Tuesday, March 11, 2025

March 2025


SCARECROW (1973)

     Since the late 1960s, five actors—Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman—have been crucial players in more than 50 films that I have included in my annual Top 10. Without these five performers I doubt I would have turned into the movie fan I became.

    Hackman, who died last month at age 95, was the least flamboyant of the five, excelled at playing both an unexceptional guy who lives outside of mainstream society and the smug insider who may or may not be corrupt. Hackman was barely a celebrity, certainly compared to those other actors, which allowed him to connect with viewers even in the most average of films. The fact that most filmgoers remember him for “The Poseidon Adventure” or “Superman” speaks to his ability to offer some class to even superficial Hollywood spectaculars while also anchoring subtle masterpieces like Francis Coppola’s “The Conversation” or Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves.”

     He found stardom later than most of his contemporaries: he was 37 when he landed his breakthrough role as Clyde Barrow’s brother Buck in “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and 41 when he won the best actor Oscar for “The French Connection” (1971).

     He was only five years younger than 1950s stars Paul Newman and Jack Lemmon; three years older than Michael Caine. But beyond his chronological age, Hackman always seems more mature, more experienced in the travails of life, than anyone else in his films.


        In “Scarecrow,” a film often forgotten in both his and Pacino’s legacies, he plays Max, a drifter and dreamer just out of prison who joins up with Pacino’s Lion in this road-trip through the West. Naïve Lion just wants to get back to Detroit to see his child born after he went to sea, but with Max in charge there are many side trips, barroom fights and disputes as they thumb their way east.

     Max’s demeanor shifts from ornery to gregarious in a split second; an opinionated hobo determined to open a car wash in Pittsburgh, who sleeps with his shoe under his pillow and wears every shirt he owns (six or seven) at all times. This stands out as a rare humorous performance in a career of dramatic roles (though he delivered hilarious bits in “Young Frankenstein” and “The Birdcage”). As directed by Jerry Schatzberg (who had directed Pacino in “The Panic in Needle Park”), with a sterling script from Garry Michael White, “Scarecrow” captures the kind of down-and-out characters that roamed the country’s hinterlands for much of the 20th Century—an American version of Vladimir and Estragon from “Waiting for Godot.” 

     Also worth checking out, from both ends of his career, is his performance as a son trying to escape the shadow of his father in “I Never Sang for My Father” (1970) and his turn as the paranoid recluse Brill in Tony Scott’s “Enemy of the State” (1998). But it’s hard to find a performance by Hackman that isn’t completely believable and, most of the time, memorable.

 

THE FIRE INSIDE (2024)

      More often than not, Hollywood’s publicity machine is the biggest obstacle facing good movies finding an audience. The studios, though just high-profile releasing companies, pick winners and losers, and rarely do under-promoted pictures get seen.

    Not surprisingly, this movie about an African-American girl from a poor community, Flint, Michigan, slipped in and out of theaters virtually unnoticed.     Find it if you can (streaming on Prime Video) because it’s one of 2024’s best movies, featuring two outstanding performances and an unblinking portrait of a struggling community.

     Telling the real-life story of two-time Olympic gold medal winner Claressa Shields, director Rachel Morrison and writer Barry Jenkins, who wrote and directed the Oscar-winning “Moonlight” (2016), take a cliché plotline—youth escapes troubled home life by excelling at a sport—and turn it into a multi-dimensional look at both the ups and downs of female boxer Shields, played with intense conviction by Ryan Destiny, and life in the black neighborhoods of Flint.

     The film opens with a pre-teen Claressa (Jazmin Headley) showing up at the local gym run by the affable Jason (a memorable Brian Tyree Henry), who takes her under his wing; by the time Claressa’s a teen, she’s among the top female boxers in the country and headed to the 2012 London Olympics.

     Not many films have captured the complex relationship between athlete and coach as well as “The Fire Inside,” and most of the credit has to go to these two actors. Henry, who scored a 2022 Oscar nomination for his role as the small-town mechanic who befriends Jennifer Lawrence in “Causeway,” is just as convincing here, especially in the second half of the story as he tries against typical biases to secure endorsements for Claressa.

      Destiny, who at 30 convincingly looks like a teen, has been a recording artist since she was 15, and has appeared in the TV series “Star” and “Grown-ish.” But her performance as Claressa is clearly a big step up. She captures the fierceness needed to succeed at boxing while displaying the vulnerability of a child coming from a dysfunctional home.    

       This is Morrison’s feature debut after working as a cinematographer on such high-profile pictures as “Mudbound” (2017) and “Black Panther” (2018). In her use of travelling-shots of Flint and the handling of boxing sequences, Morrison’s work in “The Fire Inside” shows her to be a director with a superb eye.

  

I’M STILL HERE (2024)

     The brutal regimes, with U.S. support, that reigned across South America in the 1970s and ‘80s, imprisoning, torturing, and killing thousands of citizens because of their politics, remains a still-healing scar in many of those countries.

