Digital Week – August 7th

Director/co-writer Laura Luchetti’s empathetic and sensitive coming-of-age saga follows the introspective 17-year-old Ginia (played, in a starmaking turn, by the terrific Yile Yara Vianello), who is simultaneously confused and excited by her attraction to Amelia (persuasively embodied by Deva Cassel, daughter of Italian actress Monica Bellucci and French actor Vincent Cassel), who’s a headstrong model for local artists. With a 1938 Turin setting that is both evocative and quietly chilling—Il Duce Mussolini’s fascists are hovering in the background—Luchetti’s gorgeously realized feature was one of the happiest surprises of this year’s Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at New York’s Film at Lincoln Center in June.

The creation of Electric Lady Studios—immortalized on Jimi Hendrix’s classic album “Electric Ladyland”—is the subject of John McDermott’s entertaining documentary, which lands us in late ’60s Greenwich Village alongside Hendrix’s legendary engineer-producer, Eddie Kramer, and others involved in the planning, construction and running of the first artist-owned music facility in rock. Hendrix music is generously played and the talking heads (which include John Storyk, the studios’ architect; and two of Jimi’s band members, Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox) are chatty and revealing in this valuable chronicle of an indispensable music studio, later populated by the likes of John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie and the Clash.

Director Jason Cohn’s enlightening account that explores how architect Eliot Noyes transformed American design in the mid-20^th century smartly condenses a knotted history of design into something digestible, spirited, but never dumbed down. Fond remembrances and paeans from his family members, colleagues and historians blend with well-chosen vintage footage to present this nuanced portrait of Noyes’ ongoing importance to contemporary design, from his playful but norm-shattering designs for IBM and Mobil to his family’s unique home.

Although this documentary’s stated aims are lofty, even necessary—simulating a possible insurrection on January 6, 2025, four years after the real-life attempted coup to overturn a lawful presidential election, with many actual politicians and government insiders playing a fictional presidential cabinet and advisors—what we’re actually watching ends up less than the sum of its parts. Directors Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber turn this plausible doomsday scenario into an effective if derivative pulse-pounding thriller, but the reality of what happened on January 6, 2021 is still too raw to make this well-intentioned cautionary tale more than an intriguing but manipulative curio. The best moments are unfiltered comments by real veterans Chris Jones, Kris Goldsmith and Janessa Goldbeck (CEO of VetVoice, which originated the staging of this scenario), who emotionally discuss how imperative saving democracy is. More of their reality and less of the actual war game would have made this a more powerful—though, admittedly, entirely different—film. 

In Jake Paltrow’s accomplished anthology feature, which tells the fragmented stories of several ordinary people on the periphery of the 1962 execution of Nazi Adolf Eichmann (which occurred just after midnight on June 1, hence the film’s title), is burnished by intelligence and sympathy. The three tales, which move from humor to horror, are followed by a bittersweet epilogue, as Paltrow takes the measure of a young nation grappling with shared traumas that nevertheless leave room for triumph over tragedy. Paltrow’s 16mm images look quite striking on Blu-ray; too bad there’s no interview or commentary that contextualizes this complex historical drama.