When van living becomes a way of life

      In Nomadland, director Chloe Zhao mixes real wanderers  and actors in ways that illuminate the lives of people who’ve permanently hit the road. The stock market may be breaking records, but a variety of people have checked out of the economy, some because they have no options and some by choice.    

     Frances McDormand plays Fern, a Nevada widow who lived in a town that vanished when its only employer -- the gypsum mine -- closed.  Fern's van has become her home. She sometimes finds temporary employment at an Amazon facility or in a restaurant. 

     "I'm not homeless. I'm just houseless," she says. 

    During her travels, Fern meets people who also are committed to the wandering way of life. Some move in caravans; others are loners. Some live off the grid. 

    Bob Wells, a real nomad, explains the ethos by which these travelers live, never going much beyond minimal necessities.

     Fern also meets Dave (actor David Strathairn). Although he’s on the move, Dave looks to Fern for company, at one point inviting her to stay with him at his daughter's home. 

    But Shao is too committed to realism to create characters who will be redeemed by anything resembling romance. Zhao, who previously directed The Rider, is one of those rare filmmakers who places her films at ground level, close to the way real people live and survive.

     Basing Nomadland on a nonfiction work by Jessica Bruder, Zhao takes her camera to Nebraska, South Dakota, Nevada, and California. She doesn't shy from showing the difficulties of van living: looking for bathrooms, dealing with cold, finding a place to shower, and locating hassle-free places where a van can be parked. 

    McDormand creates a character of ferocious independence. Fern never asks for sympathy. At one point, Zhao photographs Fern floating naked in a river, a woman who may be alone but who also can be at home in nature. 

    At times, Nomadland feels like a documentary, particularly when actors are interacting with non-actors. Fern, like us, hears the stories these folks tell.  A woman with cancer talks about her life.

  Whispers of plot emerge: At one point, for example, Fern visits her sister (Melissa Smith) in search of a loan to finance an expensive van repair. Generally, though, she wants nothing from anyone.

   Together, Zhao and McDormand introduce us to a woman who has lost everything (home, family, employment) but refuses to bend. Tragedy doesn't defeat Fern: It offers her glimpses of freedom. 

     That's not to say that Zhao romanticizes Fern's traveling life. She presents it without flourish or hype. Like Fern, the film demands to be taken as it is.*

I had published a review of Nomadland on Dec. 4, after festival viewing. I republish the review here because the movie goes into wide release Feb. 19.

A hit-and-miss hunk of silliness

    Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo team in a movie that's vying for a dubious title: the most ridiculous movie ever made.

    Now, there's nothing wrong with ridiculousness and when a movie opts for so much unabashed silliness, we're obliged to give it a whirl, especially with the talented and often funny Wiig as one of the principals. Remember, too, Wiig and Mumolo wrote the screenplay for Bridesmaids.

    But as silly as Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar can be, it's only mildly amusing with one great gag involving culottes, women's pants that the movie considers to be a major fashion boo-boo.

    Wiig and Mumolo play a couple of Nebraska women who've lost their husbands, one to divorce, the other to death. After their jobs at a  furniture store vanish, this duo is expelled from the local Talking Club -- a preposterous small gathering of women with nothing to say. 

    What the hell? It's time for an adventure.

    So it's off to Florida, where Barb and Star become caught up in a plot that's being orchestrated by a woman with the whitest complexion in the western world. The chalky white Dr. Lady (also Wiig)-- wants to kill off the entire town of Vista Del Mar because of slights she suffered as a child.

  An Asian boy named YoYo (Reyn Doi) and a stooge who expects to marry Dr. Lady (Jamie Dornan) are part of  a plan to kill everyone in Vista Del Mar during the town's festive shrimp celebration.

   Once in Florida, Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig) lose their buddy mojos and begin competing for the affections of Dornan's Edgar.

   Director Josh Greenbaum does his best to turn Vista Del Mar into a pastel paradise, a riot of blues and pinks punctuated by occasional musical numbers. 

