The Florida Project gets better as it moves along and builds to a powerful conclusion

Sean Baker's The Florida Project has at first a documentary feel - a study of three children and living in what appears to be a welfare hotel on the distant outskirts of Disney World. It takes a while for a narrative to develop, but it's well worth giving the film your full attention as it's one of those rare movies that gets better as it moves along and builds to an incredibly powerful and emotional dramatic climax. The center of the film is a young (about 6 years old?) girl, Moonee, and her mom, a single mother with extremely bad judgment about raising her daughter. Among other things, this film is a social commentary on the welfare system as well as an unflinching look at neglected children who have just enough care, resources, and attention to be above the line for state intervention but who seem destined to get into serious trouble once they're older and less cute and carefree. The movie is continuously fascinating visually, w/ bright, high-contrast photography capturing the harsh Florida sunlight, the bizarre commercial structures along a Florida strip, and the weird tropical colors of the vast hotels where single mothers and child live week to week at cheap daily rates. Brooklyn Prince deserves special note for her portrayal of Moonee; she has a good shot I think at best actress nomination, which might make her the youngest since Shirley Temple? It's not clear whether the film was completely scripted or of the children were encouraged to ad lib in some of the playing and their games; either way, the movie feels entirely real and credible, and though we have only limited sympathy for Moonee's troubled mother, Halley, she is by no means a monster - the adults in the movie are flawed but credible, trying to get by and do their best by their kids, in their own fashion. William Defoe as the manager of the hotel (the Magic Castle) is fine as well, a nuanced, humane character who looks after the kids from a distance, like a "catcher in the rye."

Despite some quibbles, Three Billboards is a completely engaging movie

In Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, he quirkiness of the characters and the jarring juxtaposition of humor and violence works in favor of the movie rather than against it. Why? Largely because of the great performance of Frances McDormand in the lead role: Her violence and eccentricity is grounded in plot and character: She behaves in a deranged, provocative, anti-social manner because of the great suffering in her life, the violent death of her teenage daughter and her own guilt about her last words to her daughter before the death. So when she engages in completely odd, even criminal, behavior - such as heaving Molotov cocktails into the local police station - we believe it, and we even sympathize with her. The plot of this movie - mother prods PD into more serious investigation of her daughter's death, leading to a series of violent encounters and to a thoughtful, open ending to the film - is well conceived, director. Martin McDonough, knows how to get the most out of a scene, as the movie always stays on edge and keeps us engaged start to finish. I do quibble with the violent and strange behavior of so many others in town, though some may appreciate and accept that as part of the overall dark comic vision (while I see portrayal of these rural Missourians as opportunistic and even condescending). That said, 3 Bs has to be one of the most entertaining movies of the year and will probably earn McDormand, everyone's current fave movie star, a deserved statue.

One of the best historical dramas on TV or streaming, ever - The Crown

Season 2 of the Netflix original series The Crown not only lived up to the high standard it set in Season 1 but surpassed it - truly one of the great episodic historical dramas on TV or streaming ever. It's hard to imagine how much they spent on art direction for this series, but whatever amount they spent was well worth the cost: the look of the series from the tightest closeup (items on a desk top, wall hangings in every room or chamber, table settings) to the grandest panoramas (settings that seem to be in Africa, the South Seas, Australia; airplanes, trains, autos, cycles from the period; exterior shots) - just so clear and vivid that you could watch the whole series with sound on mute and still enjoy the spectacle. But of course you'd be missing some of the best acting performances on TV, esp that of the amazing Claire Foy as Elizabeth. Her every look, every inflection (w/ her 50 ways of uttering "yes" or "I see" in that clipped, nasal British upper-class manner), and of course we watch her mature into the role over the 2 seasons covering about 15 years of Elizabeth's life (season 2 ends ca 1963 w/ the Profumo affair). And then there's the writing (Peter Morgan), with each hour-long episode like a terrific drama that could stand alone yet connects across the span for a panoramic narrative; esp in season 2 each episode seems to take on a different theme or crisis - the Suez crisis, African independence, Phillips infidelities, the marriage of Princess Margaret, a visit from the Kennedys, Prince Charles in boarding school, to cite a few - and not one fell flat, each a near perfect drama in miniature, informative, moving, believable. Do I have a quibble? Well, sometimes the utterances are so aristo-mumbled that I'm baffled and have to pick up what's going on by watching the faces and body language. I guess I could play w/ subtitles or get a better sound bar. Otherwise, it's a near-perfect series.

Rohmer's late The Green Ray is one if his great films of conversation

Eric Rohmer's 1986 film The Green Ray (his last? one of his last?) is not nearly as well known as his earlier major works, e.g., Clare's Knee or My Night at Maud's, but it's in the same general style though maybe even more distilled: Rohmer was perhaps the greatest filmmaker of conversation, the ancestor of "mumblecore" but so much finer and more intelligent. Green Ray is a movie that can break your heart, a simple tale of a young woman, Delphine, living in Paris who just can't connect with people. At the outset her plans for summer vacation go awry as she receives a call from a friend cancelling their plans for trip together. This information upends Delphine: She cannot endure spending her four weeks of vacation in Paris, nor can she endure the idea of traveling alone. It seems as if she has a lot of friends and resources, and she's very attractive and well spoken, but nothing seems to go right for her: One friend offers her an apartment in the Alps, she goes there, but returns to Paris the same day, in tears. Everywhere she goes she sees others happily engaged in conversation and in life, and she just continues to feel like an outside. Guys try to hit on her in various ways - and she's intelligent and sensible enough to walk away from these lewd or blunt overtures, but that leaves her even more alone. I can't "diagnose" her, but she certainly seems clinically depressed and at times perhaps on the spectrum - not quite knowing how to modulate her conversation to fit in w/ the lighter banter around a dinner table. We follow her through various encounters over a month-long span, each filmed in a manner that prefigures "reality TV" - a documentary look, with many long takes, sometimes with two Delphine and another character held for along time in the same frame. There's simple musical score at only a few moments; generally, the background is just the ambient noise of street  life in Paris or elsewhere on her travels (in one sequence, passers by look into the camera during a series of long takes - a flaw that makes the film seem even more authentic). I won't give anything away, but the film does rise to an emotional crescendo - an excellent work by one of the great filmmakers.

The 10 best miniseries I watched in 2017

Like so many, I have gradually shifted my movie-watching habits: from theater to cassettte to Blu Ray disc and now to streaming - so much so that we finally dropped Netflix dvd subscription (and added Filmstruck, for access to the Criterion Collection). The greatest thing about streaming of course is the opportunity to watch a miniseries at one's own pace and convenience. As the year ends, we bid adieu to Last Chance U, we welcome the new arrival of The Crown 2, and we wonder: Can House of Cards and Transparent survive without their stars? Can Stranger Things survive as the kids grow older? Will Godless resurrect? That said, here are notes on the 10 best miniseries I watched in 2017:

American Crime 3

As in each season, #3 was not about a single “American Crime” but about several crimes; the plot strands - death and murder in migrant labor camp, runaway teen addicted to Rx, mistreatment of a Haitian nanny - coincide in time and place but have only slight overlaps until the final episode, when all the main characters enter a courtroom where some will confess, others begin a trial. It's as if one were to look at everyone in a courtroom on the same day and ask: What are your stories? What brought such different people to the same place?

The Fall

One of the best police procedurals about a serial killer, this one on the loose in Belfast; in an unusual twist, there’s no mystery (to us) about the killer’s ID. The 3-season series holds our interest throughout with a nice balance of nuance, conflict (between devious killer and shrewd, super-cool though flawed police detective Jillian Anderson), analysis, and action.

Fargo 3

Season 3 of Fargo, a comic romp in the darkest manner that plays out among the seemingly kindly and innocent people of great Midwest, maintains its quirkiness right to the end. The characters, except for the lead, detective Gloria played by the excellent Carrie Coon, are cartoonish versions of, by turns, evil incarnate and bumbling naivete. The plot, though the gears click, is ludicrous - a blood-bath of brutal killings and finance schemes - yet it keeps us involved all the way, alternately laughing and hiding our eyes.

Fauda

This 12-part Israeli series maintains its pace, tension, and moral ambiguity right up to the end - a great ensemble piece with strong writing and plot and character development, good acting by all the leads - Israeli and Palestinian both - good production values, including the haunting score and the use of street locations, and a story line that offers some insight on the complexity of combating terrorism while trying, against the odds, to remain ethically superior to one’s antagonists.

Genius

This NatGeo 10-parter does a great job in examining Einstein’s personality without undue hagiography: We see his intellectual genius of course and we see his thoughts emerging through the early years of disgrace and disappointment (still incredible that he could not get a university job and wrote his breakthrough papers on relativity while he was a clerk in the patent office!), his struggles against anti-Semitism, particularly in Germany but also in the scientific community at large, and mostly his troubled relationships with family, with women, and especially w/ his first wife.

Mindhunter

This fact-based Netflix series about a small team of FBI agents and outside experts who interview some of the most notorious killers in custody picks up in intensity and the stakes are raised as the season progresses. The interviews - in which Agent Holden pushes his subjects to the breaking point - are incredibly intense and highly consequential, as the team gradually learns more about how to use the info they’re compiling in order to try to solve on-going cases - not all of which turn out perfectly, to the great credit of the series.

The Night Of

This terrific 8-part HBO series is about a young man accused of a murder and held throughout his lengthy trial on Riker’s Island, an experience that transforms him into a thug, whether he was guilty of the murder or not (though the 1^st episode depicts the events of “the night of” the killing, there is much ambiguity about what actually occurred). This series seems to be a loosely based on the experience of the wrongly imprisoned Kalief Browder, subject of another mini-series, Time.

