LISTERS (A-minus) - A hat tip to SlashFilm for alerting us to this DIY documentary by a couple of stoners who decided to go birdwatching for a year and compete for the honor of spotting the most birds in 2024. It is a no-budget gem and a hoot from start to finish.
Owen Reiser (above right) is the man behind the camera, handling a lot of narration. Quentin Reiser, rockin' a porn 'stache and bed-head mullet, is the engaging star of the show. They set out in a 2010 Kia Sedona minivan, tricked out with a bunk-bed so they don't need hotel rooms, and will cover most of the country over 12 months. They have a special affinity for Cracker Barrel, which allows them to park overnight in
their lots without having to buy a meal, even while, on one occasion, they observe a body being removed from the restaurant
("From the grits to the gallows," the boys solemnly observe).
The Reisers are pretty sharp guys (they are quick studies when it comes to identifying birds by sight and sound), but they like to play goofy for the camera. They respect the birding world for the most part, though they do have a little fun at the expense of those who might take it a little too seriously. They sit at the feet of the GOATS among the Big birders, David and Tammy McQuade, whose armchair reminiscences are entertaining. But make no mistake: the brothers are here to amuse us. Call it "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 3."
Everything that could pass through the mind of a 12-year-old boy is fair game here. The brothers' Beavis and Butt-head banter shows an appreciation for the classics, like "Thrasher? I barely know 'er." They observe that calling a bird a dickcissel sounds like a putdown (especially when you pronounce it "dicksissy"). A fellow traveler pens an ode to "tits, cocks, suckers and boobies." The brothers refer to a trogon as a "trojan." When they spot a sandpiper they note, "That thing was pipin' sand all day!" At times, the comments approach the sublime; one bird is described as "holding its wings like theater kids hold their arms."
The visuals are striking throughout. It's not clear whether all the wonderful bird visuals were taken by them (the credits list a host of "contributers" and five camcorder operators), but the cinematography is stunning at times, on a par with the best nature documentaries. Along the way, the brothers roll out crude but effective graphics. They have jaunty descriptive identifiers for the people they run across, like "looks kinda
Amish"; when they incorporate their hockey buddies into a scene, one of them is ID'd by his goals-against stats. They have a serious side, too, though. They conduct investigative journalism into birders who have cheated
and padded their counts. They distort voices and blur out faces; at one
point, they playfully blur out the face of a dog. The mix of absurdism and earnestness is deeply charming.
The Reisers develop an appreciation for the avian heroes of nature. They discuss how the sound of the common nighthawk reminds them of soccer practice as kids. Clocking a particular striking bird in the wild, one of them notes: "I'd run through a brick wall for that bird." They explore the idea that the use of phone apps and the intense competition might kill the true spirit of birding. One talking head, Hannah Toutonghi, serves as a sort of zen conscience of the film through discussions about the ethical nature of birding.
It is all entertaining and informative, silly and thought-provoking. It very likely is the best film of 2025 that you've never heard of.
PEACHES GOES BANANAS (C+) - The passionate dance-punk artist Peaches gets the documentary treatment here as she approaches 60, still sexually daring and provocative. The musician who named an album Fatherfucker and whose big hit was titled "Fuck the Pain Away" has barely lost a step, but this film does only glancing justice to her music and career.
The cameras mostly follow her along a tour of Europe in recent years. But we get little live audio, as if the filmmakers did not have the budget or technology to produce decent concert footage. Much of the dialogue consists of voice-overs, disembodied words that occasionally sync with the images but too often distract. It's a shame, because her body-positive message and the enthusiasm of her fans seem to make for fun concerts.
French director Marie Losier follows her back home, too, as we meet the parents of the artist born Merrill Nisker in Toronto, and we join visits with her sister, Suri, who suffered from multiple sclerosis. The film, thus, is more of a pastiche, an avant-garde project in its own right. It helps to be a fan (I'm a casual one, mostly from 20 years ago), and if you're not aware of Peaches' music, this one might be tough to get traction on.
ZEF: THE STORY OF DIE ANTWOORD (B-minus) - This is really nothing more than a glorified expansions of art videos by the South African rap-rave band Die Antwoord, supplemented with interviews with the couple, allowing them to whitewash their history.
