Aurelia Butler

This psychological thriller about a woman experiencing amnesia poses an essentially cinematic question: Who are we without our memories?In the opening minutes of “Fugue,” a blond-haired figure stumbles through a dark train tunnel in heels, climbs onto the platform and then squats to urinate in full public view. It’s a striking vision of a Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, though Agnieszka Smoczynska’s film is less about its heroine’s unraveling than about the pained process of her respooling.The film soon skips two years ahead, as Alicja (Gabriela Muskala), now sporting a spiky brunette bob, is paraded on TV by a state psychiatrist. She has no documents or memories, no idea of who she is, until her family calls in and claims her as Kinga Slowika: a beloved daughter and wife, and the mother of a young son.
“Fugue” — named for Alicja/Kinga’s dissociative condition — follows its protagonist as she adjusts to an old life in the Polish suburbs that she no longer recognizes. Smoczynska builds a psychological puzzle out of subtle shocks to the system: quick reflexes that reveal Alicja’s muscle memories; gestures of love that don’t quite feel like love itself. Muskala turns in a gripping performance, pitched on the razor’s edge of the film’s central mystery: whether Kinga became Alicja by accident, or because her past life gave her reason to want to be someone else.“Fugue” takes on an essentially cinematic inquiry: Who are we without our memories? When Kinga finally has a revelation, it’s triggered by home videos, records of the past untouched by the caprices of the mind. It doesn’t matter that the facts turn out to be underwhelming, because it doesn’t matter why Alicja left. The gutting question “Fugue” poses is whether any of us can ever go back to being who we once were.FugueNot rated. In Polish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

In this stylistically bold folk-horror movie, a woman is disturbed by visions related to a long-ago tragedy.On an isolated island off England’s Cornish coast, a solitary woman, known only as The Volunteer (Mary Woodvine), performs an unvarying ritual. Each day, she trudges to a rocky cliff top to examine a crop of strange-looking flowers. On the way back to her primitive cottage, she drops a stone into an empty mine shaft and fires up her generator, a small transistor radio her only link to the outside world. It seems appropriate that her bedtime reading is “A Blueprint for Survival.”Cryptic and beguiling, Mark Jenkin’s “Enys Men” (Cornish for “Stone Island” and pronounced “Ennis Main”) is a slow, seductive meditation on place and memory. Shaped by the woman’s excursions, the movie builds a repetitive, hypnotic rhythm that’s underscored by her daily notations of “No change” in a small notebook. The entries are dated 1973, yet slippery temporal shifts are disrupting her research and our understanding of the narrative. Like the woman’s increasingly upsetting visions, these time warps seem related to the eerie, vaguely human-shaped standing stone that looms over the island, a memorial to a past seafaring tragedy.Drawing from the region’s deep vein of Celtic mythology, Jenkin summons the ghosts of lost fishermen and long-gone female mine workers, known as bal maidens, stoking an atmosphere thick with ancient anguish. As a mossy growth spreads from the flowers to the woman’s body, the film’s editing grows more jagged, its rough and rocky landscape — captured on breathtakingly evocative 16-millimeter film — increasingly alien and unnerving. At times, Jenkin’s bold, experimental style can perplex; but his vision is so unwavering and beholden to local history that his message is clear: On Enys Men, the earth remembers what the sea has taken.Enys MenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

As an R&B singer, producer, dancer, music video director, choreographer and fashion designer, Teyana Taylor is no stranger to the spotlight. She’s known for her sultry singing, sexy dance moves and edgy turns on the red carpet — at this year’s Vanity Fair Oscar party, it was a sheer dark suit with a metallic gold bra. At New York Fashion Week in February, it was an avant-garde suit by Thom Browne. To it all, she brings a touch of the theatrical.But in the film “A Thousand and One,” Taylor gives an entirely different performance. Here, she plays Inez, a woman orphaned at a young age who is struggling to rebuild her life after a stint at Rikers Island. With an aim to be a better provider, she kidnaps her six-year-old son, Terry, out of New York City’s negligent foster care system.Over the course of the film, which covers a decade in gentrifying Harlem from the 1990s to the early 2000s, Taylor, who is a Harlem native, strips Inez to her core: A single Black mother trying to create a quality life for Terry while carrying the weight of the city on her shoulders. It’s the first feature film written and directed by A.V. Rockwell, and it won the grand jury prize in the U.S. dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Taylor received acclaim for her