Jarmusch in Review: Free Solo

  

BROKEN FLOWERS (2005) (A) - Ever since seeing the opening scene of "Broken Flowers," I've always fantasized about being dumped by Julie Delpy. (She doesn't have to date me; just dramatically break up with me, preferably using a heaping helping of French.)

 

That's what happens to Bill Murray's rich aging playboy, whose younger girlfriend, Sherry (Delpy), walks out on him, frustrated with his glum demeanor and refusal to commit. Along with "Dead Man," this is among Jim Jarmusch's most dour assessments of the human condition, trekking along with Murray's character as he cycles through his past by visiting long-ago exes, always with a fresh bouquet on offer, on the chance that he might have a son out there somewhere.

Bill Murray barely cracks a smile throughout, though a deadpan humor hums along the surface, mainly via the relationship between Murray's Don Johnston (a name often confused with the famous actor, and a play on Don Juan) and his neighbor Winston, a traditional family man from Jamaica. (Flashes of classic Murray rascality leak out when Don banters with Winston's precocious little girl.) It is Winston (Jeffrey Wright), an amateur sleuth, who plots the logistics for Don's road odyssey, which is prompted by an anonymous pink letter purporting to be from an ex who claims to have had his child 19 years earlier.

Don is set in his middle age -- he made a ton of money in computers -- but his sterile bachelor life is depressing, especially compared with Winston and his bustling brood. Murray is matched by a powerful cast of women portraying his exes. There is Sharon Stone as Laura, a still frisky professional closet organizer, whose teen daughter, Lolita (!) (Alexis Dziena), parades around naked when she's not there. (The look on Don's face when this happens is priceless.) Frances Conroy (HBO's "Six Feet Under") is an icy realtor with a douchebag husband, a long way from her hippie-chick days. Jessica Lange plays Carmen, an animal psychologist with little patience for Don, who is bum-rushed by Carmen's possessive receptionist (a sharp Chloe Sevigny). And the cleanup hitter is Tilda Swinton, almost unrecognizable in dark hair and heavy mascara, as Penny, whose reaction to Don is the most volatile. (The others mostly flatter him as a pesky rogue.)

Jarmusch, as he likes to do, speckles the film with coincidences, especially effective in a case like this where we're trying to solve a mystery. (Is Penny's pink typewriter a key clue? Hard to tell, because pink is prevalent throughout, which is no surprise.) The director has a field day hiding a bunch of Easter eggs, which pile up at the end, when Don runs across two young men whose presence only deepens the mystery. In the final shot, Don literally stands at a crossroads, Jarmusch's camera whirling around him in a dizzying swoop, Murray's visage placid until the end. 

Don's final stop on the circuit before he returns home is at the grave of a fifth ex, and it is that experience which seems to shake him the most. Was she The One? Like with everything else here, it is tough to tell. Jarmusch unspools one big conundrum, and it is up to the viewer to put the puzzle together in their own way. That is the gift of "Broken Flowers."

GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI (2000) (B) - This one hit better 26 years ago, but now its casual violence and earnest eastern philosophizing feel dated. That's a shame, because Jarmusch and his hand-picked star, Forest Whitaker, really click throughout. 

 

Whitaker plays a Samurai-style mob assassin, nameless to his mafia benefactor, communicating only through homing pigeons that "Ghost Dog" communes with on the rooftop of his urban apartment. Ghost Dog fancies Rashomon and studies the spiritual guidance of the Hagakure to guide him in the ancient ways of the warrior. He is like a zen James Bond, fashioning his own silencers and wielding a code-breaking device that opens security gates unlocks car doors and ignitions. (After starting the cars, he always pops in the same CD, featuring the music of RZA from Wu-Tang Clan, who scored the film.)

After Ghost Dog's most recent hit on a made man, the local mob boss (a welcome Henry Silva) orders the assassin to then be rubbed out. That sets off a battle of one against many, a classic Samurai chess match. The gangster story, shot around New Jersey, feels authentic, in the unflattering manner of '90s touchstones like "Goodfellas" or "The Sopranos," with their often-bumbling foot soldiers. Jarmusch recruits talented character actors -- such as John Tormey and Cliff Gorman -- to flesh out the crew. 

Tormey's Louie is Ghost Dog's contact, and the two have developed a bond ever since Louie saved the young man's life during a random act of street violence. The honor code between the two is tested, as Louie is reluctant to double-cross his ward but he also has sworn an oath to his mob family. Who will be left standing after the ensuing outburst of violence?

Ghost Dog is a man of few words, but his humanity is brought out by a French-speaking friend who sells ice cream, Raymond (Isaach de Bankole), and a well-read little girl he meets at a park and shares books with. There certainly was much more to be explored here.

Instead, Jarmusch settles for a rote mob revenge story, with a neo-noir nod to "Le Samourai." The relentless gore distracts from the enlightened ideas that remain undercooked when the dignified ending arrives.

BONUS TRACKS

As usual for Jarmusch, the "Broken Flowers" soundtrack is eclectic and fascinating. It includes tracks from the Brian Jonestown Massacre and from Ethiopian jazz master Mulatu Astatke. And, over the closing credits, Holly Golightly joins the Greenhornes for the trippy "There Is an End":

 

"Broken Flowers" also digs deep for the 1968 rocksteady cut "Ride Yu Donkey" by Jamaica's the Tennors:

 

And a sampling of RZA's music for "Ghost Dog":

 

Here is our latest attempt to rank the films of Jim Jarmusch, from most to least favorite:

• Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
• Dead Man (1995)
• Broken Flowers (2005)
• Down by Law (1986)
• The Only Lovers Left Alive (2014)
• Night on Earth (1991)
• Mystery Train (1989)
• Mother Father Sister Brother (2025)
• Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (2000) 
• The Limits of Control (2009)
• Paterson (2016)
• Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
• Permanent Vacation (student film, 1980)
• Gimme Danger (2017) 

Not seen: "The Dead Don't Die" (2019)

Now and Then: Tom Waits for Jarmusch

 

FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER (B+) - There is something rather comforting in a Jim Jarmusch film. The leisurely pace. The assured direction. The sparse, off-kilter dialogue. The loops of echoing themes. And his respect for his audience's intelligence.

Here he unspools three stories about parents and children, in three disparate settings capturing the awkwardness of family relations. The cinematic connective tissue involves random repeated threads -- skateboarders, wristwatches, family photos, overhead shots of tables full of food and drink, toasts, color coordination of outfits (in the red family), horoscopes, car trips and sly variations on the British colloquialism "Bob's your uncle." The other common theme: Usually parents are depicted as out of touch and pitied by the younger generation; here, Jarmusch offers a Boomer's wink suggesting that his generation was and is the wiser, more well-adjusted and hippest of them all.

