Tom Salinsky

I stumbled across Columbo as a teenager, idly channel hopping. It was the one with Dick van Dyke as a photographer and I remember not being able to work out if it was a TV show or a movie. This is one of several odd things about this amazing series. It formed part of what was called the NBC Mystery Wheel which variously occupied either a 90 minute or a two-hour prime time slot and would cycle through various different crime shows, each presenting a movie-length edition. Columbo would be followed next week by McCloud or McMillan and Wife or Quincy. This meant each production team only had to come up with 7-8 editions each year and could take their time.

Columbo stands out for a few reasons. Creators Richard Levinson and William Link had been inspired by, among other things, Dial M for Murder, Les Diaboliques and GK Chesterton’s Father Brown. The character went from a short story to a one-off TV play, to a stage play to a one-off TV movie (all with the same basic plot) and it’s here that Peter Falk was cast – the studio wanted Bing Crosby. The novelty with the original story, and the thing which inspired the writers to keep recycling it, was that it was an “inverted mystery”. The first act showed how the murder was committed, by whom and why. The rest of the drama was about how he got caught. Not a “whodunnit” but a “howcatchem”. Could the trick be repeated?

A second one-off TV movie showed that it could, and so Columbo was commissioned, and Peter Falk became a bone fide star. It’s often said that Americans don’t have a class system, but Columbo gives the lie to that assertion. Not only is the central character mild, self-effacing and unfailingly polite in the face of a parade of arrogant, self-aggrandising, pompous killers – he’s a blue collar copper bringing down wealthy evildoers who skulk in mansions and stalk the corridors of power.

It ran for eight years and was then brought back in the late eighties, with occasional specials through the nineties – 69 episodes in all, pretty much all hewing to this formula. And Columbo’s bumbling and deferential manner was in stark contrast to the macho antics of rivals Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice, Magnum PI – even Cagney and Lacey. It’s fondly remembered and there has been much speculation about a remake. Mark Ruffalo has been known to be interested, and there’s a tiny hint of Columbo in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out.

A bit more than a hint is to be found in Johnson’s 2023 TV series Poker Face which borrows the inverted mystery structure, unassuming lead and even the font for the titles from Columbo. Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a drifter with a freakish ability to detect liars. In an age of prestige streaming series, this felt refreshingly case-of-the-week with just a hint of a continuing storyline, setting up a big bad in the first episode and despatching him in the last. It has been renewed for a second season.

Not to be outdone, The Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King picked up their recurring character of Chicago lawyer Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) and dropped her down in New York City, attached to the police department where she quickly becomes an asset to the team. Once again, most episodes open with a crime being committed, leaving us in little doubt who has done what, and why, and the fun is watching Elsbeth figure it out. This she tends to do a little too quickly and easily for my taste – the clues are subtler in Poker Face and that’s more fun. A shame as I often felt that The Good Wife was the one American lawyer show which really managed to balance the legal jargon with the needs of easily-digestible narrative. A second series is airing currently.

Meanwhile, the BBC was getting in on the act, with their own quirky-individual-works-with-the-police-to-solve-crimes show. David Mitchell is puzzle-setter John “Ludwig” Taylor whose identical twin brother James is a) a detective and b) mysteriously missing. John is persuaded by his brother’s wife to pose as his brother in order to determine his whereabouts and quickly becomes an asset to the team his brother worked with. Time and again, his puzzle-skills become relevant, but although we see portions of the crime, we don’t always know whodunnit and this doesn’t play by proper Agatha Christie rules either – we usually aren’t given enough information to work it out for ourselves. But this hardly matters when the series is so charming and Mitchell is so well cast. It has been renewed for a second season.

So, in the English-speaking world, the TV landscape is and always has been awash with quirky are-they-cops-or-aren’t-they gallantly and unassumingly fighting crime, but in France it’s not such a familiar cliché – which meant there was a gap in the market. This was filled in 2021 when Stéphane Carrié, Alice Chegaray-Breugnot, and Nicolas Jean created HPI (short for Haut potentiel intellectual) in which office cleaner Morgane Alvaro gets seconded to the Lille police force and quickly becomes an asset to the team.

