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      ‘Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’ Review: Women, Uninterrupted

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      In Anna Hints’s bewitching documentary, Estonian smoke saunas beget a sweaty purification process — one that’s revealed to be more than skin deep.In Estonia, the smoke sauna is an 800-year-old tradition carried out with regularity — to this day — by the Voro community in the southeastern part of the country.Singled out by UNESCO as one of the world’s great cultural heritages (like the baguette in France or shadow puppetry in China), the Estonian practice begets a sweaty purification process — one that’s revealed to be more than skin deep in Anna Hints’s bewitching documentary, “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood.”Hints, whose grandmother introduced her to the smoke-sauna ritual, uses the documentary to speak volumes about what it means to be a woman, even as the focus remains fixed on a single location: a cramped sauna-cabin located in a forest.Inside the womblike sauna, Hints simply lets the women, who are primarily middle-aged and older, speak freely among themselves, just as they’re accustomed to doing; she doesn’t bother with title cards or other forms of contextualization. The women talk about their bodies, their relationships with men and the difficulties of growing up in a patriarchal society. One woman, her face obscured by her arm as she lies on the sauna bench, shares a horrific story about being raped as a teenager. The others listen attentively, providing the speaker with the compassionate audience she never had in her youth.Most of the subjects have chosen to remain anonymous, so Hints and the cinematographer Ants Tammik film the nude women from the neck down or using disembodied close-ups. Contrary to what one might expect, the focus on bare chests, perspiring backs and stretches of glistening skin doesn’t feel provocative.Instead, these raw bodies exhibit an organic kind of beauty, real and uninhibited as they commune with the swirling smoke from burning wood and the clouds of steam produced by moistened rocks. It’s no wonder the women tend to open up under these sweltering conditions. To feel fully aware of one’s own body is to acknowledge its scars, too.Smoke Sauna SisterhoodNot rated. In Estonian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Frybread Face and Me’ Review: Reservation Summer

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      An 11-year-old boy from San Diego goes to live with his Navajo grandmother and spends time with his cousin.“Frybread Face and Me” is set in 1990, when its protagonist, Benny (Keir Tallman), reluctantly goes to live on a Navajo reservation with his maternal grandmother (Sarah H. Natani). Having grown up in San Diego, the 11-year-old Benny has more experience with action figures, SeaWorld visits and Fleetwood Mac tunes than with rug weaving, sheep herding and bull riding. Over the kind of indelible summer beloved by screenwriters, he will receive an introduction to all three.It helps that Benny is quickly joined at his grandmother’s by a cousin of a similar age; she is widely known by the nickname Frybread Face (Charley Hogan). Fry acts as a translator with their grandmother (who has refused to learn English), teaches Benny a few Navajo concepts and even gives him a driving lesson. The cultural exchange goes both ways: Fry is enthused to learn that Benny can visit the orca Shamu at SeaWorld whenever he wants.Some complexity is introduced through one of Benny’s uncles, Marvin (Martin Sensmeier), who cruelly needles Benny for not being enough of a man (and whose own toughness is called into question after he is hurt in a riding mishap).But “Frybread Face and Me,” written and directed by Billy Luther, who has previously made documentaries and worked on AMC’s “Dark Winds,” declines, to its credit, to overplay that hand. It’s more interested in sharing on details so specific (a meal of Spam and potatoes; repeated viewings of a “Starman” videotape) they seem drawn from memory. The movie is overfamiliar and earnest, but you can’t accuse it of not being heartfelt.Frybread Face and MeNot rated. In English and Navajo, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Netflix and in theaters. More

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      ‘Napoleon’ Review: A Lumpy, Grumpy Little Man

