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      ‘South to Black Power’ Review: A Great Migration in Reverse

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      In a new documentary, the opinion columnist Charles M. Blow calls for Black Americans to move to the South to gain political footholds.The documentary “South to Black Power” — directed by Sam Pollard and Llewellyn M. Smith — employs many of the gestures a newspaper opinion piece might. Which is apt, since Charles M. Blow, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, is the film’s searching guide — but also, at times, its expounding subject.Based on his 2021 book, “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto,” the film revisits Blow’s argument that the only way for Black Americans “to lift the burden of white supremacy” is head to the South. With this “Great Migration in reverse,” they can build a majority and take hold of the political levers of those states and their legislatures.During the 2020 presidential election, Georgia, where Blow now resides, offered tantalizing evidence of the kind of might he envisions. In this documentary, which is filmed in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Blow visits Mississippi, Alabama, the Carolinas (with a warm stopover at his childhood home in Gibsland, La.).He bolsters his thesis but also stress tests it with people who have never left, who have left and returned, or, like the author Jemar Tisby, who have put down new roots with uplift in mind.In a nice bit of journalistic even-handedness, several of Blow’s interviewees are not entirely convinced by his thesis, or they believe there are other paths to political gains. For example, the community strategist Asiaha Butler shares why she decided to stay in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, despite the gun violence and the tug of family in the South. Her story of how seeing a young girl playing alone in a vacant lot and throwing bottles into the street cinched it — she had to remain — is as moving as it is authentic. And her reasons are as committed to empowering Black Americans where they are as Blow’s call for mass migration.South to Black PowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      ‘Eileen’ Review: Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway Thrill in Adaptation

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      Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway star in a period thriller that brings cathartic nastiness to a cold New England Christmas.Exceptions exist, of course, but protagonists in mainstream movies labeled feminist tend to fall along two lines. One is the endearing woman who has to break out of the cage she hadn’t even known she was in (think the girlbossing of “Barbie,” more or less). The other is the hot mess rom-com heroine, who is, as advertised, both super hot and an agent of abject chaos, her life and habits and relationships in perpetual ruins.The pleasure of “Eileen” is that its titular protagonist is all of these and none of them: repellent, bitter, repressed and in search of liberation that arrives in a decidedly unsexy manner. In some ways the story is familiar — small-town girl with a terrible life yearns to break free, and meets someone who represents that freedom — but it’s all filtered through a dirty mirror, a noir with shmutz rubbed onto the lens. Eileen’s unpleasantness is also her appeal; this girl certainly is no boss, she’s incapable of rousing speeches, and she’s never going to mutate into a heroine. She is, in other words, familiar.The movie she’s in is a psychosexual thriller, kind of. Ottessa Moshfegh, along with Luke Goebel, adapted Moshfegh’s 2015 novel into a screenplay that’s relatively faithful to the original, but with a few key twists that ensure tension for viewers who’ve read the book. Yet the outlines remain the same: It is the early 1960s, and Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) lives with her alcoholic ex-cop father in some gray, nameless New England town. Eileen’s clerical job at the local boys’ correctional center is stultifying and upsetting, or it would be if Eileen, who is in her mid-20s, could muster the ability to be upset anymore. (“Everyone’s kinda angry here — it’s Massachusetts,” she tells someone.)One day right before Christmas, the new prison counselor turns up, a pulled-together platinum blonde named Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) who seems to have floated in from another dimension. She’s educated, she jokes with the staff and she dresses in a way that emphasizes her curves. Rebecca is comfortable in the world in a way Eileen finds magnetizing. Swiftly, Rebecca becomes her center of gravity, the encapsulation of her dreams. It’s the sort of infatuation a teenager might develop, somewhere between wanting a person and wanting to be a person, but with Rebecca around, Eileen’s bloodless life is injected with sudden fire, and danger, too.McKenzie’s accent is a bit wobblier than Hathaway’s, but once you’re over that hump, the pair are thrilling together. McKenzie plays Eileen as a wide-eyed girl in arrested development who might have been an ingénue if she’d ever had a