Purgatory

 A pair streaming on the Fandor site:

JETHICA (A-minus) - A clever, simple story is buoyed by a stellar ensemble cast to explore the ideas of obsessive relationships, hauntings and atonement. On the surface, it tells the story of Jessica, who is fleeing a stalker and ends up back near her hometown outside Santa Fe, N.M., where she runs into an old friend. It turns out Jessica's stalker is more of a ghost, and her friend is dealing with her own apparition. 

If that sounds contrived, it's not. Neither is it yet another cookie-cutter horror film, thank goodness. No, it's a smart, thoughtful, concise (72-minute), ruminative buddy film and quasi road movie. Jessica (Ashley Denise Robinson) has a situation on her hands as she drives through the Southwest, and she agrees to pull over and crash with Elena (Callie Hernandez), who is lying low in her grandmother's trailer out in the middle of nowhere. They don't seem to have been close friends back in school, but they bond over their respective predicaments.

Meanwhile, Jessica's "stalker," Kevin (an inspired Will Madden) besieges the trailer with his paeans of devotion to the object of his obsession, pardon his slight lisp, Jethica. The movie trailer lets slip what's really going on here; suffice it to say that Elena has learned a few tricks on how to deal with those trapped between worlds. What's interesting is that Elena and Jessica are themselves trapped in their own netherworlds. They are living off the grid, on the run, paying penance for their perceived sins.

All of this plays out efficiently on a micro-budget with a script attributed to director Pete Ohs and his four principal actors (including Andy Faulkner as Benny), suggesting a lot of improv and a healthy amount of quirk. While Kevin's rants are off the charts, the other dialogue, especially between the women, feels spare and lived-in. Robinson has a way of conveying a lot of meaning merely with subtle looks. Hernandez -- a charismatic cross between Parker Posey and Selma Blair, with a droll Allison Williams delivery -- is the key go-between among the other three. Madden makes his madness almost lovable, and Faulkner wraps things up with a slam dunk of a final scene. 

You can try to write this off as a knock-off Mumblecore spook session, but it's better than you might expect, a director and his quartet of actors bringing their A game. (Note: Some New Mexicans might be distracted at the end of the movie. It purports to take place entirely near Santa Fe, an hour north of Albuquerque, but the final scene, based on a prominent road sign, takes place near Socorro, which is an hour south of Albuquerque.) 

L'ICEBERG (2007) (C) - From Belgium comes this trifle from what seems like a long-ago era. It's a chronically quirky story of a woman who spends the night locked in a restaurant cooler who then becomes obsessed with making a pilgrimage to the polar region to commune with icebergs. 

Because her husband and children, back in their soulless suburb, didn't even miss her while she was gone overnight, Fiona (Fiona Gordon), struck with existential angst, flees on a journey of self-discovery. She eventually meets a deaf-mute sailor (what luck!) who will guide her on the final leg of her mission. 

Three people, including the movie's husband and wife, wrote and directed this broad farce. Gordon is a wild physical comedian -- a bit Lucy, a bit Olive Oyl -- and Dominique Abel is droll as the husband. The film has a whiff of "Amelie's" whimsy, with choreographed set-pieces. However, the slapstick is more Mr. Bean than Marx Brothers.

Beyond the spectacle of the cartoon-like proceedings, the story is just too listless to maintain even a thin 84-minute running time. It's just a little too silly to matter.

Cinema Verite

 

SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF (2021) (B+) - Donald Rugoff is the subject of this deep dive into the heady days of the American new wave of the 1960s and '70s, tracking the machinations of the film distributor and theater owner who became a legend in New York's film world.

By all accounts a real prick of a boss, Rugoff was a dogged progenitor of the independent film scene, opening cinemas that would set the template for the art houses that would proliferate in the '70s, known for their mix of indie releases, foreign films and revivals (and splashy events, like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"). Director Ira Deutchman -- in his first foray behind the camera but a longtime player in marketing and distribution himself (Cinecom, Fine Line Features) -- sifts through newspaper clips and tracks down key players in Rugoff's story.

We hear from a host of Rugoff's former employees (to a person recalling an unpleasant man who expected them to be workaholics like he was), a former wife (who eventually gave up playing second fiddle to the movie industry), and some of the filmmakers who owed a debt to the man, such as Costa-Gavras ("Z"), Robert Downey Sr. ("Putney Swope") and Lena Wertmueller ("The Seduction of Mimi"), in one of her final interviews.

