Aurelia Butler

In this absorbing psychological thriller, a Guinean refugee living in France is rattled by the appearance of a menacing figure from her past.“Our Father, the Devil” centers on Marie (Babetida Sadjo), a Guinean refugee in southern France who possesses the kind of thick armor forged by intense hurt. When a figure from Marie’s past life arrives in the guise of a priest at the upscale retirement home where she works as the head chef, something in her cracks.In the assured hands of the writer-director Ellie Foumbi, Marie’s unraveling yields not only an absorbing psychological thriller, but a profound meditation on the ethics of immigration.Marie’s story begins on a high note. Her culinary mentor, Jeanne (Martine Amisse), has written Marie into her will, giving Marie an idyllic mountainside cottage. Yet Foumbi’s stark, formalist tableaux captures even the glittering French countryside as a space trembling with contained anxiety.Inexplicably, at least at first, Marie fends off the advances of a handsome bartender to whom she is evidently attracted. Sadjo, in a commanding performance, shifts easily from pure venom to bashful uncertainty — as if Marie were constantly playing mental tug of war with herself and her past.Then, Father Patrick appears (Souléymane Sy Savané) — though Marie knows him better as “Sogo,” a warlord responsible for the death of her family in Guinea. Marie reacts instinctively and imprisons Patrick in her cottage outpost, and then unleashes an inner brutality.The first part of the film relies on the ambiguity of whether or not Marie is mistaken about Patrick’s identity, but the answer isn’t simple. Instead, Foumbi’s script provokes questions about our capacity for change and the absolution of past sins — all anchored to the charged political question of an immigrant’s worth. Painfully, and at the risk of losing her new life, Marie discovers that there is no such thing as devils — or angels, for that matter.Our Father, the DevilNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

In this buddy comedy, senior outcasts played by Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri attempt to woo two cheerleaders through a fight club.Josie and PJ are high school seniors, and they have some pressing unfinished business. “Do you want to be the only girl virgin at Sarah Lawrence?” PJ (Rachel Sennott) asks Josie (Ayo Edebiri) during the dark-night-of-the-soul conversation that begins “Bottoms.” Yes, Emma Seligman’s comedy takes off with tires screeching.It is imperative for our buddies to have sex, stat, but that is a complicated proposition: Not only are they unpopular outcasts — “the ugly, untalented gays,” as opposed to the ones who breezily sashay down the hallways — but they have set their sights on two unapproachably hot cheerleaders. It is obvious that PJ and Josie will need some devious scheming to win over their crushes.Going along with a rumor that they’ve spent time in juvenile detention, the pair acquire an instant reputation as tough girls and the school lets them start a self-defense club in which the most vicious brawls are somehow allowed. Even Josie’s object of desire, Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), is impressed by consciousness-raising through punching, even more so after she learns her quarterback boyfriend (Nicholas Galitzine, of “Red, White & Royal Blue”) is cheating on her.Seligman and Sennott’s first collaboration was the quietly unsettling “Shiva Baby” (2021), which took place almost entirely over the span of one afternoon at the title wake, and progressively ensnared Sennott’s character in a web of deadpan, discomforting humor. For their follow-up, the collaborators (Sennott wrote the movie with Seligman) have gone down a completely different stylistic road, putting a queer spin on teenage sex comedies à la “Superbad” and “American Pie.” They have replaced the death by a thousand cuts of “Shiva Baby” with a gleeful broadness. It ultimately fizzes out, but “Bottoms” confirms that Seligman and Sennott are major new forces in American comedy.A lot does click here, including several delicious supporting performances, most notably the former N.F.L. running back Marshawn Lynch as the fight club’s loopy faculty adviser and Ruby Cruz as Hazel, a cool classmate whom, naturally, PJ does not even see. The script also lands many corkers, as when a student named Annie (Zamani Wilder) complains “this is the second wave all over again” after realizing PJ and Josie were prioritizing self-serving goals over sisterhood.That last aspect is what feels most undernourished and, in the end, unexpectedly timid. Not much is made of the fact that PJ is one of the biggest liars and bullies of the story and uses her gift of gab to cynically deploy empowerment messaging. And while the movie is set in a surreally heightened universe in which football players never leave their uniform and teachers read girlie magazines in class, it is oddly more comfortable goofing off with outrageous violence than elementary sexuality.For most of its tight running time, “Bottoms” hovers on the cusp of greatness. It’s often funny but it also never delivers satisfying set pieces, and stops short of questioning — not to mention subverting — the warped high school stratification that remains one of America’s building blocks.BottomsRated R for typical teen language, fight-club violence and football run amok. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