In short order, this was snapped up by ABC television in the states who put Drew Goddard in charge of it and cast Kaitlin Olson (who I’ve discovered is not an Olsen twin) as Morgan Gillory, a high potential individual who is talked into becoming a police consultant and who quickly becomes an asset to the team. You can watch High Potential on Disney+ in the UK and it has been renewed for a second season. This doesn’t commit to the inverted mystery structure – most episodes play out as a more typical police procedural, but it still feels to me like part of the same family.

There’s also Kathy Bates as Matlock, to add to our roster of usually-gender-flipped, easy-to-underestimate, quirky-kind-of-cop, solves-impossible crimes, case-of-the-week shows – but there are some quite serious and complicated problems with this iteration, which I might leave for a future essay. In the meantime, here’s your rundown of The Spawn of Columbo.

COLUMBO

Transmitted: 1968-1977 on NBC, 1989-2003 on ABC.

Starring: Peter Falk as Lt Columbo (no first name ever given) of the LAPD.

Quirks: Wears a shabby raincoat, drives a beaten-up car, sometimes has a dog (called “dog”), puffs on cheap cigars. Is often a huge fan of the very wealthy and famous killer and awestruck to be in their company. A working class stiff typically in a nouveau riche world.

Magic powers: His attention to detail is matched only by his faith in humanity. He tenaciously locks on to the killer early in the episode and all but annoys them into confessing.

Episode structure: All the classic episodes show the crime committed in detail before Columbo even shows up. A handful of later episodes mess with this formula and it kind of ruins the fun.

Supporting characters: Effectively none. A handful of coroners or other police workers show up in a few episodes, but Columbo is a lone wolf by design.

Star killers: An amazing roster of familiar faces including Patrick McGoohan (four times), Robert Culp, Ruth Gordon, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (in different episodes). Even Billy Connolly (although it’s not a great outing).

Ongoing narrative: None whatsoever (it was the 1970s, are you kidding).

POKER FACE

Transmitted: 2023- on Peacock (NOW TV in the UK)

Starring: Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale who drifts around various parts of the United States.

Quirks: Not nearly as deferential as Columbo, Charlie is usually cheerful and friendly, but has a wide cynical streak and plenty of street smarts. Paradoxically, her magic powers (see below) make it almost impossible for her to keep down a job, so we usually discover her making ends meet doing grunt work of some kind.

Magic powers: Charlie has a sixth sense for liars, which often manifests as an almost involuntary “bullshit” when a fib reaches her ears.

Episode structure: As with Columbo, we usually see all the details of the crime unfold before Natasha Lyonne makes her entrance. The wrinkle here is that after the first act break, rather than the main character only now arriving on the scene, we rewind and see much of the same events again, but from Charlie’s point-of-view. She had been there all along, we just didn’t see her. It’s fun. Also fun – Charlie isn’t a cop so sometimes she hands the baddies over to the forces of law and order, and sometimes she has to rely on natural justice.

Supporting characters: Charlie is fundamentally a loner, but she forges an uneasy alliance with Simon Helberg’s FBI agent who appears in a few episodes.

Star killers: This is stuffed with familiar faces including Nick Nolte, Tim Meadows, Adrien Brody, Chloë Sevigny, Stephanie Hsu, Tim Blake Nelson, Ellen Barkin and many more.

Ongoing narrative: After the events of the first episode, Charlie is pursued by Benjamin Bratt and eventually faces down Ron Perlman, but if you just watch episodes 2-9, you’ll scarcely notice this.

ELSBETH

Transmitted: 2024- on CBS (NOW TV in the UK)

Starring: Carrie Preston as Elsbeth Tascioni, Chicago lawyer appointed to provide the NYPD was some needed oversight.

Quirks: Elsbeth is a very enthusiastic and perky middle-aged woman, who dresses in garish outfits and is sometimes too quick to speak her mind. Like Columbo, she is easily impressed by rich and famous types, and very disappointed to discover that they have blood on their hands.

