Category Archives: Movie

Café Society

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Cafe_Society, Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Woody Allen

Eisenberg & Stewart with the director

In the new film written, directed, and narrated by Woody Allen (trailer), actor Jesse Eisenberg gets the Allen role and at times, early in the film, appears to be channeling his klutz persona. But the part requires something more, and Eisenberg delivers that as well.

In the 1930s, Bronx-raised Bobby Dorfman (Eisenberg) travels to Hollywood to look for work with his big cheese uncle (Steve Carell). He keeps semi-busy, but mostly falls in love with his uncle’s assistant Vonnie (Kristen Stewart). Alas, she says her heart is spoken for, though Bobby gives romancing her an energetic, hopeful shot.

Missing New York, Bobby returns to Manhattan to work for his sleazy older brother’s new nightclub, which he helps turn into The Place To Be. Bobby becomes a smooth and sophisticated operator in that world. You know he’ll meet Vonnie again, though what will happen . . . Eisenberg and Stewart add real substance to these characters, and her performance has been widely, rightly praised.

If you like Woody Allen’s humor, the scenes with Bobby’s parents (Jeannie Berlin and Ken Stott) are classic and hilarious. There’s not much story to hold the whole schmear together, but perfect moments of Hollywood hype and Manhattan glitz make it fun to watch. Fantastic score of 1930s jazz, beautiful and atmospheric cinematography, and big dose of nostalgia for a pre-digital age.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 72%; audiences: 68%.

The Innocents

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Innocents, Lou de Laâge, Agata Buzek

Lou de Laâge & Agata Buzek

In case the 2013 movie Ida did not give you enough of a taste of the bleak Polish landscape post-World War II and the existential difficulties a young novice there may face, The Innocents gives a whole convent of them (trailer). The opening credits note the film is based on real events. These were documented by Madeleine Pauliac, a member of the French Resistance and a Red Cross doctor in charge of repatriating French soldiers scattered in camps and hospitals across Poland at the end of the war. Her nephew helped develop the movie, using her notes.

French Director Anne Fontaine and a team of writers have brought to life this sensitive story of the aftermath of the country’s “liberation” by the Soviet army. In the soldiers’ point of view and with their commanders’ encouragement, this meant enjoying the spoils of war. As a result, at least seven of the twenty or so Benedictine nuns in this isolated convent are pregnant. “What at first appears to be an austere, holy retreat from surrounding horrors is revealed to be a savagely violated sanctuary awash in fear, trauma and shame,” says Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

While the Sisters have taken vows to hide their bodies from the view and touch of others, when the babies start coming, life gets complicated. Childbirth is a terrifying physical, emotional, and most especially, spiritual crisis for the young nuns, who feel abandoned by God. Hearing her Sister’s plaintive cries, a young novice runs to the nearby village in search of a doctor who is not Polish and not Russian. She finds an aid station staffed by the French Red Cross. Will the young doctor Mathilde (modeled on Pauliac in a stirring and subtle performance by Lou de Laâge) help? Will she be allowed to? What will become of these babies?

Keeping the children would bring scandal down on the heads of the nuns, whose situation is precarious, given the post-war privations, the suppression of the Church by Poland’s new Communist regime, and popular prejudice against illegitimate babies and unwed mothers, regardless of circumstances. They are sitting ducks. While you might be tempted to think of this movie as a period piece, wars with rape as a tactic continue today, with the young women victims often ostracized from their communities and families.

The stern Mother Abbess (Agata Kulesza, also in the cast of Ida) swears Mathilde to secrecy about the births, but is quietly frantic they will be discovered. The Mother Abbess has her own probably fatal post-rape difficulty, but this is inconsequential compared to her fear for the loss of her soul.

Acting as intermediary, Sister Maria (Agata Buzek), serves as translator, though the cultural divide remains almost unbridgeable. Says Christy Lemire in Rogerebert.com, Mathilde, the non-believer, is “a voice of reason in a place of sacred mystery.” The fine acting in this movie helps it maintain a quiet dignity and lack of sentimentality about this whole ugly business until it ends with what seems like an unlikely coda. In French and Polish, with subtitles.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 91%, audiences 84%.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

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Hunt for the WilderpeopleThis New Zealand comic gem (trailer) is about 13-year-old misfit Ricky Baker, whose last-resort foster placement is way, way out in the bush. Frankly, he’d rather be in urban Wellington or Christchurch, hanging with his homies, busting out to his walkman, tagging prime real estate, and living the gangsta life (in his head). But it isn’t to be. He’s too far and too needy to make it back. Not for want of trying.

