Long Strange Trip – 7

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Totally satisfactory as a tribute to the Grateful Dead, four hours of archival footage and talking heads from the band and fans. Of course, the soundtrack was one happy thrill after another. Seeing it in a full house of Deadheads in Greenwich Village, with director Amir Bar-Lev present, made it more a pilgrimage than a mere movie experience. There was an underlying story, too, beyond the Dead’s musical innovation and excellence: their communal spirit informed and epitomized the ’60s flower-power era but couldn’t deal with the success that turned their concerts into near riots and perversely locked Jerry Garcia into an isolation that produced his drug-induced death. Oh, and Phil Lesh looks a lot better now than he did in the ’60s.

The Lovers – 7.5

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Seen amid a slew of Broadway productions, it was refreshing to enter a world of real people, real situations and real emotions. Not that the affairs seemed terribly real – it was hard to see what the respective individuals saw in each other – but the characters portrayed by Debra Winger and Tracy Letts were so well acted, and dressed so frumpily, that you scarcely thought of them as movie stars. There were no big stakes here, just people coping with their everyday lives, and you didn’t even particularly care how things worked out, or didn’t. The trick ending produced a smile and a deep thought or two as you left the theater, but it was probably the least real moment of the film.

The Lost City of Z – 5

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Supposedly based on a novel, The Lost City of Z seemed more likely to have been based on a comic book. The lack of sophistication and subtlety in plot and acting was on a par with Brad Pitt’s performances in, inter alia Inglorious Basterds and, more recently, Allied. Imagine my lack of surprise, then, when the credits rolled and I saw that the movie’s producer was…Brad Pitt. Chris Hunnam, in the lead role, seemed to have gotten the part because of his physical resemblance to…Brad Pitt. Sienna Miller stood out among the cardboard characters, but her role was an anachronistic cliche. Add one more notch to the string of movies “based upon a true story” that you wouldn’t believe if they’d made it up.

Get Out – 8

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A totally fun horror film, with just the right amount of sci-fi mumbo-jumbo and tension-breaking humor. Allison Williams is charming, until she isn’t; Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford are wonderfully debonair parents, until hell breaks loose. The racially charged setup – white girl bringing black boyfriend home for the weekend – adds tension and a bit of misdirection. And the ending couldn’t be more gratifying.

The Hero – 5

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A little Sam Elliot is a delight to watch. An entire movie with nothing but closeups of Sam Elliot is rather too much. The story – an aging cowboy movie star given new life by a young girlfriend and a viral video – is neither deep nor plausible, and the secondary characters don’t do much with what little they’re given. In short, a film for Sam Elliot devotees only. (San Francisco Film Festival)

The Cage Fighter – 4

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A not terribly well made documentary about a not terribly interesting man engaged, not terribly successfully, in mixed martial arts – something I’m not terribly interested in and certainly don’t enjoy watching. The filmmaker took life as he found it – and the access he achieved was remarkable; not every life, however, is worth a film. (San Francisco Film Festival)

The Salesman – 8

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(fuller review TK). Real-world cinema, in this case from Iran: no special effects, no histrionics, just real people facing real situations, making choices that the viewer can admire or criticize. In other words, we are drawn into director TK’s vision and made to question our own feelings and reactions. Here, notably, we admire the lead male for his sensitivity, forbearance, skill with his pupils and ability to hold it all together; while we lose sympathy with his wife, despite her rape, as she is unable to move on and stop burdening those around her. And then our sympathies shift. For every character we see the good and the bad. And we recognize that here, as in life, there is no black and white, only many shades of grey that blend into one another, for better and worse.

I Am Not Your Negro – 7

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As much a success of style as of content: telling James Baldwin’s story through his own words, both recorded live and read posthumously, with video from the day mixed with later interviews, gave us an unusually rounded and real picture of a man we know more as a reputation.

Toni Erdmann – 1

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If not the worst movie of the year, it will take something to beat it. I had read it was that rare thing, a German comedy. We waited 85 minutes for the comedy, but by then the characters were so unpleasant to watch that we gave up. The lead woman was not just unhappy below the surface, she was a mess above. The lead man was supposedly the comic character, but his eccentricity was never explained, nor was his presence in the Bucharest scenes, and you just felt sorry for him when not squirming at the awkwardness of it all. The secondary characters were no better – not a recognizable human person among them – and the business situations were equally caricatured. Finally, the hand-held camerawork was unnecessarily annoying. In short, I can’t think of one redeeming aspect, although we did miss the final 80 minutes.

The Distinguished Citizen – 8

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Here was a film to think and talk about: how many themes did you detect, and what were they? An Argentine writer, winner of the Nobel in literature, returns to his small home town in the country – why? to bask in his glory, to refresh his imagination, to experience nostalgia? – or does he? (As an introduction to Argentine cinema, this was a nice companion to Neruda.) People greet him on the surface, then turn petty and hostile. They don’t understand him, but does he understand them? He bumbles along in his world of fiction (Oscar Martinez won the Argentine Oscar for Best Actor), finding that he can’t go home anymore – or can he?