Aurelia Butler

The sisters Fiona and Sophia Robert wrote and star in this broad, pastel-colored golf comedy.It’s hard to make a golf comedy without evoking “Caddyshack,” the ribald 1980 classic starring Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, and with its crude humor, farcical innuendo and posh eponymous setting, “The Country Club” certainly warrants the comparison. But the influence the movie more obviously courts is early Wes Anderson, especially his sophomore feature “Rushmore”: The director Fiona Robert (who also co-wrote the film with her sister, Sophia Robert, both of whom star) leans heavily on Anderson’s unmistakable, easily imitated style, using rigidly symmetrical compositions, sudden zooms and a heightened pastel color palette. As if to underscore the similarities, the movie even opens with a handcrafted, pleasantly fastidious title sequence with credits inscribed on tees and golf balls that fairly exudes twee Andersonia.These visual flourishes, while derivative, are charming and well-realized. The writing, however, has none of Anderson’s wit, tending instead toward a kind of broad and fatuous slapstick that’s closer to “2 Broke Girls” than “The Royal Tenenbaums.”This story of a pair of working-class teenage interlopers crashing an upper-crust golf tournament has a predictable sitcom rhythm, and features expository monologues of astonishing clumsiness, such as this dud, from the working-class hero Elsa (Sophia Robert) to her sister, Tina (Fiona Robert): “I guess I’m just upset about dad getting laid off. College is so far out of reach now!” The jokes are scarcely better. There is a long, long, unfunny sequence involving flatulence. According to the credits, those noise effects were provided by the comedian Steve Higgins. They were not worth crediting.The Country ClubNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

In this documentary, transgender sex workers speak for themselves without sanitizing or sensationalizing their experiences.At several points in “The Stroll,” Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s loving portrait of New York City’s transgender sex workers, moments of striking candor break through the conventions of documentary.An interviewee pauses warily in the middle of a conversation to check if it’s OK to reveal explicit details of her sex work, to which Lovell (who is transgender and a former prostitute herself) responds with, “Girl, you’re fine!” Later, as Lovell walks with another of the film’s subjects, Izzy, through the now-gentrified meatpacking district in Manhattan where they once both plied their trades, Izzy suddenly bursts into tears, interrupting the scene with a pained, “I can’t do this. I hate this place.”These scenes might have ended up on the cutting room floor in a different documentary. Here, their inclusion reinforces the novelty of “The Stroll”: It’s the rare movie that allows transgender sex workers to speak for themselves without sanitizing or sensationalizing their experiences.Lovell’s own story mirrors that of many of her interviewees, who include the ballroom icon Egyptt LaBeija and the activist Ceyenne Doroshow. (Drucker, a trans artist and activist, remains behind the camera.) Lovell ‌arrived in Manhattan as a teenager in the 1990s, seeking an escape from a hard life at home in Yonkers, ‌but she was fired from her coffee shop job when she began transitioning. So she turned to “the stroll”: a stretch of West 14th Street that cut through a blood-splattered neighborhood of meatpackers, and offered a haven for cruising gay men and transgender prostitutes. It allowed Lovell and her colleagues not just to make a living but also to find community — even a semblance of family.Inspired to take on the storytelling reins after being featured in a 2007 documentary, Lovell, along with Drucker, assembles interviews and archival images that sparkle with joy, banter and sorority, even as they detail brutality and precarity. What unfurls is a micro-history of New York: from the 1970s, with the city’s early gay rights movements (which often excluded transgender people), to the broken-windows policies of the ’90s and the economic fallout of Sept. 11, to the gentrification that began to sweep the city when Michael Bloomberg took office as mayor in 2002.As the city became seemingly safer, prettier and richer for some, its most vulnerable denizens paid a steep price. “I can’t believe how many times I had to go to jail for the Highline Park to be built,” Lovell says wryly. But if “The Stroll” is an indictment and elegy, it is also a remarkable document of the self-determination of the women and workers who learned, in the face of the worst odds, to fend for themselves and each other.The StrollNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Max. More

