The Top Ten Films (I Watched) in 2022

 The Top Ten films (I Watched) in 2022:

The terrific Romanian 2007 film 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days from Cristian Mungiu - isa film everyone in an abortion-banning state should be forced to watch over the 2 hours or so, through a series of mostly long stills, and sometimes long tracking shots in which Mungiu conveys the struggle over a few days of two college roommates in Romania, with its ridiculously strict anti-abortion laws (couldn’t happen here, could it?). 

Wim Wenders’s music-documentary Buena Vista Social Club (1999) is a totally enjoyable start to finish look at Cuban music - a project that began when the great American guitarist Ry Cooder, who’s been for many years a proponent of world music, travels to Cuba to try to connect with the great stars of traditional Cuban dance music, much of which had been performed by members of the eponymous club. 

What a nice surprise to come across the under-the-radar Best Pic nominee Coda (2022), which shocked everyone with its Best Picture Oscar: a terrific film that’s heart-warming, never soporific or gratuitous, about a teenager who works on her family fishing boat out of Gloucester while a full-time h.s. student with dreams of becoming a pro singer, with the catch that her family members all have complete deafness. 

In the Soviet WWII film Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985), one of best war, or anti-war, films I’ve ever seen, we follow a young man’s induction into and armed combat and takes us through astonishing sequences of cruelty and brutality that never feel gratuitous, just horrifying. 

The Billy Wilder classic Double Indemnity (1944) is one of the best ever among American films noirs - from the look of LA ca. 1938 (the setting for the plot), the fantastic hard-boiled dialog (screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, based on a novel by JM Cain, so how could you go wrong?), great acting by the 3 leads, each cast against type (McMurry, Stanwyck, E.G. Robinson), and a fun plot that will have you thinking all the way through,

Dino Risi’s Italian road movie, Il Sorpasso (1962), is totally watchable and fun and sad and touching. “Road Movie” doesn’t to it justice; it’s a comedy with much pathos, with two guys, strangers essentially, taking a weekend drive away from Rome and along the Coast - with Vittorio Gassman as the extrovert, risk-taking, domineering personality and the recently gone Jean-Louis Trintagnant as the timid, cautious, nerdy guy.

Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel (2022) - the title will become evident a few bits into this 60-minute program, directed by Bo Burnham - is an absolutely unique (and excellent) piece of cinema, something like an hour-long comedy sketch, sure, but also like a 60-minute one-man play and like an hour-long discussion unrehearsed and like an hour-long therapy session.

Radu Jude’s 2016 film, Scarred Hearts (the title is awkward, at least in English) is a beautiful if painful medical odyssey, as we follow a young man (early 20s) in 1935 Romania as he enters a TB asylum; the care he receives may have been adequate in its day but from our vantage looks brutal and ineffective: essentially the well-meaning doctor punctures the patient’s stomach to siphon off infectious pus - extremely painful - the puts the patient in a body cast, essentially making him immobile for months - with obvious physical (and mental) deterioration. 

John Ford’s 1939 classic, Stagecoach, is still a pleasure to watch if you can get by the racism and stereotypes that mar some of the scenes and just recognize these - the Apache warriors, the comical Hispanic-American English pronunciations - as relics from a (nearly) bygone era. In essence, the film is a version of the Canterbury Tales meets Sartre’s No Exit, as a group of 10 or so travelers, each with his/her own mission, share a coach for transport across dangerous open lands to the next fortification.

Martin Bell’s documentary Streetwise (1984) is a stunning and extraordinary film on the (mostly) teenagers living on the streets of Seattle, then, ironically, known as the “most livable city in America.” This scene is the polar opposite of the Microsoft/Starbucks Seattle culture that we know (of). Bell’s camera follows these children, all of them from broken homes or other terrible and threatening and loveless lives.

Top Ten Miniseries (I watched) in 2022

The Top Ten Miniseries (I watched) in 2022:

You won’t find a more hateful character on screen than Jean Paul (JP) Williams (played by Claes Bang) in the Irish black-comedy thriller (yes, lots of genre crossings) Bad Sisters (2022).

Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back (2021) is a monumental work of documentary and film editing - Ja 6-hour series built from hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours of film and recoding of the foursome in studio (and, ultimately, on rooftop) as they spent a month developing what would be their final album, Let It Be.

