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      Streaming Movies: ‘Bernie,’ ‘Damsels in Distress’ and More

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      Atypical star vehicles, ensemble indies, high-powered genre pictures and gripping historical documentaries are among the highlights of this month’s offbeat picks.‘Damsels in Distress’ (2012)Stream it on Hulu.Eleven years ago, the “Barbie” mastermind Greta Gerwig was known not as the director behind a billion-dollar blockbuster, but as one of the most charismatic actresses on the indie film scene. Her talents are nicely showcased in this sharp-witted, frequently quotable comedy of manners and satire of campus life. The writer and director is Whit Stillman, who helped define smart, talky ’90s indies with his triple play of “Metropolitan,” “Barcelona” and “The Last Days of Disco”; this, his first feature in 13 years, was a welcome return to form. Gerwig is at her complicated best as Violet, who helps her friends (Megalyn Echikunwoke, Carrie MacLemore and Lio Tipton, all memorable) navigate the unfortunate men of the fictional Seven Oaks College; Adam Brody is likably squirrelly as the campus cad.‘The Seagull’ (2018)Stream it on Max.Gerwig’s frequent leading lady Saoirse Ronan is one of the many familiar faces in the ensemble cast of this well-crafted adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s theatrical classic. Brian Dennehy, Billy Howle, Elisabeth Moss and Corey Stoll also appear, as residents and visitors of a picturesque country estate outside Moscow, though Annette Bening shines brightest in the showcase role of Irina Arkadina, the comically vain and heartbreakingly complicated diva of the Russian stage. The director Michael Mayer works a bit to hard to jazz up the text with showy camera movements and excessive coverage, but those momentary distractions can’t detract from the fine acting on display here.‘Non-Stop’ (2014)Stream it on Netflix.Liam Neeson’s third act as a hero of pulpy action pictures has seen its ups (“The Grey”) and its downs (the “Taken” sequel of your choosing), but this tightly-wound potboiler is one of the genuine highlights. He stars as Bill Marks, an ex-cop-turned-air-marshal battling a mysterious killer who’s bumping off the passengers — one every twenty minutes — of an international flight. The director Jaume Collet-Serra takes the right approach to this somewhat silly premise, crafting the picture as a cross between Agatha Christie, “Airport” and “Speed,” and the ensemble cast (which includes Michelle Dockery, Scoot McNairy, Julianne Moore, Lupita Nyong’o, Linus Roache and Shea Whigham) helps keep this wild flight on course.‘Drug War’ (2013)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.The celebrated Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To (“Election,” “Triad Election,” “Breaking News”) brought his decades of film craft to bear in this fast-paced, furiously entertaining crime epic. There are characters galore and subplots aplenty (as is To’s custom), but the underlying premise is simple: a bad guy (Louis Koo’s ruthless drug kingpin), a good guy (Sun Honglei’s dedicated undercover cop) and a pursuit. To’s breathless set pieces are as relentless as ever, but the picture is about more than mere action; he gives dimension to what could have been cartoon characters, and surveys the human consequences of the titular conflict.‘Bernie’ (2012)Stream it on Hulu.The true story of how a beloved East Texas mortician murdered a wealthy widow could’ve made for a probing character study (or, perhaps, a tacky Netflix true crime docuseries). Instead, the director and co-writer Richard Linklater achieves a delicate and precise mixture of dark comedy and small-town portraiture, thanks in no small part to a cast that includes Jack Black (Linklater’s “School of Rock” star) as the mortician, Matthew McConaughey (Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” star) as the district attorney who prosecutes him and the great Shirley MacLaine as the victim, a characterization she pitches somewhere between Ouiser from “Steel Magnolias” and Beelzebub.‘A Hologram for the King’ (2016)Stream it on Max.Tom Hanks movies were still an event in 2016, yet few paid much attention to this light yet lofty adaptation of Dave Eggers’s novel. Perhaps it was just a bit too odd, too steeped in the hands-off style and indie sensibility of its director Tom Tykwer (“Run Lola Run”), but it’s an undiscovered gem of Hanks’s late period. He stars as Alan Clay, a recently divorced and undeniably desperate American consultant in Saudi Arabia for what is intended to be a brief sales pitch to the Saudi government. But days pass as he waits for his audience with the Saudi king, resulting in an unexpectedly effective combination of insightful character study and “Waiting for Godot”-inspired absurdism.