Reviews

For Patricia Highsmith, homosexuality was a metaphor for deception and the orgasmic release that comes with death. A purveyor of existential crisis and anything unconventional, her novels and stories have inspired filmmakers of a similar bent, like Hitchcock, Rene Clement, Anthony Minghella, and now Steven Zaillian.

An Oscar win and nominations for his screenplays, Zaillian has moved to the long form of the Netflix serial in this black-and-white retelling of "The Talented Mr. Ripley," abbreviated to just "Ripley," although clocking in at over seven hours. The added length demonstrates, as it often does, that--while exhaustive--it fails to impress without staying power.

In the role of the titular, creepy chameleon, English actor Andrew Scott effects a flat, non-regional, American accent like that of a 50s television announcer, and manages, somehow, I know not how, to come off rather asexual, especially for one who earned a reputation as having played a sexy priest. His counterpart in the plot's ménage, which includes Dakota Fanning as Marge Sherwood and Johnny Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf, is an actor named Eliot Sumner who plays second victim Freddie Miles, both suspicious of Tom and a bit jealous, too--jealous of his attraction to Dickie. Males with fuzzy sexual preferences interested Highsmith, and Miles is that typical blue-blood, Ivy leaguer whose sexuality falls on a sliding scale: think William F. Buckley, and a perfect foil for Ripley. Marge, however, was always a problem for Highsmith, who understood a lesbian, but Marge is a 50s housewife-in-waiting that's neither here nor there. She, quaint American debutant, is an obstacle in this: a usual object of desire, but disposable. Her misfortune is that she isn't killed, just bypassed.

As to the movie itself, Zaillian wisely keeps the action in the past where, let's face it, it belongs: without social media, Facebook, iPhones, DNA, and color (except for one brief homage to Spielberg, his mentor). The result is visually striking, but more arty than artful. And without strictly scoring his movie, relying instead on sound that comes naturally, he attempts something akin to documentary. But thrillers, which this story is, as Hitchcock knew, do not work as documentaries (he tried that only once).

All of the above is just part of what's wrong with this movie. It's also drawn out to exasperation, over extended with minutiae and obscure references to Caravaggio (one indulgent, gratuitous flashback), and as slow as a how-to for the obsessive-compulsive. Thank goodness for fast forward.

Ripley is the all-American psycho, an original once upon a time. But his type has been done to death, and by actual serial killers (think Andrew Cunanan) whose lives have been serialized and movieized ad nauseam. Why are such killers fascinating? Well, it's clear why they fascinate writers, directors, and actors. But audiences? Leave that to the analyst whose employment depends on it. Writers, directors, and actors are doing well enough for themselves.

Netflix's "The Crown" concludes Monarchymania with a collective sigh of relief, and one, big, fat, Royal anticlimax of the century, as Charles, at last, is allowed to reside legally inside Camilla's knickers.

Uncle Walt once explained: "I don't want the public to see the world they live in. I want them to feel they're in another world." And so, not coincidentally in Windsorworld, as Elizabeth explains Britain's need for pomp and circumstance, such is the duty of the Monarchy to lift people out of their ordinary existences and into another realm, and certainly not, heaven forbid, remind them of what they already have. That's how privilege justifies its right to be privileged, and, as a matter of right, its prerogative to own swans.

That the Queen might have ever contemplated abdicating the throne to number two, one can only guess, is Peter Morgan's fairytale ending. But Mummy always knew best, that Charles' lack of spine and interest in people would not a Monarch make, not in her lifetime anyway. If she was anything, she was sensible, and not just in her shoes, but in honoring, to the grave, what she (or Morgan) acknowledges is a "dreadful," "unnatural" system.

After all, that was the promise she had made to her subjects before taking on the job, as Olivia Colman reminds her, along with the other incarnation, Clair Foy, who return to tie up the Queen's narrative in a clever, neat bow. It's a nice trick to give some element of humanity to a living anachronism, and attribute a conscience to a woman who always appeared to act as if programmed by obligation. Perhaps had Liz, occasionally, let down her hair and loosened her garters, like debauched, gin-swilling, chain-smoking Margaret (either alter-ego or anti-hero), she might have seemed less aloof and more able to relate to the commoners. At least, that is what Morgan poses in his alternate narrative, not so much as a criticism of the Queen, as a re-evaluation.

Perhaps it's true (who knows?), Elizabeth lived vicariously through Margaret's adventures in hedonism, her champion of modernity; and how she lived, endured, evidently, but lived, nevertheless, life from head to entrails, drowning regrets--she had a few--in martinis, stroke by stroke, that at times she seemed to have nine lives. Acting as her apologist, Morgan reminds us that Margo the cat died peacefully in her sleep, the final reward for one who had been handed a privileged life and, for spite maybe, or sheer orneriness, pissed it away. Well, she had reasons.

Looking ahead, he does rather set the stage for more merry lives of Windsor, alluding to the double-teaming mother and daughter Middletons, laying a trap for "shy old thing" William, and the outcast Harry, number two, unwilling to be a company man, glaring daggers from the sidelines at brother Will.

Now begins the reign of Charles II and his mop-headed Queen: Will and Kate biding their time in the wings, Harry and Meghan whiling away their time in exile. The story writes itself.

