Adventures in Words

Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence in “Don't Look Up.”  Netflix image via IMDB Why do the birds go on singing? Why do the stars glow above? Don't they know it's the end of the world? –  Skeeter Davis, The End of the World At a lab not unlike Pukalani's Institute for Astronomy, Ph.D. candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is tracking points of light across a bank of computer screens when she happens onto an anomaly. Dismayed by her discovery, she runs it by her boss, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). He's dismayed, too. There's a comet the size of Mount Everest on a collision course with the Earth. It will arrive in six months 14 days. It will cause what astronomers call a planet extinction event. The end of the world is the subject of director/co-writer Adam McKay's new comedy, “Don't Look Up.”  Yes, you read that right.  Comedy.  After launching his career with “Saturday Night Live,” then moving to the big screen

                                       A family outing in “The Hand of God.”  Netflix image via IMDB In 2013 he gave us “The Great Beauty.” He won the best foreign language Oscar for that one. A few years later, in English this time, he directed Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as they contemplated “Youth” from the other end of their lives while luxuriating in a Swiss health spa. Paulo Sorrentino is the kind of filmmaker who paints masterpieces. For this awards season, his holiday gift is “The Hand of God,” an affectionate reverie of his teen years growing up in Naples. Now showing on Netflix, it's a portrait of the artist as a young man, although not until the movie's end does young Fabietto (Filippo Scotti) realize filmmaking is his destiny. Like Italy's incomparable Federico Fellini, whose spirit is like the hand of God guiding his disciple's artistry, Sorrentino's movies aren't content to just be spectacularly beautiful. They live and breathe. They feel. They

    Olivia Colman and Dakota Johnson in “The Lost Daughter.”  Netflix image via IMDB. For folks who mark the holidays by going into a funk, here are a couple of new movie award contenders to speed you on your way. “The Lost Daughter” is the one that landed Olivia Colman in the best actress race at the Golden Globes. Like a future Judi Dench, there seems to be no role Colman can't make her own, picking up award nominations whenever she's anywhere around a camera, and helping her co-stars and collaborators win nominations, too. In this case that collaborator would be Maggie Gyllenhaal, earning her nomination in her directorial debut after all the exciting things she's done as an actress. Gyllenhaal also wrote the screenplay, adapted from a 2006 novel by Elena Ferrante. It follows Leda, a classics professor and translator on holiday to a small beach resort village in Greece where she's got work to do while working on her tan. Despite the sunny clime (when it's not rain

  Eh, so how you say “dysfunctional” in Italian? It translates as something like “House of Gucci.”  Although the Internet Movie Database classifies it as crime drama based on a book subtitled “A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour and Greed,” you can't watch this Ridley Scott-directed romp without noticing that it's actually a comedy. Not slapstick or low-brow by any means – although Jared Leto's portrayal of idiot cousin Paolo is a one-man train wreck whenever he's on screen – but more of an operatic farce where everyone is dressed ridiculously over the top and speaks with a fractured Italian accent. Lady Gaga picked up the best actress prize from the New York Film Critics Circle for her portrayal of Patrizia Reggiani, daughter of a truck driver who wins the heart of Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), marries him and manages to do more damage to the family's luxurious brand than a $29.99 rip-off handbag. She's a gold digger, Maurizio's painfully patric

Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons in “The Power of the Dog.”  Netflix image via IMDB Monday's Golden Globes nominations signaled that we're in the home stretch of awards season. Strangely, it feels like the more movies I see, the behinder I get. It was also a reminder of how silly the awards – all of them – are in the first place. A recent exposé in The Washington Post followed an exposé in the Los Angeles Times last winter revealing that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the group responsible for bestowing the Golden Globes is, um, a sham.  Originally formed of foreign journalists covering America's film industry, its membership is under 100 (as compared to the 5,000 members of the Motion Picture Academy who vote on the Oscars). And of the 100, a lot of them aren't exactly real journalists, but more like freelancers for marginal publications who make ends meet with the first-class airfare, luxe hotel accommodations and freebies liberally dispensed to

         Andrew Garfield in “tick, tick … BOOM!”  Photo by Macall Polay/NETFLIX Jonathan Larson is a name you may not recognize of the man who created the musical hit “Rent” in the early '90s. The rock opera was based on Giacomo Puccini's opera “La Boheme” about starving artists in Paris. Larson moved its setting to lower Manhattan in the age of AIDS, modeling its cast of characters on himself and his friends. “Rent” opened off-Broadway in a workshop production. It subsequently moved to Broadway where it played for more than a decade. Its awards included a Pulitzer Prize that Jonathan Larson wasn't around to accept. Netflix's “Tick, tick … BOOM!” explains why not. (I was going to add a spoiler alert to that information, but since the movie acknowledges Larson's passing in its opening scenes, I'm not giving anything away. “Tick, tick … BOOM!” – adapted from a musical monologue Larson composed – is an in-memoriam tribute as much as anything else.) Andrew Garfield

