Daniel Kaluuya in NOPE. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Every year, I keep a running list of the best movies I’ve seen this year. By the end of the year, I usually end up with a Top Ten and another 5-15 mentions. Here are my Best Movies of 2021 and Best Movies of 2020 lists. To get on my year-end list, a movie has to be one that thrills me while I’m watching it and one that I’m still thinking about a couple of days later.
I’ve seen one hundred-and-three 2022 films so far, but I have yet to see promising prestige films like Women Talking, Broker, The Son, Empire of Light and The Whale. Pretty sure some of those will end up high on my list when I finalize it in a couple months. (BTW that 103 total for 2022 doesn’t include the 86 festival submissions that I’ve screened (those will be 2023 films) nor the 79 movies from earlier years that I watched this year.)
I almost always pick an international film like Drive My Car or Incendies or an indie like Winter’s Bone, Hell or High Water or Leave no Trace as my top movie of the year. So, readers may be surprised that my top choice his year was Nope, a sci fi and horror film -a popcorn movie. (I did pick a science fiction movie, Ex Machina, as my top movie of 2015.) I especially admired – and recommend – Nope because of:
Jordan Peele’s ingenious take on our current culture – instead of seeking to battle or befriend space aliens, Peele knows many would ask, how can we monetize this?
The deep, textured and fresh characters of OJ, Emerald, Angel and Jupe – unusual for a popcorn movie.
Nope’s reflection of Peele’s love of movies with its combination of the horror, sci fi, western, comedy and show biz movie genres.
My hopeful thought. Will Jordan Peele bring young moviegoers to theaters for horror thrills and teach them to expect SMART movies?
Here’s the complete list:
Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal in AFTERSUN. Courtesy of A24.
Photo caption: The Wife and the Movie Gourmet still enjoying wedded bliss
Happy 22nd Anniversary to The Wife, also known as Lisa, The Love of My Life!
We started out the year by admiring Power of the Dogtogether and just last week saw Babylon (she was a good sport).
This year, like the previous two, we binged EVEN MORE more episodic television together. Her dad is living with us, and he has an insatiable appetite for crime dramas, so we’ve watched many more seasons of them, especially on Acorn and BritBox, including Blood, Jagged, Rebeckah Martinsson, Bordertown, Secret City, The Chestnut Man, Inventing Anna, The Sounds, Under the Banner of Heaven, Deadpool, Guernsey and Van der Valk. As far as we can tell from TV, the murder epidemic in England, Scotland and Wales having spread to Ireland, France, Iceland and Australia, has now pierced Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Utah. Our favorite has been Shetland, but we mourn the report that Douglas Henshall will not be returning for next year’s season. Not all our TV fare was murderous – we also enjoyed the latest episodes of Derry Girls, The Crown and Somebody Feed Phil.
She even got me to watch Encanto and Spirited. She enjoyed my non-mainstream film choices of Hit the Road, A Love Song and Bitterbrush, and she liked The Return of Tanya Tucker even more than I did.
Once again, she tolerated my spending huge chunks of time covering Cinequest in person and Frameline, San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) Nashville Film Festival and San Francisco Jewish Film Festival virtually. She was also OK with my helping out Cinequest by screening 86 Cinequest submissions. I’m getting ready now for to cover Noir City in person and Slamdance virtually (for the first time) in January.
We were in LA twice this year, and we visited the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and Bunker Hill’s Angel Flight and Bradbury Building, locations for dozens of films.
She’s the biggest fan and supporter of this blog DURING ALL OF ITS TWELVE YEARS, and I appreciate her and love her. Happy Anniversary, Honey!
Photo caption: Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in BABYLON. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
Babylon is a whole lot of movie. More movie than you’re expecting. And maybe more movie than you want.
Writer-director Damien Chazelle (La La Land, Whiplash) has delivered a kinetic and kaleidoscopic showbiz epic of over three hours, which is visually stunning, ever entertaining and sometimes shocking. Now, is it a good movie?
Set beginning in 1926, Babylon traces Hollywood’s transition from silent film to the talkies by tracing the stories of a mega-movie star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), the ambitious starlet Nelly LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the African-American trumpet prodigy Stanley Palmer (Jovan Adebo) and the sultry Chinese entertainer-by-night Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). The audience largely experiences Babylon from the point of view of Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican household gofer whose abilities as a fixer propel him up the movie studio ladder. Chazelle’s view of Hollywood is as a human-crunching pool of toxicity, that a person must leave to survive with any decency or happiness.
