Movies

You’ll want nothing so much as a woolly sweater when you see “The Lodge,” a film so wintry in tone and setting that no movie-theater thermostat will banish its chill. Even so, the directors, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (the Austrian pair who made “Goodnight Mommy” in 2015), have coaxed only a disappointingly timorous horrorscape from that marvelously glacial mood.There’s no denying their competence — they have style to burn — and their cinematographer, Thimios Bakatakis, is a wonder at painting dark and dread-filled interiors and ominously snow-blanketed surroundings. Both distinguish the titular remote lodge where Richard (Richard Armitage) has dumped his two children, Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh), a few days before Christmas. While Richard, a successful nonfiction author, works in town, his recently traumatized kids must get to know their soon-to-be stepmother, Grace (Riley Keough) — who just happens to be the sole, pill-popping survivor of a religious cult that committed mass suicide.[embedded content]More unsettling than terrifying, the story (by the directors and Sergio Casci) builds to a leisurely, irresolute and unsatisfying climax. As a snowstorm hems them in, the children watch Grace with unconcealed suspicion. Aiden, the older of the two, knows her history from reading one of his father’s books; but though Grace may be fraying from gruesome flashbacks and hideous dreams, it’s Aiden who’s by far the creepier.Despite its visual flair and unrelentingly taut atmosphere, “The Lodge” is more successful in sustaining unease — like the eerie, unexplained shots of a spooky dollhouse — than in building a convincing narrative. Ultimately, its message seems to be: Just because you’re bonkers doesn’t mean the specters of your past aren’t out to get you.The LodgeRated R for guns, ghosts and a little nudity. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. More

Debates persist about the appropriate ways to depict World War II onscreen, but “stodgily familiar,” which describes “Waiting for Anya,” is probably not the most historically sensitive mode.This child’s-eye view of Occupied France is set in a village in the Pyrenees, where, at the outset, Jo (Noah Schnapp), a shepherd’s son, spots a bear and alerts adults. The bear, a mother, is killed (the better to be used as a metaphor).Soon after, Jo discovers that at a nearby farm, a woman (Anjelica Huston) is hiding a Jewish man (Frederick Schmidt) and a growing number of children. His ability to keep that secret, even while he goes eagle-watching with a Nazi corporal (Thomas Kretschmann), is a test of mettle.[embedded content]“Waiting for Anya” is not so sentimental that it imagines every character can escape death. But it has little use for complexity. If there are Nazi collaborators among the French here, for instance, they don’t have notable speaking parts. And making the most prominent German officer sympathetic to saving Jewish children avoids reckoning with the depths of the Third Reich’s evils.Based on a novel by Michael Morpugo (author of “War Horse”), this film suffers from other deficits of verisimilitude. Characters speak English with such strong accents it’s odd that the director, Ben Cookson, didn’t opt for French and German. And as harrowing as Jo’s ordeal may be, the movie doesn’t fail to provide the obligatory uplift.Waiting for AnyaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. More

In “Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made,” streaming on Disney Plus and based on the first book in Stephan Pastis’s children’s series, the amateur gumshoe Timmy (Winslow Fegley) uses a gargantuan vocabulary to indicate his precocity, his work as a detective tantamount to his sense of self. As he runs a little agency out of the cramped home he shares with his two-job-juggling single mother and a C.G.I. polar bear named Total as his sidekick, “normal is for normal people” becomes one of his mantras to explain his idiosyncrasies.The elementary-schooler would probably be at home in a Dashiell Hammett novel on the trail of a chocolate Maltese Falcon, as he speaks semi-exclusively in detective/cop dialogue, saying things like, “affirmative,” asking about Russian operatives (read: Portland hipsters) and repeating his other mantra: “Mistakes were made.” When a backpack goes missing, a hamster turns up dead and the “Failure Mobile” (his mother’s Segway) disappears, Timmy Failure is on the case, an imagined Holmesian intuition on hand.[embedded content]Yet, in spite of the cutesy little mystery threads that the film initially begins weaving, the director Tom McCarthy’s focus is more on the boy’s outsider status. His grades are bad, his family is lower income, the kids at school think he’s weird and he easily exasperates adults. The film could have contrasted the absurdities of Timmy’s world with the reality around him by using the clichés of film noir to create a smoky, illusive fantasy, while occasionally popping that bubble, like in Rian Johnson’s high school-set mystery “Brick.” Instead, it prefers outsized “30 Rock”-like asides that illustrate Timmy’s imagination straightforwardly, but not interestingly or with charm.There isn’t enough in the way of good jokes or clever references to investigators of yore to make the film appealing, and the flatness of Timmy’s delivery, which is supposed to scan as deadpan, doesn’t contain enough nuances to make much of the humor land. Maybe in a few years, the detective can dive into another mystery that deserves to be solved.Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were MadeRated PG for some language, thematic elements and a child being rude in the name of private investigation. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. More