Music-video producer Jon Day and animator Jack Shih curate this collection of videos and talking-head interviews with Ninja and his wife, Yolandi Visser, who give off bizarre avant-garde vibes more than a decade after breaking big with viral YouTube videos featuring their eccentric music and video styles. He is tall and angular, tattooed and intense; she is cute and mouse-voiced, with a winnowing glare. Their child, Sixteen, a young adult, has been a prop in their videos and her doe-eyed demeanor captivates in interviews separate from her parents.
We don't hear any of the negative assertions that have dogged the band -- though there is a mild reference to accusations of homophobia, but their default response is to just point to their DJ, Hi-Tek, who is gay, and shrug it off. Photographer Roger Ballen, a longtime collaborator, shows up to support two of his favorite visual artists.
You just know there is much more to the stories here -- I mean, what was up with their adoption of a troubled 9-year-old, who would later allege trauma from being exposed to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll? How authentic is their cultural affinity for zef culture among lower-class Afrikaners? Their songs can be catchy, but is this mostly style over substance, the provocations of a failed rapper who found his mousy muse?
Regardless, the images can be quite compelling at times, and their hysterical rave-ups can be quite catchy. There's just something lurid about participating in a deep dive into the couple's lifestyle.
BONUS TRACKS
We previously linked to "Bag It" from Peaches. Here is her signature song, "Fuck the Pain Away":
"Tombstone, Baby" live in Los Angeles:
The most representative Die Antwoord song and video, "Fatty Boom Boom" (starts at 1:45):
In just a snippet, the Die Antwoord doc takes a break from the hectic and slips in this trippy interlude from Rodriguez, "I Wonder":
From the closing credits of "Zef," the hallucinatory "Age of Illusion" (featuring their daughter, Sixteen):
COVER-UP (B+) - Laura Poitras makes a pilgrimage to the knee of the granddaddy of investigative journalists, Seymour Hersh, and he curmudgeonly sits for her camera and shares stories, from his breakthrough reporting on the atrocities in Vietnam to his late-career missteps.
The first third of the documentary is devoted to the defining story of Hersh's career: his unmasking of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, orchestrated by Lt. William Calley. It is bookended with what is essentially the capstone to his career, his exposing of the torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq two decades ago for the New Yorker. In between, Poitras seeks to dig beneath the stoic exterior of a man who guards his privacy as well as he protects his sources. (He also gets his due for his efforts, competing against Woodward and Bernstein, to break his share of Watergate stories for the New York Times.)
Poitras ("Citizenfour," "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed"), working with co-director Mark Obenhaus, borrows Errol Morris' tactics and plants her camera firmly in front of Hersh, and she places another one above him, sneaking glimpses at his archived notes. At one point she gets him to break down and threaten to halt the proceedings over her invasive questioning. She mixes in old clips of Hersh interviews and pieces it all together neatly.
Hersh comes off as a diehard soldier devoted to policing abuses of power. His personality is a bit of a tough nut to crack (his take on his gruff parents speaks volumes), but Poitras does an admirable job of picking at an old warhorse's brain and heart.
THE ALABAMA SOLUTION (A-minus) - Andrew Jarecki ("Capturing the Friedmans," "The Jinx") curates footage from smuggled cell phones to show the horrific conditions in Alabama's state penal system, in an echo of brother Eugene Jarecki's 2013 prison expose "The House I Live In." If you're not numb by now, you'll be shocked and appalled at the treatment of human beings in the deep south.
The scenes in the detention facilities -- blood, standing water, rats, drugged and mentally ill inmates -- might remind you of Geraldo Rivera's harrowing reports from mental institutions in the 1970s or the POW scenes in "The Deer Hunter." Jarecki focuses on a few inmates who communicate through video chats via smuggled smart phones. Robert Earl (aka Kinetik Justice) has done 20 years, five in solitary confinement, and he is an articulate spokesman for the rights of inmates. Melvin Ray is a jailhouse lawyer desperately trying to get the federal government to intervene. As he notes, it has always taken the feds to fix Alabama's ills, ever since Reconstruction; this time, the state is better equipped to fight off the U.S. Justice Department.
