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      In ‘Meanwhile,’ a Nation Remembers to Breathe

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      The director Catherine Gund fuses work from multiple artists with archival footage and interviews to craft an exploration of Black resilience.The makers of “Meanwhile” (in theaters) describe it as a “docu-poem,” which is a bold choice: Not many people encounter feature-length nonfiction poetry onscreen. But in about 90 minutes, the director Catherine Gund fuses work from multidisciplinary artists, words from the author Jacqueline Woodson, soundscapes by the musician Meshell Ndegeocello, archival footage and interviews in a way that elevates each of those elements, crafting an exploration of Black resilience. If in verbal poetry the meaning often resides in surprising juxtapositions, words used in ways that surprise and unsettle us, then this is, indeed, poetry.The spine of the film is breath: the act of breathing, the suppression of breathing, the absolute necessity of sharing breath, and space, with one another. Throughout the film, the sound of someone breathing is layered into images of artworks, threaded through conversations, quietly present beneath spoken lines. It’s intimate, an invitation to consider the theme.And to expand it, too: Artists and activists, the film suggests, generate breath for a community to take in — and breath is what makes survival possible. In this case, the focus is on Black Americans, as illustrated by clips of grief and police violence toward civilians in the wake of George Floyd’s death. But more than simply meditating on a community’s turmoil and pain in a single historical moment, “Meanwhile” extends its gaze forward and backward, asking what joy looks like, and what it takes to keep on breathing when the world wants you to stop.Near the start, onscreen text provides a twofold definition of the word “meanwhile.” The first is sequential: “in the intervening period of time.” The second is simultaneous: “at the same time.” The two seem a bit contradictory, but as “Meanwhile” builds to a crescendo, it becomes clear how in harmony they are. In an archival interview, the musician Nina Simone says that “freedom is a feeling,” and that it means “no fear.” Thus, the movie suggests, freedom is something you can experience while also working toward freedom’s creation. Artists know that for sure — “Meanwhile” aims to make it clear to everyone.Poetry by nature is allusive rather than literal. It gestures at meaning while trusting readers to lean in and discover significance for themselves. “Meanwhile” works the same way, and thus feels like both a provocation and a request to consider what flourishing looks like in this chaotic moment — for Black Americans, and for anyone who finds themselves drowning, struggling to breathe. More

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      Florida Mayor Threatens Cinema Over Israeli-Palestinian Film

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      The mayor of Miami Beach wants to end the lease of a group renting a city-owned property because it is screening the Academy Award-winning “No Other Land” there.The mayor of Miami Beach is seeking to oust a nonprofit art house cinema from a city-owned property for showing “No Other Land,” the Oscar-winning documentary that chronicles the Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes in Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank.The mayor, Steven Meiner, introduced a resolution to revoke the lease under which O Cinema rents the space, he announced in a newsletter this week. He described the film as “a false, one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people that is not consistent with the values of our city and residents.”Kareem Tabsch, the co-founder of O Cinema, said that the threat of losing its physical location in Miami Beach was “very grave and we take it very seriously.”“At the time, we take very seriously our responsibility as a cultural organization that presents works that are engaging and thought provoking and that foster dialogue,” he said. “And we take very seriously our responsibility to do that without interference of government.”The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, which is now co-counsel for the theater, criticized the mayor’s move, as did the makers of the film, which won the Academy Award for best documentary earlier this month but has not been acquired in the United States by a traditional distributor for either a theatrical or streaming release. Distributors in two dozen other countries had picked up the film even before it won the award.Daniel Tilley, the legal director of the Florida branch of the ACLU, said in an interview that “what’s at stake is the government’s ability to use unchecked power to punish those who dare to express views that the government disagrees with.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Young Hearts’ Review: Finding Acceptance

