Category: Pop

Actors and actresses

Catching up on Oscar nominated (and not) performances

In catching up on the Oscar-nominated actor and actress performances, I also checked out some of the performances of non-nominated recent actress-spotlighting movies. Which is to say I made an excuse to go see “Wuthering Heights”(in theaters), a 2026 release that has a good shot at production and costume design nods in next year’s awards season. This Emerald Fennell-directed (she also adapted the screenplay) version feels as much like an adaptation of the Kate Bush song “Wuthering Heights” as it does of Emily Bronte’s book — we mostly get main characters and vibes but only a loose riff on plot from the original text.

Margot Robbie is the Cathy and Jacob Elordi is the gruff Heathcliff, an idea the movie sells mostly by making him look like 2 feet taller than her and eventually giving him a gold tooth. In Bronte-era England, child Heathcliff is “adopted” by Cathy’s drunken father (Martin Clunes) and the two grow up together, forming a deep attachment that turns all heaving chests and longing looks as they get older. But as Cathy’s dad has gambled away the family fortune, Cathy feels compelled to marry wealthy neighbor Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) to secure her future. Angry Heathcliff runs away for a few years and comes back with money of his own but still as angry and heaving as ever. Everybody here seems more comically unhinged than in the book with Edgar’s ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver), whom Heathcliff marries out of revenge, being the kookiest. Perhaps the movie’s most compelling character is Nelly (Hong Chau), presented here not as a servant who grows up with the main characters but as Cathy’s hired companion who is the child of a titled father and mother who is unmentioned (but it’s implied was not married to him) and is stuck by classism and racism in a lonely existence. There are problems with story and character construction but while not good exactly the movie is an enjoyable watch with Cathy’s enormous red dresses, the windy cliffsides and its “let’s do a silly one” approach to the material. For actresses, this movie probably gives more interesting stuff to do to Chau and even Oliver (she wins the “understands the assignment” award with the delivery of a wink) than Robbie, though she does get some great costumes.

Speaking of unhinged fun, I also checked out The Housemaid (rent or purchase), an adaptation of the book by Freida McFadden, directed by Paul Feig and starring Amanda Seyfried having the most fun. She plays Nina Winchester, wife of extremely rich Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar) and mother of sullen child Cece (Indiana Elle). She hires Millie (Sydney Sweeney) as a live-in housemaid — which is a relief for Millie, who is out on parole and in desperate need of a job and a place to live to keep from going back to prison. I haven’t read the book so I had the fun of spending the first chunk of the movie trying to figure out who — the perfect wife, the doting husband, the eager housemaid — will go bananas. The movie then takes you on a fun rollercoaster ride, in which all performers acquit themselves quite well but Seyfried is the standout. This is a truly fun movie night watch.

I also wanted to see what all the fuss (i.e. gleeful derision) was about Ella McCay (Hulu, rent or purchase), a James L. Brooks movie starring Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis and Albert Brooks, among others. This strange dramady with its 1990s vibes (but set for no particular reason in the late aughts) feels very much “what if a tween girl became governor.” The movie writes Ella, an adult woman in her mid 30s, as if she was 13 Going on 30-ed from a middle school student government meeting to the lieutenant governor’s office of some pretend state. Here, this patronizingly drawn character gets the top spot when the previous governor is appointed as a U.S. Secretary of something. Ella is supposed to be hyper-competent and love government and public policy but the character acts as though she’s never paid attention to politics at all, even during an election (including her own). This disconnect does fit with the rest of the movie in that nothing about the characters really makes sense. Everybody — Ella’s beloved aunt played by Curtis, Ella’s estranged father played by Woody Harrelson, Ella’s bodyguard played by Kumail Nanjiani — seems like they are in their own separate movie, with tones and plot focuses entirely different from each other. It’s so thoroughly weird and sexist in a very specific mid 1990s way that I almost recommend it as an oddity that needs to be seen to be believed. Almost.