Occupied

A smart, taut, and frighteningly realistic Norwegian series, Occupied is about a Russian occupation of Norway and the rise of a resistance force within the country. The characters are complex and multidimensional, the villains are suitably loathsome yet somehow also human and vulnerable, the alliances are ever-shifting and tricky, and the action scenes keep you always on edge

The Vietnam War

Whether you lived through the Vietnam era or not, it’s still powerful and moving to see the many news clips, war photography, plus contemporary interviews with those involved in many facets of the Vietnam War, including several North Vietnamese veterans. Ken Burns has outdone himself; there is nothing in this series of the saccharine tone in his famous Civil War series; this series is much more dynamic, nuanced, and provocative, worth anyone's time - everyone's.

Wanted

The Netflix (via Australia) two-season series Wanted has flown completely under the radar, but we found it completely entertaining and engaging right through the end of Season 2: The two women on the run, initially because they witnessed a botched mob hit involving drugs and a crooked cop, are a great pair, very different, both odd, each smart and brave in her own way. We like them both from the outset, and they’re not superheroes, just wily and courageous and all their decisions seem to work out, at least up to a point.

The 10 Best Films I Saw in 2017

Some comedies, some dramas, some adaptations; some from the U.S., some European, one Korean, one Iranian; one documentary and one musical; a few new films and a few 2016 catch-ups - here's a report on the 10 best films I saw in 2017:

Certain Women (2016)

Kelly Reichardt’s smart, introspective, and moving film is a series of three short narratives, based on stories by Maile Meloy, about female protagonists (played really well in turn by Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart) linked only by their shared setting (contemporary South Central Montana), time, and mood. If any filmmaker could tackle Chekhov, I think Reichardt could do great adaptations of a series of his stories.

Fireworks Wednesday (2006) In Iranian

An early work from Iranian writer-director Asghar Fahradi, whose films are as thoughtful and dynamic as great stage dramas - Ibsen or Pinter come to mind - with tremendous family antagonisms against a background of life in a complex urban community. It’s a difficult and sometimes challenging movie that comes together and builds in power and impact as it moves inexorably toward a difficult conclusion (not a resolution).

Get Out (2017)

Jordan Peele’s fantastically inventive and surprising film takes on all the black male cliches and stereotypes directly in a way that no white writer-director could possibly have done. All of us in our anxiety about race can see elements of ourselves in this film, in these bizarre or beleaguered characters - clearly one of the best films of the year.

The Handmaiden (2016) In Korean

Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s film centers on a country estate in which the manor is built half in traditional Japanese style and the other half as an English manor house with Victorian-era furnishings and décor – a metaphor for the overall theme. We think we’re embarked on one of the many servant-governess stories so common in English literature (and film) - Jane Eyre, Turn of the Screw, Rebecca, et al. - but suddenly the movie takes a dramatic shift and we’re in a completely different film, in which the characters are underworld figures plotting and scheming, with and against one another.

La La Land (2016)

Damien Chazelle's Hollywood musical draws heavily and consciously on Hollywood musical traditions and makes out of these  something contemporary and lively and entertaining. I'd thought maybe this movie was being over-hyped; it's not - the hype was justified.

Life, Animated (2016)

Roger Ross Williams's documentary is a powerful, emotional, and honest account of the struggles of one young man, Owen Suskind, and his family to help him overcome the severe autism that transformed him into near silence at age 3. The movie is based on the book by Owen’s father, Ronald Suskind; Williams does a great job letting the story tell itself, staying in the background, never intervening in the scenes he's recording, keeping interviews with experts to a bare minimum.

Julieta (2016) In Spanish

This film is another great work with Pedro Almadovar’s signature style and his favorite issues: examining the life of a woman in crisis, and in particular the relationships among women and how they support one another, told in a crisp and stylish narrative style with a sparkling view of life in contemporary, largely well-to-do contemporary Madrid and filmed with extraordinary beauty of color composition (just looking at the backdrops of most of Almadovar's shots and the exciting color combinations is like a trip to a gallery or museum) and  with an unobtrusive yet emotive score.

The Silence (2016)

Based on a 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo, Martin Scorsese’s film is completely engaging start to finish: a smart, disturbing narrative with haunting cinematography and a subtle, mysterious pseudo-Asiatic score. In essence, it’s a spiritual adventure story, as two Portuguese missionary priests working in 17^th-century Japan, together and later separated, endure a series of hardships and dangers; it's also an examination of the nature of faith and morality - Scoraese's best film in years.

The Silence of the Sea (1949) In French

Jean-Pierre Melville’s first film is a simple, austere, tour de force. Based on a pseudonymous novel or short story published in France during the Occupation, the story concerns an elderly man and his 20-something niece who are forced to billet a German officer. Amazingly, the German is pretty much the only one who speaks (other than voice-over narration) throughout most of the film, as he is met with a wall of silence – a metaphor for the French resistance.

Toni Erdmann (2016) In German

This nearly 3-hour "eccentric father-uptight daughter film" is totally entertaining, engaging, and, in the end, moving without ever being sentimental or soporific. It would have been so easy to make this movie dogmatic or schematic - the daughter completely changing her ways, for example, and leaving corporate life behind or providing a new “option” for her client under which nobody gets laid off, etc. But director Maren Ade will have none of that, and the movie ends on a poignant, but still somewhat unsettling, note. Can an English-language remake be far behind?

Dark feels like a ripoff of Stranger Things - only w/out the charm

I know copyright law can be nuanced when it comes to purloined ideas, images, and general themes, but I think that The Duffer Brothers, creators of Stranger Things, could make a good case against the German team that developed the Netflix series Dark. Let's see: Part of the series set in the 80s? Check. Group of teenagers from a small town hike in the woods. Check. One goes missing, sending town into a search frenzy. Check. There's a nearby industrial plant sealed off for high security. Check. there may be some kind of chemical or poison leakage from the plant? Check. A police officer leading the search makes his way through a dark underground passage - stupidly, alone and poorly prepared - and comes upon doors that seem to lead to an underground entry to the mysterious plant. Check. Cut to the management of the plant, which we see is in some kind of collusion w/ local officials to keep things quiet. Check. The gang of friends includes a red-headed girl whose presence causes rivalries among the boys - check - and one member who disappeared for some time but has returned. Check. The search for the missing child leads the boys to find an obscure map that may help them find their way to the "crossing." Check. I could go on - but why bother? Dark is amazingly, suspiciously like Stranger Things, but with a shift to a slightly older generation (h.s. v middle school) and more focus on the adult relationships, some adulterous, pushing the story from PG to R. All OK I guess if Dark were ... any good. It was promising at first, despite the extremely complex plot that involves something like a warp in time, juxtaposing contemporary scenes w/ episodes from 33 years back. But instead of becoming more clear and focused as the season progresses, the series to my mind has become a tangle of plot lines, almost impossible to follow, and why bother anyway? None of the adult characters is interesting or even particularly likable, and the kids are basically blanks. What made ST work is the charm of the young kids finding their way in life - plus some very appealing adult characters as well. Dark has none of the charm of ST so we're left with the plot, which is not enough, or maybe too much.

Melville's first film is simple, austere, and a tour de force

Jean-Pierre Melville's first film, The Silence of the Sea (1949) is simple, austere, and a tour de force. Based on a pseudonymous novel or short story published in France during the war - an incredible act of bravery in itself - the story concerns an elderly man and his 20-something niece living in a small town in an unnamed province, during the Occupation, who are forced to billet a German lieutenant. Throughout the movie the man speaks almost entirely in voice-over narration and the niece, as far as I can recollect, says only one work. Almost all of the movie takes place in their parlor, and the German officer is the only speaker. But Melville does so much with this material: The German tells them about his love of France, about his hopes that the Occupation will build a beautiful relationship between their 2 great countries; he's cosmopolitan, cultured, well-traveled, and well educated, a man of feelings and sensitivity. He seems interested in the niece. But the man and his niece never say a word to the German; in every scene the man puffs on his pipe, the niece works on some embroidery - they refuse to offer him the least civility - a great political statement! I won't give much away, but at one point the German gets a two-week leave and heads to Paris, which has been lifelong ambition. These scenes are amazing; he visits the various sites, and we often catch, just against the margin of the frame, the Nazi flag or a group of German soldiers. The officer spends time in a club w/ other German officers - another fantastic scene, with one of the men singing a mournful ballad and as others watch there's the hint of homo-eroticism. Eventually, a political discussion ensues, and the German officer seems to begin a transformation (the political argument is the one possibly heavy-handed moment in the film). The three lead actors are all great, w/ special props to Nicole Stephane as the niece - her facial expressions are  as restrained yet powerful and emotive as those of Jeanne d'Arc in Dreyer's great silent film. Silence of the Sea is a great report on the agonies that many good French people (silently) endured during the occupation.

