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In Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman (Focus, 12.25), Carey Mulligan plays Cassie Thomas, a dryly calculating and determined woman on a mission of appropriate vengeance against insensitive male assholes.

Is this “the performance of her career,” as N.Y Times profiler Kyle Buchanan (aka “”The Projectionist”) insists? It’s certainly an attention-getting one, and Mulligan is almost sure to be Oscar-nominated for a Best Actress trophy, and who knows? Maybe she’ll win it.

I happen to feel that the richest and most rewarding screen performance of Mulligan’s career came when she played Maud, a married woman who becomes drawn into the women’s suffrage movement in 1912 London, in Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette (Focus Features, 10.23.15).

From my 9.5.15 Telluride review:

“Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette (Focus Features, 10.23) is the shit — a near-certain Best Picture contender and a cast-iron guarantee that Carey Mulligan will be Best Actress-nominated for her subdued but deeply emotional, fully riveting performance as Maud Watts, a married factory worker and mother of a young son who becomes a women’s suffrage movement convert in early 1900s London, just as the militant phase (led by the Women’s Social and Political Union, or WSPU) begins to kick in.

“This is one top-tier, richly textured, throughly propulsive saga, and a good four or five times better than I expected it to be.

“The Suffragette trailers were promising enough but the people at Focus Features had done a brilliant job of tamping down any expectations on a word-of-mouth basis. I’d come to suspect, based on a lack of any palpable advance excitement, that it might turn out to be a decent, good-enough film that could possibly provide a springboard for Mulligan…maybe. Well, it’s much more than that, such that I felt compelled explain to Gavron at the after-party that I was fairly gobsmacked.

“Mulligan, looking appropriately hangdog for the most part, handles every line and scene like a master violinist. She’s always been my idea of a great beauty, but when she chooses to go there she has one of the saddest faces in movies right now. The strain, stress and suppressed rage of Maud’s life are legible in every look, line and gesture. Mulligan is fairly young (she just turned 30 last May) but she’s a natural old-soul type who conveys not just what Maud (a fictitious everywoman) is dealing with but the trials of 100,000 women before her, and without anything that looks like overt ‘acting.’ All actors “sell it,” of course, but the gifted ones make the wheel-turns and gear-shifts seem all but invisible.

“I was saying last night that her Suffragette perf is on the same footing with Mulligan’s career-making turn in An Education, but now, at 8:15 in the morning after less than six hours of shut-eye (and with my heart breaking over the realization that I’ve blown my shot at catching the 9 am screening of Spotlight), I’m thinking Maud is her signature role.”

Three days ago Outpost director Rod Lurie asked industry-connected Facebook followers for their Ten Greatest Films of All Time lists. Five years ago I posted a list of 160 of my all-time greatest films, and even that omitted a shitload that I regard quite highly. So the idea of boiling that list down to ten…forget it.

Let’s use a more specific standard for inclusion, to wit: which films on your greatest of all time list seem to echo some aspect of the way things are today or reveal or reflect something about human nature as most of us are assessing it in late 2020? Certain great films like Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate, for example, seem to address life and/or the human condition as it was in the mid to late ’60s, and perhaps not as much today.

I’m told that many if not most of the lists that have come in so far have Jaws at the very top. I’m sorry but that’s pretty close to ridiculous. It’s just a popular, well-jiggered summer monster beach flick…come on!

HE’s Top Ten Greatest American Films (and this could all change five minutes from now): (1) A Serious Man, (2) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, (3 & 4) The Godfather & The Godfather, Part II (5) 12 Angry Men, (6) Election, (7) Paths of Glory, (8) Rushmore, (9) Manchester By The Sea, (10) On The Waterfront.

HE’s Top 11 to 20 Films: (11) Lawrence of Arabia, (12) Moneyball, (13) Groundhog Day, (14) Goodfellas, (15) Out Of The Past, (16) Children of Men, (17) Zero Dark Thirty, (18) Heat, (19) The Best Years of Our Lives, (20) Shane.