‘Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story’ (2017)Stream it on Netflix.Few film stars of the 1930s were as shimmeringly seductive as the Viennese vamp first called Hedy Kiesler, and first known for her then-shocking in-the-buff turn in the 1933 Czech import “Ecstasy.” But this is no mere tale of Old Hollywood stardom. Lamarr lived an eventful and exciting life, of sin and scandal and, most notably, invention — particularly her development of a communication system that formed the foundation of modern Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. She was a woman more dynamic and complex than any of the characters she played, and Alexandra Dean’s documentary tells her story with excitement, verve and plentiful (not to mention well-earned) sympathy.‘Radio Unnameable’ (2012)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.For decades, Bob Fass was a comforting voice for nocturnal New Yorkers — the overnight host on WBAI-FM, an early developer and practitioner of “free-form radio,” opening his phone lines and airwaves to an assortment of searching callers and outlaw entertainers. Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson’s affectionate documentary tells the story of Foss’s show and his life (to the limited extent that they were separate at all), via a riveting collection of archival audio recordings, photographs, films and memories, from his early searching days to the loosely organized and occasionally out-of-control gatherings of what he called his “cabal” of loyal listeners. On Fass’s show, insomniacs and night workers and eccentrics found not only a megaphone, but a community; Lovelace and Wolfson’s film gently draws the line to contemporary high-tech counterparts, while still longing for the idealism and possibility of the past. More

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      ‘The Outsiders’ Heads to Broadway in March

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      A new musical adaptation of a popular novel by S.E. Hinton will begin performances in March.Get ready to rumble.“The Outsiders,” a new musical adaptation of the 1967 S.E. Hinton novel of teenage alienation, as well as the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola film starring Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze and Ralph Macchio, will begin performances on Broadway this spring. The cast has yet to be named.The musical is set in Tulsa, Okla., in the 1960s and follows an increasingly bloody conflict between rival gangs — the East Side have-nots, the Greasers, and the West Side haves, the Socs (short for “socials”). It will begin previews at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater on March 16, with an opening slated for April 11.“The Outsiders” was initially set for a world premiere at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in June 2020 before the pandemic delayed and then scuttled those plans. When the production finally began performances in California in February, it had a nearly three-hour run time, with a cast of 25 led by Brody Grant as Ponyboy Curtis, an orphaned 14-year-old who lives with his older brothers, Sodapop (Jason Schmidt) and Darrel (Ryan Vasquez), both of whom have left school to support him. (Sky Lakota-Lynch played his best friend, Johnny Cade.)Angelina Jolie was announced last week as a lead producer. Jolie, whose credits as a film producer include “Maleficent” and “Unbroken,” saw the world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego this year with her 15-year-old daughter, Vivienne, whom she said will serve as her assistant (the pair also attended a touring production of “Dear Evan Hansen” in Philadelphia last year).While some critics found the musical’s ambitious scale appealing, others thought the story was weighed down by too many characters and themes. “Awkward, yearning, fast on its feet, the show, like the adolescents it describes, is still trying on various identities,” Alexis Soloski wrote in a review for The New York Times, though she praised the “effortless yet thoughtfully diversified” casting of the Greasers, who, like the Socs, are white and male in both the book and the movie, as well as the “gorgeous, mournful music.” (The songs are by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, of Jamestown Revival, as well as Justin Levine, who won a Tony Award for his orchestrations for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”)Danya Taymor (“Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” “Pass Over”), who directed