Nosh 50: 'Silence,' 'Elle' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Silence and Elle

Silence
I put off seeing Martin Scorsese’s Silence, out of admiration for the novel by Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Christian writer of great subtlety. And I didn’t really care to witness Scorsese, at 74, again scourging himself with his  whip of Catholic doubt and hope (its bloody drops sprinkle much of his work, most potently The Last Temptation of Christ). Endo’s book gave him “the kind of sustenance that I have found in only a very few works of art” – so attention is owed.

What is meditative and finely layered in Endo’s prose can easily become, on screen, a Stations of the Cross travelog. Silence, filmed in Taiwan, takes two Portuguese Jesuit priests into 17^th century Japan, hoping to find their possibly faith-fallen mentor, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson). Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield, with terrific hair) and Garupe (magnetic, rodent-faced Adam Driver) find their spiritual ardor shaken by tiny villages of persecuted Christian converts. Japanese imperial authorities feel that their entire, insular world is at stake, and unlike Native Americans they have the best weapons. The history fascinates, but in its first half the film keeps repeating itself, grindingly. The hunted priests are almost buried by the pictorial grandeur of rugged coasts, mists and dark woods. Competing with great Japanese painters (and directors), Scorsese can’t win.

Silence gets richer when Garupe peels away and Rodrigues, hauled to the city for agonizing trials, must choose between martyrdom or saving simpler believers from torture and execution. One is a ragged God’s fool who keeps turning up like a terrier of guilt, demanding confession and absolution (mechanical Catholicism, dramatized emotionally). Scorsese sifts Endo’s fine grains of public and intimate faith, emphasizing the Jesus/Judas dichotomy and what “apostasy” means in this fierce context. Garfield, touchingly earnest, falls short of the nuances needed. Driver has a great look and voice, but not much of a role.

Liam Neeson appears, gaunt and haunted, like an Oskar Schindler without a cause. Oddly for such a wizard of film history, Scorsese doesn’t seem to mind that the crafty old Chief Inquisitor (Issey Ogata) has the grinning, playful sadism of the “beastly Japs” who tormented Yank prisoners in American WWII movies. Usually the suave creeps were played by Chinese-American actors – and now here is Taiwan, subbing for Japan!

Tending to make even torture seem grotesquely picturesque, Silence is still an imposing display of Scorsese’s mature skill and moral passion. Perhaps the most disturbing element is the frequent mention of Nagasaki, so that the old brutalities seem to foreshadow the deadly mushroom cloud of Aug. 9, 1945. Up to 80,000 died in the atomic blast, mostly civilians who never had the time for prayer or penance. (Footnote: today about 2% of Japanese are Christian.)

Elle

At 63 Isabelle Huppert is still svelte and feline. Her acting has often had the effect of a cool, smart kitty on the prowl. So it seems right that her brutal rape, which opens Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, is calmly observed by a cat. While viewing this movie, it might occur to you that the animal was transfixed by a lesser species: ours.

As a Frenchwoman no longer young but still a bonanza of erotic and predatory kinks, Huppert coughs up a virtual hairball of crypto-feminist sensationalism. Her Michele is a hybrid, both victim and dominatrix, wired for abuse but also ripe for sinister payback. Michele is attacked by the big, masked intruder four times during the story, and yet remains in her ground-floor flat with 20 windows and scarcely any security. She always rebounds quickly and seems almost unfazed, as if savoring a cruel sport.

Destined for elite sado-masochism, Michele was the daddy’s girl and disciple of an infamous serial killer, now dying in prison. She heads a company that makes video games full of erotic violence. With sinister blitheness, Michele seduces a friend’s husband, toys with her hapless son, torments her ex-husband and stokes the fantasies of her rapist, first seen as a cordial, Christian neighbor (the actor, handsome Laurent Lafitte, is “de la Comedie-Francaise” – not a very important honor in this particular context).  The story’s rampant perversity oozes suspicion and vicious betrayal. Although director Claude Chabrol poured some similar menace in his films, his did not arrive sour from the bottle.

