Simon Boccanegra

I'll be the one to back up @Milburn Stone, then. I loved this. I noticed from Rotten Tomatoes that it's one of those cases of an extreme divide between critics and audiences (89 percent approval versus 51 percent, respectively). I'm with the critics this time, but I get it. It's one of those movies I can enjoy every second of, think about for days afterward, look forward to revisiting...and yet very cautiously recommend, and not even talk about with certain friends whose tastes I know. But it's also one of those cases where if it does reach you, it might really mean something to you. I wondered how much of herself the screenwriter, Deborah Eisenberg, who's a highbrow author herself and of Meryl Streep's generation, put into the Streep character. Of course, it's been well publicized that Steven Soderbergh encouraged a great deal of of improvisation, and it shows. There's that great scene between Lucas Hedges and Dianne Wiest about maintaining friendships and about changes in the world between the time the three leading women were young and Hedges's time. It is difficult for him to imagine how people stayed connected before the internet and social media; it's been his reality for his whole life. She counters that while methods and tools have changed, people really have not. That scene really felt like a documentary conversation between Hedges (b. 1996) and Wiest (b. 1948), and I think that's what it was. I suspect Soderbergh and Eisenberg just gave them a topic and let them go where it took them. Much of the film is in such a freewheeling conversational vein, although close analysis does reveal a clear structure. I couldn't help thinking, while watching, of all the previous associations I have with the three veteran actresses. They are cast to their strengths: Streep the cerebral one, Wiest the nurturing one, and Bergen the firecracker from whom the years have taken the most. I found Bergen very poignant here, but I loved everyone's work, including that of the two younger principals, Hedges and Gemma Chan. The main set, the ocean liner, is such a beautiful playground, and Soderbergh has shaped discursive material into a very smooth, well-groomed film. It seems light, loose, and even insubstantial while it's going on, but it is gently probing complicated matters: the connections between family members and friends, the responsibilities of writers to loved ones versus themselves and their audience, the value of art and entertainment, what we leave behind of ourselves when we're gone, how we're likely to be remembered. It doesn't give us all the things we expect from the setup. It's both less and more than its premise. It is a movie I think people will discover or return to over the years, especially as one and eventually all three of these actresses inevitably leave us. It has a lovely autumnal glow.

I watched this last night. I belatedly crossed the now-Netflix-available Snowden (2016) off my list too, so I had an unintended "Joseph Gordon-Levitt in spectacles, fact-based" double bill. The Trial of the Chicago 7 exceeded my expectations. This is an example of streamlining and dramatic license put to good use, and it's such a timely film in 2020-21, on several levels: the portrayal of uneasy alliances on the left, of systemic racial bias and judicial abuse, of brutality in response to protests, of a fraught transition from one presidential administration to another. Even though there are many moving parts and many important characters, it's all so lucid, accessible, engrossing. I've run hot and cold on Aaron Sorkin since the '90s, while always recognizing his intelligence and facility. This was some of his best work. I wasn't entirely on board with Eddie Redmayne's Tom Hayden, because I always find there to be a mannered, "strenuous" quality to his performances, but he had his moments. My favorite performances in this stacked, mostly male ensemble were those by Gordon-Levitt, Sacha Baron Cohen, Frank Langella, and the ever-amazing Mark Rylance. As far as disappearing into a character goes, I had no idea I had even been looking at Kelvin Harrison Jr. (as Fred Hampton) until the movie was over. Even when I went back to his scenes, I had a hard time believing it was the same actor who had played the spiraling student athlete in Waves (one of my 2019 favorites). Also, one of my favorite "Hey It's That Guy" types, John Doman (the psychiatrist on ER, Rawls on The Wire, Michelle Williams's father in Blue Valentine, and a hundred other credits), was hilariously despicable in his one scene as John Mitchell. Great show.

In an early scene, when the guys are first arriving to rehearse, Levee is the only one who expresses any curiosity about that door and where it might lead. The others -- older, less ambitious and/or more worn down -- are paying it no mind. They blow it off when he tries to start a conversation about it. So I could see from the start where that was going in terms of metaphor, but I thought his continuing attention to it throughout the film, and the ultimate payoff (or non-payoff), played well.

