Emma.

 

Fashion photographer Autumn de Wilde's Emma. is an admirable work, finely crafted and meticulously composed. Its production values are exquisite; each frame is a study, a tableau of near artistic perfection -- stately interiors of the 19th-century British country estates and the expansively verdant countrysides surrounding them. It's all just breathtaking. 

De Wilde directs an array of fully realized characters nestled in Jane Austen's mannered story space and led by the luminously doe-eyed Anya Taylor-Joy as the title character, a young and unattached woman of means who enjoys playing match-maker but is not particularly well-suited to the task. Her latest project is the school girl Harriet (Mia Goth), whose lineage is dubious but whose devotion to Emma is unquestionable. 

Circling around the two women are suitors with varying degrees of dexterity, played by Johnny Flynn, Josh O'Connor and Callum Turner. Screenwriter Ellen Catton's dialogue is as rich and sumptuous as the tea cakes gracing the parlor tables.

 

As marvelous as Emma. is in its entirety, I was especially taken by Miranda Hart's performance as the bounteously dithered Miss Bates, upon whom Taylor-Joy's Emma directs withering condescension. Of all the manor folk who populate Austen's beauteously appointed but frequently unmannered chambers and porticoes, Miss Bates is the gentlest and utterly without guile. Hart's depiction of this prim bundle of self-deprecation elevates every scene she's in. I was charmed.

 

Homer Price / reflection

Some of my earliest reading adventures were with Homer Price. I read the crazy doughnut story, which has been made into movies, dozens of times and especially loved it when the poor kid -- Rupert Black -- got the doughnut with the diamond bracelet. Even though the passage below would surely give some folks fits, there seems to be a guilelessness to its offensiveness, and Robert McCloskey was such a mensch that it's hard to get mad.

"(T)onight (Friday) was the dress rehearsal of the Pageant. Homer and Freddy and a couple of their friends were taking the part of Indians. They were going to be powdered all over with cocoa, striped with mercurochrome, and draped with towels around their middles. Homer had to get to rehearsal right on the dot, because he started the Pageant by rubbing two sticks together to make a fire. Most of the Pageant was historical, all about Ezekiel Enders and the founding of Centerburg. The organist of the African Baptist Church wrote the words and music for a long choral work, which the choir was going to sing all the while the Pageant was being acted."

William Thomas Jr. / Buckwheat

This is a studio portrait of William Thomas Jr., the child actor who played Buckwheat in the Little Rascals / Our Gang film shorts of the '30s and '40s. His was reputedly the longest continuing character in the popular serials. The serials were criticized by many for perpetuating harmful racial stereotypes, but celebrated by others for featuring black and white children co-existing amicably. Thomas left the series in '43 and entered military service. He never performed in another motion picture. He was not quite 50 when he died 40 years ago this October.

In White America / reflection

Much of my life has been about making discoveries and connections.

One of my earliest memories of serious theater was a production of Martin Duberman's "In White America," performed in a small chapel at Claflin College. It may have been reader's theater. It was 1970 or '71.

I was not familiar with the work but was riveted, chilled and touched by the stories, documented tales of personal and impersonal encounters between the races. The six member cast of black and white actors was a mix of students, faculty and guest performers. In looking back, I figure that by the time I saw this staging, the play had been circulating for a few years. It's original off-Broadway production in 1963 included Moses Gunn (a distinguished stage performer and co-founder of the Negro Ensemble Company) and Gloria Foster (later known to millennials as the Oracle in the Matrix films).

She won an Obie for her performance.

Duberman was born in 1930 the son of a Ukrainian immigrant. He is a historian, biographer and retired professor who was also a tireless civil rights and gay rights activist. In the preface to the 1964 edition of his play, Duberman wrote (in part):

"My starting point was the wish to describe what it has been like to be a Negro in this country (to the extent that a white man can describe it). Neither popular journalism nor professional history has made much effort to tell this story. Both have been dominated by whites, and the whites, whether from guilt, indifference, or hostility, have been slow to reveal the American Negro's past. The revelations are painful, but they must be faced if the present is to be understood, and the future made more tolerable."

Here are a couple of scenes from the play's Second Act.

Oscar Picks

Oscar prognostication is a harmless (and useless) activity that folks who love movies toss at anyone who will listen. I don't know the movie business well enough to really handicap any of the pictures that made the cut this year, but I know that "best" is such a loaded term that it is almost meaningless as a label for quality or importance.