Dennis Lehane’s Black Bird miniseries (2022, Apple) is one of the most successful dramatizations “based on a true story”- a terrific and harrowing look at the life of a 20-something straight-arrow seeming guy (Taron Egerton as James Keene), nabbed as an Rx dealer and sentenced to 6 years - but the FBI makes him an offer: They will have his sentence commuted if he’ll go undercover into the prison for the “criminally insane” to get info and and wrench a information from a scary guy (Paul Walter Hauser as Larry Hall) who’s in jail for the murder of a young woman.

Hostages, an HBO documentary series (2022, 4 episodes, from a team of 5 directors), is a detailed look at the Iranian revolution of the ’70s, the American complicity based on years of support for the brutal Shah, and ultimately the collapse of all social order, a vacuum filled by the charismatic Ayatollah who turns a blind eye on the mob attack of the U.S. embassy, leading to 444 days of imprisonment of embassy staff, a few Marines (or just one?), and other Americans working with the embassy.

The HBO 8-part series Julia (2022) with Sarah Lancashire predominant as the eponymous French Chef Julia Child, is a pleasant, enjoyable, approachable series that has lots of laughs, smiles of recognition from those who recall the original TV series, and its moments of darkness and struggle as well: much talk about women being pushed aside in the male-dominated world of public (and I would guess commercial) TV, some sharp debate about whether Julia’s role was supportive of or harmful to progressive women of her era (the ‘60s), and a few glimpses of a some of the hidden truths in Julia’s life.

Nanfu Wang’s terrific 6-part documentary series, Mind Over Murder (2022, HBO) tells of the conviction of a six people known as the Beatrice Six. This gives nothing away, as you will learn in the first 60 seconds or so of the first episode that the 6 were later exonerated and released from prison after some 20 years after their conviction. How and why? 

In Season 3 of My Brilliant Friend “Lenu” rises to some fame through her publications as, thanks to her spoiled intolerable husband, her marriage cracks at the seams. This series remains one of the best on-going series of the 2020s - better and more accessible, I believe, than Ferrante’s source novels. 

Hagai Levi’s re-take on Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage doesn’t quite measure up against the original, but it’s still a powerful and sometimes frightening intense, close look at a youngish (30+) Boston-area couple and how they deal directly and painfully with issues that arise over the course of their endangered marriage: pregnancy and medical abortion, infidelity, separation, sexual longing, and, in the episode closest the Bergman original, heart-felt reparation. 

The HBO series Slow Horses Season 1 (2022, James Hawes, director; based on Mark Herron novel) is a complex and emotionally draining work about a team of British agents assigned to Slough House aka Slow Horses because of their various screw-ups and misdeeds - as they try to redeem their reputations through their efforts to thwart the kidnapping of a young Muslim comedian taken by a group of right-wing extremists who plan to execute the young man.

The 2nd season of Mike White’s HBO smash The White Lotus (2022), similar to the first in its luxury hotel setting for the rich and uber-rich, this time in Sicily, despite recent quibbles about its celebration of conspicuous consumption and display and the free ride that the most obnoxious characters get at the end (no spoilers), was a lot of fun to watch from the outset, and if we hate some of the characters, which we’re supposed to and expected to, well, that’s part of the fun as well. 

 

The Top Ten Classic Films I Watched in 2020

 

The Top Ten (OK, it's 11) classic films I watched in 2020:

Day for Night

Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) film is probably the best of all movies about the making of a movie; no other film gives as great a sense of what it’s like to direct a film and of the complex internal dramas that take place throughout the process of a shoot. 

Faces Places

The penultimate Agnes Varda film (2017) is a totally enjoyable and surprising documentary about her public-art project, in which she joins forces with a 33-year-old French graffiti artist who goes by JR. 

Fireman’s Ball 

These hapless, sexist firefighters can’t seem to get anything right, including fighting a fire, which I think was a brave thing for Milos Forman to dramatize in 1967, when any critique of uniformed officers came as close as possible to a critique of the Soviet control of the government; I believe most Czech viewers, though maybe not the Soviet censors, got the point.

Fox and His Friends

This 1976 film stands as probably Rainer Werner Fassbinder's first great work, groundbreaking in many ways and a film that established RWF as a master at staging and composition and as a multiple threat, director, writer, lead actor; in particular, the film was one of the first honest and non-exploitative films about gay culture.

