Aurelia Butler

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    ‘The Girl With the Needle’ Review: A Series of Unfortunate Events

    This grim and exceptionally stylish film centers on a Danish woman who becomes tied up in the black-market baby trade.A couple of times in “The Girl With the Needle,” a grim story of a woman out of options, the director Magnus von Horn positions his camera in front of a mass of textile workers streaming out of the mill after their shifts. The moments pay homage to one of history’s first motion pictures, a Lumière film of employees leaving a factory.If that early cinematic curiosity captured reality, von Horn’s piercing black-and-white film elevates it, filling its world with figures and places out of a Gothic fairy tale. Set in post-World War I Copenhagen, the story, inspired by true events, follows Karoline (a remarkable, often wordless Vic Carmen Sonne) as she finds herself in a series of spaces — grubby tenements, factory floors, a utilitarian bathhouse, a circus sideshow — connected only by a menacing mood and a winding maze of steep cobblestone streets.The plot is a series of unfortunate events, with Karoline becoming pregnant by her boss only to be frozen out by his mother and fired from her job. At the same time, her husband, assumed to be dead, returns home from the war with his face disfigured. It’s a strong start for a story about how, amid hardship and desperation, compassion can wear thin.But once the story veers into a local woman’s black-market adoption scheme, Karoline’s personal troubles are eclipsed by a greater evil — the details of which inspired the screenplay. These events scandalize, yet “The Girl With the Needle” is most intriguing when it lingers in its disturbing fictions, which come to life with exceptional style.The Girl With the NeedleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Day of the Fight’ Review: Innovating an Old Cliché

    Revisiting a boxing classic, and honoring a filmmaking legend.A professional fighter, or at least a professional fighter with any sense, does one thing in between bouts: They train. They train and train and train. In 1951, Stanley Kubrick made a short documentary called “Day of the Fight,” which virtuosically distilled the process leading to the middleweight boxer Walter Cartier’s victory in a Newark bout.Jack Huston, an actor here making his debut at a writer-director, takes Kubrick’s picture as inspiration for a dazzling debut feature using the same title. “Day of the Fight” is an unabashed genre picture that manages to be both the kind of movie they supposedly don’t make like they used to, and also something bracingly fresh. It’s anchored by the lead actor, Michael C. Pitt, here ferocious and heart-stabbingly vulnerable in equal proportion.Huston and Pitt worked together as actors on the series “Boardwalk Empire,” and their affinity here is crystal clear, although Huston never appears onscreen. The director and actor invoke clichés — such as the story of a broken-down fighter looking for a “shot” at redemption — for the purpose of exploding them with raw emotion.Pitt plays Mike Flannigan, who’s making a comeback after 10 years out of the ring. The comeback corresponds with Flannigan’s efforts to piece together his broken life and family. The movie’s unforgiving New York City is grittily conjured with black-and-white cinematography (by Peter Simonite) into which some color occasionally bleeds. Stalwart support from Steve Buscemi and Joe Pesci enhance the authenticity.Huston is a legacy filmmaker — his grandfather, the director and actor John Huston, made a pretty distinctive boxing picture himself, “Fat City,” from 1972. “Day of the Fight” honors the elder Huston with unwinking reverence, but a voice that’s wholly its own.Day of the FightRated R for language, themes, violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Bona’: A Filipina Superstar Wreaks Vengeance in a Two-Fisted Melodrama

    Recently rediscovered and now digitally restored, Lino Brocka’s 1980 movie, starring Nora Aunor, opens for a week at Metrograph.The title character in “Bona,” a stark tale of selfless devotion by the Filipino director and prominent political activist Lino Brocka (1939-1991), is a middle-class Manila schoolgirl who develops a fierce, morbid attachment to a narcissistic movie extra — a fantasy all the more desperate for being set and shot on location in the miserable slum where her idol lives.Made in 1980, thought lost, recently rediscovered and now digitally restored, “Bona” was featured in the most recent New York Film Festival and begins a weeklong run at Metrograph on Friday.As mordant in its way as the slyly subversive movies Luis Buñuel made in Mexico, Brocka’s two-fisted melodrama is a hellish, compelling work by a director whom the French critic Serge Daney, then editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, called “the great filmmaker of the ’70s.”“Bona” opens with a high-angle shot of a screen-filling crowd, participants in a Philippine religious spectacle, the Feast of the Black Nazarene. Glimpsed among the masses, Bona (Nora Aunor) is next seen as a star-struck spectator to a movie shoot whose extras include the handsome Gardo (Phillip Salvador, an axiom of Brocka’s cinema). Diminutive and determined, Bona cuts school to continue watching the production and, after a beating from her father, runs away to become Gardo’s devotee — an unpaid live-in maid.Bona had plastered her room with pictures of Gardo. His image is similarly ubiquitous chez Gardo, a shack without plumbing in Manila’s largest slum, Tondo. Reporting on the 1982 Manila Film Festival, the journalist Elliott Stein noted that as the area was officially off-limits for film production, “Bona” was not simply a movie but “an admirable act of civil disobedience” — fitting for a movie in which “obedience” is key.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Y2K’ Review: Dying Like It’s 1999