 

Adam Driver accepts the torch from Tom Waits as Jarmusch's off-kilter anti-hero, as they star together as father and son in the first short, with Mayim Bialik as Waits' daughter. The two offspring set the table for the whole movie with their disjointed and arm's-length conversation during the drive on the way up to their father's isolated lake house. It is clear early on that the father is exploiting his kids' generous nature and not letting on that he might be living a better life than his messy house suggests.

Waits is perfectly odd as the mumbling, fumbling father who just doesn't connect with his spectrum-y adult children, whether he is running down a list of drugs he's not taking or wielding an ax for no good reason. Driver, who starred in the director's "Paterson," can underplay a role with the best of them; I can't imagine anyone else in this specific role. And Bialik is the ultimate get-along sister/daughter. The actors have wonderful chemistry playing three relatives that have none. You almost wish it were its own standalone short film.

The third episode jumps a generation to a pair of 20-something twins visiting Paris to clear out the apartment of their parents, who have died in a plane crash. Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) have a playful banter and a fundamental connection, which is a refreshing contrast to the stilted relations on display in the first two episodes. Again, the lives of the parents -- excavated through photos, fake IDs and documents -- suggest a much more interesting narrative than the mundane plot we are watching, a clever sleight of hand.

 

Moore and Sabbat display the ease and dexterity of veteran actors, and it is fun to explore the side streets and interiors of Paris with this laid-back pair. They also are the most intellectually curious of all the film's characters. And we get a final subtle generational twist for the finale. 

The middle entry is the weakest. Charlotte Rampling portrays a best-selling novelist who must endure a traditional mother-daughter high tea with her two dysfunctional daughters. Cate Blanchett plays a straight-up nerd, and Vicky Krieps is the stereotypical aging punk-rock chick (at least Jarmusch's version of one). They live in Dublin, of all places, walking on eggshells around each other at the mom's fancy home. 

You can't ask for three more skilled actors, but they struggle to connect; their disparate accents don't help. There is no heft to the narrative, besides the disappointment a high-powered parent can barely conceal in her under-achieving children. Maybe the filmmaker just doesn't have an ear for this type of female interaction. It's fine but dwarfed by the impeccably curated tales that bookend it.

DOWN BY LAW (1986) (A-minus) - Jarmusch is at his '80s quirkiest, blessed with three unique actors who bond in this absurdist prison tale set in the unforgiving swamplands of Louisiana. 

John Lurie returns to the fold from "Stranger Than Paradise" to portray Jack, a somewhat dimwitted pimp who gets set up in an embarrassing police sting. Tom Waits, whose music career was humming along, is Zack, a hipster-doofus deejay who gets suckered into being a bagman, with disastrous results. They are eventually joined in prison by Roberto, a happy-go-lucky Italian who speaks fractured English and is played with broad comic joy by Roberto Benigni, in his American film debut (and his first of three films with the director). 

 

Benigni seems to embody all three Marx Brothers simultaneously as he steals the show from his sublimely deadpan co-stars. He constantly mixes up Zack and Jack (understandably), and he crafts charming fractured phrases from his notebook of English idioms. ("I am a good egg. ... We are a good egg.") Waits, especially, provides a deadpan backboard for the giddy offerings from the strange man they call Bob.

Time passes slowly but pleasantly in the jail cell. When they eventually make their way into the backwoods as fugitives, Jarmusch and cinematographer Robert Mueller let their lazy camera glide along the swamps with the stumbling escapees. Jarmusch's plot employs a satisfying switch at the end, alighting upon a lovely Italian restaurateur in the middle of nowhere (Nicoletta Braschi), who helps flip the hipster script.  

The filmmaker avoids the sophomore slump and sets the table for a rolling out of his patient, outre character studies and zen thought experiments that would play out over a four-decade career. 

BONUS TRACKS

Jarmusch shuns music in favor of an eerie stillness for most of "Father Mother Sister Brother," but then he picks a perfect daytime car ride in Paris to drop a needle on "Spooky" by Dusty Springfield:

 

 

Here is our latest attempt to rank the films of Jim Jarmusch, from most to least favorite:

• Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
• Dead Man (1995)
• Broken Flowers (2005)
• Down by Law (1986)
• The Only Lovers Left Alive (2014)
• Night on Earth (1991)
• Mystery Train (1989)
• Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) 
• Mother Father Sister Brother (2025)
• The Limits of Control (2009)
• Paterson (2016)
• Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
• Permanent Vacation (student film, 1980)
• Gimme Danger (2017) 

Not seen: "The Dead Don't Die" (2019)

The Best of 2025: It's Not Me, It's You

 

Generation X is in a millennial slump. 

There is no need for a grand essay this year, or a diatribe. As usual, you may jump down to the lists and you'll find dozens of movies to stream right now. But I do want to address Gen X's midlife malaise. So this year we are going to offer a sort-of anti-list upfront. 

As a Gen X elder (let's not debate this), I'm saddened to see so many filmmakers lose their mojo as they trail me into middle age. Some of my all-time favorite directors have lost me with their releases in recent years.  

I believe in chapters, and I learned early on that it's not easy to sync with an artist throughout their career. The three-album rule was invented for a reason, and feel free to apply it to filmmaking. I had my quarter-life crisis after college, realizing that some of my favorite bands just didn't thrill me anymore. Now, at the three-quarter mark, I find that it is a parade of filmmakers who leave me disappointed. (By the way, I have long since forgiven Joe Jackson.)

So let's elevate the annual "It's Not You, It's Me" category from below and highlight a list of 2025's offenders, who either outright offended or just fell short in some way:

• Noah Baumbach, age 56. ... His 2025: Back in the day he made a handful of brilliant movies; this time he excreted the maudlin "Jay Kelly" with his new pal George Clooney. Baumbach has made one good film in the past decade. ... His Heyday: "The Squid and the Whale" (2005) and "Frances Ha" (2013)
• Paul Thomas Anderson, 55. ... 2025: He once made a handful of brilliant movies, but he has grown as bloated as his budgets. The latest is his fetishism of fascism, "One Battle After Another," which follows the fun but lightweight "Licorice Pizza" (2021). ... Heyday: "Magnolia" (1999)
• Kelly Reichardt, 61. ... 2025: She was onto something with "The Mastermind," but a bland star (and a blaring soundtrack) under- and overwhelmed her thin plot. ... Heyday: "Certain Women" (2016)
• Wes Anderson, 56. ... 2025: We walked out of 2023's "Asteroid City." We made it through "The Phoenician Scheme," but barely. ... Heyday: "The Royal Tenenbaums" (2001)
• Chloe Zhao, 43 (cuspy). ... 2025: She somehow managed a decent final half hour of "Hamnet," but the first hour was nearly unwatchable. For some reason, I did not walk out. ... Heyday: "The Rider" (2018)
• Lynne Ramsay, 56. ... 2025: She produced something powerful and compelling at times with "Die My Love," but she tripped over some tropes and didn't earn the ending. ... Heyday: "Morvern Callar" (2002)
• Rian Johnson, 52. ... 2025: He ran the well dry with a weak third installment of his "Knives Out" series, "Wake Up Dead Man." ... Heyday: "Looper" (2013)
• (We pause, briefly, in honor of our onetime service to the country as a copy editor, for a discussion of commas. Is there an argument for leaving out the comma in "Wake Up Dead Man" and "Die My Love"? Doubt it. "Sorry, Baby.") 
• Yorgos Lanthimos, 52. ... 2025: He continues to botch scripts, this time muffing the last 20 minutes of "Bugonia." ... Heyday: "Alps" and "Dogtooth" (2010-12)
• Francois Ozon, 58. ... 2025: The man is in his own league, but even he is working in a minor key, with 2025's "When Fall Is Coming." ... Heyday: "Time to Leave" (2006) and too many others to list
• Jia Zhang-ke, 55. ... 2025: Even an all-time great could barely hold our interest in his career pastiche "Caught by the Tides." ... Heyday: "The World" (2006)

