Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Unclenching the Fists’ Review: A Moody Russian Drama

    Kira Kovalenko’s moody drama centers on a young woman trapped under her father’s thumb in the North Caucasus region of Russia.The Russian director Kira Kovalenko’s moody, miserablist drama “Unclenching the Fists” captures a turning point in the life of Ada (Milana Aguzarova), a young woman trapped under her father’s thumb.The chilly mountain region where they reside is in a mining town in North Ossetia, a Russian republic in the North Caucasus, an area still raw with the memories of civil warfare and extremist violence.Zaur (Alik Karaev) is a possessive and domineering single parent, forbidding Ada from wearing perfume should it attract male attention, and — most alarmingly — locking his daughter and youngest son into their shared apartment in the evenings, only allowing them to exit when he sees fit. Distrustful of institutions, Zaur refuses to allow Ada to get the treatment she needs for injuries sustained during a terrorist attack, forcing the young woman to wear adult diapers.Ada rebels as best she can, meeting up with her dimwitted pseudo-boyfriend, Tamik (Arsen Khetagurov), between shifts at a local grocery store. An opportunity for liberation emerges when her big brother Akim (Soslan Khugaev), who left to find work in a city, pays the family a visit.With its steely color palette and brooding, tight-lipped performances, the film often trades in art-house cinema clichés — and its relentless atmosphere of doom and gloom reduces the characters to mere victims of implacable forces. Ada’s psychological tumult is captured in intimate close-ups and fluttering camera movements, while the absence of a score complements the film’s uneasy mood of pent-up rage and stifling despair.That said, a final act pivot renders this fraught family portrait into something much gentler and empathetic than the first half of the film would suggest, even if Ada’s quest for freedom ultimately feels more impossible than ever.Unclenching the FistsNot rated. In Ossetian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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    ‘White Balls on Walls’ Review: Time With the Gatekeepers

    The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam becomes a somewhat flimsy case study for fine-art diversity and inclusion conversations in this documentary.From its tub-like exterior to its gallery walls and vast conference room, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is awash in white. But the Dutch documentary “White Balls on Walls” concerns a different whiteness (and maleness) endemic in one of the Netherland’s cultural institutions. The movie’s cheeky title comes from a protest that the arts-activist collective the Guerrilla Girls (or an offshoot) staged outside the museum in 1995.The filmmaker Sarah Vos began following the museum’s director, Rein Wolfs, and his staff in 2019 as they set out to address diversity and inclusion. The museum’s slogan, “Meet the icons of modern art,” had been met with scrutiny of the who-decides-what-is-iconic variety. Vos tracks those efforts through the height of the pandemic and the social justice demands wrought by the killing of George Floyd. There will be some awkward social distancing and a doubling down on Wolfs’s sense that the museum must include a richer array of artists, welcome a more diverse demographic and, while it’s at it, hire more people of color.With access to behind-the-scenes processes, the documentary can be instructive about the work of changing legacy institutions, but also wincingly cautionary as Wolfs, his administrators and curators get tangled up in numbers and nomenclature. (“‘Gender balance,’ that sounds nicely diverse,” a woman says in an early meeting.) Their internal conversations — about colonialism, gender and Dutch identity — become more nuanced when people of color arrive. Charl Landvreugd, the museum’s head of research and curatorial practice, and the curators Vincent van Velsen and Yvette Mutumba, offer that nuance and give context to the museum’s quandaries. But even they don’t always pierce the hermetically sealed feel of the documentary.White Balls on WallsNot rated. In English and Dutch, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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    James Acaster’s ‘Party Gator Purgatory’ Was Decades in the Making

