Aurelia Butler

Kavich Neang’s lush feature tells a largely autobiographical tale of growing up in a building whose often painful history is a microcosm of his country’s.The title of Kavich Neang’s richly observed feature, “White Building,” is, first of all, an exaggeration: The dilapidated apartment bloc it describes is so chipped and black with soot that it’s barely white; indeed, it is so falling apart that it’s barely a building.But for Samnang (Piseth Chhun), the young protagonist of this sensitive and largely autobiographical coming-of-age portrayal, it is home, as the real-life White Building it is based on was for Neang.Located in central Phnom Penh, the building is an apt symbol of the often excruciating changes Cambodia has endured over the last 60 years. It was built in the 1960s to house civil servants, then emptied during the Khmer Rouge’s forced relocations of the 1970s. In the ’80s, it became home to working class people like Samnang’s diabetic father (Sithan Hout), who, like Neang’s, is a sculptor. Now its inhabitants are being pushed to take a lousy deal so it can be demolished for new development, in a city they can no longer afford.Unlike his parents, Samnang has no memories of the Khmer Rouge. He and his friends grew up with cellphones and hip-hop, and they dream of becoming a famous dance troupe. They want what other boys of their generation want: girlfriends, Nikes, a chance to prove themselves.Neang excels at that Tarkovskian trick of rendering the small details of decay — a cracked tile, a leaking ceiling — with such lived-in precision that they feel somehow specific and surreal at once; like the title, images strain their own semantic boundaries. The film’s loose plotting and secondary character development can leave a few too many hanging threads, but its sense of place is so palpable you can almost smell the smoky city markets, the sweat, the hormones.White BuildingNot rated. In Khmer, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

A veteran cast attempts to fend off a deluge of clichés in this cheap-looking, pleasingly scrappy war film.The microbudget war movie “Come Out Fighting” is so conspicuously cheap-looking that it could be initially mistaken for one of the direct-to-video mockbusters made by the somewhat infamous indie studio The Asylum — those thrifty, semi-plagiaristic exploitation flicks like “Ardennes Fury” or “Operation Dunkirk,” which have little to recommend them besides their zany, so-bad-it’s-almost-good zeal. But while it has a blatant shoestring sheen, “Come Out Fighting” isn’t arch or irony-laden; in fact, the tone is quite serious, albeit also seriously clichéd. Between the dogfights, ambushes, minefield maneuvers and flamethrower attacks — all of them realized with cut-rate visual effects — the film is contemplative and somber, pensively reflecting on such steadfast wartime themes as determination, valor and courage among men. Perhaps needless to say, the movie features no women.It features no surprises, either, telling a familiar story about a squad of stouthearted soldiers in World War II endeavoring to rescue their commanding officer after he is trapped behind enemy lines. The writer-director Steven Luke, who has several of these low-budget war movies under his belt now, leans hard on the conventions of the genre, and borrows heavily from “Saving Private Ryan.” His writing is thin and tends regularly toward platitudes, with characters spouting wisdom like “the cards have to fall where they fall.”Both Luke and his cast — especially Hiram A. Murray as the indomitable Lt. Hayes and Dolph Lundgren as the experienced and kindly Major Anderson — seem gamely committed to the material, managing at times to muster a genuine sense of gravity. This impression of effort on the part of all involved makes “Come Out Fighting” strangely likable even when it’s bad. And it is often bad.Come Out FightingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and available on demand. More

