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      Looking to Watch Movies and Make Friends? Join the Club.

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      Around New York City, there’s a robust circle of film enthusiasts showing offbeat movies in bars and shops, where lingering afterward is welcomed.At Heart of Gold, a cozy bar in Queens, a mad scientist recently brought to life a corpse that went on a blood-drenched rampage. But the people nursing their beers there didn’t call the authorities. They cheered.That’s because the undead were marauding on a screen, set up at the front of the bar, that was illuminated by “Re-Animator,” Stuart Gordon’s 1985 horror-science fiction splatterfest. The occasion was a Monday night gathering of the Astoria Horror Club, which meets regularly to watch scary movies over hot dogs, mulled wine and other anything-but-popcorn concessions.Before the film, Tom Herrmann and Madeleine Koestner, the club’s co-founders, introduced “Re-Animator” with a trigger warning about a sexual assault scene and a reminder to generously tip the staff. About 35 people watched the movie seated, but others stood, complementing the onscreen mayhem with shrieking, gasping and, as a decapitated head got tossed around, an explosion of applause.The Astoria Horror Club is just one of many film clubs that, while not new in concept, are quietly thriving in and around New York City. At many of these events, movies are shown not in traditional theaters but in bars, shops and other makeshift spaces, for small groups of people, many of whom arrive early for good seats and stay afterward to gush and vent.The screenings are open to the public, but mostly it’s Gen Zers and millennials who are joining strangers to watch movies that, in many cases, are for niche tastes and were made before streaming was a thing.These kinds of films are programmed regularly at the city’s revival houses, like Film Forum and Metrograph. But what these film clubs offer is ample space and time, where debate and friendships can blossom without leaving your seat. For cheap, too: At chain theaters, tickets can be more than $20 apiece, not including food and drinks. Many of these film clubs are free to attend, although patrons are asked to pony up for beer or bites.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 Promised Land’ Review: Coaxing Crops From a Wild Land

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      Mads Mikkelsen stars as a soldier with little money but big ideas who gets royal approval to try to conquer a vast shrubby expanse.The Danish drama “The Promised Land” takes its old-fashioned remit with enjoyable seriousness. Set in the mid-18th century, it is a classic tale of haves and have-nots filled with gristle and grit, limitless horizons, scenes of suffering, reversals of fortune and cathartic recognition. It has sweep, romance, violence and spectacle, but what makes it finally work as well as it does is that it largely avoids the ennobling clichés that turn characters into ideals and movies into exercises in spurious nostalgia — well, that and Mads Mikkelsen.Mikkelsen stars as Capt. Ludvig Kahlen, a war veteran with little more than a frayed uniform and a well-polished medal on his chest, who sets out to cultivate the heath in Jutland, the peninsula that makes up most of Denmark. There, on a vast shrubby expanse thought untamable yet beloved by the Danish monarch, Kahlen hopes to work the land and establish a settlement for king, country and himself. Over time, as seasons change and visitors come and go, he does just that, building a new world and cultivating the ground in a laborious, engrossing process that the director Nikolaj Arcel charts with ease and gripping drama.Written by Arcel and Anders Thomas Jensen, the well-paced story briskly takes Kahlen from the poorhouse to the royal palace minutes after opening, establishing the reach of his ambition. (The movie is based on the novel “The Captain and Ann Barbara” from the Danish writer Ida Jessen.) There, he seeks permission to build on the heath from the king’s advisers, a collection of imperial rotters in wigs and satin breeches who agree to his request only after he pledges to pay for the endeavor with his military pension. In return, Kahlen wants a title, a manor and servants; effectively, he wants to become one of them.Mikkelsen is excellent, and inexorably watchable. He almost always is, whether he’s infusing life into a cardboard Hollywood villain (“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”) or having a palpably rollicking time playing a rampaging hero (as in the entertaining action romp “Riders of Justice,” written and directed by Jensen). Mikkelsen’s severe good looks are a crucial part of his appeal, as is the sense of menace and intrigue that certain beauty brings with it. Mikkelsen knows how to complicate his looks and he’s particularly adept at amplifying its menace by withholding readable emotion, a technique that turns his face into a mask you anxiously wait for him to drop.Kahlen soon reaches Jutland alone on horseback, and the story begins to take flight, as does the camera. With boundless aerial views that establish a sense of place both geographic and emotional, Arcel at once conveys the land’s immensity (and harsh grandeur) and emphasizes the titanic effort of Kahlen’s enterprise (and its loneliness). In both sun and rain, he repeatedly bores into the ground with a hand-held auger to gauge the quality of the soil, feeling, smelling and all but tasting the dirt. With every twist of the auger, he steadily underscores his will. By the time he finds what he needs it’s as if the heath had finally surrendered to him.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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      Jack Jennings, P.OW. Who Helped Build Burma Railway, Dies at 104

