January '24 Digital Week I

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week 

Anselm 

(Janus Films)

German director Wim Wenders returns to the 3-D format that worked well for his documentary Pina about choreographer Pina Bausch; but the earlier film showed dancers gracefully moving in space while Anselm, which displays German artist Anselm Keifer’s paintings, installations and sculptures, only intermittently suggests the impressive spaciousness of his works. The rest of the 90-minute documentary is a decent primer on the artist’s life and art, which has been controversial in his native country, where he has been accused of being a Nazi sympathizer—or even a Nazi. Wenders’ eye, of course, is unerring; the 3-D segments showing Keifer’s works’ sheer monumentality are superb, but seeing the artist riding around on his bike or a tree branch glistening with snow isn’t the most essential use of the technology.

May December 

(Netflix)

Todd Haynes’ latest riffs on the Mary Kay Latourneau saga through Samy Burch’s soggy script introducing a TV actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), tailing 60-year-old Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) and her 36-year-old husband Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) as research prior to making a film about their relationship that began when he was 13 and she in her 30s, Gracie later serving a prison term and having his baby. The bulk of the film dramatizes how they deal with others’ perceptions of their time together, but despite this being strong material for an illuminating drama, Haynes has made a film that’s too often sophomorically soap-operaish, with weird Lifetime-movie vibes. Haynes has made bizarre choices like using Michel Legrand’s score from 1971’s The Go-Between with little thought about its inappropriateness for his own drama, and the acting surprisingly follows suit, superficially fine but with little depth, which is a surprise coming from Moore and Portman, not to mention the universally-praised Melton.

Saltburn 

(Amazon)

Following her Oscar-winning script for her 2020 directorial debut Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennell has made a crude, one-note black comedy that follows Oliver Quick, a naïve new student at Oxford who befriends the popular and affluent Felix Catton; when Oliver is invited to the Catton family’s sprawling estate, Saltburn, for the summer, things get really wild, culminating in “shocking” sexual activity and deaths. Too bad that Fennell would rather ignore what could have been fascinating character dynamics—especially among the denizens of Saltburn—and instead concentrate on a bunch of one-dimensional stick figures being manipulated by their creator in order to get to a risible final plot twist. There’s lovely location filming and a game cast (although poor Carey Mulligan is stuck in a nothing role as Felix’s mom’s purported bestie); then there’s Fennell’s overreliance on an assortment of fluids, bodily and otherwise (bathwater, semen, rain, spit, blood), making Saltburn shrill instead of substantial. 

The Teachers’ Lounge 

(Sony Pictures Classics)

In İlker Çatak’s intelligent drama with the pulse of a thriller, incidents of petty theft among students and adults in a typical German middle school threaten to become large-scale controversies that touch on so many of today’s ills: cancel culture, racism, privacy and misinformation. Anchored by an exacting performance by Leonie Benesch as Carla, an idealistic teacher whose attempts to do the right thing only exacerbate the situation, Çatak’s film keeps moving tautly in different directions, keeping the viewer off-balance while one wonders what might come next. Tightly co-scripted by Çatak and Duncker, this low-key but subtly subversive case study is definitely the find of the current movie season and should not be ignored.

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

The Holdovers 

(Universal)

Alexander Payne teams with Paul Giamatti for their first collaboration since the droll 2004 comedy Sideways, which suffers from a streak of self-seriousness largely missing from their earlier pairing. Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, an ornery professor at a New England prep school stuck babysitting the students who have nowhere to go during the holidays—he soon becomes friendly with bored but bright Angus, ignored by his family. Giamatti is always terrific and newcomer Dominic Sessa is even better as Angus, but Payne overstuffs his film with incidents and subplots that stretch credulity as well as keep the wider world (especially Vietnam and other pertinent events of the era) at bay. Also worthwhile is Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s subtle portrayal of Mary Lamb, the school’s cook whose beloved son has just been killed in Vietnam—although, again, a bit too conveniently for Payne’s purposes, Mary’s husband also died young in a freak accident. The film looks good on Blu; extras include deleted scenes, alternate ending and on-set interviews with the cast, Payne and others.