Movie review by Greg Carlson

Noah Baumbach’s ambitious, hysterical adaptation of Don DeLillo’s famously “unfilmable” modern classic “White Noise” is – given the bona fides of the source material – certain to divide opinion. For the supporters, the director’s cinephilia sparks and shimmers from one giddy moment to the next. Nobody will overlook the homage to Godard’s “Weekend,” but the filmmaker just as enthusiastically embraces the 1980s-era Spielbergian domesticity on display in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “Poltergeist.” Snootier members of the intelligentsia will whine that the movie dumbs down or misses altogether the philosophical heft of the book, and the structure presents some screenplay difficulty, but Baumbach mostly has his cake and eats it: “White Noise” is very entertaining and very funny.

Netflix splashed out a reported 80-million dollars on the movie, and from the opening frames, it is clear that Baumbach is working with the largest budget of his career. Rejecting digital acquisition, the glorious 35mm motion picture photography by Lol Crawley captures all the hues in Jess Gonchor’s candy-colored production design. The 1984 setting keeps with the novel and Baumbach runs wild with the consumerism relentlessly critiqued by DeLillo. The shelves of the well-stocked A&P offer seemingly endless choices for product brands that are looped on television screens playing well-known jingles. It’s all presented as a period piece, but the foundational themes (as well as the odd coincidence linking the central protagonist’s research agenda with Kanye West’s latest awfulness) are evergreen.

Adam Driver, making his fifth movie with Baumbach, plays Jack Gladney, a middle-aged, death-obsessed, oft-married professor known as a pioneer in the field of “Hitler studies.” Gladney’s inability to speak fluent German may cause feelings of deep insecurity, but he puts up a good front for his colleagues and an even better one for his family. Spouse Babette (Greta Gerwig) is equally concerned with mortality. Daughter Denise (Raffey Cassidy) suspects that Babette is taking pills and aims to expose the secret. Baumbach condenses and simplifies the book’s presentation of the Jack/Babette family tree, keeping the focus on the interactions of the core group. Don Cheadle’s Murray Siskind and the rest of Gladney’s fellow academics (including Jodie Turner-Smith as Winnie Richards and Andre Benjamin as Elliot Lasher) are not utilized to their full potential.

Given the massive scope and diversity of DeLillo’s themes, any film adaptation would necessitate deletions and sacrifices. Baumbach favors the black comedy over a sense of real existential dread, but the decision doesn’t necessarily cause the movie any harm. The scale of the novel’s second section, “The Airborne Toxic Event,” sees Baumbach choreographing eye-popping action in and around evacuation site Camp Daffodil. The ensuing panic perfectly captures the confusion caused by rapidly-evolving instructions from apparently clueless civil and government authorities. The proximity of the movie to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic rings some bells. Other chimes are sounded in the environmental and climate-change disaster realities that have only become more urgent since “White Noise” was published.

By the time “White Noise” returns to the grocery store for a dance party finish that shares some DNA with the concluding scene of “Fantastic Mr. Fox” – incidentally the only other literary adaptation for which Baumbach has a screenplay credit – admirers of the filmmaker will be smiling at the ways in which the new movie embodies Baumbach’s longtime preoccupations and simultaneously points toward bold new possibilities.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Citizenfour” Oscar-winner Laura Poitras profiles photographer and activist Nan Goldin in “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.” Like its talented subject, the movie cannot be confined to a single category or story arc. Along with a penetrating, candid examination of Goldin’s career trajectory, the film spends considerable time on the artist’s efforts to hold Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family accountable for the overprescribing of opioids including OxyContin. Poitras artfully covers lots of territory in the documentary, which received the Golden Lion, the Venice International Film Festival’s highest honor, in September of 2022.

Goldin may not be a household name outside the art world, but her searing and confessional pictures are among the most influential to emerge from New York City’s post-Stonewall cultural explosion. Documenting friends, acquaintances, and her own intimate relationships, Goldin profiled members of the gay and transgender community with the eye of an insider. Her interests also led to photos of the Bowery-based drug scene and images of the vibrant post-punk and new and no wave music worlds. The film’s center section examines in detail “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” Goldin’s protean slideshow.