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      He was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and was one of thousands of prisoners whose hardships were the basis for the film “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”Jack Jennings, a British prisoner of war during World War II who worked as a slave laborer on the Burma Railway, the roughly 250-mile Japanese military construction project that inspired a novel and the Oscar-winning film “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” died this month in St. Marychurch, England. He was 104.His daughters Carol Barrett and Hazel Heath told the BBC on Jan. 22 that he had died in a nursing facility, though the exact date of death was unclear.They said they believed their father was the last survivor of the estimated 85,000 British, Australian and Indian solders who were captured when the British colony of Singapore fell to Japanese forces in February 1942.A private in the 1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment, Mr. Jennings spent the next three-and-half years as a prisoner of war, first in Changi prison in Singapore and then in primitive camps along the route of the railway between Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar).To build bridges, Mr. Jennings and at least 60,000 P.O.W.s — and thousands more local prisoners — were forced to cut down and debark trees, saw them into half-meter lengths, dig and carry earth to build embankments, and drive piles into the ground.In his 2011 memoir, “Prisoner Without a Crime,” Mr. Jennings described the dangerous process of driving the piles, using a heavy weight raised by the men to the top of a timber frame.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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      ‘Argylle’ Review: A Cat Cannot Save It

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      A simulacrum of a spy movie offers few pleasures and plenty of headaches.Last year, while Hollywood’s actors and writers were on strike, people often asked me why the unions had such a bee in their collective bonnet about artificial intelligence. A.I. could never write a screenplay as well as a human, they said. Wouldn’t that ultimately spell doom for any studio that tried to replace their writers, and the whole thing would right itself on its own?My answer, then and now, was that it wouldn’t matter if the screenplay was good. Audiences have become so accustomed to watching movies and TV shows — excuse me, content, half-watched from behind a phone screen — that resembles something they liked once that A.I.’s regurgitations will not feel out of place. It doesn’t have to be better, I said. It just has to be adequate.“Argylle” was not, to my knowledge, written by A.I. (It was written by Jason Fuchs.) But it perfectly embodies the soulless, human-free feel that I worry about. It is ostensibly a tribute to spy movies of an earlier age, not clever enough to be a spoof and certainly not satire. But a homage shows affection for, understanding of and respect toward the thing it is honoring. “Argylle” feels pasted together by a robot manipulating some kind of spy Magnetic Poetry.What pleasure is extractable in “Argylle,” directed by Matthew Vaughn, lies in its mild surprises. Let’s just say the protagonist, Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard, very wide-eyed), is a best-selling spy novelist and, despite her protestations, the very epitome of a cat lady. (Her Scottish fold cat, Alfie, appears entirely computer generated even when I think they surely were using a real cat, and his presence seems calculated to add some whimsy to the plot. It does not.) She lives alone in a nicely appointed cabin nestled between mountains in Colorado, and she is afraid of dating and of flying. Instead she taps away at her novels, which have legions of fans.But stuck on the ending of the latest installment, she hops on a train to visit her mother (Catherine O’Hara), and has the bad luck to find herself seated across from a grungy-looking guy named Aidan (Sam Rockwell). He is reading her latest novel, “Argylle,” named for the fictional spy she both writes about and sees everywhere (played by Henry Cavill, sporting an overemphasized widow’s peak). She tries not to let on who she is; she fails; and then, out of nowhere, things go haywire.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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      ‘Not a Pretty Picture’: A Director’s Unflinching Response to Trauma

