Parallel Mothers

 

Pedro Almodóvar's Parallel Mothers unfolds like a flower, revealing the uncertainty and complexity of its characters' lives. The mothers of the title -- Janis (Almodóvar's longtime collaborator Penélope Cruz) and Ana (new face Milena Smit) -- meet in a Madrid hospital where they are both about to deliver their first child. Janis, the almost-40-year-old fashion photographer, is jubilant with anticipation; Ana, a disaffected and alienated teenager, is not. They bond and enter single motherhood the better for having met ... at first.

As is his practice, Almodóvar folds into this already rich story of human (dis)connections socio-political elements that extend the film's message beyond the intimate to the universal. This time, the subplot involves Janis's grandfather, who was executed by Francoists and tossed in a mass grave with other anti-fascists. Janis enlists the help of a handsome archaeologist (Israel Elejalde) to exume the remains so that family members might bury them properly. This leads to personal entanglements.

Cruz's Janis is the emotional center of Almodóvar's film of two mothers, but Smit's Ana, a needy and dyspeptic character, no longer a child and not quite woman, is an intriguingly hazy mass of conflicted emotions and raw need. Her distress meshes well with Janis's own.

As provocative as Almodóvar enjoys being on behalf of people and causes close to him -- particularly LGBTQ+ rights -- the story of these two women feels uniquely of the moment, as societies clash in so many corners about women's liberty and threats to their freedom to choose their own happiness.

A Man Named Scott

 

Robert Alexander's documentary on hip-hop entertainer and actor Kid Cudi, A Man Named Scott (2021), is a highly affecting film. It is intriguing because Cudi, birth name Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi, is so engaging as he and his collaborators describe his creative process, the substantial impact his musical vision has had on millennial culture, and the nearly crippling depression he's battled much of his adult life.

Cudi's emergence as a creative innovator tracks along with changes in the recording industry, which maddingly embraces both the "sure thing" and the "change agent" and wages fierce battles to contract and control bankable artists. Cudi attributes the success of his experimentalism to tapping into emotional veins that other rappers were either ignorant of or chose not to acknowledge. This left Cudi as a singular voice speaking to uncertainty and despair, feelings his listeners connected with.

Counted among his fans are celebrity friends who appear in the film, Shia LaBeouf, Jaden and Willow Smith, Timothée Chalamet, and, of course, Ye (formely Kanye West). His fans followed him devotedy through his musical explorations, they say, because his words never failed to be salient and important.

Alexander's film, his first documentary as a director, is artfully constructed, going beyond the usual interviews and file footage of concerts or recording sessions to incorporate theatrical performances that illuminate Cudi's narrative. It's a beautful and important work.

The Tender Bar

 

George Clooney's The Tender Bar takes a familiar coming-of-age story (based on the memoir by J.R. Moehringer) and turns it into a rumination on the people and events that give our lives structure by their presence and their absence.

Tye Sheridan plays J.R., a young man who has grown up on Long Island under the watchful eye of his mother (Lily Rabe) and with the loving tutelage of her brother, his Uncle Charlie, played with wonderful ease and enormous charm by Ben Affleck (in top acting form). They are all living with J.R.'s grandparents (Christopher Lloyd and Sondra James) in a clapboard house that's barely large enough to hold them and the various aunts and cousins who use it as a port during life's frequent storms. They're a loving, unkempt, directionless mess.

Uncle Charlie owns a bar, The Dickens, and is as schooled in the ways of the world (and man science) as anyone, due primarily to his voracious appetite for great books. He pushes young J.R. (played as a boy by the impressive child actor Daniel Ranieri) to read, which inspires the chronically indecisive boy to set his sights on being a writer.

J.R. gets a scholarship to Yale, falls badly in love, establishes a lifelong friendship but carries around the weight of his absent father (Max Martini), a radio D.J. who abandoned the family shortly after J.R.'s birth and only appears or calls to assure and disappoint. This is something J.R. must be rid of before he can move on.

Clooney is adept at bringing his players into close proximity, in spaces where they exchange intimacies, soft lies and hard truths. Every barstool wise-crack, callow insensitivity or naive reveal feels real. And that's the picture's true strength, despite some unevenness in character development and narrative flow, it feels really authentic.

Scream (2022)

 

Scream (2022) pulls off a pretty neat parlor trick. It tells the audience exactly what it's doing, what the franchise and other similar slasher movies have done, reunited surviving members of the legacy cast, winked at the audience of fankids who are WAAAAAAAYYY too smart for their own good, revealed the ending long before it arrived and STILL was able to deliver genuine jolts and surprises. Well done!

Belle (2021)

 

Japanese director / animator Mamoru Hosoda's lavish Belle (2021) is the umpteeth retelling / recasting of the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, set both in an enormous virtual world called "U", over which a beautful singing avatar named Belle rules, and in actual southern Japan, where a withdrawn high school student named Suzu seems to be losing the struggle with adapting to her mother's death years before. How these two worlds rise and converge is the gist of the story, whose pacing is more deliberate than game-based anime but which succeeds with a thoughtful storyline and characters that have more dimensions than one might expect in an animated feature. I regret the dubbed version of the film and not the original Japanese with subtitles was screened at my showing. I prefer seeing and hearing the product as the director had intended.

The 355

 

Simon Kinberg doesn't deliver much that's new for the super-spy genre in The 355. Even its central premise of a team of international female "bad asses" teaming up to avert global catastrophe by retrieving a device that could subvert and control the cybersphere doesn't feel especially fresh. The same "ladies get it done" swagger we've been seeing for decades.

The picture -- which stars Jessica Chastain, Diane Kruger and Lupita Nyong'o as American, German and British assets, respectively, along with Penelope Cruz as a Colombian psychotherapist to spies and Bingbing Fan as a Chinese double (triple) agent -- delivers some good thrills but two or three set pieces that go too long for the punch they pack. A bit more story (more about what drives these women), less close-quarter fighting (it all becomes a blur) and one or two fewer double-crosses (secret agencies cannot be that porous) would have greatly improved the picture.

The Tragedy of Macbeth

 

Joel and Ethan Coen are motion picture royalty, having written/directed/produced innovative and enigmatic features for the past 40 years, often with Joel's wife, Frances McDormand. Joel Coen has recrafted Shakespeare's The Scottish Play and cast Denzel Washington in the lead role, with Frances McDormand as the Lady of the house.

Coen has edited the text, even though the original play is among the shortest by the Bard, and fully diversified the casting, all of whom deliver solid, classical readings. Coen has also enhanced the play's spectral elements, recrafting the tale as a phantasm in stark black and white on sets and locations that evoke both the staginess of Olivier's Hamlet (1948) and the surrealism of Bergman's Seventh Seal (1957). The result is an exquisite and invigorating reimagining of this familiar story of bloody ambition and madness. As one might expect, Washington and McDormand are terrific, but I also found the performances by Alex Hassell as Ross, the nobleman and messenger, and Kathryn Hunter as the witches, striking and highly memorable.