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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

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      ‘Billion Dollar Heist’ Review: How to Rob a Bank, Digitally

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      This documentary chronicles a 2016 digital bank heist by pairing commentary from cybersecurity experts with a toolbox of visualization techniques.In 2016, a team of cyberthieves stole $81 million from a central bank in Bangladesh. The theft was meticulously executed: The hackers gained access to the bank’s financial transfer system through contaminated email attachments that allowed them to plant custom malware, which they used to worm through the office’s computer network until they reached the single server responsible for dispatching encrypted orders.If this sounds convoluted in writing, just imagine trying to spin its esoteric details into a true-crime yarn fit for neophytes. “Billion Dollar Heist,” directed by Daniel Gordon, attempts the task by leaning on a stable of cybersecurity experts to walk viewers through the operation. To further explain, Gordon whips out a toolbox of visualization techniques. When, for example, the subjects describe how the hackers navigated Bangladesh’s internal network, Gordon depicts the mission as a Super Mario-like video game.With so much action transpiring in the digital realm, the documentary is careful to milk its handful of terrestrial story beats: a critical typo in a transfer request, a multiday gambling spree at a Philippine casino, the wily scheduling of the attack on a national holiday to ensure that bank employees would be offline. These details ground the narrative, but their prominence contributes to the film feeling like predigested news — particularly when the more arcane aspects of the story remain undefined.“Billion Dollar Heist” is not totally bankrupt, but in mining its central cybercrime for tidbits while smoothing over its complexities, the film erodes its power both as seminar and spectacle.Billion Dollar HeistNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Back on the Strip’ Review: Just Some Mikes in Need of Magic

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      Wesley Snipes plays the leader of a has-been group of strippers vying for a second act in this ensemble comedy, which struggles to turn its gimmicky ideas into laughs.According to “Back on the Strip,” a tedious ensemble comedy from Chris Spencer, what makes a man a successful stripper is not good looks, the right moves, or a memorable stage persona: Being a true once-in-a-generation talent, it posits, requires a substantial endowment down south. That’s what gave Mr. Big (Wesley Snipes), the leader of a once-famous male revue crew, his legendary status, and it’s what allows him to see a prodigy in Merlin (Spence Moore II), a young man who accidentally reveals himself onstage during a disastrous magic show in Las Vegas.After Mr. Big spots this promise, he gets his old squad, the Chocolate Chips, back together, now with Merlin at the helm. But Merlin’s so-called gift is also the gimmicky curse at the heart of the movie. Traveling to Vegas at the behest of his mother (Tiffany Haddish, whose voice-over relentlessly narrates practically every scene), Merlin wants to become a professional magician, but his body puts him on a path that he feels is a compromise to that dream.It’s both a shame and a wonder that the film managed to assemble such a beefed-up roster of talent — Snipes, Haddish, J.B. Smoove, Faizon Love and, in a cameo, Kevin Hart — for what amounts to a stilted, factory-line comedy.Seeing Hart’s brief but flat cameo is a study in how even megawatt star power can be rendered lifeless without the right writing and direction. Snipes in particular gets lost in an overdone, confusingly drawn performance as a stud whose best days are behind him.Back on the StripRated R for sex stuff, language and some drug use. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Landscape With Invisible Hand’ Review: Hit Subscribe, Alien Overlords

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      The latest film from Cory Finley follows two teens on an alien-controlled earth who stream their love life to an extraterrestrial audience.“Landscape With Invisible Hand” mashes up the teen romantic comedy and alien-invasion horror genres to campy, mixed results. In an opening montage of paintings created by one of our high-school-age heroes, Adam (Asante Blackk), we’re introduced to a near-future in which an alien race known as the Vuvv has taken over Earth, not by force but through salacious dealings with the planet’s most enterprising capitalists. Over time, the Vuvv — who, far from ferocious creatures, resemble hermit crabs without shells and communicate by rubbing their paddle-like hands together — have rendered most Earth jobs obsolete with advanced technology, forcing humans to find creative ways to scrape together enough money to survive.While in art class, Adam falls for the new girl at school, Chloe (Kylie Rogers), and invites her struggling family to stay in the rundown house where he, his mother, Beth (Tiffany Haddish), and sister, Natalie (Brooklynn MacKinzie), are living. Tensions arise between Beth and Chloe’s father (Josh Hamilton) and brother (Michael Gandolfini) because the new arrivals can’t pay rent. This leads Chloe to suggest a “courtship broadcast,” where she and Adam stream their dating life to a paying alien audience — a sort of intergalactic Twitch channel, broadcast through futuristic implants. The Vuvv, who reproduce asexually, have a fixation on human dating culture and romance. It’s as unnerving and darkly funny as it sounds.Based on a young-adult novel by M.T. Anderson, “Landscape With Invisible Hand” is the director Cory Finley’s third feature after “Thoroughbreds,” and “Bad Education,” and like those prior films, it relishes in eerie discontent punctuated by oddball humor. But the plot never fully gels; characters ebb and flow in and out of the spotlight, and soon Adam and Chloe’s get-rich-quick scheme — and its strain on their relationship — falls by the wayside for a much stranger charade involving Beth and a young Vuvv who wants to play the role of a nuclear-family father. The one constant is Adam’s beautifully rendered artwork, which depicts the gradual creep of Vuvv control over human life through a teenager’s eyes.Finley’s allegorical gestures toward issues of class, race and authoritarianism are more than apparent, but the film’s tonal inconsistencies make the satire wobble. There’s certainly intention in the way Finley depicts the Vuvv’s injection of propaganda into the human school curriculum, and how he shows certain Earthlings, like Chloe’s father, eagerly prostrating themselves in front of the alien invaders. But despite real-world parallels, these thematic elements contain no bite. The Vuvv, with their blatant lack of empathy and outdated perception of human society, are treated as jokes from the beginning. As a result, even their most alarming threats to Adam and his family come across as slight and inconsequential, undercutting the film’s central theme of resiliency.Landscape With Invisible HandRated R for science-fiction violence and a space alien’s idea of intimacy. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Birth/Rebirth’ Review: Staying (Not Quite) Alive

