The Humans (2021)

Don't expect an Amy Schumer comedy here, but Jack and I liked this excellent drama, where a family gathers for Thanksgiving in a run down New York apartment and demonstrates their fears and conflicts with only an occasional laugh. The spectacular ensemble is made up of Beanie Feldstein, Richard Jenkins, Jane Houdyshell, Schumer, June Squibb, and Steven Yeun. Playwright Stephen Karam adapted his play and directs this production, adding an eerie cinematic underlayer that's hard to describe.

The music by Nico Muhly is not available online but you can follow the following links on Apple Music to hear songs by Steve Reich, Billie Holiday, and Philip Glass that were used in the movie.

Feldstein was last blogged for Booksmart, Jenkins for Kajillionaire, Schumer for Snatched, Squibb for Soul, Yeun for Minari (Oscar-nominated for it), and Karam and Muhly for The Seagull, the former for writing the screenplay adaptation and the latter for composing its score.

I've seen but a handful of Houdyshell's screen roles, but it should be noted that she won a Tony for The Humans onstage, among her nominations for other shows. This is Karam's feature directing debut. The Humans won him the Tony Award for Best Play in 2016 it was also a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics love this, averaging 92%. There's no audience rating, I'm guessing because not enough people have seen it?

We streamed it on Showtime on November 30. It's no secret that I prefer to watch a movie with captions. When we cued it up a few days before, I couldn't get the captions to work on our Apple TV. In the opening scene cast mutters in the hallway and I couldn't understand what they were saying. There are a lot of scenes shot from a distance and the dialogue is not very clear. After much cursing (by me--Jack is calmer), we watched Little Fish instead that day. It turns out that on Showtime you have to swipe down to activate the captions and they worked fine after that. Captions are very much needed for this movie and I recommend you use them.