"Big" does not necessarily equal "best," neither do "edgy," "uncompromising," "artful," "sincere" and "truthful." I would attach at least one of those words to each of the nominated pictures. Which is the best? HTFSIK? But here are my thoughts, FWIW.

"The Irishman" was huge, Scorsese's homage to Scorsese, and he's already been celebrated for directing a mob picture.

"Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" was Tarantino playing in the same auteur's revisionist sandbox he played in with "Inglourious Basterds."

Haynes' "Joker" pulled no punches and Joaquin Phoenix was his usual uncannily committed self. He's protean and fascinating in a picture that puts a disturbing, painted face on gun violence. Maybe too sympathetic?

Gerwig's "Little Women" was a thoroughgoing, beautifully composed empowerment statement using familiar material. Though lovely, no surprises.

Mangold's "Ford v Ferrari" featured some thrilling racing sequences but lacked a firm emotional center. Waititi's "Jojo Rabbit" had tons of heart but satirizing Nazism has been done before and it didn't win then either.

Baumbach's "Marriage Story" is so raw and abrasive in its honesty that audiences likely felt battered by the scheming and vitriol.

This leaves Mendes' phenomenal cinematographic achievement "1917" and Bong Joon-ho's savage opera buffa of class warfare "Parasite."

If Academy voters pick "Parasite" as Best Foreign Picture, the big winner will likely be “1917."

A Fall From Grace

Tyler Perry's Netflix trifle A Fall From Grace is a soapy thriller with monstrous implausibility and criminal misuse of some talented actors. Perry himself can deliver a line when directed but his own narratives are unimaginative, formulaic. In this one, middle-aged divorcee Grace Waters (Crystal Fox) is courted by a young, studly beringed photographer in a Larry Blackmon high-top 'fro (Mehcad Brooks) whom she soon marries. Predictably, he turns out to be a cad and a thief who cheats on Grace in their bedroom! Grace, shamed and taunted, bashes him in the head with a bat and ends up arrested.

A poorly schooled and nearly indifferent public defender, Jasmine, played by Bresha Webb, is assigned to Grace's case to enter a guilty plea but is persuaded something is amiss, because the cad's body was never found. Meanwhile, Grace's BFF Sarah (Phylicia Rashad), who has been in her corner all the while, becomes Jasmine's only hope of winning an acquittal, as Jasmine hopes to convince the jury the Sunday School cookie baker was too nice to kill her husband -- even though Grace admits to having done it. Yes, it's an unholy mess with a howlingly ridiculous twist at the end that will send many viewers screaming from the room -- if they hadn't already done so.

Perry is the fabulously wealthy purveyor of urban market schlock who many people will defend as a dependable and known commodity. You'll never get art from Mr. Perry but his fans don't want that. They want shrieking women in Vera Wang and Red Bottoms and the men who love (or hate) them. One doesn't stumble blindly into a Tyler Perry experience; one enters with eyes and ears wide open. And that's the real crime.

Carnival Row

As allegories go, Amazon’s Carnival Row is on par with celebrated space series Battlestar Gallactica and The Expanse for depth and complexity. Unlike Tolkien’s trilogy, these three programs wear their politics on their sleeves. Tolkien, at least in my scattered readings, was more circumspect about the meanings of his books.

Carnival Row is a thoroughgoing fantasy thriller set in some mythical world where storybook creatures walk (or fly in the case of the Faeries, or Fae) among men. These non-humans have fled war in their own lands, sought asylum and been ghettoized in dank and dangerous districts away from humans, who detest them and debate their fate in Parliament.

Because of the costuming, art direction and British casting — Orlando Bloom (LOTR's Legolas) as the conflicted police inspector Rycroft Philostrate and Cara Delevingne as his winged ex-lover and revolutionary Vignette Stonemoss (the character names are marvelous and ridiculous) — one might assume the setting is Victorian England but the location is as murky as the mysterious creature disemboweling city residents and casting entrails about the vacated carcasses.

It’s all ghastly and gruesome and set against the backdrop of xenophobia and immigrant panic. Its strange appeal is suspended in the air, like the statues of the bound and hanged martyr erected in the churches in this seriously effed up world. This last device was a startling reminder to me that, though we’re inured to them, crucifixes are pretty barbaric religious emblems, for real.