    There are chuckles. The worst kind of tourists, Barb and Star are unable to resist shopping for the trashiest tchotchkes. Before an accommodations upgrade, Barb & Star check into a ramshackle motel where the desk clerk asks if they will require towels. Wiig, Mumolo, and Dornan are sandwiched into an off-color sight gag, and an occasional line reveals how bereft of awareness, the two can be.

    "A person's face says a lot about how they look,'' says Star, a supposed example of her uncanny wisdom.

     If a movie is going to be this outlandish, it better do it with abandon and without shame. A total commitment to silliness might be Barb & Star's saving grace. Full of raunch, the movie may not always work but it's far too preposterous to hate.

    Still, a step back suggests that Wiig and Mumolo came up with two cluelessly funny characters who may not be worth an entire movie, particularly one with a climax involving swarms of deadly mosquitos and a kid in a submarine.

When the FBI invaded the Black Panthers

 

    If you approach Judas and the Black Messiah hoping to find a biopic about Fred Hampton -- a leader of the Chicago Black Panthers in the late 1960s — you'll be disappointed. In a way, director Shaka King gives us a biopic but not of the usual kind. 

    Judas and the Black Messiah stands as a portrait of a tense American period, one that encapsulates a particular '60s brand of activism, betrayal, idealism, organizing, and perhaps even delusion. It may be helpful to think of the movie as a biopic of a moment that once burned vividly in the nation’s consciousness.

    A charismatic speaker and determined organizer, Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) was gunned down in a police raid in 1969. Invading Chicago police fired 90 shots; the Panthers who were gathered in Hampton's apartment fired none.

      The FBI had used an informer -- played here by LaKeith Stanfield — to infiltrate the Panthers and ultimately to help facilitate the raid that resulted in Hampton's death. Hampton was 21 when he died

     King builds his story around three characters. Kaluuya's Hampton, Stanfield's William O'Neal, and FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons). At the risk of overstatement, I'd call that great casting. 

     All three are terrific. Kaluuya creates a fiery thoughtful Hampton. Stanfield does an exceptional job of portraying the conflicts faced by a man who came to care about Hampton and the cause and at the same time became the Judas of the title.  Plemons plays the kind of man who shields his ambitions behind a flat, down-to-earth manner.

     Once he established himself with the Panthers, O'Neal became the Panthers' chief of security, a position that gave him the access he needed to gather information on the Panthers.

      At first blush, it may be a bit much to think of Hampton as a black messiah, but the movie's religious connotations don't come from Hampton. They stem from then FBI director Herbert Hoover. 

     Hoover (Martin Sheen) thought the Black Panthers posed the greatest threat to the kind of American ideals he advocated. All that was needed to start a full-scale revolution was a black messiah. For Hoover, Hampton fit the bill.

      For those who don't remember, during the '60s, protestors of various stripes routinely branded the police as "pigs." There was no shortage of antipathy toward uniformed officers.  Still, it seems especially absurd now to hear Plemons' Mitchell equate the Panthers with the Klan.

      King makes it clear that the Panthers didn't stint on revolutionary rhetoric. They regarded themselves as revolutionaries in a Maoist mold. But King also shows that the Panthers organized schools, provided free breakfasts for kids, and tried to establish community health-care institutions.  And Hampton tried to cross racial and ethnic lines to form a Rainbow Coalition of activism.

     The movie also makes room for a tender but never overdone romance between Hampton and Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback), a young Panther who was committed to the cause.

    King and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt present the story in taut, leaping segments that evoke the fever-dream atmosphere of a moment in which the country was awakening to ideas of Black Power.

    As such, Judas and the Black Messiah stands as a memorable, powerful movie that leaves you wondering how Hampton might have evolved had he not been killed.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 2/12/21-- 'Minari,' 'Land' and 'The World to Come'

     Like most reviewers, I'm being inundated with streaming opportunities. In a normal moment, it would be possible to give more space to the movies that you'll find in these cinema diaries. But I've decided that it's better to call attention to these movies than to ignore them and sometimes, a special movie -- in this case Minari -- finds its way into a diary post. 

