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      ‘Albert Brooks: Defending My Life’ Review: Revisiting Past Hilarity

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      This actor, comic, writer and director is seen in a cinematic retrospective that celebrates his talent, but not always in a critically discerning way.“Albert Brooks: Defending My Life,” a documentary about the venerable comedian, filmmaker, actor and writer, directed by his lifelong friend Rob Reiner, has the easy, amiable air of a career retrospective — wistful and hagiographic, it’s the kind of thing that usually accompanies a lifetime achievement award.Now 76, Brooks certainly deserves the recognition: the first four of the films he wrote and directed between 1979 and 2005, “Real Life,” “Modern Romance,” “Lost in America” and “Defending Your Life,” are among the finest American comedies ever made, and his trailblazing work on the late-night talk show circuit during the 1960s and 1970s had a seismic impact on the landscape of contemporary comedy. (To say nothing of his Academy Award-nominated turn in “Broadcast News,” a near-peerless masterpiece.)But there’s a reason we have comedy roasts, not toasts, as the rhapsodic tone of this film makes clear — breathless flattery just isn’t that interesting, no matter how funny the person receiving it. While Brooks deserves acclaim, he deserves it in a format as compelling and dynamic as he is. “Defending My Life” is simply too flat.Brooks and Reiner, lounging in a booth at Matteo’s Restaurant in Los Angeles, reminisce chummily about Brooks’s life and work, while an ensemble of comedy A-listers including Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, Jonah Hill and Larry David gush over his influence in a series of standard-issue talking head interviews. There are also clips from Brooks’s films and standup routines, which render much of the praise from the interviewees redundant. We don’t need to be told that Brooks is a genius. Even a brief glimpse of his work makes the case.Albert Brooks: Defending My LifeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      ‘Dream Scenario’ Review: Space Invader

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      Nicolas Cage plays a mild-mannered professor who inexplicably wanders into others’ dreams in this wonderfully weird dark comedy.Balding, bespectacled and bowed by the weight of a thousand disappointments, Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) moves through “Dream Scenario” with a schlubby passivity. At the college where he teaches evolutionary biology, his students sigh and fidget; during a lesson on zebras, he explains that their stripes keep them safe by ensuring that they don’t stand out from the herd. Not standing out is Paul’s entire vibe.Then he learns that, inexplicably, he has been popping up in people’s dreams. At first, it’s just the reveries of family and acquaintances — one of his daughters, a former girlfriend — but soon his invasions spread to complete strangers. A droll running joke has dream-Paul refusing to respond to the dreamer’s cries for help: In one scenario, his daughter is being pummeled by falling objects while Paul calmly rakes leaves; in another, a student is being menaced by a gore-soaked pursuer while Paul, sashaying past, declines to intervene. In Paul’s world, as in our own, it’s possible to go viral by doing virtually nothing.This could seem like a one-trick conceit; but the Norwegian writer and director, Kristoffer Borgli, infuses his screenplay with a sadness that foregrounds Paul’s long-burning need for recognition. At lunch with a former graduate school classmate (Paula Boudreau), who has recently published the book about ants that he himself has struggled to write, he attacks her for stealing one of his ideas. Later, he pushes back defensively when a former girlfriend (Marnie McPhail Diamond) describes his inaction in her dream about a dying friend.“You’re still doing that?,” she asks, incredulous. “Searching for the insult?” It’s perhaps the movie’s most important line, adding layers to a character who could seem a fool. But Paul is dull, not despicable, a vaguely resentful academic who’s loved by his stoic wife (Julianne Nicholson) and yearns to be included in their neighbor’s famed dinner parties. His newfound celebrity has him perplexed, then pleased, and ultimately petrified when the movie takes a dark turn and the dreams become nightmares. Now Paul stands out. Now he will be hunted — and not only online.Pondering the downside of notoriety and our willingness to exchange safety for fame, “Dream Scenario” is often funny and frequently surreal. Borgli’s previous feature, “Sick of