Bordertown

 The Finnish detective series Bordertown has a modularity of tone and structure that befits a region that gave the world component furniture. The series stars Ville Virtanen as a bewilderingly taciturn criminal investigator blessed with preternatural  deductive abilities but wanting in discernment about those closest to him. His manner matches his world -- angular, precise and dispassionate. The series is in Finnish with smatterings of English, and, for me, it is the strangeness of this language (of the same family as Hungarian and Basque) that lends the series a unique sonic imprint to match its refreshingly unconventional narrative. It's tough going but satisfying once the pieces are in place.

The Fades

I'm quite taken with this BBC armageddon / zombie / angel miniseries The Fades (2011), which stars a pre-"Get Out" Daniel Kaluuya as Mac, the series narrator-of-sorts and best pal to lead character Paul (played with impeccable understatement by Iain De Caestecker), who is a newly minted celestial warrior commissioned to stop the destruction of human kind by angry souls trapped between earth and the after life. Kaluuya's Mac has tremendous "mouthy" wattage -- he probably has twice the number of lines as his mate -- but his devotion to his changing and challenging friend in the face of the last days gives their relationship added depth.

Deadpool 2

Deadpool 2's director David Leitch and star Ryan Reynolds plow deeper into the first film's irreverence to lampoon the Marvelous Comic Universe of which Deadpool is self-satisfactorily not a part of. Propriety is MIA in the eternal rejuvenator's bloody but not entirely cynical adventure, which directs as much of its attention to the world of film as it does to the film's fictional world. In this sweeping and nonsensical tale, costumed avenger (lower case A) Wade Wilson / Deadpool loses his true love (Morena Baccarin) in a revenge attack by some bad guys and vows to join her in the afterlife. The indestructible Deadpool's powers of rejuvenation, however, keep him from achieving his goal, so, in the meantime he joins up with a motley crew of not entirely actualized mutants to save a mouthy, intemperate and dangerous kid (the hilarious young Kiwi actor Julian Dennison of Hunt for the Wilderpeople) from a time-traveling assassin (Avengers: Infinity War's MVP Josh Brolin). The body count, of course, is unchartable, and the laughs are delivered so fast and furiously that the script (co-written by Reynols) often works against itself.

Isle of Dogs

 Wes Anderson’s films are so compositionally complex that they are visually overwhelming. When combined with a satirical script that is equally as dense with wordplay, you have a work that is easy to admire but, at least for me, difficult to love. Anderson’s animated Isle of Dogs boasts all of the qualities that make Anderson’s films motion picture events. Expressively voiced by Bryan Cranston, Greta Gerwig, Courtney B. Vance and Liev Schreiber, Isle is the story of the expulsion of all canines from a Japanese city and the boy who sets out to find his banished pet. Its signature Andersonian wit is burnished with poetic passages about duty and loyalty.

Tully

In Jason Reitman's Tully, Charlize Theron is Marlo, the due-any-minute pregnant mother of an 8-year-old and 6-year-old. Though she loves her earnest but absent husband (Ron Livingston) and her lovable but challenging kids (Lia Frankland and Asher Miles Fallica) she's unraveling, rapidly. When her status-conscious brother (Mark Duplass) offers to pay for a night nanny to relieve some of the pressure, Marlo rejects the idea at first but shortly after the third arrives decides to give it a chance. The weirdly empathic Tully (Mackenzie Davis) is a godsend who helps Marlo not only get some rest but uncover the real reason happiness has been so elusive. The script by Diablo Cody (Young Adult, Juno) is soulful and winning and, quite often, hilarious.

Cinema Filings: Call Me By Your Name -- Updated

Narratively and compositionally, Call Me By Your Name offers a wealth of material for cinephiles to study. Though not a perfect film, it is an interesting and evocative one that overcomes its ambiguities with strong performances and emotional intelligence. These notes assume the reader has seen the film at least once. (BECAUSE I TRY TO DEAL WITH EVENTS IN THE FILM CHRONOLOGICALLY, SCROLL DOWN FOR NEW MUSINGS.)

*One of the film's most reproduced images is of the film's young protagonist Elio Perlman, elbows resting on a stack of books, framed by an open window in his family's Italian villa, where doors and windows are often propped open or batted by breezes, suggesting an openness to the setting and those who live there, even though some of the residents have secrets.

*Many scenes take place at a dining table set up just outside the villa's kitchen; an orchard of apricot, cherry and peach trees is just beyond. Food is ever-present as is the easy exchange among guests, who appear to be many. And this, again, lends a liberality and civility to the setting and its denizens.
   
*Among the film's many beauties is the fluidity of language among Elio, his parents and their summer resident, the American graduate student Oliver, whom Elio is drawn to. Director Luca Guadagnino stages an opening scene with the Perlmans speaking alternatively English, French and Italian. This is repeated in later scenes and is matched by the presence of Italian and French newspapers in the home. Theirs appears to be an international consciousness, probably one that is foreign to many audiences in the U.S.

