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      Two Cult Classics Restored and Brimming With Chaotic Life

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      Timothy Carey’s erratically brilliant “The World’s Greatest Sinner” and Emilio Fernández’s redemption melodrama “Victims of Sin” finally come to big screens.“Why can’t I be a god?” wonders Clarence Hilliard, the insurance salesman turned aspiring dictator in “The World’s Greatest Sinner.” Like a grenade slowly rolling around a room, Timothy Carey’s erratically brilliant, thoroughly independent 1962 film tracks Clarence’s rise from family man to rock’n’roller to megalomaniac politician. Along with Emilio Fernández’s “Victims of Sin,” from 1951, it’s one of two outstanding, larger-than-life restorations that are receiving theatrical premieres this week.Clarence (Carey) is introduced as an oddball dad with a devout wife and children — until he tosses away life’s script. Clarence wants more. He takes up street-corner preaching, perhaps inspired by a voice-over narrator who sounds like Satan, a few drinks in. Hungry for attention, he starts a rock band and gyrates for crowds, sparking a riot. (The music is courtesy of a young Frank Zappa.) Now going by God Hilliard, he organizes a movement called the Eternal Man’s Party to run for president.Carey was a genuine wild-card who could make his Method contemporaries look tame. (Stanley Kubrick tried to harness Carey’s unique bearish volatility, casting him in “Paths of Glory” and “The Killing” as a condemned soldier and a gunman.) Doubling as the director, Carey stokes the off-kilter mood with heady camera angles and looming shadows, lingering on Clarence as he goes berserk. But Carey’s reckless fool sure sounds astute on the danger of underestimating tyrants early on: “If they believed in what I was doing, they’d try to stop me. That’s what makes it so easy.”Emilio Fernández’s “Victims of Sin” also goes full throttle with an engrossing redemption melodrama about a nightclub dancer who raises an abandoned baby. Ninón Sevilla, the Cuban-born star of musical rumberas films, plays our heroine, Violeta, with irresistible verve. She wows audiences with her moves, then fights to save the infant that a co-worker was strong-armed into leaving behind.Ninón Sevilla in “Victims of Sin.”Janus FilmsFernández’s lustrously shot Mexico City film is partly a tale of two nightclubs. Violeta dazzles audiences at Cabaret Changó, where the mix of mambos and more is bumping. But a zoot-suited gangster named Rodolfo (Rodolfo Acosta) holds sway, and other women must work as private dancers. Pushed into the streets for her defiance, Violeta struggles to take care of her adopted child, until she is taken in by the decent owner of a nightclub by train tracks, Santiago (Tito Junco).Kindness and cruelty are forever at war in Fernández’s world, as Violeta nobly raises her child; the hard-luck plot sometimes bursts with the moody poetry of alley views and bridge vistas (thanks to the cinematographer, the great Gabriel Figueroa). Onstage there’s a mini-anthology of music by Pérez Prado, Pedro Vargas and Rita Montaner (who charms with a spicy number called “Ay José”). But there’s music, too, in the movie’s melodrama, swooping low with Violeta’s travails before making us hope that our spirits will be lifted again.The World’s Greatest SinnerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters.Victims of SinNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘When Evil Lurks’ Review: These Demons Are Fast and Furious

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      Humans become bloodthirsty demons in a shockingly grisly new contagion horror film from Argentina.Evil strikes fast and mean in Demián Rugna’s punch-to-the-face new film.It begins as Argentina is facing a supernatural plague that turns people into bloodthirsty demons, a contagion that has Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez), his brother, Jimi (Demián Salomón), and their rural village on edge. When the brothers come across one of the infected — a man who’s turned into a putrid, drooling. horrifically obese monster — they manage to move him far out of town. But that only spreads the contagion and fear, forcing Pedro and Jimi and their families to flee.Into the picture comes an older woman (Silvina Sabater, wonderfully understated) who is one of the few who knows how to use a strange (and under-explained) device to kill off the creatures, and it’s her wily mother-protector resolve that drives the film’s frenzied final stretch. That is until Pedro makes an out-of-character decision that ends the otherwise smart story on a what-were-you-thinking note.Rugna’s film is at its most electric when it delivers jolts of stomach-churning violence to push the action forward and build its brutal world. A horrific scene involving a dog and a little girl happened so suddenly and gruesomely, I sat up and gasped out loud.If only Rugna’s script had more such explosive moments and fewer directionless loose ends, like Pedro’s undercooked relationships with his mother and his autistic son. Still, this is a dark and timely parable about what happens when trust — among community members, within families, between a government and its people — disintegrates.When Evil LurksNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘She Came to Me’ Review: A Sea of Troubles (the Romantic Kind)

