Quick Takes, April 2026

Masaki Suda

One of the better thrillers released in the US in 2025, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud is the story of Ryôsuke (Masaki Suda), a small-time chiseler who resells dubious goods on the internet. Karma strikes back at Ryôsuke in the form of disgruntled buyers who unite online and then proceed to stalk him. The aura of paranoia and distrust is conveyed through the queasily sick grey/blue palette employed. As in classic noir, no one is to be trusted. When Ryôsuke finds an ally at the end of a classic finale, it is with the shared knowledge that they both are damned.

Jalmari Helander's Sisu: Road to Revenge is a worthy sequel to the 2022 film. This film is a pared down action and chase film, more akin to a graphic novel than to the mythos of the the first film. Jorma Tommila is back as the resilient protagonist. Stephen Lang, as Tommila's Soviet nemesis, lends his grizzled visage to the proceedings and is a snug fit. Like the original, this film is almost totally devoid of dialogue.

Given its subject matter, Paul McCartney and Wings' musical adventures in the decade following the break-up of The Beatles, Morgan Neville's Man on the Run is a relatively brisk and entertaining documentary. Neville wisely doesn't get bogged down into a rundown of the minutiae of Macca and company's various albums. No sane person wants the whole story on Wild Life or Red Rose Speedway or London Town. Instead, we see more of McCartney and the various iterations of his band onstage or frolicking backstage and in the studio. Despite inane lyrics and some of the worst haircuts of the 20th century, the doc does provide a good portrait of the pleasant, if dippy cute Beatle. Even though this is an authorized biodoc, I was happy that discordant notes were allowed, particularly Nick Lowe's putdown of Marry Had a Little Lamb; McCartney's second worst single.

I was a fan of the series, but the new film, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is a slight disappointment. Tom Harper's direction is spirited enough, but show runner and screenwriter Steven Knight seems bereft of new ideas. Cillian Murphy is always great as the stone-faced Tommy Shelby, but too many interesting characters are now dead and the new ones are not as memorable. Only Barry Keoghan as Tommy's Gypsy son strikes any sparks with Murphy. Rebecca Ferguson is disastrously cast as a palm reading Romani, but Knight's female characters have almost always been under drawn. The mystical aspects of this installment are beyond Mr. Knight. The film attempts to retell the pagan ritual of the new king dispatching and displacing an old one, but the tale is not as grounded as in previous installments. Start with the old episodes instead.

Danny Huston's Mr. North, from 1988, is an adaptation of Thornton Wilder's last novel, Theophilus North. North seemingly has the gift of healing and entrances Newport society of the 1920s. Huston captures Wilder's magically realistic tone, but also his vapidity. The result verges on Merchant/Ivory light, pleasant, but in no way memorable. Huston is most at sea in his direction of a comic chase sequence. However, he assembled a crack cast: Anthony Edwards, Robert Mitchum, Harry Dean Stanton, Angelica Huston, Virginia Madsen, David Warner, and Katharine Houghton. Acting laurels go to Mary Stuart Masterson. The booby prize goes to Tammy Grimes. The film includes rare appearances by Christopher Durang, Cleveland Amory, and Marietta Tree.

Pierre Morel's The Gunman, from 2015, is a feeble action film with Sean Penn as a contract killer. The picture is very loosely based on Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Prone Gunman, an icy and compact noir. Three listed screenwriters, including Mr. Penn, have added international settings and a romantic triangle. The bloat reduces this to a flashy vanity project. A good cast is largely wasted: Ray Winstone, Jasmine Trinca, Javier Bardem, Mark Rylance, and Idris Elba.

Cédric Jimenez's The Man with the Iron Heart is the umpteenth and worst rendition of the 1942 assassination of SS Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. Based on Laurent Binet's superb novel HHhH, the film offers a cursory and jumbled version of fascinating historical events. Key incidents, like the Night of the Long Knives, are presented without context or proper explanation. A fine cast is stranded in a waxworks. The story is fascinating, but interested parties are advised to read Binet's book or view such previous cinematic versions as Hangmen Also Die! or Anthropoid. The most compelling aspect of The Man with the Iron Heart is Stephen Graham's performance as Heinrich Himmler.

Cloud

The Housemaid

Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried

Paul Feig's The Housemaid, adapted by Rebecca Sonnenshine from the best seller by Freida McFadden, is a superior thriller, easily Feig's best film since A Simple Favor. As in that film, Feig is able to draw out the class and feminist themes in the material without distracting his audience from the technical pleasures of the yarn. The two leads, Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried playing, respectively, maid and employer, have rarely been better. The film has a strong ensemble with Brandon Sklenar, Elizabeth Perkins, Michele Morrone, and Indiana Elle all offering good turns. Feig delivers a well judged and taut thriller that is one of the least flabby Hollywood flicks of 2025.

The Housemaid was a hit, but I think it is the type of trashy seeming commercial product that is underrated by critics and the Academy. Part of this also is due to the fact that this is a "women's picture", the kind of picture that has always tended to get dismissed critically as such even when they were directed by John Stahl and Douglas Sirk. However, The Housemaid has as much to say about the way we live now as One Battle After Another does. One thread I'll pull is the film's invocation of Barry Lyndon, seemingly a distinctly different flick. However, the thematic concerns between the films are quite similar: namely the marshaling of domination via political, class, and sexual means. Like Jack Torrance in The Shining, the male monster of the id in The Housemaid is reduced to a frothing beast trapped in the labyrinth of his own design. 

Time of Roses

                 Ritva Vepsä                   

Risto Jarva's Time of Roses, from 1969, is a curious Sci/Fi mystery from the Finnish director. The film had a New York release in 1970, but has gone largely unseen in the US since. The folks at Dead Crocodile have rectified this situation by releasing a spiffy looking disc. The film is set in the far off future of 2012 and concerns a documentary filmmaker named Raimo played by Arto Tuominen. Raimo is obsessed with a long deceased model named Saara (Ritva Vepsä) whose life was embroiled by scandal. Raimo is further intrigued when he encounters Saara's doppelgänger, an uninhibited nuclear engineer named Kisse, also played by Ms. Vepsä. Raimo cajoles Kisse into participating in a film about Saara, but, as viewers of Vertigo already know, the past cannot be recaptured and, thus, the film ends tragically.

