Batman: The Animated Series - "Prophecy of Doom"

“Peace to all, brothers and sisters. The negative plane is aligned with the positive, bringing forth astral harmony!”

Concerned that the self-proclaimed prophet Nostromos (Michael Des Barres) is bilking his wealthy friends, Bruce Wayne endeavors to infiltrate “The Brotherhood” to learn the truth. Batman discovers the criminal past of Nostromos while the prophet’s final prediction grows ever nearer...

Nostromos joins the pantheon of forgettable villains created for Batman: The Animated Series (right alongside Red Claw and The Sewer King), which is perhaps remarkable for the show that gave us Harley Quinn, Roxy Rocket, and The Condiment King while also reinventing rogues like Mr. Freeze. We’ll never see Nostromos again, which is probably for the best. It’s ironic, though, that a show which revolves around a singular hero so often rises and falls on the strengths of his antagonists.

The underwhelming nature of Nostromos sheds light on the bigger problem with “Prophecy of Doom” on the whole, and that’s that it isn’t incompetent by any means; it’s just largely uninspiring, and it feels like there could have been a lot more done with it. For one, Nostromos doesn’t behave like a Batman-level villain until the very end, which boasts a Batman ’66-style death trap which unfortunately doesn’t feel quite earned by this episode. Furthermore, Nostromos’s greatest crime seems to be bilking rich idiots out of their fortunes, to which I say, serves ’em right! There’s nothing in the episode to suggest Nostromos isn’t a con artist, and had his villainy come as a surprise – if, for example, the magician Zatanna had been around to lend at least a semblance of credence to the inclusion of magic in Batman’s world – “Prophecy of Doom” might not have been a flop, and Nostromos might have been worth revisiting at some point.

As it stands, the best parts of the episode have nothing to do with the villain, a surprising statement given what scene-stealers the villains of Batman: The Animated Series often end up becoming. No, I’m not referring to Bruce Wayne’s one-and-done circle of socialite friends, who are so bland it’s amazing their surname isn’t literally Whitebread. There’s an engaging scene in the second act where Bruce Wayne escapes an elevator crash, giving chase as Batman to the saboteur; it’s set up with a nice bit of dreadful foreshadowing from a cheery security guard and Bruce’s dawning realization that something is afoot, and it gives Batman one of his two standout sequences.

It’s that planetarium death trap, though, that never congeals with the rest of the episode, and it seems a tad overblown for Nostromos, who spends most of the episode pouting and prognosticating while his partner-in-crime does most of the heavy lifting (but who’s otherwise so forgettable that I can’t recall his name). There’s also a distracting visual similarity between Nostromos – an original creation exclusive to this episode – and the pre-established Justice League villain Felix Faust, which gestures toward a less forgettable version of this episode. Ultimately, then, “Prophecy of Doom” refuses to embrace the mystical potential of its plot, incongruous as it might be in the established world of BtAS, but consequently it never manages to be the kind of threat that merits a Batman-level response. That, I suppose, is a task to which next week’s episode is much better suited.

Original Air Date: October 6, 1992

Writers: Dennis Marks and Sean Catherine Derek

Director: Frank Paur

Villain: Nostromos (Michael Des Barres)

Next episode: “Feat of Clay,” in which things get a bit muddy.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

The Top 10 Kermodean Rants

From the delightful ongoing comic book series Giant Days. I have a similar process for writing these reviews.

Today, The Cinema King is proud to bring something completely different and yet somewhat familiar. It’s a Top 10 list, but it’s a Top 10 list of someone else’s reviews.

Who is Mark Kermode? Kermode is, for my money, one of the sharpest critics alive, an astute cinephile and an indisputably entertaining reviewer in his own right. He’s a noted academic, his favorite film is The Exorcist, and he is – with Simon Mayo – a presenter on BBC Radio 5 Live’s “Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review.” He’s the chief critic for The Observer, has authored a number of books (both high-brow academic and more widely accessible), carries a PhD in English (much like yours truly), and plays double bass in a skiffle band.