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      Two women nurture a reanimated child in this grisly gynecological horror movie.Motherhood is both mad and monstrous in “Birth/Rebirth,” Laura Moss’s ultrasmart, ferociously feminist take on the Frankenstein myth. Yet while the story (by Moss and Brendan J. O’Brien) surges to corporeal extremes, the movie is most resonant when — like Prime Video’s “Dead Ringers” and the harrowing AMC+ drama “This Is Going to Hurt” — it resolutely records the gross indignities of everyday procreation.For Dr. Rose Casper (Marin Ireland), a chilly morgue technician, dead tissue is infinitely more interesting than living. In her dingy apartment in the Bronx, Rose experiments obsessively with reanimation, using embryonic stem cells. (How she obtains them involves a sick joke which I refuse to spoil.) A snuffling pig called Muriel has so far been Rose’s sole success.Elsewhere in Rose’s hospital, an overworked maternity nurse named Celie (a terrific Judy Reyes), struggles to find time for her lively six-year-old daughter, Lila (A.J. Lister). But after Lila succumbs to a deadly infection, a guilt-wracked Celie and an avid Rose will find common purpose in revivifying the child’s corpse. What follows is a quietly freakish, slyly humorous tale of devoted co-parenting, with Lila serving as daughter to one woman and science experiment to the other.Wrapped in drab locations and jaundiced lighting (Chananun Chotrungroj’s photography is brilliantly bleak), this grisly gynecological horror movie is not for the squeamish. Pregnancy hasn’t been this perverse since the underappreciated “Alien 3” (1992); yet as the women’s behavior grows ever more shocking — and Ariel Marx’s nerve-plucking score intensifies — Moss offers no rebuke to their heedless amorality. There is only the audience to judge.And, perhaps, Lila. “I’m not getting enough attention,” she whispers to her mother early in the film. Little did she know that all she had to do was die.Birth/RebirthRated R for purloined placentas and stolen semen. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Simone: Woman of the Century’ Review: An Admired Leader in Focus

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      Elsa Zylberstein and Rebecca Marder play the French politician Simone Veil in this heavy-handed biopic.In “Simone: Woman of the Century,” the director Olivier Dahan applies the same ultra-glossy lacquer he lavished on biopics of Edith Piaf (“La Vie en Rose”) and Grace Kelly (“Grace of Monaco”) to the life of the French politician Simone Veil (1927-2017), a Holocaust survivor who, as health minister, fought for the legalization of abortion in France and who later served as the first female president of the European Parliament.Veil’s remarkable, decades-spanning career — which also included advocacy for the rights of Algerian prisoners and for patients with H.I.V., at times when both were shunned — calls for a grand canvas. Dahan’s default mode is closer to bombast.Early on, in a sequence set on the brink of the abortion law’s passage in 1974, he supplies a lengthy montage of male legislators shouting invective in close-up. Later, in this decidedly nonchronological film, Veil’s internment at Bergen-Belsen becomes an occasion for Dahan to execute a virtuoso Steadicam shot through the barracks. No matter how grave the situation, “Simone: Woman of the Century” treats it as spectacle.Veil is played at different ages by Rebecca Marder and Elsa Zylberstein. Timeline-wise, the actresses switch sometime around the upheaval of May 1968, although the complicated, at times barely motivated flashback structure means that they are in effect coleads throughout.Dahan, who also wrote the screenplay, provides a serviceable overview of Veil’s accomplishments and ethical sense (partly shaped by her experiences in the camps), and of the barriers she overcame in misogynistic civic spheres. But her biography deserved a more considered treatment — and a considerably less heavy hand.Simone: Woman of the CenturyNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Miguel Wants to Fight’ Review: A Rite of Passage