the La Jolla production, will return for the Broadway run, as will the rest of the creative team. The book is by Adam Rapp (“The Sound Inside”) and Levine, who also handled the arrangements and orchestrations, with choreography by Rick and Jeff Kuperman.In addition to Jolie, the show’s producers also include American Zoetrope, the San Francisco film production company founded by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas; as well as Sue Gilad and Larry Rogowsky (“Moulin Rouge!,” “Funny Girl”).Hinton’s novel, which was published when she was a teenager, has long been celebrated for its relatable protagonist and unpolished authenticity. But those same qualities have also put it on frequently challenged books lists for its portrayal of gang violence, underage smoking and drinking and strong language.“The Outsiders” joins two other Broadway productions that have announced dates for next year. “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s dark comedy about a family grappling with antisemitism in France, opens in January; and “The Notebook,” a musical adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’s best-selling romance novel, opens in March. More

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      Horror Movies Streaming: ‘Bad Things,’ ‘Zom 100’ and More

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      Inhospitable ghosts, a kid werewolf and Japanese zombies make up this month’s scary picks.‘Bad Things’Stream it on Shudder.The writer-director Stewart Thorndike wrestles with ghosts in her new slow-burn haunted hotel film.Ghosts as in spectral humans, like a little girl with disintegrating fingers, who spook the Red Roof-style motel that Ruthie (Gayle Rankin) inherits from her grandmother. Ghosts as in the emotional traumas that haunt Ruthie and the guests — her partner, Cal (Hari Nef), their friend Maddie (Rad Pereira) and Maddie’s guest, Fran (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) — who join Ruthie at the motel to determine its fate. Then there’s the phantom of “The Shining,” a film Thorndike aspires to summon, down to the creepy joggers who might as well be Kubrick’s menacing girls in grown-up athleisure wear.Together, these spirits join forces in an unsettling and moving film about motherhood and bad memories, one that won’t so much grab you by the throat as squeeze your hand. Thorndike sustains an eerie mood throughout, but wanders off course as the stakes become fuzzy in the final stretch, when a hospitality expert (Molly Ringwald, wonderful) appears to Ruthie, and a chain saw roars to life.The film gets big assists from Jason Falkner’s minimalist score and Grant Greenberg’s cinematography that washes the Ithaca, N.Y., hotel where the film was shot in despairing hues.‘Enys Men’Stream it on Hulu.Mark Jenkin’s unnerving folk horror fable joins “Skinamarink” and “The Outwaters” in this year’s thrilling class of experimental horror films that give fear a form. Enigmatic and nightmarish, the film is about a woman known only as the Volunteer (Mary Woodvine), who spends her days alone on an isolated island off the British coast where she’s charged with tending a terrain that seems to be overtaking her emotionally and physically. Did I say alone? The strange figures who haunt the landscape suggest otherwise.Jenkin shot on a gloriously textural 16 millimeter, and uses many of the hallmarks of experimentalist cinema, like repetitive cuts and a warped score, to unsettle a sense of place and time. Figuring out what it adds up to — a purging of personal traumas? a feminist response to misogynist evils? both? — is the fun of watching this singular and lush but demanding movie that may test some horror fans’ patience and desire for plot, so if it’s a clearer and cleaner scare you want, look elsewhere.‘New Religion’Stream it on Screambox.In this penetrating Japanese film about loss, grief and self-forgiveness, the director Keishi Kondo paints a tortured picture of Miyabi (Kaho Seto), a divorced woman who at night works as a call girl, even as she mourns her young daughter who one minute was tending to plants on the family’s apartment balcony and in a flash, disappears.Miyabi has a new boyfriend (Ryuseigun Saionji), but their spark is flickering, which is why she’s drawn to the attention showered on her by one of her clients, Oka (Satoshi Oka), a mysterious photographer. Miyabi agrees to let Oka take photos of her, and their sessions become a therapeutic way for her to process grief. But as Miyabi’s grasp on reality loosens with each portrait, their macabre photo shoots take her on a darkly supernatural trajectory.Kondo is both a precisionist and a full-throttle abstractionist; one minute he fills the screen with emotionally chilly drama and the next with expressionistic images of cocoons and bubbling landscapes. Moth motifs get heavy-handed as Miyabi’s sorrow transforms into psychosis, but all is forgiven when the film so seamlessly blends a sensory visual experience with a moving study of a mother’s anguish.