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      ‘Silver Dollar Road’ Review: Black Land Loss Is Still Happening

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      The 20th century saw a mass dispossession of Black farmers. This intimate documentary focuses on one family’s recent battle to keep their home in North Carolina.Sixty five acres on the coast of North Carolina were purchased by Mamie Reels Ellison’s great-grandfather in the aftermath of slavery. That land on Silver Dollar Road became a home, a place to farm and fish, and a sanctuary, stretching from its pine and gum-tree woods to a sandy beach, where the Reels family relaxed for generations.By the 2000s, though, the Reels homestead was in jeopardy. Developers had claimed the waterfront property, and Mamie’s two brothers, Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, lost eight years in jail for refusing to vacate their houses. Directed by Raoul Peck, “Silver Dollar Road” adapts a 2019 ProPublica feature by Lizzie Presser into an intimate portrait of the family’s forbearance in the face of dispossession.Mamie and her niece Kim Duhon lead the family’s effort to hold onto the land, but while dipping into the legal morass, Peck’s film is more about sitting with the two women and their relatives, hearing out their fears and hopes as their ancestors’ land sits in limbo. Peck, who directed the fierce and engrossing James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” refrains from systemic-style analysis to let the family speak for themselves about their experience.A birthday gathering for 95-year-old Gertrude Reels sets the tone early on for the family’s tight-knit circles and sense of continuity. Interviews with Mamie and Kim evoke fond memories of their childhood haven, illustrated with faded photographs; and Melvin, a fisherman with a winning flair, gives us an on-the-ground sense of the land, roaming through woods and waterways. (Peck draws on 90-odd hours of footage originally shot by Mayeta Clark for ProPublica.)Their legal trouble dates back to the 1970s when a Reels patriarch, suspicious of Southern courts, died without leaving a will. His land was passed to his children, but one of the co-owning relatives secretly sold the land to a developer through a legal loophole. It’s only one maneuver among many that have been exploited in a vicious history of Black land dispossession, as the film’s concise captions make clear: Over the course of the 20th century, Black Americans lost about 90 percent of their farmland.The film’s second half shifts to the battle to free Melvin and Licurtis from a sentence whose substantial length feels racially motivated. But Peck doesn’t give the film over to talking-head experts explaining how the Reels are symptomatic victims. Their weariness and sadness comes through in interviews with them, but they’re also palpably borne up by love and belief. (Animated intertwining branches in the film’s illustrations evoke their family tree.)While videotaping outsiders on the Reels property during the brothers’ time in jail, Mamie minces zero words about racism among whites. But no one here is defined by this struggle, and amid the looming threats to a cherished home, Peck’s accomplishment is to let the Reels family own their emotional space.Silver Dollar RoadRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’ Review: Thinker, Player, Searcher, Spy

