The Bibi Files (2024)

This insightful documentary about Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power, on and off, for more than 17 years since 1996, is about the corruption charges that he has been facing. The parallels between his situation and the recently reelected American president are both startlingly clear and frightening that about half the population in both countries vote for a leader who is clearly a criminal who has the goal of enriching themselves at the expense of their country. The film consists of leaked interviews by the police with Netanyahu, his wife and his son, as well as the investigators’ interviews with Miriam Adelson and husband, Sheldon, the hotel and casino magnate who died in 2021. These longtime Netanyahu allies here sound, in admittedly brief clips, like they’re trying to distance themselves from Bibi and Sara. The video clips of police interrogations are interspersed with interviews by the filmmakers with journalists, politicians, and a childhood friend of the prime minister. The film makes a strong case that Netanyahu’s legal woes – the politician is charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes – mean that it’s very much in his interests to prolong Israel’s war on Gaza. Interviewees talk of wholesale quantities of champagne and cigars requested by Netanyahu from associates, with extravagant gifts of jewelry for his wife, Sara. Meanwhile, interrogation footage of her husband – a key component of the film – is eye-opening. He’s described elsewhere as an adept liar and the whole situation is a warning for other democracy’s that have autocratic leaders.

Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villvicencio

This is the second book by this author that I have read--the first was The Undocumented Americans, a short memoir of the author's time working as a volunteer translator for unaccompanied minors who were applying for asylum. It, like this, is a short work that speaks volumes about what it is to be an undocumented immigrant. It was a finalist for The National Book Award for non-fiction, and this was long listed for the award for Fiction this year. Catalina immigrated to the United States from Ecuador as a child, grew up in Queens living with her undocumented grandparents, and the book covers a year of her attendance at Harvard. This in some ways parallels the author's own life, and is meant to highlight the plight of students who are smart, have real potential, but without proper documentation, none of that is of much help to them. This is not so much a book about campus life as it is about the ties that bind immigrants, how those ties are remarkably different than their fellow students, especially at these elite universities, and how that anchors and also limits them. The author is one to watch--she is a compelling story teller with a lot to say, and I would recommend this.

Black Box Diaries (2024)

This documentary, which made the list of nominees for the 2025 Best Feature Length Documentary Oscars, shines an unflattering light on Japan's rape culture. Not that there was any doubt about this, but #MeToo extends beyond the borders of the United States, and this is a story that reveals that to be true. The story begins in 2015, when JPnese journalist Shiori Ito — then a 26-year-old intern at Thomson Reuters — went out for a drink with renowned TV reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi, only to become intoxicated and taken against her will to his hotel room. Her allegations of ensuing rape are brusquely dismissed by police: Under a century-old Japanese law that has only recently been revised, sexual assault wasn’t necessarily defined by non-consent, especially if the victim’s resistance was not violent. Ito methodically lays out a national culture built to protect men’s honor first in such situations — in particular well-protected men like Yamaguchi, whose friends in high places include Shinzo Abe, then Japan’s Prime Minister (spoiler alert--he does not come off well here either). Discouraged by both the authorities and her family from taking the matter any further — at potential cost to her reputation and career prospects — Ito nonetheless goes public with her accusations in 2017, pursuing legal action against Yamaguchi and finding a publisher for her tell-all book “Black Box,” a volume intended not just to relay her experience but to prompt a reevaluation of Japan’s archaic sexual assault laws. Undeterred when the prosecution review board rules that she has no case, she transfers it to civil court instead, whereupon her fortunes gradually begin to shift, even as she faces hostility from the media and hate mail from the general public. This is a compelling tale--it opens with CCTV footage from the hotel where she was raped showing that we was carried into the hotel and tries to escape several times and then follow with Ito's interview with the driver that night backing up her story that she wanted to leave and her attacker wouldn't let her. We know the ending, and the film unfolds to show just how hard it is to get justice for sexual violence in Japan.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

I am slowly (very slowly) working my way through books on the New York Times Best 100 Books of the 21st Century that I had not read when it came out, and this is one of them. I was unfamiliar with the author, but she is apparently known for her attention to sex at the fringes and the people who live there. Allison is the heroine and the book vacillates between where she is now and where she once was. She is a former model now in her late 40's, and haunted by her friendship with Veronica, an older woman who died of AIDS. Alison herself has hepatitis C now and cleans offices. Once beautiful, she has not aged well. She lived fast and hard and it shows. She takes fistfuls of codeine so she can move her arm, injured in a car accident, enough to be able to wash windows as part of her job. It is hard for her to reconcile her decrepitude with her glittering memories of being a model in Paris -- a life that crashed to a close after an affair with a powerful, corrupt agent ended badly. This is a cautionary tale, what could happen if you grasp at the brass ring and slip badly in pursuit of it. It is tightly written and all too believable.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (2024)