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      Anthology Film Archives is screening a new 4K restoration of Martha Coolidge’s 1976 docudrama about date rape.Made nearly half a century ago and long hiding in plain sight, Martha Coolidge’s “Not a Pretty Picture” is at once an autobiographical documentary, a Pirandellian psychodrama, an acting exercise, a personal exorcism and a powerful political tract.The subject is date rape, and it could not be more topical. In a rare theatrical run, a new 4K restoration of the movie opens on Friday at Anthology Film Archives.At 16 years old, in 1962, Coolidge was sexually assaulted by an older schoolmate. Her 1976 movie restages and analyzes the rape. In the film, it’s 1962 again and the actress playing Martha (Michele Manenti), innocently adventurous, takes a trip with three boys and another girl to New York City. No matter how self-possessed she believes herself to be, she winds up isolated in a loft, where she is cajoled, bullied and ultimately raped by a far more self-assured predator (Jim Carrington), who separates her from her friends.Coolidge interviews the performers onscreen as well as directing them and encouraging them to improvise. The assault is the movie’s central scene, but nearly as compelling as the long takes of Manenti wrestling with Carrington as he urges her to “just please relax …” is the sight of Coolidge watching the struggle, her hand over her mouth.The performances are multifaceted. Manenti herself was raped as a teenager and discusses this in the film. In critiquing his character, Carrington calls him “uneducated” (a polite substitute for jerk) and comes off nearly as glib, yet honest in his identification with the rapist. Anne Mundstuk, Coolidge’s boarding school roommate and confidante, is cast as her teenage self and recalls her own feelings at the time as well as her thoughts on re-enacting them.Coolidge frames “Not a Pretty Picture” with her own expressions of vulnerability. It begins with a school recital performance of the most achingly pure of folkie love-songs “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” sung by Coolidge and shown in long shot from the perspective of two smirking boys in the audience. It ends with the filmmaker acknowledging the shame she felt and the lasting damage that the rapist inflicted.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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      ‘She Is Conann’ Review: Queen of the Barbarians

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      This feminist riff on “Conan the Barbarian” is a sci-fi horror movie sprinkled with a bit of glam-rock fairy dust.“She Is Conann,” Bertrand Mandico’s gonzo-feminist riff on “Conan the Barbarian,” plays like an opera from hell. In the first few minutes, Rainer (Elina Löwensohn) — a humanoid hound who could be related to the Crypt Keeper — terrorizes an old woman wrapped in foil. The creature, who wears a boxy leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, struts around and monologues in a snakelike whisper, and then bites off a chunk of the woman’s flesh.Rainer leads the hapless dame into a sparkling cavern, where the queen of the barbarians herself, Conann, is perched on a high tower, clutching a human heart that looks more like a Christmas tree ornament.“She Is Conann” is a particularly nasty kind of sci-fi horror movie, sprinkled with a bit of glam-rock fairy dust. It unfolds almost entirely in a foggy underworld that resembles an elaborate haunted house. As opposed to computer-generated imagery, Mandico relies on built sets and practical effects, which give the film a stagey feel. Its unabashedly excessive scenes of violence also offer a gross-out realism.With Rainer as our guide, the plot loosely revolves around Conann’s ascension to power through the ages. First, she’s an innocent white teenager (Claire Duburcq) who witnesses a band of sadistic warriors chop her mother in half; then, she’s an androgynous 20-something (Christa Théret) who looks like the offspring of David Bowie. In the lengthiest act, she’s a Black woman with a fierce buzz cut and metallic threads (Sandra Parfait) living in a metropolis with her girlfriend.It’s more of a fever dream than an actual story, offering a queer counternarrative to the macho vision of the legendary warrior that is as hypnotic as it is gnarly.She Is ConannNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘How to Have Sex’ Review: This Paradise Is Nothing but Trouble