This doesn't take into account:

• The occasional Boomer -- Rob Reiner's soggy "Spinal Tap" sequel, or Nuri Bilge Ceylan's so-so "About Dry Grasses."
• Or the clouds forming on the horizon for a couple of Millennials: We've struggled twice so far to make a dent in 37-year-old Celine Song's "Materialists" (her "Past Lives" was No. 1 in 2023), and we gave up on "Pavements" from Alex Ross Perry, 41. (We preferred the Pavement doc "Louder Than You Think," about their crazy drummer/producer.) 
• Meantime, Walter Salles, 69, got back on his game with "I'm Still Here," and 73-year-old Boomer Jim Jarmusch is still steady-as-he-goes, maintaining his niche as the zen master, with his latest, "Father Mother Sister Brother."

OK. So I'm in a funk. The good news is that there are fresh voices out there; look below for movies from the likes of Eva Victor, Nina Conti, Isabella Roland, Rungano Nyoni, Michael Strassner, and more. The future remains promising, as the generations churn.

***

Below you'll find a ton of movies to sample, most from 2025, but some that hurtle you back decades (see "The Leftovers" below). Where possible I point out where you can stream them. My main go-to services are HBO, Mubi, Criterion, Netflix, and the library's free Hoopla (or Kanopy in your jurisdiction) or DVDs. Each film citation has a link to my original review.

THE TOP 15 of '25

(For the first five movies, I watched them more than once, confirming them as top picks.) 

  1. Blue Moon. Richard Linklater (a late Boomer with an X sensibility) directs a pitch-perfect Ethan Hawke in "this endlessly clever and charming tale of the bittersweet final days" of songwriter Lorenz Hart. Including Best Screenplay, in fact one of the best of all time. (In theaters; Netflix 2/14) 

  2. The Ballad of Wallis Island. "It is funny and full of heart; it's an earnest labor of love that tells a somber story without wallowing in any emotional muck." (Amazon Prime)

  3. Eephus. The best feature film about baseball ever made, with a tiny budget and a cast full of mostly non-actor ringers. (Mubi)

  4. Sorry, Baby. One of the many quiet indie gems on the list, often starring the writer-director (here Eva Victor), that stuck with us a long time. (HBO)

  5. One to One: John & Yoko. A meticulous, fascinating deep dive into the culture of New York City at the time an ex-Beatle showed up. (HBO)

  6. Sunlight. A buddy-movie road trip across New Mexico full of wit, heart and charm, led by stars Shenoah Allen and Nina Conti, who directed. (Rental on demand)

  7. Sentimental Value. Another mature, thoughtful character study from Joachim Trier (age 51). (In theaters)

  8. Diane Warren: Relentless. A documentary buoyed by the sheer force of the personality of its subject, a prolific MOR songwriter. (Hoopla/Kanopy)

  9. I'm Still Here. A tale of bravery and endurance from Walter Salles, whose exploration of Brazil's secret police will feel hauntingly relevant. (Netflix)

10. The Alabama Solution. A searing indictment of a state prison system, from the prolific Jarecki family. (HBO)

11. D(e)ad. Isabella Roland's family, working with a tiny budget, helped produce this clever comedy, one of the funniest movies of the year. (Rental on demand)

12. Song Sung Blue. When was the last time -- if ever -- you danced in the aisles in joy after a movie? The most fun at the theater in 2025. (Coming to Peacock)

13. Pee-wee as Himself. A filmmaker does a personal exploration of one of the most fascinating artists of the past 40 years. (HBO)

14. Listers. Microbudget DIY filmmaking at its finest; this documentary about birdwatching is the best movie most people never saw. (Free on YouTube)

15. Is This Thing On? Bradley Cooper wrings pathos and humor out of a disintegrating marriage, thanks to his star, Will Arnett. Including Best Director. (In theaters)

JUST MISSED THE LIST

(Honorables mentioned)

• The Baltimorons (AMC+)
• It Was Just an Accident
• Die My Love (Mubi)
• Friendship (HBO)
• Drowning Dry (Mubi)
• Father Mother Sister Brother (Theaters, then MUBI)
• Matt and Mara (Mubi) 

 

MORE TOP DOCS 

This was a particularly strong year for documentaries. Buckle up for a long list of releases, mostly in the B+ range. Many, too, Just Missed the List: 

 

• The music profiles: "Devo" explored in detail the origins of an art collective (Netflix); "Janis Ian: Breaking Silence" was intimate and revealing (PBS); "Becoming Led Zeppelin" gave the old boys their due (including drummer Jon Bonham through archival recordings) (Netflix); "Sunday Best" explored Ed Sullivan's commitment to civil rights on his variety show (Netflix); "Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted" was a total hoot (rental on demand).
• Ben Stiller excavated his family history in "Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost" (Apple TV)
• Raoul Peck powerloaded "George Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5" (rental on demand)
• A fascinating profile of Andy Kaufman, "Thank You Very Much" (rental on demand) 
• "Breakdown 1975" examined not just movies but our fraying culture during a pivotal year (Netflix) 
• "Secret Mall Apartment" had a great little-known story to unpack (Netflix)
• "The Perfect Neighbor" told a tragedy mainly through police body-cam footage (Netflix)
• I enjoyed getting to know comedian/podcaster Marc Maron in the gloomy documentary "Are We Good?" (rental on demand)
• Laura Poitras showed why she is one of the best, with her complicated profile of Seymour Hersh in "Cover-Up" (Netflix)  

 

TOP PERFORMANCES

• Songwriter Lorenz Hart in "Blue Moon" was the role Ethan Hawke was born to play, and no other performance came close this year. 
• Fernanda Torres was riveting throughout "I'm Still Here." 
• Susan Chardy was a well of guarded emotion in the disappointing culture study "On Becoming a Guinea Fowl" from Rungano Nyoni. 
• Jennifer Lawrence, fierce and feral in "Die My Love." Robert Pattinson and Sissy Spacek managed somehow to keep up with her.
• Tim Key walked a tightrope between comedy and drama in "The Ballad of Wallis Island," with an assist from Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan.
• No one can quite do what Renate Reinsve does every time, including this past year in "Sentimental Value."
• Hugh Jackman melted into his character, a Neil Diamond impersonator, in "Song Sung Blue."

