Physically in nature, but spiritually divorced from it. Suffers, for me, from the same fatal flaw of so many modern releases with highbrow ideals (All Quiet on the Western Front and The Brutalist come to mind), where there's a calculated aesthetic imagination on display, but none of the electricity of life to make it tick. Magic Hour is lovely, yes, but it isn't an idea unto itself. And why is it that even our best craggy faces are feeling so…

It's difficult for me to spot the weaker Deanna Durbin vehicles because of how much life she brought to every moment in her small filmography. His Butler's Sister is a slight Cinderella story—a plot you've seen a hundred times—and yet what a pleasure it is to watch Durbin fill the screen with her particular warmth.

But it's not just warmth that makes her the underseen star I most want to introduce to my female friends. She's wry, too. And a…

A strange, unsatisfying combination of elements. Sound design that imitates old films, but is somehow less intelligible than the most neglected, crackling-with-age movies I've recorded from TCM (perhaps we're meant to feel that the mic was hidden at the bottom of one of Mank's Seconal bottles), an aspect ratio and lighting that hearkens to Cold War-era black & white, faux damage to the film stock that bookends scenes like a quaint afterthought, a frequently jazzy score with the generic zip that…