On this traditional day of moviegoing, here are ten new feature films, most of them only available in cinemas, ranked from those I most enjoyed to those I most regret seeing.
American Fiction
Jeffrey Wright stars as a deep-thinking novelist who feels out of sorts with his life, with his job as an English professor, with his upper-middle-class family of doctors, and with the literary establishment, which prizes stories of Black dysfunction far more than his serious fiction. Out of resentment, he writes an over-the-top ghetto novel under a pen name as a joke – which to his shock becomes a blockbuster hit, with Hollywood calling. As I write in my review, this first-time filmmaker Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure” is both a smart, funny satire of the way the white establishment pigeonholes Black artists, and a warmhearted if cool-eyed family drama. The starry cast is terrific.
The Holdovers
Paul Giamattti portrays Paul, a strict, pedantic, much-hated teacher of classical history at a New England prep school whose headmaster has forced him to remain on campus during Christmas break in 1970 to supervise a handful of students with nowhere to go, along with the school’s grieving head cook, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, whose son has just been killed in Vietnam. Paul forms an unexpected bond with Angus, a smart, rebellious, smart aleck of a student portrayed by newcomer Dominic Sessa. In some ways this is a predictable movie, with Paul and Angus slowly revealing their dark and sad secrets to one another, and to us. But the acting is superb, the relationship among the three main characters funny and heartwarming, and the timing for this movie is just right.
The Teachers Lounge
Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) is a new idealistic teacher in a progressive German middle school who sees herself as a problem-solver more attentive to the needs of her students than her colleagues. To solve the problem of recurrent thefts in the school, she sets up a makeshift form of surveillance. Although well-meaning, her action leads to an increasingly complex series of repercussions that are thought-provoking for their changing and challenging perspectives. This film is both suspenseful and darkly comic, in four different languages (mostly German), with English subtitles.
The Color Purple
A movie adaptation of the Broadway musical about Celie, an abused and neglected Black woman in early twentieth-century Georgia who we see over forty years come to accept herself, with the help of three loving women. As I write in my review, there is something lost in the translation of “The Color Purple” from stage musical to movie musical, but something else is gained. The musical numbers often take place in the kind of vivid on-location settings that the theater can’t easily replicate. And these musical numbers, more than any other element in the movie, justify yet another version of this story – which began as Alice Walker’s epistolary novel in 1982, became a movie by Steven Spielberg in 1985 (which you can see online), then a 2005 Broadway musical, followed by a reimagined Broadway revival in 2015.
The Iron Claw
The true story of the Von Erich brothers, whose bullying father pushed them all into becoming professional wrestlers in the 1980s, with results so tragic that a surviving son believed the family was cursed. The movie, which is as much off-kilter comedy as tragedy, is the second about wrestling I saw this year (the other is “Cassandro.”) Both concede that professional wrestling is showmanship and choreography rather than competitive sport, yet ask us in effect to root for the characters. I’ll admit that the acting is first-rate, but it’s kind of painful to see Jeremy Allen White and especially Zac Efron bulked up to monstrous proportions; I hope this isn’t permanent.
The Boys in the Boat
A movie adaptation of the non-fiction book by Daniel James Brown about the Depression-ravaged members of the underdog University of Washington rowing team who wound up competing for gold at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. If it’s an absolutely predictable underdog sports movie, so are most underdog sports movies, which is part of their appeal. If the sport is crew, which it’s fair to say is not as popular as is depicted somewhat ludicrously in the movie, there is some beautiful photography in this film directed by George Clooney. Still, I couldn’t help thinking of movies that have done the sports triumph in adversity during the Great Depression much better, including Seabiscuit and Cinderella Man – and, most pointedly, all the movies (such as “Race”) about Jesse Owens, who more famously competed for gold in Nazi Germany.
