Posted

in

by

Tags:


Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a tense and unpredictable thriller with twists at every turn. If you love deep, dark mysteries, you’ll love it but don’t expect a resolution to the mystery of who murdered Mildred Hayes’ 16-year-old daughter. The film is not really about the crime itself. It’s about the actions and reactions of people in deep grief who don’t always do the right thing.

Oscar winner Frances McDormand has the role of her career as Mildred, the personification of the mad-as-hell, not-gonna-take-it-anymore aspect of the #MeToo Movement. She’s matched by fellow Oscar winner Sam Rockwell as Dixon, the racist cop who finds redemption in compassion for the last guy he beat up (Get Out ‘s Caleb Landry Jones) and the no-nonsense Mildred; and by Oscar nominee Woody Harrelson as Willoughby, the deceptively laidback sheriff. Almost as good are Lucas Hedges as Mildred’s son, John Hawkes as her ex-husband, Peter Dinklage as a friendly businessman, Zeljko Ivanek as the desk sergeant, Clarke Peters as another sheriff, Jones as the local real-estate agent, and Abbie Cornish as Willoughby’s wife.

Writer-director Martin McDonagh fashions his masterwork as if it were a British murder mystery, but it is based not on a British incident, but on his discovery of two billboards he observed in passing through the U.S. some years earlier from which his imagination ran wild. We’re so fortunate that it did.

Pixar’s Oscar-winning Coco, set for the most part in Mexico’s Land of the Dead, is not for young children but this animated masterpiece is a must-see for older children and adults. Its message that no one is truly dead if they are remembered is both simple and eloquent at the same time. The film’s Oscar-winning theme song, “Remember Me,” sells this in spades, especially as sung in its second iteration by Gael Garcia Bernal as a fast-fading skeleton.

“Remember me though I have to say goodbye. Remember me, don’t let it make you cry. For even if I’m far away, I hold you in my heart. I sing a secret song to you each night we are apart. Remember me though I have to travel far. Remember me each time you hear a sad guitar. Know that I’m with you the only way I can be. Until I’m in your arms again, remember me.”

A fast-moving thriller, the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time provides Robert Pattinson with his best role yet as a bank robber who spends a night trying to free his mentally handicapped brother (Benny Safdie) from being sent to New York’s notorious Riker’s Island. Although set in a different borough, Queens as opposed to Manhattan, the film’s edge-of-the-city narrative is highly reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s 1985 film After Hours, which was also about a wild night in New York City.

Darkest Hour, like this year’s Dunkirk and Their Finest, is set in the early days of England’s entry into World War II. Unlike those two films, this one centers on Britain’s newly elected prime minster, Winston Churchill. Always a popular dramatic figure, the best depictions of the man for my money have been the TV portrayals of Albert Finney in 2002’s The Gathering Storm, Brendan Gleeson in 2009’s Into the Storm, and John Lithgow in 2016’s The Crown, all of which won their lead actors an Emmy.

Oscar winner Gary Oldman, under the direction of Joe Wright (Atonement), harrumphs and growls his way through the two-hour production with the aid of a fat suit and heavy makeup that took four hours to apply and another hour to remove every day. Personally, I prefer Oldman in the early films that made him famous, 1986’s Sid & Nancy and 1987’s Prick Up Your Ears, or in his subtle late career triumph, 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Kenneth Branagh’s version of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is impressively filmed but lacks the thrill of Sidney Lumet’s 1974 version in which all the members of the earlier all-star cast were given their moment to shine. Here, some are, as they say, more equal than others, and that isn’t good. Branagh’s Hercule Poirot doesn’t hold a candle to either Albert Finney in the 1974 version or David Suchet who played Poirot memorably on TV from 1989-2013, which included an excellent 2010 adaptation of the same novel. Best in the cast of this one is Micelle Pfeiffer in the role played by Lauren Bacall in the 1974 version and Barbara Hershey in the 2010 version. Judi Dench has the role played by Wendy Hiller and Eileen Atkins in the earlier versions and Penelope Cruz has the old Ingrid Bergman role.

All the above-reviewed films are available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. Newly released on Blu-ray are two gems of the 1960s.

Criterion’s 4K restoration of Tom Jones is actually for two films, the original 1963 theatrical release and the seven-minutes-shorter 1989 director’s cut release, which is the previously released MGM DVD version. I prefer the more detailed original theatrical release of this still marvelous film whose reputation has diminished somewhat since the ribald humor that shocked audiences in the day is rather mild by today’s standards. Even without the winks, it’s still great fun with Albert Finney, Susannah York, Hugh Griffith, Edith Evans, Joan Greenwood, Joyce Redman, and the rest of the cast in fine fettle.

Criterion’s generous extras include an in-depth interview with Walter Lassally, the cinematographer who supervised the restoration of both versions shortly before his death last December at the age of 90 as well as a recently recorded interview with Vanessa Redgrave who was married at the time to the film’s director Tony Richardson.

Even more than Tom Jones, Stanley Kramer’s 1965 film of Ship of Fools has suffered critical malaise in the intervening years.

At the time of its release, Ship of Fools was one of the most critically lauded films of its time. Set in 1931, it was based on Katherine Ann Porter’s mammoth best-seller about a passenger ship sailing from Mexico to Germany. The novel took Porter twenty years to write and was on practically everyone in America’s coffee table from the time of its release in 1962. Oskar Werner as the ship’s sympathetic doctor, Simone Signoret as a drug-addicted anti-fascist, Vivien Leigh as an aging alcoholic, Lee Marvin as a former baseball player, Michael Dunn as a philosophical dwarf, and Heinz Ruhmann as an optimistic Jew who thinks the German people will come to their senses and reject Nazism are the standouts in the film’s large cast.

Ruhmann, who was Anne Frank’s favorite actor (his picture still stands amidst the pictures of American film stars over her bed in Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House), is the film’s moral center in this, his only American film. His cheerful optimism bears more than a little resemblance to many of today’s American politicians who dismiss the warning signs of things to come.

The film’s incisive commentary on the Indicator Blu-ray is by Twilight Time’s Nick Redman and Julie Kirgo, along with screenwriter Lem Dobbs. Extras abound.

This week’s new releases include Lady Bird and The Breadwinner.

Verified by MonsterInsights