Beyond Rugoff's personality and accomplishments, Deutchman reanimates a golden era of film-going. Rugoff was a showman; he built lavishly designed theaters and lobbies, and he was an imaginative marketer -- as responsible as anyone for the success of Monty Python's "Holy Grail," in part by dressing up local actors in knight's costumes and having them gambol about Manhattan, for example. Not content with mere movie posters, Rugoff hired an artist to create elaborate window dioramas for new releases at his main theater.

Deutchman, as documentarians like to do these days, injects himself into the story (he was one of the former employees), but he makes it work, and his playfulness with the narrative makes for captivating viewing. Take a trip back to a great era of American filmmaking.

DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY (1968) (A) - We revisited this foundational outsider film, a micro-budget experiment from journeyman Jim McBride about an obsessive filmmaker who documents his life falling apart during one summer week in New York. As we put it after discovering it in 2006:

It's perhaps the first-ever mockumentary, about a guy dealing with a breakup. It was shot in summer 1967 in New York, and 98 percent of it is legit -- the sounds and the images of the city are not made up. The film is a jarring immersion in that place and time. More real than real, it seems.

David (L.M. Kit Carson) -- in a persona that would eventually be familiar to modern influencers and vloggers, albeit in condensed iPhone/internet form -- lugs a 16mm Eclair film camera, Lavalier microphone and reel-to-reel recording deck with him wherever he goes, capturing not just Manhattan in a particular moment of time, but also the minutiae of his life through confessional diary entries spoken directly into the camera. His antics include hounding his model girlfriend, Penny (Eileen Dietz), at all hours of the day and night; when he secretly films her sleeping in the nude, she finally flees him for good. Depressed, he films his TV habit during one evening, and we get a hyper-speed montage of fleeting images from an actual night of network TV: "Batman," "Star Trek" and shows by Dean Martin and Joey Bishop, commercials and all.

McBride scripts a few monologues for side characters, including Sandra (Louise Levine), a sexed-up potty-mouth who playfully harangues David from her car while paused in traffic. Another character, in Godardian fashion, offers meta-commentary on the impossibility of pointing a camera at something or someone and expecting to capture true reality; the presence of the camera alters reality as soon as the 24-frames-per-second start rolling.

"David Holzman's Diary" created quite a stir when it traversed the festival circuit during the summer of love. It isn't revealed until the end credits that it's a work of fiction, and the crowd reportedly booed in San Francisco at the deception. McBride and Carson started out just goofing around with the equipment and turned a germ of an idea into a feature. McBride borrows not just from the French New Wave but also the groundbreaking documentary techniques of the Maysles brothers and D.A. Pennebaker. It truly is fascinating to be immersed in a specific moment and place in time -- AM radio provides a vague running commentary throughout, and we hear news reports out of Vietnam and snippets of Top 40 songs.

Carson is an engaging figure. (He didn't have much of an acting career, but he would go on to write "Breathless" and "Paris, Texas" in the '80s.) David is flustered by the turn of events -- just as he starts documenting his life it begins unraveling, leaving him bereft by the time the powerful ending rolls around. This is not just a mesmerizing time capsule, but also a clever, moving character study. 

Herstory

 

WOMEN TALKING (C+) - Well, it is right there in the title. Truth in advertising. This is a movie about women talking. Whether it seems tedious to you will depend on your point of view and your tolerance for showy performances.

Sarah Polley offers a stagey and over-acted drama about abused women debating whether to leave their Amish-like religious cult. And boy, do they debate it. While all the evil men are away (improbably), some of the women meet in a hay loft to argue over whether they should stay (and possibly rebel against the men) or escape (and possibly doom their souls to hell).

The film is based on a Miriam Toews novel, which itself is launched from a true story of a Mennonite colony in Bolivia in the 1950s. It feels odd to place this in what seems like a North American setting in the year 2010; while it might be understandable for women to feel trapped and without options 60-plus years ago in the middle of South America, that feels more like an implausible conceit in modern times. 

That's a shaky foundation for a bleak drama, and the performances of the women never fit well together. Rooney Mara is the surprise powerhouse here (like in "Carol"), hitting just the right tone as the pregnant Ona, with a crush on the man who watches over the women and takes notes of their deliberations, August (Ben Whishaw), whose job it is to teach the schoolboys. Jessie Buckley (much better in "The Lost Daughter" and "Wild Rose") bursts with promise, but she can't seem to find a consistent voice as Mariche, who lives with a particularly abusive husband. The short straw, though, goes to Claire Foy as angry Salome, who wants to stay and fight; Foy comes off as strident, as if she is on stage playing to the cheap seats. Frances McDormand offers little more than an uninteresting cameo.

