Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ Review: Exhumation at Sea

    A 1970s submarine recovery operation by the C.I.A. is the subject of this documentary, which prioritizes the excitement of undercover work over any serious consideration of the agency’s legacy.The C.I.A. mission recalled in “Neither Confirm Nor Deny,” Philip Carter’s neat and steadily paced documentary, sounds like the stuff of a Tom Clancy Cold War thriller. In the film, C.I.A. veterans and journalists recount a 1974 U.S. operation to recover a Soviet nuclear submarine that had sunk in the Pacific six years earlier. It’s a high-risk mission made more suspenseful by technical challenges, the looming specter of Watergate and a need for secrecy in the face of scrutiny from Russia and the press.The story assembles before our eyes like an illustration in a manual for superspies. The goal: obtain valuable nuke data. The tool for the job: a big ship with the ability to snatch the sub and sneak it away to American shores. The cover story: an undersea mining operation fronted by Howard Hughes.David Sharp, who directed the mission and wrote a book about it, is the most prominently featured of the wonky talking heads here. He relates amazing details — like what the U.S. did with bodies of Soviet sailors that were discovered — in the understated manner of a kind science teacher. The Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour M. Hersh, who wrote about the operation for The New York Times in the 1970s, offers a salty insider perspective.Almost in passing, we hear of the C.I.A.’s role in the bloody 1973 overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende, who was then the democratically elected leader of Chile. In that light, the documentary, with its triumphant account, feels a little too selective in presenting the agency’s legacy, and its title — which seems to celebrate the government’s concealment of its actions from the public — comes across as misjudged.Neither Confirm Nor DenyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘It Lives Inside’ Review: The Horrors of Building Self-Acceptance

    This feature debut about a high schooler’s struggle with her cultural identity is promising, even if the allegory doesn’t always land.Why did you even come here, Samidha scoffs at her mother, if you were just going to be another Desi housewife? It’s about as piercing a jab as an American child could throw at their immigrant parent, and emblematic of the kind of disdain central to “It Lives Inside,” a social-horror movie from the writer-director Bishal Dutta, in his feature debut.As Samidha (Megan Suri), an Indian American teenager, has gotten older, she’s increasingly distanced herself from anything that might reveal her cultural identity. She goes by Sam to her peers, avoids speaking Hindi and had a mysterious break from Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), an Indian American classmate who used to be her best friend. When she lashes out at Tamira, she unwittingly unleashes a monster ripped from Hindu folklore.It’s a compelling premise. And as a horror movie with frights and an effective score, the film largely works. But the weightier themes around internalized racism and the immigrant experience fail to push beyond the basics, and the allegory doesn’t always succeed — a connection between the back story of the film’s monster and the idea of cultural self-acceptance is pretty flimsy.Still, it’s a promising debut from Dutta, who offers a fresh premise that proves a natural fit for the genre. The themes will feel familiar to the American children of any diaspora. High school is scary to begin with. But when there’s only one other classmate of your race, what’s worse than being mistaken for each other?It Lives InsideRated PG-13 for terror, violent content, bloody images, brief strong language and teen drug use. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Something You Said Last Night’ Review: They Holiday, but Can’t Get Away

    In this too-languid drama, a young transgender woman and her family butt heads during a fraught beach vacation.The family in Luis De Filippis’s assiduous new film keeps busy during their beachside vacation. Not by swimming and sunbathing but by bickering and nit-picking, over slights both big (what it means to quit school) and small (what it means to lose a card game).Or maybe that’s just how Mona (Ramona Milano), her husband, Guido (Joey Parro), and their wayward 20-something daughters, Siena (Paige Evans) and Ren (Carmen Madonia), who is transgender, expresses love: by ending conversations with tears and exposed resentments, only to make nice and do it again the next day.Loosely based on the writer-director’s own Canadian-Italian family, this intimately observational film is in no rush to capture oversized dramatics but also small moments, like a birthday celebration at a kitchen table. Its only real emotional punch comes when the sisters accuse each other of being the family’s biggest disappointment.In the film’s press notes, De Filippis said she wanted to make a movie “where trans women are not vilified, sensationalized, or eroticized.” Mission accomplished. Ren, an aspiring writer, is decidedly human: impetuous, shy, silly — a victim of, if anything, insecurities.But she’s earthbound to a fault, dramatically. Unexceptional transgender characters are arguably markers of cinema’s progress; Trace Lysette’s understated performance is what made her prosaic transgender character so moving in “Monica.” (That film was also invested in bigger stakes.) But one can only watch Renata, and this film, do so little for so long before yearning for more than naturalism and tenderness to drive the slice-of-life story.Something You Said Last NightNot rated. In English and Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘26.2 to Life’ Review: Running in Circles