Goldin crosses paths with many other aspiring creative artists during her most fecund years, and Poitras carefully organizes the guest book by allowing some notable faces to flutter and flicker by and others to take up more space and greater prominence. The deeper Poitras dives, the greater the realization that so many of Goldin’s peers lost their lives to AIDS or drug overdoses. Goldin once wrote of her late friend and collaborator Cookie Mueller: “She was the starlet of the Lower East Side: a poetess, a short-story writer, she starred in John Waters’s early movies. She was sort of the queen of the whole downtown social scene.”

Mueller may personify and characterize the moment in time that Goldin so memorably captured, but Poitras devotes just as much or more attention to David Wojnarowicz, who was recently memorialized in Chris McKim’s vital, feature-length portrait. Goldin’s curatorial role in the “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” exhibition in 1989 is highlighted by the director for more than one thematically resonant meaning – you marvel at the way Poitras connects the dots between ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to illuminate the intersection of politics and art that will factor in different stages of Goldin’s life.

Seen planning and carrying out the civil disobedience designed to force prominent museums to remove the Sackler name from buildings, wings, galleries, and collections, Goldin leverages her own prominence to bring about change. Like many autobiographically-inclined artists, Goldin preserved and archived her own family history. The tragedy of older sister Barbara, who took her own life in 1965 when Nan was eleven, haunts “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” as profoundly and poignantly as any of the photographs Nan would go on to make. Goldin’s openness and forthrightness extends to her advocacy on behalf of so many others who, like herself, struggled or continue to struggle with opioid addiction.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Few reviews of Maria Schrader’s sturdy “She Said” go without mentioning “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight.” The new film, in line to pick up some award season recognition on the basis of its subject matter alone, follows the work of Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporters Megan Twohey (played by Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (played by Zoe Kazan) as they doggedly pursue on-the-record confirmation of the sexual misconduct, sexual assault, and rape accusations against Miramax mogul and Oscar-winning producer Harvey Weinstein. “She Said” is based on the 2019 Kantor and Twohey book of the same name – which emerged from the Times story first published in 2017.

Schrader is steady at the helm, navigating all manner of curious obstacles that come with dramatizing such a high-profile chapter in recent Hollywood. Scenes are shot at the newspaper’s iconic Midtown Manhattan location, Ashley Judd plays herself, and a number of other well-known celebrities factor in the narrative. The damning, horrifying, undercover audio of Weinstein made by Ambra Battilana Gutierrez while working with the NYPD in 2015 is included, extending its status as a smoking gun in the saga. Gutierrez just testified on November 8, less than two weeks before the premiere of “She Said,” during Weinstein’s current rape trial in Los Angeles.

Screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz and director Schrader make the right decision to carefully limit the ways in which Weinstein physically inhabits the movie. With the exception of the authentic sting recording, Weinstein is played by actor Mike Houston. But the filmmakers refrain from allowing a fully-formed performance of the figure to occupy center stage as the ranting bully previously established in Weinstein profiles. Instead, the disembodied voice heard in a small number of phone calls focuses on the producer’s paranoia, manifested in a strange obsession with Gwyneth Paltrow. Instead of giving Weinstein oxygen, the story is methodical and procedural. Can Twohey and Kantor convince women previously victimized by the serial predator to talk?

Condensing, combining, and streamlining are expected elements of movie storytelling, but “She Said” works toward a composite that validates as many facts and details as possible within the limitations of the feature film format. The depiction of the personal, nonwork experiences of Kantor and Twohey revolves around the ongoing challenges of motherhood and work/life balance. “She Said” acknowledges the toll of the job. In one scene, Twohey tees off on a rude and aggressive creep who doesn’t want to be dismissed. In another, a threatening, anonymous phone call unnerves and unsettles.

