In the Heights

 

Fans will hear and see musical and narrative similarities between Lin-Manuel Miranda's "Hamilton" and his earlier Tony-winning work "In the Heights," both now delivered as motion pictures (though Hamilton was a filmed stage production and In the Heights fills city streets).

Both shows blend musical genres (hip-hop, Latin and more conventional theatrical structures) and weave together stories that explore how families (broadly defined) fight for self-identity and validation, albeit against vastly different backdrops.

Hamilton's sweep was grander -- America's liberation from Britain -- and In the Heights covers more intimate ground, the indomitability of the human spirit, represented here by immigrants and Dreamers from the Caribbean living in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Audiences will likely be moved to laughter and tears by these denizens and their dicey dilemmas.

Director Jon M. Chu's color palette is saturated; reds, greens, blues and yellows run down the sides of the screen (figuratively speaking) and wash over the audience, as his camera trots along with and flies above the film's wonderfully winning troupe of principals (Anthony Ramos, Corey Hawkins, Leslie Grace, Melissa Barrera and Gregory Diaz IV) and scores of dancers over the course of three steaming summer days in New York, before a citywide blackout.

The film's pacing is vigorous and, like Hamilton, the score is nearly through-sung; long passages have nearly no spoken dialogue. Also, like opera, the songs are heavily expositive, bearing the characters' own stories (Breathe, Paciencia y Fe), rousing anthems for community and solidarity (In the Heights, Alabanza, Carnaval del Barrio) and bawdy romps (No Me Diga).

In the Heights is an unquestionable cinematic achievement, which, as I shared with my screening partner today, will likely sweep during award season. It's biggest competition will no doubt be Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, scheduled to open during the winter holidays.

Cruella

 

Aussie director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya; Lars and the Real Girl) takes the villainess from Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and turns her into the mad and misbegotten title-heroine of Cruella, and uses a vaultful of cinematic feats and flights of fantasy in doing so.

This high-dollar / high-concept battle of the Emmas (Stone as the ambitious Estella and her devilish alter-ego Cruella and Thompson as the wicked Baroness) is set in the world of haute couture of London in the '60s and '70's. The picture follows Estella/Cruella as she fights to be noticed by the celebrated Baroness but discovers, as it were, the empress was naked.

Cruella is tuneful (huge soundtrack but is not a musical), campy and energetic. And, as one might expect from Disney Studios, the movie contains a bounty of elaborate set pieces, each more daring than the one before. The script contains many clever passages and is well-served by a cast of pros -- Mark Strong as The Baroness's Valet, Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser as Estella's grifting mates. But, Cruella, though often delightful, is longwinded, clocking in at two-and-a-quarter hours.

Spiral

 

The Saw franchise of eight (or nine) splatter films (depending on if you count Chris Rock's latest movie, Spiral) were successful because they walked the line between the plausible and implausible in the games of deadly entrapment the homicidal maniac Jigsaw devised to test or punish his victims (again, depending on your POV). Darren Lynn Bousman directed three pictures in the original series and has returned to tweak that winning formula while keeping the ironic sadism front and center. The results are mixed and if the ending is to be believed, this might be the start of another bloody series.

Rock plays an exasperating city detective who is also the son a former chief of police (Samuel L. Jackson). He has found himself on the bad side of nearly every cop in the department because of his renegade, showman ways. Rock's cynical Zeke Banks is teamed with rookie William Schenk (Max Minghella) , whose eager young lawman Banks finds annoying. This allows Comedian Chris Rock to riff on a few of his favorite topics -- himself and his marriage, sex, infidelity, divorce and porn (they are not unrelated). I feel this is the film's biggest weakness: It does not ask Rock to drop the stand up and fully invest in this other persona. This lends the picture an uneven tone. This is not a buddy cop dramedy.

The Banks / Schenk team, a familiar pairing to even casual moviegoers, is assigned the investigation of the contraption murder of a fellow detective, one of the few officers who didn't hate Banks. Soon, the investigation starts to sprawl as other cops are killed horribly and the murderer sends bait to Banks to keep him engaged. It's not just the killings that are messy here. The pacing of this story is strange, the narrative arc pitted with holes and shortcuts. Too much of the story relies on flashbacks and backstory reveals and not enough on actual detective work. That Banks eventually comes face-to-face with the killer is not because he's a skillful detective but because the puppet master knows his victims so well.