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      A love-triangle comedy from Rebecca Miller, starring Peter Dinklage, Marisa Tomei and Anne Hathaway, gets an emotional boost from an unexpected source.There’s a scene in “She Came to Me,” the writer-director Rebecca Miller’s juggling act of a romantic comedy, that sounds like the setup of a joke: An opera composer and a tugboat skipper walk into a Brooklyn dive bar. The composer’s wife, a psychiatrist, is back at their brownstone. But for the blocked composer, Steven (Peter Dinklage), his wife, Patricia (Anne Hathaway), and his seafaring muse, Katrina (Marisa Tomei), what happens next is hardly a laughing matter.The unexpected liaison cures Steven’s writer’s block. It also provides an object for Katrina’s affection — or, rather, affliction. “I’m addicted to romance,” she tells Steven, revealing an anomaly in her otherwise independent personality. As for Patricia, she’s got her own compulsions. This is a romantic triangle that may recall the screwball of a Nancy Meyers rom-com.Buoyed by a score from Bryce Dessner of the rock band the National, an original Bruce Springsteen song and the expert performances of its all-in ensemble, the film also casts a luminous aura around a first love, that of two high schoolers, Julian (Evan Ellison) and Tereza (Harlow Jane). He’s Patricia’s son and Steven’s stepson; she’s the daughter of their housekeeper, Magdalena (Joanna Kulig in a soulful turn). Tereza’s stepfather, Trey (Brian d’Arcy James), is a persnickety Civil War re-enactor and a court reporter.The teenagers’ relationship hits serious snags, through no fault of their own. Age plays a part, but so does class and Julian’s race; he identifies as Black. Amid the roiling neuroses of the adults, the young beloveds provide the film with a surprising emotional ballast.She Came to MeRated R for salty language. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Totally Killer’ Review: More Like Marty McDie

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      This teen slasher comedy with a time-traveling twist can’t muster up enough charisma to make its mash-up concept sing.“Totally Killer,” a time-travel teen slasher comedy, is quick to acknowledge itself as a mash-up of two 20th-century cultural touchstones. “Have you seen the movie ‘Back to the Future?’” Jamie (Kiernan Shipka), the movie’s teenage protagonist, asks a pair of cops, before later making an allusion to “Scream,” Wes Craven’s spooky-season classic. The somewhat gimmicky genre combination may have had the potential to be a winning combo, but “Totally Killer,” directed by Nahnatchka Khan, struggles to muster up enough charisma to stick the landing.After the Sweet Sixteen Killer, who murdered Jamie’s mother’s friends when her mother was a teenager, makes a sudden return on Halloween, Jamie is thrust into a time machine that sends her back to 1987, when the original killings took place. Posing as the new kid in town, Jamie becomes close with the teenage version of her mother (Olivia Holt), hoping to stop the killer before he begins his rampage.The fun premise can make for a passively enjoyable watch during a Halloween binge, but the film mostly feels like it’s just going through the motions. Its ‘80s throwback setting is short on color and life, and its slasher elements lack the choreographic or cinematic oomph to induce any terror, or even tension. Shipka is the unequivocal bright spot, naturally embodying the charm, emotion and wit that made this movie’s forebears shine in the first place.Totally KillerRated R for bloody violence, language, sexual material and teen substance use. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘The Royal Hotel’ Review: Pulling Pints and Watching Their Backs

