Rants and Ruminations

Cinequest 2018 is just around the corner

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Make your plans now to attend the 28th edition of Cinequest, Silicon Valley’s own major film festival. By some metrics the largest film festival in North America, Cinequest was recently voted the nation’s best by USA Today readers. The 2018 Cinequest is scheduled for February 27 through March 11 and will present almost 100 feature films and dozens of short films and virtual reality experiences from the US and over thirty other countries. And, at Cinequest, it’s easy to meet the filmmakers.

This year’s headline events include:

  • Celebrity appearances by William C. Macy, Andie McDowell, John Travolta, Charlie Sheen and Turner Classic Movie host Ben Mankiewicz.
  • Opening night film: Macy presents his new comedy Krystal, co-starring Rosario Dawson;
  • Closing night film: Brothers in Arms, a documentary on the making of Platoon, co-presented by the narrator, Sheen.
  • New movies with Peter Fonda, Burt Reynolds, Jon Hamm, Marion Cotillard, Hilary Swank, Piper Laurie, Rosamund Pike, Stanley Tucci, Melissa Leo, Kiefer Sutherland, Kal Penn, Robert Forster, Mathieu Amalric, Charlotte Gainsbourg, James McAvoy, Alicia Vikander and Michael Shannon.
  • New movies by directors Wim Wenders, Arnaud Desplechin, Melanie Mayron, Jan Sverak (Kolya) and Tony Gilroy.
  • The silent The Wind with Lillian Gish, projected in a period movie palace, the California Theatre, accompanied by world-renowned Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer organ.

This year, Cinequest presents 74 world premieres and will host over 800 artists from over thirty countries.

Indeed, the real treasure at Cinequest 2017 is likely to be found among the hitherto less well-known films. In the past four years, the Cinequest gems Eye in the Sky, Wild Tales, Ida, The Hunt, ’71, Corn Island, The Memory of Water, Magallanes, Quality Problems, The Sense of an Ending, For Grace, Lost Solace, Class Enemy, Heavenly Shift, Oh Boy/A Coffee in Berlin and The Grand Seduction all made my Best of the Year lists.

The renovation of the old Camera 3 Theater into 3Below Theaters & Lounge means that Cinequest will regain its Downtown San Jose vibe, with concurrent screenings at the 1122-seat California, the 550-seat Hammer and the 257-seat 3Below, all within 1600 feet of the VIP lounge at The Continental Bar.  There will still be satellite viewing in Redwood City.

3Below has lost Camera 3’s middle aisle and replaced all the seats.  The decor is sharp, and they’ve added a movable stage for performances, lectures and Q&As.  The once notorious restrooms are remarkably clean (and no longer accessible from the neighboring parking garage, so they have a chance to stay that way).

At Cinequest, you can get a festival pass for as little as $165, and you can get individual tickets as well. The express pass for an additional tax-deductible $100 is a fantastic deal – you get to skip to the front of the lines!

Take a look at the entire program, the schedule and the passes and tickets. (If you want to support Silicon Valley’s most important cinema event while skipping the lines, the tax-deductible $100 donation for Express Line Access is an awesome deal.)

As usual, I’ll be covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. I usually screen (and write about) over thirty films from around the world. Bookmark my Cinequest 2018 page, with links to all my coverage (links on the individual movies will start to go live on Sunday February 25). Follow me on Twitter for the latest.

NOIR CITY 2018 is here

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The Noir City film fest, always one of the best Bay Area cinema experiences, is underway in San Francisco this week. Noir City is the annual festival of the Film Noir Foundation, spearheaded by its founder and president Eddie Muller. The Foundation preserves movies from the traditional noir period that would otherwise be lost. Noir City often plays newly restored films and movies not available on DVD or streaming. And we get to watch them in a vintage movie palace (San Francisco’s Castro Theatre) with a thousand other film fans.