    Christine Yoo’s new documentary follows the inmates of San Quentin Prison in California who train to run a grueling marathon inside its yard.Christine Yoo’s documentary “26.2 to Life” tells the story of a unique race: the San Quentin Prison Marathon, run by inmates of the maximum-security facility in California within the walls of its heavily guarded yard.As the film makes clear, with its deliberate, observational style, the mental fortitude required to endure this marathon is extraordinary: The competitors must trace the same tedious loop around a makeshift track more than 100 times to complete the 26.2-mile distance, with only their fellow inmates and a handful of volunteers to cheer them on. It’s not a setting that inspires a meditative state of mind.Many of these men are facing life sentences with little hope of parole, and training for the marathon enables them to derive some meaning from their time inside. “It allows you to feel like you’re doing something normal,” one runner describes. “Like you’re doing something that’s not prison.”Yoo was granted exceptional access to San Quentin, and when she depicts the mundane qualities of life there — inmates working odd jobs, writing letters, passing the time alone in their cells — the movie gains some of the penetrating clarity of one of Frederick Wiseman’s films. The in-prison material also has a lo-fi look that’s a refreshing change from the glossy style of many recent docs, and the various off-site interviews with family members of the inmates expand the scope of their stories in an enriching way.When the movie concentrates on the race, it verges on sentimental, trotting out heartfelt speeches and cloying musical cues — not entirely unjustified, considering the inmates’ tragic back stories and inspiring achievements. But it compromises an already compelling event.26.2 to LifeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘My Sailor, My Love’ Review: When Romance Comes Ashore

    A grumpy man warms to a good-natured housekeeper in this film directed by Klaus Haro.Howard (James Cosmo), the Irish widower and retired sea captain of Klaus Haro’s bittersweet drama “My Sailor, My Love,” is furious that his daughter has hired a good-natured housekeeper named Annie (Brid Brennan), to disturb his seclusion. At first, the grump does his best to scare off the invader. “Never darken my door again!” he thunders old-fashionedly, as though he’s subconsciously aware that the writers Kirsi Vikman and Jimmy Karlsson are drawing on centuries of love stories about savage men and civilizing women. The production designer John Hand has even worked in a nod to the rose from “Beauty and the Beast.”The curveball is that after rushing the romance (the brute is tamed in a week!), Haro shifts his attention back to the daughter, Grace (Catherine Walker), who is unfairly, but understandably, aggrieved. Her father’s always treated her cruelly — how dare he be kind to someone else?! Grace’s resentment is an astute twist. Imagine Disney’s singing teapot enrolling in primal scream therapy, except when Grace attends a support group for women who’ve given too much, she can’t let out her steam.Life, and the film’s costume design, haven’t been fair to Walker’s self-sacrificing miserablist. (When can we stop dressing this kind of character in wan beige and headache-inducing braids?) Every one of her scenes is an indignity overemphasized by a strings and piano score that needs to ease up. The painful dynamic is credible; the dialogue not so much. Still, the actors are in full command of our empathy, especially Brennan’s gray-haired caretaker who, when she cracks open her heart, seems to glow from within.My Sailor, My LoveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Cassandro’ Review: Gael García Bernal as the Luchador Saúl Armendáriz