Unremittingly morose and un-photogenic, E. Allen Poe continues to haunt the American psyche and countless middle-school students, as his body of work resurrects routinely like the dead Ligeia, or, in the case of this gothic mess, the undead Madeline Usher.

If it's true that a strong will keeps one alive, then Netflix and series creator Mike Flanagan, and his staff of writers, will see to it that Poe never rests easy.

Unrest, however, may well have been Poe's intention, cosmologically speaking, as his literary output begs for over simplification in our current age, which is the mandate of Netflix's standards and practices, making Poe's work ripe for mini-series fodder. A term, by the by, that never made any sense since "QB VII" in the 70s; more maxi than mini, the combined running time of eight episodes is far longer than a feature film. Poe would agree, since a good story should be read (and a film viewed) in a single sitting, and a mini-series requires more than one sitting, so it can't be any good.

"The Fall of the House of Usher,"considered the best example of Poe's "unity of effect," where every detail--tone, theme, characters, setting, plot--is in perfect alignment, each related and relevant to the other, has been reduced to campy delirium, "Mary Worth" on opium. In effect, what Flanagan, et al have done in this crazy quilt of a series is denigrate, in eight hours, a perfect, self-sufficient reality and reshape it into a codependent tangle of narrative threads.

Borrowing from Poe's collection of fiction and poetry for extra material, as well as its obsessive motifs--such as premature burial, decomposition, reanimation of the dead, madness, incest, mourning, drug addiction--and also repurposing its memorable characters, like C. Auguste Dupin, arguably the first great detective in Western fiction, recast here as an assistant D. A., a suitable contrivance for a contrived storyline, Flanagan has butchered "The House of Usher" that, for his purposes, is merely an exoskeleton on which the series can hang its rotting flesh.

Speaking of which, Bruce Greenwood, more suited to the cover of "Cigar Afficionado" than the ravages of Roderick Usher, is the let-down at the center, a last minute replacement for Frank Langella, whose hollowed-out, warmed-over look of death is sadly missing. In the role of Dupin, Carl Lumbly, remembered from "Cagney and Lacy," is an interesting choice, but wrong, especially to those of us who came to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in our childhoods. Also in the lineup: Mary McDonnell, who peaked early in "Dances with Wolves," pulls out all the stops as Madeline; Anabeth Gish, buried before her time, appears as a character Poe wisely left out; and Mark Hamill, for fun, pops up as Arthur Pym, from not Nantucket, but Poe's only completed novel, experimental and odd, more hoax than horror.

Poe was postmodern before postmodern was a word, and adept at deadpan comedy before deadpan appeared in print. He was a 20th-century writer born too late, an artist made for the movies before movies existed. Sixty years after his death, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was one of the earliest films in the silent era. Now 115 years later, this.

Wes Anderson's whimsical crack at epic form, a continuation of his now patented style, persists, perhaps compulsively, in his adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic story "Poison," its third time on the small screen, and, one hopes, its last.

Needless to say, he had to try something different the third time round, after the master of suspense had put his own stamp on it in 1958. That's a hard act to follow, considering a generation recalls it fondly, one assumes even Anderson.

Anyhow suspense isn't Anderson's thing. In a way it's refreshing that a young director is disinclined to emulate Hitchcock. Instead, it's interesting that he chooses to acknowledge in his work the artifice of its form, calling attention to its representation of reality, and abandoning altogether the suspension of disbelief. Using this distancing effect, as he does in these films of Dahl's stories, goes counter to the very nature of film itself, since the first time audiences faced a loaded gun watching "The Great Train Robbery."

Interesting, yes, even watchable, to a point (17 minutes is tolerable). But does it do justice to Dahl's fiction? Maybe Anderson places too much emphasis on the idiosyncratic qualities of Dahl and not enough on the substance, which is overtaken, finally, by all the gimmickry. After all, "Poison" is really about blatant racism during Britain's imperial rule in India, than a "venomous" krait, as Anderson's readjustment of Dahl's rather halfhearted ending infers. Reality does matter in the end, so why avoid it?

Videographer Grant Singer's directorial debut, "Reptile," is an arduous 134 minutes of detailed minutiae that snakes toward the obvious. More convoluted than necessary, it's a conventional procedural with a cast of likely suspects, all of whom are intended to mislead, where bad is bad, and good is worse. If you've seen any number of cop movies in the last fifty years, you'll know where this one is heading.

Novice filmmakers today, like Singer, believe they owe a debt to film noir, but what they fail to grasp is that, in classic noir, style follows technique, which means, foremost: sure-footed structure, narrative, and plot. Good filmmaking should be transparent to the viewer, as Orwell said of good prose, and reflect meaning, not obscure it. Singer's packing in details and unnecessarily expanding the narrative serve only to befuddle viewers for his self-indulgence and amusement.

His movie is supposedly a 21st-Century take on those 1940s gangster movies, popular now, but generally unpopular when they were made, typified by light and shadows, a style of gloom and fatalism that came to be called "film noir," which was, in effect, Hollywood's reaction to a world at war. America's optimism during the post WW I years had ended and in its place came nihilism in the form of crime, and criminals with nothing to lose, where life itself was meaningless. It's easy to see how this attitude, and these films, inspired the French Existentialists.