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      Joaquin Phoenix is oddly mesmerizing as the French emperor in Ridley Scott’s historical epic charting his rise and ruin.When he was in his mid-20s and first visited the studio where he would late shoot “Citizen Kane,” Orson Welles is said to have likened the movies to the best electric train set a boy could have. Welles is a defining inspiration for Ridley Scott, who is best known for monumentally scaled historical epics like “Gladiator” and “Kingdom of Heaven.” In these movies as well as in his latest spectacle, “Napoleon,” Scott plays, to push Welles’s metaphor further, with the biggest train sets conceivable — giant, beautiful, gleaming machines that can, by turns, transport and overwhelm you. He’s a heavy metal guy.“Napoleon” is a very big movie, as you would expect given that it follows its title subject from the bloody delirium of the French Revolution to battlefields across Europe, Africa and, catastrophically, into Russia. More startling, though, is that the movie is also often eccentric and at times eccentrically funny. You expect refined craft and technique from Scott and the pleasures of spectacle filmmaking at its most expansive. You expect heft, seriousness, not snort-out-loud humor, which I guess explains why, while watching the movie, I flashed on Karl Marx’s axiom about history being first tragedy and then farce.It opens in Paris amid that convulsion of violence called the Terror, with surging, shouting crowds and the metallic hiss of the falling guillotine blade. Aristocrats are losing their heads (Scott re-creates one execution with gory verisimilitude), and Napoleon Bonaparte — a mesmerizing, off-kilter, lumpish Joaquin Phoenix — will soon profit from the chaos. Before long, the story has jumped forward and now Napoleon is in the southern French port city of Toulon, where he strategically routs the Anglo-Spanish fleet that has taken the city.Scott establishes Napoleon’s early rise to power with bold imagery and brusque narrative economy, vividly setting the historical moment with scenes from both inside the corridors of revolutionary power — enter Robespierre — and the surging anarchy out in the streets. Napoleon’s rise at this point is largely facilitated by the politician Paul Barras (Tahar Rahim), a silky operator with the pacific mien of a patiently lurking predator and an inescapable aristocratic hauteur. Everyone addresses one another as Citizen, which, in Barras’s case comes across as the 18th-century version of performative political correctness. Together, Barras and Napoleon consolidate their positions. Exit Robespierre.Joséphine (a fine Vanessa Kirby) makes her entrance soon after, catching Napoleon’s notice (her décolletage helps) and ushering in the story’s second plotline. A widow whose husband lost his head during the Terror, Joséphine has been recently released from prison, an ordeal that has left her with short, choppy hair and a very keen sense of self-preservation. It’s not at all clear what she actually sees in Napoleon, other than his uniform, growing reputation and obvious interest in her. She’s (relatively) poor for a society woman and has children, so desperation plays a role, though the movie suggests that what Joséphine truly sees is power.After Joséphine appears, the movie soon bifurcates into two lines of action, one involving Napoleon’s military campaigns, and the other the couple’s relationship. This kind of dual plot structure is a familiar template of old Hollywood that features two entwined strands — involving adventure and romance — that together bring everything to a close. What’s unusual here is how separate the lines of action remain in “Napoleon” and how they don’t as much interconnect as run on parallel tracks. When he’s not facing off against the Austrians, the British and the Russians, Napoleon is struggling with Joséphine, who vexes him almost as much as the Duke of Wellington (an amusing Rupert Everett).Written by David Scarpa, the movie tracks Napoleon’s relentless rise to despotic power — he crowns himself emperor — amid political intrigues, bloody battlefields and some occasional hasty rutting with Joséphine, who invariably cuts him down to size. He’s a little man, you are regularly reminded, and his relationship with Joséphine (who soon and understandably takes a lover) makes him smaller. Periodic bits of text function as de facto chapter headings, grounding the story’s chronology and announcing the next conflagration. Historical figures come and go (Paul Rhys plays Talleyrand), but for the most part the movie slides over the complexities of both the revolution and Napoleon’s reign as well as the reasons France has been swept up in endless battles on so many fronts.The war scenes are extraordinary, vigorous, harrowing and rightly grotesque. The tremendous scale of some of these battles helps give them their visceral power, as does Scott’s complex staging and use of masses of human actors and horses. With cannon blasts, bursts of smoke and the sights and sounds of armies of men thundering over fields toward their deaths, he conveys the frenzy of war, its heat and terror. As the fighting grimly continues, and the body count mounts, the absolute waste of it all becomes overwhelming, which is, I imagine, why Scott seems so uninterested in Napoleon’s vaunted military genius.“Napoleon” is consistently surprising partly because it doesn’t conform to the conventions of mainstream historical epics, which is especially true of its startling, adamantly unromanticized title character. (The movie also doesn’t always conform to the historical record, and some may take issue with the portrayal of the Battle of Austerlitz.) In the early scenes, Napoleon seems to be another of Phoenix’s taciturn, unnervingly volatile, enigmatically damaged, violent men. The difference is that this Napoleon, with his bloat, scowls and consuming needs, often resembles nothing as much as an angrily petulant baby, one whose cruelty and pathological vanity make the horror he unleashes unnervingly familiar.NapoleonRated R for intense scenes of war. Running time: 2 hours 38 minutes. 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      ‘Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros’ Review: A Beautiful Collaboration