moment to sparkle. Instead her flat affect, which on someone else might be mysterious and intriguing, turns her invisible. Eileen’s own father tells her, in a moment of uneasily companionable boozy candor, that there are people in the world who live like they’re “in a movie,” the “ones making moves,” but that Eileen is the other kind of person: “Easy. Take a penny, leave a penny. That’s you, Eileen. You’re one of them.”So Rebecca, whom Eileen’s father would probably term a “dame” (or maybe a “hussy”), comes like a bolt from the frigid blue, though more sophisticated eyes than Eileen’s can detect some kind of performativity in her self-presentation. She is, after all, a female Harvard graduate (not, she emphasizes, Radcliffe) in early ’60s New England. She’s been educated with men and now works in a prison for boys and seems perfectly comfortable taunting men in a dive bar. She’s developed a kind of bombshell casing, for reasons unknown but easy to guess at. Hathaway’s performance is pure Hollywood siren wrapped in a wool skirt suit. What she is hiding, her motivations — that’s all opaque, and despite a veneer of vulnerability, there’s something just a little seedy about her.These sorts of women, off-putting and maddeningly erratic, tied to the physical in a way that makes others uneasy, are familiar territory for Moshfegh. She’s perhaps best known for her 2018 novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” about a young woman who in response to grief develops an addiction to sleeping pills and their accompanying twilight state. In Moshfegh’s imagination, emotional states are signaled by bodily obsessions viewed with disapproval in polite society. For Eileen, this manifests in compulsive behavior: masturbating while spying on a couple in a car, only to stuff snow down her tights to stifle the impulse, or chewing candies and spitting them back out by the bowlful, in an attempt to control her body size. (In the novel, she’s also scatologically fixated, downing laxatives and frequently commenting on fecal matters; the film, perhaps necessarily, carves this part away.)But the story is also a perfect pairing for its director, William Oldroyd, whose previous film, the 2017 thriller “Lady Macbeth,” introduced Florence Pugh to the world. Oldroyd’s cold but keen eye for women pushed to the edge of a nervous breakdown by boorish, violent men meets rich ground here. Not just Eileen, but Rebecca and several other female characters are not good or angelic women, and yet they’ve clearly bent themselves to fit molds made by men. The film’s titles, its grain, its shots that bathe Rebecca and Eileen in glowy red lights and deep shadows — it’s all meant to evoke the period, but also an era where women like these fit in like a wrong-handed glove.All of this adds up to discomfort and a bitter aftertaste. Unlike this year’s big movies about women breaking free from oppressive circumstances — the aforementioned “Barbie,” the forthcoming “Poor Things,” among others — it is not obvious that Eileen is destined to find a fuller, richer life free from the confines of patriarchy. She may not be the kind of person who really can. She is, in fact, rather ordinary, not — to return to her father’s statement — the kind of person who’s in a movie, who makes decisions and does things.Except, of course, she’s the lead of her own movie now. Refusing to make Eileen into a girlboss or a heroine or even an example is what makes the whole thing so delicious, so cathartic, so strangely realistic, even if the viewer is left a little horrified. “Eileen” is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.EileenRated R. A whole lot of nasty business. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Eileen’ Review: Sudden Fire, Sudden Danger

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      Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway star in a period thriller that brings cathartic nastiness to a cold New England Christmas.Exceptions exist, of course, but protagonists in mainstream movies labeled feminist tend to fall along two lines. One is the endearing woman who has to break out of the cage she hadn’t even known she was in (think the girlbossing of “Barbie,” more or less). The other is the hot mess rom-com heroine, who is, as advertised, both super hot and an agent of abject chaos, her life and habits and relationships in perpetual ruins.The pleasure of “Eileen” is that its titular protagonist is all of these and none of them: repellent, bitter, repressed and in search of liberation that arrives in a decidedly unsexy manner. In some ways the story is familiar — small-town girl with a terrible life yearns to break free, and meets someone who represents that freedom — but it’s all filtered through a dirty mirror, a noir with shmutz rubbed onto the lens. Eileen’s unpleasantness is also her appeal; this girl certainly is no boss, she’s incapable of rousing speeches, and she’s never going to mutate into a heroine. She is, in other words, familiar.The movie she’s in is a psychosexual thriller, kind of. Ottessa Moshfegh, along with Luke Goebel, adapted Moshfegh’s 2015 novel into a screenplay that’s relatively faithful to the original, but with