 I've included Minari in this edition of the Cinema Diary because the movie was a hit on the festival circuit, has turned up on many 10-best lists, and already has received considerable attention. I gave it honorable mention status.

Minari

In Minari, writer/director Lee Isaac Chung tells the story of a Korean family trying to start a farm in Arkansas during the 1980s. In his warm but realistic endeavor, Chung focuses on family dynamics. Dad, a deservedly praised Steven Yeun, dreams of making a go of farming, which -- for him -- means taking a stab at being his own man. Mom (Yeri Han) goes along but is more skeptical about the chances for success. Grandma (a scene-stealing Yuh-jung Youn) arrives to help young David (Alan Kim as the couple's son) and Anne (Noel Cho as the family daughter). Chung astutely avoids rising-immigrant cliches. Mom earns money in a chicken processing plant and Dad receives help from a strange Pentecostal neighbor (Will Patton). Youn and Kim play a perfect and often unexpected grandma/grandson duet and Yeun delivers a performance that brims with both frustration and hope. Don't expect a Rocky-style aspirational pep talk. Fair to say, then, that Minari eschews nostalgia and, though set in the 1980s, feels very much alive in the present.

Land

Watching Land, a movie marking the directorial debut of actress Robin Wright, I kept asking myself what might have motivated Wright to pick this story about a woman who withdraws into nature's harsh isolation. Edee (Wright) moves into a remote cabin in Wyoming with little experience in how to negotiate life in the wilderness. We'll eventually learn what prompted Edee's withdrawal from society, but it's not too difficult to guess where her motivation lies. Before heading for the hills, Edee tells her sister (Kim Dickens) that she no longer can bear life around people. Most of the movie involves watching Edee struggle to survive. She must learn to hunt, gather enough wood to keep from freezing, find ways to feed herself and adjust to taking care of bathroom needs in an outhouse. At one particularly low point, Edee is rescued by a native-American woman (Sarah Dawn Pledge) and another wilderness denizen (Demien Birchir). Watching Edee nearly freeze to death gives you the shivers, but Land never seems to gather the kind of thematic momentum that would have justified Edee's battle with unforgiving nature. It doesn't help that Edee has moved into the wild less for purposes of discovery than for what can seem like a punishment. 

The World to Come

In The World to Come, Vanessa Kirby portrays Tallie, a 19th- century farm woman who lives an emotionally Spartan existence with her husband Finney (Christopher Abbott). The movie focuses on a friendship between two women that quickly blossoms into love. Abigail (Katherine Waterston) plays another resident of this unforgiving environment. She's married to Dyer (Casey Affleck). They've lost a child and evidently whatever passed for love in their relationship. The men in director Mona Fastvold's movie are a sour lot. Finney is an unapologetic chauvinist who tries to guide his wife's behavior with Old Testament pronouncements. The morose Dyer seems lost and lugubrious. The women ultimately realize their passion for each other but it doesn't take much foresight to know that things won't proceed toward a sunny conclusion.  An atmosphere of hardship and deprivation serves as a backdrop that heightens the  longing both women experience. A surfeit of narration (mostly from Abigail) tends to substitute for drama and although the performances are fine (notably Waterston's), the movie left me wondering whether Tallie and Abigail were not only being constrained by their husbands but by Fastvold's stark conception of the movie. 

Another foray into the punishing world of Gitmo

 

     The Mauritanian draws inspiration from a best-selling memoir by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a man who spent 14 years imprisoned in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. 

     Slahi was arrested in Mauritania in 2001. He had just returned from Germany, a country identified as a hotbed of Islamic radicalism. Earlier, Slahi had visited Afghanistan.

