Movies

Paula Kelly, a tall, lithesome dancer who was one of the first African-American women to make a successful transition to movies and television from Broadway, using the musical “Sweet Charity” as the bridge, died on Saturday at a nursing facility in Whittier, Calif. She was 77. Her niece, Dina McCarthy, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Ms. Kelly burst into the movies in 1969 in “Sweet Charity,” an adaptation of the stage musical about an ever-hopeful taxi dancer — a dance partner for hire — in a run-down Times Square dance hall. Ms. Kelly played the dancer Helene, one of two best friends of the title character, Charity Hope Valentine, played by Shirley MacLaine. Chita Rivera played the other.Although lesser known than the movie’s big stars — Sammy Davis Jr. also had top billing — Ms. Kelly more than held her own, especially in the seductive number “Big Spender” and the energetic “There’s Got to Be Something Better Than This,” in which the three dance-hall girls express their determination to get respectable jobs.Onstage, Ms. Kelly played Helene in the London production of “Sweet Charity” (with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields and a book by Neil Simon). The director, Bob Fosse, who also directed and choreographed the show on Broadway, asked Ms. Kelly to reprise the role for the movie, which was to be his feature-film directorial debut.He called her “the best dancer I’ve ever seen.”Her performance in “Sweet Charity” landed her other acting roles in movies, among them the science-fiction thrillers “The Andromeda Strain” (1971) and “Soylent Green” (1973). It also led to multiple parts on television shows including the dramas “Hill Street Blues” and “Police Woman” and the sitcoms “The Golden Girls” and “Night Court,” in which she played a public defender, winning an Emmy Award nomination in 1984.Ms. Kelly earned another Emmy nomination for playing one of television’s first black lesbian characters, in the 1989 ABC mini-series “The Women of Brewster Place.” Adapted by Oprah Winfrey’s production company from a novel by Gloria Naylor, the mini-series, also featuring Ms. Winfrey and Cicely Tyson, was praised for showcasing the complexities of the lives of black women living in a tenement building. Ms. Kelly’s character, Theresa, lived in the building with her partner, Lorraine, played by Lonette McKee.Ms. Kelly had long caught the attention of critics. After seeing her in an adaptation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” on Broadway in 1971, Walter Kerr of The New York Times wrote, “I suspect you are going to notice her — cool and angular and with legs as elegantly articulated as an aristocratic crane’s — wherever she turns up.”“Some performers are performers,” he added; “a few are presences.”Paula Alma Kelly was born in Jacksonville, Fla., on Oct. 21, 1942, to Lehman Clarence and Ruth Naomi (Dempsey) Kelly. Like many black families of that era in the South, the Kellys and their three daughters joined the Great Migration and headed north when Paula was 6 months old, settling in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. Lehman Kelly became the superintendent of the apartment building where they lived, and Ruth Kelly worked in retail sales.The family arrived after the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, but many of its major figures were still there. The family’s neighbors included Billie Holiday, Johnny Hodges and Billy Strayhorn, and music was always emanating from open windows.“Before she was old enough to walk, Kelly would bob her head to the music of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Buddy Johnson,” her cousin Baron Kelly wrote in an entry in The National African-American Biography (2006).When she saw her first Broadway show, “West Side Story,” Ms. Kelly was inspired to pursue a career in dance. She auditioned successfully for admission to the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and won a scholarship to the dance program at Juilliard in 1960.During her second year there, she took six months off to make her professional dance debut on tour with Harry Belafonte. When she returned, she switched to Juilliard’s bachelor of arts program. She was scheduled to graduate in 1964 but, for reasons that remain unclear, left in June without getting her degree.But she was already on her way. She had made her Broadway debut that year in the musical “Something More!,” starring Barbara Cook, and was plucked for the London stage production of “Sweet Charity.”She was soon making dance appearances on “The Carol Burnett Show” and “The Dean Martin Show.” In 1967 she was a featured performer at the grand opening