rickchatenever Reviews

The Greatest Night in Pop (2024)

We Are (Still) the World

[9/10 · 22 February 2024]

OK, here's a challenge.

Try watching "The Greatest Night in Pop" without getting chicken skin and putting the hairs on your neck into a frenzy.

For about an hour.

That's the effect of watching Bao Nguyen's music documentary about the creation of the aid anthem "We Are the World" one night in 1985. It's now streaming on Netflix.

My guess is that people of a certain age won't be able to get to the end without tears in their eyes, either.

It's a flashback to a place far, far away now. In the '80s, famine in Africa was killing children by the thousand. Musician Bob Geldof had organized the Live Aid concert that took place simultaneously in England and America a year earlier. Destined to be knighted for the achievement, Sir Bob launched an era of mega rock benefits to raise aid for victims on the other side of the globe.

Calypso king and human rights activist Harry Belafonte realized that those efforts were essentially being made by white artists for black victims. He's the one who called for black artists to start helping too.

All of this unfolds early in the film as the task of creating a single song, a single record, falls to two of the era's biggest superstars, Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson. Legendary Quincy Jones comes on board to produce. Storied LA entertainment manager and humanitarian Ken Kragen gets the job of assembling the talent. Although he's up against crazy touring schedules and monumental egos, before he's done, Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen, Cindi Lauper, Kenny Loggins, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Kenny Rogers, Huey Lewis, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson, Smokey Robinson, Dionne Warwick and Billy Joel are on board. Oh, and let us not forget Bob Dylan. Or Bette Midler singing in the chorus.

And that's the short list.

Lionel Richie was hosting The American Music Awards on Jan. 28. Since so many artists would be in Los Angeles for the show, that night was set for the recording following the ceremony at the nearby A&M Studio.

The first 30 minutes of the film feel like most other rock documentaries - well-produced but conventional, talking head narrators recalling the lead-up to the making the record, illustrated with archival video footage and stills. Just as he was a linchpin in the project - and destined to win six awards himself that night - Richie emerges as the film's soulful, through-line narrator.

Aside from the challenge of putting all the jigsaw pieces together, little throwaway details of the recounting take on new meaning a half-century later. It was the time before cell phones. (Anyone remember that that felt like...?) It was the 12th annual American Music Awards for an industry barely out of its infancy. When the producers released Jackson's demo recording of the song for the other singers to learn, it was on cassette tapes, sent through the mail.

And when the artists start showing up at the studio that night, they all ...look...so...young... Producer Quincy Jones had taped a sign, Ted Lasso-like, on the studio wall. It said, "Check Your Ego at the Door." Considering the superstar magnitude of the talent in the room, the sentiments could only go so far, but still, it's amazing how much of the artists' humanness shines through. Arranged in a semicircle on risers, there's more than a little resemblance to a high school chorus. Each was a musical giant, but they behave more like starstruck fans of each other's fame and talent.

It's when the recording session begins that the film separates itself from other rock docs, and the talent of director Bao Nguyen - himself a young Vietnamese immigrant that night who would credit the song for helping him learn English - emerges.

Using a digital clock face to mark the passing minutes, he brings the deadline urgency, the tension, the moments of frustration and exhilaration into real time, making the audience feel and share in the joy of creation.

There was drama. Prince, probably Michael Jackson's greatest rival at the time, was in LA that night, and negotiations were ongoing to get him to join the project. There was levity. Anyone who missed a cue was threatened with having Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles drive them home. When Harry Belafonte, in the back row of the chorus was recognized for spearheading the project, the others spontaneously break into a spirited rendition of the Banana Boat Song. Day-o, day-o, daylight come and me wan' go home ... Future Noble Prize recipient Bob Dylan was probably the heaviest dude in the room, but he was also the most uncomfortable. It fell to master mimic Stevie Wonder to demonstrate how to sing his part and sound like Bob Dylan.

The film overflows with such moments, both in the footage taken that night, and in the recollections of the artists remembering them now. Bruce Springsteen wears the years since that night in the lines on his face. Huey Lewis is disarmingly candid talking about his terror when he was singled out to do harmony with Cindi Lauper and Kim Cairnes.

Despite the excesses of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, it was an age of innocence. These iconic figures were still artists, not brands. Marketing was still rough around the edges. Nobody was worried about being authentic. They had their hands full just being themselves.

As it turns out, it wasn't a moment of checking their egos at the door, but losing them to something greater. Diana Ross was the last superstar to leave the studio, futilely wishing the night wouldn't end.

Diana Ross' name is now in the lengthy dedicated-to list that closes the film. All the fame, all the almighty talent crammed into the studio that night, couldn't outrun the demons outside the door for some of them, and life's inevitabilities awaiting us all.

Poor Things (2023)

Barbie's wonderfully twisted soul sister

[9/10 · 5 January 2024]

They live in different worlds, light years apart, but Margot Robbie's Barbie and Emma Stone's Bella Baxter in "Poor Things" are actually long lost sisters this movie awards season.

After "Barbie" rang out 2023 as the poster child for a very good year of girl power, I kicked off 2024 by catching up with "Poor Things" on the big screen. While both Barbie and Bella are on missions to find themselves, Bella turns out to be more provocative and stimulating to spend some quality time with. True, she's something of a nymphomaniac, but that just adds to her charm.

She's a wiggy, whimsical one-of-a-kind creation from a place between Frankenstein and Monty Python. And Yorgos Lanthimos's gorgeous, eye-popping movie around her - literally the world of a mad scientist - has leapfrogged up my awards choice list for so boldly and originally taking on my favorite movie themes of all: You know, the meaning of life, and stuff like that.

Set in - or more like, launched from - Victorian London in the 1890s, it is a role-reversed variation on the Frankenstein theme. Bella is the reanimated creation of renowned surgeon Dr. Godwin Baxter (a perfectly cast Willem Dafoe). Although it's his face that's stitched together, as opposed to her perfect beauty, the fact that she calls him "God" and he refers to her as "an experiment" pretty well sums up their relationship. At least at the beginning.

Not to give away any spoilers not revealed in the trailers, but bringing Bella to life entails her evolution from infant to woman, all in the obviously all grown-up body of Emma Stone. The role's physical requirements alone are astounding. In the early scenes just learning to walk is the challenge. Throw in a heaping helping of courage required to play Bella once she discovers sex - but Stone's all in, in every frame.

It's a bravura performance, hilarious at times, wise and profound at others. Her Golden Globe nomination is much deserved, and an Oscar nomination is a foregone conclusion.

Wanton yet still innocent and pure, the sexual stage of her development is reminiscent of Mark Twain's observation: "Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...!" Once Bella discovers this supremest of delights, she can't understand why people just don't do it all the time.

Dr. Baxter has a young assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) who's smitten on first sight of Bella. But rakish defrocked attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) also learns of Dr. Baxter's marvelous creation and comes sniffing around.

Bella has yet to learn the meaning of evil intentions, and is happy to take the cad at his word and go traveling with him. On a sort of Victorian update of the Odyssey, she proves herself a quick study and quite resourceful in the ways of the world.

