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Reviews
April '22 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 27 April 2022 18:32
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Streaming/In-Theater Releases of the Week
Petite Maman
(Neon)
The best film at last fall’s 2021 New York Film Festival was, unsurprisingly, French director Celine Sciamma’s emotionally precise and ingenious followup to her brilliant Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the best film of the 2019 NYFF. In this understated but shattering chamber piece, an eight-year-old girl whose beloved grandmother has just died meets and befriends a familiar-looking young girl while accompanying her parents to clean out the grandmother’s house.
Sciamma, probably the most accomplished and confident filmmaker working today, has created a movie that’s almost impossible to describe: The Twilight Zone meets Ponette gives a broad outline, but Sciamma works on such a fragile, delicate canvas that the effect is of a master miniaturist working at the very height of her powers, like a Vermeer or a Fauré, one with insights into the thinking of children of all ages—as well as their parents.
(Magnolia)
In a lesser actress’ hands, the character of Anaïs—a fluttery millenial who is perpetually late, perpetually self-centered, and perpetually on her own wavelength—would be pretty much unwatchable, but Anaïs Demoustier’s charming, winning onscreen presence compels the viewer to root for her even as she does the most insensitive, selfish, immature things like start sleeping with an older, married man, then make a beeline for his wife, a famous novelist, and begin an affair with her.
Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet has written and directed a self-aware romantic comedy that follows its heroine with alternating amusement and bemusement, but thanks to Demoustier’s magnetism, it remains buoyant throughout.
The Duke
(Sony Pictures Classics)
Don’t let the dullish title put you off: this beguiling film by director Roger Michell—who died last year at age 65—tells one of those “stranger than fiction” true stories that only needs a guiding directorial hand to put it through its immensely entertaining paces. In 1961, 60-year-old British retiree Kempton Bunton said that he stole Francisco Goya’s Duke of Wellington portrait from the National Gallery in London, keeping it hostage in exchange for the government ended the TV license fee to elderly pensioners.
Michell’s light touch, Richard Bean and Clive Coleman’s witty script, and the enormously appealing and sympathetic performances by Jim Broadbent as Bunton and Helen Mirren as his put-upon wife add up to a splendidly diverting tale.
(Film Movement)
The members of the Trofymchuk-Gladky family in Krasnohorivka, a town in the war-torn Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, decided to record themselves—they all love cinema—to show their everyday existence during frequent periods of bombing by Putin’s Russia.
Iryna Tsilyk won the best director award at the 2020 Sundance Festival for this moving portrait of survival and creativity, focusing on a single mother and her four children, who have made their home a safe haven from the outside mayhem that has defined their lives for several years.
4K/UHD Release of the Week
Singin’ in the Rain
(Warner Bros)
Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s 1952 musical is a joy from start to finish: no one’s been able to equal Kelly’s extraordinarily cinematic choreography—with the possible exception of Bob Fosse—and Kelly’s co-stars Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds are unmatched, even by their directors’ exacting standards.
This all-time classic looks quite luminous in its new UHD transfer; extras comprise a 50-minute documentary ported over from the 60th anniversary Blu-ray edition (too bad nothing else from that stacked release was included) and an audio commentary by Reynolds, Donen, Donald O’Connor, Cyd Charisse, Betty Comden, Adolph Green and others.
Cosi fan tutte
(Naxos)
Mozart’s delectably comic chamber opera for six characters, which follows two couples that after many trials and tribulations are finally reunited, is distinguished by Mozart’s masterly music and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s witty libretto, both of which remain front and center in director Sven-Eric Bechtolf’s impressive staging last year in Florence, Italy.
Of course, a terrific cast helps immeasurably, particularly the trio of delightful women, Valentina Nafornita, Vasilisa Berzhanskaya and Bendetta Torre; the agless American Thomas Hampson holds it all together as the regal Don Alfonso. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.
Dementia
Jigsaw
(Cohen Film Collection)
These low-budget shockers are as different as can be. 1953’s Dementia, by director John J. Parker, is a 56-minute stream-of-consciousness piece of avant-garde juvenilia about a woman who, beset by memories of a damaged childhood, may or may not have committed a murder. It’s scored to Georges Anthieul’s moody music, and its jittery images make an impression, although not what Parker would have wanted.