Key events ratchet up the drama. A mother pushes for answers after her son is brutally beaten to death, almost certainly under false pretenses. We see clips of the smug guard who did the killing, as he smirks through his deposition. We watch the mother, who is on oxygen, struggle to catch her breath and report the latest update after returning from a meeting with impotent prosecutors. The family's lawyer takes on the Sisyphean task of seeking justice; a key witness to the killing fears for his life.
Prisoners go on strike, withholding their free labor; that provokes a brutal crackdown meant to starve the men into submission. Earl is beaten and placed in solitary confinement; he takes video of rats swimming in his toilet. This is the belly of the beast. And Jarecki's camera refuses to blink or make these medieval conditions appear more palatable than they are.
A SAVAGE ART (B-minus) - One of the most celebrated political cartoonists of the modern era gets his due with this documentary subtitled "The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant." It's mostly a hagiography -- Oliphant's daughter is an executive producer, and his son is essentially the narrator -- but the artist's powerful work pierces the platitudes.
A trio of filmmakers cobble together archival footage and clips of old interviews over the years with Oliphant, an Australian native who came to the United States in 1964, in his late 20s, to take over as political cartoonist at the Denver Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize within three years. (He would later denounce the honor.) In the '70s he moved to the Washington Star, where his profile was heightened considerably in the nation's capital.
The documentary can be a little hard to follow at times, as it jumps back and forth in time and grabs snippets of interviews of Oliphant from a variety of sources. It would help, too, if the filmmakers gave the cartoons more time on screen and room to breathe. As it is, the film stands as a reminder of how potent and raw Oliphant's work could be. One scathing attack on the Catholic church is captured in an image of salivating priests chasing a gaggle of frightened children, withe caption, "The running of the altar boys." The origin of Oliphant's mascot, a penguin named Punk who offered pithy comments from the corner of the panel, is explained, and we get a pretty good sense of the artist's irascibility through the years.
The final third confronts both the decline of newspapers and political cartoons and the physical decline of Oliphant, now 90 and nearly blind, who was a respected painter and sculptor, as well, in his later years (in Santa Fe, N.M.). This all could have been just as insightful as an hour-long PBS special, though the in-depth history of cartooning was appreciated, and it certainly did not need his children papering over their father's personal shortcomings (including two divorces). And it could have let more of the work tell the story. Credit is due for the footage of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, a Washington Star colleague back in the day, paying tribute to Oliphant with saucy memories delivered at a dinner in his honor.
WHEN FALL IS COMING (B) - I can't think of anyone who could pull off this slight, odd narrative -- about a grandmother's unhealthy compulsion to be with her grandson -- anywhere near as well as master storyteller Francois Ozon.
Helene Vincent is endlessly charming as Michelle, a stylish grandmother who may or may not be having cognition issues. She picks mushrooms with her dear friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko) and ends up poisoning her own daughter, Valerie (Ludivine Sagnier), who thinks it might have been an intentional act so that Michelle could get more time with Valerie's adolescent son, Lucas (a sharp Garlan Erlos). Eventually something does happen to Valerie (and Michelle might have something to do with that), and Lucas comes to live with Michelle.
Meantime, Michelle extends kindness -- perhaps an unhealthy amount -- to Marie-Claude's ex-con adult son Vincent (a menacing but amusing Pierre Lottin). Helene Vincent shoulders the production like the old pro she is. Michelle's friendship with Marie-Claude (who is unhappy and unhealthy) is sweet, and her generosity -- if that's truly what it is -- is admirable. A couple of narrative zags keep the viewer guessing until the end.
This probably tracks most with Ozon's "In the House," another shaggy-dog story that meanders with some real and perceived twists. It also feels compatible with a recent Ozon film, "Everything Went Fine," which also dealt with death and family relations. Here he crafts a satisfying low-key thriller.
OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN (2023) (C) - Tripping over the line between legitimate drama and Hallmark shmaltz, Rebecca Zlotowski turns in an earnest examination of a woman with a loudly ticking biological clock who seeks true love with a hunk who has a 4-year-old daughter. Will they make it? Will they make their own baby?