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      Molly Manning Walker’s vaporous coming-of-age story tracks a 16-year-old girl during a brief, booze-soaked Grecian getaway.For all the hard-partying and forced euphoria onscreen, the movie “How to Have Sex” proves grim going. A vaporous coming-of-age story, it tracks Tara (a fine, sympathetic Mia McKenna-Bruce), who plays a 16-year-old British girl on a brief, booze-soaked getaway in Greece. There, amid crowds of other like-minded vacationers, she hangs with friends and strangers, hits the clubs, scarfs fast food, drinks and drinks some more, tossing back endless shots until she staggers into oblivion, only to rouse herself for another round of the same.Tara and her supposed besties — Enva Lewis as the nice Em, Lara Peake as the not-so-nice Skye — have arrived in Malia, a resort town in Crete, fresh from their crucial secondary-school exams. They’ve come for a fly, flop and fornicate holiday, one of those excursions with sandy beaches, cheap hotels, nonstop beats and crowds of fit people who look and talk just like them. Giddy and super-stoked, the girls have come equipped with suitcases of beachwear, tubs of makeup and apparently superhuman livers. Tara is also hoping to lose her virginity, a familiar rite of passage that here turns into a blurry life lesson.The writer-director Molly Manning Walker eases you in with shrieks and laughs, hovering camerawork and naturalistic scenes. Walker is a cinematographer making her feature directing debut and she’s keenly sensitive to the power of color; she uses a wide spectrum to set (and change) the mood, signify interiority and telegraph ideas. (The director of photography is Nicolas Canniccioni.) Kids being kids and often drunk — and because Manning Walker is loath to put words in their mouths — the characters rarely express themselves coherently. Instead, as the story unfolds, she plays with the palette, the inaugural velvety blue giving way to the sun’s white glare, blasts of Day-Glo green and washes of red.The story begins taking shape once the girls meet three other young British tourists, including a guy named Badger (Shaun Thomas). From their nearby, amusingly portentous balconies, Tara and Badger trade shy looks and soon the two groups have joined forces. Complications ensue along with more rounds of clubbing and boozing and vomiting. Em pairs off with Paige (Laura Ambler), but Skye isn’t taken with the other circle’s third member, Paddy (Samuel Bottomley). Instead, she keeps checking out Badger, an affable doe-eyed guy with a seemingly incongruent lipstick print tattooed on his neck right above the words “hot legends.”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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      ‘Disco Boy’ Review: Pawns in a Bigger Game Struggle for a New Start

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      This feature debut from the Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese takes on ordinary people trying to free themselves from the bonds of their homelands.A dance, in the forest, first eerily hypnotic and then propulsive, collides with a tableau of ravaged lands and oil-slicked waters. It’s an abrupt cut between scenes that embodies in miniature the central tension of “Disco Boy” — a neon-dream parable cast against the shadow of sweeping global forces.It’s also when the disparate stories of this entrancing feature debut from the Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese finally converge. Alex (Franz Rogowski) is an undocumented Belarusian immigrant who, after crossing into France, joins the Foreign Legion for a chance at getting his papers and starting a new life. At the same time, in the Niger Delta, Jomo (Morr Ndiaye) is leading a rebel group fighting the devastating foreign exploitation of the area’s oil-rich land. When Jomo’s group takes a foreigner hostage, Alex leads a rescue mission that brings him right into Jomo’s path.They are on opposite sides of an unremarkable clash, in Abbruzzese’s eyes just a violent blur of bodies forming another speck in the grand scheme of armed conflict. And yet, the film laments, their stories are the same: They are ordinary people, unwittingly caught up in the cold gusts of empire — men who, hoping for better lives, are pushed toward cruel fates beyond their control.Even if it sometimes borrows too overtly from its obvious influence, “Beau Travail,” the 1999 opus by Claire Denis, “Disco Boy” is a lean but sweepingly ambitious film crafted with formal rigor. Abbruzzese deftly transitions between haunting silence and kinetic energy, a balance supported in particular by Vitalic’s pulsating score and the inspired compositions of the cinematographer Hélène Louvart. Rogowski pulls it all together with stoic features that emanate so much sorrow and history.“Do you ever wonder what you’d have become, if you’d been born on the other side, among the whites?” Jomo asks his comrade at one point in the film. The tragedy is that they’ll never know.Disco BoyNot rated. In Igbo, French, Russian, Nigerian English and Polish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More