Godless holds up well across 7 episodes

The 7-part Netflix series Godless is entertaining right through to the end - and it truly does seem like the end, rather than an entree to a expected season 2 - in fact the only dud was the first episode, which introduced a welter of characters and plot elements and was hard to follow; I definitely would watch at least through episode 2 before deciding whether to go on. On some level it's just a typical shoot-em Western with gunslingers galore (Jeff Daniels playing a particularly weird and complex one) and a lot of frontier life in and around the saloons and the corrals of the post Civil War SW, but there are some "modern" Western elements, too, notably the inclusion of an isolated black community made up of retired Buffalo Soldiers now trying to farm the arid land. Most of all, the series is notable for it's feminist stance, with at the center a community called La Belle, N.M., in which virtually all of the men had died in a mining disaster and the women now run the show. That's a great concept, and the heroic stance of the women in the final episode is great, but it was a little disappointing, after seeing the series promoted as a series about women running a town in the west, that most of the major roles - w/ only 2 exceptions - are still given to the "menfolk." The two women w/ strong roles, though - Michele Dockery as a widow running remote ranch and raising her half-native American son - and Merrit Wever (had to look up her name) playing the de facto mayor of La Belle - are both really good, and there are some pretty funny moments as well egarding the town's former leading prostitute who, in the absence of clientele, has become the school marm. All told, a good, entertaining dramatic series that holds up well across 7 hour-long episodes.

Bresson's last film is his worst, sadly

Bresson's last film, L'Argent (1983) does not do justice to his career; it's a sad example of a very old filmmaker - he was probably about 80 at the time and, based on video of a Cannes news conference included in the Criterion Collection he looked frail and sounded almost doddering - who's locked in his ways to the point of mannerism and self-parody. Yes, Breton is well known for his unusual narrative pacing, in particular for lingering on the after-effect of an action; when a character leaves a room, for example, he lets the camera linger at some length on the door the character closes behind her. We get many, many long shots of closed doors (including some cell doors and gates in a prison), empty hallways, empty offices - and to what end? These do not advance the story in the least. Bresson is also well known for working entirely w/ amateur actors. Great, if you can get a fresh and insightful performance from them, but he did not do so in this weak movie: All of the characters are wooden in their body movements and their dialogue, and the very few action sequences, such as a prison riot, are embarrassingly bad (the protagonist threatens a guard with a soup ladle!). Worst of all, the plot is difficult to follow and ultimately makes no sense, as we watch a young man railroaded into prison after he's caught w/ some fake bills who descends deeper into criminality and eventually into mass murder, and we never believe it for a second: We don't know enough about his life, background, needs, drives, anything to help us understand him or care about him - completely unlike the great Bresson films such as Pickpocket, A Man Escaped, or Diary of a Country Priest. Of course I understand and sympathize with the desire to continue to create works of art, but sometimes it's better - like Roth, like Munro, to name two recently retired writers - to know when to stop (and maybe focus on teaching, criticism, or some other artistic endeavor).

An early Bresson film gives some hints about his later works of genius

Robert Bresson's 1944 film (his 2nd I think), Les Dames de Bois de Boulogne, doesn't quite have the open and improvisatory feeling or the interest on the outsiders and the lonely that we see in his later great films, such as Pickpocket or Diary of a Country Priest, but it's a good story - based on a short novel by Diderot, apparently - and shows us some of the talent that Bresson would develop further: the haunting closeups of faces in moments of torment, the careful pacing, and the occasional - I wish there had been more - plein air  scenes, particularly at the rendez-vous point in the Bois and the nigh-time scenes in the rain at a scruffy Paris "place." The story, briefly, involves a society woman who's tired of her on-going but going-nowhere relationship with a society gentleman; she tells him she wants to break if off, but, instead of pleading for her love he tells her that this is great, he was going to make the same suggestion, but they can continue as friends, etc. Obviously, she is insulted and horrified by his reaction and she sets off a plot against him. She arranges for him to meet "by chance" a pretty young friend of hers, and by making the friend "hard to get" she increases his ardour; he falls in love w/ the young friend and eventually they get married. One the night of the wedding, however, she tells him the truth: his new bride has been a cabaret dancer (horrors!) and I suspect the movie is playing it safe and we're to read between the lines and assume she was a prostitute (the title may give that away; I expect the Bois was a known pick-up place at that time). The plot moves along nicely, but a few key points are left murky, at least to me: How did this society woman know the nightclub dancer in the first place? How or why did she support the dancer (and her mother), paying their rent, etc., and for how long? Anyway, a good if not a great film and the first steps on a path that lead to some truly great works by Bresson. 

A potentially good project that falls flat: Alias Grace

I suppose the Sarah Polley six-part Netflix series Alias Grace, based on Margaret Atwood's novel, which in turn is based on historical fact, is watchable - I watched it, anyway - if you can take six hours of all men are horrible (w/ one exception, and he's a complete weirdo) and all women are victims. Maybe that's true; anyway, that's not what bothered me. Mostly, this could have been a taut and provocative series about a 19th-century Canadian murder case - the eponymous Grace, along with a fellow servant (a guy) were charged w/ murdering their boss and his head servant; the man was hanged and Grace sentenced to life in an asylum, where she is horribly mistreated. A group of benevolent Canadian church folks took up her cause and invited an American doctor, one of the first to treat mental illnesses, to come to Kingston, Ont., to treat Grace; he does so through a series of interviews in which she is supposed to live through and narrate the events of the crime. This is something like a 19th-c version of Mindhunters, but w/out the drama. In effect, we go up to the 5th episode/hour before Grace even begins to talk about the crime; do we really need that much information on the hardships she endured and the system of domestic servitude? Things pick up a bit in the final two episodes, but things also get obscured rather than clarified: Grace undergoes hypnosis and gives a completely different account of the murders, and in the end we never know to what extent she lies, hallucinates, distorts, suppresses, or tells the truth. Essentially, this series is a literary adaptation that's far too dependent on the source text - there are far too many scenes in which we get long voice-overs from Grace or long passages of her discussion w/ the interviewing doctor and almost nothing of interest happening on screen - it's like a reading from a novel at times, in other words. Polley has done some great work (e.g., her documentary/memoir The Stories We Tell), so it's especially disappointing that this potentially good project should fall flat.

The Ornithologist: An interguing film, but what's it all about - if one may ask

Portuguese director Joao Pablo Rodrigues's 2017 film, The Ornithologist, is visually stunning - not just the shots of birds, though those are great as well - mysterious, and engaging, up to a point. It's definitely not a movie for anyone who likes everything in a film to tie together and to "make sense." This is a film of puzzles and enigmas, and though many segments of the film may be subject to interpretation others I think intentionally defy interpretation. They're "real" because we see them on film; whether they mean anything at all is another matter. The film, briefly, involves the eponymous ornithologist, Fernando, who sets off in a kayak on a river in what we later learn is part of a pilgrim's trail in NW Spain. At the outset, ominously, he receives a message reminding him to take his meds. Shortly into his bird-watching jaunt he gets swept away in a current, loses pretty much everything, including his pills - so is all that follows his hallucination? Rodrigues doean't give into the movie cliche of dreams and visions; everything is photographed with a "realistic" lens. Strange things begin to happen to Fernando, including some episodes that seem impossible if taken literally (e.g., two female Chinese pilgrims tie F up in the night so that he can barely move let alone escape; how could they do this?). I won't give away crucial information, but will only note that there are many religious overtones, especially involving the crucifixion, and a completely puzzling (to me) closing sequence that may suggest the successful completion of a pilgrimage or rite of passage. To me, this kind of narrative would never work in fiction/in print - we wouldn't buy the events for a second - but when we "see" these events quite literally before our eyes we're much more credulous, we're drawn in. The question is: Into what? Was there a point to this journey? If so, it eluded me.

Netflix series Wanted entertains right through the end of Season 2

The Netflix (via Australia) two-season series Wanted has flown completely under the radar - I can't find a single review or article on this series - but we found it completely entertaining and engaging right through the end of season 2: The two women on the run, initially because they witnessed a botched mob hit involving Rx and a crooked cop, are a great pair, very different, both odd, each smart and brave in her own way. Over the 12 episodes their characters grow and evolve (and in fact learn that they're not as different as first it appeared), and given the extreme nature of this plot, in which there are any # of hairpin turns and split-second life/death decisions, it's surprising how winning and credible these two are: We like them both from the outset, and they're not superheroes, just wily and courageous and all their decisions seem to work out, up to a point. I actually found myself at times thinking what will Lola do next, how will she get out of this - as if she were a person and not a character (i.e., the real question should be: what will the screenwriters think of next?, right?). Season 2 ended pretty conclusively - I won't give anything away  - though as always there are a few loose threads that possibly could get picked up and wound into a 3rd season - but why not quit while ahead?

A highly literary film with a few truly great scenes: Meyerowitz Stories

Noah Baumbach's 2017 The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) makes not effort to hide or smother its literary ambitions, evident from the title of course, obvious to those who know that NB himself is the son of a somewhat avant-garde writer who struggled for recognition, never quite attaining the first rank, and from the tone it establishes right away: a series of set pieces, stories if you will, that seem very scripted and literary, but in a good sense for the most part: These are scripted, literary people, players in the New York academic and intelligentsia and the arts community. It's a little hard to warm up to this film at first, as Danny Meyerowitz (Adam Sandler, who is great in this role) is such a sad sack and so domineered by his father, played by Dustin Hoffman, Harold M, an officious, self-important sculptor retired from a teaching gig a Bard and living very well w/ 4th wife in Manhattan and obsessively worried about his reputation. The film brightens considerably when Ben Stiller, playing youngest son, a successful investment counselor living in LA, shows up to deal w/ various family issues. Though the ending feels loose and out of control - as if made up of snippets that didn't fit elsewhere - there are a couple of great scenes that make the film totally worth watching - in particular the two half-brothers getting into it w/ each other, the toasts at the "show" featuring one of Harold's sculptures (by this point it's obvious that Harold was an overblown hack, but it gets even worse), and Danny's final confrontation with the frail, weakened Harold. There have been a ton of films about dysfunctional, highly educated and creative families, but Baumbach has created his own little postage stamp of urbane backbiting and misery, with just a touch of lightening humor and humanity (esp if you can buy the closing image), and this film is almost like a culmination of his work to date.