A documentary examines how the winner for best picture of 1969 captured shifts in American life.How many ways did “Midnight Cowboy” occupy the nexus of the cultural changes of the 1960s? The documentary “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy” cites plenty.The film was revolutionary in its depiction of sex, and particularly in its acknowledgment of the existence of gay life. It tweaked the movie-cowboy archetype at a time when westerns allegorized the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. Its screenwriter, Waldo Salt, had been blacklisted in the 1950s. It took advantage of the possibility of filming on location in New York and of capturing aspects of the city — such as hustlers and homelessness — that had scarcely been shown onscreen, or had been limited to experimental cinema. A late interlude in the film documented elements of the Warholian art scene.And in winning the Oscar for the best picture of 1969, “Midnight Cowboy” may have represented a rare instance of the Academy Awards’ accepting important shifts in American life. (Or perhaps the academy looked forward and backward simultaneously: Two interviewees note that John Wayne, a supporter of the war and an icon of a more conservative America, took best actor that year for “True Grit.”)Whether “Midnight Cowboy” deserves or can bear the weight that “Desperate Souls” accords it, the director Nancy Buirski presents these issues with a good mix of small-bore and big-picture insights and only the occasional overstatement or fuzziness. The documentary might have pinned down more clearly, for instance, why “Midnight Cowboy” received its X rating, later changed to R.But “Desperate Souls” convincingly argues that there’s no other time at which Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) could have become enduring movie characters, let alone have the tenderness between them depicted so subtly. (The documentary was inspired by Glenn Frankel’s 2021 book, “Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic.”)Buirski’s film gives much of the credit to John Schlesinger, the celebrated British director who was shooting his first movie in America. “Desperate Souls” notes that in his next film, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971), he would break ground again in showing gay life (and, through Peter Finch’s character, perhaps acknowledge some of his own outsider’s perspective as a gay, Jewish, relatively upper-class Briton).Interviewed in the documentary, Voight recalls making a facetious — but accurate — prediction to Schlesinger that they would live in the shadow of the movie. (He’s also shown in a screen test that makes you wonder how he got the part.) Schlesinger (who died in 2003) and Hoffman are heard in voice clips.But some of the strongest commentary comes from writers who can stand outside the film itself, like Charles Kaiser (author of “The Gay Metropolis”), the critic Lucy Sante and J. Hoberman, a regular New York Times contributor (whom I also know personally). All situate the film in a historical context, its importance in which, Sante suggests, came at least partly by chance: “When people express their own time, it’s generally by accident.”Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight CowboyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

Four military veterans go through PTSD treatments in this understated documentary.In 2018, Jason Kander, a rising star in politics who was running for mayor of Kansas City, suddenly dropped out of the race, of which he was the front-runner. Kander, a veteran who had spent time as an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan, announced that he would be seeking treatment for PTSD and depression.He recalls the internal battle that roiled within him for over a decade in “Here. Is. Better.,” a documentary that follows four military veterans who each undergo different forms of PTSD treatment. Kander is the most high-profile subject of the film, and, consequently, the clearest example of one of its primary points: Those suffering from PTSD are often fighting a war that is invisible to both the general public and the sufferers themselves, who regularly struggle to believe they are worthy — or in need of — help.Indeed, even as we see the film’s subjects describing and confronting horrific events, there is something painfully quiet about how the trauma looks from the outside. There are no breakdowns, exceptional stories or intensely dramatic moments (save for one visceral scene at a hockey game that the film does a disservice by overediting). Instead, the documentary, directed by Jack Youngelson, is about the slow, difficult work of reaching out, opening up and eventually finding a glimmer of hope, day by day.In this sense, Youngelson’s film is not formally spectacular and doesn’t necessarily pack the showiest emotional wallop. But those traits likely make it truer to the lives of these veterans, as full of silent courage as they are of tragedy.Here. Is. Better.Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