unadorned performance, with The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis calling her “terrific” in a notebook from the festival.With Aaron Kingsley Adetola in “A Thousand and One,” which won the grand jury prize in the U.S. dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival.Focus Features“This is the story of a street woman, and I think you needed to feel her rawness,” said Rockwell in a video interview. “One of the things that I told Teyana in terms of preparing for the role was, ‘I hope you’re ready to forgo your glam.’”Life transitions gave Taylor, 32, a head start down that road. During filming, she was six months postpartum after giving birth to her second daughter. “You don’t feel beautiful, you don’t feel confident,” she said of that time, in a video interview. She also attended the funerals of three different friends, all in Harlem, including one she grew up with as a child. “Having to see your friends lying in caskets. Going to wakes on my lunch break. I had a lot to cry about,” she said.But in “A Thousand and One,” the character Inez hardly cries, despite her hardships. Even at her most vulnerable, when it seems the men for whom she has sacrificed have abandoned her, she cracks a smile. “She’s able to have this strength even through her tears,” Taylor said. “It made me respect A.V. on a whole other level.”When Taylor watched the final cut, she remembered filming scenes of emotive crying. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh no, this is my Viola moment! Why are you not using the snot? I’m going in right now, I killed this scene.’ And A.V.’s like, ‘No, that’s just not who Inez is.’ She’s always in survival mode to people.”Taylor understood what it’s like to be in survival mode. She drew parallels to her professional life, saying she suffered abandonment by people she trusted to protect her. With her mother, Nikki Taylor, as her manager, she entered the music business at age 15. She has choreographed music videos for Beyoncé and appeared in other videos by Jay-Z and Kanye West. Her single, “Gonna Love Me,” has been streamed more than 167 million times on Spotify, and her three studio albums all reached the Billboard 200 chart.Then in late 2020, she announced in an Instagram post that she was retiring from music. She was signed with G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam at the time and had released “The Album” earlier that year. In her post, she mentioned “feeling super under appreciated” and “constantly getting the shorter end of the stick.” She also hinted at the time “that when one door closes another will open,” and the first opportunity that came along afterward was the role of Inez.“I didn’t have that Inez role locked in before I retired, so it was a real-life faith walk,” Taylor said.“It’s realizing that the things that I’ve been through and the amount of time that it took was not a punishment,” Taylor said. “It was preparation.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesNow, she’s forging ahead as an actor, director and producer. She has roles in two other upcoming films, “The Book of Clarence” and “The Smack,” and said she has plans to direct her first feature, a project from the production company she co-founded, the Aunties.Later this year, she’ll also release her own Air Jordan sneaker called, fittingly, “A Rose From Harlem.” It features a rose-colored, thorn-trimmed swoosh on the right sneaker, and a black swoosh with jagged stitching on the left. Taylor sees both herself and Inez as roses from Harlem. “This sneaker is a love letter to all the roses who grow out the concrete, from their own hoods, really making it out and putting on for their city, putting on for their neighborhood and really just making the hood proud,” she said.According to her, the wait was long for her own Air Jordan, and for the collaboration to launch the same year as the release of “A Thousand and One” seemed predestined. Taylor felt at peace with the past, and with any feelings of frustration and resignation in her career.“I always say, grace over grudges. Because what’s for me is already written,” she said. “So if it was meant for me to be abandoned or maybe mistreated, that gave me the strength to be able to tap into this character, Inez. It’s realizing that the things that I’ve been through and the amount of time that it took was not a punishment. It was preparation.”In the film, Inez tells Terry she’ll go to war for him. She defers her dream to be a hairstylist, instead keeping a steady job as a cleaner to pay the rent. It mirrored some of the experiences Taylor’s own mother contended with.