Category: Film Reviews

The Bubble (R)

Karen Gillan, Pedro Pascal.

Also Peter Serafinowicz, Rob Delaney, Maria Bakalova, Leslie Mann, Iris Apatow, Keegan-Michael Key, David Duchovny, Fred Amisen, Kate McKinnon and so many more in this Judd Apatow-directed and co-written endeavor. Gillan, Mann, Duchovny, Key, Pascal and young Apatow play the central characters shooting the sixth movie of a dinosaur-based action franchise in a pandemic movie-set bubble at an English estate. Their time on the shoot begins with a 14-day quarantine wherein we watch actress Carol (Gillan) nearly lose her mind. Then the actors continue to drive each other crazy while they begin the movie itself, what with all the jockeying for a better lines, the various dramas of their personal lives and the cabin fever of being confined to a hotel.

Coming in at more than two hours, The Bubble very much feels like an extended director’s cut on a concept that was still being worked out even as the movie was being shot, with lots of flabbiness and seemingly every idea that anyone had depicted on screen. Particularly in the first half or even first two thirds, you almost feel like you’re watching a collection of sketches on a theme more than a straightforward narrative. The movie pulls itself together toward the end, finding a (relatively) tighter pacing and more laughs.

While I would be happy to never watch another pandemic-related bit of content ever again, The Bubble is more of a “movie set” movie than a “pandemic” movie and its affability builds as it goes along. And it helps that the cast is full of people who seem to understand the assignment and are having fun. It’s a perfectly serviceable bit of comedy to have on when you are looking to devote 40 to 63 percent of your attention to something. B- Available on Netflix.

The New Hampshire Jewish Film Festival kicks off Thursday, March 31, and runs through Sunday, April 10, with 16 films in all — 11 features, five shorts and four in-person screenings. Most of the movies also will be available virtually, either during the festival itself or during a bonus week, April 11 through April 24.

Tickets start at $12 for individual screenings or you can buy packages for screenings of all movies, virtual only ($118) or in-person and virtual ($130 for one person, $180 for two). See nhjewishfilmfestival.com for details and check out Meghan Siegler’s story on page 10 of the March 24 (last week’s) issue of the Hippo (which you can find at hippopress.com).

Thanks to the organizers, I got advance screenings to a few of the films.

The festival kicks off with an in-person screening of The Automat at the Rex Theatre (23 Amherst St. in Manchester) on Thursday, March 31, at 7 p.m. with a post-film discussion with director Lisa Hurwitz and collector/restorer Steve Stollman. If you can’t make it to that screening, you can also watch the movie during the virtual screening bonus week.

Either way, this movie, like the coffee it so lovingly describes, is well worth the price. This is an absolute charmer of a documentary about the Horn & Hardart chain of automats, which dominated the New York and Philadelphia restaurant scene in the early and mid 20th century. Put a nickel in a slot and open the compartment to reveal the pie or sandwich or creamed spinach you’d been craving, and another nickel gets you coffee so good that Mel Brooks sings a song about it over the documentary’s closing credits. Brooks appears throughout the documentary along with Carl Reiner and Elliott Gould explaining the place of this democratizing but also stylish eatery in their youth and young adulthood. (Descriptions of the restaurants’ gleaming floors, brass fixtures and high ceilings reminded me of discussions of similar era movie palaces and suggest a real luxury-for-all approach to design in public spaces — in case anybody is looking for a senior thesis.) Also appearing here are Wilson Goode, former mayor of Philadelphia, as well as Colin Powell and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, discussing both the food (there’s a lot of pie talk, be prepared to get hungry) and the social vibe created by a space where a business exec, a member of New York’s booming (in the 1920s) female workforce and a blue-collar worker would share a table and where recent immigrants to New York could feel welcome.

You also get the business side of the restaurant — how it rose and the forces that led to its fall. It’s a delightful story told with great fondness and humor.

I had the great good fortune of watching Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen at the start of Oscar weekend and it was a perfect way to kick off a weekend of thinking about the art and craft of movies. This documentary (which will be available during the bonus week) offers a great examination of all parts of the movie-making process as it looks at how the successful Broadway musical was translated into the 1971 movie. The songs and the way director Norman Jewison wanted to block a scene influenced the production design, just as the casting of the actresses and finding their comfortable key influenced the way John Williams brought the music of the stage musical to the screen. How do you recreate the look of a turn-of-the-20th-century shtetl in Ukraine some 60-plus years later, after wars and during the Cold War? Jewison discusses finding an Anatevka-like village in the former Yugoslavia.