Stranger Things: Better, the less you think about it

In short, Stranger Things (Season 2) is better the less you think about it; the plot - building on Season 1 - in which monsters and monstrous forces generated by a secret government installation in central Indiana are threatening to multiply and destroy the nearby town and beyond, and they somehow devour the consciousness of some of the children whom come into contact w/ them (never mind that in Season 1 the nefarious nature of the government agents involves capturing newborns and treating them like lab rats in hopes - successful - of endowing them w/ supernatural powers), is entirely incidental. The show is about good folks v evil forces, about a mother in distress and a couple of good men who risk and even give up their lives to protect and save others and most of all about a group of teenagers who work together to fight the evil monsters as they do battle w/ the equally strange, alien forces of adolescence. The greatest character is Eleven, subject of the mind-control experiments who has escaped from the government lab and now wants nothing more than a normal teenage life, but she can't quite decode all the messages of the world around her - taking undo risks, struggling to understand friendship and, later, the first blush of teenage love and affection. Unfortunately, Eleven plays less of a role in Season 2, but she still dominates the story line whenever she touches it. Despite the strong production values, the supernatural elements of the story make no real sense, but never mind - these series is really about people, and as such it rings true. The Duffer Brothers, writers and creators and directors of some of the episodes including the season finale, have a great sense for how kids talk and think and interact, they touch the right moments without getting overly sentimental or cliched, and they have a good sense of the period (circa 1980) as well. Thought the conclusion of Season 2 wraps up almost all of the loose strands, the door for another season was left ajar - I suspect we'll see more of these kids until they outgrow their roles.

A good Australian TV crime drama about 2 women on the run

A note on the surprisingly good series Netflix has picked up from Australian TV, Wanted, which in some ways is just a good old crime story with lots of plot twists and betrayals and close escapes and schemes gone wrong and entrapments and evasions and couple of shootouts and chases rough terrain, of crooked cops and innocent victims. What propels this series (Season 1 was 6 episodes) is the partnership between the protagonists: Two women waiting at an urban bus stop witness a drug deal gone wrong, they get drawn into the fray and one of the women, Lola, shoots to death one of the drug dealers - who, it turns out, was a cop involved in the deal. Lola and the other witness, Chelsea, run off and the police pretty quickly ID them and thus begins a hunt across Australia for these two women, who as we quickly learn are polar opposites and great comic foils for each other: Lola is tough, a rule-breaker (with a past), working class, outspoken, smart, fearless. Chelsea is from a wealthy family, she's timid, conservative, even prim, has supposedly never been in trouble - but she has a past two and a criminal predilection, as we gradually learn. There's lots of great comic dialog between these to and, over time, of course they bond into friendship and both evolve as characters. The scenes of rural Australia are great, especially for American viewers, as we for the most part of completely unfamiliar w/ life in the "bush" and in the other remote regions of Australia - this is not a movie about the hip city of Sydney or the beautiful tourist destinations; rather, about rundown roadside motels and desolate gas stations miles from any other outposts. Like most crime dramas, it's really hard to keep all the plot elements clear in mind and some probably make no sense under close examination, but the movie's a fund ride and pretty exciting all the way through. Whether Season 2 can build on this momentum, well, probably not, but worth a look.

The success of Season 2 Stranger Things

Stranger Things Season 2 is actually better than we'd thought it would be; Season 1 was fresh and imaginative and ending on a pretty sharp note, and so many of these miniseries are unable to build on the first season and most just shrivel up and die the quiet death of non-renewal - but Season 2 of Stranger Things, at least at the half-way point, keeps up the nice spirit of the first season. Most of all the show is about the kids and their friendly, slightly nerdy relationships, and that carries on really well, even w/ the isolation of the central figure in Season 1 - Eleven - who unfortunately has only a peripheral role in this season. (The young actor who takes on the mantle of the one girl in the guy-group is a little too cool and pretty for the part, I think.) Winona Ryder carries on with her role as the mom outraged and frightened by what's happening to her son, Will - she's great for the part, as is a new character, her kind of goof and insecure boyfriend, Bob. I'd also say that the technical scenes - that is, largely, the goings on the "upside down" world are more sophisticated visually and musically than in Season 1 - budget must have been upped. All this, though, goes with a caveat: The series is good as long as you never stop to think about it, as the premise of this government-sponsored lab of evil doctors and scientists who manage to create some weird fungal virus that various appears as lizard- or slug-like creatures or as a mass of slime or as something like a giant spider or - I don't know - none of it makes any sense nor is it credible for a minute, but the point of a series like this is to just give in and let it take you were it will. ST works because it never takes itself too seriously (compare with, say, Glitch, which tries too hard to be credible) and stays close to the kids-eye-view.

Powerful and moving film adaptation of 3 short stories: Certain Women

Kelly Reichardt's smart, introspective, and moving film Certain Women (2016) is a series of three short narratives about female protagonists (played really well in turn by Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart) linked only by their shared setting (contemporary South Central Montana), time, and mood. This is not a series of interlocked narratives a la, for ex., Crash, but somewhat of an anthology piece: cf Altman's film based on Raymond Carver stories - and unsurprisingly Certain Women is based on a set of short stories by Maile Meloy (I've read some of her stories in the NYer though I don't remember those adapted for this movie). I've seen some though not all of KR's previous films - written and directed by - and you can see here the continuity of interest, a focus on young women (though Dern's role here is of a more mature woman), lonely, generally in sparsely populated Western settings, trying to get by and to come to terms with who they are in life, often using an "open" ending rather than a climactic, dramatic conclusion, with the women maybe at a wiser point than at the outset but still with decisions, pain, and life before them. (If any filmmaker could tackle Chekhov, I think KR could do great adaptations of a series of his stories.) This is not the movie for those who want high drama and lots of action, but for those moved by introspection, mood, ambiguity, and sense of place (he captures the look and feel of small Western cities really well, with the ever-present whistle of passing freights, esp in the first of the 3 narratives) - in other words, qualities salient in serious literature - this film adds to KR's formidable body of work and is well worth your watching.

Mindhunter gets better as it goes along; looking forward to Season 2

The Netflix series Mindhunter is a classic example of a series that grows on you or perhaps just gets better as it moves along and the team finds its footing. What seemed like a slow and awkward start as the young FBI agent Holden begins - inspired by his new girlfriend - to get interested in the psychological makeup and social background of the most heinous criminals. In the first episodes, as he tussles w/ various conservative elements in the FBI bureaucracy trying to get the OK to move ahead w/ his research, the series seemed a little unfocused (so many different antagonists) and low-key (did we really care so much about his research?). But as the plot settles in the the small team of agents and outside experts begin interviewing some of the most notorious killers in custody - are they all based on real people? at least one - Richard Speck - obviously is - the series picks up in intensity and the stakes are raised. The interviews - in which Holden really pushes the subjects to the breaking point - are incredibly intense and highly consequential, as the team is gradually learning more about how to use the info they're gathering in order to solve on-going cases - not all of which turn out perfectly, to the great credit of the series (we're so used to seeing everything solved and tied up neatly in 60 minutes). There is some back story on each of the characters (troubled marriages, "secret" life as a lesbian, paranoia and anxiety attacks) - just the right amount, I think, to keep us engaged w/ them and to build tensions w/in the team, without overwhelming the plot and submerging into personal psychodramas. Looking forward to Season 2.

A series that lets us in on the ambiguity of crime investigations - cases aren't always solved in 60 minutes or less

We're about halfway through the new Netflix series Mindhunters, and after a slow start the series does build in intensity and hold our attention. At first, the series seemed terribly meandering: focused on a 29-year-old FBI agent, Holden, who gets transferred out of his first assignment - hostage negotiating - and assigned to training of agents and police officers. Partly because of a young woman, a sociology grad student, whom he meets and begins dating, he becomes increasingly interested in learning about the psychology of pathological criminals, esp serial killers (those who attack women in particular). What's troubling about the first several episodes is that Holden has no real antagonist: there are passing efforts to make it seem that the FBI was resistant to pursing this new line of research, that there would be conflicts between H and various traditional forensic agents who focus on physical evidence, not mental states of being. But these antagonisms seem to vanish in thin air, and by episode 4 or so Holden and his somewhat crusty, older partner, Bill, seem to have the go-ahead to pursue their research (they are soon joined by a BU criminology professor, a woman, who seems at first a potential love interest but has her own back story). By this point, we're in for the ride and what this troika take on a few cases: interviewing a confessed serial killer to learn his story and his pathology, getting involved in a couple of local investigations of brutal murders. Although it's hard to accept that, even in the setting of this series (1977) the idea of looking at a killer's mental make-up was such a radical idea, what's good about the series is its ambiguity: In most such shows, and there are thousands, the cops/agents/specialists step in and solve the case (in 60 minutes or less). Here, the resolutions of the case are not always so clear, and may even end in failure or in a truculent DA refusing to recognize the "psychological" evidence and working out a plea deal w/ the wrong guy. So there's a lot of potential here, as we watch the 3 investigators in the inchoate stages of their work and watch them get better over time.

