I’ve awarded the non-Oscar for Best Director of a Documentary to Jimmy Chin for this engaging, gripping drama cum tutorial about Alex Honnold’s obsession to climb El Capitan in Yellowstone without a safety net – e.g., free solo. First, there’s the charming main character, wonderfully ingenuous and open for someone in his position: the best in the world, who calmly and openly faces death for the sake of experiencing perfection. His girlfriend, fortuitously, is easy on the eyes, as well. Second, the director inserts himself and his camera crew discreetly into the film, not to share the glory but to give the viewers a sense of how the amazing photography of Hannold’s ascent is accomplished. They also serve as on-screen stand-ins for us, especially when Mikey Schaefer turns his back, afraid to watch. Third is the dramatic story: how Alex prepared for years for his climb and then pulled it off, in less than four amazing hours. My face was wet with tears, and I felt I’d been through the proverbial wringer by the time we said goodbye to a world we had just discovered.

Michael Moore has packed four movies, four movies, four movies-in-one, at least! There’s Hillary’s defeat; Flint’s water crisis; the Parkland school shooting; and Trump’s neo-Fascism, at least two of which pick up on earlier Moore films. There’s a ray of hope in the person of four emerging radical candidates for Congress and the West Virginia teachers’ strike, balanced by a discussion with a Yale history professor cautioning that our democracy is not a given. As a coherent movie, this doesn’t score very high, but as a collection of clips that make you alternately sad and outraged, it does the job.

Who knew that Joan Jett was still rocking? Somehow, despite all the sturm und drang of a typical rock biography – rejection, no respect, getting ripped off, amazing highs of fleeting fame, falling-out with bandmates, etc., etc. – she resisted and survived, not only setting an example but mentoring other female rockers. After the sold-out preview at the Riviera, we were treated to a 2018 sound check with Joan and the Blackhearts pounding out Fresh Start, Cherry Bomb and Bad Reputation like it was 1980. Joan herself was an engaging interviewee, and the other talking heads were generally additive, not duplicative, including Michael J. Fox on Joan’s acting career and (gorgeous) Kristen Stewart on the movie Joan produced about the Runaways. And of course the music, while not quite the Ramones, was worth hearing again.

This was shaping up as an excellent study of a marriage, with Glenn Close accommodating herself to the shadow cast by her Nobel Prize-winning husband, but then it took a horribly wrong and totally unnecessary turn that was both totally unbelievable and made us rethink, and doubt, the wonderful characterization that Close had offered before. It didn’t help that the Jonathan Pryce character was presented without redeeming qualities and that the son was introduced mainly for Pryce to be mean to. I don’t see Close winning the rumored Oscar for this, but I will say the movie lends itself to discussion.

A charming rom-com in the Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts mold that might have scored even higher if I could have understood the English (Irish/Australian) accents. All four characters were delightful: the beauteous Rose Byrne, the humorously cloddish Chris O’Dowd, the talented slacker Ethan Hawke and the precocious Azhy Robertson, who at maybe 9 years old was clearly the sanest of the bunch. As befits a Nick Hornby story, the music was fabulous: “Different Drum,” “Mixed Up, Shook Up Girl,” “Waterloo Sunset” as well as the not-bad “Tucker Crowe” originals. What fun to watch an easy-to-follow movie with no bad guys, no nervous or cringing moments, just a path full of interesting details for the characters to figure out their way in life.