This sometimes sleepy feel-good drama follows the story of a working-class man’s battle against London’s financial elite.Not only are major global banks as we know them too big to fail, but local, community-oriented ones are sometimes too small and well-intentioned to even exist. It’s the reality of a system that left Dave Fishwick dismayed, and what serves as the premise for “Bank of Dave,” a film loosely based on the true story of Fishwick’s battle with Britain’s financial system to create a community bank meant to help the little guys.A man of the people who has made a modest fortune selling vans, Dave (Rory Kinnear) is a Ted Lasso of sorts within his small English town of Burnley, where he makes a habit of loaning money to local businesses and friends in need. After Dave gets the idea to institutionalize his generous streak with the Bank of Dave, where all profits will go to charities, Hugh (Joel Fry), the stiff London lawyer Dave has hired to help, comes into town expecting to disabuse Dave of his idealism. A new bank has not been approved in 150 years, and the powers that be were set up solely to protect the elite.Yet, after following Dave around for a couple days and catching feelings for his niece, Alexandra (Phoebe Dynevor), Hugh quickly becomes a convert to Dave’s mission.It all makes for an inoffensively pleasant David (or, rather, Dave) and Goliath story. The conflicts involving complex, powerful interests are set up and solved with simplified, clean emotional beats — helped along in particular by Fry and Kinnear, who do the legwork to support a sometimes sleepy feel-good drama from the director Chris Foggin. Even if the movie is about one small win, there’s a sedate pleasure in seeing it play out, especially knowing a version of it happened in real life.Bank of DaveRated PG-13 some strong language. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

In this beautiful and beguiling tale of transformation, a young woman’s altered body unlocks her true self.The clicks and whirs of a gigantic, peep show-like contraption known as a zoetrope fill our ears as an enigmatic botanist (Sebastian Rudolph) observes the image of a slowly unfurling fern. Watching him is Eva (Simone Bucio), a timid young woman for whom sound has become something of an obsession.Her nonbinary sibling, Zara, played by Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, has had a breakdown, and Eva must take over Zara’s job as a Foley artist for a drug company commercial. She must learn to make the sounds of a horse prancing in place, a dressage move known as a piaffe.With “Piaffe,” the filmmaker and visual artist Ann Oren, extrapolating from her 2020 short film “Passage,” has made a silken study of physical and erotic transformation. Like the horse that stars in the commercial, Eva exists in a kind of stasis, restrained from moving forward.Learning to mimic equine behavior emboldens her, and her body responds by sprouting a fleshy appendage that grows rapidly from a penile protuberance to a full-length tail. Timid no longer, Eva pursues a series of erotic encounters with the botanist, who tells her that ferns are hermaphrodites: Like Zara, they embody more than a single gender.Gorgeously shot by Carlos Vasquez using 16-millimeter film (and filmed in part in the famous Warsaw Fotoplastikon), “Piaffe” is ideologically abstract and beguilingly weird. Its experimental style, marked by long, dialogue-free stretches, color flares and pristine sound effects, can seem calculated and off-putting, the narrative slight and dramatically slack. Yet the film’s provocations have a playfulness and generosity that are enormously appealing. In the same way as the fern, Eva has unfurled from a defensive crouch to an open embrace of who she was meant to be.PiaffeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