Nothing comes together here. It all feels like jagged ideas tossed together into a sluggish narrative. Much of the "action" takes place in that hay loft, giving this a claustrophobic air. Whishaw's August cries a bunch of times, and you wonder why Mara's Ona would fall for such a sap, even if he is the opposite of the unseen brutes. In the final reel, Polley rushes toward a Cecile B. DeMille ending that feels undeserved. Besides, it's 2010; even if they choose to leave, how far will they get in their horse-drawn wagon, trailing a bunch of kids, and with no money. Do we care? It's clearly fiction.

PAMELA: A LOVE STORY (B) - The bombshell Pamela Anderson gets a sympathetic portrayal in a rote documentary that nonetheless reveals layers of Anderson that you might not expect. She comes off as thoughtful and introspective -- would you believe she has kept a diary most of her life? 

Director Ryan White, who has also profiled tennis champ Serena Williams and Dr. Ruth Westheimer, hangs with Anderson during COVID days, when she has let her guard down and retreated to her ancestral home in British Columbia. (Yet another fun fact: she's Canadian!) Now in her 50s, she often appears here without makeup and in baggy clothes, suggesting that she has finally been freed from whatever obsessive diet that gave her a famously waspy figure. 

Anderson reflects on the good, the bad and the ugly of her life, most notably the whirlwind romance with rock drummer Tommy Lee. (That was only one of six of her marriages; the most recent one comes and goes during the course of filming.) She still comes off as willfully naive about the whole sex-tape scandal. But she gets to make the case that she at least has some acting chops to go with her sex appeal, including a recent run on Broadway in "Chicago."

While the career highlights help structure the narrative, it's the small personal moments that make the movie. She might have played a bunch of bubbleheads on the screen, but she actually is rather meditative, even a bit philosophical, in her day-to-day life. Let's wish her luck on that path to tranquility. 

BONUS TRACK

To drive home its tone-deaf nature, "Women Talking" heavily features the old Monkees hit, "Daydream Believer." Here is the version by the songwriter, John Stewart:

New to the Queue

 February is the bluest month, but it's a light blue, like a sky blue ...

We just can't quit the guy, especially when it's his big swan song, "Magic Mike's Last Dance."

Matt Johnson makes good movies ("The Dirties," "Operation Avalanche"), so we're stoked for his comic retelling of the rise and fall of a onetime tech darling, "Blackberry."

A documentary about an obscure power-pop band from Chicago in the 1990s, "Out of Time: The Material Issue Story."

Another band from the heartland that you might never heard of, but who have one of the great compilations CDs, "We Were Famous, You Don't Remember: The Embarrassment." 

From Finland, a journey of love, "The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic."

Holy Crap!* Fine Young Cannibals

 

BONES AND ALL (D) - Luca Guadagnino has been in a downward spiral for years now, and let's hope he has finally hit rock bottom. The man who once brought us "I Am Love" and "A Bigger Splash" -- two of the finest films of the 21st century -- has been wallowing in self-indulgent melodrama for years now.

His fascination with Timothee Chalamet -- the pouty, pretty star of the lumbering "Call Me By Your Name" -- has led him down a disastrous road. And here we have a road movie -- at least a weak attempt at one -- that is also a mess from start to finish. Hey, how about an earnest drama about two young adults coming to terms with their shared affliction -- cannibalism. 

The drama that unfolds is, too often, downright laughable -- as in accidentally funny and just weird overall. The gore -- the chomping of flesh -- is rampant. It is simply unpleasant to sit through.

Chalamet co-stars as moody Lee, a 130-pound bad-ass, who is drawn to 18-year-old Maren (Taylor Russell), who has newly set out on her own and is discovering her full powers as a cannibal. She recently learned -- from a creepy old stranger (Mark Rylance in "Cape Fear" De Niro territory) with a stereotypical southern accent -- that "eaters" can smell each other, and thus sustain some sort of noble underground railroad of freaks who crave human flesh. These outcasts literally sniff the air, as if they are floating cartoon animals hot on the scent of a freshly baked pie.