of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas with Jack Benny, Tony Bennett and Andy Williams.Two years later she put on a solo dance performance at the Academy Awards ceremony, where Sidney Poitier introduced her as “the sensational young dancer from ‘Sweet Charity,’” accompanied by the U.C.L.A. marching band.Much in demand that year, Ms. Kelly was seen on Broadway in “The Dozens,” a comedy with Morgan Freeman, and appeared nude in a photo shoot for Playboy magazine.In a busy career, Ms. Kelly starred in black-oriented films like “Cool Breeze” (1972) and “Trouble Man” (1972), which had a soundtrack by Marvin Gaye. She played Leggy Peggy, the wife of a congressman, in “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974), a comedy starring Mr. Poitier and Bill Cosby.But she never gave up the stage. In 1976 she helped choreograph a musical adaptation of “Peter Pan,” in which she played Tiger Lily. She also danced in a touring production of the Duke Ellington revue “Sophisticated Ladies” in 1982.In 1985, Ms. Kelly married Don Chaffey, a British film director, writer and producer. He died in 1990. She is survived by her longtime partner, George Parkington.Despite her many acting roles, Ms. Kelly’s first love was dance.“The only time I feel complete expression is when I’m dancing,” she told the black weekly The New Pittsburgh Courier in 1968. “Then I feel I have no problems, no worries, no hangups. I feel I could do anything in the world.” More

The French filmmaker Robert Bresson once said: “Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.” In “I Was at Home, but…,” the German director Angela Schanelec seems to have taken her ideas and stashed them deep in a private vault. Every so often, though, she cracks open this movie — with a line, an image, a snatch of a song — offering you fugitive glimpses of an intensely personal world. (It won her the best director award at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival.)“I Was at Home, but …” begins with a hare being chased by a dog across a rugged, bleached-out rural landscape. It’s a tense race for life — the hare is fast, the dog too — and invokes countless scenes of endangered bunnies, including in Renoir’s “Rules of the Game.” (Schanelec’s title, in turn, seems to nod at Ozu’s “I Was Born, but…”) The chase appears to end with the hare resting among an outcropping of rocks. This is followed by a brief, enigmatic interlude of a charming donkey wandering in a derelict house where the dog tears at a small, dead animal, presumably our hapless hare.After this mysterious opener, we cut to a girl in a red coat sitting alone on a curb in deep twilight, framed by a stand of trees in the background, a backpack next to her. The combination of the color of the coat, the isolation of the girl and the crepuscular woods brings to mind Little Red Riding Hood, an association that settles in your mind like an unformed thought. A boy — later revealed to be the son of the protagonist — walks by wordlessly. A few beats later there’s a shot of him in front of a brick building, where the buzzing of exterior lights mixes with bird calls and insects whirs.Not long after, the movie shifts to a classroom where a girl recites a line from “Hamlet”: “Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven light!” In the original, these words are spoken by the Player Queen in the play within the play, when she insists she would never remarry, an allusion that — like the Red Riding Hood imagery — settles in your head as a possible clue. As you cast about for meaning, you may remember Hamlet’s mother, the real queen, who in this same section says, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” This isn’t something one could say of Schanelec, whose narrative approach is austere and elliptical, and whose intentions can be so inscrutable that “I Was at Home, but …” can feel like a private reverie rather than one meant for sharing.The dog and the donkey return at the end of the movie, again without overt explanation. Between these bookended scenes, Schanelec focuses on a series of acquaintances, notably a woman, Astrid (Maren Eggert), who lives with her two children, including the boy seen earlier, who seems to have returned after a cryptic absence. Over time and outwardly disparate scenes — Astrid buys a used bicycle, comically harangues a filmmaker and visits her son’s teachers — a hazy yet moving mosaiclike portrait of this lonely, melancholic woman emerges. And while you end up knowing little about Astrid, you sense (and feel) her grief, which saturates this movie.Throughout, Schanelec’s color and framing are impeccable, the shots harmoniously balanced. She uses a lot of