*Annella Perlman is a translator, who one afternoon reads to her husband and son from a German edition of a Renaissance romance. The three are gathered on a couch in the villa's music room / study while rain pours outside. The staging suggests this is a familiar setting for them. The text, about a lovelorn and indecisive young knight, resonates with Elio and seems to light a fire under him to resolve his own matters of the heart. And, indeed, he tries in the film's next scene.

*Though celebrated for its candid representation of the intimate moments between Elio and Oliver, the film also revels in ambiguity that contributes to its in medias res tone. What had been the nature of Elio's relationship with Marzia before Oliver arrived? Where was Oliver spending his nights? How much did the Perlmans know when they sent Elio off with Oliver to Bergamo? Though not deal breakers, these questions do linger.

*And what to make of Marzia? For me, this wonderful character, played with even tenderness by Esther Garrel, epitomizes the film's commitment to peace and grace. Her "friends for life" scene with Elio was a balm for an audience left raw by Oliver's departure. 

*Like the best of film, CMBYN operates on many levels -- the visual and the auditory. Having extraordinarily attractive performers can eclipse other subtler narrative elements. For example, the tolling of bells -- town square, church or dinner -- punctuates several scenes in the film and complements the filmmaker's effort to ground the action in a time and place. These sounds, while recessed, can be as meaningful as the saying of the boys' names -- whether during introductions, lovemaking or that fateful winter phone call. They're all markers.

*Cinematographer Mukdeeprom's camera lingers on details of the film's setting and the characters' faces, hands and feet to strip away artificiality and decrease the distance between viewers and subjects. Oliver's foot floating refracted in the villa's pool, Elio's bare feet as he leaves the pool to challenge the "usurper" at picking apricots and, later, as the two men's feet find each other during their midnight tryst. These shots, while part of the film's sensuality, also disclose the humanity of these subjects. 

*It's not entirely clear in the film why Oliver was so overbearing during his first days with the Perlmans, but Elio seems the only one put off by the casual nature of the student's interactions; Oliver seems brash and self-involved. The scene at the volleyball game crystallizes this. Oliver, taking a break from his noisy display in the game, grabs the bottle of water from Elio and then gets "handsy"with him, a gesture that is misread. Professor Perlman might actually be onto something when he says in the next scene that Oliver might be "shy." Perhaps this "shyness" is unease mixed with a desire to be liked but not truly known. Of course, Elio cracks that egg -- eventually.

*Metaphors can be stretched beyond reason but one resides in Annella's peach orchard that is difficult to resist. Elio's discovery of a form of carnal knowledge with the aid of fruit does allude to the Garden of Eden and the introduction of sin to the world. Elio's response after being discovered by Oliver does reflect shame and disgrace, though Oliver himself is amused and intrigued. The shot of Elio plucking the fruit is nearly biblical.

*The short but important interlude after Elio's Bach "recital" is the scene of him scratching out scolding notes to himself about his earlier treatment of Oliver. "I was too harsh" and "I thought he didn't like me." This scene gets to some of the interior nature of the source novel, which is narrated by Elio, and reveals the vulnerability hiding behind the bravado.

*Oliver's brief comment about "hiddenness" he shares with Elio from the manuscript he was preparing strikes an ironic note, after the fact, as both men were at the time hiding, perhaps not as well as they imagined, secrets from one another. Hiddenness is also present in Elio's secret loft in the villa where he consorts with Marzia and later Oliver. And, of course, in his furtive snooping about Oliver, and his rather feral encounter with Oliver's swimming trunks (a much closer encounter was in the novel).

*When the power went out at the villa that rainy afternoon, Professor Perlman told a disconsolate Elio that he and his mother were always there for Elio if he ever needed to talk. In the next scene, during the Piave confession, Elio told Oliver he was confiding in him because there was no one else he could talk to. A truly strange reveal given what the professor said. As attractive as Elio is, the character also had more than a tinge of the callow manipulator in him -- lying to the girls and crabbing about his mother -- which actually made the character all the more believable.

*At Monet's Berm, Oliver tells Elio he likes the way he says things. I liked the way everyone spoke in the film. One of the true delights of the picture is how carefully the dialogue avoided banality. Even the raucous lunch time exchange about Italian politics was spicy and rococo, which made Oliver and Elio's fairly terse exchange after their midnight rendezvous all the more endearing. "I just wanted to be with you" is probably as lovely and honest a sentiment that can be shared with a loved one. 

*Elio's nosebleed after Monet's Berm was an elegant narrative red herring. To those who were brought up on motion pictures in which tragic figures were felled by virulent diseases, Elio's nosebleed was probably viewed as presage to a cancer diagnosis. In fact, it served to more fully awaken Oliver's suppressed feelings for Elio but also pressed Oliver into the uncomfortable position of revealing his canard with the young Parisienne Chiara. This would explain Oliver's hasty retreat from the villa when Chiara and Marzia arrive and his conspicuous absence the following day, which led to the fateful midnight tryst.