a few key twists that ensure tension for viewers who’ve read the book. Yet the outlines remain the same: It is the early 1960s, and Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) lives with her alcoholic ex-cop father in some gray, nameless New England town. Eileen’s clerical job at the local boys’ correctional center is stultifying and upsetting, or it would be if Eileen, who is in her mid-20s, could muster the ability to be upset anymore. (“Everyone’s kinda angry here — it’s Massachusetts,” she tells someone.)One day right before Christmas, the new prison counselor turns up, a pulled-together platinum blonde named Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) who seems to have floated in from another dimension. She’s educated, she jokes with the staff and she dresses in a way that emphasizes her curves. Rebecca is comfortable in the world in a way Eileen finds magnetizing. Swiftly, Rebecca becomes her center of gravity, the encapsulation of her dreams. It’s the sort of infatuation a teenager might develop, somewhere between wanting a person and wanting to be a person, but with Rebecca around, Eileen’s bloodless life is injected with sudden fire, and danger, too.McKenzie’s accent is a bit wobblier than Hathaway’s, but once you’re over that hump, the pair are thrilling together. McKenzie plays Eileen as a wide-eyed girl in arrested development who might have been an ingénue if she’d ever had a moment to sparkle. Instead her flat affect, which on someone else might be mysterious and intriguing, turns her invisible. Eileen’s own father tells her, in a moment of uneasily companionable boozy candor, that there are people in the world who live like they’re “in a movie,” the “ones making moves,” but that Eileen is the other kind of person: “Easy. Take a penny, leave a penny. That’s you, Eileen. You’re one of them.”So Rebecca, whom Eileen’s father would probably term a “dame” (or maybe a “hussy”), comes like a bolt from the frigid blue, though more sophisticated eyes than Eileen’s can detect some kind of performativity in her self-presentation. She is, after all, a female Harvard graduate (not, she emphasizes, Radcliffe) in early ’60s New England. She’s been educated with men and now works in a prison for boys and seems perfectly comfortable taunting men in a dive bar. She’s developed a kind of bombshell casing, for reasons unknown but easy to guess at. Hathaway’s performance is pure Hollywood siren wrapped in a wool skirt suit. What she is hiding, her motivations — that’s all opaque, and despite a veneer of vulnerability, there’s something just a little seedy about her.These sorts of women, off-putting and maddeningly erratic, tied to the physical in a way that makes others uneasy, are familiar territory for Moshfegh. She’s perhaps best known for her 2018 novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” about a young woman who in response to grief develops an addiction to sleeping pills and their accompanying twilight state. In Moshfegh’s imagination, emotional states are signaled by bodily obsessions viewed with disapproval in polite society. For Eileen, this manifests in compulsive behavior: masturbating while spying on a couple in a car, only to stuff snow down her tights to stifle the impulse, or chewing candies and spitting them back out by the bowlful, in an attempt to control her body size. (In the novel, she’s also scatologically fixated, downing laxatives and frequently commenting on fecal matters; the film, perhaps necessarily, carves this part away.)But the story is also a perfect pairing for its director, William Oldroyd, whose previous film, the 2017 thriller “Lady Macbeth,” introduced Florence Pugh to the world. Oldroyd’s cold but keen eye for women pushed to the edge of a nervous breakdown by boorish, violent men meets rich ground here. Not just Eileen, but Rebecca and several other female characters are not good or angelic women, and yet they’ve clearly bent themselves to fit molds made by men. The film’s titles, its grain, its shots that bathe Rebecca and Eileen in glowy red lights and deep shadows — it’s all meant to evoke the period, but also an era where women like these fit in like a wrong-handed glove.All of this adds up to discomfort and a bitter aftertaste. Unlike this year’s big movies about women breaking free from oppressive circumstances — the aforementioned “Barbie,” the forthcoming “Poor Things,” among others — it is not obvious that Eileen is destined to find a fuller, richer life free from the confines of patriarchy. She may not be the kind of person who really can. She is, in fact, rather ordinary, not — to return to her father’s statement — the kind of person who’s in a movie, who makes decisions and does things.Except, of course, she’s the lead of her own movie now. Refusing to make Eileen into a girlboss or a heroine or even an example is what makes the whole thing so delicious, so cathartic, so strangely realistic, even if the viewer is left a little horrified. “Eileen” is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.EileenRated R. A whole lot of nasty business. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Silent Night’ Review: On the First Day of Christmas, Kill.

