April 2025

 

SINNERS (2025)

     One movie vampire can create a sexy, creepy, ominous atmosphere and serve as a troubling metaphor for the unknown space between life and death. Dozens of vampires in a movie are just silly, sending me in search of the channel changer. 

     Up until necks began to be bitten, Ryan Coogler’s latest film (following “Creed” and the “Black Panther” pictures), again starring Michael B. Jordan (two of him), is a beautifully rendered portrait of African-American life in Depression-era Mississippi Delta. Twins Smoke and Stack (Jordan) return to their hometown after a stint working with Al Capone in Chicago, with a bundle of cash and plans to start a juke joint.

       The star attraction—other than plenty of food and drink—at the blues club is their young cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), who plays a mean guitar, and veteran bluesman Delta Slim (a memorable Delroy Lindo). The planning for opening night, along with reunions with Smoke’s and Stack’s and Smoke’s old flames, make up the first two-thirds of the film. Once the party begins, the film goes into full force, with Coogler, who also wrote the script, juggling a half-dozen plot lines.

      Then a young Irish immigrant and a pair of white locals camp out in front of the club, sending the story into “Walking Dead” territory. I struggled to see the point as the vampires didn’t seem to represent white racists—the local KKK has its own plans to erase the juke joint—or serve as symbols of a society keeping Black entrepreneurs from succeeding. It felt to me as if Coogler found himself struggling for an ending and thought: “Hey, everyone loves a vampire/zombie story.”

       What I admire about the movie is its heartfelt tribute to blues music, and the genre’s Delta home. Just a few of the blues greats who came from this part of the country include Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon and the last of them, Buddy Guy, who has a touching cameo in “Sinners.” Unfortunately, the vampires also bring the blues, and not in a good way.

  

QUALITY STREET (1927) and BEVERLY OF GRUSTARK (1926)

       Marion Davies’ career has been both underrated and overrated since she became a star in the early 1920s.

       Her film work was dismissed for many years because of the promotional assistance she received from the vast media empire run by William Randolph Hearst, her constant companion for 30 years. Hearst pulled her out of the chorus line and made her a leading lady, financing most of her films and controlling her career with an iron fist.

       As his mistress, Davies became a leading hostess of the Hollywood community at both Hearst’s San Simeon castle and in their Santa Monica villa (while Hearst’s wife mingled in high society in New York). It was easy to write off her movie success—even as she became one of the most popular stars of the 1920s—since she was the boss’s girlfriend.

        And then there was the uncomplimentary portrayal penned by screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, ironically a close friend of Davies, who created the fictional Susan Alexander, a failed opera singer, in his not-too-obvious attack on Hearst in “Citizen Kane.” That Davies was anything but a failure in Hollywood—though she was an alcoholic like Alexander—didn’t stop the comparisons.

        In recent years, her work has been rediscovered and now she’s acclaimed as one of the great comedians of the late silents and early 1930s. As always, the pendulum has swung too far. While her acting is better than the typical silent performance and brings a casual naturalism to her roles, Davies was far from a great actress as some would have you think.

        In truth, she was both limited by and profited from her attachment to Hearst. Even at the height of her popularity in the late 1920s, Davies roles were handpicked by Hearst and he chose the director assigned to her through an arrangement with Louis B. Mayer, according to various recent biographies.

 

    In “Quality Street,” she plays a young French girl betrothed to the most eligible bachelor (a bland Conrad Nagel) in town, but before they can marry, he goes off to the Napoleonic Wars. When he returns, she’s a dowdy, glass-wearing (in old movies, a clear indication of age) and teaching school (could it be worse?). He loses interest but when Davies pretends to be her younger niece, spicing up her looks, his interest increases. Believing that he is fooled by her slight change of appearance takes a great leap of the imagination. Ten years later, it was remade with Katharine Hepburn in the lead.

     From a play by J.M. Barrie, best known for his “Peter Pan” books, this is a rather tiresome romance clearly influenced by Shakespeare’s much-used identity switching, a theme that runs throughout Davies career. (In “Little Old New York” (1922), she plays an Irish emigrant to America who pretends to be her dead brother to claim an inheritance. It’s only slightly more believable.)