@Milburn Stone: Yes. Lindsay-Hogg and his crew were shooting at Twickenham for the whole of January 1969. What made it into Let It Be was just an 80-minute sliver. In fact, the rough cut of Lindsay-Hogg's film itself was an hour longer than what was eventually released to theaters. That version was only seen by the inner circle. Apparently it had a lot more of Yoko in it ("[T]he other three didn't really think that was appropriate," per Lindsay-Hogg). It's possible the Jackson film will have some overlap with Lindsay-Hogg's, but I gather that the majority of it will be new.

I did find the Jonestown survivor an interesting person, and the Jim Jones/People's Temple story has always held fascination for me, so I enjoyed it. But I will say we've found the one guest who makes it hard for even Leah to get a word in edgewise. At 113 minutes, it's by far the longest episode in the series to date, and Capt. Williams must be talking uninterrupted in 90 of those minutes. Leah's interjections are at an all-time low, and there's only scant evidence that Mike hadn't taken the week off. But I do like that when they have a guest who knows much more about some topic than they do, they hang back. They were that way with the Jehovah's Witnesses and the NOI people on the A&E show too. They're good interviewers in that sense. It's just that so much of the time, the content is in their field of expertise too, so it's more conversational (and, yeah, maybe more dynamic and interesting). ETA: For their next branching-out attempt, I'd love to hear them talk to one of the former Manson Family members such as Dianne Lake, given Manson's connection to and borrowing from Scientology.

Turman also has the distinction of being the only African American actor ever to have a part in an Ingmar Bergman film. It was The Serpent's Egg, 1977. Turman told a good story about that in a career retrospective interview some years ago. He had been in a dry spell, hadn't had a gig in a while, and when he got the call, he assumed someone was pranking him. He cursed them out and hung up. He couldn't believe that one of his idols, who generally worked in his native Sweden with all-Scandinavian casts, would have something for him. But The Serpent's Egg was a big-budget thriller in English, produced by Dino de Laurentiis, about the first stirrings of Nazism between the wars. Bergman had seen Turman in Cooley High and wanted him for a supporting role. Fortunately, they tried again by sending him a script in the mail. His big scene, as a jazz musician in a brothel, is one of the highlights. I thought Ma Rainey's Black Bottom worked better than the film of Fences a few years ago, which I didn't care for, apart from the performances of Davis and Stephen McKinley Henderson. Wilson's is an extreme example of theatrical writing; you never forget it was conceived for the stage. The monologs themselves have a musical quality, like solo arias. But this film was tauter and more effectively edited than Fences. The play is best approached as an imaginative exercise and as social commentary, not really a document of what happened at a particular recording session. But knowing that Ma Rainey was, in 1927, just on the cusp of has-been status, with the vaudeville circuit having collapsed, musical tastes changing and new voices emerging, adds something to the effect. In her silent final scene in the back of the car, I think she sees the big picture. She might win some small battles by tooth and nail, but the war is going to go against her.

I seem to have had a better time with this one than most of the viewers in the thread so far did. It didn't especially bother me that Oldman was playing half his age some of the time, any more than it bothers me when -- in the classic at issue -- 25-year-old Welles is playing the bitter late-in-life Kane with the help of that not-so-convincing bald wig. What mattered more to me is that Oldman carried himself like someone who really would talk in this epigrammatic, verbal-snowballs-to-the-face style, always walking a fine line between being welcomed for his wit and shunned for his abrasiveness and lack of restraint. I found Seyfried a most endearing Marion Davies, and the acting support otherwise excellent. Tom Burke really conjures the Welles voice. The one scene I disliked was that epic rant of Mank's at the Hearst dinner party near the end, in which the guests keep getting up and leaving the room. It's one of those stagy episodes in which it's hard to believe no one cuts the misbehaving guest off sooner. Of course we aren't going to be fretting with Houseman over whether the Citizen Kane script will be finished; we know the film becomes an important cinematic artifact. But in any film hinging on a subject of history, the same is true. We know the Titanic will sink, we likely know the outcome of the battle of Guadalcanal, we know the Selma march eventually does take place. Those examples are subjects of higher stakes, yes, but all of these movies dramatized the foreordained. Here, I think there's less "drama" than there is personality and texture. I suspect dramatic license has been taken with the characterizations and relationships, and I know the Shelley Metcalf character is fictionalized, but the film makes me believe in this world where all of these legends keep bumping into each other and trading their quips. It's a literate and dashing script by the elder Fincher, and the world of Hollywood in the first decade of talkies (give or take) is beautifully recreated on the craft level. It's perhaps Fincher's most amusing movie. And it has a great and uncharacteristic period-influenced score from the Reznor/Ross duo. If it were the best of the year, it might be a down year, but I enjoyed my couple of hours with it.

