Adventures in Words

Photo via IMDB At first “Anatomy of a Fall” seems like a so-so title for an excellent movie, winner of the Palm d'Or at Cannes, now nominated for numerous Golden Globes including Best Drama. Directed by Justine Triet who co-wrote the script with her partner Arthur Hurai, it's a murder mystery that evolves into compelling courtroom drama. But what it's really about is stories – the ones we tell each other, the ones we tell in public and the ones we tell ourselves.  Stories, like the verdict in a trial, can never be more than approximations of the truth. If there even were such a thing as  the truth . The script follows what happens after 11-year-old Daniel ( Milo Machado Graner)  returns from a winter walk with his border collie Snoop, to find the body of his father Samuel (Samuel Theis) lying dead in the snow. Samuel would seem to have fallen from the third-floor balcony of their French chalet, but after the police arrive, they suspect his wife Sandra (Sandra  Hüller ), who

Zac Efron as Kevin Von Erich in “The Iron Claw.”  House Claw LLC photo via IMDB Even before we hear of the family curse, there's a sense that things aren't going to end well for the Von Erich brothers. When it comes to family businesses, professional wrestling wouldn't be most people's first choice.  If they had a choice. Zac Efron, bulked up to be almost unrecognizable from his High School Musical teen heartthrob days to play Kevin, oldest of the four real-life good ol' boys out of West Texas who came to prominence on the wrestling circuit in the 1980s. Jeremy Allen White is brother Kerry, Harris Dickinson is David, and Stanley Simons is Mike. Along with Kevin they were destined to be known almost as much for their bad luck as for all the championship belts they would win.  Guiding their rise was their dad Fritz (Holt McCallany), himself a former professional wrestler whose squeeze-the-forehead-til-the-brains-come-out move provided his signature in the ring, and th

Sunbathing at Saltburn.   Photo courtesy of Prime via IMDB.com She's a mischief maker, that Emerald Fennell. Last year, the versatile English actress, writer and director won a bunch of awards, including an Oscar for writing “Promising Young Woman.” It was a wry tale of gender vengeance featuring Carey Mulligan as a med school dropout who finds brilliant ways of settling scores with the perpetrators of a gang rape of her classmate. Actually, her target was more like men in general. Now Fennell's back with “Saltburn,” another diabolical tale of settling scores that dances precariously on the line between black comedy and horror show. Now available on Prime Video, it's brilliantly written, dangerously sensual, sumptuous to watch, and thoroughly unsettling – that's the point. Barry Keoghan stars as Oliver Quick, a bright young Oxford student often at the mercy or the butt of the joke for wealthy, legacy classmates like snobby Farleigh Start (Archie Madekwe). Seemingly comf

Callum Turner and “The Boys in the Boat.”  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. photo via IMDB Merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream ... A huge bestseller when it was published in 2013, Daniel James Brown's “The Boys in the Boat” was a big hit in my circle of friends. The kind of book that gets recommended, if not passed around, pal to pal. Set in the '30s it was the true story of the University of Washington junior varsity rowing team who not only gunned down the storied, legacy crews of California and Ivy League colleges, but went on to the 1936 Olympics in Adolf Hitler's Berlin. It was an adrenalized page turner, a movie waiting to happen. Now that it's getting to the screen, it helps to have George Clooney in the director's chair. Although he stays offscreen, the double-Oscar-winning actor, producer and director is the biggest name on the project.  It's his face – generally recognized as one of the coolest guys on the planet – in many of the production

  Sukeika Janouad and Jon Batiste.  Photo via IMDB 2022 was the best of times, the worst of times for Jon Batiste and Suleika Janouad. Both. Everywhere. All at once. In every moment. It was the year the couple married. It was the year Jon left his high-profile gig leading the band on The Late Show with Steven Colbert. He would go on to win five Grammys, including the coveted Album of the Year, which hadn't been won by a Black artist in more than a decade. Although Suleika's bestselling “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted” would be acclaimed as one of the best books of the 2022, she would spend most of the year in hospital beds, receiving chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant and other treatments for the recurrence of acute myeloid leukemia,  a rare condition that had first stricken her a decade earlier. On September 22 of that year, Jon Batiste premiered his “American Symphony” in Carnegie Hall. His wife was in the audience. These events provide the framework

  If alphabetical order hadn't put it at the top of the cheat sheets I consult for Oscar predictions, I might never have seen “American Fiction.” It would have been my loss. A huge one. Not painted on the large cinematic canvases of its likely Best Picture competitors like “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie,” “Killers of the Flower Moon” or “Poor Things,” director-co-writer Cord Jefferson's wise comedy scores its bull's-eyes on a life-size target, somewhere between the heart and the brain. The writing is brilliantly original, coming at well-worn black racial themes with eyes so fresh, you feel like you're seeing the subject for the first time. Jeffrey Wright carries the film, showing a side of himself often missing from past powerhouse dramatic performances. He's lovable … despite the fact that his character doesn't know how to be. His Thelonius Ellison – you can call him “Monk” – is a prickly, Harvard-educated California university literature professor, author of several n

                          Carey Mulligan and Bradley Cooper in “Maestro.”  Jason McDonald/Netflix photos via IMDE.com. An old adage holds that meeting an idol isn't always a good idea, if you don't want to be disillusioned. That's the takeaway from “Maestro,” a penetrating portrait of monumental musical artist Leonard Bernstein, starring, directed and co-written by Bradley Cooper. Considering how much sublime beauty and exuberant joy he brought to the world as a conductor, composer and concert pianist, “Lenny's” life offstage was a glorious mess. Darkness and unrequited hunger in his psyche counterbalanced the soaring highs he shared with adoring audiences. Spanning three decades beginning in 1946, Cooper's ambitious epic follows the artist's meteoric rise and reign in concert halls around the world. His accomplishments extended to theatrical stages (“West Side Story”) and screens large and small,  including his Young People's Concert series in the new mediu