    Walter Salles (“Central Station” “The Motorcycle Diaries”), Brazil’s most high-profile filmmaker, tells the horrors of his nation through the true story of Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and their family. The picture earned unexpected Academy Award nominations for best picture, best actress and took home the Oscar for best international film.

   While the first third of the picture focuses on the happy family enjoying their Rio de Janeiro oceanside home, in the background the political situation in the country grows darker.

 

     When their good friends decide to relocate to London, the Paivas send their oldest daughter with them out of caution. A few months later, Rubens, a one-time politician who is secretly helping the underground movement, is arrested, followed by his wife and another daughter.

    The filmgoer experiences the oppressive government through the experiences of Eunice, who after she is released from prison, works to discover what happen to her husband.

     Eunice’s upbeat but determined personality as superbly portrayed by Oscar-nominated Torres dominates the film, as she balances her roles as activist and mother. If there is a flaw in the film, it’s that Eunice, facing an horrendous reality, remains so calm and deliberate in her search for justice.

      Torres, who has been a major Brazilian star for more than 30 years, winning the best actress award at Cannes in 1986 for “Love Me Forever or Never,” scored a well-deserved Oscar nomination (and should have won) for her performance in “I’m Not Here” and took home a Golden Globe. Her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who earned an Oscar nod in 1998 for Salles’ “Central Station,” plays the older version of Eunice in “I’m Still Here.”

     Salles extends the film’s story to present day, which, for me, reduces the impact of the political chaos of the 1970s even as it gives a fuller picture of the Paiva family. Yet that’s a minor complaint; “I’m Still Here” is the perfect example of how to personalize a societal problem, a national tragedy.   

  

KILL OR BE KILLED (1950)

    One of my wishes for the new year is that more Hollywood directors attempt to make serious films with running times in the 90-to-100-minute range. It’s possible: their predecessors managed to do it for 80 years.

      While I’m not claiming that this low-budget Lawrence Tierney picture, directed by Max Nosseck (a B-movie director from Germany), is equal to any 2-hour-and-30-minute Oscar-nominated picture, or even very good, but it shows how much plot one can packed into 67 minutes. Here’s what happens in barely over an hour:

·         Tierney sings “Oh! Susanna” in a South American bar with the local band.

·         He demands payment for installing AC in the bar.

·         The owner, while getting Tierney’s money, is killed.

·         Tierney sees the killer run away and follows. But the cops follow Tierney, thinking he killed the bar owner.

·         Tierney escapes onto a boat, hidden away by the unhappy wife (Marissa O’Brien) of the boat’s owner (Rudolph Anders). For Tierney and O’Brien, it’s love at first sight.

·         He jumps ship and works on an island with natives clearing bush.

·         When he demands some rights for the workers, the boss (who ordered the bar killing) and his righthand man (George Coulouris of “Citizen Kane” fame) figure out that he’s the witness in the bar killing.

·         The pair enlist Tierney (he’s an engineer) to design a hospital for the workers, with no intention of building it. (The plot offers no reason why they don’t kill him immediately.)

·         During this time, Tierney and the boss’s wife pick up their romance.

·         There’s also time for the boss to wax philosophically about the dangers of the jungle and life’s fate while everyone dons a pith hat.

·         A native servant boy befriends Tierney and warns him that Coulouris is going to push him into the piranha-infested river.

·         Instead, Coulouris sleeps with the fishes and Tierney returns to battle it out with Anders.

·         During the fight, the young servant shoots the boss dead.

·         Tierney and Maria kiss and all is well in the jungle.

I can only hope that a few of the movies I’ll see in 2025 will have that much going on.

 

THE PIANO LESSON (2024)

      While not as memorable as the 1995 television production of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, this film, filled with fine performances, continues Denzel Washington’s ambitious plan to bring all of Wilson’s works to the big screen.

     It began with “Fences” (2016), giving Washington one of his best roles as Troy Maxson, a frustrated middle-aged father and husband. The actor served as producer for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (2020)—the play lumped into the “Pittsburgh Cycle” but set in Chicago—and this new film.

     But he turns “The Piano Lesson” into a family affair: son Malcolm makes his directing debut (and co-wrote the script with Virgil Willliams) and John David plays the key role of Boy Willie.

     Most of the action, set in Depression Era Pittsburgh, takes place in the home of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson) where his niece, Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) keeps the prized heirloom, a piano handed down from slavery days. Her brother Boy Willie wants to sell the piano to buy some land back home in Mississippi. That conflict spurs most of the discussions, along with the occasional appearance of the ghost of a man Boy Willie might have killed.

     All three principals are superb; Jackson won a Tony for this performance in the stage revival of the play in 2023 and Deadwyler, outstanding as Emmett Till’s mother in “Till” (2022), should have been a contender for a supporting actress Oscar.

        Unlike “Fences,” this film doesn’t utilize its Pittsburgh setting, which was disappointing. In addition, writer-director Washington needed to take a red pen to Wilson’s play, which goes off on tangents that lose their impact amidst all the talk.