Chalamet mumbles a lot and clenches his jaw to show that he's conveying emotions. He seems to be channeling Nicolas Cage's over-the-top character in "Valley Girl" -- but as if it were being parodied, like in "Walk Hard." Russell seems talented but completely adrift in an under-defined role. I felt bad for Russell having to interact with her co-stars. She had to cuddle up with Chalamet's bony physique, and the two have zero chemistry together.  And she not only endures leers and slurs from Rylance's character, but he also lies on top of her at one point, literally drooling. Why would anyone think to put a young actress through that? There certainly is little payoff to the scenes in this unfortunate movie.

I felt bad for Mark Rylance, too. There is no salvaging his spooky hick stalker. Rylance is considered, at least in his IMDb intro, "the greatest stage actor of his generation." (I'd never seen one of his movies before. Or his stage plays, for that matter.) Here he is reduced to a stereotypical menacing simpleton.

So, as far as the lead performances go -- whether it was their fault or not -- this film has three strikes against it. That doesn't even count the wretched writing, and just the overall cravenness of the idea in the first place.

"Bones and All" fails at every attempt at allegory it might have been trying to make:  addiction; otherness; coming out; the struggles of adolescence; child abuse; parental abandonment; stalking. Any serious analysis along those lines fails as a fool's errand. Maren seeks solace in a tape recording made by her father, and those snippets start out as a clever narrative device, but the drip-drip of these mundane musings become irritating by the second half of the film.

It all reaches a silly climax.  As Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's turgid soundtrack bleats on, Chalamet utters some final lines to his co-star that are as predictable as they are unintentionally funny. From beginning to end, this is an ill-advised dud.

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

Motley Crews

 

BROKER (B) - This is a low-key follow-up by Hirokazu Kore-eda to his impeccable shaggy dog story from 2018, "Shoplifters." Like that previous film, the writer-director cobbles together a makeshift family that lives just outside the law. This slow-paced effort provides diminishing returns.

Song Kang-ho ("Parasite") and Gang Dong-won play a mismatched pair -- the first, older, runs a laundry and the second is a former soccer star who grew up in an orphanage. They run a hustle in which they take babies left at a church's drop box and hawk them on the black market. 

The baby's mother in this case, So-young (Lee Ji-eun), comes back for the baby and finds the pair, joining them in finding a suitable couple for the baby boy. This road-trip gang is joined by a boy, a major soccer fan, who escapes the orphanage to join the adventure, in what is portrayed to outsiders as an extended family. The group is tagged by two police detectives, including Bae Doona, stealing the show as Soo-jin, a hardened cop, partial to stuffing her face during stakeouts as she patiently tracks her prey.

The film is sweet and smart, but it never quite takes off. It is more of a series of vignettes, both amusing and touching. The narrative is knitted together neatly, and the performances are all strong (even the boy, always clinging to that soccer ball is charming). Lee comes off as pretty and shrewd, showing just enough maternal instinct to insist on finding the right home for her newborn. But it's the stone-faced Bae who quietly grounds the film, determined not to let these brokers get away with their crime.

I LOVE YOU MAN (2009) (A) - Everything comes together here to create comic gold -- a fine idea, solid jokes and a deep, talented cast. Paul Rudd takes command as a bumbling mensch who is set to get married but has no pool of friends from which to put together a stable of groomsmen.

Rudd plays goofy Peter Klaven, an L.A. real estate agent who is looking for a big score by selling the home of Lou Ferrigno (playing himself), aka the original Incredible Hulk. Peter is in love with his fiancee, Zooey (Rashida Jones), who begins to fret that Peter doesn't have enough friends to fill out the wedding party. So Peter agrees to get fixed up on man-dates and even goes online to meet buddies. They range from a 90-year-old man (Murray Gershenz) to an age-appropriate guy who mistakes Peter's interest for romantic affection (Thomas Lennon). 

Peter eventually meets Sydney (Jason Segal), a free spirit who wanders into an open house at the Ferrigno place to sample the free food and trawl for divorced women. It's a fine meet-cute, and soon the two are bonding in Sydney's band cave, sharing their abject love for the band Rush. Peter's constant references to "slappin' [playing] the bass" is a wonderful running joke; in fact, Rudd is masterful at Peter's horrible attempts to do various  accents (any accent he does comes out sounding like a leprechaun) or to coin lame hipster phrases, often just ending up tongue-tied.

John Hamburg, whose writing credits include "Meet the Parents" and "Zoolander" and who directed "Along Came Polly," wrote the script with journeyman Larry Levin. The writing is smart at every turn, silly but believable.