Wonka
Timothée Chalamet stars in this musical prequel to Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and the two previous movies) on how Willy Wonka came to become a successful chocolatier. It starts off in a simultaneously playful and sweeping musical number that shows Chalamet as a likable naif arriving for some reason from way atop the mast of a ship to a European city that looks to be a cross between London, Paris, and Prague, quickly losing his life savings, and being targeted by a series of cartoonish villains as he tries to set up a magical chocolate shop. The movie is certainly colorful. It’s also busy, and twee, and way too long – two hours of listening to Chalamet sing. Look, I’ve long loved Timothée Chalamet (even before he became a movie star), but casting him in a musical feels like one of those social science experiments where confederates are paid to say that something that is actually colored red is blue, in order to test whether the study participant will deny reality and say it’s blue like everybody else. When I hear him sing, I see red.
Killers of the Flower Moon
The movie is based on the actual macabre romance between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) in order to tell the larger true story of the exploitation, robbery and outright murder by white people of members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma after the discovery of oil on their land made them strikingly rich. Based on a non-fiction book by David Grann, this is director Martin Scorsese’s latest critical darling, likely to be remembered at Oscar time. Cineastes have kvelled at the masterful composition of individual shots. But “Killers of the Flower Moon” made for uncomfortable viewing, and not just because of its depressing subject: It’s 206 minutes long – an unjustifiable length for a movie that could have been a lot less leisurely and repetitive.Scorsese’s long-time favorite DiCaprio feels stupendously miscast as a Texan villain; his celebrity may be one of the reasons why this horrid, true chapter in the history of Native Americans (with a screenplay co-written by Scorsese) focuses on a white character, whose immorality is exceeded only by his stupidity.
The Zone of Interest
The domestic life of Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig and five children, as they make a home in a cottage on the grounds of Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp where the real-life Hoss served as commandant. Many film critics have lauded this film, an acclaim I find inexplicable, given how much director Jonathan Glazer uses the Holocaust for an exercise in arty filmmaking. For most of the movie, we see the family eating or gardening, with only occasional evidence of where they are, such as a belching smokestack in the distance, or the fur coat Hedwig is trying on, or the loose teeth one of the sons plays with in his bed at night.
Saltburn
Barry Keoghan portrays Oliver Quick, a scholarship student who we are at first led to believe is struggling earnestly to find his place at Oxford University; he is taken under wing by an aristocratic classmate Felix (Jacob Elordi) who is warm and decent (and hot) and invites him to his huge country estate, Saltburn, to meet his eccentric family. That Oliver winds up betraying his hosts is far less offensive than the betrayal that writer-director Emerald Fennell commits against the viewers (and arguably the actors as well), when near the end of its two hour running time, everything we thought we knew is exposed as a lie, and “Saltburn” abruptly turns into an exceedingly ugly, graphic rip-off of “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” You’ve been warned
5 Streaming
If you’d rather stay home, here are five 2023 films that are currently streaming, all of which I recommend, listed alphabetically.
A Thousand and One on Amazon Prime
Teyana Taylor gives an affecting performance as Inez, a deeply complicated, often hard-to-like woman who kidnaps her six-year-old son Terry from the foster care system while trying to survive in a rapidly changing New York City.
Barbie on Max for subscribers
The opening scene — a meticulous spoof of the opening of “2001: A Space Odyssey” — completely sold me on Greta Gerwig’s impossibly pink riff on the 64-year-old doll from Mattel. If I didn’t stay as riveted through every twist and turn, it’s not hard to understand why this clever, often funny and sometimes thought-provoking entertainment has so far grossed almost a billion and a half dollars worldwide.
Flora and Son on Apple+ for subscribers
A sweet tale of a reckless Dublin mother (Eve Hewson), at odds with her rebellious teenage son (Orén Kinlan) and estranged from his father (Jack Reynor), who starts taking Zoom guitar lessons from a burned-out songwriter in Los Angeles. (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), which miraculously – but modestly – eventually benefits everybody.
Oppenheimer for sale and rent
The epic, important and fascinating story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.
Rustin on Netflix
Colman Domingo is captivating in this inspiring true story of the gay, Black civil rights activist Bayard Rustin and his effort to put together the March on Washington, now best known for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech.