Dream Horse

 

Welsh director Euros Lyn has composed a triumphant love letter to his homeland in Dream Horse, the true story of a group of Welsh villagers who pool their meager funds to breed and train a thoroughbred that goes on to win big at the races. Toni Collette, who is Aussie, and Damian Lewis, a Londoner, lead the wildly engaging cast of characters, many of the actors are Welsh, who buy into the daft scheme by Jan Vokes (Collette) and stifled tax adviser Howard Davies (Lewis) and by doing so revitalize themselves and their bedraggled town. Collette is winning as always as the spirited wife / daughter/ store clerk who dares to see more in life than the predictability of her marriage and her job by looking into the eyes of fiercely competitive steed named Dream Alliance. Yes, the story arc is familiar but the execution is sure and delightful..

A Quiet Place Part II

 

Actor/director John Krasinski borrows from James Cameron's oeuvre of crisis cinema to build on the dreadful foundation he laid in the superb A Quiet Place (2018). Part Two begins where One ended, forcing audiences to overlook some obvious growth in the children, who are the stars of this chapter. Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe as sister Regan, who is deaf, and brother Marcus, who is traumatized, do heavy lifting in their parallel subplots. She strikes out to investigate a broadcasted message that may be a signal to safety as he recovers from a disastrous injury and tends to his infant brother while mother Evelyn (Emily Blunt) is away gathering supplies. The compounded calamities as the Abbots try to avoid the voracious aliens hunting humankind by sound for sport recall Cameron's deftness in building suspense as troubles come cascading down around the players. The final standoff between the Abbott sibs and the toothy invaders is a true nail-biter.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)

 

Fifty years ago, Melvin Van Peebles dropped an incendiary cinematic bomb with the release of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, a film that is often misclassified as blaxploitation. Blaxploitation is the label given to '70s films with Black themes that were created by white filmmakers, targeting Black audiences. Sweet Sweetback was an independent satirical protest film, funded and directed by a Black man, that has relevance two generations after its initial release.

The film was written and directed by Van Peebles, whose earlier film Watermelon Man (1970) was trashed by The New York Times as a messy, unfunny waste of his talent. Sweet Sweetback is a disjointed and uneven tale of political pandering, police corruption, community disintegration, religious fraud, false arrests, narrow escapes, violent retaliation and sex. Van Peebles is the title character, a man raised and exploited by prostitutes, who finds himself friendless after he is targeted by police needing an arrest after the murder of a Black man. Van Peebles's character spends most of the film running from the police.

Sweet Sweetback was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry last year, and, to my mind, is more important for what it says than how it says it. It is not a model of great filmmaking, but, in many other ways it is a great film to see and discuss, to wrestle with Van Peeble's sardonic vision and dark defiance and the picture's warning that those wronged will eventually return to "collect some dues."

The Black Network (1936)

A recent discovery, The Black Network (1936), is a fascinating cinematic curio, a short film set in a Harlem radio studio and its environs during the Depression. The film's headliners were Nina Mae McKinney (the Dusky Little Diamond Lil of Lancaster, South Carolina) and youthful Nicholas Brothers, in what may have been their first screen appearance as characters and not just specialty dancers. The story is slight and silly and some of the mugging and line delivery is cringe-inducing but I think the 20-minute picture, link below, is a valuable historical and cultural artifact. It was directed by the prolific creator of light film fare Roy Mack.

Wrath of Man

 

Guy Ritchie's latest collab with Jason Statham's "great stone face" adds to the Brits' bulging filmography of bruising, bromosexual caper films that feature an array of thuggish fiends, pulling heists and triggers. Because Ritchie has mastered this turf as well as any has (or perhaps should), the narrative is spiced up with a serpentine timeline and a murky internecine element that isn't fully explained or explored. Still, fan kids don't love Guy or Jason for their minds and will undoubtedly love this quippy, hi-NRG tribute to the evils of greed and the joys of red-meat revenge.