Magic powers: Like many of her TV peers, Elsbeth is freakishly perceptive and notices many details which others miss.

Episode structure: Frequently makes use of the inverted mystery structure, but isn’t wedded to it – and as noted, the plotting isn’t quite as A1 as on Poker Face.

Supporting characters: A much more traditional roster of supporting characters, which gives a general throughline of: how much faith will these beat cops and career detectives learn to place in this kooky lawyer from out-of-town? Adding much class is The Wire’s Wendell Pierce as Captain Wagner. Cara Patterson as Kaya Blanke serves as an effective 2IC. Various other detectives float in and out, but none makes a huge impression, and you could say the same for Elsbeth’s son, Kaya’s dishy roommate and so on.

Star killers: Once again this is stuffed to the gills. Say hello to Jane Krakowski, Blair Underwood, Laurie Metcalf, Vanessa Bayer, Eric McCormack, Alan Ruck, Keegan-Michael Key, Matthew Broderick and countless others.

Ongoing narrative: A thin slip of a continuing storyline surrounds Elsbeth’s true reason for being in New York, and she gradually becomes closer and closer to Maya over the course of Season 1. Having exonerated Captain Wagner, in Season 2 she comes under suspicion herself, and there’s a further ongoing storyline which surrounds Lost’s Michael Emerson, whose entrance in the cold open of the episode One Angry Woman is nothing short of genius. Despite having (a bit) more screentime devoted to the season arc than Poker Face, this generally does a good job of balancing both aspects.

LUDWIG

Transmitted: 2024- on BBC One

Starring: David Mitchell as John “Ludwig” Taylor, a reclusive puzzle-setter.

Quirks: Cripplingly shy and introverted, with a strong sense of self-preservation, John cares deeply for his brother and his brother’s family, and he loves a good puzzle. He sometimes fails to take into account other people’s feelings, and is a shockingly poor improviser, which makes it all the more remarkable that his fairly inept deception isn’t tumbled immediately.

Magic powers: He da puzzle king.

Episode structure: Rather than seeing all the details of the crime, we get a few hints about what really happened before the police show up.

Supporting characters: Nice turns from Dipo Ola as James’s partner DI Carter and Sophie Willan as the station’s IT expert. Anna Maxwell-Martin is luminous as always. The unchanging team of younger coppers is a bit more anonymous. Ralph Ineson makes a strong impression.

Star killers: Not bad for a home-grown show. The first batch of episodes includes appearances from Felicity Kendall and Derek Jacobi, but this isn’t the usual case of “arrest the most famous person in the cast, they probably did it.” Many of the guest actors are familiar from other UK TV shows, but very few are really huge names.

Ongoing narrative: John’s deception is a foregrounded feature of many instalments, and the reasons for it take up half of episode one and most of episode six, but it is very engaging if slightly ludicrous. Season 2 has been set up without this element and it remains to be seen whether the show will be stronger or weaker without it – especially given how exciting it is when the whole house of cards collapses in episode six.

HIGH POTENTIAL

Transmitted: 2024- on ABC (now showing on Disney+ in the UK)

Starring: Kaitlin Olson as cleaner turned police consultant Morgan Gillory.

Quirks: Morgan hates unsolved puzzles, and is brash and overconfident, despite clearly having no shortage of empathy. Whereas Columbo was often star-struck, Morgan is impossible to impress and treats everyone the same.

Magic powers: Morgan sees everything, notices everything, and has a photographic memory as well as the kind of wide-ranging general knowledge which would put the average quizzer to shame. Here’s another contrast with Columbo. Peter Falk’s character was fascinated by new technology and always found something new to learn. Morgan Gillory already knows arcane details about which way churches face or the life cycles of exotic animals just by watching cable TV or listening to podcasts.

Episode structure: As with Ludwig, we tend to get an incomplete version of the murder which keeps us guessing as to who really did what to whom.