Today, of course, America faces a different kind of pessimism, and crime and criminals of a different stripe, with tiny flags pinned to their lapels, but the attitude hasn't changed. Good and evil still have the same face.

What's interesting in this film, and it's all that's interesting, is that Benicio del Toro, hound-dogged and persistently glum, is cast as a good cop. However, plagued by unspecified emotional issues, his character is typical of the now commonplace, movie cop who brings to the job his own personal "baggage," for whom therapy is inevitable, as it is for del Toro (a co-writer of the script and perhaps the one responsible for this cliché). In fact, all of the cops are a grab-bag of cliches (who "may smile and smile, and be a villain"). But to his credit, del Toro does give his character an off-beat edge, with his love for a high-end kitchen faucet. In the stock role of cop wife, hackneyed since creation, Alicia Silverstone, at that awkward age now, is wasted. Does she or doesn't she dally with the handyman? More baggage.

Singer-turned-actor Justin Timberlake appears as the grieving widower, and drug dealer that flips houses, too, who may or may not have murdered his wife. The husband, as everyone knows by now, is the most likely suspect, which means he's probably not the murderer. Had he been, however, the movie might have succeeded in achieving a surprise ending (but that's been done before, cf "Jagged Edge"). He appears like a man programmed to act, perhaps by mommy with whom he cohabitates, drug lord and lady, who helps him dress in the morning, a reason why bathroom doors lock. Anyway, Timberlake does his actorly best to appear dispirited, like this movie.

"Whimsical" and "fantastical" are often used to describe the magical fiction of Welsh author Roald Dahl, whose stories, ostensibly for children, have an undercurrent of adult sentiment, mischief, and acerbic wit. His match has been met in recent years in American auteur Wes Anderson, and lately this year in his confectionery, "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar," a short, 40 minutes derived from Dahl's short story collection of the same name. Yes, it is by definition "a short," yet inexplicably longer than it ought to be.

Anderson's remarkable film career has been on the radar of admirers since "Bottle Rocket" in 1996, his directorial debut at twenty-seven, followed by "Rushmore" in 1998. With Jerry-built plots of comedy and gloom, mistaking character development for quirky and loopy, and endings that deflate like party balloons, their singular style has wormed its way ad nauseam into the collective unconscious of the current wave of filmmakers and writers, the results of which can be sampled on Netflix, ad nauseam.

The word often attributed to Anderson is "postmodern," a catch all for anything that defies explanation in words of one syllable. No one can fault him for this, as he is, without question, an interesting artist who inspires debate, revulsion, and love. This "short" is a case in point. Unlikely to ever become a perennial favorite, like "Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang," it is at least not longer than 40 minutes because any longer would have been sensory overload.

Typical now of Anderson's eccentric visual style, the film is, in effect, a colorful, three-dimensional, pop-up book, although oddly flat, despite forced perspectives, yet by laterally moving the camera, to cut from one scene to the next, as if flipping the pages of a book, there is a fluidity, too, like the sweeping camera moves in a Max Ophuls' film. But, not quite. Nothing in an Anderson film is like anything previously seen.

Conceptually, it's not even a film. In fact, by having actors directly address the audience, disclosing the fictive world, using perfunctory, mechanical line readings to alienate them further from any character identification, his work is, perhaps intentionally, an endorsement of one of Dahl's "revolting rules": "Films are fun...but books are better!"

The life and loves of Leonard Bernstein are the subjects of Bradley Cooper's movie biography, "Maestro," Netflix's latest lux production for the big and small screen and this year's Oscar tease.

Presented in competition at the Venice International Film Festival, lush and romantic, in that classic style typical of the Hollywood biopic, it sweeps in with grand gestures and the stirring strings of Bernstein's beloved "Adagietto" from Mahler's 5th Symphony, the composer's love letter to his wife. But, unfortunately, like the typical biopic, it romanticizes a complicated, messy life that's better suited to austere documentary than swelling violins and sumptuous vistas.

Perhaps crude to note, but the Bernstein story is worthy of movie treatment only because homosexuality compelled him to lead a double life, which today may seem quaint, in that sense of a love that dares not to speak its name. Older movies about gay composers, Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart, are laughably inaccurate accounts of what are otherwise fascinating, tragic men. In "Night and Day" (1946), Porter, as portrayed by Cary Grant, himself closeted, isn't a gay man but a lousy husband, and physically wrong for the role. Far worse in "Words and Music" (1948), Mickey Rooney's portrait of Hart's tortured life is reduced to a general malaise over being short. Sexually conflicted, philandering Bernstein, as Cooper presents him, makes for good copy in 2023.

The movie opens with a quotation of Bernstein's: "A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension within the contradictory answers," which seems less an explanation than an admission of regret for what's to follow.

Admittedly, a heterosexual conductor with a remarkable career but a commonplace life does not a movie make, not to mention a movie about a conductor, albeit a great one. Anyway, conducting is really a mystery to most, as its purpose seems unnecessary to the result; however, one can't dispute that dramatically wielding a baton, flinging one's head and hair about in time to music, does add a rather welcomed, visual highlight to a concert of otherwise stultifying musicians.

