Not one of Eastwood's best films

Clint Eastwood, now 88, has made some great movies over his long career but his 2018 film The Mule isn't one of them. Granted, Eastwood does a find job of acting playing the lead - an 87-year-old man whose run into financial straits and takes on a job as a drug "mule" for a Mexican cartel, carrying every-increasing shipments of narcotics in the bed of his pickup truck from El Paso (I think; the movie is very confusing about locations and about Eastwood's route) to Chicago. Apparently this movie is based on the exploits of a real man, who came to no good end; it's based on an NYT feature story. That doesn't help matters, though. The scenes of his several drug runs and of his various meetings w/ cartel members at several levels, including the head of the cartel, just feel like so many cartel movies and TV shows we've all seen in recent years (see for a good example Oazark), but without the tension (obviously, Eastwood will make it to the end of the movie. There are some humorous moments, however, because of Eastoowd's naivete and lack of facility with the basic tools of communication: he can't figure out how to send a text, he has a propensity for stopping for sandwiches, to help stranded motorists, and for hookups w/ prostitutes when he stays overnight on his routes; he also foolishly flashes around his cash payments and spends the $ extravagantly. On the other hand, he's shrewd in some ways, steering the police away from his truck on a few stops. So is he wise or a fool? The movie never decides that. The real lead weight on the film, though, is Eastwood's broken relationship w/ his ex wife and his daughter (and granddaughter); these scenes are so tendentious, poorly written, and logically inconsistent as to stop the momentum such as it is dead in its tracks every time the home life gets introduced; my guess is that the original story had none of this, that the family life was shoe-horned in to give the drama some human context, and it just doesn't work. In the end, this film is a minor work w/in a well-worn movie genre - worth seeing if at all for Eastwood's performance only.  

The timing is all wrong for this Cheney biopic, Vice

Adam McKay's biopic about the life and times of Dick Cheney, Vice (2018), comes at us as almost a parody of the conventions of documentary cinema and with a huge warning flag: So much of Cheney's life has taken place in the darkness, there's so little known about what he said or might have said in various moments of crisis in his life and in our world (most notably 9/11, when he took charge in the White House w/ W on the road), so many of his meetings were private and secretive, that McKay and his team acknowledge they're going to just fill in the blanks as they see fit. Sometimes, that works well, as they have some lighthearted fun w/ a documentary about an subject who remains obscure and hidden: playing out one scene as if Cheney (Christian Bale) and his wife, Lyn (Amy Adams) - both of them giving great performances - speak to each other in Elizabethan English (So embarrassed that I don't know if they were actually quoting Shakespeare - Richard II maybe? - or talking in pastiche), a funny moment when the credits role halfway thru the movie, and other jaunts. All to the good - but there are major problems with this movie that kept me from enjoying it or even in fact making it to the end (2 1/4 hrs!). First, the timing is horrible. Do any of us really have room in our hearts or minds to hate Dick Cheney or any other public figure at this time when our hatred and fear is well focused on you know whom? The movie feels quaint and unneeded. Second, OK, though I'm sure I agree w/ McKay and all  of his political beliefs, the film relentlessly pushes us to loathe and despise Cheney entourage. Clearly, less is more: The facts alone, in a straightforward documentary, would be enough, and I don't need or want to be manipulated by spliced in footage, ludicrous characterization, and heavy-handed moralism In the end, therefore, the movie is kind of a bore and an unnecessary one at that: Cheney was a fright and a danger, but times have changed and the movie feels about as relevant as a take-down of the Buchanan administration.