1917

The artistry of Sam Mendes’s 1917, a staggeringly realistic depiction of wartime devastation, doesn’t just push the envelope of cinematography with its nearly hour-long continuous tracking shot (a marvelous visual accomplishment) but also with the intelligence of its narrative. Two young WWI British soldiers — Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) — are dispatched on a veritable suicide mission to deliver a general's command to stand-down to a hawkish colonel about to send 1,600 men into a German trap. Among the men is Blake’s older brother, which gives the younger much incentive to complete the mission, casting his mission as a coldly cynical order from the general but in keeping with the madness of war. Chapman and MacKay are tireless troupers in Mendes’ experiment to depict the two soldiers narrowly escaping one potentially fatal encounter after another, with the bodies of dead soldiers draped along barbed-wire fences and lining the sides of trenches and craters. It’s a horrifying landscape of misery, and the two men, not entirely up to their mission, trudge along through mud and viscera toward heaven knows what. It is a triumphant testament to modern movie-making and the human spirit.

Just Mercy

Destin Daniel Cretton’s Just Mercy has a compelling and dramatic story and strong lead performances by star / producer Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx and Brie Larson. But it is freighted, as so many big studio pictures about civil rights and social justice, with depictions of racist cops and courts that feel as if they’ve been pulled from To Kill a Mockingbird, which is referenced several times at the outset. The evocation might be the director’s intent, to suggest little has changed over the 60 years since Harper Lee published the book. That makes sense as the film is based on Bryan Stevenson’s published account of his work on behalf of death row inmates in Alabama beginning in the early ‘90s. Jordan plays Stevenson with stalwart resolve and humanity as he puts his Harvard law degree to work for those who can least defend themselves against a bigoted justice system. Foxx is Walter McMillan, a man falsely accused of murder, railroaded by an unscrupulous police chief and sentenced to death on the word of an unreliable witness (a terrific Tim Blake Nelson). The film has more than a few powerful moments — Rob Morgan’s work as war-damaged veteran Herbert Richardson is particularly outstanding — but occasional missteps that detract from an otherwise solid piece of work. A snapping German Shepherd at the entrance to the courtroom felt ham-fisted, and Richardson’s reference to a PTSD diagnosis while certainly possible didn’t feel plausible considering the time period, and Stevenson’s comments to his associate (Larson) about slave ships and lynchings, while all certainly true, felt strangely out of place — directed less at her and more at the audience. Still, the picture packs genuine emotional power.

Fast Color

Julia Hart's Fast Color is visually enticing but lacks the aching self-reflection of Hart's wonderful 2016 feature Miss Stevens. It has a few quiet moments of revelation but is mostly ghostly puzzlement and non sequiturs that fall short of nuance and poetry. Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars as Ruth, a young woman with mysterious, seismic powers that appear to have outgrown her control. She comes from a line of similarly gifted African American women (quite literal "black girl magic"). On the run from scientists with murky agendas, Ruth returns to her family home in Texas at a time when the world's resources have been depleted. (It's not explained what forces beyond human wastefulness are responsible). At home is mother, Bo, (the always engaging Lorraine Toussaint) and Ruth's precocious daughter, Lila (Saniyya Sidney), whom Ruth left with Bo after a near catastrophic incident that is augured and depicted in the film but then abandoned, as is Bo's relationship with the local sheriff, played with strange remove by David Strathairn. Mbatha-Raw (an unconventional beauty) is always luminous on the screen and her performance here strikes me as committed but the material (written by Hart and Jordan Horowitz) is frustratingly thin. Much of the story's weakness is its lack of detail, which is ironic for a film whose central conceit is its main characters' ability to deconstruct and reassemble the physical world.

Uncut Gems

Benny and Josh Safdie's courtship of Adam Sandler for the demanding role of Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems is storied among cinephiles. They started pitching the idea to Sandler in 2011 and he finally said yes two years ago. The wisdom in their determination is in nearly every frame of this riveting and exhausting film.
Sandler's Ratner is a middle-aged New York jeweler and gambler who is working tirelessly to prove that he is not the chump much of the world is taking him for. He is being chased by a half-dozen bad debts and is trying with ever-growing futility to score big and settle all scores.