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      Two master performers, the filmmaker Errol Morris and the writer John le Carré, circle the truth in this mesmerizing biographical documentary.When a onetime private detective sits down to question a former spy and confessed performance artist, you might expect some verbal fisticuffs, a bit of bobbing and weaving or defensive prickliness. And when the interlocutor is the filmmaker Errol Morris and his subject is David Cornwell, a.k.a the sublime fabulist John le Carré (who died in 2020), those expectations only intensify.Yet “The Pigeon Tunnel,” a four-day conversation Morris recorded in 2019 (and adapted from Cornwell’s 2016 memoir of the same name) is nothing if not smooth, Cornwell’s sentences as creamy and cunning on the tongue as on the page. Polished, urbane and preternaturally prepared, Cornwell’s sometimes mischievous demeanor forms a kind of shadow narrative, a fascinating carapace that Morris’s interrogatory arrows fail to fully pierce. This drains the film of spontaneity, but pumps it full of a strangely satisfying intrigue: Who is playing whom?Morris is a master exploiter of this kind of duality, and he sounds positively gleeful here. Returning repeatedly to the notions of deception, betrayal and performance — the movie’s three philosophical pillars — he coaxes Cornwell through his spectacularly unsettled childhood to his career as a young operative in the British Secret Service. A gift for artifice emerged early as he learned to emulate his upper-crust schoolmates and a social class to which he did not belong. Espionage came easily after that, his Cold War adventures spurring deep reflections on the nature of duplicity (the infamous double agent Kim Philby, he believes, was addicted to it) and fuel for the novels he would later write.Looming over every anecdote, though, is the formidable shadow of Cornwell’s father, Ronald, a grandly unapologetic swindler and the film’s original deceiver.“I can see my life as a succession of embraces and escapes,” Cornwell says at one point. And while he managed to avoid embracing Ronald’s final, heartless scam — perhaps the most tragic of the film’s many betrayals — it’s clear that he never fully freed himself from his father’s larcenous influence.Much of this will already be known to those familiar with Cornwell’s memoir, his previous interviews or Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography. But even if you have never read a le Carré novel — or seen one of the many movies based on them — “The Pigeon Tunnel” will delight the curious. Cornwell might disappointingly refuse to discuss his reportedly colorful sex life, but he seems more than willing to bare psychological wounds. Of particular poignancy is his fear that human beings have no center, that what he calls our “inmost room” is empty and the things we seek mere chimeras.Intellectually rich and cinematically disciplined (brief movie clips, another perfectly aligned Philip Glass score), “The Pigeon Tunnel” is a cautious, playful portrait of an expert manipulator. And though Morris’s dramatization of the titular event — Cornwell’s boyhood memory of a horrifying hunting trip — offers a delightful visual metaphor for Morris’s interviewing style, his other re-enactments are unnecessary: Surrender to Cornwell’s eloquence and the images create themselves. Exactly how many of them are inventions perhaps even he couldn’t have said for sure.The Pigeon TunnelRated PG-13 for wrecked birds and resolute smokers. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      ‘Young Soul Rebels,’ Isaac Julien’s 1991 Drama, Lands at IFC

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      A newly restored print of Isaac Julien’s 1991 politically minded musical drama opens Oct. 20 at the IFC Center.Few movies were more freighted with expectation than Isaac Julien’s “Young Soul Rebels” — a politically minded musical drama populated by “soul boys,” punks, and skinheads, financed by the British Film Institute and directed by a 30-something Black gay film artist.A double time-capsule, made in 1991 but set in 1977, the year of the Sex Pistols and Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, a newly restored print of the film, Julien’s first feature, is opening Oct. 20 at IFC Center.The eponymous rebels are teenage best friends, Chris (Valentine Nonyela) and Caz (Mo Sesay), operating a pirate radio station, the Soul Patrol, that privileges funk over punk. Both have issues with the larger community. Chris is macho and gay. Caz is straight, metrosexual and the son of a white mother, played by Frances Barber. The co-star of Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi’s multi-culti “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” Barber was a rare veteran in a cast of neophytes.Julien first attracted attention with his poetic essay “Looking for Langston,” a meditation on the Harlem Renaissance that outed the writer Langston Hughes and incurred the wrath of Hughes’s estate. “Young Soul Rebels” is more mainstream, less suggestive of the raw punk movies made in the late 1970s than the power pop films — “Something Wild” or “Desperately Seeking Susan” — that followed, as well as Hollywood’s 1990 tribute to pirate radio, “Pump Up the Volume.”The kids quarrel, go clubbing — their preferred dive seems open to punk, disco, and soul — and find romance. Caz woos Tracy, a glamorous production assistant (the future star Sophie Okonedo). Chris is courted by a dimwitted anarchist punk (Jason Durr). Complications include racist cops, the patriotic frenzy of the Jubilee and, opening the movie, a friend’s murder.“The moments when the film tries to build suspense are clankingly overdone,” Stephen Holden wrote in a generally sympathetic New York Times review, adding that “Young Soul Rebels” was best when exposing “the schisms in London society in scenes of the local street life, where tensions are often on the verge of erupting into violence.” Still, for all the shots of a cardboard cutout of an inanely waving Queen Elizabeth, the movie pulls a few punches, the nastiness of the far-right National Front, for one, seems somewhat mitigated.“Young Soul Rebels” had its premiere at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, where its queer-positive attitude and nuanced treatment of racial difference were overshadowed by three forceful Hollywood movies by Black filmmakers: “Jungle Fever,” “Boyz N the Hood” and “A Rage in Harlem.” As reported from Cannes, Julien criticized “Jungle Fever” and “Boyz” as sexist and homophobic and took particular issue with “Jungle Fever” for what he characterized as its negative view of interracial relationships. By contrast, Julien’s vision of the United Kingdom intimated the idyllic, inclusive United Colors of Benetton. Rather than the “no future” nihilism of 1977, “Young Soul Rebels” reflects the promise that came with the archconservative Margaret Thatcher’s political demise.If hampered by its script, “Young Soul Rebels” is helped by an essential good cheer and a percolating soundtrack segueing from Funkadelic to the Blackbyrds to Poly Styrene. Indeed, this may be the most upbeat movie ever to open with a sex murder and end with a fascist riot — prelude to a curtain call that has the couples sorted out and everyone dancing.Young Soul RebelsOpens Oct. 20, IFC Center Manhattan, ifccenter.com. More