“It was rough, but I had to do what I had to do,” Teyana’s mother, Nikki, said in a phone interview. She worked two corporate jobs and went to college while raising a young child mostly on her own, sometimes with the help of family members. “The way I looked at it, I’m going to always go above and beyond to take care of my kid. I always made sure she never needed for anything or wanted for anything.”Playing a single mother in the film, Taylor tapped into her experience being raised by a single mother.Erik Carter for The New York TimesTaylor herself now has two daughters with her husband, Iman Shumpert, the basketball player who is also a winner of “Dancing With the Stars.” The children are Iman Tayla, nicknamed Junie, age 7, and Rue Rose, age 2 (“going on 22,” Taylor said). During the film shoot, Junie was the same age as Aaron Kingsley Adetola, the actor who plays the young version of Terry, and in real life, the two children became best friends. Junie wanted to be on set and part of it all. “They let her call ‘Action!’ a few times. She’s following in my footsteps. She’s literally a mini me,” Taylor said.There’s no obvious trace of Taylor’s music and dance skills in her performance as Inez, but her background in these disciplines influenced her approach. For one, she was very in touch with her body, an important part of any performance, according to Rockwell, the director. “She has such a unique timber to her voice,” Rockwell said, so they played around with how Inez talks and moves as she matures in the film. “Teyana was able to dig into these parts of herself. To see her find those steps was exciting for me, and really inspiring to see this performer come to life in a way that I don’t think anybody was expecting.”The way a musician records a verse or song 50 times to get it right, Taylor gave her performance the same level of specificity. “Detail is a skill, and I’m a very detailed person,” Taylor said. For her, the stakes were high. She didn’t want to continue making work in which she was just dancing or looking glamorous. She had entered a new phase and wanted to be taken seriously. “I had a story to tell,” she said. “In a lot of ways, Inez’s story was my story.” More

The involuntary manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin has suffered setbacks, and now the district attorney has withdrawn from the case and named two special prosecutors.The district attorney who brought involuntary manslaughter charges against Alec Baldwin in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the “Rust” film set in New Mexico is stepping away from the case, her office announced Wednesday, as she named two new special prosecutors to handle the case.The district attorney of Santa Fe County, Mary Carmack-Altwies, had been the face of the prosecution since the beginning. But in recent weeks the case has faced a couple of setbacks: Prosecutors downgraded the charges Mr. Baldwin faces after his lawyers noted that the law he was initially charged under was not passed until after the fatal shooting, and the special prosecutor who was originally named to help with the case, Andrea Reeb, decided to step down after her appointment was challenged in court.The appointment of Ms. Reeb was initially challenged by lawyers for Mr. Baldwin, who argued that it violated the New Mexico Constitution for her to serve as a special prosecutor and a New Mexico legislator at the same time. (She was also an elected member of the state’s House of Representatives.)A lawyer for Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the original armorer on the film “Rust,” who was also charged with involuntary manslaughter in the fatal Oct. 21, 2021, shooting of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, then raised another issue.The lawyer, Jason Bowles, argued that if Ms. Carmack-Altwies — who had said she needed help prosecuting such a high-profile case — wanted to appoint a new special prosecutor, the law required her to recuse herself from the case entirely. The judge hearing the case agreed, and Ms. Carmack-Altwies was left with the choice to either hire legal help and stay on the case or step back from it and let a new special prosecutor act.She chose to step back, announcing on Wednesday that she would be appointing two New Mexico lawyers, Kari Morrissey and Jason Lewis, as special prosecutors.“My responsibility to the people of the First Judicial District is greater than any one case, which is why I have chosen to appoint a special prosecutor in the ‘Rust’ case,” Ms. Carmack-Altwies said in a statement. “Kari Morrissey and Jason Lewis will unflinchingly pursue justice in the death of Halyna Hutchins.”Now, the case will move forward without either of the prosecutors who made the decision to charge Mr. Baldwin and Ms. Gutierrez-Reed with involuntary manslaughter, and who reached a plea deal with Dave Halls, the movie’s first assistant director, who had oversight of safety on set. More

