Make your plans for an early look at the year’s biggest movies at the Mill Valley Film Festival.
OUT NOW
- Spike Lee’s true story BlacKkKlansman is very funny and, finally, emotionally powerful.
- Crazy Rich Asians is wildly popular for a reason – it’s damn entertaining and probably the year’s most appealing date movie. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll wait for the chance to see Awkwafina in her next movie.
- Wyeth, the latest documentary in the PBS American Masters series, takes on the odd case of the great painter Andrew Wyeth and explores the question, what is a muse? And how can great art come from the most unlikely and obscure subjects?
- Three Identical Strangers is an astonishing documentary about triplets separated at birth that ranges from the exuberance of discovering siblings to disturbing questions of social engineering.
- Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke and Chris O’Dowd sparkle in the affable romantic comedy Juliet, Naked; it’s an okay rom com with a fresh premise – boy loses girl and finds her pursued instead by his lifelong idol.
- The hyper-violent and stylized Belgian thriller Let the Corpses Tan is a contemporary thriller that pays loving homage to the Sergio Leone canon. Essentially a soulless exercise in style, more interesting than gripping. It’s a visual stunner, though, and the Leone references are fun.
- The coming-of-age drama We the Animals is imaginative, but it’s a grind.
ON VIDEO
My Stream of the Week is the Korean drama Poetry, where an older woman takes a poetry class that unlocks her ability to observe. This unhurried film is troubling, uncomfortable and very, very good. It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2011. You can stream Poetry from Amazon and Vudu.
ON TV
Yesterday I wrote about Stranger on the Third Floor from 1940, recognized as the very first film noir because of the pioneering cinematography of Nicholas Musaraca. It plays on Turner Classic Movies on September 18.