From animated partygoers to real families embracing a name, this basket of goodies includes seven titles, among them comedy, tragedy and documentary.Every year, features from the Sundance Film Festival can become critical favorites — “Past Lives” is a notable example — but the fest’s shorter works can fade away. The “2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour” brings a seven-film omnibus to cinemas across the country, and Kayla Abuda Galang’s “When You Left Me on That Boulevard” alone is reason enough to see it.This lovely and funny short portrays a Filipino American family’s Thanksgiving get-together through the eyes of Ly, an introverted teenager who’s a daydreamer even before she gets stoned with her cousins. It’s a film that contains both bustling images and delicate vibes, inner-voice stillness and subtle soundscapes, all of which can flourish in a movie theater.Galang seems especially drawn to dialing into private spaces in social situations, for example when Ly talks about her boyfriend as if to herself, until a cut reveals she’s surrounded by family members. Ly can sound endearingly oblivious, but instead of having the actor play that tendency for cheap laughs, the writer-director picks up on the warmth in the room.Galang also looks out for different ways of showing how the family is together, whether it’s karaoke — the short’s title comes from a song Ly’s aunt belts out — or a cool split shot of kids and parents hanging out on either side of a wall. If past Sundance collections are any guide, this short might preview a feature, and Galang’s immersive exploration of inner and outer spaces makes one eager to watch what comes next.Family bonds weather transitions in a number of the shorts. “Parker,” from Catherine Hoffman and Sharon Liese, the sole documentary in this selection, teases out a rich, arduous history of Black experience in a decision by members of a family in Kansas City to adopt the same surname. Interviews with the parents and their children show the love, and the fears and trauma, that can be inscribed in a name, and the peace of mind and unity promised by their choice.Resembling vérité nonfiction, Crystal Kayiza’s “Rest Stop” follows a Ugandan-American mother traveling with her three children to join her estranged partner. Kayiza dwells on scenes that a feature might relegate to a montage, the better to sit with feeling unsettled and tired and scattered, but pushing ahead to another future. Liz Sargent’s “Take Me Home” is also a portrait in becoming, as an overwhelmed, cognitively disabled woman (played by Sargent’s real-life sister, Anna) sends an S.O.S. to her sister after years of relying on their ailing mother.Comedies are well-represented in the collection: “Pro Pool” feels like a trailer for itself as it churns through retail workplace humor, while the stop-motion animation “Inglorious Liaisons” fondly portrays a goofy teen party, wherein people have light switches for faces. But Aemilia Scott’s shrewdly written, well-cast opener to the program, “Help Me Understand,” turns a focus group of women testing detergent scents into a nervy experiment in hung-jury dynamics. Shifting gears from satire to a double-edged dissection of point of view, it’s a snappy way of prepping viewers for the multiplicity of voices to follow.2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Film TourNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

A kidnapping cult regrets making off with a detective’s daughter in this wearyingly unsavory movie.I didn’t count the number of times a woman’s face is smashed — by a fist, a boot, a brick wall — in “God Is a Bullet,” Nick Cassavetes’s first feature in almost a decade. But the misogyny of the movie’s risibly sadistic villains is only one distasteful thread in this sleazy saga of rescue and revenge.Adapted by Cassavetes from Boston Teran’s 1999 novel of the same name, the plot centers on Bob Hightower (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a mild-mannered detective, as he searches for the child-trafficking cult that has murdered his ex-wife and abducted his daughter. Impassive behind a despairing mustache, Bob welcomes the foulmouthed assistance of Case (Maika Monroe), a battle-hardened cult escapee. Case possesses intimate knowledge of the gang’s degenerate leader, Cyrus (a crazy-eyed Karl Glusman), for whom she has sacrificed several teeth and most of her self-respect.The searchers don’t have much of a plan, drifting through the dim rooms and dusty outposts where Cyrus and his acolytes might be found. Jamie Foxx, inexplicably named The Ferryman, is around to provide Bob with tattoos and ammunition, and an almost unrecognizable January Jones appears briefly as a sneering drunk whose pertinence remains vague — at least to anyone as numbed by the film’s viciousness as I was.Coming in at an interminable 155 minutes, “God Is a Bullet” has a punishing implacability. The acting is workmanlike, the settings are often ugly and the special effects — especially a grisly stomach-stapling — can only be described as strenuously specific. For Cassavetes, this may be as far from “The Notebook” as he is ever likely to get.God Is a BulletNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. In theaters. More

