Watch List Weekly Recap 11/12/22

This week's topics: A mesmerizing art film, a mournful blockbuster, and a Red Wave that wasn't.

Watch List Weekly Recap 11/12/22

This is the Friday recap of Ty Burr’s Watch List postings for the week. If you’d like to receive this weekly email ONLY, please go to your account page and under “Email notifications” uncheck every box except “Weekly Digest.” If you’d prefer to not receive it at all, uncheck just “Weekly Digest.”


Oops! I got so busy yesterday that I forgot to send out the weekly digest. Apologies, and here’s what you missed if you aren’t getting the newsletters as I post them during the week.


I saw that MUBI, the subscription art-film streaming service, was showing one of my favorite movies by one of the most unique filmmakers out there, Sweden’s Roy Andersson, and I had to let you guys know. (It’s available for VOD rental on other platforms as well.)

Pick of the Day: "A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence"
Have you ever seen a Roy Andersson movie? You’d know if you had; the Swedish writer-director makes films slowly — only four in the last 22 years — but with painstaking cosmic absurdism. He works in the same wing of the Museum of Cinema that houses David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Peter Greenaway, and other artist-extremists — except Andersson’s exhibition hall is Old World, exhausted, and covered with a fine patina of surrealist dust.

Can I talk about politics for a second? I had a bizarrely hopeful feeling leading into Tuesday’s election, which means I was either naive or prescient. Glad not to have been naive for once.

Election 2022: Kind of Blue
My two cents about Tuesday’s election: The beginning of the end of the Trump Era may at last be in sight. The bloated parade balloon has been punctured, the spell has been broken. There are still millions of delusional true believers out there in the heartland, but in Washington and in the nation’s statehouses, Donald’s status…

For Friday, I went long on a big-screen superhero film for a change. Why? Other Marvel movies have dealt with loss, but in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” the grief feels real because it is real.

"Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"
Can you have a superhero movie without the superhero? That’s the question that sounds throughout “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/4, in theaters), and its echoes bounce off everything: characters, actors, the audience. Other Marvel movies have dealt with loss – the last two “Avengers” installments killed off half the universe, for Pete’s sake –…

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