis who has personality to burn and lives life to the fullest, lighting up every room he enters, looks be damned. Oswald can sweet-talk women, glibly banter in a pub, and pour his heart out onstage singing karaoke. He is the X-ray opposite now of Guy, whose insecurities seem to be eating away at his insides, just like the experimental drugs chewed away at the tumors covering his face. Pearson (who actually has that condition) has a wonderful swagger, and Reinsve oozes appeal as Ingrid.

And this is an appealing story. The problem is, I couldn't help thinking occasionally, that Schimberg's storytelling skills surface only occasionally and instead get masked and smothered by the conventions of filmmaking, selling us another palatable version of "Cyrano" or "The Elephant Man." This is a very good movie, but Schimberg certainly has an even better one lurking inside him.

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (B-minus) - What a precious, delicate debut feature about three women from provincial villages struggling to live independent lives while working at a hospital in the big city of Mumbai. It's a shame that it feels so antiseptic and anticlimactic most of the time. 

Prabha (Kani Kusruti) has an estranged husband from an arranged marriage who works in Germany. She lives with the more free-spirited Anu (Divya Prabha), a fellow nurse who is quietly dating a Muslim man while her family back home tries to match her up online with more suitable suitors. They are friends with a hospital cook, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), who is facing eviction from her apartment so that another skyscraper can be built in its place.

Prabha rebuffs the advances of a doctor, citing her marital status, descending into a mopiness that is not much fun to watch. Anu is more fun and modern, but the whole storyline of forbidden love with a dream guy has nothing to say beyond the standard rom-drama tropes. The script rarely rises above cliches, like when a character bemoans, "You can't escape your fate." Too many scenes drag in a film that clocks in just shy of two hours. One of the bright spots involves a pregnant household cat, but that plot line gets abandoned without resolution.

Writer-director Payal Kapadia, schooled in documentaries, certainly has an elegant touch behind the camera. But one of the main points of her film is that these women from small towns are facing a challenge in the hustle and bustle of Mumbai -- yet she oddly insulates the women from the noise and grit of the city, which often are rendered merely as background material, all artsy and muted. There doesn't seem to be a connection between the women and the city life exploding all around them. A switch of venue in the second half to Parvaty's small town offers hope to reignite the flagging story, but again we are treated to artifice and mood rather than the true hum of real life. As a result, a bittersweet ending lacks the punch it deserves. It all feels like a missed opportunity.

BONUS TRACKS

"A Different Man" has a delightfully raunchy soundtrack. Here is "I Owe It to the Girls" by Teddy and the Frat Girls:

The Cramps also show up. Here is the swaggering "I Can't Hardly Stand It":

 

And here's a palate-cleanser. Oswald croons a heartfelt version of this '70s classic, Rose Royce's "I Wanna Get Next to You":

Back in the Day

 We turn back the clock to the turn of the millennium to revisit a couple of classics that toyed with the concept of turning back time.

MEMENTO (2000) (A-minus) - Guy Pearce puts in a powerful star turn as filmmaker Christopher Nolan explodes on the scene in this touchstone neo-noir tale -- told in reverse -- of a man with short-term memory loss desperately seeking to avenge the brutal murder of his wife. They both brought a unique voice to the mainstream with this mix of humor and suspense, a fresh manner of storytelling.

 

Pearce stars as Leonard, who uses notated Polaroid pictures and body tattoos to make up for his inability to remember anything since the murder. In the opening scene, we see him shoot to death Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), who we'll soon find out, by working backward, seemed to be his friend and an improbable suspect in the home invasion that gave Leonard the brain injury and killed his wife (Jorja Fox in fleeting flashbacks). As we tumble back in time, we meet Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), a bartender with a connection to the drug trade, and we implicitly don't trust her.

Meantime, Nolan intersperses black-and-white scenes of Leonard in a hotel room, gripped by paranoia at some point in the timeline, in a narrative that runs forward. Another layer involves the story of Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky), a man whose same amnesiac condition drives his wife to despair and whom Leonard knows from handling Jankis' case in Leonard's past life as an insurance investigator. It is an fascinating Rubik's Cube of a screenplay that Nolan created with his brother Jonathan, whose short story was the inspiration. We're never sure what is true and what is not, and instead of that being confusing or disorienting it is always intriguing.

