First Reformed

Movies to See Right Now

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Kôji Yakusho in Hirokazu Koreeda’s THE THIRD MURDER. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society (SFFILM).

Opening this week: The Third Murder is the work of director Hirokazu Koreeda, who made the 1995 art house hit Maborosi and one of the best movies of 2008, Still Walking. Koreeda’s Shoplifters just won the Palm d’Or at Cannes, and will be released in the US by Magnolia Pictures on November 23. I saw The Third Murder at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). The Third Murder is a legal procedural that takes a philosophical turn.

OUT NOW

  • Please make every attempt to see the best movie of the year, now in Bay Area theaters: the emotionally powerful coming of age drama Leave No Trace from Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone). Superbly well-crafted, impeccably acted, thoughtful and emotionally powerful, it’s a Must See.
  • The savagely funny social satire Sorry to Bother You carries the message that humans are more than just their commercial value as consumers and labor to be exploited.
  • The political documentary Dark Money exposes the growing threat of unlimited secret money in political campaigns.
  • Puzzle intelligently and authentically traces one woman’s journey of self discovery.
  • The surprisingly emotional biodoc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is about Fred Rogers’ fierce devotion to the principle that every child is deserving of love and our protection.
  • First Reformed: Ethan Hawke stars in this bleak, bleak psychological thriller with an intense ending.
  • Three Identical Strangers is an astonishing documentary about triplets separated at birth that ranges from the exhuverance of discovering siblings to disturbing questions of social engineering.
  • American Animals is funny documentary/reenactment of a preposterous heist.
  • RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

ON VIDEO

I’m sure that you’ve never seen this week’s video pick because I don’t think it got a theatrical release.  It’s the indie thriller Dose of Reality, which brings a jaw-dropper of a Big Surprise. Dose of Reality is available to stream on Amazon.

ON TV

  • This is a great week for film noir and neo-noir on Turner Classic Movies.  We begin on August 6 with The Set-Up (1949), one of the great film noirs and one of my 10 Best Boxing Movies. Robert Ryan plays a washed-up boxer that nobody believes can win again, not even his long-suffering wife (Audrey Totter).  His manager doesn’t even bother to tell him that he is committed to taking a dive in his next fight.  But what if he wins?  Director Robert Wise makes use of real-time narrative, then highly innovative. Watch for the verisimilitude of the bar where the deal goes down.
  • Also on August 6, there’s the 1950 Perfect Murder noir Tension, with Richard Basehart as the meek night manager of a pharmacy who is married to a slutty shrew (Audrey Totter – of course).  She sneers, “”You were full of laughs then. Well, you’re all laughed out now””  When the wife humiliates him with her newest affair, he works a pair of the newly invented contact lenses and some flashy clothes into a new second identity.  The wife’s boyfriend ends up fatally shot, and the cops start looking for the pharmacy manager.  Will he take the fall?  Barry Sullivan is the cop and Cyd Charisse is the good girl.
  • And on August 9, TCM plays one of my favorite neo-noirs, the Don Siegel thriller Charley Varrick.  Walter Matthau stars as the title character, an expert heist man who sets up a “perfect crime” bank robbery which, of course, goes awry. Worst of all, it turns out that Varrick has stolen a secret Mob fortune being laundered by the bank, and now the underworld organization is after him. Only his wits can save him. I’ve rewatched Charley Varrick a couple of times recently, and it still holds up for me.
Audrey Totter and Richard Basehart in TENSION

Movies to See Right Now

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LEAVE NO TRACE

Please make every attempt to see the best movie of the year, now in Bay Area theaters: the emotionally powerful coming of age drama Leave No Trace from Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone). Superbly well-crafted, impeccably acted, thoughtful and emotionally powerful, it’s a Must See.

OUT NOW

  • First Reformed: Ethan Hawke stars in this bleak, bleak psychological thriller with an intense ending.
  • Three Identical Strangers is an astonishing documentary about triplets separated at birth that ranges from the exhuverance of discovering siblings to disturbing questions of social engineering.
  • American Animals is funny documentary/reenactment of a preposterous heist.
  • RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

ON VIDEO

My video pick was the best foreign film at the 2017 Cinequest, the Czech and Slovak drama The Teacher. It’s a visceral peek inside the everyday dread inherent in society behind the Iron Curtain. The Teacher can now be streamed on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.

