My Old School (Movie)

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    ‘Stars at Noon,’ ‘Vortex’ and More of This Year’s Streaming Gems

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    A look back at some of the finest under-the-radar streaming picks of the year.December is upon us, prompting a glut of year-end best-of lists from film critics, awards-giving bodies and various experts. Most of those feature titles you might not have seen, and some you haven’t even heard of. In that year-end wrap-up spirit, this month’s guide to the hidden gems of your subscription streaming services consists solely of films released in the United States during the past calendar year. Check out some obscurities, and impress your friends and colleagues at holiday parties.‘Stars at Noon’Stream it on Hulu.Claire Denis’s erotic drama is immersed in the worlds of journalism, espionage and geopolitics, but the real subject is one of her standbys: the sexual dynamics between men and women, and the transactional nature therein. The participants here are Trish (Margaret Qualley), an underemployed American journalist in Nicaragua who’s doing a bit of sex work as a side hustle, and Daniel (Joe Alwyn), a British businessman who’s both buying and selling. Denis keenly observes how the power shifts between them, and rarely without a struggle; their dialogue scenes have a cockeyed unpredictability, particularly since one or both is always in a state of desperation. Alwyn is fine, good even, but Qualley is a revelation; she is, by turns, funny, sexy, savvy and broken.‘Vortex’Stream it on Mubi.The extremist Argentine-French filmmaker Gaspar Noé’s most recent effort is his gentlest, though only because he’s best known for provocations like “Irreversible,” “Enter the Void” and “Climax.” Here, he tells the story of a long-married couple (played by the Italian filmmaker Dario Argento and the French actress Françoise Lebrun) and how their idyllic retirement is ripped apart by her increasingly debilitating dementia. It sounds not unlike Michael Haneke’s devastating “Amour,” a similarly dour tale of aging and mortality, but Noé inserts an additional visual dimension: He plays out the events in split-screen, with her separative frame a devastating visualization of her mental isolation — a stylistic flourish that makes this harrowing drama all the more affecting.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.‘The Survivor’Stream it on HBO Max.Once upon a time, a Barry Levinson-directed feature based on a true story, with an all-star cast and successful debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, would have been a shoo-in for Oscar consideration. In today’s peculiar marketplace, it’s bought up by HBO only to never be seen again. But this is a stellar historical drama, with Ben Foster in fine form (both dramatically and athletically) as Harry Haft, an Auschwitz captive who survived his time there by boxing, and later used those skills to make a career as a boxer in America. The fight scenes are brutal, the dramatic stretches wrenching, and Levinson orchestrates his first-rate cast with aplomb.‘Elesin Olba: The King’s Horseman’Stream it on Netflix.In 1943, in the region of Africa now known as Nigeria, the longstanding tradition of the tribal king’s horseman committing ritual suicide after the death of the king (and thus following him into the afterlife) was prevented by British colonialists. That true event inspired Wole Soyinka’s venerable play “Death and the King’s Horseman,” which was adapted into this absorbing feature film by the Nigerian novelist, playwright and filmmaker Biyi Bandele (who died just before its premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival). The portraiture of customs and rituals is fascinating, and the Brits are properly villainous. But the film truly comes alive in its closing scenes, a thought-provoking and thoughtful contemplation of mortality and responsibility.‘Navalny’Stream it on HBO Max.Between interviews for Daniel Roher’s documentary, but on a hot mic, the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny tells a friend, “He’s filming it all for the movie he’s gonna release if I get whacked.” That candor and fearlessness was part of what made Navalny a thorn in the side of Putin’s Kremlin, and as such, he was the target of a likely assassination attempt by poisoning in 2020. Roher’s cameras follow Navalny as he recovers, prepares to return to Russia and participates in an independent investigation of the poisoning, resulting in an explosive, accidental confession by one of the perpetrators. Roher carefully avoids outright hagiography (via evenhanded discussion of Navalny’s image and ethics), using his access and materials to assemble a first-rate, though nonfiction, political thriller.‘My Old School’Stream it on Hulu.The story of a supposedly 17-year-old secondary school student who was revealed, after over a year in classes, to be a 32-year-old former student caused a sensation in Scotland (where it occurred) and across Europe — so much so that it was slated to be adapted into a feature film, with the actor Alan Cumming in the leading role. That film was never made, but now the story has become a documentary, and since the film’s subject would consent only to an audio interview, Cumming appears on camera to lip-sync the man’s words. (Got that?) The rest of the tall tale is told via animation, archival footage and alternately funny and contemplative contemporary interviews with the classmates of “Brandon Lee,” who attempt to puzzle out why they were so easily fooled, and (in the stellar closing sections) how well they remember the entire affair. The director Jono McLeod tells the story straight, as they all heard it and as “Lee” told it, which makes for a wild, twisty ride indeed.‘Free Chol Soo Lee’Stream it on Mubi.Everybody loves the story of an innocent man, wrongfully accused and then rightfully freed, and it’s been a standby of documentary cinema since (at least) “The Thin Blue Line.” Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s film begins as that movie, relating how Chol Soo Lee was convicted and imprisoned for a murder in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1973, based on scant evidence and flimsy eyewitness testimony, only to become a common cause for the Korean American community until he was finally freed more than a decade later. But that’s only part of the story. With sensitivity and nuance, the filmmakers follow Lee’s troubled post-prison journey, reminding us that happy endings are often temporary. A riveting and often heartbreaking tale. More