     At the time of Slahi's Afghanistan foray,  mujahideen fighters -- with US support -- were battling a communist government. Slahi also had been involved in a financial transaction involving a cousin who was part of the al Qaeda web.

     The Mauritanian clearly stands on Slahi's side, taking a highly critical view of the interrogation methods adopted during the George W. Bush, post 9/11 administration. Slahi, by the way, never was charged with a crime.

      Although he's depicted as considering himself safe from prosecution at the movie's outset,  Slahi awakens in Gitmo where he endures a Kafkaesque 14 years that included good guy/bad guy interrogation and torture. 

     After  enduring numerous bouts of torture, Slahi confessed.

     Enter Albuquerque-based attorney Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) who takes on Slahi's case as part of her pro bono work. She's assisted by Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley), a younger attorney.

    Benedict Cumberbatch plays a Louisiana-born marine, the attorney who opposes Hollander's efforts but seems a decent enough fellow. 

    Religious and committed to his job, Cumberbatch's Lt. Col. Stuart Couch lost a pal on United Flight 175. He's enthusiastic about his work, but he's also portrayed as a man who believes in fair play. He doesn't want to be part of what might amount to a conspiratorial lynching.

     Foster opts for a performance consisting of tight, highly controlled gestures. An underutilized Woodley doesn't make much of an impression. 

     Not surprisingly, the movie's most vivid performance is given by Tahar Rahim, as Slahi, a man who doesn't immediately tell his lawyers about his confession for fear that he'll be tortured again.

     Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) plays the story straight, turning the film into a legal procedural with highly unsettling scenes of Slahi's torture.

    Thanks to Slahi's Guantanamo Diary, lots of news reports, and documentaries, the material in The Mauritanian, though predictably disturbing, hardly feels revelatory. 

    At this point, The Mauritanian feels less like a compelling expose than a dutiful reminder that Guantanamo has produced stories that the US won't want to paste in its book of proud memories. 

    

    

Nominees for the 2021 Critics Choice Awards

The year 2020 may have been ...

Oh well, pick your own adjective.

Despite a larger than usual amount of election- and Covid-induced  craziness, the Critics Choice Association (CCA) -- a group to which I belong -- has revealed its nominations for this year's film awards. Winners will be announced on March 7 at on an awards show to be broadcast on the CW network beginning at 7 p.m.

Mank, director David Fincher's look at the writing of the script for Citizen Kane, led the field with 12 nominations, including best director, best actor, best supporting actress, and best screenplay.

Minari, the story of a Korean family trying to establish a farm in Arkansas during the 1980s, came in second with 10 nominations.

For those prepping for the coming awards season, here's a complete list of this year's nominees:*

*Nominees for this year's Oscars, by the way,  will be announced on March 15. 

 BEST PICTURE  

Da 5 Bloods 

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom 

Mank 

Minari

News of the World 

Nomadland 

One Night in Miami 

Promising Young Woman  

Sound of Metal 

The Trial of the Chicago 7 

 

BEST ACTOR  

Ben Affleck – The Way Back  

Riz Ahmed – Sound of Metal 

Chadwick Boseman – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom 

Tom Hanks – News of the World 

Anthony Hopkins – The Father  

Delroy Lindo – Da 5 Bloods 

Gary Oldman – Mank

Steven Yeun – Minari 

 

BEST ACTRESS  

Viola Davis – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom 

Andra Day – The United States vs. Billie Holiday 

Sidney Flanigan – Never Rarely Sometimes Always

Vanessa Kirby – Pieces of a Woman 

Frances McDormand – Nomadland 

Carey Mulligan – Promising Young Woman

Zendaya – Malcolm & Marie 

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR  

Chadwick Boseman – Da 5 Bloods

Sacha Baron Cohen – The Trial of the Chicago 7 

Daniel Kaluuya – Judas and the Black Messiah  

Bill Murray – On the Rocks

Leslie Odom, Jr. – One Night in Miami 

Paul Raci – Sound of Metal  

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS  

Maria Bakalova – Borat Subsequent Moviefilm 

Ellen Burstyn – Pieces of a Woman 

Glenn Close – Hillbilly Elegy 

Olivia Colman – The Father)  