    As a child, music was the British comedian’s first obsession. Decades later, his first record tells the story of a toy alligator.The British comedian James Acaster can remember the moment he fell in love with music at 6 years old. At a party held by a member of the congregation of the “hippie-ish” church his parents attended in Kettering, a town in central England, he heard a compilation album featuring songs like Men at Work’s “Down Under” and “Centerfold” by The J. Geils Band.“I just couldn’t believe how good every single song was — it was blowing my mind,” Acaster said in a recent video interview. Music became “a pretty immediate obsession.”By the time he was a teenager, Acaster was playing in several bands. He left school at 17, without taking his final exams, and didn’t go to college, so he could focus on building a career in music.At 22, though, he didn’t have a record deal, and when his experimental jazz group split, Acaster started focusing on comedy instead. He had been dabbling in stand-up as a side project since he was 18, and it felt like a welcome break from the pressures of trying to make it in music.“It was nice to do it and not care about it,” he said. “Whereas every time I was onstage with a band, I really cared and wanted it to go well.”In one special in his Netflix series “James Acaster: Repertoire,” the comedian moves from the idea of him being an undercover cop to talking about a breakup. Silviu Nutu Vegan Joy/NetflixToday, Acaster, 38, is one of Britain’s most popular comedians, and he has finally released a debut album of sorts: “Party Gator Purgatory,” a 10-track experimental record featuring Acaster’s drumming and made with the 40-artist collective he founded called Temps.In comedy, Acaster has had critical and mainstream success. A fixture on British comedy panel shows, in recent years he’s also found success in podcasting with “Off Menu,” a show about dream meals he co-hosts with the comedian Ed Gamble.On the talent-filled British comedy circuit, Acaster has carved out a singular voice: a mixture of whimsy and vulnerability, surrealism and biting commentary, as seen in his stand-up special “Cold Lasagna Hate Myself 1999,” in which he explored a difficult period in his personal life with both candor and his signature frenetic performance style.This balance is what has connected with people, said Matthew Crosby, a British comedian and friend, who praised Acaster’s “genuine authenticity” in a recent phone interview.Acaster looms so large on the British comedy scene that others have begun to emulate him. “Anyone who’s got a really distinctive unique style, whether wittingly or unwittingly, gets aped by the circuit — Eddie Izzard and Harry Hill are the people who immediately spring to mind,” Crosby said. “And you see it now with lots of people doing James.”On the talent-filled British comedy circuit, Acaster has carved out a singular voice.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAs comedy, once his low-pressure creative pursuit, transformed into a fully-fledged career, Acaster disengaged from both listening to and making music. Then, in 2017 he had a mental-health crisis precipitated by breakups with his girlfriend and his agent, and he began collecting albums released in the previous year, ultimately purchasing 500 releases from 2016 alone, he said.“When things got a bit rough that was my most recent thing that had brought me a lot of comfort so I carried on doing that,” he said. “I just sort of reacquainted myself or renegotiated my relationship with music as a fan.”He codified the personal project in “Perfect Sound Whatever,” a 2019 book in which he claims that 2016 was the best ever year for music, and explains why.In 2020, he started making music again, and the result is “Party Gator Purgatory,” an experimental, hip-hop inflected and drum-heavy record, which follows the death, purgatory and resurrection of a life-size toy alligator Acaster won at a fair when he was 7.The album’s high concept is typical of Acaster’s creative process, and the way he works his way out from a single idea. “You’re just running with whatever hunch you’ve got that this might be fun,” he said. This approach is clear across Acaster’s books, podcasts and stand-up. On the album, the idea is the travails of a stuffed toy; in one special in his Netflix stand-up series “Repertoire,” Acaster began with the idea of his being an undercover cop, “and by the end you’ve got a show that is about a breakup you’ve had,” he said.“He’s not afraid of being incredibly niche,” Crosby said. “He doesn’t sort of sit down at the start of each day and go, ‘What can I do that’s going to make me a load of money?’ He goes, ‘What am I really interested in?’”This penchant for niche ideas is evident in an album that is dense and genre-defying. “Party Gator” is largely inspired by “What Now?,” a 2016 album from the experimental musician Jon Bap, in which the drums feel deliberately out of sync.“You’re just running with whatever hunch you’ve got that this might be fun,” Acaster said of his approach to the creative process.Tom Jamieson for The New York Times“He’s just a freak and he likes weird music and I think we both like a lot of weird stuff,” said NNAMDÏ, a Chicago-based musician who raps on the album, in a video interview.Making the album was a labor of love, an all-consuming project that stretched over two years. On the album Acaster plays drums, served as a producer and curated a 40-strong roster of collaborators, including the singer-songwriter Xenia Rubinos and the rapper Open Mike Eagle. He would listen to a drum track he’d created, figure out who he wanted on it, and reach out. Acaster had interviewed some of the musicians he wanted to work with for his book, “Perfect Sound,” and around half of them he cold emailed. “I just got very very lucky that people would say yes,” he said.Taking place mostly during Britain’s pandemic lockdowns, the collaborations happened over email and Zoom, through which Acaster was able to foster an environment of experimentation. “For the majority of it, he just told me to do whatever I felt like doing,” NNAMDÏ said. “He kind of took what I did and manipulated it. It is still what I did, but he added his own little textures to it and chopped up some things and kind of freaked it, made it cool.”With an album that may not appeal to mainstream audiences, Acaster is levelheaded about what its reception could look like. “I really hope that it finds its audience, and the people who would like it discover it and get into it,” he said.In many ways, the making of the album is a mark of success for Acaster.“I love it all and I love it as much as any of my stand-up shows, anything I’ve done,” he said. More