Bernstein was this and so much more: adept at both classical and popular music, winner of Emmys, Tonys, Grammys, and an Oscar nomination, honored and celebrated, from Broadway to the New York Philharmonic, to concerts in Israel, Vienna, London, Berlin, Tanglewood--"On the Town," "Westside Story," "A Quiet Place," "Candide," "Mass," "Kaddish." A musician, a performer, a teacher, he tried to demystify symphonies and the work of conducting, specifically in his CBS broadcasts for children, but mostly for anyone to whom a baton seemed like a magic wand. And he collaborated with some of the best creative minds of the 20th Century. But all of that is material for another film and another filmmaker.

Prodigious like his subject, Cooper does triple-duty here as writer, director, and actor, playing the Maestro himself, whom he uncannily resembles, despite latex enhancements to his own features. Cooper's love and admiration for Bernstein are obvious and should come as no surprise: he dives into the role, but never really inhabits it. Without creative distance and restraint, his performance is a testimonial, not an exploration of a life, and especially one in relation to music.

A visual storyteller, with an eye for composition, Cooper places and moves his camera with purpose, frames shots for dramatic effect, and edits with rhythmic precision. And as he showcased in his first film, ambitious yet flawed, "A Star Is Born," he also has an ear for music cues and underscoring shots to elicit the right emotion at the right moment. Like his mentor Steven Spielberg, he is a classicist at heart, and, unhappily, like Spielberg, not an innovator, but a follower (an observation, not a criticism). Classic Hollywood filmmaking has stood the test of time and isn't going away anytime soon. Yet, a filmmaker who follows form is never an artist, only a craftsman. Altering his appearance, for instance, to play Bernstein is indicative of craft, what actors from Lon Chaney to Orson Welles have done to find character, working from the outside in. This choice, while outmoded today, is still an accepted practice among actors, more so in biopics. But for Cooper it only adds to the list of reasons why this film doesn't work.

Its focus, and its reason for being, is Bernstein's 33-year, somewhat "open" relationship with Costa-Rican actress Felicia Montealegre, which began in 1946 when the two met--felicitously--at a party in the home of pianist Claudio Arrau, her teacher (Cooper reimagines this meeting as a meet-cute moment in the home of Bernstein's sister, Shirley, limned by Sarah Silverman, not stretching far). The competent Carey Mulligan plays Montealegre, but she's a bit too peaches-and-cream in a role that's better suited to a Latin. To her credit, she ably acts the part of an astute woman, talented in her own right, entangled in a romance with a gay man, yet she struggles to get under her skin. Adding to this struggle, she and Cooper don't fit as a pair, evidenced by their inevitable, overripe recriminations-and-accusations encounter staged in a set piece, a long-take against a backdrop of Thanksgiving parade balloons, their egos inflated. This kind of relationship does happen, of course, but hardly ever succeeds, balloons notwithstanding. The difficulty here is conveying the attraction, the job of the principal actors, certainly, but also of the director/writer. The obvious conclusion one may draw is that banal standby, "love is blind." True enough, but why marry him? And then later, after his swishing from one young thing to another, why remain married to him?

Therein lies the dilemma, the basis of Bernstein's self-indulgent, double life, which necessitated his needing a beard. Montealegre fit the bill. She was also a pretty ornament and a uterus for a man whose life was ruled by his whims. With similar whimsy, Cooper takes the audience along on this romantic escapade, expecting them to understand it and emotionally connect with it, but neither he nor Mulligan is credulous wholly to muster a convincing performance. Rather, they come off appearing stilted, forced, as if trying too hard to seem like real people, yet seem more like those frustrated, upper-class, country-club people in Douglas Sirk movies. Period set pieces, cigarettes, cocktails, and attractive costumes worked for Sirk, but not as compensations for a weak script.

The image in the movie's poster perhaps says it best: an elegantly coiffed and attired woman, faceless and alone, the word "Maestro" hovering lordly above her.

What is to be learned? What questions provoked? What essential meaning? What tension within contradictory answers? Don't bother, it's not worth the effort, except to gather that Bernstein was indeed master of his career, but not of his life. If anything, he's an abject lesson for those who care to examine life because examining life is what makes it worth living. But that's more credit than the movie deserves.

Amazon's latest comedy effort, "Jury Duty," an orchestrated prank on one unsuspecting idiot, is by far the worst premise for a fake documentary since "The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest," that only a James Marsden fan could fall for it. He's Ronald Gladden, which is, in fact, his name, and it's the best joke in this one-joke series.

Pranking innocent victims for comedy gold began first on radio, before taking up residence on television, at various times for over five decades, thank you Allan Funt. The idea was clever sixty years ago and succeeded because its premise was fundamental, as long as everyone involved, including the audience, was in on the joke, except, of course, the stooge. The difference, however, between those former pranks and the one executed over eight episodes in this series, is that the mark in this con isn't just the butt of the joke, but the butt.

That trapped-in-a-nuthouse expression on Gladden's face isn't quite the same naïveté of those who were caught on candid camera in the past, because what happed to them could have happened to anyone watching at home. Antics of that type had not yet reached its saturation point in American life. Now the country is awash in it, that everything is fair game, from the courthouse to the White House.