Cuaron's family saga Roma depicts thet passage from innocence to experience

Roma (2018) is another fine work from the Mexican writer/director Alfonso Cuaron, quite a shift from his previous movie, Gravity, and apparently a highly personal and autobiographical work. The movie, set in 1970/71 and shot entirely in b/w (not sure why as by 1970 there were few b/w movies, at least in the U.S., but it looks great throughout) tells of a well-to-do family in Mexico City (apparently in a neighborhood called Roma; I had to look that up - not a great title for this movie I think) with four young children (the oldest maybe about 12?), two servants, and a marriage that's coming apart - a fact that the parents try to keep from the kids, which just increases the tension and uncertainty of their lives. At the center of the story is the teenage servant Cleo, a young woman who seems to be of Mayan descent and is from a remote country village - shy and unsophisticated and the victim of the mother's wrath, wrath that should have been directed toward the faithless husband/provider. Yalitza Aparcio - with no acting experience - is the megastar in this show, as she endures a number of traumas and hardships while doing her best to provide a loving environment for the young children, largely ignored by their parents, while meeting the many demands of keeping this large family clean and clothed and fed. It's a story that could so easily have been mawkish and sentimental, but there's not a wrong or melodramatic note in this film. In particular, there are several tour de force sequences, from the deceptively difficult 360-panning shots that show us the elegant household from Cleo's POV to some terrific crowd sequences - the New Year's Eve forest fire, the riots in the streets of Mexico City, the delivery room in the city hospital - and some quieter and more intense personal moments that dramatize her passage from innocence to experience: Cleo's bus ride, Cleo in the furniture store, Cleo and the children on the beach at Veracruz. This is certainly Cleo's story start to finish, but we also get a sense of the family dynamics; at the end, we feel sorrow and pity for all (except the father), and we're left wishing there were more - which is the best possible way to end a movie, or any narrative.

A genre picture that will hold your interest

Jacques Audiard's English-language debut, The Sisters Brothers (2018) is an American movie of the most traditional kind - a Western involving gunslingers, brothers at odds w/ each other, a manhunt, a strange alliance between the hunter and the prey, treks on horseback across the rugged Western plains and passes, a Gold Rush element, bar fights, prostitutes with kind hearts, many shootouts, wildlife attacks - in short, everything that over the past 80 years have drawn French viewers and filmmakers to American cinema. There's no groundbreaking element to this film (although there's a bit of twist involving a chemist who claims to have a formula that will revolutionize panning for gold) but to his credit Audiard traverses the familiar ground with ease and confidence. A strong cast of lead characters - particularly the ever-present John C. Reilly in a career role - carry this story (from a novel by Patrick DeWitt) along briskly; the lead characters are (for once) clearly delineated, making it easy to follow the narrative line, there's plenty of tension, and a few really ghastly scenes not for the faint of heart. I wonder why the set-up - gunslinger brothers who argue about language and syntax - gets dropped somewhere in the middle of the film, and I quibble with the ending, which seems to me to wrap things up too easily and to leave threads dangling, but overall this is an entertaining genre piece that should hold your interest - more than I can say for most 2-hour (the current requisite minimum for films w/ prize ambitions) movies.

If Beale Street could be a great movie this isn't it

I have to think that Barry Jenkins made a really bad decision in following up his AA winner, Moonlight, with an adaptation of the (last?) James Baldwin novel, If Beale Street Could Talk. Jenkins must be a huge Baldwin admirer (he dedicates the movie "to Jimmy"), as who isn't, and must have been taken in by reading Beale Street, but his very faithfulness to the novel as a sacred text from his literary hero is the undoing of the work. This movie - well-intentioned, well-acted at times (w/ particular props to the excellent Regina King) is terribly slow-paced, sentimental, and didactic, clocking in at two hours that felt like 4. I'd re-read Beale Street not too long ago, and it struck me as Baldwin's attempt to write a mass-appeal best seller while also scoring some points about the injustices black Americans experience in the legal system. Right on for this second point: Baldwin write about false arrests and the pressure to plead guilty in this book (and now movie) set in the 60s - true then, true when Baldwin wrote it (the 80s?), true today - as we all know. At least today it's better documented and made public through social media. Jenkins, hitting home of the obvious, includes a few stills of blacks under arrest and working in prison gangs, an unneeded, heavy-handed message. Overall, the pace of this movie is so slow because, in following the novel, a lot of the key scenes are elided and the only really great scene, in book and film, is the argument between the warring black families over the fate of their children, an homage to Romeo and Juliet, perhaps. In brief, the film and book begin with a young man, Fonny (sp?), in prison being told by his girlfriend, Tish (the narrator) that she's pregnant. The drama, such as it is, involves trying to get Fonny out of prison, where he's being held unjustly, the result of a police frame-up. Compare this, say, to the great series on this topic, The Night Of, and you can see how all the tension, conflict, and ambiguity is strained out of this film and replaced with what?: Many scenes of the young couple in love, having their first night of sex, setting up their first apartment, planning to move up in the world to a vacant loft space, and so on. At best, the movie is heart-driven if not plot-driven, but the end is a long time coming and leaves open far too many questions. The fault lies in part w/ the material - I'm not sure there's any way to make a great movie out of Beale Street, which is not necessarily a bad thing to say about a novel - but if there is this isn't it.