  

LEE (2024)

      One of the most interesting women of the 20th Century, Lee Miller was a high-profile fashion model, an avant-garde photographer, a figure in the Paris-based surrealism art movement of the 1920s and an admired war photographer during World War II who famously posed in Hitler’s bath tub the day he killed himself.

     But the best thing about this bio-pic of Miller, directed by Ellen Kuras, a top Hollywood cinematographer (“Summer of Sam,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), making her first feature, is the performance of Kate Winslet, who brings this fearless, bohemian woman alive. Otherwise, the movie plays like a coffee-table photo book of Miller’s life, including clunky narration by way of by end-of-life interview scenes interspersed through the first half of the film. 

      While there are glimpses of her life among the surrealists—she was photographer Man Ray’s mistress for a time—the film is mostly interested in her work during the British blitz and as she followed the Allied troops as they liberate Europe with photographer partner Davy Scherman (Andy Samberg). The most interesting drama depicted in the film are the fights she has with her employers, London Vogue editors, over her pictures. Andrea Riseborough, Oscar nominated in 2022 for “To Leslie,” is especially memorable as sympathetic editor Audrey Withers.  

     Since “Sense and Sensibility” (1995), when she was just 20, Winslet has been among the cinema’s finest actresses, yet she’s found few good roles in the last 10 years. Her best work in that period is probably as a rural detective in the 2021 HBO series “Mare of Easttown.” I had hopes “Lee” would be the big-screen return she needed, but it isn’t worthy of her talents or Miller’s.     

 

MANHANDLED (1924)

     Long before she played the delusional Norma Desmond, Gloria Swanson was among Hollywood’s most popular movie stars, beginning in the late 1910s. Still a teenager, she arrived on the West Coast from Chicago and almost immediately became a star of Mack Sennett’s Keystone comedies along with her husband Wallace Beery. (They divorced after about two years.)

      Moving to Lasky’s Famous Players (later Paramount), she started working in features, starting with Frank Borzage’s “Society for Sale” (1918) and then making a half dozen for director Cecil B. DeMille and ten for director Sam Wood. Allan Dwan, another of the great silent filmmakers, was her director of choice when she made “Manhandled,” a romantic comedy that displays Swanson’s comic skills.

     In the opening sequence, shopgirl Tessie becomes lodged between two tall men (Swanson was not quite 5-feet tall) as she rides home on the crowded subway. In a plot typical of the era, she’s allured by wealthy suitors as she nearly forgets about her longtime beau (Tom Moore). Frank Morgan (“The Wizard of Oz”) plays the owner of a dress shop and tea room who hires Tessie to serve as hostess, imitating a Russian exile. It makes little sense, but it gives Swanson plenty of chances to roll her distinctive eyes and show what a feisty woman does in the face of aggressive behavior of men.  

       Though she married six times, Swanson’s most famous relationship was with Joseph P. Kennedy, who saved her financially in the late 1920s and became her paramour. Her extravagant lifestyle had left her virtually broke despite being one of the highest paid actresses in the business.  Most memorably, their partnership resulted in one of the most legendary films of the silent era, “Queen Kelly.”

      They hired the difficult, obsessive Erich von Stroheim (“Greed” “The Merry Widow”) to direct and he lived up to his reputation. Disputes, financial and artistic, resulted in the film never being finished by von Stroheim, instead it was cobbled together by Swanson and director Richard Boleslawski and released, with sound scenes added, in 1932. It all but ended von Stroheim’s career.

      The intended version was reconstructed and released 50 years later. It features one of Swanson’s best performances as a convent girl abducted by a prince, caught up in royal intrigue and eventually being shipped off to Africa to run a brothel. (Clips of the film are shown in “Sunset Blvd.”)

     Like most silent stars, Swanson struggled to find her footing with the coming of sound, though she was only in her early 30s. After 1931, the actress could be heard regularly on radio programs but appeared in just four films before Billy Wilder rejected Mary Pickford and Mae West and cast her in the role of a lifetime for “Sunset Blvd.” (1950).

     While her performance remains one of the most iconic in film history (along with the irony of von Stroheim being cast as her driver), it didn’t do much for her movie career, spending the rest of her working life mostly in television and on stage (“Twentieth Century” in the 1950s, “Butterflies Are Free” in the 1970s). She had memorable guest roles playing herself on “The Beverly Hillbillies” and later in the film “Airport 1975.”

      Because both Swanson and Norma Desmond were silent actresses who were no longer stars, it’s easy to equate them. Yet unlike Wilder’s character, Swanson was hardly forgotten in 1950 and was anything but a bitter recluse.

     It’s also bad history to regard the silent era as just a prelude to talkies. Silent pictures were an art form, with its own gallery of stars and filmmakers, its own style and techniques, that abruptly ended in 1927, leaving most of the players behind or diminished. Swanson was one of the lucky ones, delivering one last great performance.