Leah Remini talked more than once on the show (and I'm sure in her book as well) about the pressure she was under to bring her King of Queens costar Kevin James into the fold, and how when she didn't do it, they treated her as though she were failing. It makes me wonder about Elisabeth Moss's experience. If they were eager to get Kevin James, they must have been dying to get some of the people with whom she's costarred on the long-running shows The West Wing and Mad Men. I think more than some celebrity members -- and especially more than some who are second-generation -- she sees which way the wind is blowing. When she got a question on a social-media platform about parallels between Scientology and The Handmaid's Tale, while she did pay some lip service to the party line (starting off with "That isn't true about Scientology"), she generally deflected. She didn't "confront" the way an Alley or an Elfman would have.

I only got to see the original Let It Be documentary a few years ago. For about 40 years it has been kept off the market, and I'd heard about how dreary and acrimonious it was, how it painted the group's members in the worst light. Maybe going into it with those expectations affected the way I perceived it, but it really wasn't so bad. Certainly, it isn't the nonstop bickering and bad feeling I'd expected. And it's good fun to hear them sounding so ragged in rehearsals, trying to find the right shape for now-famous songs that were in various stages of completeness. The worst I could say, really, is that the first hour or so is disjointed and meandering. Lindsay-Hogge just runs a lot of episodes and incidents in a random sequence: here's something cute, here's something intriguing, here's something tedious that goes on too long, and you only really know we've moved to a different day because the clothes change. It only takes off as a special documentary when they get to the rooftop. I'm eager to see the new film.

I didn't know until now that there were two Ann Todds of classic Hollywood. When I saw the name in the TCM montage, I couldn't believe that the woman who had played Gregory Peck's wife in The Paradine Case had only just now died, since that was in the '40s and she was well into adulthood. But this was Ann E. Todd, a child actor of the same era. A nice clip package, as always.

Shoah was one of her greatest dissents ("Sitting in a theatre seat for a film as full of dead spaces as this one seems to me a form of self-punishment"), but her positive reviews were my favorites of all. If I loved a movie and then I read her full review after seeing it, I could feel that no one else really got at what made the movie special. She could suggest the intangibles of a film with well-chosen phrases. Nashville (which Rinaldo mentioned) is a great example, and The Godfather Part II, Blue Velvet, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being are others that come to mind. A lot of good critics can describe the fundamentals -- the writing, acting, and craft elements -- of a great movie, but she could share with you her experience of seeing one and being won over, delighted, surprised, overwhelmed by it. The generous space The New Yorker gave her helped, but some of this quality even survives in capsule form in 5001 Nights at the Movies.

I don't know if this played a role in Sarah Jessica Parker's selection as Kael's voice in What She Said, but Parker got a rave in the last movie Kael reviewed for The New Yorker, Steve Martin's 1991 L.A. Story. In fact, the last words were about Parker's performance as SanDeE*. "[She's] the natural heroine for an L.A. movie. She's the spirit of L.A.: She keeps saying yes." That said, I didn't like SJP's narration. I understand that she wasn't trying for an impersonation, but we hear so much of Kael herself in archival footage of television appearances, and it's discordant when the well-known, very different voice of Carrie Bradshaw keeps horning in in voice-over, delivering famous review quotes. I was disappointed in that doc as a whole, although it was pleasant enough and I might recommend it as a crash course for someone who wonders why movie-loving people still talk about Pauline Kael. (Really, I'd first recommend picking through For Keeps or 5001 Nights at the Movies.) It's something of a primer, hitting all the ups and downs while not delving too much into contentious matters. Paul Schrader does get a nibble in, with his comment: "In the end of the game, what Pauline Kael promoted wasn't film. It was her." The documentary on Roger Ebert earlier in the decade (Life Itself) seemed to me better as both filmmaking and portraiture. Of course, the subject was alive and cooperating when it was begun, and his condition and his death give it another layer of poignancy. However, I had a better sense of the person and the life when the movie ended, and I learned more I had not known already. I consider Shoah one of Kael's greatest reviews. I differ with some of the above in that I don't think Kael's contrarian streak has gone extinct in modern film criticism. Whenever a new movie is released to widespread acclaim, it's easier than ever to find dissenting voices, with Rotten Tomatoes collating everything. And there are always at least a few. To give one example of a very highly praised movie of recent years, Moonlight has 386 reviews posted there; seven are pans, They're not all obscure bloggers either; some are with major publications, and two have the site's "top critic" seal. (A third is, perhaps inevitably, the National Review's Armond White.)