‘Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead’Stream it on Netflix.Akira (Eiji Akaso) hates his job, so the zombie apocalypse that hits Tokyo could not be better timed. “I don’t have to go to work anymore!” he exclaims on a rooftop as a band of the hungry undead grab for him from behind a gate. That charmingly irreverent set up is what fuels Yusuke Ishida’s zombie comedy, a live action adaptation of the eponymous manga.The film’s subtitle refers to Akira’s list of “100 Things I Want to Do Before Becoming a Zombie,” which includes riding a motorcycle (check!) and putting things in a shopping cart “without caring about price,” a cinch considering his supermarket is empty save for the zombies that the eager-beaver Akira, who played American football in college, easily outmaneuvers.The silliness that made the film so charming in the beginning becomes tiresome as the story moves away from Akira, a delightful protagonist, and instead relies on extended cat-and-mouse scenes that add little more than new characters. By the end of two, too-long hours, the walking monster shark (long story) and a heavy-handed message about individuality — which may delight teen fans — I was worn out.‘Wolfkin’Rent or buy it on major platforms.If there’s a common denominator in horror, it’s the word don’t. Don’t go into the basement. Don’t enter the woods. And don’t mess with mothers, and that goes double for moms of monsters.In Jacques Molitor’s werewolf drama, the monster is Martin (Victor Dieu), one angry little boy. After he bites another kid, Martin’s mother, Elaine (Louise Manteau), takes him to his dead father’s Luxembourg estate where the boy’s grandparents don’t know she or Martin exist. The grandparents waste no time folding Martin into what his grandpa calls “a very old hunting family,” one that makes Elaine feel like an outsider, especially when she’s shocked to watch her son transform into a wolf. From there, the film stumbles as Molitor tries to figure out where to go next, and I wish the answer hadn’t been to blow the whole thing up.Werewolf movies have been queering horror since Lon Chaney Jr. got hairy in “The Wolf Man” in 1941, and this is a small effective addition. Any parent who has ever loved a child who’s different will appreciate the story of a mama-bear protector and her young boy’s monstrous coming-out. More

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      How the Drama of ‘The Blind Side’ Helped Sports Fans Look Past Questions

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      “The Blind Side” played on sports fans’ penchant for too-tidy narratives, our columnist writes. A legal battle between the N.F.L. player and the family depicted in the film seeks to answer questions the dramatization looked past.Michael Oher, center, filed a lawsuit against Sean Tuohy, left, and Leigh Anne Tuohy, right, over their conservatorship of his business affairs.Matthew Sharpe/Getty ImagesOf course America loved “The Blind Side,” the 2009 movie about a homeless and hapless Black teenager rescued from a bleak future by a wealthy, white family. It was based on the true story of the Tuohy family, led by Sean and Leigh Anne, who took the future N.F.L. player Michael Oher into their home and raised him proudly as he made it to college and beyond.It’s the type of story we’re used to in sports, one that undergirds our beliefs about sport’s power to create lifelong bonds, help its participants overcome hardships, and build character. It’s also a simplified rendering of race in America, one that hinges on the trope that white people can be magically redeemed by coming to the aid of a Black character.Audiences sucked it up. The film took in over $300 million and Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy, self-possessed belle of the New South.But “The Blind Side,” based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis, renders a complicated reality in the most digestible format. This week, surprising news of a lawsuit filed by Oher against the Tuohys spurred many to reconsider the movie, searching for answers to questions raised by the legal claim and obscured by the film’s comfortable, tidy narrative.Oher is suing the couple for a full accounting of their relationship. He claims that when he thought he was being adopted at 18, the Tuohys urged him to sign a conservatorship that gave them