From Anthony Lane’s 11.17.23 Maestro review:

“Felicia Montealegre is the last character whom we see in Maestro, and the first actor’s name in the end credits is that of Carey Mulligan. This is her movie, and Bradley Cooper, to do him justice, knows it.

“How Mulligan can manifest such sweetness of nature without a trace of cloying, let alone mush, beats me. I spy a ghost of Julie Andrews in Mulligan’s smile, at once forgiving and brisk, and what she establishes, in Felicia, is the perfect ratio of rose to thorn. Hence the film’s best sequence, which is shot in one take, with no music and no camera movement at all. Mr. and Mrs. Bernstein talk, just the two of them, in a room overlooking Central Park West, during a Thanksgiving Day parade. The conversation stiffens into repartee, and then into rage. ‘If you’re not careful, you’re going to die a lonely old queen,’ Felicia cries.

“Behind them, through the window, we glimpse the huge head of a Snoopy floating by. Amid the Pax Americana, here is war.

“The movie does feature a death, though whose I will not reveal. Suffice to say that, in its wake, some viewers will have to be mopped up from the floor of the cinema. The looming pain is both sharpened and soothed not by Mozart or Mahler but by the sight of the Bernstein children larking around to Shirley Ellis’s ‘The Clapping Song.’ This is where Maestro scores.

“Spurning a fruitless bid at comprehensiveness, Cooper has conjured something as restless and as headlong as his subject. (‘I’m always just barely keeping up with myself,’ Bernstein once said.) To and fro we go, from the incisive bite of black-and-white, for the dawning of Bernstein’s fame, to the rich ironic glow of color in his later, grander, and less contented years; from the furious bliss of ambition to a kind of exhausted peace. And if Leonard Bernstein never got to star as Tchaikovsky in a Hollywood biopic, opposite Greta Garbo as the composer’s patron — a project that was seriously mooted in 1945 — then let us not lament too long. The guy had other things to do.”

Just to clarify or simplify by comparing Blitz the Ambassador‘s The Color Purple (Warner Bros., 12.25) to Steven Spielberg‘s 1985 adaptation of the same 1982 Alice Walker novel, it shakes out as follows:

(a) Fantasia Barrino plays Whoopi Goldberg (the lead role of Celie Harris Johnson), (b) the Oscar-touted Danielle Brooks plays Oprah Winfrey (Sofia), (c) Taraji P. Henson plays Margaret Avery (Shug Avery) and (d) Colman Domingo plays Danny Glover (i.e., the cruel shithead called Albert “Mister” Johnson).

Fantasia Barrino talks about how after saying "No" to producers Scott Sanders and Oprah Winfrey ("Queen O"), it was director Blitz Bazawule that got her to say "Yes" to playing Celie in #TheColorPurple    @Variety pic.twitter.com/96A2RywuYJ

— Clayton Davis (@ByClaytonDavis) November 18, 2023

The 60th anniversary of JFK’s murder in Dealey Plaza is four days off (11.22.23). Ditto the theatrical premieres of Maestro and Napoleon.

I haven’t taken the time to watch Barbara Shearer‘s JFK: What The Doctors Saw (streaming on Paramount +), but I’m not buying the occipital head wound claim. Never have, never will.

Two and a half years ago I explained very carefully why this dog won’t hunt. My argument is contained in seven irrefutable paragraphs.

Posted on 7.2.21: “I’ve watched many, many interview videos with those Parkland doctors, particularly around the time of the 50th anniversary (i.e., 2013), and not a single interviewer or moderator followed up with an obvious follow-up question, to wit:

“’Nobody’s challenging the accuracy of your first-hand observations,’ the doctors should have been asked, ‘but how do you explain the bizarre lack of ANY visual evidence in the Zapruder and Nix films…why is visual evidence that shows a rear-of-the-head blow-out…why is this supposed evidence completely missing in the Zapruder and Nix films? How do you explain this?”

“One could also mention the fact that LIFE’s Richard Stolley — the man who arranged for LIFE’s purchase of the Z film and who saw the raw Zapruder footage in Dallas right after it came out of the lab — it’s surely significant that Stolley never once mentioned any discrepancy between the raw Z film and the various color versions that eventually became ubiquitous after the Z footage was aired by Geraldo Rivera in the late ‘70s.

