This week I’m featuring an absolute MUST for Silicon Valley film lovers, Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. The Club is wrapping up its 22nd season this weekend and looking forward to 2019. A 2019 Club membership can also be a treasured Holiday gift.
And I’ll be trying to figure out how, despite ten solid days of family and job commitments, I can see three of the most promising movies of the year: Green Book, Widows and Burning.
OUT NOW
- The sci fi coming of age adventure Prospect has a one week run in the Bay Area at San Jose’s 3Below and is well worth seeking out..
- The masterful documentary Monrovia, Indiana is a fascinating movie about a boring subject.
- The Great Buster: A Celebration is Peter Bogdanovich’s biodoc of the comic genius Buster Keaton, filling in what we need to know of Keaton’s life and body of work.
- Just in case you haven’t gotten around to seeing it yet – Lady Gaga illuminates Bradley Cooper’s triumphant A Star Is Born. Don’t bring a hankie – bring a whole friggin’ box of Kleenex.
- What They Had is an authentic and well-crafted dramatic four-hander with Hilary Swank, Michael Shannon, Blythe Danner and Robert Forster.
- The Outlaw King, with Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce, exists for those who need a dose of medieval slaughter and a spunky queen, but there’s not enough there for the rest of us.
- Skip First Man – a boring movie about a fascinating subject.
ON VIDEO
My stream of the week is the searing French thriller Custody, in which writer-director Xavier Legrand paints the most elemental and realistic depiction of domestic violence that I’ve seen. Custody won Legrand the Silver Lion (Best Director) at the Venice film festival. It can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
ON TV
On November 20, Turner Classic Movies presents what I considered the very best movie of 1996, Secrets & Lies. Written and directed by Mike Leigh (Life Is Sweet, Naked, Topsy-Turvy, All or Nothing, Vera Drake, Another Year), this is Leigh’s masterpiece.
Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is an accomplished young British woman who has been raised by middle-class adoptive parents. She decides to track down her birth mother, who turns out to be the working class hot mess Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn). This triggers Cynthia’s emotional damage from giving up baby Hortense, her panic at explaining this to her family – with the complicating factor that Hortense is Black. All kinds of family complications ensue. Cynthia’s underachieving daughter (Claire Rushbrook) is not at all comfortable with the emergence of an over-achieving sibling. Cynthia’s sister-in-law (Penelope Logan) faces this through her own child-related anguish. And Cynthia’s brother (Timothy Spall), who has clawed his way to respectability, has to juggle these developments.
There’s a searing emotional authenticity to Secrets & Lies, but there’s plenty of humor, too. (The montage of the brother’s portrait photography clients is hilarious.)
Blethyn’s fine performance is the showiest, but this is the movie where I recognized the greatness of Timothy Spall. Secrets & Lies, Leigh, Blethyn and Jean-Baptiste were all nominated for Academy Awards, with Secrets & Lies and Fargo losing the Best Picture Oscar to The English Patient (only because The English Patient was far, far more pretentious), This is a film of uncommon humanity.