A feel-good film that actually works: Green Book

Okay to Peter Farrelly's Green Book (2018) is about the one-millionth road trip-buddy movie in which two seeming opposites (2 guys, 2 gals, one of each) come to loike and appreciate (or even fall in love w/) each other as they overcome various obstacles. And okay, so Green Book is the cinematic equivalent of Newton's Law, every action leads to an equal and opposite reaction, so if a gun is introduced early on it will go off before the final scene and if the wife says "you better be home by xmas" there will be a made dash through the snow to make it from Birmingham to NYC just in time and if ... I could go on. Yes, it's totally predictable; and yet ... it's also totally watchable and  enjoyable, with plenty of tension and plenty of light comedy, too, along the way. And it's also a social commentary, based on - or as the opening credit puts it - inspired by - a true story. Farrelly,who earned his comic chops in such early, hilarious moves as Something About Mary and Dumb & Dumber, shows great comic pacing throughout and he gets terrific performances from the leads, Maharshala Ali as jazz/pop pianist Don Shirley and Vigo Mortensen Tony (Lip) Vallelonga. As actually happened, Shirly hires Tony Lip to be his triver on a concert tour that concludes in the Deep South (in 1961), where they encounter various forms of suspicion, hostility, and outright racism. The two men completely differ in personality and background, and their presence freaks out a # of people in the South and elsewhere, as they cannot understand a black man's being the "boss" of a white man. You can easily figure out how things will develop, but that still leaves space for a few really good scenes (notably, the arrest of the two when Tony assaults an officer, Don Shirley's helping Tony write letters home to his wife, and the tense moments in a private dining club in Birmingham) and of course we expect to hear Don Shirley place some classical pieces - his true passion, though he was discouraged from pursuing a classical career), and Farrelly doesn't disappoint us there, either. I usually don't feel good about feel-good films, but this one is an exception,;hard not to like it.

Why First Man is such a yawn

Damien Chazelle's First Man (2018), about Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and the path that led him to be the first man on the moon, is far more technically demanding (tons of flight simulations and recreation of space capsules and lunar modules, all of which led to nerve-shattering journeys, all depicted brilliantly and probably accuratel, so far as I know) than his previous highly successful films Whiplash, La La Land) but it will not earn him the coveted BP Oscar toward which he seems to be striving. Bigger and longer is not necessarily better, and definitely not in this instance. First of all, by now the space race so called is overly familiar ground, in biopics (Apollo 11, The Right Stuff), miniseries (From the Earth to the Moon), fiction Gravity) - and it's not clear what new ground Chazelle hopes to find here. More problematic, he tries to cover a long span of time involving many space missions and it's really hard to keep track of the development of the Apollo program - too much material to over even in a bloated 2.5 hour slog. Third, and more important, Armstrong is a vapid character, terse and uncommunicative, which may be true to life (the astronauts by and large were not the most effervescent group) but is deadly for this movie; we know little more about him at the end than at the outset, and as a personality he never holds our interest - nor to the other players, none of whom has a distinct role or identity. The movie tries for some family background - the long-suffering wives and children, etc. - which we have certainly already seen; Claire Foy does her best as Mrs. A., but she has little to work w/ aside from one powerful seen when she tells her husband off. Obviously any real tension about Armstrong is minimal, as every viewer knows the outcome of his mission. All in all it's a technically proficient project - and a stretch into a new area for Chazelle - but it's a yawn of a movie, unable to live up to its ambitions.