Amanda Seyfried – Mank

Yuh-Jung Youn – Minari 

 

BEST YOUNG ACTOR/ACTRESS  

Ryder Allen – Palmer 

Ibrahima Gueye – The Life Ahead 

Alan Kim – Minari  

Talia Ryder – Never Rarely Sometimes Always 

Caoilinn Springall – The Midnight Sky  

Helena Zengel – News of the World 

 

BEST ACTING ENSEMBLE  

Da 5 Bloods 

Judas and the Black Messiah 

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom 

Minari 

One Night in Miami 

The Trial of the Chicago 7

 

BEST DIRECTOR  

Lee Isaac Chung – Minari 

Emerald Fennell – Promising Young Woman 

David Fincher – Mank  

Spike Lee – Da 5 Bloods 

Regina King – One Night in Miami   

Aaron Sorkin – The Trial of the Chicago 7

Chloé Zhao – Nomadland  

 

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY  

Lee Isaac Chung – Minari 

Emerald Fennell – Promising Young Woman 

Jack Fincher – Mank 

Eliza Hittman – Never Rarely Sometimes Always 

Darius Marder & Abraham Marder – Sound of Metal  

Aaron Sorkin – The Trial of the Chicago 7

 

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY  

Paul Greengrass & Luke Davies – News of the World

Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller – The Father 

Kemp Powers – One Night in Miami   

Jon Raymond & Kelly Reichardt – First Cow  

Ruben Santiago-Hudson – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom )  

Chloé Zhao – Nomadland

 

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY  

Christopher Blauvelt – First Cow  

Erik Messerschmidt – Mank 

Lachlan Milne – Minari

Joshua James Richards – Nomadland  

Newton Thomas Sigel – Da 5 Bloods   

Hoyte Van Hoytema – Tenet 

Dariusz Wolski – News of the World   

 

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN  

Cristina Casali, Charlotte Dirickx – The Personal History of David Copperfield 

David Crank, Elizabeth Keenan – News of the World 

Nathan Crowley, Kathy Lucas – Tenet   

Donald Graham Burt, Jan Pascale – Mank  

Kave Quinn, Stella Fox – Emma 

Mark Ricker, Karen O’Hara & Diana Stoughton – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom 

 

BEST EDITING  

Alan Baumgarten – The Trial of the Chicago 

Kirk Baxter – Mank   

Jennifer Lame – Tenet 

Yorgos Lamprinos – The Father 

Mikkel E. G. Nielsen – Sound of Metal   

Chloé Zhao – Nomadland 

 

BEST COSTUME DESIGN  

Alexandra Byrne – Emma

Bina Daigeler – Mulan 

Suzie Harman & Robert Worley – The Personal History of David Copperfield

Ann Roth – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Nancy Steiner – Promising Young Woman  

Trish Summerville – Mank 

 

BEST HAIR AND MAKEUP  

Emma  

Hillbilly Elegy)  

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom  

Mank

Promising Young Woman 

The United States vs. Billie Holiday   

 

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS  

Greyhound  

The Invisible Man 

Mank 

The Midnight Sky  

Mulan 

Tenet 

Wonder Woman 1984   

 

BEST COMEDY  

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm 

The Forty-Year-Old Version

The King of Staten Island

On the Rocks

Palm Spring

The Prom 

 

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM  

Another Round 

Collective

La Llorona 

The Life Ahead 

Minari 

Two of Us 

 

BEST SONG  

Everybody Cries – The Outpost 

Fight for You – Judas and the Black Messiah  

Husavik (My Home Town) – Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga 

Io sì (Seen) – The Life Ahead 

Speak Now – One Night in Miami  

Tigress & Tweed – The United States vs. Billie Holiday

 

