Screen Test

Margaret Qualley and Ethan Hawke in “Blue Moon.”   Sony Pictures Classics photo via IMDb Blue Moon You saw me standin' alone Without a dream in my heart Without a love of my own Ethan Hawke makes himself almost unrecognizable to play Lorenz Hart, the man who wrote those words.  Hart was five-feet tall, balding, a cigar always in his mouth, his back so curved his chin barely clears the bar at Sardi's where he spends most of the movie “Blue Moon” yakking away. His sad – if witty and sometimes brilliant – monologues are performed for bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), piano player Knuckles (Jonah Lees) and assorted folks who stop by the legendary Broadway celebrity hangout one fateful night in 1943. Showcasing the alcoholism and other sorts of self-destructiveness that would kill him at age 48 seven months later, it's a daring, all-in performance by Hawke. It's already getting buzz this awards season. Whether or not it nabs an Oscar nomination or two, it won't win many...

                Gary Oldham is Jackson Lamb in "Slow Horses."  Apple TV+ photo via IMDb.com Picture Britain's greatest secret agent reimagined, not as James Bond but as a flatulent, foul-mouthed, whiskey-swilling slob under a lion's mane of unwashed hair in holey socks always propped among the cigarette butts on his desk. Meet Jackson Lamb. After spending a couple of weeks bingeing through four and a half seasons of “Slow Horses,” I find I've become a fanboy. I may have come to the party late, but I'm hardly alone in my fondness for Apple TV's brilliantly written, white-knuckle exciting, nauseatingly violent and genius-level hilarious spy thriller that gets a bunch of nominations whenever they hand out television awards. As magnificently portrayed by Gary Oldman, Jackson Lamb actually sleeps in his permanently wrinkled shirt and tie on a dingy sofa in his dingy office. Whether asleep or awake – sometimes it's hard to tell – he farts a lot. Hy...

  Leonardo DiCaprio in “One Battle After Another.”   Warner Bros. Pictures photo via IMDb.com A few months after the provocative “Eddington” tried to find black humor in America's slippery slide toward fascism, iconic writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson mines the same sardonic vein in the action-packed “One Battle After Another.” Leonard DiCaprio stretches his Oscar-winning versatility into Cheech and Chong mode to play the film's antihero, Bob, who, it should be noted, goes through most of the film's nonstop chases, shootouts and road rages wearing a bathrobe.  Sixteen years earlier, his name was “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun. He and his honey, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), were political revolutionaries. Not the horned boogeymen we hear about in White House press briefings, but the real kind. Anti-capitalistic warriors, armed to the teeth with explosives and big honkin' machine guns. They liberated migrants from heavily guarded immigration holding facilities. They r...