Supporting characters: Like Elsbeth, this is as much about the slowly deepening relationships and bond of trust between Morgan and her co-workers, and Morgan learning the rules of cop-land. She’s partnered with Daniel Sunjata as Detective Karadec, who manages not to turn his part into too broad a piece of comic relief, and it’s always nice to see Judy Reyes from Scrubs now as the head of the LAPD Major Crimes Division. A couple of other less charismatic cops are also hanging around (same team every time), plus Morgan has kids and an ex-husband played by Taran Killam from SNL (and Scrubs).

Star killers: The Amazing Spider Man’s Marc Webb directed an episode – does that count?

Ongoing narrative: Morgan’s deal for working with the police includes resources to investigate the disappearance of her first husband, but this comes up far less often than you’d think.

All of which brings us to Kathy Bates as Matlock, who once again is an unassuming quirky character who has talked her way into joining a team in order to investigate wrong-doings, but who is also pursuing her own agenda. And yet, for all its superficial similarities, this is a very different show – and I think a worse one. All of the foregoing are well-made, highly entertaining procedurals of the kind we weren’t getting any more. Maybe we’ll talk about Matlock in a few days…

The last of the Best Picture nominees this year (for me personally) is arguably the one which is dominating the discourse the least. That’s not surprising given that it’s neither a hugely controversial offering likely to split the crowd, but nor does it really have a shot at the big prize. I’m Still Here is the latest from Walter Salles whose Central Station from 1998 I remember thinking was fantastic, and there’s a weird overlap here with Emilia Pérez. Jacques Audiard’s film takes the fate of the disappeared in Mexico and uses it as a lever to open up the morality of a former gangster now living life as a civilian – and as noted, it rather collapses under the weight of a lot of silly clichés at the end, regardless of what you think about the depictions of the Mexican people, trans people and whether or not you liked the songs.

Salles’s intentions are rather more sober and serious as he tells the true story of the disappearance of politician Rubens Paiva in Brazil in the 1970s – through the eyes of his wife Eunice, played by Fernanda Torres. And although Selton Mello does great work as the husband, as do the teen/child actors playing the kids, it’s Torres who carries this absorbing film bodily on her shoulders. From her early caution as friends meet in her home to consider action against the military regime, to her steely management of the armed men in her living room, to the trauma of her imprisonment, to her heroic efforts to rebuild her life, she’s amazing.

This is a simple, unfussy film which tells its story without flinching and without glorifying, but which never feels like a documentary. From the very beginning, every aspect rings true, and how lovely to see Fernanda Montenegro – Oscar-nominated star of Central Station – in a cameo at the end. Fernanda Torres is nominated for this film, but I assume Demi Moore has this sewn up. Obviously it has a shot at Best International Feature, particularly given the Emilia Pérez backlash – although Audiard still won at the BAFTAs, so who knows? I enjoyed this more than any of the other Best Picture nominees, apart from The Substance – but hold on, there’s another film coming.

I gotta be honest, I put on Sing Sing feeling a bit like I was going to have to eat my greens. I’ve loved Colman Domingo since first seeing him on Fear the Walking Dead, but there are so many trite, clichéd and frustrating ways to tell the story of prison-theatre-programme-leads-to-personal-growth-but-also-brings-up-trauma that I suspected this would rapidly fall over its feet and land in saccharine schmaltz or hysterical melodrama. Boy, was I wrong. This incredible movie dodges every single tired trope the second they appear on the narrative horizon, and every frame of this rings so perfectly and so affectingly true, that I should have guessed earlier that almost the entire cast are graduates of the programme in question and they’re all essentially playing themselves, with Domingo, Paul Raci and Sean San José the only ring-ins.

I don’t know how I would have experienced the film if I’d known that beforehand – I don’t think it’s intended to be a big surprise. But now I want to watch it again knowing that because the performances are even more incredible when you consider that for most of the cast it would be their first time on a movie set. So all the credit in the world to them, but also to director and co-screenwriter Greg Kwedar for marshalling these resources with such precision and empathy. Shot on 16mm, the feeling of confinement gradually shades into intimacy and the surroundings feel totally authentic from the very first frame. I’m calling it – this is my favourite film of 2024.