Back to the Oscars and the lead actress nominations. I enjoyed Jessie Buckley’s performance as Agnes, aka Mrs. Shakespeare, in Hamnet (available for rent or purchase). It really is her movie as she plays a mother dealing with grief and a wife dealing with an artistic husband who needs London — and a life largely away from Agnes and her children — to succeed. She does good work making us feel the weight of all this.

Song Sung Blue (Peacock, rent or purchase) gives Kate Hudson her Oscar nomination for playing Thunder, the stage name for Claire, wife of Lightning or Mike (Hugh Jackman), a journeyman musician playing rock medleys at fairs and the like. When he meets Claire he is both instantly smitten and inspired by her to create a Neil Diamond Experience act, which he names Lightning and Thunder, giving Claire a nickname that she finds delightfully empowering. Hudson is truly the movie’s center, turning in a strong performance of someone who has to fight her way through considerable life hurdles while trying to keep optimistic about what she can accomplish. She’s able to show us all of of that, and a sense of humor, in small gestures and expressions. I am fully team this-era Kate Hudson. I also liked what Ella Anderson and the musician King Princess do here, playing Claire’s and Mike’s, respectively, teenage daughters from previous marriages. This is a movie tells a straightforward story but truly sings because of its performances. Plus some extremely fun music, including, of course, “Sweet Caroline” — bum bum BUM.

As mentioned in my year-end look at films, I lovedRose Byrne as a mom clinging to sanity in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You(HBO Max and for rent and purchase). I saw Bugonia(Peacock, rent and purchase), which got Emma Stone a nomination, a while back and generally did not enjoy it or her performance, which felt like a faded copy of a role she’s played a lot recently, including in 2023’s Poor Things.

In the supporting actress category, I feel like there are no bad options of the three performances I’ve seen: Amy Madigan in Weapons(HBO Max, rent or purchase); Wunmi Mosaku forSinners (HBO Max, rent or purchase) and Teyana Taylor for One Battle After Another (HBO Max, rent or purchase).

I’m setting aside for a moment the two actress nominations for Sentimental Value, which I’ll catch up with when I see the movies nominated for International Feature Film. The movie also earned a supporting actor role. And, in the leading actor category, The Secret Agent, another international film nominee, got a nod.

Diving into the rest of lead actor nominations, I finally caught up with Richard Linklater’sBlue Moon (Netflix, rent or purchase), which received a nomination for Ethan Hawke’s performance as Lorenz Hart. I found Blue Moon thoroughly charming even though (or maybe because) it is self-consciously talky. Hawke is great as suffering chatterbox Hart, living through the nightmare that is longtime professional partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) getting raves on the opening night of Oklahoma!, his first production with Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). Hart praises the musical, derides the musical, snobbily bemoans its popular aspects and begs Rodgers to do another brand new production with him. Through it all he bounces clever anecdotes off the bartender (Bobby Cannavale), the piano player (Jonah Lees) and fellow patron E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy). Hart is at Sardi’s, right where he shouldn’t be to endure all this but also maybe right where he can’t help but be. Among his disappointments is Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a 20-year-old Yale student attending the party who Hart is in love with? Or fascinated by? Or some other kind of tragic situation, that he seems to realize is doomed and yet still has a “but maybe?” hope about it. Hawke turns in a good performance bringing humanity to a character who could have been written off as a passive aggressive blowhard.

Speaking of aggressive aggressive blowhards, let’s talk Marty Supreme(rent or purchase). Directed and co-written by Josh Safdie, this movie has that Safdie brothers sweaty desperate energy that made Uncut Gems such a — not pleasure, exactly. Engaging cinematic panic attack, maybe? Here, while my gut “ugh, with this guy” reaction to Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mouser, wanna-be table tennis star in the 1950s, didn’t really change throughout the movie I did warm to how good Chalamet was at being a jerk on the come up, whose single-minded graspiness has just enough of a spark of charm. He is a good table tennis player and he is horrible at everything else, including basic “being a human” things. He is a guy whose whole vibe is asking for money he will definitely never pay back. It shouldn’t shock Odessa A’zion’s Rachel, Marty’s sometimes situationship, when his immediate reaction to her pregnancy is something like “it’s not mine.”