I think Ryder (or any real actress of the right age and physical type) would have helped enormously with the Mary scenes, because poor Sofia Coppola was just lost as an on-camera presence in a major role. But the film was too little and too late. It never made a compelling case for its existence, even when pros like Pacino, Garcia, Keaton, Shire, and Mantegna were center stage. Coppola made four great films in those heady New Hollywood days of the '70s (the first two Godfathers, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now). Few of his "young genius" peers of that era fell farther once the '70s were over. I guess Cimino and Bogdanovich did, but most of the others who would be in that conversation -- Scorsese, Malick, Allen, Spielberg, De Palma, etc., and Altman who was a little older but a late bloomer -- had highly regarded work in early and later periods. Sure, it's easy enough to find people who really like one or more of FFC's later films, either for nostalgic reasons or because they really think they're good movies, but there's a big gap in standing between his '70s films and the rest. Now he seems to do as much "re-direction" as he does direction. We've had two alt versions of Apocalypse Now since 2000, and he's gone back into the editing room with The Outsiders, The Cotton Club, and now Godfather III. I won't be surprised a bit if he tinkers with Peggy Sue Got Married or Gardens of Stone or the Dracula movie next. I don't want to be too petty about it, though. If you make four great films and your ceiling thereafter is "decent," you're still finishing ahead of most people who make movies.

Adelaide had just seen a Hands Across America promo in 1986, the day of her switch. It wouldn't have been the only one, as Hands Across America hype was ubiquitous that spring. HAA was a sunny, optimistic way of raising consciousness and funds for the disadvantaged and forgotten. There were a song, a music video, T-shirts, other merchandise. It was very on-brand for Reagan-era do-gooderism (e.g., "We Are The World"). All these years later, Adelaide leads the Tethered -- disadvantaged and forgotten -- out from underground and co-opts HAA's imagery for her much darker "activism." The piece below, not a long read, deals with the HAA motif well and includes Vanity Fair quotes from Peele on the subject. https://www.inverse.com/article/54329-us-hands-across-america-engages-with-dark-hypocrisy#:~:text=Peele's confirmed as much an,cure hunger and all that.”

I think Hubai is off on this one. Morricone's score is all over Days of Heaven. We only hear "The Aquarium" over the opening titles and (in fragments) two more times: when the characters are waving at President Wilson's train and near the end when the girls elope from the boarding school. Had he replaced most of Morricone's music with it, it would have been very monotonous. However, some of the Morricone score is a variation on "The Aquarium," as below.

I'm reminded a bit of how James Horner was spitting mad for the remaining ten years of his life about the rejection of most of his score for The New World. He slaved over a hot desk and this is the thanks he got. Some of his music is there, but it's easy to miss. Malick, who's always been big on using classical music in his films (Orff, Saint-Saëns, Faure, Ives, Smetana, Mahler, Berlioz, et cetera), decided to more prominently feature Wagner and Mozart. They were not 17th-century figures, but I though it worked well enough. I remember when the movie was in theaters and people were commenting on "Horner's score" and actually praising (or panning) Wagner and Mozart.

Marnie is the great divider. I really couldn't stand it, and I've been surprised as the voices have become louder and more numerous claiming it as one of his masterpieces. There are some movies you don't take to, but you can imagine finding more in them on a repeated viewing, and I didn't get that from this one at all -- it certainly puts what it has right over the plate. But I don't even think it's well acted, except for Diane Baker as Lil. The Birds is my personal checkout point, and I like that one much less than I like Psycho and earlier ones in the pantheon (Vertigo, Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, Rebecca, etc.). I suppose I should see Frenzy again sometime. That's the other well-regarded late one. I saw it only once in the tape era and don't remember much of anything.

