Movie review by Greg Carlson

No doubt many cinephiles first encountered the tale of the charismatic French volcanologist couple Katia and Maurice Krafft in Werner Herzog’s 2016 “Into the Inferno,” itself a spectacular meditation on the terrible wonders of pyroclastic flow. Another group would have made the acquaintance of the scientist-adventurers through the 1987 ”Nature” episode “Volcano Watchers,” broadcast just four years before their deaths on June 3, 1991 in the eruption of Japan’s Mount Unzen. Documentary filmmaker Sara Dosa honors the legacy of the intrepid pair in “Fire of Love,” her entertaining and accomplished master class in assemblage. The film was one of the opening night features of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

The Kraffts may be better known in their native France than in the United States, but American viewers will immediately recognize a kinship with Jacques Cousteau, arguably the most famous of the do-it-yourself conservation and ecology heroes of the second half of the 20th century (and the subject of “Becoming Cousteau,” the recent documentary by Liz Garbus). Dosa, like Wes Anderson in “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” seizes on the stylish allure of entrepreneurship: authoring books, delivering lectures, making regular appearances on talk shows, and writing, producing, photographing, and editing educational nature films are all part of the enterprise.

Dosa also embraces an Andersonian appreciation for filmmaking focused on Gen X childhood nostalgia – as well as the kind of deep Francophilia on display in “The French Dispatch” – illuminating Katia and Maurice as hip avatars of the intellectual godhood of physics, chemistry, and geology. In their Team Zissou-esque matching red stocking caps, the Kraffts and their collaborators perform all sorts of colorful and hair-raising experiments that, at least for the less sensible Maurice, appear to be as much about playing to the camera as they are about hard research and data collection. At one point, Maurice floats out on a lake of sulfuric acid in a rubber raft, leaving a furious Katia fretting on the shore.

The partnership of the Kraffts is, of course, the film’s raison d’être, and Dosa is fully aware that the rarity of the single-minded lovers is the heart and soul of her film. Katia and Maurice are equally obsessed by and addicted to the awesome power of volcanic activity. They speak a special language with a certain vocabulary known only to the other. In one sense, Maurice and Katia experience an ongoing, romantic ménage à trois with the volcanoes, although Maurice never did accomplish his impossible dream of inventing a lava-proof kayak/bubble that would allow him to ride directly atop a molten river.

The morbidly curious might tune in to see how Dosa handles the tragic final moments of the Kraffts (Katia was 49 and Maurice was 45 when they died). She does, but with tastefulness and grace, preferring instead to emphasize the joy and passion they applied to their vocation. Dosa’s decision to enlist Miranda July as the film’s narrator is absolutely perfect. And the incredible soundtrack, which uses needle-drops by Air and Brian Eno in between Nicolas Godin’s retrofuturistic flourishes, deserves a deluxe Mondo pressing on lava-red vinyl.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Multiple observers have pointed to filmmaker Sean Baker’s practice of extending radical empathy to the characters who inhabit his fascinating, colorful film world. In “Red Rocket,” Baker continues to explore this territory with a high-wire balancing act that has energized critical debate and sparked conversation about the fictional depiction of reprehensible, immoral, and illegal behavior as demonstrated by the charming, the clever, and the charismatic. Of course, it’s nonsense to argue that the actions of antiheroic figures reflect a moral failing on the part of the director – from Tony Camonte to Tony Montana and Alex DeLarge to Travis Bickle, bad boys, bad men, and bad manchildren have populated plenty of classics.

I suspect that Baker, writing again with regular collaborator Chris Bergoch, has been taking heat on these counts in no small part because “Red Rocket” is so damn funny, blasting off with such an air of exuberance. Not unlike the way the Coens made “The Big Lebowski” into a curious recent period film via the Dude parroting George Bush’s admonishment of Saddam Hussein, “Red Rocket” takes place during the time leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Background references to Clinton versus Trump have led some to read the film as an affirmation of just how easy it can be to fall for the empty promises of those seeking (or seeking to retain) power.

At the eye of a self-generated hurricane is Mikey Saber, the swaggering, shit-talking hustler whose capacity for manipulation is matched by the anatomical blessings that served him as a longtime performer in pornographic videos. The indefatigable Mikey is played to the hilt by once-upon-a-time MTV personality, model, rapper, and actor Simon Rex, whose own early career appearances in a small number of solo masturbation videos provide the bona fides to suggest the kind of carefully cultivated authenticity that Baker fosters through his usual onscreen blend of professionals and untrained newcomers.