    A computer glitch makes electronics go haywire in this zany and nostalgic horror-comedy from the comedian Kyle Mooney.The first 20 minutes of the director Kyle Mooney’s “Y2K” are so densely packed with references to turn-of-the-millennium pop cultural ephemera — AND1 apparel, “That 70s Show,” devil sticks, Tae Bo and the Dancing Baby, to name a handful — that I was exhausted by nostalgia before the end of the first act.Mooney’s ordinarily eccentric, heavily ironic sense of humor, honed over many years on his cult-favorite YouTube channel and later on Saturday Night Live, seemed to have been replaced by something more cloying and conventional, where simply reminiscing about 1999 was a substitute for actually writing jokes about it. (Mooney and Evan Winter penned the screenplay.) Where was the genius behind such classic sketches as “ball champions,” an early forerunner of “How To With John Wilson” and “I Think You Should Leave”?But then the movie takes a sudden, jarring pivot, and Mooney’s unique sensibility aggressively (and thankfully) reasserts itself: A familiar story of teenage slackers at a New Year’s Eve party transforms into an anarchic, over-the-top Armageddon picture, as the “Y2K problem,” the computer coding crisis that incited much fear on the eve of the year 2000, turns all electronics evil and bloodthirsty at the stroke of midnight. A beard trimmer leaps into jugulars, a VCR shoots tapes like a cannon, and the carnage of consumer goods is nasty, gory and cruel, with a darkly comic mean streak that recalls Joe Dante’s “Gremlins.”Jaeden Martell, Julian Dennison and Rachel Zegler, as the teens tasked with thwarting the apocalypse, make charming heroes — but it’s Mooney himself, as the loquacious stoner Garret, who is the film’s dopey MVP.Y2KRated R for strong language, frequent drug use and intense graphic violence. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Unstoppable’ Review: A Fearless Athlete, at Home and Away

    In “Unstoppable” a focused Jharrel Jerome stars as Anthony Robles, who won a 2011 NCAA wrestling title and was born with one leg.“Unstoppable” tells the story of Anthony Robles, who won a 2011 NCAA wrestling title and was born with one leg. But despite the training montages and the hustling to qualify for teams and competitions, William Goldenberg’s feature directing debut comes to life more often as a conventional family drama than as a conventional sports movie.That’s probably a good thing at a time when the sports drama is starting to feel like a dying genre. “Unstoppable” takes time to flesh out the cyclical family dynamics that preoccupy Anthony (Jharrel Jerome), a disciplined athlete who can falter when his mind is elsewhere. His father, Rick (Bobby Cannavale), lords over the household, where Anthony is the eldest of five children. His mother, Judy, patches up the damage, in a typically sure-handed performance by Jennifer Lopez, negotiating mixed emotions.The action joins Anthony in high school in Arizona, working out to motivational videos, eyes on the prize. He gets a scholarship offer from Drexel University in Philadelphia, but is gunning for a better wrestling program. Jerome gives Anthony a daunting focus and self-possession, which befits the incessant tests that competitive wrestling throws at him (on top of a part-time job at an airport). He gets some requisite tough love from his blustering high school coach (Michael Peña).Anthony opts to stay local and go to Arizona State University when his dad upends the family with a sudden absence. At this school, making the team is an uphill battle, and his coach (a nicely underplaying Don Cheadle) needs to be convinced. Yet soon Anthony is on the mat winning matches, with a swaggering final-boss rival looming at another university.But the most gripping scenes can be the confrontations at home (especially given a sometimes creaky script). Cannavale effectively puts across a machismo that turns from dad swagger to insidious undermining to much worse (though the violence is largely shown through its aftermath). Jerome stays contained, even quiet, in showing Anthony’s resistance, which only raises the tension. Lopez deftly scales her energy up or down in the scenes of regrouping after the storm.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Oh, Canada’ Review: Jacob Elordi as a Young Richard Gere

    Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi star in Paul Schrader’s meditative drama about guilt and seeking forgiveness.Near the beginning of “Oh, Canada,” Paul Schrader’s adaptation of his friend Russell Banks’s novel “Foregone,” a small camera crew is preparing a room for a documentary interview. It’s a beautiful room, with dark wood-paneled walls, antique furnishings, a case containing awards and trophies. It looks like the home of someone who has led an interesting and successful life.The space belongs to Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), a documentarian and something of a left-wing celebrity living in Montreal with his wife and creative partner of many years, Emma (Uma Thurman). Fife is dying. But he’s agreed to allow two former students, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill), themselves documentary filmmakers, to interview him on camera. They are champing at the bit to memorialize him, but Fife’s motives in agreeing are not purely about the film.The themes running through much of Schrader’s work, especially lately, revolve around redemption — the messiness of it, the possibility of it, the impossibility of it. The man who wrote “Taxi Driver” has, in his 70s, given us “First Reformed,” “The Card Counter” and “Master Gardener,” movies about solitary men wrestling with the task of living in a world that humanity has wrecked, and the dread of discovering oneself personally unforgivable for one’s place in it. A recurring line from “First Reformed” feels like a precis for all of these: Will God forgive us?“Oh, Canada” circles around this theme, too. But while the men of the recent trilogy have preferred to pour their thoughts into journals, Fife is the kind of person who bottles everything up, able to move forward only by ditching the past. His life — at least before he crossed the border into Canada as a much younger man, leaving everything behind — is a series of secrets that not even his wife was fully aware of. His admirers, and history, see his crossing to Canada as bold protest against the Vietnam draft. But the story is more complicated, and now he feels he must get it off his chest before he crosses another border.In other words, he must confess. This religious practice, confession, is the beating soul of “Oh, Canada.” It’s signaled early: When the documentary crew is preparing the room for Fife, they awkwardly move a decorated Christmas tree out of the shot, revealing a portrait of some clergyman on the wall. Then, as the filmmakers get started with the shoot, they tell Fife that they’re going to be using the technology he developed, which seems to be the Interrotron we associate with the work of Errol Morris. It creates a way for an interview subject to feel as if they’re maintaining eye contact with the interviewer while actually looking directly into the camera lens. Morris (and, presumably, the fictional Fife) has said that this leads to more revelation. He’s also compared the tool’s results, its ability to rip away self-consciousness, to Freud’s psychoanalysis couch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The End’ Review: It’s All Come to This

    Joshua Oppenheimer’s postapocalyptic musical about a wealthy family in an underground bunker is placidly disturbing.Joshua Oppenheimer is our age’s great bard of cognitive dissonance. His previous two films, “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” are technically documentaries about the horrific Indonesian mass killings in 1965-66. But they’re more fundamentally about the extraordinary lengths to which the human mind — or, really, the human soul — is prepared to go in justifying its own coldblooded atrocity. I don’t have to tell you that this goes far beyond one historical event, and so do these two documentaries. The subjects are men who perpetrated the massacre and seemingly feel no remorse at all. Something inside them has rotted away.They’re disturbing films, chilling the viewer to the bone. So, too, is “The End,” which when I first heard about it sounded like a particularly unlikely Oppenheimer project. The film, which he wrote with Rasmus Heisterberg, is not a documentary at all: It’s a musical, set in the nearish future, about a family living in a vast and luxurious underground bunker while the world literally burns above them. And they, it turns out, caused that apocalypse.The man of the house was an oil mogul when the world was alive, a great defender of fossil fuels and an affectionate guardian to his family. He is named only “Father” in the press notes, and played by Michael Shannon, who sings and dances very well. His wife (Tilda Swinton, with an appropriately reedier voice) is a nervy former ballet dancer, spending her days rearranging the well-appointed rooms of their dwelling, the walls of which are decked out with the world’s greatest masterpieces. They brought them when they fled the surface, apparently.Mother and Father have a son (George MacKay, suitably strange) who was born underground and now is in his 20s. He’s been well-educated in this bunker, even doted upon by all of these adults — his parents and the few others they allowed to come with them. His best friend is also his mother’s best friend (Bronagh Gallagher), who in the past was a great chef. They also have an affable butler (Tim McInnerny) and a grumpy doctor (Lennie James). And for decades, that’s been everyone. There’s next to no one left above.Musicals mostly deploy songs when characters are experiencing great emotion: desire, or fear, or exhilaration. But “The End” plays with these expectations, because emotion is a tricky subject for these bunker-dwellers. Yes, they sing lyrical songs with great swelling orchestral harmonies, and sometimes they dance. (Oppenheimer wrote the lyrics, with music by Joshua Schmidt and score by Schmidt and Marius de Vries.) But in between smiles, their faces slip into mask-like panic, with eyes that are dead. Oppenheimer modulates the lighting during the scenes from cool to warm and back again, underlining the vacillating feelings they can’t acknowledge outright.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Nightbitch’ Review: Motherhood? Woof! Grr!