Harakiri

Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 film is truly one of the great Samurai films of all time though it's not as well known or recognized, perhaps because overshadowed by Kurosawa’s work in the same genre; the film engages viewers right from the start as the first half hour or so is among the most powerful sequences in Japanese film.

In the Mood for Love

Writer-director Wong Kar-Wai's film from 2000 is a sad and strange tale of a man and a woman, each in an unhappy and faithless marriage, who meet and fall in love but find it impossible to leave their marriages begin a new life with each other, which may remind viewers of the great British film Brief Encounter.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

The man above suspicion in Elio Petri’s from from 1970, a police chief who commits a murder and flaunts authority is played by Gian Maria Volonte, who he gives a great performance: cruel, brutal, and scary, especially in his rants against “political” prisoners (i.e., anarchists, Marxists, et al.), an outburst that seems eerily contemporary. 

Of Time and the City 

Terence Davies's documentary from 2008 is a personal recollection and evocation of his childhood in Liverpool (in the postwar years, the 50s and 60s), a moving and sometimes frightening testament to the hardships of poverty then and now and a testament to what Davies calls the English propensity for the dismal. 

Shame 

Ingmar Bergman's great film from 1968 responded to the critiques of his beautiful chamber drama for being remote from the issues that were rocking the world; in this film Bergman takes on some of his typical material, the strains and break-up of a marriage, and plays out the drama in the context of war and revolution. 

World of Apu

Satyajit Rays the conclusion of his Apu trilogy not only lives up to its reputation as a classic in world cinema — it may even go beyond its reputation, as it looks better, more original, more mysterious today than it would have in 1959, with so many beautiful and strange settings in Calcutta and in rural India that now feel like messages from time capsule. 

Young Torless

Volker Schlondorff's debut film, from 1966, about hazing and abuse in a boarding school, is of course painful to watch, but it's not unrelieved or gratuitous pain and its message, articulated by Torless in a passionate speech in which he attacks those who are indifferent and feckless or cowardly in the face of abuse and exploitation, resonates today, perhaps even more than it would have 50 years ago.

The Top Ten returning or classic miniseries I watched in 2020

 The Top Ten returning or classic miniseries I watched in 2020 

Babylon Berlin 

This series emulates The Crown, as we can only wonder at the amount of money and the creative energy to replicate Berlin in 1929 down to the smallest detail, but in other ways this is its own series entirely, particularly in Season 3, as the Communists face off against the National Socialist Party.

Berlin Alexanderplatz 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 13-part series was ground-breaking in 1980 and has been hugely influential in charting the course for long-form, character-driven dramas such as The Sopranos, The Wire, House of Cards - the list could go on. 

The Crown

I will join in the universal praise for Season 4 of Peter Morgan’s monumental series, which deserves commendation on every level and aspect, starting perhaps with the spare-no-expense sets and settings for the royal family, all reconstructed and resurrected it seems in perfect period detail.

Fauda 

Like its predecessors, Season 3 of this Israeli series about team of agents assigned to undercover, anti-terrorism work against radical Islamists and Palestinian activists is as tense and gripping as anything on TV or streaming, start to finish - and of course it leaves the door open to a 4th season. 

Last Chance U 

Football is the vehicle but the show itself, which concluded this year with Season 5, is about so much more than football; it’s about communities, leadership, poverty, inequity, and the “collision of forces” inevitable in any high-pressure sports enterprise that is part of an academic setting. 

Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Season 3 of this series was a definite step up from Season 2, which seemed to drift away from what gives the series its strength and its life: Rachel Brosnahan’s portrayal of the eponymous rising-star standup comedian.

Ozark 

The 3rd season continues with the great storytelling, writing, and ensemble acting (Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, Julia Garner) of the first 2 seasons, as we watch the Byrde family sink ever deeper into world of money laundering, corrupt gambling, the heroin trade, and an outright war between two Mexican cartels. 

Rectify 

This highly intelligent and moving socio-drama about a man released from prison after 20 years on death row, which never really found its audience, was not only a personal drama focusing on the now severely traumatized man but it was also a family drama, a legal thriller, and, to a lesser extent, an issue film about the rights of prisoners and of ex-prisoners trying to make the best of what's left of their lives post-incarceration.

Schitt’s Creek 

There’s no doubt that this excellent series, which is both hilarious and completely engaging, is one of the few comedy-miniseries of our time in which the show gets better with each passing season and ended, this year with Season 6, on the right note at the right time.

