Audrey Kupferberg

When it comes to films about Hollywood history, the more cynical the presentation, the more audiences relish them.  That concept has influenced the creation of Mank, a recent black-and-white arty release, written and directed by David Fincher and being streamed on Netflix.

Remember the old ad for chocolate bars:  Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don’t.  Well, that adage applies to films as well as candy.  Two recent quality films available for home viewing may well satisfy your craving, whichever that craving may be.

Who doesn’t like a good Christmas movie?  If you look among the classics, you will find stories of romance, sprightly musicals, dramas of human error and redemption, fantastic tales of Santa and his elves, and family movies with happy resolutions.

Kino Classics has just released a ten- film BluRay set of Yiddish language feature films.  The titles come from the heyday of Yiddish film production, the late 1930s.  When I first heard of the release, I assumed it featured the restorations of The National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University, but I was mistaken.  These are restorations completed by Serge Bromberg at Lobster Films, along with the Museum of Modern Art, the Deutsche Kinemathek, and the Fillmoteka Narodowa in Warsaw.

Films and TV series about LGBTQ+ adults are not uncommon. Most are distributed with a mainstream audience in mind and are quite popular. The recently released feature film version of the Broadway revival of Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band on Netflix is one example of a lively, evocative production centering around a small group of gay men in 1968. Crowley’s play was quite controversial when it opened off-Broadway pre-Stonewall riots when gays were closeted for the most part and shunned by many.

It would take half this radio piece to explain all the awards that Sophia Loren has received over the decades.  Her film career in Italy and Hollywood blossomed in the 1950s when producer Carlo Ponti changed her name from Scicolone to Loren and redesigned her career.  They married in 1957.

Born in Warsaw shortly after World War II, filmmaker Agnieszka Holland has had a prolific career writing and directing for film and television. Her parents were journalists who fought in the resistance.  She’ll be remembered for her works centering on the horrors of World War II, particularly Europa, Europa in 1990 and In Darkness in 2011.  She also directed several episodes of House of Cards.

The gruesome legend of Lizzie Borden has not faded from our popular culture, even after 108 years.  Remember the oft-quoted rhyme:  Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her father forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her mother forty-one. 

I was just reading a book about an evil younger brother who conspires to destroy the life of his weaker older brother in order to seize the elder’s more powerful position. The child of the brother who has been destroyed speaks out, revealing the sins of the younger brother.  No, I wasn’t reading Hamlet; I was reading Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough.

Halloween used to be the season for vintage horror films.  A favorite choice was Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera or Bela Lugosi in Dracula.  But times have changed.  After all, there are so many newer, frightening movies being made with fast-paced action and sophisticated special effects that send chills down your spine.

In thinking about the Spanish Flu pandemic that lasted approximately from the spring of 1918 to the summer of 1919, a crisis that appears to have begun in Kansas, not Spain, I am interested to read of its effect on the movie industry.  Richard Brody wrote a piece on this subject for the March 17 issue of the New Yorker magazine.

Motion pictures take us in many different directions.  Through our viewing experiences, we see parts of the world to which we will never travel and meet people with eccentricities we will never otherwise encounter.  Sometimes a film will be about the places to which we have traveled and about people who are very much the same as ourselves or the folks in the next town over.  When done right, the characters and storylines in those films can be as engaging and at times even as explosive as more imaginative and exotic movies.

The career of Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning actor/producer/writer Steve Coogan hit one of several high points a couple years ago with his interpretation of Stan Laurel, the great silent film comic, in his final years. Stan & Ollie is one of the few of Coogan’s most memorable projects on which he seemingly did not have creative control.  Among Coogan’s outstanding works—where he clearly had control as actor/producer/writer-- is Philomena from 2013, a drama about an elderly woman, played by Judi Dench, who seeks knowledge of the child she once bore and who was taken away while she was being held in a nightmarish convent. 

The City Without Jews, an Austrian silent feature film from 1924, has been rediscovered and restored.  It is available for home viewing with a musical score on Blu-ray and DVD through Flicker Alley.  The title is a shocker, especially coming several years before Hitler’s rise to power and well more than a decade before the Holocaust.  But anti-Semitism didn’t originate with the Nazis; it’s ages old.  In this story, the Jewish population is expelled from a fictional version of Vienna.  The head councilor is warned ahead of time, “Abandon your project!  Inhumanity doesn’t make for good politics.”  Now, to my mind, that is a warning that has never grown stale.