Val Guest directed 1962’s Jigsaw, a minor mystery about detectives looking for the perpetrator in a particularly gruesome killing, which succeeds more atmospherically than as an edge-of-your-seat whodunit. Both B&W films have fine hi-def transfers; the lone Dementia extra is Daughter of Horror, the same film but with added explanatory narration.
Writing with Fire
(Music Box Films)
This bracing if at times tense documentary by writer-directors Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas follows the intrepid journalists in India who run its only women-run newspaper, Khabar Lahariya, which is moving from print to online. These women unflinchingly go into every possible difficult situation, smartphones at the ready, to uncover and report news to an increasingly skeptical public.
Seeing the private lives of the women and how their careers affect them beyond the newsroom is eye-opening, especially in times of extreme uncertainty for journalists, even in supposed bastions of free speech. Extras include a making-of featurette and interview with both directors.
Broadway Play Review—Tracy Letts’ “The Minutes”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 27 April 2022 02:28
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Minutes
Written by Tracy Letts; directed by Anna D. Shapiro
Opened on April 17, 2022
Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, New York, NY
theminutesbroadway.com
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| The cast of Tracy Letts' The Minutes (photo: Jeremy Daniel) |
Tracy Letts, our most adventurous playwright, has written everything from his early, creepily incisive character studies Bug and Killer Joe and his Tony-winning dysfunctional family epic August: Osage County to his most recent Broadway play, the lacerating midlife crisis comedy Linda Vista. Through his plays, Letts demonstrates his facility for a wide range of subject matter as well as a cutting sense of humor and a sympathy for all of his characters, however flawed.
And now there is, also on Broadway, The Minutes, Letts’ most political play yet. Although it doesn’t start out that way—at first, members of a small city council engage in amiable pre-meeting chit-chat and their meeting begins fairly innocuously—soon it devolves into in-fighting, backbiting, conspiracy theorizing and closeminded speechifying. In other words, it’s a microcosm of the sad state of democracy in America today.
When Big Cherry council newcomer Mr. Peel (Noah Reid) asks about the mysterious absence of fellow council member Mr. Carp (Ian Barford) from the evening’s meeting—Peel, away the previous week for his mother’s funeral, missed what happened to precipitate Carp’s leaving—the battle lines are drawn and, as Peel further complicates matters by requesting that the minutes from the last meeting be read to the council, the corruption, the graft and the whitewashing of the town’s history move front and center. With every succeeding comment by one of the council members, the meeting goes further off the rails, especially for those hoping to remain in power.
That summary might make The Minutes sound pretentious, but Letts’ playwriting strength is that he doesn’t telegraph anything, instead letting events occur organically from the council’s discussions to the crucial history he’s given the town of Big Cherry (whose very name, we learn, comes from a racial slur). Only at the play’s climax—when The Minutes goes from nasty but necessary political satire to an overobvious metaphor—does Letts make a slight misstep, but even in its overblown ickiness, the unsettling finale perfectly encapsulates the cultification of America in 2022 (and even 2017, when the play premiered).
As always, Letts’ writing perceptively differentiates among his characters: the nine council members and the town clerk are all individualized as much from his sharp dialogue as from the exceptional acting, which director Anna D. Shapiro astutely shepherds on David Zinn’s impressively detailed set. The production also boasts marvelous lighting by Brian MacDevitt, purposeful sound design by Andre Pluess and on-target costumes by Ana Kuzmanić.
Letts himself plays the haughty mayor, Superba, with gusto, but he allows the other cast members to shine as well. (Letts has given each character either a blatantly descriptive name or a dull, ordinary one.) The best in the polished veteran cast are the amusingly bemused Austin Pendleton as Mr. Oldfield, the much too senior member of the council; the hilariously deadpan Jessie Mueller as Ms. Johnson, the ultra-efficient town clerk; and the intense Ian Harford, who was also terrific in Linda Vista, and who as Carp makes the most of his short onstage time to thoughtfully focus the themes of the play, which brilliantly paves the way for Letts and Shapiro’s final, disturbing coup de théâtre.