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      John Woo’s latest is as violent and merciless a revenge thriller as you can imagine.It’s a widely-held proposition that great artists mellow as they age. That hasn’t held true in filmmaking. Robert Bresson ended his career in his 80s with two of his most fevered and angry works, “The Devil Probably” and “L’’Argent.” Martin Scorsese, now 81, put out the tortured and indignant “Killers of the Flower Moon” this year. And now the inspired action filmmaker, John Woo, 77, delivers the merciless revenge shoot-em-up, “Silent Night.”Woo’s pictures have always operated on the “pure cinema” principle. Simply put, he prefers showing to telling. And what he shows are emotional extremes and their violent fallout. For this picture he put his prodigious staging, shooting and cutting skills to a test that won’t surprise his fans: The movie is practically free of dialogue. Joel Kinnaman plays Brian, a father living near California gang turf, driven mad by grief after seeing his young child killed by a stray bullet fired during a battle. In his initial maniacal reaction, he’s shot in the throat by a drug dealer with slashes of black tattooed on one side of his face.The attack happens around Christmas, and once Brian emerges from a monthslong drinking binge, he shapes up, takes up arms, and marks the next Christmas on his calendar: “Kill them all.” And so it goes. Car chases, motorcycle chases, stabbings, shootings, bone-breaking. Even without the talking (Catarina Sandino Moreno, as Brian’s beleaguered wife, mutters “OK” once or twice), there’s a lot of sound and fury and it works: This is suspenseful and cathartic, and even the schmaltzy stuff is so distinctly John Woo that it’s welcome.Silent NightRated R for, well, violence. No language, though! Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Godzilla Minus One’ Review: Bigmouth Strikes Again

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      Japan’s famous monster franchise returns with an appetite for destruction but also a notably sober outlook.You have to like Godzilla’s style. Confident, with an almost stately groove to his step — and why not? With “Godzilla Minus One,” the giant prehistoric lizard is heading toward the 70th anniversary of his Toho studio franchise. Once again, Japan emerges from World War II only to face this atomic colossus, whose appetite for destruction remains unabated and a reliable spectacle.In a prelude, Godzilla makes landfall during the war on an island where a kamikaze pilot, Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), has just detoured to desert. Koichi survives the monster’s attacks, becoming a ball of guilt and shame. He resettles in Tokyo’s rubble with a stranger, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who’s caring for someone else’s baby.They’re a nuclear family, as it were, but remain unmarried, simply co-survivors. Koichi’s camaraderie with crew members on a mine cleanup ship lightens the mood, but soon Godzilla rears his leathery head again with attacks on ships, streets and the people unfortunate enough to be there.Less vengeful or bored than just a phenomenon, Godzilla stomps and chomps away, spiky, dead-eyed, his hide rough as cooled magma. Signature moves include the snap-and-toss (grabbing and flinging a human or train-car aside) and his blue ray (not the high-resolution disc but rather an explosive thermonuclear beam). The writer-director, Takashi Yamazaki, integrates crowds and effects with a sure hand, and endows the violence with a dour air.The mood suits as citizens band together and decry Japan’s wartime disregard for life. The heroic arc is creaky, but despite the chintzy clichés about Godzilla movies, this one keeps bringing blockbuster brio to heel with a sometimes heavy heart.Godzilla Minus OneRated PG-13 for monster mash. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘American Symphony’ Review: Intimate Harmony

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      This portrait of the musician Jon Batiste and the author Suleika Jaouad follows an artistic couple through ambition and adversity.Partway through “American Symphony,” the musician Jon Batiste pokes gentle fun at the coverage he received in advance of the 2022 Grammys. The breadth of his 11 nominations, which bridged pop, jazz and classical categories, made him tough to label. He ultimately fended off Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish to win album of the year.This documentary, directed by Matthew Heineman, is likewise deceptively tricky to peg. In the broad strokes, it is a process film, following Batiste, who grew up in the New Orleans area and trained at Juilliard, as he prepares a wildly original symphony that shares a title with the movie. “My ambition for composing this symphony is massive,” he says. “I’m trying to expand the canon of symphonic music, break through long-gatekept spaces.”