The 10 Best Miniseries I watched in 2018

As with everyone else on the planet, we continue to shift our viewing preferences away from discs (and theaters) toward streaming, with particular interest in the miniseries format - which continues to provide the most absorbing, entertaining, and informative cinematic material and remains a great venue for new artists, established artists seeking new challenges, and in particular for creative teams from around the world to find larger, international audiences. Of course there's a tremendous amount of junk - pretentious, needlessly gruesome and violent, obvious ripoffs - out there, and perhaps in a future post I'll go through some of the many series that we looked at and immediately of after one episode or so abandoned. But for today, here are the Top Ten Miniseries I Watched in 2018, arranged alphabetically:

Babylon Berlin. A tremendously accomplished police-procedural series from Germany, set in the 1930s and brought to life with exquisite period detail, great acting from the leads and a provocative story throughout its 16 episodes, with many plot lines, betrayals, and reversals of fortune.

The Bodyguard. Jed Mercurio's series from the UK is about as intense and compelling as any short series that's come across from Netflix in the past several years, a tense and tight plot with many strands and many surprising twists and a few of the most tense scenes ever involving suicide bombs and assassination attempts against a cabinet member.

Call My Agent, Seasons 1 and 2. This six-part  (per season) series is a really good comic drama about a small but powerful Paris agency representing major French film stars, with the amusing kick that each episode involves a star (or 2) playing himself/herself, often against type - and this series seems to be hinting at an American setting for the next season.

Elite. An eight-part series from Spain about students from different social strata and their complex inter-relations, a high-school drama that is both sympathetic and highly credible (the only comparable series I can recall is the great Friday Night Lights).

Fauda, Season 2. Right up to the last moments of the last (12th) episode in Season 2, the Israeli Netflix series Fauda maintains its tension, excitement, and complexity, holding us from start to finish; this series has been criticized by all sides in the Israel-Arab conflict, which probably means it's doing something right - and it seems to be headed for more of an international plot in Season 3.

Halt and Catch Fire, Seasons 1-4. We're a little late catching up on this one, which depicts the many ups and downs that a close-knit group of techies in Texas (and later in Silicon Valley) experience as they go through various startups and shut-downs throughout the early years of the PC industry and the founding of the Internet.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Seasons 1 and (so far) 2. Amy Sherman-Palladino's series on Prime, starring the great Rachel Brosnahan in the title role and perfect sidekick Alex Borstein, is a pleasure to watch start to finish, especially for Brosnahan/Maisel's comic routines that continue to surprise and delight us in every episode.

Ozark, Seasons 1 and 2. Jason Bateman's series has become the best crime-drama miniseries of its type since Breaking Bad, as another good guy gets involved with narcotics to help his family, or so he thinks, and ends up putting everyone at risk.

Trapped.  This beautifully photographed 10-part series from Iceland is a murder mystery with many twists and tendrils, as   fishing trawler pulls up a dismembered body in the harbor just as a huge Danish passenger ferry pulls into port, and the local police force - consisting of a chief and 2 beleaguered officers - begins an investigation that leads them down many paths

A Very English Scandal. A 3-part series based on historical events, this is a terrific drama in the mode that we have come to expect from the best of British TV, with terrific writing, acting (with Hugh Grant in the lead), and production values as well as some surprisingly effective against-the-grain decisions, such as the use of a jaunty, upbeat score that at times is so jarringly at odds with the emotional subtext of this series that it brings the project into sharp relief.

And some other contenders include the hilarious American Vandal Season 1, Collateral from the UK, the creepy Homecoming, the German spy drama The Same Sky, and the documentaries Evil Genius and Wild, Wild Country. 

Melissa McCarthy's excellent performance as a forger

Marielle Heller directed Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) but there's no doubt that it's Melissa McCarthy's movie start to finish. She is completely convincing as Lee Israel, the protagonist, a struggling author of biographies, suffering for alcoholism and from a sour and vindictive personality. Pushed to the edge of poverty, she stumbles across a few letters from Fanny Brice, old vaudeville star, while doing research for a biography (which her agent tells her nobody will want to publish); she steals the letters (they were tucked away in a library book) and sells them. When the bookstore owner who buys them indicates they'd be much more valuable if they contained more unusual information that shed light on the author, McCarthy gets the idea of forging other letters and documents, and she continues over the next year or so to create and sell at least 400 forged letters - until she at last is busted. This film - with a good screenplay by Holofcener (a fine director in her own right) and Whitty - breaks no new ground in cinema but the story line is straightforward and clean - and the movie is of particular interest because it's based quite closely on Israel's confessional biography; the case was and is quite well known among book dealers and antiquarians. McCarthy is an unsympathetic character, for the most part (her character is very witty, which helps cary the movie and helped w/ her forgeries), who has little remorse about the many people (including a sad young woman whom she befriends) she's duped, in effect, robbed from - but there are dark hints throughout that her actions are not necessarily unique except in scope and that dealers are more than happy to buy dubious material so long as they think they can sell the documents at a higher price to naive collectors (which may be why Isreal got off so easily). McCarthy shows that she can range beyond the comic roles that have made her famous; this show is all hers.