Eddie Muller, who you should recognize as host of  Turner Classic Movie’s Noir Alley series, has programmed this year’s version as “Film Noir from A to B”.  Back in the classic noir period of thw 1940s and early 1950s, filmgoers expected a double feaure – an “A” movie with big stars, followed by a shorter and less expensively-made “B” picture.  Each evening of Noir City will feature A and B movies from the same year, starting with 1941 and ending with 1953.  Trench coats and fedoras are not required (and no smoking, please), but, other than that, you’ll get the full retro experience in the period-appropriate Castro.

Noir City runs through next Sunday, February 4. To see the this year’s Noir City program and buy tickets, go here.

Many of the films in this year’s program are VERY difficult to find.  The Man Who Cheated Himself, Destiny, Jealousy, The Threat and Quiet Please, Murder.  The Man Who Cheated Himself has just been restored by the Film Noir Foundation.

My personal favorites on the program:

  • I Wake Up Screaming (sorry – last Friday night):  A very early noir with a stalker theme and a creepy performance by the tragic Laird Cregar.
  • Shadow of a Doubt (sorry – last night): Set in Santa Rosa back when you could drive through it quickly, the ultra-sympathetic Theresa Wright starts connecting the dots that link her very favorite Cool Uncle (Joesph Cotten) to serial murders.
  • Roadblock: I love the growly noir icon Charles McGraw as a mean heavie or a relentless copper.  Here he plays against type as a super-straight sap turned to the dark side by the dame he falls for.
  • The Blue Dahlia:  The only original screenplay by the master of the hardboiled, Raymong Chandler.  Alan Ladd returns from wartime service to find an especially disloyal wife.  When she is murdered, the cops suspect him, and the mob is after him, but he does find Veronica Lake. (Digression: Were Ladd and Lake the shortest pair of romantic leads ever?)

To see the this year’s Noir City program and buy tickets, go here. Don’t miss out on Noir City’s bang up final weekend, with The Man Who Cheated Himself and Roadblock, The Big Heat and wickedly trashy Beverly Michaels in Wicked Woman.

Laird Cregar in I WAKE UP SCREAMING

If I picked the Oscars

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THE BIG SICK

The nominations for this year’s Academy Awards come out tomorrow – and Academy of Motion Picture  Arts and Sciences is not asking my opinion.  But if I picked the Oscars:

Best Picture:  My choice for the year’s best movie – Truman – is NOT going to be nominated because it is a little-seen Spanish movie. But there are several deserving choices, including The Big Sick, The Shape of Water and The Post. The Academy almost always chooses a drama for Best Picture, seemingly equating seriousness and gravitas for quality. That means that comedies – and despite the coma, The Big Sick is fundamentally a romantic comedy – get underrated. So I don’t think it will win, but I gauge The Big Sick, an almost perfect film, to be the best American flick of the year.

Best Director:  I’m rooting for Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water, a story that could not be told as well in a novel, on stage or in any other artistic medium. It has to be a movie and one which springs from del Toro’s imagination.

Best Actor:  He’s probably not going to even get nominated, but I would go with Richard Gere in his best career performance in Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. The huge favorite, of course, is Gary Oldman for Darkest Hour; it’s a fine performance, but I think the Oscars over-elevate portrayals of Great Men and Women.

Best Actress:  Can’t go wrong with Meryl Streep in The Post or Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water.   Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird was pretty special, too.

Best Supporting Actor:  Sam Rockwell is going to win this for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, but I prefer the performance of Woody Harrelson in the same movie. Harrelson doesn’t have as  showy a role, but this is one of Woody’s very best performances. Another brilliant performance that will NOT be nominated is Steve Coogan’s guy hanging on to sanity with his fingernails in The Dinner, but nobody saw it.  Among the guys who stand a chance of getting nominated, my preference is for Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project.

Best Supporting Actress:  Allison Janney will be nominated for I, Tonya, she will win and she will deserve it.

Best Animated:   Coco, of course.  Pixar is back.

Best Documentary:   The brilliant Ken Burns documentary The Vietnam War, which aired on PBS, isn’t eligible for an Oscar, but it was the year’s best doc.  Of the eligible documentaries, I really liked Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.