 

GUILTY PLEASURES

• The Lost Weekend: A Love Story. The sweet story told by John Lennon's girlfriend in 1974, May Pang. (Amazon Prime)
• Splitsville. Another fun romp from filmmaking team Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin. ("The Climb") (Rental on demand)
• Dig (XX). An updated music doc that revisits the aughts "rivalry" between the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. (Leaving Criterion) 
• The Merchants of Joy. A cheesy but effective profile of sellers of Christmas trees in New York City. (Amazon Prime)

 

THE LEFTOVERS

Some 2024 films we caught up with:  The powerful PBS documentary about workers organizing, "Union." ... The fascinating four-hour mystery saga, "Trenque Lauquen." ... We walked out of the Dylan biopic "A Complete Unknown," and instead went back in time to two classic documentaries about the man. ... The offbeat study of asexual adults, "Slow." ... Anne Hathaway was charming in the rom-com from Michael Showalter, "The Idea of You."

Wayback Machine: There were three of the all-time classics from the American New Wave: "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Rosemary's Baby" and "Shampoo." ... We went back to the '80s to hang out with Spike Lee ("Do the Right Thing") and John Hughes and Molly Ringwald. ... We enjoyed Goldie Hawn in Steven Spielberg's "Sugarland Express." ... There were two Rolling Stones-related nuggets, "Performance" and "Gimme Shelter." ... We paid respects to Gene Hackman (R.I.P.) in "The Conversation" and Peter Sellers in "Being There." ... We dove deeper into the oeuvre of Joan Micklin Silver ("Between the Lines"), with "Crossing Delancy" and "Hester Street." ... Then there were the '70s hippie spectacles "Hair" and "Jesus Christ Superstar." ... Along with a documentary about Tura Satana, we screened the Russ Meyer B-movie classic "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" ... And, of course, we sampled liberally from Guild Cinema's annual summer film noir series (here and here).

R.I.P: We paid tribute to David Lynch and Robert Redford. We still have one more Lynch entry to go. ... We owe a tribute to Diane Keaton. ... We sampled "Spinal Tap," then and now, in memory of Rob Reiner, and we have a follow-up to that due in a few weeks. 

 

IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME

(Well, maybe this time it is you. 

Some of our favorites let us down.)

 

• (See above)

COMING ATTRACTIONS

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

• The Secret Agent
• The Ice Tower
• Bob Trevino
• Sirat
• Miroirs 3

Join us in 2026 as we track down those titles and more of the finest movies you wouldn't otherwise think of watching.

Follow the Money

 

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (C) - I'm hard-pressed to come up with a more inconsequential movie than this whimsical curiosity, which tells an odd story about Iranians but sets the action in Winnipeg in winter. It's a series of mildly amusing vignettes stretched out to feature length.

 

I would recount the plot, but I couldn't figure it out -- or decipher whether there actually was a plot. Wikipedia describes it as a film that "blends the seemingly unrelated stories of Negin and Nazgol, two kids who find money frozen in ice and try to claim it; Massoud, a tour guide in Winnipeg who is leading a confused and disoriented tour group; and Matthew (director Matthew Rankin), who quits his unfulfilling job with the seceded federal government of Quebec and travels home to Winnipeg to visit his mother."

There are a lot of turkeys that show up throughout. Sight gags that are as light as air float by and dissipate; it's difficult to remember most of them just hours after having seen the movie. Matthew confronts a rival who has taken his place in his mother's favors. Everything here is deadpan and quaint. It's as effervescent as a Sprite, with about as many calories. It's Guy Maddin meets Jim Jarmusch, but drained of any special quirk and rendered in Persian (and French), for good measure. This one went over and around my head.

WIDOWS (2018) (B-minus) - This female revenge flick has both a ridiculous premise and trite screenwriting, but it is entertaining enough to get you to stick around and see if these gals can pull off a big heist.

Viola Davis leads an overstuffed cast as Veronica, who joins forces with the other widows who all lost their husbands in a robbery gone awry in order to pull off a $5 million job that Veronica's husband had been planning before the men died. A parallel story line involves Colin Farrell as Jack Mulligan, a Chicago-Irish ward pol running for election to the seat held for years by his machine-veteran father (a feisty Robert Duvall) against a black preacher, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry). Manning has a vicious brother Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya, truly menacing), who is tasked with collecting a multimillion-dollar debt owed by Veronica's husband (Liam Neeson). (Yeah, that's a lot of above-the-title names. Jacki Weaver has a cameo too.)

The improbable set-up is strained further by the paint-by-numbers script, the hack-work of Gillian Flynn ("Gone Girl") and director Steve McQueen ("20 Years a Slave," "Small Axe"). And you may never see a movie that is set in Chicago look and feel so unlike Chicago. The cinematography is antiseptic and the accents and phrasing are random. Farrell, especially, has a tin ear for next-gen Irish pol-speak.

The various story lines are trite -- toxic masculinity; women dependent on the ill-gotten gains of thugs; an average person instantly transforming into a fearless criminal mastermind; and a marriage strained by the tragic death of a son. I was able to predict the maddeningly unoriginal dialogue with uncanny accuracy. The stakes of a local election can't support a convincing narrative. A key plot twist at the end improbably relies on the trope of a pet dog sniffing out a surprise suspect hiding behind a door. 

Brit McQueen seems like the wrong choice to tell such a gritty, pulpy tale set in the American Midwest, imposing his auteur sensibilities on a dese-dem-and-dose tick-tock thriller. Somehow the cut-and-paste cast -- including Cynthia Erivo as a bad-ass hairdresser who joins the caper (though Michelle Rodriguez and Carrie Coon are wasted here) -- drag this over the finish line.

Troubled Youth

 Another round with our latest favorite, Renate Reinsve, then a truly bad new release, followed by a palate-cleanser courtesy of our favorite analyst of French kids, Celine Sciamma.

 

ARMAND (C+) - Renate Reinsve literally and figuratively stomps all over a slow-burn suspense film from Norway about a parent-teacher conference from hell, but neither she nor the workmanlike supporting cast can make this debut film makes sense. It drags its mysteries out to nearly two hours, about a half hour too long.

 

Halfdan Ullman Tondel -- the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman -- pays homage to his grandfather with claustrophobic visuals inside a school and a narrative that is wrapped in several mysteries. Elisabeth (Reinsve), a harried and disgraced actress, is called to the school because her 6-year-old, Armand, has engaged in "sexual deviancy" with another boy. The accusers are the parents, Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and Anders (Endre Hellestveit), who happen to be her in-laws -- Sarah is the sister of Elisabeth's dead husband, Thomas, who also had been a student at the school and apparently suffered some unexplained accident or form of abuse as a child.