So it is at Gladden's expense, and only his, for all involved are paid actors, that merriment ensues, merriment of performers, not audience members (those with functioning brain cells). Not to give the series more credit than it deserves, as a sociological experiment, "Jury Duty" demonstrates the gullibility of Gladden's generation, inbred and raised on lame humor, that such far-fetched, idiotic behavior as that of the hoaxers passes for normal.

The horror, the horror of this fact is that nothing too extreme in these proceedings, nothing too absurd, implausible, or preposterous registers for an instant in Gladden's conscious mind, nothing triggers, not even the slightest fraction of doubt in his thinking brain, not a second, not a flash of clarity, that maybe, just possibly, this courtroom of errors is a put-on, a spoof, a con.

Despite all that, in the final episode, stupidity is rewarded, as the teetering-on-senility judge straight out of central casting turns mawkish and benevolent, declaring Gladden a "hero" (for blind allegiance to crackpots and a minor celebrity), boosting his self-esteem, valued at one-hundred grand, before taxes. That's how America gets things done.

How sad for Gladden and those of his generation, and anyone who thinks this series qualifies as entertainment, not that anyone would notice.

A secret door in a bookcase (amazing!); a hidden room under a staircase (incredible!); an expanding dining table (magical!); glass shelves over a window (astonishing!). What could possibly lie ahead? I wonder. A bed hidden in a wall, or perhaps a sofa that converts into a bed. Will wonders never cease?

Such is the ingenuity of Netflix's latest house makeover series, "Hack My Home," or "Handover My Tacky House to Hacks." The brain trust responsible for quartermastering the gadgetry--gurus of the spatially challenged--read like a roster of Justice League Interior Decorators: someone on Design, on Innovation, on Construction, on Engineering. The one from MIT figures out, I know not how, that a dining table can actually expand (affirmative inaction). Could she possibly conceive of a more comfortable way to dine than sitting on stools? In Episode Two, the one on Innovation has a novel idea of storing the homeowners' junk in the crawl space (of course, they thought their junk looked better in the sunroom). Next, the team visit a futuristic house stuck in a time warp. Their mission, which they've accepted, is to bring it into the present. So back at HQ, the team brainstorm innovative solutions: for a closet, a Lazy Susan; for beds, pods; and for storage, steps that are draws! Needless to say, no credit is given to Thomas Jefferson, who invented the Lazy Susan in the 18th Century, nor to the Japanese, who created Tansu in the 17th, and sleep pods in the 20th (1979, in fact).

Not to make more of it than what it is (a thirty-minute sugar rush), it's just another in the vein of white noise at mealtime, same design, different hacks.

In July of 1969, the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle safely landed on the moon's surface, in the sea of tranquility. Less than one month later, the LaBianca family was murdered in their California home. These startling, incongruous events are reimagined here, somewhat, in Charlie Brooker's "Beyond the Sea," a dismal exercise in crisis counseling that gives as good as one gets (yes, there will be blood).

Oh my, the things they can do in 1969, which is, coincidentally, the annus horribilis of Manson and Tate, really a minor plot point: "The Valley of the Dolls" is casually mentioned, as well as a book by Robert A. Heinlein, whose science fiction novel "Stranger in a Strange Land" partly inspired the Manson cult. The other point, just as minor, "how" things are done, without technology advancing beyond the cathode ray, is never explained, but never mind, French pop tunes will suffice. Meanwhile, NASA has the means to transport "replicas" of human beings from outer space to earth, which leads one to wonder what other incredible feats of science has the government withheld from the common masses (along with the existence of aliens, of course).

But I digress. Brooker's story has nothing to do with any of that, or with anything else for that matter. Yet observant viewers might detect strains of "Breaking Waves" in the plot, however strained, if you can wrap your head around it--after all, the characters can, as well as the actors portraying them: Aaron Paul, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Mara, the three Nouvelle Vague principles. They are faithful to the material, which does neither them nor the material justice.

Having given these wasted 79 minutes from my life some after thought, I am reminded of that old saw: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Brooker's point here, if he has one, may be that basic human jealousy and acts of vengeance are about as low-tech as it gets in a high-tech world, and, I contend, about as low as television entertainment can get, cathode ray notwithstanding.

That's the signpost up ahead--your next stop, the loading and unloading zone. "Loch Henry," the second installment in season six of Charlie Brooker's twilight saga, "The Black Mirror" (2017 and 2018 were fallow years for Emmy), takes us to the quaint and cozy moors of Scotland, where something wicked this way comes.

Young student documentarian, Davis McCardle, played by unknown Samuel Blenkin, with a look like haunted desolation (wonder why?), returns to the bonny brae of his homeland with his girlfriend (soon-to-be felled by a lousy poker face), equipment, and a really bad idea for a Netflix documentary. Soon they trade the idea for a better one with legs. Needless to say, poor-white-trash, backwoods sadists (not just in America), with an underground dungeon is, as the saying goes, must-see TV.

Not to spoil the end for anyone (Brooker's script accomplishes this long before the denouement), it should come as no surprise--not a red herring in sight--that Davis' mummy is far too simple and dreary and thick to be anything other than a power-drill-wielding psychopath (in a Bafta mask) and mistress of the dungeon. As it turns out, she and hubby found fun and exciting ways to keep romance alive (which explains the aforementioned "haunted desolation"). Alas, not infirm of purpose, she performs the ultimate sacrifice for the art of the documentary (apparently, a filmmaker at heart, so really not all bad).

