Thanks to the Film Noir Foundation, two newly restored classics of film noir are available on DVD. Both are from Argentina – and one of them is a masterpiece.
The masterpiece isLos tallos amargos(The Bitter Stems), one of the most imaginative and psychological movies of the classic film noir era. Because of his insecurities, a man invents imagined threats, but his real nemesis is himself. The shocking and ironic ending that would have been far too dark for any Hollywood film of the era.
Los tallos amargos was listed as one of the “50 Best Photographed Films of All-Time” by American Cinematographer. Its storied dream sequence is one of the most surreal in cinema. Los tallos amargos won the Silver Condor (the Argentine Oscar) for both Best Picture and Best Director (Fernando Ayala).
Narciso Ibáñez Menta and Laura Hidalgo in THE BEAST MUST DIE
The other film newly available on DVD is The Beast Must Die, which begins with the murder of a man so despicable that every other character has at least one motive for killing him. A visiting detective novelist becomes a murder investigator. As he peels back the onion, the whodunit revolves around which motive propelled the act of murder. There is a big reveal and a shocking ending.
The Los tallos amargos and The Beast Must Die DVDs can be pre-ordered from the Film Noir Foundation, and they will ship beginning November 2, 2021.
Sibyl: The filmmaking is so exquisite that it masks the delicious trashiness of the story. This sex-filled melodrama is now widely available to stream (Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube).
The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:
Mama Weed: it’s always fun when Huppert gets outrageous. Laemmle.
ON TV
THE KILLER SHREWS – this is a dog in a fright mask
This being Halloween Week, Turner Classic Movies starts out with some of the more outlandish movie monsters on October 26, First. we have carnivorous rabbits the size of horses in Night of the Lepus. Then we have a classic from my list of Least Convincing Movie Monsters, – it’s The Killer Shrews, where the filmmakers have put fright masks on dogs, and then applied shaggy patches to the sides of the dogs and ropy rat tails to their backs.
Then, on October 29, TCM brings us a REALLY scary movie, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams must figure out that humans are being replicated by floating pods from outer space. Leonard Nimoy plays the chillingly confident and authoritative Dr. David Kibner – not everybody can be menacing in a turtleneck. The final shot is spine tingling.
Btooke Adams and Donald Sutherland in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
In director Justine Triet’s sex-filled (and sometimes darkly funny) melodrama Sibyl, the psychotherapist Sibyl (Virginie Efira) decides to phase out her practice and return to her primary obsession – novel writing. Sibyl is changing the trajectory of her own life, and she reflects on the one true love in her past (Niels Schneider), her sobriety, her parenting and the family of her sister (Laure Calamy).
While off-loading most of her patients, Sibyl picks up a new one – a needy young actress (Adèle Exarchopoulos from Blue Is the Warmest Color). The actress is about to jump start her movie career, but she’s having an affair with the other lead actor (Gaspar Ulliel), who is inconveniently married to the director Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann).
Each of these threads is its own melodrama, and Triet braids them together into an always entertaining story. We are our choices – and we can be our impulses.
Sibyl may be a psychotherapist, but she hasn’t mastered the concept of boundaries. Most egregiously, she doesn’t hesitate to use the personal secrets of her patients as fodder for her novels. Yikes! And she doesn’t resist rampant boundary-crossing by the actress, the actor and the director, either, and she’s used by all of them.
The characters, especially Sibyl, fill the camera lens with passionate sex – on the floor, up against a door, on the beach, on an apartment bathroom’s sink, on the deck of a boat, but not, to the best of my recollection, on a bed.
Niels Schneider and Virginie Efira in SIBYL
There’s lots of sly, dark humor, beginning with the over-intellectualized mansplaining in the very first scene. The sister is hilarious, especially when she coaches her niece on how to manipulate her mother. At one point, the director of the film-within-the-film responds to a lover’s meltdown on the set: “Guys, let’s keep the drama fictional if you don’t mind.“
The scene where the director first meets the actress who has just been impregnated by the director’s husband is another comic masterpiece from Hüller.