The most controversial movie of the year, and we're far enough along in this annus horribilis that I doubt the designation will be taken away. Attacked by politicians, mass down-voted on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, excoriated in rambling YouTube hot takes, the impetus for a spike in Netflix cancellations. As often is the case in these matters, the movie seems to go over better with people who watch it first rather than making up their minds based on Netflix's poster (which is misrepresentative), the trailer, or the synopsis. That doesn't mean you will love it, but at least you can argue against it in good faith. It is the first feature film for Maïmouna Doucouré, a 35-year-old Senegalese-French screenwriter/director. The heroine, 11-year-old Amy (pronounced like the French word ami), lives in a Paris slum with her devout Islamic family and is responsible for much of the care of two younger brothers. The father is away, and there is tension in the household because he will soon be bringing home a second wife, who will live there and enjoy marital pride of place in a polygamous arrangement. Amy's grand aunt, one of a long line of elderly movie church ladies of all creeds, pressures the mother to "be a woman" and present herself to neighbors as happy and accepting of the newcomer. The mother internalizes her pain and shame at her demotion—in a brutal scene, she slaps herself and moans like a wounded animal—and Amy is the only child old enough to pick up on this. Amy begins to reject not only the customs of her religion but modesty and virtue themselves. We can read what is going through her mind: "My mother did everything 'right', and where did it get her?" Amy falls in with a clique of rebellious girls at school who call themselves the "Cuties." They are influenced by older girls, who are in turn influenced by social media and the raunchier side of pop culture. The Cuties practice risqué dance routines in hopes of winning a competition. The Cuties' behavior is entirely imitative. We see that they understand not at all the provocations with which they are toying, nor are they alert to some real dangers around them. (There is a tense scene in which they show their moves to two security guards, one of whom appears to leer.) Amy's behavior spirals into greater transgressions of theft, violence, and exhibitionism, disturbing her family and even the other Cuties. The film charts her painful search for some sort of equilibrium amidst conflicting messages she receives. What has been most controversial about the film is the way Mme. Doucouré shoots the rehearsal and performance scenes for the dance competitions. She is very aggressive here, zooming in close and panning up bodies in skimpy outfits as if directing one of the music videos that were the Cuties' models. And, of course, these bodies are of preadolescents rather than adult women. I will admit that for all her talk in interviews about going through proper channels of French government approval and having a counselor present on set, these scenes make for uneasy viewing. But these scenes (at least, for me) are balanced by the sensitivity of the surrounding material, the convincing picture painted of the culture. One talking point has been that real children are taking part in a film they should/would not be allowed to see, but this was equally true for famous R-rated films from The Exorcist to Taxi Driver to Stand by Me. I recall no similar outcry, at least nothing so sustained and vociferous, when Macaulay Culkin at this age played a sociopathic murderer in the rancid thriller The Good Son. Unlike that one, this is not a film with villains we can see. The "evil" is far away, abstract. The main girl is painfully sympathetic; the mother is loving but sad and overwhelmed, and the severe aunt is simply passing on what she was taught long ago, much of it proscriptive or superstitious. It is not a perfect film. A few detours into magical realism (such as a dress that appears to bleed) clash with the more realistic tone of most of it, and the script resorts too easily to contrivance. Twice, important matters related to the father's second wedding just happen to be on the same day as something involving a dance competition, and Amy begins to look hopeless at planning even for an 11-year-old. But it is a strong first feature, deserving of its critical acclaim more than its opprobrium. I hope the intense controversy does not harm the writer/director's future opportunities, for I believe hers is a valuable voice. She is helped by powerful performances from Fathia Youssouf as Amy, Maïmouna Gueye as the mother, Mbissine Thérèse Diop (star of the seminal Black Girl more than 50 years ago) as the aunt, and other performers young and adult. If you do watch this, I recommend setting your language preferences for French audio with English subtitles. The default is likely to be the English dub, which is as imperfect as such things usually are.