Solid performances are also to be had from Fran Drescher as Marty’s mother, from Tyler the Creator and Luke Manley as Marty’s friends, from Gwyneth Paltrow as a 1930s film star trying to organize a theatrical comeback and even from, I guess, Kevin O’Leary, Mr. Wonderful himself, as Paltrow’s husband demonstrating a different kind of jerkishness from Marty’s.

Of the movies I’ve seen before, One Battle After Another also got nominations for Leonardo DiCaprio in lead (shrug, sure), and Benicio Del Toro (yay!) and Sean Penn (boo for this cartoon character) in supporting. I would be delighted to watch Michael B. Jordan win for his double performance in Sinners and Delroy Lindo win supporting for his role in that movie. And I didn’t dislike Frankenstein(Netflix) as much as many critics — it’s so pretty! — but c’mon with that Jacob Elordi supporting nomination (for the role of the Creature).

Dragon Cursed by Elise Kova

(Entangled Publishing, 464 pages)

It’s been a minute since I’ve been so enraptured with a book that I removed myself from real-life obligations to immerse myself in a different world, and I have no shame about the fact that the book that brought me to this magical place is a young adult novel. Dragon Cursed is in good company, living on the same shelves as The Hunger Games and Harry Potter.

My skepticism in starting this was less about the genre and more about whether I wanted to read another dragon-themed book, having recently read the non-YA Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros and other dragon-adjacent books. I’m glad I didn’t let that stop me. Dragon Cursed is unique despite some typical tropes, and it’s fun, fast-paced and full of compelling characters. I loved the heroes and hated the villains — and I love that sometimes it was hard to know who was who.

This was only my second experience with an Elise Kova novel, but she’s published many fantasy/romance books and series for adults and young adults. Prior to this I listened to her most recent adult novel, Arcana Academy, on audiobook and really enjoyed it.

Dragon Cursed is set in Vinguard, where dragons are an eternal threat to the people. The main character, 18-year-old Isola, was deemed “Valor Reborn” at age 12 after she survived a face-to-face encounter with a dragon. She then spent six years training with the vicar of Vinguard, who pushed her to her limits, assuming she has the ability to battle the Elder Dragon, as Valor had done.

Isola doesn’t believe she’s Valor Reborn. She’s terrified that she’s actually dragon cursed.

Being dragon cursed means someday transforming into a dragon that can and will destroy anything and everything. To prevent this, every year Vinguard holds a Tribunal for all 18-year-olds.

“Every moment of this Tribunal is a test — a test to ensure that a dragon cursed does not draw breath within the walls of Vinguard,” the vicar says. If there are any signs that there’s a dragon within a tribute, he is killed by Mercy Knights, so called because it is seen as an act of mercy to kill someone before they become a beast.

Heading into the tribunal, Isola worries that every challenge she faces could out her as dragon cursed. She’s not alone, though. She’s there alongside her best friend, Saipha, as well as a few enemies who seem to dislike her because of the attention she’s received as Valor Reborn. And then there’s Lucan, a maybe enemy or maybe friend, who follows her as if he’s been assigned to watch her every move. Lucan was taken in by the vicar and is assumed to be his prodigy, but Lucan’s motives become less clear as he both hurts and helps Isola throughout the trials.

The “is he friend or foe?” trope of course paves the way to a simmering romance between Lucan and Isola. It’s PG, definitely YA appropriate, and just the right balance of frustrating tension, complicated feelings and tender moments.

My 17-year-old daughter just finished the Empyrean series and loved it — except for the rather explicit spicy scenes. So I gave her Dragon Cursed and assured her that it is full of action and drama and dragons, but way lighter on the intimacy.

One minor complaint: The use of magic was confusing at times. There were several instances during the trials where I thought, “Wait, what just happened?” I’m pretty new to the fantasy genre, though, so that could be my lack of understanding of how, for example, sigils work. Fantasy requires a fair amount of suspending disbelief anyway, so this didn’t impact my enjoyment.