Time of Roses is as uneven a film as I've seen in some time. The best parts match the sublimity of Alphaville, the cheesy bits reminded me of Logan's Run. The decor and look of the film point not to the future, but to the pop ethos of 1969; plastic furniture and all. The score is third rate, ranging from tepid cocktail jazz to a faux raga for the (fully clothed) orgy sequence. However, some of the intimations of future shock are prescient: including "mood pills", a form of the internet, cryogenics, and totalitarian surveillance. Indeed, there are genuinely moving scenes amidst the mod clutter: especially the deflating last shot and a sequence where a blind companion of Saara's touches the face of her doppelgänger.

Jarva was a politically committed filmmaker who made both documentary and fictional films. He died prematurely in 1977 at the age of 43, after the premiere of his last film The Year of the Hare, in an auto accident. Time of Roses has more than a fair share of political allegory. Kisse's comrades at the nuke plant are planning a wildcat strike and even hijack the state TV station to announce it. This despite the regime's claim that "class boundaries have been abolished." Raimo represents the detached and feckless bourgeoisie who are more interested in slugging down Scotch and practicing free love that in pursuing social justice. 

Dante's Inferno

             

Henry Lachman's Dante's Inferno is a structurally saggy vehicle for Spencer Tracy, his last film for Fox, that has some mitigating moments. This 1935 flick benefits from casting Tracy as a heel, a carnival barker who becomes an entertainment titan.Tracy was much more interesting as a rounder and a bounder, as in Up the River, than as the models of masculine virtue he was cast as at MGM. We first meet Tracy's character, Jim Carter, working as a coal stover on a cruise ship. Fired for malingering, Carter takes a debasing job, in blackface, at a carnival. That doesn't last long, but the kindly Henry B. Walthall, playing Pops the owner of the titular attraction, takes a shine to Carter and hires him as a barker. Carter excels at the job and soon has the suckers streaming to the sideshow. The fact that Pops has a comely daughter named Betty, played by Claire Trevor, helps induce Carter to stay on in the job.

Betty and Jim soon marry and, a dissolve later, have spawned a nauseatingly cute male moppet. The domestic scenes are the biggest drag in the picture, static episodes extolling domesticity and morality while Carter pursues wealth through amoral means at work. Ms. Trevor is wasted in a vanilla role and if you are a fan of her work, you know she is much better with a little sulphur. The surreal carnival scenes work much better. The sets are gaudily magnificent and Lachman employs tilted angels for surreal notes. The uses of grotesque backdrops recalls 1934's The Scarlet Empress. Cinematographer Rudolph Maté (Vampyr) employs filters, gauze, and vaseline to delirious effect.

The scope of this production is breathtaking. Not only do we get to witness the destruction of the carnival set, but there is a fire aboard an ocean liner that takes the character of Carter full circle. Before the conflagration, there is even a sizzling dance number featuring a young Rita Hayworth, then billed as Rita Cansino. However, the most memorable sequence of this over stuffed turkey is a fifteen minute wordless sequence which is meant to illustrate Walthall's sonorous reading of Dante's text. Owing much to Gustave Doré's engravings of Dante, the sequence is a supreme example of Hollywood bad taste, but at least has a sense of bold vitality. This sequence, like best parts of Dante's Inferno, harkens back to the vivacity of the late silent era in contrast to the placidity of Production Code Hollywood. 

Henry B. Walthall and Spencer Tracy

Suzhou River

Jia Hongsheng

Lou Ye's Suzhou River, from 2000, is a disjunctive noir set in Shanghai. The film is purposefully hard to follow for a number of reasons. Foremost is that Mr. Lou shifts the film's point of view, from the first person POV of a videographer (Zhang Ming Fan) to a third person POV of a motorcycle messenger (Jia Hongsheng), about a quarter of the way through this 83 minute picture. The lives of these two characters intersect. Furthermore, Lou employs a hand held camera in a way that further obfuscates who is who and what is what. There is a time leap in the plot and, to cap things off, the two lead female characters are played by the same actress: the sublime Zhou Xun. 

However, the plot, which I will not reveal, is consistent with the often labyrinthian nature of mysteries and noir. The hand-held technique jibes with the gritty portrait of Shanghai's decayed industrial riverside. The performances are exemplary, particularly the doomed Mr. Jia who succumbed to inner demons in 2010. Suzhou River is a film that fully explores the fatalism inherent in the noir genre. A masterpiece that repays repeated viewings.  

One Man's Way

Don Murray

Denis Sanders' One Man's Way, from 1963, was not quite as terrible as I thought it would be. That said, it is still pretty terrible. The film is a biopic of Norman Vincent Peale, a (then) famous Protestant minister and author of the best selling The Power of Positive Thinking. As a hagiography, the film is slightly better entertainment than the equally ass kissing JFK flick of that year, PT 109. What value the film has comes not from the anodyne script or Sanders' pedestrian direction, but from some interesting performances. Don Murray stars as Peale and his committed performance is the main reason to see this flick. Murray provides a engaged portrayal of spiritual struggle and is very strong at delivering Peale's sermons. The film also contains memorable bits from Diana Hyland (in her film debut), William Windom, Virginia Christine, Carol Ohmart, Veronica Cartwright, Butch Patrick, Tom Skerritt, and Bing Russell.

Of course, this portrayal of Peale's life is pure bunkum. What I objected to the most was the portrayal of Peale as force for ecumenical unity and toleration. We see him playing nice with a Jewish gentleman, urging him to visit his rabbi. In fact, Peale was a narrow minded right-winger who courted controversy with his political views. He came out against the presidential candidacy of Adlai Stevenson in 1952 because of Stevenson's divorce. Stevenson responded "I find Saint Paul appealing and Saint Peale appalling." During the 1960 election, Peale spearheaded a movement to oppose the election of John Kennedy because his allegiance to the Pope allegedly outweighed his allegiance to his nation. Peale was widely criticized for his stand and never really regained his public standing. Even reactionary Papist William F. Buckley Jr. repudiated him. Though a national figure in the 1950s, Peale is largely forgotten today. One Man's Way did little to burnish his reputation. It opened a month after JFK's assassination and was a box office bomb. 

Pompei: Below the Clouds

               

Gianfranco Rosi's Pompei: Below the Clouds is an elegant portrait of Naples. Unlike Rosi's previous documentaries such as Fire at Sea, Rosi shot this documentary in black and white. The high contrast beauty of the photography lends itself to the theme of timelessness in the film. A modern city under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, the environs of Naples boast some of the world's most storied ruins and Roman antiquities and Rosi conveys the manifold glimpses of eternity the city contains. The film has no narration, but follows a disparate group of people as they work, relax, and learn. We visit a 911 call center and a study hall monitored by an aged tutor. We see a team of preservationists tunneling below the surface of the earth to witness ancient sites where antiquities have been looted by thieves. We witness a team of Japanese archaeologists excavating a site. We see a team of Syrian sailors offload a shipment of Ukrainian grain from a gigantic hold in their ship; another of the film's many excavations. 