 

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (2024)

     Pedro Almodóvar’s latest picture, his first in English, displays the difficulties often faced by writer-directors working in a language not their own. His hyper-reality, soapy Spanish pictures have established him as one of the best filmmakers of the past 40 years, but this heavy-handed metaphor for the death of the planet due to climate change lands like a young filmmaker’s sincere first effort.

      Adding to the impression that the film was made by a grad student are the endless references to literary heroes, including James Joyce (quotations from “The Dead”), Faulkner, Hemingway, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf along with filmmakers Rossellini, Bergman and Max Ophüls. I appreciate the director giving props to those who inspired him (as Woody Allen has done in a few of his films), but most of the references seem forced into the plot.

    Martha (a perfectly cast Tilda Swinton), suffering from cancer, has decided to end her life and persuades Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a friend she hasn’t seen in years, to be there when she does it, literally in the room next door. They spend the last few weeks—while Martha ponders when to take her life—at a high-end cabin in upstate New York.

     On paper—it’s based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez—the movie seems like a perfect setup for heartfelt, intellectual conversations delivered by two world-class actresses. But the dialogue is blunt and simplistic, lacking any sense of nuance that you would expect from two well-educated women (Ingrid is a novelist, Martha a foreign correspondent). The clunky dialogue sucks the life out of the story.

     Even more didactic are the discussions between Ingrid and her on-again, off-again boyfriend (John Turturro), who lectures on the ravages of climate charge. Nothing in this film is left to the imagination.

       Swinton comes off best, looking emaciated (more than usual) and worn out she rises above the script to give a striking performance. 

 

PHOTOS:

Gene Hackman and Al Pacino in “Scarecrow.”  (Warner Bros.)

Fernanda Torres in “I’m Not Here.”  (Sony Pictures Classics)

Danielle Deadwyler and John David Washington in “The Piano Lesson.”  (Netflix)

Gloria Swanson puts off another suitor in “Manhandled.” (Paramount Pictures)

 

 

 

Thursday, February 27, 2025

Best of 2024


  Films

  1  September 5

  2  A Complete Unknown

  3  Conclave

  4  The Brutalist

  5  Saturday Night

  6  Hard Truths

  7  The Apprentice

  8  The Fire Inside

  9  The Old Oak

10  His Three Daughters

 

11  Knox Goes Away

12  Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

13  Gladiator II

14  Sing Sing

15  Fly Me to the Moon

16  The Piano Lesson

17  Dune: Part Two

18  Thicket

19  Civil War

20  Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

 

 Director

 1  Tim Fehlbaum, September 5

 2  Edward Berger, Conclave

 3  James Mangold, A Complete Unknown

 4  Jason Reitman, Saturday Night

 5  Brady Corbet, The Brutalist

 

 Actor

 1  Timothée Chalamet, A Complete Unknown

 2  Ralph Fiennes, Conclave

 3  Adrien Brody, The Brutalist

 4  Gabriel LaBelle, Saturday Night

 5  Colman Domingo, Sing Sing

 

 Actress

 1  Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths

 2  Nicole Kidman, Babygirl

 3  Ryan Destiny, The Fire Inside

 4  Tilda Swinton, The Room Next Door

 5  Mikey Madison, Anora

 

 Supporting Actor

 1  Jeremy Strong, The Apprentice

 2  Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain

 3  Ben Chaplin, September 5

 4  Brian Tyree Henry, The Fire Inside

 5  Guy Pearce, The Brutalist

 

 Supporting Actress

 1  Natasha Lyonne, His Three Daughters

 2  Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown

 3  Danielle Deadwyler, The Piano Lesson

 4  Isabella Rossellini, Conclave

 5  Felicity Jones, The Brutalist

 

 Screenwriter

 1  James Mangold and Jay Cocks, A Complete Unknown

 2  Peter Straughan, Conclave

 3  Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum and Alex David, September 5

 4  Mike Leigh, Hard Truths

 5  Azazel Jacobs, His Three Daughters

 

 Cinematographer

 1  Jarin Blaschke, Nosferatu

 2  Greig Fraser, Dune: Part Two

 3  Eric Steelberg, Saturday Night

 4  Phedon Papamichael, A Complete Unknown

 5  Lol Crawley, The Brutalist


Friday, February 7, 2025

February 2025


2024 OSCAR NOMINATIONS

     There’s no point in reiterating what I’ve said about the movies that dominate this year’s Oscar race (see below for a few) other than to give the Academy voters a pass: there weren’t many good movies to choose from. Ridiculous nominations are the result of too many voters and too few movies.

     I was most surprised by the lack of support for two films, both about broadcasting, that were among the year’s best, “September 5” and “Saturday Night.”