The 10 Best Movies I Watched in 2018

As we gradually transition from cinemas to discs to streaming, I watched relatively few recent movies over the past year and watched a lot more episodic series, increasingly are the source most entertaining and literary form of cinematic expression, but here is a list, alphabetically arranged, of the 10 Best Movies I Watched in 2018, w/ a few runners-up:

Andrei Rublev, by Andrei Tarkovsky (1966). It's best to give up any pretense of trying to follow a traditional plot or narration in this Soviet-era film and just focus on what you're seeing on the screen: an amazing and beautiful series of scenes the re-create better than anything I've ever seen the look and feel of what life must have been like in the middle ages.

An Autumn Afternoon, by Yasujiro Ozu (1962). The great Ozu's final film centers on a old-school Japanese businessman who wrestles with the idea that his daughter at 24 may be ready for marriage and who, over time, comes to accept that she must begin her own life no matter what the cost to him.

Beyond the Hills, by Cristian Mungiu (2012). For those (like me) who love long and thoughtful narratives about "real" people, movies in the tradition of great 19th-century naturalist (and realist) fiction, Romanian director Mungiu's Beyond the Hills, about a 20-something woman, recently "released" from the orphanage where she was raised who has now entered a strict Eastern Orthodox convent in the hills beyond the borders of a small city, is a must-see.

Blackkklansman, by Spike Lee (2018). Lee's bold and exciting drama Blackkklansman tells the story of Ron Stallworth (based on his book Black Klansman and played well by John David Washington), who in the 1970s became the first black police officer in Colorado Springs and on his own initiative began the infiltration of a violent and sadistic local chapter of the KKK.

Funny Games, by Michael Haneke (1997). Funny Games (the original, German-language version) is a cruel and frightening movie about a home invasion; if it were just a horror/snuff picture, we wouldn't even be talking about it, but Haneke is into something deeper and more reflective as he breaks the 4th wall of cinema and has one of his characters address you the viewer.
Layla M, by Mijk de Jong (2016). Layla M is a terrific drama that's both topical and universal: the story of a young (last year in high school) girl in Amsterdam, of Moroccan descent, who gets drawn into a jihadist movement.

Life Is Sweet, by Mike Leigh (1990). Life Is Sweet, from the under-appreciated Leigh, is a domestic drama about a working-class family in an English row-house suburb, generally making the best of tough times, spirited and, at least at first, seeming to love one another so that at first we think we're seeing a sweet domestic comedy but then the fissures appear in the wall, the cracks widen, and we see the trauma and trouble at the heart of the family.

The Salesman, by Asghar Fahradi (2016). Farhadi's Oscar-winning Iranian drama is about an actor/school teacher whose wife (and co-star, in Death of a Saleman) is assaulted in their new, somewhat sketchy apartment and whose search for the perpetrator leads him, and the film itself, in some completely unexpected directions.

The Unknown Girl, by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (2016). The Dardenne Brothers mvie (from Belgium) tells of a young doctor who single-handedly runs a clinic that treats many immigrants, all of them working class, none wealthy, whose world is upended when she learns that a woman has been killed outside of her clinic.

Woman in the Dunes, by Hiroshi Teshigahara (1964). One of the great art-house films of the 60s, with a screenplay by the author of the source novel, Kobo Abe, about a man held captive by a mysterious lady and by malevolent villagers in a small house in a swale beneath enormous sand dunes - a drama, an allegory, and in some ways better and more frightening than the novel.