The Staggering Girl

 

"Once the world was deliberate, and now there's randomness, and no one seems to mind." ~ Bruno (Kyle MacLachlan), The Staggering Girl (2019)

Julianne Moore won an Oscar for playing a middle-aged linguistics professor struggling with early-onset Alzheimer's in Still Alice (2014). A personal favorite of mine whose on-screen breakdowns are like emotional hurricanes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-A-L9LmQmU), Moore later starred in the puzzling, impressionistic short film The Staggering Girl by auteur director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name). In it, Moore plays Francesca, a blocked writer who returns to Italy to collect her blind, aged but still willful mother Sophia (Martha Keller) -- an artist of some renown -- and bring her back to New York.

The film runs a bit over 30 minutes and is a whirlygig of Francesca's fragmented memories of her childhood -- she's supposedly working on a memoir. The pieces are ghostly and elusive. And, on reflection, that's all probably intentional.

It is beautifully shot by Guadagnino's frequent cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Suspira, Call Me By Your Name) and contains many striking tableaux and portraits. All of the women are draped in Valentino's capacious gowns and cloaks because the film was created with the help of the designer's production director. Its stunning interiors and Italianate architecture lend the movie the feel of a fashion shoot.

The quote from Bruno about the world's abandonment of order was descriptive of Sophia's latest art work -- scrawls and slashes of paint on canvas -- but it also describes this picture -- a movie that is about sense and not substance.

The Truman Show, Redux

 

I found a lot of truth in Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), an allegorical film whose premise is the ubiquity of fabrication.

When Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) hit the wall during his escape attempt at the end of the picture, many viewers no doubt felt the impact, watching him mount the stairs to see the world as he had never seen it -- as it really was. What a moment!

Non-cinematic epiphanies aren't nearly as grand as Truman's but they can be earth-shaking. Discovering a lying friend or cheating companion or one's own petty cruelty can be upsetting and call for action.

It's not always a total surprise, right? As with Truman, sometimes we've seen the cracks, the inconsistencies, the wires, and eventually pull all of the threads together and ... voila! Ed Harris has been calling the shots.

If we're lucky, discovering manipulation, deceit, disappointment will not destroy us; it will lead to better things -- a loyal friend, respectful companion ... maybe talk therapy.

But perhaps THE most significant pull from Weir's weird world was Truman's discovery that only a fake universe is all about us. And who wants that?

Two Distant Strangers

The Oscar-winning short feature Two Distant Strangers, directed by Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe, uses a familiar trapped-in-a-time-loop device to add another layer of reflective protest to the burgeoning body of BLM messaging art.

Joey Bada$$ and Andrew Howard star as the perpetual victim of police violence and the cop who pulls the trigger, respectively. Free -- a writer of topical content for The Daily Show, Wilmore and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee -- does not plow new ground with the movie's social justice polemics and the Groundhog Day device might strike some as an odd choice for such an urgent crisis, but the picture is handsome and contains some nice visual embellishments.

A bird's-eye view shot of a police car moving through an empty city street reveals the names of George Floyd and others who were killed by police chalked on the roof of a building, and a similar overhead shot of Carter's dead body reveals the blood pooling in the shape of the African continent.

Still, both Bada$$ and Howard deliver convincing performances in a picture that some might find too fanciful to be impactful.

Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train

Readers of a certain age may remember the '60s anime series Astro Boy, Marine Boy and Speed Racer, which, though Japanese, featured characters with round eyes and dubbed voices that were decidedly not NIpponese. It's almost like they were created for importation to predominately Caucasian markets. (That the anime industry seems to revere European facial features is a source of continuing debate.) The popularity of those series in the U.S. and the U.K. testifies to the creators' strategy.

As a kid, I liked the fanciful stories and the characters' weirdly robotic motions, their

over-emoting and the garish comic panel action effects. They were a gas!

Fifty years later, anime technology has made these TV series and the films based on them some of the most visually arresting -- and expensive -- cinematic experiences around.

Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train was released on April 21 and at this writing has grossed more than $400 million worldwide. For the uninitiated, the story of three young samurai-like warriors battling demons on a deadly passenger train pinballs between gamer weaponry and Zen axioms about fearlessness and dedication. The unfamiliar will likely never get firm footing in Demon Slayer's story space, but all of the color and light is pretty stunning.