Verhoeven, now 77, seems very eager to be again a top provocateur if not (quite) pornographer. But Elle is too loaded with glib, Franco-fishy ideas about family, gender and power to get him back to the pulp heat of his crude hits Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Although Huppert’s witty expertise oils the screws of manipulation, the story’s chic rot gains nothing from references to Medea, Beethoven, Simone de Beauvoir and Pope Francis. Pundits who preen for this ugly contraption are fooling themselves. The most honest scene in Elle is Michele’s cat, simply true to its nature, pouncing on a wounded sparrow.

SALAD (A List)

From my not very lofty perspective, these are the Twelve Best Films of Christian Religious Life (with date and director): The Passion of Jeanne d’Arc (C-T. Dreyer, 1928), The Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1951), Monsieur Vincent (Maurice Cloche, 1947), The Nun’s Story (Fred Zinnemann, 1959), The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, 1950), Barabbas (Richard Fleischer, 1961), Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, 1948), Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois, 2006), Elmer Gantry (Richard Brooks, 1960), The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), Romero (John Duigan, 1989) and The Apostle (Robert Duvall, 1997).

Smaller blessings include Robert Morley in The African Queen (John Huston, 1951), Peter Sellers in Heavens Above! (John and Roy Boulting, 1963), Deborah Kerr in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (John Huston, 1957), Meg Tilly in Agnes of God (Norman Jewison, 1985) and John Hurt in Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

New York drama critic Percy Hammond suddenly died soon after reviewing Orson Welles’s Macbeth in 1936. The production’s imported witch doctors had put a Haitian hex on him. Ten years later, when some critics denigrated his extravagant stage show Around the World in 80 Days (into which he poured most of his own money), Orson got cheeky on the radio: “My voodoo friends are still in New York. I can always get them together for a special event …. I’m not threatening you, I just thought I’d mention it.” (From Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In the 1960s, “movies got hip in a hurry, though today the laughs are lean in Barbarella, Candy, Cat Ballou, Enter Laughing, Expresso Bongo, Greetings, Head, Help!, The Knack, Lord Love a Duck, The Magic Christian, The Maltese Bippy, Morgan!, Pound, The President’s Analyst, Putney Swope, Watermelon Man and (the dead-worst) Casino Royale. Despite reserves of taste, Mel Brooks and Zero Mostel were not about to amen Sholem Aleichem’s declaration on arriving in America; “I will never permit myself to give in to American taste and lower the standards of art.’ Lows can be highs, and compared to most competition, The Producers was Beluga caviar.” (From the Zero Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

In the Belgian Congo, Sister Luke (Audrey Hepburn) reveals a maternal instinct in The Nun’s Story (Warner Bros., 1959; director Fred Zinnemann, cinematographer Franz Planer).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 49: 'Jackie' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Review of Jackie

The most stunning moment in Jackie, a stunning film, has Jacqueline Kennedy finally stripping off the fabled pink dress, the one she wore to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. She wore it spattered by Jack’s blood during the frantic rush to the hospital after the president’s shooting, and sitting next to his coffin on the flight to Washington, and when attempting to visit his autopsy, and in the White House she would soon have to leave. Now the dazed and exhausted Jackie stands naked in the shower, and blood runs down her back. Never mind that it couldn’t have seeped sufficiently through the rather heavy dress (she had cleaned her face earlier), for in this startling image the film concentrates the Greek-tragic shock which has never entirely subsided. This has nothing to do with politics or conspiracies. While hard to watch, Jackie is a kind of balm, even after 53 years, for anyone old enough to have deeply experienced that most terrible event.