Almost from the beginning, she senses she has little use for the petty minds and puny imaginations of "polite society." In this respect she is like the film's director Lanthimos, who, it seems, doesn't suffer fools or hypocrisy gladly. After testing limits of taste and sexual norms in "The Lobster" and "The Rivals," he fully hits his stride with "Poor Things," tiptoeing along a titillating tightrope between mindless lust and profound revelation.

The fact that both Dafoe and Ruffalo give what may be the best performances in their brilliant careers further attests to Lanthimos's directorial talents. By the story's climax Ruffalo draws laughter for just showing up on screen, while Dafoe goes to the other end of the spectrum, tapping into a source of real love.

The script adapted by Toby McNamara from Alasdair Gray's dark comic novel adds to the performances, and to the sense of "Poor Things" as a unique, if bizarre, work of art. The characters speak Victorian English, including sexual euphemisms, with 21st century sensibilities, often with laugh-out-loud results. Throw in colorful Monty Pythonish flying machines, steamships and architecture, and the results feel wacky and whimsically lost in time and space.

The climactic joke in "Barbie" is that being a plastic doll means she's lacking certain parts essential to be an actual woman. In Bella Baxter's case, it's these very parts that lead to discovery ...and to danger.

Emma Stone, who also produced "Poor Things," said she wanted to play the role to explore so many dimensions of what it means to be a woman.

But on her odyssey to "see what the world is really like," she and her co-stars paint an even grander picture of what it means to be a human, in a rollicking, challenging, illuminating and gloriously entertaining raunchy gem of a movie.

Ferrari (2023)

Vroom with a view

[7/10 · 4 January 2024]

Even if he didn't have the perfect name for the job, after seeing "Ferrari" it's hard to picture anyone other than Adam Driver starring in it.

This despite the fact he's 20 years younger than Italian automotive icon Enzo Ferrari was during the film's 1957 time frame. After being part of "The House of Gucci" ensemble, Driver had the accent down. He just had to dye his hair gray and add some prosthetics to more closely resemble the former race driver now struggling to keep his storied company afloat.

Disregard the contrived brouhaha that the role should have gone to an Italian actor - Driver nails it.

The studio is billing this as a mix of "Grand Prix" and "The Godfather," thanks to its gorgeously recreated Italian settings. Race tracks. Colorful villages. The streets of Rome. Dimly lit opulent interiors.

It's Vroom with a View.

The venerable Michael Mann, who pioneered using automobiles as co-stars with the human actors in "Miami Vice," is a natural to direct. He has a whole toy box to play with in the voluptuously sculpted, ridiculously loud and powerful fleet of red racing machines embossed with the Ferrari stallion emblem.

In their leather jackets, cigarette in one hand, blond magazine cover girl on the other arm, the drivers - including Patrick Dempsey as Piero Taruffi - were the rock stars of the era on tracks across Europe. But in Italy, Enzo Ferrari towered above them major domo style, alpha to the max, ramrod straight, always impeccably dressed in suit and tie, every gray hair in place above his signature sunglasses.

Racing, it turns out, was less daunting than keeping the company books in the black.

That job fell to his fiery wife and partner Laura (Penélope Cruz). She managed the business side of the factory whose client list favored wealthy playboys and Middle Eastern sheiks. As opposed to rivals like Jaguar, for whom racing was good for selling cars, the Ferrari factory sold (a lot less) cars in order to support Enzo's lethal addiction, the passion for speed and checkered-flag victory.

Unfortunately for volatile Laura who keeps a pistol in her nightstand, when Enzo's heart isn't at the track, it's in the villa he provides for Lina (Shailene Woodley), the "other woman" he adores, along with their son Piero.

The Ferraris' marriage is as combustible as the cars precipitously fueled with huge funnels in the pit stops. Passions are most inflamed - and Driver and Cruz's performances at their best - when they're fighting.

Most of the excitement though, comes from the cars, especially in the grueling 1,000-mile Mille Miglia road race across Italy. The late Brock Yates - legendary in automotive culture for decades - co-wrote the script before he died in 2016. Director Mann shares Enzo Ferrari's obsession with every detail of these miraculous machines, putting us in the cockpit in one second, sending us soaring high above the undulating roadways in the next, turning it all into visual poetry.

"Ferrari" takes its place this awards season in a crowded field of mid-20th-Century period pieces, several of them about sports. Time is not necessarily on their side. The events they depict are too close to be historical, but feel dated and quaint in today's world. For all the mechanical sex appeal Ferraris conjured in the '50s, the cars on-screen - not to mention the Alfa Romeo and Fiat sedans the characters drive away from the track - look slightly cartoony in 2024.

When Francis Ford Coppola created the "Godfather" trilogy, it was a seminal, organic process. The images, moods and textures came from a place deep in his soul to spring to life cinematically. The movie screen was his Sistine Chapel ceiling on which to paint his masterpiece.

Imitation may be a form of flattery and homage, but borrowing so much "Godfather" imagery and screen craft - opera on the music track, cuts back and forth from Catholic ritual to real-world dangers - inadvertently creates a race in which "Ferrari" comes in second.

"Ferrari" has the added burden of being about real people - granted, larger-than-life members of a dynasty rather than a mere family. "The House of Gucci" met a similar challenge with operatic, over-the-top strokes, painting its characters as clowns and buffoons when warranted. Aside from Enzo 's sardonic one-liners, "Ferrari" doesn't have much of a sense of humor.

Enzo wasn't an amoral godfather, but wasn't a particularly likable guy, either.

He was just a captain of industry who never outgrew a boyish delight in going fast, engaged in a sport where victory comes at a high price indeed.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Brilliant search for "Truth"

[8/10 · 26 December 2023]

At first "Anatomy of a Fall" seems like a so-so title for an excellent movie, winner of the Palm d'Or at Cannes, now nominated for numerous Golden Globes including Best Drama.

Directed by Justine Triet who co-wrote the script with her partner Arthur Hurai, it's a murder mystery that evolves into compelling courtroom drama. But what it's really about is stories - the ones we tell each other, the ones we tell in public and the ones we tell ourselves.

Stories, like the verdict in a trial, can never be more than approximations of the truth. If there even were such a thing asthe truth.

The script follows what happens after 11-year-old Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) returns from a winter walk with his border collie Snoop, to find the body of his father Samuel (Samuel Theis) lying dead in the snow. Samuel would seem to have fallen from the third-floor balcony of their French chalet, but after the police arrive, they suspect his wife Sandra (Sandra Hüller), who was in the house at the time, may have been involved.

Complicating things, Daniel has been almost blind ever since an accident damaged his optic nerve a few years earlier. He's not an ideal witness.

The film's original title "Anatomie d'une chute" has a more poetic ring. In subtitled French the movie is up for a foreign-language Golden Globe, even though much of the dialogue is spoken in English.

"Blind Justice" might be a better title. Rather than a whodunnit, the murder mystery is whether it was a murder at all. And was the "Fall" an accident or a metaphor?