Rosi takes us to an abandoned cinema where films, that range from Rodolfi's The Last Days of Pompeii to Rossellini's Voyage to Italy, are projected that allude to the famous eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE and its aftermath. The gorgeousness of the imagery in ...Below the Clouds left me so stupefied that it almost upended my critical facilities, but Rosi also manages to show that Naples is a gritty modern day seaport with its attendant problems. This bifurcation enables the film to take its place alongside such trenchant excavations of Naples as Curzio Malaparte's The Skin and Peter Robb's Street Fight in Naples: A City's Unseen History. 

Dust Bunny

Mads Mikkelsen

Bryan Fuller's Dust Bunny, his feature film debut, was released in the US on December 5th on four hundred screens and was pretty much out of theaters by Christmas. Lionsgate must have felt it was too quirky for a big market success, but Lionsgate's marketing strategies for all their 2025 were extremely misguided. Furthermore, Dust Bunny is an R rated film that will appeal best to perverse ten year olds. Maybe it will be a cult film one day, on the level of Buckeroo Banzai or Labyrinth, but it is too weird to be a blockbuster. Fuller, the show runner of Pushing Daisies, Hannibal, and American Gods, already has betrayed the hallmarks of an auteur in his television work. The mordant humor and surreal touches of his television work are much in evidence in Dust Bunny.

The film is a fable with the moral that we all carry a monster within. The titular monster emerges each night from under the bed of Aurora, an eight year old in New York City played by Sophie Sloan in deadpan Wednesday Addams mode. After losing successive sets of parents to the dust bunny, Aurora hires a unnamed hitman (Mads Mikkelsen) who lives in her apartment building to eliminate her problem. The hit man has problems of his own, Aurora has witnessed him killing a dragon (of sorts) in Chinatown, and is disinclined to believe her. Between action sequences, Aurora and the stone faced assassin work out their problems and gain mutual trust. Young Ms. Sloan is fine, it is almost always a good idea to direct young performers towards the deadpan, but Mr. Mikkelsen carries the film. A major film star of this century, Mikkelsen carries on the heroic tradition of stoic machismo embodied by Wayne, Eastwood, and Max von Sydow. 

Dust Bunny is visually vigorous for a film primarily set in a New York apartment. Every effort has been made, by CGI and practical effects, to highlight the fairytale nature of the project. The apartment building is baroquely appointed with rooms decorated in bold colors. The view of New York from Aurora's room is a tribute to the old fashioned art of matte painting. The unreality of the film allows us follow the childlike logic of a fable. We know, as we did when we were little tots, that such tales involve peril, but that the protagonist will emerge triumphant in the end. I also enjoyed Isabella Summers' score and, particularly, the use of Sister Jane Mead's recording of The Lord's Prayer. This 1973 hit, it reached number four, I had blissfully forgotten, but Fuller uses it to full comic effect in a scene in which Aurora steals a brimming collection plate  from a church in order to pay the hitman. Whether Dust Bunny is a one-off or a start to a film directing career, I salute Fuller's audacity. The picture is slight, but lovingly crafted. Dust Bunny also features Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian, and Sheila Atim.

Die My Love

 

Jennifer Lawrence on all fours in Die My Love

Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love is my favorite bad movie of the year. The film is an adaptation of the brilliant Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz's slim first novel Malate amor. This tale of a new wife and mother coming undone was originally set in rural France, but Ms. Ramsay and her two talented co-writers have transposed the drama to North America with Alberta standing in for Montana. Not that the picture seems particularly American even with US icons like Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte in the cast. No matter, the tale of a traumatized woman mentally unraveling suits Ms. Ramsay's astringent feminism, but also shows her limitations.

Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), the protagonist, never adjusts to domesticity with her new spouse (Robert Pattinson) and baby. Montana is her husband's territory and the couple move into the abandoned home of a relative of his, who we will eventually learn has committed suicide. The house is fairly isolated, so the attending alienation only exacerbates Grace's post partum depression. The picture suffers from portentousness, however. A mysterious motorcycle rider ( a wasted LaKeith Stanfield) and wild black horse too patly portend Grace's desire for freedom from domestic bonds. Soon, she is barking at the dog, acting horny, scurrying around on all fours, and discarding her clothes at the drop of a hat. I thought the picture should have been called Diary of a Mad and Feral Katniss.

Ramsay pounds us over the head with this theme, but fails to visually express the atavism of her material. We never feel the unconscious pull that guides Grace to the forest for her eventual annihilation. The overly placid adaptation of Train Dreams suffers from this same fault, but, at least, Ramsay can never be accused of being an overly placid director. I suspect she is more suited to urban material. Ramsay plays up the sick house horror of the home, but it flattens the supporting characters into Gothic schtick reminiscent of, and this is not meant as a compliment, Sam Shepherd's Curse of the Starving Class. Pattinson suffers the most from this. A fine actor, he is so misdirected that he comes off as a cartoon: just a pretty boy in a trucker hat. As with her performance in Mother!, Ms. Lawrence almost redeems an arty misfire. She gives a committed performance that gives us the unhinged madness the rest of the picture lacks. She has displayed her lack of inhibition as a performer before, but never with such ferocity.

L'Accident de piano

Adèle Exarchopoulos
           

Quentin Dupieux's L'Accident de piano is a typical pratfall filled misanthropic farce from the eccentric Gallic talent. Adèle Exarchopoulos stars as Magalie who we eventually learn is a social media star whose online sobriquet is Megajugs. The first act consists of an injured Magalie, assisted by her PA Patrick (an excellent Jérôme Commandeur), settling into a chalet near the Alps. Dupieux has endeavored to make Ms. Exarchopoulos as unattractive as possible, a Herculean undertaking, and succeeds with padding, a frugly wig, and braces. Apparently a stunt involving a piano has gone awry, but this first section of the film is intentionally obscure and off-putting. We do learn that Megajugs is a narcissistic diva who enjoys bullying the apparently long suffering Patrick. Their solitude is broken by some hooligan fans and a phone call by a blackmailer who knows the details about the piano accident.