Perhaps this American nightmare has always required a brilliant foreign director. Pablo Larrain, from Chile, peels open our collective myth to make Mrs. Kennedy live again in her most awful but heroic days. Larrain found the right star: Natalie Portman. Well past her popular cuteness, her mature beauty is a half-shattered mask of tremendous expressiveness. This is a crowning role, more deserving an Oscar than her win for Black Swan (but credit Darren Aronofsky, who directed that lurid hit, for producing Jackie and hiring Larrain). Portman uses details both layered and exposed to reveal a woman suddenly at the border of both her own and national sanity, trying fiercely to understand. Her raft for survival was the Camelot myth, which she gave to journalist Theodore H. White (Billy Crudup). Larrain and writer Noah Oppenheim use this misty fantasy, one that is now half-forgotten, without irony, and we understand Jackie’s fierce need for it.

Larrain, 40, made a great movie about celebrity craziness (Tony Manero, 2008) and a thrillingly effective film about Chilean politics (No, in 2012). Working in America with a fairly big budget, on a profoundly freighted subject that has been infected by pulp (chief case: Oliver Stone’s JFK), Larrain does not falter. His regard for Mrs. Kennedy is fearless but compassionate, and he treats the assassination with powerful freshness. Portman has so personalized her role that the horror hits intimately. The folding of classic clips (not the Zapruder film) into re-staged events is seamless, vivid and factually credible. With cinematographer Stephane Fontaine, Larrain keeps everything rooted in Portman’s often benumbed or distraught but charismatic responses.

Larrain has said that a good director is “like a kid with a bomb.” Inevitably, any detonation sets off some quibbles. White’s interview is stretched out as a tense counterpoint. Teddy White, whose campaign book had exalted Jack’s election in 1960, would never have shown up for a talk with the grieving widow wearing a loose tie and a fairly remote manner. The segments of Jackie’s famous 1962 White House tour on TV are touching (her breathy nervousness is wonderfully caught by Portman), yet the value diminishes. Peter Sarsgaard, an actor of wispy, ironic nuances, struggles to capture Bobby Kennedy’s special blend of fire and ice (he’s also taller than Jack, an odd reversal). Excellent are Greta Gerwig, as Jackie’s devoted assistant Nancy Tuckerman, and – a bold, original addition – John Hurt as a profoundly caring but never sentimental priest.

Jackie is probably the best movie ever made (or likely to be) about the awful blow of 1963. Now, knowing her future (the Jackie O phase, the quieter New York years, the tragic death of her beloved son after her own), we can lay more dark laurels on this woman who, as Portman says with almost pleading pathos, “never wanted fame. I just became a Kennedy.” Larrain and Portman have restored her as a living person, swamped by history but entirely human, enduring her brutal fate as well as any figure not scripted by Racine or Euripides. What matters is to watch the film with total attention. And pity. 

SALAD (A List)

The Best Kennedy Films, by my appraisal: Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016), Thirteen Days (Roger Donaldson, 2000), Ruby (John Mackenzie, 1992), Primary (Robert Drew, 1960), Oswald’s Ghost (Robert Stone, 2007), Love Field (Jonathan Kaplan, 1992), Bobby (Emilio Estevez, 2006), Parkland (Peter Landesman, 2013) and PT 109 (Leslie Martinson, 1963).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

I Love Lucy remains a beloved TV show, and “Orson Welles did a guest shot in the 1950s. During rehearsals he had sat in the wings, staring at the star. Asked what he was doing, Welles, enchanted with Lucy’s skills since the 1940s, explained ‘I am watching the world’s greatest actress” (quote from Ball of Fire, a Lucille Ball bio by Stefan Kanfer).Welles had used Ball on radio and briefly on stage. In a different mood and moment, he probably would have given that praise to his great collaborator Agnes Moorehead. You can see his funny appearance (Oct. 15, 1956) as Lucy Meets Orson Welles on YouTube.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Movie music really matters, as in The Horse’s Mouth: “After a score by Joyce Cary’s son Tristram was found too heavy for a frequently comedic project, (director) Ronald Neame had a great flash: Prokofiev’s concert suite Lieutenant Kije. One of the century’s most inventive composers, Sergei Prokofiev fled Soviet Russia but later became a culture toy of Stalin and died the same day, his obituaries quashed by the dictator’s. Kije was written for a 1933 film of Yuri Tynyanov’s comic novel about an imaginary soldier and a mad czar (Stalinist analogies apply). Witty, jazz-free in instrumentation but romantically yearning, it fully met the challenge of Guinness’s Gulley Jimson.” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle).

