March 2022

THE BATMAN (2022)

     Remember “The Dark Knight”? This latest incarnation of Batman doubles down on the darkness, in both our hero Bruce Wayne’s character and the look of the film. This version of Gotham City, never a bright and shiny island, exudes such a grimy, dangerous pitch black that it’s hard to imagine anyone other than homicidal maniacs wanting to live there.

     If you assumed that after at least 10 big-screen tales in the past 35 years about Wayne and his crime-fighting alter-ego screenwriters had run dry of original storylines, you’d be correct. Despite numerous jaw-dropping sequences, the script offers little beyond the usual “everyone is corrupt” scenario, while piling on to the already tapped-dry absent-parent diagnosis.

      Robert Pattinson, who’s done good work in “Tenet” and “The Lighthouse,” slides into the legendary costume, bringing a more cynical, arrogant attitude but not much more. As Wayne, he’s barely there, looking more like the bass player in a neo-punk band than a city leader and industrialist. Poor Lt. Gordon (the always reliable Jeffrey Wright), who serves as The Batman’s escort, interpreter and defender; eliciting more than a half sentence from Batman is played like a major breakthrough.

      As expected, the supporting players have all the fun, starting with Paul Dano as the main provocateur, The Riddler, who plays the role as if his hair is on fire; Colin Farrell, unrecognizable as The Penguin; Zoe Kravitz as an unnamed Cat Woman, who serves as Batman’s wingperson and love interest; and, best of all, John Turturro as Carmine Falcon, a mobster who seems to have connections to everyone in Gotham.

       Hard to know exactly what director Matt Reeves (who did first-rate work on two of the “Planet of the Apes” films) brings to this CGI-heavy picture, but the look of the movie is worth the price of admission. I can almost guarantee that director of photography Greig Fraser, nominated this year for “Dune,” will be back at the Oscars show in 2023. The production design by a team led by James Chinlund, who worked with Reeves on the “Apes” films, creates a bleak, claustrophobic universe that dwarfs the story.

      While I don’t see this Batman franchise reaching the artistic heights of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, but, for my money, any Batman is better than all the other comic book heroes put together.

 

RIFKIN’S FESTIVAL (2022)

       Casting is everything. I’m constantly watching B-movies from the 1940s and ‘50s and, in many cases, the only thing that separates them from the prestige pictures that remain critical darlings half a century later are the actors. Not even the quality of the performances, but simply the name. If it’s Lawrence Tierney on the run rather than Kirk Douglas, the picture’s fate is all but sealed.

     In Woody Allen’s latest film, which received a very short theatrical release but can be streamed, the 86-year-old writer-director all but tanks the project by casting the curmudgeonly 78-year-old character actor Wallace Shawn as Mort Rifkin, former cinema professor married to a much-younger movie press agent.

      I have always enjoyed Shawn in his many appearances in film and TV since his debut in Allen’s “Manhattan” (1979); he was great as the radio star Masked Avenger in the director’s “Radio Days” (1987). But his unsteady, high-pitched voice and disconcerted manner are hardly the stuff of a leading man, especially one nearing 80.

      The very elementary story follows Mort to the San Sebastian Film Festival, where he’s the plus one of his wife Sue (Gina Gershon), whose client Philippe (French actor Louis Garrel) is a painfully serious director whose film is the most anticipated of the festival.

    Almost immediately, Mort suspects his wife is carrying on with the younger (but much closer to Sue’s age) man and spends the rest of the story fretting about it.

    The only relief from his constant complaining comes when he meets an attractive physician (Spanish actress Elena Anaya) with an equally problematic marriage, who he befriends.

     In nearly every scene, despite the usually quotient of clever, amusing Allen dialogue, I kept imagining another actor in the role of Mort—Alec Baldwin (remember, the film was shot two years ago), Steven Carell, Colin Firth, Josh Brolin, all stars of recent Allen films—rather than Shawn, the epitome of the regular old guy, who looks like he arrived on set directly from a mid-afternoon nap

       The reasons to see “Rifkin’s Festival” are the handful of expertly done comic homages to some of the great European films of the 1950s and ‘60s, usually in the form of Mort’s dreams, including Fellini’s “8 ½,” Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim,” Godard’s “Breathless,” Bergman’s “Persona,” Bunuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” and, lastly, recreating the chess match from Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” with Christoph Waltz as a sarcastic messenger of death.

     All are beautifully shot in glorious black and white by master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, including a very funny take-off from “Citizen Kane.”  (Storaro’s camera work throughout the film makes you want to book the next flight to the Spanish coast.)

     Otherwise, the movie is a frustrating slog—not nearly as interesting as Allen’s previous, barely released, “A Rainy Day in New York.”