More than one set of male genitals appears to be savaged in “Come to Daddy” (others, happily, are displayed without penalty), but not until the midpoint of this dementedly comic thriller do we recognize the means of reproduction as its driving force.Of course, any movie that features the line “Semen contains more protein and nutrients than an ear,” and opens with paired quotations from Shakespeare and Beyoncé, might not be entirely on the level. So thinks Norval (Elijah Wood), a music-industry poseur, of his out-of-the-blue summons to the isolated shoreside home of his long-estranged father. His misgivings only deepen when the drunken, mercurial man who greets him (Stephen McHattie) provokes a confrontation that leaves Norval facing more mayhem and mounting gore than his sensitive soul can comprehend.[embedded content]The first feature from the New Zealand director Ant Timpson, “Come to Daddy” initially exhibits an endearing strangeness that’s reinforced by Daniel Katz’s quirky camera angles and airily elegant framing. As the action narrows to an underground cell and, later, a series of swinger-stuffed motel rooms, the atmosphere becomes more claustrophobic and the plot substantially more nutty. Enjoyable performances from Wood and Martin Donovan (whose character prefers to remain unidentified) hold the film to its redemptive goals, even as it descends into what can only be described as bloody bedlam.Absurd yet bold, lurid yet a tiny bit touching, “Come to Daddy” drags poor Norval from hopefulness to horror to a wickedly literal form of closure. More than a few audience members might even be happy to accompany him.Come to DaddyRated R for foul language, a feces-smeared pen and a lethal roll of plastic wrap. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. More

Watching an attractive young male-female couple go through a complicated routine, a bearded, older instructor (Kakha Gogidze) glowers. They should not be looking at each other; their gaze should be to the floor, he says. “There is no sexuality in Georgian dance,” he almost growls. The rehearsal is interrupted by the arrival of a new dancer, Irakli (Bachi Valishvili), who’s told to remove his earring almost immediately. Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani), the young male dancer who had been at work, looks at the new guy with trepidation and something else.[embedded content]In the event you needed more foreshadowing, there’s a subsequent scene in the female changing quarters where dancers gossip about a male member of the troupe who was kicked out for being gay. Tbilisi, where this movie, written and directed by Levan Akin, is set and was shot, looks like a pleasant place to live, but also like a land out of time. The young members of the Georgian dance group all smoke like chimneys, and their world, and the world around them, has seriously retrograde ideas about human relations. This means trouble for Merab, who has more than a socially unacceptable new love on his plate: his family is struggling in poverty.Gelbakhiani, the lead actor, has a lean physique, striking red hair and certain facial features that suggest he’d actually make a great Alfredo Linguini in a live-action remake of “Ratatouille,” not that such a thing should happen. He and the rest of the cast perform with conviction, and the whole movie is attractively, solidly put together. But its dramatic components, fraught as they are, are tepidly delivered. The movie catches fire only in its final scene, in which Merab expresses his rebellion in the language of dance, not words.And Then We DancedNot rated. In Georgian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. More

Women and people of color figured more prominently in popular films in 2019 than in any other year measured, according two new reports released this week. The studies, published annually by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative and U.C.L.A.’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, examined films released in the last dozen years.The U.S.C. report found that 31 of the top 100 grossing films in 2019 featured a lead or co-lead actor of color, an increase from a record set in 2018, when 27 such films were counted. Women, meanwhile, also bested a record set the previous year. They were the lead or co-lead in 43 of the 100 films, up from 39 in 2018.For both groups, the figures are more than double what they were a little more than a decade ago. (In 2007, the first year of U.S.C.’s report, just 13 of the top 100 films featured people of color in a lead role, and 20 featured women.) But they still lag behind the demographics of the country as a whole, which the Census Bureau counts as 40 percent nonwhite and 51 percent female.Trailing both demographic and box office trends this year were the nominations of major awards organizations — including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts — which went overwhelmingly to white actors. Stacy L. Smith, the founder of the U.S.C. initiative, singled out both groups in a statement.“It is clear that Hollywood is taking steps to create more inclusive stories and that those films are connecting with audiences,” she said. “Yet, there is also a very obvious disconnect between what sells tickets and what garners awards points.”As opportunities for women and people of color in front of the camera have increased significantly, gains in powerful behind-the-scenes positions have been more modest, the University of California, Los Angeles, report shows. Only 14 percent of directors of high-grossing films last year were people of color, according to the report, a bump compared with 2011 (the first year analyzed) but a 5 percent decrease from 2018. Women directors, driven by the success of movies like Lorene Scafaria’s “Hustlers” and Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women,” continued a steady climb since 2011, but still worked on just 15 percent of top films.Among the 11 heads of major film studios — the executives tasked with deciding what movies are made and by whom — 91 percent were white and 82 percent were male, U.C.L.A. found.Are most successful films white and male because of audience preferences, or in spite of them? Yet a third study released this week — from the advocacy group ReFrame, authored by U.S.C.’s Smith — sought to answer that question.The existence of a female lead or co-lead had no significant effect on box office performance, the report found. But, contrary to longstanding conventional wisdom in Hollywood, films led by people of color performed better than white-led films when controlling for other factors.“This is a finding that cannot be ignored and is consistent with what activists, advocates and artists have been saying for years,” Smith said. “Stories with underrepresented leads or co-leads make money. Period.” More