In 1982, Carol Gilligan wrote, “As we have listened for centuries to the voices of men and the theories of development that their experience informs, so we have come more recently to notice not only the silence of women but the difficulty in hearing what they say when they speak.” Gilligan’s words are an apt reminder to those who have criticized “She Said” for not fully conforming to the rhetorical strategies embodied by so many cinematic “true life” accounts of journalists at work. The way in which the film presents the testimony of Laura Madden (Jennifer Ehle), Zelda Perkins (Samantha Morton), Rowena Chiu (Angela Yeoh), and others affirms the value of Schrader’s strategy: listen and then listen some more.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Amy Bandlien Storkel and Bryan Storkel dispense delights of all kinds in their breezy documentary “The Pez Outlaw,” an imaginative portrait of wily entrepreneur Steve Glew. A single-minded obsession with the colorful candy containers sets the stage for a tongue-in-cheek drama that casts Glew as himself in a series of “Unsolved Mysteries”-meets-Wes Anderson reenactments. Some viewers may not receive the title subject’s idiosyncratic personality in the spirit offered by the filmmakers, but the whole goofy tale is so harmless, it’s hard to watch without a smile on your face.

Depressed and discouraged, Glew was working in a Michigan machine shop when he experienced a “light bulb” moment that would soon lead him to a Pez factory in Eastern Europe. Traveling to Slovenia with son Josh, Glew made key contacts and filled duffel bags with Pez designs and prototypes that were unavailable in the United States. His intuition was correct: the toys he acquired for pennies could be resold to rabid collectors for a significant mark-up. From there, it was just a short leap to the wild brainstorm of commissioning variant colorways and other modifications. Some of the film’s interview subjects affirm that Glew single-handedly transformed Pez collecting.

There was only one small problem: Glew was breaking the law as a smuggler.

Even though the Storkels flirt with the idea of a deeper dive into the ethics of Glew’s willingness to flout import and customs regulations, the manner in which the movie addresses the blunders of Pez’s American administration paints executive Scott McWhinnie as villainous killjoy to Glew’s mischievous elf (“magical troll” is the more common epithet used by some of the collectors who knew him). With a flowing white beard and a glint in his eye, Glew gleefully recounts sticking it to Pez U.S.A. for as much and as long as possible. Although not quite in the same league, “The Pez Outlaw” is reminiscent of Seth Gordon’s “The King of Kong,” with Glew as the beleaguered Steve Wiebe and McWhinnie as the hissable Billy Mitchell.

Glew is far from a reliable narrator, and the filmmakers seize the opportunity to run with all sorts of the farfetched claims made by or about him (one of the most amusing is Glew’s insistence that he was personally responsible for the institution of the one-per-household limitation on mail-in cereal box premiums). The more time you spend with him, the more he comes across as a shrewd mercenary hiding behind the “dumb American” facade that he acknowledges served him well on his excursions overseas and his subsequent battles with “Pezident” McWhinnie.

Fortunately, the Storkels include enough material centered on the durable and enchanting romance between Glew and wife Kathy to keep us firmly on his side. Candid and every bit as sweet as a sleeve of twelve cherry-flavored Pez, Kathy represents a nurturing and encouraging spirit able to keep her partner grounded when he would otherwise zoom off into the stratosphere. In 2014, the enterprising and ambitious Glew offered the movie rights to his life story on eBay. Fortunately for us, the documentary approach eventually prevailed, proving the old adage that truth can be stranger than fiction.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, “Catherine Called Birdy” lands on Amazon Prime Video following a short theatrical window. One of two 2022 films directed by the perpetually controversial Lena Dunham, the medieval bildungsroman was a labor of love based on the filmmaker’s professed affection for Karen Cushman’s 1994 Newbery Honor Book. Dunham, who also adapted the novel for the screen, delivers the most polished and confident feature of the four she has made so far, demonstrating a genuine affinity for both spirited anachronisms and timeless challenges that outline the similarities and differences faced by young women in the 13th century versus today.

The title character is played by a winning Bella Ramsey, perhaps best known as Lyanna Mormont in “Game of Thrones.” Currently 19, Ramsey believably inhabits the rambunctious and irrepressible 14-year-old confronted with the painful social realities and expectations that come with the territory and the times. The central conflict and several subplots revolve around the custom of arranged marriages. Though not long a teenager, Birdy has virtually no say regarding her husband-to-be. To make matters worse, the fragile economics of her family place tremendous pressure on Birdy’s father Lord Rollo (Andrew Scott) to choose a groom based on financial security above all else.