Myself” (2023), also examined someone going to extremes to gain the attention she felt she deserved. Here, though, he has more ideas than space to execute them, and the movie’s third act can feel overloaded and indecisive of where it wants to land. Sharp, unheralded cuts from dream to reality leave us little time to get our bearings; yet they also leave Cage free to roam the length and breadth of his considerable acting range. The sight of Paul, in his shabby parka and scrubby beard, attempt to re-enact a young woman’s erotic dream — at her request — could make you want to put your eyes out.Full marks in this scene, though, to the terrific Dylan Gelula who, along with other supporting players like Michael Cera (as an advertising pup who wants Paul to carry a can of Sprite into people’s dreams) and Tim Meadows (as Paul’s department head), help ground the film’s cringe comedy. In the end, “Dream Scenario” is less interested in cancel culture than the fickleness of a mass audience that can rapidly swerve from adulation to condemnation — even when, like Paul, you really haven’t done anything at all.Dream ScenarioRated R for awkward groping and awful outerwear. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Youth (Spring)’ Review: Garment Rending

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      The documentarian Wang Bing examines the cloistered world of young textile workers in China.Despite running three and a half hours, the documentary “Youth (Spring)” withholds a great deal. That isn’t necessarily a criticism. The film is the latest documentary from Wang Bing, a persistent and widely admired chronicler of China’s downtrodden — its migrants, its outsiders, its mental patients and its survivors of forced-labor camps.“Youth (Spring)” is partly a follow-up to his “Bitter Money,” which opened in New York in 2018 and concerned the textile boom in Huzhou, China; the city had become a destination for migrants eager for work. While “Bitter Money” devoted some time to the journey itself, “Youth (Spring)” takes more of an inside-out approach, looking specifically at young textile workers — most of the identified subjects are in their late teens or early 20s — from a radically cloistered perspective.The overwhelming majority of the movie is set in Zhili, a district of Huzhou that holds more than 18,000 workshops that make children’s clothes, according to the closing credits, where Wang typically places his documentaries’ only contextual information. “Youth (Spring)” zeros in on what must be a small fraction of those workshops. Several are on a thoroughfare incongruously named Happiness Road.The trash on the streets (“Heard of public hygiene?” one man shouts) makes the exteriors look even grimmer than the interiors. Visually, the shops are practically interchangeable. Over the long running time, the drilling noise of the sewing machines begins to prompt a Pavlovian flinch. The windows, which generally seem to have bars, barely let in any light, and at times the shops’ dull tube-bulb illumination makes it hard to concentrate on the image without vigorous blinking.But Wang’s implicit thesis, emphasized through duration and repetition, is that these shops have become the complete universe for the men and women who work there, and who live there in cramped, dormitory-style housing. (From what we hear, the managers use their provision of board and food as an excuse for paying low rates.)These settings are where they will find their first girlfriend or boyfriend or prepare for parenthood. Wang appears to prioritize the quantity of subjects rather than characterization, but one of the most vivid sections occurs early, as a young couple, Hu Zuguo and Li Shengnan, make a decision on how to handle a pregnancy. The conversation involves not only them and both sets of their parents but also the shop’s boss, hardly a model of tact. (“Cheer up!” he says. “An abortion is like you got bitten by a dog, and you bite back.”)Near the midpoint, workers at another shop stage what their manager sneers at as a “mass protest,” descending on him as a group to demand better pay, only to get brushed off because he’s supposedly busy with a rush job. Again and again, we see workers and managers arguing over the rates that each item should fetch. “Rate bargaining is hard,” says one of the few subjects to acknowledge Wang’s camera, which mostly observes invisibly. “It can take days.”There is more to come. Wang shot in Zhili from 2014 to 2019, and “Youth (Spring)” is said to be the first in a three-part series. Even for fans of Wang and mammoth docs, “Youth (Spring)” can be an arduous film to sit through. But while the running time may be indulgent, the experience of feeling trapped in this world is difficult to shake. Like Wang’s “’Til Madness Do Us Part,” set in a mental hospital, the movie is an exhortation not to forget the unseen.Youth (Spring)Not rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 3 hours 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Manodrome’ Review: The Manosphere Gets a Crude Awakening