Returning to Texas City, Texas from California with nothing but a black eye and a half-baked plan to get back on his feet, Mikey begs estranged wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) and mother-in-law Lil (Brenda Deiss) for a spot on the sofa. Their less than enthusiastic reactions tell us all we need to know about Mikey’s reliability, but they relent in exchange for household chores and rent money. The employment gap on Mikey’s resume baffles potential employers in a very funny sequence highlighting a series of interview failures. Unable to land a regular job, Mikey sells marijuana to oil refinery workers. Mirroring his domestic situation, he deals for a mother/daughter pair, and the way in which he relates to and interacts with the many women in his life bubbles with complexity.

Baker’s appreciation for even the smallest roles is a chief delight of “Red Rocket” (one of the best moments in the film is the exchange of looks between Mikey and the old man next door following what is most certainly Mikey’s biggest, most unforgivable fuck-up). Each one of the supporting cast members is terrific, but first among equals is Suzanna Son as Strawberry, the NSYNC-appreciating 17-year-old donut shop clerk groomed by Mikey for a triumphant return to Los Angeles and porn stardom. Each succeeding interaction between Mikey and Strawberry hoists another red flag, but the collaboration between Baker and Son is so skillful, you’re never quite sure whether Mikey is taking advantage of her or if she’s taking advantage of him.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Céline Sciamma follows “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” – arguably her best film in an already sensational career – with “Petite Maman,” a lovely reminder of the filmmaker’s interest in themes of childhood, transitions, and liminality. At a perfect 72 minutes, “Petite Maman” is Sciamma’s shortest feature to date. A number of observers, as well as the filmmaker herself, have pointed out the movie’s thematic similarities to the work of Hayao Miyazaki, and it is not difficult to imagine “Petite Maman,” with its generous sprinkling of magic dust, as an animated fairy tale from Studio Ghibli.

The great strength of “Petite Maman” blooms from Sciamma’s straightforward treatment of the experiences of protagonist Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), a child experiencing grief and confusion following the death of her grandmother. Accompanying her parents to clean out the house where Nelly’s mother Marion (Nina Meurisse) grew up, Nelly meets a little girl building a fort in the adjacent woods. This neighbor, who is also named Marion, is the mirror image of Nelly and is played by Sanz’s twin sister Gabrielle. As the action unfolds, the viewer ponders the nature of this curious doppelganger.

Is this new playmate real or something conjured from Nelly’s imagination? Are young Marion and older Marion one and the same? Are we in the territory of “Back to the Future,” in which time travel allows a child to meet a parent when the two would be the same age? Sciamma places Nelly’s spiritual and emotional growth at the forefront of the story, skipping any explanations for the supernatural impossibility right before our eyes. Nelly accepts Marion as her mother-to-be, taking the opportunity to develop a deeper and richer understanding of the person Marion was, once upon a time.

Sciamma was one of the four screenwriters who worked on the adaptation of Gilles Paris’s “Autobiographie d’une Courgette,” and the sensitivity she brings to the inner lives of young people carries over to her new film. In an interview with Lillian Crawford, Sciamma acknowledged that she considered animation as an option for “Petite Maman” while she was promoting “Courgette,” but in the end, we are fortunate for the warm autumnal charm of the live action edition that ended up being made. Sciamma has spoken about her admiration for “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” as a film that “changed the way” that she looks at cinema, and the visual rhymes and echoes made by the Sanz twins are doubled by the filmmaker’s Lynchian introduction of duplicate houses.

Many of us have felt as if we missed the opportunity to express a perfect goodbye to someone we thought we might see again. Nelly’s own frustration and regret at not getting her own farewell to her grandmother just right is compounded by what she perceives is her inability to properly comfort her mother, who leaves the house while Nelly is asleep. In older Marion’s absence, young Marion materializes, giving Nelly the opportunity to understand her mom not as a parent but as a peer. Sciamma’s handling of the interactions between the kids is as confident and as beautifully realized as the depiction of relationships in “Water Lilies,” “Tomboy,” and “Girlhood.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The final film in Joachim Trier’s Oslo Trilogy, “The Worst Person in the World” is one of the best films of 2021. Despite several erroneous descriptions from critics tagging the movie as a romantic comedy, the film most assuredly belongs in the more temperamental sibling genre of romantic drama. Trier’s latest is not without humor, warmth, and wit, but its concerns stretch toward darkness, transience and melancholia. Told in a dozen chapters bookended by a prologue and epilogue, “The Worst Person in the World” is anchored by Renate Reinsve’s sensational central performance. It’s a long shot that Reinsve’s Best Actress honor at Cannes will translate to an Oscar nomination, but she would have my vote.