Reinsve ("The Worst Person in the World," "A Different Man") bigfoots the sessions with administrators like the deflated diva she is supposed to be. The heels of her boots terrorize the corridor floors, and she wields an overcoat like a toreador's cape. She carries the film and provides a key centerpiece (excerpted in the trailer) in which she has an inappropriate laughing fit that devolves into maniacal sobbing. It's an extraordinary few minutes of cinema, but it's just not enough to make up for the fact that Tondel has a thin story that he stretches out interminably.

The teacher and administrators cultivate a fascinating bureaucratic subplot among them -- Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) is the green instructor, Jarle (Oystein Roger) is the put-upon principal, and Ajsa (Vera Veljovic-Jovanovic) assists him when she's not dealing with bizarre nosebleeds. Tondel certainly has an appealing visual style -- he turns hallways menacing and crowds his characters into an intimate first-grade classroom. But his reveal is not very convincing in the end, and the expiation at the climax feels unearned. He could use a good editor.

HIPPO (D) - The less said about this creepy mess the better. The bizarre debut from director Mark H. Rapaport wallows in the breakdown of a broken family, in which the mother has lost her mind and the step-siblings have the hots for each other. 

Co-writer Kimball Farley stars as Hippo, a socially stunted young adult partial to crossbows and video games as he celebrates his 19th birthday, and Lilla Kinzlinger plays Buttercup, his step-sister who was adopted from Hungary and who is eager to both lose her virginity and have a baby. Of course, Hippo is her top choice for that; but when he declines, she goes online to find a much older weirdo, Darwin (Jesse Pimentel), to come over for dinner and do the deed.

However, Darwin seems more interested in the mother (Eliza Roberts), who quickly gets tipsy and flirty, and when Darwin and Buttercup do end up in her room, things go horribly wrong. (Roberts' husband, Eric, provides clunky narration.)

It's not clear which parts of this are supposed to be funny, even if just a little. I did laugh at a few of the one-liners. But in the end, there's little humor, black or otherwise, to be mined in this depiction of disturbing mental instability. There's nothing amusing at all in home-schooled teenagers belatedly getting the birds-and-bees lesson from their mentally ill mother. Other things simply don't make sense; for example, if Buttercup was adopted years earlier as a teen, why does she have a thick Hungarian accent as if she just stepped off the boat?

Rapaport's effort here is as derivative as it gets; it is equal parts David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch and early Yorgos Lanthimos ("Dogtooth," "Attenberg") but not nearly as clever or thoughtful as any of those directors' efforts. It's just a bad movie.

TOMBOY (2011) (B+) - An early film from Celine Sciamma ("Water Lilies," "Girlhood," "Petite Maman") explores a gender-neutral child trying to fit in with peers after moving to a new neighborhood. 

 

Ten-year-old Laure (Zoe Heran, above right) has a girly little sister and another sibling on the way, and when she meets new kids in the neighborhood, her short hair and stick frame read as male. As summer lazily winds down, she plays sports with the boys, and when a cute girl named Lisa (Jeanne Disson, above left) asks Laure's name, she identifies as Mikael, and everyone then assumes she is a boy. Her parents, of course, are clueless.

The final two-thirds of the movie follow Laure/Mikael as they walk the tightrope between genders, juggling family and friends. How do you navigate the swimming pool? How do you pee in the woods when others are around? Should she reveal her gender to the crushy Lisa? And what happens when school starts in the fall?

The freckle-faced Heran captures the innocence and confusion that dominate adolescence. Disson brings nuance to the concept of puppy love, and Malonn Levana makes for a pretty sophisticated 6-year-old as the suspicious little sister. Sciamma is a master explorer of the childhood experience, whether she is reveling in a soccer game or conveying the tenderness between siblings. The questions of sexuality in "Tomboy" are secondary to the universal narrative of a child finding themself.

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":

The Best of 2023: Do Go On

A lot of things these days might make you wonder "Why go on?" Some are dramatic. Some are insignificant. Even if you do wonder, you usually just end up carrying on anyway.

Two major cineplexes have closed in Albuquerque in the past year or two, and I can't say that I miss them. There are fewer and fewer reasons to hit a multiplex these days, given the bloat that is usually on offer. Sure, it's fun to sit in a dark theater with strangers and experience art and entertainment. Maybe someday that won't be an option anymore. We'll cope. Or we'll go underground. The point is, I can't imagine I would miss 99 percent of the titles on the average marquee.

Last year I whined a bit about over-long "prestige" movies glutting the market, and there was more of the same this year. Too many movies run significantly longer than two hours, and too few deserve such an indulgence. And still more of our old stand-bys disappointed us. I can't believe so many old male filmmakers still command big budgets and rapt attention. For me it was a parade of hard passes. 

If you still have the patience for Martin Scorsese giving a dull history lesson for three and a half hours, you have my admiration and/or sympathy. Christopher Nolan pontificating melodramatically for three hours? Be my guest. Ridley Scott and Joaquin Phoenix playing war games (2 hours, 38 minutes)? I'd rather live out my days in exile. A Bradley Cooper vanity project (2:09)? Did you see the trailer?! Michael Mann brought out of mothballs to cultivate another Italian accent from Adam Driver (2:09)? Maddon'. Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti stretching a '70s period piece to a relatively brief 2 hours, 13 minutes? ... Maybe?

I believe in life cycles, hitting about every seven years or so, and it feels like another moment to flip the script and purge some stodgy former favorites. I didn't think I'd walk out on a Wes Anderson film, but his "Asteroid City" was so pointless that I could not imagine staying seated in the theater and feeling myself slowly age. We clicked off Todd Haynes' "May December," even though it was streaming for mere pennies. Things culminated on New Year's Eve, when I forced myself to watch all of "Barbie" (interminable at two hours, but thankfully streaming it in my living room) and literally woke up sick the next day. (Surely a coincidence?) I was so insulted by what Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach considered to be clever and cutting edge that it made me rethink my relationship with film the past 30 years. That is not bubblegum hyperbole.

But, also like last year, that doesn't mean it was a bad year for movies. 2023 was OK. I settled on a cool dozen films to rank as the best of 2023, and I had to rely on the multiplex for only two of them -- the rest turning up either at my local arthouse cinema (check out my history of The Guild here) or via boutique streaming services like Mubi or Fandor. (Every title below gets a link to my original review.)

There was no doubt that "Past Lives" would end up at number one, and by a pretty wide margin. The debut from Celine Song, starring Greta Lee as an immigrant finally coming to terms with her childhood sweetheart, is 105 minutes of pristine storytelling, the perfect example of why movies exist. (It might be back in your local theater this week.) The next four on my list were alternately fun (Nicole Holofcener's picking apart of a marriage and Matt Johnson riffing on the BlackBerry phenomenon) and deeply moving (another immigrant tale, "Fremont," and the best depiction of male friendship I've ever seen, "The Eight Mountains"). 