His latest scheme involves a brick of raw Ethiopian opal that he hopes to auction for a million bucks. When Boston Celtics superstar Kevin Garnett is escorted to Ratner's shop by a finder (LaKeith Stanfield), Garnett is struck by the rock's brilliance, imagines it will bring him luck and convinces Ratner to let him borrow it for that night's game. Seeing a chance to capitalize on Garnett's confidence, Ratner places a bet on the game but once again, fate works against Ratner. He misses the big score, is broke once more and time is running out to make whole everyone on his tail.
The movie's pacing is brisk, the intensity excruciating. The Safdies use a film stock that is as grainy and unflattering as a florescent light, which adds to the starkness of Ratner's predicament that, based on the unsavory characters circling about, can only end badly.

Cats

While not quite the abomination critics have described, Tom Hooper's Cats is an ostentatious exhibition of theatrical craftsmanship that, regrettably, is also frequently annoying, made so primarily by a story line that casts the mischievous Macavity (Idris Elba) as a sort of demon feline abducting his competition for the chance at another life. Elba and the other "big name" draws -- Taylor Swift, Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, James Cordon and Rebel Wilson -- acquit themselves admirably while not completely answering why they signed on to the project in the first place. (It probably all looked great on paper and Hooper is, after all, a celebrated, masterful director.) It is not a mystery why belter Jennifer Hudson is on board to serve up the timeless showstopper Memory. Despite all of the CGI motion fur and flopping ears, Hudson's performance practically drips with all of the melodic angst composer Andrew Lloyd Webber poured into it 40 years ago. The picture rewards the patient with more than a few outstanding production numbers and lots of splendid dancing by the company. (The Jellicle Ball sequence is particularly arresting and pretty freaking sexy.) The pas de deux by the leads, ballerina Francesca Hayward as the abandoned Victoria and Robbie Fairchild as the master-of-ceremonies Munkustrap, are especially lovely. Yes, there is more than enough visual absurdity for a half-dozen movies based on lesser material but the cast's treading and hoofing the boards is so top-shelf it almost makes one forget how unnecessary it all is.

Dark Waters

Queer Cinema icon Todd Haynes (Carol, Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, Safe) directs films about the exploited, the marginalized and the dispossessed, people who are injured by circumstances but press on or don't depending on their proclivities. In many ways, the Mark Ruffalo-project Dark Waters fits into Haynes' portfolio neatly, as it tells the true story of a West Virginia town on the Ohio River being poisoned by the corporate goliath DuPont and challenged by Ruffalo's legal eagle David, Robert Bilott, a partner in a corporate law firm and former DuPont defense attorney. Bilott is made aware of the case of a farmer (a terrific Bill Camp) whose herd of cattle is decimated, he believes, by runoff from DuPont's nearby dump. Bilott is first reluctant but the farmer's insistence, and his own childhood memories of his grandmother's home in the town, spur him into what he believes will be a quick resolution. Haynes' direction is methodical and by-the-numbers, with Ruffalo (who never fails to hit his marks in any film -- from Avengers to Spotlight) displaying the physical manifestations of Bilott's professional and personal battles with the first-reticent and later-defiant chemical manufacturer. Haynes and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan and Mario Correa have crafted a compelling story of greed and indifference that has several stirring moments of indignation and outrage rooted in the filmmakers' deep commitment to the value of human life and dignity. It is not a perfect film (some performances feel weary and indeliberate) but it is a marvelous statement for these times -- which is much more important.

Pain and Glory, Honey Boy

Pedro Almodóvar's Pain and Glory and Alma Har'el's Honey Boy are, respectively, the tender story of the celebrated Spanish writer / director's relationship with his spicy and withholding mother and actor Shia LaBeouf's traumatically dysfunctional boyhood in the care of his disastrously incapable father. The films are reflective, fanciful and decidely ambivalent about the central character's feelings toward the wounding parent.
In Pain and Glory Antonio Banderas is Almodóvar's alter ego, a stifled filmmaker racked with physical and emotional ailments that he tries to quell with opioids and heroin. Banderas's addled, somnambulate Salvador seems suspended between dream worlds, one lively and magical, the voice of his mother (the always radiant Penelope Cruz) providing the soundtrack for his colorful awakening, and the other, his decorous, doleful and dismissive maturity, resplendent with wall art and loneliness.
In Honey Boy, LaBeouf's alter ego Otis at 12 is played by the fine young actor Noah Jupe (A Quiet Place) and at 22 by the estimable Lucas Hedges. The younger Otis lives with his father (a striking LaBeouf) in a grungy roadside motor inn at night and acts in various forgettable roles on a studio lot during the day. Driven by his father's shame and self-loathing, Otis grows into a defiant, destructive and self-sabotaging young man whose only memories of warmth are of another abused child (FKA Twigs), a teenaged girl living in the motor court with her bottomfeeding parents. Both Hedges and LaBoeuf do the heavy emotional lifting in this unsparing, conflicted but ultimately forgiving letter to LaBeouf's father.
Both Pain and Glory and Honey Boy feature elements of magical realism that enhance their messages of regret and forgiveness despite the damage done by those charged with loving us.