Best Foreign Language Picture.  I am all in for Truman from Spain, which will not be nominated.  Of those nominated, I most admired In the Fade from Germany.

Original Screenplay:  Martin McDonagh for Three Billboards in Ebbing, Missouri.

Adapted Screenplay:  Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber for I Tonya.

Cinematography:  I’m going to cop out on this category.  There just too many wonderfully visual movies this year tp pick just one as the best.  In any other year, the Academy could easily recognize the cinematography  in The Shape of Water, Dunkirk, Call Me by Your Name, Phantom Thread, Baby Driver and Okja – but only one can win the statuette.

Film Editing: Baby Driver or Dunkirk.

Long ago, the Oscars recognized a “Juvenile” acting category.  Brooklynn Prince of The Florida Project would be deserving for her exuberant performance.

Other groups give a “Promising Newcomer”award; mine would go to Greta Gerwig as writer.  Obviously, she’s not new to the movies, but her first screenplay makes me eager to see her next ones.

Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell in THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI

Dorothy Malone and her one indelible scene

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Dorothy Malone and Humphrey Bogart in THE BIG SLEEP

Actress Dorothy Malone has died at age 103.  She began making films in 1943 with a series of small parts, of which the most indelible came in 1948’s The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart.  Malone plays a bookstore clerk who takes a liking to Bogie’s Sam Spade and initiates a quickie.  As has been noted by many, it’s one of the sexiest moments in cinema and all she takers off is her glasses.

After turning platinum blonde, she won an Oscar for her supporting performance in the 1956 Douglas Sirk melodrama Written on the Wind.   After lots of TV success (Peyton Place, et al), her final movie role was a fittingly juicy one, a pleasantly smiling murderer, in Basic Instinct (1992).

Michael Douglas, Dorothy Malone and Sharon Stone in BASIC INSTINCT

historical musings on THE POST

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Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts and Tom Hanks in THE POST

Watching The Post kindled some thoughts on the historical figures depicted in the movie.

Fritz Beebe, played by Tracy Letts in the movie, was a valued business advisor to Katharine Graham. Decades later Katharine Graham told Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air that Beebe made a half-hearted argument against publishing the Pentagon Papers; his intentional lack of forcefulness gave her the space to make the decision to publish. This dynamic is captured perfectly in The Post.  In the same interview, Katharine Graham gives her own version of the Pentagon Papers publication by the Washington Post; the movie hews closely to this account.

Watching Bruce Greenwood’s fine performance as former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara reminded me of the Errol Morris documentary: The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. In 2003, Morris got McNamara to sit in front of a camera and spill the “lessons learned” from his Vietnam War mistakes. It was an exercise in confession for McNamara. But when listening to McNamara’s “if we had only known then…”, I kept remembering, enraged, that we DID know then. And the Pentagon Papers showed that McNamara, especially, knew most of this stuff then. I have never been so infuriated leaving a theater.

Now Tom Hanks in The Post and Jason Robards in All the President’s Men are wonderful as the swashbuckling editor Ben Bradlee. If you want a dose of the real Ben Bradlee, search YouTube for “Ben Bradlee Charlie Rose” – you’ll find a 53-minute 1996 interview with Bradlee, including his first-hand account of the Pentagon Papers episode.

If you perform a Google Image search for “ben bradlee antoinette pinchot”, you’ll find the real photo of Ben Bradlee and Antoinette “Tony” Pinchot Bradlee with Jack and Jackie Kennedy.  In the movie, Tom Hanks and Sarah Paulson are Photo-shopped into the picture in the Bradlee’s Georgetown townhouse.

Daniel Ellsberg (portrayed in The Post by Matthew Rhys) is still around and has written a new book. Last month, Ellsberg agave his own Fresh Air wide-ranging interview, in which he detailed the painstaking process of Xeroxing the 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers one page at a time and cutting the “Top Secret” off each page with scissors.