This is also a Hollywood of unsurpassed debauchery and hedonism, which we taste right away in a movie mogul’s house party with lots of bare-breasted women and naked people engaging in sex, kinky sex, and perverted sex. The scene is clearly inspired by Ceil B. DeMille’s orgy scene in the silent The Ten Commandments, which seems quaint in comparison. This scene could have been imagined by Federico Fellini on speed and Hugh Hefner on acid.
Margot Robbie (center) and a cast of thousands in BABYLON. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
“Wanton excess” is inadequate to describe this party scene and much of Babylon. Like the guitarist in This Is Spinal Tap, Chazelle has set his amp to eleven. There’s so much eye candy here that Babylon will cause Baz Luhrman to feel bad about himself.
This is also the most scatological mainstream movie that I’ve seen. There’s projectile diarrhea (from an elephant), projectile vomit (from a person on a person) and urination (both from a woman onto a titillated man and from a man onto himself).
Back to the story. Chazelle shows us the Silent Era Hollywood studios with wall-to-wall outdoor movie sets, simultaneously grinding out comedies, romances and westerns. We see a cast of thousands in a medieval battle epic, and the transition to sound during the period when the technical challenges were so excruciatingly unforgiving that the sound men briefly usurped the control from the directors. Babylon’s characters are thinly-disguised recreations of John Gilbert, Clara Bow, Fatty Arbuckle, Anna May Wong, Erich von Stroheim and Louella Parsons, with some real life figures like Irving Thalberg.
Brad Pitt and Diego Calva in BABYLON. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
If you’re going to cast an actor to play a movie star from the classic era, you’re not going to cast Johnny Depp, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Robert Downey Jr. or Bradley Cooper. Just cast Brad Pitt and you’re most of way there in your storytelling – Pitt’s handsome looks are just weathered enough, and he exudes physicality, confidence and insouciance. If you want a Douglas Fairbanks or Clark Gable type – he’s your guy. And, yes, he is perfect in this film.
Likewise, Jean Smart is your gal for a cleareyed, devastating truthteller. Her character’s matter-of-fact Bad News Good News assessment of Jack Conrad’s career may be the distillation of Chazelle’s core message, if there is one. It’s the most compelling speech in Babylon.
I’ve seen actors throw themselves into Wild Child performances, but none with as much abandon as Margot Robbie. It’s a fearless, over-the-top and singular performance. Unfortunately, Chazelle’s Nelly is two-dimensional. There’s not much there except her insatiable grasping for fame and drugs, but Robbie does wring out every ounce of humanity.
This a well-acted film. Other notable pedal-to-the-metal performances:
Li Jun Li soars with sexy charisma in an underwritten part. I want to see more of her.
Eric Roberts sparkles as Nelly LaRoy’s venal and opportunistic father, who has reappeared once she is a money machine of a movie star.
Tobey Maguire’s performance was perfectly described by David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter as seeking to “out-weird Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker combined.”
Sydney Palmer’s trumpet work is downright exciting, I assume that someone other than Jovan Adepo is actually playing the instrument, but I couldn’t determine who from the credits. In any case, Adepo gets props for credible fingering, which is no small thing.
The fine cast also includes Lukas Hass, Patrick Fugit, Samara Weaving, Katharine Waterston, Jeff Garlin, Spike Jonze and, very briefly, Olivia Wilde.
Elements of Babylon are indisputably superb and Oscar-worthy, especially the cinematography by Linus Sangren (Oscar winner for La La Land), the production design by Florencia Martin and the costumes by Mary Zophres (Oscar nominated for True Grit, La La Land and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs).
Is this a good movie? There is an unusually wide range of critical assessments, which average into a a middling 59 score on Metacritic. It’s a gorgeous thrill ride, for sure, but we just don’t care about most of the characters. Some viewers will be just too distracted and exhausted by the freneticism. I think it falls short of being a great movie, but it’s so outrageous and fun to watch that it’s a must see.