Virginie Efira (who played a woman with two families in "Madeleine Collins") stars as Rachel, a high school teacher who finds her dream guy in ruggedly handsome Ali (Roschdy Zem), who is separated from his wife and shares custody of little Leila. Zlotowski mixes dewy eyed romance and gauzy cinematography (the Eiffel Tower is photographed reverently) with generous "Red Shoes Diary" nudity and R-rated lovemaking.
Rachel falls hard not just for Ali but also for Leila. At school Rachel fends off a randy co-worker and nurtures a troubled student who could be the son she never had. Elsewhere, she bonds with her sister over the continued mourning for their mother, who died when they were little. Meantime, Rachel still must compete with Leila's mopey mother (a miscast 50-year-old Chiara Mastroianni). There is also a dying mother of one of Leila's classmates to ratchet up the melodrama.
The second half descends into soap-opera territory, and the drawn-out theatrics expose Efira's limitations as a leading actress beyond looking good in a shortie nightshirt. (We previously described her as bland, in a Kim Cattrall way.) A heartfelt epilogue helps, but many won't make it to that ending unless they can find a way to care about where all these folks end up.
BONUS TRACK
The trailer for "When Fall Is Coming":
In "Other People's Children," Rachel and Ali cement their affair to Dave von Ronk's "Cocaine Blues" ("... all around my brain"):
A couple of recent releases give a shout out to the 1970s:
THE MASTERMIND (B) - Master storyteller Kelly Reichardt turns in a serviceable but disappointing drama as she winds the clock back to 1970 for another laconic character study. She is saddled here with Josh O'Connor, who doesn't bring much to the role of a slacker who helms a motley crew of petty criminals to knock off a local art museum.
It has been about a decade since Reichardt's masterpiece, "Certain Women," and about 15 years since her pristine period piece, a pioneer-era western, "Meek's Cutoff." Her last outing, 2023's "Showing Up," was "as slow and uneventful as a movie can be," and "The Mastermind" might deepen the ruts forming under her wagon wheels. She has always been a patient filmmaker who composes in a minor key, but she needs a tad more inspiration to keep her latest one pumping.
O'Connor's James Blaine Mooney has parents with money, and his mother (Hope Davis) thinks she is writing checks to further his architectural career, which has actually stalled. Instead, he uses the money to promise payoffs to his bungling gang, and they pull off a half-assed heist. The robbery isn't the hard part though; it's the stashing and fencing of the loot that becomes the sticky wicket.
It is not like Reichardt to have so much trouble pulling together and maintaining a compelling narrative. She wastes Alana Haim ("Licorice Pizza") in the role of James' doting wife. The movie lights up in the final reel when James visits old friends who are part of the Vietnam War resisters' underground, and a pair of heavyweights jolt the movie back to life, briefly. Gaby Hoffman and John Magaro mold complicated characters in a matter of about 10 minutes, serving only to remind us that the rest of the cast cannot do the same across the 110-minute running time.
Most egregiously, though, Reichardt scores the buildup to the caper and the heist itself to loud, skronking, jittery jazz music. It is relentless, sometimes drowning out dialogue. As a dramatic device, it is too derivative to be effective. "Rififi" this ain't. (Composer Rob Mazurek, in his first film, must share the blame.) This one is an interesting exercise but not an entirely successful one.
INSPECTOR IKE (2020) (B) - Sometimes a cheesy idea and a script full of silly bits is all you need. Here a talented cast of well-trained comedians send up the "NBC Sunday Mystery Movie," which once blessed us with the likes of "Columbo," "McCloud" and "McMillan & Wife."
Ikechukwu Ufomadu co-wrote the script with director Graham Mason and stars in the title role, an unflappable old-school detective who also likes to share a food recipe during each episode of this faux show. (He also has a hacky signature move at the climax of each case -- presenting a set of handcuffs to the ultimate perpetrator in creative ways.) In this "episode," we know who the killer is from the start; it's just a matter of the watching the bumbling culprit -- an understudy knocking off the lead in a male version of "Annie" called "Mannie" -- tighten his own noose.
The humor owes a debt to "Police Squad," which spoofed the genre in 1982 (and led to the "Naked Gun" movies). The sight gags are easier to pull off if you are pretending it's the low-fi early '70s and your only competition in the satire field are the skits on "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour." The decade and its shlocky shows are easy targets, and the crew is given a wide berth to commit broad slapstick.