Jeff Goldblum narrates this documentary, which features interviews with the three actresses who played the older daughters, Topol (the actor who played Tevye), and members of the film crew as well as people, like critic Kenneth Turan, talking about the story and the movie from a cultural-relevance perspective.

The shorts program features five films and you can purchase 48-hour access to the five-film block at any time from March 31 to April 10. The films are Ganef, Beefies, The Shabbos Goy, Mazel Tov Cocktail and The Tattooed Torah and they are a diverse mix in terms of style, tone and theme.

The Tattooed Torah presents as an animated storybook, with the screen panning across pictures but with people popped out from the background to give depth and blinking eyes and other small animated details that add a liveliness to the scenes. Ed Asner narrates the story of a boy and a beloved Torah in Czechoslovakia before and during World War II. The story is based on a book of the same name written by Marvell Ginsburg and illustrated by Martin Lemelman.

As with that movie, Masel Tov Cocktail slips bits of history into its tale about a teenager named Dima (Alexander Wertmann), a post-Cold War Jewish-Russian immigrant to Germany. He wrestles with his frustration, all teenage righteousness and humor, over the way Germans — the prejudiced and the well-meaning — pull him into their views of World War II and what their ancestors did (or, as some claim, definitely weren’t a part of). The short is the fourth directing credit (all shorts) for directors Arkadij Khaet and Mickey Paatzsch, according to IMDb, and it has that entertaining, scrappy indie film energy.

Ganefwill be familiar to viewers of the 2021 Manhattan Short Film Festival. It’s a tight drama about the residual effects of trauma that features Sophie McShera (best known as Daisy from Downton Abbey) playing Lynn, the housekeeper to the Hirth family, who live in an upper-class house in England. Mrs. Hirth (Lydia Wilson) tells her young daughter Ruthie (Izabella Dzeiwanska) that people can’t take what they don’t know you have — a lesson she learned as a child in Frankfurt, Germany. It’s a smartly told story that clocks in at about 14 minutes.

Beefies is a charming tale about Josh (Adam Lebowitz-Lockard), a man trying to figure out the recipe to his late mother’s “beefies” dish. (Lebowitz-Lockard wrote and directed Beefies; on the website he describes the dish as his own mother’s “sort of beef stew/stroganoff dish of meat and veggies” which he hasn’t been able to reverse engineer since she died.). In Beefies, Josh finds clues in his mother’s papers but realizes that to get answers he’ll have to call Mark (Goran Ivanovski), the brother he’s been estranged from. The movie is a sweet family tale that gets bonus points for the rare good use of pandemic as story point.

The Shabbos Goy is my favorite of the pack. This movie stars Milana Vayntrub, perhaps still best known as the lady from the AT&T commercials. As the movie poster explains, the titular person is a non-Jewish person who performs certain tasks that religious law prohibits a Jewish person from doing on the Sabbath or, more succinctly, “a human loophole.” During a gathering with her family and her future in-laws, Hannah (Vayntrub) is desperate to keep her engagement on track but won’t break the Sabbath by turning off her, er, personal device when it is accidentally activated. She runs out to find a non-Jewish person to help her, leading her to Davian (Devere Rogers), who first tries to ignore her when she crazily tries to wave him down. The movie is written and directed by Talia Osteen, who has a director credit on the Hulu movie Sex Appeal (also a fun trailer) and it is executive produced by Paul Feig.

Oscar wrap-up

If there’s one thing you’ll remember from last Sunday’s Oscars, it’s that you need to watch CODA.

OK, one other thing.

Truly, though, if you have “meh-ed” at Oscar nominees — which isn’t an unfair response in 2021 when the movies never fully felt back — hopefully CODA’s wins will entice you to check it out. It won for best picture, best adapted screenplay and best supporting actor for Troy Kotsur, who co-starred with Marlee Matlin as the deaf parents of a hearing teen (Emilia Jones) in this truly heartwarming movie. It’s on Apple TV+.

Another winner worth seeking out is Summer of Soul (… Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), the documentary that won Questlove an Oscar (which you may have missed while Googling “Chris Rock Will Smith was it a bit?”). That excellent documentary about the multi-concertHarlem Cultural Festival is on Hulu and Disney+ and is available for rent or purchase (and you can also purchase the very excellent soundtrack).