A Japanese film about real people and their struggles, a little wordy but totally believable

The 2017 Japanese film After the Storm may not be a great film - perhaps a little too long, a little too talky, a little too much at times like a stage drama - but it has a lot of strengths and is worth a look. The story in brief concerns an elderly Japanese woman living in a low-rent housing project in an unnamed, small city, and her difficult relationship with her adult son, Ryoko, who as we gradually learn has a serious gambling problem. Ryoko, oddly enough, is a successful crime writer - had at least 1 novel published to some acclaim - now struggling w/ the followup, and who has taken a job as a private detective - he says it's to get material for his book, but obviously he needs the money, and in fact he engages in some really underhanded practices, blackmailing his own clients for example. In other words, he's a sleazy and disreputable guy - but w/ some winning qualities to be sure. He keeps trying to make good - hoping against hope to restore money he's lifted from his mother, promising to keep up on his child-support payments - and he truly wants to be involved in the life of his 10-year-old son, but he's on a downward course (with the ominous note that the son seems fascinated by lottery tickets - picking up on the malady of his dad and, as we also learn, his grandfather). All told, he's a truly believable character, and by the way one of the very few writers depicted in film in a realistic and credible manner: One look at his apartment and his desk and you know he's a real writer (unlike the typical romanticized view of the suffering writer who composes in flashes of brilliant insight or suffers through "writer's block" in ecstasy - see the Pitt-Jolie ridiculous movie on this them, or rather, don't). In fact, that's the great strength of this film: all of the characters seem real, true-to-life, struggling with life's problems as we all do; there's not a moment of melodrama or cinematic gaucherie, with one exception: the odd scene in which mom, dad, and son go out onto a playground in the midst of a typhoon, and, worse, the son "loses" some lottery tickets and they go into a park and find them one by one - they would have been blown to Seattle by that time!

Two quick hits, or not, from Netflix

Two quick hits or, rather, nonhits, as we started Our Souls at Night, starring Redford and Fonda, as a 60-something couple, both widowed, small town in midwest, she's somewhat of a misfit, cultured, drinks wine, he's a fit, taciturn, drinks Coors from a can. They apparently know each other in passing. She rings his doorbell one night and says she wants to ask him something; awkwardly, he invites her in. She says: Would you like to sleep w/ me? Well, this is ridiculous on so many levels but start w/ the fact that no normal, sane person would try to start a relationship thus. But this movie is not a comic romp among eccentrics. They're both totally centric. Nothing about the first 30 minutes seemed in any way believable or interesting to either of us. After abandoning the movie I read the NYer review, which found the "would you like to sleep w/ me" scene the best in the movie, so I can only imagine what came next. NYer said Redford teaches Fonda's troubled grandson to give up his iPhone and learn to enjoy fishing - so if that's where this movie was headed, I'm glad I bailed. We moved on to Suburro, a new Italian miniseries about the mafia, the Vatican, the gypsy population, drug dealers, crooked developers, et al. in present-day Rome. Great street photography, and a snappy though very complex first episodes w/ many characters and plot strands introduced, and cleverly brought together in a surprising twist at the end of the episode. All that said this falls into the category of miniseries I kind of like, M doesn't like (too much graphic violence and heavy-handed score), and I won't be motivated to watch the next 10 or so episodes on my own. Arivaderci.

Despite initial resistance, captivated by the Burns-Novic Vietnam series

At first I didn't want to watch the Burns-Novick series, The Vietnam War, having lived through that era - it was too painful to re-create and revisit, and I was pretty sure I knew all the ground this documentary series would cover. But as the first few episodes played on the TV in the adjacent room, couldn't help it - they drew me in and I was captivated. Yes, it was painful to watch - to see the suffering not only of US soldiers but also the Vietnamese soldiers (and civilians), to see the hypocrisy and dissembling of US leaders, notably Nixon and Kissinger, to see once again how pointless this war was, what a waste of lives and fortunes, for nothing, in the end, but ego and macho. Though I was pretty familiar w/ the history of the war and of the war resistance in the US and elsewhere, it was still powerful and moving to see these many news clips, war photography, plus contemporary interviews with those involved in many facets of the war, including several North Vietnamese veterans. I had no idea so much on-the-ground footage existed. Burns has outdone himself; there is nothing in this series of the saccharine tone in his famous Civil War series - this is much more dynamic, nuanced, and provocative, worth anyone's time - everyone's.

Season 4 of Transparent picks up in 2nd half, but will this be the end?

Transparent Season 4 does pickup in the 2nd half, as the plot lines focus more on the central character, Maura - which is completely appropriate. She's the one driving this narrative, and the various plot threads about the sexual transgressions and repressions and expressions of everyone else in her family are only of interest, at least to me, insofar as we can see the connection to the unusual but completely credible and sympathetic family dynamic: a father successful in career and by all other external measures but torn apart since youth because he has identified himself as a woman. So among the things we learn in the 2nd half of season 2: there is a history of gender transition in his family (and this plays a role in youngest child Aly's beginning to question her own gender), she has a burgeoning and mature relationship with a man of her age (Donald), she meets her father, whom she thought had died when she was a young child, and has an awkward conversation with him about his desertion of the family and about her sexuality. We get some excellent flashbacks o Maura in the early stages of her marriage, in therapy, trying without success to articulate a distinction between homosexuality and gender identity - the psychoanalytic practice of the day didn't really have the vocabulary for this kind of discussion. To me, this season could successfully call itself the conclusion to the series, as we see pretty much all the lead characters on the verge of breakthrough or change; I suspect, though, that it will continue until it totally runs out of gas. I could do w/ less of the story line on Sarah's (oldest child's) sex addiction and with Josh's torment over his relationship in youth w/ the family babysitter. The visit to Israel, to me, seemed a little stagey - let's all take a trip! - kind of like the cruise that concluded season 3., though I did like the image of Aly alone in the now-deserted West Bank commune farm, her dreams of peace and camaraderie shattered. All told, though, season 4 doesn't measure of to the series at its very best, it's worth watching to stay up to date on these characters and this important topic.

A feel-good rom com that touches on some important themes of prefudice and bias: The Big Sick

The romcom 2017 movie The Big Sick is a (mostly) feel-good movie w/ a strong comic line that recalls and brings into the 20-teens a movie like When Harry Met Sally (cute meet, seemingly mis-matched couple, gradually learning to love and commit to each other) with a touch of Love Story no less (gravely ill daughter brings disparate family elements together), along w/ a few contemporary touches of its own, including a reasonably realistic view of the life of a standup comedian (doubling as an Uber driver, which leads to one of the best gags in the movie) and, more important, a smart and sensitive look at the struggle of a young Pakistani immigrant who faces down a lot of prejudice and bias and as he tries to remain close to his traditional Pakistani family, which believes in arranged marriages. Kumail Nanjiani basically plays himself in the lead, and he's a winning presence as a comedian and altogether good guy; Ray Romano does a fine comic turn as well as the oafish father of KN's girlfriend (Zoe Kazan, very winning even though for half the movie she's in a coma).  I have to quibble and say that the movie feels stretched - 2 hours is 30 minutes too long for a romantic comedy like this - and that Nanjiani and co-writer (Emily V. Gordon) tie some of the plot strands to quickly and too neatly (e.g., Holly Hunter's sudden turnaround from KN's adversary to his champion), but that said I give them props for leaving a few threads untied at the end (which I won't divulge). Apparently this film is loosely autobiographical; in any event, it's worth a look.

Why Season 4 of Transparent may be losing its mojo

The bar has been set pretty high, but I'm afraid that Season 4 of Jill Solloway's fine series, Transparent, is losing some of its mojo. The problem is that the essence of the show is Maura (Jeffrey Tambor) and the issues she faces in her transition of gender. The other characters, notably Maura's ex wife (Shelley/Judith Light) and 3 children, are useful counterweights, and it's important to see how this transition affects a wide range of family members and friends (and former friends), but I for one am much less interested in the pathways of their lives and their struggles with sexuality. Unfortunately, over the course of the first 4 episodes there's relatively little about Maura - w/ 2 exceptions: a terrific scene of her undergoing a TSA search at LAX (in episode 3) and the opening up of a new channel in her family history as she reconnects, in Israel, w/ her father (he would have to be in his 90s) long presumed dead. I hope the season continues on that theme and brings Maura back to the center. It's good to watch Shelley seeming to find herself through her association w/ an Improv theater group; less good to see the continued struggles w/ sexual identity of children Sarah and Josh. Ally is the mystery: she accompanies her "mapa" to Israel and spends a large part of episode 3 w/ a group of young, activist Palestinians - but so far she's just a listener and a sidekick. There's opportunity to move her more to the foreground. Will it happen?

A note on the Lost City of Z

Just a note on The Lost City of Z, in that I watched "only" the first 90 minutes, foregoing the last hour - not that it was a terrible movie - it wasn't - but for a great adventure story about the early 20th-century explorations in South America, it was so flat and predictable - the good guys are good and brave and nobel and handsome, and the heavies are stupid and homely and buffoons. Worse, the voyages to SA (there are 3) are poorly presented cinematically: It all has the look of a back-lot production (even if it wasn't) and it's really hard to follow the narrative of each expedition: for example, they seem to be heading off into the jungle far beyond any civilization or settlement, but all of a suddent when one of the "heavies" gets injured they put him on horseback and send him back toward the base. Huh? Many other examples of the same sort. Also, the very fact of 3 expeditions - though it must be historically accurate (as this film is based on real events) - diminishes our interest in each. Despite a feeble attempt to make this about class politics (and father-son relationships), it all falls apart - not nearly as good as, say Wim Wenders's various SA films (Fitzcarraldo, e.g.).