When Ricky (played superbly by Julian Dennison) disappears into the bush with his foster uncle Hec (Sam Neill, almost unrecognizable under a beard), the child protective system moves into high gear to “rescue” him. This dramatic and high-profile effort to save the boy, one can only imagine, comes after a dozen years of ignoring his needs and the quality and suitability of his placements atop no real understanding of what children need.

Directed with great energy by Taika Waititi, who also wrote the script, it has perhaps one chase scene that goes on too long, but as it occurs, the viewer is still basking in the enjoyment of Hec and Ricky’s hilarious encounter with a real bush man. Colander, anyone?

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times acknowledges Waititi’s effervescent touch reminiscent of Wes Anderson, and says, “Charming and funny, it is a drama masquerading as a comedy about an unloved boy whom nobody wants until someone says, Yes, I’ll love him.” And you will, too.

The credits include mention of drone pilots, and, though there are numerous helicopters in the plot, drones enable an amount of aerial photography heretofore prohibitively expensive. In the film’s travelogue dimensions, also awesome.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 100%!; audiences 92%.

Our Kind of Traitor

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Our Kind of Traitor

McGregor & Skarsgård, Our Kind of Traitor

Our Kind of Traitor is my kind of movie (trailer). A political thriller that avoids the eye-rolling tropes of so many films in the genre—the relentless testosterone-fueled special effects, vehicular mayhem, and beyond-evil bad guys. Instead, it relies for tension on the attachment it craftily develops between viewer and character, thanks to an excellent script and solid acting.

Based on the 2010 John Le Carré novel, as adapted by Houssein Amini, and directed by Susanna White, Our Kind is a movie about trust. While it shows that people at the highest levels of public trust may not necessarily have the public’s good at the top of their agendas—no news flash in this genre—trust at the personal level is still possible. And trust is entails risk. Life-and-death risk.

Low-key London academic Perry Makepeace (played by Ewan MacGregor) and his wife Gail (Naomie Harris) are in exotic Marrakesh trying to revive a fading relationship. When she leaves him alone in a restaurant, he’s befriended by a Russian at a neighboring table, Dima (Stellan Skarsgård, brilliant!), who convinces him to go to “a Russian party” extravagant even by oligarchical standards. The next day Dima persuades Perry and Gail to drop in at his daughter’s 16th birthday party, where it’s just the usual—you know, bands, fireworks, sword swallowers, bejeweled camels.

At the party, Dima pulls Perry aside and confesses he’s the chief money launderer for the Russian mafia and in imminent danger of being murdered in an internecine war. He gives Perry a flash drive and asks him to get it to MI6. He says a big bolus of dirty money is about to land on British shores by way of a shell bank headquartered in the Mediterranean. Dima wants to defect, and he wants the Brits to protect him and, most of all, his family.

Plots featuring the “average man” work because you inevitably wonder, “what would I do?” The operational guys in the British security services (sly Damian Lewis, especially) like Perry’s information, but the big bosses don’t want them to follow up, for reasons of tangled agendas noted above.

After that it’s cat-and-mouse, with Dima and Perry two little mice and pretty much everyone else in the role of fat cats. Says critic Scott Marks of the San Diego Reader, “The mid-summer release of an adult, effects-free British thriller relating to the collapse of Europe’s global financial system timed out perfectly. You’ll Brexit knowing that your entertainment dollar was well spent.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 67%; audiences 57%. The principal complaint seems to be that not much blows up (exactly what I liked about it!). Except of course, for people’s lives. Don’t believe the naysayers. It’s a subtle gem.

Genius

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Jude Law, GeniusDirector Michael Grandage’s movie Genius (trailer) about the relationship between legendary Scribners & Sons editor Maxwell Perkins and flamboyant author Thomas Wolfe had received generally tepid reviews. (while I’m delighted an editor is finally receiving screen time!).

Wolfe was an author whose moods, enthusiasms, and output were not easily corralled, even by someone with Perkins’s experience. After all, he had already brought works to the public from other writers with outsized personalities and personal difficulties–notably Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

It’s easy to imagine the slammed doors that would greet an author today who showed up with a 5000-page manuscript as Wolfe did with his second book, Of Time and the River. The challenging task of turning this behemoth into a publishable manuscript epitomizes the editor’s dilemma: “Are we really making books better,” Perkins says, “or just making them different?” Getting 5000 pages down to a still-hefty 900 made Wolfe’s work different, for sure. And better, at least in the sense of more likely to be read.