Pearce is fierce and cutting as a man who is fighting a losing battle moment by moment but who believes he is defending his (and his wife's) dignity. Like him, we're never certain what is true and what isn't, right up until the very end. Pearce (with a lean, ripped physique) almost overwhelms the screen with his energy. Moss broods as the glaring femme fatale. And Pantoliano provides comic relief with a menacing undertone. And a shout-out to Mark Boone Junior as the deadpan hotel manager where Leonard is holed up. It's a fantastic cast that helps keep the narrative from overwhelming us and somehow makes this all make sense. It can be seen as a somber rumination on the unreliability of memory.

Nolan's indie golden era would not last long. This was the middle of a run from "Following" to "The Prestige," but by the time he made the vulgar "Dark Knight" in 2008 (his second Batman movie), he was headed to the stratosphere, with mind-trips like "Interstellar" and "Inception" and lumbering historical war spectacles that include the more recent "Dunkirk" and "Oppenheimer." Turn back the clock to his early work to enjoy his most rewarding films.

RUN LOLA RUN (1998) (B+) - A quarter of a century later, this feels like a hyper-stylized bauble, with a few anachronistic flaws, but it's still a highly entertaining and thoughtful early effort from Tom Tykwer. 

 

Lola (Franka Potente) has 20 minutes to replace the 100,000 Deutsche marks that her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) misplaced, in order to save him from the mob boss who employs him as a bag man. A frantic phone call from Manni will set Lola in motion in a frenetic sprint through the streets of Berlin -- a dizzying scenario that will be repeated three times, each with similar beats along the way but entirely different outcomes.

It's a classic experiment in the butterfly effect -- Lola's escapade will be altered by just a second or two each time by seemingly innocuous events, such as a man with his dog in the hallway of her building getting in her way or a car crash that will or will not happen depending on the exact moment she sprints past a parking garage. Tykwer frequently switches perspectives through a flash-forward technique that shows, in urgent montage, the future fate of people who casually brush up against the speeding Lola, with their fates changing each time. (The vagaries of chance, as they affect life-and-death moments and interpersonal relationships, is also the theme of an American film from the same era, "Sliding Doors"; both films, in turn, owe a huge debt to Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1987 classic "Blind Chance.")

It's a heady mix of suspense and magical realism. You can almost see Tykwer playing with time as if it's a giant rubber band. Potente, with her technicolor flame-red mop of hair, energizes the entire film, which streaks by in a spunky 80 minutes, by which time viewers, too, may be out of breath. The '90s electro-beat aesthetic, with its neon palette, feels a little too much of-its-time, so it's tough to say whether this holds up from original screenings a quarter century ago. It's endlessly entertaining, but, unlike "Memento," it feels slightly gimmicky and cartoonish.

Maybe that is connected with my dashed hopes for Tykwer, who, along with Nolan, seemed like a breath of fresh air at the turn of the millennium. Tykwer would take over Kieslowski's "Heaven" in 2002, but then he got caught up in forgettable artsy fare like "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" and "Cloud Atlas." We never bothered with his project with Tom Hanks, "A Hologram for the King." Where Nolan soared to exalted status, Tykwer turned into a journeyman, and you wonder where all that energy from "Run Lola Run" went.

BONUS TRACK

Here is the pulse-racing "Lola" soundtrack:

Doc Watch: Rock Watch, Part 2: Zooropa

 

ENO (B+) - Brian Eno, the man who invented ambient music, to the delight of crossword-puzzle constructors everywhere, gets the biographical treatment in a documentary that celebrates Eno's devotion to living a truly creative life. It makes for an uplifting 80 minutes or so of hanging out with the man who produced Bowie, Devo, Talking Heads, James and U2, not to mention dozens of his own influential albums, all after starting out as a founding member of Roxy Music.