Finally, one small pet peeve: the book jacket and promo materials call the human city “Vingard,” but throughout the book it’s “Vinguard.” The first edition of the book is so visually beautiful and the story so well-written that it’s a shame this was overlooked.

Regardless, Dragon Cursed is a fun, moderately suspenseful, lightly romantic addition to the ever-growing lineup of dragon tales. A

Featured Photo: Dragon Cursed by Elise Kova.

Album Reviews 26/02/26

Namasenda, Limbo (YEAR0001 Records)

This one’ll be out in May, when it’ll be used to soundtrack some backseat romancing most wonderfully. This girl is Swedish, and when I was told her stuff was blissfully pop-oriented my mind naturally expected ABBA, which this is in a way, after a purely house/trance fashion, but you should be thinking more Kylie Minogue for the shorthand. She’s been around the Swedish techno underground for a while, breaking through with an EP in 2017; here, she fixates on a sound that I’d characterize as the passion of the AutoTune, a tool that’s all over this thing, but not to the detriment of its sexy mission. Like I alluded to, it’s Kylie for increasingly tech-accustomed ears; neo-trance track “Ultra Bomb” delivers a polite-enough drop composed of pure prettiness, a la Above & Beyond, if you’re familiar. “Cola” combines subdued reggaeton with super-refined pop sugar; “Heaven” gives us similarly innocuous dubstep. Clubgoers won’t want to miss this one. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

U2, Days Of Ash [EP] (Interscope Records)

Not knowing this six-songer was even coming, I received this on (appropriately enough) Ash Wednesday, the day it came out. I hadn’t followed U2’s doings at all since their disastrous co-branding event with Apple in 2014, when 500 million iTunes users found the U2 album Songs Of Innocence rudely shoved into their devices for free, whether they wanted it or not. I liked the band’s first two albums, back in the late Cretaceous, but Bono’s irrepressible epicness got on my nerves upon hearing The Joshua Tree, and I haven’t been back until now, when this album’s Soundcloud stream link was rudely shoved into my emailbox. Now, this is serving as an advance for a full-length album due later this year; the songs focus on headline items like Minneapolis vs. ICE and things like that, with Bono delivering some horribly apathetic vocal lines (sample: “I love you more than hate loves war” in the plodding, apathetically titled “American Obituary,” a tune that microwaves so many old U2 melodies it feels like a medley). The rest of this thing just sucks, like “Song Of The Future,” which convinces the listener that U2 regrets not being more like Flock Of Seagulls or something. Not trying to be edgy or anything, I swear, this is just a really stupid record, fact not opinion. F —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yikes, here comes Friday, Feb. 27, with a bunch of spanking new albums for us to laugh at together, don’t hog the popcorn, I’m only going to say it once! No, I’m kidding, I’m full of love for all bands and music, what would we do without it, but do I really have to include Mitski, who is this generation’s Yoko Ono? Seriously, as with Yoko, you either like Mitski’s awful music or you pretend that it’s viable, and we’re only in this mess because during Yoko’s first appearance in 1972 on The Mike Douglas Show, when Yoko sang a duet with Chuck Berry that sounded like a yowling match between two alley cats, no one dragged her off the stage in a butterfly net. Cut to now, where we have Mitski playing the part of a super-important avant-garde artiste, writing nonsense songs about existentialist whatever, and if your college roommate likes her, there’s no escape unless you decide to quit college. But anyway, she has a new album coming out this week, titled Nothing’s About To Happen To Me, and I’m going to “live review” the title track right now, let me take my tummy medicine and go do this. OK, the video starts out with our heroine being all softcore-sexytime but appropriately slovenly; the beat is mellow French café-style chill but with too much bass and dissonant melody, and then she starts singing, which of course never works out too well, but wait, it’s not all that bad. I think she’s trying to be Portishead, but there’s nothing very cool going on here. Ack, now she’s fooling around with a magnifying glass, making her mouth look huge only because she doesn’t care what anyone thinks of that, and she’s dressed like Rasputina in a poofy Victorian-era dress. OK, this just in, she moved the magnifying glass up to one of her eyes so it looks big. From there nothing much else goes on; to sum up, it’s sort of like 1970s radio pop, a lot better than her last album, not that there’s any music out there that isn’t. At some point I fully expect her to become a Vegas act meant to entertain millennials who had, you know, bad college roommates.