Here is the thing. This is a movie about a young man who was born with an illness that would inevitably lead to an early death after a long period of decline. So this is a tough story, and it stirkes close to home for me. My youngest son had a brain tumor when he was five years old and had surgery, radiation, and 18 months of chemotherapy, so I know what it is like to fear for your child's life, to mourn the things that they will miss, and to grapple with the reality that death might come too soon for them. Some people might run to the hills rather than watch this, but I lean into it. Ironically, it is my childhood cancer survivor, now an adult himself, who wanted to watch this. Mats Steen was born in 1989, and before he was even a few years old, his parents knew something was wrong with his development. He was diagnosed with a truly cruel disease called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, which weakened his physical state with each passing year, leading to his death at the age of 25. The opening half-hour details his existence through interviews with his emotionally vulnerable parents & sister, alongside home videos that make his fading physical condition palpable. After he died, his parents discovered that Mats had spent possibly as much as 20,000 hours in a game called “World of Warcraft,” where he created an avatar named Ibelin. To say he had a rich online life would be an understatement, and it is presented in his own words, through the game, as well as with interviews of players who he had relationships with in the game. It really allows for an understanding of not only why this experience mattered to him, but how much Mats shaped the lives of others through his encounters. He made friends, had his first crush, encouraged growth in others, and found his best self. A lot of modern culture derides screen time as a fruitless pursuit, but this illustrate its potential connective value, how it can bring people together in ways that forever change them, and in that light, is strangely uplifting.

The War Below by Ernest Sheyder

Civilization would not exist were it not for miners. Every year the world’s oldest industry supplies hundreds of megatons of the primary metals and minerals that are essential to all subsequent industries—from medical devices to kitchen appliances, aircraft, toys, power plants, computers and cars. In order to build the things that we are hoping will save us from our rapidly changing climate, things such as electric vehicles, solar panels, cell phones, and millions of other devices, it means the world must dig more mines to extract lithium, copper, and other vital building blocks. Hence it’s consequential when the governments of Europe and the U.S. implement policies requiring that global mining expand, and soon, by 400% to 7,000%. Where will it all come from? Mines are deeply unpopular, even as they have a role to play in fighting climate change and powering crucial technologies. These tensions have sparked a worldwide reckoning over the sourcing of necessary materials, and this book tries to unravel the complexity of the issue and reveals the ongoing brawl between industry titans, conservationists, community groups, policymakers, and many others over whether the habitats of rare plants, sensitive ecosystems, Indigenous holy sites, and other places should be dug up for their riches.

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

This is a movie for all ages--which cannot be said of many animated features this year. Bring the kids, they will have fun with this one. Feathers McGraw, the enemy of the Oscar-winning “The Wrong Trousers” has returned in all his silent glory, glowering from a prison (or, in this case, a zoo) cell and planning his revenge. Back at home, Wallace seems more co-dependent on Gromit than ever, but everything changes when he invents a “smart gnome” named Norbot, who can help Gromit in his garden and perform other tasks around the house. When Feathers hacks Norbot, it leads to a hysterical army of angry robot gnomes and a battle between the old-fashioned Wallace & Gromit and the future. Built on a foundation of comedy that comes from the silent era, this is just beautifully structured, a perfect rhythm of plotting and humor that works for all ages. It’s just so comforting to see something this creatively spry and uncluttered in its approach-—there’s something funny about using the human toil required to make stop-motion to tell what’s basically an anti-AI story—but more than anything there are simple charms in this lovely little film, one that gets in, entertains you, and gets out.

Life And Death Of The American Worker by Alice Driver

This book chronicles the worker experience at the Tyson plant in Arkansas, but it could be about any meat packing plant. The stories here are very specific, telling about specific workers and their families, but as a health care provider in Iowa, where the governor declared meat packing plant employees to be essential workers, where there was absolutely no effort to impose safety or distancing in the work place, and in April of 2020 over 700 employees at a meat packing plant in eastern Iowa tested positive for COVID. Many were hospitalized and quite a few died. They were largely middle aged and immigrants. The same is true at Tyson. The employer controls all aspects of the supply chain, and they control all aspects of the employee work experience, including health assessment and maintenance. There is nothing that is independent, so when there is a chemical spill, the company controls the narrative, and the workers have no ability to be treated appropriately, independently, or fairly. It is exactly what you would expect and deeply disturbing at the same time.

