His father's eyes

Midnight Special

Crit

Tell you one thing: when this comes out on a 25th-anniversary CerebralCortexRay edition, they're not going to be able to plausibly digitize firearms into mobile phones per the film's thematic forebearer E.T.

Tell you another thing: I've seen this film's other Spielbergian progenitor, Close Encounters, 2 or 3 times without ever having it enchant me as I'd been led to believe it would. But this? No question. 

Tell you one more thing: anything Jeff Nichols ever wants to show me, I'm in, no questions asked: in my experience he's 3 for 3, all extra-base hits. In fact, among all the mysteries this film puts on the table, the biggest question mark is why I've never rented Shotgun Stories. But oh, hey, look: it's on Amazon Prime, so I may just rectify that next weekend.

City of Gold

Crit

Never before felt any particular need to visit Los Angeles, but now I do, and not just because Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold has made me hungry for about 20 cuisines (though god knows he's done that, and many of the 20, god help me, are inescapably carnivorous). No, it's more than that: as more than one talking head in the documentary points out, Gold writes about food the way Melville wrote about whaling, by writing about people and life and goodness and pain and love. And if you can spend 90 minutes with Jonathan Gold and not love at least a little the city he loves with his whole huge heart and capacious stomach, well, you're a more fastidious diner than I.

Born to Be Blue

Crit

This is not altogether the standard fuck-up-artist-saved-by-the-love-of-a-good-woman-until-that's-not-enough narrative, but it's too much that, saved from being pro forma by the intensely committed performances of Ethan Hawke (who also directed) as Chet Baker, for a time the best white junkie trumpeter in the world, and Carmen Ejogo as his almost third wife, and ostensibly the first one he loved even fractionally as much as his horn and his heroin.

Sidenote: Hawke obviously feels the same way I do about Baker's egregious misreading of a line in "My Funny Valentine": Ethan sings it as Ira wrote it, "Don't change a hair for me." I'm glad he recognizes the error, but does he have the right to edit his historical subject like that?

Trailers

• The Huntsman: Winter's War--Prequel to Maleficent, which I have on my DVR but have never been able to work up the will to watch. 
• A Bigger Splash--Tilda Swinton as a rock star loved by Ralph Fiennes and Matthias Schoenaerts? Why on earth not?