movie gourmet

CAUGHT BY THE TIDES: China evolves, she persists

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Photo caption: Tao Zhao in CAUGHT BY THE TIDES: Photo courtesy of Janus Films.

Sweeping over decades of modern Chinese history, the auteur Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides reveals profound changes in Chinese society by implanting a personal story within an epic sweep. Writer-director Jia has built Caught by the Tides from footage shot over the 21 years as he made other movies. In a tour de force, actress Tao Zhao delivers an exquisite portrait of resilience.

The plot is deceptively straight-forward, tracing the 21-year arc of the relationship between Qiaoqiao (Tao Zhao) and her shady boyfriend Bin (Zhubin Li). He moves away to find a better financial opportunity, promising to send for her when he’s settled. But he ghosts her, and she heads off to track him down. This simple story is embedded in a portrait of a changing China over the 21-years, with Jia’s clear-eyed observation of the changes and their impacts on regular people.

Neither Qiaoqiao or Bin can affect the course of China’s evolution (they are caught by the tides), but both seek to find their place it in.

Tao Zhao and Zhubin Li in CAUGHT BY THE TIDES: Photo courtesy of Janus Films.

This is a China that we rarely see, real Chinese (and I mean hundreds of non-professional actors) doing their jobs and entertaining themselves, in cities most of us Westerners haven’t heard of. In what amounts to one dreamy 111-minute montage, Jia presents scores of vignettes . We see retired miners tipping female singers, river travel on boats large and small, a small Christian worship service, mass jogging, an adage-spouting supermarket robot, and a most unlikely TikTok star. The stream of scenes never feels disjointed or boring because the continuity of human experience is so authentic and so novel.

The story begins in 2001 in Datong, a dreary coal mining city in Northern China, a gritty place where no building seems to have been repainted for decades. By 2006, when the story moves to Fenjie City, China is ALL IN on economic development, and corruption is rampart, as everybody seeks a slice of the action; the Chinese government relocated 1.1 million people, sacrificing their homes for the economic payoff of the Three Gorges dam. and Jia shows us the human impact. In 2022, the story moves to Zuhai City near Guadong and back to Datong; despite the COVID pandemic, the new widespread prosperity is jarring, and even Datong has become vibrant.

Tao Zhao in CAUGHT BY THE TIDES: Photo courtesy of Janus Films.

Jia is one of the world’s best filmmakers; I rated his Ash Is the Purest White as one of the best films of 2019. In Caught by the Tides, as in most of his films, he benefits from the collaboration with one of the world’s most compelling screen actresses, his wife Tao Zhao. Remarkably, Tao dominates Caught by the Tides without speaking any dialogue. Her character Qiaoqiao isn’t mute or even passive; she has plenty to say but she’s able to communicate, even forcefully, with her face. Qiaoqiao isn’t able to get everything to go her way, but the sound she makes in the final second of Caught by the Tides makes it clear that she’s living life on her terms. It’s an indelible performance.

Caught by the Tides is the best movie of 2025 so far and the best Chinese art film I’ve ever seen.

THE FRIEND: grieving with an enormous dog

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Photo caption: Naomi Watts and Bing (as Apollo) in THE FRIEND. Courtesy of Bleecker Street.

We don’t see much of the womanizing writer Walter (Bill Murray) in the The Friend, but it doesn’t take long to see how selfish he was before his death by suicide. He leaves behind unfinished projects, a wife and two ex-wives, a neglected adult daughter and the deep, longtime friendship with his editor Iris (Naomi Watts). He was seemingly indifferent to suicide’s impact on the people in his life, but he has saddled Iris with the care of his surviving pet dog, Apollo. Apollo, while sweet-tempered, is an enormous Great Dane, and Iris’ apartment building does not allow dogs.

For all their qualities, Great Danes are not easy to care for, especially in Manhattan, and Iris must hustle to find a placement for Apollo while she is scrambling to save her final project with Walter and profoundly grieving. Iris is really angry at Walter, but the Apollo situation is so consuming that expressing that anger doesn’t occur to her. Will Iris be able to navigate her grief? Will she be able to keep her apartment? And what will happen to Apollo?

Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel make very few films, but they’re superb (The Deep End, Montana Story); The Friend is one of their lesser works, but it’s well-crafted and satisfying. They are able to keep the material sentimental, but not overly sentimental. This is a weeper, and The Wife and her friend liked it more than I did.

