I love Bruce, his band, his music, his performances, but there was nothing new in this documentary about his latest tour. I would have learned what his producer Jon Landau looked like if I hadn’t just had dinner with him last month in New York.
The curtain opened and hilarity ensued. And ensued and ensued. Historical inaccuracy and period costumes added a patina to the comedy that made the farce engaging. The actors, especially Conrad Ricamora as “Mary’s Husband,” were so good and the action so bawdy that there wasn’t a moment or scene that wasn’t funny, but Cole Escola gave the performance of a lifetime, topped only by their after-show cabaret act. Oh, Mary!
A directorial tour de force from Sean Baker, this tale of an erotic dancer caught up with a Russian oligarch’s son trafficked in extreme after extreme without losing touch with reality and very funny moments without descending to farce. It was, however, rather longer than necessary: the opening act of excess carried on well after we got the point and well before the looked-for conflict arose. Fine acting all around and good, gritty setting.
Visually sumptuous–those cardinals’ robes plus the Sistine Chapel!–but the story and characters never grabbed me. Ralph Fiennes was all anguish and emotion, making me long for Anthony Hopkins. John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci and comparable Italian and African(?) stars just made me wonder what they were doing at the Vatican. The plot, too, was cardboard thin, drama I couldn’t care about and an ending that was fun, but not particularly deserved. The idea that the cardinals were “sequestered” seemed to mean that Fiennes could look for the outside information he wanted, but not the rest.
A well made movie about the awkward moments of ninth grade from the perspective of a first-generation Chinese immigrant. Unfortunately, the ninth grader at the center of everything, a surrogate for the director Sean Wang, is neither charming nor interesting, so the viewer emotional involvement is missing. And ninth grade, after all, holds only so much interest.
As with her (much better) plays, Annie Baker’s film debut consists of people talking, and figuring themselves out. Unfortunately, all they talk about is their relationships, none of which are that interesting. This is sort of an Inside Out 2 but with sort of grownups.
Our 7-year-old granddaughter said she enjoyed it, although the jokes were coming faster than we could easily catch. I think I liked the first film better, but that may be because the early teenage years just aren’t fun for anyone.
A lovely, gentle romance between a charming and gorgeous Icelandic man and a lovely and demure Japanese woman, told through flashbacks to 1969 London from a 2020 present. Besides whetting my appetite for Japanese cuisine, the film almost made me nostalgic for the days of Covid lockdown.
If you’re going to have an affair, it’s probably better not to have it with your teenage stepson. That seemed to be the message of this very French film: lots of relatable characters, long takes, sex and bad decisions. It would have been easier to take if Theo, the 16-year-old bundle of animal magnetism, had been either more attractive or more pleasant, but he was a convincingly unhappy, irresponsible teen. The film belongs to Lea Drucker, who wore her emotions on her face a bit too plainly and never quite convinced us of her actions.
A disjointed melange of mostly still photos for a documentary that purported a big story–scandal at the Venice Biennale–that never showed up. What was Leo Castelli’s involvement? Who was Rauschenberg’s competition? Wasn’t he the “best painter” there? What did his later ventures–e.g., ROCI–have to do with anything? Why talking heads who arrived on the scene more than 40 years later, including a young art historian from Tokyo? It was fun to see Rauschenberg’s works, often over and over, but I missed discussion of their artistic merit, or the art of the other impressive American representatives. I felt continually short-changed.
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