Another winner that might have gotten lost in the evening’s proceedings for a different reason (it was one of the awards cut from the broadcast and then deep-faked back in, as writer Chris V. Feil described in a tweet) was The Queen of Basketball, the winning documentary short, which is available on nytimes.com. It’s a charming profile of Lucy Harris, a star college (and Olympic) basketball player in the 1970s who was drafted by, but never played for, the New Orleans Jazz.

Then feel free to shut the book on the whole messy 2021 in the Oscar-verse, with its category strife, its lack of real surprises among the winners (though my swing-for-the-fences guesses led to my still only correctly predicting a little more than half the winners) and all-over-the-place ceremony even before the infamous slap. Or, at least, shut the book after one more watch of the beautifully staged Beyonce opener and the uneven but lively at least “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” remix.

The Adam Project (PG-13)

Ryan Reynolds, Jennifer Garner.

This Netflix action-comedy also stars Zoe Saldaña, Catherine Keener and Mark Ruffalo.

Ryan Reynolds plays that one Ryan Reynolds character again in this movie about time travel, fathers and sons and digital de-aging. Adam Reed (Reynolds) is a pilot from 2050; Adam Reed (Walker Scobell) is also a present-day tween getting in fights at school and sparring with his mom, Ellie (Garner), due in part to his anger and grief over the death of his scientist dad (Ruffalo). When his mom goes out one night for a date, Adam ventures into the backyard to investigate strange sounds only to find a man bleeding in his late father’s workshed. The man knows where to find the first aid supplies, knows the special trick to closing the refrigerator and has the same scar on his chin as young Adam. The man also has the same “Deadpool but PG-13” speaking style as the kid so even if we didn’t know going in it was grown-up Adam, we’d know young Adam had just met his older self.

Neither Adam seems particularly delighted to be in their own company — younger Adam is excited that he gets ripped in the future but is annoyed older Adam won’t give him any information; older Adam meanwhile is embarrassed at having to re-experience his tween self and is annoyed that he’s landed in 2022 as he had meant to go to 2018. In this future where time travel is possible, Adam has ventured back in search of his wife, Laura (Saldana), who was lost (or was she?) during a time traveling mission.

How exactly time travel has affected the world is one of many things that’s sort of yada yada-ed here (generally, it’s not good, is what the movie tells us) along with pretty much everything about what 2050 is like and why Maya Sorian (Keener), Adam’s boss, is such a big noise in the future. Basically, she becomes another evil tech villain whose big accomplishment is becoming rich with destructive technology and follows the Adams into the past to protect her own personal future.

This is some extremely middling fare whose success as entertainment is wholly determined by how much you like that one Ryan Reynolds character. Reynolds is fine and he has a good rapport with the kid who is his younger self (who in turn is doing a pretty good Ryan Reynolds impersonation, really hitting all the beats of the Ryan Reynolds Chatty Insult TM). Sort of like the recent “Channing Tatum + dog” movie, the affability of the lead is fuel that runs this movie. But The Adam Project, while possessing of a more elaborate story than “man and dog road trip,” has less nuance to it. From the very shallow world-building to the third-best dad-rock music choices, The Adam Project feels like it was given about half the effort it needed. While Channing Tatum’s Dog was sort of enjoyably mediocre, The Adam Project feels more like something inoffensive to have on while you drift in and out of a nap. C+ Available on Netflix.

Lucy and Desi (PG)

If Being the Ricardos is too idiosyncratically Aaron Sorkin for you but you like Lucille Ball and/or television history, this documentary, directed by Amy Poehler, is a nice way to examine the working and personal relationship of the couple and their impact on television with all the men-explaining-comedy-to-women stuff stripped away. Here, largely narrated by interviews and tapes of Lucille and ex-husband Desi Arnaz talking about their life, you get a more straightforward look at their professional partnership, which, much like their friendship, outlasted their at times rocky marriage. Also adding commentary is Lucie Arnaz, their oldest child, as well as the children of some of their behind-the-scenes collaborators and women like Carol Burnett and Bette Midler talking about what Ball meant to them professionally. Without getting tabloidy, the movie has some interesting insights about the Ball-Arnaz marriage and the difficulty of building something big in their professional lives while also trying to keep their marriage together and the way work and family clashed. B+ Available on Amazon Prime.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (R)

Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher.