natural light, which imparts a near-radiant glow to some of the compositions and particularly to faces. The beauty of these visuals goes a long way to keeping you tethered to “I Was at Home, but…,” as do your own well-conditioned attempts to wrest a story from a movie that seems reluctant to offer you one. In most mainstream cinema, the story tugs you along — or prods you into its mazelike corridors and toward dead ends — encouraging you to wonder what happens next. Schanelec offers next to no such prompts, trusting that you’ll keep watching anyway.Whether you do will largely depend on your enjoyment of (or tolerance for) narrative ellipses, and your curiosity about how these faces, quotes, allusions and interstitial moments together create meaning. Sometimes, as with the girl in red, Schanelec seems to be drawing from a culturally shared storehouse of images, using certain visuals for their associative or symbolic resonance. That appears to be the case too with the donkey, whose presence may be a reference to the title figure in Bresson’s masterpiece “Au Hasard Balthazar.” This allusion, though, only becomes evident after — and if — you recognize that her precise framing also owes a great debt to Bresson.His influence is also apparent in the performances, which can be borderline affectless. The exception is Eggert, whose quiet eloquence serves as an anchor even when her face is drained of visible emotion, an emptiness that makes its flashes of animation more effective than they might otherwise be. In one of the most touching interludes, Astrid lies on the ground as a man sings Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” on the soundtrack, the song continuing over a flashback of her and her kids dancing in a hospital room. Their audience remains offscreen, though you guess it’s the father who haunts this story. And then Astrid smiles, creating a small shock that turns into a stab of feeling as you remember the moment when the Player Queen says “If, once a widow, ever I be wife!”I Was at Home, but …Not rated. In German, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

Tom and Joan are a long-married couple whose daily routines — walking for exercise, shopping for groceries, trading affectionate pretend insults — signal deep affection and easy intimacy. The movie about a trying year in their lives is called “Ordinary Love,” and the opening scenes paint a modest, careful picture of unexceptional middle-class existence.The catch — and also the point — is that these unassuming people are played by two extraordinary actors: Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville. The film, directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn from a screenplay by Owen McCafferty, is nearly a two-hander, and the hands are played with discipline, grace and wit. Neeson, taking a break from his usual wintertime angry-dad action-movie duties, is wry and crinkly, his loose limbs and craggy features suggesting great power in repose. Manville is a sharp, quicksilver presence, her face hovering between impatience and astonishment. The two of them communicate absolute trust in each other, and inspire the same in the audience. You are prepared to believe everything they say and do.[embedded content]But you may also wish there were more. The narrative of “Ordinary Love,” which stretches between two Christmases, deals with what happens after Joan finds a lump in her left breast. There are tests, more tests, surgery and chemotherapy — the grim, anxious, absurd routines of modern cancer treatment.“There won’t be a minute that I won’t be there with you,” Tom promises, and though he is true to his word, Joan’s illness subjects their relationship to complicated stresses and shocks. They are going through it together, but in a cruelly asymmetrical fashion. The caregiver and the patient are allies, but neither one shares the other’s particular suffering, which threatens to turn them into adversaries.D’Sa and Leyburn (“Cherrybomb,” “Good Vibrations”) convey this with a sensitivity that is both admirable and frustrating, casting a tasteful, restrained hush over potentially unruly emotions. The music (by David Holmes and Brian Irvine) modulates from nervous to soothing to sad, and the editing (by Nick Emerson) folds one scene tactfully into the next. It has often been said that war movies inevitably glorify combat, and it’s also true that movies about grave illness tend to sentimentalize its ravages. That is the case here: An experience often defined by dread, indignity and tedium is softened and made beautiful.There are, nonetheless, a handful of scenes that have the rough, tender pulse of real life. The major problem is that, beyond