Many of us so revere French cinema that we forget that one of the things French filmmakers do well is trashy. And Sibyl is every bit as trashy as Fifty Shades of Grey. However, the editing (Laurent Sénéchal) and the acting are so exquisite that it masks the trashiness of the story.
I originally streamed Sibyl on Virtual Cinema at Laemmle. It’s now available on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and DVD.
Photo caption: Ingvar Hilmir Snær and Noomi Rapace in LAMB. Courtesy of A24.
The very quiet drama Lamb is one of the most gripping films of the year, and one of the most unsettling. I’ve seen Lamb described as a horror film, but it is very unlike most of today’s horror films. I would rather label it as a dark, cautionary fable of karma with some supernatural elements.
It’s difficult to imagine a more pastoral setting than Lamb’s remote Icelandic sheep farm. Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) run the farm with studied competence, caring for the sheep and maintaining their tractor. No neighbors are in sight. Neither the routine nor the isolation burdens them; they are comfortable with and enjoy each other’s company.
One of their routine tasks is birthing lambs. We see that Maria and Ingvar have an established division of labor and confidence. We think we know what to expect until a lamb is birthed and Maria and Ingvar’s reaction shows that this newborn is anything but normal.
It’s remarkable that the two never debate what to do or consult experts. They both immediately fall into behaving in complete alignment. But we suspect that they are not behaving as most people would.
Writer-director Valdimar Jóhannsson is such an able story-teller, that he doesn’t show us the lamb’s body right away, and we have to surmise what’s going on by the reactions of the characters. When Ingvar’s nogoodnik bother Petur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) shows up uninvited, he brings with fresh eyes and asks WTF?
Jóhannsson uses the starkly beautiful but menacing Icelandic landscape to fill us with foreboding. Something is not right here. And there will come a reckoning.
Lamb drove me to the dictionary to review the meanings of the word monster. In Lamb, there is a creature who fits under the definition, but which is pure and sweet. Another creature is the terrifying kind of monster. And a human takes an action that is normal from a human point of view, but from a monster’s perspective is, well, monstrous.
The cast (and this is really a three-hander) is excellent. You may recognize Rapace as the pierced-and-inked Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo franchise.
Lamb is the first feature for Valdimar Jóhannsson – and it is a superb debut. You haven’t seen anything like this movie before.
This week, we have familiar favorites – Daniel Craig’s final fling as James Bond and Tony Soprano’s origin story. Plus, the Mill Valley Film Festival is underway through this weekend – here’s my festival preview.
Time for a rant: yesterday I saw Lamb at a midday show in a 209-seat theater auditorium. When I bought my ticket, someone had already purchased a ticket for seat P9, almost at the top of the room. I purchased seat C8, in the middle of the third row. As the trailers ended, a third patron seated himself – in seat C10 – with only one seat buffering us. This guy chose between 207 available seats and picked one only two feet from me – in a pandemic. What a tool! He probably encroaches at the urinals, too.
IN THEATERS
No Time to Die: Daniel Craig returns one last time as his world-weary James Bond – and it’s epic. No disposable women this time.
The Many Saints of Newark: This prequel of The Sopranos shows us what formed the teenage Tony Soprano, especially his role model “uncle”, Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola). Also on HBO Max.
Mama Weed: it’s always fun when Huppert gets outrageous. Laemmle.
ON TV
Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton in WHERE EAGLES DARE
On October 16, Turner Classic Movies presents Where Eagles Dare, a crackerjack thriller from the WWII commando subgenre (think The Guns of Navarone and The Dirty Dozen). The seemingly impossible target is a cliff-side Nazi stronghold only accessible via a funicular. And not all the commandos understand the true mission. The oddly matched stars are Richard Burton (nearing the end of his second marriage to Elizabeth Taylor) and Clint Eastwood (after the Leone spaghetti westerns but before his Dirty Harry franchise). It all works.
I went to a James Bond movie and a romance broke out. No Time to Die, a fitting farewell to Daniel Craig’s reign as James Bond, has all the action set pieces, fantastic gizmos and exotic locations that you would want in a Bond film; it all just comes down to his profound love for a woman.
Remember when the Bond formula was impossibly sexy woman beds James Bond and then tries to kill him; repeat. In No Time to Die, however, there are no disposable women.
