A surprisingly good true-crime film about the exploitation and the exploits of a group of NYC exotic dancers

The Lorene Scafaria writer/director film The Hustlers (2019) may not be Citizen Kane but it's a surprisingly good movie in a genre that more often than not is just plain exploitative and exhibitionist. Yes, it's a story about a group of exotic dancers in an NYC club catering to the Wall Street crowd; there are many scenes of near-nude dancing and foreplay, but to its credit the film puts these scenes into context by focusing (unlike, say, The Sopranos) on the suffering and exploitation of the women. In fact the women, reeling from the decline in business after the crash of 2008, set up their own little outfit, bypassing the club owners and others who chisel their money away. The plot may seem improbable, but the whole movie is based on a magazine article and is apparently quite true to the facts. The women - led by Jennifer Lopez, perfectly cast in her best film role in years - in essence pick up guys in bars, slip them drugs in a drink that knocks them cold, and steal their credit cards and other info, fleecing the guys of thousands of $s with reasonable confidence that the guys will never report these thefts - until eventually one (or 2) of them do so, leading to the arrest and downfall. Altogether, the movie is quite watchable right to the end - a rarity, today - and builds a lot of sympathy for these women who are by most measures straight-out criminals. Some of the scenes - notably the women in the club chatting and laughing among one another as they await the call onto the stage - are particularly well scripted and directed.

A mix of noir and melodrama in Losey's The Big Night

Joseph Losey's 1950 film, The Big Night, was, I think, has last work in the U.S. before he was blacklisted and migrated to England for a great career. Big Night is by no means a great movie, but it deftly combines two seemingly antithetical genres, noir and melodrama: In essence, a young man (played by Jonathan Barrymore Jr.) sees his father brutally beaten by a man bearing a cane; he vows to avenge this humiliating event and tracks down the assailant, who we learn is a sports writer involved in fixing boxing matches (unlikely, but there you have it). After he finds the man and shoots him, in a tearful reconciliation scene w/ his father, he learns some dark family secrets. OK, not much of this is believable, but we do get some fine night-time sequences, some shot apparently on location. Notable scenes include the crowd entering the arena for the boxing match (where the naive Barrymore is robbed of a ticket); Barrymore visiting a newspaper during the late-night/early-morning presstime - quite accurate, I would add; a visit to a nightclub where the protagonist has a memorable encounter with the chanteuse; and some nicely moody scenes shot on near-deserted city streets. The film would be better if the protagonist could learn about his family history gradually and over the course of the film - rather than in a big confession from dad in the final minutes - but still it's a pretty good film by a director who was treated badly.

A whole lot of fun and a new appreciation for filmmaking in Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood (2019) is among other things a whole lot of fun to watch, start to finish. It's a really good "buddy movie," about the evolving friendship between Rick, a nearly washed-up star of TV westerns now getting booked only as the "heavy" and in fear of losing his talent and his career, and his stunt double and faithful driver and gofer, Cliff; adding to the fun, these two guys on the downside of the business are played by two of the super-mega-stars of the industry, Leonard DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. QT gets great performances not only from these two but from a # of well-known and unknown actors in various cameo roles, notably Al Pacino as sleazy agent/dealmaker, Bruce Dern, and a scene-stealing child actor, Julia Butters. Most of all, the 1969-set film is a hilarious take on many facets of styles and genres of movies through the ages and particularly in the 60, notably the Spaghetti Westerns (hilariously poked in the title itself), martial-arts film (another hilarious scene in a portrayal of Bruce Lee "instructing" a group of extras), old-Hollywood westerns, and "new" Hollywood youth films of flower children and psychedelia. Even better, we get to see some fresh takes on movie-making, in particular some really good scenes of a troubled and hung-over Rick rehearsing and stumbling, in a long take, over his lines. On top of all else, the movie gives a "what-if" take on the Sharon Tate killings - not really credible, but the portrayal of the Manson clan itself is frighteningly believable. Every QT film has to have its share of violence, and he holds off until the climactic scenes before he lets loose - close your eyes if you must - but there's much more in the film to enjoy, not the least of which is some beautiful night-time cinematography, particular on drives through LA and poolside in the canyons; you'd think there's nothing more to be shown or said about these settings, but we end up seeing not only LA but the whole movie industry in a new light and with new appreciation.