Mark Kermode loves film, but there are a number of movies for which he simply doesn’t care. In that respect, he’s responsible for making short videos – filmed podcasts of his radio show – that are often more entertaining than the films he’s reviewing. He’s pithy and punchy, clever and well-read, a gifted(ish) impressionist, and an endearing personality whose adoration of cinema is matched only by his engagingly effusive disdain for movies that get it wrong. To that end, we present “The Top 10 Kermodean Rants [aka The British Do It Better].”

Note: The rants below are (almost exclusively) for films that Kermode rejected; if you’d like to see what it’s like when The Good Doctor approves, check out his reviews for Skyfall and The Dark Knight Rises. You will find a reverence and a depth of thinking that demand a second viewing of the films (or perhaps, like me, you’ll find yourself nodding along in approval, as you’ve seen this films easily a dozen times over).

Batman: The Animated Series - "Beware the Gray Ghost"

“As a kid, I used to watch you with my father. The Gray Ghost was my hero.”

When a series of bombings imperil Gotham City, Batman is reminded of his favorite television show as a boy, “The Gray Ghost,” which featured an episode eerily similar to current events. Batman tracks down the show’s star, Simon Trent (voiced lovingly by Adam West), and hauls him out of typecast obscurity to solve the mystery of the Mad Bomber.

Eighteen episodes into Batman: The Animated Series, and as perfect an episode as “Heart of Ice” was, “Beware the Gray Ghost” is the first episode to bring a tear to my eyes. It has nothing to do with a sentimental plot twist, a surprising death, or a poetically romantic love story. No, “Beware the Gray Ghost” struck a chord with my very soul because it encapsulates in twenty minutes everything I believe and adore about the superhero genre. This nutshell quality probably occurred to me when I first saw this episode twenty-some years ago, but now it feels especially poignant because I feel that I fully get it and so appreciate what it’s doing in the full complexity of the episode’s project.

Put another way, when someone asks me why I love superheroes, I’ll respond, “You got twenty minutes?” and put this episode on play. In short, this is an episode about me, a love letter to my genre and a defense of that selfsame love. The episode opens with young Bruce Wayne glued to his television set, drinking in the latest exploit of his favorite superhero, The Gray Ghost. As the episode unfolds, we learn that Batman’s love for the character partly inspired his quest for justice and his nightly fight to save his city. (In the comics, there was always a nod to Zorro, right down to the Waynes having seen a Zorro film at the theater that fateful night.) Batman has a small shrine of memorabilia in the Batcave, which is itself a replica of The Gray Ghost’s lair, and his team-up with The Gray Ghost is at once a child’s dream come true and a grown man’s opportunity to tell his hero just what an impact he had on his life. Even the fact that Bruce never got to see the end of that episode makes me wonder if his neverending battle for justice is inspired by that oldest-and-noblest aspect of serialized storytelling, “To Be Continued...”

It’s an episode about fandom, about the transformative power of this genre to help us imagine ourselves as our best selves, and it’s something I hold very deeply in my heart to be true. The line I quote above, “The Gray Ghost was my hero,” is delivered with immense gravitas by Kevin Conroy, and we can hear his idolization and the pain of losing his father all at once, joined with his hope for the future. We see that Bruce Wayne managed to survive the pain of losing his family by enacting the lessons he learned from The Gray Ghost.

Equally touching, we learn that The Gray Ghost has value for his ‘creator,’ the actor Simon Trent. That Trent is voiced by Adam West, himself in a sense plagued by typecasting as Batman, adds a layer of pathos to the long legacy of these characters. As much as Trent feels boxed in by his most famous performance, his fortuitous encounter with Batman allows him to see that “it wasn’t all for nothing,” that his work has had far-reaching consequences. We’ve followed Trent over the course of the episode thus far as a man broken by his history, facing eviction and bankruptcy, selling off his most valued possessions just to scrape by. But just as The Gray Ghost saved Bruce Wayne, Batman saves Simon Trent by giving him a purpose, represented beautifully by returning to him the Gray Ghost costume he had pawned away. (Sidebar: I do wonder how much responsibility this episode bears for the ensuing resurgence in appreciation for Batman '66.)