Reinsve plays Julie, a restless young medical student who impulsively switches to psychology before abandoning that subject for photography (much to her mother’s pursed-lip chagrin). Julie’s youth, beauty and intelligence, Trier illustrates, place her in the catbird seat; her indecision operates as the central feature of the film’s early sections. David Ehrlich puts it perfectly: “If Julie is less of a character than a vividly realized archetype, Reinsve didn’t get the message.” In other words, the star infuses this protagonist that could so easily stumble into cliche with a livewire imagination and a massive heart, even when her egocentrism draws our attention back to the potential meanings of the title in all of its self-deprecating Norwegian pride.

To a certain extent, Trier would have us believe that Julie doesn’t know what she wants, but it is more accurate to say that she does know what she wants but can’t for the life of her figure out the way to put that elusive package together. This point of view depends on an embrace of the abstract: thrills, excitement, adoration, attention, and respect are the concepts that would show up on the lists of many no matter what age, although Trier’s world will especially resonate with thirtysomethings.

Sex and romance pinball and ricochet right along with Julie’s capricious career trajectories. The initial seriousness of her commitment to and cohabitation with older cartoonist Aksel (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie, who was also great in “Bergman Island,” another of 2021’s finest) forms the spine of the movie’s examination of intimate relationships, but a chance encounter with barista Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) sets up a triangle that, like many familiar tropes depicted throughout the movie, subtly defies convention. In “Cheating,” one of the most erotically-charged of the chapters, Julie and Eivind test the limits of fidelity without “crossing the line.”

Trier is a gifted storyteller. “The Worst Person in the World” shows off the filmmaker’s command of rhythm and his affinity for the perfectly placed pop song. Cinematic flourishes, including a wonderful sequence of walk-between-the-raindrops-style magical realism, align with soundtrack gems by Todd Rundgren, Cymande, Glamour Hammer, Cobra Man, Harry Nilsson, Chassol, Prins Thomas, Christopher Cross, and others. Art Garfunkel’s “Waters of March” ideally parallels Trier’s feel for micro/macro variations explored in chapters like “Bad Timing,” “Julie’s Narcissistic Circus” and “Everything Comes to an End”:

“A sliver of glass, a life, the sun
A knife, a death, the end of the run
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It’s the end of all strain, it’s the joy in your heart”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The first Japanese winners of the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival, Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe expand “Drive My Car,” the short story of the same name in Haruki Murakami’s 2014 collection “Men Without Women,” to great success. And although the film lost the Palme d’Or to Julia Ducournau’s “Titane,” director Hamaguchi’s heavy-duty drama has emerged as one of 2021’s most admired features, collecting a sizable number of award season accolades. At 179 minutes, the running time of “Drive My Car” contrasts sharply with the brevity of Jun Ichikawa’s “Tony Takitani,” the 2004 adaptation of another Murakami story that deals with similar themes and shares a major plot point.

A three-hour investment for an introspective movie about a grieving theatre director staging a multilingual production of “Uncle Vanya” sounds difficult to sell to mainstream audiences, but Hamaguchi’s expansiveness is an asset. The filmmaker’s reputation for sprawl has been partly exaggerated: “Asako I & II” and “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” both clock in at two hours apiece. It is 2015’s “Happy Hour,” at 317 minutes, that stretches the bathroom-break limit. “Drive My Car” is fleeting by comparison. For all the viewers who give themselves over to the filmmaker’s meticulous attention to detail and powerful expression of character, the entire movie flies.

Hamaguchi’s set-up/prologue unfolds like a self-contained feature bursting with possibilities (the opening titles don’t arrive until the forty-minute mark). Hidetoshi Nishijima’s Yūsuke Kafuku is a Tokyo-based theatre artist married to a busy screenwriter named Oto (Reika Kirishima). Their collaborative compatibility crackles with an erotic electricity – Oto’s script ideas are devised during the verbal exchanges shared during sex. Hamaguchi carefully seeds surprises that will be revisited much later. Even greater realizations will be made. Many of these will involve troubled young actor Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), one of the film’s several endlessly fascinating secondary characters.