Despite the unwelcome reality that she will likely be married off for money and most certainly not for love, Birdy lives life at a breakneck pace and finds joy where she can. Dunham pokes at the outrageous unfairness of the patriarchal grip governing the women of the Middle Ages without reducing her supporting ensemble to flat and predictable stereotypes, even when it would be convenient to do so. Birdy’s attempts to sabotage every suitor play out a bit like the shenanigans on display in “Harold and Maude” when Mrs. Chasen arranges dates for her son. The frontrunner and worst of Birdy’s lot, a wealthy lech nicknamed Shaggy Beard (Paul Kaye), is only encouraged by the girl’s boorish behavior.

In a spot-on observation, Alison Willmore writes, “ … misogynistic brutality has always seemed like one of the fictional universe’s essential elements, part of an insistence that its crypto-European historical trappings be accompanied by some period-appropriate dehumanization.” Fortunately, Dunham refuses those conventions without erasing the large and small struggles faced by all women of the era. And even though the screen version risks some major alterations to Cushman’s original story – perhaps most notably in making Rollo his daughter’s hero by tweaking the climax – the essence of Birdy survives.

Like Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” and Brian Helgeland’s “A Knight’s Tale” (to name just two), “Catherine Called Birdy” takes great pleasure in placing perfect, period-incongruent needle-drops of great pop songs that provide thematic commentary on the action. Carter Burwell’s score is performed a cappella by Roomful of Teeth and several familiar tunes, including Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You,” the Angels’ “My Boyfriend’s Back,” and Rod Stewart’s “Young Turks” are delivered by Misty Miller. In Birdy’s world, girls are not allowed to attend a public hanging, go on a crusade, marry who they love, or have autonomy over their own bodies. Dunham’s movie reminds us that – at least on the latter point – the times are still darker than we’d like to believe.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Photography buffs and silent film aficionados will enjoy Marc Shaffer’s feature documentary “Exposing Muybridge,” a visually engaging account of curious cinematic forefather Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge’s place as a film pioneer was ultimately secured via the influential motion studies he produced following his ill-fated collaboration with railroad baron Leland Stanford in the early 1870s, but Shaffer attempts to put his subject’s entire creative life in context. Drawing from a series of new interviews with historians, theorists, photographers, and (in actor Gary Oldman) an enthusiastic collector, Shaffer recounts the dizzying highs and abject lows of Muybridge’s fascinating career.

Film students young and old will certainly recall class viewings of any number of Muybridge’s photo sequences come to life through animation, but so iconic are these images, Shaffer ends his film with a montage of allusions in paintings by Francis Bacon and David Hockney, Seth Shipman’s DNA data storage experiments, the photography of William Wegman and Sol LeWitt, and even U2’s “Lemon” and the animated series “Rick and Morty.” Had Shaffer been in production a little later, he could have added Jordan Peele’s “Nope” to the above list. At just under 90 minutes, the film doesn’t wear out its welcome, but there are a few aspects of Muybridge’s colorful legacy that could have used more detail and consideration.

Given that Muybridge’s life spanned 1830 to 1904 – a period, as the movie points out, of remarkable mechanization and modernization – it is a rather tall task for Shaffer to go into as much depth as Rebecca Solnit’s essential 2003 book “River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.” The talking heads interviewed by Shaffer, including Oscar-winner Oldman, are erudite, charming, knowledgeable, and passionate, but it is a real shame that Solnit is not among them. Her exceptional work, a must-read companion to Shaffer’s documentary, synthesizes several themes alluded to in the film.

That’s not to say that Shaffer doesn’t acknowledge the most remarkable milestones that link Muybridge to evolutions in image-making. One of the most enjoyable parts of the movie sees photographers Byron Wolfe and Mark Klett lining up near the exact spot where Muybridge took a breathtaking landscape plate in Yosemite National Park. By walking in Muybridge’s footsteps, minus his most reckless and perilous risk-taking, Wolfe and Klett link past and present with spine-tingling immediacy. The ways in which Muybridge edited and retouched pictures by adding dramatic details such as the favored cloud he placed in multiple compositions anticipated cinema’s commonplace manipulation of “reality” in favor of fantasy.