Succession

As we continue to watch the members of the Roy family engage in a dynastic fight to control their corporate enterprise and in Oedipal struggles to unseat or deracinate the family patriarch, the strengths remain the great ensemble performances, with every cast member in and out of the family holding up the standard set by the occasionally hilarious and demanding script.

The Top Ten (new) streaming miniseries I watched in 2020

 The Top Ten (new) streaming miniseries I watched in 2020:

Derry Girls 

This series for Ireland series stands simply as one of the funniest and most endearing comedies streaming today.

The Eddy

This series about a jazz nightclub club is a study in character and in group interaction, the development over time of life/work/family relationships that bind the lead characters to one another, and an homage to the ex-pat jazz scene still alive in Paris.

Giri/Haji

This British-Japanese co-production has some eye-closing scenes of violence and many shootouts – plus some surprisingly tender and thoughtful scenes, including a final episode with one of the most unusual surreal sequences I’ve ever seen in a crime show.

The Last Dance

This isn’t a series for basketball fans only; all viewers can watch with amazement and wonder at Michael Jordan’s dominant skills in every facet of the game, physical and mental. 

Lenox Hill

This series should be on everyone's list, a terrific documentary that follows over the course of a year or so the professional (and personal) lives of four doctors (2 brain surgeons, 1 ER doc, 1 (pregnant) OB-GYN doc) in the Manhattan hospital.

The Queen’s Gambit 

This highly acclaimed series is well worth watching regardless of your knowledge of or even interest in chess, in particular for Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance in the lead role as a chess prodigy with many troubles in her life. 

The Spy 

This British series is another in the long run of high-quality suspenseful espionage shows, though this one has a particular plaudit: The often hard-to-believe series of events is in fact based closely on an actual case of Israeli espionage.

Unorthodox 

This popular series depicts the bravery and the struggle of the 19-year-old Etsy Shapiro (Shira Haas), who flees from her ultra-orthodox community in Brooklyn to seek freedom and a new life in, of all places, Berlin. 

Waco

This series provides a surprisingly thoughtful and multifaceted re-creation of the horrendous 1993 ATF/FBI raid on the Branch Davidian complex - as seen from perspectives both inside and outside of the complex under siege. 

Who Killed Malcolm X?

This under-the-radar series presents a taut account of the 1965 assassination of the  black leader, the shoddy if not corrupt NY police investigation of the killings, the imprisonment for 20 years of 2 men who had nothing to do with the killings, and the suspicious indifference of the police and the FBI regarding the most likely assassin.

Note: And I will add one more that I watched after compiling this list: Trial 4, about the unjust imprisonment of a Boston man convicted of the murder of a Boston police detective. 

The Top Ten (new) movies I saw in 2020

 In a year of much screen time, here are the Top Ten (new) movies I saw in 2020:

1917 

Sam Mendes's WWI movie came out of nowhere - had he ever in his long career done a movie so daring and innovative? - and will astonish and engage any viewer, no matter how many war movies you've seen, or missed. 

23 hours to Kill 

You would think that, eventually Jerry Seinfeld would run out of material, as he’s made his long and brilliant career based on commentary about the minutia of daily life, but his hour-long comedy special on Netflix shows that he continue to work miracles. 

The 40-Year-Old Version

When I'd first heard about this Netflix film (written, directed, starring playwright Radha Blank) I thought, despite strong reviews, that this would be a film for which lI would not be the ideal audience; all the more props to the amazing R Blank in that I was totally captivated, entertained, and moved by her really intelligent and imaginative film.

 Ali Wong: Hard-Knock Wife 

This spirited comedy special is terrific and memorable not only for Wong’s fantastically energetic performance and her terrific comic timing but also for the range of her materials, which includes marriage equality, breast-feeding, c-sections, universal paid maternity leave and, on the lower end of the spectrum, fart jokes.

Dick Johnson is Dead

Kristen Johnson's funny, original, and moving documentary about the last years of her father's life has many surprises and somehow manages to avoid the lachrymose sensibility that pervades many such projects. 

The Farewell 

Lulu Wang's film, with a great lead performance by rising star Awkwafina as a 20-something Chinese-American would-be writer in NYC, is a movie full of multiple culture-clashes and generational clashes, family dramas and mini-dramas, and some hilarious and riotous segments.