Two years following the opening section, Kafuku travels to his residency at the Hiroshima Art and Culture Theater in his vivid red Saab 900 (changed from Murakami’s yellow). While behind the wheel, he listens to the recording of Oto reading “Uncle Vanya” dialogue with gaps where Vanya’s lines go; it’s Kafuku’s preferred method for memorization. But following his arrival, there’s a wrinkle. For insurance purposes, his hosts require a professional chauffeur – no exceptions. Following a tryout, Kafuku agrees to the rule. His driver is a young woman named Misaki Watari (Tōko Miura).

As Misaki and Kafuku get to know one another, the unconventional stage interpretation of “Uncle Vanya” weaves throughout the developing action in a kind of parallel story-within-the-story. It’s a tried and true technique that has been used, in one variation or another, for decades: Carne’s “Les Enfants du Paradis,” Ozu’s “Floating Weeds,” Hamaguchi favorite Cassavetes’s “Opening Night,” and of course Malle’s “Vanya on 42nd Street.” Away from the stage, however, the interior of Kafuku’s vehicle plays host to different kinds of drama.

They are surrounded by an incredible ensemble of characters with the capacity to astonish, but the relationship that develops between Kafuku and Misaki fuels Hamaguchi’s examination of how people choose to process long-internalized feelings of guilt and pain. Neither one of these two essential figures is inclined toward verbal expression, but each will divulge information and make striking confessions in moments of earth-shaking emotional energy that expose raw vulnerabilities we’re hardly prepared to witness.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In one of the best scenes of the year, Tilda Swinton’s Jessica Holland sits with audio engineer Hernan Bedoya (Juan Pablo Urrego) behind a massive mixing console in a recording studio in Colombia, working to recreate a mysterious sound that she has been hearing intermittently. Drawing initially from a collection of stock effects, Jessica and Hernan take their time as they methodically narrow down the possibilities, closing in on the particular qualities of the bang that has intruded in Jessica’s life. Shaping and bending the wave with his digital tools until Jessica is satisfied, Hernan is as unhurried as anyone in the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a modern master of the slow and contemplative style of storytelling some would call transcendental.

This exchange in “Memoria” illustrates the filmmaker’s playful sense of humor regarding the artistic enterprise, a kind of winking, behind-the-curtain glimpse at the sausage-grinding process of making sure all the post-production details are just right. The sound Hernan ultimately conjures, for all intents and purposes, is indistinguishable from the one that has been following Jessica around, disrupting her sleep and messing with her head. But reading “Memoria” as metanarrative unlocks only one layer of joy – Weerasethakul treats Jessica’s quest with complete respect. The source of the sound is eventually revealed. And with that revelation, the filmmaker just GOES FOR IT.

Both Weerasethakul’s full-length collaboration with Tilda Swinton and the “Memoria” project have been a long time coming. Swinton was to have appeared in “Cemetery of Splendour” (she also contributed to the first English-language book on the filmmaker, published in 2009). Weerasethakul spent time in Colombia in 2017 to develop what would become his first feature shot outside Thailand. The global constitution of “Memoria” may also represent a bid for greater creative freedom; Weerasethakul has for years been frustrated by the censorship imposed in his home country.

“Memoria” entices with its aural preoccupations, but the film is rich with many other ideas and explorations. Admirers of Weerasethakul’s filmography, which includes the brilliant 2010 Palme d’Or winner “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” can bask in the sublimity of Jessica’s episodic encounters. The best of these may be the shift from the urban Bogota to the rural Amazon jungle: Jessica leaves the city only to meet another Hernan Bedoya (Elkin Diaz) whose total recall and superpowered sleeping abilities are as remarkable as his surprise connection to Jessica. Is this second Hernan, rhyming like David Lynch’s “two Chalfonts” or Fred Madison/Pete Dayton, a coincidence, a doppelganger, a mirror?

