🎬 Judy, Goldeneye, & Good Night, and Good Luck

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK is a lovingly made ode to the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow, and transparently a passion project for George Clooney — then the most bankable star in Hollywood — who plays Murrow’s collaborator, Fred Friendly. If you know the history of Murrow and his broadcasted battles with Senator Joe McCarthy, then little in the film will surprise you, but it’s still worth seeing for David Straitharn’s performance as Murrow and the shadowy yet crisp black and white cinematography. Of course, the 2005 movie is also worth revisiting in 2019 for its enduring relevance to the unbalance between objective journalism and cruel, xenophobic American politicians.

The new Judy Garland biopic JUDY is a fine movie, but never quite ascends to anything more than that. Renée Zellweger is perfectly cast as Garland in the last year of her life, a four-times-divorced former star forced to leave her children in one of her exes’ custody because she otherwise can’t provide for them. All throughout the movie, we are reminded of how awful this situation is, and are both shown and told that Garland has since her earliest years been a victim of parents, managers, pervy studio executives, and more. Yet despite Zellweger’s immersion into the tragic character, it never feels as though we get beyond that idea, of Garland as the victim. Judging especially by its final scene, the movie wants us to remember how talented she was, and how beloved by fans, but the rest of the story can’t quite strike the needed balance between her misfortunes and her agency.

There’s so much GOLDENEYE gets right that it could have gotten wrong. As the first James Bond movie released after the Cold War, it had the precarious tasks of introducing audiences to a new Bond (Pierce Brosnan) while confirming that a new era of 007 movies could still be fun, and yet removing — or at least lampshading — the tropes of the series that were showing their age. Goldeneye has held up surprisingly well over the past 24 years, which I’d argue is a product of the filmmakers having to consciously confront those challenges. The end result is an adventure that is somehow smarter and dumber than you might expect, buttressed by a slew of character actors such as Robbie Coltrane and Alan Cumming, as well as a masterful command of tension by the writers and director. And I had totally forgotten how good Bond’s climactic fistfight with “Janus” is — a real contender for one of the best fight sequences in the series.

(new additions in bold)