control to enter into contracts on his behalf. He says that the familial bond, warmly portrayed in the movie, was a lie and that the Tuohys enriched themselves at his expense.The Tuohys have defended their actions, arguing in a statement that the conservatorship was a legal necessity so Oher could play football at the University of Mississippi without jeopardizing his eligibility.In a story with at least four versions — those of Lewis, the movie studio, Oher and the Tuohys — it’s almost impossible to discern who is telling the truth.When Michael Oher was selected in the first round of the 2009 N.F.L. draft, the Tuohy family was by his side.Jeff Zelevansky/Getty ImagesUntil this week, I must admit, I had never seen “The Blind Side.” I’d purposefully avoided it. I’m leery of movies that lean on simple racial clichés — a fatigue that began as a child, when so many of my Black heroes died at the end of films so white heroes could live.News of Oher’s lawsuit convinced me that it was time to plop down on the couch and take in the film, with the benefit of 14 years of hindsight — 14 years in which race and sports have re-emerged as essential platforms for the examination of America’s troubles.My assumptions were proved correct early in the film, while Oher’s character was taking shape. As the story unfolds, he is shown as a lost cause before meeting the Tuohys and attending a well-to-do Christian school in Memphis. The film portrays him in easy terms: as a body, first and foremost — a gargantuan Black teen whose I.Q., we are told, is low, and who has no idea whatsoever about how life operates in worlds that are not swamped in poverty and despair.Sandra Bullock won an Oscar in 2010 for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy.Warner Brothers Pictures/AlamyThe Oher of the film, particularly early on, has little agency and no real dreams of his own. When I saw that, it felt like a gut punch. “What?” I muttered. “There’s no way this characterization is true.”The Baltimore Ravens selected Oher in the first round of the 2009 N.F.L. draft. No one makes it that far in sports without a foundation of years of motivation and training, which gives credence to Oher’s long-held criticism of his portrayal in the film. He is an intelligent person, Oher has said, again and again, and he was a skilled football player well before meeting the Tuohys.Not someone who needed the Tuohys’ young, pint-size son, Sean Jr., to teach him the game in the easiest of terms — by using bottles of condiments to show formations and plays. We watch Sean Jr. at a park, delighting in putting a clueless Oher through workouts.The movie also shows the Tuohys using sports as a vehicle for Oher to develop confidence, enter a world of prestige and riches — and eventually to attend Ole Miss, the couple’s alma mater, where Sean Tuohy once starred in basketball.Oher protects Leigh Anne Tuohy when they dare to go to the neighborhoods where he’d grown up — “That horrible part of town,” she says. He saves Sean Jr.’s life when the two are in a car crash by using his massive arm to shield the young boy from the force of an airbag. When Oher struggles on the practice field as he learns the game, Leigh Anne Tuohy bounds from the sidelines and drills him with firm instruction: He must shield the quarterback the same way he guarded her and her son.“Protect the family,” she insists.A lesson delivered to Oher by a feisty white woman as if he were a first-grader (or a servant) is a turning point. Oher begins transforming from a football neophyte raised on the streets into an offensive lineman with the strength of Zeus, the nimbleness of Mikhail Baryshnikov and the size of an upright piano.Soon, we watch him play in a game, enduring aggressive and racist taunting from an opponent who initially has his way with an inexperienced rival.Suddenly, Oher snaps. He does not just block the opposing player: Enraged, Oher lifts him and drives him across the field and over a fence.“Where were you taking him, Mike?” his coach asks as Oher stands on the sidelines.