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      In this coming-of-age drama from Belgium, a 14-year-old boy falls in love with his neighbor and questions his sexual identity.There are no bigoted relatives or homophobic bullies in the pleasantly modest coming-of-age film “Young Hearts.” Instead, Elias (Lou Goossens), a 14-year-old boy, wrestles mostly with himself after he falls in love with Alexander (Marius De Saeger), his new neighbor.Shot primarily outdoors, in the Belgian countryside where the two boys ride their bikes and lounge by lakes, this debut drama by Anthony Schatteman presents a familiar conflict: Alex, who is originally from Brussels, isn’t afraid to be openly gay, whereas the provincial Elias treats their romance like a shameful secret.Elias’s friends at school, including his quasi-girlfriend Valerie (Saar Rogiers), think he’s straight, and because his dad, Luk (Geert Van Rampelberg), is a famous crooner of kitschy Flemish love songs, he’s already sensitive about being mocked.The assumptions of Elias’s family members about his sexuality — and the total absence of queer people in his life up to this point — are enough to convince him his feelings for Alex are abnormal. His mother Natalie (Emilie De Roo) and his grandfather Fred (Dirk Van Dijck) are more sensitive listeners than his self-absorbed father, but Elias insists on keeping things bottled up.The film shifts between Elias’s states of blissful surrender and angsty repression, capturing him in emotionally baring close-ups. Naturalistic performances and quiet scenes of summertime idling bring to mind Luca Guadagnino’s drama “Call Me By Your Name,” though “Young Hearts” is a more wholesome, and ultimately more cliché, endeavor. In the end, teenage brooding gives way to a sparkling fairy tale finale that shows that there was nothing for Elias to worry about, after all.Young HeartsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Novocaine’ Review: Sticks and Stones Will Never Hurt Him

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      In this gross-out action spectacle, Jack Quaid plays an unlikely action hero who, because of a genetic disorder, can’t feel any pain.If we’re in a post- “John Wick” era, where action cinema has been revitalized and modernized — more bullets and blood, more choreographed spectacle — the thrills of the genre have strangely edged closer and closer to that earliest of movie pleasures: slapstick. Particularly in the man-on-a-rampage subgenre, as the violence and gore becomes increasingly absurd, these movies begin to echo that old format, where the more creative and outrageous the pain, the more visceral the pleasure.That’s essentially the kind of silly, gross-out fun of “Novocaine,” which taps into this understanding about as overtly as possible. The key is in the invincibility clause — if, like the Three Stooges themselves, our action hero is virtually indestructible, the pain and its wacky payoffs can be endless.Other films have presented unique and often inane spins on this idea (from Jason Statham in “Crank” to Logan Marshall-Green in “Upgrade”), but this film, directed by Robert Olsen and Dan Berk, takes it to its most extreme, via an almost stupidly simple premise: Because of a genetic disorder, our protagonist Nate Caine (Jack Quaid) can’t feel any physical pain. Cue just about as many ways one can try to invoke it.Nate, though, is no willing bionic man, but in fact the opposite. Because he doesn’t have the sensors of pain to notify him if something has gone wrong, he’s led a conversely bubble-boy existence, fearful that at any moment he might unknowingly injure and kill himself. He tennis-balls the corners of desks, doesn’t eat solid foods (God forbid he bites off his own tongue!) and has become a bit of a recluse.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Who by Fire’ Review: Masculinity and Its Discontents