And also worth watching are: Orson Welles's adaptation of Henry IV, Chimes at Midnight; Bergman's The Passion of Anna, Silence, and Winter Light; two key 2017 films, The Post and The Shape of Water; the low-budget I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore; and Mungiu's Graduation.

Notes on Blackkklansman and Mrs. Maisel

Two notes, first on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 2. Far too often the 2nd season of a hit series falls way short of the mark. We watched the first episode of Maisel 2 last night and I'm pretty sure we'll stay with the series but  what a mixture of the good and the bad in this season kickoff! As to the good: Once again Rachel Brosnahan is a completely winning presence in every scene she's in. Her standup routine in this first episode is completely clever and surprising and hilarious; her stint on the B.Altman switchboard in the opening segment is great, too. The biggest surprise, though, was the hilarious episode w/ Alex Borstein (playing Susie Myerson), waylaid by a pair of thugs and talking her way out of trouble and winning them over. OK, but on the downside: The trip to Paris to bring back  Midge's mother is just awful, completely nonsensical, never funny, and never helped by the one-note whining of Shalhoub.

Second, on Spike Lee's Blackkklansman, on which I posted yesterday. First, sorry but I got the date of the setting wrong - it must be about 1972 (not 68), though I'm not sure of the exact year. Sorry. Also, I've since learned that Lee took major liberties with the facts and the source material in turning Stallworth's memoir into this movie. For example (possible spoilers), there was no bombing and "Flip" was not Jewish. I don't object to his doing so - and I think any viewer would know that the relationship with the college activist was Lee's invention. Lee's changes made the narrative far more exciting and didn't belie the truth at the heart of the story - the racism of the klan, the bravery of Stallworth (even if somewhat exaggerated), but I do think Lee should have been more forthright, with some kind of cue that some facts and incidents have been changed and that the film is only loosely based on this true episode.

Spike Lee's exciting drama celebrates the bravery of police officers who infiltrated the Klan

I'll join the chorus in praise of Spike Lee's bold and exciting drama Blackkklansman (2018), which tells the story of Ron Stallworth (based on his book Black Klansman and played well by John David Washington), who in 1968 became the first black police officer in Colorado Springs and on his own initiative began the infiltration of a violent and sadistic local chapter of the KKK. I won't give away precisely how a black cop is able to infiltrate a Klan cell, but he does so in alliance with another police officer, in another challenging and unusual role for the talented Adam Driver. Lee keeps the tension ratcheted right to the top throughout this movie - there's hardly a moment of rest or relaxation, as the two men are in constant danger throughout their investigation - hindered in part by at best lukewarm support from the PD and some outright racist behavior by a fellow officer. This movie of course is painfully relevant today, a half-century later, but I do wish that Lee had let the plot speak for itself rather than pounding home the point through use of contemporary footage of Charlottesville and its aftermath. I'd also quibble with the strangely jocular behavior of the police officers in the final segments and would have liked a little info on the fate and fortunes of Stallworth (and the klan cell in Colorado Springs) since 1968 - but these are small points in the face of a movie that celebrates the bravery of a few people who fought racism and terror in their community and that reminds us to be ever vigilant and to have no tolerance for bigotry.

A film that offers a brave look at a highly charged sociopolitical issue: The Hate U Give

George Tillman Jr.'s The Hate U Give (2018) deserves much praise and credit for taking on the vital issue of police brutality and racism in a serious manner that largely avoids melodrama and sensationalism. This film, based on the novel by Angie Thomas, focuses on a 16-year-old black girl, Starr (played very well by Amandla Stenberg), who witnesses the the death of a black friend, shot by a white police officer in what should have been a routine traffic stop. Among the strengths of the film: none of the (major) characters is all good or all bad, we get a good sense of various views of the shooting death, including an important conversation Starr has w/ her uncle, a black police officer; we see how the reports of the shooting bring out all kinds of tensions and animosities in the black community; we see Starr's character grow in bravery and independence over the course of the film; and we get nuanced but largely affirmative portrayal of the a black community in crisis and confrontation. One the drawback side, however, it seems to me that the filmmakers had little sense of Starr's back story as one of the few students of color in an elite private school. For the first 20 minutes or so, establishing Starr's relationships w/ her schoolmates and her (white) boyfriend, I thought I was watching a black version of Clueless - with way too much voice-over and no credible character except for Starr herself. I also think the one of the plot strands - the drug gang's anger at Starr for her grand jury testimony - was a bit of a stretch: Would the gang really care that she named them as a source of drugs in her community? Isn't that something everyone would know? Why pick a fight over that? That said, some parts of the film were really strong, notably the filming of the Black Lives Matter protest march turned violent and a powerful scene on campus in which Starr demonstrates to a so-called friend what it feels like for a black person to be threatened by a cop. And really I don't quite buy the ending. Still, it's a film that easily could have been maudlin and didactic but turns out to be dramatic and frighteningly informative - a brave look at a highly charged sociopolitical issue.