Philadelphia Orchestra & Philadelphia Symphonic Choir Create an Evening of Aural Beauty
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 25 April 2022 13:01
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts. Photo by Pete Checchia
At Carnegie Hall on the evening of Friday, April 8th, I was privileged to attend a magnificent concert presented by the outstanding musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra under the extraordinary direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and featuring also the terrific Philadelphia Symphonic Choir led by Amanda Quist, in a thrilling performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s incomparable Missa solemnis, which served as an exquisite coda to the ensemble’s superb cycle this season of the composer’s complete symphonies. A slate of impressive soloists added immeasurably to the success of the event—soprano, Jennifer Rowley; mezzo-soprano, Karen Cargill; tenor, Rodrick Dixon; and bass-baritone, Eric Owens—I was especially enthralled by Rowley and Cargill.
The opening of the Kyrie conveys a religious affirmation over and above its imprecatory character but becomes more impassioned with the “Christe eleison”—this tendency informs the concluding section of the movement which ends quietly. The beginning of the ensuing Gloria is appropriately exultant but transforms into something less declamatory with the “Gratias agimus tibi,” and builds to an even more triumphant conclusion in the “Gloria in excelsis Deo”—it’s splendorous and almost baroque in its complexities in the fugue-like passages.
The Credo that follows also is initially fervent but turns more introspective with the “Et incarnatus est” but it regains its celebratory dynamism in the “Et resurrexit”; the movement reaches its apotheosis with its fugue-like section, the “Et vitam venturi.” The start of the Sanctus is more subdued but abruptly intensifies; the relatively quiet, instrumental “Praeludium” ushers in the irenic Benedictus. And finally, the opening of the Agnus Dei is the most plaintive sequence in the work but unexpectedly acquires a martial character before achieving its most serene expression. The artists received an enthusiastic ovation.
Broadway Play Review—“Birthday Candles” with Debra Messing
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 22 April 2022 19:09
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Birthday Candles
Written by Noah Haidle
Directed by Vivienne Benesch
Opened on April 10, 2022
American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 42nd Street, NYC
roundabouttheatre.org
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| Debra Messing in Birthday Candles (photo: Joan Marcus) |
We meet Ernestine as she turns 17—then 18, 39, and so on, up to 107. That’s the conceit of Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles, which in 90 minutes whizzes through 90 years of Ernestine’s life, all on her birthdays, and all while she makes a birthday cake from a recipe which has been handed down in her family as an annual birthday rite.
So it's surprising that the play isn't titled Birthday Cakes. After all, there’s a running thread throughout the play that Ernestine is always in the kitchen making her own cake, whatever else is happening in her life and who is part of her life at the time—there’s her mom Alice (who dies before her daughter turns 18); Kenneth, a neighbor who keeps dropping in to remind her of his lifelong crush; Matt, whom she marries instead (then divorces); her two children, Billy and Madeleine; grandchildren; and a daughter-in-law.
The gimmickry is all around: in the play itself, from the repetition of Ernestine’s birthdays, of the dialogue, of the actions (annual pin the tail in the donkey, anyone?) to the same actors playing different people in Ernestine’s life; in Vivienne Benesch’s staging, which is always busy—all those characters flitting through Ernestine’s life, moving on and offstage, and that insistently repeated ringing bell that signals another birthday; and in several of the performances, which are pitched too high and too broadly as they all but nudge audience members in their ribcages to remind them of how sweet, substantial, and profound it all is.
Too bad that it’s mostly sentimental and treacly, much closer to soap opera than it wants to be, and if a stray tear might form while one watches, it’s likely because one or more of the big life events shown or alluded to—a child’s suicide, an ex-husband’s stroke, an senile old woman’s return to the house that used to be her home—hits close to home.
Standing tall throughout there is, at least, Debra Messing. For 90 minutes, she is at center stage, with no makeup to easily assist in showing her quickly accelerating age, and she almost manages to make Ernestine into a living, breathing person. She even nearly manages to wring a grain of truth and dignity from the play’s final images, even though she should be the focus, not—as writer and director have it—her mother cradling the baby Ernestine, the final of many missteps in Birthday Candles.
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