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Jack Ruby (Danny Aiello) and Candy Cane (Sherilynn Fenn) face the 1963 Dallas trauma in Ruby (Sony Pictures, 1992; director John Mackenzie, cinematographer Phil Meheux).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 48: 'Hidden Figures,' "Lion' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Hidden Figures and Lion

Hidden Figures

For half a century a running gag in sci-fi has been Mars Needs Women, a dopey TV film in which Tommy Kirk leads an ambassadorial delegation from Mars. NASA Needs Black Women would certainly have been a catchier title than Hidden Figures, but the aim here is not satirical kitsch. At times formulaic, and fairly prim in its archival nostalgia, this retrieval of almost forgotten history is also smart and human, a salute that deserves its success.

Ostensibly the star is hefty, high-smiling Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan, a keg of sass and savvy who heads a team of gifted black women recruited to work on the space agency’s computation force. Not given a formal rank, she is isolated with her “girls” in a drab section of the NASA compound in segregated Virginia. Spencer steals any scene she cares to, but director Theodore Melfi keeps her under control, with no loss of buzz. He gives time to pretty Janelle Monae as spark-tongued Mary Jackson, who goes for a degree in engineering despite racist obstacles. And gives even more time to Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson, a math wiz who became the Apollo 7 program’s secret intellectual weapon. Meanwhile, the Russians were in Sputnik heaven and IBM was installing a huge, main-frame computer that would threaten many of the women’s jobs.

It is Henson, ripened beyond Shug in Hustle & Flow (2005) and her sexy Vernell, “finer than frog’s hair” in Talk to Me (2007), who most rivets attention. Her facial lines angle complex feelings in multiple directions, and when she runs (in heels) across the NASA campus to find the one “colored women’s” rest room, the story eviscerates the stilted absurdity of complacent racism in the JFK era (1961 and ’62). Katherine stuns the white males of the top brain team with her rapid brilliance; her dead-on calculations saved astronaut lives. Crucially she impresses big boss Al Harrison (Kevin Costner, whose flat-top hair and terse, gum-chewing manner accent an ace portrait of authority under constant pressure). And as a tough, snippy manager who is also a blithe racist, Kirsten Dunst abandons her previous girlishness for real maturity.

Some of the scenes of family life and romance lock in snugly, a little too polished for period display. Many of the white nerds in white shirts are interchangeable, and maybe a balding actor should have been chosen to play John Glenn (he went into orbit at age 40 and was charismatic even without much hair on top). Clearly, the math-driven science is flashed at us with small hope of our comprehension, and Melfi is a crafty but custodial director. Such limits do not deflate the story’s moving power. Really, who knew? And who back then, apart from insiders, cared? Hidden Figures brings back the triumph and tensions of unique women in a very special era of routine fear and brave optimism. In space the planet that Glenn sees is neither black nor white. It is, beautifully, our very own wild, blue yonder.

Lion

There have been plenty of good movies about lost children – The Kid, The Wizard of Oz, The Search, Oliver Twist, The Quiet One, Shoeshine and Pixote come fast to mind – but Garth Davis’s film Lion has a special bite. It’s the real story of Saroo, a poor Indian separated from his older brother at age 5. He got on a train that happened to be a “ghost train” rumbling, without passengers (except for Saroo), to distant Calcutta. After avoiding potential sex slavery, he was dropped into a dismal orphanage, until a welfare worker secured his adoption by a loving Australian couple in Tasmania. Saroo is played as a boy by Sunny Pawar, whose dark, troubled face justifies his first name with a remarkable smile. This is certainly no Apu Trilogy, but the Indian scenes of the homesick boy are vividly tense and disturbing, and very well photographed by Greig Fraser.

