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      ‘Piaffe’ Review: A Sound Obsession

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      In this beautiful and beguiling tale of transformation, a young woman’s altered body unlocks her true self.The clicks and whirs of a gigantic, peep show-like contraption known as a zoetrope fill our ears as an enigmatic botanist (Sebastian Rudolph) observes the image of a slowly unfurling fern. Watching him is Eva (Simone Bucio), a timid young woman for whom sound has become something of an obsession.Her nonbinary sibling, Zara, played by Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, has had a breakdown, and Eva must take over Zara’s job as a Foley artist for a drug company commercial. She must learn to make the sounds of a horse prancing in place, a dressage move known as a piaffe.With “Piaffe,” the filmmaker and visual artist Ann Oren, extrapolating from her 2020 short film “Passage,” has made a silken study of physical and erotic transformation. Like the horse that stars in the commercial, Eva exists in a kind of stasis, restrained from moving forward.Learning to mimic equine behavior emboldens her, and her body responds by sprouting a fleshy appendage that grows rapidly from a penile protuberance to a full-length tail. Timid no longer, Eva pursues a series of erotic encounters with the botanist, who tells her that ferns are hermaphrodites: Like Zara, they embody more than a single gender.Gorgeously shot by Carlos Vasquez using 16-millimeter film (and filmed in part in the famous Warsaw Fotoplastikon), “Piaffe” is ideologically abstract and beguilingly weird. Its experimental style, marked by long, dialogue-free stretches, color flares and pristine sound effects, can seem calculated and off-putting, the narrative slight and dramatically slack. Yet the film’s provocations have a playfulness and generosity that are enormously appealing. In the same way as the fern, Eva has unfurled from a defensive crouch to an open embrace of who she was meant to be.PiaffeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Golda’ Review: Chain-Smoking Through the Guilt

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      Helen Mirren, under heavy prosthetics, channels the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in this wartime biopic.“Golda” — as in Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister who resigned in 1974 over her administration’s handling of the Yom Kippur War — films its title character in confrontational close-ups of her red-rimmed eyes, nicotine-stained fingers and swollen ankles. Somewhere under the prosthetics is Helen Mirren, formidably shouldering Meir’s suppressed anguish over the war’s death toll.Extreme costuming often feels gimmicky, but here, it humanizes the director Guy Nattiv’s terse accounting of guilt. As one imagines the burden of wearing Meir’s artificial skin, you can practically hear Nattiv hiss: Now imagine putting yourself in the actual woman’s orthopedic shoes. Or as Mirren’s Meir cracks to Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber), “Things could be worse. You could have my feet.”Israel has been surprise-attacked by Egypt and Syria, and Kissinger is concerned with keeping the Soviets calm and oil prices low. The script, by Nicholas Martin, doesn’t argue the righteousness of the conflict. Instead, it frets over the body count — and though we’re with Meir and her fractious advisers as they clap for the massacre of Egyptian soldiers, the camera reacts by going all woozy like it’s nauseous.Niv Adiri’s dense sound design and Dascha Dauenhauer’s impactful score turn war into a living nightmare. For good measure, we also go inside Meir’s bad dreams. Awake, however, the polarizing leader is the kind of stoic who chain-smokes through her lymphoma treatments. The film is structured by her cigarettes. Edits cut from one puff to another; the minister of defense, Moshe Dayan (Rami Heuberger), uses packs and lighters to stand-in for military units; ashtrays fill and fill again. We’re left with the sense that the stress of those thousands of lives cut short may have killed her, too.GoldaRated PG-13 for pervasive smoking. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Blue Box’ Review: Grappling With an Ancestor’s Impact

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      In this documentary, Michal Weits tries to process her ideas about her great-grandfather Joseph Weits, who was regarded as the father of Israeli forests.In “Blue Box,” the director Michal Weits challenges a national narrative about Israel that, for her, also happens to be a family narrative. One of her great-grandfathers was Joseph Weits (sometimes spelled “Weitz” or with variants of “Yosef”), who had a reputation as the father of Israel’s forests. That was how Michal thought of him growing up.Joseph Weits oversaw land and forestry initiatives for the Jewish National Fund, but that job description leaves out important context. In the 1930s, before the founding of Israel and in preparation for a possible Jewish state, he was instrumental in purchasing land that Palestinians lived on. During the 1948 war that followed the declaration of Israel as an independent nation, he assembled a committee that sought, among other things, to prevent Arabs from returning. The film makes the case that transforming the landscape, including planting trees, became a way of ensuring that.Joseph left behind voluminous diaries that Michal pores over in the film (Dror Keren reads his words in voice-over) as she tries to reconcile her ideas about her ancestor. In his writings, Joseph expresses conflicted feelings about his actions, which — “Blue Box” emphasizes more than once — occurred against a backdrop of antisemitism throughout Europe and the Holocaust. Michal interviews members of her extended family, who have a range of attitudes about Joseph’s legacy and in some cases are reluctant to engage with it.“I don’t want to be a part of this,” Michal’s father tells her late in the movie, after suggesting that, had she been around in 1948 or 1949, she would have been standing proudly with her great-grandfather’s cause. Part of the power of “Blue Box” is that it can’t say for sure if she would. And the familial and personal tensions give it something extra, elevating it beyond the standard historical documentary.Blue BoxNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Before, Now & Then’ Review: Love and War

