Melville’s stylized Parisian color noir still holds up well decades after all the homages and imitations. Ties with PURPLE NOON as Alain Delon’s definitive performance.
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One Life 2023
Biopic focuses on Nicholas Winton’s efforts to rescue Czechoslovakian children from Nazis and relocate them in pre-WW2 England, intercut with the older Winton coming to terms with the after effects he, in get-on-with-it fashion, suppressed for the following 50 years. May be too old fashioned in its telling (not to mention underpublicized) for contemporary audiences, but Johnny Flynn and Anthony Hopkins do practically seamless work examining the relevant portions of Winton’s century-plus lifetime.
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Hitsville: The Making of Motown 2019
Essentially Berry Gordy conducting his wake (with present tense and archival interviews from collaborators) while he’s still around to enjoy it. Some great performance footage, but the Berry-centric approach means that classic Motown music is kept on the margins while endless backslapping about the near-infallibility of the company’s assembly line of development/competition/promotion consumes much of the running time.
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What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael 2018
Once-over-lightly account of film critic Pauline Kael’s life and career hits the high/low points and contextualizes her influence upon a long-ago period where movies could be debated and ecstatic/contrarian takes would capture the attention of the general public (see also Andrew Sarris, Stanley Kauffmann, Judith Crist). Skids through the Paramount Pictures sojourn (presumably to avoid offending Warren Beatty), avoids Kael’s over-loyalty to favored directors by elevating subpar work (her review of Sam Peckinpah’s CONVOY) and glancingly acknowledges (mostly through David…