Bond, retired from the British MI6, is living in domestic bliss in Southern Italy with his girlfriend Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) from the previous Bond movie, Spectre. Bond is also grieving for the redeemed double agent of past Bond films, Vesper Lynd (most recently played by Eva Green); on the suggestion of Madeleine, who is a psychiatrist, he visits Vesper’s grave – but an assassination attempt kicks off the action in No Time to Die.
Besides Madeleine and Vesper, Bond faces another woman, his own replacement in MI6’s new Agent 007 Lashana Lynch. 007 is talented and cocky, and Bond and 007 slide effortlessly into comradeship. Ana de Armas is very funny as the supposedly inexperienced agent Paloma in a set piece (in de Armas’ native Cuba) – lethal in a stunning Bond Girl dress.
But No Time to Die revolves around Bond’s relationship with Madeleine. Madeleine’s father was also a hunter of super villains, and she has as many secrets as Bond. So, Madeleine’s reliability comes into question, and the oft-betrayed Bond certainly has justification for his trust issues. Bond once ruefully mutters, “No – I don’t know her at all.” Can Bond summon the trust that is requisite to love?
Don’t worry – the action set pieces are spectacular, particularly the once before the opening titles. That one features perhaps the most impressive deployment ever of the Bondmobile.
There’s also a super villain (Rami Malek) with a biological weapon of mass destruction. There’s a lot of blah blah about how this weapon works, and then more blah blah between the supervillain and Madeleine. And then Bond has a face-to-face with the previous supervillain, Blofeld (Cristolph Waltz) with more blah blah. I started to doze during this part of No Time to Die, but soon we were plunging back into another thrilling action.
Neither supervillain is as entertaining as the traitorous agent Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen), an ever smiling bro boy so white bread that he is referred to as “Book of Mormon”.
IMO Sean Connery was essential to the Bond franchise by creating a studly character so arrogant yet sympathetic – the guy who men want to be and women want to be with. Movie James Bonds have come and gone; (Pierce Brosnan was good, I never saw the Timothy Dalton Bond movies, and my least favorite Bond was the brattily insouciant Roger Moore.) To me, Daniel Craig is every bit as good as Connery. Craig has the requisite physicality, confidence and sex appeal, while off-loading a Connery’s hint of brutishness and adding a sad tint of world-weariness.
The Bond franchise itself is remarkable. Mick LaSalle recently wrote:
…The key to its resiliency is that it has changed with the times, yet never so much that it fully lost contact with what initially made it popular. This amazing balancing act has played out for 59 long years. (To give you a sense of how long that is in movie time, 59 years before the first Bond movie, “Dr. No,” it was 1903.)
No Time to Die is ably directed by the Bay Area’s own Cary Joji Fukunaga (Sin Nombre, Beasts of No Nation, True Detective). No Time to Die is epic and is the keystone to Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond.
Michael Gandolfini and Alessandro Nivola in THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK
In the The Many Saints of Newark, David Chase’s prequel to The Sopranos, we get a peek inside the world that formed Tony Soprano. It’s pretty good.
Set when Tony Soprano was a high schooler, The Many Saints of Newark centers on Tony’s favorite “uncle”, mobster Dickie Moltisanti (and moltisanti is Italian for Many Saints). Dickie is played by Alessandro Nivola, who has had important, but supporting, roles in plenty of good movies (Junebug, Ginger & Rosa, American Hustle, A Most Violent Year, Selma). Here, he plays the story’s protagonist, charming and smarter than the average goon, and also capable of sudden, irrevocable violence.
Dickie and Tony are not really related, but, while Tony’s dad is incarcerated, his mob colleague Dickie is looking after his family. When we meet Tony’s sulking brute of a dad (Jon Bernthal) and his nightmare of a mom (Vera Farmiga), it’s clear why Dickie is young Tony’s role model.
Michael Gandolfini, James Gandolfini’s son, plays the young Tony. Beyond the resemblance to James Gandolfini’s adult Tony, the kid can act. He’s good, but the lead is Nivola.