      Director Tim Fehlbaum, along with co-writers Moritz Binder and Alex David scored a nomination for their screenplay for “September 5” but, to me, this film should be in the running for best picture and Ben Chaplin, playing one of the key players in the coverage by the ABC sports staff of the 1972 Munich Olympic hostage tragedy, deserved a spot among the supporting actor nominations. This behind-the-scenes look at one of the signature events in broadcast journalism was the most riveting movie of the year, from start to finish. Fehlbaum should be in the running for best director.

      Has there been a more influential television show in the last half-century than “Saturday Night Live”? No program is even close and “Saturday Night” blends a nearly real-time document with plenty of myth about the 90 minutes leading up to its debut at 11:30 p.m. on Oct. 11, 1975. Director Jason Reitman, utilizes handheld camera shots and long takes to capture the nonstop backstage chaos, bringing the show’s comic legends (John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner and guests Andy Kaufman, George Carlin, Jim Henson) to life. At the center is ringmaster-producer Lorne Michaels played by the frenetic Gabriel LaBelle. At a minimum, the show deserved nominations for best picture, best director and best screenplay. It was shut out.

    The voters for best actress seemed to go out of their way to ignore the year’s best work. Marianne Jean-Baptiste delivered what may be the most impressive performance of the year in Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths” but was left out of the five nominations. Also deserving in this category, even though their films had problems, were Nicole Kidman in “Babygirl,” Danielle Deadwyler in “The Piano Lesson” and Tilda Swinton in “The Room Next Door.”

     In the supporting category, Natasha Lyonne was worthy of recognition as the rebellious, but loyal daughter in “His Three Daughters.” The film also should have earned a screenplay nomination for writer-director Azazel Jacobs.

     Whether “The Brutalist” or “Emilia Pérez” wins the top prizes, 2024 will not be remembered as a great year for movies or the Oscars.

     While I’m still not finished with my 2024 viewing—the short life of the theatrical release window makes it impossible to keep up—here’s my Top 10 right now:

1     September 5  (Tim Fehlbaum)

2   A Complete Unknown  (James Mangold)

3   Conclave  (Edward Berger)

4   The Brutalist  (Brady Corbet)

5   Saturday Night  (Jason Reitman)

6   Hard Truths  (Mike Leigh)

7   The Apprentice  (Ali Abbasi)

8   His Three Daughters  (Azazel Jacobs)

9   The Old Oak  (Ken Loach)

10  Knox Goes Away  (Michael Keaton)

 

THE BRUTALIST (2024) 

     This epic rendering of an immigrant’s journey, in all its complexities, announces itself, at 214 minutes, as a film demanding attention. While director Brady Corbet does not deliver the masterpiece he clearly set out to create, there’s enough heartbreaking insight, humanized by a superb performance by Adrien Brody, to make it one of the year’s best films.

      Brody’s László Tóth, a prominent Hungarian architect, arrives in America after being liberated from the death camps, separated from his wife and his artistic dreams buried by the horrors of the Holocaust. His cousin, who has remade himself as a gentile selling furniture in Philadelphia, gives László a job but never fully accepts this living reminder of what the Jews suffered during the war.

    But László modernistic design of a wealthy landowner’s library eventually leads to Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) contracting him to design a community center on his property, which will serve as a memorial to Van Buren’s recently deceased mother. 

    The unpredictable, often unreasonable relationship between László and Van Buren pushes the movie forward even after László’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones of “The Theory of Everything”), who now suffers from severe osteoporosis, and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) join him. His much-delayed work on Van Buren’s edifice takes a toll on László as does his foreignness, his Jewishness, his artistic obstinance, all spurring distrust and a lack of respect.

     The picture suffers from numerous abrupt edits, leaving scenes before they are fully resolved and forcing the viewer to make assumptions of how characters went from point A to point B. (No doubt the original cut was longer.) But more damaging is the disappointing final 30 minutes or so in which László disappears and others reveal the central symbolism of his work.

      Since Brody received the Academy Award for his performance in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” (2002), his best work has been in small roles (I loved his Dalí in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”), but he’s never emerged as a star. While his László doesn’t match his role as “The Pianist,” another artist who escaped from Nazi horrors, his architect in “The Brutalist” (the title refers to Brutalism, his style of architecture) keeps one interested in his fate over the lengthy picture. Though at points I felt like his character was more symbol than man.

      Pearce delivers the film’s most interesting speeches as he continuously reflects on his place in the world, giving his most memorable performance since “Memento” (2000). Jones’ character is refreshingly bright and independent and feels underused until the end of the picture.

     Corbet, who wrote the picture with his writing partner and wife Mona Fastvold, has been acting in TV and features since 2000 and took up directing in 2015. His debut, “The Childhood of a Leader,” earned him a best director award at the Venice Film Festival. His only other feature is the overwrought “Vox Lux” (2018), with Natalie Portman as an egotistical pop star. In “The Brutalist” he displays a good eye for individual scenes (greatly aided by British cinematographer Lol Crawley) but is less impressive connecting all the dots.   

     Even if it wins best picture, the film’s excessive running time will keep most moviegoers away, even those who stream six hours of a Netflix show about bickering rich people in an evening. To me, it didn’t feel overly long, though I could have done without the 15-minute intermission.