And to nitpick, here’s the one historical inaccuracy that I could find in the movie – some New York City hippie protester in 1971 gives Mario Savio’s famous “bodies on the gears” speech, which Savio actually delivered seven years earlier in Berkeley .

2017 at the Movies: farewell to the icons

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Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne
Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne

As important as are filmmakers, so are the great film popularizers. All movie fans owe a debt of gratitude to Robert Osborne, the longtime host of Turner Classic Movies. Osborne got his start in Hollywood as an actor, developed many personal friendships with icons of classic cinema and became one of the first popular movie historians. Here’s his NYT obit. Virtually all of his obits describe him as “a gentleman”, a throw-back to a less course culture. He didn’t shy way from referring to Hollywood scandals (Gloria Grahame, Mary Astor and the like) but did not take glee in them.

 

Jeanne Moreau in ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS

At the beginning of her career, Jeanne Moreau capped the best of French film noir as the gangster’s unreliable squeeze in Touchez pas au grisbi and sparked neo-noir with Elevator to the Gallows.  Then we Americans saw her as the face of the European art film with Malle’s Elevator and The Lovers, Antonioni’s La Notte, Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and Bunuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid – all between 1958 and 1964.  Her wide-ranging body of work included Orson Welles’ best Shakespeare movie Chimes at Midnight.  And, for a Guilty Pleasure, there’s the silly 1965 Mexican Revolution action comedy Viva Maria!

 

Harry Dean Stanton in PARIS, TEXAS

With exactly 200 screen credits on IMDb, Harry Dean Stanton was a prolific character actor who improbably became a leading man at age 58 with his masterpiece Paris, Texas.   Harry Dean often seemed like that uncle/neighbor/mentor who had Lived A Life but would let you inside and let you learn from his journey.  He was ever accessible and always piqued the audience’s curiosity about his characters.  Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel once posited that a movie could not be entirely bad if Harry Dean Stanton were in it.

The best movies of 2017

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Javier and Ricardo Darin in TRUMAN
Javier Cámara and Ricardo Darin in TRUMAN

Every year, I keep a running list of the best movies I’ve seen this year. I usually end up with a Top Ten and another 5-15 mentions. Here’s last year’s list.

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’m still looking forward to seeing films that are candidates for my final list, including Call Me By Your Name, Thelma, Phantom Thread, The Post and Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.  You can see the current list complete with video availability at my Best Movies of 2017.  Here’s the year-end list:

  1. Truman
  2. The Big Sick
  3. The Shape of Water
  4. Wind River
  5. Dunkirk
  6. Coco
  7. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
  8. Lady Bird
  9. The Founder
  10. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer

And the rest: Lucky and The Sense of an Ending

Sally Hawkins in THE SHAPE OF WATER

I try not to tease you with movies that you can’t find, but I need to acknowledge two sure-fire crowd-pleasers from this year’s Cinequest: Quality Problems and For Grace. Both films are emotionally authentic, intelligent and funny, but neither has distribution so far. I will feature them if and when they become available on video.

And here’s a special mention. It’s not on my list, but The Lost City of Z deserves credit for reviving the genre of the historical adventure epic, with all the spectacle of a swashbuckler, while braiding in modern sensitivities and a psychological portrait.

Brooke Purdy in QUALITY PROBLEMS
Brooke Purdy in QUALITY PROBLEMS

Happy Anniversary to The Wife!

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The Wife and The Movie Gourmet celebrating our anniversary

Happy Anniversary to The Wife, also known as Lisa The Love of My Life!

Once again, she tolerated my spending huge chunks of time at Cinequest, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Noir City, the SF Jewish Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival.

We shared some of my favorite movie experiences this year.