Simone, the blackmailer played by a tightly wound (like her braids) Sandrine Kiberlain, is a reporter who seeks not cash, but the legal tender of the age: an interview. Megajugs accedes to this and the resulting confrontation takes up most of the middle section of the film. Simone probes Megajugs' background and, through flashbacks, we view her path to fame. A viewing of an episode of Jackass inspires the 14 year old Megajugs to become the distaff Johnny Knoxville, a goal she embraces whole heartedly thanks to a "congenital insensitivity to pain." Megajugs posts videos of her masochistic exploits in which she always assumes the Wile E. Coyote role. Sandrine assumes the voice of reason in the interview. She wants to know why. Something, in the tradition of French dualism, that Megajugs is loath to do. She represents the credo of the unconscious artist reacting against interpretation. Megajugs and by extension Dupieux feels that it is pointless to analyze her nihilistic behavior.

I feel that, even though the character of Megajugs is artistically aligned with the juvenile provocateur Dupieux, that the film, which ends with Megajugs indulging in a quiet frenzy of Dionysian destruction, is ultimately an auto-critique on the limits of nihilism. Megajugs is still her 14 year old self, an aging adolescent who is hopelessly self absorbed. L'Accident de piano also stands as a visual meditation on the psychic link between comedy and violence. The flick reminds me of the old Mel Brooks joke: "Tragedy is me getting a paper cut. Comedy is you falling into a hole and breaking your leg." I'm surprised Dupieux didn't utilize a falling anvil. Regardless, Ms. Exarchopoulos makes a magnificent monster. 

El Jockey

Ursula Corbero and Nahuel Perez Biscayart          

Luis Ortega's El Jockey, released in the US as Kill the Jockey, is amiable light entertainment. Ortega is only 45, but the Argentinian writer and director has built up an impressive filmography over the last two decades. El Jockey wears its influences lightly: dashes of color and queer sensibility (Almodovar), deadpan surrealism (Kaurismäki), and comic zaniness (Jerry Lewis). Nahuel Pérez Biscayart is the lead, a hapless jockey named Remo who is under the thumb of a small time crime boss. He has a pregnant girlfriend, a fellow jockey named Abril (Úrsula Corberó), a tip of the gaucho to Victoria I suppose. Remo has a bad crash at the track and ends up at the hospital suffering from some whacky form of amnesia. He escapes the hospital, for no apparent reason, wearing a stolen mink coat and little else. While he wanders amongst the homeless and dispossessed of Buenos Aires, Abril finds consolation in the arms of another jockey, the sassy Ana (Mariana di Girolamo).

The dramatic contrivances that take up the last act are paper thin, but Ortega's visual imagination never flags. El Jockey boasts 2025's best sight gags. The colors in this flick really pop thanks to Ortega and cinematographer Timo Salminen, a longtime collaborator of Aki Kaurismäki. Both leads are superb, Biscayart does a great deadpan and Corberó smolders impressively. The dance numbers are a hoot and are a great showcase for the players. The music is outstanding, both the Argentine pop songs, old and new, and the score by Sune Wagner, of the Danish band The Raveonettes. El Jockey is not the type of movie that will change the course of film history, but it provides more entertainment than some of those that do. Currently streaming on MUBI.

Dracula

Radu Jude and f(r)iend

Sometimes an artist becomes so successful that they are written blank checks to pursue whatever folly fancies them. Griffith followed The Birth of a Nation with Intolerance, both a riposte to his critics and an expansion of an already overly epic vision. Spielberg followed the one two punch of Jaw and Close Encounters... with 1941, a film that reeks of Hollywood excess. Those who have seen Apocalypse Now Redux will know how close Coppola came to creating an unwatchable fiasco. In the publishing world, it seems that Stephen King and JK Rowling reached a point in their careers in which their popularity prevented helpful input from their editors. Radu Jude seemed to be reaching this point on his last film and has crossed the Rubicon of self-indulgence with Dracula. 

It is not that there aren't any interesting ideas in the film, Dracula is teeming with ideas. There are riffs on past representations of Dracula on film and in literature. There is much rumination on the traumas of Romanian history, Jude's primary preoccupation thus far. There are endless digressions in the post modern style.There is purposefully cheesy AI generated CGI. There is an unreliable narrator. There is a burlesque of vampiric cosplay. There is much lowbrow humor and more phalluses on display than in a locker room. Some of the ideas are good and some fall flat. I laughed more times than when I watched Spaceballs, but Mel Brooks knew enough to keep his farces succinct. Dracula runs almost three hours and never coheres. It is divided into fifteen parts and I would have jettisoned or severely pruned half of them.

If I found Dracula to be Jude's worst film, I still somewhat enjoyed it, but, then, I prefer 1941 to Close Encounters. Like 1941, Dracula has the virtue of an antic and lunatic vision despite its indulgent excess. Life seems to be imitating art in that a theme park called Dracula Land is opening in Romania in 2027. One thing that buoys me is that the player who gives the best performance in Dracula, Eszter Tompa, stars in Jude's upcoming film, Kontinental '25, which opens in the US on March 27th. 

Apart From You

            Mitsuko Yoshikawa and Sumiko Mizukubo                

Mikio Naruse's Apart from You is the best of the silent melodramas he directed in the early 1930s. The plot of this 1933 flick concerns aging geisha Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa) and her disapproving teenage son Yoshio (Akio Isono). The sullen Yoshio is skipping school and slipping into juvenile delinquency. The possibility of redemption is embodied in Terugiku (Sumiko Yoshikawa), a younger colleague of Kikue who has known, and pined for, Yoshio since childhood. Terugiku tries to steer Yoshio to the straight and narrow, but is hampered by a toxic home life. Does Yoshio return to school? Does Terugiku succumb to the lecherous advances of an older man or does true love prevail in the end? I'll never tell, but Apart from You's ambivalent ending moved me.

The film is superior to other Naruse film of this period partly because there is no child on hand to be run over in the next to last reels, as in Flunky, Work Hard! and No Blood Relation. Apart from such melodramatic contrivances, Apart from You benefits from some directorial restraint. Naruse was fond of dollying in and out from his players to add punctuation. In some of his features from this period, he employs this technique so much that I felt seasick, but Naruse employs it only once in Apart from You. That said, Naruse shares with his colleague Ozu a dazzling grasp of technique at this point in film history. He also shares with Ozu a way with his players. The two lead females of Apart from You are particularly sublime. Like all master directors, the details of Naruse's work fall more into place the more you see of his work. Apart from You shares many of the same players and themes in his other films of this period. As Neil Young said, in reply to a heckler who said all his songs sounded the same, "It's all one song."