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    ‘The Wrath of Becky’ Review: Teenage Riot

    The traumatized teen is back to finalize even more fascists in this comically bloody sequel.Continuing the vigilante adventures of its teen-drifter namesake (Lulu Wilson), “The Wrath of Becky” (a sequel to “Becky” in 2020) finds her once again doing battle with far-right knuckle-draggers.It has been two years since neo-Nazis killed her father, and Becky and her canine companion, Diego, have burned through several foster families before washing up in the home of the kindly Elena (Denise Burse). Now 16, Becky works as a diner waitress, plays Scrabble with Elena and fantasizes about slicing the throat of a sexist customer. All she needs is an inciting incident, and here, on cue, come the Noble Men, a clump of white supremacists and would-be insurrectionists, who violently attack Elena and make off with Diego. If “John Wick” taught us anything, it’s never, ever harm the dog.Directed by Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote, “The Wrath of Becky” follows the rote rhythms of the revenge thriller as Becky, done up in red boiler suit and blue nails, follows the men to a cozy farmhouse and eavesdrops on their racist plans. The subsequent slaughters are inventive, the pacing lively and the cat-and-mouse structure entertaining; but the rodents themselves are — aside from their suave leader, played by Seann William Scott — such misogynistic morons that Becky’s predominance is never in doubt.Considering the current swarming of groups like this, “The Wrath of Becky” should at least have given us chills. But the movie’s almost jokey treatment of its slobbering incels, combined with Becky’s comic posturings, hemorrhage the tension. Wilson, however, is consistently terrific, and deserves more thoughtful material. If there is to be a third film, the ending of this one suggests she might get it.The Wrath of BeckyRated R for disgusting dialogue and dripping brain matter. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Kandahar’ Review: Marooned in a Dull Movie

    Gerard Butler plays an undercover C.I.A. agent hunted by various foes in an underwhelming action film devoid of any suspense or, well, action.Everybody wants to find the undercover C.I.A. agent Tom Harris (Gerard Butler), who is marooned while on a mission in Afghanistan: the Taliban, an Iranian hound, ISIS, a Pakistani secret operative. The only people who won’t be on his tail are those looking for a good action film — the stupefyingly sluggish “Kandahar” isn’t it.For his third collaboration with the director Ric Roman Waugh after “Greenland” (by far the best of the three, from 2021) and “Angel Has Fallen” (2019), Butler has picked a rather ineffective vehicle, just like when Tom and his translator, Mo, steal a car that promptly gets a flat as they rush to catch a flight out of Kandahar.Not only is the pace tepid at best, but Tom is a bore, with at least three characters more intriguing than he is. Chief among them is Mo, portrayed by the excellent Navid Negahban (“Homeland,” “Aladdin”). An Afghan exile, he has returned home to try to locate his sister-in-law — a more compelling quest than Butler’s, whose prime motivation is … what exactly? Not being late to his daughter’s graduation in London? The nominal star is constantly overshadowed by his co-stars, who also include Ali Fazal as the dashing, motorcycle-riding Pakistani agent and Bahador Foladi as Iran’s answer to Inspector Javert.More aggravating is the way “Kandahar” keeps bringing up girls and women — on a large scale, the Taliban oppresses them; on a more intimate one, Tom is an absentee husband and father — without actually giving any of them decent screen time. The lip service only makes that absence more noticeable.KandaharRated R for language and ridiculous roughness. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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    ‘Being Mary Tyler Moore’ Review: A Tip of the Hat to the Tossed Hat

    This charming documentary aims to peek under the smile of a groundbreaking television star.No one was harder on Mary Tyler Moore than Mary Tyler Moore. “I was brought up to be a perfect person, or to look like a perfect person,” she admitted in her first memoir, “After All” (1995). Her sitcoms convinced audiences she was the best girl in the world — and the pressure to measure up to her characters kept her grinning.“Being Mary Tyler Moore,” a charming documentary directed by James Adolphus, aims to peek under the smile. We catch a glimpse of her sorrows and frustrations, of disappointments and deaths (and, yes, of that stinker where she played a nun who swoons for Elvis). But the film itself is so smitten by Moore that it skips over the worst of her self-inflected wounds. Like, for instance, Moore’s discussion in her book of when she’d get drunk and play Russian roulette with her car before eventually embracing sobriety, and, with it, the relief of confessing her flaws.Fair enough. There’s plenty to talk about simply touring Moore’s career, although plaudits from Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Reese Witherspoon are merely quick hits of celebrity glitz. The film is structured by archival footage of two television interviews with Moore. The first, from 1966, is sexist and condescending. The second, conducted 15 years later, is empathetic and probing. Between them, Moore had reshaped how women were treated on the small screen.She’d be quicker to call herself a realist than a feminist. Yet, we’re struck by how little of her TV persona was real. America’s favorite singleton hadn’t been single since high school — and its favorite plucky careerist had, in truth, lost jobs for being pregnant or requesting a raise. The irony is that Moore’s perfect image advanced the culture even as it hobbled her own joy.Being Mary Tyler MooreNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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    ‘About My Father’ Review: Robert De Niro in Dad Mode Again