*The other passionate love affair in CMBYN is the film's infatuation with books. The famous shot mentioned at the top of this posting -- which actually does not appear in the film -- suggests not only Elio's voracious appetite for the written word but the life of the mind all of the residents of the villa embrace. Elio not only reads but he notates in the margins as he does, suggesting an intellectual maturity that early in the film may have actually outgrown his emotional maturity. By film's end, they were pretty much on par.

Elio's Bach "recital" was an obvious choice when clips were distributed for the talk shows because it shows Chalamet's "virtuosity" at the piano and a bit of the dynamic between the two characters early in the film. To my ear, it actually might be the stagiest of the scenes in the movie; it feels like both men are playing roles within roles -- Oliver and Elio were clearly trying to impress one another -- which adds to the levels of complexity in the narrative but might also feel more inauthentic than is needed at that juncture.

 

*The Lake Garda "truce" is an important moment in the film, also captured in stills (see below), that signals an ending to the sparring between Oliver and Elio, at least for the moment. Elio's earlier comment at breakfast about "almost" having sex with Marzia the night before and his fairly transparent attempt to show he did not resent Chiara's interest in Oliver did little to stanch either his or Oliver's clear interest in the other. (Perhaps that's what all the shouting was about at Garda that evening.) Sexual orientation is never addressed straightforwardly, but one would infer that Elio and Oliver were pretty "fluid" in their sexuality, even though Oliver early on would rather not talk about "those things." That declaration was followed by the kiss at Monet' s Berm. Actions and words?

*At the end of the Crema piazaetta scene (below), Oliver rises and prepares to leave. Elio, uncertain, rises too, assuming, if we're to read his facial expression, that they're continuing on their journey or returning to the villa. As they remount their bicycles, Elio loses balance and leans into Oliver, who steadies him by placing a hand firmly on his shoulder for perhaps a beat too long, which foreshadows the later massage scene at the volleyball game.  A gesture we would discover three quarters of the way into the film that was Oliver's way of signalling his affection. The film is a festival of ambiguity -- allusion and elusion, miscues, non sequiturs, elliptical remarks that trail off. Just like life.

*The interiority of CMBYN is what drives much of my fascination. What's going on inside these people who are both open with their living space and so guarded with their interior space? This guardedness is mirrored in the "speak or die" passage from The Heptameron and in Oliver's face as he and Elio discuss it. It is not clear, and it shouldn't necessarily be, what Oliver is thinking or his intention in inviting Elio to accompany him to town that afternoon. The film's narrative is silent, which leaves it to viewers to infer motives if we are inclined to do so. However, one thing is certain from the exchange before they departed, neither welcomed the idea of being separated for the afternoon. 

 

*In a small but not incidental scene early in the film, Elio is in the villa's pool while Oliver is swimming laps. It's one of many occasions when the audience watches the watcher (Elio). When Oliver stops to ask Elio what he's thinking about, Elio is deliberately unresponsive: "I'm not going to tell you." As with so much else in the film, this exchange is ambiguous; it might be Elio's way of masking his interest or punishing Oliver for being so outgoing and charming or a way of teasing him to get attention. Whatever the case, it doesn't work because when Oliver gives up, Elio gives in.  These smartly observed moments, pulled from the novel's brilliance, are what collectively make the film so resonant and real.

*The crucial Piave war memorial scene was craftily staged but curious in its affect, as Oliver, so assured through most of the film to that point, seemed to retreat from Elio's advance. It was here that the two started speaking in code, acknowledging their attraction but not speaking about it plainly so as not to cause trouble for Oliver. Insisting that Elio cooperate seemed both sensible and weak. Of course, Oliver would redeem himself, if only briefly, at Monet's Berm.

*The promotional shot of Elio and Oliver walking bicycles down a village street does not appear in the film, although the pairing could easily be imagined in that story space. The shot does suggest to me an unsettling obsession on Elio's part (it's difficult to imagine the character being so transfixed) and a degree of obliviousness that Oliver could not credibly claim after Monet's Berm. Still, the film's hint at a reversal of the theme of Mann's A Death in Venice is framed nicely here.

*Elio's invitation to Oliver to go swimming the morning after their midnight rendezvous likely rang with deja vu for some viewers. Oliver extended the same invitation to Elio, under quite different circumstances, near the beginning of the film  / the summer. At that time, Oliver, presumably returning from a night out, found the lone Elio in his bedroom with idle hands. Elio, startled by the brash American's intrusion and puzzled by his interest, agrees to go swimming though he clearly would rather not. And it was then that the cogs of their companionship began to turn. Because so much is hidden in the film, Elio's suggestion that they go swimming might be viewed as a statement that he's ready to move on from the night before, wash it away, if you will. The next scene at the river, Elio is swimming apart from Oliver, which leaves questions for Oliver, and the viewer, about what had just transpired between the two.