“Earth Mama,” “Tótem” and other strong entries offer proof that the art form is flourishing regardless of what’s happening in Hollywood.Like the vernal equinox, New Directors/New Films is a sign that winter and the soul-crushing slog known as awards season have finally ended. Now in its 52nd year, the festival, opening Wednesday, is a great place to recharge and revive. With a slate largely drawn from recent international film festivals — from Berlin and Locarno to Sundance — the 12-day event is also a nice way to travel the world by proxy while previewing work before it begins percolating into art theaters and onto streaming services.Each edition of New Directors — a presentation of Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art — is partly shaped by the competition from other events. It’s also shaped by its programmers’ tastes and orthodoxies, including ideas about what constitutes a festival movie, which, much as at Cannes and elsewhere, tends to mean gravely serious, non-genre work. That can get monotonous, but at its best, New Directors offers enduring proof of cinematic life beyond the corporate bottom line: The festival’s commitment to film art is a galvanizing article of faith.This year’s program consists of 27 features, about half of which are North American premieres, along with some dozen shorts. Among the strongest is the opener, “Earth Mama,” the terrifically assured feature debut from the writer-director Savanah Leaf, a former Olympic volleyball player. Set in the Bay Area, this contemporary drama tracks the heartbreaking, frustrating, at times exasperatingly self-sabotaging daily travails of Gia (a lovely Tia Nomore), a young, single, heavily pregnant woman, as she tries to regain custody of her son and daughter, who are in foster care. Every conceivable odd has been stacked against Gia, including the degradations of systemic oppression.Anchored by Leaf’s empathy and by her precise, confident visual style, the story unfolds during the last stretch of Gia’s pregnancy. With naturalistic dialogue that largely avoids exegesis — as well as with expressionistic flourishes and subtle camerawork that often reveal what the characters don’t or can’t say — Leaf skillfully engages with larger social issues while steering clear of the kind of sermonizing that too often seeps into similarly themed dramas. In Leaf’s hands, Gia isn’t a case study or object lesson. She is instead a woman who’s both singular and much like any other — a human being, in other words, struggling to find a place and a sense of sovereignty amid the onslaughts of everyday life.Cole Doman, left, and Lío Mehiel in “Mutt,” directed by Vuk Lungulov-Klotz.Courtesy of Quiltro LLC“Mutt,” another festival highlight, this one set in present-day New York, follows its heart-stealing title character across a single exceedingly eventful and emotionally fraught day. Written and directed by Vuk Lungulov-Klotz, it centers on Feña, a young man who has recently transitioned (played by the charismatic Lío Mehiel, who, like the filmmaker, is trans), as he crisscrosses the city and through the labyrinthine complexities of his life, including his tricky, sometimes confusing relationships with friends and family. With fluid cinematography, deft narrative pacing and swells of feeling, Lungulov-Klotz creates an urgent, of-the-moment portrait of a young man who’s at once distinct and movingly, rightfully ordinary.Like most movies on the contemporary festival circuit, the selections in New Directors tend to draw on a hodgepodge of different realist traditions (Hollywood, the European art film, Sundance, etc.). This year, more than a few selections also incorporate fantastical interludes — from brief hallucinations to alternative worlds — that productively complicate and on occasion destabilize their realism. One of the boldest, most extensive uses of the fantastic occurs in “The Maiden,” a dreamy, gentle story of loss and mourning from the Canadian writer-director Graham Foy. Set in the hinterlands of Alberta, the movie focuses on several teenagers, both living and dead — a haunting that feels like a generational cri de coeur.I’m still puzzling through the far-out, what-in-the-what finale of “Astrakan,” a drama from the French writer-director David Depesseville about a watchful 12-year-old, Samuel (the appealing Mirko Giannini), who’s been placed in a foster family that seems supremely ill-equipped to deal with his trauma. For most of its running time, the movie embraces a familiar if somewhat stylized realism only to abruptly veer into full-blown symbolism. Like some of the other movies in the lineup, “Astrakan” owes a conspicuous debt to established filmmakers — the boy at times evokes François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel while the filmmaking nods at Robert Bresson via Bruno Dumont — although at its strongest, it stands on its own.The cinematic touchstones are just as obvious elsewhere in the program, which isn’t necessarily a negative. The influence of the Ukrainian auteur Sergei Loznitsa clearly informs the dramatic tumult, political pessimism and elegantly flowing camerawork of “Pamfir,” a visually striking drama from the writer-director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk about a smuggler who’s recently returned home. There’s certainly some of the Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes’s DNA in “Tommy Guns,” a far-out tale from Carlos Conceição that opens in Angola (where he was born) during the tail end of that country’s war of independence. The movie opens powerfully and gathers dramatic momentum as it begins to blur the time frame, only to lose its sting (and focus on subjugated Angolans) when it