And by “rated R” I mean hard R, with people cut in half and Bellagio-in-Oceans 11-style fountains of blood. Very R.

I know I have seen some previous Chainsaws — could not even begin to tell you which ones or what happened in them — but the movie doesn’t seem to be some mid-arc entry into the franchise and feels more like it is going the route of the recent Halloween entries, with some connection to the 1970s original but easy enough to follow for new joiners.

Melody (Yarkin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore) are chefs and partners in a plan to colonize with hipsters a small, nearly desolate Texas town where every interaction with the locals seems vaguely hostile but at least the real estate is super cheap. Their plan is to open a restaurant, an art gallery owned by Dante’s fiancée, Ruth (Nell Hudson), and maybe even a comic book store owned by Lila (Fisher), Melody’s sister — you know, zhuzh up this deserted-during-the-Dust-Bowl looking town. Hey, cool, says Lila, but I’m still getting over my trauma from surviving a school shooting and this place is seven hours from my friends so, like, maybe not? But Melody and Dante have a busload of “investors” coming and so they are charging ahead with their plans, even when Melody gets into a spat with Richter (Moe Dunford), a contractor and mechanic who doesn’t enjoy being patronized by hipsters, and Dante is fed up with the woman (Alice Krige) who seems to be squatting in one of the buildings despite having been evicted by the bank weeks earlier. Also, she’s flying a Confederate flag outside her building, which he feels like will not be so great for business with the from-this-century young people he’s got coming to check the town out.

That woman claims she squared everything with the bank and has run that home, the town orphanage, for decades. There is one last person in her care — she calls him baby (Mark Burnham), I think — and he doesn’t do so well out in the world so they need to stay. We never get a good straight-on look at Baby; we mostly see his hulking person in shadow. But we, and Melody, get enough of a look at him to know that something bad will come of their removal, especially when it leads the woman to have some kind of medical emergency.

This movie is mostly a straightforward “run, stab, run, stab” affair (well, actually, it’s more like “run, bludgeon, run, hack, run, chainsaw”). And if you like that sort of thing, with the gore and the screaming, this would seem to deliver the basics. But it doesn’t really do more and, similar to those recent Halloween installments, for me it quickly gets kind of, well, boring seems like the wrong word but — tedious? Repetitive? Fast-forwardable?

The movie does have some funny moments, not laugh out loud but more like a “ha.” And maybe it has some messaging — anti-gentrification? pro-gun? — but I feel like it more has “ideas about ideas” than it has actual ideas. Maybe there is some sense that having more than just slashing and screaming brings in a bigger crowd but it doesn’t really put forth a lot of baked-in-the-story effort in that direction. Genre die-hards might have a different opinion, but for me, for the horror agnostic, it’s a C Available on Netflix.

The Royal Treatment (TV-PG)

Mena Massoud, Laura Marano.

You know Massoud from playing Aladdin in the Guy Ritchie live-action remake and Marano from, like, around (she’s a singer, she was on a Disney Channel show, she was in The War with Grandpa). Here, they are the couple from opposite worlds: he’s Prince Thomas from Lavania, a country with a vague “International Location” aesthetic, and she’s Izzy, a hairstylist and wannabe world traveler from New York. When a Siri mistake has his butler-type guy Walter (Cameron Rhodes) call her (instead of some similarly named chi-chi salon), Izzy is at first delighted to cut hair for about 10 times her normal rate. But when she witnesses Thomas’ handler, Madame Fabre (Sonia Gray), being rude to a hotel staffer, she takes Thomas to task for not intervening on the staffer’s behalf. He apparently likes this check on his privilege because he eventually hires Izzy and two of her fellow stylists to come to Lavania to do hair and makeup for his forthcoming wedding to Lauren (Phoenix Connolly), a woman he barely knows but whom his parents are really keen for him to marry because her parents “own half of Texas.”

Though it’s been decades since I’ve seen it, this light and friendly rom-com called to mind The Beautician and the Beast (and also the TV show The Nanny, both Fran Drescher vehicles) with notes of The Princess Diaries (there is a fun mention of Genovia) and your standard Cinderella story. Nobody is all that evil, no comeuppance is all that harsh, nobody is all that compelling, but they are all perfectly pleasant to spend time with if you just need a little cotton candy fairy tale. B- Available on Netflix.