  • We discovered the obscure Norwegian gem All the Beauty at Cinequest, which was one of EIGHT Cinequest screenings that she made it to.
  • She accompanied me to see the premiere of my favorite Cinequest film, Quality Problems, and go out for drinks with the filmmakers afterward.
  • Together, we power-binged through seasons of Happy Valley, Broadchurch, Transparent, Victoria and The Crown.
  • She overcame decades of resistance to watching The Deer Hunter, and we revisited Lantana, a movie that we enjoyed for the first time early in our marriage.
  • She didn’t like (or finish) Toni Erdmann, which I loved, and she argued that I was selling Fences way short.  She sure liked Elle, though!
  • I’m always hoping, hoping, hoping that she’ll enjoy MY choice for us to watch, so I was completely gratified by her LOLs during The Disaster Artist – and now I get to bellow, “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!“.

And, as always, she still teases me for “the Romanian abortion movie”, “the Icelandic penis movie” and “the Ukrainian deaf movie”.

She’s the biggest fan and supporter of this blog, and I appreciate her and love her. Happy Anniversary, Honey!

2017 at the Movies: farewell to the actors

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Bill Paxton in ONE FALSE MOVE
Bill Paxton in ONE FALSE MOVE

I first noticed the actor Bill Paxton as small town police chief Dale “Hurricane” Dixon in the 1992 indie neo-noir One False Move (a very underrated indie). In two more indelible and more widely remembered performances, he played the lead role of polygamist Bill Henrickson for the five seasons of HBO’s Big Love and astronaut Fred Haise in Apollo 13.

 

Mary Tyler Moore with Donald Sutherland in ORDINARY PEOPLE
Mary Tyler Moore with Donald Sutherland in ORDINARY PEOPLE

Mary Tyler Moore, of course, is a giant of television history because of The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and all the fine shows produced by her MTM Enterprises. And her Mary Richards instantly became a societal icon. If ever anyone doubts the genius of her comic timing, they can just watch the 4-minute Chuckles the Clown funeral from the Mary Tyler Moore Show (it’s on YouTube).

She made very few movies, but they are worth remembering. She was Oscar-nominated for her still, emotionally distant parent in Ordinary People – a performance that she later said that she had modeled on her own father. She was hilarious as Ben Stiller’s mom in Flirting With Disaster. And she was also Elvis Presley’s last movie leading lady in the unintentionally funny Change of Habit, in which she played a social worker nun (!) who had to choose between her religious order and the ghetto doctor (Elvis!).

 

Powers Boothe in GUYANA TRAGEDY: THE STORY OF JIM JONES
Powers Boothe in GUYANA TRAGEDY: THE STORY OF JIM JONES

I first noticed – and was captivated by – the actor Powers Boothe as the mad cult leader Jim Jones in Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones; this is one of the best (and scariest) movie portrayals of a historical figure. That Emmy-winning performance launched his screen career and led to another delicious role – Cy Tolliver, the cold-eyed and evil rival to Ian McShane’s cold-eyed and evil Al Swearingen in Deadwood.

 

Martin Landau in NORTH BY NORTHWEST

Martin Landau had an acting career that spanned seven decades and resulted in 177 screen credits. His two finest performances came at age 61 and age 66 – the killer of an inconvenient mistress in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors and his Oscar winning turn as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood. Landau’s most famous role came when he was only 31, as he chased Cary Grant across the faces of Mount Rushmore in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

The actress Dina Merrill made a career of playing high society matrons (as she was in real life). She was never better in one of my favorite films, Robert Altman’s The Wedding.

The actor Stephen Furst had 88 screen credits, but none more iconic than the role in his second feature film: Kent “Flounder” Dorfman in Animal House. “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”

I remember the versatile actress Glenne Headly for giving Steve Martin and Michael Caine more than they can handle in the hilarious con artist movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Here’s her NYT obit. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.

Michael Nyqvist co-starred with Noomi Rapace in the Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movies. He was also really good in last year’s overlooked indie neo-noir Frank & Lola.

Sam Shephard was America’s greatest living playwright for decades, and also made a mark as an actor with 68 screen credits. His most memorable role was as test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff.

Danielle Darrieux, who at age 36 played the privileged and shallow countess in Max Ophuls’ The Earrings of Madame de…, died at age 100.