*In CMBYN's story world, people have names and not labels.  Neither Elio nor Oliver self-identifies as homosexual or bisexual during the course of the film. Their "more than a friendship," as Professor Perlman describes it, doesn't seem to exist on a social or political plane. It just exists. It might very well be that what grows between them, while first stifled by Oliver's fear of discovery, is so organic to them as men, and how they choose to experience the world, that the sexual component is just that -- a component of their friendship, an intense component but a component nonetheless. That's not to suggest the characters are not gay or bi or lie somewhere else along the sexuality continuum. And one might imagine that their physical relationship might have taken off quicker had either of them been "out." But that would have been an entirely different, and not altogether interesting, journey.

Call Me By Your Name's Timothée Chalamet -- Updated

Here I post notes about Timothée Chalamet, whose work in Call Me By Your Name earned him accolades and honors around the world. These are not fandom ravings but rather random musings about this exceptional young man's craft.

*A Chalamet / Glover pairing for Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen or Othello, Beckett's Godot or Parks' Topdog/Underdog would be singularly epic.

*2018 promises to be an even bigger year for Young Mr. Chalamet. Along with Beautiful Boy and Woody Allen's joint there's Hot Summer Nights (TC does Breaking Bad?) I didn't know this number was in the mix. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=O5ROSS9ReUY

 

*In Pamela Romanowsky's The Adderall Diaries (2015), Chalamet was cast as the teenage son of an abusive father (Ed Harris), who grows up to be a drug-addicted and self-destructive author (James Franco). Chalamet appears in flashes of memory, recoiling from his father's temper, self-injuring and retaliating against abandonment. It's a demanding role even though it does not carry a narrative arc, and, once again, he demonstrates his readiness and willingness to commit to a challenging part.

*Chalamet's performance in Miss Stevens (2016) was hauntingly nuanced, even though it contained some histrionics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH8y3lky2FM). His character, the boundaries-challenged Billy, was both endearing and unnerving, walking that line between comforter and creep. For an actor so young to be able to negotiate such difficult emotional territory is quite extraordinary. 

*The mystery of Chalamet's attractiveness will probably never be solved to everyone's satisfaction -- if the attempt were to be made -- but it has occurred to me that in some photographs he bears a striking resemblance to Liz Taylor. Taylor's appeal, of course, is legendary, but Chalamet's allure is not entirely in bone structure and facial symmetry. From where I'm sitting, it's in his mien, manner and intellect, as well.

*In interviews, Chalamet has included Joaquin Phoenix among the actors he admires most. I can certainly see the affinity, if it's based on body of work. Phoenix picks idiosyncratic roles; he seems to thrive on the serious challenges. His characters are often taciturn, brutalized men who glower. One recent exception was his pained loner / romantic in Her. Frivolous and Joaquin Phoenix do not occupy the same space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XeK0rc_9a0  I'm confident the same will be said about Timothée Chalamet in time.

*Chalamet should have won the Oscar because he was in nearly every scene of Call Me By Your Name, speaks three languages in it, plays Bach, covers everything from diffidence to passion, holds audiences in their seats without saying a word, and Frank Ocean thinks he rocks.

*I've heard Chalamet in a dozen interviews and think he's got one of the nimblest, most sagacious minds of any 22-year-old I've ever come across. And I've been teaching them for 25 years. He's unaffected and engaging, a real joy to watch.

*He will be one of the most consequential persons in cinema sooner rather than later. Aside from his outstanding screen work, in interviews he is focused, incisive and generous. If he avoids predators, Chalamet will be the Paul Newman of his generation, for real.

*Having seen CMBYN a couple dozen times since January -- alone and with friends -- I feel the film itself, due in no small part to his leading role, stands up remarkably under close scrutiny. It is scrupulously composed (I've created another posting for those thoughts) and thoroughgoing. Just remarkable in its presentation and affect. It is masterful and will endure.

*As a friend said to me after a screening, it takes real immersion into a role to enable an actor to alter their appearance so dramatically and to such powerful effect as Chalamet does in the course of the picture.

*The film societies decide who gets hardware, not how enriching the work was. Often the two are the same, not always. Challenging, stimulating work (whether film or performance) will always be prized by those who were touched, enlivened. And that's not bad. Not bad.

*I'm intrigued by Chalamet's 2014 film short Spinners (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOYMwuHJa3Q …) and its message about displaced and discarded young people. Film shorts are trickier for me to comment on than features because I rely so much on narrative that "snapshots" leave me too much room for mischief.