    Again playing a version of the Bard’s Rosalind, she is “Beverly of Graustark,” one of her best silents. In the kingdom of Graustark (invented countries were all the rage in the early days of cinema), Davies’ Beverly steps in for her cousin the prince when he’s incapacitated after a skiing accident, dressing as a man and handling his royal duties. Of course, she falls in love with his military aide, which opens up a Freudian can of worms. With uninspired support from the men around her, Davies carries the daffy screwball comedy.

      Both “Beverly of Graustark” and “Quality Street” were directed by Sidney Franklin, who in the sound era became MGM’s house director for Norma Shearer. He earned an Oscar nomination for “The Good Earth” (1937). 

     The actresses best remembered silents are two 1928 films directed by King Vidor, “The Patsy” and “Show People.” But unlike many performers, Davies made a smooth transition to sound film, continuing her career until 1937, highlighted by “It’s a Wise Child” (1931), in which she fakes a pregnancy.

      In her final picture, “Ever Since Eve” (1937), she again disguises herself, this time remaking herself into an “unattractive” woman, with wire-rim glasses, baggy clothes and a page-boy haircut to avoid the sexual harassment she encounters everywhere she works.

     Then, of course, she falls for her latest employer, a dilettante writer (Robert Montgomery), spurring her to switch back and forth between cute and plain.

     She was just 40 when she retired to care for Hearst, who suffered through various ailments before his death in 1951. Davies lived another ten years.

  

WARFARE (2025)

     Director Alex Garland, who last year imagined a domestic warfare in “Civil War,” partnered with Navy SEAL veteran and film producer Ray Mendoza to re-enact an intense skirmish during the Iraqi War.

     The film, which plays out in virtual real-time, has the feel of a documentary with its wrenching realistic depiction of the horrors of war and a cast of mostly unfamiliar faces. It’s based on the recollections of the survivors of an actual assault by Iraqi forces on a squad of SEALs who had taken over a house to observe the neighborhood.

    The very business-like approach of the story—the nonstop military lingo will go over the head of most viewers but adds to the film’s verisimilitude—doesn’t allow much character development before the action gets hot. Not much happens until about halfway through when a rocket blows up the squad’s attempts to exit the area. From that point on, “Warfare” is as visually nerve-racking as any battlefield movie I’ve seen since “Black Hawk Down” (2001).

     Many scenes are difficult to watch (I looked away more than once) as Garland doesn’t shy away from showing bloody battle wounds after the attack. Showing realistic death and traumatic injury doesn’t necessarily elevate a war film; plenty of great battlefield war pictures were made before censors allowed blood to be depicted---“The Red Badge of Courage,” “The Steel Helmet,” “Men at War,” “Paths of Glory” and “War and Peace” (see below), just to name a few. But considering the destruction of the human body that is shown in contemporary horror films, it’s commendable that Garland and Mendoza do not hold back in showing the casualties of war.

     As with most war films, viewers can come away from the experience with different impressions: patriotic pride, the admiration of men doing their duty and/or wondering what the point of it all is. In the 21^st Century, must young men sacrifice their lives over disputes between nations as if we are still living in the Middle Ages?

  

THE FIREBIRD (1934)

    Maybe if I knew beforehand where this story was headed, I would have been less impressed, but its sudden turn about 30 minutes in when one of the main characters is murdered makes it one of the more interesting pictures of the early 1930s.

      Based on a play of the same name by acclaimed Hungarian writer Lajos Zilahy, the script by B-movie scribes Charles Kenyon and Jeffrey Dell not only is a tightly constructed murder-mystery but, with little fanfare, examines the changing morals and attitudes of the first generation of the 20^th Century. Director William Dieterle, just before his box-office hit bio-pics “The Story of Louis Pasteur” and “The Life of Emile Zola,” smoothly mixes a familiar tale of offbeat characters living in an apartment complex (in Vienna) including popular actor Herman Brandt (Ricardo Cortez) and a family of royal blood, the Pointers.

