Nosh 139: 'Shoplifters' + 'The Upside' & More

David Elliott

         

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Shoplifters and The Upside

Shoplifters

Is having any family better than no family? Not an issue for ancient Greek royals, nor the modern, tragic Tyrones (Long Day’s Journey Into Night). Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters stakes out humbler ground – a tiny Tokyo flat occupied by six people. Spinning that question with tremendous skill, he took the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year. As Phillip Lopate noted in a fine essay, the win stirred “lingering resistance on the part of some high-art cinephiles to Kore-eda’s coronation, perhaps because in the past he has shown crowd-pleasing tendencies, and because he lacks a signature art-house visual style.” Let the tsk-tsk bees buzz. At 56 the Japanese wizard of subtle, fluid, crowded intimacy has made another marvel.

It features “Grandma” Hatsue, a virtual Granny Joad (actor Kirin Kiki, who died at 75 in September, has a lovely sendoff). She dispenses nostrums (like salt to prevent bed-wetting) and shared-pot food. Her small pension is the life raft for “adopted” son Osamu (Lily Franky, a wry and gentle Kore-eda veteran), whose seemingly common-law wife is Nobuyo (Sakura Ando). Everyone accepts whatever Osamu shoplifts with his Artful Dodger, the pre-teen boy Shota (quiet, pensive Jyo Kairi). Increasingly ambivalent about thieving, insecure in his acquired family, Shota incarnates Kore-eta’s “recurring theme of ‘throwaway children’ who live by their wits and grow up too quickly” (Lopate). Most cheerful is Aki (Maya Matsuoka), a sex-parlor model who demurely winks portions of breast at sadly gazing men. Loneliness is common in this lower depth, and the makeshift but embracing family is a kind of renegade retort to the order of Japan Inc.

The pet in the petri dish is a little girl, recently taken (lifted, literally) from an abusive family by Osamu. Renamed Lin, she (Miyu Sasaki) blossoms under fond attention. She also opens another facet of exposure (kidnapping) to a legal system that cannot tolerate this patch-pieced family. Full of tolerance, Kore-eda offers many tangs of revelation in the crammed flat and dense shops. He can also swing free, as when Osamu, hoping that Shota will finally call him Dad, charms him while walking across a parking lot. Ryuto Kondo’s camera rises like a kite, and as the figures get smaller their bond seems to expand. Shoplifters, rich in ensemble fluency, is worthy of its fine ancestors (Oshima’s Boy, Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den, Bresson’s Pickpocket, even Wenders’s Paris, Texas).

A wonderfully natural sex scene is juiced by warm summer rain, and each childhood moment registers honest feeling. Like Kurosawa deep in Ikiru, Kore-eda pulls off a startling switch of perspective, to reveal more backstory in a wider social and moral context. This writer-director of profound sentiment is no sentimentalist. When the family’s story enters public space, it never loses emotional closeness. As before in Still Walking, Nobody Knows, Without Memory, etc., Kore-eda’s master tool is most clearly and undeniably the lens of love.    

The Upside

You’d imagine that a sleek comedy “with heart,” about a black, ex-con scrounger who becomes chief handler and chauffeur for a very rich, white paraplegic who lives in a Park Ave. penthouse, would have to be hapless and horrible – a Driving Miss Daisy for hedge funders. You would until you see The Upside, which pairs Kevin Hart as Dell, the lippy dude, and Bryan Cranston as wealthy Phillip, whose lips match his eyes as artists of subtle wit and restrained pathos (he and we remain aware of the useless arms and legs). As a thin but equally excellent support for this tripod comi-drama, there is Nicole Kidman as Phillip’s crucial and appealing secretary. If you don’t relish how much director Neil Burger (Limitless) enjoys posing Kidman as a high-rise near short, buff Hart and wheelchaired Cranston, then your comedy antennae need adjustment.

Converging destinies lift Phil and Dell from suicidal funk. Their special fun includes the only crotch catheter scene ever backed by a Stieglitz portrait of Georgia O’Keefe. There is also toity but delightful use of opera. Yes, the movie preens lavish lifestyle in a manner that hardly matches the situation or mindset of most severely handicapped people. And the racial counterpoint is pretty obvious (as it was in the source, the 2011 French hit The Intouchables). Still, an excellent cast and crafty direction evade most of the squish traps. There is an almost vintage screwball pleasure in watching Cranston, Hart and Kidman rise and revel in sync, topped only by Aretha Franklin singing “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot.