Despite its good intentions, The Report is devoid of drama and character

Scott C. Burns's Amazon Prime film, The Report, gives us in detail the true history of the attempt by a team of investigators, led by one Daniel Jones (played be the ubiquitous Adam Driver), under the auspices of California senator Diane Feinstein, investigated reports of secret CIA prisons where American officers, in teh wake of 9/11, tortured suspected terrorists in what was a totally failed attempt to gather intelligence about planned attacks. The team does uncover crucial info - despite CIA attempts to destroy massive amounts of records - then runs into fierce opposition from the CIA and from various senators and administration officials as they attempt to suppress the lengthy investigative report - which finally saw the light after a leak to the NYT and some support from Feinstein and other courageous senators (including our own great R.I. Senator Whitehouse). This film is a noble project and it's good to recognize that American agents could do evil and that the country could recognize this, eventually, and take action to rectify (to a degree). That said, the film is a almost schizophrenic: On the one hand, there are many vivid scenes depicting the various forms of torture inflicted on the prisoners - these are largely unwatchable. The rest of the film consists of extensive and laborious re-creation of Jones's investigation and the obstacles Jones et al. faced; this part - the vast majority - of the film was also unwatchable because it was, well, exceedingly dull. Seldom has so much talent (many all-stars in the cast, including Annette Bening, John Hamm, Michael C. Hall, and others) been brought together w/ so little to show for it: There's one meeting and conversation after another, few or no scenes of any great drama. Driver does the best he can w/ weak material, but the few attempts to build his personality - the young idealist who loses his innocence, the man who becomes obsessed with his mission to the point of losing all contact w/ others and all perspective - go nowhere, as the film is mired in its commitment to document the years of infighting and investigation that led to the final publication of an edited version of the report (which we knew from the outset, of course). Any episode of Homeland is better than this 2-hour slog.

Dreyer's unique style is at its strangest in Ordet

Carl Th. Dreyer's film Ordet (The Word, 1955) is strange even measured against Dreyer's out strange movies - very few, over the course of many years from the silent era into the 1960s, but each in Dreyer's unique cinematic style: Long closep-ups, many slow panning shots, mannered and extremely slow and deliberate dialog, simple sets and settings, mostly shot in interiors (though the few exterior shots become all the more striking), beautiful lighting so that each shot could be a still or portrait in the style of a Rembrandt or Vermeer, very few "cuts," and an archaic look throughout - little or no technology, for example. Ordet is set on a small family farm in Denmark in 1925 (it's based on a play, about which I know nothing); the farm family, the Borgens, face 3 crises: one son, Johannes, is suffering from a delusion and thinks he is Jesus returned to earth - he wanders slowly in and out of many scenes, muttering some pseudo-Biblical words and staring into the distance, zombie-like; another son, Anders, wants to marry the daughter of the village tailor but both families strongly object because they are not of the same church (one seems conventionally Christian and the other a strange and austere Christian sect - in some ways perhaps they're not all that different, so we're seeing a case of narcissism of small differences; I also wondered whether this was a cryptic way to get at the issue of anti-Semitism and inter-faith marriage); the third son's wife is pregnant: She, Anna, is the only woman in the film w/ a significant role. Her pregnancy and delivery become the dramatic highlight of the film. All viewers will be puzzled by the surprise conclusion, and I for one do not know what to make of it - but will note here that the whole film is about the examination of faith, whether faith is a solace for the hardships of life or an obstruction that keeps people apart and destroys communities remains an open question that Dreyer raises but does not resolve. So much the better - Ordet will, or should, hold the interest of any patient viewer: It's not at all modern, and is closer in style to a silent film than to any other films being made in the 1950s, even Bergman's (obviously influenced by Dreyer, but much more "contemporary" in look and feel, even when set during the Crusades, for example); worth seeing, especially alongside Dreyer's other and strikingly similar works about faith and redemption, such as The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath.

