Emily – 6

If swelling music, period bonnets and close-ups of Emma Mackey’s eyes are your thing, this movie is for you. The story, a fabricated version of Emily Bronte’s life, contains no surprises or clues as to her artistry, but it’s pleasant enough to go back in time to the English countryside. Although Emma Mackey was attractive enough, she was an unexplained six inches taller and 30 pounds heavier than her sisters, and no match for Emma Corrin in Lady Chatterly’s Lover.

Alphabetical List of 2023 Movies

Air
Afire
All Quiet on the Western Front
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
American Fiction
Anatomy Of A Fall
Anselm
Avatar: The Way of Water
Barbie
Between Two Worlds
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
The Boy and the Heron
Close to Vermeer
Emily
Fallen Leaves
Ferrari
Flora and Son
Here
The Holdovers
Immediate Family
The Innocent
Inside
Io Capitano
Joan Baez: I Am A Noise
Killers Of the Flower Moon
The Lost King
Maestro
May December
Monster
Napoleon
The Night of the 12th
Oppenheimer
Past Lives
The Pigeon Tunnel
Poor Things
Priscilla
The Quiet Girl
Retrograde
Saint Omer
Showing Up
Still
The Stones & Brian Jones
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
The Teachers’ Lounge
To Leslie
Vengeance
Women Talking
Wonka
You Hurt My Feelings
Zone of Interest

SBIFF – 7.5

Because few of these, if any, will make it to my local theater, I will quickly summarize my reactions to nine movies I saw at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. (I accord The Quiet Girl and To Leslie their own reviews because of their respective Oscar nominations.)

Dr. Anthony Fauci – 6. A charming guy, but a disjointed documentary that shoehorned in the AIDS crisis and covered the years after the main story–Fauci’s time with Trump–was over.

Dirty Divide – 7.5. Very professional and sensitive portrait of the homeless in L.A.’s Skid Row. No fingers pointed and no solutions in sight. Heartbreaking but watchable.

The House Band – 4. Very unprofessional portrait of the homeless on Venice Beach. The story got away halfway through, and the director never found it again.

It Ain’t Over – 7. The movie’s subject, Yogi Berra, made this fun to watch. The saying, “It ain’t over till it’s over,” lost its charm, however, with its 57th repetition.

Miranda’s Victim – 2. Terrible acting, trite dialogue, confused story; not a believable character or scene. Where (or who) was the director?

Soul of the Ocean – 7. Wonderful underwater photography with annoyingly vapid narration that was neither here nor there.

Starring Jerry as Himself – 7.5. A rare comedy and a poignant tale. Made for the small screen but charming and original.

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – 7. A one-man (Ralph Fiennes) recital, dramatic and powerfully paced. I understood nothing but couldn’t move.

Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer – 5. A pleasant but incomplete look at the career of a favorite movie director. Nothing new or terribly insightful.

 

 

To Leslie – 7.5

An acting tour de force from Andrea Riseborough, who inhabits this down-and-out but deviously charming alcoholic named Leslie. Just when you think you can’t watch her another minute, the story turns and we end up with tears in our eyes. The plot, above all the ending, doesn’t withstand much scrutiny; but you want to go along, thanks to the performance by Riseborough.

The Quiet Girl – 8.5

A little gem. A quiet movie, very Irish, about a young girl and some adults. We come to know her, and love her, and I wouldn’t mind spending more time with her. If the ending is heartbreaking, even tragic, that’s Ireland for you.

Oscar Nominees

Having finally seen Women Talking I can now comment on the full slate of Oscar nominations for Best Picture, as well as many of the subcategories. Fortunately, my favorite English-language movie of the year, The Banshees of Inisherin, is also the leading Oscar nominee, with nods for Director, Actor, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress as well as Picture. Maybe it wasn’t that great a movie, but the competition is unusually thin, especially if, like me, you just didn’t like Everything Everywhere All At Once.

The oddsmakers are favoring Ke Huy Quan from that film for Supporting Actor, but for me Brendan Gleeson gave the performance of the year and shouldn’t even be in the “Supporting” category. The other nominees include Brian Tyree Henry from Causeway and Barry Keoghan from Banshees. Both gave fine “performances,” but I couldn’t understand half their dialogue, which would seem a basic requirement for this award. Judd Hirsch’s dialogue in Fabelmans was perfectly clear but he was so obstreperous I cringed when he was onscreen.