Kimi (R)

Zoë Kravitz, Rita Wilson.

Angela (Kravitz) listens professionally — her job for Amygdala is listening to clips recorded from a Siri/Alexa-type device called Kimi and translating, say, a request to order “kitchen towels” into a Kimi-recognized request for paper towels. She is sent streams of audio recorded from Kimi devices and decodes them in her home, where she works, exercises, occasionally sees a neighbor who has become something not quite a boyfriend (Terry, played by Byron Bowers) and does everything else in life. Angela, still healing after an assault and further distressed since the pandemic, is agoraphobic and can’t bring herself to leave her apartment, even to meet Terry for a quick bite at the food truck parked outside their apartments.

In one of the streams Kimi generates, Angela hears something more than just confusing regional slang or a common-word song title. Under a layer of loud music, she hears something that at first she thinks could be a sexual assault but then, as she digs deeper, she believes could be a murder. The more information she gathers, the more Angela realizes that she will have to leave her apartment to find help.

This Steven Soderbergh-directed movie is impressively economical — using everything in exactly the right amounts and pulling in only the characters (and only the amount of the characters and their lives) and story elements it’s going to need. At an hour and 29 minutes, it gives you just the right amount of story as well, turned up to the right speed to give you maximum tension as Angela tries to uncover what has happened and then get that information to the right people before she becomes another victim. Kimi is the sleek, well-crafted answer to the question of how to make a thriller on a budget. B+ Available on HBO Max.

Flee (PG-13)

This animated documentary (nominated in for Oscars in the animated feature, documentary and international film categories) tells the tale of Amin Nawabi — not, according to a story in Variety, the man’s real name, even though I believe it is the real “Amin’s” voice that we hear in the movie and he has a co-writing credit along with the director, Jonas Poher Rasmussen (whose voice is also featured). Amin is the identity created to protect the man who is now happily married — to Kaspar, who I think we also hear (I’m not sure if that’s his real name, though I suspect it is his real voice) — and living in Denmark. Amin was born in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the story of how he and his family tried (occasionally failing) to escape the country when the Soviet occupation ended and the civil war began is the story Amin is telling Jonas, a little at a time, with increasing veracity the more Amin comes to trust Jonas.

Rendered mostly in a spare but beautiful color sketch-style of animation, Amin’s story follows his family as they flee — first to Russia and then attempting to go further west, perhaps to Sweden, where his adult oldest brother already lives. Along the way, the family’s legal situation grows ever more precarious — they only ever have tourist visas in Russia — and the weight of hiding and being at the mercy of unscrupulous traffickers and even more unscrupulous Russian police drags at all of the family members, particularly Amin’s close-in-age older brother Saif.

As Amin ages, he is also coming to a better understanding of himself and his sexuality. His struggles with his fears about how his family might receive this information and struggles with the balance between living the life that might do his family the most good (one largely dedicated to work) and one that makes him feel safe and happy.

Similar to Persepolis, the animation allows you to experience Amin’s story as though you are inside his mind, with images that focus on the emotions of a moment — fear, sorrow, loneliness, excitement. It’s an engrossing way to absorb this story, while occasional archival newsclips help to ground it in a past that feels particularly relevant to this moment in world history. A Available for rent or purchase.

Ice Age: The Adventures of Buck Wild (PG)

Simon Pegg, Justina Machado.

In the grand tradition of TV series adaptations of movies starring none of the original characters and direct-to-video sequels featuring sound-alike (maybe) voices, Ice Age, the previously five-movie animated franchise, gets a sixth movie sidequel thing that is direct to streaming.

Gone are your Ray Romano and Queen Latifah and parade of big name vocal talent (except for Pegg, who voices Buck, the crazy weasel, as he apparently did in previous movies, so Wikipedia explains, which I consulted because this Ice Age saga is basically an All My Children-like web of characters, relationships and story points). Instead, Manny (voice of Sean Kenin) the mammoth, Sid (voice of Jake Green) the sloth and Diego (voice of Skyler Stone) the saber-tooth tiger are voiced by people doing a facsimile of Romano, John Leguizamo and Denis Leary, respectively. Latifah’s Ellie (now voiced by Dominique Jennings), a female mammoth who showed up in the second movie and is now Manny’s wife, and her adopted possum brothers Eddie (Aaron Harris) and Crash (Vincent Tong) are also voiced by new actors. And several characters — Sid’s grandma voiced by Wanda Sykes, Manny and Ellie’s daughter Peaches, and a Jennifer Lopez-voiced love interest for Diego — have been lopped off entirely. Which, whatever; in my review of the last movie “way too many characters” was one of my criticisms.