SALAD (A List)

12 Excellent Movies of Kids in Peril

With their year and director:

The Kid (Chaplin 1921), Shoeshine (De Sica 1946), The Search (Zinnemann 1948), Oliver Twist (Lean 1948), Night of the Hunter (Laughton 1955), The 400 Blows (Truffaut 1959), Our Mother’s House (Clayton 1967), Paper Moon (Bogdanovich 1973), Fresh (Boaz Yakin 1994), King of the Hill (Soderbergh 1993), I’m Not Scared (Salvatores 2003) and The Florida Project (Baker 2017).   

     

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Speaking post-Kane to a receptive college class in New York, in 1943, Orson Welles opened up about his new medium of film, “so very powerful and yet so very meaningless most of the time. When I tell that to people in Hollywood they get mad at me and say, ‘You’re just arty.’ … A picture must be better to see the second or third time than it is the first time. There must be more in it to see at one time than any one person can grasp. It must be so ‘meaty,’ so full of implications, that everybody will get something out of it.” (Quote from Frank Brady’s book Citizen Welles.)

  

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Elliott Gould was a startling, unlikely movie star, rising through “a classic Jewish mama, then a tough school for show kids, wedding gigs, the Catskills, learning that nerves will trample you or, if smartly engaged, trampoline you to applause. Gould’s talent had fuzzy edges, shy glances, twinkling eyes and pursed, almost lemon-sucking lips. Making Little Murders, Alan Arkin saw ‘an excellent actor. The character he plays has a kind of brooding intensity Elliott doesn’t have. He had to work very hard for that, but was completely successful.’ ” Decades later, Gould and Arkin appeared together amusingly on TV’s The Kominsky Method. (Quote from the Elliott Gould/The Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)   

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Addie (Tatum O’Neal) and “daddy” Moses (Ryan O’Neal) travel the plains Midwest during the Great Depression, in Paper Moon. (Paramount Pictures, 1973. Director Peter Bogdanovich, photographed by Laszlo Kovacs.)

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 138: 'Welcome to Marwen' + 'The Mule' & More

David Elliott

         

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Welcome to Marwen and The Mule

Welcome to Marwen

The essential process of movies is mutation. As art and biz, fun and folly, the medium keeps mutating, in a tireless shuffling of transformational cards. Welcome to Marwen is a wild card, a showy mutant of Marwencol (which not many saw in 2010). I was among those who found Jeff Malmberg’s documentary among the best (and strangest) I had ever seen. Its source and soul is a genuine hero of survival, Mark Hogancamp.

In 2000 Hogancamp, 38, went to his local bar in Kingston, N.Y. and got loaded. A flip exchange with five young, drunken toughs became violent when Mark mentioned his occasional cross-dressing (main fetish: shoes). Assuming he was gay, the phobes beat him so badly that he was in a coma for nine days, lost memory of his past, but then gradually found a therapy beyond his meds. No longer alcoholic, but still high on shoes, he began collecting and outfitting flexible doll figures, mostly Barbie-wows combating S.S. sadists (a mutation of the bar brutes).Their sexy, violent World War II occurs in his Belgian village, built to 1:6 scale on his modest Kingston property. The vampy babes fight Nazi soldaten who revive like vampires, and are helped by Mark’s alter-ego hero, a pilot named Hogie. The beauty twist is that, although the bullies destroyed Hogancamp’s talent for drawing, his art was reborn in his color photos of the Marwencol dramas. In another mutation, a New York gallery show brought him artistic esteem and income.

Enter Hollywood “imagineer” Robert Zemeckis, eagerly and rather bravely spending over $40 million (Malmberg’s budget: $38,000). The intimate yard settings and naif mise-en-scene of Mark’s art are now launch platforms for an often brilliant design team’s blasts of war-game fantasy. Human-scale dolls in fab costumes mutate with live actor/CGI magic, the cast led by Steve Carell as Mark and (looking airbrushed) Hogie. Now in his glory time, which includes Vice, Beautiful Boy, The Big Short and Foxcatcher, Carell has poignantly nailed the afflicted, lonely grace of Hogancamp, and without underlining “camp.” The movie finds some vivid intimacy, as when Mark lovingly outfits a new fem-doll to Julie London’s “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” Beyond kitsch or kinks, Mark loves women.