The soundtrack elevates the other elements of the film, especially a cover of Fred Neil’s Everybody’s Talkin’ by Iggy Pop.

Apollo is a dog of uncommonly sensitive eyes, who can express a wide range of emotions with a still gaze. He is played by Bing, also a Great Dane.

The Friend was the opening night film at this year’s Cinequest, but I missed it there. It’s now streaming on Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Paul Reubens in PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF. Courtesy of HBP Max.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – some great Memorial Day Weekend recommendations on TCM, and be sure to watch Pee-Wee Herman as Himself on HBO Max, beginning today.

A few years ago, this platform used to be HBO and then rebranded itself as HBO Max, on its way to just Max; having undoubtedly spent millions on the branding from HBO Max to Max, they are now rebranding back to HBO Max. Go figure.

I caught the coming-of-age film The Summer of 69 on Hulu, but it’s not worth a full review. It’s a raunchy “lose your virginity before high school graduation” comedy , but from the female point of view, which is refreshing. It also gets the teenage awkwardness and embarrassment just right. “Have you kissed him yet?” “No but I’ve practiced on the back of my hand.” Unfortunately, the plot thread about saving an insolvent strip club is hackneyed. The key character of a stripper/escort/sex coach is not written well, and the performance is worse. Too bad.

CURRENT MOVIES

ON TV

Robert Keith and Aldo Ray in MEN IN WAR

On this Memorial Day Weekend, Turner Classic Movies brings us another of marathons of war movies. I’m recommending three less well-known war films that deserve your attention. TCM is screening all three on May 24.

  • Men in War: An infantry lieutenant (Robert Ryan) must lead his platoon out of a desperate situation.  He encounters a cynical and insubordinate sergeant (Aldo Ray) who is loyally driving a jeep with his PTSD-addled colonel (Robert Keith).  In conflict with each other, they must navigate through enemy units to safety. Director Anthony Mann is known for exploring the psychology of edgy characters, and that’s the case with Men in War.
  • The Steel Helmet (Friday, May 24): This is a gritty classic by the great writer-director Samuel Fuller, a WWII combat vet who brooked no sentimentality about war. Gene Evans, a favorite of the two Sams (Fuller and Peckinpah), is especially good as the sergeant. American war movies of the period tended toward to idealize the war effort, but Fuller relished making war movies with no “recruitment flavor”.  Although the Korean War had only been going on for a few months when Fuller wrote the screenplay, he was able to capture the feelings of futility that later pervaded American attitudes about the Korean War.
  • Men Must Fight is a cultural curiosity, a stridently anti-war film from 1933, reflecting the widespread revulsion against the avoidable horrors of World War I. Men Must Fight predicts many aspects of World War II with unsettling accuracy. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a trip.
Gene Evans in THE STEEL HELMET

PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF: a man hidden in his own invention

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Photo caption: Paul Reubens in PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF. Courtesy of HBP Max.

Tomorrow, HBO Max begins airing the bio-doc Pee-Wee as Himself, from the acclaimed Silicon Valley native, New York-based documentarian Matt Wolf. Wolf has an uncanny gift for finding compelling stories that everyone else has overlooked: Teenage, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Spaceship Earth and Rustin.

The delightfully wacky character Pee-Wee Herman sprang on the scene, seemingly from nowhere, sweetly celebrating his own weirdness. Pee-Wee was the creation of actor Paul Reubens. Reubens, of course, had a life before Pee-Wee, and he had a very private personal life distinct from his invented persona. Sadly, Reubens lost his privacy in a career-killing tabloid scandal.

Wolf had elicited permission from Reubens to make a film about Reubens’ life, and secured hours of on-camera interview footage. But the mercurial Reubens, highly ambivalent to sharing his personal story, kept pulling the plug on the project. When Reubens fell ill, Wolf was in a race against mortality to get Reubens back on board. Fortunately, Wolf succeeded.

Pee-Wee as Himself runs three hours and twenty-five minutes and will be aired in two parts on HBO Max, beginning tomorrow.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Jean Gabin in TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – the relentlessly entertaining French epic The Count of Monte-Cristo, the insightful documentary John Singer Sargent: Fashion and Swagger and the classic film noir Sudden Fear, with its nearly perfect final twelve minutes.