In Alice Winocour’s taut film, a woman survives a terrorist and tries to piece together what happened that day and how it changed her.When Mia, the heroine of the tense French drama “Revoir Paris,” thinks about the night her life changed, her face seems to drain of all feeling, almost as if she were emptying it out. Months earlier, she survived a terrorist attack, but now she can’t remember much of what happened that evening. All she retains are vivid fragments — an image of a birthday cake ablaze with candles, the steady pounding of torrential rain — that she can’t piece together. The past may be a foreign country, but for Mia it’s one that also now lies partly in ruin.“Revoir Paris” is about grief and pain and pushing through to the next day. More centrally, it is about how trauma changes memory, sometimes shattering and distorting it. That makes it about storytelling and the stories that we tell to, and about, ourselves, which means that it’s about identity. The assault shapes Mia’s life and has come to define her: She’s now a survivor. Yet the catastrophe remains out of reach. “Maybe you’re not ready to talk,” a well-meaning friend says, not understanding that without her memories, Mia can’t yet fully tell her story.The movie opens on a day seemingly like any other, although there’s a pronounced elegiac cast to the instrumental music and the piercing violin notes. For Mia — an emotionally vivid Virginie Efira — it begins with morning coffee for her and a bowl of food for her cat. Then she’s off to her day job as a translator, winding through the streets on her Triumph motorcycle. (Yes, she is independent; yes, the make is too on point.) Later, she has dinner with her lover, Vincent (Grégoire Colin), a surgeon who’s soon called back to work. She heads home alone, but when it starts pouring, she stops in another bistro to get out of the rain.What happened next is the question — an empirical fact that the writer-director Alice Winocour skillfully turns into a taut existential mystery, one in which Mia is both the victim and the lead investigator. Part of what gives the mystery its power and feeling is that there’s a good chance you know exactly what took place: On Nov. 13, 2015, Islamic State extremists initiated a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris using guns and explosives. During the assault, 130 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded in locations across the city, including at the Bataclan concert hall. In interviews, Winocour has said that her brother was among the Bataclan concertgoers; he survived.“Revoir Paris” opens the morning of the attack, but soon after the assault ends, the story jumps forward several months. It resumes with Mia in a medical office, a doctor closely examining a jagged scar on her abdomen. She has been away from Paris and staying with her mother, an interlude that Winocour skips entirely. Instead, you follow Mia as she goes about her everyday life while beginning to reconstruct the night. As the past returns — in elliptical bursts and then in lengthier passages — Mia’s splintered memories gradually form a coherent whole, making her the author of a harrowing story within a story.Winocour’s approach is by turns discreet and direct. While Mia putters in her kitchen on the morning of the attack, for instance, she drops a wine glass on her floor, breaking it, an eerie foreshadowing of the shattered glass that will carpet the bistro floor hours later. Winocour largely avoids showing that night’s visceral horrors, abstaining from gruesome spectacle in favor of shocking pinpricks: the sound of a gasping scream, an image of a shoeless foot. Using all the tools at her disposal — narrative compression, sinewy camerawork, sharp editing, an ethereal score, stricken faces — Winocour powerfully conveys the unspeakable.As it develops, “Revoir Paris” becomes perilously overplotted. Mia connects with a group of survivors, including a teenager (Nastya Golubeva), whose parents died in the attack, as well as another unlucky restaurant patron (Benoît Magimel). The three share memories and sometimes more, forming an ad hoc support group as Mia sets out to find another survivor, Assane (Amadou Mbow), a search that takes her down unpersuasive byways. Yet even as Winocour piles on too many complications, she retains an appreciable astringency — call it a sense of emotional realism about what it means to actually survive — that keeps bathos at bay. Together with the superb Efira, she earns your tears honestly.Revoir ParisNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More