Zemeckis clearly loves his story and Marwencol. But now the fantasy village is called Marwen. The missing “col” might easily stand for “creativity overcoming limitations,” as the toy-dream Hogancamp world morphs into a studio mega-mutant. Half an hour longer than Malmberg’s strange, intimate tribute, this Big Package reminds us that Zemeckis is not only the man who did Cast Away, Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He also gave us that candy corncob of goo-goo glop, Forrest Gump. So he milks Mark’s growing crush on a neighbor, puts him through two courtroom traumas, and adds a queasy salute to the belltower sequence in Vertigo. There is even a flying time machine, very back to the past of the future. Welcome is stylish, sincere and imaginative, yet Mark Hogancamp’s best movie remains a small, mysterious documentary.

The Mule

The perfect start of The Mule would show Earl Stone (Clint Eastwood) riding a burro up to the border, then gaping at the Great Wall of Trump. Forget perfection, but tuck yourself into a cozy mule bag of story oats with this effective bounce off an actual man’s situation. A WWII veteran and flower gardener in danger of losing his home, Earl naively (at first) becomes a delivery “mule” for a Mexican drug cartel, then applies his rich pay to good deeds. Clint is 88 now and seriously eroded (so much sun in the spaghetti Western years). But in a rickety way he is still rakish, and aw-shucksy tough (cop to Clint: “You coulda played Jimmy Stewart”). The writers have protected their antique star by limiting the crime violence, even satirizing it with preening skeet-shoots of the drug lord, performed by amusing (and amused) Andy Garcia. The only howlers are two scenes of nubile whores grateful to please goaty ol’ Earl.

Eastwood directed like Earl drives his truck: smooth and assured, stretching suspense out along the road, grabbing good shots, playing famous tunes on his radio, fumbling with digital phones as if they were Japanese booby traps on Iwo Jima (about which Eastwood made two strong war films). Solid support at every turn from Garcia, Bradley Cooper, Michael Peña, Laurence Fishburne, Alison Eastwood and, as Earl’s estranged wife, Dianne Wiest (her last scene is a sunset fit to rival Edward G. Robinson’s in Soylent Green). This may be Clint’s most subtle acting since Bridges of Madison County, and the gentle-tough movie is not a cranky belch like Gran Torino. True to Eastwood’s form the picture runs a little long, but it handles humor, danger, atmosphere, PC issues and family syrup with savvy and due diligence. For Eastwood, whose face is now almost parchment, whose sandpaper voice is more paper than sand, this could be the swan song. If so, his hybrid mutant of swan and mule is very engaging.

SALAD (A List)

12 Richly Original Modern Documentaries

These go beyond interviews, file clips and obvious points. In order of arrival:

Carpati: 50 Years 50 Miles (Yale Strom 1996), The Cruise (director Bennett Miller 1997), Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale (David and Laurie Shapiro, 2000), Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thorn Anderson 2003), My Architect (Nathanael Kahn 2003), My Flesh and Blood (Jonathan Karsh 2003), Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog 2005), Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervasi 2009), Senna (Asif Kapadia 2010), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog 2010), Jiro Dreams of Sushi (David Gelb 2011) and Free Solo (Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chin Vasarhelyi 2018).

     

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Far and away Orson Welles’s most popular role was suave villain Harry Lime in The Third Man (1948). In Germany avid young women pursued him calling “Der Dritte Mann!,” though it caused Orson chagrin that Carol Reed, not he, had directed the big hit. Welles launched a BBC radio show, The Adventures of Harry Lime, “figuring that he might as well benefit from the fact … Orson impressed radio people with his uncanny speed, knocking together the show. ‘He was a powerhouse,’ said actor Robert Arden, ‘At the BBC they’d take three days to record a half-hour show. Orson had it all together and recorded inside one morning.” (From Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Playing the heartbroken, then healing Travis in Paris, Texas brought into human fullness all of Harry Dean Stanton’s instinct for quiet, searching, subtle magic: “The student of Buddhism didn’t act-out, but in. ‘To be a film actor,’ he avowed, ‘one should never put on an act, on screen or off. It should be as organic as breathing, but many people don’t know how to breathe.” (From the Harry Dean Stanton/Paris,Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)   