Almodovar's surprising adaptation of stories by Alice Munro

I can't imagine why the reviews of Pedro Almadovar's 2016 film, Julieta, were lukewarm at best, as it seemed to me another great work with his signature style and his favorite issues: examining the life of a woman in crisis, and in particular the relationships among women and how they support one another, told in a crisp and stylish narrative style with sparkling view of life in contemporary, largely well-to-do contemporary Madrid and filmed with extraordinary beauty of color composition (just looking at the backdrops of most of his shots and the exciting color combinations is like a trip to a gallery or museum) and even with an unobtrusive yet emotive score. In fact, in some ways this film is stakes out some new territory for Almadovar: the mother-daughter relationship is at the center of the film, and if anything there could be more to explain the daughter's alienation and her eventual life decisions. The eponymous Julieta (played by 2 actresses, one "current day" at about 50 years old and the other in the back story, playing the role ages roughly 20-35) is enigmatic at first but over the course of the film, as she reflects on her life, some of the enigma is clarified, though not fully resolved - which is at is should be. I was surprised and pleased to see in the closing credits that Almodovar based the film on a group of stories by the great Alice Munro; I hadn't make this connection (her stories, from Runaway, are set in British Columbia; Almodovar transposed this setting into NW Spain), but I plan to re-read the stories as I'm curious as to what other changes Almodovar may have made in his adaptation. Nevertheless, it speaks well of his direction and of Munro's writing that such seemingly personal narratives and sufficiently universal to seem and feel at home, "native," in a completely different setting and culture.

One disappointing miniseries and one complete absurdity

After 3 episodes (of 6) I'm underwhelmed by the British police drama River, in which the eponymous detective hears and responds to the voices (and images) of dead people, in particular his charming colleague "Stevie" who was recently shot in an apparent assassination. The premise is pretty good, as we see this clearly disturbed man try to keep his career alive in the London PD and try to solve the mystery of the death of his partner, and he's a complex character though not unlike a few thousand other noir detectives - a loner, an eccentric, and obsessive-compulsive type. At the heart of the matter, it seems that he and Stevie had a flirtatious relationship, and we want to find out if their friendship became any more than that. Looks unlikely through 3 episodes, but that could change. All that said what really throws me off is the completely ridiculous sense of how a police department and police investigations work. Each of the first 3 episodes also involved a case of some sort that River neatly solves within the hour time slot in various ludicrous and improbable ways. Worse, there's no sense of a working PD; for example, how many officers do you think would be involved in the investigation if one of their colleagues was shot in the back of the head? In this show, the answer is 2: River and a guy assigned to more or less be his "babysitter," and his supervisor keeps telling him to drop the matter anyway. We learn also that Stevie's family is involved in gang crimes, and somehow she got involved in a case that sent her brother to prison. Really? And so forth. We get a # of scenes of River undergoing counseling w/ a female psychiatrist, and what does that remind you of? Too many of the 2ndary characters are one-dimensional, one-note types: the supervisor constantly telling River to focus on his cases, e.g. This is a miniseries w/ a hopeful premise and a good start for me it never has the ring of truth. Additional note for the record: At least it's better than Glitch, about people rising from the dead in a midwest cemetery, that made no sense from the start and got increasingly ridiculous throughout the first episode, which three of us couldn't even bear watching to the finish.

Fauda keeps up the pace and tension right to the end

The Israeli 12-part miniseries Fauda starts well and, unlike many such programs, maintains its pace, tension, and moral ambiguity right up to the end - a great ensemble piece w/ strong writing and plot and character development, good acting by all the leads - Israeli and Palestinian both - good production values including the haunting score and the use of street locations, and a story line that offers some insight on the complexity of combating terrorism while trying, against the odds, not to sink as ethically low as one's antagonists. Obviously, the sympathy is all on the side of the Israelis, that's a given, but it's impossible not to like the Palestinian doctor who gets caught up in the web of this manhunt and is abused and deceived by all parties. I won't give any spoilers here, but will only say that the final episode leaves a few doors open - making us think what it would be like to live in the aftermath of these tragic and bloody events (involving shootings, bombings, kidnapping and abduction, prisoner abuse, sexual politics, medical ethics, and deception of every sort) and leaving open the possibility of a 2nd season, although I don't see any evidence that another season is in the works [update: apparently a season 2 is in the works]. Usually it's best to quit while you're ahead.

Biblical satire starts well but soon loses its course and ends in a complete mess

I was disappointed by the recommended (JS) French-Belgian comedy The Brankd New Testament (2016), a movie w/ great promise and some dark humor especially in the first segment but that ultimately loses focus and control and ends in a complete mess. The concept, to which I willingly suspended disbelief, is that God is a cranky old man living in Brussels with a much-abused wife and daughter (Ea) an and absent son (JC) and a computer with an enormous database of files on all human beings. We see some of his "mistakes" during the process of creating the world (ostriches wandering through a supermarket, for example) and some of his perverse "rules" (e.g., the other line is always faster). These are not exactly groundbreaking concepts - Heller had much to say on the perversity of a god who created pain, for ex. - but the movie gets off to an OK start, as the 10-year-old Ea breaks into the computer system and sends to all people a message telling them exactly how much time, to the second, they have left to live. Now that's pretty interesting. How does that change life on earth? We see a few examples (wars stop, e.g.), but then the movie goes awry, as Ea escapes to earth w/ fsix files she grabs at random, people who she wants to make into another 6 "disciples." Now the movie's gone off on divergent courses, as Ea's goal is to get each "disciple" to tell his or her story. All six suffer from anti-social behaviors, ranging from sad isolation and disappointment in life to actually reprehensible behavior (one is a known killer), and the fact is we care little or nothing about any of them (not even C Deneuve now 70+ in a reversal of her Belle de Jour role as a housewife seeking out male prostitutes and eventually falling in love w/ a Gorilla, if you can suspend that much disbelief). We have no sense that any of these people are disciples of anything, nor that there is any new testament in progress (Ea befriends a man who is homeless and illiterate to take down these stories, for some reason), so by the end the concept of the movie is long-forgotten and we're just looking at a group of oddballs who console one another and through divine intervention fulfill their dreams before fore-ordained death. The movie picks up when God comes to earth in pursuit of wayward daughter, and we follow the cantankerous God in a few confrontations w/ authority - but that's not enough to sustain a nearly 2 hour mess of a movie. The attempts at whimsy fall flat; I wondered if this is the same crew that did Amelie, as the flash cuts and the narrative style and the playful digital imagery recalled that movie, but absent its humanity and its charm.

A terrific and engaging series (at least so far) about Israeli special agents - Fauda

Very impress w/ and caught up in the first have of the Israeli 12-part (one season) miniseries Fauda, a terrific take on an Israeli secret service team of agents in their efforts to capture a Palestinian terrorist whom they had believed (and whom the world at large believes) they had killed in an earlier raid. The attempts to capture him go terribly wrong in an episode-one scheme involving planting agents to act as caterers at a Palestinian wedding. When they're "made" the wedding turns riotous and the groom is killed - which leads to a cycle of revenge and retaliation and ever-more-bold schemes. The whole series so far feels close to reality, it's tense every minute, and it's full of moral and tactical dilemmas that keep us engaged and keep us guessing. The Israeli team is super-tough, esp the de facto leader, Doron (?) who on top of the terrorist search has to deal w/ a # of family matters, including the off-the-rails behavior of his brother-in-law, also a member of the team, who goes on a personal crusade to avenge the death of his girlfriend, jeopardizing himself and the whole operation. Terrific series, complex but easy to follow thanks the the fine script. I recommend opting to hear it Hebrew, w/ English subtitles - the English-dubbed version we used for episode one sounds fake and strained.

Scorcese's best in years

Martin Scorcese's fine 2016 film, Silence, may not be for everyone - a historical piece set in 17th-century Japan, with a medley of subtitles, and weighing in at 2 hours 40 minutes - but I found the movie completely engaging start to finish, and real smart, disturbing narrative with haunting cinematography and s subtle, mysterious pseudo-Asiatic score. The story, based on a novel by the Japanese author Endo (which I plan to read) is of 2 20-something Portuguese priests who set off for the then remote and almost other-worldly Japan to check on the state of the few small Christian communities and on the fate of the legendary Portuguese priest who had brought the gospel to Japan and has seemed to disappear. The 2 witness and then endure almost unimaginable hardships and tortures as they conduct clandestine services in several remote villages and approach ever-closer to the seat of government in Nagasaki. The Japanese feudal government repressed the Christian/Catholic communities, seeing an alternate religion as a threat to their oppressive regime; the priests are placed several times in terrible moral positions - asked to renounce their faith or else witness the killing of one or several of their converts. The priests try their best to keep their faith while seeking in vain for some message from their god as to what course they should take - but their god remains ominously silent (hence the title). The movie is in essence a spiritual adventure story, as the priests, together and later separated, endure a series of hardships and dangers; it's also a examination of the nature of faith and morality - very fine, powerful, Scorese's best in years. (Not sure to what extent the movie and Endo's novel are based on fact - most likely not insofar as this is a tale of 2 specific priests, but I think the oppression of the Christian community in medieval Japan was probably factual.)