Mank

This David Fincher (dir.) & his (late) father Jack Fincher (screenplay) tells of Herbert Mankiewicz, a troubled, alcoholic, charming roundtable drinking buddy and Hollywood wash-up until he got tabbed by the 24-year-old Orson Welles to write the screenplay that would become Citizen Kane.

Nanette

Hannah Gadsby’s hour-long live-from-Sydney comic stand-up show is, at the end, a knockout —  a most unusual comic gig that mixes humor – (much of it about Gadsby’s coming out as a Lesbian in her mid-30s) – with some unusual comic riffs; who’d have thought you could work into a standup show a long and hilarious series of riffs on art history?

Pain and Glory 

Pedro Almodovar’s film is a rich and complex narrative of a type that we don’t see often today, at least in films from the U.S.: a story about a 60-something film director at a point of crisis in his life and his career

Young Ahmed

The Dardennes brothers’ latest film is a bit of a break for them: same territory and milieu (the industrial territories of Belgium and northern France) but focused on a teenager who has become absorbed in a conservative Muslim mosque whose young and charismatic leader has seemingly pushed this vulnerable young man to criminal extremes. 

And a special note to 3 excellent streaming versions of three plays: the impossible to overpraise Broadway musical Hamilton; the Bridge Theatre (London) production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the most exciting and imaginative Shakespeare productions I’ve ever seen; and the Met Opera live streaming broadcast of Porgy & Bess. 

The Top 5 Returning Miniseries I Watched in 2019

Closing out my lists of the best shows I watched in 2019, here are the Top 5 Miniseries, Returning, that I watched in 2019, listed alphabetically:

Call My Agent (Season 3): In this rarity, a series that gets better with each season, we end up caring about each of the characters in this high-end Paris talent agency, despite their double-dealings and infidelities, and we appreciate getting what feels like a true inside look at this complicated profession - what agents have to do to get, retain, mollify, appease, and coddle the talent and how they manage to earn their 10 percent.

The Crown (Season 3): Moving along with a new cast (notably, Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth and Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret) to the reign of Elizabeth II in the 1960s and beyond, this series gives us the best of British acting, writing, and directing, with all 10 episodes clear and crisp, thoughtful and provocative; as with the first two seasons, the producers held back nothing on design and milieu - perfectly recreating all the lavish environments where the royals ruled and sported, down to the last detail. 

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Season 3): Although Season 2 sagged a little, the pace picked up in Season 3 in which we see the eponymous Maisel, played flawlessly by Rachel Brosnahan, on the cusp of fame as she takes her act on the road - along with her manager, Alex Borstein, as Susie Myerson, who's getting better and funnier as the series develops. 

Mindhunter (Season 2): In the first season, loosely based on facts, Agents Ford and Tench developed the concept of identifying serial killers via psychological profiling - a new and controversial methodology in the FBI at the time - and Season 2 is even better, as it moves away from a series of profiles to dramatize the use of those new technique in one particularly sensitive and troubling case, the series of abductions of black children in Atlanta in the 1980s.

Veep (Final Season): Julia Louis-Dreyfus is perfect once again as the egotistical, tempestuous presidential candidate Selena Meyer, and we see her maneuver her way through minefields on her way to the nomination, supported by her loyal staff members whom she rebukes and abuses and on whom she depends completely; all of the supporting players are credible and rich - a true ensemble production - and most of the secondary characters are as well, most notably Timothy Simons as the odious candidate Jonah Ryan.

The Top Ten (new or first season) Miniseries I Watched in 2019

As with just about everyone else, my viewing habits and preferences have shifted gradually away from movies (and movie theaters) and ever more toward streaming miniseries, which offer so many great opportunities to develop character, plot, and milieu over the course of multiple episodes and multiple seasons. Plus, they're so accessible. Here is the list, arranged alphabetically of the Top 10 (New or first season) Miniseries I Watched in 2019:

A French Village (2009). The first (of 9) seasons newly available this year on Prime, this completely engrossing and often frightening drama brings us into a small and seemingly typical village in rural France, not far from the Swiss border, at the outset of the Occupation (1940) and presumably in subsequent seasons taking us through the course of the War and its aftermath.

Chernobyl (2019): Most of us probably have no idea of the magnitude of the catastrophe of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl nor of how it could have been even more serious and disastrous but for the brave actions of a few scientists and many other workers at or near the plan; this HBO 4-part miniseries does a great job bringing the tension of days during and after the meltdown to light. 