Keep On Keepin' On (2014)

 

I often give up on a series or movies if I've not been encouraged by others to stick with it or if the content itself isn't promising. Quite frequently, I will stumble across a keeper by accident as I did with the 2014 documentary Keep On Keepin' On, the story of the friendship between the now-deceased legendary jazz trumpeter Clark Terry and then 25-year-old, blind, aspiring pianist Justin Kauflin, whom Terry mentored. Terry, who died the year after this film was released, had a reputation for being an inspiring teacher, counting among his proteges Miles Davis and Quincy Jones, who produced the film and Kauflin's first record. Aside from being a touching portrait of a man of great talent and generosity in the last year's of his life, Keep On Keepin' On is also a primer on jazz music, its modes and aesthetics. It's a wonderful, humane tribute.

The Unholy

 

Evan Spiliotopoulos's The Unholy is a middling demon possession flick that trades in the kind of iconoclasm that takes no prisoners -- much like the film's undead witchy woman causing trouble in the fictional town of Banfield, Massachusetts. A young woman, speechless from birth (Cricket Brown), wakes up from a vision talking up a storm, healing the lame and calling townsfolk to worship Mary. All of these events are witnessed by a disgraced, boozing tabloid writer (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) looking for a payday. He gets more than he bargained for.

The picture, Spiliotopoulos's directorial debut, delivers a couple of decent jolts but plays fast and loose with continuity and logic. Cary Elwes (Stranger Things, The Princess Bride) plays the shady Southie bishop of Boston (he should probably be an archbishop) and William Sadler plays the girl's uncle and pastor of the local church whose history includes the torture and burning of the previously mentioned witchy woman back in 1845.

Most of the movie is laughably bad at times and features an undercooked spirit demon that borrows from a half-dozen other undead movie projects and a moment of cringing figurative self-flagellation by the reporter that might send actual journalists running from the room in horror.

In the Earth

 

Ben Wheatley's In the Earth is a "heart of darkness" horror flick that doesn't wander far from the genre's well-trodden path. It's a grisly and creepy and gruesome and bloody tale of science being baffled by nature, with a bit of witchy hoodoo thrown in for spice. (Any comparisons to our current pandemic are purely intentional.) The supernatural aspects of the film are accompanied by mind-bending-visual and ear-numbing-sound effects that will probably qualify this flick for midnight showings, if and when those crank back up. (Those triggered by strobe lights should stay away.) Joel Fry and Ellora Torchia lead the zoned-out cast as two scientists on a mission to reconnect with an intrepid botanist (Hayley Squires) who has dropped off the grid in the heart of a mysterious forest, only to run into a crazed woodsman (Reece Shearsmith) on a mission of his own.

Oscar 2021

I haven't seen "The Father" but the précis suggests it's a film with quiet intensity, starring two Brits that Hollywood (and a lot of the rest of America) loves -- Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. But it also feels, too me, rather modest for a Best Picture win, and the story of the onset of dementia feels so familiar by now.

I also haven't seen "Minari" but feel that "Parasite" opened up a lot of Oscar-contender doors for Korean films. The buzz around "Minari" and Steven Yeun ("Walking Dead") is pretty amazing and no doubt deserved. I'll see both "The Father" and "Minari" before the gold is given out but neither will win Best Picture, I don't feel. Too familiar and too soon.

"Judas and the Black Messiah" was charged with social and political relevance and powerhouse performances from Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield. Slotting them both as Supporting Actor nominees reminded me of the machinations with Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer for "The Help" 10 years ago. Davis was nominated as Best Actress and Spencer as Supporting Actress for the film, which was smart because they would have cancelled each other out in the Supporting Actress slot, just like Kaluuya and Stanfield will do this year, even though Davis's role was indeed supporting. In the case of Kaluuya and Stanfield, it's the opposite because they're both leads. It's even in the film's title.

"Mank" is a tremendous picture made for people who love tremendous pictures about making pictures -- which is the Academy but not most of America, I don't think. The movie's got great writing and a bravura performance from Gary Oldman, who's been acting steadily for 40 years, and all that movie magic stuff that David Fincher likes to put in his pictures, and it's in arty black and white. What's not to love? Fincher has been nominated for Best Director twice before and has never won. I don't think this will break his streak.