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      For his 44th documentary, Frederick Wiseman journeys to the French countryside to examine the workings of a family-owned, Michelin-starred restaurant.Frederick Wiseman’s transporting documentary “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” centers on a dynasty of French chefs who live and work in a pastoral region in central France named Ouches, some 65 miles west of Lyon. There, amid rolling green hills and under the canopy of a century-old oak, the Troisgros family has a celebrated restaurant whose beginnings date back to 1930. The current paterfamilias, Michel, who’s in his mid-60s, has been cooking his whole life, and while you could say he makes food, it feels more like an expression of love.Making food sounds too pedestrian for the meticulously prepared, strikingly plated dishes that come out of the kitchen at their restaurant, Le Bois Sans Feuilles (The Woods Without Leaves), and certainly this is cooking on a rarefied level. It has long been acclaimed, receiving its first Michelin star in 1956 and holding on to its third since 1968. (It’s gone through several iterations and name changes.) Michel’s father and uncle, Pierre and Jean, were widely considered to be nouvelle cuisine pioneers, emblematized by a famous salmon and sorrel dish they invented. The chef Daniel Boulud includes the Troisgros salmon recipe in several of his cookbooks.“Menus-Plaisirs” is Wiseman’s 44th documentary and the first that he’s made since “City Hall” (2020), which notionally focuses on the administration building for the city of Boston. (In between “City Hall” and “Menus-Plaisirs,” he made one of his rare forays into fiction, “A Couple,” about Sophia Tolstoy.) Wiseman’s great subject is institutions, though more rightly the tension between organizations — with their spaces, norms and rituals — and the people moving through them. The bluntly descriptive titles of his movies are an authorial signature (“Hospital,” “High School,” “Boxing Gym”) and suggestively and purposely generic; one of the profound satisfactions of his work is seeing how he turns the general into the specific.Wiseman directed, edited and served as one of the producers on “Menus-Plaisirs,” which runs a heroic four hours (about a half-hour shorter than “City Hall”!). It’s absorbing from start to finish. Much of it takes place inside the bright, nature-inspired Le Bois Sans Feuilles, which is part of a larger complex set in a mid-19th-century estate that the family restored a few years back and includes a boutique hotel overseen by Michel’s wife, Marie-Pierre. Wiseman also pops into another Troisgros restaurant, Le Central, in the neighboring city of Roanne, making a more leisurely visit to a third, the nearby La Colline du Colombier, which is in the countryside.Wiseman’s approach is analytical and dialectical, and only seemingly straightforward. As is customary with his movies, “Menus-Plaisirs” doesn’t have music, voice-over narration, onscreen descriptive text, chapter titles or any other standard hand-holding. Wiseman instead uses images of specific physical spaces — the movie opens on the Roanne railway station and then cuts to its bustling, sumptuously stocked farmer’s market — that immediately establish a strong sense of place. In other words, he grounds you in the world of the movie and then, face by face, shot by shot, scene by scene, steadily fills in its details.The movie is arranged in distinct sections that suggest the rhythms of running a restaurant. The inaugural segment (call it Prep) introduces Michel and his sons: César, who cooks alongside his father and some dozen others at Le Bois Sans Feuilles, and the younger Léo, the chef for La Colline du Colombier. The sons run into each other at the market, where they’re hunting and pecking among the perfectly arranged leafy greens, bouquets of beets and radishes, and astonishing clusters of oyster mushrooms. In this section, the sons also meet with Michel to discuss menu options, and then the movie shifts to Le Bois Sans Feuilles.It’s there in this restaurant’s spacious, quietly humming open kitchen that the movie begins to gather momentum as Wiseman moves about focusing on one and then another station: One chef expertly filets a large salmon while another trims and butchers some ribs. Elsewhere, Michel and a sommelier discuss some outrageously priced Burgundies, and a brigade of servers ready themselves for the fast-approaching service. “Menus-Plaisirs” has all the virtues of a Wiseman movie, but its focus on beautiful food that’s prepared and served with equal beauty makes it especially seductive, even if you’re not keen on everything on the menu. I now know, for instance, more than I ever cared to about cooking veal brains.Once the customers arrive (call this section Service), the rhythms of the kitchen appreciably accelerate. Anyone who’s ever watched great cooks in action (in life or on TV) knows how enjoyable, even hypnotic it can be watching people with superb craft and technique at work, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Wiseman is sensitive to the sights and sounds of kitchens, including the tempos of chopping knives and the syncopated hiss and burble of pots on a hot stove. He also underscores the hard work on an individual level and when the chefs are in the flow together. These kitchens thrum with quiet intensity, not ego.As “Menus-Plaisirs” continues, its focus widens as the chefs meet with some of their providers — at a small cattle farm, a vineyard, a cheese cave — where the mutual respect is palpable and the talk is sincere and often turns to sustainability. Each of these interludes could be spun off into a separate documentary, but together they expand the prismatic portrait of a family for whom cooking is an aesthetic, a passion, an expression of love, an ethic. There’s individual genius in the Troisgros kitchens, no doubt, but also enormous collaborative effort, which makes the documentary a nice metaphor for filmmaking itself. “Everything is beautiful,” a visibly moved Michel says of his estate; the same holds true of this deeply pleasurable movie.Menus-Plaisirs — Les TroisgrosNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 4 hours. 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      Napoleon Didn’t Really Shoot Cannons at Egypt’s Pyramids