I also want to briefly consider Memoir of a Snail which continues Adam Elliot’s idiosyncraticly adult adventures in claymation, and which combines terrific voice performances from the likes of Sarah Snook, Jacki Weaver, Magda Szubanski and Kodi Smit-McPhee with tactile plasticine animation to create a grungily charming life-story. While not quite having the impact of Elliot’s earlier triumph Mary & Max, this is still very well done, but the Best Animated Feature category is very competitive this year and I don’t think it stands a chance next to The Wild Robot and Flow, as good as it is.

I’m also trying to see all the nominees for Best Animated Feature. Inside Out 2 is wonderful entertainment despite not being a patch on the original, which just emphasises what a tremendously strong piece of work the original is. Vengeance Most Fowl is Wallace and Gromit at very nearly their best, and one barely notices the absence of Peter Sallis. I’m very excited about Memoir of a Snail, having been knocked out by the same team’s Mary and Max some years ago. That leaves The Wild Robot and Flow.

In their different ways, these are both painterly CG animations about the collision between nature and the modern world, with a largely animal cast and driven by a singular creative talent. But despite these superficial similarities they function in very different ways, although I’m pleased to say I think they’re both terrific.

The Wild Robot is the latest offering from mad genius Chris Sanders, who was let off the leash back when Disney was earning All Of The Money to make Lilo & Stitch, possibly my favourite post-renaissance 2D Disney movie. After a period in the wilderness, he came back with How to Train Your Dragon, and also has (sigh) a live action Lilo & Stitch coming out soon. Meanwhile, he’s cast Lupita Nyong’o as “Roz”, a silicon help-meet who mysteriously washes up on the shore of an uninhabited island. With echoes of both WALL-E and The Iron Giant, Roz grapples with what her purpose is, and (having spent days learning their language) turns to various animal friends for help.

This is pretty breezy, family-friendly, crowd-pleasing stuff, but an exceptional voice cast (including Pedro Pascal as a wily fox, Catherine O’Hara as a hilarious possum, Matt Berry as a neurotic beaver and Mark Hamill as a grizzly bear) and some absolutely gorgeous animation elevate this to classic status, and the script knows just when to go for the gag and when to pluck on your heart strings.

It reportedly cost around $80m which is cheap for a major CG movie. Flow was made for less than a tenth of that, and it’s almost impossible to tell. This Latvian animation was created by a tiny Latvian/Parisian team on consumer-grade equipment and tells the entirely worldless story of a tiny grey cat making friends (secretarybird, golden retriever and capybara mainly) in order to escape mysteriously rising flood waters. Again, the CG images have been given a painterly sheen, and whereas in the American movie, I’m convinced this is entirely for artistic reasons, here I think it may have been in part to conceal the relative simplicity of the digital models. But when the animation is so simultaneously characterful and accurate to the natural world, this seems like a pointless thing to quibble about.

My taste for magical realism, which at points strays in to surrealism, isn’t quite as well developed as that of director Gints Zilbalodis, but for the most part, this is a gorgeous, enthralling, sweetly beguiling story of friendship and adventure which never for a moment feels like dialogue would have added anything at all.

September 5

Tim Fehlbaum’s account of the Munich Massacre from the point of view of the ABC Sports team covering the Olympics makes an amazing trailer but only a pretty good film. Of course, it’s not the film’s fault that it’s been sold as something slightly other than what it is, but the differences between the white-knuckle, morally-queasy trailer and the rather more by-the-numbers actual movie raises questions in my mind about the wisdom of this approach.

It’s certainly an interesting piece of history, as has already been proven by Steven Spielberg who took a very different approach in his film Munich. In 1972, terrorists took nine members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage. By the early hours of the next morning, most of the terrorists and all of the hostages were dead. We follow the television crew who are used to talking over footage of swimming, long jumping and javelin events as they grapple with the reality that the are the only people able to tell the world what’s happening.

The pressure cooker environment is effective, and – as Billy Wilder observed – “audiences love ‘how’” so the stuff about having to smuggle film cans in and out of the Olympic Village, strapped to the body of a cameraman posing as a coach is fascinating. And there is tension, and there are interesting debates about whether the ABC coverage is influencing events for better or for worse, and whether ABC Sports president Roone Arledge is thinking more about innocent lives or about his own career.

The problem is that, of necessity, we only get access to either the plight of the hostages, or the actions of the German authorities, in fragments. So, we’re presented with a story in which innocent lives are at stake and a terrifying stand-off is taking place, but the film is trying to wring tension and excitement out of whether or not ABC will get access to the “bird” (satellite) or what form of words the anchor should use to (wrongly) announce that the hostages are alive and free.

It’s a decent TV movie, but I’m a bit disappointed and rather surprised to see it nominated for its screenplay. Still, in a world in which The Imitation Game wins a screenplay Oscar, anything is possible.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Also taking an unusual angle on events of global importance, but succeeding rather better is The Seed of the Sacred Fig, up for Best International Feature. The story of the making of this film by Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof could be movie in itself, as the raw footage had to be smuggled out of the country and the director had to flee before he could be arrested. Thus, this film about Iran, shot in Iran, by Iranians and entirely in Persian ends up as Germany official selection for the Academy Awards.

Missagh Zareh is Iman, newly promoted within the Revolutionary Court, but beginning to have misgivings about the nature of his role. His daughters meanwhile have an even more rebellious streak to them, amplified by protests surrounding the death in custody of a young woman (not named as but clearly meant to be Mahsa Amini), leaving his wife caught in the middle. Where September 5 is constrained by its narrative framework, the effect of the shifting political sands on this ordinary family is very much the point, and as such the family drama and the huge global story reflect on each other in fascinating, disturbing and moving ways – no more so than when Rasoulof includes real footage of Iranian protests and police actions.

While the whole cast is excellent, I must make special mention of Soheila Golestani as Iman’s wife Najmeh who fiercely attempts to steer a clear path between her own morality, her love for her family and her practical need to survive and thrive. She’s constantly trying to give nothing away, but there’s always something going on behind her eyes.

Normally it’s easy to spot which film will take the Best International Feature award – it’s the one also nominated in one or more other categories. But this year, we have both Emilia Pérez and I’m Still Here nominated for Best Picture, and Flow nominated for Best Animated Feature, leaving only this and The Girl with the Needle without additional nominations elsewhere. But of the films in the Oscar conversation, I liked this more than pretty much anything else outside of The Substance and Anora.

Mysteriously not nominated for a single Oscar, despite its star walking home with a clutch of awards all over town, Hard Truths finds Mike Leigh back in Naked territory, giving us a portrait of a thoroughly unlikeable motormouth anti-hero and daring us not to fall in love. Marianne Jean-Baptiste does incredible work as Pansy, whose brittle Karen-ish behaviour to everyone around her barely conceals an inner core of deep pain and loneliness. This drives her husband and son into a near-silent fugue state of incomprehending stoicism, and contrasts strongly with her two nieces who won’t let a little thing like Sam Spiro being loathesomely patronising put a spoke in the wheels of their plans for a Mother’s Day brunch. Sitting in the middle is Pansy’s sister Chantelle, where Michele Austin is much less showy than Jean-Baptiste but who navigates a tricky path between optimism and despair.

As usual, Mike Leigh’s improvisatory and exploratory script-writing delivers complex and truthful characters and wonderful performances, but as sometimes happens doesn’t provide us with a neat structure or much in the way of climactic catharsis. That Mother’s Day brunch looks to be the scene where all the narrative threads come together, but it passes and leads to a faintly irrelevant coda, centring David Webber’s Curtley almost as much as Pansy, and sidelining Chantelle. For the first four-fifths, however, this is epic, often hilarious, frequently heartbreaking stuff and I can only hope it does better at the BAFTAs than it did in Hollywood.

Of rather less interest is Robert Zemeckis’s slickly experimental single-camera-angle movie Here, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, and which reunited the director with his Forrest Gump team of screenwriter Eric Roth and lead actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. At least I think it’s them. For most of the running time they’re concealed behind a smear of de-aging (or up-aging) pixels, and it’s deeply to their credit that something resembling a performance manages to emerge from underneath all the digital shenanigans. This is especially true given that Roth hasn’t thought of anything remotely novel, insightful or even interesting for them or any of the other characters to say, so they just mouth Hallmark platitudes about how time flies or the future is coming as the narrative hyperactively pings from decade-to-decade seemingly at random. A couple of times, the juxtaposition of events from different periods in history brushes past something like wit, such as when a leaky roof is overlaid with a woman’s waters breaking, but these moments are the exceptions rather than the norm.

To facilitate the artifice of both the permanently locked-off camera and the huge time jumps, the whole thing was shot at Pinewood, hence the slightly disconcerting presence of so many familiar British TV faces from Michelle Dockery to Nikki Amuka-Bird to Kelly Reilly to Angus Wright to Ophelia Lovibond. All do decent accents (except possibly for Paul Bettany who seems permanently constipated) but it’s yet more artifice for a film that wants to be telling a sweet simple story about family, but which hasn’t figured out what the story is, or why we should care, or why it’s better to shoot it this way.

Nickel Boys is the first drama film from experimental documentarian RaMell Ross and it takes a grim story (from the novel by Colson Whitehead) and presents it in a very striking way which doesn’t always help. This is a very choppy, piecemeal film, in which short scenes end with hard cuts and material from other sources (and sometimes timeframes) is cut in unexpectedly. This I could have coped with, although some of the metaphors from the Apollo 8 mission and the Martin Luther King marches was a bit heavy-handed for my taste.

What I had a harder time with was the decision to shoot almost everything first person. Ross is smart enough not to be wedded to this technique, but he doesn’t stray from it often, and the idea presumably is to place us directly in the shoes of the main protagonist Elwood. We look out through his eyes and see the world that he sees. But drama is watching one person changed by another, and if we can’t see our protagonist’s face, we have to guess how he might be reacting. Near the middle of the film, Elwood’s friend Turner is also given the power of the point-of-view shot which means we can finally cut between two people having a conversation – but these conversations tend not to be the crucial ones, so we’re still stuck with only half the story.

In a second strand, taking place years after the boys’ incarceration, adult Elwood is shot over his own shoulder, so again we can’t see his face but now it’s harder to frame shots so that we can see who he’s talking to. A bit life Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, this struck me as an interesting formal experiment, but ultimately one which didn’t have the effect of immersing me more fully in the story – in fact just the opposite, it held me at a distance. That’s a shame as there’s much to appreciate here. This isn’t a true story, but it was inspired by ghastly places like the Dozier School which deserve to be exposed, and the Jim Crow era is a horrendous stain on American history, which some Americans seem only too happy to forget about.

I do have a nasty suspicion that the camerawork is designed at least in part to facilitate a final rug-pull which struck me as confusing and unlikely. Other people have found more thematic resonance in this, and maybe if I watched it again, knowing what was coming, I’d see that too, but I was too busy trying to work out the crossword puzzle which the film had set me to be truly moved or to appreciate the themes. There’s great work here from Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson and especially Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, but I didn’t get as much out of this as I expected or wanted to. I seem to be in the minority, though, so the failing may well be mine.

Sautday Night, Jason Reitman’s account of the final ninety minutes before the first episode of “NBC’s Saturday Night” went on the air is a work of obvious artifice, but it’s greatly to Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan’s credit that most of the backstory about events taking place outside of this very narrow window goes down very easily. There’s even a nice visual metaphor in one of the aspects of the film which I’d be prepared to bet never happened. This succeeds very nicely in making a somewhat trivial event seem of momentous importance, and the cast is having an absolute ball, anchored by Gabrielle LaBelle as the earnest, almost unflappable Lorne Michaels – but shout outs too to Tommy Dewey as Michael O’Donoghue, Matthew Rhys unrecognisable as George Carlin, Nicholas Braun in a remarkable dual role and most deliciously of all JK Simmons as a revoltingly vulgar evocation of Milton Berle. Good fun and buoyed by an appropriately demented score from Jon Batiste.