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      ‘Godzilla Minus One’ Stomps Into ‘Oppenheimer’ Territory

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      Those movies, along with “The Boy and the Heron,” are essentially in conversation about the moral weight of American and Japanese actions in World War II.I wasn’t expecting to cry as much as I did at “Godzilla Minus One.” The strong word-of-mouth made it sound like an awesome spectacle with cool action courtesy of the scaly title creature. And while there were awe-inducing showdowns with the monster, the Toho International production, written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, is largely a meditation on sorrow and survival in the wake of World War II.The specter of trauma has long hung over Godzilla, a creature unearthed from slumber by H-bomb testing in the 1954 original. But “Godzilla Minus One” (a black-and-white version is reaching theaters on Friday) further literalizes that as it tells the story of Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who shirks his duties, surviving both the war and an initial encounter with the beast, only to return to the ruins of Tokyo haunted by what he witnessed. Godzilla poses a threat, but one that lives mostly in the background. Instead, this is a story about finding community in the wake of destruction and learning to value yourself in a society that deems you worthless.As I watched, I couldn’t help but think about how “Godzilla Minus One” exists in conversation with two other recent releases: Hayao Miyazaki’s otherworldly exploration of grief, “The Boy and the Heron,” and Christopher Nolan’s biographical drama, “Oppenheimer.” Both “Godzilla Minus One” and “The Boy and the Heron” at least partly answer the question that some audiences had after the release of “Oppenheimer,” which documents the invention of the atomic bomb. Namely, where was the Japanese perspective in this story about the man whose invention caused so much pain for them?Neither “Godzilla Minus One” nor “The Boy and the Heron” is explicitly about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They both deal with life in Japan during and after World War II, using the fantastical to portray a people grappling with the lasting effects of a devastating conflict and their anger at those in power who were responsible. Together, the films also prove that literalism isn’t always required in stories that impart messy truths about humanity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ Review: Layers of Love and Memory

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      The Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho draws on fact and fiction in this image-rich documentary that moves fast and far, but always returns home.Early in “Pictures of Ghosts,” an exhilarating documentary about specters onscreen and off, the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, pulls out a VHS tape. It’s of a 1981 TV interview with his mother, Joselice, a historian who died at age 54. In close-up, she discusses gathering information left out of history, an approach that her son has embraced here. After the tape abruptly cuts off, he says in voice-over, “it may seem like I’m discussing methodology” — as if speaking now both for his mother and for himself — “but I’m talking about love.”Love suffuses “Pictures of Ghosts,” a cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home. Divided into three fluidly edited sections that build into a cohesive whole, the movie draws from both original and archival material, including photographs, newsreels, home movies, amateur films and images sampled from Mendonça Filho’s features. The results unfold at the crossroads of fiction and documentary, a space that Mendonça Filho knows well. “Fiction films are the best documentaries,” as a character in a movie says here.A film critic turned filmmaker, Mendonça Filho is best known for his own fictional movies, most notably “Aquarius” (2016). A nuanced, idiosyncratic drama set in his hometown, Recife, a northeastern port city on the Atlantic coast, it centers on a music critic (Sônia Braga), her circle of intimates, the enviably ocean-facing apartment in which she lives and the gentrification that she resists. It’s about stasis and change, memory and loss, art and commerce as well as a struggle for sovereignty. The building’s owners are trying to force her out, which means that it’s also about money and power — all themes that haunt “Pictures of Ghosts.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Miller’s Girl’ Review: Teacher’s Dirty Looks