The cast here has so much talent that some strong players barely get screen time or lines to utter. Jaime Pressly and Sarah Burns are sharp as Zooey's best pals. Pressly, especially, riffs well with her brute of a husband, played by Jon Favreau. They have an acidic banter that inevitably tees up hot makeup sex. Nick Kroll and Aziz Ansari are barely there as Peter's fencing buddies. J.K. Simmons and Jane Curtin are Peter's parents, and Andy Samberg is Peter's brother, a gay fitness instructor who specializes in straight guys. Carla Gallo and Catherine Reitman barely squeeze in a few lines as Zooey's other friends. We get a glimpse of Matt Walsh in the role of "inpatient golfer."

This all revolves around Rudd and Segal and their giddy new friendship. Hamburg straddles the line between parody and heartfelt storytelling, and he crafts a low-key comedy classic.

Dionne and Burt

In a bittersweet coincidence, we watched a documentary about Dionne Warwick, which featured songwriter Burt Bacharach, who died yesterday at 94. I don't want to overshadow her story, but it felt appropriate, after having started writing the review, to twin the two, whose careers might have been unimaginable if not for each other.

DIONNE WARWICK: DON'T MAKE ME OVER (B) - This is quite the hagiography, but then, the legendary singer deserves a flattering tribute, and it's not like she has skeletons in her closet, unless you want to ding her for shilling for a psychic hotline, or the rock star sins of drug possession and tax manipulations (and Twitter silliness).

Warwick, with the gospel training she shared with her cousin Whitney Houston, had a dynamic voice and range, and that's the biggest asset of this film, which takes the time to let most of her big hits play out rather than chopping them up into snippets. Starting in 1962, when she was 21, she was teamed with Burt Bacharach and Hal David, the team that would pen many of her hits in the 1960s. Warwick, in turn, would put those men on the map. (As the New York Times writes today, "Bacharach realized he had found the rare vocalist with the technical prowess to negotiate his rangy, fiercely difficult melodies, with their tricky time signatures and extended asymmetrical phrases." In other words, the woman could sing.)

Warwick, still spry and playful in her early 80s, is an engaging subject, and journeyman directors David Heilbroner and Dave Wooley don't overthink things here. They get out of the way of Warwick's talents and personality. They load up on talking heads, including Bacharach but also "That's What Friends Are For" pals Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, and Elton John, plus superfan Bill Clinton, Quincy Jones, Cissy Houston, Berry Gordy Jr. and Chuck Jackson (Bacharach's "Any Day Now"). We also hear from Snoop Dogg, who spins the story of Warwick, back in the era of gangsta rap, convening an early-morning summit at her mansion to lecture Dogg and his cohorts about their vulgar and misogynistic lyrics. Like other moments in the documentary, the tale feels sanitized and embellished -- Warwick as wise, kindly auntie -- but no harm, no foul.

We also have to sit through fawning comments from the ever-smug Clive Davis (who lured her to Arista records in the late '70s and helped revive her career) and treacly sentiments from Warwick's sons, one of whom is in the music business. So, it's all very cheery and uplifting, filtered through the gauze of nostalgia, and big deal, what do you want, a hit job that tears through her tax filings? No. What the world needs now, is love, sweet love -- it's the only thing that there's just too little of. For 90 minutes, just give me a C, a bouncy C.

BONUS TRACKS

Let's celebrate some of Warwick's greatest hits. First, my favorite from the Bacharach-David trove, "I Say a Little Prayer," with one of the greatest couplets ever written to kick off a song:

The film's title track, her breakthrough hit, "Don't Make Me Over":

And a third from Bacharach and David, "Anyone Who Had a Heart":

And then some later-career ear candy written and produced by Barry Gibb, "Heartbreaker":

 

While she had numerous hits, Warwick never had a solo number-one song on the main U.S. charts, but she did reach the top with "That's What Friends Are For" (with the super quartet) and one of my favorites, 1974's "Then Came You," with the Spinners:

OK, Boomer

 

IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING (B) - The 53-year-old band King Crimson has three drummers, all dwarfed by elaborate drumkits. That's just all you need to know about this snooty prog-rock enemble surrounding its lone remaining founding member, Robert Fripp. 

This documentary by Toby Amies offers an intimate, inside view of the band from a few years ago. Amies was apparently recruited by Fripp to be a friendly adversary on the other side of the camera, and we often hear Amies' voice as he interacts with the band members and road crew.