One of the best police-procedrual series, with credible characters and a plot that makes sense

The Icelandic 10-part series on  Prime, Baltasar Kormakur's Trapped (2015), works really well start to finish on many levels. First of all, it's a murder mystery w/ many twists and tendrils - a fishing trawler pulls up a dismembered body in an Iceland harbor just as a huge Danish passenger ferry pulls into port, and the local police force - consisting of a chief and 2 officers - begins an investigation that leads them down many paths: what's the tie-in, if any, to a suspicious fire that sent a young man to jail for arson - and the man has just returned to town; what's the connection w/ a guy aboard the ferry who was transporting two captive Nigerian women to work as sex slaves; what's up with the plan for the government of China to build a massive port facility in this isolated harbor; and so on. Add to that strong character development, particularly of the ursine, beleaguered police chief, Andri, carrying the burden of a broken marriage and a failure in his previous post with any police agency, and in particular the stark, harsh beauty of the Iceland setting and this turns out to be a fine series start to finish, with the plot much more elegantly built and completed than in almost any other police-procedural drama (Sure, there could be a sequel, but the end doesn't leave you hanging on for more, either.) and awith ll of the characters coming across as lifelike, flawed, and credible - for the most part (excepting the one or two "heavies") they're "round" characters who seem to have a life beyond or outside of this narrative.   I have to say that the plot can be hard to follow for American viewers because every character has a name that's unusual or unfamiliar to us - I'd advise paying close attention to the names in early going, as that will make it easier as you go alone when the characters refer to one another by name. We had to laugh at times at the lack of "continuity" - sometimes the village was supposed to be caught in a paralyzing blizzard and in the next sequence the roads are clear - but, hey, it must be just about impossible to film a series in Iceland and literally impossible to do so in winter, with about 10 minutes of daylight. Great series to watch, though, even for the setting alone.

A dramatic expose of conversion therapy that avoids the maudlin and melodramatic

Boy Erased (2018 - does the title echo Gerl, Interrupted?)), directed and written by Joel Edgerton (who also plays a key role) and based on the memoir by Garrard Conley, tells in vivid and dramatic detail of the horrific practice of so-called conversion therapy, in which seemingly well-meaning families, usually devout Bible Belt Christians, send their children who seem to be homosexual/bisexual/lesbian to a program that promises to get them to change their sexual identity - through prayer and various "acting out" scenarios that become increasingly cruel and even dangerous. In this case, a young man- Jared, in the film - admits to his devout parents that he has "thoughts about men" and, after seeking guidance from several ministers, his parents - in particular his father - send him to a conversion program. We see the young man's struggles with his identity, his faith, his rightful skepticism of the whole underlying principle of the therapy, and the criminal abuse that takes place in at least this program - unlicensed therapists whose main goal seems to be to keep the young people in the program as long as possible. This movie could easily have descended into the mawkish, melodramatic, or didactic - but it never does. Jared's father (played well in a real casting against type by Russel Crowe) for example, could have been a bigoted ogre, but he's not - he truly loves his son and is trying, in his misguided way, to help his child. Similarly, the conversion-therapy center (Edgerton himself plays the lead so-called therapist) is horrendous and scary but many of the techniques used - role playing, journal keeping, sharing w/ the group, professions of love and support - are not horrendous in and of themselves, at least initially. Like many such films, this one ends w/ some factual info about the extent of conversion therapy in the U.S. - estimated to damage the lives of some 700k young people and legal in, I think, 33 states - and we also see some snapshots of Conley and his family; thankfully, they're not erased.