Chris Nolan‘s Tenet has been streaming and on 4k Bluray for eight days now. I’ve watched it with subtitles one and a half times so far, and there’s no question it plays much more coherently (and certainly less problematically) this way. But you know what? It tickles and taunts more than it adds up. It still doesn’t make a whole lot of basic sense. I’m sorry but that’s a fact.

I loved the audacious, ahead-of-the-curve, first-time-ever freshness of Tenet when I saw it on a big screen in Flagstaff on Friday, 9.4, but maybe I was extra-enthused because I was so happy to watch a film in a theatre again.

I still love the inverted/backwards shit (especially during that dazzling 747 airport sequence) but the charm of that gimmick has fallen away pretty sharply, you bet.

I only know that subtitles doesn’t really solve the basic Tenet problem, which is the arrogant Nolan himself. I loved Dunkirk but now I’m back to thinking he’s an infuriating filmmaker — a guy whose films will always tax my patience (unless he makes another based-on-history film). It’s a tragedy to know deep down that Nolan will never make a film as engaging as Memento again.

I didn’t realize how badly Tenet was flunking across the board until I read a 12.18 Facebook review by Nick “Action Man” Clement, who is easily the kindest, most obliging, most turn-the-other-cheek reviewer of mainstream commercial films on the planet earth, and certainly since the 2.25.20 death of the big-hearted F.X. Feeney.

Clement’s basic deal is to bend over backwards in order to give a generous coo-coo tongue bath to almost any popcorn flick out there, past or present. It’s not that Clement has no taste, but that he’s unable to suppress the primal love he has for “guy” movies.

In this sense Clement is a dependable brand, just as Hollywood Elsewhere is a dependable place for cranky drillbit truth-telling.

So when Clement panned Tenet a few days ago, I went “holy shit….this means something! Nolan has overplayed his ‘too tricky for school’ routine and wound up shoving a cold banana up his ass….if he’s lost Nick Clement, he’s definitely done something wrong.”

Consider Clement’s assessment:

1. Overall I thought this was okay – certainly entertaining in the moment but in the end, not up to my expectations. And it makes me sad to report this fact, as I’ve pretty much loved all of Christopher Nolan’s output up until this point. Merely “okay” is not what I expect from this filmmaker. The Prestige and Interstellar remain my two favorites, Dunkirk was exceptional, and massive The Dark Knight Rises and Inception POWER. But this felt miscalculated.

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Quarters are still worth carrying around, but nickles and dimes are almost like pennies now. It was sometime in the mid ’70s or certainly the early ’80s when I resolved to never put another penny in my pocket. If a merchant gives me a dime or a nickel I’ll throw them into this pewter cup that my mother bequeathed. Five, tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds will probably hang in there another decade or two, but it won’t be long before $1 dollar notes will be retired.

My grandfather once showed me a $500 bill — let me hold it and everything. I like carrying Kennedy half dollars around. I always have eight or ten of them in my front pockets.

Yesterday a discussion arose about Eliza Hittman‘s Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Focus Features), and the New York Film Critics Circle having handed it awards for Best Actress (Sidney Flanigan) and Best Screenplay (Hittman).

I’m mentioning this because “friendo” offered an interesting thought: “It’s telling, to me, that no one in liberal media, including all the critics who championed Never Rarely, seemed to understand a fundamental aspect of the film, which is that the heroine is quite ambivalent about having an abortion.

“It’s not a ‘pro-life’ movie, but it does contain an element of that. But, of course, that dimension of it — the very thing that makes it complex — has to be denied by the very people who claim to love the film, because it doesn’t mesh with the the general pro-choice agenda.

“It’s not like I really like watching dead-serious art films about abortion. But I think once in a while they awaken your perceptions, and this one, with its bracing message that literally no one in the critical community got, did that for me more than 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

“That element in Never Rarely…Sidney Flanigan‘s profound ambivalence about what she’s about to go through, her deep desire not to do it, because there is in fact a live human in there…this element is literally the only drama in the film. That’s what’s so hilarious about the woke film-critic-industrial-annoyance-complex not getting it.