Lion (the title translates Saroo’s birth name) loses some power in comfy, bourgeois Tasmania, where the child grows into buffed stud Dev Patel, Hollywood’s favorite British Indian actor. The Aussie payoff is Nicole Kidman as Saroo’s new, very committed mother. In two key scenes Kidman, with no reach for glam, shows just what an experienced star talent can bring to a movie. Dev Patel sometimes looks like a wandering Jesus who misses Mary, but he sustains interest. How Saroo gets back to India, and what he finds, makes an emotional climax as satisfyingly heartfelt as any film has recently had. 

SALAD (A List)

These 32 Little-Seen Marvels merit more of an audience. In order of arrival: Menilmontant (Dmitri Kirsanov, 1924), Platinum Blonde (Frank Capra, 1931), Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935), The Sea Wolf (Michael Curtiz, 1941), Monsieur Vincent (Maurice Cloche, 1947),  Last Holiday (Henry Cass, 1950), Miracle in Milan (Vittorio De Sica, 1951), Five Fingers (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1952), Crime Wave (Andre de Toth, 1953), French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955), Men in War (Anthony Mann, 1957), The Music Room (Satyajit Ray, 1958), Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959), Blast of Silence (Allan Baron, 1961), High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963), Crime and Punishment (Lev Kulijanov, 1970), Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle, 1971), Day of the Jackal (Fred Zinnemann, 1973), The Outfit (John Flynn, 1973), California Split (Robert Altman, 1974), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah, 1974), Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky, 1976), Wise Blood (John Huston, 1979), Saint Jack (Peter Bogdanovich, 1979), High Season (Clare Peploe,1987), Big Night (Stanley Tucci, 1996), The Whole Wide World (Dan Ireland, 1994), Mac (John Turturro, 1997), Catarina in the Big City (Paolo Virzi, 2005), Colma: The Musical (Richard Wong, 2006), Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain, 2008) and Aquarius (Kleber Mendonca, 2015).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In 1982 Citizen Welles recalled a special instance of Hearst retribution in the wake of Citizen Kane: “I was lecturing, I think it was Pittsburgh… and a detective came up to me as I was having supper (and said) don’t go back to your hotel … I said ‘Why not?,’ and he said they’ve got a 14 year-old girl in the closet and two cameramen waiting for you to come in. And of course I would have gone to jail … I never went back to the hotel. I just waited until the train in the morning. I’ve often wondered what happened to the cameramen and the girl waiting all night for me to arrive.”  (From Walking Shadows: Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst and Citizen Kane, by John Evangelist Walsh).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The personal impact of a great film from a great town: “Facing Rome’s Trevi fountain in 1972, I expose a Polaroid print of memory: Houston’s Tower Theater, ablaze in light for the 1961 premiere of La Dolce Vita, as my teenage self sneaks into the throng. The Vatican had denounced an ‘epic debauch,’ and debate steamed like lava. I still agree with critic Robert Hughes who, decades after first exploring Rome, avowed that ‘no film has ever fascinated me more.” (From the Marcello Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)  

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Harry Dean Stanton and Brad Dourif in the crazy Dixie of Wise Blood (New Line Cinema 1979; director John Huston, cinematographer Gerry Fisher).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 47: 'La La Land,' Best 16 of '16

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Review of La La Land

“Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”

                               – Noel Coward, Private Lives.

Also extraordinary: that the old Hollywood goo still spins from the taffy machine. This past year alone, the Coen Bros. spun a funny gob with Hail, Caesar! Woody Allen massaged, unconvincingly, movie nostalgia in Café Society. And Warren Beatty achieved witty variations of retro satire in Rules Don’t Apply. Beatty barely won a shrug for his bravura effort, but a hosanna buzz is building pre-Oscar for La La Land, a seductive vamp from writer and director Damien Chazelle.