Just to prove that the episode doesn’t take itself too seriously, there’s a subtle joke in the fact that The Mad Bomber ends up being a diehard fanboy who looks suspiciously like (and is voiced by) the show’s producer Bruce Timm. But that in itself teaches us another valuable lesson – The Mad Bomber is consumed by his obsession with The Gray Ghost and his desire to own every toy and artifact associated with him. Unlike Batman, The Mad Bomber hasn’t made something better of himself out of the media he consumes. He’s a dark reflection of Bruce Timm, too, who made a career out of his interest in the genre.

And if none of this has struck a chord, the episode’s stinger tugs at the heartstrings one last time in the scene when Bruce covertly outs himself to Simon Trent at an autograph signing. “As a kid, I used to watch you with my father. The Gray Ghost was my hero... and he still is.”

Original Air Date: November 4, 1992

Writers: Dennis O’Flaherty, Tom Ruegger, and Garin Wolf

Director: Boyd Kirkland

Villain: The Mad Bomber (Bruce Timm)

Next episode: “Prophecy of Doom,” in which the magician Zatanna does not appear.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

Dirty Grandpa (2016)

Oh, the things I do for you people. As I looked for a movie to review this weekend, I found this gem “on demand,” which is a cruel joke for implying that anyone might ask for, let alone demand, the execrable piece of work. At the risk of sounding like someone’s grandfather, I should have known better. Everyone in this movie should have known better. But perhaps I should have actually acted like someone’s grandfather and just gone to bed early because Dirty Grandpa is utterly unbearable.

Robert De Niro stars as the eponymous grandpa, who cons his rising lawyer grandson (Zac Efron) into driving him to Florida for spring break, to grieve the loss of his wife in the arms of as many college girls as he can (including Zoey Deutch, doing her best Isla Fisher, and Aubrey Plaza, trying her hardest – and occasionally succeeding – to sell an R-rated April Ludgate).

You know I’m reticent to offer any kind of spoilers, but if I tell you any more of the plot you’ll see the film’s dénouement coming down the street in a cab. If I mention that Zac Efron’s character is a highstrung lawyer with an impending marriage to a real harpy of a bride, it won’t take Robert McKee to predict that he’ll find a more freespirited girl before the credits roll. If I acknowledge the drug dealer (Jason Mantzoukas, who I can honestly say has never made me laugh in anything) who has an overly chummy relationship with the police, you’ll probably assume that’s important in the third act. If I tee up any of the film’s ostensible jokes, however, you’ll probably come up with a funnier punchline than screenwriter John Phillips manages. If nothing else, you’d likely never come up with two versions of the same Terminator joke within five minutes, which Phillips accomplishes with all the grace of a first draft.

One thing about Dirty Grandpa is undeniable – Robert De Niro, an Academy Award winner and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, agreed to make this film and speak this dialogue, which is a free association mélange of smut, homophobia, and casual racism. The film’s vomitous vulgarity is married to a male gaze so leery that even Mr. Magoo can make it out. About an hour in, the film tries to moralize about the ills of homophobia while inquiring whether it’s acceptable for De Niro to use the N-word, but rather than feel at all self-aware, the film comes off as essentially mean-spirited in addition to its crude search for the absolute bottom of the barrel.

Had I seen that Dirty Grandpa was directed by Dan Mazer, I might not have watched it at all, for Mazer is a case study in the law of diminishing returns. Mazer had a hand in the hilarious Borat, the chuckle-worthy Brüno, and the unwatchable The Dictator. Now this. Perhaps Mazer would be better suited to a sitcom, because one feels that much of Dirty Grandpa is staged in such a way that Mazer is pointing to the joke and pausing, waiting for a laugh from the audience. The truth is that he’d be better off anticipating the arrival of Godot, because we certainly won’t be providing our own laugh track. Dirty Grandpa is Mazer’s second directorial feature, and we can only hope it’s his last.

At one point, Danny Glover appears for a “surprise” cameo as De Niro’s army buddy Stinky (and some jokes write themselves). “It’s all over for me,” Glover laments, to which I have to say, out of the mouths of degenerate septuagenarians, eh? Or as Efron’s character succinctly notes fairly early on, “I want to throw up.”

Dirty Grandpa is rated R for “crude sexual content throughout, graphic nudity, and for language and drug use.” Directed by Dan Mazer. Written by John Phillips. Starring Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Zoey Deutch, and Aubrey Plaza.