A wealthy heir and his longtime employee vie for control over their uncommon relationship in this twisty duet.If you’re someone who regularly bemoans the dearth of movies for adults, then take heart: “Sanctuary” is here for you. Shot almost entirely in a single location and in just 18 days, Zachary Wigon’s supremely confident second feature (after “The Heart Machine” in 2014) is a jet-black romantic comedy hidden inside a twisty psychosexual thriller. Or maybe it’s the other way around.It scarcely matters. The writing (by Micah Bloomberg, a creator of the 2018-20 TV series “Homecoming”) is so sharp, the acting so agile and the cinematography (by Ludovica Isidori) so inventive that what could have been a stuffy experiment in lockdown filmmaking is instead a vividly involving battle of wills. On one side we have Hal (Christopher Abbott), the presumptive heir to his recently-deceased father’s chain of luxury hotels. On the other is Rebecca (Margaret Qualley), a brisk beauty who arrives at Hal’s plush hotel suite, pulls out a sheaf of papers, and proceeds to ostensibly review his suitability to take over as C.E.O.But something is off; and as Rebecca’s questions grow increasingly inappropriate — and Hal’s responses appear blatantly untruthful — it’s revealed that she’s his longtime dominatrix, playing her part in a well-worn scenario. This time, though, Rebecca is improvising on Hal’s meticulously pre-written script, and his displeasure is only the first point of friction in a dizzying series of power plays that swing from sexual to financial and, finally, emotional. Alongside, Isidori’s cheeky camera mimics the pair’s volatile maneuverings, swooping and flipping through 180 degrees as it tests the limitations of what is essentially a two-character play, transforming it into something that’s often thrillingly cinematic.Unfolding over one fraught night, “Sanctuary” dances on the border between fantasy and reality. Hal, a soft-shell weakling who’s nonetheless steeled by entitlement, wants to begin his new life as “a person who wins.” As such, he feels the services of a sex worker are surplus to requirements; and as he moves to end his relationship with Rebecca, his actions — providing a lavish dinner and the gift of an expensive watch — insultingly mimic the familiar tropes of the retirement ceremony. He’s about to find out, though, that this employee will not be pensioned off so easily.Both actors are excellent, but Qualley is chameleonic in a role that requires her to slide seamlessly from playful to stern, cunning to confrontational, penitent to downright scary. At times, as when Hal erupts with unexpected violence, her face freezes and we can almost see her contriving ways to regain control of a suddenly dangerous situation. If she’s to succeed, she’ll need more than a talent for debasement and humiliation.Sexual but not sexy, “Sanctuary” is fantastically dynamic and emphatically theatrical. The ending feels too smoothly settled, but it at least prods Hal and Rebecca to answer the film’s central question: Where does role-playing end and real life begin?SanctuaryRated R for nasty talk and naughty behavior. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

This lyrical debut feature from Francisca Alegría is a slow-burning parable about our relationship to each other and to the living world.The final 20 minutes or so of “The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future,” the slow-burning parable from the writer-director Francisca Alegría, are almost entirely wordless. In its last act, the film follows the members of a fractured family as they wander about, cast in different directions and undone by recent oddities on their dairy farm. The power of Alegría’s feature debut is found not in dialogue or explication, but in the lyrical, magical realist qualities of folklore: disappointed mothers and fathers, sacred animals and cursed rivers, love and forgiveness.At the film’s start, a woman (Mía Maestro) bubbles up from the surface of the water, landing on a riverbank filled with dead fish. In a store, an old man (Alfredo Castro) collapses at the sight of her. Miraculously alive and not having aged a day, she appears to be Magdalena, the man’s wife who mysteriously drowned herself decades earlier, leaving him and his two children behind. Soon after, the man’s daughter, Cecilia (Leonor Varela) returns to the family farm to care for her shaken father. Cecilia has her hangups about her mother’s death and her own teenage child’s transgender identity.As Magdalena wanders back to the farm, the family begins to reckon with a complicated past, and the cows, which she had always loved but that suffer from the realities of factory farming, begin acting strangely. Through these animals, the film becomes an allegorical prayer — an elegy for human failures toward one another and the living world, and an incantation for a return and reversal of sorts.While often elliptical, Alegría’s directing is patient, a good quality for a movie that could have fallen prey to sanctimony. In this film, the purest truth can be seen in the eyes of its cows — the mournful gaze of the mothers, and the tragically innocent look of the calves that have been torn from them.The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the FutureNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

The director Ryan Stevens Harris brings a young girl’s subconscious to eerie life in this unnerving feature.“Moon Garden” is a nightmare tour through a small child’s psyche that the filmmaker Ryan Stevens Harris could have staged as an escape room, or a haunted house, or a themed restaurant where his creepy puppets and bizarro performers would chatter their teeth at you while smashing plates. It feels as though he chose to make a movie simply because that’s the handiest way to get his ghastly creations seen.Harris seems bored by his film’s opening sequence, a chintzy melodrama about a girl named Emma (his own daughter Haven Lee Harris, just 4-years-old when she started the project) and her miserable parents (Brionne Davis and Augie Duke). Only after Emma’s circumstances get worse — the poor dear is knocked comatose — do things onscreen improve.Heroines have been tumbling into their own subconscious since “The Wizard of Oz” and “Alice in Wonderland.” Rarely are the kids this young — and their adventures this dark. The moppet charges through all sorts of muck with kittenish courage as Harris unleashes an army of unnerving practical effects: stop motion tear-gobbling monsters, disconcerting reversed footage, time lapses of rotting fruit, skin-crawling sound design. Initially, we’re repelled by the ’90s grunge video aesthetics. Later, we admire the power in these visceral expressions of traumas Emma will someday tell her therapist.As the tot struggles to sweep up the wreckage of a rampaging bride and groom, we sense she already knows she’s the family fixer. The film doesn’t need three lullaby covers of the Badfinger ballad “Without You” when it has the poetry of Harris’s emotional insights, particularly the line: “I wish I had learned that the world was bigger than how I felt.”Moon GardenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More