Part of Arkadin’s Cooped Up series, spotlighting films that speak to our past year of life under lockdown. 

In this cult-classic documentary, mother-and-daughter eccentrics Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith Bouvier Beale (known affectionately as Big Edie and Little Edie) lose themselves in nostalgic reveries and cockeyed delusions of grandeur amidst the decaying ruins of their sprawling East Hampton estate. Aristocratic relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy, the Beales were living in abject poverty when direct-cinema pioneers Albert and David Maysles documented their oddball, reclusive way of life. Little Edie, whose trademark turtlenecks and headscarves have made her something of a fashion icon, puts on a show for the cameras, prancing around, warbling, and ostentatiously flirting with the directors. If The Lighthouse shows the distinctive weirdness that can develop between two people who are closed off in a hermetically sealed environment, this delightfully peculiar documentary portrait reveals what happens when that bubble is penetrated by visitors from the outside world. For anyone who’s come out of lockdown feeling like they can’t remember how to relate to anyone outside their own household, Grey Gardens is for you. —Keith Watson