Memoir of a Snail (2024)

This is an animated movie, but think more Life Of A Zucchini than something more silly and Happily Ever After. This is the story of two children, twins named Grace and Gilbert, but if is by no means a story for kids. Grace, who is telling her life story to her favorite pet snail, Sylvia, after the death of the last person on Earth she cared about, her best friend Pinky (a wonderful Jacki Weaver). It’s a story of notable hardship. Mom died in childbirth. Dad was a paraplegic who didn’t live long enough to raise Grace or her twin brother Gilbert (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee in adulthood). The twins were split after Dad passed, sending Grace to a pair of swingers—yes, this is a shockingly adult stop-motion movie, likely setting a new record for nudity in the form—and Gilbert to a family of religious fundamentalists on the other side of the country who use and abuse him. Much of the movie consists of letters sent back and forth between Grace and Gilbert, vowing to return to each other as soon as they can escape the shells that life has placed on them.

What I Ate In One Year by Stanley Tucci

I like the author's view on food as well as Italian food in general, and so this should have been a slam dunk win for me, but it just wasn't. It is essentially a diary of the food that he eats and prepares over the course of a calendar year, interspersed with what he is doing and who he is doing it with, and the narrative lacked the humor that I would need to be completely caught up in it. Because he is an actor, and one who was filming a movie the year this was written, and because his wife is a literary agent and the sister of an actor, there is some name dropping that happens as well--which is a distraction and a bit of a detraction for me, but it might appeal to others. The positives for me were: 1. the Italian food--he and his wife like to cook, as do my spouse and I, and they make some very good food between them over the year. 2. I was intrigued by the cookware that he developed--he seems fussy about the things he cooks with and the next time I need to buy some pans, these will be at the top of my list. They say you can use them on induction cook tops, and my pasta pot cannot be, for example. 3. I am going to check out a cookbook he likes by Julius Roberts, because again, he seems fussy. 4. I felt validated in bringing home things to cook with when I travel and for packing my own food to bring when we travel by car. I am a bit of a lightweight compared to him where that is concerned. 5. The restaurants he eats in may be worth checking out--London and Rome are the two cities where he eats out a lot, so I guess I will just have to go back to them to see if this is in fact the case. All in all, you have to be deeply into food or deeply into actors to really love this book but it isn't a tough read, it has that going for it. And I definitely would not turn down an invitation to have him cook for me.

Wicked (2024)

I am amongst one of the last people to be in the know that this is not only an extension of the Wizard of Oz story, but also a flipping of it. Part of the reason that the original stopped resonating with me at a very early age is because of how it basically pigeon holes the characters into very basic two-dimensional slots, and this appealingly takes that narrative and puts it on its head, all while delving into the why of what motivates the main characters. The Wicked Witch of the West and the Good Witch of the North, who are played by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande and each of whom gives a knockout performance, duke it out, but not in the way that you might have imagined they would and you will be charmed by it none-the-less. The all too timely themes of bullying, corrupt leaders and the demonization of difference, this is a movie that promises a froth of pink and green escapism but delivers considerably more in the way of depth and darkness.

Cue The Sun! by Emily Nussbaum

I did not love this book but I think it is because while the author does a bang up job of covering the unexpectedly lengthy history of reality TV, that the genre just doesn't much work for me. Unless it is the Great British Bake Off, in which case I am all in. What makes us look at the wide range of shows we call “reality TV” and say they have more in common than they do differences? This book is here to answer that question. A reasonable facsimile of reality television has been with us for a long time—about as long as the TV set has been a mainstay of the American living room. The story of its invention, then, is in part the story of how television workers were making the forerunners of reality TV long before anyone would call it that, and how at every step along the way, innovation was entangled with ambivalence, uncertainty, and, sometimes, exploitation. The author serves as a knowledgeable guide to reality TV’s past and present, peppering Cue the Sun! with well-researched details, lively anecdotes, and primary-source accounts of the genre’s checkered development across decades. As she demonstrates, reality television as we know it today is the product of a rich stew of influences, including Queen for a Day’s depictions of female complaints and the “Warholian coldness” of Allen Funt’s prank show Candid Camera in the 1940s, An American Family’s cinema verité–family soap hybrid and Chuck Barris’s provocative game shows in the 1970s, and COPS and America’s Funniest Home Videos’ clip-show formats predicated on real-life stakes in the 1980s and ’90s. No wonder, then, that the descendants of such varied programs may not look related at first glance. All of this leads up to the modern reality show, whereby strangers are filmed in an apartment they share or on a deserted island they have been left on, and one by one they are voted off. As you can imagine, there is a very dark underside to it all, and we are not spared any of those details. This will not make you want to revisit those shows, so beware.

