This week on The Movie Gourmet – Cinequest’s online festival Cinejoy continues and here is my Best of Cinequest and all my Cinequest coverage. I’ve also honored Cinequest by highlighting the pandemic thriller Before the Fire, a female-written and -directed film with its world premiere at a recent Cinequest.
Speaking of film festivals, here’s my First Look at SFFILM.
CURRENT FILMS
Note: Oscar winners CODA, Drive My Car and Belfast are all now available to stream.
- CODA: what’s not to like about this delightful Oscar-winning audience-pleaser? CODA’s success results from the textured supporting characters and complicated family dynamics in writer-director Sian Heder’s screenplay. AppleTV
- Drive My Car: director and co-writer Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s engrossing masterpiece about dealing with loss – and it’s the best movie of 2021. Layered with character-driven stories that could each justify their own movie, this is a mesmerizing film that builds into an exhilarating catharsis. HBO Max, AppleTV, Amazon, and Vudu.
- Nightmare Alley: enough burning ambition for a thousand carnies. IHBO Max, Hulu, Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and redbox.
- Belfast: a child’s point of view is universal. If you have heartstrings, they are gonna get pulled. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and redbox.
- The Power of the Dog: One man’s meanness, another man’s growth. Netflix.
- Don’t Look Up: Wickedly funny. Filmmaker Adam McKay (The Big Short) and a host of movie stars hit the bullseye as they target a corrupt political establishment, a soulless media and a gullible, lazy-minded public. Netflix.
- The Tragedy of Macbeth: No surprise here: Joel Coen, Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand deliver a crisp and imaginative version of the Bard’s Scottish Play. AppleTV.
- Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn: completely different than any movie you’ve seen. AppleTV, Drafthouse On Demand.
ON TV
On April 9 and 10, Turner Classic Movies airs the delightful 1956 heist film Bob le Flambeur on Noir Alley with intros and outros by Eddie Muller. In Bob le Flambeur, Bob the Gambler (Roger Duchesne) is a very decent and cool guy, whose only character flaw is that his financial planning is based on robbing a casino. The other characters, however are a uniformly amoral bunch of blackmailers, finks and pimps, all trying to betray Bob and each other in a tangle of double crosses. Still, with all its cynicism, it’s fairly cheery for a noir and even the decidedly cynical ending is fun.
Bob le Flambeur was written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, that rare Frenchman enamored of American culture; besides adopting the surname of the American novelist, Melville tooled around 1950s Paris in a Cadillac, wearing a Stetson. Melville went on to create a great string of neo-noirs in the 1960s starring Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Lino Ventura – Le Doulos, Le deuxième souffle, Le Cercle Rouge, Le Samourai and Un Flic.
Bob le Flambeur influenced the young filmmakers of the upcoming French New Wave, as well as many American filmmakers. You can also stream Bob le Flambeur from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