Waves

 

The family at the center of Trey Edward Shults's Waves is frayed, but nearly undetectably at first. Exchanges between father (Sterling K. Brown) and his coltish son (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) feel prickly but maybe that's just the natural push-pull between two alphas. Nothing more. And maybe daughter Emily (Taylor Russell) is reserved because she's shy and uncertain and not because she's lost, overshadowed by her athlete-brother and hurt by the attention both father and mother (Renee Elise Goldsberry) pour on him. The family home is a pressure cooker of expectation and disappointment, and the stresses quickly begin to show both physically and psychologically until an event sends these four damaged people flying off in different directions, taking their pain with them. Waves is quiet but its intensity is nearly unbearable. All four leads deliver extraordinary performances but young Mr. Harrison's is far and away the most real and raw depiction of youthful confusion and agony I have seen in quite a while. He is truly outstanding and on par with generational peers Timothee Chalamet and Lucas Hedges, who also appears in Waves as daughter Emily's love interest and rescuer. Waves is devastating and exhausting but richly detailed, knowing and human.

Richard Jewell

Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell takes the story of the Centennial Park security guard falsely accused of setting off a bomb that killed and injured visitors to the Atlanta Olympic in 1996 and turns it into a blunt instrument to bludgeon the media and the FBI. The film -- which features a fine performance by Paul Walter Hauser as Jewell -- also takes swings are higher education-- a prime target for rabid red staters. Jewell comes across as a socially awkward underachiever with a juvenile zeal for law enforcement that is both admirable and naive. Olivia Wilde and Jon Hamm play an unscrupulous Atlanta newspaper reporter and an FBI agent, respectively, who sacrifice Jewell for personal ambition. The rendering of these characters is so atrocious, the dialogue so dull and unimaginative that they make viewing the film a real chore. Watching their interactions was like witnessing a mob hit. Jewell's relationship with his mother Barbara (a strangely off-kilter Kathy Bates) is cloying and with his lawyer (Sam Rockwell) is peculiarly uninvolving and underdeveloped. This picture has precious little of Eastwood's usual workmanlike competence. It feels incomplete, more of a notion than a picture, but it will be raw meat for MAGA heads everywhere and more the pity.

The Irishman

Martin Scorsese’s mobster epic The Irishman harnesses the latest in film technology to follow the story’s primary characters as they age through decades of gangland maneuvering and murder. Robert De Niro is the narrator and pseudonymous fixer, Frank Sheeran, who performs both painting (hits) and carpentry (disposals) for pay — he’s got mouths to feed. When we meet Sheeran, he’s an old man reflecting on his life after war duty in Italy. He begins with driving a meat truck in Philadelphia, stealing from his bosses and making friends with powerful criminals, including mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and later Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) and becoming a trusted consigliere as well as wet worker. That Sheeran is his own witness leaves his accounting open to question, of course, but his tale of rising to capo in a crime family while serving two masters (the Mafia and the IBT) is fascinating. Scorsese is nonpareil as a storyteller, and he manages the complexity of mob action and political wrangling with dexterity. Yes, he loves criminals, and his treatment of these wise guys is no less affectionate than his earlier valentines Goodfellas, Gangs of New York and The Departed, but that’s not to say he’s amoral or that The Irishman celebrates corruption. In fact, the film includes screen notes on the often grisly deaths of the gangsters Sheeran encounters over the years — those we don’t actually see dispatched by a bullet to the face. That Sheeran himself survives to tell the tale — or at least his version — is not so much cynical as existential. As one G-man reminds him, everyone he’s known and loved is either dead or has abandoned him. That he is alone and hoping for more — redemption? expiation?  — in the picture’s last reel is a powerful statement.