Batman: The Animated Series - "See No Evil"

“Get ready for your biggest disappearing act, Ventrix. The one where no one sees you for ten to twenty!”

It’s the case Batman wouldn’t have believed if Bruce Wayne hadn’t seen it with his own eyes – or not seen, as the case may be, for Gotham is besieged by an invisible jewel thief named Lloyd Ventrix. If Batman can solve the mystery “sight unseen,” he might protect the riches of Gotham and save the life of Ventrix’s daughter in the process.

“See No Evil” was never a favorite episode of mine, I think because Ventrix isn’t a major villain in the Bat-mythos (I had a bit of a snobbery to me as a tyke). Indeed, he was created for this episode and never appears again in Batman: The Animated Series. The episode, therefore, felt a little like a stopover on the way to better episodes. Now that I’m a seasoned Bat-veteran, however, I think there’s much to like about “See No Evil,” even if – ironically enough – the visual design of the villain leaves something to be desired.

There’s something subtly revolutionary about a cartoon whose main villain is invisible because you really do have to imagine that which is not seen. And unlike a live-action film like the classic The Invisible Man, which has to restrict itself to what can be done with special effects, the unreality of animation unfetters a storyteller’s range. There’s a fine chase sequence in which Batman clings to the roof of an invisible car, which works exceptionally well thanks to the inbuilt surreality of animation. Indeed, where a live-action version of that stunt might drive an audience to start to wonder “How’d they do that?” the cartoon allows you simply to immerse yourself in the story.

Hats off to writer Martin Pasko for a cleverer script than I remembered. Pasko, late of DC Comics and a writing credit on Mask of the Phantasm, plays with ideas of invisibility and sight in ways that go beyond jokes like “See you later” (though those are in here, too). Particularly compelling is Ventrix’s motivation to see his daughter, to accomplish which he must become her invisible friend “Mojo.” Sidebar: as names go, Mojo isn’t the best, and it reminds me too much of the morbidly obese X-Men foe. I do wish Pasko had given Ventrix a “proper” supervillain name.

I wish also that Ventrix’s costume had a better look. Naturally, I don’t mean when he’s invisible, though the episode comes up with creative ways to allow Batman to “see” his foe (surprisingly, however, there’s no comparison to being “blind as a bat” or using sonar to find him). The suit which gives Ventrix his abilities looks a bit like he’s wearing gray garbage bags over his entire body. A sleeker look might have given the character a bit of longevity. Also, not to go too Mr. Plinkett, but what’s wrong with his face? The animation looks like it might be gesturing at freckles, but Ventrix ends up looking like a dermatologist’s worst nightmare.

“See No Evil” is surprisingly well-written, though it ends up being just a strong middle-of-the-road episode for Batman: The Animated Series. My sense of this as a one-off hasn’t changed; I might not deliberately rewatch it on its own, but I wouldn’t gleefully skip over it on subsequent viewings of the series. Put another way, I wouldn’t turn a blind eye to it.

Original Air Date: February 24, 1993

Writer: Martin Pasko

Director: Dan Riba

Villain: Lloyd Ventrix (Michael Gross)

Next episode: “Beware the Gray Ghost,” in which a bygone Batman bewitches us with nostalgia.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

Beauty and the Beast (2017)

It’s a tale as old as time, and it’s certainly one we’ve seen before. But for the first time in Disney’s ongoing project of remaking its animated classics into live-action big budget fairy tales (with or without a healthy dose of revisionism), Beauty and the Beast both makes the case for another retelling of the story and manages to be a compelling and potent riff on the original.

If you’re like me, you probably have vast swathes of the 1991 animated film committed to (or seared into) memory, and you’ll likely be singing along in your head to the musical numbers, which get a few bonus verses here and there but are otherwise largely unchanged. So too is the plot translated fairly directly to live-action: bookish villager Belle (Emma Watson) finds herself imprisoned in the castle of the Beast (Dan Stevens), a prince turned monstrous by a curse, in order to save her doddering father Maurice (Kevin Kline). While local ape-man Gaston (Luke Evans) pines for her, to the consternation of his compatriot LeFou (Josh Gad), the castle’s lusty candlestick Lumiere (Ewan McGregor), fussy clock Cogsworth (Ian McKellen), and maternal teapot Mrs. Potts (Emma Thompson) conspire to bring beauty and the beast together to lift the spell.