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      Two young women struggle to handle the obstreperous patrons of a remote Australian pub in this coolly calibrated thriller.We are barely 12 minutes into Kitty Green’s “The Royal Hotel” before the first C-word is dropped, but it isn’t gratuitous. The film’s language, dominated by the braying of obnoxious, bellies-to-the-bar boozehounds, is both spice and thickening agent in its pervasive mood of clammy menace. Our reward for enduring this relentless churn of apprehension is not the one we anticipate.Teasing expectations — to some viewers’ ultimate disappointment, no doubt — is much of what this keenly calibrated thriller is about, the familiarity of its setup raising our most bloodthirsty horror-movie hopes. Place two young, attractive female backpackers in a forlorn mining town somewhere in the Australian Outback; surround them with sex-starved, boorish miners; allow them no access to cell service or reliable transport. Their ensuing trials are a cyst that Green and her co-writer, Oscar Redding, take their sweet time to lance.Until then, we must gnaw our fingernails as Hanna and Liv (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick, both terrific) refresh their finances by working as live-in bartenders in the titular establishment. The hotel’s dilapidation — to say nothing of its grubby, grabby, mostly male clientele — is a far cry from the yacht parties the women were recently enjoying in Sydney. The bar owner (an indispensable Hugo Weaving) is a raging alcoholic, yet his girlfriend (Ursula Yovich) seems kind and possibly protective. And while one regular (Daniel Henshall) is frankly terrifying, another (Toby Wallace) is so clean and cute that his off-color humor is easier to ignore. At what point should the women feel alarmed enough to leave?That question haunts every frame of a movie that persistently taunts us with the likelihood of male violence, its blasted landscapes and aura of desolation pumped relentlessly by Michael Latham’s brooding cinematography. Green, in her second collaboration with Garner (after the similarly themed — if significantly less raucous — “The Assistant” in 2020), is proving a cool chronicler of workplace abuse and the kind of harassment that disguises itself as harmless fun. Sometimes a woman’s only defense is to trust the pricking skin and spasming gut that warns her otherwise.Inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary about two Finnish backpackers, “Hotel Coolgardie,” “The Royal Hotel” is after something more subtle than pure horror. In its destabilizing presentation of men whose motivations appear to shift from scene to scene — the women’s fun-loving English predecessors seem genuinely sorry to leave — it places the audience on a knife edge. This, along with the general drunkenness and the bar’s oppressive gloom, can be exhausting; but Green, filming for the first time in her native Australia, displays such a sure hand with the movie’s tone that even her brief slips into genre cliché (like a surprise snake and a convenient storm) inflict minimal damage. Her overtly feminist climax, though, feels more problematic, a betrayal of the movie’s carefully drawn ambiguities and concern for its more vulnerable characters. Hanna and Liv were never looking for a fight; all they really wanted was to see some kangaroos.The Royal HotelRated R for female skin and men with a skinful. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘More Than Ever’ Review: A Shared Melancholy

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      This middlebrow weepie about a woman dying from a rare lung disease stars Vicky Krieps and Gaspard Ulliel in his final role before his death in 2022.Since her star-making turn in “Phantom Thread,” the Luxembourgish actress Vicky Krieps has found fertile work, particularly in European productions, playing women responding to tragedy, sometimes with recklessness or self-harm.“More Than Ever,” a solid (mostly) French-language weepie, follows suit, with Krieps playing as Hélène, a 30-something married woman suffering from a rare and debilitating lung disease. Directed by Emily Atif, this middlebrow drama showcases Krieps’s captivating blend of melancholic fragility and spiky tenacity, riding on the strength of its performers, including the Gaspard Ulliel in his final live-action role before his accidental death in 2022.Ulliel plays Hélène’s loyal hubbie, Matthieu, whom we first see applying mascara to his feeble wife before a social outing. Their pals tiptoe awkwardly around the knowledge of Hélène’s health, triggering a minor meltdown by Hélène that also sketches out the tensions that inform the rest of the film.Matthieu refuses to give up hope while Hélène inches toward an acceptance of her fate that requires her to reframe her life. This means untethering herself from the past, her spouse included. This understanding comes courtesy of an “Eat Pray Love” style excursion to rural Norway, where Hélène bunks with a friend she met on the internet, Bent (Bjorn Floberg), a blogger with terminal cancer, a dark sense of humor and an idyllic property at the edge of a lake.Krieps and Ulliel give weight and texture to the couple’s push and pull. Guilt and grief intermingle, but no single feeling stands up to the brute fact of Hélène’s physical deterioration, made stark against an impassive backdrop of crystal waters and shivering woodlands. If her past films haven’t already made this clear, this is one of Krieps’s trademarks: transcendence through willful obliteration.More Than EverNot rated. In French, English and Norwegian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘My Love Affair With Marriage’ Review: A Tale of Love and Loss