Photo caption: Peter Bogdanovich with Jesse Hawthorne Ficks at the Roxie in 2019
Peter Bogdanovich will rightly be remembered as the writer-director of at least one undisputed masterpiece, The Last Picture Show. He also directed some near-masterpieces and some infamous flops. But he was also a popularizer of film history and an unsurpassed raconteur. The NYT could appropriately describe his life and career as “a Hollywood drama”. As a personal note, four of my very favorite films are his The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Saint Jack and They All Laughed.
Alan Ladd Jr. (left) with George Lucas.
I don’t often celebrate Hollywood suits, but studio exec and producer Alan Ladd, Jr., had a major artistic and social impact on American cinema. Ladd is being remembered now chiefly for being the guy who greenlit Star Wars, which seems like a no-brainer now, but it wouldn’t have happened without Ladd; then in his thirties, Ladd was younger than his Hollywood peers, but old enough to have enjoyed the Flash Gordon series as a kid. Ladd also supported Mel Brooks’ vision to shoot Young Frankenstein in black and white.
We don’t immediately think of Ladd as a feminist warrior, but it was Ladd who changed the character of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien from male to female. And Ladd was the key player behind the most groundbreaking of 1970s feminist cinema: An Unmarried Woman, Norma Rae and 9 to 5, and,15 years later, the iconic Thelma and Louise.
Ladd’s body of work was astounding: Chariots of Fire (Best Picture Oscar), Braveheart (Best Picture Oscar), Body Heat, To Live and Die in LA, The Right Stuff, Moonstruck, A Fish Called Wanda, The Man in the Moon, Gone Baby Gone, All that Jazz, Breaking Away, A Wedding, Julia, The Three Musketeers, Harry and Tonto, The Scent of a Woman, The Omen and even Kagemusha.
Jean-Luc Godard
Writer-director Jean-Luc Godard, with his jump cuts, non-linear structure and other innovations, helped revolutionize cinema as a leader of the French New Wave. He made three masterpieces in early 1960s: Breathless, Contempt and Band of Outsiders. This is the Godard of “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” But by 1968, Godard’s thinking has become so devoid of humor, nuance, texture and ambiguity that his became one-dimensional and boring. Indeed, I have found all of the Godard films since 1967’s Weekend to range from disappointing to completely unwatchable.
Bob Rafaelson was a New Hollywood director, a peer of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich and Brian De Palma. But Rafaelson only made one great movie, Five Easy Pieces, which he co-wrote. Five Easy Pieces, though, is by itself an eternal legacy.
Director Wolfgang Peterson made a harrowing submarine masterpiece, Das Boot, one of the great war (and anti-war) movies. Then got to make lots of big Hollywood action epics, none of which were as good as Das Boot.
Composer Monty Norman created the James Bond Theme for Dr. No, which has been used in every Bond film flick since. Norman massaged a tune he had written earlier, and, as his NYT obit quoted him, “I thought, ‘My God, that’s it. His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it’s all there in a few notes’.”
Sidney Poitier was an actor whose great intelligence, charisma and intensity, which combined into a righteous power. He was the first black A-list movie star and a man who changed things forever by insisting on playing empowered, non-degraded roles. Revisit the moment in In the Heat of the Night when his detective informs Carroll O’Connor’s redneck lawman, “They call me Mister Tibbs“. He wasn’t just an iconic actor, either – he was a also an accomplished director and a bona fide civil rights leader.
William Hurt in BODY HEAT.
Actor William Hurt, broke through unforgettably in his first feature film Altered States, which began a stunning run in the 1980s, of which my favorites were Body Heat, The Big Chill and Broadcast News. Hurt’s characters were frequently cerebral, contained and deliberate. His Ned Racine in Body Heat was always thinking, too, just not thinking as quickly or diabolically as Kathleen Turner’s femme fatale Matty Walker. Even after his A-list days had passed, Hurt was uniformly excellent supporting others in films like History of Violence and Into the Wild.
Jean-Louis Trintignant in AMOUR.
Actor Jean-Louis Trintignant starred in some of the most prestigious European movies of the past six decades: Roger Vadim’s …And Man Created Woman with Brigitte Bardot (1956), Claude Leloach’s A Man and a Woman (1966), Claude Chabrol’s Les Biches (1968), Costa-Gravras’ Z (1969), Éric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Red (1994) and Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012). He even made a Sergio Corbucci spaghetti western The Great Silence in 1968. Trintignant was 91.
Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
Angela Lansbury’s first screen role was as the saucy, self-interested maid in Gaslight, which kicked off a notable Hollywood career. Her best movie performance was as the evil mother in The Manchurian Candidate, molding her own son into a robotic assassin. Her memorable work in cinema was outstripped by her careers on Broadway (multiple Tonys for Mame, Sweeney Todd, etc.) and TV (264 episodes and several TV movies of Murder, She Wrote).
James Caan in THE GODFATHER
Actor James Caan is mostly remembered for his vivid portrayal of a guy with too much testosterone – Sonny Corleone in The Godfather (Bada bing!). Caan had been working since age 21 in TV series, with a John Wayne movie thrown in, when he appeared in the TV movie Brian’s Song – a highly popular weeper. He also appeared, with Robert Duvall, in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People. Most underappreciated performance? Probably Rollerball.
Louise Fletcher in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST.
Actress Louise Fletcher was unforgettable in her Oscar-winning performance as Nurse Rached in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. With her cold, assured eyes embodying impervious authority, she could maintain a soft voice and still deflate the charisma of Jack Nicholson’s McMurphy. Nurse Rached has been voted the second best female villain in all cinema (after The Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz).
Ray Liotta in GOODFELLAS.
Actor Ray Liotta became a star with his leading role in 1990’s iconic Goodfelllas and was still at the absolute top of his game this past year in The Many Saints of Newark and No Sudden Move.
Bo Hopkins in AMERICAN GRAFFITI.
Actor Bo Hopkins left us with some absolutely indelible performances in his heyday, a decade starting in the late 1960s. No one has ever been better at portraying a smirking, dimwitted redneck. I liked him best as the ill-fated young robber in The Wild Bunch, the greaser hard guy in American Graffiti and Burt Reynold’s moonshining partner in White Lightning. In this period, he appeared in Cat Ballou, The Getaway, Monte Walsh and Midnight Express.
L.Q. Jones in HANG ‘EM HIGH
Actor L.Q. Jones, born with the already Texas-colorful name of Justus E. McQueen, took the name of his first movie character (in Battle Cry) and rode it through 165 roles, bringing something interesting and different in every one. His NYT obit quoted him as liking to play “a heavy that is not crazy or deranged — although we play those, of course — but rather someone who is a heavy because he enjoys being a heavy.” Jones worked in some excellent war movies (Men in War, Torpedo Run, The Naked and the Dead, Hell Is for Heroes) and revisionist westerns (The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Hang ‘Em High). He was also a delightful raconteur, which you can enjoy by searching for “LQ Jones” on YouTube.
Clu Gulager in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
Prolific actor Clu Gulager has died at 93. The last of Gulager’s 165 IMDb credits came just three years ago in Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood. Best known for 105 episodes as the sheriff on The Virginian, Gulager made his living by guest appearances in a zillion TV shows from Wagon Train and Have Gun, Will Travel through Ironside, Cannon, CHiPs and Falcon Crest. One of his three characters on The Name of the Game was named Rex Dakota. I have just learned that he starred in 72 episodes of a 1960-62 TV Western that, amazingly, I do not remember – The Tall Man, with Barry Sullivan as Pat Garrett and Gulager as Billy the Kid. He also peppered his career with cult movies like The Return of the Living Dead and I’m Gonna Get You Sucka. Gulager teamed with Lee Marvin in Don Siegel’s classic neo-noir The Killers. At 87, he sparkled as a loquacious taxi passenger in Tangerine.
Gulager’s best-ever screen performance was in The Last Picture Show as an oil rig foreman who is the illicit squeeze of his boss’ wife (Ellen Burstyn). This guy is trapped in a job he will never improve upon and in an affair he will never control; Gulager perfectly conveys his bitter dissatisfaction. The Director’s Cut also adds some sizzle to his pool hall sex scene with Jacy (Cybill Shepherd).
Henry Silva
Actor Henry Silva is recognizable from his 140 screen credits (and, outside of the Oceans 11 movies, those roles may have all been villains). He leveraged his acting talent and unusual facial features to project menace as few actors have done, most memorably in the original The Manchurian Candidate.