In the case of Disney’s continued remake renaissance, I wouldn’t say there’s been a complete win. Maleficent was at once too distant from its source material while simultaneously pulling its punches on that difference. Meanwhile, Cinderella and The Jungle Book were visually stunning but ultimately more of the same as far as the originals were concerned. With Beauty and the Beast, however, I recall thinking several times during the film, “Oh, so that’s why they remade this!” Between its new characters and its patched-up plot holes, elucidated backstories and added lyrics, this Beauty and the Beast is a lot like a new brand of your favorite flavor of ice cream. There’s a lot that’s recognizable and reminds you what you love about it, but there are added nuances that gives this incarnation a life all its own. (It’s like the time I discovered they made cookie dough ice cream out of monster cookies and M&Ms.)

Perhaps the greatest strength of the film is its cast, which is positively bang-on from the word “go.” Watson and Stevens are well cast as the star-crossed lovers, in a romantic plotline that doesn’t feel obligatory and includes a few very well-crafted turns of character that give believability to the courtship plot. (That one such moment revolves around a library is perhaps preaching to this bibliophile’s choir, but I’d fall in love with a beast too if he had a library of his own to make Alexandria blush.) That McGregor, McKellen, and Thompson are note-perfect is right up there with “Water Wet” in terms of headlines, nor should one be surprised by the frankly stunning special effects work. What’s genuinely surprising is that Evans and Gad create something really quite special in Gaston and LeFou. Though it’s by no means sympathy for the devil, the script gives Gaston a refreshing amount of psychological depth, and Gad plays LeFou with an understated tenderness that gives LeFou a few legitimate reasons to hang around a specimen as deplorable as Gaston.

Indeed, what Beauty and the Beast does quite well is clarify a few of the nagging details and polish up the bits that work in order to present a fresh version of the story to an audience who is a little older, a little wiser, and a bit more sophisticated. This is hardly an “adult” version of the story, but it does feel a bit more grown-up, more willing to go to places the original didn’t – the question of Belle’s mother, for one, and the aforementioned update to Gaston: neither of which changes the characters or the plot but brings them into sharper focus.

Perhaps most importantly for this moviegoer, Beauty and the Beast never forgets to embrace with exuberance the playful weirdness of a film that includes a talking wardrobe, a barking footstool, and a boisterously romantic candlestick who turns a dinner invitation into something out of Busby Berkeley. It is the kind of film that touches the heart in the right places but isn’t embarrassed to leave you with a big dumb grin on your face as a talking clockface excretes gears in alarm. It’s a film that has more emotional range than we have any right to expect from a remake of an animated fairy tale.

But it’s also a film that, as the song goes, may have something there that wasn’t there before. I’m reticent to call it a brain or a heart or something so reductive, nor do I want to chalk it up to je ne sais quoi, though one character actually does. But unlike some of Disney’s more recent live-action updates, it has an unflappable demand to exist and ends up a worthy successor to the original.

Beauty and the Beast is rated PG for “some action violence, peril, and frightening images.” Directed by Bill Condon. Written by Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos. Starring Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Josh Gad, Kevin Kline, Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, and Emma Thompson.

Batman: The Animated Series - "The Cat and the Claw"

“Red Claw... a woman?”
“Do you have a problem with that?”
“Not at all - I’m an equal opportunity crime-fighter!”

After Batman traces a rash of cat burglaries to Catwoman (Adrienne Barbeau), he learns that the notorious terrorist Red Claw (Kate Mulgrew) has moved operations to Gotham City. But while the city is menaced by a gruesome plague, Bruce Wayne finds himself falling in love with Selina Kyle, who’s purchased him in a charity auction.

I have never liked these episodes as much as I want to like them, because I can’t help feeling that the debut of Catwoman deserves much bigger fanfare and much tighter plotting; though these were the first episodes of Batman: The Animated Series aired (15th and 16th in production order), watching them just after “Heart of Ice” does no favors to “The Cat and the Claw.” For one, neither of the villains is particularly well-developed. In the case of Catwoman, that’s slightly forgivable because her only motivation is to liberate shiny objects from their owners, but the show’s curious decision to instill in her a heavy-handed conservationist mentality always comes off as preachy and not a proclivity rooted in her feline alter ego. Put another way, it ends up distracting from what really works about the character – her playful yet sexualized cat-and-mouse game with Batman. (It’s no coincidence that her best appearances, “Almost Got ’Im” and “Batgirl Returns” are the ones where this never comes up.)