More simple, mainstream fun was found in "Bottoms" (at the cineplex) and "M3GAN" (on DVD). Only one documentary made the Top 12, but a bunch of others get an honorable mention below. One fun discovery was a three-part documentary, uploaded to YouTube, about the old Comiskey Park in Chicago; a fan's passion project shows a fine command of archival footage.

I've tried as much as possible to help you find the movies that are listed. The site Just Watch has a simple search function to figure out where movies might be streaming. I subscribe to Netflix, HBO Max (still, despite my "Barbie" trauma) and indie standard-bearer Mubi, and I do free trials or short-term deals with the likes of Hulu, Amazon and Criterion to strategically gobble up a bunch of titles I've flagged ahead of time. I even still have a DVD player, and the local library is a reliable source of new releases. Maybe I'm desperately staving off irrelevance.

I get it -- like my previous career (journalism), the movie industry is undergoing significant changes, based on technological advances and old-fashioned capitalist greed. It's a blessing and a curse to have so much "content" instantly available at our fingertips. (By the way, check out "Fingertips" on Apple-TV+.) This time of upheaval can leave a viewer skeptical or overwhelmed or just frustrated by the paralysis of choice. 

But (like the newspaper business) nothing has changed about the underlying purpose of filmmaking: It's about telling stories. The delivery methods are in flux, but the mission hasn't changed over the past century, since the Talkies arrived. Spin a compelling tale, don't overstay your welcome, and give me something I won't soon forget. What follows are a bunch of movies that do just that, and which are worth your time.

THE TOP DOZEN of '23

  1. Past Lives: Just a perfect movie about personal connections across decades and continents, and a sense of longing and belonging.  Including the best screenplay of the year by Celine Song. (DVD)

  2. You Hurt My Feelings: Julia Louis-Dreyfus can do no wrong in another finely tuned screenplay by Nicole Holofcener. (DVD)

  3. Fremont: A heartfelt tale of a lonely immigrant. Every generation gets the Jim Jarmusch it deserves. (Mubi)

  4. The Eight Mountains: A magical study of male friendship, captured over decades. (Criterion)

  5. BlackBerry: A giddy retelling of the rise and fall of the millennium-era technology, with a charming Canadian sensibility. Matt Johnson, an emerging master storyteller (see also "Operation Avalanche"), gets the nod for best director. (Apple/AMC)

  6. The Elephant 6 Recording Co.: The perfect depiction of creative collaboration, and a faithful tribute to a very American music movement around the turn of the millennium. (Kino)

  7. Bottoms: Pure stupid fun, as Rachel Sennott teams up again with Emma Seligman ("Shiva Baby") and co-stars with Ayo Edebiri for a spoof of high school clique flicks. (MGM, Fubo)

  8. The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic: A "brutally honest and gripping account of a handicapped man embarking on a mission, by himself, to finally meet his online soul mate." (Fandor, Hoopla)

  9. The Royal Hotel: Another young dynamic duo, Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick, trapped in the Australian outback for this "winking pseudo-horror psych-out." (In theaters)

10. Fallen Leaves: A minor-key story of two lonely people struggling to make a romantic connection. (Mubi)

11. M3GAN: This "Frankenstein" story for our times, a cautionary tale about an AI girl who gets out of control, is gonzo fun. (Amazon)

12. Jethica: "A clever, simple story is buoyed by a stellar ensemble cast to explore the ideas of obsessive relationships, hauntings and atonement." A tiny gem. (Fandor)

JUST MISSED THE LIST

• The cyber thriller "Missing." (Netflix)
  
• The fun romp "Theater Camp." (Hulu)
  
• The sci-fi bro film "Biosphere." (AMC, DVD)
• Christos Nikou follows up "Apples" with a semi-futuristic story about relationships, "Fingernails." (Apple)
  
• The slow-burn political period piece, "Chile '76." (Kino/DVD)
  
• The gay-rights '80s period drama "Blue Jean." (Hulu)
  
• The smart slow-boil suspense film "Afire." (Criterion)
  
• From Romania, an examination of prejudice, "R.M.N." (AMC)
  

 

MORE TOP DOCS 

• A deep dive into the mind of a psychedelic-music pioneer, "Do You Have It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd." (In theaters)
• The well-paced and well-argued political polemic, "South to Black Power." (HBO Max)
• A slick look at a mysterious disappearance in the Australian Outback, "Last Stop Larrimah." (HBO Max)
  
• A fascinating, if sluggish look at the '70s sex researcher, "The Disappearance of Shere Hite." (In theaters)
  
• A sympathetic profile of Mr. October, "Reggie." (Amazon)
  
• A look at a female metal band in Lebanon, "Sirens." (In theaters)
  
• The matter-of-fact "Take Your Pills: Xanax." (Netflix)
  
• A fond tribute to author and editor, "Turn Every Page." (Criterion)
  

 

TOP PERFORMANCES

• Julia Louis-Dreyfus, effortlessly funny in "You Hurt My Feelings."
• Colman Domingo, commanding the screen in the earnest biopic "Rustin."
  
• Anaita Wali Zada, stoic but moving in "Fremont."
• The ensemble -- Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro -- in "Past Lives"
  
• Mark Duplass, making it look easy, in "Biosphere."
• Ana Scotney in "Millie Lies Low." (Starz, Hoopla)
  
• Petri Poikolainen in "The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic."
• Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri, bro'ing it up in "Bottoms."
  

 

THE LEFTOVERS

Some 2022 films we caught up with:  Both "The Silent Twins" and "Dear Mr. Brody" likely would have cracked last year's list. The former was a powerful period piece, based on a true story, about quirky sisters.  The latter was a fascinating documentary profile of a tragic hippie who intended to give away his inherited riches but instead left of a bunch of disappointed people in his wake. ... We were disappointed in Jafar Panahi's "No Bears."

Wayback Machine: We finally reviewed the foundational mockumentary, "David Holzman's Diary" from 1967 and the Maysles brothers' masterpiece, "Grey Gardens.". ... Our favorite director, Krzysztof Kieslowski, finally got his due, with his Three Colors Trilogy screening at the Guild ("Blue," "White" and "Red") (also on HBO Max). ... Retro reviews of some of the all-time greats included "12 Angry Men," "Terms of Endearment," "Slap Shot," "Glengarry Glen Ross," "Basic Instinct" and "The French Connection." ...  We continued to delve into the Godard canon, with some classic early and 'mid-60s offerings and a pair from the '80s and '90s. ... There was a gem at the annual noir festival, 1965's "Mickey One" with Warren Beatty, along with late Bogart, "The Harder They Fall."