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      Men posture and peacock in the Québecois director Philippe Lesage’s ensemble drama set at an isolated house in a remote forest.One enduring storytelling strategy is to put some characters in a cage and watch them fight it out. There’s a reason so many mysteries, thrillers and horror movies take place in close quarters: Lockdowns have a way of turning people into lab animals. And whatever the cause — nature, nurture or screenwriting contrivance — when characters are stuck together, they often gnaw on one another, whether they’re on a lifeboat, in a hotel or on a private island.The studied drama “Who by Fire” from the Québecois writer-director Philippe Lesage takes place in a Canadian wilderness area that is as swooningly beautiful as it is expediently remote. Set over a blurry few days, the story largely unfolds in and around a waterfront property, a slice of paradise so isolated that visitors arrive by seaplane. There, old friends and new acquaintances connect. They read, listen to music, dance a bit, and laugh and shout over dinners filled with wine and talk. Amid the levity and Lesage’s heavy ideas about men and masculinity, they also enjoy nature and, at times, try to dominate it and one another.Lesage has a terrific eye, and he opens the movie with a grabber: a hypnotic shot of an old, boxy Mercedes alone on a highway in the near distance, a series of droning electronic notes rising and falling on the soundtrack. As the car passes miles of dense, mountainous forest, Lesage keeps the vehicle steadily positioned at the image’s vanishing point, which keeps your gaze similarly pinned. Outwardly, the setup looks familiar (you could be following friends in your own car) yet the absence of extraneous sounds — there’s no wind, no whirring engine — gives the whole thing a dreamy, somewhat eerie timelessness. Whatever the period, some old-fashioned flourishes and the absence of cellphones suggest that this is a memory piece.The car belongs to Albert (Paul Ahmarani), a screenwriter who’s en route to a friend’s house with his adult daughter, Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré), his younger son, Max (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon), and Max’s friend Jeff (Noah Parker). The owner of the remote getaway is Blake (Arieh Worthalter, an effective live wire), a successful director with an Oscar on a shelf and a plane out front. Blake’s baggage proves heavier than his visitors’: He has a dead wife, an unwieldy ego and a fraught past with Albert. When the two old friends meet, it’s all smiles and bear hugs. Before long, though, everyone is aloft in Blake’s plane and headed for some emotional, psychological and spiritual bloodletting.The movie’s opener — including the enigmatic drive, which can’t help but evoke Kubrick’s “The Shining” — announces Lesage’s gift for stirring up tension visually. That talent is evident throughout, notably during three leisurely dinners that anchor the story, each lasting some 10 minutes of screen time. Working with his director of photography, Balthazar Lab, Lesage stages and shoots these meals similarly, with everyone gathered around a long table. Over drinks and much talk, the camera alternately pushes in toward certain characters and pulls out to reveal the group’s dynamic, catching gestures and the circuitry of their gazes. “You know I hate fighting,” Albert tells Blake at one meal, an assertion that’s plainly hollow.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Opus’ Review: A New Album They’re Dying to Hear

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      John Malkovich plays a ’90s pop star who emerges from retirement with a bloody agenda.As targets for satire, flamboyant pop stars and celebrity journalists are low-hanging fruit — maybe even slightly mushy, rotten fruit. But in “Opus,” Mark Anthony Green, a former style columnist for GQ making his first feature as writer and director, bids to say something trenchant about fame while cementing his reputation as a sleek new horror auteur. He comes up short on both counts.The protagonist is a 27-year-old magazine journalist named Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri), who laments that she hasn’t written anything she considers worthwhile in three years at her job. But there’s big news: The mysterious, reclusive singer Moretti (John Malkovich) — “arguably the biggest pop star of the ’90s,” per Wolf Blitzer, in his obligatory newscast cameo — is coming out of retirement to release his first studio album in roughly the time that Ariel has been alive.And for unknown reasons, Ariel receives an invitation to Moretti’s desert compound, where she and Stan Sullivan (Murray Bartlett), her highhanded, idea-poaching boss, will join several other V.I.P.s to be the first in the world to hear it.The other golden-ticket recipients include a TV personality (Juliette Lewis), an influencer (Stephanie Suganami) and a paparazzo (Melissa Chambers). Out of all of them, Ariel is the only one inclined to show any skepticism toward Moretti’s bizarre brand of hospitality, complete with disgusting meal routines (at a banquet, diners pass around and bite from the same, increasingly saliva-saturated roll) and by-your-side “concierge” service, which in effect means that guests are guarded at all times. When Ariel goes for a jog, her minder (Amber Midthunder) even stops and starts at her pace.Like the upstate home in “Get Out” and the Swedish enclave in “Midsommar,” two movies whose influence looms unflatteringly over the proceedings, Moretti’s compound is a place where something is obviously amiss. Moretti, clearly a leader of some sort of cult, adheres to a religion that preaches a “holistic path” for creative types. There are odd rituals involving pubic grooming, wounds from oyster shucking and a puppet show in which a marionette Billie Holiday is interrogated by anthropomorphic rats.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Electric State’ Review: 1990s Robot Apocalypse? As if!