"Nomadland" is so elegant and wistful and loving that I think anyone with patience and a heart will find joy in every frame. Frances McDormand is such a genius at understatement that when she does explode in a picture (what passes for an explosion for a woman of her temperament), it is stunning. She probably showed more emotional volatility in Three Billboards than in all of her previous motion pictures combined. Director Chloé Zhao has a romantic heart and passion for America and Americans that is so welcome these days. Her pictures are expansive and respectful. I hope she and her film win.

"Promising Young Woman" strikes some folks as a mean-spirited revenge flick, which it sort of is, but I think it's also quite like Taxi Driver and Joker, without their poetics. Carey Mulligan is marvelous as a mirror reflecting meanness and manipulation back at society's entitled takers. That she is mad is quite obvious. But she comes to it honestly, and we root for her until the bitter end. Like "Judas," "Promising" might cut too deep to win a prize.

"Sound of Metal" is an audacious film that is being honored for its audacity, I think. Not unlike "Mank," it's a film that moviemakers are studying for its design components while the unschooled among us are clawing at our seats over a story that is so cringe-inducing in its portrayal of pain and self-delusion that we forget that we're watching a heavy metal drummer (Riz Ahmed) go deaf in the realest of terms. The last three minutes of this sober and exhausting film are a cathartic release.

"The Trial of the Chicago 7″ is Aaron Sorkin doing what he does best -- dazzle audiences with his wit and sagacity. Sorkin isn't as pompous as Oliver Stone was in his motion picture heyday but he's just as political and that delights some folks and pisses off some folks -- like Stone did. That Sorkin's words are solid gold and that he has a mind built for juggling complex narratives make his films engrossing -- and maybe important -- but not necessarily Oscar worthy.

Nobody

 

The ultra-violent avenger thrillers' defining franchise is the John Wick series that stars Keanu Reeves. It appeals to a certain movie-goer sensibility -- those who care less about a sensible narrative but insist on endless combat because they know all of the blood and breaking bones is high-end Hollywood fakery and delight in the excessiveness. Bruce Willis's Die Hard series, which began in 1988, may have been the forerunner of the subgenre, and Ilya Naishuller's Nobody is the latest entry. Star Bob Odenkirk plays former spy agency asset named Hutch Mansell, who gets pulled out of retirement by a botched home invasion. Odenkirk's persona as lawyer Saul Goodman of the Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul is inescapable, so "bits-of-Saul" are sprinkled in amongst the outlandish body count, wise-crackery and guerilla weaponry and the excruciating close-order battles. Odenkirk is fit and in fine fighting form as he chases down a ridiculous Russian mobster (Aleksey Serebryakov whose line readings are nearly unintelligible) with the aid of his adopted brother (a mostly off-screen performance by rapper RZA) and his loopy retired G-man father, played by Christopher Lloyd. Rounding out the leads in this entertaining raw-meat meal is Connie Nielsen as Hutch's oddly withholding wife. Yes, the narrative is a little thin on connective tissue but that just leaves more room for evisceration and dismemberment. Yay!

The United States vs. Billie Holiday

 

I bailed on Lee Daniels' The United States vs. Billie Holiday five minutes in as I've developed so little tolerance for Daniels' peculiar cartoonish indulgences. Seeing Leslie Jordan, whom I ordinarily find delightful, in a fright wig as fictitious celebrity interviewer Reginald Lord Devine asking Billie Holiday "What is it like to be a colored woman?" was all I needed to know that Daniels would be aiming low -- again.

Andra Day, a wonderfully evocative singer; the film's human subject, legendary jazz vocalist Billie Holliday; and the song at the center of the trial, Strange Fruit, deserve so much better from a man who appears to marshal considerable clout and resources. Such a pity.