The main characters are sort of shunted to the side here, with the story focusing on Eddie and Crash, who are chafing under the constant sisterly bossing by Ellie and want to strike out on their own. They end up wandering back to the Lost World, the dinosaur-filled valley beneath the Earth’s surface where the characters spent some time in a previous movie, and meet up once again with Buck Wild (Pegg), the off-kilter one-eyed adventurer who enforces a “land for all animals” peace. The boys decide to hang with Buck and help him on his current adventure: stopping a big-brained dino named Orson (voice of Utkarsh Ambudkar) from upsetting the dino-mammal coexistence in the Lost World.

I don’t fault this movie for not getting back its big money players or for moving the action — set in some vague part of the franchise timeline — to some side characters. I do fault it for not being weird enough about the whole thing. Let Buck, who has a pumpkin he calls his daughter, be weirder; let Crash and Eddie be zanier. At its best, Ice Age was never great, but it had some nice Looney Tunes elements in Scrat, the saber-tooth squirrel always thisclose to getting his acorn, and in the dopey wise-guy nature of Sid. Here, everything feels muffled, like the volume has been turned down on all the wacky and goofy — even Buck feels flatter. This movie, which doesn’t even hit the 90-minute mark and is clearly being delivered as Disney+ filler, doesn’t need a super strong emotional arc but it does need to be constantly appealing to its young audience. It didn’t feel like it consistently had that big energy. One of my younger elementary schoolers proclaimed it “boring” by about 10 minutes in, though later he did decide it was “kinda cool.”

Similar to what I said in my recent review of the fourth Hotel Transylvania installment, I think this movie’s principal selling point is that it is available in your home right now for no extra cost. This movie is probably even more younger-kid-audience-friendly than that one as it has fewer adult-type problems. It is, for a day when your kids just need new content and you just need them to settle down for a bit, fine but doesn’t offer anything more. C Available on Disney+.

Oscar movie season!

Welcome to the new class of Oscar nominees! The nominations for the 94th annual Academy Awards were announced on Feb. 8 and this year there are 10 contenders for best picture (the Oscar winners will be announced on March 27). If you’re still looking to catch up on the films of 2021, the list of nominees is an excellent place to start. Here are the best picture nominees and where to find them:

• Belfast (PG-13) Kenneth Branagh wrote and directed this semi-autobiographical tale of a boyhood amid the unrest of Northern Ireland in the 1960s. It is available for rent at home and it is still in theaters, including Red River Theatres in Concord, where it returns starting Friday, Feb. 11.

• CODA (PG-13) This excellent story about a teen who discovers her singing talent and her changing relationship with her parents might be my favorite of this group. It is available on Apple TV+.

• Don’t Look Up (R) Adam McKay directed and wrote the screenplay for this satire, which you can find on Netflix, that stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence.

• Drive My Car (NR) This Japanese film also nabbed a Best International Film nomination as well as nominations in other categories and is the one movie of this group I haven’t seen yet. It is currently in theaters in the Boston area.

• Dune (PG-13) Not surprisingly, this beautiful-to-look-at adaptation also nabbed several nominations for the look and sound of the film. It is currently available for rent or purchase and will return to HBO Max on March 10.

• King Richard (PG-13) Will Smith also got a Best Actor in a Lead Role nod for this movie about Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena Williams. The movie is available for purchase.

• Licorice Pizza (R) For me, the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s was this real star of this Paul Thomas Anderson story about a precocious 15-year-old and the twentysomething girl he falls for. The movie is currently in theaters.

• Nightmare Alley (R) This movie from director Guillermo del Toro was another one that wowed me more for its aesthetics. It is currently playing in theaters in the Boston area and available via HBO Max.

• The Power of the Dog (R) This Jane Campion-directed movie nabbed a slew of nominations, including nods in three acting categories and for Campion in the director category (making her the only woman nominated in that category this year). Find it on Netflix.

• West Side Story (PG-13) Steven Spielberg’s very good adaptation of the musical got Ariana DeBose a much deserved nomination in the Best Actress in a Supporting Role category for Anita, among its many nominations. It is currently in theaters.