        The movie seems as if it’s just another lightweight romantic comedy, with complaining neighbors, a bothersome dog-walker and Brandt’s ex-wife fighting him for alimony payments, until Brandt corners Carola Pointer (Verree Teasdale, best known as Adolphe Menjou’s wife) on the staircase and confesses that he’s been in love with her for years though they’ve never spoken. He tells her to visit his apartment at midnight, which she dismisses out of hand and, in fact, decides to move the family when the landlord is unable to evict the actor. 

        A few days later he’s found dead in his apartment of a gunshot to the head, which brings police detective Muller, played by the great character actor C. Aubrey Smith in one of his best roles. (Also giving a subtle, convincing performances is Lionel Atwill, a regular in horror pictures in the 1930s and ‘40s, as high-minded John Pointer.)

       Other than a few scenes on the street in front of the apartment building and in the theater where Brandt is performing, the story unfolds inside the rooms of the building. Muller calmly but decisively untangles the truth about the actor’s character, not made clear in the film when he was alive, that led to his murder. 

       The title comes from the famous 1910 ballet music by modernist Igor Stravinsky, who, after this film was released, sued Warner Bros. over its use of his composition. In the movie, it’s used as a symbol of society’s break with the values of the 19^th Century. Nowhere were those changes displayed more prominently than in Hollywood’s Pre-Code movies, of which “The Firebird” is among the most literate.    

  

QUEEN OF THE DESERT (2017)

      Bad reviews and abysmal box office sunk this Werner Herzog chronicle of the astonishing life of Gertrude Bell, whose travels in the early part of the 20^th Century made her one of the leading Western experts on the Arab world, before and after World War I.

      Born to an upper-class British family, Bell (Nicole Kidman, giving another fine performances) refused to lead the life she was raised to follow, persuading her father to arrange for a position in Tehran with the British embassy. After a short, but doomed romance with a fellow embassy employee (an uninspired James Franco), she dedicates her life to exploring the Middle East, learning about the many tribes of the desert, and meeting their emirs.

     A contemporary of T.E. Lawrence (played without much energy by Robert Pattinson), with whom she worked with in the British foreign office, Bell was influential in drawing the post-war map that created the modern countries of the region, offering a rare voice from the West sympathetic to the Arab people.

      The German-born Herzog, who in recent years is best known for his striking documentaries (“Grizzly Man,” “Encounters at the End of the World,” “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”), directed his first feature in 1968. His fictional film about a 16^th Century explorer seeking the gold of the mythical South American city of El Dorado, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972), put the filmmaker on the map. It’s one of the best films of the 1970s. Known for his willingness to venture into difficult locations and push his cast to the brink, Herzog has since made a handful of memorable features, including “Fitzcarraldo” (1982) and “Rescue Dawn” (2007).

     While the script of “Queen of the Desert,” is clunky and didactic at points, the presence of Kidman elevates the film along with Herzog’s focus on the desert landscape. Morocco stands in for the Middle East, stunningly captured by cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, who has shot many of Herzog’s films in the last 30 years.

     The film might not make a list of important Herzog pictures (I stumbled upon it on the free streaming service Tubi), but it serves as a very watchable introduction to a fascinating and daring woman who was unafraid to go where few Westerners had ever ventured.

  

WAR AND PEACE (1968)

    This acclaimed Soviet movie adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s mammoth novel, and one of the longest films ever made at seven hours and 11 minutes (you can watch it in four installments on YouTube), lives up to its reputation, featuring some of the most vivid battlefront scenes stunningly contrasting with shimmering ballroom sequences in gorgeous Russian palaces.

     Director Sergey Bondarchuk, a loyal nationalist, went on to become one of the Soviet Union’s finest filmmakers, following “War and Peace” with “They Fought for Their Country” (1975), a World War II epic, and “Boris Godunov” (1986), from the Pushkin play about the 17^th Century tsar. In 1968, a trimmed version of “War and Peace” was released in the U.S., becoming the first Soviet film to be nominated for, and win, the best foreign film Oscar.