Shaffer frequently returns to Muybridge’s sketchy, dangerous personal character (or lack thereof). In 1874, Muybridge murdered Harry Larkyns, the lover of his spouse Flora, reportedly saying “I have a message for you from my wife” as he pulled the trigger. Over the decades Muybridge scholars have speculated that his utter lack of inhibition could be traced to a serious head injury suffered in an 1860 stagecoach crash. The personal and the professional are often interlaced, and Shaffer’s interview subjects go on to assertively debunk the “science” claims that Muybridge used to legitimize the costly University of Pennsylvania project that would, more than his majestic vistas, his San Francisco panorama, his volumes of stereograph cards, and his zoöpraxiscope, cement his place in history alongside proof that at a gallop, a horse does indeed lift all four hooves off the ground at the same time.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Known in its original French language as “Avec amour et acharnement” (“With Love and Fury” or “With Love and Relentlessness”), the first of two Claire Denis features released in 2022 swapped original English language title “Fire” for the more satisfying and effective “Both Sides of the Blade.” The latter name is taken from a song by longtime Denis collaborators Tindersticks, and its evocative lines suggesting the pain of being cut in two echo the film’s central love triangle. Following a February premiere at the Berlinale, where Denis received the Silver Bear for Best Director, the movie is currently available to stream in the United States via several major providers. It is well worth seeking out.

The second Denis film of 2022, Cannes Grand Prix-winner “Stars at Noon,” is currently in cinemas. Both movies are based on novels Denis adapted for the screen with writing partners. In the case of “Both Sides of the Blade,” the filmmaker worked with Christine Angot to prepare and reimagine Angot’s 2018 book “Un tournant de la vie” (“A Turning Point in Life”). The opening scenes of the movie bask in the warm ocean waters of a loving vacation idyll enjoyed by Sara (Juliette Binoche, making her third film with Denis) and Jean (Vincent Lindon, recently tremendous in “Titane”). They will shortly return to a chilly Paris and a series of unforeseen conflicts that challenge their union.

Denis, now 76 years old, rejected a producer’s plea for the on-camera events of “Both Sides of the Blade” to be free of masks. The director, however, insisted on grounding the action of the story in the midst of the pandemic. The eerie quiet and the dispiriting isolation intensify Sara’s reaction when she catches sight of ex-lover François (Grégoire Colin). Instantly, she is overcome with butterflies and long-buried feelings that will soon threaten the security of her relationship with Jean. Matters are further complicated when Jean – who was also friends with François years ago – announces that he intends to form a business partnership with Sara’s old flame.

Be it film, novel, poem, or song, the triangle is one of the most frequent tropes in storytelling. Denis is such a gifted moviemaker, though, that cliche is absent from the precise and specific moments inside her intelligently-constructed universe. Intriguing details, like Sara’s work as the host of a radio program or the reasons that sent Jean to prison, are deliberately unexplored and never used as central turning points in the narrative. For some viewers, the lack of greater context for these tantalizing ingredients will frustrate and/or contribute to a sense that the story is incomplete. Others will appreciate the way that Denis is able to keep us off balance and curious about where everything is going.

The central point of view belongs to Sara, but Jean receives equitable treatment. The movie’s primary subplot involves Jean’s estranged son Marcus (Issa Perica), a biracial teenager being raised outside Paris by Jean’s mother (Bulle Ogier). Jean’s post-incarceration inability or unwillingness to be present in his child’s life poses yet another of the film’s unanswered questions, but Denis finds ways to show how Jean’s absence is doing lasting, painful damage to Marcus. Both Sara and Jean lie to themselves and to others. Binoche, as brilliant as ever, draws us close to Sara even as we wonder at her disastrous, delirious choices.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Veteran documentarian Brett Morgen clamps down on the experimental and the experiential in “Moonage Daydream,” an odyssey traversing the starfields of the late, great David Bowie. Touted as the first feature to be fully authorized by the Bowie estate (a claim that could signal something good or something bad, depending on how you feel about attached strings), Morgen’s film draws from a purported “five millions assets” to dazzle the senses with a turbocharged hagiography of its workaholic subject. Like the director’s previous rock explorations, “Moonage Daydream” is best viewed on a massive screen with a powerful sound system.