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      Set amid the upheaval of 1960s Indonesia, this drama tells the story of a woman caught in an unhappy marriage and haunted by the traumas of war.Kamila Andini’s “Before, Now & Then” is a domestic drama set against a tumultuous historical backdrop: In 1960s Indonesia, as communists are massacred by the state and the authoritarian president Suharto seizes control (with the backing of the United States), the film alights on the story of one woman, Nana (Happy Salma), who is caught in an unhappy marriage and haunted by past traumas. It’s a daring narrative mix of the personal and the political, though Andini struggles to find the right balance between the two.The movie begins in the aftermath of Indonesia’s fight for independence in the 1940s, with Nana on the run, fleeing nationalist soldiers who are forcibly taking women from villages. Nana’s husband is presumed dead, and, in a startling scene, she imagines her father being beheaded by a group of men. A temporal jump then transports us to her new life 15 years later, when she is the wife of a wealthy, absent and adulterous plantation owner. From the high-stakes prologue we switch, jarringly, to a languid, mist-swept melodrama about Nana’s fraying relationship with her unfaithful husband and her friendship with his younger mistress, Ino (Laura Basuki).The political and historical contexts fade into the background, emerging only in stray scenes of locals discussing current events, which Andini inserts like punctuation marks in an otherwise typical midcentury tale of a woman awakening to her independence. It doesn’t help that this feminist arc is a little too cute, particularly after the brutality that precedes it: All it takes to bring Nana out of her shell is Ino — a manic-pixie figure — encouraging her to dive into a lake fully clothed. It’s a pity for both Salma and Basuki, whose expressive faces convey depths of feeling that the script and direction cannot quite match.Before, Now & ThenNot rated. In Indonesian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Brief Encounters’ and ‘The Long Farewell’ Review: Kira Muratova’s Soulful Soviet Dramas

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      A pair of newly restored films from Kira Muratova about restless, disaffected women hold a special, subversive power.Through the 1970s and much of the 1980s, Kira Muratova’s stirring films “Brief Encounters” and “The Long Farewell” went unseen, banned by the Soviet Union. “The Long Farewell” provoked such outrage from censors that Muratova, then a new voice in cinema, was stripped of her film degree and prohibited from filmmaking for years.A blacklist is, obviously, an undesirable home for any worthy feature. But as I watched the exquisite 4K restorations of these two films (a collaboration between StudioCanal and the Criterion Collection), I was struck by how much their stories harmonize with their embattled history. The works, which were Muratova’s first solo outings as a director, overflow with restless, disaffected women beating against the boxes in which society has confined them. The female characters pine, ache and, amplified by the dramas surrounding them, seem to scream: Life is hard! Let us free!Both films were eventually released during the era of perestroika, and Muratova, born in what is now Moldova in 1934, went on to direct more than a dozen other features, earning international acclaim. Yet her couplet of debut films still hold a special, subversive power.“Brief Encounters,” from 1967 and my favorite of the pair, is an audacious portrait of two women on the cultural fringes pining after the same man. Muratova plays one of the leads, Valentina — a brusque regional councilwoman in Odesa, Ukraine, who’s in charge of the water supply for local buildings. The film opens on Valentina cast in chiaroscuro, groaning over unfinished work and dirty dishes. Her malaise is interrupted by the arrival of Nadia (Nina Ruslanova), an impressionable girl from the countryside who becomes Valentina’s housekeeper.The texture of domestic items and the soft geometries of light and shadow enhance every frame of this wry relationship drama, which regularly jumps back in time to scenes from Valentina’s and Nadia’s separate romances — and rifts — with the impish, nomadic Maxim (Vladimir Vysotsky, a heartthrob folk singer of the time). Muratova mirrors the brokenness of these entanglements in concrete objects: fractured dinner plates, faucets that won’t run, a guitar with popped strings, a tattered leather jacket. Some prove fixable. But the tragedy of “Brief Encounters” is that, despite the film’s frequent excursions into the past, life can’t just be restrung or repaired.A projected image of Oleg Vladimirsky as Sasha in “The Long Farewell.”Janus FilmsA more bourgeois milieu takes center stage in the “The Long Farewell,” which was produced in 1971. It charts a strained relationship between an erratic, overbearing mother, Evgeniia (Zinaida Sharko), and her angsty teenage son, Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky). As Sasha comes of age and pulls away, Evgeniia grows fragile and then melts down entirely. (Muratova was never sure why the film was an affront to censors, but she later guessed that it had to do with its avant-garde aesthetic.)If Valentina’s job inspecting water taps in “Brief Encounters” reflects her desire to restore the flow of love between her and Maxim, Evgeniia’s career as a translator belies her ongoing failure to communicate with Sasha. In one dazzling image, Muratova conveys Evgeniia’s loneliness: She shows the mother simulating being next to Sasha by projecting photos of him on the walls of her apartment. Standing in the projector’s glow, Evgeniia gazes at the images, enduring social artifacts that — like Muratova’s films — hold small universes of comfort and pain.Brief EncountersNot rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters.The Long FarewellNot rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Honey, I Blew Up the Family Film

