September 5
This is not the first film inspired by the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Steven Spielberg’s Tony Kushner-written movie of 2006 superbly conveys how revenge is a complex undertaking, not only logistically but morally. However director Tim Fehlbaum’s is a much more linear, procedural affair that views the events through the eyes and lenses of the ABC TV broadcast company.
The intensity of covering live events using old school analogue equipment is brilliantly conveyed. Among the excellent cast Ben Chaplin as a TV executive suggests that he is an underused film talent.
A Complete Unknown
Timothée Chalamet is the De Niro of our time, some say. Before his latest biopic about the table tennis talent Marty Supreme came this one about Bob Dylan. His singing was so good you could argue that he sounded better than Dylan. More importantly he captures the watchful and aloof quality that made Dylan such an astute observer of life and people.
James Mangold’s film drifts through the star’s life as he transitions from being a complete unknown to the superstar of the Newport Folk Festival in 1964.
This is where he famously went electric, much to the disgust of his fans. But thanks to this film I will now always think of it as the place where Dylan and Joan Baez sang the wry anti-love song It Ain’t Me Babe so beautifully you want the scene to never stop.
Centre: Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in Wicked: For Good. Inset left: The Ballad of Wallis Island. Right: A Complete Unknown.[Missing Credit]
Bad Shabbos
A New York Jewish comedy set on the Upper West Side is not what you might call ground-breaking cinema. Yet director Daniel Robbins has come up with a film about how bad a Friday night dinner can get that is as funny as it is fresh.
The plot in which a Jewish boy takes his Catholic girlfriend to Shabbat dinner would be more than enough comedy for most storytellers. But Robbins and his co-writer Zach Weiner chuck in a sudden death and a reason why the body must be got rid of before Catholic parents turn up to meet their future in-laws. There are also some super performances particularly from Method Man who plays the apartment block’s Jew-friendly concierge.
The Most Precious of Cargoes
This animated adaptation of Jean-Claude Grumberg’s short story tells a Holocaust story from a fairytale perspective. It even begins with a “Once upon a time…” caption. One can just hear the deniers now. “See? We told you the Holocaust was a fairytale.”
But it soon becomes obvious that this is rooted in history rather than magical folk lore. Set in a snowy, east European forest through which a train scythes through like a knife, the story begins with a grindingly poor woodcutter’s wife who prays that something one day might drop from the train’s livestock carriages to relieve their poverty. Something does. A baby wrapped in a tallit.
The surprise is how director Michel Hazanavicius (best known for the Oscar-winning The Artist) expands the story beyond the lives of one couple into a sweeping epic that dares to enter the camps at the end of those tracks. There is no denying here.
The Last Showgirl
I’m a sucker for actors who have made their careers with middle brow or trashy fair who turn out to be brimful of acting talent later in their career. I give you Hugh Grant, Pierce Brosnan and Pamela Anderson, the former Playboy model and Baywatch star who plays Shelly, the longest serving showgirl in the kind of old-school Vegas stage show that consists of women wearing bodices and feathers.
Director Gia Coppola (granddaughter of Francis Ford) tells the story of what happens when Shelly and the show become redundant with tender, humane yet unflinching lens.
The Ballad of Wallis Island
There was no more pleasurable couple of hours spent in a cinema this year than while watching this sublime comedy. It collides two personality types. One is a folk musician Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden), a pop star with an ego the size of Canada. The other is his greatest fan Charles (Tim Key), a ridiculously wealthy loner who has paid Herb half a million quid to perform near his isolated house for an audience of less than a hundred, a number which turns out to be one. Unbeknownst to Herb Tom has also invited Nell (Carey Mulligan) the other half of Herb’s former folk duo. It’s a beautifully observed gentle comedy anchored by character studies. If it were up to me I’d give Key an Oscar for the way plays a certain archetypal Englishness.
I’m Still Here
Set in 1970 as Brazil barrelled towards dictatorship, director Walter Salles serves up a chilling warning of how strongman dictatorships consume lives. A life of bare-footed football and samba rhythms is increasingly punctuation by police state brutality.
Central is Eunice (the remarkable Fernanda Torres) whose husband Rubens (Selton Mello) is disappeared. Her mission to find him lasts longer than the regime. Torres’ Oscar-nominated performance is nothing less than monumental.
Adam Brody in The Brutalist. Inset: Bad Shabbos.[Missing Credit]
The Brutalist
There were complaints that Lazló Tóth, the Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor at the centre of Brady Corbett’s epic film, is not a real life character. It was as if the critics had felt cheated having invested in a Jewish character (superbly played by Adrian Brody) only to be told he didn’t exist. Would there have been such complaints if he was not Jewish?
At its core is an artist’s fight to prevent his creativity from being diminished by his financial backers. Divided into two parts seen in one sitting, the film is bound together by Daniel Blumberg’s astounding, Oscar-winning score.
Superman
David Corenswet seemed to me to be an unlikely Superman before I saw this reboot directed James Gunn. Ten minutes in and I can’t imagine anyone else playing the superhero. The film is brimful of Jewish experience embedded in the plot, such as Superman’s status as refugee when he first arrived in America – not a point appreciated by MAGA crowd.
But most of all it’s a gripping, thrilling telling that breaths much needed life into the Superhero genre.