Spoiler Alert: the meat pie is only a meat pie.

Everyone likes a good story with a twist. H. H. Munro knew it, so did Mark Twain, O. Henry, Edgar Allen Poe, and Roald Dahl. Now Charlie Brooker knows it, too. Unlikely ever to become one of the literary greats, he is one for the television history books, like an updated Rod Serling, but not as memorable as Serling because Serling came first and was better.

I wanted to like "Joan is Awful" for the title alone. You know what to expect up front. And in deed she's awful, all of them are, Annie Murphy, et al. Joan, you see, wants to be the main character in her own life. The show (Joan's life) takes its premise (maybe not the right word in this instance) from the "Seinfeld" pilot, a show about nothing: you wake up, eat breakfast, go to work, go home, watch television. Why would anyone watch a show like that? Because it's on television. Not to put too fine a point on it, we are, in fact, watching "Joan is Awful" because it IS on television. In the first 15 minutes or so you might have thought to yourself (as I did) "Why am I watching this?" Like some continuum of art imitating life, or like that mirror shot from "Citizen Kane," the plot doesn't just thicken, it dilutes. It becomes, in effect, nothing: a show about nothing, but nothing for the new millennium, who are really into this sort of thing. Just consider the thousands of selfies and photos of what people have eaten.

It should come as no surprise that AI (Artificial Intelligence, cf Insentience) will eventually make actors obsolete--extras in crowd scenes are already out of work. Soon, the stars will be, too. Who needs them, really? After all, a computer program ought to be an improvement to Salma Hayek's enunciation, which is worse than Ricky Riccardo's. Of course, it isn't. That may be an intentional joke. This episode, for what it's worth, is cyberspeak heavy, and humor lite. Maybe that's intentional, too.

Reality was never Stephen Spielberg's thing. For nearly fifty years now, he's built a filmmaking legacy on a homogenized reinvention of Americana, like processed cheese.

For him, the messy realities of life aren't photogenic, and their stories, not arcs, but corkscrews; to him, the holocaust feels right in black and white, and Jim Crow needs pops of color. Even newsreels of D-Day don't make the cut because, in his worldview, nothing exceeds like excess.

This movie, called "The Fablemans," apropos of everything, is for Spielberg, surprisingly, a change of course. But it's not so much a departure as a detour, a romp into Lucas territory, into something like a Jewish "American Graffiti."

From a screenplay based on Spielberg's childhood, but too loose to be biographical, and too conventional to be credible, it's his fantasy about how he became hooked on movies and moviemaking, which, by all accounts, is not too far removed from the truth. But truth itself has never been adequate enough for Spielberg, unless it's either above or below the horizon. Appropriately, he receives this dictum from an old-school master (played by the very un-Spielberg David Lynch), as Spielberg has been, from inception, a classicist, never an innovator. So true to form, he breaks no new ground here, but treads assuredly, as usual, on the familiar.

Collaborating again with playwright Tony Kushner, he returns to his roots, literally--the DeMille of the suburbs--where he is, even he might agree, more at home, especially with mothers a bit off-center. Central to that end, Michele Williams, in a pixie hairdo, tackles the Spielberg mother role--really his own mother--like all those who came before, from Goldie Hawn, to Lorraine Gary, to Teri Garr, to Melinda Dillon, to Dee Wallace, and she does this duty well, taking direction from the master, as do the child actors, also central. But for Spielberg, always, it's the mother to whom attention must be paid, like a debt one can never satisfy. Indeed, the movie's least effective scenes are those set pieces featuring Williams, which seem staged, as if to belabor some point, like her kitchen histrionics, piano recital protest, and interpretive dancing in the headlights (sans underpants).

The writing is competent, not radical or memorable (except a line about licorice borrowed from Spencer Tracy), but does discover its DNA with stock Jewishness from Uncle Boris, a character inspired by Kushner, played with stock Jewishness by Judd Hirsch, then somewhere midway steers a hard left into a John Waters' movie, with Edd Kookie Byrnes, Jesus, and Aqua Net.

What was to be his ode to movies, his own "Nuovo Cinema Paradiso," is more or less a return to the made-for-television movies of his past, which is not to say those weren't good movies. In fact, they were too good for the small screen. However, the same can't be said of "The Fablemans."

Gertrude Stein made that statement, rather offhandedly, about the place of her birth, which had vanished. The same can be said about Netflix's documentary "Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me." Although Smith is gone, she's not completely vanished, as a needless 116 minutes regretfully demonstrates.

Like Venus rising from the sea, or just grow'd like Topsy, she came forth from the dire straits of Texas to dazzle and dumbfound the masses. But don't look too closely for any deep truths or poignant lessons about life and death in her 7,884,000 minutes of fame because there's nothing there. Hers is a story no different from those of many vacuous beauties celebrated by the acquisitive for the inquisitive. Good looks, as the saying goes (and it goes for a good reason) are a dime a dozen. While a beautiful face can take one someplace far from the dusty plaines and crispy fried chicken shacks of Texas, it can take one only so far, and in Smith's case, not far enough.

