What to Watch: Herzog on Criterion, "Sentimental Value"

O frabjous day. Caloo callay.

A gentle reminder of two upcoming appearances:

Sunday November 9 at 1 p.m., I’ll be at the West Newton Cinema for a screening and ensuing panel discussion of Richard Linklater’s rapturous and appropriately scrappy love letter to Jean-luc Godard’s “Breathless” and the French New Wave, “Nouvelle Vague” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/ 2). My co-panelists will be Babson College film professor Julie Levinson and Tufts University film professor Malcolm Turvey; the moderator, Erica Knudson, is the author of “Nouvelle Femmes,” about the women of the French New Wave. Allons-y, Alonso.

And next Thursday, November 12, at 6:30 p.m., the latest edition of Ty’s Movie Club at the West Newton Cinema will be a screening and post-film discussion of Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian 2006 masterpiece “Children of Men” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐), set in a 2027 in which a two-decade-long infertility crisis has left human society on the verge of extinction and where Clive Owen has to ferry the last pregnant woman to safety. The movie’s regularly cited as one of the greatest films of the new millennium and who knows how far its timing is off? Come for a hair-raisingly fine piece of cinema and a meaty conversation afterwards. Advance tickets can be purchased here. (I like this fan-made trailer much more than the official one.)

It's a pretty punk week for new streaming titles, but I will point out that Benny Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine” (⭐ ⭐ 1/2) has landed on Amazon and Apple TV at the post-theatrical premiere price of $19.99. I reviewed it for the WaPo (reposted here for paid Watch List subscribers), but if you’re coming to it cold: What the movie looks like and isn’t is a pro-wrestling bio-pic for the meathead crowd; what it doesn’t look like but is is an arthouse/indie-movie character study about a sensitive lummox. It’s the opposite of a movie like “Raging Bull,” really, since unlike Jake La Motta, who’s a beast in and out of the ring, Mark Kerr is the violent MMA fighter of the title during his bouts and a troubled man trying hard to live an emotionally open life in the world outside his matches. And, yes, that is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson giving a subtle and quite moving performance under the wig and contact lenses and facial prostheses. As Kerr’s fractious girlfriend and eventual wife, Dawn Staples, Emily Blunt does the best she can with a role that’s as shapeless as the movie. The Safdie brothers like shapelessness, of course – see “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” – and sometimes it works. And other times it just doesn’t jell. By comparison, Josh Safdie’s upcoming solo debut “Marty Supreme” is due in theaters on Christmas Day and stars Timothée Chalamet as a manic 1950s ping-pong champion. It sounds certifiably nuts, which “The Smashing Machine” isn’t and doesn’t try to be and maybe shoulda kinda wanted to be. Wait until the VOD price comes down if you’re curious.

But, hey, over at The Criterion Channel, they’ve just dumped a massive 29-film Werner Herzog festival on the service, which means you can and should catch up on any films you may have missed from this wayward genius, one of the most singular talents in the history of the medium. The man’s made 54 features and 15 short films – or 27 fictional films and 42 documentaries, slice the cake any way you want – so there’s no way Criterion can program the entire filmography without Borg-ing the service. But you get the ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ landmarks – "Aguirre, The Wrath of God" (1972); “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” (1974); “Stroszek” (1977); “Fitzcarraldo” (1982); “Grizzly Man” (2005) – as well as some neat surprises (2009’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” the crazed Klaus Kinski documentary “My Best Fiend” – not a typo – from 1999) and plenty of stuff even I haven’t seen before. What’s missing? The 1977 documentary short “La Soufrière,” in which Herzog hears about a volcano that’s about to erupt on the island of Guadeloupe and heads right over with his camera, for one thing. “Rescue Dawn” (2006), for another, the feature film version of Herzog’s 1997 documentary “Little Dieter Needs to Fly” (which is in the Criterion package) and a hellacious POW drama starring Christian Bale that’s one of the director’s most assured visions of the jungle that can live inside a man.