“What do they think the movie is about? If their left-wing boilerplate interpretation were accurate, it might as well be a movie about two teenagers hopping a bus to go to New York City to pay $500 in unpaid parking tickets.”

HE to friendo: “I honestly never considered any kind of vague pro-life undercurrent. I thought Flanigan’s character was just about buried trauma, fear of the chilly unknown, anxiety, uncertainty, wounded feelings. Why ever would she want to keep the child? I mean, she’s hiding her pregnancy from her parents, and Lord knows an expectant mother needs a serious job or a trust fund plus a serious partner with which to have a child. She has nothing.”

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…of being an exceptionally gifted actor. Appealing, yes. Gifted, no. He knew how to react brilliantly — how to respond in his usual taciturn, straight-from-the-shoulder way to certain aggressive behaviors and situations, and at just the right speed and with just the right sense of timing. And he certainly knew how to seethe and sulk.

But in terms of owning a scene on his lonesome, relying solely on his own dialogue and delivery while others listen and watch, he rarely got there. But he did once.

The below scene from Red River is probably the best acting moment in his entire life. It’s about resolve, painful rejection, parental disdain, nihilism. If Wayne had turned up the anger just a hair, it wouldn’t have landed as well. It would have also missed if he’d turned it down a notch.

Name me any other scene in which Wayne hit the mark as movingly and efficiently as he does here. Those famous bookend scenes in The Searchers (i.e., the door opening and closing upon Wayne’s Ethan Edwards) don’t count because all he was doing was just standing there — the emotional expressiveness was entirely John Ford‘s.

Ford to Howard Hawks after seeing Red River: “I never knew the big sonuvabtich could act.”

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I didn’t want to submit to Darius and Abraham Marder‘s Sound of Metal (Amazon, now streaming) because I’d heard it was a chore to sit through. Plus I despise metal rock, and didn’t want to hang in that world at all. Plus I didn’t want to aurally experience any kind of simulated deafness or diminished hearing…later. But I knew I’d have to watch it sooner or later, and I was finally guilt-tripped into catching it last night. Alright, fine, fuck me, here we go.

Eureka! Sound of Metal is an absorbing and quite delicate film about using tragedy to transition from one world to another, and one that offers a doorway into a spirit world…not so much a world of deafness and signing but one that harbors a realm of cosmic serenity and stillness…a world that expresses the age-old axiom “never speak unless you can improve upon the silence.” Radiance is everywhere.

I’m more in love with writing than almost any other human activity, but I also adore the sound of gifted speaking voices (particularly those of great English-language actors) and singing and musical performance (especially Beethoven’s Ninth and Eric Clapton‘s “Unplugged” album), not to mention the sounds of nature and the city and everything else, etc. So I can’t completely submit to the majesty of cosmic silence, but I know that this is the realm of peace and solace…the one in which God resides.

I completely agree that Riz Ahmed‘s performance as Ruben Stone, a metal drummer whose hearing suddenly collapses at the beginning of a tour, deserves a Best Actor nomination. He’s only been a quality-associated actor for six years or so (Nightcrawler, Rogue One, The Night Of) but Ruben is by far the best role he’s ever lucked into, and as you might expect his best moments in the film are non-verbal. Just about all of them, I would say.

I also agree that Paul Raci, the 60ish guy who ploys Ruben’s straight-shooting guide and teacher at a rural deaf camp, deserves a Best Supporting Actor nom. Raci, whose parents were deaf and who knows the realm inside and out, is perfect in the part. Like Harold Russell was perfect in The Best Years of Our Lives, I mean. Raci is actually a blend of Russell and Lives costar Hoagy Carmichael.

Also excellent are Olivia Cooke as Lou, Ruben’s singing-bandmate girlfriend who insists that he enroll in deaf-camp training, and Mathieu Amalric as her wealthy French dad.

The sound design team — supervising sound editor Nicolas Becker, production sound mixer Phillip Bladh, whoever else — definitely deserve Oscar noms, and…oh, hell, the Oscars themselves.