Maybe not since Jean-Jacques Beineix hit the critical gong with Diva (1981) has a talent been so praised for licking his cream while whipping it. But Chazelle’s fantasy is more snugly rooted in the oldest appeal: boy meets girl, with both lovers hooked on L.A. as the nectar Mecca of their ambition. Hooked also, Chazelle is a gazelle cropping very lush grass. He skims Los Angeles for fabled sites, stages a simplified Astaire-Rodgers dance on a skyline road, hangs around Warner Bros., highlights murals and posters, enshrines live jazz. He even snuggles into a retro showing of Rebel Without a Cause, stops it, then lifts it higher at the great Griffith Park Observatory. This is not a sardonic hipster take on fading Hollywood myth, like The Long Goodbye. It is a $30 million swoon, a color-drunk overhaul of the nostalgia so sweetly served in duotone in The Artist (big kudos now for cinematographer Linus Sandgren and his lighting team, also the designers).

Emma Stone is Mia, a big-eyed adorable hoping to break into acting. Even when rejected she glows like a moon ripe to be a star. Sebastian, a pianist and jazz purist who craves his own club, is played with blithe charm and face fuzz by Ryan Gosling. They meet cutely several times, then splurge their lusty desire mostly on wispy but darling choreography and OK songs (composer Justin Hurwitz has a shy winner with “City of Stars,” and uses terrific instrumentation). Stone and Gosling float through this gossamer rapture, scooping stardust, though they could use more time to simply romance (and act). They are almost stampeded by the glowing nostalgia clichés, which remind us that L.A. has always theme-parked itself without apology.

You can crit-snip and say the first pool scene was better done in I Am Cuba and the second one better in Boogie Nights, and snark about the story being book-ended by images of Ingrid Bergman (a touch unfair to Stone, who is more peachy than fabulous). And yet, why not lick the cream and purr? The gleaming cat’s saucer is L.A., though only one sequence (the first, on a freeway ramp) really seems like the living city more than memory. There was more improvised flair and rooted, unified texture in Richard Wong’s Colma: The Musical (2006), with its gifted teen amateurs and tiny-budget savvy about Bay Area locations. But Chazelle achieves a deluxe echo of classic Hollywood, and he never hogs into mere kitsch (he’s beyond Baz Luhrmann).

I didn’t care for Chazelle’s Whiplash – the ear-banger drumming and J.K. Simmons’s macho screaming became bores. And yet Chazelle is a canny showman. He gets the essence of Casablanca, that it’s not just about a great love, but about one sadly lost and then briefly re-kindled. And so he delves into that for the grand climax, an escalating, bittersweet daydream at a jazz club, with tasty nods to Gene Kelly’s topping “ballet” in An American in Paris. They don’t make such musicals anymore, and this isn’t one. But La La Land can levitate your spirits as we enter a difficult year.

SALAD (A List)

Here are My Top 16 of ’16, as numbered by my taste (what else?) and previously noshed in this column. Eugene isn’t L.A. or Paris, but we get plenty of quality. We are still waiting for the two new gifts from Pablo Larrain (Jackie and Neruda) and for Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson. The film's director and Nosh number are included, so just scroll down for more prose:

