Michael O'Sullivan
Get your popcorn and a warm fuzzy blanket and go on a binge this weekend. Here are a few good movies to stream – you will not be disappointed.
"This Much I Know to Be True"
The bulk of the music documentary "This Much I Know to Be True" features singer-songwriter Nick Cave and his frequent collaborator, musician Warren Ellis, performing songs from the studio albums "Ghosteen" (2019, by Cave and his band the Bad Seeds) and "Carnage" (2021, credited to Cave and Ellis).
There's no audience here; the footage was shot in the spring of 2021, in the middle of the pandemic.
But the performances - lit theatrically, in old, empty spaces in London and Brighton - feature back-up singers, a string quartet and an appearance by Marianne Faithfull, reciting the May Sarton poem "Prayer Before Work".
Supplementing the scenes, which have the feel of rehearsals or studio sessions, not quite finished but not entirely unpolished, are occasional interviews with Cave, talking about his long-standing creative partnership with Ellis or reading from his emotionally vulnerable, ask-me-anything-style online forum, the “Red Hand Files”.
The film contains no explicit mention of the 2015 death of Cave's 15-year-old son, Arthur, but "Ghosteen" was written in the aftermath of the tragedy, and an air of still-raw mourning hangs over the film.
In a terrible footnote, Cave's eldest son, 31-year-old Jethro Lazenby, also died this spring, after the film was in the can.
There aren't many talking-head interviews here. Mostly, "True" is a gift for fans of Cave's musical storytelling and an opportunity for them to bathe in lushly gloomy atmospherics. It's stirring, dirgelike and richly imagistic stuff.
As a bonus, in a brief prologue, film-maker Andrew Dominik takes a peek into Cave's new ceramics studio, where he unveils an in-progress series of statuettes depicting the life of the devil on Earth.
"Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel“
New York's Chelsea Hotel – famous for providing living quarters to such members of the literary, art, music and counter-culture worlds as Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Madonna and hangers-on from Andy Warhol's Factory – is also infamous as the site of Nancy Spungen's 1978 death, which was blamed on her boyfriend: former Sex Pistol Sid Vicious.
Their stormy, heroin-plagued relationship is related in the 1986 biopic "Sid and Nancy". Vicious died of an overdose in 1979, while awaiting trail on a murder charge in Spungen's death.
Some of the building's stories past is touched upon in "Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel", a documentary by Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt (executive-produced by Martin Scorsese), but so is its present.
The building is being renovated, ruffling the feathers of some long-term tenants. The Hollywood Reporter describes the film as "a ghost story haunted by fame and celebrity, but ultimately much more grounded and universal than that.
"Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between"
And finally, based on Jennifer E Smith's 2015 young-adult novel "Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between" the film of the same name follows Claire and Aidan (Talia Ryder and Jordan Fisher), high school sweethearts on the cusp of college who, over 12 hours, revisit the milestones of their relationship in an effort to decide whether they should stay together or break up.