  

TWIN PEAKS (1990, TV)

     David Lynch, who died on January 16, directed just ten features, five of them between 1980 and 1992, yet he may be, this side of Martin Scorsese, the most influential filmmaker of the past half century

     Starting with his 1977 cult favorite “Eraserhead,” this low-keyed, surrealistic chronicler of small-town Americana created a succession of dream-like tall tales that begin in innocence and quickly descend into unspeakable, often unexplainable, horror. “Blue Velvet” (1986) and “Mulholland Dr.” (2001) are among the finest American films since the glory years of the 1970s.

     Yet, his most memorable creation was for the small screen. Starting with the basic formula of a morning soap opera (there were a half dozen of them still airing at the time) with a large cast of characters all with secrets and most involved in illicit affairs—selling or using drugs, business corruption, cheating on one’s spouse—Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost added a murder mystery, quirky comic themes (mostly centered on donuts, coffee, fruit pies and Deputy Andy) and the supernatural all set in a small lumber town in the Pacific Northwest.     

      I was surprised, in rewatching the first season (on the free streaming service Pluto) that the pilot and second episode offer a very perfunctory introduction to the story, following the discovery of the body of Laura Palmer, a popular high school student.

       It’s only at the end of episode three that Lynch flips the switch and we enter a surrealistic underbelly of this world: Special Agent Dale Cooper, sent to Twin Peaks by the FBI, has the first of his many dreams. There’s a one-armed man, a dancing midget who announces “Let’s Rock!” and the dead girl, who whispers to Cooper the name of her murderer. This all happens in the red room, a place the show will return to often as it spins off the rails, defying reason and the expectations of primetime ABC television viewers.

     Yes, Lynch is a master of the creepy, unexplainable as he showed in “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Dr.” but he’s also an expert at weaving this unwieldy ensemble and each of their stories into a coherent plot. Watching it all these years later, knowing where it’s going, it is even more impressive how he pulls it all together. He also created the perfect solidifying role in Cooper, played with a combination of winking, sarcastic humor, cornball innocence and superhuman instincts by Kyle MacLachlan. Cooper remains one of the most memorable characters in television history.

     As in most of Lynch’s works, music plays an integral part in creating the mood. His longtime collaborator Angelo Badalamenti composed the haunting, often industrial soundscape to “Twin Peaks,” but Lynch adds an eclectic collection of pop music—from the Big Band era onward—that helps define many of his characters.  

     His revival of “Twin Peaks” in 2017 for Showtime doubled down on the disturbing and bizarre aspects of the original and stands as the director’s last great creation. Whether on TV or the big screen (or on YouTube with his daily weather reports), Lynch was an artist whose vision of our world was sometimes hard to grasp—I have no idea what he was saying in “Lost Highway” or “Inland Empire”—but you always knew he would never back down from putting his camera straight into the eyes of the best and worst of civilization.

 

THE SUBSTANCE (2024)

     I see more than my fair share of dumb movies, but I usually manage to avoid the stomach-turning gross-out horror pics that the younger generation seems to thrive on. Then, the Academy voters included this film and its star, Demi Moore, in its nominations, so I took a deep breath and did my duty.

     What I endured was the most disgusting, unwatchable movie ever nominated in the once-prestigious best picture category. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat, who has made one previous feature, “Revenge,” seven years ago, attempting to satirize Hollywood’s obsession with youth (now that’s a new concept), ogles over the naked, or scantily dressed, stars, Moore and Margaret Qualley, as if she’s making a soft-porn picture. On top of that, she throws out all reason in her haphazardly stitched together script; Fargeat’s nomination for original screenplay is a real head-scratcher.

     Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) is a longtime Hollywood star who gets dumped from her morning television gig as an aerobics instructor. Dennis Quaid plays Harvey (wonder how they came up with that name?) who never stops making sexist, sleazy comments about actresses. In case you can’t figure out what a pig he is, the director puts the camera about one-inch from his face to make him look even more disgusting.

     Almost as easy as going to your local CVS and apparently cost free, Elisabeth obtains a magic potion called The Substance that promises to recapture her youth. It’s unclear (that’s the operative description of this film) if Elisabeth realizes that her younger self will be “birthed” out of her spine and that she’ll have no memory or control of what that creation will do. Qualley, naming herself Sue, makes the best use of her beauty by auditioning to replace Elisabeth on the aerobic show—didn’t those disappear after the 1980s?

     The extensive process, which clearly should require a medical professional’s assistance, dictates that the old version and the new version are “alive” during alternate weeks. And though Elisabeth fights off any desire to end the transformation once things go awry, I had no idea what she was getting out of this. She just as easily could have hired a young actress to live out her life—at least then she could have talked to the woman about her experiences.

    Moore has a few memorable scenes—repeatedly redoing her makeup before a date is the film’s only poignant moment—but for much of the movie she’s naked and unconscious on the bathroom floor.