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      An unemployed dad-to-be is seduced by a misogynist group who call themselves “the guys” in this sensationalizing drama starring Jesse Eisenberg.The word “Manodrome,” the title of a new film starring Jesse Eisenberg, is a riff on the “manosphere” — a catchall term for misogynist online communities including so-called incels and men’s rights activists. If your first instinct, like mine, is to snicker, know that this self-important drama is devoid of humor.Directed by John Trengove, the film tracks the seduction of an unemployed worker turned Uber driver, Eisenberg’s Ralphie, by a group of women-hating men, which sets off a violent downward spiral that is, at the very least, not boring.A gym rat, Ralphie pumps iron to make up for the fact that he doesn’t feel very manly. He’s broke, and he’s expecting a baby with his girlfriend Sal (Odessa Young), with whom he lives in a teeny-tiny apartment in Syracuse, N.Y.Sal isn’t particularly excited about starting a family, but Ralphie seems to think fatherhood will save him — if only the system wasn’t working against him. In other words, he’s easy bait.Ralphie’s workout pal Jason (Philip Ettinger) steps in, and introduces him to “the guys”: a diverse gang of bachelors who bunk together in a country mansion owned by the group’s leader and bankroller, Dan (Adrien Brody). They offer a sense of community and material perks, emboldening Ralphie to act out against Sal and unleash his inner alpha.Eisenberg — beefed up in this role and stripped of the cocky, motormouth bravado he’s known for — plays the edgy Ralphie like a ticking time bomb of pent-up feeling. Though the script, which relies heavily on pseudo-psychology, doesn’t leave room for much mystery. Ralphie is self-loathing, intensely homophobic, and was made fun of as a kid for being chubby — connect the dots and you’ll be able to anticipate half of the film’s twists (and there are surplus twists).Crude and sensationalizing, “Manodrome” is like an amalgam of all the headlines you’ve read about the kinds of men who succumb to warped ideologies.ManodromeRated R for sex, domestic abuse, gun violence and cultlike activity. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Journey to Bethlehem’ Review: No Room at the Inn? Try the Multiplex

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      It’s no “Home Alone” or “Jesus Christ Superstar,” but it does have Antonio Banderas as a song-slinging Herod and Lecrae as a quavering Angel Gabriel.Christmas announces its coming earlier every year. We haven’t even hit Thanksgiving and here is this peculiar Nativity movie for, um, someone’s whole family, directed and co-written by Adam Anders. Anders, making his feature debut here, is a former “Glee” writer and music producer, and his co-writer, Peter Barsocchini, is a veteran of “High School Musical.” While their treatment of the ancient world is informed, to say the least, by their prior work, the scenario also feels like Hallmark pulped through a Disney strainer.For instance, the future Jesus-mom, Mary (Fiona Palomo), bridles at her arranged marriage, and actually says, “What about my dream of becoming a teacher, like my father?” She is talked down by girlfriends on a shopping trek who sing, “Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary/It’s good for you.”The familiar story line is festooned with “kicky” touches, like a meet-cute between Mary and Joseph (Milo Manheim) at a fruit market, and the angel Gabriel (the rapper and singer Lecrae) struggling with stage fright before making his presentation to the Blessed Virgin. Later, in a dream, two Josephs ponder the pregnancy issue, with the anti-Mary manifestation singing “Don’t make concessions/for her transgressions.”Antonio Banderas appears as Judea’s King Herod, dead set on making sure the newborn (other) King doesn’t stick around for long.“Did he lose a bet?” one may wonder, seeing Banderas in this role. Apparently not; he clearly relishes playing a singing and dancing villain. In his introductory number, he croons about how, yes, it’s good to be king.“Mine is the kingdom/mine is the power,” he belts out. And Joel Smallbone, as his scheming son Antipater, sidles up beside him to harmonize on “mine is the glory.”The magic of movies does depend on a certain suspension of disbelief, but “Journey” tests the viewer beyond rational credulity, even as it persists in asserting the reality of its existence.Call it a Christmas anti-miracle?Journey to BethlehemRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Still Small Voice’ Review: Grant Them the Serenity

