I am about 10 items from finishing up with Netflix!

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"Unorthodox" was recommended by Jessica Chastain, so it
is a must see. During COVID times she had one of these
zoom-telecast with the lead actress Shira Haas, and it
was mutual admiration society. Watching the head-shaving
scene immediately tells me why -- it requires the kind
of emotional acrobatics and control that Chastain herself
is so justly famous for. I suspect Haas is losing her
real hair in that shoot, so there can only be one take.
Impressive. The 4-hour miniseries is taut and lean;
it only slowly reveals the background to the characters,
and some early scenes would not be fully explained until
much later. Maria Schrader directs with great confidence.
She is never the kind of director who would throw in an
overhead shot or a freeze-frame, but the use of Berlin
location is subtle and excellent, and the wedding scenes,
with Haas' character's mother being ostracized, are
especially well done. I'm never been acquainted with
the Orthodox Jewish community in New York, but did
blunder into the Montreal Outremont community once,
and it was austere and oppressive ...

"The Queen's Gambit" is kind of the opposite -- overlong,
by the numbers, and as quintessentially American as
"Unorthodox" is unmistakably European -- down to the
valorizing of substance abuse, of course. I have never
liked Anya Taylor-Joy. Directors tend to let her exotic
fish-eyed look dominate her scenes and slow things to a
crawl. She is actually quite good in this series, not
Shira Haas-good but solid enough. The problem is that
the series have extended flashbacks to her character's
orphanage upbringing, and the child actresses playing
her younger self are one-note and tiresome. Those
flashback scenes seem to take forever too -- 20, 30
minutes at a time, unlike the quicksilver backward
glances of "Unorthodox." The background music is
lull-you-to-sleep pop tunes, not the elegiac Schubert
in "Unorthodox." (Haas's character at one point
even plays the sonata that Bresson picked for _Au
Hasard Balthasar_.) I really didn't finish watching
it. I cheated and skipped forward to the final episode.
If it were about storming the Raevsky redoubt in "La
Bataille de Moskova" instead of chess, it might be of
some interest.

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Jessica Chastain also mentioned somewhere that she
liked _The Hand of God_, so I Paulo Sorrentino has
never been my favorite director; his framing and
lighting are really good (they make him an Italian,
and better, Wes Anderson), but his stories are too
precious, shallow. _The Hand of God_ is lovely
to look at, and is certainly more emotionally honest
than _The Great Beauty_ or _This Must be the Place_.
It is supposed to be autobiographical, about the
writer-directors' teenage years in Napoli, living
with his crazy and extended family, watching Maradona
bring home the serie A title (not sure it was called
that then). The film's title refers to Maradona's
deliberate handball goal against England in the 1986
World Cup. I am not far from Sorrentino's age, and
that year I was gutted that England was eliminated by
such a blatant act of cheating, despite Gary Lineker's
heroics. (The England striker scored 6 goals despite
having a broken arm in a huge cast -- although I might
be confusing that with the 1990 world cup.) Hopefully
that puts things in perspective for the soccer-
challenged. I wonder how the English cinephiles
received this film ... Anyway, Sorrentino is a
fabulist who dreams too much about celebrities and
cinema; the autobiographical element gives the film
a grounding that is sorely needed.

Jessica Chastain is a self-described cinema nerd
who feasts on these auteurist films. I wonder why
she hasn't worked more closely with the big-name
auteurs apart from Malick, Bigelow, del Toro ...
and I'm counting John Michael McDonagh. Well she's
also worked with Ridley Scott and Christopher
Nolan, even though I don't care for Nolan. And
Liv Ullmann, and the underrated John Madden. OK,
that's quite a handful actually. But the point
is, she should really consider directing. I bet
she has a much firmer grasp on framing and the
visual language of cinema than most Anglo-
American actresses who do try their hands at
directing.

I still haven't watched her "Tammy and George"
series -- that needs 120% of my attention for
6 hours -- but will get to it soon!