Ruben adapts well to silence and signing, but he still longs for sound and speech. A sizable portion of Act Two is about him selling his mobile home, drums and sound gear so he can afford cochlear implants. But once the implants are embedded and activated, the sound that he hears is like that of an empty tin can attached to a taut metal wire. He pays $30K for this? I can’t believe in this day and age that expensive artificial devices sound this bad.

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12:25 pm: Kelly Reichardt‘s First Cow, a commendable if vaguely irritating period drama set in 1820s Oregon, has won the NYFCC’s Best Film award. If this isn’t the most “what planet are these guys living on?” NYFCC award yet, I’d like to know what is.

For decades an occasionally offbeat NYFCC trophy signified something highly valued — a fully considered saluting of a worthy achievement by serious pros. But the woke-era NYFCC brand is something else. It used to be that the Los Angeles Film Critics Association was the loopiest award-giving group for their absurd mid-voting brunch breaks — the NYFCC has now overtaken them.

HE would have voted for Mangrove (despite Amazon’s decision to focus on Emmy awards), Nomadland, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Father, Mank…each delivers a stronger, more levitational viewing experience than First Cow.

Excerpt #1 from HE’s First Cow review: “Do you see what I mean about watching a Reichardt film? She can’t even indicate whether or not Cookie and King Lu are gently sexual with each other or just palsy-walsy. (Skeletons holding hands doesn’t count — the dying King Lu may have simply reached for Cookie’s hand out of a primal fear of death.) She can’t devise a conversation between them in which the pair, feeling antsy about the thievery, go to Toby Jones and suggest that he might want to fund them in a start-up bakery business. She can’t show the guy with a rifle actually shooting Cookie or, more to the point, King Lu. Because if King Lu takes a bullet it would therefore make sense when he lies down next to Cookie and dies.”

Excerpt #2: “And yet the things that happen in a Reichardt film never feel movie-fake. Her stories might feel a tad confusing or under-explained, but I’ve never had believability issues. She has a certain low-key way of shooting her material, and always takes her time and yaddah yaddah. But as I watched First Cow (I actually watched it in three stages) I felt my soul draining out of me like sand. First Cow never comes to you — you have to come to it, and with the patience of Job.”

12:03 pm: Sidney Flanigan, who movingly portrayed a traumatized rural teen trying to obtain an abortion in Never Rarely Sometimes Always, has been handed the NYFCC Best Actress award. In a certain fashion Flanigan played the under-written “Autmun” to the hilt, and I’m not dismissing the solemnity or scope of her performance — it’s one of the saddest female turns ever, certainly over the last 20 years. But this strikes me as yet another manifestation of NYFCC eccentricity. I would have approved of Nomadland‘s Frances McDormand taking the prize. Or (my personal choice) French Exit‘s Michelle Pfeiffer. Or Promising Young Woman‘s Carey Mulligan. Or Pieces of a Woman‘s Vanessa Kirby. Or The Life Ahead‘s Sophia Loren as a career achievement tribute. Any of these.

11:32 am: Earlier this morning the NYFCC handed their Best Foreign Language Feature award to Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s Bacurau, an allegorical modern-day Brazilian western (Sam Peckinpah meets El Topo‘s Alejandro Jodorowsky). I hated Bacarau when I saw it at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. Andrei Konchalovsky‘s brilliant Dear Comrades! should have won.

11:15 am: Eliza Hittman, director-writer of Never Rarely Sometimes Always, has won the NYFCC’s Best Screenplay award. Critics have been creaming over this melancholy abortion-driven drama all year long, but I happen to feel it’s underwritten as far as Sidney Flanigan‘s Autumn character is concerned. She’s so traumatized and self-suppressed that she can’t let go (except during that deeply touching scene in which she’s questioned by the abortion clinic lady). I’ve always felt that this was dramatically insufficient. I respectfully disagree with Hittman’s “less is more” aesthetic. Plus Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a good film within its own perimeter, doesn’t hold a candle to Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

11:03 am: Nomadland‘s Chloe Zhao has won the NYFCC Best Director award. Expected, no dispute, completely deserved.