Ray Liotta plays Dickie Moltisanti’s dad, Hollywood Dick Moltisanti. I don’t personally KNOW Ray Liotta, so I will refrain from saying that he can play mobsters effortlessly or that’s he’s a natural. Let’s just say that Liotta makes his mobster performances LOOK effortless. Here, his Hollywood Dick, returning home from an Italian holiday with a trophy bride, is filled with gusto. There’s also a bonus Liotta performance as a related, but much different, second character.
There’s enough in The Many Saints of Newark to show us how Silvio Dante, Big Pussy and Paulie Walnuts, all a few years older than Tony Soprano, would come to accept Tony as he crew leader. And there’s a big reveal about the extent of Uncle Junior’s (Corey Stoll) vindictiveness.
The Many Saints of Newark includes a depiction of the 1967 Newark riots, rising Black consciousness and the changing demographics of Newark and its suburbs,
Has there ever been better episodic television than The Sopranos? Breaking Bad and The Wire can stake their claims, but it’s clear that The Sopranos sets the standard.
The David Chase-crafted story of Dickie Moltisanti would allow The Many Saints of Newark to stand on its own as entertainment. For fans of The Sopranos, however, it’s even more insightful and evocative.
The Many Saints of Newark is in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.
Photo caption: Tim Blake Nelson in OLD HENRY. Courtesy of Shout! Factory.
Three new movies in theaters this week, but I’m only recommending one of them. Of course, I’ll try to catch the new James Bond movie, the last with Daniel Craig, No Time to Die.
I just got back from covering the Nashville Film Festival, and here’s my preview of the Mill Valley Film Festival, opening tonight.
IN THEATERS
Old Henry: If you appreciate a good western, then Old Henry is your movie. The big shootout is thrilling, and Tim Blake Nelson is so good as a man who knows he can’t have redemption and only seeks some solace. Old Henry is now playing nationally, including for one-week run at San Francisco’s Roxie.
The Nowhere Inn: In this comedy, Carrie Brownstein (Portlandia) plays herself directing a documentary about her real life friend, the avant-garde musician Annie Clark, who performs as St. Vincent. These are two smart and talented women, and the movie is maybe half as funny as they are. If you need a dose of St. Vincent’s sexy vibrancy, then watch her perform instead.
Titane: Demented, icky and excessive, the Cannes Palme d’Or winner is intentionally unpleasant to watch. A maniac stripper has sex with, and becomes impregnated by, a Cadillac; she’s also a serial killer with a fetish for impaling her victims. I felt punished, even tortured, when I was watching Titane.
The Dry: a mystery as psychological as it is procedural. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
ON TV
Edmond O’Brien in D.O.A.
On October 13, Turner Classic Movies brings us one of my favorites – 83 minutes of noir hysteria titled D.O.A. This grippingwhodunit opens with a man walking into a police station to report HIS OWN MURDER. The man (Edmond O’Brien) finds out that he has been dosed with a poison for which there is no antidote – and that he has only a few days to live. He desperately races the clock to find out who has murdered him and why. Much of D.O.A. was shot on location in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and one SF scene has one of the first cinematic glimpses into Beat culture. The little known director Rudolph Maté gave the film a great look, which shouldn’t be a surprise because Maté had been Oscar-nominated five times as a cinematographer. The next year, he followed D.O.A. with another solid noir, Union Station, with William Holden and Barry Fitzgerald.
Photo caption: Tim Blake Nelson in OLD HENRY. Courtesy of Shout! Factory.
The fine western Old Henry is centered on Henry (Tim Blake Nelson), a widowed settler in the wilds of 1906 Oklahoma. Henry is content with being a solitary sod buster, but he has serious skills from a violent past, and both the past and the skills are unknown to his teen son (Gavin Lewis). The son is brash and impulsive, and desperate to escape the drudgery and isolation of the homestead.
A man badly wounded by a gunshot (Scott Haze) turns up with a satchel full of cash ( (obviously contraband). Henry nurses him, and chooses to hide him when three armed men show up, led by Ketchum ( Stephen Dorff), who claims to be a sheriff. Ketchum knows that his target is in Henry’s cabin, and he recognizes that Henry is more than a dirt farmer. When Ketchum returns with reinforcements, a climactic gun battle is inevitable.
