Wes Anderson. French dispatch.

  After a relatively flabby -- for him-- but grandly rewarded by the Hollywood, "Grand Budapest Hotel", Wes Anderson rehabilitated himself by his latest "French dispatch". His stellar status has grown so much that major stars such as Adrien Brody, Elizabeth Moss, Saorise Ronan, Willem Dafoe and Leah Seydoux agree to play cameos in his movies, some being dressed in totally unrecognizable attire, without one thereof or in quite subdued roles. 

The critics who consider this movie disorganized simply cannot handle cinematic art divorced of a specific "moral" message, usually feminist, racial, anti-Russian or some other kind. It shares the same name-dropping routine as the "Mank". Namely, the person other than a graduate student in American journalism has to do a prominent search in Wikipedia -- inconvenient in a dark movie theater -- to get any idea of his allusions. 

Why Brody's character, whose prototype was strangely identified with David Duveen by the cineasts -- despite his lack of promotion of the modernist art -- is being made up and dressed like Jean Cocteau, who indeed was a tireless promoter? Is "French dispatch" a code word for "New Yorker" -- again the majority of the cineasts' suggestion -- or "Paris Review", which is the minority opinion? Was this ambivalence random or contrived by Anderson? Why the 1968 revolutionary leader is called Zeffirelli and what connection that has with the opera? Because he could not be called Feltrinelli or Cohn-Bendit? His is a very American movie despite being set up and filmed in France -- and obviously the member of New York cultural elite can explain all the minute details by Anderson -- but it is good all the same. 

Encanto.

Formulaic plot; but an inventive combination of realistic and psychedelic uses of color and light. Also a very creative implementation of movements and sequencing of plans from far-offs to close-ups. Altogether wonderful. 

The House of Gucci

      

           Unlike "The Last Duel" where the same director could have added a depth of character at the expense of historic accuracy, the House of Gucci shows the family struggles of the rich and famous with a hefty dose of psychological realism. And Lady Gaga can act. The only unworked line was Adam Driver's character turning from a "boy next door" into a sybarite capitalist shark under the influence of his overbearing wife only to reveal his lack of business acumen in ceding control of his company to the Bahrein investors. 

The Spine of the Night.

A rotoscope movie, extremely inventive in details and successfully merging Western comic and anime styles but totally senseless.  

Dune.

I never understood what was wrong with critics-maligned "Dune" by David Lynch and why this new version is so exalted by them. Probably, during the times that passed, the tastes degraded. It is an elaborate computer-generated cosplay with Timothee Chalamet as Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Fergusson as Rebecca Ferguson and Zendaya as Zendaya with the cameos by Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa. Only a relatively unknown Oscar Isaac can be mistaken for the Duke Leto Atreides I. They perform a rather primitive fable of the Cold War built by Herbert on the foundations of "Lawrence of Arabia". Namely, bad, oppressive colonizers (Turks/Russians) of desert planet Arrakis (Iraq, but at the time the whole Middle East was engulfed in the struggles by Nasser's clones) producing most of the world's Melange (Oil) are replaced by good, enlightened colonizers (Brits/Americans). Even the name of the Emperor Padishah Haddam (Saddam) is an instance of life imitating art. At the time Saddam Hussein was already prominent in the junta ruling Iraq but was not recognized as the top dog, the big cheese, par excellence. This does not mean that Herbert was a bad writer--after all Gulliver's Travels were a satire crammed with long-forgotten barbs and allusions on contemporary British politics and society--but Swift remained immortal. 

Ridley Scott. The Last Duel.

The action is good, period details are excellent but the movie characters are underdeveloped. There is no ambivalence in them. Ridley Scott freely borrowed cinematic stuff from Alaine Resnais--repeated shots of the same scene to enhance realism, and used the template of the "Return of Martin Guerre".  

I am sure that his characters were such in real life: J. de Carrouge was a dependable but tempestuous and semi-literate boor, his wife--a wronged woman, LeGris--a social climber devoid of any scruples and Count d'Alencon--a scheming Renaissance prince straight from Machiavelli--enlightened but ruthless and immoral. But this does not make a movie interesting. I would wish a conscious retreat from the historical chronicles--that LeGris was really madly in love, that Marguerite was torn between her true feelings and conjugal duty, and that the Last Duel was essentially a glorified suicide of LeGris to save the honor of his beloved, even at the cost of his own soul--not a trivial consideration for the Middle Ages.   

Noah Baumbach. Marriage Story.

Noah Baumbach never veers from his well-beaten track of the family chronicles of upper-middle class New York families, probably inspired by his own adolescence, for now he firmly graduated into the Hollywood upper class. But in this particular genre he achieved perfection. After the flailing "Frances, Ha", he completely rehabilitated himself with the coherent and powerful storyline and the impeccable performances of Driver, Johansson and Dern. Despite the fact that the narrative dissolves into a soapy-syrupy ending  (the creatives who cannot get UCLA professorship on a dime are obviously outside Noah's mental scope) just like infirm but daring "Sideways", Baumbach retains his cinematic verve to the end. Ninekaikos, Ebraious!