This borrows funny folks (and a sense of humor) from the worlds of the TV shows "Search Party," "Los Espookys" and "Fantasmas," including Ana Fabrega as a doltish police officer; John Early as the victim; Aparna Nancherla as a leader of the troupe; and Matt Barats as Harry, the goofball murderer. They all revolve around Ufomadu's deadpan zen master, and their loose-limbed sketch-comedy skills make for low-key fun.
BONUS TRACK
Let's do a ranking of Kelly Reichardt's films from most to least favorite:
1. Certain Women (2016) 2. Old Joy (2006) 3. Meek's Cutoff (2011) 4. Wendy & Lucy (2008) 5. First Cow (2020) 6. River of Grass (1995) 7. Night Moves (2014) 8. The Mastermind (2025) 9. Showing Up (2023)
THE NEW YORKER AT 100 (B) - There is something mildly disappointing about a perfectly fine but ordinary documentary about the legendary New Yorker magazine as it turns 100. It's like taking a picture of the Grand Canyon; you just can't replicate it in two dimensions.
Director Marshall Curry's film is not exactly fawning, but it is certainly deferential. It stands in awe of everything the highbrow magazine has ever done. But it hits a lot of the high notes as it plays out like a greatest-hits album from a classic-rock band. There are the legends: John Hersey's Hiroshima piece; Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," James Baldwin's "Letter From a Region in My Mind."
Staffers espouse gratitude for the steady guidance from the editor's office over the years. Kalefeh Sanneh says he is appreciative that the open-minded readership is "willing to go wherever you take them." We watch pen-and-notebook journalists in action -- John Lee Anderson abroad; Nick Paumgarten on the streets of the city; and Rachel Syme in a restaurant interviewing Carol Burnett. We spend time with the "vaunted" fact-checkers; they even fact-check the cartoons. We watch staffers pick through the cartoon submissions for the week. The visual style is represented by art editor Francoise Mouly (above).
One staffer relishes the irony of a magazine, widely viewed as elitist, strictly enforcing house style that demands an accent aigu over the e in "elite" in print. Thoughtfully, author Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie cautions about falling into the trap of liberal/academic guilt; she reasons that a dose of elitism is necessary during a time when anti-elitism is swamping the nation.
The talking heads are legion. Actors Molly Ringwald and Jesse Eisenberg swoon when recalling the thrill of getting published by the New Yorker. We glimpse eccentric legends like cartoonist Roz Chast and film critic Richard Brody, who, like many others, discuss their process and craft. Hilton Als is the wise veteran; the dogged Ronan Farrow is the relative newcomer. Tina Brown is on hand to analyze her stewardship in the 1990s, widely seen as modernizing the paper just in time to save it from the dustbind of fussy history.
The central character is current editor David Remnick, and there is a little too much of him, at times delving into some of his family life that just isn't interesting. But overall -- as it churns through the publication's 10 decades methodically -- this is a surprisingly comprehensive snapshot of a very good magazine that still cares week in and week out. As its jam-packed weekly issues have proven in the past year, the New Yorker at 100 still has impressive game.
THE MERCHANTS OF JOY (B+) - This bright documentary is both joyous and insightful, as it delves into the hustle and bustle of small-business operators who sell Christmas trees on the streets of New York City.
Director Celia Aniskovich (riffing on a magazine article by Owen Long) frames the narrative as a tale of "five families" -- and her nod to organized crime is not inapt; the cutthroat practices can be mob-like at times, and there are several references to actual mafia infiltration of the sourcing of trees from places as disparate as Vermont and Oregon. It's a business where 11 months of prep inform five weeks of street-smart retailing. The entrepreneurs jockey for key locations and then supervise an army of seasonal workers, some of whom sleep in wooden sheds tucked behind the tree stands.
The business owners are all engaging. There is George, a big lug who could have played Bobby Baccalieri on "The Sopranos." He is looking for love as well as December profit. Heather (the NYC Tree Lady), a decade into recovery, likes to hire alcoholics and addicts as a way to help them get straight. Her soft touch with a homeless man discovered sleeping in her shed exemplifies her relentlessly upbeat attitude. Unseen but heard in telephone recordings is Kevin Hammer, a proverbial and mythological bigfoot on the block who talks New Yawk tough and shows little patience for playing kumbaya with the others.