“Think of all the people who were ostensibly involved in the alleged alteration of the Z film…those at that alleged CIA secret Kodak lab in Rochester, not to mention Bethesda doctors who took pictures of Kennedy’s head wound during the autopsy, and how they all somehow managed to ignore or cover up the gaping occipital head wound WHILE AT THE SAME TIME creating ostensibly fake images of the top of the head and right temple wounds…

“Remember also how the blood and cranial brain matter somehow caught the sun’s reflected glare in Dealey Plaza in the Z film, and how difficult it would have been to fake this…

“Remember also that Jackie Kennedy’s white-gloved right hand touched the rear of JFK’s head right after the fatal shot and yet her glove wasn’t soaked in blood…

“And then imagine the number of people involved in this alleged conspiracy to hide and deceive, and ask why none of them — NOT ONE ALLEGED CONSPIRATOR — blurted out any kind of deathbed confession. People are generally terrible at keeping a secret, especially over a period of several decades. And yet every last photographic conspirator kept their yaps shut for decades on end. EVERY LAST ONE stuck to Moscow Rules to their last dying breath.”

Archie (Britbox, 11.23), a four-part biopic of Cary Grant (aka Archie Leach), might be tolerable or even agreeable by direct-to-streaming standards. Give it a chance, right? But you have to wonder about the casting…God.

60 year-old Jason Isaacs, who plays the older, gray-haired, bespectacled Grant in his ’50s and ’60s, is a gifted actor and probably delivers some kind of acceptable Cary inhabiting. But he doesn’t begin to resemble the fellow. Not for a blink of an eyelash.

The producers were presumably aware that Grant had brown “cow eyes,” as Myrna Loy described them in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (’48). Isaac has icy blue eyes — intense, crinkly, a bit warlocky.

And 19 year-old Oaklee Pendergast, a young beanpole with rodent eyes, plays Grant at age 27 or thereabouts. Not a hint. Nothing. Why?

The producers probably figured “well, Isaacs doesn’t look like Grant so that lets us off the hook with Pendergast.” Except Pendergast doesn’t look like a young Isaacs either. Why do casting agents cast biopics in this crazy-ass way?

And yet Laura Aikman is a dead ringer for the young Dyan Cannon, who was married to Grant from the early to mid ’60s. And Ellie MacDowall seems like an acceptable stand-in for Jennifer Grant, the now 57-year-old daughter of Grant and Cannon.

A likely reason for these two resemblances is that Dyan Cannon and Jennifer Grant are executive producers of Archie.

Dainton Anderson and Calam Lynch reportedly also play Grant at different stages of his journey.

Archie was created and written by Jeff Pope; the four episodes were written by Paul Andrew Williams.

Kim Jorgensen on Facebook: “Saltburn (Searchlight, 11.17) is my film of the year. We’re talking cinema, baby — attitude, style, irreverence, confidence, rebellion. It’s out there.

“I didn’t care for Emerald Fennell’s previous effort, Promising Young Woman, but this one makes up for it. She’s the most accomplished new European voice since Ruben Östlund.

“I really hate to harp upon our wonderful critics, but they gave it only a 58 Metacritic score. Most of them saw it at Telluride, where it screened AFTER the rhapsodically received All of Us Strangers (91 score), and they seem to have expected the same boring, method-acting, nuanced, character-driven piece of politically correct gay banality.

“[But with Saltburn] they got an expressionist opera: Brideshead Revisited meets Idol/Euphoria and Tom Ripley (with a dollop of Barry Lyndon). Giving away the plot would rob you of the constant unexpected twists, including the truly inspired last shot.

“Unlike Searchlight’s Strangers and its low-to-nonexistent theatrical potential, Saltburn at least has the feel of a possible commercial arthouse hit (to the extent that such creatures are not extinct). Here’s hoping.”

HE to Jorgensen: As you know, the Telluride reactions to Saltburn were sharply divided. I hated it so much that I had to take a brief lobby break. You can actually call it an extended bathroom break mixed with buying popcorn. I

I liked hanging with good-looking Jacob Elordi but that’s where it stopped. I spent most of the time staring at Barry Keoghan’s bee-stung nose. And the bulbous nose isn’t his only sizable characteristic, by the way, as the final naked Greek satyr scene makes clear.

Fennel can tell us that England’s wealthy and corroded elite are sick in the head…jaded, poisoned, appalling…until she’s blue in the face, but the conceit is standard woke positioning and the design is…okay, it’s inventive but also shallow and gaudy. I hated everyone except Elordi, and the film basically feels arch and perverse and eventually dull. Did I mention suffocating and oppressive? Well, I have now.

When Saltburn finally ended I let out a HUGE sigh of relief.

That said I agree with your remarks about All of Us Strangers.