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      This absorbing documentary follows a chaplain at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.Mati, the employee at the center of the hushed and absorbing documentary “A Still Small Voice,” reports for duty at an ordinary-looking office. There are cubicles, roller chairs, a water cooler and flat lighting that the director, Luke Lorentzen, would never dishonor by gussying up with a lamp. These are the chaplains’ quarters at The Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, and Mati and her colleagues are here to comfort the dying and the families of the dead — to transform this 1,134-bed institution into a sacred space. They are Olympian empaths and they are exhausted.Unexpectedly — and astutely — Lorentzen emphasizes not the emotional support these workers give, but the support they need to soldier on. Mati leans on her fellow residents and their supervisor, David; he, in turn, allows the camera into his counseling sessions with his own adviser, the Rev. A. Meigs Ross, where he admits that he no longer has “the gas in the tank.” Lorentzen keeps the image respectfully still while the chaplains vent their grievances in sensitive, measured language. When the pressure drives two to snap and interrupt each other, their moderately raised voices are as shocking as a slap.Here, comfort isn’t found in any particular religion. The one unifying belief is in a centering breath. Mati, raised Hasidic, questions whether she believes in God at all. Yet, in a powerful scene, she baptizes an infant who died at birth. Her persuasive words of comfort seem improvised. The holy water is in a Styrofoam cup. Somewhere, a door slams. It’s human and messy — and it’s divine.A Still Small VoiceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Orlando, My Political Biography’ Takes a Collective Approach to Joy

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      The filmmaker Paul B. Preciado shares the title role with 20 trans and nonbinary performers to make a point about the cage of identity.Few movies this year have lived in my head as long and as happily as “Orlando: My Political Biography,” which I’ve been thinking about since I first saw it in September. Written and directed by the Spanish-born philosopher and activist Paul B. Preciado — a trans man making his feature directing debut — the movie is, at its simplest, an essayistic documentary about transgender and nonbinary identity that draws inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando: A Biography.” Yet trying to squeeze “My Political Biography” into a tidy categorical box is fundamentally at odds with Preciado’s expansive project, which is at once an argument, a confession, a celebration and a road map.It’s also a sharp, witty low-budget experimental work of great political and personal conviction, one that breathes life into Woolf’s novel about a 16-year-old boy in Elizabethan England who, after centuries of trippy adventures, enigmatically ends up as a 36-year-old woman in 1928, the year the novel was published. Woolf dedicated the book to her lover Vita Sackville-West, whose son Nigel Nicolson described it as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” one in which Woolf weaves Vita “in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds.”Don’t expect luxurious trappings here; this isn’t the usual screen waxworks with meticulous details but few ideas. It is instead a pointed, spirited, up-to-the-minute exploration of sex, gender and sexual difference through the character of Orlando, who serves as Preciado’s mirror and avatar. In the novel, Orlando (long story short!) awakes one day to trumpets blaring “Truth!” and finds that he’s become a woman — a development that is, well, complicated.