Loving her was always part of the deal. In the early 1950s, every Monday evening across America, millions of Americans turned the dials of their big black-and-white Admirals, General Electrics and Westinghouses to CBS for “I Love Lucy.”  It may have been the greatest title ever written. For anything. To love Lucy wasn't to know her, necessarily – but writer/director Aaron Sorkin's new drama “Being the Ricardos” is here to fill the gap. Somewhat at least. Powered by a(nother) triumphant performance by Nicole Kidman, not so much portraying comedy legend Lucille Ball as channeling her, it joins the long list of based-on-a-real-icon stories pacing this year's Academy Award field. The “I” of the title was, of course, Ball's husband onscreen and off, conga-playing Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz. Just as the real Desi was the catalyst that sparked Lucy's greatness, Javier Bardem's terrific performance is a similarly potent secret ingredient, generating great chemistry wit

Rooney Mara, Bradley Cooper, Mark Povinelli and Ron Perlman    in “Nightmare Alley.”  Fox Searchlight photos via IMDB How much you'll like “Nightmare Alley” depends on how you feel about freak shows. As opposed to ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds associated with first loves at wholesome state fairs, freak shows were among the carney attractions in the early part of the last century, pitching their tents across the heartland to dupe the rubes with a bizarre assortment of accidents of nature.Exotic dancing girls and silver-tongued devils conned the crowds. The freaks were the Darwinian miscues with extra or missing appendages or organs, or bones like rubber, there to fascinate or repulse all who had a dime to enter the tent. The bizarre world of carney freaks is like catnip for writer-director Guillermo del Toro in his remake of the 1947 noir thriller. Weird visions on movie screens are a trademark for the Mexican filmmaker who, you may recall, won a bunch of Oscars in 2018 for “The

                    Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds and Jude Hill in “Belfast.”  Focus Features image via IMDB. There's an air of inevitability finding Kenneth Branaugh's “Belfast” – already a prize winner at several film festivals – high in Oscar predictions for the year's best picture. After breaking onto the scene as a Royal Academy Shakespearean wunderkind before eventually becoming the academy director (and a knight of the royal order), Branaugh found bigger audiences when he became a filmmaker, acting and directing projects on increasingly epic scales. In “Belfast” he comes full circle and brings it all home. Shot mostly in black and white, it's a warmly remembered recollection of his boyhood, in the mode of Fellini's “Amacord” or Alfonso Cuaron's 2019 Oscar winner “Roma.” It takes place the the turbulent late '60s when the streets outside his family's working-class flat were scenes of violent skirmishes led by Protestant gangs trying to root out the Ca

Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil Burbank in "The Power of the Dog."  Netflix image via IMDB Oscar-winning writer-director Jane Campion casts her native New Zealand in the role of 1925 Montana in her haunting new drama “The Power of the Dog.” The rolling hill panoramas, sometimes traversed by a lone automobile or train under clouds lumbering ominously across the sky are co-stars with the superb cast in her gorgeous film. But the grandeur can barely contain the pent-up explosiveness of Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch).  Phil and his brother George (Jesse Plemons) are the wealthy owners of a sprawling cattle spread, complete with one of those rustic mansions you expect to find Kevin Costner in. Phil is the working cowboy, always in chaps and spurs. He's loved and feared by the other ranch hands, and has a clever way with words when he's not hiding it under his surly side. Brother George does his share of the ropin' and herd driving, too, but always in a business suit,

       Wallace Wolodarsky, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson at work.  American Impirical Pictures imaes via IMDB, Movies tend to get divided into genres – drama, comedy, action, documentary, animation … But classification schemes don't work with filmmaker Wes Anderson. He's his own genre. The only way of accurately describing his work is to say,  It's a Wes Anderson movie .  Film fans will know exactly what you mean. The latest doorway into his imagination – as usual, brightly colored, wiggy, whimsical, wistful – comes under the masthead “The French Dispatch.” It's a fictitious literary magazine that might easily be mistaken for The New Yorker if it were not based in the petite French city of Ennui on the banks of the river Blasé …  Neither of these destinations can be found on any actual map, of course. How the magazine evolved from “Picnic,” the Sunday features section of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Star newspaper into a literary publication with a half-million readers is