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      Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega fight pheromones and cliché in this eye-rolling duel between a teacher and his student.You can almost smell the arousal wafting from the screen as “Miller’s Girl” wends its overheated way through lubricious conversations and a comically on-the-mark soundtrack. Even the camera turns dreamy whenever the improbably named Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega) — a microskirted tease and the film’s linchpin — activates her pout, especially if she’s chewing or smoking. It should be said that either is preferable to her talking.And oh, how she talks, her pretentious narration as grating as her precocious reading habits. A trust-fund teenager with absent parents and a Southern mansion at her disposal, Cairo arrives for her initial high-school writing class having already inhaled everything on the syllabus. Her professor, Jonathan Miller (an uncomfortably miscast Martin Freeman, who may have lost his professional bearings along with his English accent), is understandably turned on: A languishing writer who lacks both literary inspiration and behavioral boundaries, Jonathan is easy prey for Cairo’s jailbait shtick.A work of glaring artifice, “Miller’s Girl,” written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, is being touted as a psychological thriller, but it’s too vapid and silly to do much besides titillate. Bugs crawl on windowsills and a lighted cigarette drifts lazily to the floor in a movie that traps gifted actors in a fog of pheromones and cliché. Jonathan’s disappointed wife (Dagmara Dominczyk) slinks around in various states of undress and sobriety, like one of Tennessee Williams’s ruined heroines; Cairo’s best friend (Gideon Adlon, a standout) lusts after a baseball coach (a jovial Bashir Salahuddin), who lusts right back. Of course Cairo’s favorite author is Henry Miller.“This is inappropriate,” a chastened Jonathan finally admonishes Cairo, having climaxed while reading her term paper. She may be a minx, but he’s the real monster.Miller’s GirlRated R for smutty language and puerile poetry. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Mambar Pierrette’ Review: Cosmic Misfortunes

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      A gifted seamstress, played by the filmmaker Rosine Mbakam’s cousin, has to put out a string of fires in this rich portrait of Cameroonian womanhood.Pierrette, a gifted seamstress and a mother of three, can’t seem to catch a break. After a hard day’s work at her humble shop in Douala, a busy city in Cameroon, she’s mugged by a motorcycle taxi driver. It’s also the rainy season and her home — and later her shop — is flooded overnight. It’s a foul time to be broke: The kids are heading back to school and their supplies aren’t cheap.The events of “Mambar Pierrette” are fictional, but the film’s nonprofesssional actors play versions of themselves. The drama is the first narrative feature by Rosine Mbakam, a Cameroonian filmmaker based in Belgium. Over the past decade, Mbakam has distinguished herself as a formidable verité-style documentarian; her subjects, Cameroonian women at home and overseas.Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat, cast in the title role, is Mbakam’s cousin, and many of the figures who orbit Pierrette’s life are the actress’s neighbors and relatives.A rich community portrait unfolds as Pierrette prepares her clients’ orders and flits around town putting out fires. We get a sense of the patriarchal customs that dictate village life; the frictions between modern, enterprising women like Pierrette and tradition-bound ones like her mother. These and other realities are made apparent in a beautifully organic manner, through the kind of intimate chatter that happens between people who’ve known each other for decades.Pierrette’s rotten luck is no joke. We see, with startling clarity, how a stolen wallet turns into a missed payment, and an electricity shut-off means a sewing machine that can’t sew. Yet the film’s gentle naturalism (at times edging on the uncanny, courtesy of cheeky editing rhythms and an unsettling-looking mannequin) gives her tribulations a cosmic undertone.Mbakam hits a remarkable balance. The sociopolitical truths that make up Pierrette’s losing streak are evident, without the miserable patronizing so common in films about struggle in Africa. Also palpable is a more universal gut feeling: the half-serious suspicion that one has been cursed.Mambar PierretteNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero’ Review: A Hip-Hop Trailblazer

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      The documentary, streaming on Max, follows the queer singer-rapper on the road and at home, but the best scenes by far are when he is onstage.To watch the singer-rapper Lil Nas X in the documentary “Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero” is to witness a Black queer man embody a power that still feels very new.Directed by Carlos López Estrada (“Raya and the Last Dragon”) and Zac Manuel, this film, streaming on Max, is historically important given its subject’s place in hip-hop, a genre dominated by heterosexuality and hypermasculinity. New interview footage with Montero Lamar Hill, a.k.a. Lil Nas X, from both on the road and in his home, is juxtaposed with performances from the artist’s recent “Long Live Montero Tour,” a celebration of queer eroticism and joy.But the scenes are assembled like the wall collage of pop stars that we see in his otherwise empty bedroom, resulting in frustrating interview segments that are both broad and cursory. Lil Nas X is forthcoming in the documentary about his preshow bowel movements, for example, but is less open about more meaningful thoughts, such as how his religious journey is connected to his work.When the musician Little Richard, known for his flashy attire and complicated past, comes up in a 1972 interview clip that Lil Nas X briefly comments on, the film makes a quick point about Black queer artists who have struggled to be out. It then falters by generalizing a history that, with some added details, could have better emphasized Lil Nas X’s current impact on culture.“Saying actual words — it’s really hard to do,” Lil Nas X eventually admits. Still, the best parts of this documentary are onstage, where his freedom to be himself tells its own thrilling story.Lil Nas X: Long Live MonteroNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      ‘The Peasants’ Review: A Village Rendered in Oils

