The Baltimorons, Riefenstahl, September Movie Preview
Two reviews of new movies and my list of I want to watch this month.
There were a handful of notable new releases this weekend, two of which I had the privilege of screening in advance. As usual, that did not mean I could finish my reviews before they opened. Read on for more about charming Christmas dramedy The Baltimorons and an exhumation of a Nazi propagandist’s archives in Riefenstahl, followed by my September watchlist.
But first a quick announcement:
NYFF Coverage Coming Soon!
The New York Film Festival begins at the end of the month and your humble correspondent got a press badge again!! The fest begins quite a bit earlier for me, as the bulk of press screenings are held in advance of Opening Night.
I’ll put up a couple pre-fest guides leading up to September 26: a preview of what I’m excited to watch and an updated guide of where to eat around the Lincoln Center. During the festival itself, as with last year I’ll be publishing some dispatches and quick reviews. But I’d love to know what kind of NYFF-related things you’d want to hear from me, lots of brief posts versus longer pieces, etc. And if you are a writer/blogger/editor/PR flack and wanna collaborate/commission something/etc., drop me a line.
The Baltimorons
Now playing in NY. Expands to further markets (including Baltimore) beginning September 12.
Just as practically every critic described The Brutalist as “monumental,” almost all reviews of Jay Duplass’s Christmas dramedy have called it “charming.” But charming is the most succinct way to characterize The Baltimorons; suggestions from the thesaurus come up short. “Charm,” in my mind, implies a likable shabbiness, a sense that more than meets the eye. Plus, there’s that irresistible allusion to Charm City.
Unfolding almost entirely on Christmas Eve, the film is a simple story about the chance meeting of Cliff Cashen (Michael Strassner), an alcoholic comedian six months sober both from drink and improv, and Didi (Liz Larsen), an older dentist convinced she’s alright with spending the rest of her life alone. After a freak accident that leaves his face smashed on a doorjamb, Cliff requires emergency dental surgery. Given the holiday, willing providers are rather hard to reach, and Didi is the only one who takes his call. She puts in a temporary filling and books him a follow-up for after the weekend, but thanks to a series of very funny but unfortunate events, the two wind up spending the entire day together. Tenderness blossoms as they go around Baltimore, and their connection may end up somewhere in between platonic and romantic.
Combine the walk and talk two-hander of Before Sunrise with the blue Christmas environment of The Holdovers, and you’ve almost got The Baltimorons. There are two other ingredients that really make this movie work. One is a script, written by Strassner and director Jay Duplass, that balances broad comedy with darker themes (the first scene is of an unsuccessful suicide attempt). Cliff, like the actor who co-created him, is a seasoned improv performer from Baltimore who struggled with alcoholism and almost landed SNL. But unlike his fictional counterpart, Strassner hasn’t given up on a comedy career.
The second thing that powers The Baltimorons is the winning chemistry between Strassner and Larsen. The former has a laidback naïveté that makes Cliff’s manchild tendencies more tolerable, while the latter has a pleasantly raspy voice with the same sonorous qualities as those of Holly Hunter and Amy Sedaris. This film is Duplass’s first directorial outing without his brother Mark (who served as a producer), but unlike a certain other broken-up fraternal filmmaker, he proves to be more than capable on his own. With the assistance of cinematographer Jon Bregel, we see plenty of Baltimore, including the famous “Miracle on 34th Street” Christmas spectacle and the now-destroyed Francis Scott Key Bridge. But Duplass keeps the focus on Cliff and Didi as they bumble around their hometown. There’s no snow on the ground, but their dreams of a white Christmas are realized.
Tasting Notes
This being Maryland, crabs figure into The Baltimorons on several occasions, including when Didi and Cliff crash a Christmas party/wedding reception. Crab cakes are the hors-d'œuvre of choice, which I ought to eat/make more often. Didi drunkenly cries out for softshells, but they are way out of season by December.
This being a movie made by and about white people, sweet potato casseroles also play a role. (I absolutely hate this dish.) Cliff apparently makes a really good one, with candied pecans and marshmallows.
The best snack pairing for a movie set in Baltimore, of course, is popcorn tossed in Old Bay. If you’re looking for a cozy neighborhood bar in Gowanus, not far from Barclay’s is Fourth Avenue Pub, which offers free popcorn. A tub of Maryland’s favorite seasoning is always at your disposal. The popcorn machine disappeared for some time due to COVID, but fortunately it has since been restored.
Riefenstahl
Now playing in NY at Lincoln Center and the Quad. Expands to further markets beginning September 12.