High school horror gets a supernatural twist in this ultragory feature.Blood — viscous and dark, venal and menstrual — soaks all the way through “Perpetrator,” Jennifer Reeder’s hyperbolic stab at the high school slasher movie. Noses seep and floors are awash, the treacly ooze serving as both a coming-of-age symbol and a lubricant for a story whose misandry burns bright and hot.“Girls like you just don’t know what you’ve got till it’s all gone,” a masked sadist breathes, hovering over Jonny Baptiste (Kiah McKirnan), a savvy high school senior. He’s not the only predatory weirdo who threatens the school’s jumpy female students, including a creepy principal (Christopher Lowell) who oversees supposed self-defense classes that warn against biting and screaming. Dating a chiseled alpha male named Kirk (Sasha Kuznetsov) seems especially perilous, given that his crushes rarely reappear in school.Jonny’s home life is scarcely cozier. Lodged with a witchy great-aunt whose love language is snarling (Alicia Silverstone, disappointingly underused), the motherless teenager must navigate the ancestral superpower that her 18th birthday has recently bestowed: a turbocharged empathy that allows her to physically mimic another person. And perhaps catch a killer.Screwy and strange, “Perpetrator” is gleefully unsubtle, but its ensanguinated excess is part of the fun. (As is the casting of actors who appear to be on their 10th repeat of 12th grade.) The tone swivels from campy to menacing, outrageous to comic; but Sevdije Kastrati’s oleaginous photography has the surreal power to nail some of the movie’s dottiest sequences, like the killer siphoning his victims’ blood through a wound that resembles an angry anus.The film’s most enjoyable idea, though, is its positioning of female empathy as armor instead of Achilles’ heel. Gazing into the mirror, Jonny’s face wobbles and shifts; when the perpetrator is revealed, will she be ready?PerpetratorRated R for a disembodied heart and a disgusting dessert. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

Helen Mirren, under heavy prosthetics, channels the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in this wartime biopic.“Golda” — as in Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister who resigned in 1974 over her administration’s handling of the Yom Kippur War — films its title character in confrontational close-ups of her red-rimmed eyes, nicotine-stained fingers and swollen ankles. Somewhere under the prosthetics is Helen Mirren, formidably shouldering Meir’s suppressed anguish over the war’s death toll.Extreme costuming often feels gimmicky, but here, it humanizes the director Guy Nattiv’s terse accounting of guilt. As one imagines the burden of wearing Meir’s artificial skin, you can practically hear Nattiv hiss: Now imagine putting yourself in the actual woman’s orthopedic shoes. Or as Mirren’s Meir cracks to Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber), “Things could be worse. You could have my feet.”Israel has been surprise-attacked by Egypt and Syria, and Kissinger is concerned with keeping the Soviets calm and oil prices low. The script, by Nicholas Martin, doesn’t argue the righteousness of the conflict. Instead, it frets over the body count — and though we’re with Meir and her fractious advisers as they clap for the massacre of Egyptian soldiers, the camera reacts by going all woozy like it’s nauseous.Niv Adiri’s dense sound design and Dascha Dauenhauer’s impactful score turn war into a living nightmare. For good measure, we also go inside Meir’s bad dreams. Awake, however, the polarizing leader is the kind of stoic who chain-smokes through her lymphoma treatments. The film is structured by her cigarettes. Edits cut from one puff to another; the minister of defense, Moshe Dayan (Rami Heuberger), uses packs and lighters to stand-in for military units; ashtrays fill and fill again. We’re left with the sense that the stress of those thousands of lives cut short may have killed her, too.GoldaRated PG-13 for pervasive smoking. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

Set amid the upheaval of 1960s Indonesia, this drama tells the story of a woman caught in an unhappy marriage and haunted by the traumas of war.Kamila Andini’s “Before, Now & Then” is a domestic drama set against a tumultuous historical backdrop: In 1960s Indonesia, as communists are massacred by the state and the authoritarian president Suharto seizes control (with the backing of the United States), the film alights on the story of one woman, Nana (Happy Salma), who is caught in an unhappy marriage and haunted by past traumas. It’s a daring narrative mix of the personal and the political, though Andini struggles to find the right balance between the two.The movie begins in the aftermath of Indonesia’s fight for independence in the 1940s, with Nana on the run, fleeing nationalist soldiers who are forcibly taking women from villages. Nana’s husband is presumed dead, and, in a startling scene, she imagines her father being beheaded by a group of men. A temporal jump then transports us to her new life 15 years later, when she is the wife of a wealthy, absent and adulterous plantation owner. From the high-stakes prologue we switch, jarringly, to a languid, mist-swept melodrama about Nana’s fraying relationship with her unfaithful husband and her friendship with his younger mistress, Ino (Laura Basuki).The political and historical contexts fade into the background, emerging only in stray scenes of locals discussing current events, which Andini inserts like punctuation marks in an otherwise typical midcentury tale of a woman awakening to her independence. It doesn’t help that this feminist arc is a little too cute, particularly after the brutality that precedes it: All it takes to bring Nana out of her shell is Ino — a manic-pixie figure — encouraging her to dive into a lake fully clothed. It’s a pity for both Salma and Basuki, whose expressive faces convey depths of feeling that the script and direction cannot quite match.Before, Now & ThenNot rated. In Indonesian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More