When the case goes to court, details of the couple's marriage start emerging, each more uncomfortable than the last. Wife and husband were both writers; she was the more successful of the two. Competitiveness and jealousy added to the insecurities, blame, shame and other resentments just under the surface of their marriage, which had been under additional financial pressures since their son's accident.

Such raw, intimate candor looking at marital stress marks this as a foreign film, where the concept of Mature Audiences doesn't have anything to do with whether anyone takes their clothes off. (American audiences prefer the simpler emotions of the Marvel Universe.) But the terrain will be instantly recognizable, if painful,to anyone who's ever been in a serious relationship.

Is their crumbling marriage the "Fall" in the title? The fact that wife and husband were both writers, turning their lives into storyboards, creating fictions to live in, adds another level to the question of what really happened. How much their creative tensions and rivalry reflect those of the couple who wrote the film's script is anyone's guess.

Maintaining her innocence despite viewers' growing doubts, Sandra is a stoic figure in the courtroom, guided by her attorney (Swann Arlaud) playing defense against brilliant interrogation by the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz).

All the humiliation Sandra is experiencing so publicly, is made worse by the pain the revelations are causing her son, who insists on attending the trial each day.

Hüller's performance is wondrous, spanning the spectrum from vulnerability to courage.

For all the raw nerves it exposes, "Anatomy of a Fall" is visually beautiful, richly cinematic from its sweeping mountain panoramas to telling details in closeups of its cast of characters, whom we come to care deeply about as the story goes on.

While movies set in courtrooms are usually white-knuckle rides to reach a verdict, writer-director Triet has more than that on her mind. The law, it turns out, can be a pretty arbitrary realm. It's an arena of competing subjectivities - whoever comes up with the most convincing story wins.

Not a very reassuring concept as it resonates in courtrooms thousands of miles from the one in the movie.

The story does reach a final verdict, but leaves the distinction between guilt and innocence purposely blurry. In the face of such uncertainty, personal morality is all we've got to reach the right conclusion.

"Anatomy of a Fall" reaches the right conclusion.

And the title turns out to have been perfect all along.

Bravo!

The Boys in the Boat (2023)

Predictably uplifting

[7/10 · 25 December 2023]

... Merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream ...

A huge bestseller when it was published in 2013, Daniel James Brown's "The Boys in the Boat" was a big hit in my circle of friends. The kind of book that gets recommended, if not passed around, pal to pal.

Set in the '30s it was the true story of the University of Washington junior varsity rowing team who not only gunned down the storied, legacy crews of California and Ivy League colleges, but went on to the 1936 Olympics in Adolf Hitler's Berlin. It was an adrenalized page turner, a movie waiting to happen.

Now that it's getting to the screen, it helps to have George Clooney in the director's chair. Although he stays offscreen, the double-Oscar-winning actor, producer and director is the biggest name on the project.

It's his face - generally recognized as one of the coolest guys on the planet - in many of the production stills and the "for your consideration" ads targeted at industry voters this awards season. George and co-producer Grant Heslov also took part in a recent Zoom press conference for the film along with cast members Joel Edgerton, who stars as taciturn coach Al Ulbrickson; Callum Turner, who plays team member Joe Rantz; and Hadley Robinson, who lights up the screen as Joe's sweetheart, Joyce.

Opening in theaters Christmas Day, it's a feel-good throwback to old-fashioned moviemaking.

Taking place during the Great Depression, the scrappy kids at their oars offered glimpses of optimism and hope, rare commodities in those tough times. Rowing was a popular spectator sport in that pre-ESPN era with spectators lining river banks and in some cases following the action in train cars on the shore keeping pace with the sleek 8-man wooden shells slicing through the water.

Not just an incredibly demanding sport, rowing was a culture, too. The rowing world was made of wood - not just the glossy racing shells, but also their big-doored, high-ceilinged boat houses. You can almost smell the resins and varnish coming from the boathouse surrounded by lush forest on the Seattle campus.

As the team keeps achieving more success, the gorgeous historically recreated settings move, first to colleges on the East Coast before heading for swastika-adorned Germany. Legendary speedster Jesse Owens was another member of the U. S. Olympic team that year. During the press conference Clooney acknowledged borrowing camera angles from Hitler's propagandist Leni Riefenstahl for the climactic Olympic rowing scenes.

"We like to use Nazis whenever we can for filming," he joked.

The mood was light during the Zoom press conference, now that the film was in the can and the cast's arduous training was long past.

London-born actor Turner, whose Joe Rantz is as close as the eight-man team can get to having a hero, acknowledged that he hadn't had any previous rowing experience.

"None of us had actually. And we turn up in February, and we get on the river. And it's snowing. And we're all in the tight shorts and freezing cold and have no skill at being in the boat. And after about three weeks, George and Grant come down to have a look and check in on us. We weren't in a good place. And I could see the pain behind the smile on George's face." "That wasn't pain. That was fear," corrected Heslov.

The boys on the real team hadn't had any experience, either. For Joe and several teammates, making the team - beating the scores of hopefuls for the eight seats (plus the coxswain) - meant getting room and board at the university.

Unlike Ivy Leaguers born to the sport, the junior Huskies were rough hewn. "They were lumberjacks," said Clooney. They came together as a team "out of necessity, out of hunger, out of having nothing else." The actors trained together for five months. Unlike their competitors in the film in new fiberglass shells, their boat, the Huskie Clipper, was made of wood like the original. Beyond just acting, there was a sense of athletic accomplishment for Turner and his teammates.

"The hardest part about rowing is that you all have to be in complete unison," said the actor. "There's no, like, hiding. And if one person is out by a millimeter, the boat suffers." For his part, Clooney faced a different set of challenges.

"The oars are, you know, 15 feet long. And then the boats are 40-some feet long. So, you can't get close to the boats with the camera. And you can't get side by side or ahead of the boats with your camera boat, 'cause you'll capsize the boat. So, we had to come up with a design to get in tight enough to make it exciting. Meaning, we're on an 80-foot arm on the boat with a 300-millimeter lens, 200-millimeter lens, down low, getting wet, trying to hold focus while you're doing that. So, there was a ton of, like, math to try to make those things exciting." On top of that, neither Joe Rantz or Coach Ulbrickson were especially loquacious. They were men of action rather than words. On the printed page this is no big deal. On the big screen it can be. Hadley Robinson's feistiness along with her beauty, and Courtney Henggeler's portrayal of the coach's wife, Hazel, go a long way to humanizing their male partners.

In a key scene, Joe and Joyce share what Clooney called "a 1940s movie kiss" - in a train station, no less. In a way, "The Boys in the Boat" itself is a 1940s movie. It's beautiful to look at, it wears its heart on its sleeve. It comes from an era when wholesome was cool. Standing up and cheering was nothing to be embarrassed by.

But the psychological reserve of its characters played better on the page than they do on the screen.

Despite Clooney's assured direction and the unbreakable spirit of the cast, neither the predictable script nor the soft sentiments of Alexandre Desplat musical score produce the irrepressible "Chariots of Fire" sorts of emotions that spell the difference between good sports movies and great ones.