1. Son of Saul (Laszlo Nemes, Nosh 6) – An engulfing and timeless film, a stunningly internal, personal vision of a Hungarian death camp in the Nazi terror. 2. Rules Don’t Apply (Warren Beatty, Nosh 43) – Using Howard Hughes, Beatty sums up his times, town and stardom, with plush, impudent wit and a fresh discovery: Lily Collins. 3. Aquarius (Kleber Mendonca, Nosh 42) – An angry but lyrical view of hard urban change in Recife, Brazil, as defined by a lovely old building and Sonia Braga’s career topping performance. 4. The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer, Nosh 26) – A  wee but deep wonder about girls, dance, puberty and a strange psychic plague, all alive on screen with mysterious subtlety. 5. Miss Hokusai (Keiichi Hara, Nosh 38) – A totally Japanese, surreal salute to the talented daughter of a great painter, animated exquisitely. 6. La La Land (Damien Chazelle, this Nosh). 7. Life, Animated (Roger Ross Williams, Nosh 28) – Amazing documentary about Owen Suskind, who found escape from autism through his joy in Disney animation; this is so not a plug! 8. Sully (Clint Eastwood, Nosh 32) – Spot-on salute to the pilot who crash-landed the right way, his heroic cool delineated by Tom Hanks with just the facts, no preening. Further …

9. Moana (Disney, Nosh 45) – With its radiant Polynesian mariners, critters and ocean vistas, Disney’s finest animation in years (also funny). 10. Francofonia (Alexander Sokurov, Nosh 17) – The Russian visionary’s dreamy-smart meditation on the culture cult of the Louvre, Paris, art and historical memory. 11. Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonca, Nosh 3) – The Brazilian master’s unfaltering docu-dramatic scan of Recife in all its shifting, shimmering layers, astonishingly beautiful. 12. Miles Ahead (Don Cheadle, Nosh 13) – As far into weird genius Miles Davis as a fearless speculation film is likely to go; nakedly strong acting and direction by Cheadle. 13. Southside With You (Richard Tanne, Nosh 32) – An intimately charming portrait of the great First Couple before they became that, on their initial date in Chicago, with Parker Sawyers a superb Barack, cocky but nervously facing Tika Sumpter’s fine Michelle. 14. Midnight Special (Jeff Nichols, Nosh 14) – The lucid Arkansas wiz of actors and atmosphere does a sharp, unsettling take on the alien invasion and cover-up tropes, with a swell cast. 15. A Bigger Splash (Luca Gudagnino, Nosh 18 ) – Not the Hockney doc but a comedy of absurdist lust on an island, best served by Tilda Swinton and lewd satyr Ralph Fiennes. 16. Florence Foster Jenkins (Stephen Frears, Nosh 29) – She sang terribly, yet heard herself as great. Meryl Streep nails Flo’s diva delusion with humor and movingly tender dignity, wonderfully supported by Hugh Grant and Simon Helberg.

Other viewings to value: Bad Santa 2 (Nosh 44), Dark Horse (21), Deepwater Horizon (35), The Eagle Huntress (45), Eye in the Sky (10), 45 Years (4), Free State of Jones (22), Genius (23), Hail Caesar! (2), The Infiltrator (25), The Jungle Book (15), Little Men (33), My Golden Days (11), Our Little Sister (34), Race (5) and Weiner (20).

(In memory: in 2016 we lost Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, dead at 76 on July 4, and Poland’s Andrzej Wajda, dead at 90 on Oct. 9, both absolute masters of film and brave protest under long, oppressive regimes. Sorry, Debbie and Carrie, but you have to take seats behind them – but do share some jokes.)

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson decided to take this Nosh off.  He went to Pink’s in L.A. for hot dogs, with a vintage bottle of Paul Masson.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“For writer David Campany, Funny Face ‘never quite suppresses the creepy undertones of manipulation that is perhaps always implicit in the power relations of the fashion industry,’ But can retrospective layering of modern political correctness possibly be fair? This gauzy Cinderella dream is neither feminist nor sexist, neither intellectual nor pea-brained. Its only ‘agenda’ favors grace, beauty, fun, fashion, song, dance, romance and Paris. Let those not grateful go soak themselves in Half a Sixpence, Song of Norway and Mamma Mia!” (From the Audrey Hepburn/Funny Face chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, found on Amazon, Nook and Kindle).

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Geza Rohrig plays a Jewish worker in Nazi Hungarian hell in Son of Saul (Sony Pictures Classics, 2015; director Laszlo Nemes, cinematographer Matyas Erdely).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.