I say "80 minutes or so," because the filmmakers, taking a cue from the master of "generative" music (in which computer programs are used to help create and manipulate sounds), made this a generative documentary. The gimmick here is that the film is never exactly the same from screening to screening. (Wikipedia: "The film uses a computer program to select footage and edit the film so that a different version is shown each time it is screened.")

Director Gary Hustwit does use a hectic editing style, with scenes appearing to be randomly assembled and sudden bursts of rapid-fire montages that flash by in a blink. It's a bit of a distraction but not enough to take away from the man who lives an intentional life. As he puts it, he indulges his intellect and passions, even though he engages in self-deprecation by referring to himself as a "failed glam rocker."

The documentary shares a kinship with "The Elephant 6 Recording Co.," the 2023 film that we called "a gleeful immersion into the DIY music and art scene" of millennial-era Athens, Ga. Eno has kept diaries his whole life, jotting down ideas (writings and drawings), and then translating them to the experimental sounds he turns into music. He describes how he changed his early-morning habits from "input" (eating breakfast and surfing the internet) to "output" (creating things), to the point that he gets pretty hangry by his first meal at noon. All in the service of generating art in its many forms.

It also reminded me of a film equivalent to The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron's DIY guide to unleashing one's inner spiritual bohemian. Eno developed prompt cards that he used to spark ideas in the music studio. He shows an unflagging interest in the world around him, whether it is studying a batch of baby spiders in his garden or taking a walk and marveling over the discovery of a rock that looks exactly like a potato. He lives and breathes an old-school devotion to natural innovation.

The music is impressive throughout. Eno is skilled at describing the process of producing songs and the random sounds that he turned into some familiar hits, whether it was Bowie in Berlin, the foundational early Talking Heads albums, or his deep collaboration with U2 during their prolific run in the '80s. He was not a traditional record producer, merely twirling knobs; he was more of a Fifth Beatle, noodling on the fringes in order to help achieve each band's fully realized vision. Bowie, in an archival clip, says he's not sure what exactly Eno does in the studio -- "I mix my own records" -- but he somehow creates a space for the songs to take shape.

Throughout, Eno on camera is charming and humble in a very British way. It is fun to see clips of his old long-haired gender-bending days in the early '70s. He despised touring, and so he ended up in studios, fiddling around with the latest technology in the nascent days of digital recording. The result is a half-century of output, mostly through collaboration, whether it was recording a New York street musician ("Ambient 3" with Laraaji) or some of the most iconic rock 'n' roll of our time (Bowie's "Heroes," Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime"), as he paved the way for the likes of Moby.

He has led an envious life. He doesn't lord it over us, but rather shows us the path to tapping into our own innate abilities.

BONUS TRACKS

One of my favorite albums of all time is "Wrong Way Up," a 1990 collaboration between Eno and John Cale. It features a lot of uncharacteristically giddy pop. It opens with "Lay My Love":

 

Eno talks about a collaboration with Daniel Lanois and brother Roger Eno on a soundtrack for a documentary about the Apollo program and moon landing. Riffing on the idea of space as the "final frontier," they wrote several frontier songs -- i.e., country-western -- with Lanois on pedal steel guitar. Here is "Silver Morning":

 

And "Weightless":

 

 Here is "Moment of Surrender" (2009) by U2. Eno tells the story of how he came up with the opening galloping percussion sound, joined by Daniel Lanois on guitar, before Larry Mullen Jr. showed up to add drum parts and then the rest of the band completed the song.

 

Ho-hum. "Been There, Done That." Eno and Cale again:

Doc Watch: Rock Watch, Part 1 - Nutopia

 

DAYTIME REVOLUTION (B) - Mike Douglas was a square who hosted a daytime talk show for housewives in the 1960s and '70s. He would have co-hosts who sat in with him for a week at a time. He would start out each show singing old-fashioned versions of modern hits. In February 1972, the former big-band crooner started out one week by singing the Beatles' "Michelle," a horrific slice of cheese that sets into motion a documentary about one of the most improbable TV experiences you'll find: John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosting five episodes of the "The Mike Douglas Show."