*Knowing that Kid Cudi's credos speak to Chalamet adds interesting levels to the actor's descriptions of what gets him going and how he's handling his fame. I suppose walking the line between the desire for affirmation and "whatever" can be tricky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRPpLGxGNZY

Ready Player One

Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One is expensive (175 million dollar) and disorienting (two-thirds of the film takes place in game space), loaded with pop culture references and self-referential witticisms, but, regrettably, it is also overstuffed and emotionally inert for long stretches. Most of the film's interest is in the execution of Spielberg's singular transporting vision onto the screen which occasionally in the past has fallen just short of full realization (see Bruce the shark from Jaws). In this case, the picture is a visual marvel set in the near future where citizens escape their overpopulated existence through a virtual reality game called Oasis, taking on avatars and living a fantasy life that occasionally means warring fantastic creatures to accumulate points and coins. Spielberg's hero is the teenage orphan Wade (Tye Sheridan), whose avatar, Parzival, is a skillful bad-ass who often teams with other masked players in Oasis. He befriends a rogue female avatar named Art3mis / real name Samantha (Olivia Cooke), who is actually playing the game to find a way to destroy it. This crew joins the rest of the gaming universe in a challenge to find secret keys that will lead to an Easter Egg hidden by the game's creator (Mark Rylance) somewhere in the guts of the virtual world that will pay trillions of dollars and transfer control of the game to the winner. Ben Mendelsohn plays the head of the gaming company plotting to keep anyone from wresting control out of his hands. Yes, it's convoluted as hell, which is much of its problem, the other part  being the actual people get so little screen time that the audience never really develops a connection with them and so their quest (while amazing to watch) feels remote.

Chappaquiddick

In John Curran's Chappaquiddick, Sen. Ted Kennedy (Jason Clarke) is portrayed as the whipping boy of the Kennedy clan, who did absolutely everything wrong after driving off a bridge on Martha's Vineyard and leaving a devoted campaign worker (Kate Mara) to drown. As portrayed by the masterful Mr. Clarke, Kennedy is at once despicable and pitiful, but certainly no more callous than the stable of power brokers and spinmeisters who had been doing the palsied and indomitable Joe Kennedy's (Bruce Dern) bidding for years and are called to save the senator from himself. The screenplay by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan is smart and confines the story to the week after the accident, which, coincidentally was the time of the first moon walk -- the time of one Kennedy's posthumous space age triumph and his youngest brother's near implosion.

A Quiet Place

 
John Krasinski's mean monster thriller, A Quiet Place, makes clear what's at stake in a truly startling way within the picture's first five minutes and adds layers of complication and dreadful concern through to the last reel. Krasinski directs himself and Emily Blunt as the parents of a small family trying to stay alive after what appears to have been an alien invasion that left humankind scattered, scarce and scared. The beasties are hideous, ravenous and blind; they hunt using sound, which means to avoid attack one must be quiet -- always. Contributing more than a little irony to this entertaining pressure cooker of a movie is the young actress Millicent Simmonds, who plays the couple's oldest child, who uses a hearing aid. Simmonds, who actually is deaf, brings an emotional weight to her role that nearly matches the more senior members of the cast and that's saying a lot considering what Emily Blunt must face down during the course of this terrific picture.

District (2017)

Anthony Bawn (nee Newsome) created an interesting, no budget TV series last year that was streamed on what his company describes as the only black-owned, LGBTQ service on the web. District, which is now playing as a single hour-long piece on Amazon, explores the intersections of blackness, maleness and sexuality in an original context, IMO -- labor exploitation among black men in Atlanta. The series / film stars Brandon Anthony, the most polished of the half-dozen men in the cast, whose character, Miller, is an elaborately tattooed, under-employed hustler of sorts who is preyed upon by his occasional lover Jayvon, a homeless drug addict who nonetheless rocks a swimmer's build. One of Miller's generous "friends" introduces him to a secretive cartel of black construction contractors called the Brotherhood, from whom he learns that strings are attached to everything. The film suffers from uneven performances from cast members (all of the men are out-acted by Tami Roman as Miller's straight-talking, imprisoned mother), poor sound editing and mixing, and a curious narrative voice-over from Miller that's distorted to sound like anonymous witness testimony.

Journey's End

British director Saul Dibb's anguishing cinematic treatment of R.C. Sherriff's 1928 stage play Journey's End trains an unwavering but humane eye on the devastation of war that goes beyond the destruction of flesh and bone to the pulverization of the mind and the spirit. Sam Claflin stars as Captain Stanhope, a company commander in 1918 who is deep in the whiskey bottle as the film opens and never finds his way out. He is counseled and supported by the stalwart Lieutenant Osborne (Paul Bettany) and Second Lieutenant Trotter (Stephen Graham), both of whom are much loved by the soldiers under their command. Into their ranks comes a freshly minted second lieutenant, Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), a personal friend of Stanhope's who requested assignment to his friend's company, which has been assigned to hold a trench in northern France. Stanhope, embarrassed by his drinking, is at first cold to the new officer, who admires him still and understands little of what combat is actually about. In time, Stanhope receives word that the Germans will be moving on the company's position in a few days and the company can expect no assistance or relief. The film spends most of its time showing us what goes on beneath the surface among this group of battered, frightened but resolute soldiers, who, we realize, as they must, that they are little more than dispensable fodder.