Caught by the Tides

Zhao Tao       

Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides is film that spans two decades in the Northern Chinese city of Datong. Zhao Tao, Jia's wife and muse, plays the part of Qiao Qiao who we meet juggling multiple jobs (singer, dancer, model, and bar girl) amidst the gig economy of the year 2000. She has a boyfriend, Bin (Li Zhubin), but he is her manager and the relationship dynamics between them resemble that of whore and pimp. They part when Bin's shady dealings catch up with him. They reunite in 2022 in a China recovering from the COVID pandemic. Bin spies that it is Qiao Qiao checking out his grocery items, but their reunion proves more bitter than sweet. Qiao Qiao has moved on emotionally and the finale has her doing literally just that.

Despite the curdled romance at the film's center, Caught by the Tides is more a meditation on progress, for good and bad, in 21st century China than a fictive narrative. Jia was able to assemble the film, in which his characters really do age, from documentary footage, abortive films, and outtakes from other projects. The film feels haphazard, it leaps about through time and space shifting from grainy video in the Academy ratio to gorgeous widescreen film. Cuts are predicated on poetic links rather than plot development. The use of different modes of travel in the film, air, rail, boat, and road, denote this as a film about life's passage. The soundtrack ranges from Shanxi opera to Chinese punk rock: the only constant is change. We visit an area not basking in the lap of China's economic miracle. Rather, it is an area and culture that has been subsumed since the construction of the 3 Gorges Dam. One of the best films released in the US in 2025 containing a performance for the ages by Zhao Tao.

Envy

Ben Stiller

I was not even aware that Barry Levinson's Envy existed until I stumbled upon a DVD of the film at my local library. Apparently, this 2004 film was such an ignominious flop that it left not a trace on the public consciousness. The two major film companies responsible for its financing had so little faith in it after its box office demise that it never had a release on disc until Shout Factory, champions of pop culture errata, snapped it up. I decided to give it a chance based on the cast alone: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler, and Christopher Walken. Alas, the film is direly unfunny. Stiller and Black play SoCal neighbors who work at unfulfilling jobs at a 3M plant. Weisz and Poehler are underutilized as "the wives". Black invents an aerosol spray that eliminates animal waste dubbed Vapoorize. That is the level of the humor. The film's primary focus is on Stiller's resentment over his friend's success. 

There are moments of humor, but they are few and far between. Walken fares best because he is well cast as an eccentric barfly. Black is underused. The only moment that captures his comic energy is an infomercial in which he pitches his product. Stiller is really the lead here. Leon Redbone contributes a song cycle reminiscent of Jonathan Richman's efforts in There's Something About Mary, but comic lightning did not strike twice. Stiller has a good moment telling off his boss, but pratfalls and physical schtick, which the Farrelly brothers handled well in ...Mary, are not Barry Levinson's forte. He is more adept at verbal comedy linked to characterization and characterization is extremely thin in Envy. Stiller and Levinson's attempts to milk physical comedy from a dead horse flop badly. It seems to me when Levinson ventures outside his native Baltimore, the results have been feeble. Avoid Envy.

A Woman of the World

                       Pola Negri and Chester Conklin                    

Malcolm St. Clair's A Woman of the World, released in 1925, is an amusing fish out of water trifle than runs only 70 minutes. The Tubi stream is only so-so in terms of visual fidelity and sharpness, a pity since Bert Glennon (The Scarlet Empress, Stagecoach) manned the camera, but it still gives us a chance to see a relatively neglected silent. The film was based on Carl Van Vechten's recent novel, The Tattooed Countess. Tasked with turning this into a vehicle for one of Paramount's big stars, Pola Negri, screenwriter Pierre Collings dropped the age of the Countess by two decades and, thankfully, retained her tattoo. Morrie Ryskind was responsible for the intertitles which sardonically lampoons the narrow mindedness of the Babbitts and Babettes of small town America.

The film opens with a prologue on the Riviera in which Negri finds her husband, a no account count, in flagrante delicto. To get away from her troubles, Pola travels to America to visit his long lost cousin, who turns out to be...Chester Conklin(?!). Conklin, five years removed from Mack Sennett, was still the best second banana in the business and his rapport with Negri is priceless. His character, like all of the men in the film's fictional town of Maple Valley, is suspicious of her foreign ways, but becomes a puddle in her presence. The scene in which he reveals his own tattoo to Negri is priceless. The exoticism of Negri unleashes neurotic and erotic currents in Maple Valley. Two men fall in love with her, the most significant being the local DA (Holmes Herbert), a bluenose with a fanatical zeal for reform. They meet cute when he calls her a loose woman, she is smoking a cigarette after all, and he tells her to leave town. The road to true love is rocky and not helped by the local gossip mongers busy knitting on their porches. Pola ends up confronting the DA at a city council meeting brandishing a whip for a finale that inevitably leads to a clinch and a just married sign. 

Pola Negri: bangs were big in the flapper era

Malcolm St. Clair's career, like Ms. Negri's, nosedived in the sound era. His direction here is simple and elegant, his focus more on actorly byplay than panoramas. He rarely moves his camera and seems fond of close-ups of telling details: hands and balls of yarn. The one pan in the film tracks a bit of gossip as it goes from one end of the room to the other. Negri is playful and game. She suggests a real woman behind the guise of a vamp. I never have cared for Holmes Herbert, too much of a throwback to the 19th century for me, but he fits his uptight role. Charles Emmett Mack plays a younger admirer, the kind leading ladies of the day ultimately reject because they are only a boy. He is promising, but died, prematurely and tragically in an auto accident in 1927. All in all though, A Woman of the World is a delight.