Atom Egoyan is a popular and prolific Canadian filmmaker.  He has been a favorite with audiences at the Toronto Film Festival for more than twenty years.  He had a critical and box-office success as far back as 1994 with a thriller about strip clubs called Exotica.  His top-rated film is 1997’s The Sweet Hereafter about a bus crash in a small town. Yet browsing through his filmography on the Internet Movie Database, I note that a good number of his films received mixed reviews and rather low audience ratings.

Arthouse films are a different breed from most mainstream films.  They often stress style and and creativity over straightforward story-telling.  Since arthouse films are independent productions, the filmmaker usually has the final word about every detail of the movie.  There are no studio staff and moguls to dictate changes to affect marketing.

Just when you think that documentary films have tackled every possible storyline, one pops up to bring new light to a subject and geographic site yet relatively unexplored.  Such is the case with the highly-praised, feature-length documentary called Honeyland, a film of such quality that it is to-date the only movie to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature Film. Many thanks to my friend, Everett Aison, artist and filmmaker, for pointing me towards this title, which is available for home viewing. 

The names of two comedy legends have come to mind in the past few weeks. The first is Carl Reiner who died on June 29 at the age of 98.  Reiner is best remembered for his work on the 1960s hit TV series The Dick Van Dyke Show where he was creator, producer, writer, and performer.  Reiner played Alan Brady, Rob Petry’s formidable boss.

In George Stevens’ poignant film, I Remember Mama, the Norwegian-American mother brings her daughter’s writings to a successful author for review.  She trades her most precious Norwegian recipes for that service.  In the end, the author advises her to tell her daughter to write about what she knows.  Tried and true advice, indeed.  And such is the case with the recently released feature Hope Gap, written and directed by William Nicholson. 

The French film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, ercently released for home viewing, has been nominated for a long list of international film awards and has won a healthy number of them.  With this project, French writer/director Celine Sciamma has intended to depict a story about falling in love and showing the span of a deeply-felt but pretty much unrealizable passion.

From Miss Marple and Nancy Drew to Jessica Fletcher and Agatha Raisin, female sleuths have been solving crimes in the most entertaining ways.  Two recent comedy-drama detective series to feature women detectives are Frankie Drake Mysteries and Queens of Mystery. 

Now that the third season of the award-winning BBC One television series Killing Eve has finished airing, I am wondering if season three was warranted?  In order to give proper consideration to this point at issue, it was necessary to revisit the 16 episodes making up seasons one and two and then consider the content of the most recent season.  To summarize the plot of Killing Eve in a sentence, when a trained assassin is hunted by an unconventional and inexperienced intelligence officer, the two women click.

Two feature films, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Emma., have some real entertainment value but suffer from a number of shortcomings.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that it is expanding its efforts to bring more diversity into its membership an its annual Oscar awards.  For much of the past hundred years, the American film industry establishment hasn’t been particularly welcoming to people of color.  Now that there are many actors, directors, writers and technicians of various races making quality films, it will be interesting to see the results of the improvements the Academy is touting.

FRANKIE is a feature released theatrically a few months ago about a film star who is dying of cancer.  It recently was made available to the home viewing market.  I asked myself, who would think to see a film about a dying person during a pandemic?  My answer was simple.  Many people would, because this movie stars the Oscar-nominated, BAFTA-winning French star Isabelle Huppert who played the lead in Michael Haneke’s THE PIANO TEACHER twenty years ago and in Paul Verhoeven’s suspense film ELLE in 2016.  Furthermore, the producers of ELLE brought us FRANKIE.

Higher Ground Productions, Barack and Michelle Obama’s media production company for distribution through Netflix, has released a new documentary about the 44th First Lady.  It is called Becoming, the same title as her best-selling biographical and philosophical memoir. 

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, my mother often turned down invitations to go for a ride or have a late lunch with friends and family.  Her excuse?  She had to watch her soap operas.  We always laughed off her addiction to these melodramas that presented romance, dysfunctional families, crimes, secrets, and lies.

I believe that most of us have hit a point in our stay-at-home lifestyles where a key element of our existence is comfort. That might mean adding more pillows to the sofa, eating mac-and-cheese more often than usual, or watching the movies and TV shows that we love the most.  These may be programs or films that go back to our happy youth or the first years of our marriage.  They may be entertainments that we almost know by heart. 

With so many folks staying at home these days, families are planning weekly movie nights.  They are searching for films that appeal to all ages and spark lively conversation after viewing.  One such film is Blinded by the Light, a 2019 release, the story of a teen-aged Pakistani-British teenager in 1987 who becomes obsessed with the works of Bruce Springsteen.

Kino Classics has released two films from the golden age of German cinema – films from the Weimar Republic, a particularly rich period for the arts that lasted from the end of World War I until the rise of Hitler.