Amazon streaming tip: Mark Pellington/Alex Ross Perry's poetic and moving NOSTALGIA

Yes, Mark Pellington (shown at left, director) and Alex Ross Perry (shown below, co-writer) do seem an odd combination, but in this particular case the combo works better for TrustMovies than either writer/director's work has managed to do individually.

Granted the title NOSTALGIA is a tad overused (95 exact title matches on the IMDB!), but it does indeed apply to this movie, whose themes are grief, loss, and the importance in one's life of both objects and memories. The film begins with a lovely scene in a diner between a waitress and a quiet, contemplative man (played

quite memorably by John Ortiz) who is an insurance assessor. We then move to one of his clients (Bruce Dern) and then to another (Ellen Burstyn), with various family members and friends involved, and from there to a dealer in sports memorabilia (Jon Hamm, shown in bottom photo) and then to this man's sister (Catherine Keener), her family and a sudden bereavement.

That's it, so far as plot goes. What holds the movie together and makes it often so beautiful and moving is its combination of themes, visuals and dialog, all brought to thoughtful, specific life by an array of first-rate actors, led by Mr. Ortiz who is a good here as I've yet seen him. He brings the kind of grace and understanding to the proceedings that help lead us into this unusual, artful look at the "whole" (or maybe the "hole") of our lives.

Criticism has been leveled at the film due to its supposed repetitiveness, yet each episode has its own special tale brought to life by top-notch performers. Supporting roles are cast with such a roster of talent -- Beth Grant to James Le Gros -- that each small performance rings  true and special.

The question of what the objects we collect during our lives mean -- to us, as well as to others -- is given a most interesting workout here, and the result is worth experiencing and thinking about.

Yes, the movie is slow-paced (and the final section goes on a bit too long), but it is so beautifully filmed that some of you, at least, will be pleased to have viewed it. Do give this film a try. Nostalgia is streaming now via Amazon, where Prime members can see it free of charge.

An Irish filmmaker explores Russian life: Johnny O'Reilly's entertaining soap opera, MOSCOW NEVER SLEEPS

Basically a soap-operatic set of interlinked stories telescoped to fit into a one-hundred-minute format, MOSCOW NEVER SLEEPS begins like yet another of those Russian movies about life in Russia that sets out to show us all too believably (see Leviathan or The Fool) how ugly, heartbreaking, corrupt and nasty it is for all the characters -- no matter what their station in life. But then, as the movie wends its very lively way along, something odd happens, and you slowly begin to see things in a slightly more positive light.

This most likely is because the movie was made by an Irishman, Johnny O'Reilly, pictured at left, who is said to have lived in Moscow for the past dozen years, and is clearly rather smitten with the place -- as awful in so many ways is it probably is (whether you're Russian or Irish). As writer and director Mr. O'Reilly has given us quite the set of characters, each one brought to fine life by the excellent set of actors he and his casting directors and Elina Ternyaeva & Yulia Milovidova have corralled.

These folk, who include the likes of a very ill but very popular Russian television star (Yuri Stoyanov, above) and a pair of not-very-happy nor friendly step-sisters (Anastasiya Shalonko and Lyubov Aksyonova, below, left and right), out for a night on the town that turns into something a tad more appalling...

a not-so-nice business mogul (Leviathan's Aleksey Serebryakov, below), who's in the midst of being screwed by the state and maybe also by his would-be singer/girlfriend,

who is suddenly torn between her richer, more powerful current beau and her poor-but-hunky ex, who is now in hot pursuit. These latter two are played by Eugenia Khirivskaya (below, right, and at bottom, left) and Oleg Dolin, (below, left and bottom, right) who, if you like your men big, beefy and beautiful, is one hell of a knockout here.

There are a number of other key players, including a granny, her son, grandson, and the son's put-upon wife, and each set of characters and their circumstances are handled with precision, brevity and smarts, so that we come to care as much for these people as the film's short running time can possibly allow.