the cancer and their devotion to each other, Tom and Joan seem barely to have lives at all. We know that they had a daughter, named Debbie, who died, though we don’t know how or how long ago that tragedy occurred. Tom and Joan have, as far as we can tell, no other family, no jobs and no friends, though they do strike up an acquaintance with a couple they meet at the hospital.Tom feeds the fish in his aquarium, and he and Joan take daily power walks and squabble about nutrition, but any cultural interests or political opinions they might have remain unspoken. Or else left blank by the filmmakers, who depend on Neeson and Manville to fill in the script’s empty spaces with the force of their personalities. It almost works, but as persuasive as the performers can be, Tom and Joan seem less real the more time you spend with them.Ordinary LoveRated R. Sexuality. Profanity. Mortality. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. More

Last month, when Bong Joon Ho, the South Korean director of the film “Parasite,” accepted the Golden Globe for best foreign language film, he teased American moviegoers that a whole world of wonderful cinema awaited them beyond Hollywood.“Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” Bong said during his acceptance speech.In the United States, foreign language films with subtitles rarely gain the traction that “Parasite” has. It won over both audiences and critics and raked in more than $35 million on its way to winning four Academy Awards on Sunday, capping a glittering awards season with a best picture Oscar. It was the first film not in English to take home the top prize in the Academy’s 92-year history.It was a seismic night for fans of foreign films in the United States, where moviegoers have historically preferred their popular films in English. And it left some wondering: Are those one-inch-tall subtitles still a barrier?Even before “Parasite,” a thriller about the class divide in South Korea, took off, there were signs that things had begun to shift for subtitled entertainment in the United States. The film joined a small group of subtitled films that have broken through to mainstream success in Hollywood over the last two decades, like “Roma” (2018), “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006), “Amelie” (2001) and “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” (2000), a Chinese drama that earned $128 million, making it the highest grossing foreign language film in the United States.Over the same period, as streaming services have replaced network and cable television, subtitles have also gained a stronger toehold on smaller screens, from cellphones to TV sets.Researchers credit the shift in part to two factors. The first is a 2016 rule from the Federal Communications Commission that made it mandatory for a TV show that has been captioned for broadcast to also be captioned when it is posted online or on a streaming service such at Netflix or Hulu. The second factor, they say, is Netflix itself. It is the most popular streaming platform in the United States, with more than 60 million paid subscribers, and much of its original content is in languages other than English.More than 50 percent of the audiences for the Netflix shows “Dark,” which is in German, and “3%”, which is in Portuguese, are international. A Netflix spokeswoman pointed to “Narcos,” a series about drug dealers in Mexico and Colombia. It has scenes in both Spanish and English, and uses subtitles for the Spanish dialogue, but that hasn’t kept the show from being popular, she said.What’s happening in your brainFor people who dislike subtitles, common complaints have been that they distract from the action onscreen, are hard to focus on, or that reading them can feel like work if a plot is complicated. Dubbing, in which speech in the target audience’s language replaces the original dialogue, is an easier alternative, some say.And it’s true that watching a movie with subtitles is cognitively different than watching one without, experts say.“Whenever you are watching a movie there is a whole orchestra’s worth of things happening in your brain,” said Jeffrey Zacks, a professor of psychology and brain science at Washington University.“That information includes what the words are and how they are ordered but also information about pitch and amplitude, which tells you a lot about emotional expression,” he added.The need to read to understand what is going on means you have to use other parts of your brain, according to Tim Smith, an associate professor of cognitive psychology at Birkbeck, University of London.But there is no scientific proof that the extra cognitive load is what keeps people from plopping down in front of a screen to read and watch a subtitled movie, Smith said.Rather, the extra work does not necessarily detract from the experience the movie has to offer, he said.