THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING WOMAN

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of A Private Life...

...a new psychological thriller starring Jodie Foster.

VAN FICTION

Opening this weekend at Arizona Mills IMAX...

Nomadland--Frances McDormand is Fern, a widow left adrift after her gypsum mining village in Nevada becomes a ghost town. She wanders the western states in her beloved van, which she calls "Vanguard," following seasonal work, and connects with the subculture of van and RV nomads with a hub in Quartzsite, Arizona. She works cleaning state parks or in the kitchen at Wall Drug in South Dakota, at a beet harvest in Nebraska, at an Amazon facility in Nevada. She makes friends; a fellow nomad named Dave (David Strathairn) might even be a love interest, although Fern is cautious in such matters.

Scripted and directed by Chloe Zhao, this adaptation of Jessica Bruder's nonfiction book feels like a true original, heartwarming without sentimentality, maybe a hair slow but beautifully acted and shot. McDormand and Strathairn are the only two professional actors that I recognized; most of the rest of the cast, including "vandwelling" YouTube guru Bob Wells, use their own names and play themselves, with great warmth and poignancy. This gives the movie the quality of a documentary, but with a movie star presence at its center.

And it need hardly be said that McDormand is wonderful; Fern is another of her classic sensible yet frayed at the edges creations. She gets across Fern's aching sadness at finding herself at such a cosmically loose end, but she also shows us the exhilaration she feels at her independence. Whenever Fern is tempted with an offer of permanence, her instinct is to move on. Maybe when Kris Kristofferson observed that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, Fern's lifestyle is what he meant.

Also opening today...

Minari--Lee Isaac Chung wrote and directed this autobiographical chronicle of a Korean family struggling to start a farm in rural Arkansas in the early 1980s. Dad Jacob (Steven Yeun) is an expert "chicken-sexer" (able to quickly determine the sex of chicks at a hatchery and sort them). He's dragged his family from California to the south, to the horror of his pretty, pious wife Monica (Han Ye-ri), because he wants to start a produce farm specializing in Korean vegetables and fruits for what he perceives as a growing immigrant market in Dallas and Oklahoma City (the title refers to an herb popular in Korean cuisine).

The couple and their two young children, Annie (Noel Kate Cho) and David (Alan Kim) are eventually joined by a mischievous, fun-loving Grandma (Youn Yuh-jung), who doesn't seem to David to act like a grandma is supposed to. There's also a showcase role for Will Patton, as a religiously ecstatic, tongue-speaking farm hand trying to help Jacob realize his dream.

This may be the best film I've seen so far this year; a contemporary take on the early-'30s dramas about ordinary people up against agricultural and meteorological fate, like Murnau's City Girl or Dovzhenko's Earth. As in those films, the antagonists are largely elemental: water, fire, health. But Minari's characters aren't emblematic; they have a psychological subtlety and reality, and their passions and priorities also drive the conflict. The story-telling is simple, but the problems these people have with the land, and with each other, are anything but.

The Mauritanian--The title character, played with disconcerting charm by the Algerian-French actor Tahar Rahim, is Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who was held at Guantanamo Bay for a decade and a half, and tortured, without ever being charged with a crime, on suspicion of having been a recruiter for 9/11 terrorists. Jodie Foster and Shailene Woodley are the pro bono lawyers working to free Salahi under habeas corpus, and getting stonewalled by U.S. intelligence. Benedict Cumberbatch is the Marine officer assigned to prosecute Salahi, who finds himself equally stonewalled.

Directed by the capable Scotsman Kevin Macdonald, this is another of the surprisingly large class of political dramas like The Report or Official Secrets or Fair Game, which remind us of the constitutional outrages of the W. Bush administration, as well as the failure of the Obama administration to rectify most of them. Macdonald sets a unhurried pace, and generates a steadily waxing sense of almost Kafkaesque fury and horror. It's a well-acted, compelling movie and it can boil your blood. And it should.

SHOW ME THE MONEY (MONSTER)

Opening this weekend:

Money Monster—George Clooney plays a buffoonish TV financial pundit in the Jim Cramer mold. Julia Roberts plays the long-suffering director of the silly show he hosts, and Jack O’Connell plays the scruffy disgruntled loser with a gun who takes him hostage on the air, demanding to know what happened to the $60,000 he lost to an investment that the TV guy claimed was safer than his savings account.

The screenwriters, Alan Di Fiore, Jim Kouf and Jamie Linden, aren’t exactly Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, but they do manage to give the dialogue a certain amount of snarky, unpredictable wit, and the director, Jodie Foster, stirs up a lot of whirling frenzy around what is essentially a static situation. So the movie generates a Front Page-like energy that carries us along quite enjoyably, even as the story’s complications grow harder and harder to swallow.

It helps that Clooney, who also co-produced, doesn’t seem to mind looking like a stooge onscreen. We’re asked to believe that, in this crisis situation, the host, director and crew of this show would swing into action as highly competent investigative journalists, swiftly tracking down the secret that led to the loss of the guy’s money. But helping us accept this laughable conceit is the look on Clooney’s face—scared, but also glum and guilty; the look of a man who has known all along, at some level, that he’s just a shill, but is only now confronted with the reality of his irresponsibility.

Roberts gives a maternal authority to her role—she’s as much a nanny as a director—and some of the other actors, notably Christopher Denham, Giancarlo Esposito, Caitrona Balfe, Lenny Venito, Emily Meade, Dennis Boutsikaris and Condola Rashad, bring speed, charm and a surprising amount of comedy to what they’re given. Money Monster is too conventional, too close to superficial, to be a really scary monster—I doubt it could be considered much more subtle in its dissection of matters financial than the shows it's spoofing. But it’s fast and well-made and entertaining, and the cast gives it heart.

A personal note: I was sworn to secrecy until it opened, but my pal Gayle Bass, lovely co-host of Right This Minute, appears briefly in Money Monster, playing the complex role of Gayle Bass, lovely co-host of Right This Minute. So even if there was no other reason to see it…