This week on The Movie Gourmet – James Stewart, Robert Mitchum: The Two Faces of America, coming up tomorrow on TCM and an unusually personal review of Jazzfest: A New Orleans Story. Plus two very contrasting remembrances.
Frameline —the world’s largest LGBTQ film festival— runs through Sunday, June 26, 2022. Here are my four recommendations.
REMEMBRANCES
A few weeks ago, we lost actor Bo Hopkins, who 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.
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.
CURRENT MOVIES
- Montana Story: a family secret simmers, then explodes. In theaters.
- The Duke: he finally gets his audience. In theaters.
- Downton Abbey: A New Era: harmless enough. In theaters.
- Everything Everywhere All at Once: often indecipherable and mostly dazzling. In theaters.
- My Donkey, My Lover and I: it had me at the title. In theaters.
- Jazzfest: A News Orleans Story: introducing the perfect 8 days of culture. In theaters.
- Hit the Road: a funny family masks their tough choice. Streaming at Laemmle.
- Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres: tell me more. Netflix.
- James Stewart, Robert Mitchum: The Two Faces of America: is “hero/anti-hero” too simplistic? On Turner Classic Movies tomorrow night and WATCH TCM and DIrecTV.
- Fanny: The Right to Rock: triple-threat trailblazers. In theaters (but hard to find).
- Jane by Charlotte: as mildly interesting as the subject. AppleTV.
- Mau: fact-based optimism and thinking big. Streaming at Laemmle.
WATCH AT HOME
The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:
- Electrick Children: magical Mormon runaways in Vegas. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
- Dick Johnson Is Dead: funny, heartfelt and frequently bizarre. Netflix.
- The Women’s Balcony: a righteous man must keep his woman happy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
- The Handmaiden: gorgeous, erotic and a helluva plot. Amazon (included with Prime), Vudu.
- Very Semi-Serious: glorious The New Yorker cartoons. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
- Touching the Void: the gripping true life story of a mountaineer who had to cut his climbing partner’s rope. Amazon, AppleTV.
- The Women’s Balcony: a righteous man must keep his woman happy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
- NUTS!: the rise and fall of a testicular empire. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
- The Imposter: you gotta see this. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.