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      In Oz Rodriguez’s coming-of-age film, a martial arts-obsessed teenager is determined to throw his first punch.In the lives of the four protagonists of “Miguel Wants to Fight,” brawls are ubiquitous. But when a fight breaks out on a basketball court and the martial arts film aficionado of the group, Miguel (Tyler Dean Flores), doesn’t participate, it becomes clear that he has never actually thrown a punch.After his parents break the news that his family will be moving soon, Miguel becomes obsessed with picking a fight before he leaves — a misguided way to cope with his anger.Directed by Oz Rodriguez (“Vampires vs. the Bronx”), “Miguel Wants to Fight” is an endearing and offbeat take on the teenage coming-of-age film. It centers on best friends Srini (Suraj Partha), Cass (Imani Lewis), David (Christian Vunipola) and Miguel, who grew up together in Syracuse, N.Y., immersed in the boxing world. Miguel’s father Alberto (Raúl Castillo), owns a gym, and David’s father was a boxing star. Miguel spends his time making TikTok reels of fight scenes starring his friends.There are some laughs and the cast is talented, but the movie ultimately falls flat, missing an opportunity to delve into the insecurity, teen bravado and anger that leads to physical fighting in the first place.Instead, it leans too heavily into references to and re-enactments of classic films, like “The Matrix” or “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which take up space in the film that could instead have been devoted to character development. As a result, “Miguel Wants to Fight” ends up feeling one-note, lacking the depth that might have elevated it to a must-watch movie.Miguel Wants to FightNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch it on Hulu. More

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      ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ Windmill Is for Sale in England

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      The property, which was the home of Dick an Dyke’s character in the 1968 film, is listed for 9 million pounds, or $11.4 million.A historic windmill in the English countryside that appeared alongside Dick Van Dyke and a magical flying car in the 1968 movie “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” has gone up for sale.The black-and-white Cobstone Mill, in Buckinghamshire, England, just outside London, is part of a property that also includes a main house, about 37 acres of land and a swimming pool. It could be yours for 9 million pounds (about $11.4 million).The mill is thought to have been built around 1816 and was used to grind cereal until 1873, according to Savills, the real estate firm selling the property. Before the windmill could be used as a movie location it needed substantial renovations. The property had been damaged by a fire and, according to local media reports at the time, squatters had been living in it.In the film, which was loosely based on a children’s book by the James Bond creator Ian Fleming, the windmill served as the home for Mr. Van Dyke’s character, a nutty, widowed inventor named Caractacus Potts, who lives with his children, Jeremy and Jemima. Together with his love interest Truly Scrumptious, played by Sally Ann Howes, and his car, named Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for its distinctive engine sounds, they journey to the land of Vulgaria to battle the tyrant Baron Bomburst.The windmill survived this encounter with Van Dyke’s character’s latest invention. Hughes Warfield/United Artists Britain, via ShutterstockBut the windmill’s film industry connections didn’t end there.In 1971, the actress Hayley Mills bought the property at auction with her husband, Roy Boulting, a film director. Ms. Mills wrote about the first time she saw the property in her 2021 memoir, “Forever Young.”“I recognized it at once as the children’s home in ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ and it was love at first sight,” she wrote, envisioning her and her husband watching their child play in the afternoon sun, even though the property was “utterly impractical.”Mr. Boulting then surprised her by buying it at auction for 30,000 pounds (about $38,000). “It was crazy, completely, marvelously crazy,” she wrote. While she hoped the windmill would become her dream home in the country, and while she started renovating the property to make it livable, the windmill’s renovations weren’t finished, according to the autobiography, and the couple later divorced.The property was later owned by David Brown, an English industrialist and a former owner of the automaker Aston Martin. In the 1980s, the property was sold to the current owner, according to Stephen Christie-Miller, one of the realtors on the listing.“It’s such a landmark when you drive through the valley,” Mr. Christie-Miller said, “It dominates.”The windmill is a Grade II-listed building, which means it’s considered of national importance and is legally protected from being demolished or significantly altered without special permission.Though the price tag is steep, there has been interest in the property, Mr. Christie-Miller said, especially for the usually slow month of August during which many prospective buyers are on vacation.“So many people know it,” he said, adding that he was planning to show the windmill to two potential buyers on Wednesday and had already showed it to one couple who were, he said, “very keen.”Since peaking in August last year, house prices in Britain have begun to drop. Last month, prices fell 3.8 percent compared with a year earlier, according to Nationwide Building Society, the steepest annual drop in more than a decade.Between the windmill and the house, the property has six bedrooms and four bathrooms, according to the listing. The windmill’s sails were restored in the past 18 months, according to Savills.With views over the nearby countryside, “the windmill itself would be a lovely place to have an office,” Mr. Christie-Miller said, but added, “not that you’d get any work done.”It’s not just “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” fans who might be excited. The windmill looks over the village of Turville, where scenes from the 1990s English sitcom “Vicar of Dibley” were filmed.Mr. Christie-Miller said the listing stands out in his 40-year career. “It comes up once in a generation,” he said. “It was last on the market in 1988. The next person will probably own it for another 30 years.” More