Streaming Services: In a bid to clear out the backlog, we did a short stint with Hulu and discovered the thoughtful dark comedy about suicide, "On the Count of Three"; the disturbing story of a marriage in limbo, "The Killing of Two Lovers"; a brutal cringe comedy about a reunion of college pals, "All My Friends Hate Me"; and another winner from Hannah Marks, "Mark, Mary + Some Other People." ... Amazon turned up "Reggie" and not much else.

R.I.P: We said goodbye to Paul Reubens (Pee-wee Herman), Alan Arkin ("The In-Laws"), Wayne Shorter Burt Bacharach (paired with a Dionne Warwick doc) and Sinead O'Connor.

 

GUILTY PLEASURES

• Owen Wilson spoofing the PBS legend Bob Ross in "Paint."
• A fan's tribute to the Chicago White Sox' old ballpark, posted for all to see on YouTube, "Last Comiskey." 
• Nicolas Cage doing his thing in the inconsistent but often amusing "Dream Scenario."

  
  

 

IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME

(Well, maybe this time it is you. 

Some of our favorites let us down.)

 

• We walked out of the latest from Wes Anderson, "Asteroid City."  We labeled it the Twilight of Twee.
• We also turned off Todd Haynes' tedious "May December."
  
• OMG, the technicolor yawn that was "Barbie," from the formerly respected duo of Greta Gerwig (director) and Noah Baumbach (her co-writer). It was insipidly irritating and the absolute low point of the year.
  
• Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams just couldn't find the magic again in "Showing Up."
• Sarah Polley failed to make a book leap off the page, giving us the chatty, leaden "Women Talking."
• Luca Guadagnino delivered an unintentionally comical bomb, "Bones and All."
  

COMING ATTRACTIONS

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

• All Dirt Roads Taste Like Salt
• Adults
• All of Us Strangers
  
• Drylongso
• The Delinquents
• Plan 75

Join us in 2024 as we track down those titles and more of the finest movies you wouldn't otherwise think of watching.

Immigration Tribulations

One of the best of the year, plus cleaning two out of the queue during a free month of Amazon Prime.

FREMONT (A) - Sometimes a movie is so pleasantly perfect that words fail a critic. Just go see it; trust me.

With a heavy debt to the deadpan storytelling and grainy visual style of Jim Jarmusch, writer-director Babak Jalali deftly unravels the story of Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), a refugee from Afghanistan, where she collaborated with the Americans as a translator. She is now in the bland Bay Area town of Fremont, dying slowly of boredom and desperate to make a human connection. She does have interactions -- with co-workers, neighbors, a therapist -- but she yearns for something deeper. 

Donya works at a small local fortune-cookie factory, where she graduates from making the treats to writing the fortunes, which gives her not only a creative outlet to process her emotional issues but also a way to slip in her phone number to whatever lucky soul might find it and contact her. That faux pas will backfire on her. But it will lead to an eventual trip to Bakersfield that offers the hope of a happier future.

Among Donya's acquaintances are co-worker Joanna (Hilda Schmelling), who at one point sings her an old folk tune ("Just Another Diamond Day," below); a cranky Afghan neighbor and his bullied wife; the factory owner (Eddie Tang) who is full of uplifting aphorisms and pithy life lessons; and the proprietor of the restaurant where Donya joylessly eats her dinner every night, joining him in watching a foreign soap opera. Best of all is Gregg Turkington as Dr. Anthony, the therapist, whose alternative methods appear to be self taught (and which revolve around teachings from the novel White Fang). Turkington ("Entertainment") gives this production comedic credibility, serving as the perfect foil for the exasperated Donya. Throughout, Wali Zada, a newcomer, is placid and monosyllabic but barely concealing the roiling emotions within, all suggesting hours of backstory conveyed in a single glance.

Jalali is partial to static shots framing a single character, another Jarmusch touch. The story is paced perfectly over an hour and a half. "Fremont" is co-written by Carolina Cavalli (whose "Amanda" also was released this year), and the script is spare but profound. When Donya has a serendipitous meeting with a brooding auto mechanic (the ubiquitous Jeremy Allen White), the slow grind of life's incivilities suddenly gives way to a glimmer of sunshine out there in California, a land of hope and dreams.

NOBODY'S WATCHING (2017) (B-minus) - Lightweight and uneventful, this earnest film depicts the challenges faced by  an immigrant from Argentina hustling to find work and a sponsor to stay in the United States.  Unfortunately, the main character is a pretty-boy actor who had made a name for himself in Argentina, and it's tough to empathize with his non-grueling existence as a nanny for a friend, among other odd jobs that are not back-breaking.

Nico (Guillermo Pfening) is mostly in denial after, early on, it is clear that the main reason for his move to New York -- a starring role in a Mexican director's independent film -- is falling through and he will be stranded without decent acting work. (It doesn't help that he's blond and blue-eyed and doesn't "look Latino," so he gets rejected at auditions.) Nico jeopardizes his job as a nanny with questionable behavior and soon descends into a decadent lifestyle of drugs and random sexual encounters.

It doesn't help that doors are closing back in Venezuela, too. The show-runner for the popular soap opera that Nico co-starred on had put Nico's character in a coma, though that's not the only reason Nico fled -- there is also a romantic history between him and the show-runner (Pascal Yen-Pfister), who is a closeted husband and father. Much of this movie actually plays out like a soap opera, and not a particularly compelling one at that. The director Julia Solomonoff (writing the script with Christina Lazaridi) is an Argentine who studied film at Columbia, so she surely has crafted a personal tale of an immigrant's life in dog-eat-dog New York. It would help if she gave us more solid reason to care about whether Nico will ever collect a TV show check again.

GOLDEN VOICES (2019) (B-minus) - This comic drama, set back in 1990, never finds an appealing tone as it follows an aging couple whose move from Russia to Israel lays bare the weaknesses of their relationship. It's simply not funny enough to be a comedy or compelling enough to be a drama.

Maria Belkin can be quite captivating at times as Raya, who dodges the mood swings of her surly husband, Victor (Vladimir Friedman), whose disposition is clouded by the fact that he can't get work like they had in Russia -- as renowned voice-over actors who dubbed some of the all-time great films. Raya, instead, gets a job at a call center, and she hides the fact that the work involves phone sex under a pseudonym. Victor eventually falls in with a shady operation that bootlegs theatrical screenings on videotape. If that plot sounds familiar, it's because it strongly echoes a "Seinfeld" episode about Russian pirates. 

Belkin is an aging beauty with an expressive face, in the mold of Katherine Helmond ("Brazil" and TV's "Soap"), and she does her best to wring pathos from her role. But Victor is just a gruff old brute, and when the inevitable climactic reveal comes, it's hard to feel invested in the marriage or to care about how this turns out. Toss in a deus ex machina involving Saddam Hussein's threat of a gas attack on Israel, and things just fall apart at the end.