Fripp is universally described as insufferable. And he doesn't mind showing off many of these qualities on camera. He is obsessive about practicing his guitar, and he expects more than perfection from the musicians around him. He prefers to dress primly in tailored suits, and he speaks down to his audience, as if it's patently obvious that he has figured out everything about life and believes that he is never wrong. Yeah, he's that guy.

One can admire Fripp and his artistry, but you don't have to abide him. Fripp, for all I know, is technically brilliant. But King Crimson, as one fan lets on during an interview, is quite the acquired taste. The songs are tough to stomach. They are a mix of heavy metal, jazz noodling, high school poetry, horn skronks and show-off guitar licks. (A typical song is titled "Larks' Tongues in Aspic - Part IV." Dare we call some of this frippery?) To me, the music has always sounded like, to borrow Fripp's own pet phrase, a load of shite. 

But you don't have to love, or even like, King Crimson's jams to appreciate what's going on here. This is a story about an iron dictator who runs his band like an abusive husband or father. Several times during the film, band members pause and look over their shoulder while being interviewed, as if Big Brother might be listening in. In fact, Fripp, tooling around in the background of one shot, suddenly jumps into a conversation to show that he's been listening, and he proceeds to chastise both the questioner and the interviewee for both failing to steer the conversation precisely where he thinks it should have gone. Imagine the daily drudgery of trying to please this man. 

While we get whiffs of "This Is Spinal Tap" and the Metallica documentary "Some Kind of Monster" (a title that could have worked here, too), Amies, to his credit, isolates the band members and draws out some quality insights. The director has a habit of pushing them to go deeper than their initial answers, and the conversations grow deeper and more thoughtful, even philosophical.

The star of the movie is multi-instrumentalist Bill Rieflin, previously known as a drummer with the likes of Ministry and Pigface back in the day. Halfway through the film it is revealed that Rieflin has been battling cancer for years (he died in 2020), and his commentary is truly thoughtful and touching, at times. Why bother continuing to play in this band (especially for such a prick like Fripp) when he could be checking more things off his bucket list. The simple answer, he says, is because this is just what he does -- he's a musician. 

Former members chime in to lend perspective to the rollercoaster ride this band has endured under Fripp's fanaticism. All of them retain respect for the man, no matter how ugly their fallouts were decades ago. Two of them left after the first year of recording and touring. Guitarist-vocalist Adrian Belew -- who mistakenly thought he was an equal partner of Fripp's in the '80s and '90s -- talks about his hair falling out during that era, and he doesn't mince words about getting kicked out of the band, but he still speaks kindly about Fripp. It's as if he and the other victims -- perhaps with the help of years of therapy -- have made peace with their experiences, perhaps lucky to have escaped. Fripp is sort of like the scorpion in the old cautionary tale -- he is who he is, don't expect him to change, and tolerate his perfectionism for as long as you can.

Fripp does seem to have created a cohesive band of fine musicians -- he notes that this is the first iteration of the band not to have someone in it who actively hates him -- and there is no doubt that King Crimson makes a deep connection with its audience. On that level, he is an unqualified success, a visionary who was intent on succeeding at all costs. Or, as Walter Matthau's Willy Clark said of his former partner, Al Lewis, in "The Sunshine Boys": "As an act, nobody could touch him; as a human being, nobody wanted to touch him."

BONUS TRACK

No way we're linking to or embedding any King Crimson songs. Gen X did this sharp post-punk alt-prog better. Here's Steve Albini's Shellac, for example, with "A Minute":

 

Hell, let's do a second one, also off the album "At Action Park." This one is "Crow," live:

The Best of 2022: Time to Move It Along

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE TOP 20 of '22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

JUST MISSED THE LIST

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

 

MORE TOP DOCS

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

TOP PERFORMANCES

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

 

THE LEFTOVERS

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

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

 

 

GUILTY PLEASURES

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

 

IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME

(Well, maybe this time it is you)

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

COMING ATTRACTIONS

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

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

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

Deconstructing Video Memories

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BONUS TRACK

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

The trailers:

Let Her Eat Cake

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

BONUS TRACKS

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

 

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

 

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

New to the Queue

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

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

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

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

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

BONUS TRACK

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

Now & Then: Andrea Arnold's Character Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing Like a Good Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BONUS TRACK

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

Doc Watch: The Perils of Success

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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