You also get perhaps the strangest movie Herzog ever made – which really is saying something – the surreal all-little-people epic “Even Dwarfs Started Small” from 1970. I remember this clearing the house when we showed it at my college film society in the late 1970s; I doubt it has lost any of its disturbo-absurdist majesty since.

 If nothing else, you’ll be able to bone up on your Werner Herzog impression.

New in Theaters:

A dramatic recreation of the 1945 trial of the German high command, “Nuremberg” (⭐ ⭐) is the kind of project that will rack up award nominations on the strength of its subject and old-school you-can’t-handle-the-truth filmmaking, but it’s a mediocre movie all around – subtle as a mallet, with some of the most ham-handed dialogue you’ll hear all year. Speaking of hams: Russell Crowe is much the best thing here as Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, cannily baiting Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) from a prison cell and U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) from the witness stand. I don’t know whether Crowe gained weight for the part or whether he’s assumed late-Depardieu proportions on his own, but his Goering is the size of a small German principality, and he uses that bulk to underplay the role, knowing he’s going to crowd out the other actors anyway. Shannon is miscast but honorable, Malek ramps up the overacting as his character emotionally frays at the seams and the peerless Richard E. Grant is wasted in the straight-man role of a peer, England’s Sir David Maxwell Fyfe. Only John Slattery hits his marks as Nuremberg Prison commandant Burton C. Andrus, providing a little Roger Sterling acid to an enterprise that sorely needs it. 

The writer-director is James Vanderbilt, better known as the screenwriter of David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” two “Spider-Man” movies – the really bad ones – two “Scream” installments” and that dreadful Guy Ritchie “Fountain of Youth” that Apple TV+ foisted on us in May. It’s his second film as a director, after 2015’s “Truth,” and with a huge cast and high-stakes dramatic set pieces, Vanderbilt has bitten off more than he can chew. “Nuremberg” is Classics Illustrated filmmaking, with a musical score (by Brian Tyler) that underlines everything with a neon Sharpie and dialogue that should come with word balloons (Sir David to Jackson: “You say that as if trying the Nazi high command with untested case law and the whole world watching is going to be the easy part!”; hotsy-totsy lady reporter to Kelley: “Strap yourself in – this city’s about to become the greatest show on earth!”)

But I’m making “Nuremberg” sound terrible when it’s just obvious and dull, the kind of movie you watch on demand and then go to Wikipedia for more interesting follow-up research on your own. Like I said, it’ll get attention come Golden Globes time and Crowe might even squeak out a supporting actor Oscar nomination, but it’s a film that aspires to the level of last year’s “The Conclave” or Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” – enjoyable middlebrow blood-and-thunder – when it should be aiming much higher. There are some fumbling but noble attempts to remind modern viewers of the possible parallels between then and now ("You know why it happened here? Because people let it happen. They didn’t stand up until it was too late") and toward the end of “Nuremberg,” actual documentary footage of the death camps, shot by Allied forces in 1945 – the bulldozed piles of bodies, the skeletal survivors – is shown to the assembled courtroom and to us in the audience. It is as wrenchingly obscene as it ever was, discombobulating at least one of the characters and raising the movie to a standard of historical impact it fails to meet elsewhere. That Vanderbilt uses those images to give “Nuremberg” unearned weight is only a minor obscenity of its own.

By contrast, one of the year’s very best movies is opening in New York and Los Angeles today and rolls out to other cities next week. I saw it at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and re-post my review (with a little rejiggering) below the jump for paid subscribers.

I make many of these posts available for free but I don't make any money that way, so if you'd like to support this venture, learn about more great movies and join the discussions (see below) by becoming a paid subscriber, the management would greatly appreciate your benevolence.

To sweeten the deal (this week), here's nearly 90 minutes of Charles Grodin tormenting Johnny Carson in several decades of brilliantly funny performance-art guest appearances on "The Tonight Show," found when I was prepping for a Q&A after a screening of the lovely new documentary about the actor.