I was happy about Laura Dern's Oscar win both ways. I applauded it as a "career recognition" moment for someone I've never seen be bad, who always gets the most out of what she has to work with...and I thought her Nora was a great supporting performance, a memorable and distinctive entry in the movie-attorney annals. And I can't say one of her three nominated rivals I've seen was clearly more deserving. Florence Pugh was a good Amy March, but was given the impossible task of convincing us she was 12 for the earlier parts of the story. Margot Robbie's work was one of the best things about the so-so Bombshell, but if Dern's recognition was for a single scene (I don't really agree), Robbie's would have been just as much so -- that scene of her suffering through Lithgow/Ailes's near-GYN-exam of her in his office. And Scarlett Johansson was very charming in JoJo Rabbit, but it was the lesser of her nominated performances, and I wouldn't give it the edge over Dern's either. I didn't see Kathy Bates in Richard Jewell, because I have yet to enjoy an Eastwood-directed movie, and it was going to take more than a single surprise nomination to make me try again. Bates is always good too, but, eh, she has an Oscar. I realize that there may have been performances on the level of Dern's that were unnominated. I'd hear a case for, say, Taylor Russell in Waves, Da'Vine Joy Randolph in Dolemite Is My Name, Zhao Shu-zhen in The Farewell, past winner Penélope Cruz in Pain and Glory, or one of the women from Parasite. (Look at how diverse that category could have been!) But as good as they all were, no one was really buzzing about any of them pre-nominations. So, while there was zero suspense about it, since Dern had cleaned up in the precursors, this was one of my happier moments of the 2020 ceremony.

I think Quentin's tempo has slowed down a bit as he's grown older, and essentially he now makes limited series and smushes them into very long feature films. I was surprised by how much better The Hateful Eight (which I had found numbing as a 168-minute single serving) worked in the Netflix four-episode version. My suspicion is that Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood might be a similar case, if he follows through on recutting the 4 hours and 20 minutes he shot. He had to make a lot of choices to get it ready for the Cannes premiere. Allegedly, there was one cut scene in which Julia Butters was so good that she might have received an Oscar nomination. But I did love the film as released last summer. It was one of my three favorites of 2019, along with Parasite and the Pedro Almodóvar movie Pain and Glory.

He also shoots the fleeing she-replicant (the Joanna Cassidy one with the snake) in the back in Blade Runner. He's overmatched by each of the four of them in a fair fight.

Anyone who had wanted to see the much-delayed final product of Woody Allen's severed partnership with Amazon -- a film readied for release two years ago -- can now do so easily, as it has hit various digital platforms. A good movie was not being withheld from us. As far back as Everyone Says I Love You (1996), it was apparent that Allen had lost the knack for writing younger characters, male or female. Although he has two college-aged daughters now and presumably listens to and talks to them, things had not improved by 2018. Chalamet broods and grouses and mimics the author's cadences like all the other bright, hyperverbal Allen stand-ins. Fanning dithers and blushes like Diane Keaton more than 40 years ago, when the words had more wit. The movie is, of course, attractive. It has good-looking people at every turn; it's nicely shot by the legendary Vittorio Storaro; the New York exteriors look great whether bathed in rain, sun, or mist; and the smooth, precise style of direction Allen worked out in the post-Annie Hall period has not left him. But as a screenwriter, time has passed him by. This is an out-of-touch octogenarian's story about privileged college seniors, and it's as tin-eared as that sounds. The young couple gets separated in Manhattan, and Chalamet's cynical young poker shark runs into and flirts combatively with the sister (Gomez) of an old girlfriend. He later persuades an escort (Rorhbach) to pose as his girlfriend at his wealthy parents' party. (I kept expecting some comedic potential to be mined in that sequence, but it's thrown away. It's just a setup for a ludicrous truth-telling scene between Chalamet and Cherry Jones, playing his high-society mom.) Fanning's bright-eyed student journalist improbably bewitches, in succession, a famous director (Schreiber), the director's screenwriter partner (Law), and a heartthrob actor (Luna). Any pop-culture reference the twentysomethings make is to the pop culture of Allen's own youth, e.g., Cole Porter and mid-20th-century musicals. The romantic near-misses and realignments have no resonance; I never cared for a moment who wound up with whom. This is especially sad for a viewer who has fond memories of pictures like Hannah and Her Sisters and Husbands and Wives. In those, the actors had characters to play, rather than just collections of tics and attitudes. The only cast member who gets much out of the material is Selena Gomez. It isn't that her lines are better than anyone else's, but she has good timing and puts them over with tart authority. Hers is the most likable character in the film. The piano jazz on the soundtrack is always pleasant (although I think Allen has used the same recording of "I've Got the World on a String" at least once before). Chalamet gets to sing "Everything Happens to Me" in a thin-toned but on-key and musically sensitive style that reminded me a bit of Chet Baker. Skip, unless you're a completist for someone involved.