(Ben Sisario, writing in The New York Times, described the piece, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2022, as a “Whitmanesque canvas of funk, Dixieland jazz, operatic vocals and Native American drums.”)But this is also a movie about two artists, their love, their creative attitudes and how, as a couple, they approach living a “life of contrasts.” That description comes from the writer Suleika Jaouad, Batiste’s partner (they marry during the film), whose best-selling memoir, “Between Two Kingdoms,” was published in 2021 and who, before college, studied at Juilliard herself, with a specialization in double bass.As Batiste gets ready for his Grammy and Carnegie Hall coups, Jaouad undergoes a bone marrow transplant after a recurrence of cancer. (She received her first leukemia diagnosis at 22, and from 2012 to 2015 wrote in The Times about her experiences.)While some of the backstage material has an official feel (Batiste and Jaouad are listed among the many executive producers, along with Barack and Michelle Obama), the documentary does not shy from showing private moments. It captures Batiste hiding his head under a pillow as he talks on the phone with his therapist and sits in with the couple as a doctor discusses the open-ended course of chemotherapy he is recommending. When it comes to the music, too, the film is unafraid to dwell on a drawn-out silence or phrase.American SymphonyRated PG-13 Potentially upsetting medical scenes. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘May December’ Review: She’ll Be Your Mirror

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      In Todd Haynes’s latest, Natalie Portman is an actress studying the real-life model for her character, (Julianne Moore), a woman with a tabloid back story.Much of Todd Haynes’s sly, unnerving “May December” takes place in and around a picture-perfect home, that favorite movieland setting for American dreams turned nightmares. This one comes wrapped in a dappled, hazy light that blunts hard lines and brightens every face, so much so that characters sometimes look lit from within. Even the evening has an inviting velvetiness, as if all of life’s shadows have been banished. In characteristic Haynes fashion, though, nothing is as it first seems in this shimmering Gothic, including the light that becomes more like a queasy, suffocating miasma.“May December” is the story of two women and their worlds of lies. They meet when a TV actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), visits Gracie (Julianne Moore), the inspiration for her next role. Gracie lives in a large waterfront house in Savannah with her husband, Joe (Charles Melton), their teenage twins and two Irish setters. They have another kid in college, jobs they seem to enjoy and a complicated history that’s summed up by the box Elizabeth finds at their front door, and which Gracie opens with a shrug of familiarity. It’s feces, she explains coolly, and this isn’t the first such package.That box is a blunt metaphor for the ugliness at the core of “May December” — years ago, Gracie became tabloid fodder after she was caught having sex with Joe when he was in seventh grade — a setup that Haynes brilliantly complicates with his three knockout leads, great narrative dexterity and shocks of destabilizing humor that ease you into the story. The first time I watched the movie, I almost clapped my hand over my mouth during one absurd moment, unsure if I was supposed to be laughing this hard. Of course I was: Haynes is having fun, at least for a while, partly to play with our expectations about where the movie is headed.A progenitor of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, Haynes likes to dig into that space between the world that exists (or we believe exists) and the world of appearances. He’s a virtuoso of paradoxes. That partly explains why he’s drawn to the woman’s film, with its focus on ordinary life, its domestic spaces, moral quandaries, political dimensions and tears. These films evoke what the critic Molly Haskell once described as “wet, wasted afternoons” and reveal what lies “beneath the sunny-side-up philosophy congealed in the happy ending.” She might as well have been talking about this movie.Written by Samy Burch — it’s her first produced screenplay — “May December” is a woman’s picture in a distinctly Haynesian key. As he has in some of his earlier films (“Far From Heaven,” “Carol”), Haynes at once embraces and toys with genre conventions. He uses beautiful images (and people), bursts of lush music, pointed metaphors and floods of feeling to provide the familiar pleasures of a well-told, absorbing narrative film, even as he picks it apart at the seams. This can create an uneasy dissonance, and there are instances when it seems as if you’re watching two overlaid movies: the original and its critique, a doubling that works nicely in “May December,” which soon becomes a labyrinthine hall of mirrors.Gracie’s character is loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who in 1997 was arrested for having sex with one of her sixth-grade students, abuse that started when he was 12. She pleaded guilty to child rape and eventually served time in prison, where she gave birth to their first two children. (They later married.) The case generated a predictable tsunami of grotesque media slavering and found putatively serious journalists referring (and continuing to refer) to the sexual assault as a “tryst” and “forbidden love,” language that prettied up the crime as a passionate romance.Gracie rationalizes her relationship with Joe on her own terms, which emerge as Elizabeth gathers intel. As Elizabeth plays detective — she scans old tabloids, interviews family and friends — she helpfully establishes the back story. Gracie