Magical Mystery Tour versus The White Bus

Fab Four gone flab

I first saw The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour in 1978 or so, a scratchy and wan print at a midnight showing. After seeing the similar tour bus driven The White Bus, also originally released in 1967, I thought to give it a another chance. Was it still the witless psychedelic farrago that I remembered? Alas, yes. I guess it was too much to expect that the pop music darlings of that age could make an interesting film, but did they even try? The project seems hastily conceived and shot. Phantasmagoric moments as the bus tours the English countryside are interspersed with amateurish videos of the band's new material. The music, except for the truly mad I Am the Walrus, is subpar Fabs; the barrel scrapings of their psychedelic era. The only thing I can say positive about the film is that it is a link from The Goon Show to Monty Python. At least the band had good taste in genuine English eccentrics like Ivor Cutler and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

Lindsay Anderson's The White Bus mines a similar vein of English eccentricism in glorious black and white. The Beatles' film had been inspired by Ken Kesey's adventures with his busload of merry pranksters. No such foreign or lysergic influence pervades Anderson's film. The short, 47 minutes, film was made to be part of a portmanteau project that would also include short films by Tony Richardson and Karl Reisz that would prove not to be. Shot in 1965, The White Bus had a brief release in 1967, but has languished in obscurity since. The film was written by Shelaugh Delaney, edited by Kevin Brownlow, and stars Patricia Healey. Healey plays a depressed London clerk working in a Brutalist building who embarks upon a train ride in a very gray London. The unnamed she gets hit on by a bowler caricature of an aristo, but cheers up when entertained by the antics of a cadre of Manchester United fans. The group sing-a-long is more winning and better shot than the one in The Beatles' flick.

Patricia Healey

The gal disembarks in Manchester which looks even more sooty and sinister than London. Happily, a double decker tour bus happens by and our heroine hops on. The passengers are a mix of English types, international travelers, and the Lord Mayor and his Macebearer, both dressed in full regalia. The characterizations are less exaggerated than in Magical Mystery Tour and the whole enterprise looks great, probably at the cost of The Beatles' catering budget. The groups tours industrial sites, museums, gardens, weaving centers, cake factories and witness Anthony Hopkins sing, very briefly, Resolution der Kommunarden, a Brecht poem about the Paris Commune of 1871 set to music by fellow traveler Hans Eisler. The picture occaisionally explodes in sequences of color, as in Anderson's If..., but nothing should be read into this. Anderson admitted he did so in desperation. He would use whatever precious film that was gifted to him by hook or crook. The film addresses alienation from a secure distance. Anderson pokes fun at English nationalism, class strictures, and the Church: all safe and easy targets. The Manchester buildings still bombed out from the Second World War leave more of an impact on the mind's eye.

Despite its limitations, The White Bus, especially in comparison to Magical Mystery Tour, is a coherent and realized picture from a director with a true filmmaker's eye. Ms. Healey had a haphazard film career, including two cameos in subsequent Anderson films, but earned a moniker that many would envy, Mrs. Englebert Humperdinck. They were wed from 1964 till her death in 2021.

In memory of Erich Kuersten

Just Imagine

Maureen O'Sullivan and John Garrick

David Butler's Just Imagine is a justly neglected science fiction film from 1930.  The film is set in the far off future of 1980 in a world in which planes are the primary vehicles and numbers have replaced names. Marriage is dictated by the state which provides what little plot the film has. Lovebirds Maureen O'Sullivan (as LN-18) and John Garrick (as J-21) can't get a marriage license from the Politburo, so Garrick flies off to Mars to earn enough brownie points to wed his lady love. There, he encounters a planet of doppelgängers who alternately coddle and bruise him. There is also a refugee from 1930, played by vaudeville star El Johnson who specialized in ethnic (Swedish) humor, who is monikered 0 and serves no real purpose except to provide comic relief. Oh, as if things weren't bonky enough, there are musical numbers.

Joyzelle Joyner and John Garrick on Mars

The picture has the searing impact of a burlesque revue with jokes about the Volstead act included. The sets and costumes are endearingly gaga. The men's suits in the film's 1980 resemble maitre d's outfits at a French restaurant in Vegas. The tony dwellings of 1980 resemble the Art Deco look of the 20s and early 30s. Butler is a curiously lightweight director who was able to carve out a steady career in Hollywood despite helming a number of disasters like this one. He is able to create a few bold and startling images, Ms. O'Sullivan in close-up superimposed upon the surface of the earth or a passel of nekkid chorines (Pre-Code, baby) shimmying before their pagan idol, but the film doesn't really hold together. It resembles a night of vaudeville, alternating between comic and musical numbers. Neither Garrick nor Johnson were able to make much of an impact in their film careers and soon returned to the stage. I've never seen Ms. O'Sullivan look more beautiful, but she, like Garrick, gives a largely inane and callow performance. The second bananas, Marjorie White and Frank Albertson, fare much better. Ms. White was to die prematurely and tragically of an auto accident in 1935.

I would have enjoyed the film more if the songs had been better. The team of Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson were responsible for both the songs and the flimsy screenplay. They wrote some classic songs, like Bye Bye Blackbird, Has Anybody Seen My Gal ? and You're the Cream in My Coffee, but inspiration was lacking on this one. Most of the songs are light ballads designed for Garrick's tenor voice. They seem like knock-offs of the work of Sigmund Romberg, known for operettas like The Desert Song and The New Moon. Indeed, the drinking song in Just Imagine seems like a direct rip from the drinking song in Romberg's The Student Prince. Only the White and Albertson number, Never Swat a Fly, has any razzmatazz. Just Imagine is streaming on Tubi, if you are in the mood for a real Hollywood hallucination.

      

Father Sergius

                       

I cannot recommend the print of Father Sergius (Otets Sergiy) that is currently streaming on Tubi. It seems to be the product of a Soviet re-release from the 1930s. The quality is murky and the film image seems pared down. The film is certainly truncated in length, eighty minutes of a film that was originally nearly two hours, but options are limited. Mubi ran a print of similarly shortened length a few years back. There are purportedly full length versions circulating on disc, but they are of dodgy provenance.

However, the film is of both artistic and historical value and I could not pry my eyes away. The film was begun during Kerensky regime, but not released until after the Bolsheviks had consolidated their seizure of power in 1918. Tsarist law forbade the depiction of priests onscreen, so this was the first adaptation of a Tolstoi short story that had been published posthumously. There have been subsequent versions, including an adaptation by the Taviani brothers in 1990 which transposed the action to Italy. Father Sergius, the film, adheres fairly closely to the arc of the original story. We watch the title character age from a hot-tempered aristocratic soldier to an aged holy man who embraces abject humility in Siberia. The story is typical of late Tolstoi, a predictable morality play tracing one man's spiritual regeneration; a story akin to that of the Buddha. Prince Kasatsky, the future Father Sergius, is on the eve of his wedding to a well-connected Countess whom he has pined for when he finds out that she has served as the mistress of Tsar Nicholas 1. Before you can say Platon Karataev, the prince has renounced worldly desires and status and donned the robes of a priest. Through the years his devout demeanor attracts followers, as a slew of female temptresses try to snatch him from the straight and narrow. Eventually, he succumbs to the charms of one of them and abandons his church. In order to fully embrace humility, he becomes a wandering beggar which leads to exile in Siberia. Thus endeth the lesson.