Journeyman director Erik Nelson puts together a perfunctory but pleasing chronicle of the societal clash between John & Yoko -- with their counter-culture and new-age friends as guests -- and whatever passed for entertainment late afternoons in the early '70s. Nelson takes 108 minutes to casually unfold the events of that week, in which America would have a good chunk of time to reacquaint themselves with the former Beatle and his avant-garde wife. Guests included yippie Jerry Rubin, Black Panther Bobby Seale, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and comedian George Carlin. Soon after the shows aired, President Nixon would add Lennon to his enemies list and have the government harangue the singer for three years over his green card. 

 

Nelson mixes insightful talking-heads commentary with leisurely extended clips that allow the songs and conversations room to breathe. You might have seen videos over the years -- especially Lennon jamming with Chuck Berry on "Memphis Tennessee" (note Berry's eyes widen when Ono's warbling kicks in) -- but the key here is placing that slice of cultural curiosities into full context. We proceed day by day throughout the week, and each day's clips are preceded by snippets of the day's news reports. The method immerses the viewer into a very real time and place.

Both Lennon and Ono come off as earnest and charming, especially as they grow more comfortable with the format as the week progresses. Lennon points out to Douglas that he didn't write "Michelle," as Douglas claimed, though he did pen the middle eight. He has kind words for his former songwriting mate when an audience member asks his opinion on the first Wings album. Ono, ever the conceptual artist, supervises a project in which a teacup is broken into pieces and then glued back together one piece at a time over the course of the week. 

"Mike Douglas" producer E.V. Di Massa (also a producer on the documentary) shares his institutional knowledge from behind the scenes back in the day. (Fox News ogre Roger Ailes got his start on the show.) Bit players from that week provide some of the most insightful memories 50 years later, including folk singer Nobuko Miyamoto, macrobiotic chef Hillary Redleaf (again, watch Berry's reaction when he bites into one of her fried creations), and experimental musician David Rosenbloom, whose stint involved the group gathered cross-legged on the floor while John and Yoko wore headbands fixed with sensors to create biorhythms for him to translate through a keyboard and synthesizer. (Not everyone, apparently, was invited by the guest hosts for their alt sensibilities; glimpse veteran comedian Louis Nye at the end of one show, unmentioned.)

The film grows wistful by the end -- it notes matter-of-factly that Lennon finally secured his green card and lived with Ono in New York "until December 8, 1980" -- and a soulful version of "Imagine" doesn't hurt. It's a luxury to hang out so casually with my favorite Beatle, as he and his soul mate sought to spread their message of "a brotherhood of man" into living rooms across America. It was a delightful notion, and "Daytime Revolution" is a quaint exercise that allows us to dive back into a time of turmoil and idealism, when there nonetheless was hope that we could transform that mess into a more enlightened world.

BONUS TRACKS

One of the highlights of "Daytime Revolution" is an acoustic version of Ono's best song, "Sisters, O Sisters," accompanied by Lennon on guitar. Here is the studio version from "Some Time in New York City":

 

It's so hard to find videos of Lennon's performances that week on YouTube, but here is an audio version of "It's So Hard," with Elephant's Memory:

R.I.P., Gena Rowlands, Part 3: Adventures

  Gena Rowlands, the longtime wife of and collaborator with John Cassavetes, died in August at age 94. With an assist from the Guild Cinema, we are (re)viewing some of her foundational films. Here we tracked down two films that Cassavetes did not direct, though he is the star of the first one. Follow these links to Part 1 of the series and Part 2.

TEMPEST (1982) (A-minus) - Paul Mazursky unspools a thoughtful rumination on middle age as he refashions Shakespeare's play for modern sensibilities. John Cassavetes lets others handle the writing and directing, and he pours his whole being into the role of Phillip Dimitrius, an architect who is fed up with the phonies and the rat race and tosses away everything, including his wife, Antonia, played by Gena Rowlands.