Marriage Story

Writer/director Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story puts the auteur's signature wit and insight to work in a tale of the most personal and excruciating of human trials -- the dissolution of a marriage. Scarlett Johansson and Adam Drive are New York off-Broadway theater couple Nicole and Charlie, parents of young Henry (Azhy Robertson), and parties in a marriage that is threatened, we come to discover, by presumption and resentment. When we meet them they are seeking counsel, not altogether successfully, to resolve issues driving them apart. Then Nicole, who has been genius director Charlie's muse and leading lady, accepts a role in a television pilot and moves to L.A. with Henry. Charlie is unperturbed, thinking the change is temporary and he'll visit frequently. In the meantime, Nicole, who has discovered Charlie's infidelity with a company member, hires a top-dollar eviscerator (the wonderful Laura Dern) to represent her in a divorce. This action leads to an escalation of tension and spiraling bitterness that culminates in a scene of blistering vitriol the likes of which I've not seen since Liz and Dick tore at each other's throats in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966). It's a sad, depressing clash of two decent but damaged people trying to perfect the imperfectible. (And alone is worthy of the accolades the film is receiving.) Baumbach is a masterful wordsmith but in two particularly nice set pieces near the end he juxtaposes musical numbers from Stephen Sondheim's Company that Nicole and Charlie perform to different audiences. These are nice moments -- one frothy and the other wistful -- that had they been given to lesser actors would have fallen flat or been soupy. Instead, they capture two people who are slowly finding their ways out of misery..

The Lighthouse

Imbued in every image of a lighthouse are questions about the inhabitants, how they deal with the isolation, what they have seen, close calls their beaming signal has averted ... if the keeper is sane. Writer / director Robert Eggers second feature, The Lighthouse, is richly evocative of those seaside sentinels but delivers no definitive answers.This film is just as genuine in its depictions of location and dread as Eggers' first, The Witch (2015), a visually stunning scarefest set in Puritan New England. Once again, Eggers' meticulosity is in every frame, in every word uttered by the picture's two principals, a keeper (Willem Dafoe) and his taciturn assistant (Robert Pattinson), in every forboding inch of the New England lighthouse's barren, wasted rock. Eggers is working in black and white to startling, unsettling effect, as the men check into the battered quarters for a month's duty. Dafoe's Thomas Wake browbeats the younger Ephraim Winslow with humiliating invectives, forbidding him from doing anything but scullery chores and mindless repairs, and most certainly denying his requests to ascend to the top of the lighthouse, Wake's peculiarly, jealously guarded domain. As for the matter of the men's sanity, well, Eggers certainly makes a case for madness, but a powerfully evocative speech by Wake actually suggests there might be more at work than minds being devoured by personal demons.

Parasite

South Korean writer / director Bong Joon Ho (Okja, Snowpiercer) is a visionary, but he's no sentimental optimist. His films luxuriate in bloody class conflicts, where audience favorites are often sacrificed on the altar of art. The poor are not necessarily nobler than the rich, and they often don't get what they deserve -- or maybe they do. His latest film, the marvelous award-winner Parasite, is true to form -- a thoroughgoing tale of an under-employed family of frauds living below ground (the picture is brimming with metaphors) who through an elaborate ruse insinuate themselves into the lives (and home) of a wealthy family in need of an English tutor, and, incrementally, an art therapist, chauffeur and housekeeper. Bong shows true genius in building the crafty Family Kim's plan to ride the vain and vacuous Park family's gravy train until a dark and stormy night threatens to bring the scheme to a screeching halt. Bong uses a loving skeptic's eye in staging elaborate set pieces that alternate between shrieking hilarity and horror.

Queen & Slim

In the soon to be iconic photograph from Melina Matsoukas's distressing Queen & Slim, stars Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith posed on the hood of one of several getaway cars they drive while fleeing the shooting of a Cleveland police office on the night of their first date. That sequence is anguishing, and sets the bar high for the rest of the film. If only the disciplined intensity was sustained. Matsoukas and screenwriter Lena Waithe serve up quite a melange during the fugitive couple's trek toward Miami and a plane to take them to Cuba. Some episodes are comic, some romantic, some philosophical, some political but the inconsistency does not enhance the story; it left me puzzled. The tonal variety feels like a mix-tape, which is probably not coincidental as Matsoukas is a veteran music video director; this is her first feature film, and it has a phenomenal soundtrack. The film's premise feels undermined by a surfacy narrative that can not withstand close scrutiny; leaps of logic and geographic dislocation detract. These would not be matters of concern if the film was being offered as a parable, the characters more totems than real people trapped in an unbelievably untenable situation, but that doesn't seem to be what's going on here. Communities are shown embracing and protecting the fugitives but for reasons that don't rise above vengeance and bloodlust. At this moment in history -- with tensions between black communities and law enforcement raw -- audiences, particularly audiences of color, need rational stories that explore all aspects of human loss -- not just BLM agitprop.