On the other hand, while Batman: The Animated Series did create its share of significant Batman characters – most of them, now that I’m thinking of it, women – Red Claw is ultimately a disappointment. This has much to do with the ambiguity (read: poor writing) surrounding her ultimate plot. She wants to build/bankroll a resort to acquire the arms underneath it, to steal a plague and never use it, to blackmail the city to do... terrorism? Or does she actually want to exterminate the big cats along the way? Of course, the word “terrorism” has a different valence now than it did in 1992, but it seems that Red Claw is a thinly-drawn villain with a shoehorned link to Catwoman solely by virtue of their animalistic nomenclature. (Though puzzlingly, when she returns in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” Catwoman is nowhere to be seen.) This is all, of course, to ignore the fact that this episode repeats the gag where Batman (and Commissioner Gordon, too) is surprised to learn that his adversary is a woman, a retrograde attitude that shouldn't surprise someone who has already gone up against Poison Ivy.

As is often the case with so-deemed “bad” episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, there are so many good things in “The Cat and the Claw” that don’t add up. I’ve mentioned the playful banter between Batman and Catwoman, which Conroy and Barbeau play like a 1940s screwball comedy. The circumstances of their meeting at a charity auction, and their first date involving a car chase across Gotham, are spot-on plays with the dichotomy between Bruce and Selina and their masked alter egos. And there’s something undeniably cool about the image of Batman driving a gasoline truck while chucking a grenade out the window, to say nothing of the episode’s homage to The Maltese Falcon at the end.

Indeed, if this episode had been more Maltese Falcon than Die Hard, it’d be an A-plus winner of a show. As it is, “The Cat and the Claw” is neither a great episode nor as bad as “The Forgotten.” It’s a middle-of-the-road “I’d rather not” of an episode, padded out with good ideas but perhaps too lean to justify a two-parter – especially when the last two-parter was as good as “Two-Face” was.

Original Air Date: September 5-12, 1992

Writer: Sean Catherine Derek, Laren Bright, Jules Dennis, & Richard Mueller

Director: Kevin Altieri & Dick Sebast

Villains: Catwoman (Adrienne Barbeau) and Red Claw (Kate Mulgrew)

Next episode: “See No Evil,” in which Batman fights a little girl’s invisible friend.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

Monday at the Movies - April 3, 2017

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” When your Cinema King goes channel-flipping, you never know what he’ll find.

A Serious Man (2009) – It’s no secret around here that I’m a fan of Joel and Ethan Coen, but I hadn’t remembered this movie well enough to prepare myself for how quickly it would sink its claws into my brain and there prey upon my weakness for a good puzzle box. Put another way, as its protagonist frequently laments, “What’s going on?!” Michael Stuhlbarg stars as physics professor Larry Gopnik, up for tenure amid a swirling cavalcade of calamity; his son’s bar mitzvah rests in a hazy pot-clouded future, his shiftless brother (Richard Kind) lives on his couch, a divorce looms with his wife and her ersatz beau Sy Ableman, and a disgruntled South Korean student may have left a bribe in Prof. Gopnik’s office. The film is Gopnik’s search for answers – from his family, his attorneys, and his God – but as with most Coen movies, the result is a madcap romp seasoned with light misanthropy, a dizzying world that makes increasingly less sense but nevertheless transfixes the viewer. It shares some affinity with Barton Fink, whose glasses Gopnik seems to have borrowed, and it carries a similar theme of a bewildered academic who’s all the more frustrated by the feeling that all of this should be making sense to him. After a few viewings, I’m still not sure if this is a modern-day story of Job or a postmodern search for answers in a world unable to provide them, but two things of which I’m certain – it’s irresistibly hilarious and eminently quotable. I don’t often hear this mentioned among the best of the Coens, though I’m starting to think that’s a weirdly exclusive list, since A Serious Man is as good as any of their other comedies of errors.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!