    Gael García Bernal plays a flamboyant figure taking the world of Mexican professional wrestling by storm in this underdog drama directed by Roger Ross Williams.When Barton Fink, the neurotic screenwriter cooked up by the Coen brothers, scrambles to write a wrestling picture, his peers prescribe the basics. Tell us the man’s ambitions. Entangle him in a romance. You know the drill. Not even in Barton’s most delirious dreams could he have envisioned “Cassandro,” about a flamboyant, sequin-clad luchador who takes his ring name from a telenovela. But I bet Barton could have drafted the film’s outline, which uses the same squelchy gym bag of tricks as many underdog sports dramas.Based on a real star of Mexican professional wrestling, or lucha libre, Saúl Armendáriz (Gael García Bernal) is a profoundly unusual athlete wedged into a biopic that sometimes feels like passable stage fighting: elegantly executed but drained of danger.Directed by Roger Ross Williams (“Life, Animated”), the movie depicts the decisive, late-1980s period when Saúl ascended out of obscurity and into the big time, braving countless training montages and a few private miseries on his way to the top.We meet the striver in Texas in early adulthood, when he is assisting his mother, Yocasta (Perla De La Rosa), with her laundry business and wrestling at a nearby club. Using the name El Topo (The Mole), he tumbles into the ring masked and petite, a pipsqueak doomed to act as a punching bag opposite giants. “Let me guess. You’re always cast as the runt?” challenges Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez), a local lucha hotshot and trainer. She spies potential in Saúl, and offers to coach him pro bono.Colindrez, like many of the actors in this movie, is a superlative performer. Her character is granted little interiority — she serves by turns as Saúl’s fierce advocate and his shoulder to cry on — but alongside Bernal she radiates a cool glow fit for a film less shackled by the ebbs and flows of established convention. In conversations with Sabrina, Saúl toggles between English and Spanish, reserving the latter for colloquialisms or teasing, and the mixture gives their dialogue an organic rhythm. He uses the same blend of languages with his lover, Gerardo (Raúl Castillo), a married luchador with kids whom Saúl sees in secret.Saúl’s sexuality is at once a major plot point and somewhat underexplored. With gentle nudging from Sabrina, Saúl, who came out as a teen and is supported by his mother, soon reinvents his ring persona as the campy Cassandro, an “exótico,” or luchador who plays with femininity. The character initially attracts slurs and heckling, but quickly (and perhaps too effortlessly) starts winning matches and becomes a fan favorite. This is an era when H.I.V. and AIDS panic was at its shrillest, and although the real-life Cassandro was sometimes rebuffed by homophobic opponents, the movie never mentions the epidemic. (Williams wrote the screenplay with David Teague.)“Cassandro” is at its strongest when it zeros in on the relationship between Saúl and Gerardo, who share a physical intimacy that both echoes their fighting careers and acts as an escape from them. Alone, safe from onlookers, the pair tussle in bed. “Don’t you think he’s sexy?” Saúl says, referring to Cassandro as if he were a third person who might join them.Williams, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is an expert orchestrator of naturalism. The trouble is that lucha libre, built on glitz, is anything but naturalistic. The self-assured freedom Saúl channels in bed never makes its way into scenes in the ring, which tend to tire when they should dazzle.CassandroRated R for drugs and slugs. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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    36 Hours in Santiago, Chile: Things to Do and See

    10 a.m.
    Hike a city-center hill
    Clear a sore head with a sharp ascent up Cerro San Cristóbal, a green islet of native trees and plants in the city center. At 10 a.m., the cable car opens, getting you to the top in under 10 minutes (a hop-on, hop-off day ticket costs 7,900 pesos and includes the funicular railway and shuttle buses within the 1,821-acre Parque Metropolitana). If you’d rather do the hour-long hike, start at the Pedro de Valdivia Norte entrance. As you climb, enjoy panoramic views of the city and mountains, incongruously punctured by the 980-foot, needle-like Gran Torre Santiago, South America’s tallest building. Your reward at the summit is a mote con huesillo (around 2,500 pesos), a refreshing, sweet juice containing a rehydrated peach and a handful of corn, available from the many stands at Estación Cumbre. To descend, take the funicular down the far side, leaving you in Bellavista — and just a block from La Chascona, the poet Pablo Neruda’s quirky home. More

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    ‘Paul Robeson’ Review: A Tribute to an Entertainment Titan

    The film’s subtitle is drawn from one of the performer’s quotes in his autobiography “Here I Stand”: “I’m a Negro. I’m an American.”The opening of “Paul Robeson: ‘I’m a Negro. I’m an American.’” offers an unintentional caveat about the 1989 documentary directed by the East German filmmaker Kurt Tetzlaff. Paul Robeson’s rich baritone undergirds archival footage of Black children playing in a dusty open space, smokestacks in the background. The use by the director of a Negro spiritual, however beautiful, swaps whatever joy these kids might have been experiencing (they are at play after all) for a questionable sentimentality around Black life and suffering.But then much of Tetzlaff’s documentary, recently restored and receiving its first theatrical run in New York, casts an aura — admiring and melancholy — around Robeson to the detriment of a more shaded portrait. The athlete-performer-activist’s achievements are well known (gridiron great, Columbia University Law graduate, first Black Othello on Broadway), but in this film, their roots and meaning go mostly unexplored.The documentary shows glimmers of promise when featuring interviewees who had an intimate grasp of the America that shaped but also tore down Robeson. Harry Belafonte turns teary talking about Robeson’s grace. The singer Pete Seeger’s account of white rioters attacking attendees at a Peekskill, N.Y., concert in support of workers in 1949 remains chilling. Tetzlaff aims to dive into Robeson’s mistreatment by the United States government for his activism, as well as his expressed admiration of the Soviet Union and its people — but the movie sticks to the shallow end.Hinted at, but never fully realized here, is a more compelling film about the tantalizing promise Black progressives like Robeson held for Eastern Bloc citizens, like the director.Paul Robeson: ‘I’m a Negro. I’m an American.’Not rated. In English and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More