   There are many other holes in this story, but most offensive is the film’s treatment of these women: They are brainless Barbie dolls who have no friends or hobbies or even the most Hollywood of necessities, a charity.

   If filmmakers are looking for real stories of misogynism in Hollywood they are endless, including many starring another character named Harvey.

  

HARD TRUTHS (2024) and THE OLD OAK (2024)

       Two of the finest British filmmakers of the past 40-plus years released movies this year that will probably mark the end of their careers.

      Not surprisingly, as longtime advocates of social justice, Mike Leigh (“Hard Truths”) and Ken Loach (“The Old Oak”) both deal with the plight of UK’s minority population in their films. Also not surprisingly, both films are among the best I saw in 2024.          

      Eighty-one-year-old Leigh, best known for “Naked” (1993) and “Secrets & Lies” (1996)—eight of his films have found a spot on my yearly Top 10s—examines the emotional complexities of the extended family of a deeply distressed woman, played ferociously by Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Pansy is both depressed and angry at the world, constantly berating her soft-spoken husband Curtly (David Webber) and their isolated, overweight adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett)

       Pansy’s constant rants and inability to interact with strangers on the most basic level starts out as amusing but soon becomes concerning. Only her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), who shares with Pansy the heartbreak over the sudden death of their mother, offers some sympathy for her.

     While I wouldn’t rank “Hard Truths” among Leigh’s best—that’s a high bar to hurdle—it showcases one of the most powerful performances he’s ever directed. Jean-Baptiste earned an Oscar nomination as the daughter of a white woman in “Secrets & Lies” and later was among the stars of the long-running CBS drama “Without a Trace.” In this new film, she shows an astonishing range of emotions as Pansy, giving one of the best portrayals of depression I’ve ever seen. That Jean-Baptiste was ignored by the Academy, along with Leigh’s script, makes no sense, especially considering the competition.

     The movie’s cinematographer, Dick Pope, who has been shooting Leigh’s film since “Life Is Sweet” (1991) and scored an Oscar nomination for the director’s “Mr. Turner” (2015), died in October.

      Loach’s picture studies the reaction in a small, one-time coal mining town when a group of Syrian refugees relocate there. TJ (Dave Turner), a middle-aged native who owns the town’s tavern, the Old Oak, becomes an advocate for the immigrant community despite his strong connections to longtime residents. The Syrians are led by Yara (Ebla Mari), a young woman who is determined to integrate the refugees into the community.

     The leisurely film sometimes plays more like a Frontline report than a more subtle drama as Loach and his longtime screenwriting collaborator Paul Laverty offer a balanced look at the positives and negatives of the immigration story at the community level. But TJ’s dilemma—the older citizens threaten to boycott his business over his friendship with the Syrians—keeps the film interesting.

     Turner, a career fireman and bartender, who had small roles in Loach’s two previous pictures, “I, Daniel Blake” and “Sorry We Missed You,” brings unpretentious sincerity to his performance as TJ, bringing authenticity to small-town views. It’s the kind of performance that have made Loach’s films so memorable over the decades.

      Mari is equally fine in her first film performance and the first time she’s acted in English; she grew up in a part of Syrian under Israeli control, working in local theater.

        The 87-year-old Loach, not as well-known as Leigh in this country, has never held back his socialist views and hostility to the positions of the British government. Until the 1980s, he mostly worked in television and then broke through internationally in the ‘90s with “Riff-Raff” (1991), “Raining Stones” (1993) and “Ladybird Ladybird” (1994).

  

WICKED (2024)

     Like a Marvel origin story, this fast-paced, overstuffed musical seeks to explain a movie character we thought we understood—in this case, incredulously, the Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz.” For younger readers, she was the one who harassed Dorothy and her friends (and Toto, too!) because the visitor from Kansas accidentally crushed her sister to death.

      This tale—based on the Tony-winning 2004 Broadway hit—begins with the Wicked Witch’s death being celebrated in the land of Oz (and a glimpse of Dorothy’s crew headed back to the Emerald City) before Glinda, the Good Witch (pop singer Ariana Grande), remembers their time together in college.

     Cynthia Erivo (Oscar nominated for “Harriet” in 2019) plays Elphaba, the future wicked witch, who was born with green skin (picking up from the 1939 original) and a chip on her shoulder. Glinda, the pretentious, haughty blonde who everyone loves, is forced to room with the abrasive Elphaba as the first half of the film mimics the foolishness of a Harry Potter sequel. Not until they get out of their version of Hogwarts, arriving in Oz for a meeting with the Wizard (a way too flip Jeff Goldblum) does the picture get interesting.

      Except for the high-spirited production number, “One Short Day,” when they arrive in Oz—featuring the play’s original Broadway stars Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel—the songs struck me as time killers. But then I doubt songwriter Stephen Schwartz (“Godspell” and countless animated musicals) was targeting senior citizens.