The surprisingly uplifting documentary Matter of Mind: My Parkinson’s shines a light on Parkinson’s disease, and what we need to know about it. An estimated one million Americans are living with Parkinson’s, and the key to Matter of Mind’s success is in introducing us to three of them – a Brooklyn optician, a San Francisco fitness trainer and an Alaskan cartoonist – and their families. All three films in the Matter of Mind trilogy, including My ALS and My Alzheimer’s will be available to stream between May 15 to June 3, 2025.

I am looking forward to Matt Wolf’s HBO biodoc Pee Wee Herman as Himself, which begins airing on the weekend after next. The week after, theaters will offer Caught by the Tides, from the Chinese master filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke and his muse and leading lady Tao Zhao and the buzzed-about The Life of Chuck.

Note: I recommended the highly innovative The Accident after screening it for the 2024 Slamdance, and it’s now streaming on Fandor.  The Accident went on to win the Narrative Feature Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance.

CURRENT MOVIES

ON TV

Lino Ventra, Jean Gabin and Jean Moreau in TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI.

Tomorrow night, May 17, Turner Classic Movies is airing a great and underappreciated film, the French film noir Touchez pas au grisbi on its Noir Alley with intro and outro by the czar of noir, Eddie Muller. A seasoned and very, very cool gangster (Jean Gabin) has hidden a massive haul of stolen gold bullion as his retirement fund. The gold is from a notorious heist that he has never acknowledged masterminding, and the movie’s title translates as “don’t touch the loot”. He has kept his secret with remarkable discipline and cleverness, but his longtime partner may become the weak link.

Probably the greatest male French movie star ever, Jean Gabin had dominated prewar French cinema, and, after the war, he aged into noir and, in the 1960s, into neo-noir.  Gabin oozed a seasoned cool (like Humphrey Bogart) and imparted a stately gravitas to his noir and neo-noir characters. Jean Gabin is on my very short list of the most perpetually cool humans to ever walk the planet, along with Dean Martin, Ben Gazzara, Joan Jett and Barack Obama.

Jeanne Moreau appears in an early role. So does that most watchable of French stars, Lino Ventura, whose bloodhound face had been reshaped by his earlier careers as a professional wrestler and boxer. Touchez pas au grisbi is one of my top five film noirs and one of my top fifty movies of all time.

MATTER OF MIND: MY PARKINSON’S: real, uplifting, essential

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Photo caption. Isa and Veronica Garcia-Hayes in MATTER OF MIND: MY PARKINSON. Courtesy of PBS Independent Lens.

The surprisingly uplifting documentary Matter of Mind: My Parkinson’s shines a light on Parkinson’s disease, and what we need to know about it. An estimated one million Americans are living with Parkinson’s, and the key to Matter of Mind’s success is in introducing us to three of them – a Brooklyn optician, a San Francisco fitness trainer and an Alaskan cartoonist – and their families. On April 8, Matter of Mind: My Parkinson’s becomes available on PBS’ Independent Lens and the PBS App..

Parkinson’s is incurable and degenerative, and attacks motor abilities. Matter of Mind does not sugar coat the symptoms, ranging from from tremors, falling and speech impairment to dementia and depression. Nevertheless, there are now medicines and surgeries ((including deep brain stimulation)) that can impact the symptoms.

We watch the three subjects and their families, all engaging and relatable, explore the medical treatments, with their risks and tradeoffs, and adapt to getting the most out of their lives, even with Parkinson’s. Matter of Mind emphasizes the impacts on family members and the importance of family in supporting each sufferer’s response.

The 54-minute format of Independent Lens fits this subject matter exceptionally well – long enough to explain the science without becoming an eat-your-broccoli slog.

This is the second in a series of three documentaries on neurodegenerative diseases from co-writers and co-directors Anna Moot-Levin and Laura Green; all three films in the Matter of Mind trilogy, including My ALS and My Alzheimer’s will be available to stream between May 15 to June 3, 2025.I’m usually not keen on disease movies, but Matter of Mind: My Parkinson’s is so good, and Parkinson’s so prevalent and inadequately understood, that this is essential viewing.

JOHN SINGER SARGENT: FASHION AND SWAGGER: locking gazes

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Fortunately, the insightful documentary John Singer Sargent: Fashion and Swagger spends much of its running time staring at the subjects of the painter’s portraits, who gaze back at us is if they were alive.