      As a side note, “Rifkin’s Festival” brought the number of movies (not counting repeat viewings) I’ve seen since I started keeping track in 1978 to 8,000. It’s no coincidence that watching a new Allen film registered that milestone—I planned it, foolishly hoping for a much better film.     

     Approaching the number, I was struck mostly by how many hours of my life I’ve frittered away on bad movies—maybe half the total, being generous—even as I continue to be hopeful every time the opening credits roll. But I watch on, expecting, health permitting, to hit the 10,000 mark in the next 10 years.

  

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (2022)

     Despite the title, Julie isn’t really a bad person—just indecisive.

     This Norwegian film offers the prelude to a life, all those relationships, rash choices, wrong and right turns, that we inevitably experience before we settle into what we generally define as “our life.” Yet all these half-stops need to add up to something cohesive—at least in drama—and writer-director Joachim Trier doesn’t make much of an effort to deliver a payoff.

     First introduced as a medical student, Julie (a luminously flighty Renate Reinsve) then turns to psychology before taking up photography, while actually earning a living as a bookstore clerk. At one point, she’s inspired to try her hand at writing, getting an article published on sex in the #metoo era.

    Yet all these pursuits exist purely to lead her to different men. As much as the film embraces Julie’s feminist independence, it continues to define her by the boyfriend de jour. I seriously doubt that a similar movie about a man’s early adulthood struggles would be so centered on his partners.

     Julie’s most lasting relationship is with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a punkish, 40something graphic cartoonist whose success seems to stifle her progress as he seeks some kind of permeance.

     What elevates this picture, and I assume earned it nominations for best screenplay and foreign-language film, is Reinsve’s performance. She makes you sympathize with her plight even as you are shaking your head at her foolishness.

She brought back memories of 1970s performances by Jill Clayburgh in “An Unmarried Woman” and Judy Davis in “My Brilliant Career,” characters searching for something even as they’re not sure what.

     I have no doubt that if I had seen this film when I was in my 20s, I would have found it irresistible. But that was then. Fits and starts of youth make for amusing moments but eventually they need to add up to something.

  

THE REPORT (2019)

     In the 1960s and ‘70s, when American politicians found themselves being held accountable after a couple hundred years of playing gods, filmmakers jumped in, turning the political thriller into a popular genre.

     Some of the best films of the 1960s took both military and civilian leaders to the cleaners (“The Manchurian Candidate,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “Fail Safe,” “The Best Man,” “Seven Days in May”), before the conspiracy theories became more sinister in the 1970s with “The Parallax View,” “Three Days of the Condor” and “All the President’s Men.” Hollywood was tapping into the growing belief that maybe the guys (and in those days it was all men) running the country weren’t all to be trusted.

    Since that awakening, politicians, generals, the intelligence community and corporate bosses have been featured as bad guys in American films more often than serial murders. Everyone seems to be corrupted in the “Mission: Impossible” and “Bourne” franchises.

     But no paranoiac creativity was needed in “The Report,” written and directed by Scott Z. Burns (screenwriter of “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “Contagion”), which chronicles the actual investigation into America’s torture program launched post-September 11.

      Instead of Woodward and Bernstein or the “Spotlight” section of the Globe, the Senate Intelligence Committee ran this probe with a very determined Daniel Jones (Adam Driver, more intense than usual) as its lead investigator.

      Working for about seven years with a small team, Jones, along with his boss Sen. Dianne Feinstein (an excellent Annette Bening), fought the stonewalling of CIA and the Obama administration to gain cooperation, access to records and ultimately publication of the heavily redacted, almost 7000-page report.

      Burns impressively turns the drudgery of the meticulous probe cinematic—adding scenes of the torture and meetings held by those who greenlighted the plans—without turning the film into a Frontline documentary.

    What the report makes clear is that despite the unspeakable acts of torture on hundreds of men, nothing of substance was ever discovered from the secret program. Almost as depressing, no one in the intelligence community ever took responsibility for the Bush administration’s actions—even though Obama was president when it was finally revealed.    

     Burns avoids overplaying the dramatics, instead detailing the facts: this is a political procedural that tells the disturbing story of unchecked, easily duped, secretive government agencies that do whatever they want in our name.

     

THE TENDER BAR (2021)

      J.R. Moehringer’s acclaimed remembrance of his Long Island upbringing, which seemed like a natural for big-screen treatment, took 15 years to be turned into a motion picture. That should have been a clue.

     The screenplay, by Oscar-winner William Monahan (“The Departed”), and lead actor Tye Sheridan (“The Card Counter”) fail to make the film version of “J.R.” engaging enough to steer the ship of a coming-of-age story. While the adults dominate the first act, when it’s Sheridan’s turn to carry the narrative, the movie grows tedious.