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Deep in French caverns, prehistoric horses run free in Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Sundance Selects 2010; director Werner Herzog, photographed by Peter Zeitlinger).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 137: 'Vice' & More

David Elliott

         

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER: Review of Vice

Vice, which explores the “vice” in Vice President, is a buckaroo bonanza of riffs, facts, japes, ironies and sniper angles on the most powerful No. 2 in our history. Compared to Dick Cheney, current VP Mike Pence is just a Trumper with a thumper (his pet rabbit, Marlon Bundo). Cheney, under but more like over George W. Bush, took command of policy and turned his pompous pimple of a job into a festering boil of manipulation.

Director and writer Adam McKay earned comedy stripes with The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights, then greased himself for this dive into the big muck pool with The Big Short. McKay, informed but no pinchy academic, enters with Vice into the wild, rootin-tootin’ domain of Dr. Strangelove, Bulworth, C.S.A., The Interview, Wag the Dog and the docu-grenades of Michael Moore. Vice has heft, stretch and swagger. Although its cartoonish energy is in the zestful graphic tradition of ink-men like Nast, Levine, Feiffer and the Mad gang, it’s less a cartoon than a manifestoon – a broadside with the vitriolic zeal of prose ambushers like Mencken and Tom Wolfe. Every laugh pings, provoking a thought.

The key is fearless Christian Bale. He added 40 pounds, then blob prosthetics, then make-up to become the Wyoming Wonder of boardroom guile and carnivore appetite, his chubby head turning like a tank turret, his eyes icicles of feral cunning, his voice a flat monotone from the man cave of power lust. Bale’s Cheney is great in a Sinclair Lewis way. Behind the almost bovine, Rotarian demeanor are the will and brain of a Republican Machiavelli. His anti-charisma is fascinating. Verbally cogent, even terse, Cheney is also a stunning contrast to our current King Minus, the super-brat whose Oval Office is an orifice of tweets and tantrums.

Cheney becomes the serial exploiter of many mentors (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, “Poppi” Bush, Roger Ailes, the oil industry rajahs). A long-term ally was Donald Rumsfeld, played by Steve Carell as a vain, prickly weasel. Electorally, Cheney was duller than dust. But his ambition was a tireless computer of intrigue, and his most crucial enabler was canny wife Lynne, a real power addict (Amy Adams is Betty Crocker cake with sprinkles of arsenic). Their love was true, their scheming ruthless. After Lynne saved Dick from booze, he did one fine thing: he didn’t hurl their daughter Mary (Alison Pill) into conservative Christian hellfire for being gay. Vice is sometimes slap-happy with its cascading materials, allusions and tangents, but I loved the couple’s giddy mock-duet of Shakespearean plotting. And the surreal fantasy jolt halfway through, using a credit scroll, is inspired.
 

Fate arrived as a frisky chump: George W. Bush. He was, for Cheney, a providential and then presidential vacuum through which Dick could fire the lightning bolt of his power grab. “Helping” the amiable, needy candidate select his VP in 2000, Dick chose himself, then shoved the full load of his “unitary executive” agenda down George’s gulping craw. Control mole Dick and Sam Rockwell’s goofy-spaniel George become an almost Orwellian update on the contrast synergy of smooth Dean Martin and nutty Jerry Lewis.

Reality always has the last laugh, and the cocky vaudeville of Dick & Dork led to dismal punchlines: a court-jacked election, 9-11, then lies and Iraq, torture and financial collapse. Caught in a circular maze of smug, false assumptions, the men caused many thousands of deaths. Once boyish rascals, driving wild and drinking hard on long Western roads, they “matured” into the reckless chiefs of a deceitful, brutal, fear-mongering regime that damaged the world (if in Trump Time you have nibbled on Bush-Cheney nostalgia, this film will end it). Vice has drawn some critical cavils and harrumphs. But anyone who complains that it lacks formal rigor or Chomsky chops of analysis is like someone who attends the circus to work on a crossword puzzle.