Dahomey (2024)

The movie starts off by contextualizing exactly what the problem being addressed is. “I grew up completely ignorant that my heritage, my culture, my education, my life and soul had been kept overseas for centuries.” The problem is not unique to this culture and these people—invaders and occupiers have routinely taken what they see of value, and for centuries thought little about it and had few regrets. The indigenous people of Bolivia were enslaved by the Spanish and mined enough silver to build a bridge made of it from South America back to Spain in the early days of sea travel, and that continued for much of the next 400 years. This film depicts the return of 26 royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey, which was established in the 17th century. In late 2021, the artifacts were transported from museums in Paris back to their place of origin, The Republic of Benin. This is about reckoning with history that has been forever altered by colonialism. French troops originally seized the artifacts after war broke out between them and the Kingdom of Dahomey, in 1892. Like most colonial occupiers, France inflicted both physical and cultural violence against the people of Dahomey, robbing them of their history as well—they were especially deprived because of their historical skills as metal workers. They made things that had both artistic as well as cultural value. The current state of Africa has been largely shaped by European interference, from language and education to the state of their cultural institutions.

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud

This book was long listed for the Booker Prize in 2024, and as is so often the case, I liked this book better than the one that won. A review that I read of this book noted that the author has taken her structure as well as her title from a speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, where Jaques declared that the “strange eventful history” of human life has seven acts--the title of the book is taken from this, as well as the structure of the book--although it is a drama rather than a comedy. The book is a sweeping story of the lives of three generations of the Cassars, a Franco-Algerian family at a pivotal time in history for Algeria. It begins in 1940 in Salonica (now Thessaloniki), as the Germans sweep into France and Gaston Cassar hears General de Gaulle make his broadcast calling on those French still “free” to join him. She ends 70 years later, in 2010, in Connecticut, as Gaston’s son dies in a hospice, tended by a Haitian nurse whose name, like his, alludes to a language and nationality foisted on them by colonial history--the French colonialization legacy is part of the subtext of this story. It includes the Algerian war of independence, as a result of which the family lose their home and national identity; the two years the family’s most promising scion spends as a student in Paris, during which he endures something that blights his adult life; his sister’s broken-hearted suicide attempt; an alcoholic’s hard-won recovery; the courtship of a couple who have been held up throughout the novel as exemplars of married love and yet all is not as it seems. If you like these lengthy stories that cover intergenerational trauma, this is a book for you.

Dune: Part 2 (2024)

Let’s start off with the good news.  This is gorgeously filmed and the acting is top notch.   I have not read the Dune series in 50 years, and I am pretty sure I petered out before the end, even though it was wildly popular when I was a teen, so my memory of the story line is sparse at best, and I cannot comment too accurately on how well the movie adhered to the original.  What I do know is that my youngest son kept commenting on it’s similarity to other epic storylines told across several movies, so maybe the details and the locations change but the struggle between good and evil looks pretty similar.  The movie doesn’t seem overly long, in spite of clocking in at nearly 3 hours, but the bleakness is pervasive.  It is likely to garner several nominations, and they will be well deserved, but overall, it is good rather than great.

Grown Women by Sarai Johnson

This is a multigenerational story about black families that is set more in culture than strictly in poverty (although, don't get me wrong, there is plenty of poverty here). The novel spans the 1940s through the mid-2000s, and the story is driven through the narratives of great-grandmother Evelyn and her three-generation lineage of daughters: Charlotte, Corinna and Camille. For much of the novel, Evelyn is present only through memories. Charlotte’s mothering of Corinna and Corinna’s mothering of Camille take center stage. It is about inadequate parenting and then downstream consequences of kicking your child out rather than believing them, about the value in getting over your wounded pride, and how trauma reverberates across generations. Evelyn is the catalyst — she never quite wanted the role of mother to begin with. Thrust into raising Charlotte, Evelyn wrestled with a desire to balance motherhood with pursuing her own professional endeavors. Their mother-daughter bond, or lack thereof, resulted in Charlotte needing to leave her home to focus on her life as a young mother. She and her daughter live in poverty as a result, and Corinna reaches out to Evelyn for her daughter Camille's sake. Camille serves as the bridge to her family’s matrilineal reconciliation. She carries the weight of generations past, and yet has deep responsibility to carve a new life for herself that includes empathy, hope and unapologetically living out her dreams.