Criminal (2019). This 12-part series from Netflix is a terrific project of high ambition, which consists of four sets of three dramas, each set from a different European country and using the same parameters: a 40-minute police interrogation of a suspect in a tightly confined setting. 

Escape at Dannemora (2019). This Ben Stiller-directed 7-episode miniseries from Showtime is a terrific prison movie, based closely the famous prison breakout in a remote New York locale, with exceptionally strong performances not only by the leads - Patricia Arquett, Benicio del Toro, and Paul Dana - but also from just about all of the secondary players.

Les Miserables (2018). This 6-part BBC/PBS English-language miniseries of Hugo's novel (2018) does a fine job presenting the highlights of the sinuous narrative, cutting this enormous text down to a fairly simple period piece, love story, and melodrama that follows the course of the eventful life of Jean Valjean (Dominic West).

Made in Heaven (2019). This Indian 9-episode series on Prime about a team of wedding planners who cater to the wealthiest of Delhi society at first seems as if it's an escapee from the Bravo channel, but we quickly see that it's far more than a lifestyles of the rich fantasy indulgence: There's a terrific and compelling through story that makes us think of the class structure in India and all that it still entails.

Mrs. Wilson (2018). This surprisingly good 3-part series on PBS depicts events are so odd that we wouldn't believe them in a fictional narrative - but the series depicts actual events in the life of the grandmother of the star of the show, Rita Wilson; the series moves gracefully across a few time spans, gradually filling in the picture of an entire life, it will keep you thinking and guessing and wondering right to the startling closing sequence.

Succession (2019). This 10-part HBO series portrays a dysfunctional, uber-wealthy. loathsome family, based loosely, or maybe not so loosely, on the Murdoch clan and its right-wing media empire; this show is well written and well acted by a large ensemble, each family member with a distinct personality and neuroses.

The Honourable Woman (2014). This series (for rent only) has to rank as one of the most intelligent and best-acted shows I've seen recently, a totally gripping story start to finish about a sister (Maggie Gylenhall, doing a fantastic job and rocking an English accent) and her brother who have taken over a huge family business and charitable organization dedicated to bringing about peace and understanding between Israel and Palestine. Good luck!

Unbelievable (2019). This Netflix 8-part series, based closely on true events that took place in Colorado and Washington in 2008-11, depicts the pursuit and capture of a serial rapist (and the horrifying treatment by male police officers that some of the rape victims endured); the two lead detectives are played brilliantly by Merritt Wever and Toni Collette. 

The Top Ten Movies I Watched in 2019

A mixture of new and classic, narrative and documentary, here is my list of the Top Ten Movies I Watched in 2019 (listed alphabetically):

American Factory (2019). Julia Richert and Steven Bognar provide a fantastic look at a clash of cultures and how that affects the American workplace in the post-industrial era; this documentary is much better and more powerful than its understated title would suggest - it's full of drama, conflict, surprises, ideas, and just plain weirdness.

Bitter Rice (1949). Giuseppe De Santis's movie, about the women who work at the annual rice harvest and planting in the wet fields in northern Italy, is a classic in every sense. It stands up to anything else from its era as both a social document and a powerful drama (or melodrama).

A Brighter Summer Day (1991). This terrific movie by the late Taiwanese director Edward Yang examines the lives of several teenagers in Taiwan in 1960, about 10 years after their families fled  mainland China and Mao's revolution to settle in Formosa. Today, Yang would probably have developed this 4-hour movie as a mini-series.(Bonus points: Check out Yang's even greater movie, Yi Yi)

Cold War (2018). Pawel Pawlikowsky's film from Poland is a great story of doomed lovers and their tempestuous relationship that plays out in a series of episodes across a 20-year time span; we see the struggles to build a life and a career in music and to be true to one's self not just against a wave of commercial pressures but against political pressures that can shut you off completely - or lock you up.

Il Posto (1961). This Italian (Milanese) film, written and directed by Ermanno Olmi, is another one of the somewhat unappreciated neo-realist works (this one filmed with no professional actors) that made Italian postwar cinema so great, tells of a teenage boy in a working-class family pressured to apply for a coveted white-collar job in a large unnamed company - a job he doesn't really want.

A Midsummer Night's Dream (2018). This highly inventive, contemporary-LA take on Shakespeare by writer-director Casey Wilder Mott is eccentric and fast-paced, as much fun to watch as just about any production of a Shakespeare comedy that I've seen on film.

Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood (2019). Quentin Tarantino's 1969-set film is, among other things, a whole lot of fun to watch, start to finish: a really good "buddy movie" starring two industry mega-stars, with DeCaprio as a nearly washed up star in TV Westerns and Pitt as his driver and gopher; a send-up of many mid-century movie styles and trends; and a really cool inside look at the process of movie-making, and who's not interested in that?

Ordet (1955). This film, set on a small Danish farm in 1925, is strange even for Carl Th. Dreyer: long close-ups, many slow panning shots, mannered and extremely slow and deliberate dialog, beautiful lighting so that each shot could be a still or portrait in the style of a Rembrandt or Vermeer, and unforgettable segments such as the botched delivery scene and the weirdness of a young man who wanders in and out of various scenes murmuring scripture. (Bonus points: Compare with Dreyer's Day of Wrath)

Three Identical Strangers (2018). Tim Wardle's documentary starts off as if it's going to be a feel-good story about triplets separated at (actually, six months after) birth who discover one another through a series of chance encounters when they're about 20 years old, but this movie gets darker and darker and becomes a serious examination of medical ethics, as we learn that the three boys, unbeknownst to them, had been part of a vast (and as yet unpublished) medical experiment.

Tokyo Story(1953). It's pretty much impossible to over-praise Yasujiro Ozu's film, a seemingly simple tale about an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their children, in what perhaps will be their last such visit; despite the father's flaws and mis-doings, it's impossible not to feel empathy for this couple, who are treated abominably by their children (an indication of the seismic shifts taking place in postwar family life) and truly welcomed only by their war-widowed daughter-in-law, who is both saintly and deeply troubled. (Bonus points: See Ozu's final film, Late Autumn)

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. 

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.

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?

The 10 Best TV Programs I watched in 2016

Each year, TV seems to provide us with more great dramas, comedies, and documentaries. Can we doubt that if Shakespeare were alive today he'd write for TV? Or at least watch it? Here are the 10 best TV programs I watched in 2016:

American Crime (Season 2). This excellent anthology series uses many of the same actors to tell a completely different crime narrative in each (of the first 2) season. Season 2, about an allegation of homosexual rape at a high-school party, is just as good as Season 1. Kudos to Felicity Huffman for her lead role.

Black Mirror. The totally disturbing and provocative series from England, picked up by Netflix in Season 3, about how technology could further change and disrupt our lives in the near future. Suggestion, skip the first 2 episodes (this is another anthology series; no need to see all or in sequence) and begin with episode 3.

The Crown. Possibly the most expensive TV series ever made, accurate in period detail both at the macro (WWI-era airplanes, cars, and Jeeps) and the micro (the flowers, the chinaware, the clothing), and on top of that a fine personal and political drama about the first years of QEII's reign.

House of Cards (Season 4). The Kevin Spacey-Robin Wright White House psycho-drama continues, with his career (and their marriage?) on the wane and hers on the rise?

Last Chance U. A great and under-the-radar Netflix documentary series about the players at a Mississippi junior-college football powerhouse, with particular focus on the academic counselor who does all she can to keep these young men, who are completely unprepared for (and largely uninterested in) academic work, in the program.

Making a Murderer. The extremely popular series about a man who was unjustly convicted of rape and, on release from prison, runs into deeper, and more suspicious, problems with the law.

The People v O.J. Simpson. I know you think you're already familiar with this story - but believe me you're not. Even if you don't care about football, this is a totally gripping account of the trial and its effect on the involved parties, the LA communities, and the nation. Good idea to see this first and then, if your curiosity is aroused, watch the ESPN documentary.

Stranger Things. Yes it's rather preposterous even as sci-fi, but it's effective and moving as a portrait of teenage and preteen life in the U.S. in the 1980s. In the spirit of ET: innocent kids v evil scientists, clueless parents, and the establishment in general.

Transparent. Would have been so easy to make this series lurid and sensational, and it's anything but: It's smart, informative, sensitive, sexy, funny (esp the opening sequence of Season 2), and credible. A must-see.

Veep (Seasons 1 and 2). Really funny, esp but not only Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and an over-the-top but recognizable image of what life is like on the staff of a high-level government agency. Hoping that HBO/Amazon will make subsequent seasons available in Prime.