The film’s official website is as delightfully enigmatic as the experience of watching “Memoria.” It contains a section called “Bang Stories,” a quartet of firsthand accounts of alarming sounds ranging from the comic to the unnerving to the traumatizing. Superfans will also discover the opportunity to purchase a hardcover, companion art book containing “photographs, a personal diary and sketchbook, research notes, treatment excerpts, and email correspondence.” Scouring the website for clues and insights also turns up this absolute catnip: Weerasethakul writes, “I imagine a scenario in which Jessica Holland, a comatose character from Jacques Tourneur’s ‘I Walked with a Zombie,’ wakes up. She finds herself in Bogota, being drawn by a dream or a trauma that she doesn’t remember.” Count me in.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Since his big screen debut in 1996, Paul Thomas Anderson has made a series of rewarding movies as identifiable by their director’s gift for dazzling cinematics as they are by bravura performances and exhilarating ensembles. Anderson has noted that there is nothing quite as exciting as watching a movie star at work, but unknown actors bring an altogether different kind of energy to the mix. In his ninth feature film, “Licorice Pizza,” the filmmaker directs newcomers Alana Haim (of the sister pop/rock trio Haim) and Cooper Hoffman (son of Anderson’s longtime collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman) in an Andersonian mashup that merges San Fernando Valley fact and Hollywood fiction.

The early 1970s time period and location draw favorable comparisons to Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which takes place four years prior to the events of “Licorice Pizza.” Both movies warp and bend nostalgia-infused fantasy with fancifully augmented depictions of celebrities whose lives intersect with the protagonists. Both movies rejoice in the perfectly placed needle-drops of carefully curated songs emanating from car speakers and transistor radios. Both movies nail the anything-is-possible look and feel of Southern California dreaming.

Hoffman’s Gary Valentine, whose exploits are based in part on the tales of producer Gary Goetzman, is as precocious and entrepreneurial as fellow fifteen-year-old Max Fischer in “Rushmore” (he also brings to mind Tom “The Great Brain” Fitzgerald). Despite the stylistic differences between the imagined worlds of the two Andersons, Valentine and Fischer develop serious crushes on older women, cook up all manner of fake-it-til-you-make-it schemes, see the world not necessarily as it is but how they want it to be, and navigate the liminal state between childhood and adulthood with the support of single parents.

The big difference, however, is that “Licorice Pizza” belongs as much – or more – to Haim’s Alana Kane, the rudderless and restless young woman who captivates Gary when they meet on yearbook picture day at his high school (she’s working as a photographer’s assistant). Anderson recognizes the age-inappropriate obstacle of the potential romance. Much of Alana’s push-pull attraction/repulsion toward Gary revolves around her recognition of their decade gap. But no matter how she tries to leave the teenager’s orbit – in one of the film’s many side trips she volunteers for real life L.A. city council member Joel Wachs’s campaign – she realizes that she has found a kindred spirit.

Their friendship courses through a warmhearted array of offbeat anecdotes that ultimately strengthen their takes-one-to-know-one bond. In one terrific sequence, they deliver and set up a waterbed for hairdresser turned movie mogul (and Barbra Streisand beau) Jon Peters, played by Bradley Cooper in a livewire, scene-stealing turn. In another, Sean Penn materializes as a William Holden surrogate who, not unlike Peters, tests Alana’s receptiveness to his predatory creep game and not-so-veiled come-ons. Penn, gunning a motorcycle near hangout Tail o’ the Cock, lets rip the speed and motion that Gary and Alana demonstrate more regularly on foot. They run with intensity and purpose, racing headlong in the direction of endless possibility.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Master filmmaker Jane Campion, notching a fresh Silver Lion win for Best Direction at the recent Venice Film Festival, returns to the screen after a twelve-year absence with “The Power of the Dog,” a handsome and potent Western based on the 1967 novel of the same title by Thomas Savage. The 67-year-old’s last feature, the lovely John Keats/Fanny Brawne romance “Bright Star,” stands among Campion’s most accomplished movies. “The Power of the Dog” can be added to that list. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another dozen years for the next one.

Benedict Cumberbatch anchors a superb cast as Phil Burbank, a wealthy and well-educated rancher whose close partnership with his brother George (Jesse Plemons) is threatened when George marries widow Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst). Both Rose and her delicate son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) face the nonstop humiliation of Phil’s cruelty and harassment. Campion initially plays up the marked contrast between the siblings, hinting that the successes built by Phil and George could be destroyed by some unspoken turmoil — George is polite and fastidiously groomed while Phil is rude and much in need of soap.