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      Who needs dystopian artificial intelligence to destroy faith in humanity when you can watch this sci-fi extravaganza?In “The Electric State,” a young woman and a silent robot slowly make their way across the carcass of the United States, littered with beached war ships and drones. In this alternative history, machines got on a fast track to sentience during the 20th century and waged war against humanity, which barely won. By the alt-1990s, hyper-capitalism and virtual reality have destroyed communal and social bonds — people are so addicted to V.R., which they mainline via helmet-like neurocasters, that they can go into vegetative states, oblivious to the world around them. The story is muted and evocative, and it leaves you with a powerful feeling of bereavement and grief for what we, as a species, have brought on ourselves.I’m sorry, I was talking about the illustrated novel “The Electric State” (2018), by the Swedish artist and writer Simon Stalenhag.Anthony Russo and Joe Russo’s movie version, streaming on Netflix, is quite different.It does have the same context and setup, but whereas the book is elliptical in narrative, muted in color palette and melancholy in mood, the movie is obvious, garish and just plain dumb. (For those interested, the Prime Video series “Tales From the Loop” is a much worthier adaptation of Stalenhag’s universe.)Naturally, a film can have an autonomous worth, equal but distinct from its source material (“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and “Blade Runner” come to mind). But even considered on its own, this “Electric State” remains a hyper-processed industrial product packed with sugar and sodium (in the form of quips and battles), along with such wonderful additives as goopy sentiment and automatic-pilot acting.We still have a young woman, Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), and she is still accompanied by a robot, Kid Cosmo (voiced by Alan Tudyk). But she is no longer central to the story or even the cast, having teamed up with a swashbuckling smuggler, Keats (Chris Pratt), and his own bot sidekick, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie). Because it’s easier to blame epochal collapse on one bad guy than on collective apathy, we also get Stanley Tucci as Ethan Skate, a tech tycoon up to no good.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Looney Tunes Movie With Daffy, Porky and Petunia

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      Subtitled “A Looney Tunes Movie,” this installment, directed by Peter Browngardt, takes bubble gum to a whole new level.Porky Pig just turned 90. His first cartoon was released on March 2, 1935; his tormentor and eventual foil Daffy Duck came along a couple of years later. These Warner Bros. comedic chaos agents were wild ripostes to Disney’s arguably saccharine Mickey Mouse. And after years of entertaining adults in the movie theaters of the early- and mid-20th century, television exposure turned Porky and Daffy, along with Bugs Bunny and others, into inspirations for generations of young wiseacres.“The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie,” directed by Peter Browngardt from a script by almost a dozen writers, races out of the gate with old-school moxie. Browngardt is a “Futurama” and Cartoon Network veteran. He’s also been honing his approach to Daffy and Porky with television’s “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” which has run six seasons on Max. Browngardt’s gnarly approach to the Looney Tunes characters seems more influenced by the gross-out antics of Nickelodeon’s “Ren & Stimpy,” than by, say, Warner’s own much-missed “Animaniacs.”The 20th- and now 21st-century pictures featuring these toons are a mixed bag. The least-inspired iterations of the characters, in the “Space Jam” movies, have been the most popular. Joe Dante’s wonderful “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” from 2003, had the spirit of the older cartoons — it appreciated the value of dropping anvils on coyotes’ heads, and more — but failed to find box office favor. But in Browngardt’s installment, citing pop-culture references and breaking out into song have little to no place. Instead, the movie subjects Daffy Duck to a butt-crack joke, and compels him to twerk.Which feels especially weird because the style in which our heroes are depicted comes directly from the Looney Tunes of old. The movie’s technical aspects are largely admirable, and it pays homage to the greats of the animation department once known as Termite Terrace by naming the movie’s restaurants after the past masters Robert Clampett and Tex Avery.Early on, the young BFFs Daffy and Porky are instructed by a creepy character that if they “stick together,” all will turn out right for them. Sticking is a major motif here, as an alien goo renders a new brand of chewing gum irresistible. It also makes its consumers mindless zombies. With the help of a “flavor expert,” Petunia Pig, Daffy and Porky scurry to save the world from, yes, blowing up like a gum bubble. The action is frenetic and gleefully vulgar; at one point a dome of bubble gum emerges from a dog’s rear end. There’s also some old-school slapstick; chattering fake teeth turn out to be practically world-saving.But the movie’s energy doesn’t pay off in dividends of real pleasure. Anarchy has never been so mere as it is ultimately rendered here.The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes MovieRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More