10:47 am: Sorry for overlooking the NYFCC giving their Best Supporting Actress trophy to Maria Bakalova, for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. She was engaging in that Borat sequel and yes, she helped to punk Rudy Giuliani but c’mon…this is pure eccentricity, pure organizational egotism on the part of the NYFCC. The Father‘s Olivia Colman or Mank‘s Amanda Seyfried should have won. Or Yuh-jung Youn in Minari for her colorful grandma. Or even Glenn Close‘s “Mamaw” in Hillbilly Elegy.

10:40 am: Delroy Lindo was won the NYFCC Best Actor award for his anxious, anxiety-torn performance as a Trump-supporting Vietnam veteran in Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods. Lindo acted that part all to hell and he has a strong narrative on his side, but I would’ve voted for The Father‘s Anthony Hopkins. You know who was really good and hasn’t gotten much awards attention? Ben Affleck in The Way Back — a solid performance about a guy struggling with alcoholism and his own glorious past.

10:05 am: The New York Film Critics Circle has given its 2020 Best Supporting Actor award to the late Chadwick Boseman for his performance in Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods. Boseman played a ghost and a memory whose name in life was “Stormin'” Norman Earl Holloway. You can call this a combination career tribute and shared grief award. The award essentially says “our hearts were broken when we lost this good and glowing actor to cancer last August, and this is our way of saying we love him and wish he was still among us.”

I understand the sentiment and share the sadness, but I also think it’s fair to ask if Boseman would’ve won for his performance had he lived. When the late Peter Finch won the 1976 Best Actor Oscar for his Howard Beale performance in Network, there were no post-win surprises or tut-tuts — Finch had hit a grand slam and everyone knew it. Ditto Heath Ledger when he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his Joker performance in The Dark Knight. Plus the NYFCC is a highly eccentric awards-bestowing group. They’ve shown that to be the case many times over.

If it had been my call I would have suggested handing Boseman a sorrowful special career-tribute award, and then given the Best Supporting Actor trophy to, say, Bill Murray (On The Rocks) or one of the One Night in Miami guys (Leslie Odom or Aldis Hodge), or Trial of the Chicago 7‘s Mark Rylance or Sacha Baron Cohen. Or Nomadland‘s David Straitharn.

Given what it obviously is, Fisher Stevens and Justin Timberlake‘s Palmer (Apple, 1.29) has the right kind of attitude. Or so it seems. Timberlake (who hits 40 on 1.31.21) as a former high school football star who returns to his small podunk hometown after serving a 12-year sentence for…who knows? Moves in with mom (June Squibb) and forms an unlikely friendship with Sam (Ryder Allen), a young effeminate lad who lives next door. You can see where it’s going in a flash.

If I’d been in Times Square during last night’s snow storm, the idea of peddling around on a bicycle would’ve never crossed my mind. I would’ve just tramped around in my snow boots, scarf, silken long johns, three T-shirts, sweater, gloves and thermal hoodie. I hate what Times Square has become, but what a thing to miss out on. What a moment.

Times Square during great blizzard of December 1947.

ditto

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Here’s HE’s latest Best Picture chart. I’m honestly split 50/50 on the merits of Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland and David Fincher‘s Mank, and so they’re tied for second place. (At least for the time being.) They’re both excellent films, and in a Mangrove-free world either could easily occupy the #1 slot. But Steve McQueen’s film happened, and there’s no question it’s 2020’s finest.

Curious as it may seem to some, I regard Roman Polanski‘s J’Accuse (i.e., An Officer and a Spy) as a 2020 feature, even though it never opened (and probably never will open) stateside.

It had its world premiere at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, and began to illegally stream earlier this year. In my book that makes it a necessary 2020 release, as there was no other way to see it. The Polanski stamp demanded the attention of film mavens the world over. Even if J’Accuse was streaming right now on Amazon, Netflix or HBO Max, would most critics ignore it all the same? Probably. The applicable terms are “fear” and “cowardice.” Or, if you will, “playing it safe.”