Sugarcane (2024)

This is what generational trauma looks like. This impactful, multistranded documentary weaves together a dogged investigation into the horrific crimes perpetrated against generations of Indigenous children at a residential school run by the Catholic church in Canada, with accounts of the trickle-down of damage, from grandparents to parents to children. Specifically, children were raped, beatened and killed. The rapes produced babies, who were mostly incinerated. In the midst of uncovering what happened, which involved a detailed record review, ground penetrating radar to find unmarked graves, and in one case, DNA testing that revealed the father of one native elder to be a specific priest. The pervasive feeling of shame and being inferior, being unworthy of love are the legacy of the survivors of the residential schools throughout the Americas. It’s a remarkably courageous and exposed work, particularly for co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat and his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, whose painful journey together in search of healing is the film’s spine. The sickening facts of the case are presented with a respectful restraint but it’s impossible to watch this and not feel a cold, hard rage on behalf of the victims. The Catholic church does not come off well, either in the past, or currently--they do nothing to atone for their sins, including not confessing them. This is streaming on Disney and is well done and well told.

Tell Me Anything by Elizabeth Strout

This author has masterfully linked the stories that she has created over the years across books to produce full pictures of the characters that she writes about--now she has put Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton together, side by side, to see what they have to say to each other. So while Lucy and Olive do develop a relationship here, the center of the novel belongs to Bob Burgess, the 65-year-old lawyer, the neighbor that Lucy went on leisurely walks with during COVID and beyond. Lucy still lives with her ex-husband William, the father of her grown daughters, with whom she’s rekindled a romance. Bob lives within the shadow of his overbearing minister wife, Margaret, but a fresh legal challenge spurs him into action: the defense of a middle-aged hermit, Matt Beach, accused of murdering his elderly mother in nearby Shirley Falls. The beauty of this book is that it is so ordinary--meaning it is both relatable and believable, the people within could be your neighbors. It is not so much reality TV but more Mr. Roger's Neighborhood meets Lake Woebegone; everyone is a little above average and very decent.

Flow (2024)

This move won the Golden Globe for best animated movie and it is certainly gorgeously animated, and my favorite animated movie that I have seen to date. The movie is set in a forest, though it's unclear where on Earth this forest could be — the fauna make that a little complicated. The protagonist is an ordinary black housecat, whose perspective we become closely attuned to. It's a solitary creature, dodging packs of dogs and predatory secretary birds, but it was clearly loved once. It takes refuge in an abandoned cabin adorned with more-than-life-size carvings of a cat that we presume to be it only gigantic. So humans lived here at one time, we know not when, but we soon understand why. One day, out of the blue, the forest is overtaken by an enormous flood. The water rises until only the peaks of mountains provide refuge. Our cat, by the skin of its teeth, survives, and it eventually comes across a capybara in a small, weathered sailboat. This vessel gathers a ragtag group of survivors over time, picking up a ring-tailed lemur, a secretarybird, and a yellow Labrador. As they traverse this new world, these strangers must find ways to coexist and to survive all the uncertainties that present themselves. I read a review that likened this to a video game, not to disparage the animation, but to give a sense of the journey this band of animals in on, facing down one peril only to be confronted with another, like different levels in a game. The exact meaning of it all eludes me, but it is beautiful and peaceful to watch.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

I am slowly working my way through the half of the New York Times Best 100 Books of the 21st Century that I have not read (VERY slowly indeed), and read this, only my second book by this author. It is much like the first, which is a sweeping saga of a deeply flawed family who are essentially the opposite of supportive of each other, and unlikable at the same time. The Lambert family is essentially a sad cast of characters. The elder Lamberts, Enid and Alfred, are in a mess. Alfred, a once confident and able, if anal-retentive man, is succumbing rapidly to Parkinson's disease and dementia. He hangs out all day every day in the basement to avoid Enid, who has problems of her own. For a start, she thinks Alfred might still get better if only he'd do the useless exercises his doctor has given him. She's also obsessed with the idea of bringing her children together for one last Christmas – a prospect that seems horribly unlikely since the children don't want to visit her, her view of them is wildly distorted, and they have problems of their own. Gary tries to avoid the fact that he is crushingly depressed by drinking more and more martinis. Denise's love life has become so tangled that she's lost her job and just about everything else. Chipper has been fired from academia for sleeping with a student and things only get worse when he starts working for a criminal to defraud the people of Lithuania. The book is tragic in most senses of the word, and yes, there are moments of true hilarity amidst the crushing despair. It is realistic, from start to finish, and everyone manages to pick themselves up and do a little better. It is brilliant and difficult.