The Iron Claw (2023)

Packs a powerful punch

[7/10 · 23 December 2023]

Even before we hear of the family curse, there's a sense that things aren't going to end well for the Von Erich brothers. When it comes to family businesses, professional wrestling wouldn't be most people's first choice.

If they had a choice.

Zac Efron, bulked up to be almost unrecognizable from his High School Musical teen heartthrob days to play Kevin, oldest of the four real-life good ol' boys out of West Texas who came to prominence on the wrestling circuit in the 1980s.

Jeremy Allen White is brother Kerry, Harris Dickinson is David, and Stanley Simons is Mike. Along with Kevin they were destined to be known almost as much for their bad luck as for all the championship belts they would win.

Guiding their rise was their dad Fritz (Holt McCallany), himself a former professional wrestler whose squeeze-the-forehead-til-the-brains-come-out move provided his signature in the ring, and the title for the movie. Maura Tierney is their Bible-reading mom, Doris, the long-suffering archetype, a staple in stories like this.

Under Sean Durkin's writing and direction, '80s hair styles and wardrobes along with the cars and décor of the era provide eye-catching distractions around the performances, which, as you might imagine, are pretty twangy and gritty.

"The Iron Claw" takes its place this awards season with "Nyad" and "The Boys in the Boat," reenactments of underdog achievements in sports often overshadowed by flashier competition.

Pro-wrestling is hardly an unknown quantity in the sports world, although it's always been hard to find the line between actual competition and orchestrated show-biz.

Kevin tries to explain the difference to Pam (a scene-stealing Lily James), who knows she's gonna marry him from the moment they meet. The tight trunks, the poufy hair, the sequinned capes and the cockfighting trash talk are as essential as physical conditioning in this line of work.

They're all reminders that one of the earliest superstars in the ring was known as Gorgeous George. More recently Dwayne Johnson did pretty well in the sport, too, before segueing into pure entertainment and becoming the biggest star in the world.

The spectacle and artificiality can't disguise the extreme conditioning and strength needed to set foot in the ring. Growing up on the family ranch, the brothers bonded closely, perhaps because their dad was such an unforgiving SOB.

On a paranoid mission to avenge forces in the world he felt had constantly wronged him, his boys become his instrument of revenge. Having a drill sergeant for a father helped forge the unique love they had for each other, but couldn't save them from daddy's demons.

Writer-director Durkin observes rather than judges the dysfunctional dynamics and the brotherly hijinks, surrounding them with beautifully choreographed and filmed action in the ring. For all the melodrama in tights, or maybe because of it, the gladiatorial dance is amazing to behold.

As the centerpiece of everything happening on screen, Efron's performance is an impressive surprise. While he couldn't overcome the height difference between himself and the actual Kevin, he makes up for it with an utterly believable presence in the ring, and levels of emotional nuance outside it.

With that overdeveloped physique and a different shape to his face (the result of jaw surgery after an accident), he graduates from being the magazine cover pretty boy, finding emotional heft and soul that honor his character's bedrock, redneck roots without pandering to them. He may not make the final cut in this year's best actor Oscar race, but deserves a truly honorable mention.

After all the dark places "The Iron Claw" takes us, it comes up with a final scene and tear-jerking postscript nobody could have seen coming. Not a victory, exactly, but a happy ending for a family that certainly deserves one.

Saltburn (2023)

Seductive mischief making from Emerald Fennell

[7/10 · 21 December 2023]

She's a mischief maker, that Emerald Fennell.

Last year, the versatile English actress, writer and director won a bunch of awards, including an Oscar for writing "Promising Young Woman." It was a wry tale of gender vengeance featuring Carey Mulligan as a med school dropout who finds brilliant ways of settling scores with the perpetrators of a gang rape of her classmate. Actually, her target was more like men in general.

Now Fennell's back with "Saltburn," another diabolical tale of settling scores that dances precariously on the line between black comedy and horror show. It's brilliantly written, dangerously sensual, sumptuous to watch, and thoroughly unsettling - that's the point.

Barry Keoghan stars as Oliver Quick, a bright young Oxford student often at the mercy or the butt of the joke for wealthy, legacy classmates like snobby Farleigh Start (Archie Madekwe). Seemingly comfortable enough in the role of nerdy outcast in his scholarship wardrobe, his fortunes change when he is befriended by classmate Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). Felix is everything that Oliver isn't - obscenely wealthy, charismatic beyond belief, catnip for any woman in sight, utterly assured in every moment.

The friendship begins with an act of giving on Oliver's part, but is that enough to explain Felix's endless generosity in return? They're hardly equals, but the rich son of nobility keeps acting as though they are.

Are friends just playthings for Felix? Is their improbable relationship love, or lust, or what?

We suspect we're going to find out ... but we're not sure we want to.

The enigmas mount after Felix invites Oliver to his family's opulent estate - Saltburn - for the summer.

In endless corridors lined with original art and folio editions of Shakespeare, Oliver is greeted by the family, a decadent bunch for sure. When he first meets Felix's father, Sir James Catton (Richard E. Grant), he's giggling like an eighth grader watching a video of "Superbad." Sir James is in the library with his loquacious wife Elspeth (a terrific Rosamund Pike), who calls everyone "darling," but can barely wait for them to leave the room to start talking about them. Her first such target, played by Carey Mulligan, is identified in the credits as Poor Dear Pamela. The coterie includes daughter Venetia (Alison Oliver), pouty and blond, Oliver's first seduction just waiting to happen.

Farleigh Start, Oliver's nemesis from Oxford, is here, too. He's a cousin, his status something between family member and freeloader. Symbiotic relationships - people using, or misusing, or toying with or otherwise exploiting each other - are as close as the Cattons can come to family ties, as they while away the summer in alcohol and swimming spots and one debauchery after another.

Beginning with Keoghan, last seen earning an supporting-actor Oscar nomination for "The Banshees of Inisherin," the performances are wicked and delicious.

Underpinning them all is the peculiar bond between Oliver and Felix. Oliver talks to the camera periodically - a device director Fennell uses to frame the narrative - seeking the distinction between loving and being in love. But we suspect that neither he nor we are getting to the sordid depths of the matter.

Fennell as a smart, stylish filmmaker, whether it comes to probing psyches or orchestrating amazing tracking shots, going from room to room or building to building, sometimes with scores of extras in the background. She is a master of ambiguity, not tying up loose ends but rather letting questions of character linger.

The fact that she has a devilish sense of humor is another plus ... or drawback if you don't have the stomach for "Saltburn's" eat-the-rich school of comedy.

American Symphony (2023)

Wondrous journey into two souls

[8/10 · 17 December 2023]

2022 was the best of times, the worst of times for Jon Batiste and Suleika Janouad.

Both. Everywhere. All at once. In every moment.

It was the year the couple married. It was the year Jon left his high-profile gig leading the band on The Late Show with Steven Colbert. He would go on to win five Grammys, including the coveted Album of the Year, which hadn't been won by a Black artist in more than a decade.