      The movie begins with young JR and his mother (Lily Rabe) moving back to his grandfather’s home (Christopher Lloyd, looking like he just walked off set of “The Addams Family”) and the boy, with little contact with his father, forms a bond with his bartender uncle (Ben Affleck). Director George Clooney does a good job of replicating the 1970s, with a soundtrack of Top 40 tunes and those classic fashions, but the story comes off as too generic to have any impact. Once JR heads off to Yale to become a writer—he spent time as a Los Angeles Times reporter in the 1990s, winning a Pulitzer for featuring writing—the film loses almost all its energy.

    While Clooney’s record as a filmmaker is far from flawless; for every “Good Night, and Good Luck” and “The Midnight Sky,” there have been flops, “Monument Men” and “The Ides of March.” In “Tender Bar,” Sheridan simply doesn’t have the screen presence to hold the episodical plot together.

       Only Affleck manages to carve out an original character, though the bromides he offers whenever JR hits a bump in his road grow tiresome.  All in all, it’s a disappointing trip down memory lane.

 

ANNETTE (2021)

     This painfully serious musical goes beyond just being a bad film—it’s an aggressively unpleasant bad film.

      Adam Driver (who else…he seems to star in six films a year) plays an outrageous performance artist, whose act is so offensively idiotic that it has to be taken as parody, marries a famous opera singer (Marion Cotillard) much to the displeasure of the paparazzi.

      Nothing much happens for the next hour or so, until, the story soars into fantasy land when Driver discovers that his newborn can cry loudly in tune. She becomes a huge star during a worldwide tour---and did I mention that the child is a wooden, Pinocchio-like puppet?

       Maybe the satirical insight of this creation by director Leos Carax and writers Ron and Russell Mael (avant-garde pop duo Sparks) went over my head, but I can definitively state that the score by the Maels is unlistenable. A child could have written a more interesting set of lyrics.

      Driver and Cotillard, usually fine actors, don’t have a chance in this misguided art-film, but I kept wondering as I watched: at what point did they realize they had hit the low point in their careers?

 

BEST FILMS OF 2021

     Maybe the industry still hasn’t recovered from the pandemic, but the year offered startling few quality pictures. Here is my list of best films and performances. I found it a struggle to fill out my Top 20, filling the second half with films that weren’t very good, but had something, usually performances, that at least made them palatable.

  Films

  1  West Side Story                                       11  Spencer

  2  The French Dispatch                               12  The Green Knight

  3  The Card Counter                                    13  Nightmare Alley

  4  Pig                                                            14  In the Heights

  5  The Tragedy of Macbeth                          15  No Time to Die

  6  The Lost Daughter                                    16  Being the Ricardos

  7  Passing                                                     17  Licorice Pizza

  8  Don’t Look Up                                           18  King Richard

  9  House of Gucci                                         19  Belfast

10  tick, tick…BOOM!                                     20  The Power of the Dog

 

  Director

  1  Steven Spielberg, West Side Story

  2  Wes Anderson, The French Dispatch

  3  Joel Coen, The Tragedy of Macbeth

  4  Paul Schrader, The Card Counter

  5  Lin-Manuel Miranda, tick, tick…BOOM!

 

  Actor

  1  Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog

  2  Nicolas Cage, Pig

  3  Oscar Isaac, The Card Counter

  4  Denzel Washington, The Tragedy of Macbeth

  5  Andrew Garfield, tick, tick…BOOM!

 

  Actress

  1  Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter

  2  Kristen Stewart, Spencer

  3  Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye

  4  Lady Gaga, House of Gucci

  5  Jennifer Lawrence, Don’t Look Up

 

  Supporting Actor

  1  Ciarán Hines, Belfast

  2  Jared Leto, House of Gucci

  3  Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog

  4  Mark Rylance, Don’t Look Up

  5  Jeffrey Wright, The French Dispatch 

 

  Supporting Actress

  1  Ariana DeBose, West Side Story

  2  Ruth Negga, Passing

  3  Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter

  4  Toni Collette, Nightmare Alley

  5  Tilda Swinton, The French Dispatch

 

  Screenwriter

  1  Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness

      and Jason Schwartzman, The French Dispatch

  2  Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Lost Daughter

  3  Rebecca Hall, Passing

  4  Paul Schrader, The Card Counter

  5  Steven Levenson, tick, tick…BOOM!

 

  Cinematographer

  1  Janusz Kaminski, West Side Story

  2  Dan Laustsen, Nightmare Alley

  3  Andrew Droz Palermo, The Green Knight

  4  Ari Wegner, The Power of the Dog

  5  Bruno Delbonnel, The Tragedy of Macbeth

 

 

 

Photos:

Jeffrey Wright and Robert Pattinson in “The Batman” (Warner Bros.)

Wallace Shawn, Gina Gershon and Louis Garrel in “Rifkin’s Festival. (Gravier Productions)

Ben Affleck and Tye Sheridan in “The Tender Bar.” (Amazon Studios)