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      But scholars say that a trailer for Ridley Scott’s new film draws attention to the French emperor’s complex and lasting legacy on the study of Egypt’s cultural heritage.As Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” opens for Thanksgiving holiday viewing, scenes from the film’s trailers are making waves. That was especially true of a sensational depiction of French troops led by Joaquin Phoenix as the French emperor firing cannons at the pyramids of Giza.“I don’t know if he did that,” Mr. Scott told The Times of London. “But it was a fast way of saying he took Egypt.”There is no evidence that French invaders launched artillery at the pyramids, or that Napoleon’s troops shot the nose off the Sphinx, another piece of popular apocrypha (evidence suggests that the nose was chiseled off centuries before Napoleon’s time).“From what we know, Napoleon held the Sphinx and the pyramids in high esteem and used them as a means of urging his troops to greater glory,” said Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. “He definitely did not take pot shots at them.”While creative license is expected in Hollywood biopics, Mr. Scott’s cinematic choices prompted memes, discussion and lighthearted dunking, including riffs about Napoleon battling mummies.Some historians have criticized Mr. Scott, but many hope “Napoleon” will generate interest in the events that inspired the film. And while Napoleon didn’t literally hurl projectiles at the pyramids, his invasion of Egypt had a profound effect on Egyptian cultural heritage and how the world understands it today.“Ultimately, the campaign is a defeat — the French lose and get kicked out,” said Alexander Mikaberidze, a professor at Louisiana State University in Shreveport who specializes in Napoleonic history. But Napoleon’s invasion also resulted in a complex scientific and cultural legacy, he added: “the beginning of Egyptology, the beginning of this fascination with Egypt and the desire to explore Egyptian history and Egyptian culture.”The title page of the the multivolume publication Napoleon commissioned upon his return from Egypt.James Smith Noel Collection/Louisiana State University at ShreveportA drawing by Dominique Vivant, later Baron Denon, who accompanied Napoleon on the Egyptian campaign, of French scholars measuring the Sphinx.James Smith Noel Collection/Louisiana State University at ShreveportThe French campaign in Egypt from 1798 to 1801 was driven by Napoleon’s colonial ambitions and a desire to stymie British influence. But in addition to amassing an army of some 50,000 men, Napoleon made the unusual decision to invite more than 160 scholars — in fields like botany, geology, the humanities and others — to accompany the invasion.The scholars documented the cultural and natural landscapes of Egypt, which they eventually compiled into a seminal 1809 publication that contained detailed entries about the Giza pyramid complex. This is one reason historians know that Napoleon visited the pyramids, as shown in Mr. Scott’s film, though it is unlikely he regarded the structures as military targets.“There was a real interest on the part of the scholars and, I think by extension, a real interest by Napoleon to be able to understand these things that Europeans hadn’t really had unfettered access to since the classical period,” said Andrew Bednarski, a visiting scholar at the American University in Cairo who specializes in Egyptology and 19th-century history.In their effort to document Egypt’s vast archaeological heritage, the French scholars seized many important artifacts, including the Rosetta Stone, a rock inscribed with three languages that proved instrumental in deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The stone and many other spoils ended up in British hands after the French hold on Egypt collapsed in 1801. By then, Napoleon had returned to France.Following the failed campaign, word of Egypt’s cultural wonders spread across Europe and powered a new wave of global Egyptomania. This insatiable appetite for Egyptian antiquities has resulted in centuries of exploration, excavation and exploitation of the region’s vast material culture. Since Napoleon’s invasion, countless artifacts have been removed from Egypt by prospectors and traders, many through clandestine and outright criminal channels.The Rosetta Stone, on view at the British Museum in London, was one of the spoils of Napoleon’s Egypt campaign.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThe Nefertiti bust, found in Egypt by German archaeologists in 1912.Michael Sohn/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs a result, many of Egypt’s greatest treasures, including the Rosetta Stone and the bust of Nefertiti, are in museums and private collections far from home. Egypt’s antiquities community has been working for years to repatriate as many artifacts as possible, with some success, while also developing new strategies to protect its cultural legacy within the nation’s borders.“There are more site management plans, an increase in museums and an upsurge in media coverage of antiquities, which is geared not only to attract tourists but also to fostering national pride and educating the general Egyptian public as to the significance of their heritage,” Dr. Ikram said.Egypt has also been confronting a resurgence of looting in recent years as a result of domestic instabilities. The Antiquities Coalition, a U.S.-based nonprofit, estimated that following the 2011 revolution, about $3 billion worth of relics had been illegally smuggled out of Egypt. The Institute of Egypt, a research center that Napoleon established in Cairo during his invasion, burned down in 2011 during the tumult of the Arab Spring. Erosive forces such as pollution and the effects of climate change, including extreme weather, pose another threat to Egypt’s monuments and artifacts.Napoleon’s ill-fated campaign ignited the modern demand for Egyptian antiquities that still rages today. Mr. Scott’s vision of Napoleon shooting cannons at the pyramids of Giza is just a continuation of this longstanding impulse to co-opt Egyptian symbols and market them to a new audience. Many experts have decried the inaccuracies in the film — prompting an expletive-laden response from Mr. Scott. But some see in “Napoleon” the opportunity to revisit the polarizing French emperor’s lasting effects on the world.“Anything that might spark people’s interest in the history of Egyptology, the effects of colonialism around the world, the Enlightenment — any of those things — I think is only positive,” Dr. Bednarski said. More