“The change of sex,” the book’s narrator asserts, “did nothing whatever to alter their identity.” As Preciado explains, his own transformation was more complex. “You didn’t know, perhaps,” he says, gently addressing Woolf, “this was not how one became trans.”From the very start Preciado expresses love and admiration for Woolf and her novel, but he also critiques some of her choices; he’s enraged, for one, that Orlando is an aristocratic colonialist. Even so, for the most part he expresses palpable tenderness toward Woolf, a quality that suffuses “My Political Biography” as he loosely re-creates Orlando’s narrative trajectory and plucks characters, episodes and sentences from the book. Along the way, Preciado draws attention to the construction of identity and that of the movie itself, fusing form and subject. While he’s peering behind the scenes (and as crew members drop in and out), he also introduces a chorus of other voices, including that of trans pioneers like the American actress-singer Christine Jorgensen and those of his trans performers.Preciado’s most provocative conceit is that he shares the role of Orlando with 20 other trans and nonbinary individuals of different ages, hues and shapes. While Preciado largely remains offscreen, other Orlandos enter and exit, introducing themselves to the camera, talking about their lives and — with both naturalism and charming, at times goofy, theatrical flourishes — playing out scenes from the novel, their words mingling with Woolf’s. Like her Orlando, his travels widely (if on a shoestring budget), undergoes metamorphoses and weaves through the centuries. One Orlando (Amir Baylly) wears a magnificent headpiece and shows off his legs; another (Naëlle Dariya) preens in a billowy wig festooned with tiny ships.By sharing the role of Orlando, Preciado shifts the story from the individual to the collective, taking it out of the private realm and into the public sphere. This communitarian shift from me to we also allows Preciado to attenuate the familiar documentary binarism (and power dynamic) in which there is one person who films and another who is filmed. Everyone is invited to this party. As Woolf writes, Orlando had “a great variety of selves to call upon”; Preciado similarly calls on a multiplicity of selves, at one point introducing a sweet-faced, pink-haired Orlando (Liz Christin) who visits a psychiatrist, Dr. Queen (Frédéric Pierrot), as other Orlandos chat in the waiting room sharing stories, hormones and laughter.Liz-Orlando’s mother has sent her to Dr. Queen for dressing like a girl and speaking about herself in the feminine. When the doctor asks Orlando how she believed herself “authorized to wear a skirt as a young man,” she answers that she’s not a man. “So you’re a woman?” the visibly confused shrink asks, brow furrowing. “I wouldn’t exactly say that either,” Orlando says with a Mona Lisa smile. The visit to the psychiatrist’s office takes place fairly early on and while the doctor’s bafflement is played for obvious, somewhat uneasy laughs, his inability (or refusal) to truly see Liz-Orlando has a sharp sting that lingers for the rest of the movie.The office face-off comically distills the rigid medical orthodoxies that Preciado challenges in greater detail in his electrifying short book “Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts,” a published version of a speech that he delivered in Paris in 2019 at a conference of 3,500 psychoanalysts. Having been invited to talk about “women in psychoanalysis,” Preciado instead spoke about, as he put it in his speech, “finding a way out of the regime of sexual difference.” For him, that meant a world beyond the cages of masculinity and femininity, an idea that inspired this audience of putative professionals to heckle Preciado, who writes that he was only able to deliver a quarter of his talk.“My Political Biography” is lighter and certainly funnier than “Can the Monster Speak?,” though the two work as companion pieces. The movie is serious, which you would expect given the political and personal stakes that one after another Orlando — with open faces and feeling — express. This is, on the one hand, a movie made by a philosopher who studied with Michel Foucault. At the same time, Preciado’s lightness of touch and intellectual nimbleness buoys the movie, lifting both it and you. There is nothing tragic other than the world that insists on policing bodies. Preciado’s superpower in this warm, generous movie is that while he speaks brilliantly to the cages of identity, he sees — and shares — a way out of them. He talks and listens, he exhorts and confesses. He insists on pleasure, speaks to happiness, invites laughter and opens worlds. Here, joy reigns supreme, and it is exhilarating.Orlando, My Political BiographyNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Killer’ Review: He’s a Deadly Bore