The Courier (2020)

 

That Dominic Cooke's The Courier feels a tad stagey makes sense considering Cooke is a decorated British theatre director at the helm of only his second feature film. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the title character, an Englishman in 1960 who facilitates business partnerships. He is contacted by MI6 and the CIA to serve as an undercover liaison between a Soviet informant (the tremendous Georgian actor Merab Ninidze) and British and American intelligence, played by Angus Wright and Rachel Brosnahan, respectively. Cumberbatch is an actor of impressive versatility and presence; his five minutes near the end of the powerful WWI film 1917 crystallized the film's message of misery that comes from hubris. He delivers the same commanding performance in this crisp story of a man, who never pictured himself as courageous or sacrificial, answering the call, not of Mother England but of compassion and loyalty.

Chaos Walking

 

Director Doug Liman's futuristic Chaos Walking, based on a series of young adult sci-fi novels, is set light years from Earth in a world where the thoughts of men are manifested in light and images called Noise. Women are not so gifted (or cursed).

A "thoughtful" young man named Todd (the ever-winning Tom Holland) is being reared by two men (Demián Bichir and Kurt Sutter) who are farming land purposefully set apart from the rest of a settlement run by the scar-faced / fur-coated Mayor (the ever-intriguing Mads Mikkelsen), when a young woman named Viola (Daisy Riley of the Star Wars reboot) crashes from the sky into the womanless settlement and evinces for the Mayor and a mad preacher played by David Oyelowo that trouble is coming.

The film, which is more entertaining than not, introduces lots of notions and prompts tons of questions -- the reason for the colonization, the origins of the Noise, why it is attached to male DNA, what of the marauding humanoids called Spackle. These were quite likely fleshed out in the books but they kept the movie from developing into a fully coherent narrative for me.

Another Round

Four Danish friends, teachers in the same high school who feel mired in banality, test a theory that staying in a state between inebriation and sobriety is the road to better personal and professional performance. This is the premise of Thomas Vinterberg's Another Round, nominated in Best International Feature Film and Best Director Oscar categories.

The wonderful quartet of middle-aged men is led by Martin (Mads Mikkelsen), the history tutor who has retreated into diffidence and distractedness to such a degree that his students challenge his laxness and his family ignores him. As the film begins, he speaks with quiet hesitation when he should be commanding attention. He's lost interest in his job, his students and his family and seldom sees his friends (played by Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang and Lars Ranthe).

All of that changes when they begin the experiment with inebriation and productivity, journaling their findings. Soon they each are turning corners and are breathing life into their students, awakening dormant minds and rediscovering passion. But, as these stories go, matters get out of hand and the drinking -- which increases in regularity, duration and potency -- leads to disaster.

Vinterberg has directed a marvelous film that is beautifully acted by the four principal players and several key featured players, especially Maria Bonnevie as Martin's dispirited wife, Anika.

The Mauritanian

 

Documentarian Kevin McDonald has directed a handful of feature films. Forest Whitaker won an Oscar and Golden Globe for portraying Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in McDonald's The Last King of Scotland (2006). Jodie Foster just won a Globe for playing attorney Nancy Hollander in The Mauritanian, McDonald's adaptation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi's memoir Guantanamo Diary, which recounts his torture while a detainee suspected of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks and Hollander's efforts with assistant Teri Duncan (Shaileen Woodley) to uncover the truth and secure Slahi's release.

While Foster is steely and efficient as a woman guided more by protection than affection, French actor Tahar Rahim pours so much heart and anguish into his portrayal of Slahi that the film seems almost pointless when he's not on-screen.

Some of that is also due to the wispiness of the legal aspects here. What is known now about extradition and torture was not known when Slahi was captured in 2002, and needed to be discovered, revealed by the players. The circumstances surrounding Slahi's capture and detention, the nature of the evidence gathered about him, the testimony of others supposedly involved in the attacks, the motives of his interrogators are touched on but mainly left to inference, which feels to me as if they are beside the point. I think doing so misses the point of Slahi's memoir.

It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that major motion pictures released in theaters are at a disadvantage to streaming services that can devote 5x the number of minutes to developing the complexities of these narratives. For all of its winning qualities -- Foster, Rahim and Benedict Cumberbatch as the Pentagon's lead prosecutor -- the film has the feel of a warm embrace of Slahi and those others wrongfully treated by the United States and not an exposition of how the country got it so wrong.