The quotation from Psalm 22:20, “Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog” gives the story its title and initializes the possibility that Phil and George may travel the path of Cain and Abel or Jacob and Esau. But Campion knows when to hold back information and when to offer revelations that rearrange what we thought we knew about these characters and the things they hide in their hearts. Phil’s unyielding recalcitrance will be tempered with a degree of audience sympathy that brings to mind the danger of the love shared between Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist in a narrow space where queerness defies the expectations of heteronormative cowboy life.

Campion investigates the bond between Phil and his late mentor Bronco Henry without flashback. Instead, our own feelings toward the hard protagonist begin to shift once we discover more about Phil through his evolving interactions with Peter. “The Power of the Dog” contains several instances in which major surprises force us to reevaluate things we have witnessed with our own eyes. And Campion, assisted by Jonny Greenwood’s superb score, is brilliant at tightening the screws. Entire scenes unfold without spoken dialogue. Instead, the sounds in the ranch house — boots on stairs, an unwelcome duet between Rose and Phil — are as tense and evocative as any horror movie.

It is surely a disservice to reduce Campion’s filmography to a study in gender, despite the longstanding focus of so much scholarship. In her essay “The Limits of Sexual Emancipation: Feminism and Jane Campion’s Mythology of Love,” Noelle A. Baker asserts in her opening line, “Jane Campion directs movies about strong, eccentric women.” While “The Power of the Dog” makes an argument for the addition of “…and men” to that statement, Dunst’s Rose, indeed strong and eccentric, is another in a long line of richly drawn figures whose interactions with and reactions to all of those in her orbit explode with thrilling complexity and layers of meaning.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

With almost surgical precision, filmmakers Peter Middleton and James Spinney dissect the life and work of “The Real Charlie Chaplin,” a worthwhile addition to the many studies of one of the most recognizable screen performers in cinema history. Their documentary functions partly as critical biography, using Chaplin’s narrative preoccupations as the basis of a psychoanalytical reading of the man’s oeuvre — and vice versa. But the film also moves to scrutinize the auteur’s behind-the-scenes behavior, addressing Chaplin’s sexual predilection for adolescents. Three of the four women he would marry — Mildred Harris, Lita Grey, and Oona O’Neill — were teenagers at the time of their respective unions.

Middleton and Spinney access Chaplin’s incomparable filmography to illustrate their film’s central premise: that Chaplin was so closely identified with the character of the Tramp that we still struggle to separate the creation from the creator. Readers of David Robinson’s essential 1985 volume “Chaplin: His Life and Art” and viewers of Richard Schickel’s 2003 film “Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin” have already witnessed, to a significant degree, the reconciliation of Chaplin and the part he played for so long. Middleton and Spinney decide against the conventional talking head approach favored by Schickel, opting instead for a hit-or-miss series of reenactments (not unlike Clio Barnard’s technique in “The Arbor”) in which actors lip-synch to audio recordings.

Much more consistently engaging is the liberal use of archival material, particularly in the spectacular early sections that contemplate not only the origins of the Little Fellow’s iconic costume but also the way in which that outfit anticipates a personality, encompassing in wordless pantomime all the pluck, tenacity, sexual fluidity, mischief, pathos, fearfulness, and desire to be treated with dignity that would endear our ultimate underdog to millions of viewers. The filmmakers delight in showing clip after clip of Chaplin impersonators practicing the twirl of the cane, the angle of the bowler, and the twitch of the mustache.

Just as it anchors the design perfection of Olly Moss for Criterion’s “The Great Dictator,” that latter item will return later in the film when Middleton and Spinney explore the Tramp’s most unexpected doppelganger: Adolph Hitler. The future tyrant was born just four days after Chaplin, and the similarities in their impoverished backgrounds have enough juice to link the two (see also Brownlow and Kloft’s “The Tramp and the Dictator”). Chaplin’s political consciousness would later lead to an awful cycle of FBI “leaks” — outright fabrications — to Hedda Hopper, who would then publish columns that Hoover would quote to escalate the bureau’s attacks on Chaplin.

The latter portions of the feature are illustrated with the oft-excerpted home movie footage of Chaplin with Oona and children at their Manoir de Ban estate in Switzerland, and they touch on the familiar beats of political exile ahead of the moving acceptance of an honorary Academy Award in 1972. At one point, we hear narrator Pearl Mackie (who is terrific from start to finish) say, “When you ask for the real Charlie Chaplin, a thousand voices reply.” No doubt each new generation will reexamine and reassess the offscreen Chaplin even as the monumental achievement expressed through his body of work will continue to seduce freshly-stunned viewers.