Emmanuelle Riva’s 89 screen credits are spread over the past SEVEN decades. She was a fixture of the French New Wave, beginning with Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour in 1959. We remember her Oscar-nominated performance in 2012’s heartbreaking Alzheimer’s drama Amour.

Emmanuelle Riva in ARMOUR
Emmanuelle Riva in AMOUR

 

The actor Frank Vincent gloried in mobster roles, playing characters like Johnny Big , Joey Big Ears, Tommy Tomatoes and Tommy ‘The Bull’ Vitagli. He is best known as Phil Leotardo in The Sopranos. His most memorable (and ill-fated) line was directed to Joe Pesci in Goodfellas: Go home and get your shine box….

Haruo Nakajima was the first actor to play Godzilla (before computers did that). Nakajima, who had been playing the minor bad guys dispatched by the hero in samurai movies, sweated profusely inside the rubber monster suit for twelve Godzilla films.

John Hurt (center) in THE HIT
John Hurt (center) in THE HIT

John Hurt’s magnificent career started in the 1960s, but I first noticed him in 1976 when he leaped out of the screen as the lethally mad Caligula when PBS broadcast the BBC miniseries I, Claudius. Hurt is probably most recognized (by my generation) for his Oscar-nominated performance as the title character in 1980’s The Elephant Man or as the first victim of the alien in Alien. But Hurt was always able to stay current with performances in popular films like V for Vendetta and Hellboy and he played Ollivander in the Harry Potter movies. He also recently made Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011) and Snowpiercer (2013), and was the best thing (as The Priest) in the awful film Jackie (2016). My own favorite John Hurt performance was as the more disciplined hit man in the 1984 British neo-noir The Hit.

John Hurt (left) with Derek Jacobi in I, CLAUDIUS
John Hurt (left) with Derek Jacobi in I, CLAUDIUS
John Hurt with Natalie Portman in JACKIE
John Hurt with Natalie Portman in JACKIE

2017 at the Movies: farewell to the filmmakers

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Jonathan Demme
Jonathan Demme

If he had made no other films, Jonathan Demme would be forever remembered for his horror masterpiece The Silence of the Lambs (1991), one of only three movies to win Oscars in all four major categories: Best Picture, Director (Demme), Leading Actor (Anthony Hopkins) and Leading Actress (Jodie Foster). It also won the Screenwriting Oscar (Ted Tally).

Jonathan Demme, however, was a director who could master many genres. He started out with genre exploitation movies, and I first admired his work in the little indie Melvin and Howard (1980), with its delightful performances by Jason Robards and Paul Le Mat. Then he made one of the two or three best ever rock concert films, Stop Making Sense (1984) with The Talking Heads.  And then he directed the topical drama Philadelphia (1993) and the wonderfully engaging addiction dramedy Rachel Getting Married (2008).

His body of work screams versatility, and his masterpiece…Well, his masterpiece just screams.

John Avildsen won the Best Director Oscar for Rocky (which also won Oscars for Best Picture and Film Editing). We still employ many cultural references to Rocky today, and remember it for launching the career of Sylvester Stallone and a spate of mostly mediocre sequels. But don’t discount Rocky. Remember that someone had to choose how to shoot Rocky Balboa pounding beef carcasses, running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and courting Adrian by introducing his turtles Cuff and Link. Movies don’t achieve iconic status by accident. Avildsen made a brilliant film that was both poignant and thrilling.

In his film Night of the Living Dead, George Romero re-invented the fictional zombie as a shambling, semi-decomposed brain-eater, and that is the zombie that we all envision today. Night of the Living Dead also changed movie standards (for better or for worse) to accept gratuitous gore for the sake of entertainment. And, because its rejection by major movie studios forced Romero to go indie, Night of the Living Dead became one of the first hugely successful independent films.

Bruce Brown directed The Endless Summer in 1966, thus inventing the surf documentary.

Jerry Lewis: Not My Cup of Tea. Maybe now we’ll finally get to see his notorious and long-suppressed The Day the Clown Died, the 1973 movie Lewis wrote, directed and starred in – about a clown imprisoned with children in a Nazi death camp.