 

     Obviously “War and Peace” is meant to be seen on the widest possible screen—the filmmaker moves the camera (in collaboration with a team of cinematographers) across the sets like few filmmakers of the era dared attempt—which I appreciated even on my 26-inch computer screen. The print available on YouTube is excellent, retaining its vibrant colors.

      Bondarchuk also plays the tale’s lead actor Pierre, whose feelings about the Napoleonic wars, the place of royalty in Russia and his oft-confusing love life serve as the connecting thread of Tolstoy’s narrative. His romance with the Countess Natasha (Lyudmila Saveleva), who goes from girl to woman in the course of the story, is one of the most famous in literary history.

     This incredibly complex production, cited at the time as the most expensive movie ever made, was filmed between 1962 and 1967 and shown in four parts to Russian audiences starting in March 1966 and finishing in November 1967. Reportedly, the 1956 Hollywood version of the film, starring Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn, inspired the Soviet leadership to launch the project.

      In America, the Soviet original was trimmed by an hour and, of course, dubbed. A few years later, in 1972, it was shown on ABC over four evenings.

    Not surprisingly for a seven-hour picture, it drags at points as it depicts a 19^th Century world that moved at a much slower pace. The epic’s most impressive performance is given by Vyacheslav Tikhonov (among the stars of another Oscar-winning Soviet film, “Burnt by the Sun”) who plays Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, a tightly wound soldier whose family is central to the story.

     In this era of lengthy streaming series, “War and Peace” doesn’t seem so epic today, but contemporary writing rarely matches Tolstoy’s insight into the decisions made by individuals and societies that shape the world. It’s a powerful cinematic experience, one I never thought I would have the opportunity to enjoy.

  

THE HIDDEN ROOM (1950)

      Edward Dmytryk, who went from being an admired martyr as one of the Hollywood Ten, serving time in prison for his connection to the Communist Party, to a pariah who named names in front of Congress, somehow managed to forge a productive career as a filmmaker.

     Born in Canada to Ukrainian parents, he grew up in Los Angeles, starting his movie career as a messenger for Famous Players-Lasky while still in high school. After years of working as an editor and then director of B-movies, he broke through with “Crossfire” (1947), an acclaimed picture about antisemitism starring Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan, which scored was Oscar nominations for best picture and best director.

     That same year Dmytryk rejected HUAC’s request to testify against others who were former members of the Communist Party and was blacklisted by Hollywood. Moving to England, he directed one of his best films, “The Hidden Room” (released in the U.K. in 1949 as “Obsession”), a deceptively low-key tale of a psychiatrist taking revenge against the latest suitor of his wife. 

      A very proper Robert Newton (“Odd Man Out” and, as Bill Sykes in David Lean’s “Oliver Twist”), plays Dr. Clive Riordan who has run out of patience with his unfaithful wife Storm (Sally Gray), forcing her and her date, an American, Bill Kronin (Phil Brown) to confess at the barrel of a gun. The doctor eventually ushers Kronin into the night, one assumes to kill him, but instead locks him up in what seems to be an abandoned bomb shelter.

    It’s not surprising that the movie’s screenwriter Alec Coppel was one of the writers contributing to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958), the ultimate picture about an obsession.

    As Scotland Yard gets involved (Naunton Wayne is entertaining as Supt. Finsbury) when the family dog goes missing, Riordan sticks to his devious plan.

     His work was recognized at Cannes as a finalist for best director, but soon after he return to America to serve his prison term and then went before the committee to name many fellow filmmakers who had been in the party.

      Like Elia Kazan, another director who testified, Dmytryk flourished in the wake of his turncoat actions, highlighted by “The Caine Mutiny” (1954) with Humphrey Bogart, “Raintree County” (1957) starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift and “The Young Lions” (1958) starring Marlon Brando, Clift and Dean Martin.  His career continued into the 1970s.

 

PHOTOS:

 Michael B. Jordan plays twins Smoke and Stack in “Sinners.” (Warner Bros.)

 Marion Davies with Conrad Nagel in “Quality Street.” (MGM)

  The poster from “The Firebird.” (Warner Bros.)

A battlefield scene from “War and Peace.”  (Janus Films)

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 20^th 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 20^th 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)