ON TV

Andy Griffith in A FACE IN THE CROWD

On July 17, Turner Classic Movies is airing A Face in the Crowd. During every year of the 1960s, Andy Griffith entered the living rooms of most Baby Boomers as Sheriff Andy Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show and in guest appearances on Mayberry R.F.D. Younger folks knew him from another ten seasons on television starring as Matlock.

But, in his very first feature film, Griffith shed the likeability and decency that made him a TV megastar and became a searingly unforgettable villain. In the 1957 Elia Kazan classic A Face in the Crowd, Griffith plays Lonesome Rhodes, a failed country guitar picker who is hauled out of an Arkansas drunk tank by talent scout Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal). It turns out that he has a folksy charm that is dynamite in the new medium of television. He quickly rises in the infotainment universe until he is an A List celeb and a political power broker. To Jeffries’ horror, Rhodes reveals himself to be an evil, power-hungry megalomaniac. Jeffries made him – can she break him? The seduction of a gullible public by a good timin’ charmer predicts the careers of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, although Lonesome Rhodes is meaner than Reagan and less ideological than Bush.  The seduction of a gullible public by a corrupt demagogue also predicts Donald Trump although Lonesome Rhodes is far less narcissistic and fascistic than Trump.

Amazingly, A Face in the Crowd did not garner even a nomination for an Academy Award for Griffith – or for any of its other filmmakers. Today, it is well-regarded, having been added to the library of Congress’ preservation list in the US National Film Registry and rating 91% in the critical reviews tallied by Rotten Tomatoes. It is one of the greatest political films.

Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal in A FACE IN THE CROWD

Movies to See Right Now

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Ethan Hawke in FIRST REFORMED

My pick for the year’s best film so far, Leave No Trace, will be released next week. In the meantime, don’t forget to catch the previously ultra-rare The Man Who Cheated Himself Saturday and Sunday on TCM’s Noir Alley. The psychological thriller First Reformed is a significant work of art, but it’s a tough watch.

OUT NOW

  • First Reformed: Ethan Hawke stars in this bleak, bleak psychological thriller with an intense ending.
  • American Animals is funny documentary/reenactment of a preposterous heist.
  • RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

ON VIDEO
This week’s video pick is You Will Be My Son, a father-son saga with a thrilling and operatic ending. Set in French wine country, it’s also a pretty fair food porn movie. You Will Be My Son is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Tunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

ON TV
On June 27, Turner Classic Movies will present one of my very favorite Alfred Hitchcock films, North by Northwest, with perhaps the greatest ever collection of iconic set pieces – especially the cornfield and Mount Rushmore scenes, but also those in the UN Building, hotel, mansion, art auction and the 20th Century Limited train – they’re all great. Back in the days of the Production Code, some filmmakers could deliver sexual and erotic content without actually showing nudity or simulated sexual activity; one of the best examples is the flirtation between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint on the train (and it even culminates with the notorious allegory of the train penetrating the tunnel).

Cary Grant in NORTH BY NORTHWEST

Movies to See Right Now

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Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn in BEAST

It seems to be the season for psychological thrillers, and it’s hard to say which of Beast and First Reformed has the more surprising and powerful ending.

OUT NOW

  • Beast: Jessie Buckley is a force of nature in this psychological thriller.
  • First Reformed: Ethan Hawke stars in this bleak, bleak psychological thriller with an intense ending.
  • American Animals is funny documentary/reenactment of a preposterous heist.
  • RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  • A Quiet Place is as satisfyingly scary as any movie I’ve seen in a good long time. Very little gore and splatter, but plenty of thrills. I’m not a big fan of horror movies, but I enjoyed and admired this one.

 

ON VIDEO
My Stream of the Week is a thinking person’s psychological thriller from Cinequest, Prodigy. You can now stream Prodigy on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu YouTube and Google Play.