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      ‘Monster’ Review: Uncovering a Mother-Son Japanese Mystery

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      This drama from Hirokazu Kore-eda traces a series of events from the perspectives of a single mother, her preteen son and his fifth-grade teacher.The stretch of time that unfurls in the sublime Japanese drama “Monster” begins with a fire and ends during a monsoon. These elemental disasters, and a fragile cluster of events that fall between them, are viewed from the perspectives of three characters entwined in a messy struggle for understanding: a boy, a mother and a teacher.Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda (“Broker,” “Shoplifters”) and written by Yuji Sakamoto, “Monster” opens as Minato (Soya Kurokawa), a sensitive preteen, begins fifth grade. His single mom, Saori (Sakura Ando), grows concerned when Minato comes home distressed and with injuries. She soon casts blame on his teacher, Hori (Eita Nagayama), who is fired over the accusation.A master of family affairs, Kore-eda directs with a discerning but delicate style, and “Monster,” with its triptych structure, initially feels more schematic than is typical of his works. There is a deep pleasure, though, in marrying this screenplay’s layered form with Kore-eda’s sensitivity and low-key naturalism. While the film’s first segment gestures at science fiction — Minato insists his brain was replaced with a pig’s — the second seamlessly pivots into something Kafkaesque. That’s all before Minato’s point of view excavates the story’s essential truths.Lovingly detailed and accented by an aching score from Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March, “Monster” is one of the finest films of the year, and its structure — like its circle of characters — carries secrets that can only be unraveled through patience and empathy. Put a different way: It’s easy to call someone a monster before you squelch a muddy mile in their shoes.MonsterRated PG-13. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Cypher’ Review: Tierra Whack in a Twisty Music Documentary

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      A biographical look at the Philadelphia rapper Tierra Whack takes a hard left turn.“Cypher” is a fakeout film disguised as a real music documentary. For a while, you believe it will chronicle the rapper Tierra Whack’s rise, from teenage Philadelphia poet to Grammy-nominated hip-hop artist whose fans include Cardi B and Billie Eilish.As the film eases you in with a cushy setup, Whack jokes that it could be completely derailed, ending in jaw-dropping fashion — which it does. “You could die, I could die and then we can’t shoot anymore,” she says, amusing even the director, Chris Moukarbel. Then things get weird. When Whack and her crew wind down at a late-night diner after a Chicago concert, she meets a fan desperate for her to watch a video that you know she shouldn’t watch. Afterward, she is still the real Whack, but in a very different movie. Adding to the sinister shift, she spots an ominous radio on the set of Beyoncé’s “Black Is King” film (Whack, who has a cameo, was actually there).A cunning experiment in cross-genre filmmaking, “Cypher” is all fun, games and hagiography until it’s not, effectively deceiving at every conspiratorial turn. The less you know about how this meta spine-chiller comments on the dark side of celebrity surveillance, the greater the thrill of discovering the “real or not?” events as they come. I’ll say this much: When “Cypher” stops masquerading as a sincere artist bio and ends up where you never thought it would, the film certainly gives new meaning to “behind-the-scenes access.”CypherRated R. A few expletives. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More