“To the bus,” Oher deadpans, his tone innocent and childlike. “It was time for him to go home.”By the film’s end, the transformation is complete. We learn that under the watch of a wealthy white family, Oher’s I.Q. has improved to an average level! We see him become a high school champion! We watch a parade of coaches — real coaches, playing themselves in the film — fawn over Oher as they try to persuade him to suit up for their school.It is hard to figure out, by the movie’s telling, Oher’s motivation, or his savvy, because he continues to be portrayed as a prop — quiet, docile, a young man who, for the most part, does as his newfound family says. This, by the way, makes it hard to even figure out, all these years later, the truth of his lawsuit.Oher has disputed his portrayal in the film, telling his version of events in two memoirs.Scott Cunningham/Getty ImagesWhat we do see in the movie is that he shines in college and the pros. There he is in the N.F.L., in his Baltimore Ravens gear. He had made it to the sports Promised Land and through it all, the Tuohy family was at his side.This film had everything.The dumbed-down trope about race and class in America that Hollywood has always peddled.The simplified narrative that uncritically hails sport and its purity, the way it can change lives, always for the better, by shaping diamonds in the rough into jewels. The shadowy side of sports — the cheating, the lies, the broken promises, which, in this legal tussle, could be coming from either side — never encroach on the fairy tale. More

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      ‘Mutt’ Review: Surviving Reconciliation

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      A newly out transgender man meets with his estranged father, his ex-boyfriend and his sister for the first time since his transition in this drama.Playing out over the course of one New Yorker’s notably difficult day, the drama “Mutt” follows its protagonist, Feña (Lío Mehiel), as he has surprise encounters with three important figures from his life — his sister, his ex-boyfriend and his estranged father. For anyone, this lineup would represent a packed schedule, but it’s especially challenging for Feña, a newly out transgender man who hasn’t seen many loved ones since his transition.Feña’s father, Pablo (Alejandro Goic), is the first to call and the last to arrive in the film. There’s a cultural divide between Feña and Pablo, who is planning a visit from Chile. Feña doesn’t speak perfect Spanish, and in turn, his father refuses to speak to Feña respectfully about his gender. But before that visit, Feña is bowled over by another disruption. He runs into his ex-boyfriend, John (Cole Doman), at a club. While the two still have chemistry, John is reticent to rekindle their relationship, afraid of the chaos that Feña unleashes into his life. Feña has barely had a chance to recover from this surprise rendezvous, when his younger sister, Zoe (MiMi Ryder), abruptly appears at Feña’s work, having run away from school and from the home she shares with Feña’s abusive mother.The writer and director Vuk Lungulov-Klotz uses elegant observations of urban life to pass the narrative between the three central relationships. Feña juggles his responsibilities through phone calls and borrowed cars; his lifelines are doorbell speakers and public restrooms. These features of city life feed a sense of realism, as does the film’s warmly-lit and intimately framed cinematography. But that realism here is exhausting, even if it is well-intentioned — by the film’s end, even Feña seems ready to escape from the trial of his packed plotlines.MuttNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Adults’ Review: Oh, Brother

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      Michael Cera’s latest misfit is a poker addict unable to communicate with his sisters in Dustin Guy Defa’s keen-eyed dramedy.The adults of Dustin Guy Defa’s keen-eyed dramedy probably wouldn’t realize that the movie’s title refers to them. These three emotionally stunted siblings — Eric (Michael Cera), Rachel (Hannah Gross) and Maggie (Sophia Lillis) — are more like suspicious alley cats. What went awry in their home where Eric, a loner with patchy mutton chops and a poker addiction, has arrived for the shortest visit he can get away with? Like his characters, Defa keeps mum. The film is about this family’s inability to talk, so he’s obeying their limits.Defa’s tight and tidy focus on communication — mostly verbal, sometimes role play (“Hug me like you haven’t seen me for three years,” Rachel instructs Eric) — adds a smart layer to this otherwise familiar tale of estrangement. The trio is only sincere when reverting to the stage acts they invented as children, a showcase of vaudeville comics and singers. (The lyrics, by Defa, have an off-kilter cadence that fits the tone better than the sentimental pop-folk soundtrack.) Gross is saddled with the flattest role: a dour cynic who goes grim-faced whenever Cera enters a room. When she finally starts slinging insults in a witch’s squawk, it’s a treat to see her cut loose.Cera is known for playing misfits, but his inscrutable Eric is even more awkward about what he should and shouldn’t say. At the card table, Eric unnerves the gamblers, by, for once, blurting out exactly what he thinks. Later, he confounds a flirtatious girl (Kiah McKirnan) with a string of mixed signals. But nothing wounds him like a failed joke — his only form of connection. After yet another chilly meet-up, he sighs, “Was it my delivery?”The AdultsRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Madeleine Collins’ Review: A Duplicitous Mother

