If you haven’t seen it, don’t miss the Mr. Rogers biodoc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Saturday night on PBS.
OUT NOW
- In They Shall Not Grow Old, Lord of the Rings filmmaker Peter Jackson has, for the first time, layered humanity over our understanding of World War I. By slowing down the speed of the jerky WWI film footage and adding sound and color, Jackson has allowed us to relate to the real people in the Great War. This is a generational achievement and a Must See.
- Roma is an exquisite portrait of two enduring women and the masterpiece of Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men and Y Tu Mama Tambien). Will win multiple Oscars. It is streaming now Netflix.
- Green Book: Tony Lip is a marvelous character, and Viggo Mortensen’s performance is one of the great pleasures of this year in the movies.
- Vice: in this bitingly funny biopic of Dick Cheney by writer-director Adam McKay (The Big Short), Cheney is played by a physically transformed and unrecognizable Christian Bale. A superb performance, .pretty good history, biography from a sharp point of view and a damn entertaining movie.
- Stan & Ollie: Steve Coogan as Stan Laurel and John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy deliver remarkable portraits of a partnership facing the inevitability of showbiz decline.
- Pawel Pawlikowski’s sweeping romantic tragedy Cold War is not as compelling as his masterpiece Ida.
- The Favourite: Great performances by three great actresses, sex and political intrigue are not enough; this critically praised film didn’t work for me.
- Do NOT, under any circumstances, see I Hate Kids, which I started to screen for a film festival earlier in the year, but could not bring myself to finish. Somehow, it got a theatrical release, but it only has a Metacritic rating of 12.
ON VIDEO
My Stream of the Week is Mustang, an Ocar-nominated drama about five exuberant Turkish teenage girls who challenge the repression of traditional culture. You can stream Mustang on Netflix, Amazon, iTunes. Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
ON TV
Turner Classic Movies is in the midst of its 31 Days of Oscar series, and I think that it’s time to revisit a spectacle. On February 13, TCM is broadcasting Lawrence of Arabia. For decades, many of us watched this epic squeezed into tinny-sounding TVs. In 1989, I was fortunate enough to see the director’s cut in an old movie palace. Now technology has caught up, and modern large screen HD televisions can do this wide-screen classic justice. Similarly, modern home sound systems can work with the great Maurice Jarre soundtrack.
Nobody has ever created better epics than director David Lean (Bridge Over the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago). Peter O’Toole stars at the moment of his greatest physical beauty. The rest of the cast is unsurpassed: Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, thousands of extras and entire herds of camels. The vast and severe Arabian desert is a character unto itself. And master editor Anne V. Coates delivered what is called the greatest cut in cinema.
Settle in and watch the whole thing – and remember what “epic” really means.