Yakov Protazanov was the primary director of the project, but after he fell ill Alexandre Volkoff, who adapted the Tolstoi story for the screenplay, filled in. Whoever was responsible, the direction is sturdy, if not astonishing. Foreground and background are contrasted for some nice contrapuntal effects. Images of Sergius' betrothed are superimposed over his meagre room to show that he has not fully escaped worldly desires. There are a few rickety 45 degree pans, but they seem designed to do little except show off the sets. Whoever did the makeup seems overly fond of kohl.

The primary reason to see the film is the title role performance by Ivan Mosjoukine, the premier film actor of pre-Soviet Russia. He gives a bravura performance in which he ages from sixteen to sixty. Mosjoukine reminds me, in terms of looks and talent, of John Barrymore without the hamminess. Both Mosjoukine and Volkoff headed for exile in the West in 1920. They even collaborated on a few films in France. Mosjoukine had a brief stay in Hollywood, where he was trumpeted as the next Valentino, but the rise of the talkies cut his stay short. He will remain immortal because he was the actor Lev Kuleshov utilized to illustrate his celebrated effect.

1917: The Making of a Revolution

Maxim Gorky

I was taken aback by how much I enjoyed Stan Neumann's documentary 1917: The Making of a Revolution which is currently streaming on Tubi. I am mad keen on the Russian Revolution and will watch even the blandest collection of archival footage and talking heads. However, this doc has no newsreel footage or talking heads. It switches from expertly chosen still photographs to animation and footage of historic sites as they look in present day St. Petersburg. Neumann was born in the Czech Republic and lives in France. The 53 minutes length of this documentary makes me think that it was probably made for French television, but I could not pin this down for a fact.

The French title for the documentary gives a better idea of the scope of this film: Lénine -- Gorki, la révolution à contretemps. The film uses the polemical blasts and op-ed pieces by Lenin and Gorky to portray the dialectical push and pull of revolutionary ferment in 1917. This is not the best approach for an overview of the revolution, Trotsky is barely mentioned, but it serves well the constrictions of a film this length. What is here has great impact. The animated sections are lively, I particularly liked the breakdown of political parties in the style of Malevich's Suprematist Compositions. I also adored the use of Alexander Blok's poem The Twelve. The narrator recites passages as we glimpse Jury Annenkov's illustrations for the original edition which gives as much a flavor of 1917 in Petrograd as any period photo.

The clincher for me was the use of the great Denis Lavant to portray Gorky in his Italian exile. Lavant's passionate yet mellifluous readings of Gorky's Revolutionary era essays are beautiful. History comes alive. 

Blue Moon

Ethan Hawke

Blue Moon is a another winner from Richard Linklater and another testament to his handling of ensemble work from his players. That said, Robert Kaplow's script is centered entirely on Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, played by Ethan Hawke, on the most humiliating evening of his life. Kaplow, who wrote the script for Me and Orson Welles, foreshadows Hart's demise in a brief prologue. We then travel back months in time to the night in 1943 when Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! is making its New York debut to a rapturous reception. Hart, who had teamed with Rodgers for two decades before becoming increasingly drunken and unreliable, can't stomach sitting through the show. So, he repairs to a lovingly recreated Sardi's where the remainder of the film occurs. Rodgers and Hammerstein eventually arrive to toast their triumph, further nudging Hart towards despair and a relapse.

The downbeat and insular nature of the project is magnified by the closed in nature of the action. Instead of opening up what is essentially filmed theater, Linklater closes the action down as much as he can to reinforce our sense of Hart's claustrophobic debasement. Debasement is the key theme of the film. Even when Hart's muse (Margaret Qualley) confides to him about her deflowering, the story ends not with catharsis, but humiliation. Despite the downbeat nature of this picture, I actively enjoyed it. This is primarily due to Mr. Hawke's outstanding performance. Hawke not only captures the pathos of his character, but also his wit and warmth and that makes all the difference into keeping this flick from falling into morbidity. Hawke has always been a ridiculously talented actor, but this is most soulful effort.

Linklater and his editor, Sandra Adair, masterfully weave the staff of Sardi's around Hawke.  They act as a contrapuntal chorus to the tragic hero in a picture attuned both to Broadway melodies and the music of dialogue. I particularly relished Bobby Cannavale's ripostes and double takes as the bartender. I also enjoyed the contributions of Jonah Lees, Patrick Kennedy, Aisling O'Mara, and Caitríona Ennis. Decades of accumulating evidence has led to this conclusion, but Blue Moon further cements Linklater's reputation as an American master. 

Bugonia

Emma Stone

Spoiler Alert...I enjoyed Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia, but I have always had an affinity for his work and can certainly understand those who are repelled by his misanthropy. Bugonia takes its premise from a Korean film that I have not seen entitled Save the Green Planet. Two small town Georgia cousins, Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis, kidnap a big tech CEO played by Emma Stone. They, or least Plemons character, is convinced that Stone is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy intent on supplanting the human race. Control and its abdication is one of the repeating themes in Lanthimos' work. Plemons is the dominant partner between the two cousins. We learn that his mother is in a coma and that the attendant stress has compelled him into a paranoid spiral. He wants Stone to bend to his will, but she remains obdurate. 

Delbis is to Plemons here as Lennie is to George in Of Mice and Men. This is the film's most glaring flaw. Every time the two talk of maybe finding a new home in another galaxy, I can't help but think of the dream of the rabbit farm in Steinbeck's book. Delbis' character is a few bricks short of a load and too good for this savage world. The contrast between the two cousins is over much in an already schematic movie. The warm tones of the cousins' rustic house is juxtaposed with with the cold contemporary feel of Stone's home and corporate headquarters. She drives a loaded Mercedes truck while Plemons navigates a ten speed. An elitist versus the common man, etc., etc. The contrast is a comic one though Bugonia is the blackest comedy one can imagine. ECT torture, a murder, a suicide, a beheading, and more, ultimately culminating in the extinction of the human race.