Kerry Condon was a revelation in Banshees. Her role as Colin Farrell’s sister seemed minor at first, but by film’s end you realized how much she added to the otherwise male-heavy story. I thought I was discovering her and was surprised that I wasn’t alone. (I wonder if her residing in LA the last ten years instead of, as she sounded, Ireland made a difference for the Academy.)

I hope Colin Farrell repeats his Golden Globe win as Best Actor, although I am slightly less impressed after watching his almost identical performance in In Bruges ten years before.  I didn’t like Austin Butler’s rendition of Elvis, I didn’t, and probably won’t, see Brendan Fraser in The Whale, and I didn’t notice any acting by Paul Mescal in the plotless Aftersun, which is the exact quality the L.A. Times theater critic raved about recently. Bill Nighy was wonderful, as usual, in Living, which I discount because it was a pale imitation of Ikiru (although Kazuo Ishiguro cast a cloud over Takashi Shimura’s original interpretation at his SBIFF panel appearance).

The big battle is expected to be the Best Actress race between Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh. The other three nominees–Michelle Williams, Ana de Armas and Andrea Riseborough–can be dismissed out of hand. We have been to tributes to both Cate and Michelle and were impressed by each of them. Unless voters feel that it’s Michelle’s turn, however, I expect the award to go to Cate, and I will approve.

I have no credentials to opine on the technical categories, but as a layman I would give awards to Avatar for Visual Effects; to Wakanda Forever for Costume Design; to All Quiet on the Western Front for Cinematography and, spreading the wealth, to Top Gun: Maverick for Editing. I remember being struck by the score of more than one movie, but I can’t remember which they were. Since All Quiet is the only film nominated for both Score and Sound, I have to think that was one of them. One award I would not give is Original Song. In general, they have nothing to do with their movie and only play over the final credits, when most of the audience is leaving or has left the theater.

International Feature is easy, for Argentina, 1985 was my favorite film of the year. I haven’t seen two of the nominees, but having seen short clips and heard from their directors I feel certain that they wouldn’t change my choice.

Women Talking – 5

With cinematography by Walker Evans, dialogue by Kahlil Gibran and star turns by Ben Whishaw as Anthony Perkins and Rooney Mara as the non-Virgin Mary, this film had serious and artsy engraved on every tableau. Unfortunately, it just didn’t connect with me. I couldn’t tell if it was a fable, a parable, a women’s dream, a philosophy class or a visitor from an alternate universe, one where the Southern Cross is visible in the Northern Hemisphere and census workers broadcast “Daydream Believer” from their van.

Black Panther II: Wakanda Forever – 5

For an action movie directed at the short-attention-span generation, this was one slow film. Every scene between fights dragged on; as for the predictable fights, they were without visceral emotion and internal logic, as was the rest of the film. Deep looks of concern and longing mainly recalled their comic book source. The ending was one long hint of a sequel to come, which I will be glad to avoid. On the plus side, I was happy to see Richard Schiff and Julia Louis-Dreyfus representing the White establishment, and Wakanda gets my Oscar vote for costume design.

Saint Omer – 7

A simply shot, mesmerizing courtroom drama, semi-opaque as a drama but evocative of ideas. Of maternity, of personal responsibility, of colonialism, of man and woman, of race, more of race, of journalistic objectivity. From our viewpoint, it is also curious to observe and try to understand the French criminal justice system (with six seasons of Spiral as our background). We never quite understand the two Black women at the story’s center, the writer and the defendant who murdered her child. It is not our place to understand them. But they are unforgettable.

Retrograde – 7

Utterly remarkable footage of the last days of the Afghan war, embedded with American troops/advisers in Helmand Province, then with the Afghan forces after the Americans withdrew. The story wasn’t much, and there were perhaps too many scenes of soldiers looking at each other, talking on the phone, and just thinking; but the portrait it painted of the two forces was devastating: the Americans exuded competence, the Afghans were amateurs. You wondered what 19 years of American training had accomplished; or, conversely, what we were doing there at all. There was no discussion or explanation of why the Taliban were such superior fighters, or even what the war was about. And footage of the withdrawal itself–what a mess! As a scrapbook of a doomed war, this should be a keeper.