Aurelia Butler

On a whim, a Frenchwoman goes to visit South Korea, the country of her birth, in Davy Chou’s drama.“Return to Seoul” is a startling and uneasy wonder, a film that feels like a beautiful sketch of a tornado headed directly toward your house. The first-time actor Park Ji-Min, a French artist, delivers a full-bodied performance as Frédérique Benoît, a reckless 25-year-old adoptee born in South Korea and raised in Paris who books a flight to her birthplace on a whim. Freddie doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t have the names of her biological parents, and doesn’t want to blend in. Nudged to obey the local custom of pouring alcohol only for others, she snatches a bottle of soju and chugs.In this boozy opening sequence, the writer-director Davy Chou unleashes a character who, one senses, has never felt comfortable anywhere. Magnetic, sexy, mercurial and bold, Freddie is an object of fascination to everyone she meets: a bookish hotel clerk (Guka Han), a sweet-faced nerd who wants more than a one-night stand (Kim Dong-Seok), a grimy tattooer with a stash of psychedelics (Lim Cheol-Hyun) and an international arms dealer twice her age (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) who arranges a rendezvous on a hookup app.Freddie craves stimulation, shifting personalities several times over the eight years of the film — tomboy to glamour punk to wellness drone — confessing that South Korea’s effect on her is “toxic.” The script, shot in vivid colors by the cinematographer Thomas Favel, doesn’t indulge in psychoanalysis. Still, it’s not hard to imagine how a kid who couldn’t help standing out in the schoolyard would grow into a misfit incapable of forming genuine bonds with those she meets and discards.Chou himself is the French-born grandson of a Cambodian film producer who vanished in 1969 as the Khmer Rouge began to seize control and shred the country’s movie industry, and he seems to understand the contradictions in Freddie’s feeling that she’s been robbed of a life she doesn’t actually want to live. The director is intrigued by dislocation, and is attentive to both its dry specifics and its messy frustrations. The film credibly details the strict procedure through which South Korean adoption agencies connect children to their estranged families (telegrams!), yet the reveal that Freddie’s blood relatives named her Yeon-hee, meaning “docile and joyful,” lands like a bitter joke. Clearly, they never knew her in the slightest.Park’s trickiest scenes are with the fantastic actor Oh Kwang-Rok as Freddie’s birth father, an air conditioning repairman who, like her, acts out when he’s drunk. Their time together feels both momentous and aggressively dull: awkward lunches, boring drives, stilted exchanges of banalities peppered with grand statements that strike Freddie as pushy and overly paternalistic. Barriers of language and resentment are difficult to surmount, especially when the acquaintance Freddie totes along to interpret pads their conversation with anxious politesse, making a frank talk frankly impossible.When communication fails, music takes charge. Jérémie Arcache and Christophe Musset’s score is made of thrumming drums and insistent bleeps, building twice to explosions where Park dances with abandon, gyrating as though Freddie doesn’t care if she sees anyone in Seoul ever again. The camera chases after this human whirlwind, and we’re thrilled to be swept up in her storm.Return to SeoulRated R for drug use and nudity. In Korean and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

With arresting interviews and archival footage, this documentary looks back at a 1960s voting-rights campaign in Alabama that gave rise to a national movement for Black power.“Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power” opens with interviews with men and women who grew up in the titular Alabama county in the 1960s. The Black interviewees, children of sharecroppers, recall an atmosphere of poverty, racism and bloody violence; their white counterparts, members of landowning families, remember a “peaceful, almost idyllic place.”These discrepant versions of life in Lowndes set the stage for Sam Pollard and Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary, which retraces the story of how one of the most inequitable, fiercely segregated counties in America gave rise to a national movement for Black power. In 1965, Lowndes had no registered Black voters, despite its population being 80 percent Black. The directors follow the ripples of change that started when a local man, John Hulett, began organizing Black voters, culminating in the founding of a new party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, with an influential symbol: the black panther.The film teases out one of the many microhistories in the Civil Rights movement. Notably, Lowndes did not see the sustained involvement of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; instead, its grass-roots struggle drew the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, led by Stokely Carmichael, which took a more local — and more radical — approach.Yet the power of the collective, more so than any individuals, is the focus here. The film is anchored with the arresting faces of Lowndes locals and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers, who recall a range of stirring details — from setting up camp in a house with no running water to internal debates over the term “Black power.” The archival footage, too, mixes protest images and quotidian scenes, illustrating the simple acts of community that underlie any political movement.Lowndes County and the Road to Black PowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