Although Suleika's bestselling "Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted" would be acclaimed as one of the best books of the 2022, she would spend most of the year in hospital beds, receiving chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant and other treatments for the recurrence of acute myeloid leukemia, a rare condition that had first stricken her a decade earlier.

On September 22 of that year, Jon Batiste premiered his "American Symphony" in Carnegie Hall. His wife was in the audience.

These events provide the framework for Matthew Heineman's powerfully affecting documentary that shares the title of Batiste's musical creation. Its Higher Ground production company was created by Michelle Obama and her husband in 2018 with the goal of lifting diverse voices in the entertainment industry. It's playing on Netflix.

It feels meant to be, writing about "American Symphony" after recent blogs reviewing "Maestro" and "American Fiction." They have a lot in common. Like "Maestro," it presents a loving marriage of creative giants, the husband fulfilling his artistic genius, the wife beset by setbacks and pain beyond belief.

Like "American Fiction," it focuses on a brilliant Black artist staking his creative claim in a society built on a foundation of the enslavement of his race. (The similarity of the films' titles is unfortunate, confusing and diluting each's powerful impact during this awards season.) Except, unlike the other two films, "American Symphony" doesn't have actors. It has the actual people. They're not acting, they're living their lives.

Filmmaker Heineman is the third member of their marriage, capturing an intimacy that rarely makes its way to the screen. He's there with them in their bedroom or her hospital bed, as they grapple with everything coming their way. In one light-hearted interlude, Suleika takes Jon to the snow. He has never sledded before. We ride down the hill with them, lost for a moment in giddy, silly escape.

But not for long.

Pain, isolation and discomfort are givens in Suleika's illness. What's not expected is the resilience, philosophical strength and occasional bursts of humor she finds to face them. In her bed she starts painting giraffes. They quite good, actually.

By her side supporting her, Jon is also up against a different set of challenges. Scion of a New Orleans musical dynasty, his gifts transported him to Juilliard en route to a rarified place in the musical hierarchy where fame itself may become his greatest danger.

Heineman - and his three co-cinematographers - transport us into his brain, recording telephone sessions with Jon's therapist flowing into voice-over commentary that unflinchingly probes his artistic process, and the insecurities besetting artists no matter how much acclaim they achieve.

The documentary was filmed in the time of Covid, but finds endless expressiveness in its characters' eyes. When they remove their masks, their faces are visually striking element in the film's grand design. Jon's smile is sunshine; his dance moves are joy itself.

The creation of Batiste's symphony provides a plot of sorts, as he mines deep ore in all the cultures that have produced "America," beginning with the Indigenous people who were here when the Whites arrived, bringing the Blacks in chains a short time later. He melds their sounds into a musical masterwork that defies labels - classical, jazz, roots, blues, bebop, hip-hop and a hundred others - because it's them all.

But the film's real symphony isn't just the music. It's the two people/ at the center of the story, bravely leading us on this wondrous journey into their souls.

American Fiction (2023)

A work of genius, heart and hilarity

[8/10 · 11 December 2023]

American Fiction

If alphabetical order hadn't put it at the top of the cheat sheets I consult for Oscar predictions, I might never have seen "American Fiction." It would have been my loss. A huge one.

Not painted on the large cinematic canvases of its likely Best Picture competitors like "Oppenheimer," "Barbie," "Killers of the Flower Moon" or "Poor Things," director-co-writer Cord Jefferson's wise comedy scores its bull's-eyes on a life-size target, somewhere between the heart and the brain. The writing is brilliantly original, coming at well-worn black racial themes with eyes so fresh, you feel like you're seeing the subject for the first time.

Jeffrey Wright carries the film, showing a side of himself often missing from past powerhouse dramatic performances. He's lovable ... despite the fact that his character doesn't know how to be. His Thelonius Ellison - you can call him "Monk" - is a prickly, Harvard-educated California university literature professor, author of several novels that no one, other than adoring academic critics, read.

Earning its audacious title, "American Fiction's" plot is as well crafted as its metaphors. Before it's finished, black stereotypes and tone-deaf white efforts to embrace them have fallen under its satirical scalpel. So have the worlds of academia, publishing and Hollywood moviemaking. Its humor is smart and sly. It's no coincidence that Monk shares his last name with author Ralph Ellison, whose "Invisible Man" helped usher in the black American literary renaissance of the '50s and '60s.

While its satire is spot on, at its heart the movie is really about family. Turns out Monk isn't the only "doctor" in his family. His sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) are physicians. The Ellisons are upscale enough to have a beach house as well as their big family home where matriarch Agnes (Leslie Uggams) is in the early stages of Alzheimer's All that brain power doesn't make them any less dysfunctional than other families. They just have wittier things to say about it.

After Monk is drawn back to his family roots in Boston, his writing career takes an unexpected turn. What starts as a prank protest of "authentic" portrayals of black people in mainstream culture - notably by overnight-sensation black novelist Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) - inadvertently transforms Monk into a caricature himself. Which, to his dismay, is the path to the literary glory he has spent his life chasing.

"The dumber I behave, the richer I get," he complains to his agent (John Ortiz). (This isn't a spoiler - it's in the trailer.) Considering how intelligent the script is, it's ironic that a single word plays a crucial, and hilarious, role summing things up. You know the word - the one that begins with "F." Watching "American Fiction" is richly rewarding, punctuated by laugh-out-loud moments steeped in real affection for its gently flawed characters. It has already picked up wins at early film festivals; expect plenty more nominations all around its cast and creators as awards season cranks into high gear.

Its rich vein of empathy and compassion make for magnificent fiction. It truly is a work of literature as much as genius filmmaking.

Watching it, I found myself uttering out loud, that word I mentioned above.

For me it wasn't a curse at all, but a spontaneous expression of admiration, awe and pure joy.

Maestro (2023)

Ambitious epic of highs and lows

[7/10 · 6 December 2023]

An old adage holds that meeting an idol isn't always a good idea, if you don't want to be disillusioned.

That's the takeaway from "Maestro," a penetrating portrait of monumental musical artist Leonard Bernstein, starring, directed and co-written by Bradley Cooper.

Considering how much sublime beauty and exuberant joy he brought to the world as a conductor, composer and concert pianist, "Lenny's" life offstage was a glorious mess. Darkness and unrequited hunger in his psyche counterbalanced the soaring highs he shared with adoring audiences.

Spanning three decades beginning in 1946, Cooper's ambitious epic follows the artist's meteoric rise and reign in concert halls around the world. His accomplishments extended to theatrical stages ("West Side Story") and screens large and small, including his Young People's Concert series in the new medium of television.

But more central to Cooper's grand design, it chronicles Bernstein's 25-year marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).

Cooper gives Mulligan top billing in the credits. Deservedly so. Hers is the more layered performance as she advances from radiant brilliance as a stage actress through the willing sacrifice of her own career in service to her husband's, into final painful decline.

Complicating their relationship was Bernstein's bisexuality. When, as a young assistant conductor, he received the phone call that would change his life - to step in for an ailing guest conductor and, without rehearsal, conduct the New York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall that afternoon - he was in bed with Jerome Robbins, destined for his own Broadway fame as a dancer and choreographer.