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      ‘Butcher’s Crossing’ Review: Perilous Country

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      This western about the gluttony of westward expansion is saddled with a miscast Nicolas Cage.Out west is a place of freedom and lawlessness, of beauty and brutality, and, when you have no escape, of endless stretches of god’s country where one’s mind can begin to fade.Will (Fred Hechinger), a young Harvard dropout who wants to see more of the country, learns this quickly after he sets out for the Colorado mountains with a small group of buffalo hunters in the latter half of the 19th century. Miller (Nicolas Cage), the group’s leader, takes Will under his wing as they go looking for a bounty of buffalo hide. But soon enough, they find themselves battling the elements, and what was intended as a weekslong hunt keeps them through the winter.It’s in this stretch, about midway through, that the creeping dread that has somewhat aimlessly coursed through Gabe Polsky’s “Butcher’s Crossing” makes way for something more compelling: psychological drama built around the rotten core of the period’s insatiable westward expansion.“We don’t belong out here,” Fred (Jeremy Bobb), a hired hand, says grimly at one point. Not on this hunt, not on the Native American burial grounds they’ve heedlessly camped out on, not out here in this land. Stubborn and rapacious, Miller keeps them there.It’s a mostly well-crafted film with decent visual scope. The film’s greatest flaws are in Cage’s shakily written character: Stroking his shaved head like a cowboy version of Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz from “Apocalypse Now,” he’s a madman that the film halfheartedly positions as an avatar for American greed. As fun as he can be to watch, Cage was the wrong actor to cast in a role that called for a more subtle, weatherworn performance. Hechinger, though, is superb, despite his thinly developed protagonist. He naturally embodies a young man who wants to truly know the country, yet shudders at the festering underside he comes to face.Butcher’s CrossingRated R for language, brief sexual content and some bloody violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      At NY Dog and Cat Film Festivals, Love, Licks and Looniness

