Rose D. Cotton 
THE TENDER BAR: 3 ½ STARS
There are many life lessons in “The Tender Bar,” a laid-back new drama starring Ben Affleck based on the life of journalist and author JR Moehringer, and now streaming on Amazon Prime. Located in and around The Dickens, a bar named after the author of ‘David Copperfield’, bar stool wisdom on the value of books, education, caring for your mother and ‘not keeping l ‘money like a drunk’ in the front pocket of your shirt, abounds.
The story begins in 1973 on Long Island. Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” plays on the car radio and the impressionable JR (played in his youth by Daniel Ranieri) lives with his mother Dorothy (Lily Rabe) and grumpy grandfather (Christopher Lloyd). Her father, a radio DJ nicknamed The Voice (Max Martini), is not pictured.
JR’s father figure is Uncle Charlie (Affleck), a charming bookworm and owner of The Dickens. It’s a wealth of advice, with which JR soaks up “masculine science” like a sponge. Charlie’s instructions range from the pragmatic – never order neat bar scotch – to the ideological – he urges J.R. to study philosophy. “You always do well in this class,” he says, “because there are no right answers.”
Charlie’s advice and the colorful regulars who populate the bar, like Bobo (Michael Braun) and Joey D (Matthew Delamater), help shape JR’s young life. “When you’re 11,” he said, “you want an Uncle Charlie.”
Cut to a decade later.
JR, having inherited his Uncle Charlie’s love of storytelling and words, is a student at Yale, studying law, but aspires to be a writer. Now played by Tye Sheridan, he falls in love with Sidney (Briana Middleton), a smart “lower-middle-class” classmate who teaches J.R. another lesson in heartbreak.
“The Tender Bar” is an understated coming-of-age story that works best when it has a drink in front of it. Which is to say, when it focuses on The Dickens and the life lessons young JR absorbs at the bar, these scenes have a nice nostalgic feel to them. Director George Clooney vividly recreates a time when 10-year-olds were sent to the local bar to buy Grandpa a pack of cigarettes. Clooney sets the scene, but it’s the actors who bring it to life.
As Affleck settles into the acting phase of his career, he does some of his best work. His Uncle Charlie has effortless charm, a fierce intellect, and is a bit of a villain. It’s a perfectly shaped and worn performance, like an old baseball glove.
The scenes shared by Affleck with Ranieri provide the film’s highlights. The young actor, who is making his film debut, brings a real curiosity to JR, a kid who has been pushed around. but always has its eyes on the future. It’s a delightful performance. Sheridan mirrors the character well as a young adult, but it’s Ranieri who makes us worry about JR
“The Tender Bar” is a well-crafted and circumspect look at JR’s life. The stakes seem low and big dramatic moments are rare, but this textured look at the importance of community, including drunks at the bar, in the formative stages of JR’s life is a quiet winner.
THE LOST GIRL: 4 STARS
“Children are an overwhelming responsibility,” says Leda (Olivia Coleman) in the opening moments of “The Lost Daughter,” a new drama directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal now streaming on Netflix. She’s sunny in her delivery of the line, but for Leda, words carry real weight. Inspired by a novel by Elena Ferrante and adapted to the cinema by Gyllenhaal, it is a story of unsentimental motherhood.
The film begins with Leda, a 48-year-old literature teacher, on a working holiday on a picturesque Greek island. She describes herself as a selfish person seeking peace and quiet, but between the attentions of caretaker Lyle (Ed Harris) and Irish student Will (Paul Mescal), she gets nothing from either. the other.
Then there’s Callie (Dagmara Domińczyk), a pregnant woman who asks Leda to leave a spot on the beach so her family can expand. “They are bad people,” said one resident.
Callie is annoying but Leda is fascinated by her sister Nina (Dakota Johnson), a mother struggling to raise her young daughter Elena (Athena Martin).
Leda is consumed by memories of the time she spent raising her daughters Bianca and Martha. But these are not happy memories from a baby book. Twenty years ago, she was an “unnatural mother” who cared more about her job and an extramarital affair with fellow teacher Hardy (Peter Sarsgaard) than her children.
Going back and forth from present day to two decades past, where Leda is played by the great Jessie Buckley, the story fleshes out the portrait of a woman harboring deep regrets for her past actions. “It’s like I was trying not to explode,” Leda says, “and then I exploded.”
“The Lost Daughter” is a promising debut behind the camera for Gyllenhaal. She skilfully manages parallel stories, past and present, bringing them together to paint a complete portrait of the complex character that is Leda. She’s a very different person in the two halves of the film, and Gyllenhaal keeps us simple to follow. The story is rich and textured, and poses more questions than it answers, but it’s not cluttered with unnecessary detail. The real gift of the film is to trust the viewer with its characters, to treat them as flawed people without spoiling the story with incredible twists. It’s an assured narrative, carried by the wonderful performances of Coleman, Johnson and Buckley, who bring intelligence and, above all, humanity to characters that are not always sympathetic.
JUNE AGAIN: 3 STARS
“June Again,” a new comedy-drama starring Australian legend Noni Hazlehurst, is a heartfelt story that reverses the plot of the 1990 drama “Awakenings.” This film centered on the work of Dr. Malcolm Sayer, played by Robin Williams, a neurologist who discovers a way to wake up catatonic patients who survived the 1917-1928 epidemic of lethargic encephalitis.
“June Again” is a different twist, but highlights some of the same issues. The new film focuses on the patient. June (Hazlehurst), is a woman in her 60s with vascular dementia brought on by a stroke. Like the folks in “Awakenings”, she suddenly regains her memory after a lapse of years and finds herself in a world far different from the one she left behind.
Her doctor told her that “dementia is not a disease that goes away. This lucidity that you experience will be temporary. A few hours if we’re lucky. They want her to stay in the dementia ward, but she has other ideas. She escapes, hails a cab, and returns to her old life, or what’s left of it. For June, it’s like the last five years never happened, but life went on.
Her high-end artisan wallpaper store is in shambles, her son Devon (Stephen Curry) has dropped out of school and is divorced, her daughter Ginny (Claudia Karvan) lets her husband and kids walk all over her and her grandson Piers (Otis Dhanji) was seriously injured in an accident. “Is there anything that hasn’t crumbled in this family?” request June. “I think I got back just in time.” With time running out and an uncertain future, June begins a new life.
“June Again” strikes a balance between drama and humor in its examination of June’s revival. The issue of his dementia is being treated with respect, but not with washcloths. June is a grainy character, who oscillates between lucidity and confusion, but Hazlehurst embodies it. She creates a compelling portrait of the person June was and the woman she is now. It’s a fiery yet sensitive performance with edge and heart.
There’s a lot going on in “June Again.” A mother-daughter subplot dominates the middle of the film, while family dynamics and June’s fragile grip on current events drive the story forward. There are moments of emotional manipulation, but the strong actors, especially Hazlehurst and Karvan, defy stereotypes and subvert the film’s more predictable plot twists.