“When you’re watching a subtitled movie, you have to be engaged with the screen and be more attached, but once you engage with that, you can have as rich an experience as if it were your language,” he said.How much have audience tastes changed?When it comes to subtitled films, there’s what happens in your brain, and there’s what happens in the entertainment business.In the 1930s, subtitles for foreign-language films were called English explanatory titles. One man who translated over 300 films in the early Hollywood era, Herman G. Weinberg, was profiled in 1947 by The New Yorker, which called him the “nuance preserver.” He started with literal translations from the original language, and then worked from there.“We’re adapters, rather than translators,” he told the magazine of the work he and his three assistants performed. “We try not to lose any wisecracks, even if it means stepping up the pace, because an American will hear a couple of Frenchmen in the audience howl at a joke in French and it burns him up not to be in on it.”Weinberg was credited with the superimposed titles for the smash hit German film “Zwei Herzen im Dreiviertel-Takt,” or Two Hearts in Waltz Time. The film is considered by many to be the first subtitled for the American market.Through the 1950s, subtitled foreign language films were marketable in the United States, according to Carol O’Sullivan, a historian of film translation at the University of Bristol in the U.K.“There were two big audiences for subtitled films,” she said. “You were either really well-read or were from an immigrant community that knew the language,” she said.Back then, movies from around the world were mainly being shown in New York, she said, and if they found success there, they would be shown elsewhere.But few foreign films could ever surpass a Hollywood movie at the box office, O’Sullivan said.In the 1970s, as American films became more experimental, diverse and exciting, the marketability of foreign language films diminished, Dr. O’Sullivan said, adding that not much has changed.“The situation has always been that there are more standout successes,” she said.Theater owners, from national chains to local independents, have yet to find the surefire formula to marketing a subtitled foreign language film.About a decade ago, the national theater chain AMC decided it wanted to show more subtitled films — and make money doing it. To help with the effort, it hired Nikkole Denson-Randolph to be the vice president of content strategy and inclusive programming.Despite a growing acceptance of subtitles, a movie still has to be captivating to make it in the American market, Denson-Randolph said.“There are a couple of distributors who have kind of figured out how to attract a younger psyche,” Denson-Randolph said. “Films that can attract attention are very character-driven.”“Parasite,” she said, had what it took to succeed in the American market, including a hefty marketing budget.“Inherently the film was slick, and the direction was gorgeous, she said. “It is much harder when you don’t have a budget and you’re targeting a different audience.”For the past 10 years, Denson-Randolph has brought more subtitled foreign language movies to American screens, somefrom China and some from India’s Bollywood.“We are opening dozens of subtitled foreign language films a month, some on one screen, some on 10, as we learn what our guests are looking to watch,” Denson-Randolph said, adding that AMC has not yet been able to crack the code.“We have seen a lot of distributors attempt to produce the same magic as ‘Parasite,’” she said. “But if you don’t know who the audience is, it’s hard to make them work.”In the art world, subtitled films can always find an audience, said O’Sullivan, the film translation historian.“Subtitled films cannot compete with Hollywood in market terms but they could compete in cultural prestige terms,” she said. “They have always been more important in cultural circles.”In the past, theaters were selective about what movies they showed, because of limited distribution. For many subtitled films, audiences had to go to special cinemas. But with digital distribution and streaming, there is a larger opportunity for a wider audience to watch foreign films.Today Netflix adds subtitles to their content in 28 languages, allowing their content to be marketable in different countries.“We’re seeing a growing number of our members choosing shows and films that transcend borders, and cultures,” a Netflix spokeswoman said.Watching a movie with subtitles may require more brain activity but cinema is a great way to look at the world, said Dennis Lim, the director of programming at Film at Lincoln Center, one of New York’s premiere independent theaters.“What it requires is orienting your eyes and your body and your cognitive system to stay on that task,” Zacks, the Washington University professor, said. “You don’t need so much.” More