Frida (2024)

This documentary of the artist Frida Kahlo is one that you will love or hate, and it might depend on how you feel about the subject herself. Creative, colourful, and predominantly told through the words of its subject as recorded in her illustrated diaries, this engaging documentary about the Mexican artist is a beguiling and rather beautiful tribute to her spirit and originality. Its deft blend of archive footage and what I found to be lovely, organic animation of her works of art marks the directorial debut of Carla Gutiérrez, who served as the editor on several documentaries about groundbreaking women including RBG, about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Julia, which looked at the legacy of television chef Julia Child. Kahlo’s life was full and eventful, but while the film doesn’t attempt to explore every aspect and every romantic connection, it does delve satisfyingly deeply into her interior life, explored through her artistic output. There is something wildly appealing about how Kahlo approaches art that has endured robustly, more so than her fragile body endured, and for me, it is captured in this imaginative telling of her life and her creative process. I saw an exhibit of her early work, some dating back to her childhood, and the consistency with which she applied magical realism to her art is breathtaking, and reflected throughout this documentary, which is short listed for the 2025 Feature Length Documentary Academy Award.

The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan

This is not your usual Amy Tan book, and I would characterize it as a memoir more than anything else. The author self-discloses that she is prone to obsessiveness, and we know that birds have a way of bringing that quality out in people. When the author finds something that she loves, she jumps in with both feet and gets those around her on board so that it goes her way, and that is what happened here. She is someone who, like a lot of us, has enjoyed nature and being outdoors, and birds are a ubiquitous part of that no matter where you are. It wasn't until 2016 that she caught the bird watching fever, and then during COVID, when in the Bay Area where she lives there were very few things to do outdoors, she took it from a hobby to a mission. She notes that on top of the love of nature she has also enjoyed sketching throughout her life, and that birding has been an avenue to hone those skills as well. On the up side, this book really got me thinking about myself and how I related to birds, and where I want this to incorporate this into my life, especially as I inch towards retirement and having way more time. The downside is that this just really seems more like interfering with nature, of brining it into your life in a really organized and somewhat strange way rather than just observing. She wants to be part of their lives, to be recognized by them rather than watching them, to the point where she is purchasing literally thousands of dollars worth of worms that she stores in her refrigerator to get birds to come back to her yard in droves. All in all I would say if you are an Amy Tan fan, you should check this out, and then if you are not, but you really love birds and stories about the people who are obsessed with them, this would fit the bill.

Inside Out 2 (2024)

Yet another mental health movie from the Pixar oeuvre, featuring emotions and how to manage them. Joy is on top as the emotion bundle goes, and she believes she has perfected an unimpeachable system for molding Riley. With the help of the usual crew—Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust—she deposits the glass balls holding Riley’s worst memories to a distant realm called the ‘back of the mind’, which is an age old strategy for getting by. Those of use who are from New England are very familiar with it. She deposits the best moments to an underground lake whose tendrils form a forest that reaches from the glimmering waters toward the sky, forming Riley’s core beliefs. “I am a good person,” the girl often repeats to herself. You can’t really argue with Joy’s methods. Riley, now 13 years old, is giving, smart, and, by Joy’s own account, exceptional. The girl who once feared loneliness in her new Bay Area surroundings has a tight-knit friend group too. The trio are so close that they’ve formed a formidable team on their hockey squad. They’ve even caught the eye of a high school hockey coach who has invited them to a three-day camp where players like Val-—Riley’s hero-—attend. For Joy and her cohorts, you can’t ask for much more. Along comes the biggest, most obvious obstacle possible at the teenager Riley: Puberty. A late-night alarm, in fact, announces its beginning, leading to some additional emotions appearing: Embarrassment, Ennu, Envy, and the most destructuve emotion of all, Anxiety. When Riley learns her best friends will be attending a different high school next year, Anxiety takes it upon herself to wholly recraft Riley in the hopes that new version of her will impress Val. She throws away Riley’s present sense of self to the back of her mind and exiles Joy and the other old emotions. It’s up to Joy and company to restore Riley’s former sense, journeying to the back of the mind, before Anxiety totally upends Riley’s ability to function.

