This week on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of Saturday Night, I Used to Be Funny, and It’s Not Me. I’m waiting to see the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer with Daniel Craig, Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door with Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, and Brady Corbet’s acclaimed third feature, The Brutalist with Adrian Brody – and I’m getting twitchy with impatience.
CURRENT MOVIES
- Anora: human spirit vs the oligarchs. In theaters.
- Conclave: explosive secrets? in the Vatican?. In theaters and now streaming.
- Blitz: one brave, resourceful kid amid the horrors. AppleTV.
- A Real Pain: whose pain is it? In theaters.
- The Substance: the thinking woman’s Faust, if you can take the body horror. MUBI (free), Amazon, AppleTV.
- Endless Summer Syndrome: there will be hell to pay. In arthouse theaters.
- The Outrun: facing herself without the bottle. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandngo.
- The Remarkable Life of Ibelin: totally unexpected. Netflix.
- Saturday Night: chaos as entertainment. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- It’s Not Me: his life as an art film. Amazon, Fandango.
- The Settlers: reckoning with the ugly past. MUBI.
- Emilia Pérez: four women yearn amid Mexico’s drug violence. Netflix.
- I Used to Be Funny: PTSD is no joke. Netflix, Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- Kneecap: sláinte! Amazon, AppleTV.
- Will & Harper: old friends adjust. Netflix.
WATCH AT HOME
From my Best Movies of 2024 – So Far:
- The Bikeriders: they ride, drink and fight, and yet we care. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- Hit Man: who knew self-invention could be so fun? Netflix.
- Challengers: three people and their desire. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- La Chimera: six genres for the price of one. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- In the Summers: they mature, he evolves. Amazon.
- Ghostlight: a family saves itself, in iambic pentameter. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango (included).
- The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed: is she going to be a loser? Amazon, AppleTV, Hulu.
- Sweetheart Deal: a triumph of cinéma vérité. In arthouse theaters.
- Love Lies Bleeding: obsessions and impulses collide. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- I Saw the TV Glow: brimming with originality. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
ON TV
Set your DVR to record the December 27 Turner Classic Movies airing of Three Strangers, a much underrated film noir from 1946, co-written by John Huston. Geraldine Fitzgerald, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre play three people who don’t know each other ando are brought together by an odd gamble. There’s a legend that, if three strangers make the same prayer to a Chinese god, he will grant a their wish. Each of the three needs money, so they partner in the purchase of a sweepstakes ticket and give it a go.
Lorre’s character is a destitute alcoholic who would buy a bar with his windfall and never leave it. The other two need to hit the jackpot, too, but their reasons are much, much darker. The ending of the story is absurdly noir for some and tragically noir for others.
The best element of Three Strangers is Geraldine Fitzgerald’s a performance as a woman who seems eccentric, until she reveals herself as dangerously unhinged. John Huston had wanted Fitzgerald for the Bridgit O’Shaughnessy role in The Maltese Falcon, and I’m glad that Mary Astor got the part instead because Astor’s performance was perfect – and maybe the best ever liar in the history of cinema. But, when you see her in Three Strangers, it becomes clear that Fitzgerald would have been a remarkably interesting Bridgit, too.
Lorre and Greenstreet were first paired five years earlier in The Maltese Falcon (Greenstreet’s very first movie, at age 62), and Three Strangers was one of eight more films that took advantage of their chemistry.
The director was Jean Negulesco, who knew his way around the noir genre (The Mask of Dimitrios, Nobody Lives Forever, Johnny Belinda and Road House). Three Strangers is plenty entertaining, and Fitzgerald is a revelation.