While news reporters, talk show hosts, and breathless fans supply confirmation of Bowie’s convention-busting approach to pop cultural invention and reinvention, Morgen lets his subject provide the principal narration on-camera and via voiceover. Nixing talking heads and any freshly-recorded interviews conducted with associates, family members, and admirers either famous or common, the technique is a solid fit. “Moonage Daydream” is committed to art and artist. With few exceptions, like the acknowledgement of Bowie’s love for Iman, private life stays private. Morgen favors the constantly shifting, always protean man-of-many-faces in Bowie’s public (dis)guises.

Even at 140 minutes, “Moonage Daydream” can feel strangely hurried and musically incomplete. Many of Bowie’s signature songs, including “Space Oddity,” “Heroes,” “Let’s Dance,” “Ashes to Ashes,” “Changes,” “Starman,” “Modern Love,” “Life on Mars?” and several others pop in and out of the timeline, some fleetingly. Morgen makes the seemingly impossible choice to give a few tracks extended play, but the most devoted acolytes will certainly weep for the ones left behind (“The Man Who Sold the World,” “Young Americans,” “Queen Bitch,” “Rebel Rebel,” “China Girl,” “Fame,” etc.). Even so, Morgen deserves some credit for taking a big swing.

The director can also be commended for both analyzing and trusting a very particular audience. He has made something for fellow aficionados, as “Moonage Daydream” assumes that the viewer already knows a thing or two about its star. The uninitiated won’t get any kind of straightforward treatment of chronological career highlights, even if the film is very loosely organized into core periods that extend beyond the studio albums to touch on Bowie’s other pursuits, from visual art to theatre and film performance. Clips from his stage turn as John Merrick in “The Elephant Man” are accompanied by images from features including “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” “The Hunger,” “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” and “Labyrinth.” Even so, sound edges vision.

When Morgen inserts shots of Bowie strutting with Tina Turner to sell Pepsi, or backseat moments from Alan Yentob’s “Cracked Actor,” “Moonage Daydream” toys with a level of critique that is otherwise mostly erased – like marriage number one to Angela Barnett. In general, the filmmaker falls back on his keen editorial skills to take us on an emotional ride capable of as much humor as contemplative, tearful darkness. So whether you count yourself as a diamond dog or an absolute beginner, trust Morgen to invite you to the dance hall. There’s no dress code, of course, but a finely tailored ice-blue suit by Freddie Burretti sure would look good.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In “Nothing Compares,” director Kathryn Ferguson builds an airtight case for the reevaluation of music icon Sinead O’Connor, the Irish recording artist who achieved worldwide success and critical acclaim during the course of a career that attracted negative media attention like a magnet collecting nails. The film, now available on Showtime following a Sundance debut in January, transports viewers back three decades (and more) to focus initially on O’Connor’s tumultuous childhood, incendiary vocal talents, and early milestones before shifting to an assessment of the most outspoken and controversial choices that made as much or more noise as the heartbreakingly confessional songs on her brilliant albums.

Longtime fans already know the biography, but Ferguson applies remarkable editorial skill to make judicious choices regarding what to keep and what to omit. Archival material is plentiful and pointed, with O’Connor supplying much of the story in her own words and through a variety of talk show appearances and other television interviews. Along with several key collaborators, O’Connor’s first husband John Reynolds offers insightful commentary, as do admirers like Peaches and Kathleen Hanna. Ferguson skips talking heads, making an exception for the vintage O’Connor clips. The lack of on-camera interviews focuses attention on the evocative visuals.

Ferguson begins the film with O’Connor’s October 16, 1992 appearance at Madison Square Garden, where she was supposed to perform Bob Dylan’s “I Believe in You” as part of the show that would be collected as the “The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration.” Met with a mixture of boos and applause, the shaken but defiant singer scratches the scheduled tune for an improvised reprise of Bob Marley’s “War,” the song she had recently chosen for the “Saturday Night Live” gig that would arouse a firestorm and inspire headlines, parodies, threats, opinion pieces, and boycotts. O’Connor’s “SNL” performance has aged much better than the embarrassing mock outrage of Joe Pesci and Madonna.