Real Americans by Rachel Khong

There is a tension in this book about what it is to be "real" in a country where almost everyone is an immigrant. Even the Native Americans, who are arguably the only real Americans, came from somewhere else, on foot or by boat, but they did not originate here--and also have intermingled DNA with all the other immigrants over the centuries since. The vibe here is that white people are the "real" Americans and that Asian immigrants are the interlopers who are trying to fit in. The book spans three generations of a Chinese-American family. The relationships between each generation are both loving and deeply troubled. May is a woman who flees Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China to come to the U.S. She’s a brilliant scientist (a researcher of biogenetics, which becomes weirdly relevant) but struggles to form a close relationship with her daughter, Lily. Lily wants the loving relationships she sees in other American families but her mother can barely identify her emotions, much less identify them. The third generation is Lily's son Nick. As is so often the case, in both literature and in life, this is a family that does terrible things to each other, with consequences that span decades. The characters are both sympathetic and unlikeable, shutting each other out and making decisions without ever talking to each other, and in the end, the secretive nature of one generation is passed down to the next. And even as each generation tries to overcome the deficits of the previous generation, it doesn’t make things better. Lily tries to be the affectionate parent her mother wasn’t, but both overcompensates and is no more honest with him about his father and grandmother than her mother was with her. Nick also finds himself in troubled relationships, because he’s uncommunicative and closed off. And so it continues, trauma bleeding from one generation to the next, and yet, with a twist of genetic manipulation added into the mix.

Furiosa (2024)

I watched this on the way home from South India, which at the rate we were going was a 2-day journey in real time, with lengthy layovers, longer plane flights, and several of them. If I had been more attentive to detail, I would have noticed that anything this might be nominated for an Oscar for already had an available shortlist published for (admittedly just a couple days ahead of time, but still, it was knowable information) and this was not on it. Still, having watched every single one of the Mad Max ouevre going back decades, it was probably in the cards that I would watch this one as well. It is another apocalyptic epic western, this one a prequel to “Mad Max: Fury Road”. It is all about the stunts--the film is here to give you more: more gravity-defying chases, more high-flying stunts, more deeply felt pathos, and, somehow, an even greater spirit to push the limits of what the frame can seemingly hold. It leaves you with a feeling that there is more happening just outside our viewing window. It also shamelessly employs Christian iconography and Arthurian legend to craft an entrancing story that still manages to surprise, even if we already know of the bleak future its guiding us toward. So even though it did not get an Oscar nod as of yet, it is one of the best prequels to be had, should you follow this sort of thing.

Heavy by Kiese Laymon

The author is s professor at a well respected university, and this is his story. As memoirs go, this is a well told story , but it is very hard to read. It is chock full of unwelcome truths about what it is to grow up black in America. Violence is the everything everywhere all at once. His father’s mother was raped by a sheriff in Enterprise, Mississippi. His own mother goes to bed with a gun beneath her pillow. Laymon understands violence as a social system in the most memorable quote of the book: “Parents were trained to harm children in ways children would never harm parents, babysitters were trained to harm kids in ways kids could never harm babysitters. My body knew white folk were trained to harm us in ways we could never harm them.” He was sexually and physically abused as a child, often by people who either loved or took care of him. You can see how hard it would be to move beyond it, even though his mother was a highly educated professional and wanted the same for him. This emphasis is on truth telling rather than sugar coating – turning it into a kind of guiding principle –and it is a heavy burden. And heaviness is at the center of his autobiography. He himself is heavy: the book begins with the 11-year-old Laymon weighing 208lb. Later he will get bigger, at one point reaching 319lb. and he struggles with his weight throughout his childhood and young adulthood. But the title also refers to history, to the unfinished legacies of slavery, to the burden black Americans have to bear from living in a country that distrusts, demonizes and all too often destroys them. Who would want to face up to that heaviness?

Emilia Pérez (2024)

This was short listed for Best International Feature Film, but it is not a submission from Mexico, but rather from France. It has none of the charms of the best movies that come out of Mexico, nor is it's portrayal of the country in any way flattering. Its writer-director Jacques Audiard is French, but it is also not Mexican because it was almost entirely shot on Parisian soundstages where the streets of Mexico City were recreated for scenes with an international cast. Even its source material—a chapter in Boris Razon‘s 2018 novel Écoute— is foreign. The result from all these layers that remove it from Mexico is a hyper-curated, phantasmagorical melodramatic narco-opera from the mind of an artist with no direct ties to the land in which he’s chosen to set his fiction. What it is exactly is a bit hard to pin down--it is a crime thriller that boils over into melodrama, laced with violent action. Zoe Saldaña gives an excellent performance as a lawyer who has become bored with her work, making her a perfect choice to take on a formidable and dangerous assignment: to help a brutal Mexican drug kingpin disappear from sight—even from his wife and two children—and live the rest of his life as a woman. Both iterations of that character are played by trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón, who gives the breakthrough performance of the year. Love it or hate it, it is a unique portrayal and story line and I very much enjoyed it.