A series for everyone, regardless of your interest in football: Last Chance U

Big fan of Last Chance U season 1 and greatly anticipated season 2 - finished the series (8 episodes) last night, and would say it's definitely worth watching as a follow-up to season 1 but do not skip the first season. Season 2 does not stand up well on its own. It's a little more diffuse than season 1, as it never quite gets a solid footing in its reportage on the athletes (series is about football players at E. Miss. Junior College, almost all of whom were kicked out of D1 programs for various misdemeanors or worse and are hoping for a 2nd chance, playing for a perennial powerhouse JC team), as the players never come into clear focus; we don't have the head-to-head competition among 2 QBs from season 1, and overall the key players are not quite as distinctive or articulate as those in season 1 - and far too many appear for only a few moments. That said, season 2 is more about the head coach, Buddy Stephens, and his staff, and of course about extremely likable and dedicated Brittany Wagner, the academic advisor for the players. The season kicks off w/ Buddy noting that he didn't like the image he saw of himself when he watched season 1 and he vowed to be a better person - not so vulgar, temperamental, bullying. I'll leave it to viewers to determine whether he reforms or not, but will say that the LCU team does a great job with a few vignettes that are revealing about the complexity of Buddy's character - tender at times w/ family, vicious when things go wrong on the field. Should he be renewed for a 10th season as coach? He seems to do what they want of him - win ballgames, at all cost. But what a cost! That becomes more clear in season 1 than ever before. Aside from Buddy, it seems at times as if all the staff plus Wagner are using the series as an opportunity to make the case to advance in their careers. How well they succeed at this - and it varies - is revealed in the final episode. I'll say for this documentary series - as I've also said about the great Friday Night Lights - that it's not about football per se - football is only the vehicle that carries a terrific examination of race, poverty, sports, celebrity, higher education, and human nature - a series for everyone, regardless of your knowledge about or interest in football.

What makes for a good crime documentary?

There have been many great true-crime dox, beginning probably w/ The Thin Blue line and reaching fruition in some of the miniseries such as OJ Made in America and esp Making of a Murderer. Roughly, there are three elements that move a crime doc from good to great: a great and intriguing crime, a narrative that sustains mystery and ambiguity, and use of much original footage. The HBO doc from 2016, Mommy Dead and Dearest by all means has a weird and intriguing crime: a young woman w/ severe illnesses and disabilities is accused of conspiring w/ a young man, possibly her boyfriend, to murder her mother in cold blood. The twist is - and I'm not really giving anything away as you learn the entire essence of the case in the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film - the young woman has succumbed to her mother's perverse and abusive behavior and over the course of her whole lifetime has faked these illnesses and disabilities. Her mother had her, among other things, pretend to be a cancer patient (even shaved her hair) and pretend to be unable to walk w/out a wheelchair. In fact she had her daughter undergo a lifetime of painful and invasive medical procedures - and as a result the mother was lavished with praise and affection as a mom carrying a heavy burden and the were even provided w/ gifts from charities and donors (a Habitat for Humanity house, trips to Disney, etc.). The young woman - actually in her 20s and quite articulate, though she was presented as a myopic teenager with mental retardation - enlisted help of an online boyfriend and had the mother killed, a crime she denied at first and then admitted. OK all very strange, and the film raises a ton of questions about who's responsible for this travesty: where were the social services? where was the school system? what about the doctors and others who administered 24 years of unneeded medical interventions? The problems with this film, though, lies in the other two elements. First of all, there's no sense of mystery; we know the basic facts within a few minutes and then learn that the young woman - Gypsy Rose Blancharde - had been forced to pose as someone with crippling illnesses. My thought is the film would have worked better had we "met" Gypsy earlier in her life and then build toward the crime, the arrest, and the unraveling. Second,  unfortunately for the filmmakers, there isn't a lot of original footage - recordings of the police interviews and and of some courtroom material, for the most part - so the doc consists 80 percent of talking heads. It's almost as if the quality of a documentary is inverse to the % of talking-head interviews. The team did a good job with the material in hand, but it does fall a little short of greatness.

Spoilers: Some thoughts on the conclusion of The Night Of

The HBO 8-part series The Night Of is engaging right to the end. Spoilers here inevitably: i was half-right in foreseeing how this would work out, in that the defense of Naz, accused of murdering a young woman w/ who he'd had a one-night relationship, would focus on establishing the existence of other possible suspects whom the police did not identify or pursue. Some of these were obvious to any careful viewer from the outset - though I also knew that none of these folks would be charged with the crime. As foreseen, the ending is dark, with Naz exonerated (hung jury, and state declines to pursue a 2nd trial) and now a drug addict and a street thug, thanks to his time in Riker's and he changes he made to survive there. I had thought he would be acquitted and then would have memories of actually killing the young woman - but he comes off as still innocent yet a victim of the system, and that's probably a better ending than the one I'd envisioned. (Under cross-examination, he does for the first time say that the doesn't know whether he killed the woman; that's about as close as the story comes to a possible admission of guilt.) I'm a little troubled by the development in the final episode that suggests the woman's financial adviser had been stealing from her and that he had possibly been the killer and that the DA will pursue indicting him; this leaves the door open a crack for a possible sequel - which I doubt will happen - and seems a little too pat an opportunistic. They'd have done better, in my view, to just leave it w/ the possibility of 4 other killers rather than suggest that the financial adviser is definitely the man

The tragedy of The Night Of - possible exculpation, but a ruined life

The HBO series The Night Of continues to hold our interest through disc 2/episode 6: It's an odd but effective narration in that we know more than the central characters, but over the course of the episodes, particularly 4 through 6, they begin to figure out the alternate potential narrative: If Naz did not kill the young woman, as he insists, then who did? By the end of episode 6 there are (at least) 3 additional suspects, at least in the minds of Naz's attorneys (at least 2 of them had already aroused our suspicions). But while they are making these heroic efforts to create reasonable doubt and exculpate Naz, Naz himself is ever more deeply drawn into the criminal underworld and gang culture of the prison (Riker's Island), so what we're heading toward is a tragic conclusion in which he may get off but his life is ruined - a true expose of the system of criminal justice in the U.S. (and maybe elsewhere, as it's based on a British program).

The cruel and destructive people in Antonioni's The Red Desert

Antonioni's The Red Desert (1964) is worth watching for the cinematography and design alone - so many great shorts of weirdly colored interiors, of the horrifying nightmare landscape of a vast gas-fired power complex, of the ruination of the earth around the complex through toxic pollution of water and air (this was set far before there were any serious attempts at environmental regulation - progress and industry at all cost), beautiful shots of vast commercial freighters passing through fog-shrouded harbors, and of course about a million close-ups of Monica Vitti playing a severely disturbed young woman who's at the center of this movie. It's Antonioni, however, so the pace is deliberative and he dispenses w/ the usual continuity and transitions; many of the sequences make no sense if taken literally (e.g., Vitti in one of the first scenes is with her young son at the scene of a workers' strike at the power plant; she wanders off into the woods and reeds to eat a sandwich - where did her son go?). Essentially, it's a story of distress and despair - Vitti has been suicidal since a strange auto accident, and none of the people in her life seem able, or even willing, to communicate w/ her about her anxiety and disturbances. In fact, the people around her are horrible: trying to take advantage of her emotional fragility, casually destructive and violent with one another, and equally destructive with their environment, social, political, and physical: many great scenes of air and water pollution, and the casual indifference of the managers of the power plant to safety and health, from small things like tossing away a sandwich wrapper to the vast, like the yellow poison gas spewing from the huge smokestacks. Great scenes include the drinking scene with 4 couples in a little shack on a commercial wharf that they begin tearing apart incinerating, Richard Harris's crude sexual attack on Vitti, the "tour" of the power plant, the visit to the installation of the telescopes, and ships passing by the wharf in the fog as Vitti wrecklessly drives along the wharf.

A miniseries and a move that expose the horrors of the system of so-called criminal justice

Based on 1st 3 episodes (out of 8) of The Night Of, the 2016 HBO miniseries from Steven Zaillian and the great crime writer Richard Price, this looks like a terrific, and terrifying, examination of the criminal-justice system as seen through one case in which things go horribly wrong for the protagonist: a 23-year-old man (Naz), of Pakistani descent but U.S. born, an excellent student in college, takes his dad's cab, without permission, to drive to a downtown party, but gets waylaid when a girl hops into his cab, takes her home, they engage in some Rx and alcohol consumption, way out of the Naz's league, then violent sex; Naz seems to pass out of black out and when he wakes finds that the young woman has been stabbed to death. Frightened, he runs off but is soon picked up on DWI suspicion, and once the cops connect him to the crime scene he's toast: his blood and DNA are all over the place, he doesn't and can't deny being present, claims he blacked out and has no idea how the woman was killed. Here are my thoughts: Price does a great job providing subtle clues as to who might actually have murdered the woman. We see two black men exchange angry words w/ Naz as he is about to enter the woman's apartment; she leaves a back door open by mistake - so naturally we think one of the men must have killed her. Of course this plays off our racial biases - the Pakistani seems so nice and kind, the black guy so menacing. My guess is that these are red herrings and that we learn later in the series that Naz was guilty, that the Rx caused him to become violent and then to black out. Just my guess. Meanwhile, we see throughout the first 3 episodes at least the failings of the criminal-justice system - the pressure on the kid to plea to a lesser charge, the difficulty in getting good counsel, the terrifying conditions under which he's held (w/out bail) while awaiting trial. I was not surprised to see on IMDB that this drama is based on an English show, Criminal Justice, and I want to remind anyone reading this that friend AW wrote and directed a great HBO movie of the same title that similarly exposes the horrors of the judicial system based on the facts and suppositions of one criminal case.

Who wouldn't want to watch Eight Days a Week, but is it really a great movie?

