Funny Pages – 5

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A celebration, I guess, of an oddball teenager who makes a series of bad decisions in service to his love of cartooning. Amusing, not funny. You don’t want to feel sorry for people, but overall the picture here is fairly sad.

Malik – 6.5

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If I didn’t know “Malik” is Arabic for “king,” I would have thought it meant “Godfather,” so much does this two-hour, forty-minute Indian epic borrow from the Coppola classics, not only characters and plot, but several scenes that are direct lifts. (Then again, maybe in the Malayalam language that’s what it means.) Unfortunately, Fahadh Faasil, who plays the godfather, lacks the presence, or maybe the acting skills, of DeNiro and Pacino. The scenes of criminal activity are beyond belief, but more important and credible are the personal relationships. Although the lightning-fast subtitles and unfamiliar culture made the non-linear story hard to follow, my attention and interest never flagged. [Amazon Prime]

Fire of Love – 5

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90 minutes of home movies without any discernible plot or organizing principle. By the end I had no idea what a “volcanologist” is or whether this couple were actual scientists or merely storm-chasers. What they were “studying” was never disclosed. If their only contribution was to warn people that volcanoes are dangerous, that hardly seems earth-shaking. Miranda July’s breathless narration tended toward over the top and didn’t help. The pictures were amazing, but after awhile one felt free to doze.

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris – 6

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Call me stonehearted, but I wasn’t touched by Mrs. Harris or her story. The good guys were too sweet, the bad guys too ugly and nothing met the plausibility test. Individually, however, the characters were charming, especially Natasha, and the clothes were almost worth the price of admission.

Where the Crawdads Sing – 7

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Much better than I expected.  The action takes place from 1953 to 1969, and the film feels like it. When was the last time we saw a hero as decent, sincere, handsome and blond as Tate? The story is just as implausible as it was in the book, but the imperfect crime at its climax is finessed more adroitly. The biggest plus of the film is David Strathairn’s performance as the Gregory Peck/Sam Waterson lawyer. In fact, echoes of To Kill A Mockingbird echo through the marsh. Daisy Edgar-Jones, in a hard role, is fine.

Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song – 7.8

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The title acknowledges the film’s duality – one part about the man, the other about the song. The former is interesting but leaves the singer as inscrutable as he was going in: ladies’ man? Zen monk? fraud victim? poet? The story of the song is more satisfying, and the song is great. I wonder, however, if I wouldn’t have been happier listening to Jeff Buckley, or Brandi Carlile, or John Cage singing more of the alleged 160 verses than getting teased, time and again, with the same two. Talking heads were purposefully and tastefully integrated, and Cohen’s music, which generally defines “lugubrious,” comes off quite well.

Flux Gourmet – 3

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An absurdist comedy about a “culinary collective” that was too far off the mainstream for me. One of those films where you feel the director has a cult of 17 followers, and you’re not one of them.

Nope – 3

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I fear for the movies, when this is counted as the major release for the month, and the four trailers previewed are all for horror films that seemingly favor special effects over real people or situations. A thriller(?) depending upon an alien spaceship is especially hard to take seriously at the same time we are seeing images of the cosmos from the Webb telescope, but Daniel Kaluuya as a Hollywood horse wrangler didn’t make much sense from scene one. If there was a point to the movie, anywhere, I couldn’t find it. I liked the inflatable tube men, but that was about it.

The Gray Man – 2

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How many people can you kill without any discernible justification or plausibility seems to be the calling card of this Netflix franchise-wannabe, featuring Ryan Gosling in the Bourne/Bond role and a slew of other actors who are either bad (e.g., Rege-Jean Page as Carmichael) or as cliched as the plot.

Official Competition – 8

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Hilarious! Antonio Banderas steals the movie, as well as the movie-within-the-movie, in a master class of actors acting at acting–all very meta. A bewigged Penelope Cruz is perfection as a dominatrix director, and Argentinian actor Oscar Martinez holds his own against showboat performances from his Spanish co-stars. The plot is a stage for a string of laugh-out-loud jokes, each set up with care, that linger deliciously after the movie ends–or does it? The architecturally minimalist set was probably suggested by Covid filming, but it suits the purity of the satire.