isn’t a teacher, and she and Joe met in a pet store, a seemingly incidental detail that takes on poignantly metaphoric resonance as the story unfolds. At one point, Elizabeth also accompanies Gracie and her daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu) on a shopping trip. When the girl tries on a sleeveless dress, Gracie tells Mary she’s “brave” for baring her arms and not caring about “unrealistic beauty standards.” Mary looks crushed, Gracie oblivious and Elizabeth a bit stunned but oh-so fascinated.At this stage in her process, Elizabeth has begun to imitate Gracie’s gestures and expressions, a turn that Haynes expresses in the tricky shot that opens the shopping scene. As Mary tries on dresses, the women sit side-by-side facing the camera, two mirrors flanking them like drawn curtains. Because of the angles of the mirror, Elizabeth looks as if she’s seated between Gracie and Gracie’s reflection. It takes a beat to read the image and figure out why there are two Gracies, although as Elizabeth slips into character, suddenly there are three.Moore and Portman’s synced performances give the movie much of its weird comedy. Elizabeth guides you into the story, and you’re tagging along when she pulls up to her Savannah digs and later to Gracie and Joe’s home. Portman gives Elizabeth the studied agreeability of someone who has to work to present a friendly front, an effort that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever interviewed a bored film star. Elizabeth is quick to smile, but Portman shows you the character’s brittle affect, so that you see the flickers of hesitation in her eyes and twitches around her mouth. Mostly, you see that Elizabeth isn’t a very good actress. (Presumably that’s why when she tries out Gracie’s lisping voice, she evokes Madeline Kahn.)Gracie doesn’t need to put up a false front because her existence is nothing but a fully committed, melodramatically rich performance that Moore supplely delivers with alternating eerie calm and impressive histrionic mewling and caterwauling. Gracie has embraced her roles as a loving wife and doting mother, and seems to be living in a profound state of denial about what these roles have cost her husband and children, a lack of understanding (and remorse) that establishes the story’s inaugural moral crisis. It’s not at all clear, at first, if Gracie is lying to herself, blissfully self-unaware or just another garden-variety sociopath playing at the American dream, uncertainty that gives the story a frisson of mystery.Gracie and Elizabeth dominate the first half of “May December.” Then, almost imperceptibly, the focus shifts to Joe, and the story grows ever more serious, heavy and very, very sad. Moore and Portman are tremendous, but it’s Melton’s anguished performance that gives the movie its slow-building emotional power. A stunted man-child with a hulking, ponderous body, Joe too has multiple roles as a father and husband, an object of desire and exoticized other. Yet none fit as persuasively, and he’s most at ease in the scenes of him with the Monarch butterflies he raises in little cages. It’s a sweet pastime and a potentially blunt metaphor, one that Haynes handles with enormous, moving delicacy, never more so than when these beautiful creatures emerge from their chrysalises and Joe tenderly watches them take flight.May DecemberRated R for references to the sexual abuse of minors and some adult nudity. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Who We Become’ Review: Interrogating Identity and Injustice

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      Three young Filipino women self-document difficult conversations with their families and friends during the first year of the pandemic.Three young Filipino women probe ideological divisions in their communities in “Who We Become,” a sensitive but straightforward documentary largely filmed during the first year of the pandemic. The nonfiction exercise consists almost entirely of footage captured by the subjects; the director PJ Raval assembles the self-documented scenes into a rough arc by tracking how the women stay connected to their families and engage with them about identity and injustice.The film begins with a perfunctory news montage priming us on the Covid-19 crisis — as if we need a reminder — before pivoting to spend time alongside Lauren Yap, a college senior returning to her family home in Bedford, Texas, for virtual graduation. The documentary goes on to bring in scenes from Monica Silverio, an activist in Austin, and Jenah Maravilla, a community organizer in Houston, who both become involved with the Black Lives Matter movement. Their friends are encouraging of their advocacy work; their parents, sometimes less so. “Do a peaceful protest at home,” Monica’s father suggests on a video call.The issues explored in “Who We Become” are essential, but the film’s content can occasionally feel superficial, as when Raval scrolls through text and images the women shared on Instagram. Those social media posts, designed for public consumption, pale in comparison to the documentary’s personal scenes. When, in an intimate video call, Jenah’s longtime friend Rachel tells her, “you’ve treated my Black body with care,” it is more galvanizing than any number of infographics.Who We BecomeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More