I can get on board with this. I have liked him in some more "down to earth" movies, such as Witness, without feeling that his acting was a big selling point of the movie. A number of other actors of the right physical type in the same era might have done as well. "Workmanlike" is a good word for him when he's not playing a Solo/Indy/Deckard pulp hero. I did admire his commitment to the fanaticism of the main character in The Mosquito Coast (and River Phoenix was very good as the son, too), but the movie was not a success with either critics or audiences. He didn't have much success with big swings out of his zone, as the brain-damaged character in Regarding Henry went even less well.

I'm doing a post-S5 Netflix rewatch of the first four seasons, because even though I've been with Better Call Saul from the start and have liked it, a lot of the events, especially in the early years, have gone blurry for me. I've never seen any episode more than once. It's reminding me how great Michael McKean was in this role. The love/hate relationship of the McGill brothers was the engine of the first three seasons, and it gave us great scenes like that truth-telling confrontation at the end of "Pimento" (1-9). McKean always played Chuck's inflections, hesitations, and expressions just right. When you watch the episodes again knowing where everything's going, everything about his performance tracks. I remember that when I was following fan forums more in the first couple seasons, Chuck was polarizing; there were people who wanted him gone even before the first season finale. I consider him a great and necessary character whose run had to end eventually to get us to the next phase, and the show got the most out of him.

I caught up with this last night. It was one of those "tier two" new movies I was curious about, but not enough to see in the theatrical-release window. Background: I've seen the Kubrick The Shining several times, I read King's The Shining two or three times as a young person, and I saw the forgettable 1997 miniseries once. I've never read Doctor Sleep because, while I have enduring respect for King as a writer, I disembarked somewhere around Needful Things. So this was an all-new story to me. All I knew was that it picked up with Danny Torrance as an adult. I give the writer/director, Mike Flanagan, a lot of credit on a degree-of-difficulty level. He managed to make a respectful, even reverent sequel to both the book and the film, bridging the distance between them. The reverence is not always in Doctor Sleep's best interests. The weakest scenes were the ones with new actors impersonating Shelley Duvall, Jack Nicholson, Danny Lloyd and Scatman Crothers circa 1980. They were good impersonations, sometimes eerily good (Alex Essoe's Wendy running toward the park bench, frantic, yelling out to Danny), but it was hard to react to them as anything but impersonations. Those scenes had a waxwork or tribute-band quality. The film following or surrounding those scenes was better. Something I found special and unusual about it, for a horror thriller, is that we got to see the "villains" being terrified too. There were mutual stalking and terror tactics going on. It was a real psychic war. The sympathetic characters of Abra, Dan and Billy got to get their own licks in, not just in the climax. As satisfying as that element was, I found I didn't even hate the members of True Knot, despite the gruesome things they did onscreen. When I thought about it, I realized they were like obligate carnivores. They didn't think of what they were doing as evil. They wanted to keep living as much as their victims did, they were facing extinction with their dwindling supplies, and they were long past being emotionally affected by the necessary sacrifices. This is a credit to King, Flanagan and the True Knot actors. I'm a little surprised not to read more effusive praise for Kyliegh Curran in the reactions I've seen so far. I thought she showed the presence and strength of someone who could become an important actor in adulthood. The same goes for Jacob Tremblay, whom I knew going in from Room. His big scene here is so excruciating that the viewer has to recover from it to get back into the film. Rebecca Ferguson, whom Doctor Sleep probably helped more than it did anyone else, is as great a principal antagonist as everyone said, magnetic and complex, reminding me of a beautiful Swede of an earlier generation, Lena Olin. But Ewan McGregor was only workmanlike, Some actors deepen in middle age, as the youthful glamour falls away; others grow paler, less interesting. Unfortunately, I have McGregor in the second category. He was overshadowed here, much as he was in Beginners and The Impossible. This is not a horror classic. It's slow, dense and deliberate without completely making that pay off, and it was hard for me to buy something integral to the premise: that an intact Overlook would have been shuttered after the events of Kubrick's film. In that version of the Overlook's history, would one more crazy caretaker who only successfully committed a single murder really get the place closed down? And in nearly 40 years, it was neither reopened under new owners nor demolished with something else on the site; it just sat there in a very mild state of dilapidation? But a solid effort, well worth seeing.