Although he submerged his sexuality in ensuing decades, becoming instead a doting father to his three children, Lenny would eventually become less discreet in his pursuit and seduction of younger men.

He was a charismatic figure of boundless enthusiasm and insatiable appetites. For all the exacting precision he expected from his musicians, on the podium he seemed ravished by the music, his face in ever increasing ecstasy, utterly spent by the final note.

Cooper learned to conduct with the same ferocity he brings to every detail of his portrayal - the frenetic Manhattan accent punctuated by the ever-present cigarette in his fingers or hanging from his lips. ("Maestro" should come with a surgeon general's warning of secondary smoke risks just from watching it.) Around the central performances, with stars like Sarah Silverman in the supporting cast, Cooper captures bygone eras with distinctive visual touches. He'll shoot dialogue shots from the distance, making the settings in Manhattan, Tanglewood or the Bernstein home in upstate New York as important as the words. The cinematography, following "Oppenheimer's lead in black and white and color, is as lavish and bold as the musical score.

The Bernsteins' Park Avenue duplex overlooking Central Park also became a hub of activity, awash in upscale liberal cocktail parties brilliantly immortalized by Tom Wolfe in "Radical Chic and Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers." Here as on the podium, Bernstein was always "on," always performing, the center of attention, sucking all the air out of the room.

Considering that he essentially launched his career as the pretty boy in "The Hangover's" hapless quartet, Bradley Cooper continues to demonstrate himself as a consummate artist on both sides of the camera. "Maestro" nicely follows his remake of "A Star Is Born," which also probed the tortured soul of music making.

Creative genius, it seems, isn't always a gift for the handful of humans who possess it. In Bernstein's case it felt like an unachievable responsibility, a curse as much as a blessing.

As a member of the audience that grew up watching Bernstein's Young People's Concerts in the '50s, he remains a mythic figure, more demigod than human to me. Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese are about my age. Similar feelings my have prompted them to sign on as producers of Cooper's film.

Lydia Tár also grew up watching the Young People's Concerts, which shaped her ambition to become a conductor herself. Lydia, of course, wasn't real, but the brilliant creation of Cate Blanchett and writer-director Todd Fields in last year's similarly themed "Tár." Ironically, it's Lydia rather than Lenny who is ultimately the more compelling screen character. His very human failings don't fit nearly as neatly into three-act structure as her fictional flaws did.

True, Leonard Bernstein's artistic genius achieved immortality in his lifetime.

But sucking all the air out of the room gets annoying after a while.

May December (2023)

A comedy? Really?

[7/10 · 30 November 2023]

Walking a thin line between elegant and creepy, Todd Haynes' "May December" is a suspenseful psychological maze that leaves you knowing less than you did when you started.

Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman star, playing two versions of the same person. She's Gracie Atherton-Yoo, who made tabloid and People Magazine covers years earlier when she seduced a coworker in the pet store where they both had jobs. She was in her mid-30s at the time; her co-worker, Joe Yoo, was 13.

She gave birth to their child in jail. After her release she wed the boy, and they're still married with more kids a quarter-century later.

Julianne plays the real Gracie. Natalie is TV star Elizabeth Berry, who will be playing Gracie in an upcoming movie. She has come to Gracie's beachfront home in scenic Savannah to research the role.

Charles Melton plays hunky husband Joe, who's all grown up now. He's about the same age as Elizabeth, in fact.

If this is sounding vaguely familiar in a tawdry tabloid way, it's because it was inspired by the true story of elementary school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau who went to prison in the 1990s for raping a 12-year-old student in her class. She married him on her release.

Writers Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik aren't trying to tell her story, but rather to untangle its hairball of intertwined emotions. The relationship between actress and subject is pretty weird to begin with. (I must have missed the part in the script about why Gracie and Joe agreed to the deal in the first place.) But even as Portman and Moore merge visually on-screen, sometimes with only the color of their hair to tell them apart, they're obviously at cross purposes. Gracie is a sly one, or maybe just batshit nuts. Under the guise of artistic process, it's not hard to notice that the TV star is here to steal her soul.

Oscar winners Portman and Moore have a field day with the material, playing cat and mouse, continually switching which one is the aggressor. Haynes is a wily observer of their potentially lethal interplay, enhancing the increasingly sensual undercurrents with mirrors and amazing cinematic inflection points.

It's all about playing roles ... and playing each other.

Husband Joe gets in on the volatile sexual chemistry, too. Seemingly an innocent victim when the relationship began, he now seems to be the prize in the undeclared catfight. Whether he will be collateral damage before it's over is another thread in Haynes' kinky mystery.

With notebook always in hand, the actress continues probing. Gracie's ex (Chris Tenzis), the kids they had together, the pet store owner, the lawyer in Gracie's trial - she interviews them all, trying to find the pieces Gracie won't share. The detective work sends her, and the audience, down lots of rabbit holes.

Characters imprisoned - metaphorically if not literally - for their sexual inclinations is familiar territory for award-winning director Haynes. In his "Far From Heaven" in 2002, Dennis Quaid played a perfect '50s husband hiding his homosexuality from his wife, also played by Julianne Moore. Haynes' award-winning "Carol" in 2015 follows a developing relationship between Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, set once again against the sternly disapproving social norms of 1950s Manhattan.

Haynes also directed Blanchett in "I'm Not There," where she was one of six actors (Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Richard Gere among them) portraying Bob Dylan. After that, having just two actresses do one character is child's play.

As much as Haynes is a deep diver into dangerous unsettling emotional places, he is also an impeccable visual artist paying homage to cinematic glories of bygone eras. He's fond of saturated colors and lush orchestrations.

Interspersing closeups of cocoons evolving into butterflies - one of the script's sub-themes - with gorgeous Savannah landscapes and interiors, "May December" is as gorgeous as its stars to just gaze at.

Netflix, which premieres the film Friday, is billing "May December" as a comedy drama. That may be for Golden Globe consideration, which has separate categories for each.

But finding the humor is a bit of a stretch. Whatever laughter it generates is the nervous kind, discovering yourself in an uncomfortable situation just beyond your grasp, hoping you're not the butt of the joke.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023)

Another delicious Wes Anderson confection

[8/10 · 21 November 2023]

Wes Anderson has done it again.

Last summer he snuck the wiggy sci-fi comedy "Asteroid City" onto movie screens moments before everyone caught Berbieheimer fever. In a sly way, "Asteroid City" was a combination of the two films that were destined to rewrite box-office history.

Like "Oppenheimer," it offered its own version of America's dangerous faith in technology to combat the Cold War paranoia of the '50s. And like "Barbie," it hid its worrisome themes in pastel plastic wrapping.

Of course, being a Wes Anderson creation, it felt like it could have just as easily been a fable or fairy tale imagined by a child.