The tragedy here is self-inflicted, although tragedy is maybe too big a word for so small a matter as the life of Anna Nicole Smith. Any parallels with the extraordinary career of Marilyn Monroe are entirely expedient and included here only to frame a narrative that has no other plausible basis for existing. Cashing her winning ticket in the genetics lottery may have gotten her face in print and provided the means for breast augmentation, but being photogenic without having any real talent is like getting all dressed up with nowhere to go. Except, apparently for Anna, only to wheedle her way into Southfork and land smack dab on the lap of wheelchair bound (eventually bedridden) billionaire J. Howard Marshall, who had by then when they met (at a strip club, naturally) reentered the id stage of his life for the instant gratification he had once gotten from breast feeding. In one inadvertently comical phone conversation (recorded for posterity and a future lawsuit), Smith coyly asks Citizen Marshall if he wants to see his "rosebud," which shows--although one doubts purposely--how anything relevant went over her head, like the use of that word.

Always seeming too much at home with sycophants, she was perhaps naive not to see (or maybe just playacting for cameras) that her shady biological father wanted more than the usual father/daughter relationship, or that her "attorney," Howard (dateless-at-the-prom) K. Stern, didn't have her best interests at heart (but knew he made for good television anyway)--and somewhere in the insanity lost sight of her troubled son. He's the tragedy in this meaningless story.

A statement in the epilogue, the purpose of which may not have been the filmmaker's intention, clarifies for viewers, once and for all, Smith's existence, in that her daughter Dannielynn "inherited nothing," nothing monetarily, but from her mother, getting nothing was always inevitable.

Robert Siodmak brings a unique noir sensibility to the horror genre in RKO's "The Spiral Staircase" (1945)--the result is more thriller than horror. With no studio interference, Siodmak could cut the film as he pleased, using the staircase image as a central motif, prompting a retitling (the working title was "Some Must Watch," from Ethel Lina White's novel). Highlights include Nicholas Musuraca's cinematography (Siodmak instructed him to use Greg Toland's technique with depth of field); Roy Webb's memorable theremin music; Siodmak's characteristic use of mise-en-scene (some sets borrowed from "Citizen Kane"); baroque, claustrophobic interiors embellished by chiaroscuro lighting; Ethel Barrymore's Oscar-nominated performance; and a wonderful assortment of character players: Elsa Lanchester, Sara Allgood, Rhys Williams, and James Bell. The cast also includes Dorothy McGuire, Kent Smith, Gordon Oliver, Rhonda Flemming, and George Brent in a surprising role.

Legendary Maria Montez, the Queen of Technicolor, is the titular "Cobra Woman" (1944)--in a dramatic, dual role! "Geev me the Cobra jewels!" Conspicuously lush, like a Sirk melodrama, but with no hidden messages, this is pure camp, and Universal's A-film for its biggest stars: Montez and Jon Hall, who were, in a way, mirror images of each other in both looks and talent. Also necessary to the A-team is the equally beautiful, but perhaps more talented, Sabu. And playing Hava (no nagila), Lon Chaney appears, as contractually required, his wonderful Lennie just a few years behind him.

By far the best moment: Montez in charmeuse and heels, arrogantly leading a procession of slave girls through the jungle. For an added bonus, see Montez perform the Cobra dance. Enthralling!

Costarring Samuel S. Hinds and Mary Nash, as the Queen, from a screenplay by Richard Brooks (yes!), and directed by, also legendary, Robert Siodmak.

In his unorthodox documentary on the early career of David Bowie, "Moonage Daydream," Brett Morgen accomplishes the impossible: to outline the creative genius of arguably one of the most important artists in the 20th Century. Like the works of the man it documents, it's a stunning achievement that intuitively mixes Bowie's music with images from various media--newsreels, television interviews, films, concerts, found footage--to visually illustrate the confounding virtuosity of the artist's mind.

Creative output, which defies interpretation, like that of Bowie's, exists on its own merits. It doesn't need explanation to be appreciated. One can say the same for Morgen's film. However, Bowie may provide a possible explanation, late in the film, describing his belief that people take fragments from the world around them to create their own existences. Unfortunately, as it's often the case, what an artist believes does more to mystify his art than explain it, but don't let that deter you.

Bowie's extraordinary career and life have been well documented in both print and television interviews, snippets of which are seen here, so Morgen's resisting convention in his portrait of the artist is prudent. In fact, it complements this visionary's body of work, and is as close to perfect as a biography can be.

For a filmmaker, perhaps one of the most difficult, near impossible goals, is to have an audience lose themselves in your creation, becoming fully immersed in the experience of your work. Morgen's film does this and, most remarkably, in collaboration with its most remarkable subject.

Actress and comic Alex Borstein, making the most of the popular Mrs. Maisel, trods the boards in her own Amazon special, "Corsets and Clown Suits," (or, "Purification , Purgation, and the Perception of Perception"), a blending of comedy and psychodrama, that illustrates why self-deprecating humor, while always a matter of course, is not the best approach to self-perception.