    The comedian Sebastian Maniscalco enlists his “Irishman” colleague in this labored comedy, where gags fall flat.The stand-up comedian Sebastian Maniscalco first worked with Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 crime drama “The Irishman.” Maniscalco played the erratic real-life gangster Joey Gallo; De Niro’s character, Frank Sheeran, kills him in the movie. Scorsese has a near-uncanny knack for effectively using professional funnymen in serious roles — Jerry Lewis in “The King of Comedy” and Don Rickles in “Casino” to cite but two — and Maniscalco acquitted himself well in his small part.The point we are obliged to get to is this: Maniscalco has now enlisted De Niro to act in “About My Father,” a romantic comedy largely derived from the comedian’s own life. How largely? Well, Maniscalco plays a character named Sebastian Maniscalco. He’s engaged to his ideal woman, Ellie (Leslie Bibb, who’s charming here), and has finally been invited to her very rich family’s Fourth of July weekend. In short order, Sebastian’s father, Salvo, is invited too. Salvo is an Italian immigrant from Sicily who runs a beauty salon, has a fierce work ethic, is dead cheap and severely opinionated, and has several other traits that make for engaging stand-up comedy and cinematic character work.De Niro is reliable in his comedic mode. Here, with his hand gestures and the frequent monosyllabic exclamations of exasperation, the actor’s Salvo sometimes resembles a kinder, gentler version of his Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull.” The supporting players David Rasche and Kim Cattrall as the future in-laws provide good comic foils for De Niro.Alas, in less than an hour and a half of running time (the director Laura Terruso does orchestrate the proceedings with a palpable sense of dispatch), the movie demonstrates how quickly “amiable and inconsequential” can shift to “hackneyed and labored.” A sickly poultry improvisation gag involving a peacock falls flat, and the speed bump to the happy ending is right out of the Hallmark Movie Scriptwriter’s Handbook.About My FatherIn theaters. Rated PG-13 for language, partial nudity, improvised-poultry humor. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Attachment Diaries’ Review: Love, Sick

    A gynecologist and her patient form a horrifyingly twisted connection in this batty, bloody Argentine melodrama.A trashy treat coated in a high-art gloss, “The Attachment Diaries” gleefully kneads melodrama, noir, horror and sexual perversion into a pathological romance between two deeply damaged women.The setting is 1970s Argentina, where a rain-soaked, apparently destitute Carla (Jimena Anganuzzi) arrives at the home of Irina (Lola Berthet), a severe gynecologist. Carla, claiming to have been gang-raped, is seeking an illegal abortion (her second, as it turns out), but her pregnancy is too far along. Instead, Irina offers to shelter Carla until the birth, then sell the child to a wealthy couple. Irina, it seems, has more than one lucrative side hustle; she also has a Ph.D. in chemistry, which will serve the women well when their pathologies hit the fan and the bodies hit the floor.Defined by a near-tactile tension between the profligacies of the script (by the director, Valentín Javier Diment) and the coolly reserved elegance of Claudio Beiza’s cinematography, “The Attachment Diaries” takes its excesses so seriously that it’s impossible not to laugh. As the women’s twisted histories and sick behaviors are slowly revealed — Carla, for instance, performs dark experiments in decoupage, while Irina excels at dismemberment — Diment flirts with farce. The film’s taproot, however, slurps insistently from a deep reservoir of misandry and rape trauma, commonalities that wrap the women in a cocoon of shared pain.At once lugubrious and nutty, depressing and daring, “The Attachment Diaries” unfolds, for the first hour or so, in the softest black and white. Then, just past the midpoint, the screen floods with a rich, golden light, timed to coincide with Irina’s first experience of sexual release. Psychotic killer and star-crossed lover have just become one and the same.The Attachment DiariesNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More