I have nothing but disgust and condemnation for any sexual abuser in any realm, but in this instance it’s also unconscionable, I feel, to not separate Polanski the artist from Polanski the flawed individual. Brilliant filmmaking is brilliant filmmaking, and it’s completely derelict for critics to ignore this film, as almost all of them have over the last year or so.

I had to give J’Accuse the third place slot — it’s too mesmerizing, too exacting and too searing to be designated any other way.

The Mangrove irony, of course, is that Amazon has decided not to go for Oscars but Emmys, which I regard, due respect, as a mistake. If I’d been in Amazon’s shoes I would have submitted the other four Small Axe films — Lovers Rock, Education, Alex Wheatle and Red, White and Blue — for Emmy consideration while declaring Mangrove to be a theatrical, Oscar-qualifying, stand-alone feature.

There’s no theatrical realm to speak of these days so any half-decent streamer can (and in Mangrove‘s case, definitely should) be regarded as a Best Picture contender. If any 2020 film deserves to be so regarded, it’s Mangrove.

If not for the pandemic Mangrove would have premiered in Cannes last May, perhaps played a couple of early fall festivals besides NYFF ’20, and gone on to a semblance of theatrical glory. It would’ve certainly emerged as a top-ten favorite on all the lists. Academy and guild voters would’ve had no choice but bestow a Best Picture nomination, as they did six years ago with McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave.

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Please tell me how you feel after reading Peter Suderman‘s “This Blockbuster Is Coming to a Living Room Near You,” a 12.11 opinion piece in the N.Y. Times.

If you’re at all human and north of 40, Suderman’s article will almost certainly usher in the gloom. It might even provoke stomach acid or the dry heaves. I’ve calmed down since I read it, but somewhere in the middle I was dreaming, absurdly, about running into Suderman and going all Jimmy Cagney on his ass.

There’s nothing in Suderman’s piece that’s especially new. The pandemic has all but killed theatrical, and post-vaccine there’ll be no putting the toothpaste back into the tube. Yes, theatrical has been slowly dying for years. Right now it seems as if middle-class, middle-budgeted, intended for theatrical films like Spotlight, Moneyball, Birdman, 12 Years A Slave, Call Me By Your Name, Drive, The Social Network, The Lighthouse, Zero Dark Thirty and Manchester By The Sea are becoming (or have become) all but extinct. A decade hence movie theatres will soon be regarded in the same light as Broadway theatre. Only elites will return to cinemas after the all-clear sign is given…what, nine months hence?

Before this year the only way to really savor big-screen films properly was at film festivals, at least in my view. That, at least, was something to hold onto. Right now the only safe way to go is with my 65-inch Sony 4K HDR. Then again I love being able to stream just about anything in HD or 4K these days…in that sense we’re living in a golden age. But man, I hated Silberman’s essay all the same. Or more precisely, I hated the subhead — “The next generation of event viewing is likely to look more like Game of Thrones and less like Tenet.” My pulse was racing. I was seething.

Bottom line: Suderman’s all-couches, all-streaming scenario reads like a reasonably candid assessment of what’s happened to Hollywood and exhibition over the last 10 or 11 months, and where we’re all probably headed. He’s not “wrong” but tone of the piece certainly flirts with my idea of smarmy and smug. All I could think about was Chryssie Hynde singing “My City Was Gone.”

Suderman excerpt: “The move by Warner Bros. means that even if anxiety about Covid-19 diminishes, some of the biggest movies of 2021 will no longer be exclusive theatrical engagements. Some viewers who might have ventured out to a multiplex will undoubtedly choose to stay home. And that, in turn, is another reason for those of us who love seeing movies in theaters to worry that when the pandemic ends, the theatrical experience of yesteryear will be gone.

“Theaters won’t disappear completely, but they are more likely to become rare first-class events rather than everyday experiences for the masses. To some extent, this was already happening, with comfier seating and more upscale concessions, and ticket prices rising in tandem. In the aftermath of the pandemic, moviegoing, once a Saturday-afternoon time waster and the go-to option for an inexpensive date, could become a comparatively rarefied luxury.

Peter Suderman’s reply was tweeted less than five minutes after this piece was posted.

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