Nomadland

In Chloé Zhao's inspired and inspiring Nomadland, Frances McDormand plays Fern, a member of the tribe of "houseless" Americans who crisscross the country's expansive middle section chasing piece work and peace. Midway through the film, Fern sells the last of the possessions that will not fit in her life, that is, in her van. Fern, who followed, married, nursed and then buried a dreamy manchild in the middle of Nevada and never found her footing -- and perhaps herself -- again, meets fellow nomads in an RV park and chooses them, and they her, as family.

Zhao, using actual nomads in this film just as she cast damaged but determined bronc busters in The Rider in 2017, has an amazingly discerning eye for one not born in the U.S. (she's Chinese and schooled in England). She knows telling details and displays incredible patience with the film's pacing and its nuances. She balances breathtaking openness with remarkable passages of introspection, many of the most riveting are delivered by McDormand, who, once again, shows audiences why she is one of the most engaging and reflective actresses on the screen.

Nomadland's narrative sparsity and the impecuniousness of the characters stand in stark contrast to Middle American greed and waste. The storage unit industry generates $40 billion each year renting out the 2 billion square feet of storage space across the country.

The World to Come

The two women at the center of Mona Fastvold's beautiful and tragic story, The World to Come, are farm wives in Upstate New York in 1856. They are trapped in miserable marriages, beset by drudgery and isolation, but find in each other, first, kindred spirits then soul mates and then lovers.

Told through hauntingly poetic journal entries by Abigail (Katherine Waterston), the film unfolds languidly. Abigail's attraction to the amorous Tallie (a smoky and spectacular Vanessa Kirby) begins as an ember but eventually consumes her and pushes her to the brink of insanity.

Abigail, who is still mourning the loss of her young daughter to diphtheria, is unequally yoked to the honorable but forlorn Dyer (Casey Affleck), whose name is a homophone descriptive of the couple's precarious existence. Tallie is married to Finney (Christopher Albert), a scornful martinet, who resents the world, his wife and her resistance to bearing him children.

The exchanges between the women are seductive and warm, those with their husbands, coarse and cold. The women's exchanges with one another are entrancing. Their exchanges with their husbands, terse and epigrammatic, more proverbial than heartfelt.

Fastvold's direction is elegant, her attention to period detail extraordinary, and her love for these four unfortunate characters is in every frame of the picture.

Malcolm and Marie

Sam Levinson's Malcolm and Marie is more trial than triumph. Though Zendaya and John David Washington deliver Levinson's abrasive lines capably, the animus between them feels inconsistent and so unpersuasive. Zendaya is the more persuasive as the addictive and self-loathing Marie, than is Washington as the genius filmmaker who has used his lover's pain as inspiration. They take turns butchering one another with revelations and confessions, tearing at each other because they both love and despise the other -- and themselves. Malcolm and Marie is exhausting and exasperating and left me wondering "Why?"

Director Tim Story also has a recent releases. Story has directed the live action/animated rehash of the classic cartoon Tom & Jerry.

Story made his name with music videos. He has directed one commendable movie -- Barbershop (2002) -- but mostly blockbuster movie dreck that are panned by critics but generate dollars for the studios. For example, the blustering and bombastic Ice Cube / Kevin Hart vehicles Ride Along and Ride Along 2 drew in more than $200 million at the box office. Story's films aren't deep. Thematically, they're far from the emotional convulsions in Levinson's M&M. That Story's T&J, which I have no intention of seeing, will be judged as a banal money-grab is assured. And, frankly, that's fine with me.

Levinson's Malcolm and Marie is a race and sex minefield through which the two characters meander, setting off explosions for an hour and half for no apparent reason other than, perhaps, to feed the public's fascination with warring couples and to address the near absence of vitriol at this level being voiced by Black actors. Levinson is a relatively new filmmaker whose pictures are generally well-regarded but they don't make money. Why he chose to try to articulate the complexities in the relationship between a Black man and woman is not clear. But I'm cool with it.

I would love it if Levinson's Malcolm and Marie were truthful but he should be free to try and fail. And Story should be free to direct brainless fodder, the cinematic equivalent of the wings special at Applebee's.

That's what a post-racial America looks like.