There was a recent bit of drama on Film Twitter involving Nazis and piracy. A popular link-sharing account called “rarefilmm” came under fire after uncritically pointing his followers to a collection of over one hundred films produced under the auspices of the Third Reich. It didn’t help that the person he shouted out for the tip turned out to be a full-on Neo-Nazi. Less than twelve hours later, after a predictable and deserved backlash, he deleted the tweet and issued a lengthy mea culpa while defending piracy as “the only true form of preservation.” (Never mind that cinematic preservation is more than just downloading mkv files from Google Drive, and that all those Nazi movies were uploaded to the Internet Archive, a stable and accessible resource if there ever was one.) These films have historical value but require careful presentation with proper context, not just tweeted out.
Perhaps the most well-known titles in that collection are Triumph of the Will and the two-part Olympia, both of which were directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Timely, then, that one example of context has arrived in the form of a new documentary that examines the life and lies of Hitler’s most famous propagandist. Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, the result of months of research into its subject’s newly available archives, pulls no punches in dismantling her claims of having been an apolitical aesthete who, despite palling around with Hitler and Goebbels, apparently had no knowledge of the Holocaust.
Riefenstahl is often described as a pioneering female auteur, and that it is merely unfortunate that her eye for capturing the beauty of the human body was used to advance Nazi propaganda. (This is like saying The Birth of a Nation is a pretty good flick if you excuse all the racism.) After the war, Riefenstahl aggressively attempted to rehabilitate her image, defending her intentions as purely artistic. I don’t know how many are fooled by that, but Veiel provides plenty of evidence to the contrary; she was not merely complicit in her collaboration with the Nazis, but a true believer and active participant.
The nearly two-hour runtime is rather lengthy for this kind of archival documentary, but it is exhaustive. Excerpts of Riefenstahl’s work are analyzed to show how her focus on a specific definition of beauty was used to ferment resentment in humanity’s less glorious specimens, thus furthering support for Nazism. We also see personal photographs, letters, and outtakes from her many documentary and talk show interviews, with the only contemporary intervention coming from dry-voiced narration.
But Veiel ensures that viewers won’t come away thinking that his film has only to do with the past. Interspersed throughout are telephone conversations, recorded in the 1970s, between an embittered Riefenstahl and some of her sympathizers. One caller advocates for a “return to morality, decency, and virtue” in his country, prophetically surmising this would only take “one or two generations.” She affirms that “the German people are predestined” to re-awaken their fascist instincts. Blood and soil sentiments have once again infected national politics in Germany and beyond. (The US is no exception.) When it comes to the Third Reich, it isn’t just their cinema that has been preserved through the generations.
September Movie Preview
Folks seemed to like it when I did this last month, so these are all the September releases currently on my radar. The list is starting to get crowded as awards season ramps up… October and November are even more congested.
I haven’t seen any of these except for the bolded titles.
Out this weekend
Four Nights of a Dreamer (New restoration playing in NYC at Film Forum)
Robert Bresson is a huge blindspot in my amateur cinema studies. Starting with this underseen late-career work, based on a Dostoyevsky short story, would be unorthodox when the French filmmaker was best known for his austere reflections on spirituality. But I don’t have to follow a syllabus. Kenji Fujishima, in his review for Book and Film Globe, deems it “worthy to be considered one of Bresson’s masterpieces.”
Highest 2 Lowest (Streaming on Apple TV+)
Saw this in theaters a few weeks ago (where it’s still playing, at least in New York). My annoying take is the beginning and ending are bad, but it’s bad accidentally on purpose. I have a piece outlined about how the easy jazz score and bland neo-soul songs reflect Denzel’s character being old and out of touch (in parallel to the pleasantly bland pop music in Lurker). Hoping I can get around to actually writing it.
A dinner party themed on this movie could absolutely rip. Classic NYC food (ballpark hot dogs, Puerto Rican cuisine, etc.) mixed with luxury ingredients. Wagyu chopped cheese, anyone? Highest 2 Lowest cuisine.
Preparation For the Next Life
Minding the Gap is one of my favorite documentaries of recent memory. It’s surprising that Bing Liu’s first narrative film has gotten so little buzz. Is it due to poor promotion from Amazon, or is it just a poor movie?
Twinless
I really liked James Sweeney’s first movie, Straight Up, a quirky 21st century take on the screwball comedy with neurotic characters obsessed with cinema. The buzz for Twinless has been strong ever since it premiered at Sundance so this is the movie I’m most eager to see this weekend.
The Threesome
Splitsville may have stolen the thunder of what looks to be another polyarmory romantic comedy but this looks fun? I never watch trailers, so I actually have no idea what the vibe is besides the logline.
Yi Yi (New restoration playing in NYC at Lincoln Center, nationwide rollout to come)
I saw this for the first time nearly two years ago, when the Lincoln Center did a full Edward Yang retrospective. It’s truly one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen, and on the occasion of a new restoration, it has returned to play at the Walter Reade before NYFF takes over. Here’s a bit of what I wrote as part of a larger overview of my encounters with Yang’s work:
“I’m glad that my first time was in a theater, a place where I could fully dedicate three hours of my day to this film. By the time Yi Yi reached its quietly devastating conclusion that brought happy tears to my face, I viewed the long runtime not as an imposition, but as an invitation to be fully immersed in another world. In one scene, a character claims that “movies give us twice what we get from daily life,” and it never felt truer than when I saw this movie.