One wild card is the wounded man, with his uncertain identity and motives. Another is the son, rigorously sheltered by Henry and ignorant of the cost of real violence. He’s spoiling to get into a fight – and that is not helpful.
Tim Blake Nelson, with nary a wasted word or action, commands the screen as the ever steely Henry. I saw Old Henry in personat the Nashville Film Festival, where Nelson revealed that his performance was informed by “restraint and stillness” because, for Henry, “any exposure means vulnerability”. So, Blake made Henry “laconic in actions as well as words”.
Nelson is a magnificent actor, who has elevated many a character role (Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?). Here he gets the lead role in a movie that premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Good for him.
Old Henry is the the first feature written and directed by Potsy Ponciroli. And it’s a well-crafted film. The filmmakers get the period right. The art direction and the production design are flawless, and the weapons have the necessary heft. Old Henry was filmed on a cattle farm in Tennessee, but it sure looks like Oklahoma.
If you appreciate a good western, then Old Henry is your movie. The big shootout is thrilling, and Tim Blake Nelson is so good as a man who knows he can’t have redemption and only seeks some solace. Old Henry is now playing nationally, including for one-week run at San Francisco’s Roxie.
Photo caption: Agathe Rousselle and Caddy in TITANE. Courtesy of NEON.
I don’t think I’ve ever before described a movie-going experience as “punishing”, but here goes. After being assaulted by the French sci fi horror film Titane, which purports to be two portraits of abnormal psychology, I felt beaten, even tortured.
The headstrong child Alexia causes an auto accident and gets a platinum plate in her skull. She grows into a stripper at car shows (Agathe Rousselle), and has a serious automobile fetish. In Titane’s most notorious scene, Alexia gives a new meaning to auto-eroticism by having sex with, and becoming impregnated by, a Cadillac.
Alexia is also a serial killer, and her second signature fetish is impaling her victims. She keeps a spike in her hair for this purpose, but a bar stool will suffice, too. One victim gets away and indemnified her, so Alexia changed her appearance and goes underground as a young man. Here, she happens on a beefy fire captain (Vincent Lindon), who is grieving for a son who disappeared ten years ago, and adopts Alexia as his long lost, now recovered, son.
Through much of Titane, we are asking WTF is going on? Writer-diretor Julia Ducournau keeps surprising us by piling on segments that are SO twisted and bizarre, that most of us could not imagine them.
Most of Titane is intentionally unpleasant to watch. Characters bleed blood, unless they bleed motor oil. Bones crunch, mouths froth and bellies are picked open. The murders are gory, and Alexia self mutilates as her pregnancy progresses, right up to an excruciating birth scene.
Oh, and let me be very clear about this, Titane is NOT a date movie.
The character of Alexia is just a bad seed, a feral maniac. The character of the troubled fire captain is also bizarre, but he’s more psychologically interesting. He insists that everyone else accept what is clearly a delusion. Does he understand that this is not his son?
Vincent Lindon in TITANE. Courtesy of NEON.
Lindon (who muscled up for the role) is superb in this crazy role, which requires him to exude command authority and also the deepest vulnerability. It’s a very brave performance, and it works, for example, in his solo dance to She’s Not There.
Myriem Akheddiou is also excellent in a brief scene as the mother of the fire captain’s missing child.
I know my share of American firefighters. They would be surprised by Titane’s French firefighters, who let off steam by getting high and holding raves in the firehouse, all hypnotically dancing to electronica.
Notably, Titane won the Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. While one of the two most prestigious prizes in cinema (along with the Best Picture Oscar), the Palme d’Or is no guarantee that a movie is great – or even watchable. On the positive side, recent winners have included the superb Parasite, Shoplifters, Amour, Blue Is the Warmest Color and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. On the unfathomably bad side, cinematic excrement like The White Ribbon, The Tree of Life, Dancer in the Dark, and now Titane – has also won.
The critical consensus is far too kind to Titane. Many critics correctly label what had come out of Julia Ducournau’s mind as “demented” and then credit her for the visual excess in telling an unbearably icky story. It’s just demented, excessive and icky.
