![]() ![]() Scott calls the film “ a powerful and pungent reminder of the necessity of art.” (Netflix is also streaming Denzel Washington’s adaptation of Wilson’s “ Fences.It was looking pretty grim there for a while. Davis is superb as Rainey, chewing up her lines and spitting them out with contempt at anyone who crosses her, and Chadwick Boseman, who died in 2020 and won a posthumous Golden Globe best actor award for his performance, is electrifying as the showy sideman, Levee, a boiling pot of charisma, flash and barely concealed rage. ![]() The setting is a Chicago music studio in 1927, where the “Mother of the Blues” Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) and her band are meeting to record several of her hits, though that business is frequently disrupted by the tensions within the group over matters both personal and artistic. Wolfe brings August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winner to the screen, quite faithfully - which is just fine, as a play this good requires little in the way of “opening up,” so rich are the characters and so loaded is the dialogue. That tension and conflict would be enough for a lesser filmmaker, but Campion burrows deeper, taking a carefully executed turn to explore his complicated motives - and desires in this film of welcome complexity and unexpected tenderness Manohla Dargis called it “ a great American story and a dazzling evisceration of one of the country’s foundational myths.” (For more frontier drama, stream “ Legends of the Fall.”) Watch on Netflix Phil is a real piece of work, and when his brother and ranching partner George (Jesse Plemons) marries Peter’s mother, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), it brings all of Phil’s resentment and nastiness to the surface as he tries, in multiple, hostile ways, to exert his dominance and display his dissatisfaction. “I wonder what little lady made these?” Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) asks about the paper flowers created by Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) - the first indication of the initial theme of Jane Campion’s new film, an adaptation of the novel by Thomas Savage. Hughes was so taken by the performance of little Macaulay Culkin that he wrote the kid his own vehicle - “Home Alone.” (For more wild comedy, try “ This Is the End” and “ Liar Liar.”) But Hughes’s savvy script slowly reveals that Buck is wiser than he seems, and Amy Madigan lends welcome support as his best girl. Candy’s Buck at first seems like a rehash of his “Planes, Trains” character, a vulgarian chatterbox hilariously out of his element. Candy is the title character, the black sheep of a well-to-do nuclear family who is brought in as a last-choice babysitter when the parents leave town for a medical emergency. Two years after their celebrated collaboration on “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” the writer and director John Hughes and the comedian John Candy reunited for this rough-and-tumble comedy. (Baumbach’s “ Marriage Story” and “ The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)” are also on Netflix.) Scott wrote, as Baumbach dissects this family’s woes and drama with knowing precision. The film is “both sharply comical and piercingly sad,” A.O. Laura Linney is passive-aggressive perfection as his mother, while Jeff Daniels, as the father, captures a specific type of sneeringly dissatisfied Brooklyn intellectual. ![]() Two young men growing up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, weather their parents’ nasty divorce in this ruthlessly intelligent and mercilessly evenhanded coming-of-age story from the writer and director Noah Baumbach, who drew upon his own teenage memories and put himself, not altogether appealingly, into the character of the 16-year-old Walt (a spot-on Jesse Eisenberg). ![]()
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