8 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
COURTESY JANUS FILMS
One of the most important recent film restorations, of Jan Oxenberg’s
wildly imaginative personal documentary “Thank You and Good Night,”
from 1991, is resurfacing at Film Forum’s virtual cinema, on Sept. 16,
and on the Criterion Channel, on Sept. 23. More than a decade in the
making, Oxenberg’s film was sparked by the news of her grandmother
Mae Joffe’s terminal illness. Delving deep into family stories and child-
hood memories, Oxenberg filmed her grandmother, her mother, herself,
and other family members throughout Joffe’s waning days. Unresolved
conflicts and unhealed traumas are revealed in interviews and her own
confessional voice-over—and brought to life in comedic dramatizations
and elaborately decorative Rube Goldberg-esque reconstructions. The
movie savors the intimate and the anecdotal (involving Joffe’s friends,
recipes, and tchotchkes) even as it leaps into grand metaphysical theatre.
Pondering the mysteries of death with her grandmother and other rela-
tives, Oxenberg crafts a poignant, tragicomic crowd scene—filmed at a
surprising New York location and set to music by Curtis Mayfield—that’s
among the most exalted modern cinematic metaphors.—Richard BrodyWHATTO STREAM
tells a story of strong personal resonance, about
an aspiring young Black filmmaker named Jay
(Obinna Nwachukwu) who, after living for
many years in California, returns to his family
home, in D.C., only to find his neighborhood
gentrified. Despite offers from brokers and
investors—and racist hostility from new white
neighbors—Jay’s mother (Melody A. Tally) and
stepfather (Ramon Thompson) are staying put.
Jay plans to make a film that, he says, will “give
a voice to the voiceless”—the neighborhood’s
survivors, young men who’ve faced drug wars
and incarceration. He seeks out his longtime—
and long-unseen—friends, who now consider
him an outsider and are suspicious of his in-
sistent inquiries. Gerima films Jay’s intimate
confrontations with an impressionistic flair
that focusses attention on characters’ listening,
thinking, and remembering; flashbacks and
dream sequences infuse Jay’s tightening con-
flicts with the pressure of history—both social
and intimate.—R.B. (Streaming on Netflix.)Sexy Beast
This drama, from 2001, is a tale of expatriate
Cockneys, dry-roasted by the Spanish sun and
determined to get England off their backs. Gal
(Ray Winstone), once a crook, and his wife,
Deedee (Amanda Redman), once a porn star,
have retired to the Costa del Sol. There, they
are tracked down by an old acquaintance, Don
(Ben Kingsley), who invites Gal back home for
one last crime. In his début feature, the British
director Jonathan Glazer turns the first half
of the picture into a cool study of hotheads,
saturated with creative cursing; the second
half, which finds Gal returning to London,
stumbles and slides into the grim traditions of
gangsterland. But the movie needs to be seen
for its clean compositions, for its sure touch
of fantasy, and, above all, for the forbidding
presence of Kingsley—the prince of darkness,
lightly disguised as a human being.—Anthony
Lane (Streaming on HBO Max and other services.)Tabu
The Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s
two-part drama, from 2012, is a deeply imag-
ined psycho-excavation of modern Europe.
In Lisbon, Pilar (Teresa Madruga), a lonely,
middle-aged social activist, gently pursued by
a gentleman artist, finds her elderly neighbor,
Aurora (Laura Soveral), a capricious faded
diva, in decline despite the care of her house-
keeper, Santa (Isabel Cardoso). Aurora, on her
deathbed, divulges a man’s name and address.
When Pilar finds him, he delivers a tale of his
long-ago encounter with Aurora—a roman-
tic whopper, set in one of Portugal’s African
colonies, that he narrates while it unfolds on-
screen like a silent movie. In Gomes’s vision,
the serenely cultured solitude of the modern
city rests on a dormant volcano of passionate
memories packed with adventurous misdeeds,
both political and erotic. Filming in suave,
charcoal-matte black-and-white, Gomes depicts
the mini-melodramas of daily life with a ten-
derly unironic eye; his historical reconstruction
of corrupted grandeur is as much a personal
liberation as it is a form of civic therapy. In
Portuguese and English.—R.B. (Streaming on
the Criterion Channel.)
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For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-townDr. Noah Praetorius, a medical-school professor,
student-orchestra conductor, and founder of a
clinic that yokes modern science to folk wisdom.
Praetorius treats a troubled young woman, Deb-
orah Higgins (Jeanne Crain), whose unwanted
pregnancy lands her in his clinic (their frank
allusions to abortion are audacious surprises)
and, soon, in his romantic schemes. Meanwhile,
Praetorius’s unorthodox methods arouse oppo-
sition, especially from the weaselly Dr. Rodney
Elwell (Hume Cronyn), who brings trumped-up
charges against him that also threaten his faithful
sidekick, Shunderson (Finlay Currie), one of the
strangest and most haunting supporting charac-
ters in all of Hollywood. A counterpart to the
Commendatore from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,”
Shunderson is a stone-faced victim of eros-fu-
elled injustices. On the basis of this character
alone, the movie—whimsical, profound, and
stirringly idealistic—would be immortal.—R.B.
(Streaming on Amazon and the TCM app.)Residue
For his first feature, Merawi Gerima, a native
of Washington, D.C., and a U.S.C. graduate,called “the experiment”—that’s how John Hen-
derson (Brooks), a novelist suffering from writ-
er’s block and a lonely recent divorcé, describes
his bold decision to return to his childhood home
and move back in with his mother, Beatrice (Deb-
bie Reynolds). John hopes to renew his artistry
and repair his love life by reëxamining their trou-
bled relationship and reliving his own past. He
even restores his old bedroom to its former high-
school-era glory, forcing a lifetime of frustrations
and submerged conflicts to the surface. Some
involve petty domesticities; some involve his ri-
valry with his brother, Jeff (Rob Morrow), a suc-
cessful sports agent, for their mother’s affection;
and some, of course, involve sex. In the process,
Beatrice—the film’s prime mover and guiding
light—also relives frustrations; Reynolds’s ex-
quisitely calibrated, mercurially comedic perfor-
mance reveals the stifled passions that inform a
lifetime of rigidly refined habits.—Richard Brody
(Streaming on the Criterion Channel and Amazon.)
People Will Talk
Joseph Mankiewicz’s noble, mysterious 1951 com-
edy of medicine and mores stars Cary Grant as