Actor Roger E. Mosley is best known for his 158 episodes as the helicopter pilot on Magnum, P.I. and over 50 guest appearances in tv series. As the title character in Leadbelly and many TV shows, he paved the way for more positive and empathetic depictions of African-American characters. He also worked in one of best-ever TV movies, The Jericho Mile, in one of the best sports movies, Semi-Tough, and as Sonny Liston (with Muhammad Ali himself) in The Greatest.
Although her body of work was overshadowed by her off-screen personal life, actor Anne Heche was superb in Wag the Dog. That was one of a remarkable string of Big Movies in 1997 and 1998: Donnie Brasco, Volcano, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Six Days Seven Nights, Return to Paradise and Brian De Palma’s Psycho.
Photo caption: Meat Loaf, with Nell Campbell in THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW
Meat Loaf unforgettably burst into cinema in the 1975 cult favorite The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Often credited as Meat Loaf Aday, he also acted in a series of character roles, most notably in Fight Club.
Actor Tony Sirico, best known for his Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri in The Sopranos, overcame a youth that landed him in Sing Sing to play a slew of movie and TV gangsters (and appear in four Woody Allen films, too.)
Musician Ronnie Hawkins is best known as the irrepressible, earthy rockabilly mentor of The Band. In the movies, he was unforgettable in The Band’s concert film The Last Waltz; (who is THAT guy on stage with Dylan, Clapton, Neil Young and Van Morrison?) He also had an acting role in Heaven’s Gate.
Daniel Kaluuya in NOPE. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.
During the Holidays, I suspend my usual The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE so I can highlight the very best movies from earlier in 2022. These are on my list of Best Movies of 2022, and they shouldn’t be overlooked. Now you can watch them all at home.
Photo caption: Tilda Swinton in THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER. Courtesy of A24.
The Eternal Daughter begins with the filmmaker Julie (Tilda Swinton) bringing her elderly mother (also Tilsa Swinton) for a getaway at an Welsh country hotel. It’s an enormous, sinister-looking edifice, a Victorian building of Gothic design. When the building creaks and goes bump in the night, mysterious figures appear at windows and there’s knocking from supposedly unoccupied rooms, The Eternal Daughter has all of the trappings of a haunted house movie.
Mom and daughter appear to be the only visitors, although hotel staff insists otherwise. They are at the mercy of the hotel’s receptionist/manager/server (Carly-Sophia Davies), who, to a hilarious extent, could not be any more disinterested in her guests’ happiness ,comfort or approval.
Julie’s experience at the hotel is one of persistent dissatisfaction. She wants to work, but the only WiFi signal is three floors above their room, and she has sporadic cell phone service only in one special spot outside. Her requests to get the room they actually reserved and the expected amenities are stonewalled by the receptionist.
Her hot button, however, is that she doesn’t feel that she is bringing her mother any happiness. It turns out that this trip is a birthday treat for her mother, who had stayed in this house as a child during WW II. The mother is serene and uncomplaining, except to object to Julie “fussing” over her. Julie has microplanned every detail, down to lighting the candle on the mom’s birthday cake, but Julie doesn’t think she is doing anything right.
What’s going on in this slow burn? It turns out that writer-director Joanna Hogg isn’t taking us to a haunted house or to a comedy of manners in a bad hotel. This is a psychological drama. Julie is haunted, alright, but it’s by her relationship with her mother, which she’s having a very hard time figuring out.
Joanna Hogg is a veteran director who got the chance to become an auteur at age 59, beginning in 2019 with The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part IIin 2021.The Eternal Daughter is the third of these highly personal, apparently autographical films, with the Julie character as Hogg’s alter ego. In those films, Julie was played by Honor Swinton Byrne (Tilda Swinton’s real life daughter) and Swinton played Julie’s mom.
All three films are personal, as in specific and decidedly NOT universal. Although I am generally not a fan of naval-gazing, Hogg’s genius as a filmmaker is such that The Eternal Daughter and its siblings, slow burns all, are mesmerizing.
Photo caption: Zoe Kravitz in KIMI. Courtesy of HBO.
Steven Soderbergh is very good at making tight little thrillers, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In his Kimi, Angela (Zoe Kravitz) is a Seattle techie living and working in her loft apartment during the COVID lockdown, where she and the loft apartment dwellers across the street watch each other being locked down. But she’s not really trapped in her apartment by public health protocols, which have eased – she’s agoraphobic.