A Fantastic Woman

Chilean director Sebastian Lelia’s A Fantastic Woman assumes nothing in its depiction of a trans woman whose partner dies suddenly, leaving her to contend with the man’s abrasive and transphobic ex-wife and brutish son as she comes to grips with the meaning of their relationship and her place in the world. The narrative does not ride on the back of current political disputes and activist sloganeering. The film’s lead is not heroic just supremely human. Daniela Vega is stoic and nearly regal in her bearing as the beset Marina, who simply wants to salvage some element of happiness out of a horrible situation.

Unsane

Steven Soderbergh's clever, iPhone-filmed distress fest, Unsane, is a tightly wound creep thriller that will no doubt have audiences yelling at the screen -- in the best way. British actress Claire Foy (The Crown) stars as Sawyer Valentini, an anxious and possibly crazy young woman who is on the run in Pennsylvania from a stalker back home in Boston. A visit to a counselor for her anxiety lands her in a psychiatric hospital, that may or may not be legit, for observation, but she bounces off the walls and off of other patients. A gregarious fellow patient (Jay Pharoah of SNL) who may or may not have an opioid addiction befriends Sawyer and tries to help her adjust. A weirdly menacing medical technician played by Joshua Leonard (director and star of the pioneering handheld creep fest The Blair Witch Project) may or may not be Sawyer's stalker from Boston and no one seems to believe her claims that he is. Both Foy and Leonard deliver a degree of intensity in their roles that could have easily devolved into parody. Instead, they are riveting and exhausting. Unsane is a smartly crafted tale in this Age of Time's Up and predatory health care.

Seven Seconds

Netflix's Seven Seconds starts as a refreshing treatment of a rapidly aging dramatic premise -- honest folks face off with bad cops and a beleaguered and cynical criminal justice system -- but it turns mawkish in its final hour. It's worth the watch because of Clare-Hope Ashitey's winning performance as Assistant Prosector KJ Harper, a karaoke-loving booze hound who is assigned the case of teenage black boy who was hit by a Jersey City cop and left in a ditch to die. Though at first reluctant, Harper is joined in this Black Lives Matter crusade by NYPD transfer Joe "Fish" Rinaldi (Michael Mosley), a ballsy guy who hates dirty cops more than he hates New Jersey. The series' rogues' gallery of despicable characters includes a trio of undercover detectives who are in bed with a local black gang that is slinging drugs on city corners, an ambitious chief prosecutor who needs the case settled to lock in the black vote for the next election and happens to be Harper's ex-lover, and the dead boy's family, church-going folks who sway between indignation and madness. The final courtroom scene might remind some viewers of To Kill a Mockingbird; I'm sure the scene was meant as an homage but it felt forced and treacly to me.

Hard Sun

Brit Neil Cross's Hard Sun joins the bleak ranks of binge series occupied by Mr. Robot and The Night Of ... whose grim premises suggest the creator's intention to go dark and get ever darker. In the case of Hard Sun, the irony is deliberate and the brutality unrelenting. Cross, the creative mind behind Luther, has crafted his narrative around a catastrophic solar episode, not fully explained in season 1, that is predicted to destroy life on earth in five years (yes, cue Bowie). Were that horrible projection not enough to contend with, London's unhinged are using leaked reports of humanity's destruction as reason to mete out their own last-days retribution on sinners and saints alike. No, it's not a pretty picture but the three primary players are, er, stellar. Jim Sturgess, who I remember best from the Beatle's tribute film Across the Universe and the card-counting hat trick 21, plays DCI Charlie Hicks, a corrupt cop who may or may not have murdered a fellow officer; Agyness Deyn (Clash of Titans) as DI Elaine Renko, a crack detective and astoundingly messed up woman whose assigned to Hicks' unit to replace the dead detective and, secretly, to get to the bottom of the shooting; and the eminently watchable Nikki Amuka-Bird (Luther), as an MI5 operative on the hunt for the pirated documents that tell the story of the solar episode, code name Hard Sun. The series also features some outstanding work by the young actor Jo Jo Macari as Renko's slasher offspring, the psychotic but weirdly lovable Daniel.