Following an inexplicable stripper, Borstein opens the show, not too perceptively, with a discourse on perception (as Chris Rock does in his Netflix special), giving the impression her performance will be something more than routine, but proving only to be a loss-leader. Trust the material.

Who can blame her? Self-depreciation has been thus for many female comics, from Fanny Brice, to Totie Fields, to Joan Rivers, for whom low self-esteem was the standard bearer, and remains so, apparently, for Borstein (who has such a pretty face).

Befitting her self-image, she dons a clown suit--albeit modified--and funny shoes, solely for the purpose of comic treatment, perhaps also as a failsafe. Trust the material. Granted, visual humor hardly ever fails, like miming the unappetizing state of her vagina and a lama's giving birth, but body-image shtick and feminine hygiene jokes are old standbys and strictly stand-up, not the substance of a performance piece, which, in this instance, I admit, is reaching, notwithstanding the musical interludes included with the price of admission (although hardly worth it). She sings well, sort of like Gomer Pyle lowering his voice to belt out "The Impossible Dream," but it's not her singing that puts asses in seats. It's her own that does.

"The Citadel," A. J. Cronin's shocking expose of unethical practices in the medical profession, which laid the groundwork for the NHS, must not be confused with Amazon's latest cartoon spectacle, the less definitely titled "Citadel," which lays, well, let's just say it lays. If you don't know what, the first two episodes ought to inform you. I stopped watching after the second. Frankly, I don't know why I bothered to watch at all.

If live-action animation is something you relish, as I suspect many do, then by all means cast your gaze upon it. The narrative (too generous a word) moves along rapidly like a Watson and Skinner behavioral-modification, brainwashing film. There's a lot of jibber-jabber about plutonium and spies and implants and memories being wiped and a new world order lead by Leslie Manville, still in the throes of her bitchy Princess Margaret.

The late great Stanley Tucci pops up (as he seems to be doing often lately) in the role of bald, sardonic sidekick, accepting the torch, with no apparent shame, from Ben Kingsley and Patrick Stewart. Apparently, like them, he's entered the underwriting phase of his career.

There's really no point in going any further. The CGI codependent story, if you care, is a mashup of everything you've ever seen before and less, with the requisite amount of explosions, firepower, combat choreography, head banging, body slamming, and hushed whispers (so you know it's serious, or not worth hearing). But fear not, the heroes remain forever attractive, resilient, and bulletproof, even Mr. Tucci, for whom acting, it seems, has become a capital gain.

"The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," in its fifth and final season (oy gevalt!), is proof that even for a clever idea, like Mrs. Adler's Gefilte fish, there is no such thing as an unlimited shelf-life. What began six years ago as a nostalgic trip to the halcyon fifties and a housewife's unlikely rise in stand-up, harking back to those early days of Borscht Belt comedy, has now reverted to type: a potpourri of Jewish jokes as as stale as week-old challah.

Reuniting the team of Brosnahan and Borstein, in their Emmy-winning roles as comic and agent, the series resumes Amy Sherman-Palladino's feminist fantasy that poses a what-if story about a Joan Rivers type and the actual Lenny Bruce, who meet cute (in lockup for indecency, of course) and become fast friends and lovers. Granted, an improbable premise, yet a promising one that delivers at first, but soon goes trite and forced, and so unconvincing as to be less fiction than science fiction.

Rivers was, arguably, a trailblazing performer, like Bruce, but far more mainstream and middle-America acceptable than he (at least in early days). After all, one doesn't become Ed Sullivan's favorite, as Rivers was proud to admit, with off-color humor and an arsenal of f-bombs like that of Pallidino's dream girl. The salty gal from Larchmont in Channel suits and pearls is reimagined here as an upper east-side JAP with children and brisket, who assumes her husband's unsuccessful sideline in stand-up one night in a drunken free-for-all, expletives not deleted. It's a lark with schtick that sets her on a path to moderate success. (Although Rivers is apparently the inspiration, the more likely one would be Jewish actress and screenwriter Gertrude Berg, of the Park Avenue Bergs, who never hung a wash out a window.) With her inveterate cap-wearing sidekick in tow, Mrs. Maisel, as she's billed, sets out on a series of improbable--yet comically hopeful and emancipating--adventures in show biz, in pristine period sets and clothes, the way a fantasist always remembers the past. Her humor doles out slices of life, more indoctrinating than self-effacing like Rivers, and always seems filtered through a contemporary, me-too sensibility, as if to suggest a routine of a comic transported backward in time (hence, science fiction). Unfortunately, the jokes fall flat, as they usually do in movies about stand-up comics (compare "This Is My Life," "Punchline," and "Lenny"), where only the on-screen audience provides laughter, on cue.

Palladino, a cockeyed visionary, and a likely student of screwball comedy, especially its sharp-witted, snappy banter, has taken great pains to make her dialogue swing in true screwball spirit; however, her wisecracking comes off not so much as effortlessly as labored, and more imposed for effect than natural (compare Mark Sandrich, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and Leo McCarey).

After six seasons, tedium has set in like rigor mortise. If you suspend credulity, as the series has done, you might watch just to enjoy the scenery, the mid-century decor and couture (apparently, everyone in the fifties followed the latest trends), as well as the popular tunes on the hit parade. After all, chopped liver ain't chopped liver without some schmaltz.