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — “The Hunt” is back on. Only this time Universal Pictures has designed a radically different marketing campaign for the violent film, which is ostensibly about liberal elites who kill conservative “rednecks” for sport.Before “The Hunt” was shelved last year in the face of criticism, Universal had started to market the film as something it was not: a relatively straightforward horror flick. Now the studio is hoping that an unusual marketing tactic — forthrightness — will protect “The Hunt” from blowback before its release on March 13.A new trailer, released on Tuesday, does not try to boil down “The Hunt” to a single, salable genre, which is the way Hollywood usually approaches films. Instead it presents “The Hunt” as it is — an absurdist satire that leaves no side of the political divide unscathed and is equal parts comedy, horror and thriller.“Not one frame was changed,” Jason Blum, who produced the film with Damon Lindelof (“Lost,” “Watchmen”), said in an interview. “This is exactly the same movie.”“The Hunt,” starring the Emmy-nominated Betty Gilpin (Netflix’s “Glow”) and the two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank, was supposed to arrive in theaters in September. Trailers in July veiled the political aspect of the $15 million film and made it resemble an entry in the Universal’s dystopian “Purge” horror series. Universal had not yet screened “The Hunt” for film reporters or critics.Then 31 people were killed in back-to-back shootings in Texas and Ohio. The Hollywood Reporter published an article saying Universal had pulled ads for “The Hunt” as a result. The article, based on a copy of the script, also disclosed that the movie revolved “around third-rail political themes” — notably elites stalking “deplorables.”An outcry followed, with conservative pundits criticizing the film’s premise as “sick” and “awful.” Before long, President Trump alluded to “The Hunt” on Twitter, saying it was made by liberal Hollywood “to inflame and cause chaos.”Caught in a maelstrom, Universal canceled the release, leading to accusations of censorship.Universal, a division of NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast, said on Tuesday that it would give the film a wide release in theaters. It also invited a handful of reporters to its campus in the San Fernando Valley to watch “The Hunt” in the Alfred Hitchcock Building and discuss it afterward with Mr. Blum and Mr. Lindelof.“We didn’t want to just pretend that nothing had ever happened,” Mr. Blum said.Mr. Lindelof, who wrote the screenplay with Nick Cuse, said “The Hunt” had been inspired by “Get Out,” the blockbuster comedic mystery, social satire and horror film directed and written by Jordan Peele. (Mr. Blum was a producer.) It may be hard to believe, but Mr. Lindelof insisted that he had never expected “The Hunt” to prompt political blowback, certainly not on a presidential level.“It didn’t strike me as third rail,” Mr. Lindelof said of the film. He added of Mr. Trump: “I wish that he had seen it. The movie he was talking about was not the movie I feel that we made.”“The Hunt” begins (spoiler warning) with a close-up shot of text messages on a phone. One reads, “Promise you won’t judge me?” The conversation is about killing “deplorables” for sport. The discussion seems serious. Or is it in jest, albeit in very poor taste?The film, directed by Craig Zobel, whose credits include the well-reviewed 2015 thriller “Z for Zachariah,” then introduces the unlikable elites. One snootily rejects the caviar offered to him by an attendant on a private jet. He would prefer figs. There aren’t any? Sigh. Champagne will have to suffice.A dozen strangers then wake up in a clearing in the woods. All are overt stereotypes. A woman from Wyoming rocks a spectacular mullet. One older man wears a beige fishing shirt and a military cap.The liberal elites then begin the slaughter. “For the record, climate change is real!” one shrieks before blowing up a victim.Then one of the people being hunted turns the tables, picking off the killers one by one until only the ringleader remains. Slaying the liberals is not terribly difficult: They are easily distracted — bickering with one another over politically correct language, squealing in delight when the progressive filmmaker Ava DuVernay likes a social media post about their volunteer work in Haiti.By the end of the R-rated film, the story has included a paramilitary unit in Croatia, a dark internet conspiracy theory, a killing by stiletto pump and a pig wearing a T-shirt.