Colin Firth, as Perkins, keeps his hat on during almost the entirety of the movie, symbolic perhaps of how his character tries to keep a lid on his difficult author. Jude Law as Wolfe is by turns outrageous, contrite, drunk, hostile, and sentimental. Pretty much like the novels, actually. His performance is consistently inconsistent and always interesting. He shows Wolfe as a man with a lot of words bottled up inside him who can’t always control the way they pour out.

It’s odd to see a mostly British and Australian cast playing so many titans of American literary history, including Perkins and Wolfe, Guy Pearce as Fitzgerald, and Dominic West as Hemingway. (The Hemingway scene required an ending credit for “marlin fabricator.”) The women in the lives of the protagonists are Laura Linney as Mrs Perkins, perfect as always, and Nicole Kidman, who believably portrays the obsessed Mrs. Bernstein. She’s left her husband to cultivate and promote the much younger Wolfe and has her own flair for the dramatic. The performances make the movie worth seeing.

The National Book Award-winning Perkins biography by A. Scott Berg was transformed into a screenplay by John Logan. New Yorker critic Richard Brody dings the script for its departures from the detailed and more richly peopled original, including the book’s fuller explanation for the rupture between Wolfe and Scribners. Brody says a lawsuit and Wolfe’s unsavory political views played a part, and leaving them out does seem a mistake.

Portraying in cinema an intrinsically intellectual and abstract enterprise is difficult (The Man Who Knew Infinity struggles with the same challenge). Like me, reviewer Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert.com apparently had not read the book, so did not have Brody’s reservations. Kenny found “the exchanges between editor and author exhilarating. Logan’s script . . . is invested in the craft of words like few other movies nowadays, even those ostensibly about writers.”

Wolfe blasted onto the American literary scene like a runaway train and departed before he could accomplish a judicious application of the brakes. Yet, he eventually realized who’d kept him on course, as his moving deathbed letter attests.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 48%; audiences: 56%.

The Man Who Knew Infinity

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Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, The Man Who Knew InfinityEven if you’re familiar with the broad outlines of Srinivasa Ramanujan’s amazing history, this movie (trailer), written and directed by Matt Brown, is intriguing and moving on many levels.

A mathematical genius, mostly self-taught and with no university degree, Ramanujan’s insights are still being applied and their significance explored today.

“Almost a century on, his work remains a fertile field of study, an object of astonishment, and a source of pride to his native land,” says Anthony Lane in The New Yorker.

Ramanujan grew up poor in early 20th century Madras (now Chennai), India. When his talents are finally taken seriously, he is encouraged to contact G.H. Hardy, a leading mathematician at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Hardy (played superbly by Jeremy Irons) is a bit of a misanthrope. He brings Ramanujan (Dev Patel) to Cambridge and becomes his mentor, not especially to do the young man any good, but for the intellectual challenge. He insists Ramanujan develop the proofs of the theorems he derives, it seems, by intuition. But Ramanujan is “a genius who can only explain that his propensity for solving problems and equations comes from God!” says Mimansa Shekhar in India Times.

Ramanujan struggled with the proofs, resenting that they keep him from developing new ideas. The tug-of-intellectual-war between the him and Hardy forms much of the movie’s conflict. Both of them confront a calcified British academic hierarchy, reluctant to admit an Indian could match—much less surpass—English intellectual prowess.

Hardy is interested in math. Full stop. While he recognizes Ramanujan’s mathematical powers, he’s little interested in the other aspects of life that animate his protégé—his culture, religion, and love of his wife (Devika Bhise) whom he’s left back home under the hostile supervision of his mother (Arundathi Nag).

Ramanujan does have advocates at Cambridge—Hardy’s mathematics colleague John Edensor Littlewood (Toby Jones) and Bertrand Russell (Jeremy Northam). But it’s the start of World War I, and people’s attention is mostly elsewhere.

Jeremy Irons is perfect, and I liked Dev Patel’s performance, too. Jones and Northam are always good. As with any biopic, the plot is constrained by the actual events of Ramanujan’s life, and in his case, those events—significant and earthshaking though they were and continue to be—take place mostly inside his head. Even if we moviegoers could see them, we wouldn’t understand them! Nevertheless, I found the story moving along rather perkily, aided by excellent scenes of India and his wife’s coping with her obsessive mother-in-law.