Angela works for a big, sinister tech firm that harvesting way too much private information from each of us and that is the basis for the paranoid facet of this paranoid thriller. She believes that she has heard a violent crime, as in an audio version of Rear Window. Now she knows too much, and she’s in danger.
Kimi is an okay paranoid thriller until the finale, when it turns into a superb action movie. It turns out that the tiny, sniveling Angela has some commando resourcefulness in her. The final set piece is like Wait Until Dark on steroids – very tight, very imaginative and very entertaining.
Photo caption: Margaret Qualley in STARS AT NOON. Courtesy of A24.
In the atmospheric neo-noir Stars at Noon, it’s the early 1980s in Nicaragua, and wannabe journalist Trish (Margaret Qualley) is learning that one can not always live by ones wits. She’s hoodwinked a magazine into paying her way to write a travel puff piece, while always intending to write a political expose; that article has annoyed the government to the point of revoking her press pass and confiscating her passport. Now she’s broke, unable to pay her way out of the city’s cheapest motel and into the airport, cadging meals from hotel buffets and obsessing on how to procure some shampoo for her increasingly sweaty scalp.
What she has going for her is command of the Spanish language and having learned her way around the country, geographically and culturally. She’s mastered the alphabet soup of Central American intelligence and security entities, each nastier and more ruthlessly repressive than the last. Trish is also highly manipulative and eager to sleep with any man who might help her in any way.
She picks up the handsome Brit Daniel (Joe Alwyn) at his upscale hotel, intending to get a roll in the hay, 50 dollars US and some stolen hotel shampoo out of the encounter. When Trish finds a hidden gun in his stuff, she (and the audience) think he must be dangerous, like a hit man or an intelligence operative. When she finds that he’s also in over his head, she and he have fallen in love with each other.
He’s not dangerous to others – he’s dangerous to be with. She was in desperate circumstance, but now the two of them are desperate for their lives. It’s too late – their fates are now entangled. And they’re going to have to make a mad dash for the border.
Stars at Noon won the Grand Prixe, essentially second place at Cannes, and this must have been because of the jury’s reverence for Claire Denis, the iconic French director, and a glass ceiling-busting female filmmaker at that. As one would expect from a Denis film, Star at Noon is competently crafted, but it’s just way too long at two hours and twenty minutes. Although Qualley and Alwyn spend a lot of that time unclothed and grinding away, I didn’t find their chemistry to smoke. Stars at Noon is too needlessly languorous and not sizzling enough to be a really good movie.
Qualley pulls her dress over her head within minutes of meeting any man; if the director weren’t female, Stars at Noon would face criticism for male gaze exploitation.
Denis also has oddly chosen a sound track that could have lifted from Showtime soft porn.
Qualley with her fidgety energy and her hyper-direct gaze, is perfectly cast as Trish. I first saw Qualley when she jumped off the screen as a Manson Girl in Once Upon a Time..In Hollywoodand then in Fosse/Verdon. She has the charisma to carry a movie much better than Stars at Noon.
Joe Alwyn is dreamy enough to make it credible that Trish would fall hard for Daniel.
Photo caption: Margaret Qualley and Benny Safdie in STARS AT NOON. Courtesy of A24.
I can’t say enough about Benny Safdie’s performance as a character credited as CIA Man. His affability makes him all the more sinister. The CIA Man knows that he holds all the cards, and there’s no need to seem like a brute, even if he is going to compel Trish into an egregious and traumatizing act. It’s all business, thank you very much.
I usually think of Benny and his brother Josh as indie directors (Uncut Gems), but Benny has been acting and he has real chops. In Licorice Pizza, he nailed the role of the closeted, charismatic do-gooder politician,
John C. Reilly shows up briefly, wearing a wild 1980s-perm-gone-wrong as the editor that Trish has burned her very last bridge with, and his cameo is hilarious.
I watched Stars at Noon on Amazon, one of the many streaming platforms which offer it.
TALE OF KING CRAB. Courtesy of Oscilloscope Films.
During the Holidays, I suspend my usual The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE so I can highlight the very best movies from earlier in 2022. These are on my list of Best Movies of 2022, and they shouldn’t be overlooked. Now you can watch them all at home.