Anderson's new "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar," was, in fact, imagined by Roald Dahl. Ralph Fiennes stands in for the author in an all-male cast also featuring Benedict Cumberbach, Dov Petal and Sir Ben Kingsley, enjoying a comically light-hearted final chapter in an acting career that pinnacled with his Oscar-winning portrayal of "Gandhi" 40 years ago.

Running a mere 37 minutes and playing on Netflix, "Henry Sugar" has modest aspirations. It's a flavorful appetizer on the eve of heavier movie award season feasts coming soon.

As portrayed by Cumberbach, sometimes in red pajamas, Henry Sugar is not the real name of a British idler. Henry, the author observes, isn't a bad man ... but not a good one either. Blessed with family wealth, he's mostly concerned with enlarging it. Gambling, not necessarily by the rules, is his preferred method.

When he comes across an account of an Indian yogi who practices the art of seeing without using his eyes, Henry realizes that mastering this skill is his path to limitless fortunes in the casinos he frequents.

As with "Asteroid City," Anderson turns Dahl's droll wordplay into a plot like nesting dolls - stories within stories within stories. Fiennes serves as the first narrator, introducing the character and setting the scene in his fastidious writing studio. His speaks in clipped, double-time cadences that the other characters pick up as they take over the narrative, which moves from England to India and back again. The distinctive verbal rhythms are reminders that fictional characters all speak with one voice - the author's. To bring home the point and add to the fun, many of the actors play more than one role.

The rapid delivery of the lines makes you wonder, briefly, if Anderson is scrimping on run time in the name of economy. But of course he isn't. It's just a way of calling attention to the words themselves, bursting with Dahl's delight at his own wit and verbal gymnastics.

Anderson brings the same sort of giddy whimsy to the look of the film - children's book illustrations come to life, literally dropping onto the screen like gaily painted stage backdrops.

Luckily for all - beginning with Henry Sugar himself - there's a moral to the story that redeems his previously wasted life. Insisting to the end that what we've witnessed is true - except for the names and details that have been changed - filmmaker Anderson not only attests to the powers of Roald Dahl's imagination, but even more so to his own.

The Holdovers (2023)

Lots to like, but ...

[7/10 · 21 November 2023]

Considering that it's billed as a feel-good movie for the holidays, there's something slightly Scroogelike in admitting I didn't love "The Holdovers" as much as I expected to.

There's lots to like though.

It reunites award-winning director Alexander Payne with his "Sideways" star Paul Giamatti in a bittersweet coming-of-age dramedy set in a New England prep school in the last week of 1970. Giamatti plays priggish classics teacher Paul Hunham, convinced that civilization hit its zenith with ancient Greece and has been in a downward slide ever since.

He treats his students accordingly, referring to them as troglodytes and reprobates.

Although he bullies his students with his intellectual rigor, Mr. Hunham is hard to take too seriously. His corduroy wardrobe is stodgy, he smells, and his eyes go in different directions. "Walleye" is the hardly affectionate nickname given to him behind his back by fellow faculty members as well as the student body of Barton Academy.

Pity the poor handful of boys who can't go home for the holiday break when he gets the assignment of babysitting them in the dorms. Among them is Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a bright, rebellious challenge for the by-the-rules teacher. Feeding them is Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), the black cafeteria supervisor grieving the loss of her own son in Vietnam. They're a unique trinity, three broken souls sheltering in place at the allegedly most wonderful time of the year.

David Hemingson contributes the script that echoes with the preppie angst of such classics as "Catcher in the Rye" or "Dead Poet's Society." Young Dominic Sessa makes his screen debut, more than holding his half of the two shots with lovable veteran Giamatti. Sessa never seems to be acting, relying instead on the awkward anxieties of his own adolescence to make the portrayal so real.

"The Holdovers" upends the familiar father-figure-and-son dynamics by making each of them such damaged goods. Throw scene-stealing Randolph into the mix and the movie turns into one of those rare but uplifting instances of everyone saving everyone else.

Like director Payne's best work - personal favorites include "About Schmidt," "Sideways," "Nebraska" and "The Descendants" - the setting is a character in the story. This time it's snowy New England, offering a postcard assortment of colonial settings to come in from and get warm.

While Payne's trademarks are wisdom and empathy for his very vulnerable characters, the one glitch this time is predictability. Ever since Charles Dickens created the template in "A Christmas Carol," audiences have known that heartlessness stems from deep wounds and is, ultimately, a pathway to salvation. We know where "The Holdovers" is headed the first time we see the poster. Hemingson's script offers few surprises. It doesn't crackle. The dialogue often feels like actors reciting lines.

The movie also continues a disquieting trend on screens this year, as I watch eras I actually lived through transformed into what the industry calls period pieces. Often their filmmakers were kids at the time or not even born yet.

Most of the small (but much appreciated) audience for this blog falls into my demographic niche - once invincible baby boomers, now the market for CPAPs and Depends - who may know what I'm talking about.

"Authentic" is a much used word these days, signifying things or people who are real and true. But when I was growing up in those eras that have become period pieces, the word authentic appeared prominently on the boxes of airplanes and battleships my little fingers assembled.

In those days authentic referred to a replica made of plastic.

On my way out of the theater after watching "The Holdovers," I noticed a poster for the 20th anniversary rerelease of "Love Actually." Now there's a holiday classic that still crackles with originality and warmth two decades later. That's the difference between authentic and the real thing, actually.

Oppenheimer (I) (2023)

Haunting tale of haunted triumph

[9/10 · 14 November 2023]

Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" is a tale of triumph and apocalypse, as haunting and haunted as the man whose story it tells.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was the brilliant theoretical physicist chosen to lead America's World War II effort to build an atomic bomb before Adolph Hitler did. For many filmgoers, writer-director Nolan's three-hour thriller provides the introduction to this world-changing figure. He was dubbed "the father of the A-bomb" by a grateful, war-weary America, but a few years later fell victim to McCarthy Era character assassination for his left-leaning political views.

For me, the movie is not only sweeping and magnificent - it's personal. Oppenheimer was a name I knew well, ever since boyhood.

My father, Dr. Alfred Chatenever, was one of the scientists who worked on the top-secret program to develop the bomb, dubbed The Manhattan Project. The project eventually stretched across the country all the way to the tiny town of Los Alamos, secretly constructed from the ground up in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico. But my dad's assignment kept him in Manhattan, working in a clandestine lab hidden in a converted parking garage.

All of this was highly classified at the time. My dad couldn't even tell his wife what he did, or explain to anyone else why he wasn't with the rest of the boys over there in Europe or the South Pacific. But in the years following the war, all three Chatenever kids eventually heard the stories. We knew the players destined for key roles in Nolan's complex narrative - not just Oppenheimer, but other scientists including Albert Einstein, Nils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Edward Teller. And Army General Leslie Groves, who oversaw the two-billion-dollar project - that's billions in 1940s dollars - and personally picked Oppenheimer to guide it.

Stops on Chatenever family summer road trips in the '50s included Oak Ridge, Tennessee, another city built in secret, to house laboratories and facilities to enrich the uranium needed for the bomb. On another trip, we visited Los Alamos itself.