Still one of the best series ever on Netflix: Season 3 of The Crown

Season 3 of Peter Morgan's terrific series, The Crown, picks up where Season 2 ended, w/ the necessary changes, i.e., w/ an older set of actors portraying Queen Elizabeth and family - and of course the updated casting seems perfect, w/ Olivia Colman taking over seamlessly from the great Claire Foy and great performances as well from Tobias Menzies (Prince Philip),  Helena Bonham Carter (Princess Margaret), Erin Doherty as Princess Anne, and Josh O'Connor as Prince Charles as we follow the Windsors from roughly 1960 to the 25th Jubilee in 1977. This series gives us the best of British acting, writing, 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 flowers, the furniture, the cutlery, the oil paintings on the gallery walls, and "motor vehicles," the planes and trains, the croquet equipment - everything!). Over the course of the ten episodes we see the Queen, at last, show some flashes of tenderness and sentiment - though for most of the episodes she and the other royals are clench-jawed, cold, and viciously protective of their life of privilege. A theme throughout has been the interference with anyone in the family headed for an "unsuitable" marriage - to the ruin and despair of several members of the family. The one way in which this season falls a little short of the first two: In seasons 1 and 2 we see the gradual "education" of Queen Elizabeth, as she evolves from a young woman thrust on the world stage and initially treated like a pushover into a powerful monarch and family leader. In Season 3, she is a well-established character and personality and does not evolve any further; each episode depicts a different family/national crisis, but mosy are not centered on the Queen (the episodes on Charles - his schooling, his relationship with Camilla - are particularly moving; those on Margaret are at times comic - HBC is a great comic actress - and at times harrowing). But the season doesn't have a plot "through-line" in the same way that Seasons 1 and 2 did. Still, one of the best shows to come through Netflix in many years, and all viewers are awaiting Season 4, which will introduce Princess Diana.

The good and thenot so good in Scorsese's The Irishman

Our cultural appetite for great movies about the mob/gangsters/organized crime of almost any era remains forever unsated, with Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (2019, Netflix) the latest entry - and one of the best, though by no means a perfect movie. MS, basing his movie on a book by Charles Brandt (and screenplay by Stevn Zaillian) is clearly working in the great tradition of the extremely long feature (or multiple-edition feature) with the members of the Pantheon being Coppola (Godfather movies, at least the first 2), David Chase (Sopranos, 7 seasons!), and Scorsese himself (Goodfellas). One difference between the Irishman and these others: This movie feels about an hour too long at 3.5 hours; the others left us wanting (up to a point) and getting more. To take the negatives first, The Irishman - the story of a Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) who rises from a trucker who skins a little off the top by stealing and unloading some of his freight to become a mob assassin (as the film wry calls is, "painting houses") to a top-level associate of the mobbed-up union boss Jimmy Hoffa - aptly and deftly delineates Sheeran's rise through the chambers of the underworld, but it almost completely lacks context: We see nothing of his childhood or his parents and almost nothing of his married life or his personal. His rise to prominence seems scripted and foreordained; there's a big difference between stealing some sides of beef and killing a man in cold blood, but we don't see any hesitation, remorse, or regret about this dramatic change in his life, from thief to killer. I know including such material would make this movie even longer, but maybe it should have been in two parts? Hoffa is a leading character, and the movie offers its own theory on his demise, which is kind of obvious though I won't give it up here, but I found Al Pacino's portrayal to be off the mark: His Hoffa is an eccentric, sometimes bumbling tyrant; I think, no matter how weakened he was by the end of his reign, he still has to be portrayed as someone formidable and fearsome. All that said, there are some tremendous strengths in The Irishman as well, not the least of which is it did hold our interest over its long span and its multilayered narration (3 strands of time). There's plenty of action, but none feels gratuitous, and by far the greatest part of the film involves the long private conversations among the key players, the 3rd by Joe Pesci as Russell Buffalino: There are many long confidences in which the characters speak in euphemisms and in code, a means of expression generated no doubt by years in fear of surveillance. Particularly great are the asides among characters as the dinner in Frank's honor, as the various forces plan to push Hoffa out of the picture. Also fantastic: the art direction and costuming, beautifully evoking the look and feel of this era and this culture without ever feeling overdone or over the top (Goodfellas was similar; so for that matter is the current Netflix series The Crown). All told definitely a film worth seeing; probably worth the $ and the trouble to see it on a full screen, if you can stand the 3.5-hour length; otherwise, it plays well at home, too.