BONUS TRACKS

This one from "Fremont" plays on a disc while Donya is driving in her car to Bakersfield. It is "Ulu Palakua" by Iwalani Kahalewei:

 

And here is "Just Another Diamond Day" by Vashti Bunyan, from 1970: 

Millennial Wall Street

 

BLACKBERRY (A-minus) - Matt Johnson has established himself as the master of the flashback process movie. He previously imagined NASA in the late '60s faking the moon landing in "Operation Avalanche," and now he starts in the mid-'90s to tell the story of the BlackBerry device, the once-ubiquitous attachment to rich assholes everywhere before the company crashed and burned through malfeasance and a little device that came along called the iPhone.

Johnson stars as Doug, one of the co-founders of Canadian start-up Research In Motion, along with Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis, the visionary behind the outfit. If Mike is an idiot-savant, Doug is more of an idiot. He sports a red headband at all times, even the one time he has to don a suit to impress other suits. Doug speaks almost exclusively in dialogue from classic movies. He lives for Movie Night at the office, quoting along with dialogue.

Their fledgling operation is soon taken over by an opportunistic and brazen CEO, Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), who immediately gets them in the door at Bell Atlantic, to pitch their PocketLink device, based on a crude prototype, slapped together literally overnight. 

Throughout the film, RIM has to walk a fine line between flooding the market with BlackBerries and not overwhelming the systems they run on. In 2007, the iPhone came along -- building the keyboard into the screen instead of having a click keyboard -- and the downfall of BlackBerry was swift and messy.

Johnson -- writing with Matthew Miller -- borrows a little from HBO's "Silicon Valley" (the nerds often riding to the rescue of the reckless CEO) and a bit from "Wall Street" (Balsillie poached top techies from Google and elsewhere, using an accounting trick with stock options that caught the eye of the SEC). His visual style has a shaky documentary feel to it, but is not afraid of drone shots of skylines, either. Baruchel is dead-on as the spectrum-y tech whiz (he eventually morphs, not unlike Steve Jobs, into a Jim Jarmusch-like spiritual guru), and the bromance between Mike and Doug is touching. 

Johnson's narrative hurtles along at break-neck speed, as one liners shoot out and land with ease. When reminded that "perfect is the enemy of the good," Mike claps back, "Well, good enough is the enemy of humanity." We already know that this is going to end in corporate tragedy, but that doesn't take away any of the entertainment value. Maybe it's the Canadian sensibility, the over-arching self-deprecation, that makes this all so delicious.

Some people are born storytellers. There's a Tarantino-esque DYI confidence to Johnson's filmmaking. It is a perfect match of this story that needed to be told, and done so without a heavy hand.

BONUS TRACKS

The film kicks off with the nervous energy of Elastica's "The Connection" over the opening credits:

When the film advances to 2003, the Strokes chime in with the infectious "Someday":

 

When things start to fall get out of control, the White Stripes charge in with "Hello Operator":

Family Business, Part 2: Decay

 

THE MACALUSO SISTERS (A) - It would be difficult to find a movie as gorgeous and sad as this tale of five siblings dealing with tragedy at three different stages of life. Writer-director Emma Dante unleashes an epic tone poem about the sisters in Palermo, bereft of parents and ranging in age from tween to twenties, who keep doves on their roof for renting out to weddings, their main source of income. 

Dante seeks to delve into the paralysis of families who get stuck in the past and their sclerotic traditions. Their grief -- tied to the death of the youngest of them during a day at the beach (and probably connected to whatever happened to their parents) -- haunts them in the form of little Antonella (Viola Pusateri), who continues to appear in her sisters' visions, having never aged beyond girlhood. Dante takes us to a second phase in time, when the survivors are relatively young adults, bickering over the house, as another of them announces a cancer diagnosis. Finally, she jumps forward to old age, when only two are around to bury a third. 

The two the younger middle sisters are not fleshed out much (one is a bookworm; the other is homely and lonely), and the focus turns to vain Pinuccia, who is popular with the men, and melancholy Maria, a frustrated ballerina with lesbian tendencies. The casting is impeccable -- except for Antonella, each character will be played by two or three actresses -- and the aging of the sisters does not become a distraction but rather a selling point.

Dante is working in familiar territory -- the movie brings to mind the sister film "Mustang," as well as Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and the recent mood pieces from Eliza Hittman. She elides dialogue at times, going for atmosphere over direct storytelling (with an effective loop of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedie No. 1" ringing out at key moments). Some of the scenes -- like a playful, tender moment experienced by a young Maria -- can be suffused with joy, longing and a little dread. 

Dante makes the steadily decaying apartment a character unto itself. By the end, that dwelling is weighted with hopes and dreams but pockmarked by bird droppings and faded wallpaper, a haunted museum. Dante unveils the fateful beach outing in flashbacks that reveal a little more of what happened each time, and she injects a montage-like scene at the end that plays out like a brain emptying its memories just before death takes hold, and the effect is both thrilling and anguished. Some heartaches never heal.

EL PLANETA (A-minus) - With a notable nod to early Jim Jarmusch and a bit of the Maysles brothers' "Grey Gardens," Amalia Ulman offers a deadpan take on a mother and daughter eking out their last days of grifting in an economically depressed seaside Spanish town. Ulman, a New Yorker from Argentina, once lived in Gijon, which hosts this cinema verite polemic touching on Ulman's common themes of class, gender and sexuality.

She stars as Leo (Leonora), a 30-ish would-be fashion aesthete who has bad luck meeting available men and is stuck with her eccentric mother in a flat with no heat and, eventually, no electricity, as the pair's economic reckoning slowly comes to a head. The women still put on airs and a confident face to the world -- Leo in funky fashions of her own creation and her mom, Maria (Ulman's own mother, Ale), in a full-length fur coat and designer handbag (convenient for carrying shoplifted items). They dine out on the tab of a local politician that Leo may have dated at one time. With little food in the house besides pastries, Leo whines, "If I keep eating carbs, I'm going to have a poor person's body."

Ulman shoots in distinct black-and-white, with long static camera shots and languorous dialogue reminiscent of Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise." She uses old fashioned screen wipes for a corny retro effect. Her camera lingers on the shuttered businesses of Gijon, a town that apparently has never recovered from the 2008 recession. The women -- exhibiting that bittersweet "Grey Gardens" loopiness -- bicker over mundane household things. Maria likes to "freeze" her enemies by writing their names on scraps of paper that she places in the freezer. Leo, meanwhile, pursues relationships but can't find a man who wants anything but a side romp. (Her meet-cute with a blase shopkeeper (Zhou Chen) finds a real connection between the two actors.) 

Ulman is endlessly appealing as she acts out a parallel version of her own life story. She doesn't lay all her cards on the table, and the pace of this 80-minute exercise can be a bit lethargic in spots, but she reels you in to the sadness and ennui of the mother-daughter team at this critical juncture in their lives. Ulman has a lot to say here about fourth-stage capitalism, and it's fascinating, not really knowing her history going into this (there's this profile focusing on Ulman's transition from fashion and art to film), to be introduced to her fresh voice. 

BONUS TRACK

Satie: