I haven’t been seeing very many current movies, and this even includes The Death of Stalin.  But I did read the graphic novel, The Death of Stalin (2017), by writer Fabien Nura and artist Thierry Robin—it “inspired” the making of the movie—and I enjoyed it.  The pictures are stark and tough-minded, the writing is magnetic.

The monstrous Stalin dies early on.  The monstrous Lavrentiy Beria is first shown raping a hapless girl (for a rapist he was), and it isn’t long before we see just how contemptuous of Stalin the barbarous official is.  After the big guy dies, Beria schemes.  Depicted here is a cold hell, a bleak, loveless, secular domain where violence can be employed at any time and self-seeking dominates.  When criminals are in power is the book’s theme, and it’s virtually relevant for the situation in socialist Venezuela when Madura blocks foreign aid from reaching his distressed people.  I repeat:  socialist Venezuela.

A Catholic nun-to-be, Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska), learns that she is Jewish and that her parents were murdered in an anti-Semitic Poland during WWII.  The person who discloses this information is Ida’s aunt (Agata Kulesza), a disillusioned former state prosecutor for the Polish commies. . . This is all I wish to say about the plot of the well-received Ida (2014) since so many reviewers have already described it, so I will go on to pronounce it a solid work of art about which Peter Rainer is absolutely right in his view that the film is “about the spiritual agonies of postwar Poland.”

What’s more, it exhibits how people respond to the fragility of their own lives in a place like postwar Poland:  Ida, after all, is quietly rattled by what she learns.  Patently, there are good responses and bad responses.

Pawel Pawlikowsky, the man who directed the annoying (to me) and ignorant My Summer of Love, has acquitted himself nicely with Ida, a film of black-and-white pictorial benefits.  I mean shots such as that of Ida standing in a circular, below-the-ground spot for which the clergy surely have a name and telling a statue of Jesus situated there that she’s not yet ready to take her vows.  Or the one where, at a fork in the road, she kneels and prays before a station of the cross while her aunt waits beside her car and smokes.  With images like these, the movie cannot escape providing at least hints of depth and significance.

(In Polish with English subtitles)

English: Agata Kulesza – a Polish actress. Busko-Zdrój, 30.06.2010 r. Polski: Agata Kulesza – polska aktorka na planie “Ojca Mateusza”. Busko-Zdrój, 30.06.2010 r. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The nineteenth century in Stanley and Livingstone (1939) is much like the twentieth century in that the work that men do takes them far from home and into remote areas, and the men aren’t even soldiers.  One of them, Dr. Livingstone (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), is a missionary who might have died in Africa, but didn’t.  Henry Stanley (Spencer Tracy) is a newspaper man assigned to hunt down Livingstone if rumors of his death are false.

What would be corny in movies today, such as some stuff involving Walter Brennan, was not considered corny in 1939, although there is not that much corniness at all in this absorbing Henry King film.  Much of it is quite mature (there is intelligent talk) and well-meaning, with some captivating, Kenya-provided safari footage.  Even the less than believable hot pursuit of Stanley and his helpers, who have virtually no arms, by many hostile natives is something to see.  As for the acting, a lot of grounded work gets done.  Spencer Tracy is just Spencer Tracy—but this works.  Hardwicke is truly fine as a man of God, while Brennan, Charles Coburn, Nancy Kelly and others are exactly right.  Congrats all around.

In the 1932 Night World, there is an opening montage of night-life naughtiness wherein a shot of a young boy in prayer appears.  If the boy is praying for the adults who frequent Happy’s Nightclub, they need it.  Trouble, like depravity, rises in this spellbinding sphere; there is talk of hardship (Tim the doorman’s wife is in the hospital) and, later, more than talk.  A fellow named Michael Rand (Lew Ayres) is getting drunk after the murder of his father, and he himself is almost murdered (!), for all the comfort he receives from Mae Clark‘s friendly dancer.

In large measure it is blackly realistic if dramatically lean.  Richard Schayer did the screenplay, not at all flubbing the dialogue; and the appropriate direction is by Hobart Henley.  As usual with early ’30s American flicks, though, an antiquated song and dance number gets performed, something Scorsese never had to put up with.

In the 1932 Night World, there is an opening montage of night-life naughtiness wherein a shot of a young boy in prayer appears.  If the boy is praying for the adults who frequent Happy’s Nightclub, they need it.  Trouble, like depravity, rises in this spellbinding sphere; there is talk of hardship (Tim the doorman’s wife is in the hospital) and, later, more than talk.  A fellow named Michael Rand (Lew Ayres) is getting drunk after the murder of his father, and he himself is almost murdered (!), for all the comfort he receives from Mae Clark‘s friendly dancer.

In large measure it is blackly realistic if dramatically lean.  Richard Schayer did the screenplay, not at all flubbing the dialogue; and the appropriate direction is by Hobart Henley.  As usual with early ’30s American flicks, though, an antiquated song and dance number gets performed, something Scorsese never had to put up with.