Two families are passing the torch between generations. George and Jane, after 50 years, are ready to fully hand off to daughter Ciree, who has been running the operation for a while now. And then there is Greg (above), whose son, dubbed "Little" Greg (despite towering over his dad), dropped out of college and is taking over for his aging dad. The 60-something father is stout and has a white beard (and a jolly demeanor) and thus plays the role of Santa Claus at events. It's all a little too ho-ho-ho for my tastes, and the production values smack of a reality TV show competition.
However, Aniskovich is blessed with made-for-TV characters. Part of the fun is learning the process, from tree farming to setting up the stands to making the sales, rain or shine, snow or no. She even has a little twist at the end when drama enters the life of one of the families. All the characters are a joy to hang out with.
BONUS TRACK
"Merchants of Joy" reaches off the grid for its Christmas songs. That includes "Christmas Wrapping" by the Waitresses:
I took on the 24-hour challenge of seeing the latest epic films by two celebrated directors (starring two generational acting talents) and filing this review -- and nearly made it ...
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (B-minus) - Paul Thomas Anderson caught lightning more than a decade ago adapting Thomas Pynchon's "Inherent Vice." He tries to duplicate his luck here, but rather than stick with the original story, this movie is merely "inspired by" Pynchon's novel Vineland.
Anderson takes what was an interesting idea of Pynchon's from the 1980s -- the life of '60s revolutionaries who have gone underground -- and transports it to more modern days (albeit an era that still has pay phones), and he injects a repulsive storyline involving militant immigration jackboots and white supremacists, which are not mutually exclusive clubs. The gang of cretins is led by a character actually named Lockjaw and played hideously to the rafters by Sean Penn in what is destined to be immortalized as a classic crossword-puzzle definition of a "ham."
This is the umpteenth movie in which the old racist scum has the hots for black women, and Anderson serves up Teyana Taylor as the prize sex object. She plays Perfidia Beverly Hills, who gets a weird sexual charge out of freeing detained immigrants and robbing banks. Taylor (compelling in "A Thousand and One") gets to fire an automatic weapon while exposing her overripe pregnant belly. What she does not get to do is develop this character, who abandons her child and rats out her co-conspirators when caught by Lockjaw.
Perfidia goes into witness protection and leaves the child with the baby daddy, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Father and daughter get new identities and a relocation to California, and 16 years later he's Bob, a stoner who can't remember the code words for the radical group that still exists underground. His 16-year-old daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti, above), will turn out to have movie-super-hero skills like escaping from murderers and excelling behind the wheel as if she stole it from a car commercial. (It's the kind of movie where the climactic scene involves three vehicles on a highway where no other car will ever come along, miraculously. Did the $150 million-plus budget run out of gas or extras?)
DiCaprio flashes moments of brilliance, but the mayhem keeps interrupting and forcing him to run around a lot, not unlike the characters in 2021's "Licorice Pizza." (It's also the kind of movie where Bob can literally fall off of a roof, get up and escape his pursuers, miraculously.) The white supremacists are rendered as cartoon villains, who gather in a wood-paneled mansion and worship "St. Nick."
This collage of chaos sprawls across 2 hours and 42 minutes. By the second half, it is nothing more than a glorified episode of "The Rockford Files" (by way of Quentin Tarantino). Penn, ridiculously swole here, infuses his character with physical tics (complete with a distinctive gait) that might immediately take you out of the movie, far too aware that the masterful actor is performing. (He, too, comes off as super-human, walking away from an attack that would obliterate mere mortals. Miraculously.)
Only Benicio del Toro acquits himself here, in a minor role as an immigrant-protecting sensei; his subtle mannerisms during a DUI traffic stop run rings around the hysterical mugging of DiCaprio and Penn. Just as we recently realized that we were over Josh Brolin ("Wake Up Dead Man"), it is apparent that Sean Penn is well past his sell-by date. Meantime, the talents of Keke Palmer and Alana Haim are just wasted.
"One Battle After Another" is presumably intended to mock and satirize the military-industrial complex and its white nationalist agenda. But Anderson merely fetishizes that evil mind-set while also glorifying the violence of the radicals. (Willa will also gets to show off her skills with an automatic weapon.) I have very little bandwidth left for depictions -- positive or negative -- of Stephen Miller's goon squads, or enlightened Hollywood's useful idiots who purport to skewer the powers that be.