BEST SCORE  

Alexandre Desplat – The Midnight Sky

Ludwig Göransson – Tenet  

James Newton Howard – News of the World 

Emile Mosseri – Minari 

Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross – Mank 

Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Jon Batiste – Soul 

A pandemic of lost memory

 Little Fish is the second movie I've seen this year that deals with a pandemic in which memory loss becomes rampant. Apples, a Greek movie that traveled the fall festival circuit, took place in Athens where many people were being struck by amnesia. Director Christos Nikou took a more complex view of memory loss than Little Fish director Chad Hartigan, who works in a more familiar key. Hartigan builds his story around a romance between newlyweds played by Olivia Cooke and Jack O'Connell. What begins as a conventional romance takes a strange turn when O'Connell's Jude begins to lose his memory. He's not the only one. What the movie calls Neuroinflammatory Affliction (NIA) has caused widespread memory loss. Much of the story involves efforts by Cooke's Emma to keep O'Connell's Jude from vanishing into a forgetful haze. A question arises: Is it possible to sustain a relationship when memory begins to vanish? The movie retreats from the question when it slips into romantic mode and a subplot involving a possible corrective program by a research outfit doesn't really go anywhere. Cooke and O'Connell make an appealing couple and we seldom feel deprived by the lack of an explanation for the disorder that's sweeping the globe. Obviously, the sense of disconnection from the familiar jibes well with the current Covid 19 environment. Although the movie can be a bit bland, I doubt whether many viewers will be disappointed that Little Fish plays more like romance than speculative sci-fi, flirting with larger questions as Emma and Jude try to hold onto each other and themselves.

Viggo Mortensen makes his directorial debut

    Falling, a serious, often disturbing film about a father/son relationship, marks the directorial debut of actor Viggo Mortensen.   

   Familiar to audiences for playing Aragorn in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy and for portraying a chauffeur who overcomes his racism in The Green Book, Mortensen drops us into rough terrain, showing what happens when an already difficult problem is made insoluble by dementia.

   The movie's son, played by Mortensen, is gay; the father, rendered in abrupt vitriolic strokes by Lance Henriksen, could serve as a poster boy for insensitivity. 

   Mortensen, who also wrote the screenplay, shifts between present and past to create a fuller picture of Willis's rueful life and its impact on his family.

   From the start, we know that Willis qualifies as a hard case: As a young father (played by Sverrir Gudnason), Willis looks at his infant son John and tells him that he's sorry he brought him into the world to die, hardly a feel-good welcome.

    The present-tense elements take place when the New York-based Willis visits California to be closer to his John and his sister, a late-appearing Laura Linney.  

    By this time, Henriksen's  Willis, a man in his 80s, has slipped into a demented fog. If Willis ever had any ability to censor his worsts impulses, they're long gone.

     John does his best to practice forbearance even as the visiting Willis crudely insults him and his husband Eric (Terry Chen). It doesn't take long to figure out why John and his sister wanted to put 2,400 miles between themselves and their father.

     Flashbacks flesh out the story of Willis's earlier days with  Hannah Gross appearing as Willis's wife. Fidelity isn't Willis's strong suit. Eventually, he leaves Gross's character for Jill (Bracken Burns), a woman he also abuses.

     To add shading, Mortensen includes scenes-- moments, really -- in which Willis shows genuine affection for his son. Both of these scenes involve hunting and provide much-needed nuance about the complexity of a bullying relationship.

     When a movie revolves around a character as caustic as Willis,  the other characters tend to be forced to the periphery. Mortensen's John, an Air Force veteran and late-blooming gay man, is raising a daughter (Gabby Velis) with his husband, but we don't learn a lot about that relationship.

       Perhaps in a bow to his work in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, Mortensen casts Cronenberg as a proctologist in one of Falling's lighter moments. Take it as a comment about the movie's tone that the comic relief takes place in a proctologist's office.

