Roma is now available to stream on Netflix. I think that it’s a masterpiece. Your best choice in theaters is Green Book (link goes live this weekend).
And tickets are on sale (and going fast) for Silicon Valley’s best Holiday movie experience – the Stanford Theatre’s Christmas Eve screening of It’s a Wonderful Life.
OUT NOW
- Roma is an exquisite portrait of two enduring women and the masterpiece of Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men and Y Tu Mama Tambien). Will win multiple Oscars.
- Green Book (link goes live this weekend): Tony Lip is a marvelous character, and Viggo Mortensen’s performance is one of the great pleasures of this year in the movies.
- Shoplifters won the Palm d’Or at Cannes. This is a witty, and finally heartbreaking, look at a family that lives on the margins – and then is revealed to be not what it seems.
- Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind and its companion documentaries, all available to stream on Netflix.
- Bitter Melon, H.P. Mendoza’s dark indie comedy on an issue that a Bay Area family must finally face.
- The masterful documentary Monrovia, Indiana is a fascinating movie about a boring subject.
- Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes provides insight into of the man who founded Fox News and thus defiled the American body politic and made possible our venerable nation’s descent into Trump’s America.
- The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen Brothers’ anthology of darkly funny Western vignettes, is recommended only for Westernphiles and Coen Brothers fans. It is streaming on Netflix.
- The Favourite (link goes live this weekend): Great performances by three great actresses, sex and political intrigue are not enough; this critically praised film didn’t work for me.
- The Outlaw King, with Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce, exists for those who need a dose of medieval slaughter and a spunky queen, but there’s not enough there for the rest of us.
- Skip First Man – a boring movie about a fascinating subject.
ON VIDEO
My Streams of the Week are the eight of my Best Films of 2018 – So Far that are already available to stream: Leave No Trace, The Rider, The Death of Stalin, Beast, Custody, Monrovia, Indiana, Three Identical Strangers, Quality Problems and Outside In.
ON TV
On December 17, Turner Classic Movies will broadcast the top heist film ever, the pioneering French classic Rififi: After the team is assembled and the job is plotted, the actual crime unfolds in real-time – over thirty minutes of nerve-wracking silence.