September 12
Happyend (Playing in NYC at Metrograph and SF at the Roxie, limited expansion later.)
Backsliding civil liberties, resurgent nativism, tech-enabled state surveillance, and the cynical exploitation of natural disasters are a timely backdrop for a timeless story about a group of teenagers who come together and fall apart during their last year of high school. Set in a barely future Tokyo, Neo Sora’s neo-dystopian film is a “kids aren’t alright” movie with political salience. Through his examination of Japan’s institutional xenophobia, Sora successfully makes a movie with leftist politics without falling back on blunt polemical statements. Sort of a contra-weeaboo movie if you think about it.
This was one of the best films I saw at NYFF last year, and I never did end up writing the longer review I had planned. The original distributor folded, which unfortunately seems to have snuffed this film’s chances at making a real impact. It’s a shame that this will be the most underseen gem of 2025.
The History of Sound
Getting internet boyfriends Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor in a gay romance film together was a casting coup. But reviews have been tepid and it’s from the director of that juiceless remake of Ikiru that somehow snagged Oscar noms for Bill Nighy and Kazuo Ishiguro (who penned the adaptation of the Kurosawa classic). Don’t think that awards success will happen here but who knows.
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
The fact that it’s distributed by Bleecker Street does not give one hope that this is any good, so I’m waiting to see what the reviews are like before penning this into my schedule.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
Getting good notices out of TIFF, this looks like a fun, shaggy comedy. They’re saying it’s the greatest Toronto showcase since Scott Pilgrim vs The World.
September 19
Apollo 13 (re-release)
I’ve never seen this. I predict this 30th anniversary release, playing in IMAX, will out-gross Ron Howard’s newest movie (which, despite Deadline’s exhortations, is a clear bomb).
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
Kogonada’s first foray into studio filmmaking will be an interesting one to watch. Colin Farrell was excellent in After Yang and Margot Robbie is a good actor, so they’ll make an appealing pair. But apparently the trailer was a trifle. They should be selling this on Joe Hisaishi scoring a first Hollywood project for the first time.
The Lost Bus
Paul Greengrass directs a true story thriller in which Matthew McConaughey drives a school bus through the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, CA. Just premiered at TIFF and got high praise from the Hollywood populists.
Megadoc
The behind-the-scenes documentary revealing the making of Megalopolis. Enough said.
Predators
When I was a kid I watched a lot of To Catch a Predator. This documentary intrigues me, as it examines the legacy of the NBC program. We caught predators but at what cost? Distributed by MTV’s doc division, which has a very strong track record at the Oscars if you wanna get a jump start on that. (The same studio released last year’s excellent Black Box Diaries, which landed a nomination.)
September 26
One Battle After Another
The VistaVision projection—one of three in the entire world—being at the Regal Union Square is kinda funny. I’m sure it would have been set up at the Walter Reade had it not been for NYFF. At the start of the summer I had planned on filling all my gaps in Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography but did not get far. Finding time to see old movies in between new movies and having a social life? Now that’s one battle after another.
Repertory Series of Note
When the World Broke Open: Katrina and Its Afterlives (Through September 21 at MoMA)
Just browsing the program is an education in the history of New Orleans, on screen and off.
Chantal Akerman: The Long View (September 11 – October 16 at MoMA)
The MoMA follows this up with a more traditional director retrospective. Some of Akerman’s films are frequently screened in NYC theaters (even the four-hour long Jeanne Dielman) but this is a good opportunity to see some of her short form works. And you can see News From Home, frequently excerpted in Instagram posts, in its entirety.
Terence Davies: Time Present and Time Past (September 12 – 21 at MoMI)
Don’t think I’ll be able to catch anything in this retrospective, which is a bummer because I’m woefully unfamiliar with the late director’s body of work. But if you haven’t yet been to the Mission: Impossible exhibit at the museum, you now have two good reasons to visit!
On the Museum of Modern Art: not everyone knows that they are also an actively running movie theater! A membership (which starts at $75 for a year) gets you free tickets, making it by far the best deal in NYC moviegoing. (Plus you get free admission to an entire museum.) They recently set up a referral program so if you sign up please use my link!!!
If you become an Access member or join at a higher category, you’ll get $20 off your first year. Just use my special link and enter promo code FRIEND at checkout. When you join, I’ll get rewarded with a $20 MoMA Design Store gift card.
I share the Explore level of membership with a friend of mine, which gets us free guest admissions and early access to film tickets which comes in handy for the hot tickets in MoMA’s annual Contenders series.
I was planning on watching Highest 2 Lowest this week — and now I have a menu. ty ty!