The Laundromat

Steven Soderbergh's unique brand of political subversion doesn't always deliver the audiences but his films certainly are entertaining. His latest, The Laundromat (Netflix), weaves together a handful of ironic tales of people crushed by a predatory cartel of gouging, phantom underwriters. Meryl Streep heads a cast of characters caught in Gary Oldman and Antonio Bandera's web of fraud and unaccountability that spans the globe.(Yes, ripped from the headlines.) Streep's Ellen Martin is left a widow after a touring river boat capsizes near Trenton, Michigan. When she discovers the tour company's insurer can't pay she investigates and finds nothing but false leads and dead ends. Her story intersects with several others, each taking the level of corruption deeper. Although Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns sermonize during the last five minutes of the film, it's a welcome and timely message about the threat greed and deception pose for democracy.

Knives Out

Rian Johnson's deviously comedic, big house murder mystery, Knives Out, is artfully composed -- from the script to the art direction to the cinematography -- but not at all precious. The A-list cast for this story about the death of the wealthy patriarch (Christopher Plummer) of a ridiculously pampered family (see poster) are generous with their gifts in Johnson's rich story space; no scenery chewing here. The movie's surprises are abundant, many howlingly funny sequences. Daniel Craig's gentleman sleuth, Benoit Blanc, is a marvelous (awards-worthy) creation, erudite and cagey. The lovely Ana de Armas is the dead patriarch's young Latina nurse at the center of what appears to have been her employer's suicide ... but was it? This film is not what I expected.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Marielle Heller's engrossing Can You Ever Forgive Me? from last year depicted the descent of a blocked and frustrated writer into a morass of self-destruction through fraud. Heller's latest, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, charts a different though still riveting course as it recounts the beginning of the friendship between a magazine writer (Matthew Rhys) and Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks with his usual uncanny brilliance). Cynics will no doubt chuckle at Rogers' unrelenting cheesiness but will quickly be entranced by his steadiness and abiding decency. It's those qualities that the wounded and bitter Lloyd Vogel doesn't trust, and tries to reveal as Rogers' attempt to mask his own demons. A new father who has resisted the role, Lloyd is estranged from his own father (a wonderful Chris Cooper) who is trying to reconnect after years of absence. Heller has crafted a visually arresting and narratively complex story that brings together fine actors for exchanges that resound with truth and healing. At one point toward the end of the film, Rogers and Lloyd are sitting over lunch and Rogers asks for a minute of silence to call to mind all of the people who made their lives possible. For that entire minute, not a sound, not a breath was heard in the theater during the screening I attended. What a touching sequence!

Doctor Sleep

Mike Flanagan's Oculus (2014) was an ably crafted entry in the new horror genre of spirits who kill for no reason, just because they can. In Flanagan's latest film, Doctor Sleep, the demons certainly seem to have purpose but it's tough to care if all we're given is "evil has always been." Working from Stephen King's sequel to The Shining, Flanagan expands on the original's world of clairvoyants, angry haints and mad men with axes for an intermittently entertaining update on mind-reader Danny Torrance, who as a boy escaped the haunted Overlook hotel with his mom, leaving his possessed father to freeze to death, lost in a hedge maze. Thirty plus years later and Torrance (Ewan McGregor) is walking roadkill, who stays drunk to keep his demons at bay. His "shine" is awakened by a young girl Abra [as in Cadabra] (Kyliegh Curran), who "sees" the kidnapping and murder of a boy by a witchy mystic (Rebecca Ferguson) and a tribe of fairly redundant hench-people who feast on the souls of shining folk. Yes, the premise lacks the subtle creep of King's best work; it's loopy, ham-fisted and bombastic.The last reel showdown takes place in the abandoned Overlook hotel where the ghosts from the previous picture make a not-unexpected curtain call. It's all a bit annoying and silly. Stanley Kubrick's film broke new cinematic ground and Jack Nicholson powered through his role as the unlucky Jack Torrance, and delivered moviedom's most memorable Kubrick stare. Flanagan and crews' energetic effort does not rise to the level of artistry of the original (and, frankly, the story never actually gels) but it probably fits nicely in the new world of meaningless menace.