Not since Toni Servillo’s spider-web politico in Il Divo have movies had a villain so packed for menace behind a plodding façade. Amid the stormy churn of this satirical mill, notice that the quietly ticking center is a kind of sick miracle: fat, meat-loving, stress-loaded Dick waddled on for decades, his health lousy, his coronary crises many. McKay’s device of using a war-vet narrator is a stretched fuse, but its closing blast is, truly, all heart. Richard Bruce Cheney, still proud of his long, patriotic service, turns 78 on Jan. 30.

SALAD (A List)

Ten Bravura Portrayals of the Dark Side of Politics

Claude Rains as Senator Paine, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (director Frank Capra, 1939); Ray Collins as Boss Jim Gettys, Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941); Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark, All the King’s Men (Robert  Rossen, 1949); Orson Welles as Cesare Borgia, Prince of Foxes (Henry King, 1949); Ed Begley as Gov. Tom Finley, Sweet Bird of Youth (Richard Brooks, 1962); Cliff Robertson as Sen. Joe Cantwell, The Best Man (Franklin Schaffner, 1964); Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon, Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984); Noah Taylor as Adolf Hitler, Max (Menno Meyjes, 2002); Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland (Kevin Macdonald, 2006) and Toni Servillo as Giulio Andreotti, Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino, 2008).

     

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

From Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood column for March 31, 1949: “It’s a little early to predict the Oscar-winning player for best supporting actor next year, but (director) Henry King has picked him: Orson Welles as Borgia in Prince of Foxes. Henry said everybody told him he would have trouble with Welles, that he’d never be on time. ‘I’ve never worked with anyone as cooperative,’ says King. ‘He came on location two days ahead of schedule, and after the first morning always beat me on the set at 8 a.m.” Inevitably, Orson would twink that: “I used to hide and wait until he’d start to scream, ‘Where is he? I know the son-of-a-bitch is away in Venice shooting that goddamn Shakespeare!’ And then I’d step out of the bushes and say, ‘Do you want me, Henry?” (Quotes from the Welles/Bogdanovich book This is Orson Welles.)  

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In The Producers Kenneth Mars took the part of Franz Liebkind, Nazi janitor turned idiotic author, after Dustin Hoffman decamped to star as Benjamin in The Graduate: “Mars, no Dusty puppy, is more like a Reichstag guard dog. He sings both the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ and ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ He rants about Churchill and declares that Hitler was ‘a terrific dancer!” (Quote from the Zero Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)   

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Cesare Borgia (Orson Welles) plots his conquest of central Italy in Prince of Foxes (20^th Century Fox, 1949; director Henry King, photographed by Leon Shamroy).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 136: 'Roma' & Top 12 Movies of 2018

David Elliott

         

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER: Review of Roma

In 2001 Alfonso Cuarón splashed into view with the playful, erotic Y Tu Mamá También. He went on to direct one of the best Harry Potters (2004’s Prisoner of Azkaban), but with Great Expectations, Gravity and Children of Men he seemed to fall into a conceptual grid of themes. Now Cuarón returns to roots, confidently. His wonderfully populated Roma is the most elegantly layered canvas of city life since Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013). It seems odd that this absolutely Mexican movie is called Roma, yet with due respect to Sorrentino’s glowing Rome, Fellini’s exuberant Roma and even the Roma (gypsies), Cuarón earns his title. Roma is the story’s bursting section of Mexico City.

Shot almost entirely there and largely pulled from Cuarón's memories, the film was written and photographed by him, using silky-silver tones that deliver emotional flow without exotic tropical color. In 1971 the capitol city still faces student protests and strikes, following the state-ordered massacres of 1968. The maid and nanny Cleodegaria Gutiérrez is utterly non-political, a sturdy little refugee from Oaxaca poverty. She is gratefully dutiful for “her” family: the mildly spoiled, sparky mother Sofia (fine Marina de Tavira), Sofia’s self-involved doctor husband and five delightful kids (the mascot is Marco Graf’s Pepe). Cuarón saturates us in their daily rhythms, giving virtual roles to the dog Burrón and the Ford Galaxy crammed into a narrow garage.