Definitely worth seeing, and a worthy subject for a film. In India, Ramanujan’s birthday, December 22, is celebrated as National Mathematics Day.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 62%; audiences, 80%. (Why the gap? My guess is audiences are less bothered by the conventional story.)

Maggie’s Plan

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Ethan Hawke, Greta Gerwig, Maggie's Plan

Ethan Hawke & Greta Gerwig in Maggie’s Plan

Tons of history and your mom tell you falling for a married man is a chancy way to find happiness and a father for your baby. In this romantic comedy by writer-director Rebecca Miller (trailer), the unlikely happens and aspiring novelist John Harding (played by Ethan Hawke) actually divorces his self-absorbed, chilly wife Georgette (Julianne Moore) and marries the girl. They have a lovely baby. A couple of years on, though, the marriage is just not working.

That’s when Maggie (Greta Gerwig) develops her plan. She’ll try to get John and Georgette back together.

There are some nice moments and some funny moments, though the comedy is never quite as screwball as it might have been. As a tale of female manipulation, Maggie’s efforts don’t reach the delicious complexity of Lady Susan Vernon  in Love & Friendship, also in theaters now.  Lady Susan plows ahead like an ocean liner, let the devil take the hindmost, and that creates a more comic effect than the rather more realistic angsty New Yorkers in Maggie’s web.

Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph are a prickly married couple, long-time friends of Maggie, stuck to each other like burrs. Mina Sundwall is John And Georgette’s teenage daughter, a perfect adolescent cynic.

Gerwig gives an engaging performance, Hawke is always interesting, and Julianne Moore shines as the ambitious academic—with a Danish accent, no less. There’s a real New York feel to the film, too. Says Christy Lemire in RogerEbert.com, director Miller “truly gets the city’s rhythms and idiosyncracies, and her dialogue frequently sparkles.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 84%; audiences 59%.

Love & Friendship

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Lady Susan, Kate BeckinsaleIn this brilliantly funny movie (trailer), writer-director Whit Stillman takes on a lesser-known early Jane Austen novella, Lady Susan. It’s a a gem of female manipulation cut and polished on male cluelessness, and Lady Susan Vernon is the lapidarist in chief.

In this early epistolary novel (probably written when Austen was only 23), the author’s disdain for the treatment of women is evident, and her character gets her revenge, deliciously. Though it’s still the cake underneath  her better-known novels, there it’s masked by a thicker romantic frosting (see this recent post about the dark subtext of Austen’s novels).

Near-penniless, Lady Susan must find a husband for herself and her daughter, and Kate Beckinsale is a powerful Susan, “the most accomplished flirt in all England.” The cast is strong, with Chloë Sevigny as the American Alicia Johnson, Susan’s co-conspirator, eager to avoid being returned to Connecticut, Susan’s perceptive sister-in-law Catherine (played by Emma Greenwell), and long-suffering daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark). Jemma Redgrave, playing Catherine’s mother, immediately reveals herself as an heir to the British acting family through her strong physical resemblance to auntie Vanessa.

The men are cheerfully dim-witted, none more so than Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett). With £10,000 a year, he’s as rich as Darcy. But he’s also “a bit of a rattle”—“Regency slang for blithering idiot,” A.O. Scott reminds us in The New York Times. “How jolly! Tiny green balls. What are they called?” Sir James asks, pushing them around his dinner plate. “Peas.” Catherine’s brother Reginald (Xavier Samuel) is not dim, but even he is no match for Susan’s calculated charm offensive and her “uncanny understanding of men’s natures.”

Quite apropos of the current political season, friends Susan and Alicia blithely justify their most outrageous behavior, putting themselves always on the high ground. At one point, when confronted with her own irrefutable error, Susan snaps, “Facts are horrid things.” Clearly, a woman for this season.

Above and beyond the satisfying plot, delicious characters, and irresistible pull toward respectable matrimony, the charming countryside (filmed in Ireland) and gorgeous costumes are worth the price of admission. Over the story, widow Susan’s costumes go from all-black deep mourning, to light mourning (grey and lavender), to none at all. When she dons that scarlet dress, look out! “It all ends up pretty much as expected,” Scott says, “and yet also manages to take you by surprise.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 99%; audiences 74% (I’m betting audiences find it “talky.” But in the talk, there’s wit.)