drifts into self-conscious surrealism.Naíma Sentíes in “Tótem,” the second feature from writer-director Lila Avilés.Courtesy of Limerencia FilmsEnergetic, sweeping and feminist to the bone, the Iranian drama “Leila’s Brothers,” from the writer-director Saeed Roustaee, traces its title character through the claustrophobic tumult of her life, family and world. Leila (Taraneh Alidoosti, vivid and grounded) is trying to balance her desires with the competing, clamorous needs of her squabbling brothers and impoverished, traditionally minded parents. Organized around a series of encounters, the movie fuses the personal with the political. It opens with a protest that soon turns violent, an overture that sets the tense, fractious mood and telegraphs the story’s trajectory. Then, scene by scene, it lays bare the complexities of contemporary Iran.“Chile ’76,” Manuela Martelli’s visually and tonally meticulous exploration of political resistance and conscience, takes place in the brutal years after the 1973 American-backed coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. Soon after it opens, Carmen (Aline Küppenheim), a doctor’s wife with expensive taste who’s decamped to her family’s vacation home, is asked by a priest for help with a wounded stranger. Before long Carmen is drawn into a shadowy world of passwords and strange noises on the phone, and this unnerving feature has turned into a veritable horror movie. When a body washes up on a beach, Carmen tells her grandchildren to avert their eyes; by then, though, hers have been pried open.There isn’t a false note in the tender Mexican drama “Tótem,” which follows the 7-year-old Sol (Naíma Sentíes, suitably luminous) as she navigates the chaos and indifference of her sprawling family during celebrations for her ailing father. With intricate staging, lapidary camerawork and an expressionistically warm palette — along charming appearances from the natural world — the writer-director Lila Avilés creates a richly textured, deeply compassionate portrait of a family that’s falling apart as one of its youngest members comes into consciousness. “Tótem” is only Avilés’s second feature — her first, “The Chambermaid,” screened at the 2019 festival — but it’s also one of the finest movies you’ll see this year.“Tótem” is also the kind of movie that I think one of the festival’s early programmers, the writer Donald Richie, had in mind when he told The Times in 1972 that the inaugural New Directors “will introduce deserving films that perhaps otherwise might not have exposure here.” It was an honorable idea then; it still is. If anything, the fragility of the art-film exhibition, which has only been worsened by the pandemic, makes the festival’s support of movies like “Tótem” feel even more necessary than it did back then. And if I haven’t convinced you to get off the couch, then consider that this year the festival has sweetened its offerings with a smartly priced package of five movies for $50 — a cinephile carrot that’s as good as it gets.New Directors/New Films runs from Wednesday through April 9. For more information, go to newdirectors.org. More

A 60-year-old retiree travels to the Philippines to follow his dreams of stardom in this documentary.The documentary “I’m an Electric Lampshade” follows an unlikely subject: Doug McCorkle, who has spent nearly 20 years working as a corporate accountant in New York state. He’s a person of unassuming appearance — an older gentleman in glasses who is balding and not trying to hide it. His colleagues speak fondly of him in interviews, and McCorkle is happily married to his wife, Gina. They have no children, and they are economically comfortable enough to retire early.But despite his commonplace appearance, McCorkle’s retirement is an event that few are likely to forget. With Gina’s encouragement, McCorkle has decided to reinvent himself as a pop star, and his retirement party serves as a launch party for his first music video, an electronic track referencing drugs and sex.The director John Clayton Doyle follows McCorkle on his transformation, and the documentary changes as McCorkle’s project grows. What begins as a mixture of vérité footage and interviews morphs into a surreal travel documentary when McCorkle joins a training center for drag queens and aspiring actors in the Philippines. The film ends as a concert documentary for its 60-year-old star, who performs scantily clad and in glam-rock makeup.The film’s most direct critiques of McCorkle’s project pass by briefly in interludes during his trip to the Philippines. He is confronted by a fellow trainee, a Filipino drag queen named Fandango, who reminds McCorkle that he is essentially a tourist. But the film doesn’t linger on political critique, and it largely avoids asking the practical questions that might add dramatic weight to McCorkle’s dreams. The documentary hides the financial costs, physical tolls and even artistic philosophy, leaving only an exercise in ego.I’m an Electric LampshadeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or buy on most major streaming platforms. More