“As anyone who has seen the movie can attest, it’s all so over the top and absurd,” Mr. Lindelof said. “It’s possible that people will see this movie and say it’s irresponsible or is a call to violence. But the morality of the movie” — who is left standing at the end — “has always felt very clean to us.”As any Hollywood marketer will tell you, it is exceeding difficult to burnish a film once an unfavorable narrative has formed around it. So part of Universal’s new marketing strategy involves embracing the ugliness. “The most talked about movie of the year is one that no one’s actually seen,” Universal’s new poster says. “Decide for yourself.”But the new trailer also marks “a big tonal shift,” as Mr. Lindelof said. Rather than a horror movie with some social commentary, à la “The Purge,” “The Hunt” is shown as a comedic social satire with some horror elements. In particular, the new trailer plays up the absurdity of the premise.“You wanted it to be real, so you decided it was,” Ms. Swank’s character says sternly.Which leads to a question: Why didn’t Universal take this approach to begin with?Michael Moses, Universal’s marketing chief, declined to discuss the studio’s initial strategy or the shift revealed on Tuesday except to say in an email: “To simply restart the previous campaign felt like it ignores what transpired. We thought it appropriate to acknowledge the film’s history and also the potential curiosity around it.”The initial strategy probably boiled down to Movie Marketing 101. Satires are hard to explain to a mass audience. Horror films are easier. More

“Wild: Life, Death and Love in a Wildlife Hospital” and “Waiting for Giraffes,” documentaries paired for a double bill opening Wednesday at Film Forum, are both relatively short and feature animals and Middle Eastern settings, but they take different approaches. “Wild” is a gentle, observational movie for animal-lovers; “Waiting for Giraffes” has its eye on geopolitical issues.“Wild” is a largely fly-on-the-wall-style portrait of an Israeli veterinary hospital where animals hit by cars or shot, for example, are tenderly rehabilitated.[embedded content]The directors, Uriel Sinai and Danel Elpeleg, are interested not only in the animals but also in the humans who look after them. Shmulik Landau, a tireless caretaker, patiently helps an unsteady young gazelle stay on her feet and eases her pain with medication and massages. (He died in 2017, and the movie is dedicated to him.) The devoted veterinarian Ariela Rosenzweig Bueler persists in finding an obstruction in a hyena’s digestive tract, even when her colleagues are about to give up. And confronted with a wild ass who has suffered a shattered bone, she explores options for healing an animal who might otherwise need to be euthanized.The charms of “Wild” are minor, lying mainly in the pleasure of watching the animals and the big-hearted professionals devoted to them.“Waiting for Giraffes,” at least initially, seems to have a broader scope. It follows Dr. Sami Khader, a Palestinian veterinarian at the Qalqilya Zoo in the West Bank, who is seeking to boost his institution’s visibility and access to animals by gaining admission to the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria.The film, by the Italian-born director Marco De Stefanis, opens by quoting the organization’s standards on enclosures, which should be built “to avoid the risk of persistent and unresolved conflict.” The excerpt offers an obvious metaphor for the Israeli-occupied West Bank.The title refers to potential replacements for a giraffe the zoo had that died. Various people onscreen share the reasons they have heard for its death, which may have been connected to violence in the region.But “Waiting for Giraffes” doesn’t lean hard into its occupation-as-a-zoo theme. It is largely devoted to earnestly celebrating Khader’s mission. He takes seriously a recommendation that his job is to bring the animal kingdom to West Bank Palestinians whose travel is controlled by the miles of barriers Israel has erected.“We can’t visit the sea,” a prospective zoo visitor says. “An aquarium with fish would be a compensation.”Waiting for GiraffesNot rated. In Arabic, with English subtitles. Running time: 55 minutes.Wild: Life, Death and Love in a Wildlife HospitalNot rated. In Hebrew, with English subtitles. Running time: 59 minutes. More