Anderson's film is at times clever, occasionally enlightening, but mostly annoying, stuck in a timeless limbo. The man who gave us pulpy but thoughtful fare like "Boogie Nights," "Magnolia" and "Punch-Drunk Love" (all in a row) is turning into another big-budget hack. The organized chaos that somehow jelled in "Inherent Vice" never coheres in this follow-up run at Pynchon's world.
MARTY SUPREME (Incomplete) - I've not been a fan of the Safdie brothers -- "Uncut Gems" was "messy, overlong," and "Good Time" was "macho bunk" -- but they went their separate ways this year, and Josh Safdie's "Marty Supreme," starring a manic Timothee Chalamet, looked like a fun ride. I made it through 85 of its 150 minutes, exasperated and exhausted from the $7 New Year's Day matinee.
As we noted during "Uncut Gems," Safdie simply tries to cram too much into this movie, in which Chalamet plays a ping-pong wunderkind in 1950s New York but mostly spends his time as a broke grifter scamming his employer/uncle, his married girlfriend (whom he apparently impregnated), and a businessman's wife, a faded 1930s starlet played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who is the only cast member who adds a human dimension to a character.
Chalamet is a whirlwind as the smarmy, fast-talking bullshit artist Marty Mauser. He is often sweaty and frantic, and not just in his ping-pong scenes. He is scrawny, with a wispy mustache, and it is difficult to believe throughout that he can swindle the Ritz in London for a royal suite or that his Lord Fauntleroy banter would work on Paltrow's classy dame. The whole thing, despite Chalamet's considerable talents, is a tough sell.
"Marty Supreme" is also dizzyingly violent, with hectic, in-your-face camera work that comes off like the work of Scorsese or Tarantino on even more cocaine. The middle hour goes down multiple rabbit holes, and each time Marty somehow, improbably never gets his ass seriously kicked. The ping-pong virtually disappears for a good chunk of the film. (Marty loses a world championship at the beginning of the film and prepares to avenge that loss the following year in Tokyo, but he does absolutely no training or practice in advance of taking on the world champ. "Rocky" this is not.)
Safdie simply forgot to tell a cohesive story with a sympathetic lead character. At the 85-minute mark, my senses were fully assaulted ('80s new-wave music blares, out of context, on the soundtrack), and I had little interest in finding out what happens to this asshole. I'll end by handing it off to a few reviewers who did gut it out until the end:
William Bibbiani, The Wrap: "'Marty Supreme' ... has no idea how to
conclude while saying something — anything — about Marty, his journey or
anything else. ... There’s no dramatic throughline that tracks, just desperation and an
incongruous conclusion that doesn’t organically follow that despair. ... It observes the destruction in Marty’s wake and shrugs, not because it’s
actually sympathetic, but because we’re supposed to be won over by his
all-American gumption in spite of his carnage."
Stephanie Zacharek, Time: "It’s about as brash and peripatetic as Safdie’s last feature, 2019’s Uncut Gems, ... but its undertones are nastier, and it’s somehow even more exhausting. ... He’s supposed to be a complex character, but maybe he’s just an unbearable one. ... For Safdie, a movie seems to be just an excuse for a million and one
digressions and distractions; he’ll throw anything at the wall to see if
it sticks. ... Amorality can be fun, but Marty Supreme has no emotional
core -- though it does try to grab us in its final minutes, when Marty is
unrealistically redeemed in a moment of mawkish sentimentality."
Roger Moore, Movie Nation: "Safdie strains to keep 'Marty Supreme' moving at an exhausting sprint
for its excessive, indulgent two and a half hours. He can’t. Even
Chalamet needs a breather. ... But in Safdie’s film, all this expended on-screen energy and effort isn’t edifying or rewarding. It’s just exhausting."
BONUS TRACKS
A clever little nugget in "One Battle" reveals that the hold music for the revolutionaries' secret phone network is Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," the lyrics of which also furnish some of the secret counter-signs memorized by the members:
A rather obvious choice for "Battle's" closing credits is Tom Petty's "American Girl":