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      Michael Fassbender stars as a loquaciously dull hit man in David Fincher’s latest film about bloody exploits.David Fincher can’t get enough of that murderous stuff — his filmography bleedeth over with miscreants (“Alien 3”), home invaders (“Panic Room”) and multiple maniacs (“Seven,” “Zodiac,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “Gone Girl”). During one of his periodic breaks from painting the big screen red, Fincher served as a producer and director on the Netflix show “Mindhunter,” another of his visually impeccable, morgue-cold creep-outs. This one was about F.B.I. agents profiling serial killers like Edmund Kemper, a ghoul whose silkily insinuating manner resonated more deeply than the show, which ended after two seasons.“Mindhunter” was easier to admire than to love, which is habitually true of Fincher’s work and was certainly true of his last movie, “Mank,” an Old Hollywood exhumation about powerful people who kill dreams and souls. In Hobbesian terms, life in a Fincher film tends to be solitary and poor, nasty and brutish, if not necessarily short. That’s the case again in his most recent movie, “The Killer,” about a nameless hit man — played by Michael Fassbender — a chatty loner first seen waiting for a victim to show up. In time, the mark appears, the Killer shoots but misses, and spends the remainder of the story trying to clean up the mess.“The Killer” is based on a French comic book with the same title written by Alexis Nolent (who goes by Matz) and illustrated by Luc Jacamon. The protagonist is an outwardly ordinary-looking hit man who’s as physically unassuming as he is inevitably nihilistic: Other people are awful, the world is hopeless, “we’re living on a pile of corpses,” etc. He quotes Christ and Kazantzakis, pals around with kindred villains, regularly has sex with balloon-breasted ladies but also spends a lot of time alone, which means the comic panels overflow with his loathing and insipid thoughts. What makes him ostensibly interesting isn’t his job or body count; what’s intriguing, at least before your eyes finally glaze over, is that he’s dull.The idea of an anti-Bond type with an illegal license to kill is, yes, an idea, one that flickers weakly on the page amid a mass of genre clichés. What’s most distinctive about the comic is the contrast between its protagonist and Jacamon’s cinematic illustrations, with their rich hues, canted angles and interplay between realism and expressionism. You keep reading only to keep looking. Fincher’s visual approach in the movie is relatively muted by contrast. He bathes the screen with sulfurous yellow, throws in a few showy shots — an unblinking eye seen through a gun scope — and, as he likes to do, goes dark and then darker, as in one extended fight sequence that’s so dimly lit it sometimes hovers on the threshold of visibility.Written by Andrew Kevin Walker (“Seven”), the movie ditches a lot of the comic’s gasbag observations, shaves the plot to the bone, folds in some pop-culture yuks (the Killer uses sitcom aliases) and takes a jab at WeWork. Fassbender’s character still prattles on a lot, mostly in voice-over, both when he’s on the job and off, but much of what he says is repetitive and on occasion near-affirmational. “Forbid empathy,” he murmurs. “Trust no one.” On occasion, he sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself or just settle his mind so he can focus on the violent task at hand; at other times, he sounds as if he’s dispensing avuncular advice to students of slaughter: “This is what it takes if you want to succeed.”One problem with the movie is that without the Killer’s anti-humanist rants, his historical references and political entanglements, there isn’t much left other than Fincher’s virtuosity, Fassbender’s tamped-down charisma and the thorny pleasures of watching evil people commit evil with great finesse. What this Killer has are a lover (Sophie Charlotte), who’s merely a plot contrivance, a luxe beachfront house and a storage unit kitted out with the tools of his trade (guns, passports). What he doesn’t have is much of a personality or a code, a way of being that complicates the violence, as in the films of Jean-Pierre Melville and his admirers. So what is the Killer? Mostly, it seems, he is a way for Fincher to kill time.After the first job in the movie goes bad, the Killer finds that he’s now a target, which adds a bit of tension and mystery as he dodges threats amid the bang-bangs — the gunfire is more polyrhythmic than the metronomic editing — and the splashy entrances and exits from the other generic types: the Lawyer (Charles Parnell), the Client (Arliss Howard), the Expert (Tilda Swinton), the Brute (Sala Baker). Throughout, Fassbender holds the center with his lissome, controlled physicality and near-unmodulated voice. The character is boring and so is this movie, but like the supremely skilled Fincher, who can’t help but make images that hold your gaze even as your mind wanders, Fassbender does keep you watching.The KillerRated R for ultraviolence. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More