Love, Simon

Greg Berlanti's Love, Simon delivers layers of affectionate humor in the telling of this coming out story of high school senior Simon Spier (Nick Robinson) who begins to correspond via email with another secretly gay student at his high school whom he knows simply as Blue. A virtual romance blossoms (mostly in Simon's fertile imagination) and is kept from Simon's unbelievably cool parents (Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel) and his devoted buddies (Katherine Langford, Alexandra Shipp and Jorge Lendeborg Jr.). When his correspondence is discovered by a classmate (a wonderfully irrepressible Logan Miller), Simon concocts ways to keep his deluded blackmailer happy, all of which, of course, go sideways. This affirming picture is brimming with charm and wit, none of which is barbed. Simon's dilemma is ultimately resolved, of course, but it serves as a fairly pointed lesson about the interconnections of our lives and loves. Tony Hale as Assistant Principal Worth and Natasha Rothwell as drama coach Ms. Albright add delicious helpings of sauce to the mix.

Annihilation

Alex Garland's phantasm of a film, Annihilation, contains familiar expedition tropes, a brutal and agonizing attack sequence and stunning visuals that, unfortunately, spangle more than enlighten. We follow a team of female scientists and warriors into a piece of coastal U.S. territory that is being genetically transformed by an extraterrestrial presence called The Shimmer. Others have ventured in but not one has returned. The picture poses an interesting paradox -- the benign alien threat. Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Oscar Isaac star.

A Wrinkle in Time

Ava DuVernay's adaption of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is such a frustrating work that it's difficult for me to pinpoint where to place my disappointment. I guess I'm perplexed more than sad. Two young siblings (Storm Reid and Deric McCabe) and a friend (Levi Miller) set off in the company of three fantastically costumed cosmic creatures (Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling) to search for the sibs' scientist father (Chris Pine) who is lost in another time and dimension. The script feels uneven and quite often uncertain of itself. The derision the sibs suffer at school because of their father's disappearance feels grotesque and unreal but is explained, to some degree and not entirely convincingly, later. Actually, some important exposition about the discovery at the center of the story has been omitted from the final print, even though, oddly, it was included in an early trailer. The animated elements are top-notch Disney but don't contribute substantially to story development. A pretty spectacular flying sequence runs two hairs too long and is followed by comparatively lesser visual effects that don't quite add up to a thrill ride. The final showdown with the evil force IT is a showcase for the often engaging Miss Reid and the precocious though overtaxed Master McCabe. And, still, the three child actors heading this fairly contained adventure aren't well-served by the story. The dreamy young Master Miller is reduced to prepubescent eye-candy, and the early banter between Reid and McCabe is too often garbled when it's not cloying. Ms. DuVernay's decidedly multicultural casting and storytelling is trading in some interesting racial politics. The casual viewer might not question the choice of perennial heartthrob Pine to play the missing father and British beauty Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the perplexed mother / wife but others might wonder why the film, which was boldly promoting the universality of humankind, would show such timidity in casting these roles so conventionally. I wonder what the response would have been had they cast Sterling K. Brown as the father, for example. Children, especially younger girls, will no doubt enjoy the film's power girl message but the picture itself is not one for the time capsule. Pity.

Black Panther

Celebrated director Ryan Coogler brings his Hollywood A-list gravitas to bear in the latest Marvel Universe entry, Black Panther. Despite the less-than-nuanced decision to release the film, which features a predominately black cast, during Black History Month, Disney Studio's assured blockbuster offers much to appreciate and to ponder, whether inside or outside of the African diaspora. Chadwick Boseman plays Prince T'Challa, who ascends to the throne of the fictional nation of Wakanda after his father is killed in a terrorist attack on the United Nations (depicted in Captain America: Winter Soldier). T'Challa, like his noble forebears, is also a costumed superhero, Black Panther, whose abilities are derived from a rare mineral found only in his country and coveted by mercenaries around the world. T'Challa's nemesis is an erstwhile American soldier of fortune named, most unsubtly, Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), who claims Wakandan roots and wants to liberate oppressed people in the U.S. and elsewhere using Wakanda's miraculous technology and weaponry. This richly textured, exquisitely designed and expansive film boasts an international cast (Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Daniel Kaluuya, Martin Freeman, Letitia Wright) and delivers all of the bang and bad-assery fans expect from a Marvel Universe picture while posing provocative questions about national identity and kinship, isolationism, security and community.

Broadchurch

I feel I'm experiencing traumatic stress associated with processing the callousness of the DT administration. I'm raw, like my nerves have been rubbed all over with a scouring pad. When I watch a program like the first season of Broadchurch, before you know it I'm feeling flinty and pissed, wanting someone, anyone, to be punished. My condition isn't helped by the superbness of David Tennant and Olivia Colman, who voice obstinateness and resoluteness, respectively, like few actors I know. Colman, whose diction I find captivating, was MVP in The Night Manager (won the Golden Globe), and Tennant, well, is Tennant: Classically trained. Indefatigable. Probably the most loved Dr. Who of all time (pardon the pun). The Brits really have a way of peeling off the layers of community sin and this series is a prime example. The last episode of Season 1 was unrelenting in its depiction of human distress and nearly unbearable grief and regret. And yet, the image of memorial pyres burning along the southern coast of England gave me chills.