Set in the early days of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this drama depicts the upheaval of Palestinian society from a 14-year-old girl’s perspective.Set in 1948, the year that Israel declared independence, spurring a war that would result in the upheaval of Palestinian society, “Farha” depicts a relatively small-scale tragedy considering the scope of the violence. Yet the drama, which primarily unfolds in a tiny storage room, speaks volumes.The film, by the Jordanian writer-director Darin J. Sallam, is a brutal kind of coming-of-age story. It follows Farha (Karam Taher), a plucky 14-year-old who chafes against gendered traditions. She petitions her father (Ashraf Barhom), the leader of their village, to let her go to school in the city with her best friend, Farida (Tala Gammoh). Dad eventually concedes, with nudges from a modern-minded relative, but Farha’s time on cloud nine is abruptly cut short.Sallam doesn’t go out of her way to detail the politics fueling the moment — basic knowledge of what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) that impacted the region at the time should make it clear that the newly arrived soldiers are from the Israel Defense Forces.From Farha’s teen-girl perspective, life is scowling at boys and daydreaming about urban adventures. So when the gunfire starts and the village descends into chaos, it’s all a blur. Not grasping the dangers, Farha impulsively jumps out of the family getaway vehicle, refusing to leave her father behind.Almost immediately, Farha’s father throws her into a storage cellar and locks her in for her safety. She remains there for an indefinite amount of time, rummaging through the preserves, catching rainwater, peering out of a peephole. She finds a gun buried inside a sack of grains — was the threat present all along?One day, a scene of great barbarity plays out before her tiny window, with the camera approximating Farha’s obstructed point of view. Most of the rest of the time, however, Sallam keeps the camera fixed on Farha’s face. Farha doesn’t do much besides wait, yet, by simply looking at this young girl, we witness a devastating transformation.FarhaNot rated. In Arabic and Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

Luke Evans, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley lend their voices to this animated musical of the holiday classic.In a season of movies that singe the rich — we see you “The Menu” and “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” — the animated musical “Scrooge: A Christmas Carol” spares one of literature’s more infamous capitalists, Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge (voiced by Luke Evans). Perhaps “spares” is not the right word for what Jacob Marley’s partner in predatory lending endures in the director Stephen Donnelly’s vivid if hardly warranted adaptation of Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella.The timing for Dickens’s Industrial Revolution jabs may be apt, but this outing’s gilded extravagance muffles the author’s less-is-moral observations. The animation waxes psychedelic. The songs, arranged by Jeremy Holland-Smith, often have an auditioning-for-Broadway belt to them. The opener “I Love Christmas” — with Scrooge’s good-hearted nephew, Harry (Fra Fee), singing and dancing his way to his uncle’s establishment — feels pushy.Before his death in 2021, the distinguished lyricist-composer Leslie Bricusse wrote that new song. Holland-Smith and Donnelly penned two others, and the arranger revamped the other songs, which Bricusse had created for the 1970 adaptation, “Scrooge,” including the Oscar-nominated, zest-for-life-and-death number “Thank You Very Much.” That film starred Albert Finney and featured Alec Guinness as Jacob Marley. This cast, too, brims with class acts: Jonathan Pryce as the cautioning Marley; Olivia Colman as Past; Jessie Buckley as Scrooge’s onetime fiancée. Especially winning are Giles Terera (as Tom Jenkins) and Trevor Dion Nicholas as that most Falstaffian of the Christmas Eve ghosts, Present.This update has its moments of aplomb, but too many of Dickens’s most incisive lines are no more, which invites the not entirely charitable, two-word retort Scrooge made famous.Scrooge: A Christmas CarolNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

A dense espionage narrative proves all too tangled in this directorial debut from the South Korean actor Lee Jung-jae.“Hunt,” the feature directorial debut of the South Korean actor Lee Jung-jae (a star of “Squid Game”), is a tangled espionage thriller that recalls the suspenseful works of the British novelist John le Carré.Set during the early 1980s, the film, dominated by flashbacks, features double crosses, subterfuge, geopolitical angst and professional regret as the backdrop to an intense pursuit by two competing intelligence agents — Park Pyong-ho (Lee) and Kim Jung-do (Jung Woo-sung) — to uncover a North Korean mole embedded in their agency who intends to assassinate South Korea’s president.A dense narrative bursting with elaborate red herrings proves an unmanageable mess as the film wears on. Kim and Park accuse each other of being the spy; student protests explode; missions misfire; anonymous soldiers eliminate key witnesses; and Kim uses an allegation of treason against Park’s adoptive daughter (Go Yoon-jung) as blackmail. All of this is barely held together by vigorous shootouts littered throughout. Lee’s overt visual homages to Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” and Ben Affleck’s “Argo,” his keen eye for period detail, the rising body count and the moral quandary that arises when Park and Kim question their loyalty to their country do little to reclaim one’s interest.A convoluted conclusion, begot by an unconvincing change of heart, obliterates any chance of “Hunt” offering the clarity it needs to be entertaining. Instead, Lee’s directorial effort wanders toward something unmemorable.HuntNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 11 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