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      ‘My Old School’ Review: An Impostor Makes the Honor Roll

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      A documentary uses animation and professional actors to tell the story of a once-notorious hoax.“What is a person?” It’s a profound and complicated philosophical question, posed by a man named Stefen during an interview in “My Old School.” Like most of the other people who appear on camera in this brisk, slippery documentary, Stefen has a particular person in mind, a student at Bearsden Academy in the early ’90s known to his classmates as Brandon Lee.Stefen, who is one of the few Black pupils at Bearsden, a school in an affluent section of Glasgow, remembers Brandon fondly as a friend who invited him to parties and protected him from racist bullying. Other Bearsden alums have more ambivalent memories, but they all describe a curly-haired young man who impressed his teachers, charmed his peers and wanted more than anything else to become a doctor.They also agree that their classmate, who showed up as a fifth-year student (roughly the equivalent of a high school junior) after the start of the academic year, could seem a little odd. He looked older than 16 — “he had old skin,” one of them recalls — and alluded to a mysterious and tragic family history. He also had a car and a fondness for ’80s pop music, neither of which was typical among Glaswegian teenagers in 1993.As it turned out, Brandon wasn’t a teenager at all. When Stefen and the others first met him, he was 32 years old, and the name he used was borrowed from a recently deceased celebrity. This isn’t a spoiler, even though “My Old School,” directed by Jono McLeod — a television journalist who was one of Brandon’s classmates — arranges the case into a teasingly suspenseful narrative. The hoax was widely reported in Scotland and beyond, and the news reports and talk-show interviews that McLeod folds into the story may jog dim recollections of a faded media frenzy. There have been so many other grifters and impostors to keep track of in the intervening years.“Brandon,” whose real identity comes out midway through the movie, is given the chance to explain himself, though it can’t quite be said that he reveals himself. The gray-haired, middle-aged man in a drab windbreaker who faces the camera is the actor Alan Cumming, who faultlessly lip-syncs a first-person tale, told in the “real” Brandon’s voice, that is by turns sad, strange and self-serving.The movie, in the end, doesn’t quite know what to make of it all, perhaps because of the director’s barely mentioned personal stake. In flashbacks, Brandon and his classmates are represented in brightly colored, simply drawn animation that evokes the MTV cartoons of the era. Some of their adolescent voices belong to actors and pop singers, emphasizing the gap between them and their grown-up, live-action selves.There’s a disjunction between the jaunty, can-you-believe-this tone of “My Old School” (which ends with a peppy cover of the Steely Dan song of the same name) and the darker implications of its story. The people who knew Brandon look back mostly with incredulity and amusement at his imposture and extend him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his motives. The film takes his words at face value — even though it doesn’t show his face — and takes for granted that his deceit was benign, motivated by his ambition to study medicine and overcome adversity.At the same time, surely there is something creepy about a grown man socializing with children half his age, not only in the halls of Bearsden but also at parties where he served them alcohol, and on a vacation he took with a few of them to Spain. The movie glances toward this moral gray area but mostly looks elsewhere, practicing a troubling kind of access journalism and falling back on a dubious epistemological relativism. Its fascination with Brandon becomes a kind of credulity, a willingness to accept uncritically the mystifications of a proven liar.My Old SchoolNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More