The finale is soundtracked by Marlene Dietrich's version of Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, an ironic capper akin to Kubrick's use of Vera Lynn's We'll Meet Again at the conclusion of Dr. Strangelove. Lanthimos has the same chilly remove and misanthropy as Kubrick. There are no warm close-ups in Bugonia. Most shots are at a remove. There are almost as many Easter eggs and threads to pull in Bugonia as in any Kubrick film and like Kubrick, Lanthimos is under appreciated for his work with actors. Stone and Plemons both do superb work in the film as does Stavros Halkias as a clueless cop. Lanthimos represents a humanism that can conceive of the extinction of humanity as a positive for the planet. As one character puts it, "this isn't Death of a Salesman." Bugonia is another of Lanthimos' portraits of man as a "sick ape".

The Wonderful World of Tubi, February 2026

Greta Garbo in The Kiss

Jacques Feyder's The Kiss, from 1929, is the last, and perhaps best, silent film that Greta Garbo made for MGM. The witty script, based on a George Saville short story, was by Hanns Kräly, a frequent collaborator of Ernst Lubitsch. However, Kräly's career in Hollywood would be severely affected after Lubitsch discovered that Kräly was carrying on an affair with Lubitsch's soon to be ex-wife. Kräly soldiered on as a screenwriter, but was consigned to B pictures after 1930. The Kiss is a romantic melodrama with comic flourishes set in France. Garbo is married to an older banker, but is in love with a lawyer played by Conrad Nagle. A young swain, wonderfully played by Lew Ayres, is also infatuated with her which leads to tragic consequences. Cedric Gibbons' Art Deco sets are eye popping. So are Adrian's outfits for Ms. Garbo, but sometimes for the wrong reasons. Feyder's direction is light on its feet, resulting in a melodrama that never bogs down or loses momentum. It is a great pity that this was the only English language feature that Feyder directed in America. Highly recommended.

Joe May's Asphalt, from 1929, is an Erich Pommer production which makes me wonder if Pommer produced any poor or even mediocre films in Germany during the 1920s. Asphalt is a melodrama that combines romance and crime in Weimar Berlin. Thief Betty Amann seduces young cop Gustav Frölich. It ends badly after the requisite trysts and heists. The picture boasts extraordinary subjective POV shots and impactful close-ups. A masterpiece on par with Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. Joe May's reputation declined when he was consigned to B pictures in Hollywood, but for me he is now a subject for further research.

Tubi has three musical comedies from the early 1930s, all starring Eddie Cantor, that are worth a peek. The best of the three is Roman Scandals with completely gaga musical numbers directed by Busby Berkeley. Berkeley also contributed to Whoopee!, shot in two strip Technicolor, which is bogged down by its stage bound presentation; like the film version of the Marx brothers' The Cocoanuts. The runt of this litter is Kid Millions, but it does contain wonderful turns by Ethel Merman and the Nicholas brothers. All three films were typically classy Samuel Goldwyn productions and all three films are greatly helped by Stuart Heisler's editing. Cantor was a quadruple threat talent who was already a huge star on stage and thanks to his recordings. Cantor's lineage of wisecracking smart alecks includes token goy Bob Hope and Woody Allen, though Cantor always remained a naif. He never employed a leer. Cantor proved to be good value for Goldwyn in response to the success of The Jazz Singer. Both Jolson and Cantor's film careers suffered parallel declines in the late 1930s. Scholars of the Production Code can note the difference between 1933's Roman Scandals and 1934's Kid Millions. 

Jiří Weiss' The Golden Fern is an epic Czech fantasy film from 1963. The film is shot in wide screen black and white, gorgeously lensed by Beda Batka (Marketa Lazarova, and, um, Little Darlings). The film concerns a 18th century shepherd who happens upon the titular and magical fern. A forest sprite morphs into a beautiful woman in order to retrieve the fern, but falls for the studly if arrogant shepherd. They have a brief idyll until the shepherd is pressed into service for the Austro-Hungarian Empire in their latest conflict with the Ottoman Empire. While serving the Empire, the shepherd become entangled with a haughty aristocrat played by Daniela Smutná who gives the film's best performance. She is just toying with the lad, but true love is betrayed and the fern crumbles to dust. The film is uneven. Some of the action and supernatural scenes are quite clumsy, but the scenes of life in an 18th century military camp are compelling. These moments left their impact upon Kubrick's Barry Lyndon much as Jaromil Jireš' The Joke influenced Full Metal Jacket. Interested parties should check out the immaculate disc from Deaf Crocodile.

Frank Borzage's Song o' My Heart, from 1930, is Fox's attempt to concoct a vehicle for Irish tenor John McCormack. McCormack was one of the top recording stars and concert draws of the day. His repertoire ranged from traditional Irish ballads to opera. Fox paid him 500,000 clams and he liked Hollywood enough to buy an estate there. However, the film is a slipshod affair. I guess Fox figured they had already shelled out enough on this project, so every expense was spared. The story is drivel and the acting is horrid. The version on Tubi is mostly silent with 14 songs. Other, all talking, versions exist, but a 70 mm print is presumed lost forever. A half dozen of the musical numbers were taken from a recital, so this is one static picture. Featured are Alice Joyce, Maureen O'Sullivan (an Irish discovery by Borzage), John Garrick, and J. Farrell MacDonald, billed here without the J. Unless you want to see what McCormack looked like while performing, this is eminently skippable.

Even with its commercials, I can't think of a better streamer for budding cinephiles than the free, for now, Tubi. Right now you can watch scores of films by DW Griffith, John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Kenji Mizoguchi, Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Ingmar Bergman, David Cronenberg, Werner Herzog, Blake Edwards, Ernst Lubitsch, etc. I think Tubi has a better lineup of classic films than any streamer, including The Criterion channel. Also check out these classics currently streaming on Tubi: Godard's Contempt, Chabrol's This Man Must Die, Brian de Palma's Sisters, Franju's Eyes Without a Face, Carol Reed's The Third Man, Dryer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, Jarmusch's Dead Man, Andre de Toth's Pitfall, GW Pabst's The Diary of a Lost Girl, Sirk's A Scandal in Paris, Zhang Yimou's Shadow, Bigelow's Point Break, Clive Donner's What's New Pussycat, Melville's Le Samourai, Rossellini's Journey to Italy, Davies' A Quiet Passion, Friedkin's To Live and Die in LA, Siegel's The Lineup, Leni's The Man Who Laughs, Tarkovsky's Solaris, Rush's The Stunt Man, Marquand's Eye of the Needle, Lynch's Eraserhead, Margarethe von Trotta's Sheer Madness, Stroheim's Greed, Borzage's A Farewell to Arms, Chaplin's The Gold Rush, Keaton's Our Hospitality, and many more. A cinematic feast awaits.

Betty Amann in Asphalt