The doc traces Sargent’s life, and talking heads try to explain how his brushwork results in such compelling art, but I didn’t find that stuff as compelling as when the camera zooms in and lingers on the face of a subject. Sargent really had a gift for making it seem as if the subject is alert to your walking into the room and then engaging with you. They seem in mid-conversation instead of mid-pose.

We get to spend so much time unhurriedly locking eyes with these folks, mostly rich women from 150 years ago, that it’s like being inside a John Sargent Singer coffee table book.

The title refers to “swagger portraits” (which I didn’t know was a thing) – vanity portraits commissioned by the rich and famous to depict their subjects as grand, important and fashionable. Sargent excelled at these.

John Singer Sargent: Fashion and Swagger is streaming free on kanopy.

THE COUNT OF MONTE-CRISTO: you think you’ve seen a revenge movie?

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Photo caption: Pierre Niney in THE COUNT OF MONTE-CRISTO. Courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.

The French epic The Count of Monte Cristo is a relentlessly entertaining three hour plunge into betrayal, revenge and forgiveness – and some spectacular French real estate. Alexander Dumas published the original adventure novel 185 years ago, and it’s been made into over 100 movies and episodic series. This version, by writer-directors Alexandre de La Patelliere and Matthieu Delaporte, is pretty fun, and gorgeous to look at.

The sweeping story spans 24 years, beginning in 1815 when the protagonist, Edmond Dantes, (Pierre Niney) is nineteen years old and on the verge of a wonderful life. A seafaring prodigy, he has just earned the captaincy of his own ship, which will earn him affluence, and he’s about the marry the stunningly beautiful love of his life. But three other jealous and resentful men manufacture a false charge and railroad into a life sentence of solitary confinement in a remote island dungeon. Before he know what has hit him, Dantes has been suddenly and unjustly stripped of everything he had or could have had.

After languishing in hopeless squalor for six years, he makes contact with another prisoner who has a plan for an escape – but it will take them another eight years to implement. In The Count of Monte-Cristo‘s most thrilling scene, he manages a skin-of-the-teeth escape. He then tracks down an immense medieval fortune and returns to France with a new identity – the Count of Monte-Cristo – and the power and status of great wealth.

He can no take revenge on the three men who betrayed him, but killing them is not enough for Dantes – this is not the kind of revenge movie that we’re used to. Dantes needs to break them completely – he needs to deprive them of their wealth, their status, their families and their own sense of self-worth. To do that, he creates and manipulates an elaborate web of traps.

The base assumptions and societal mores of early 19th century France, of course, are utterly anachronistic to our modern sensibilities , but de La Patelliere and Delaporte make Dantes’ situation relatable. The first two hours of the story is remarkably adherent to the source material. De La Patelliere and Delaporte reworked the some of the revenge devices at the end, but they were true to Dumas’ overall story arc. And, who, these days, has actually read the original? (I’ll admit that I have only read the Classics Illustrated comic book as a boy.)

De La Patelliere and Delaporte, along with cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc make this a visually splendid film, aided by impressive chateaus, period costumes and the attractive cast.

Niney is an able enough actor to carry the film, appearing in 90 percent of the scenes and aging 24 years. The rest of the cast is fine, too, with Patrick Mille sparkling as the ever-grinning, vile speculator Danglers, one of Dantes’ three main targets.

The Count of Monte-Cristo is available to watch for free on kanopy and to rent from Amazon,AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango. There are many similar titles, including a 2025 mini-series,so be sure to get the 2024 French movie with the hyphen in the title.

SUDDEN FEAR: twelve minutes of movie perfection

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Joan Crawford in SUDDEN FEAR.

The riveting final twelve minutes of the 1952 film noir Sudden Fear is movie perfection. Now, it’s a pretty good movie for the first hour and thirty-eight minutes, but its ending takes Sudden Fear up a couple of notches.

Here’s the set-up – a highly successful woman (Joan Crawford) marries a guy (Jack Palance) who really just wants her money; he plots with his longtime girlfriend (Gloria Grahame) to do in his wife for the inheritance. The wife discovers their scheme, and plans to get them before they can get her.

The wife has sneaked into an apartment when the husband unexpectedly returns, and she becomes trapped and defenseless in a closet, just hoping against hope that he won’t discover her. The tension mounts as he putters around the apartment, and there’s an ingenious use of a wind-up toy to build even more suspense. After several excruciating minutes, her cover is blown, and she manages to bolt. As she runs for her life through the hilly sidewalks and alleys of San Francisco, he careens after her in a large sedan.