The Heart In Winter by Kevin Barry

This is an "it goes from bad to worse" kind of a story. Tom Rourke is an Irishman haphazardly subsisting in the mining town of Butte, Montana, in the 1890s. He has a poor excuse for a job as assistant to a poor excuse for a photographer, and earns drink money by writing letters for illiterate men luring brides from the east. Tom has two fateful meetings, both involving love at first sight. The first is with a palomino horse, which he stumbles upon while coming down from opium. He’s no horseman, and yet the animal calls to him. The second is with Polly Gillespie, a newly arrived mail-order bride who walks into his photography studio with her God-obsessed stick of a husband, Long Anthony Harrington. The three of them take off on the run and it goes very very poorly.

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

I just do not get the Marvel Universe, and in my defense, there is a lot of material there to keep up with. The sheer volume of spin off TV shows that are required watching or you just cannot keep up with what is going on and it jsut gets even more confusing. Deadpool is the exception to the rule though. Hw seemed like the anti-superhero, the one who could poke fun at himself. Now, 8 years on from his first appearance, Ryan Reynolds’ sweary superhero has evolved from plucky insurgent to the cornerstone of a potential Marvel revival, which I hear is much needed. So when he refers to himself as ‘Marvel Jesus’ in this splashy, extremely violent, timeline-traversing quest to protect his friends and beloved ex (Morena Baccarin, barely in it) from erasure, he’s not kidding. Deadpool Wolverine is a franchise resurrection dressed as an odd-couple bromance, with a new version of Hugh Jackman’s grizzled Wolverine along for the ride. And it’s altogether too much heavy lifting for a character who lives to snark from the sidelines to be for naught. This was strangely entertaining, despite it's over the top gore, but it puts me no closer to understand ing where Marvel is headed.

When The Clock Broke by John Gantz

This is the long story of how we in the United States got to where we are today, which is a country where the Republican presidential candidate in 2024 was an avowed white supremacist fascist who advocated the violent overthrow of the government if he couldn't win legitimately and the race was literally too closed to call. That does not, however, capture what the book is about--it is largely a political recapitulation of 1992 in the U.S. The author's angle is that the populist resentments of today’s MAGA America were present in that late-recessionary year, in which the country, having emerged triumphant in the Cold War, turned in on itself. It is an interesting proposition to contemplate--and for me, it was a lot interesting to read in such detail. I was, after all, alive and well during this period, and (apparently inappropriately relieved) to have a third candidate break the stranglehold that Reagan had on beefing up the wealthy and gutting the middle class. He places the origins of the current distemper earlier than most others do--although some trace them all the way to Andrew Jackson in 1828, or at least to the Civil War. Some people never got over having a caste system whereby as a white person, no matter how poor and uneducated, you are not at the absolute bottom of the ladder. The Ross Perot phenomenon of 1992 and the related crack-up of the Reagan Republican Party under George H.W. Bush is a major flag for Ganz’s argument, and he mines the period for other useful omens--Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, and Howard Stern, to name a few.

Daughters (2024)

I wondered where the idea for this documentary came from, and I read that review that explained it. In 2013, Angela Patton gave a TED Talk that got lot of mileage. She spoke about a program she created in Richmond, Virginia, to bring girls and their incarcerated fathers together in an environment that would make the fathers and daughters feel cherished and connected. These “Daddy Daughter Dances” have been so impactful the program has expanded to other prisons. This movie is co-directed by her and is a documentary about the first of these dances in a Washington D.C. prison. To qualify for the program, the fathers have to complete a 10-week program to strengthen their fathering skills, which means sharing some painful experiences, regrets, and fears. One man says it is the first time he has ever been in an environment where men talk about feelings. As the title indicates, Patton and co-director Natalie Rae make the girls the center of the story, with four as the focus. They all miss their fathers to varying degrees, and while the reasons they are in prison are never discussed, but the daughters are aware of the time they have left and the things that they are missing because of it. There are dozens of carefully observed and touching moments in “Daughters,” which won both the Documentary Audience Award and the Festival Favorite Award at Sundance. Watching the fathers change out of their orange prison uniforms into jackets and ties is extremely powerful. And then it becomes even more meaningful as we see some of the fathers teaching others how to tie a tie, a skill we associate with tended bonding moments between father and son, then with occasions like graduation, dates, and interviews for office jobs that these men never had. It is a movie well worth watching.