     Although I appreciated much about Falling, I can't say that I totally believed in Mortensen's highly concentrated approach, mostly because Willis is so out-sized in his repugnance that it's impossible to feel anything for him. Henriksen dominates the other performances, including Mortensen's fine portrayal of a man struggling not to engage in combat with a bullying father.

     I guess, then, it's possible to look at Falling as a kind of domestic war movie in which one side only can save itself by refusing to fight.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 2/5/20 -- 'Two of Us,' 'Bliss' and 'The Right One'

Two of Us

 Barbara Sukowa and Martine Chevallier  play aging lovers in Two of Us, director Filippo Meneghetti's look at a love that struggles to shed its secrecy. The two women live in adjoining apartments. Chevallier's Madeleine, called "Mado," resists uprooting her life and moving to Rome with Sukowa's Nina. Such a move would mean announcing her gayness and changing the emotional calculus that allows her to maintain her relationship with her grown children. They don't know she's gay. Early, on Madeline tells Nina that she's willing to sell her apartment and move to Rome. But she falters when it comes to informing her children. The movie's principal development involves Madeleine's health. After Madeline suffers a stroke, her daughter Anne (Lea Drucker) takes over her care. Madeline's son (Jerome Varanfrain) grows increasingly impatient with what appears to be Nina's intrusive efforts to remain in Madeline's life. The children think their late father was the love of Madeline's life. The arrival of a caregiver (Muriel Benazeraf)  prompts Nina's  to push Benazeraf's character aside so that she can fulfill a role that reflects the reality of a long, mostly satisfying relationship. We wonder whether Madeline, who has lost the ability to speak, will play a role in deciding the outcome. The movie has as much to do with Nina's ability to function in a climate of secrecy as with the love the two women share. That makes Two of Us a touching reminder of the toxic complexities that result when secrets are kept.

Bliss

Owen Wilson joins Salma Hayek in a story in which two  down-and-out Los Angelenos  enter an alternate reality that resembles the ultimate vacation destination. Or maybe that alternate reality is the real thing. Or maybe you won't care which is which. The story begins by introducing us to Wilson's befuddled Greg,  a man who messes up at work, accidentally kills his boss and then takes to the streets of Los Angeles. Divorced and at loose-ends, Greg seems unable to connect with his daughter (Nesta Cooper), a young woman who keeps trying to salvage her relationship with Dad. Initially, Hayek's Rita charges into the movie, telling Greg that she can free him from any suspicion that he may have murdered his boss. Rita's powers to tinker with reality apparently stem from crystals that she ingests and which she eventually shares with Wilson's Greg.  Rita explains the movie's various developments to Greg, but director Mike Cahill's movie never makes much sense and winds up as a ragged, lunging attempt to engage questions about the nature of reality and meaning that have been better addressed in other movies. Matrix enthusiasts can rest easy.

The Right One

If there's anything to be discovered by watching The Right One, it's that actress Cleopatra Coleman has the requisite humor and charm to hold a movie together. Of course, romcoms aren't solitary affairs: It takes two to tango. The second part of director Ken Mok's  ostentatiously quirky romcom revolves around Nick Thune, who's stuck playing Godfrey, a shape-shifting character who assumes various poses throughout the movie: a singing cowboy, an effete art critic, or a hard-rocking DJ. For reasons that aren't clear, Coleman's Sarah is attracted to Godfrey and pursues him without even knowing his real name. She's a writer and aren't all writers fascinated by oddballs? Godfrey reluctantly becomes involved with Sarah, allowing her to visit the many characters he plays. The plot strains to tell us why Godfrey can't simply be himself. All of this amounts to little, aside from providing each actor with an opportunity to showcase something: Thune, versatility; Coleman, snappy charm. But both are stranded by an implausible story that, rather than reaching a crescendo of love and acceptance,  sticks a flat ending. With Iliza Schlesinger as Sarah's obnoxiously self-absorbed editor.