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      Collections of short films, both documentary and fiction, make their annual visit to Manhattan, followed by tours around the country and Canada.The cinematic events debuting at the Village East by Angelika this weekend won’t feature any of the acclaimed actors from the recently concluded New York Film Festival. Some of the major figures in these movies have been known to jump on their directors, fall asleep on the job, drool on camera and chew the scenery (in every sense).But that’s no surprise: They’re among the four-legged performers in the sixth annual NY Cat Film Festival and the eighth annual NY Dog Film Festival. Each offers short documentary and fictional works illustrating how people affect the lives of animals, and how animals affect the lives of people — usually in positive ways.“I try to keep them to films that are lighter and that simply uplift you,” Tracie Hotchner, the founder of both festivals, said in a video interview. And even though some of the featured dogs and cats are in difficult circumstances, the movies, she added, are “more of a celebration of the groups that rescue them.”These grass-roots film programs also benefit their subjects: Of the $18 all-inclusive ticket price for each festival, 10 percent goes to a pet-adoption nonprofit. (The Manhattan screenings will help support Muddy Paws Rescue and Meow Parlour Cats.) And fans who can’t see the programs this weekend may be able to catch them in the coming months when they tour to independent cinemas nationwide and in Canada.“BARC if You Need Help” examines a program that recruits juvenile offenders to train animals.Tula Asselanis/The Latham Foundation“These are not, you know, Hollywood-style movies,” said Hotchner, an author, radio host and podcaster based in Vermont. They’re “like the poetry of films.”Some are clearly light verse. The 102-minute feline festival, at noon on Saturday, includes “The Cat Duet,” by Lorelei De Armas and Julian Wood, 12-year-olds from Detroit who filmed themselves singing “Duetto buffo di due gatti,” a comic song often attributed to Rossini. (The only lyric is “Meow.”) The 110-minute dog festival, at noon on Sunday, features Nepal Arslan’s “47 Seconds,” his haiku-like response to discovering decades-old footage of a couple with a dog eerily resembling his own.“Silent Paws,” by the global initiative Mutual Rescue, even incorporates a real poem: a work of the same title by Gabriel Spera, which scrolls by during an elegy to lost feline companions.Neither festival, however, has a shortage of serious documentaries. Michelle Williams’s “Bear the Courthouse Canine” explores the pivotal role that a gentle Labrador retriever plays for the Contra Costa County, Calif., district attorney. Trained to lie under the witness stand during trials, Bear comforts traumatized victims who are testifying, especially children.The dogs in “BARC if You Need Help” work on the other side of the criminal justice system. Produced by the Latham Foundation for the Promotion of Humane Education, this film examines Building Adolescent Responsibility and Compassion, a program in Michigan that recruits juvenile offenders to train animals — frequently pit bulls that have troubled histories, too.“It’s like a mirror for them,” Tula Asselanis, the documentary’s director, said of the teenage participants. And the film suggests that “redemption is a powerful possibility, just through using the human-animal bond.”But what struck Hotchner most about the festivals’ submissions this year was how much they tried to capture the inner lives of animals.With cats, “it’s like, you know, ‘E.T.,’” she said. “So this alien comes into your life, and they’re so beautiful and so lovely. But what makes them tick?”The filmmakers’ speculations are often comic, as in “Insomnia,” by Kim Best, who provides subtitles detailing a cat’s ruminations on this most unlikely of feline problems: “Embarrassingly, I considered sleeping with a dog.”A scene from “Ranger: Canine Alpinist,” about dogs aiding climbers on Mount Hood.Joe DanielOther films that venture inside the minds of their subjects include Ned Thanhouser’s docudrama “Ranger: Canine Alpinist,” which relies on voice-over to relate the perspective of a dog who assisted human climbers on Mount Hood in Oregon almost a century ago. In the fictional “Set Adrift,” the British director Jennifer Sheridan uses only her furry actor’s expressiveness to convey a dog’s grief. Peta Hitchens’s Australian documentary “Filming Dogs” investigates a psychological question: Do pets like her own really enjoy performing for movies and television?Intriguingly, Juhi Sharma’s comedy “Purrrfect Intervention” features no animals — until the credits. Kisha Peart, who produced and wrote it, stars as a New Yorker so cat-obsessed that her friends arrange treatment for her.“Obviously, I’m a cat lady,” Peart said, adding that she turned her own pet’s camera shyness into a visual joke. Her character, she said, is “this crazy cat lady, but where are her cats?”Live animals won’t attend the screenings, either, but they will be at parties on the eve of each festival. These celebrations, which require separate tickets, will feature mingling with the filmmakers and authors of books about pets. One of Hotchner’s contacts even arranged for a visiting celebrity at the pooch festivities: Bastian the Talking Terrier, whose YouTube channel has almost two million subscribers.“I don’t know any famous dogs,” said Hotchner, who owns two Weimaraners. “But he said yes.”NY Cat Film FestivalSaturday at the Village East by Angelika, Manhattan; catfilmfestival.com.NY Dog Film FestivalSunday at the Village East by Angelika, Manhattan; dogfilmfestival.com. More

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      ‘The Delinquents’ Review: Money for Nothing