Of course Ron Howard's Hulu movie, Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years, is fun to watch; how can you not like the extensive archival footage of Beatles' live performance, from the early days in Liverpool and Hamburg through the first live concerts in Europe the the U.S. to the stadium concerts of 1965 and 66, and finally to their impromptu rooftop performance - their last performance as a quartet apparently. Great footage, great music, some moments never seen before, and Howard keeps the talking heads to a minimum - just a few contemporary comments from Paul and Ringo and from a few others, including Elvis Costello. That's all good - great as an archival exploration, great for the music, but as a movie? It feels flat and unawakened; I completely agree w/ comment AW made to me that the movie lacks a point of view. Yes, we see the arc of their lives - how fame came at them so suddenly, how it became impossible to do what they loved to do which was simply to perform their music, how the were forced to become studio musicians and were all the better as such, for a time (the movie does not dwell on this, which is fair, as it's about the "touring years"). But we don't really come out of this with any advanced knowledge; there's little or no insight into the struggles of their personal lives, in particular broken marriages and increasingly heavy use of Rx. Obviously, this was the price Howard had to pay to get the cooperation of the reps and families of all 4. But overall it comes off as an old-fashioned PBS masters' show, flourishing amid the abundance of archival material, but not as a thoughtful, original piece of documentary cinema.

A good, informative Einstein biopic though could have used more science and less schmaltz

For better or worse the National Geographic 10-part series on the life of Einstein, Genius, seems to be wrestling w/ its identity throughout: Is it a biopic? Or a Hallmark movie? By the end, it's a little bit of both; personally, I would have liked a more faithful adherence to the facts, details, and most of all ideas (and ideals) of Einstein's life. But I also have to say that the series does a great job in examining Einstein's personality, without undue hagiography: We see his intellectual genius of course and see his thoughts emerging through the early years of disgrace and disappointment (still incredible that he could not get a university job and wrote his breakthrough papers on relativity while he was a clerk in the patent office!), his struggles against anti-Semitism particularly in German but also in the scientific community at large, and mostly his troubled relationships with family, with women, and esp w/ his first wife. Clearly, E was not a genius when it came to relationships, though he does get some good lines when he tries to reconcile with his first wife, Malleva. In the 2nd half of the series, his struggle to get visas to travel to the U.S. is the highlight, as well as his wrestling w/ his lifelong commitment to pacifism v the need to annihilate the Axis powers - and of course his struggle w/ the idea that the atomic bomb is the practical application of his theoretical research. There's some good scenes about the corruption of German science during the war - and about the race between Germany and US to develop the a-bomb. Some things are left unclear, however, in particular the Moe Berg spy episode and the plot to kill Heisenberg (seemed out of "left field," and not really part of the E bio but too good to pass up). I also suspect E's role in persuading an American official to issue thousands of visas to German Jews may have been overstated. Unfortunately, in the final episodes the mood becomes rather sappy as E reconciles to an extent w/ his children and befriends a 10-year-old girl who has lots of questions about science; is this based on any real incidents? Doubtful. I would have liked more on the Russian spy who become his mistress for a time - how much did she learn from the old man? Was her truly never suspicious of her motives? And I'd have liked more explanation of his theories - in other words, more science, less schmaltz - and the series could have given us some updates on the lives of the main characters post 1955 (E's death). All that said, it's an entertaining series and gives a good outline of the contours and detours of E's life.

An excellent portrait of a genius in development

Finding the National Geographic 10-part series on the life of Einstein, Genius, to be far better than I'd expected, esp after a somewhat meandering first episode. By episode 2 the series settles into a chronology of AE's life, but with an inventive narrative that occasionally moves around in time (appropriate for the subject, right?) in a fluid and careful manner, in fact one of the best uses of narrative jumps in time that I can recall in any miniseries or movie. The focus is, somewhat surprisingly, on AE's personal, domestic life, particularly his difficult courtship of wife "Dolly" - like him, a gifted physics student, who gives up her own work to raise his family, take care of his eccentricities, and help him as at the least an assistant on his revolutionary papers. One of the important issues the series explores is whether she received proper credit for her work - with a comparison w/ Marie Curie, rightly credited in her partnership with her husband and their work on radium. Yes, there are some cornball scenes w/ dialog that obviously never took place and never would; yes, it's kind of funny to hear all these forced German accents; yes, it could do w/ a little more explanation of AE's various theories and ideas - but the series does give the sense of a genius in development, struggling with a range of issues, not just intellectual, but love, marriage, family, career, politics, and of course anti-Semitism. Halfway through and looking forward to next 5 episodes.

Any reason to watch The Wizard of Lies?

Where to begin with the Barry Levinson HBO film The Wizard of Lies, a take on the Bernie Madoff and his criminal scam? First of all, I literally could not bear to watch beyond the 2-hour mark, my brain was turning to Swiss cheese. Does a Levinson-De Niro duo have carte blanche to include in the final v every single scene that was filmed? This movie - about a story very familiar to most people, by the way - makes the same point repeatedly, to numbing effect, and draws out scenes such as son Mark's suicide interminably for no good reason. The point of the film: Madoff was a heartless, self-centered, cruel, crude, scam artist who duped many people including many who should have been wiser or more circumspect with their massive investments. The film also argues that the Madoff children and spouse knew nothing about his scam; that's plausible, but their ignorance was in part a willful blindness. So be it - I can't see the purpose of this highly unentertaining movie unless it could give new insight into Madoff, his family, or even the SEC's notorious failure to investigate the Madoff enterprise. Why not, for example, something about Madoff's childhood or his youth? Instead the movied is dead-weighted with leaden dialog (I admit that De Niro does a good job as always, even w/ some really bad scripting) and a supporting cast that ranges from the bland (the 2 sons), the ridiculous (Michelle Pfeiffer straining w/ a NY accent, almost comical!), the obscene (an especially crude Hank Azarian). What watch this movie? Perhaps to see how far Levinson has from the entertaining simplicity of Diner and the good sense of plot and pacing in his films of, gulp, 40 years ago.

A dark comedy that holds you beginning to end - Fargo Season 3

Season 3 of Fargo maintains its quirkiness right to the end; it's a rare mini-series drama in that (despite the jokey disclaimer that fronts each episode: This is a true story ... - I get it, did you have to go back to this every time!) we don't believe in for one second, nor are we meant to do so. The characters, except for the lead, detective Gloria played by the excellent Carrie Coon, are cartoonish versions of, by turns evil incarnate and bumbling naivete. The plot, though the gears click, is ludicrous - a blood-bath of brutal killings and finance schemes - yet it keeps us loving along, alternately laughing and hiding our eyes. You've got to love the strength and determination of the petty thieves, esp Mary Eliz Winstead as Nikki Swengo, Ewan McGregor's double role-playing (the brother Stussy), and David Thewlis as VM Varga, the sleaze who puts the squeeze on Stussy's parking-lot empire and turns it into a $200-million holding off-shore company. I can't say that this series is morally enlightened, or enlightening, but it's a comic romp in the darkest manner that plays out among the seemingly kindly and innocent people of great Midwest - and by the way the photography of the winter scenes in Minnesota is consistently engaging and, in its dark way, quite beautiful, much like Fargo itself.

A movie about medical science, race, journalist - worth watching

The HBO film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (George C. Wolfe, dir.) is a drama in part about the amazing story of the eponymous black woman who died in Baltimore in the 1950s in her early 30s and whose genes were the first that medical scientists were able to keep alive after the woman's death - these genes have been used for decades in the development of many significant medical advances and cures. Throughout, Lacks had been anonymous (the genes were known as HeLa, but her name had never been revealed supposedly to protect patient privacy) and her family was not only never compensated for or given a share in any profits from the sale of her genes but in fact never even knew that she had been part of a scientific experiment. When her adult children learn of this ca 1999, they barely understand the concept - they think their mother has been "cloned" - and they are furious at the Johns Hopkins Hospital for its callous indifference to the family. This story all came to light thanks to the research of an intrepid journalist, Rebecca Skloot (played by the excellent Rose Byrne), who worked closely w/ the family to write the book about HeLa on which this movie is based; the work did not go smoothly by any means, as the surviving daughter, played very well by Oprah Winfrey, proved difficult and unstable and other family members were at times hostile and suspicious. Strangely, the movie is more about Skloot than about H Lacks, which some may see as yet another appropriate of her heritage - but Skloot's attempt to learn about the person behind the story does give the movie a narrative arc and the appropriate tension. The narrative is a little hard to follow at times, w/ so many characters introduced quickly, but there are several dramatic highlights and it's such an unusual story - about medical science, racism, journalist - it's worth a watch.

Excellent documentary about a young man with autism

Roger Ross Williams's documentary Life, Animated is a powerful, emotional, and honest account of the struggles of one young man, Owen Suskind, and his family to help him overcome severe autism that transformed him into near silence at age 3. Over the course of his life - at the time of the film he is 23 - he struggles, along w/ heroic efforts by his parents and older brother and by several teachers and case workers, to make contact with others and to live a happy and fulfilling life w/ some independence. A significant aspect of his personality is that he takes great solace from and finds meaning in Disney animated movies, about which he is somewhat of a savant. Evidently, the clear resolution of crises and dilemmas helps him (and others like him - he founds a Disney movie club at his school for children and young adults w/ special needs) make sense of his world and of social relationships. Touchingly, he in particular identifies with the "side kicks." Some of the scenes of Owen interacting with classmates, particularly with the "sweetheart" Emily, are sweet and painfully touching. One highlight is a brief speech Owen makes at an international conference on autism, in which he says that people think those with autism don't want contact w/ others - but that's not true, he says. We just don't know the clues to help us make this contact. So sad. There's no easy or obvious answer for Owen or others like him, but he's blessed with a great family that can support him emotionally and to an extent financially. The movie is based on the book by his father, Ronald Suskind; Williams does a great job letting the story tell itself, staying in the background, never intervening in the scenes he's recording, keeping interviews with experts to a bare minimum.