• Oh how adorable, looks who’s back and being all Satan-y, it’s Rob Zombie, who sings about gross devil stuff and Frankensteins and Night Of The Living Dead stuff, the only song I ever really liked from him was “More Human Than Human” because it ripped off Gravity Kills so exquisitely. Naw, I don’t actually hate Rob Zombie; he’s sort of like a heavy metal Herman Munster who watches too many 1980s horror B movies, and I don’t expect much deviation from that template on this new LP, The Great Satan, which opens with “(I’m a) Rock ‘N’ Roller.” Yup it starts with weird Martian sounds, and then it becomes evil and doomy and industrial, like Skinny Puppy for dummies. I don’t mind it, nope.

• British “virtual band” Gorillaz are back again, with more collaborations and cartoon antics and music I don’t personally like, on “their” new album, The Mountain! If you like ’80s krautrock with Aughts-era falsetto vocals, you’ll love the new single “The Happy Dictator,” which includes a feat from Sparks, believe it or not.

• We’ll round out the week with Bruno Mars, you remember him, from back when you were in junior high just a couple of years ago, when there was still some faint semblance of hope for humanity. Yes, his new album is The Romantic, which spotlights the title track, in which he does all sorts of Bone Thugs And Harmony scat-singing over a poppy 1970s-pseudo-jazz beat that evokes Drake covering an Otis Redding song or whatnot. It’s OK! —Eric W. Saeger

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: The Grownup Noise, No Straight Line in the Universe and Jennie Arnau, A Rising Tide

Album Reviews 26/02/19

The Grownup Noise, No Straight Line in the Universe (self-released)

The focus of this Boston-based act, which has had a rapidly revolving door-load of short-term members, is bridging the gap between Americana and indie-rock, which, it seems to me, has been handled quite well by Wilco to name just one band. These tunes are full of great sounds and some very deft musicianship, but there’s more twee here than indie, and not enough bluegrass to qualify as high-grade Americana. That pretty much sums up the failure — or resistance — on the part of critics to “classify” them properly, not that that’s as important as being recognized as a band that has great songs, but knowing that these guys are happily well-entrenched in the Boston scene, (still) with all its Evan Dandos and Morphines, should answer some people’s questions. Their fatal flaw is singer Paul Hansen, whose unflustered, bland tenor doesn’t do the songs much justice, but that’s a matter of taste of course. In the end it’s a Boston alt-rock band that’s a cross between Guster and, jeez, I don’t know, Yo La Tengo; I can’t feign enthusiasm for it. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Jennie Arnau, A Rising Tide (self-released)

