The enigmatic power of ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock,’ plus the week’s best movies in L.A.
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Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
The Sundance Film Festival is winding down and we covered the fest from all angles.
Photographer Jason Armond created images with the teams behind films such as “Free Leonard Peltier,” “The Wedding Banquet,” “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” “Atropia,” “By Design,” “Twinless” and many more.
There are also video interviews with the creators of the festival’s most talked-about titles, including “Sorry, Baby,” “The Alabama Solution,” “Oh, Hi,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Peter Hujar’s Day,” “Together” and “Love, Brooklyn.”
Critic Amy Nicholson wrote about her highlights from the early days of the festival, including “Bunnylovr,” “Bubble & Squeak,” “Rabbit Trap” and “Sugar Babies.” She also reviewed one of the most anticipated films of the festival, “Opus” starring Ayo Edebiri and John Malkovich. Amy has another dispatch coming soon.
I wrote about the documentary “The Stringer,” which explores whether the iconic image from the Vietnam War known as “Napalm Girl” was in fact not taken by the long-credited Associated Press photographer Nick Ut but rather an unknown freelancer named Nguyen Thanh Nghe, who has long lived in anonymity in California.
There was already strong pushback against the film even before it premiered, coming from the AP and Ut.
“This story challenges my profession and established truth in my profession,” said Gary Knight, a veteran photojournalist and executive producer of the film. “We were all heavily invested in making sure that we were diligent, thoughtful and treated everybody with respect and tried to get this right. So we’re all stakeholders in the story.”
‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ at 50
Tonight the American Cinematheque will host the West Coast premiere of a new 4K restoration of Peter Weir’s 1975 film “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” The restoration will begin a run at the Laemmle Royal on Feb. 21.
Weir, who also made such films as “Gallipoli,” “Fearless,” “Dead Poets Society” and “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” hasn’t made a film since 2010’s “The Way Back” but did receive an honorary Oscar in 2022 and a Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival in 2024.
The atmospheric style and boldly ambiguous storytelling of “Picnic at Hanging Rock” have made it extremely influential over the years. Based on a novel by Joan Lindsey, the film is about a group of schoolgirls who, on Valentine’s Day in 1900, go to a remote scenic outcropping to spend the day. But a teacher and three of the girls go missing, setting off all sorts of speculation as to what may have happened to them.
Writing about the film in 1998, when it was back in theaters around the time of Weir’s “The Truman Show,” Kevin Thomas praised “Hanging Rock” as “outrageously erotic in its symbolism and implications” as well as “a gorgeous-looking, superbly wrought enigma.”
Thomas also noted, “Throughout a major, remarkably consistent three-decade career, director Peter Weir has invited audiences to peer beyond surface reality to discover different worlds, whether they may be of the imagination or the supernatural, as a route to self-discovery. … The exquisite and seductive ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock,’ which helped revive the Australian film industry as well as establish Weir’s reputation, is cinema at its most evocative.”
Jim McKay’s ‘Girls Town’
A new 4K restoration by IndieCollect of Jim McKay’s 1996 “Girls Town” will have its local premiere at the Los Feliz 3 tonight, with an encore screening on Monday. McKay and actor Guillermo Diaz will be there tonight for a Q&A. Largely unavailable for many years, the film won two prizes when it premiered at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival and is a welcome reminder of the festival’s history and legacy.
Starring Lili Taylor, Bruklin Harris, Anna Grace and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (in her film debut), the movie was written by McKay in collaboration with his cast. The story tracks a group of New York City high school seniors as they grapple with the fallout from the suicide of a friend after she is sexually assaulted.
In his review, Kevin Thomas celebrated the film for its “unique denseness and richness,” adding, “‘Girls Town’ is a serious film, even demanding in the complexity of its people and their relationships, yet it gets a steady stream of laughs. … The film depicts with utter conviction a world in which girls in the process of becoming women have little opportunity to assert themselves or to be understood when they’re most in need of support.”
Points of interest
Jessica Williams introduces ‘Blue Crush’
On Sunday, Vidiots will screen John Stockwell’s 2002 surfing drama “Blue Crush” with an introduction by actor and comedian Jessica Williams.
Inspired by a magazine article by Susan Orlean titled “Life’s Swell,” the story of female friendship and empowerment stars Kate Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez and Sanoe Lake as friends on Maui’s North Shore who all have dreams of making it as professional surfers.
Vidiots’ program note describes the film as a “cinematic comfort food classic,” while Kenneth Turan’s original review noted, “For although director John Stockwell (who did the more successful ‘crazy/beautiful’) and his co-writer Lizzy Weiss do it right some of the time, ‘Blue Crush’ ultimately gets away from them. Way longer than it needs to be, overloaded with increasingly strained contrivances, it’s a film that feels as if it outsmarted itself by listening to too many “what if” ideas from too many story conferences.”
A Richard Pryor / Eddie Murphy concert double-bill
Long before the recent wave of televised stand-up concert specials, there was the comedy concert film. On Monday the New Beverly will have a double bill of 1979’s “Richard Pryor: Live in Concert” and 1987’s “Eddie Murphy: Raw.”
Directed by Jeff Margolis, “Richard Pryor: Live in Concert” captures the comedian at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach in December 1978 and was released within a matter of months. In a review of the film for The Times, Linda Gross noted that the film was released without an MPAA rating. Gross added, “For most of us, Pryor’s use of vulgar language is less threatening than his insights into our own vulnerabilities. In the best sense, Pryor’s language and irreverence are subversive — they strike a major blow against hypocrisy.”
Directed by Robert Townsend, “Eddie Murphy: Raw” was filmed at New York City’s Felt Forum (the original name of the Theater at Madison Square Garden). Reviewing the film, Michael Wilmington wrote, “The two best bits in ‘Raw’ avoid macho. They’re both recollections of Murphy’s boyhood, one an imitation of himself imitating Pryor. Later on, he tells a story — not funny, but goofy and sweet — about watching his mother make hamburgers with green peppers and Wonder Bread. It’s a rare human moment in the film, and it reminds us that all of Pryor’s greatest routines came from humanity, the ability to mock yourself as well as the world. Most of the jokes in ‘Eddie Murphy Raw’ are the kind you regale buddies with to show off. Anyone as good as Eddie Murphy should have outgrown that years ago.”
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