      It’s not a bad musical, but it suffers from way too many songs, some just 30 seconds long, and poor casting. Erivo looks like she’s a 45-year-old among teens, (the actress is 37) while Prince Fiyero, the romantic interest, is played by a 36-year-old (Jonathan Bailey).

    Most shocking was that after 2 hours and 30 minutes, it ends with “To Be Continued.” Director Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians,” “In the Heights”) should have turned it into a streaming series.   

     Margaret Hamilton’s performance as the witch in the original classic, along with her flying monkeys, scared the bejeebers out of three generations of kids. The idea that someone would turn her into a sympathetic character is hard to grasp—what’s next, the troubled boyhood of Hannibal Lecter?—but how can you argue with 10 Oscar nominations.

  

NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (1979) and NOSFERATU (2024)

    If there were to be remakes of this 1922 vampire picture, I cannot think of two directors more qualified for the job than Werner Herzog and Robert Eggers.

    Right after the novel’s copyright expired, Herzog made his version with his best friend, wild-man Klaus Kinski, as Count Dracula (Herzog uses the names from Bram Stoker’s original story) along with Isabelle Adjani and Bruno Ganz as the victimized young couple.


    It’s nearly a scene-by-scene remake of F.W. Murnau’s silent reworking of Stoker’s story (penned by Henrik Galeen) with Kinski made up to resemble Max Schreck, the count in the original. Kinski’s Dracula looks like a living skeleton, with a white, bony head made even creepier with bright red lipstick and black eyeliner. By draping Kinski in black cloaks, at times he seems to be just a floating head. (Far from Bela Lugosi’s 1931 version, “Dracula,” in which the vampire shows up for afternoon cocktails looking like an overdressed, unthreatening uncle.)

    Ganz, who went on to a great career in Germany and America, highlighted by his stunning portrayal of Hitler in “Downfall” (2004), seems uncomfortable with English in “Nosferatu.” (The film was shot in German and English simultaneously.) While Adjani, among the leading French actresses of the era, who earned an Oscar nomination for “The Story of Adele H” (1975), isn’t given much to do as Dracula’s object of affection.

     While visually, Kinski dominates the film, the most memorable performance is given by Roland Topor, a French artist and writer involved in European avant-garde filmmaking. He plays Renfield, Dracula’s insane sycophant, who while being held in a mental institute laughs uncontrollably for no reason.  

    Now Eggers, director of the atmospheric “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse,” has made a version that also follows the plot of Murnau’s film while adding in all the graphic violence and sex that could only be hinted at 102 years ago (even Herzog’s version is very PG). But the explicit realism doesn’t equate to a scarier experience; in fact, at points this tale was so over the top it almost felt like a parody.

    The story, set in early 19th Century Germany, begins with teen Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp, Johnny’s daughter, who resembles Adjani) experiencing horrible dreams of being possessed by some evil spirit. Fast forward a few years and she’s a newlywed, brokenhearted when her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult of “Juror #2”) is tasked to travel out of the country to finalize a real-estate deal.

     After an arduous journey, Thomas arrives at the Gothic castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard, under a mountain of prosthetics), a tall, specter of a human with long arms and claw-like hands who speaks in an almost unworldly voice. (At points, I could have used subtitles to decipher his deep, vaguely Eastern-European accent.)  Murnau renamed the vampire because of disputes with Stoker’s heirs and Eggers follows that name change.

      One look at this creature and most would run for their lives, but Thomas, who comes off as foolishly innocent as Pip, hangs in there, to his regret.

     Back home in Wisberg, Ellen’s nightmares have returned, accompanied by seizures and screaming fits. Reluctantly, her doctor calls in an expert on possession and other occult matters, Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe, of course). The casting of Dafoe is another connection to the original—he played actor Schreck in “Shadow of the Vampire” (2000).

     Maybe the scariest segment of the original silent was Orlok’s voyage across the sea—taking the long way around, I guess—to his new residence in Wisberg. In Eggers’ film (compared to the silent version), it’s less clear what’s happening aboard the ship, but when it crash-lands at the port, Orlok is the only man still “alive.”

     Eggers usual cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, nominated for “The Lighthouse” and this film, shoots Orlok’s castle as if it’s an outpost of hell but he and the director keep the Count in such deep shadows and at a distance that, at times, I felt like he was an extra rather than the main character.

   There is much to appreciate in this film—Dafoe, as always is a joy to watch play another eccentric character—but too much talking and too much explaining takes away too much of the story’s horrific magic.

 

 PHOTOS:

 In the ABC-TV control room in “September 5” (Paramount Pictures)

David Lynch as Gordon Cole in "Twin Peaks" (ABC-TV)

Kyle MacLachlan and Sherilyn Fenn in “Twin Peaks” (ABC-TV)

Michelle Austin hugs Marianne Jean-Baptiste in “Hard Truths” (Bleecker Street Media)

Klaus Kinski is “Nosferatu the Vampyre” (Twentieth Century Fox)