The middle of the Americana/alt-country road — and I mean right in the middle, where it doesn’t pay to remain very still because a zillion other artists might run you over — is where this New Yorker finds her comfort zone. She’s been out of it for 15 years until this album, which is said to exhibit “southern charm meets New York grit, with a healthy dose of heart,” which might describe Sheryl Crow, to whom Arnau’s been compared, but nah, I’d say the tunes feel like a more organic Waxahatchee. The instrumentation is another matter, an all-hands-on-deck affair that runs the gamut from Sade-tinted yacht-pop (“Sail Away”) to Lucinda Williams cowboy-waltzing (“Mabel”) to Smoke Fairies banjo-folk (“The King”). “Young and Alone,” the pensive but wispy focus track, is an honest labor of love calling into question the broken system that’s resulted in countless school shootings across the country; she’ll be donating proceeds from the song to Everytown for Gun Safety. B+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yay, new albums coming out on Friday, Feb. 20! The new-album race is heating up as we speak, now that the holidays are over and Valentine’s Day is over and the most pathetic Super Bowl performance by the New England Patriots since their 46-10 loss to the Chicago Bears in 1986 is over, like, there’s really no days off for you slackers to look forward to until Memorial Day, unless you choose to finally surrender a few of the 300 comp days you’ve hoarded or, in the case of most workers, just quit your job and move back in with your ex! It’s all good, do whatever feels right is what I say, and maybe a few of these new albums will cheer you up, who knows, but of course the biggest “music news” of February was the Super Bowl halftime show led by Puerto Rican reggaeton-rapper Bad Bunny, because no one could shut up about it on their social media whatevers! For no reason whatsoever, it turned into a controversy, because Bunny sang and rapped in Spanish, which one would normally expect, given that that’s, you know, what he does; to me it was a cool thing for the NFL to do again, recognizing Latin culture as a major component in the country’s DNA, and that’s really about it. I didn’t find the music to be all that groundbreaking, like, there’s all sorts of great reggaeton, merengue, salsa and mambo to be found if you spend a few seconds looking, for instance there’s the five-hour ¡Con Salsa! show on WBUR radio (90.9 FM in Boston) every Saturday starting at 10 p.m. if you could use some perfect afterparty ambience (you can also stream the whole show on the station’s website), but either way the vibe is almost universally positive, so what’s the harm? Sure, some people took the halftime show as an affront somehow, but they probably didn’t mind that Chubby Checker and The Ronettes played at 1988’s halftime show or that Gloria Estefan and Stevie Wonder played 1999’s “Celebration of Soul, Salsa and Swing” halftime show, and so on and so forth. Now, one conservative buddy of mine on Facebook said he simply didn’t like Latin music and could leave it at that, which I commended him for. I mean, in the end, it’s younger people who buy albums, so trotting out the Rolling Stones again like they did in 2006 in order to trigger nostalgic feels in people who can barely remember the last time they had a legitimate Billboard No. 1 hit song (they didn’t come close that year) would be a bit of a disservice to the record-buying public, don’t you think? Whatever, I’m sure people will flip out over whoever plays next year’s Super Bowl halftime show, but for the record I’d be fine if they went country-indie-rock, like, say, with Mumford & Sons as the headliner, since they’re so much more relevant than Kings of Leon now. In fact, the Mumfords release their new LP, Prizefighter, this week, featuring the pretty-epic-pretty title track and “The Banjo Song,” which is similarly sweeping and epic. I like them, the end.

• Florida power-pop band New Found Glory release their 11th album Listen Up this week. They haven’t charted for at least six years, because boring, but the new single “Beer and Blood Stains” has a pretty filthy guitar sound and actually has a pulse.

• Also this week, electroclash icon Peaches releases No Lube So Rude, and of course the title track is awesome. It is made of dubstep, goth-industrial and diva-pop smothered in pure lunacy.

• We’ll close with Hilary Duff, aka Lizzie McGuire to people who are around 35. The new record, Luck Or Something, includes the single “Roommates,” which is pretty and pleasant, sort of like a kinder gentler Alanis Morissette. — Eric W. Saeger

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: The Grownup Noise, No Straight Line in the Universe and Jennie Arnau, A Rising Tide

The Emergency, by George Packer

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 401 pages)

During the Covid-19 pandemic, George Packer often traveled between rural New York and New York City. They seemed like two different worlds, he told the Pittsburgh Review of Books. The dichotomy underpins Packer’s dystopian novel The Emergency.

It centers on 48-year-old surgeon Dr. Hugo Rustin, struggling to adapt to his new life after the collapse of the government, defined only as “the empire.” There was a standoff in the capital that lasted for weeks and devolved into fighting between mobs, and before long the leadership and police fled and looting began. A new form of governance emerged, more egalitarian than the old system, marked by the motto “Together.”