The home is a microcosmic reflector of the huge city, and each crisis finds intimate perspective. The father’s radical decision avoids pyrotechnics but impacts everyone. A temblor shakes up a maternity ward. Cleo’s visit to a furniture store suddenly endures the spillover of a street protest. Her own crisis is the most personal, yet without rhetoric or sudsy slop. There are some obvious signifiers, like a doll left in a gutter, and a forest fire that rallies solidarity (Mexico, land of murals, loves symbols). But the many grace notes include the sustained vista of the beautiful old Teatro Metropolitan, where customers suffer a dippy French war farce (a bad gift globally, shown in the U.S. as Don’t Look Now, We’re Being Shot At). Cuarón is good at such juxtapositions, as when Cleo tries to decipher her loutish boyfriend, nakedly preening his martial arts routine (was Cuarón inspired by a similar episode of a soccer player in The Great Beauty?). 

Roma is an episodic vision, but to call it a telenovela with aesthetic ambitions would deny its superbly textured feelings and potent, prismatic focus. Its humanism is not sloganized. Its feminism is more contra-macho than anti-male. The excellent cast pivots on the pensive, soft-spoken but absolutely lived-in performance of Yalitza Aparicio as Cleo. Her hospital emergency is unforgettably affecting, her first visit to a beach (echoing Y Tu Mamá También) is equally resonant. Any sensitive visitor to Mexico or Central America has pondered these small peasant women, with their Mayan features and blocky bodies that seem to incarnate the patience of eternity. After centuries they have their movie icon, Cleo of Roma.      

SALAD (A List)
Twelve Best Movies of 2018, as reviewed on this site:

1. Roma – Reviewed above.   

2. Wildlife – Paul Dano’s impeccable directing debut examines a family’s breakdown in 1950s Montana. Superbly acted by Ed Oxenbould, Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal (See Nosh 133, Dec. 7, below).

3. Call Me by Your Name – Probably the finest coming-of-age film with a gay edge. Timothée Chalomet, micro-tonally subtle, never just poses in Luca Guadagnino’s warm Italian succulence (Nosh 97, Feb. 2).

4. Isle of Dogs– Canines romp, rule, scheme and scratch in another triumph of deluxe high design and sly wit from Wes Anderson (Nosh 106, April 20).

5. Vice – With fervor, Adam (The Big Short) McKay chops former V.P. Dick Cheney (stunning Christian Bale) into juicy-bitsy pieces (review appears next week).

6. Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool – Annette Bening’s topping role portrays the last phase of film star Gloria Grahame. Jamie Bell is her English fan turned lover, in Paul McGuigan’s homage beyond nostalgia (Nosh 99, Feb. 22).

7. Darkest Hour – Gary Oldman got a worthy Oscar for playing Churchill in his toughest war year, directed with power by Joe Wright (Nosh 94, Jan. 12).

8. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? – Morgan Neville’s moving documentary traces the life and good works of endearing TV icon Fred Rogers (Nosh 115, July 6).

9. Free Solo – Quietly obsessed Alex Honnold becomes the first person to climb the sheer wall of El Capitan without ropes or crampons. This documentary has an astonishingly intimate, immediate tension (Nosh 129, Oct. 26).

10. A Fantastic Woman – Diva Daniela Vega sustains the risky bravura of a pioneering Chilean trans. Director Sebastián Lelio explores the core of both hip camp and Latin homophobia (Nosh 102, March 23).

11. BlacKkKlansman – Some caricatural excess doesn’t hurt Spike Lee’s spiking of that old devil Klan. Richly funny but serious are Adam Driver and John David Washington (Nosh 120, Aug. 17).

12. Eighth Grade – After countless teen-girl movies, here’s a first-rate one that overhauls cliches. Terrific Elsie Fisher, 14, was directed with a keen eye and savvy heart by Bo Burnham (Nosh 119, Aug. 10).

(Other pleasures: At Eternity's Gate, Beautiful Boy, Bombshell: Hedy Lamarr, Boy Erased, The Cakemaker, Can You Forgive Me?, Final Portrait, Green Book, Lean on Pete, Leave No Trace, Let the Sunshine In, Loveless, Maria by Callas, A Quiet Place, RBG, Red Sparrow, The Shape of Water, Widows, You Were Never Really Here.)

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson is away this week, contemplating his newly salvaged The Other Side of the Wind, as I hope to do before long.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

This week I give my book a hiatus, but feel free to order Starlight Rising via Amazon, Nook or Kindle.

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Ed Oxenbould (front) is the son bewildered by the cracking marriage of Carey Mulligan and (rear) Jake Gyllenhaal, in Wildlife (June Films, 2018; director Paul Dano, photographed by Diego García).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.