 

Phillip disappears to a remote Greek island, towing his young teen daughter along and having a meet-cute with a young free spirit, Aretha (Susan Sarandon), who pauses her travels and shacks up with him in his spare mansion on a cliff. They are pestered by the island's self-styled tour director and goat-herder Kalibanos (a euphoric Raul Julia). Friskiness is in the air, as Aretha is endlessly frustrated by Phillip's newfound asceticism, and Kalibanos lusts after everything that moves (that includes his flock), especially horny for the virginal daughter, Miranda (Molly Ringwald in her film debut). (His main point of seduction is a portable TV in his cave with an antenna that picks up "Gunsmoke" reruns. Miranda is sorely missing her new-wave New York lifestyle full of gadgets and entertainment.)

Mazursky expertly weaves a narrative that jerks back and forth in time. Phillip is frustrated with the millionaire behind an Atlantic City casino project, Alonzo (Vittorio Gassman), and he bickers with his wife, embarrassing her in front of their friends at a party. Life on the island, though, is edenic. Phillip lets his grey hair grow out, and he can spend his day in a robe if he wants. Meantime, Antonio has taken up with Alonzo.

Phillip eventually invokes his powers of sorcery to conjure up a storm that lands Alonzo's yacht on the island, forcing a reckoning of the old couple and two new ones. Alonzo's entourage is full of delightful character actors, including Anthony Holland as his physician and Jackie Gayle as a Borscht Belt comic serving as the rich man's jester. Alonzo's son, Freddy (Sam Robards, also in his first screen appearance), tags along and enjoys a few "Blue Lagoon" moments with Miranda. 

Rowlands doesn't have much screen time, but she delves into her character's own middle-aged ennui and goes toe-to-toe well with Cassavetes, who has rarely been better. His gravity plays off of Julia's pantomime performance, and Mazursky mixes it all in a loose-limbed 140-minute production that never flags. This one hit me much differently in my early 60s as it did in my 20s, though I'll always swoon the same way to Sarandon (wearing but a white tank top) and Ringwald splashing in the surf and crooning "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"

NIGHT ON EARTH (1992) (A-minus) - Rowlands stars in the first of five vignettes involving cabdrivers on one night in five cities, from Los Angeles to Helsinki. Jim Jarmusch was at his creative peak -- nestled between "Mystery Train" and "Dead Man" -- and his travelogue is lushly photographed, with stories that are funny and heartfelt.

Rowlands plays Victoria, an on-the-go casting agent addicted to her clunky early-'90s mobile phone. She hops in a cab with the pint-sized chain-smoking tomboy Corky (a scene-chewing Winona Ryder), and they take the first crack at the deadpan dialogue that Jarmusch will unfurl across two hours. L.A., at sunset, has never looked so rich and colorful. Victoria and Corky banter to the point that Victoria, frustrated at the lack of quality candidates for her latest project, starts to see the loquacious Corky as the answer to her prayers.

 

That sets the table for a series of short stories that grow more complex and sober as the film progresses. Armin Mueller-Stahl is an inept immigrant cabdriver who plays second fiddle to his high-energy passengers YoYo (Giancarlo Esposito) and Angela (an insane Rosie Perez). The scene then shifts to Europe, where we get the somber Parisian driver (Isaach de Bankole) ferrying around his cynical blind fare (Beatrice Dalle from "Betty Blue") on a spiteful journey across the city. Thinks go off the rails in Rome as Roberto Benigni goes ballistic as a hilarious, crazed driver chauffeuring an appalled priest who is slowly succumbing to a heart attack while Benigni's oblivious driver prattles on. The final segment features Matti Pellonpaa as a melancholy driver who tells his heartbreaking tale to three drunken louts as dawn slowly breaks.

Jarmusch juggles it all with smarts and skill and makes it all look effortless. He's never been so light-hearted and slapsticky. But he also sketches out complex characters with heart and soul. And his establishing shots are luscious as he spans the globe, shooting on location. He is buoyed by a fine cast and the music of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan.

BONUS TRACK

Waits with the theme song for "Night on Earth," "The Good Old World":