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      This animated musical about a young woman’s sexual and romantic awakening uses a gloriously tactile aesthetic.“You’re not a complete person without your soul mate,” croon three mythical birdlike women early in the coming-of-age musical “My Love Affair With Marriage.” The vocal trio — who fall somewhere between a Greek chorus and the “Macbeth” weird sisters — are among countless whimsical devices that elevate this beguiling animated feature, which traces the sexual and romantic awakening of a young woman in the Soviet Union.Written and directed with wild imagination by the Latvian filmmaker Signe Baumane (“Rocks in My Pockets”), the film follows Zelma (voiced by Dagmara Dominczyk) over 23 years as she transforms from spunky kid to lovelorn teenager to restless wife to realized artist — all while entangled in a double helix of fallacies about female worth and feminine purpose. Alternating between sass and sincerity, Baumane methodically identifies the origins of these myths and then traces how they pinball Zelma through a series of agonies and ecstasies.It’s a moody, unpredictable tale of love and loss, stuffed with vivid metaphors, Soviet period detail and pedagogical sequences about the physiology of love. The glue holding these disparate pieces together is the film’s gloriously tactile aesthetic: Baumane crafted Zelma’s world by overlaying line-drawn characters on meticulously constructed papier-mâché dioramas. The result evokes an adult puppet show crossed with a graphic novel, and like the budding female identity the film untangles, the whole thing takes a little time getting used to. Once you do, it is remarkably beautiful.My Love Affair With MarriageNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Foe’ Review: The Space Between

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      Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal play a farm couple with a less-than-idyllic marriage in the Midwest of the future.Set in a future when devastation of the environment has humanity turning to outer space as a homestead, “Foe” presents a spectacle of futility. Not the climate change disaster itself, which is tangential to the plot, but the sight of great actors throwing themselves into this material, as if they were slogging through a Tennessee Williams marathon instead of the equivalent of a distended “Twilight Zone” episode with an aesthetic that might be described as “Dorothea Lange filter.”The actual source is a 2018 novel by Iain Reid, who wrote the screenplay with the director, Garth Davis (“Lion”). The subject isn’t the dystopia, but a marriage. One night in the year 2065, Junior (Paul Mescal) and Hen (Saoirse Ronan), who live on a farm in the Midwest (played by Australia), are approached by a car with “Blade Runner” headlights. The driver is Terrance (Aaron Pierre), who brings news he insists should be seen as positive. (Pierre does not have a role that calls for the consuming physicality of Mescal’s and Ronan’s, but he does have a sly way of asking for a glass of water — a scarce resource — so the request sounds vaguely like a threat.)Junior has been selected as a candidate for off-world colonization. Nothing will happen just yet, the couple are promised, but of course — to skip ahead to Terrance’s second visit, a year later — something does. Junior’s advancement to the next round means that Terrance will need to move in with them, to probe Junior like a lab rat. Also, don’t worry! While Junior is away, Hen will live with a biological replacement — a replica that has living tissue and Junior’s memories. It’s the high-tech equivalent of leaving a war wife with a photograph, Terrance explains, except that this photograph can live and breathe. All to help their marriage survive, naturally.The proposal gets a bad laugh, perhaps not entirely intended. Junior doesn’t like the idea of Hen cohabitating with a fleshy facsimile, and he suspects that Terrance is trying to drive a wedge between them. But partly because the narrative reveals information piecemeal, the marriage can only be defined in generic, broadly symbolic terms. (The two wed straight out of school; Junior resents when Hen plays the piano.)To their great credit, the Irish stars, often loosely clothed and soaked in sweat from the lack of air conditioning, have such presence and chemistry that it’s possible to believe in their intimacy — the pull and tangle of their bodies, their paroxysms of anguish — and even to pretend in the moment that they have full-fledged characters to play.Drawn to magic-hour vistas and pseudo-poetic shots of ripped greenhouse plastic blowing in the wind, “Foe” looks as if it’s been bronzed. (The cinematographer Matyas Erdely, of Laszlo Nemes’s “Son of Saul” and “Sunset,” works wonders with natural light.) But the cryptic, allusive mode is at odds with the film’s efforts to psychoanalyze a marriage. The archetypal characters of Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” — almost certainly a visual influence — merely had to suggest back story. Here, Hen and Junior’s glanced-at history is asked to carry weight the sketchy outlines cannot bear.The hollowness turns out to be a feature, not a bug, and a completely unnecessary final beat dispels any troubling ambiguities that might have lingered. What begins as a sleek, science-fiction-tinged mystery leaves little more than a cloud of dust.FoeRated R. Spousal estrangement. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More