Jack Palance in SUDDEN FEAR.

In this extended sequence, there’s almost no dialogue except for his yelling her name. The storytelling rises to the level of Hitchcock’s, and the storyboard could be taught in film school.

Director David Miller directed over forty features, many with big stars (Billy the Kid with Robert Taylor, Flying Tigers with John Wayne, Twist of Fate with Ginger Rogers, and The Story of Esther Costello with Crawford and Two decades later, he directed another thriller, the cheesy and tasteless conspiracy movie Executive Action with Burt Lancaster. But there’s nothing in his body of work that would indicate that Miller could create those twelve minutes of perfection in Sudden Fear.

Miller had a lot of help from cinematographer Charles Lang, who makes the best of the shadows and the natural Dutch angles of San Francisco’s sloped streets. Lang went on to shoot two of the most iconic film noirs, Ace in the Hole and The Big Heat. Lang had lots of ucess outside the noir genre, too: The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Some Like It Hot, The Magnificent Seven, One-Eyed Jacks, The Flim-Flam Man, Wait Until Dark. Lang was nominated for an Oscar for his work in Sudden Fear, as were Crawford, Palance and costume designer Sheila O’Brien.

Jack Palance in SUDDEN FEAR.

I’m not a big Joan Crawford fan, but even I recognize the power of her best two scenes here. In the first, she silently listens to a conversation between the two plotters, and her face registers the changing emotions as she connects the dots. In he climactic scene, she recognizes what she can and cannot do, and changes her course of of action, but then, initially frozen with terror, must rally herself to escape from her husband. The sequence concludes with a final close-up that is vintage Joan Crawford.

Gloria Grahame in SUDDEN FEAR.

Palance, oozing physicality and intensity, is perfectly cast. Grahame, whose performance is very understated next to Crawford’s and Palance’s, is excellent.

Sudden Fear can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango and is free on kanopy; it also occasionally plays on Turner Classic Movies.

Jack Palance and Joan Crawford in SUDDEN FEAR.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Asahi Hirano and Sabrina Jie-A-Fa in EGGHEAD & TWINKIE. Credit: Olivia Wilson, Courtesy of CanBeDone Films and Orange Cat Films.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – I’m trying to get you thru the movie doldrums with the delightful coming of age story Egghead & Twinkie and the genre-busting reenactment doc Starring Jerry as Himself. May is Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and both movies feature Asian American filmmakers and lead characters.

I am looking forward to Matt Wolf’s HBO biodoc Pee Wee Herman as Himself, which begins airing on the weekend after next. The week after, theaters will offer the buzzed-about The Life of Chuck and Caught by the Tides, from the Chinese master filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke and his muse Tao Zhao.

Note: I recommended the highly innovative The Accident after screening it for the 2024 Slamdance, and it’s now streaming on Fandor.  The Accident went on to win the Narrative Feature Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance.

REMEMBRANCES

Mariko Kaga and Ryô Ikebe in PALE FLOWER

Director Masahiro Shinoda was a groundbreaking auteur, best known for his bracing neo-noir Pale Flower.

Character actor Craig Richard Nelson’s first film role was as a snobby, fastidious preppy in The Paper Chase (1973), and he nailed a similar character in Robert Altman’s A Wedding (1978). In this period, he had small roles in Altman’s 3 Women (1977) and Tony Bill’s My Bodyguard (1980). Even though he worked in TV and film through 1998, his performances were increasingly less memorable.

CURRENT MOVIES

ON TV

Gene Hackman in the 1975 NIGHT MOVES

On May 13, Turner Classic Movies is honoring Gene Hackman by airing Night Moves, along with his better known movies, The French Connection, Hoosiers and Mississippi Burning. In the1975 character-driven neo-noir Night Moves, Hackman plays an LA private eye who follows a trail of evidence to steamy Florida. Hackman shines in the role – the detective is deeply in love with his estranged wife (Susan Clark), but unsuited for marriage. Night Moves also features Melanie Griffith’s breakthrough role as the highly sexualized teen daughter in the Florida family; Griffith was right around eighteen-years-old when this was filmed, and had already been living with Don Johnson for three years. Night Moves features an impressive ensemble of supporting actors: Harris Yulin, James Woods, Edward Binns, Max Gail (Wojo on Barney Miller) and the sui generis Kenneth Mars.