Like Oppenheimer, our dad carried the weight of the bomb on his conscience for the rest of his life. True, it ended World War II ... but it also ushered in a new age perhaps more lethal in its ultimate consequences than the firestorm explosions that leveled the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, claiming more than 100,000 lives.

Working on the bomb had been a moral imperative at the time. Many of the scientists were Jewish, knowing all too well the consequences if Hitler got the bomb first. But once it was clear that Germany's efforts wouldn't succeed, the prospect of whether or not to drop the bomb on Japan became far more ambiguous. A number of top scientists on the project signed a petition urging President Harry Truman not to use the weapon.

It was all grist for the mill in discussions around the Chatenever dinner table. So I had a leg up before setting foot in the theater to see Christopher Nolan's version of these events based on the book "American Prometheus" by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

In the lead role, Irish actor Cillian Murphy doesn't portray Oppenheimer so much as he resurrects the boundless genius and many failings of this complex man. Trained at Harvard, Oxford and Germany's University of Gottingen, Oppenheimer received his PhD at age 23. He introduced America to quantum physics, and spoke six languages including Sanskrit, but might as well have been wearing one of those T-shirts embossed with the words "I'm with Stupid," atop an arrow pointing at his crotch. His activities supporting leftist causes would also come back to haunt him when an intellectual rival Louis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) targeted Oppenheimer out of a misplaced sense of betrayal.

The genius of Oppenheimer and his peers was accompanied by mighty egos, deep insecurities and rock-star vanity.

Just keeping track of all the details of the story would be daunting enough, before trying to recreate the sights, sounds and textures of '40s and '50s America so authentically. But filmmaker Nolan further complicates matters with a nonlinear script, sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white, that jumps back and forth between key incidents - both high and low - in its protagonist's career.

Every detail of Nolan's screen artistry shimmers with blinding brilliance, like micro glimpses of the staggering power unleashed by splitting an atom. Atoms, of course, are invisible to the naked eye, but "Oppenheimer" makes invisible things visible, just as it takes us into the greatest scientific minds of the 20th Century and helps us see what they saw.

In a movie season generally devoted to mindless action for the dumbed-down masses, it's a thrilling work of intellect and taut excitement, providing lessons in history and science against panoramic backgrounds worthy of a classic Western.

Cillian Murphy's star turn is not the only great performance in "Oppenheimer." Emily Blunt as his alcoholic but ultimately tough-as-nails wife Kitty, is superb. So is Matt Damon's Leslie Groves, whose exchanges with Oppenheimer feel electrically charged. Oscar winners like Kenneth Branagh and Rami Malek show up in cameos, attesting to the quality in every facet of Nolan's grand design that's only slightly less ambitious than the Manhattan Project itself.

When the Los Alamos scientists successfully exploded their first bomb prototype in a test labeled Trinity, Oppenheimer is said to have recited from memory a Sanskrit passage from the Hindu spiritual text the Bhagavad Gita: If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One - I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.

Our faith in technology was the ace in the hand that helped us win World War II. But three-fourths of a century later we keep learning that the legacy of believing in technology is unintended consequences.

It's an ironic postscript that the great minds that created the atomic age left it to new generations that not only lack their intelligence and wisdom, but fear them as well.

Nyad (2023)

Heroic Water Nymph

[7/10 · 14 November 2023]

Besides the nearly suicidal demands it places on the body, long-distance open-ocean swimming isn't a sport for the faint of mind or weak of character.

Along with the continuous threat of vomiting, the cold-from-the-inside-out sensation of hypothermia and the lactic acid build-ups that reduce chiseled muscle to jelly, there are the hallucinations and visits to the dark side of your psyche that accompany the lonely hours in endless expanses of ocean.

Welcome to the world where Diana Nyad set out to stake her claim.

"Nyad," now playing on Netflix, tells the true story of the champion marathon open-water swimmer who, after a long stint as an ABC Wide World of Sports commentator, returned to the water when she turned 60 to complete her dream of swimming from Cuba to Florida.

There's no surprise ending. Everyone already knows how the story turned out in 2013. Plus, swimming long distances is nothing if not methodically boring. Dare to be dull is my mantra as I do my daily pool laps. So the filmmakers have their own challenges keeping things lively, along with the challenges they depict on the screen.

Luckily there are Oscar-winners on both sides of the camera to convey the struggle as well the uplifting climax, adapted from Nyad's book. Annette Bening plays the character whose name in Greek translates as "water nymph." The role's swimming requirements are just the first test for the 65-year-old actress. Before the film ends her face will be severely disfigured by jellyfish, sunburn, and the ocean itself in the course of her many attempts to fulfill the goal she set for herself when she was still in her 20s.

But just as demanding are the psychological dimensions of her character. Her dream is cosmically ambitious, and her single-minded dedication is obviously inspirational. But the film doesn't pull any punches when it comes to the doubts, self-absorption and exploitation of those around her required to make her dream come true. Bening's performance is excellent, but that doesn't mean her character gets any more likable as the story progresses.

All the warm fuzzies are left to her coach and BFF Bonnie Stoll, wonderfully portrayed by Jodie Foster. Bonnie is pressed into the role of reluctant facilitator at every stage of Diana's quest. Bonnie exudes warmth, vulnerability, humor and tough love, softening Diana's sharp edges as she goes. They're not a couple, but more like soulmates or partners in an entity better than either could be by herself.

Foster doesn't so much steal the movie as emerge as the story's true star. And every time she's onscreen, she rocks.

Rhys Ifans rounds out the principals as navigator John Bartlet. With uncanny knowledge of weather and the Gulf Stream, he becomes the linchpin of Nyad's mission, at considerable cost to himself. If Bonnie is the real star, he's the North Star.

But as the story illustrates, if Diana's self-absorption pushes everyone around her to their breaking points, the process also brings out higher selves they could have never found by themselves. Diana may be a soloist, but wouldn't exist were it not for her team.

Directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi showed themselves zen masters of screen action, winning an Oscar for the amazing documentary "Free Solo." It was followed by "The Rescue," the documentary recounting of the miraculous mission to save the young members of a Thai soccer team trapped deep in a cave in in 2018. This time, working with superb actors, the filmmakers add more nuances of psychology and character to their resumes.

Considering the slow-motion pacing and long boring hours inherent in distance swimming,"Nyad" intersperses flashbacks of their protagonist as a girl and young woman. The tough, triumphant woman she would become was in some measure the result of men in her childhood and youth. Years later she would learn labels, like abandonment and abuse.

"Nyad" is buoyed by an outstanding golden oldies music track. It was the playlist Nyad sang to keep herself going through the boredom and the waves, and to help her make it through the darkest nights. As with all great sports movies, the music is the hidden weapon, triggering adrenaline and endorphins for the audience along with the athletes.

Ironically, the release of the film has revived controversies about Diana Nyad's version of the events in her book. Spats like this bring out her prickly side, a defiant pride bordering on hubris.

But along with Bening, the real-life Diana deserves praise for allowing her portrayal in "Nyad" to reveal the chinks in the armor of the heroic water nymph.