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      The filmmakers DK and Hugh Welchman apply a painstaking oil painting technique to render this sweeping drama set in a 19th century Polish village.The painstaking process behind “The Peasants,” the new painted film exercise from DK and Hugh Welchman, is only laid out after the film ends. As the credits roll, the directors show clips of painters viewing reference footage and then reproducing the images in oil on canvas, sometimes frame by frame.The filmmakers pioneered the inventive animation technique on their previous feature, the Oscar-nominated “Loving Vincent,” and they apply it here to a story of sweeping scale. Based on Wladyslaw Reymont’s novel, “The Peasants” follows Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska), a young woman in 19th century Poland who is driven into a loveless marriage with a wealthy widower (Miroslaw Baka) despite her ongoing flirtation with his strapping son, Antek (Robert Gulaczyk).The world of the film is insular and provincial, stacked with themes of family and faith and peopled with vulnerable girls, resentful wives and brooding men quick to trade punches over perceived affronts to their pride or dignity.“The Peasants” is divided into four seasons, and its inventive visual style proves richest when rendering landscapes — scenery that shifts in color and stroke with the climate. But as the story’s melodrama grows repetitive, so do the visuals. The painted animation is especially deficient in close-up shots (of which there are many); the smudgy brushstrokes blunt facial expressions. In these moments, the technique seems to be working against the film’s emotion rather than for it.The PeasantsRated R for sexual violence and nudity. In Polish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘American Star’ Review: Armed and Vacationing

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      Ian McShane stars as an assassin killing time in the Canary Islands.“American Star,” the latest film to showcase the travel benefits of being a professional killer, opens with Wilson (Ian McShane) arriving in Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands. After parking his rental car off the side of a desert road, he peeks in the trunk to find a photograph of his latest mark, who of course lives in a sleek, modernist home nearby.But the mark isn’t there, which leaves Wilson consigned to killing only time. Keeping a low profile in a jet-black suit that matches the rental car and attracts the attention of nearly everyone — he befriends a kid (Oscar Coleman) who wants to know why he hasn’t brought swim trunks — Wilson hits it off with a bartender, Gloria (Nora Arnezeder). She appears to be the mysterious blonde who turned up while he was scoping out the (sleek, modernist) house.Citing local wisdom, Gloria says there are only three types of people in Fuerteventura — residents, tourists and those who are running from something. By that point, she has accompanied Wilson to the site of a wrecked ship that provides the movie’s central metaphor. Gloria’s mother (Fanny Ardant) says her daughter has always found that “heap of scrap metal” fascinating. The viewer is meant to conclude that Wilson, a psychologically scarred Falklands veteran, is her new favorite scrap.There is also a younger assassin (Adam Nagaitis), a son of Wilson’s war buddy. He says he is on the island to make sure the hit comes off — an ominous sign. But much of “American Star” is more engaging than a summary makes it sound. Despite an oddball taste for wide-angle lenses, the director, Gonzalo López-Gallego, can sustain a solid slow burn. Still, neither McShane nor the scenery can take the rust off the basic scenario.American StarRated R. Vacation or no, he’s still a hit man. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Glen Powell at the Sundance Film Festival

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      The star and co-writer of “Hit Man” heard that his film had wowed audiences, but because of the actors’ strike, he couldn’t see for himself until now.Glen Powell doesn’t want for much these days, after co-starring in “Top Gun: Maverick” and watching his new film, the romantic comedy “Anyone but You,” cross $100 million at the worldwide box office. Still, for the past few months, there was one little thing he felt he had missed out on.It has to do with “Hit Man,” a comedy Powell co-wrote with the director Richard Linklater that casts him as a hapless teacher who must pose as an assassin for hire. I first saw it at the Venice Film Festival in September, where it proved so crowd-pleasing that the audience broke into applause midway through the movie. A week later at the Toronto International Film Festival, the response was also through the roof.But for months, Powell had only heard about all that secondhand. Since the Screen Actors Guild strike was still going strong during the fall tests, Powell wasn’t able to attend a premiere of “Hit Man” until it played Monday night at the Sundance Film Festival. Afterward, he called me from a car that was speeding him toward celebratory drinks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More