Without doubt, “Nothing Compares” would have been a much different viewing experience had Ferguson been granted permission to include the singer’s recording of the Prince song that signaled the apogee of O’Connor’s international fame (and which provides the movie’s title). The denial was made worse by Prince-sibling Sharon Nelson’s comments to “Billboard” that not only was O’Connor undeserving of the song’s use, Prince’s “version is the best.” As a diehard Prince fanatic, I will argue that Nelson is wrong on both counts. O’Connor’s cover is the definitive recording of the song.

Even though the absence of “Nothing Compares 2 U” stings, Ferguson handles its importance to O’Connor’s ascendant superstardom with appropriate grace. Fortunately, the wealth of intense and dazzling songs that came before and after – including “Mandinka,” “Troy,” “Just Like You Said It Would Be,” “I Want Your (Hands on Me),” “Black Boys on Mopeds,” “Jump in the River,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “Three Babies,” “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” “I Am Stretched on Your Grave,” “Thank You for Hearing Me,” and others – are a testament to the integrity, principles, outrage, fearlessness, and political conviction O’Connor modeled years before the Catholic Church would publicly acknowledge the sexual abuse and assault of adults and children.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Writing recently in “The New Yorker,” Julian Lucas shares commentary that places into context the ongoing controversies assailing Gina Prince-Bythewood’s historical action drama “The Woman King.” Set in West Africa during the years encompassing the grim slave trade, the film has a champion and star in Best Supporting Actress Oscar-winner Viola Davis, who portrays with force and intensity the title character General Nanisca of the Kingdom of Dahomey (in what is now Benin). General consensus suggests that Prince-Bythewood’s 50-million-dollar film, which puts every cent – and then some – on the screen, will succeed despite any reasonable and unreasonable criticism it currently faces.

Even though Davis commands the headlining power, the film’s central protagonist is Thuso Mbedu’s Nawi, a tenacious orphan determined to enter the ranks of the Agojie, otherwise nicknamed the Dahomey Amazons by Western Europeans. Not in dispute is the existence of this electrifying military sisterhood, one of a tiny number of all-female, modern-era armies. In the film’s early sections, Prince-Bythewood draws much from the pageantry of the trials and tests of mettle staged by Patty Jenkins in “Wonder Woman.” Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther,” which features the Dora Milaje – its own cohort of elite women warriors partly inspired by the Agojie –is another notable cinematic relation.

The Hollywood version of any script claiming to be based on a “true story” invites detractors to engage in a game pointing out any and every historical inaccuracy and narrative embellishment. Regarding “The Woman King,” Lucas takes the position that the “film’s conceit is, charitably, an elaborate exercise in wishful thinking.” At the heart of the matter: the one-sided depiction of a nation engaged in widespread enslavement being portrayed as philosophically abolitionist. Importantly, Lucas argues that “The Woman King” should not be held to a higher standard than the massive number of period films told from a white point-of-view, but the complete and complex argument should be read in full.

Clearly, most critics are on board with “The Woman King” no matter its historical misrepresentations. And Prince-Bythewood, a veteran whose 2000 debut feature “Love & Basketball” is a contemporary classic, stages the battle sequences with drive and clarity. But the script by Dana Stevens, based on a story by Stevens and Maria Bello, falls back on oversimplification when it should be embracing nuance and complexity. A subplot involving a forbidden romance between Nawi and a stupefyingly naive businessman-sailor named Santo Ferreira (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) is wholly unconvincing.

In an instant it is plain to see that Davis is superior to her material. She plays Nanisca with unrelenting resolve, square-jawed commitment, and looks (both her own gaze and her fearsome mien) that kill. She brings a weariness and sadness to the commander that speaks volumes about her feelings toward King Ghezo (John Boyega), a supremely self-confident monarch who clearly relishes his power as much as he enjoys the pleasure of his multiple wives. Like other elements in the film, the historical Ghezo differs from the fictionalized iteration. But for viewers who choose to focus on the adrenaline rush of the feminist warriors ready to challenge the patriarchy, “The Woman King” proudly wears its crown.