This documentary highlights Robert Downey Sr.’s charisma and curiosity even when it shows him in decline.In the films he directed in the late 1960s, Robert Downey Sr. credited himself as “A Prince.” It was a private joke typical of the antic artist. As he told Johnny Carson (he was one of a very few “underground filmmakers” to get booked on “The Tonight Show”), “I’m too young to be a king.”The man was not, as it happens, consistently courtly. But his son, Robert Downey Jr., the movie star, notes in this picture that his dad was “a very charismatic guy who had different ideas and curiosity.”“Sr.,” a documentary directed by Chris Smith, with Robert Downey Jr. providing a strong production hand and onscreen presence, highlights that charisma and curiosity even when it shows the older Downey in decline. (He died in 2021 of complications from Parkinson’s.) The focus here is divided between the father-son relationship and the father’s groundbreaking work. The elder Downey’s absurdist films, including the furious satire “Putney Swope,” are the connective tissue between underground movies and the Marx Brothers.Downey‌ was a permissive parent in bohemian ’60s mode, and also a cocaine enthusiast in his post-“Swope” years. Downey Jr. had his own harrowing period of addiction that included a stint in prison. “We would be remiss not to discuss its effect on me,” Downey‌‌ Jr.‌‌ says of his dad’s cocaine years. “I would sure love to miss that discussion,” Downey‌‌ Sr. replies dryly. But the details of how the father cleaned up, became a caregiver to his terminally ill second wife and tried to help his son are terribly moving.Downey Jr. speaks of this movie as an exercise in trying to understand his father. But by the end of this short but satisfying exploration, the viewer realizes that he gets him better than he even knows. “He is connected to some sort of creative deity,” Downey Jr. says. It’s an apt summation.Sr.Rated R for language, themes, raw humor. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

Claire Foy: We formed a really strong bond [working on the movie “Women Talking,” out this month]. It felt like so little time had passed since the shoot [in summer 2021], and the film went down really well [at its New York Film Festival premiere in October], so it was a wonderful, cyclical thing to enjoy it together.We exposed a lot about ourselves [at this dinner] and were very honest in our opinions — that’s just the way we speak to one another. But what happens in the hayloft stays in the hayloft [where much of the movie, which takes place within an isolated religious community, unfolds].Sarah Polley: This has always been a really fun, imaginative, intellectually stimulating group of people. Claire is a real truth teller; Rooney [Mara, who didn’t attend the dinner] does a lot of connecting; Jessie [Buckley, who was away filming] is the life of every party; Judy [Ivey] is incredibly wise but holds that wisdom lightly; Sheila [McCarthy] is a bridge builder and peacemaker; Michelle [McLeod] always sees the “funny” in a moment; Liv [McNeil] is an attuned observer; and Kate [Hallett] can imagine how people feel before they feel it.Our conversations weave fluidly in and out of very serious and light things — sharing things personally and talking about the world at large — which is, I think, what groups of women who are close do. I’ve been fascinated by how women in groups don’t finish one line item, resolve it, then move on to the next. It’s not a linear thing.On the CoverFrom left: McCarthy, Hallett, McLeod, Polley, Foy, McNeil, Gardner and Ivey of the film “Women Talking.”Jason SchmidtThe attendees: All from the “Women Talking” family, the guest list included its director, Sarah Polley, 43; its producer Dede Gardner, 55; and its actors Claire Foy, 38; Judith Ivey, 71; Sheila McCarthy, 66; Michelle McLeod, age withheld; Liv McNeil, 17; and Kate Hallett, 18.The food: The mushroom risotto at Lincoln Ristorante at Lincoln Center took both Foy and Polley aback — Foy enjoyed it despite being suspicious of fungi ever since watching the poisoning scene in “Phantom Thread” (2017), and Polley because it was “the best I’ve ever had in my life.”The conversation: They all discussed Hallett’s first visit to New York City (she’d never been) and Ivey’s 1992 turn on “Celebrity Jeopardy!,” where, as Polley put it, she got “smoked” by Luke Perry. In keeping with a theme of “Women Talking,” they also talked about sexism (Polley says that’s “probably something that comes up often for women everywhere in groups”).Polley has picked these songs for gatherings she’s thrown in the past:Interviews have been edited and condensed.All Together Now More