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      This clever, but disappointingly tame psychodrama sees Virginie Efira as a professional translator secretly living with two families; one in Switzerland, the other in France.The French psychodrama “Madeleine Collins” feels like a domesticated version of a Hitchcock movie, with all the frenzied longing and perversion leashed up and reined in. It’s too bad, considering the film’s novel premise. Usually, the man plays the two-timer, but in the film’s “don’t worry, it’s just business travel” swindle, it’s the woman who dares to have it both ways.Judith (Virginie Efira), a professional translator, shifts between households just as easily as she does between languages. In Switzerland, she lives with her boyfriend, Abdel (Quim Gutierrez), and their little girl; in France, with her husband, Melvil (Bruno Salomone), a celebrated conductor with whom she has two sons.The first part of “Madeleine Collins” plays like a straight drama about Judith’s balancing act. She takes the train between countries, seemingly gliding to and fro thanks to elegantly controlled camera movements by the cinematographer Gordon Spooner.Judith’s freakish skill for deception possesses a similar artistry. When her eldest son catches her whispering sweet nothings to her lover on the phone, Judith quickly pivots from the accusation, and turns the face-off into a discussion about her kid’s sexuality.In heated moments like these, Judith’s lies feel startlingly natural, which asks the question: Just how much of her own Kool-Aid is she sipping?Directed by Antoine Barraud, the film withholds crucial details about the true nature of Judith’s relationship with Abdel, and cleverly fills out the picture through tiny hints and glances, creating suspense through fresh turns of ambiguity in each scene.But the payoff from such fog-clearing doesn’t quite grip the way it should. Despite Efira’s efforts, Judith’s inevitable breakdown never hits a satisfyingly deranged register. Her motivations turn out to be less spicy, and more blandly sympathetic than one had hoped from this pressure cooker of a film.Madeleine CollinsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Bella!’ Review: Taking the Fight to the Streets and the House

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      The jam-packed documentary “Bella!” hustles to chronicle the pioneering political career of the New York congresswoman Bella Abzug.Jeff L. Lieberman’s biographical documentary “Bella!” churns along at a hectic pace as if hustling to keep up with its subject. Bella Abzug fought ferociously for equal rights and against the Vietnam War in the U.S. Congress, bringing a New Yorker’s tenacity and a plain-spoken dedication to democratic ideals, akin to fellow pioneer Shirley Chisholm.The child of Russian Jewish immigrants, Abzug began her political path with pamphleteering in childhood, and later drew on organizer-style moxie and a Columbia legal education (defending Willie McGee in a notorious case in Jim Crow Mississippi). But it wasn’t until 1970 that she ran for a congressional seat, beating a longtime incumbent in Manhattan in the primary and kicking off a busy decade of legislative battling.Lieberman’s starry interviews — from Hillary Clinton to Gloria Steinem to Representative Maxine Waters to the avid Abzug fund-raiser Barbra Streisand — speak to the liberal, feminist revolution of which Abzug was a vital part. Abzug’s own words — drawing on audio diaries — provide the background to her political worldview: as a reaction to the “cocoon approach to living” of the 1950s, as a manifestation of Judaic notions of justice, and as a dedication to equal rights for all, leading to her sponsoring the Equality Act of 1974, intended to “prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, marital status, and sexual orientation.”Aides and others recall that the tireless Abzug could be both a charmer and a screamer. After losing a 1976 Senate race to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, she tried and failed to attain other offices before shifting to international activism; she died in 1998. Her never-say-die advocacy still inspires, but the film also illustrates the merciless challenges of electoral endurance even for the fiercest fighter.Bella!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More