The Tiger Hunter
Sami (Danny Pudi) is an Indian engineer eager to make it in America. He wants to get the girl back home (by winning over her unimpressed father) and “achieve absolute greatness” like his dad. Director Lena Khan’s sweet-natured immigrant comedy follows the plucky Sami as he makes his way through mishaps and misunderstandings in disco-era America. If he makes it, it will not be alone but with the help of the community he falls in with.
Conduct! Every Move Counts
The biennial Georg Solti competition draws as many as 500 applicants from 70 nations. Twenty are chosen, given 20 minutes to rehearse an orchestra and half an hour to conduct a composition. The winners are likely to find prestige careers. The losers? Conduct! documents a recent contest, focusing on five up-and-comers as they face make or break. Unlike sports, the unquantifiable intangibles of the human spirit are in play. Cut to judge’s comments: “Terrible! Hacking it up!”
Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense
“Truth is now,” says trumpeter Nicholas Payton. Bad philosophy, but it does describe an ideal of what jazz can be. The documentary explores the meaning of that music at a time when many players don’t like the word jazz. For them, jazz so-called is more a way of approaching music than anything else. But as one critic notes, jazz no longer communicates much of anything to the wider world if it means nothing more than jamming.
The Way West
Robert Widmark and Kirk Douglas affect raspy cowboy accents as sleepy-voiced Robert Mitchum looks on with bored dismay. The Way West (1967), a western from the Hollywood genre’s declining years, places three great stars of ’40s film noir onto a wagon train bound for Oregon. Filmed in Panavision and Deluxe color, The Way West catches the vastness of the frontier and is notable for Sally Field’s debut—barefoot on the back of a wagon.