 

ON TV
On June 16, Turner Classic Movies will air Sydney Pollack’s under recognized 1972 masterpiece Jeremiah Johnson, which features a brilliantly understated but compelling performance by Robert Redford. If you want to understand why Redford is a movie star, watch this movie. Give lots of credit to Pollack – it’s only 108 minutes long, and today’s filmmakers would bloat this epic tale by 40 minutes longer.

Robert Redford in JEREMIAH JOHNSON
Robert Redford in JEREMIAH JOHNSON

Movies to See Right Now

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Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn in BEAST

This week, I’m featuring two psychological thrillers with powerful endings and a comic heist documentary.

OUT NOW

  • Beast: Jessie Buckley is a force of nature in this psychological thriller.
  • First Reformed: Ethan Hawke stars in this bleak, bleak psychological thriller with an intense ending.
  • American Animals is funny documentary/reenactment of a preposterous heist.
  • RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  • A Quiet Place is as satisfyingly scary as any movie I’ve seen in a good long time. Very little gore and splatter, but plenty of thrills. I’m not a big fan of horror movies, but I enjoyed and admired this one.

ON VIDEO
My Stream of the Week is the very funny and sentimental The Last Movie Star with 82-year-old Burt Reynolds and Ariel Winter (Alex Dunphy in Modern Family).  You can stream it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

ON TV

FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE

Faithful readers know that I revere the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood/Ennio Morricone spaghetti westerns. On June 13, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting the three great Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. All star Clint Eastwood and feature wonderfully idiosyncratic scores by Ennio Morricone.

Eastwood’s character in the trilogy is referred to in film literature as “the man with no name”. But actually, the character is named Joe, Monco and Blondie in the three movies, respectively.

Here’s Morricone’s theme for A Fistful of Dollars.

FIRST REFORMED: how bleak can we go?

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Ethan Hawke in FIRST REFORMED

In the emotionally bleak psychological drama First Reformed, Ethan Hawke plays Toller, the clergyman in charge of a historic church with about ten parishioners. The church survives as the museum-and-gift-shop arm of a modern megachurch helmed by Reverend Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer billed as Cedric Kyles). Toller is a very troubled guy, who is consumed by a journalling project, which he says brings him no peace, but only self-pity. Toller is content to perform a weekly service and guide the odd tourist through the church.  That is all about to be disrupted by the church’s upcoming 250-year anniversary celebration, which Toller dreads.

Toller is asked by one of his tiny flock (Amanda Seyfried) to counsel her very depressed husband (Phillip Ettinger).  Few understand depression as well as Toller, who, we learn, has joined the church because of a grievous family loss.  He is also obsessively thinking and over-thinking a crisis, not so much of faith, but of purpose.  And, it is revealed that Toller is in physical pain from a very menacing medical condition.

Toller tells the young husband that balancing hope and despair is life itself.  Indeed, most of First Reformed focuses on the despair.  As First Reformed gets darker and darker, it become more and more intense, all the way up to a ticking bomb of a thriller ending.  The ending is such a squirm-in-your-seat nail-biter that it’s hard to watch, but the payoff is worth it.

Amanda Seyfried in FIRST REFORMED

Writer-director Paul Schrader, has created a serious work of art in First Reformed.  It is a very still movie with a very spare soundtrack.  The aspect of the frame is squarish and sometimes square.  Everything about First Reformed is distilled down to its concentrated core.  Schrader wrote Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ, and directed Affliction and Auto Focus.  So he is no stranger to plumbing the depths of human internal crises.

Ethan Hawke is excellent as Toller.  Hawke’s performances are usually fidgety.  Not here.  Hawke is notable for his stillness as he plays a man who flings himself into reflection and away from social entanglements.

The supporting performances are superb: Amanda Seyfried, Cedric the Entertainer, Bill Hoag as Toller’s lay assistant and Victoria Hill as the woman who wants to rekindle a connection that Toller doesn’t have the emotional capacity for.  All are suitably understated; this movie is so stripped-down to concentrate on the profound, there’s just no room for a Big Performance.

Phillip Ettinger is wonderful as the depressed young husband.  This is a smart, committed and sensitive character who isn’t at all wrong – he’s just obsessing and going off the rails.

Who can be saved from despairing at the human condition? And what does it take?  First Reformed provides an answer in its exceptionally powerful ending.