Rustin was happy to do what he could to keep the hospital running. But as Together took hold, he began to resent some of the changes — how people under his command called him by his first name, how titles like “nurse” or “housekeeper” were replaced with “healing associate” and patients were called “healing recipients.”

He finally snaps when a junior associate points out a mistake at the end of a grueling day. That results in Rustin being called into a meeting — a “Restoration Ring” — where his colleagues recite principles of Together like “I am no better and neither are you” and “Listen to the young.” Rustin tries to apologize without compromising his values, and it doesn’t go well. He is advised to spend a month wandering around the city and then come back and share the lessons he has learned.

Meanwhile, Rustin’s wife, Annabelle, is caught up in the spirit of Together and starts a ministry of sorts helping to care for the homeless “Strangers” constructing tent encampments near their home. His son Pan and his daughter Selva, too, have taken up the cause.

It is the father-daughter relationship that is at the heart of this book, as Dr. Rustin and Selva attempt a dangerous journey in a dystopian world even while bickering about the ordinary things families bicker about. Rustin understands that Selva’s beliefs, as much as he thinks they are wrong, come from a good place — at one point, she tells him, she has been angry with him “because you never believed the world could be better or worse than the one you gave me. And that breaks my heart.”

And Packer makes it clear that there were things wrong in the pre-Emergency world; for one thing, the disdainful way Rustin and those of his standing referred to the bottom 10 percent, the ones barely getting by and often succumbing to addiction, as “Excess Burghers.”

But there are uncomfortable things in the new world, too, such as the “Suicide Spot” — a gallows where young people go and put a noose around their neck, and are then talked out of the act by young people serving as “Guardians.” It is a ghastly sort of therapy, but the Guardians take pride that they have not lost a child. And there are ghastly things that father and daughter encounter as they venture beyond the city’s borders in hope of reuniting a “Stranger” father in the city with his missing son.

From the opening pages of the novel it is clear we are being asked to consider what happens when a society of disparate means and morality throws out the old ways of being for a new order. But it is not clear whether Dr. Rustin is the hero or the antihero in this world. That is one of the mysteries that propels the reader through the story; it is as compelling as whether Hugo, Annabelle and their children can stay together in a Together world. Give Packer credit for not revealing his hand; this is a deeply nuanced book. Most astonishingly, it’s also occasionally funny. B+

Featured Photo: The Emergency, by George Packer

Oscar documentaries

Many of this year’s Oscar-nominated feature-length (four of the five nominees) and short-film documentaries (three of the five) are available for home viewing and make for compelling, though not particularly lighthearted, watches.

My pick in the Documentary Feature category would be The Perfect Neighbor (Netflix), a chilling look at a sour neighbor relationship that turns tragic and is told largely through police body cams. The movie gets the drumbeat of dread going from the beginning.

It’s often the inmates telling their own story in The Alabama Solution (HBO Max), which looks at the abuse and neglect of prisoners in the state’s prison system and their attempts to get somebody to listen to their plight. Come See Me in the Good Light (Apple TV+) is a sad, beautiful and frequently funny look at Colorado Poet Laureate Andrea Gibson as they battle an incurable cancer, fighting for a chance to do one last live show and get more time with their wife, poet and author Megan Falley. In Mr. Nobody Against Putin (VOD and streaming on Kino Film Collection), a videographer at a school in Russia is horrified by the increasing amount of government propaganda pushed on the students and unsure how to help them and himself.

Of the short documentaries: I watched the 33-minute All the Empty Rooms (Netflix) in small chunks over several days — it offers heartwrenching interviews with four families whose kids were killed in school shootings and gives us a look at the bedrooms they left behind, with all their photos and stuffies and bits of hopeful kid-ness. In Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud (HBO Max), Craig Renaud talks about the work and death of his journalist brother, including a look at Brent’s focus on the people caught in war zones. Also on HBO Max, The Devil Is Busyoffers a well-constructed day-in-the-life of a woman who works at a women’s health care clinic and the stress and threat of violence she and her colleagues face.

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