    Amy Adams plays a stay-at-home mom who comes to believe that she’s a dog in Marielle Heller’s adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel.The sly, teasing conceit in “Nightbitch,” a fantasy starring Amy Adams, is that one day her character — a beleaguered, bone-weary mother — turns into a dog. That isn’t a metaphor, though maybe it is. The movie is wily on that point, even as you see her turning into a glossy-coated, tail-wagging, fang-baring canine. It looks kind of fun. Unlike poor Gregor Samsa, whose transformation into a giant insect in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” ends tragically, the mother’s change proves exhilarating. Among other things, she no longer needs to behave like a good girl. Hers is a galvanizing rebirth, one that’s red in tooth and claw.Written and directed by Marielle Heller, and based on Rachel Yoder’s novel of the same title, the mother — she doesn’t have a proper name until she starts calling herself Nightbitch — enters shortly before her great transformation. She, along with her unnamed husband, 2-year old son and criminally neglected cat, lives in one of those nice movie houses in a leafy, generic suburban neighborhood in Anytown, U.S. Unhappy with day care, the parents have decided that the mother, an artist who’s had critical success, will stay home. It isn’t going well. Their toddler is, ta-da, a toddler, and a babbling bundle of joy, energy and raw need.The mother’s awakening begins, appropriately, with her canine teeth, which seem to be getting sharper. Her body also seems hairier. She’s puzzled but also intrigued. For his part, her husband (Scoot McNairy, in a largely thankless role) seems oblivious, his usual state. Before long, she is scrutinizing a bump near her coccyx that’s big enough to send most of us to urgent care. The mother, though, isn’t like most people; she’s a clever, at times comic, engagingly offbeat fictional vehicle for some familiar and dubious ideas about female identity as well as maternity, domesticity and femininity. All of which is to say, this is also about power.Heller’s previous explorations of the lives of women include “Can You Ever Forgive Me” and “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” her feature directing debut. For her adaptation of “Nightbitch,” Heller has retained the novel’s claustrophobic intimacy; the mother leaves the house, though it never feels like she gets out enough, in part because she’s usually with just the kid. That her interior life proves far more interesting than her material reality isn’t a surprise. Heller makes that clear early with the use of visual repetition, underscoring the monotony of the mother’s dawn-to-dusk life with shot after shot of her frying up breakfast and reading a bedtime book. The point is made quickly, but Heller keeps making it.More successful are the scenes in which you hear both what the mother says and what she thinks. To allow you to get into the character’s head, Heller has translated passages from the book’s stream-of-consciousness narration into chunks of voice-over. This makes for some nice comedy, especially when the mother’s spoken utterances are in sharp contrast to her unvarnished, panicky, annoyed voice-over. “Do you just love getting to be home with him all the time?” an acquaintance asks. Er, yes and no. Most people, though, her husband very much included, don’t seem really interested in what she says, never mind what she thinks. It’s no wonder that even when she’s nodding along with others, her thoughts run wild.The story takes a surreal turn when the mother pierces the cyst on her back with a needle, a visceral, entertaining gross-out moment that, as milky liquid oozes out, briefly shifts the movie into body-horror terrain. When she pulls a wispy tail out of the cyst, the movie slips into magical realism and starts getting down to its weird business. The mother gives the cat the side eye and chases a squirrel, her toddler giddily in tow. Then one evening, while the husband is away and the boy is (at last) asleep, she changes into a floofy dog with a luxuriant tail. Enter Nightbitch. She finds a pack, pads around the streets, runs wild.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More