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Sing Street

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Sing Street

Ferdia Walsh-Peelo & Lucy Boynton in Sing Street

A charming movie from Ireland about a half-dozen Dublin boys at the Synge Street Christian Brothers School who start a band (trailer). We sort of know this story. We’ve sort of seen it before. But the freshness of the acting make it fun all over again. Conor Lalor (brilliantly played by Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) is a new student at the school and the adolescent boys there plan to make his life miserable. Life at home is bad, too, with his parents fighting and splitting.

A real place, the Synge Street CBS has a long history, and this movie takes place in a time of pupil loss and relatively low achievement (a line in the credits mentions that the school is “not the same place” it was in the 1980s, when the film is set). The first scene of Conor in his new classroom shows the elderly priest who is their teacher, hearing aid dangling, writing on the blackboard with his back to the pupils who are creating holy hell. The principal steps inside and the students stand to attention. The principal glances at the board and points out to the teacher that in this class he is to teach French, not Latin. Teacher: “French. How modern.”

The school’s Latin motto “Viriliter Age” (“Act Manly”), is translated by Conor’s older brother as “Rape your students.” In short, the school is chaos. Conor channels his creativity toward writing songs and creating the band, Sing Street.

These musical ambitions have a lofty goal: impressing the older teen girl, Raphina, who stands near the school every day and claims to be a model. If she is a model, and if he has a band, she can star in his music videos! Simple. The fact that he mostly carries it off is wondrous, resulting in a feel-good movie about a collection of near-misfits who make music work for them.

The band’s songs are by Gary Clark, lead of the 1980s British band Danny Wilson, and it’s good. We don’t know how Conor hears it, but what he sees in terms of music video potential is the pole star he’s determined to follow—and take Raphina with him.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating, 97%; audiences, 96%.

Elvis & Nixon

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Elvis & NixonIf you remember the Nixon presidency at all—the odd, stiff gestures, the way the man hunkered down like a turtle trying to duck back into its shell, his paranoia and cluelessness, and his straight-arrow staff (all criminals in the making)—you will appreciate how much this odd movie (trailer) nailed the early 1970s!

My expectations weren’t high, and perhaps that’s the key, because it surprises you at every turn, even though the premise is tissue-thin. It’s based, after all, on the fact that the photo of Nixon meeting Elvis in the White House on December 21, 1970,  is the most-requested photo in the National Archives. When you think of the treasures the Archives possesses, this is absurd on its face. A more incongruous encounter is hard to imagine, as Mark Olsen said in the Los Angeles Times, “one stiff in a businessman’s suit and the other relaxed in a velvet cape.”

What makes the film so strong are the performances. Kevin Spacey is Nixon in both body language and with his bitter, eye-popping rants. Michael Shannon is a less handsome yet ultimately powerfully sympathetic Presley. He visits the President to offer his help. He’s set on obtaining a badge as an At-Large Federal Agent so he can help combat the drugs and youth unrest he sees as destroying the country. In this goal he finds an ally in the President, or, as NPR reviewer Dave Edelstein said, “two lost souls connect.”Presley’s supreme confidence—arriving unannounced at the White House gate—makes an interesting counterpoint to Nixon’s lack of it.

The supporting cast—Colin (son of Tom) Hanks and Evan Peters as Nixon aides Egil Krogh and Dwight Chapin and Alex Pettyfer as Presley confidant Jerry Schilling—all play it so straight the two leads are free to let the absurdities of the situation have full rein:

Krogh (to Bob Haldeman): The King is here.
Haldeman: The President doesn’t have any appointments with royalty.
Krogh: No. THE King. Elvis.

No one knows what really went on in that session. Nixon hadn’t started taping his encounters yet, though staff were present for parts of it. The script by Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal, and Cary Elwes is a plausible and imaginative recreation.Their humor can be subtle as well as laugh-out-loud (as I did, lots) and some great sight gags, too, like when Presley and Schilling run into an Elvis impersonator in the Los Angeles Airport. But it never goes for caricature or the cheap shot.

“Nobody really wants to see a big takedown of Elvis Presley,” director Liza Johnson said in the LA Times article linked above. “And nobody needs to see a big takedown of Richard Nixon because that happened already.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 76%; audiences, 77%.