Another plus are the many gorgeous shots of Moscow, by day and night, that make the city seem, for all its cavalier cruelty, something special and beautiful. (You can certainly understand why those three sisters longed for the place.) So lively and fast-paced is Mr. O'Reilly's keen direction that we have little time to do more than hang on for the alternately funny, moving and wild ride -- by the end of which Russian life seems to have at least partially redeemed itself. Well, almost.

Distributed via Snapshot Productions, the Russian-language film (with English subtitles) hits theaters nationwide, beginning June 9th, 2017 in New York City at the Village East Cinema, June 16th in Los Angeles at Laemmle’s Ahrya Fine Arts  and Town Center 5, and June 30th in Washington, D.C. at the Landmark E Street Cinema. The film will then expand into additional cities throughout the summer.

From Basque country: Garaño and Goenaga's quiet, thoughtful, deeply moving FLOWERS

Back in 2010 TrustMovies viewed and covered, during the FSLC's sorely missed annual series, Spanish Cinema Now, a wonderful film from writers/directors Jon Garaño and José Mari Goenaga titled 80 Days (80 egunean). That film unfortunately never saw theatrical release here in the USA, so it pleases me no end to be able to cover the theatrical debut of the pair's latest work, FLOWERS (Loreak). This marks the first time a Basque-language film has been submitted by Spain as the country's nominee for Best Foreign Language Film at the upcoming Oscars. (Language enthusiasts and foreign film buffs alike will discover that the Basque language, Euskara, sounds little like Spanish.)

The talented pair of writers/directors, Garaño and Goenaga (above, with the latter on the left), here abetted in the writing department by Aitor Arregi, have created a quietly complicated tale of lives entwining in a most unusual way. Oddly entwined lives are nothing new to cinema (consider Paul Haggis' Oscar winner Crash and his much-better, though less seen, Third Person), but what distinguishes the world of these filmmakers is how beautifully they avoid melodrama, despite their film being about some of the very things -- love, possible adultery, death and family squabbles -- most prone to bring this out in a movie.

Instead, the filmmakers -- via elegant, composed-but-never-showy cinematography (by Javier Agirre) and a tale that holds our attention by virtue of its complicated and beautifully wrought characters -- draw us in and manage to keep us focused on the bigger picture, even if we don't know for some time what that picture will include.

The story involves an early-middle-aged woman (a lovely, smart, and very subtle performance by Nagore Aranburu, above) who gets some surprising news from her physician, after which she begins receiving weekly delivery of flowers -- with no note or name-of-sender attached.

Another woman, Lourdes, a wife and mother who works as a toll collector (Itziar Ituño, above) is in an unhappy relationship with her mother-in-law, Tere (Itziar Aizpuru, below, who was so fine in the filmmakers' earlier 80 Days).

What connects all three women is a man -- surprise! -- Beñat (played by Josean Bengoetxea, below), who proves the filmmakers' ace-in-the-hole: a character who bonds the others -- and the movie itself -- even though we never really know him nearly as well as we come to know these women. In the film's finest scenes, we follow along with what happens to one of these characters -- as a corpse! -- and the movie touches profundity without ever seeming pretentious.

Garaño and Goenaga's great accomplishment, in addition to avoiding the expected melodrama, is to make mysterious -- even as they show us the connections and characters -- the workings of this thing we call life. And while they do not leave any "loose ends," how events work out, and why, is full of the unexpected made entirely credible.

Flowers is so very fine a film, in fact, that I would hope to see it among the finalists for that Oscar. Probably not, however, because the Academy usually proves more receptive to melodrama over real drama or films of particular subtlety. But we'll see.

Meanwhile, you see this film, please -- if possible on the big screen, where it's wide-screen cinematography is best appreciated. From Music Box Films and running 99 minutes, it opens this Friday, October 30, in New York City at the Paris Theatre, then goes to Washington DC on November 6, to Philadelphia on November 20, and to Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal on November 27. Click here, then scroll down and click on THEATERS to see all currently scheduled playdates.