Tweed pressed, best vest

Laavor et hakir (The wedding plan)

Crit

What a silly, lazy-Hollywood-flick premise this is: her engagement ends, but she goes ahead making plans for the wedding, needing only to snag a groom by Hanukkah. In fact, there will doubtless be a lazy Hollywood remake of this, but accept no substitutes: this is a moving film about faith, doubt, and desperation. Any film that can make me feel the tug of religious orthodoxy, even Orthodoxy, is doing something special. A gem.

Cross purposes

Alien: Covenant

Crit

I'm sorry, I can't remember anything that happened in space, because I was so distracted by the prologue, wherein a scientist/industrialist so brilliant and wealthy and powerful that he has acquired some of the great artworks of the Western world, and a home that fairly reeks with 22nd-century style and class, displays Michelangelo's monumental David in a room with such a low ceiling that he has to put holes in both ceiling and floor to accommodate the height of the sculpture, which thus can't be viewed properly from anywhere and presumably can be viewed completely only by standing near its silo and craning your neck up and down. Wtff?

OK, I lied: I do remember one thing that happens in space, or rather on the mysterious planet on which the Covenant ill-advisedly lands: someone quotes a famous poem and attributes it to the wrong Romantic poet.

Clearly, we need to do everything we can to keep the NEA and the NEH alive.

The Lovers

Crit

Well, yes, that really is one of the most misleading trailers ever. I saw it roughly a hundred times, over what seems like a year, and it promised a wacky, slapstick bedroom farce. Despite a cast of people I love or at least like a lot--Debra Winger, Tracy Letts, Aidan Gillen, and Melora Walters--it looked pretty dismal.

But no. A bit of bedroom farce, yes, but there's nothing wrong with that, and one bit of slapstick that's funny even after a hundred viewings of the trailer. But also: weight. Weight unimaginable from the trainer. This is a serious (and seriously funny, make no mistake) plumbing of the reasons people come together and why they sometimes stick beyond the point either one much wants to.

One of the best films I'll see against my will this year.

Trailers

• Kingsman: The Golden Circle--I guess I really need to have a look at the first one.
• War for the Planet of the Apes--I'd forgotten that even really smart apes fall prey to cliché.
• Dunkirk--Christopher Nolan gets his Spielberg on.
• Menashe--Another movie about idiotic religious regulations. 
• A Ghost Story--An unusually weird one, and from what I've heard, an exceptionally good one. 
• The Big Sick--Another one for which I have high expectations.

No rematch

Chuck

Crit

Liev Schreiber portrays the Jersey palooka (hated nickname: The Bayonne Bleeder) who went 15 rounds (minus about 80 seconds) with Muhammad Ali and inspired another palooka from across the Hudson River to make a movie about a palooka with heart who gets an improbable title shot against a brash, mouthy, poet of a fighter and wins moviegoers' hearts while losing the fight.

This one is nonfiction and thus a lot less appealing, but Schreiber and director Philippe Falardeau make it one memorable sad bastard movie.

In his shoes

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer

Crit

A surprisingly gentle and moving portrait of a guy who initially seems to be angling for the next big score but turns out only to want to be in the game. Be careful what you wish for . . .

Richard Gere has never been one of my favorites (in fact, he wouldn't rank any higher than fifth in this great cast, behind Steve Buscemi, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Michael Sheen, and Hank Azaria), but this is an engaging performance, and ultimately a heartbreaking one.

Trailers

• Maudie--Sally Hawkins as an untutored artist
• Paris Can Wait--Wow: I immediately recognized Diane Lane (attired unprovocatively) from almost directly behind. The film looks dumb, though travelogue pretty.
• The Wedding Plan--Goofy-premised but apparently very good Israeli film.

I never read a blog--I never streamed AP--

A Quiet Passion

Crit

So languorous. So languorous. In none of Emily Dickinson's tens of thousands of impatient lines of tetrameter and trimeter is there a moment of languor, so I find director Terence Davies’s pacing an odd choice.

Equally strange is the expansion of an obscure friend of Dickinson's sister Vinnie, one Vryling Buffum (Catherine Bailey) into the poet's bosom friend and a full-fledged Oscar Wilde character.

That said, never for a moment did I disbelieve that Cynthia Nixon was Emily Dickinson, and if the core of the film is believable (as well as the nearest satellite to the core, if you'll pardon the mix, the eternally welcome Jennifer Ehle as Vinnie), I'll put up with elements that seem ill-considered.

Credit Davies, too, for smart use of the poetry--never obvious, save for a forgivable triplet of greatest hits near the end. And the one diegetic poem creates by far the sweetest moment of the film, maybe the only sweet moment, which only the crankiest tenure-denied associate professor could begrudge.

Extra credit

Bacalaureat (Graduation)

Crit

Oh, you know I'm a sucker for a good daddy-daughter story. The daddy (Romeo, Adrian Titieni) and daughter (Eliza, Maria-Victoria Dragus, putting me in mind of a young Lauren Ambrose) in question live in Cluj, Romania, which, strictly from the evidence of this film, is where you'd start if were gonna give Europe a colonoscopy. So you can understand what it means to Romeo and Magda (Lia Bugnar) that their daughter is on the cusp of a scholarship to Cambridge.

But she is assaulted a few days before the first part of a clinching examination, and though she escapes being raped, she takes the test with the sprained wrist of her writing hand in a cast and with her mind understandably unfocused. So Romeo, a doctor at the local hospital, calls in some favors in order to tilt her final score toward what it would have been without the disruption.

A couple of problems with this plan: first, Romeo is circumstantially complicit in the assault, because instead of delivering her to the door of her school that day, he accepted her offer to hop out a short walk through a construction site away--accepted her offer because it was more convenient for his next stop, at his mistress's flat. So onto his ambition for her is ladled guilt.

But the second problem is bigger, because in a culture of corruption, Romeo and Magda have raised Eliza to recognize the right thing, and to do it. And since the plan requires her to make recognizable marks on her test paper, the plan can't be executed without her knowing the moral compromises at hand.

Another story I'm a sucker for: good people drawn into badness by a randomly hateful universe. Another such I liked was 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, which shared with this one a writer and director: Cristian Mungiu.

Fetch another round

Guardians of the Galaxy, vol. 2

Crit

Was the first one as grotesquely uneven as this one? I know it had scenes as hilarious as the hilarious scenes here, but did it have long, draggy, aimless sequences too, like this one? And it may have had some soppy sentimentality, but I'm pretty sure it didn't sop as soppily as this one does. One thing's certain: while that one violated the First Cheeseblab Commandment--Thou shalt not let your comedy run past 2 hours--its violation was a venial one minute, while this one mortally sins by 17 minutes, which (duh, why the commandment exists in the first place) seems much, much, much, much longer.

On the upside: best Stan Lee cameo ever.

Trailers

• Thor: Ragnarok--I'm sorry, but with Noah Syndergaard on the disabled list I can't even think about this.
• Star Wars: The Last Jedi--Yeah, right, "last."