Phantom Thread

Paul Thomas Anderson's films are not to be enjoyed as much as endured. That is not to say they aren't well made; Anderson is an auteur of the first order. (His is a fiercely creative imagination.) It's that his subject matter is often bleak, people behaving badly, irrationally, brutally, talking past each other and quite often past the audience too. Such is the case with Phantom Thread, reportedly the last picture the film's star Daniel Day-Lewis will make. 'Tis a pity that the celebrated actor will not be signing off with a more powerful role or substantial piece. Still, Day-Lewis, Anderson and the film are nominated for Oscars. Day-Lewis plays Reynolds Woodcock, a British dressmaker for the aristocracy who seduces and then abuses a young woman (Vicky Krieps), who though his model and lover turns out to be more than a match for Woodcock's monstrous behavior. The film is beautifully designed and filmed and plays with viewers' perceptions and expectations. While one might expect a famous couturier to be turning out some knock out frocks, Woodcock's creations, to my eye, are boxy and cranky and unbecoming to the women who commission his work. In fact, he's touted as a genius but he's actually more of a fussy martinet who is coddled by his severely pinched sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville), and haunted by his dead mother, whose wedding dress he made at the age of seven. Anderson, who also wrote the screenplay, once again welcomes audiences into a world of supremely unlikable people and it's excruciating.

I, Tonya

Aussie director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) never asks for the audience to suspend disbelief while watching I, Tonya. In fact, the film opens with Margot Robbie as an older, spent Tonya Harding announcing that the film is a mix of truth and lies. Each member of the stellar ensemble -- Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Paul Walter Hauser -- goes for broke in this retelling of the low-class horrors that created a world-class figure skater and then all but ruined her life. Janney, an effing scream as Tonya's witch of a mother, cusses and smacks her way through the picture, dragging on cigarillos while abusing her daughter and destroying all goodness in her path. When Tonya finally moves out and in with boyfriend Jeff Gillooly, she simply exchanges one variety of sociopath for another. It's Gillooly and his portly numbskull of a friend Shawn who came up with the idea of sabotaging "America's Darling" skater Nancy Kerrigan. How and when sabotage, which started as sending some intimidating letters to Kerrigan, became bashing her on the knee is disputed but that's the wonder of this madhouse of a picture. It's all a Crockpot of truths, half-truths, mis-rememberings and full-blown lies that the audience is welcome to believe or not. Robbie and Stan are truly inspired as the warring couple, who in the end stopped just short of killing each other.

Hostiles

In Hostiles, director Scott Cooper (Black Mass and Out of the Furnace) takes viewers on a journey across some beautiful U.S. territory to tell the story of a sad and hollow Army officer in the 1890s (Christian Bale) who rediscovers his humanity while escorting an ailing Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi) and his family from a New Mexico prison post to his traditional burial grounds in Montana. Bale's Capt. Joe Blocker refuses the mission at first, bearing nothing but hatred for all Indians, but relents when his pension is threatened. He starts out with a full (and familiar) contingent of men (the clueless private, the untested West Point lieutenant, the loyal black corporal, the world-weary sergeant who is one stiff drink away from self-destruction) but are soon joined by the widowed and childless survivor of a ranch raid and slaughter (Rosamund Pike). As these stories go, Blocker's party is slowly picked off by Comanches and other hostiles along the trail, putting into question whether they will arrive at the destination. Cooper, who directs raw, brutal films about men refusing to give in to untenable circumstances, offers in Hostiles a picture that takes full advantage of the stunning vistas of New Mexico and Colorado but invests most of the movie's impact in quiet moments between these men and women, when they reveal the devastation that violent hatred has laid on them.

Mudbound

Mary J. Blige's Oscar-nominated performance as the quietly determined, fiercely sacrificial mother of a WWII tank commander (Jason Mitchell) who returns home to the Mississippi Delta is a well-modulated study of power and presence in film. Blige's character, Florence Jackson, is a supporting role but she doesn't just grace the margins of the scenes she's in, seasoning the proceedings with homespun bromides and nods. Instead, she pulls attention to her when she's present because of the weight of the burden she carries: She is caring for her family who live as tenants on a farm that seems cursed while being pulled to tend to the children of the landowners.  Rob Morgan plays her husband, Hap, a farmer who preaches on Sunday about freedom in this lifetime. He's committed to his family's safety, which means entering through back doors and obliging even the most heinous of souls if they're white. This rankles his oldest son, returned veteran Ronsel, who finds friendship and trust in his fellow veteran, Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), the younger son of the farm owners. Their perilous friendship eventually leads to disaster for the men but not before helping them both to heal a bit. Mudbound, directed by Dee Rees, deals candidly but also artfully with our country's miserable past; with insatiable desperation; the horrors of race hatred; the lingering, debilitating effects of war. It's a wrenching, difficult picture that does, however, convey the message that love will bring the victory in the end ... and maybe in this lifetime.