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      A bank worker asks a colleague to watch the cash he has stolen in this low-key Argentine feature from Rodrigo Moreno.To Morán (Daniel Eliás), who works at a bank, the scheme makes good economic sense. Over beers, he explains his idea to a colleague, Román (Esteban Bigliardi). Morán, you see, has robbed money from their employer. He hasn’t taken an unreasonable amount — merely what the two would earn in 25 more years of working there. Morán intends to turn himself in and go to prison for much less than that: With good behavior, he calculates he will spend three and a half years behind bars. In the interim, Román can watch the bag of cash, which they will split. If Román refuses to cooperate, Morán could easily frame him as an accomplice anyway.This encounter occurs just shy of half an hour into the three-hour Argentine film “The Delinquents,” written and directed by Rodrigo Moreno. Morán is not the first person to elect this particular illegal financial plan, at least in cinema. Moreno has pointed to “Hardly a Criminal,” a 1949 film by the great Argentine-born director Hugo Fregonese, as an influence. The most lurid version of the scenario might be in Nagisa Oshima’s “Pleasures of the Flesh” (1965), in which the man minding the loot decides to spend a year lavishing it on female companionship, then kill himself.Nothing that exciting happens in “The Delinquents,” and in a sense, the film is an elaborate joke on viewers who go in anticipating high stakes. Like Morán, “The Delinquents” wants to live modestly. It’s less concerned with satisfying the expectations of its genre than in finding waggish ways to deviate from them. To the film’s thinking, narrative is only a construct. “The Delinquents” makes a game out of seeing how much doubling and wordplay it can get away with without being accused of preciousness. Clever wipes show the protagonists’ lives in parallel. Structure is unstable; a belated flashback reveals the pair to be connected in an unexpected way.Right at the beginning, two of the bank’s clients are found to have the same signature. Morán and Román’s names are anagrams, something that is obvious before Moreno introduces the characters Morna, Norma and Ramón. In prison, Morán meets a gang boss who is the same as his bank boss, in the sense that both are played by the same actor, Germán De Silva. (That doing time is tougher than toiling in a bank is not a notion Morán appears to have factored into his cost-benefit analysis.)“The Delinquents,” which Moreno shot from 2018 to 2022, is itself divided into two parts. The low-grade suspense of the first section gives way to a deliberately rambling back half, and, en route to its non-denouement, the movie muses over picnicking, horseback riding and other joys that money can’t buy. As in “Psycho,” a comparison the ruptured plot faintly evokes without earning, the robbery isn’t what matters here.The film is not without its charms or a sense of humor. The scene in which Morán gets himself arrested, catching even the police off guard, is a comic highlight, as is the business involving Laura (Laura Paredes, of “Trenque Lauquen”), a determined accountant assigned to investigate the robbery for an insurance company. Her efforts to torment Román might have made for a great workplace comedy in their own right, but “The Delinquents” spends three hours scolding its audience for being greedy.The DelinquentsNot rated. In Spanish with subtitles. Running time: 3 hours, 9 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Exorcist’ at 50: How One Horror Movie Shocked the World

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      Essays by Jason Zinoman, Manohla Dargis and Erik Piepenburg Could a movie about a girl possessed by the devil really have caused audience members to faint and lose their lunch at theaters? The vehement reaction to “The Exorcist” when it premiered in late 1973 helped create a special place for it in pop culture, as […] More

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      ‘The Devil on Trial’ Review: Whodunit? Satan?

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      This documentary revisits a 1981 homicide that the defense tried to attribute to demonic possession.It isn’t for me to say whether Arne Cheyenne Johnson really killed his landlord Alan Bono because he was possessed by a demon, as his lawyers tried to argue in a landmark 1981 trial in Connecticut known as the “devil made me do it” case. But on the basis of the spurious, crudely sensational documentary “The Devil on Trial,” it isn’t for the director, Christopher Holt, to say what really happened, either.The film strives to present a credible account of a disturbing story, which also involves the supposed possession of a young boy and an exorcism conducted under the guidance of the self-declared ghost hunters and demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren — events loosely depicted onscreen in “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It,” a fictionalized account.The story is that Johnson accidentally summoned the demon possessing the child to enter his own body, igniting the mayhem that followed.While the documentary’s opening credits insist that “all the audio recordings and photographs” used are real, the film appears to have little interest in the truth and even less in reportorial integrity.The photographs, which purport to show evidence of possession, have been so heavily filtered and processed that “real” seems misleading. The old, garbled audio recordings are not compelling testimony either, and the filmmakers know it: They’ve goosed them up with sound effects and dramatic theme music.Firsthand accounts of the events from Johnson and others are used as fodder for slick re-enactments, which is where Holt really goes to town: Houses shake, lights shudder and shadowy figures lurk mysteriously, all in the style of a third-rate horror movie. The desperation to be scary, rather than engaging or provocative, is an intellectual failure, and an artistic one — a failure of imagination. Instead of challenging assumptions, exploring implications or discussing the difficult questions here, Holt merely mines the material for superficial shock value and lurid titillation.The Devil on TrialRated TV-MA for disturbing imagery and violence. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More