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      What ever happened to the live-action adventures and G-rated titles adults and children could watch together in the theater?My son’s first movie was “La La Land,” which he watched strapped to my chest during a baby-friendly matinee in Brooklyn. He was 7 months old then, hungry and appropriately fussy, which means that I spent most of the movie standing at the back of the theater — nursing, jiggling, shushing — and that neither of us has seen “La La Land” all the way through. But you can’t say I didn’t start him early.For me, moviegoing is a pleasure learned in the 1980s from my own mother. She mostly took me to movies that she wanted to see — “Stranger Than Paradise,” “Heat and Dust.” That decade brought plenty of kid-centered blockbusters too: “E.T.,” “The Goonies,” “The Princess Bride.” Moviegoing is a habit I’ve hoped to instill in my own children. A theatrical experience insists that we all watch the same thing at the same time. At home, on movie night, I’m as likely to be dealing with the dishes or scrolling on my phone. In a theater, we share the experience. Also: popcorn.But as we’re not superhero fans (and unlike my mother, I balk at taking school-age kids to R-rated films), our moviegoing has been sporadic. Most months, there’s nothing we want to see in theaters. We’re not alone.In the spring, Matt Singer, the editor and critic at ScreenCrush.com, posted on Twitter, “As a parent of little kids it would be great if there was literally *any* movie in theaters right now I could take them to.” His choices at the time were “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” a PG-13 sequel with a body count that would have terrified his 5-year-old, or “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” which had already been running for four months, mostly because exhibitors keen to attract a family audience had no other options.G-rated titles have largely disappeared. Even the Pixar film “Elemental” was rated PG.Disney/PixarNow, in August, there are a few more films in wide release. My kids, 7 and 10, recently saw “Elemental,” Pixar and Disney’s latest animated collab, with my mom. (Her tastes have mellowed.) Theaters are still showing the live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid” and the computer-animated “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken” seems to have come and gone more quickly, though it remains available on demand.David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers, estimates that family films will earn about $4.9 billion this year, commensurate, or nearly, with recent prepandemic totals. But there are only 12 major theatrical releases currently scheduled for the whole of 2023, about half as many as in 2019. And the lineup, which includes the current “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” and the forthcoming “Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie” and “Trolls Band Together,” is not particularly inspiring.“The companies aren’t in it for charity,” Gross said. “They’re going make movies that have an advantage.”Of these 12, a third could reasonably be called original: “Elemental,” “Ruby Gillman” and the forthcoming “Wish,” with Ariana DeBose voicing Disney’s latest animated heroine, and “Migration,” about a family of ducks written improbably by Mike White (“White Lotus”). The others all depend on pre-existing intellectual property — cartoons, video games, books. Many of these movies, though by no means all, have a lowest-common-denominator feel, testifying to conservatism among studios and a deficit of imagination and ambition.So what happened to the great family movie?Well, a lot of things. “It’s cultural, it’s technological, it’s financial, it’s sociological,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior analyst at Comscore, a media analytics company.“Wish,” from Disney,” is one of the few original films aimed at children this year.Walt Disney Animation StudiosWhile certain stressors on the family film predate 2020, the pandemic obviously compounded the current predicament: It disrupted the supply chain, pushed many families out of the moviegoing groove and diverted quality releases to streaming services. Of the major genres, the family film has been the slowest to rebound theatrically, which has made studios reluctant to take chances on a wide release for riskier material.“Right now, the question is what does it take to get any movie in the theater that isn’t giant branded I.P.,” said Nina Jacobson, a producer and a past president of the Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group, a studio in the Walt Disney Company. The theatrical marketplace, she suggested, has largely stopped taking those chances, creating a closed loop. “If you don’t give people anything to go to see other than Marvel movies, then you can say only Marvel movies work,” Jacobson said.But family films have been undergoing a shift that predates both 2020 and Marvel dominance. The G rating, a stalwart of the films of my childhood, has nearly disappeared, a corollary to the reluctance of producers of family films to admit that they’re meant for families.“My entire career, there has been a shortage of movies that the youngest kids can see in the theater,” said Betsy Bozdech, an editorial director at Commonsense Media, a site that rates and reviews media aimed at children. “The G rating basically doesn’t exist anymore.” This year, we will probably see no full-length G-rated movies. (Even the “Paw Patrol” sequel is PG.) Only a decade ago, there were 18. In 2003? More than 30.The dearth of family films is also a function of the much chronicled demise of midbudget movies — including ones that Jacobson oversaw, like “Freaky Friday” and “The Princess Diaries.” Midbudget movies don’t have to work as hard to earn back their investment and they can afford to appeal to a narrower tranche of the moviegoing public, meaning the releases can be more particular in tone and style.Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a related move away from live-action theatrical family films and toward animation. What live action there is, as in the case of Disney’s high-grossing remakes, often relies on so many computer-generated effects that it doesn’t seem live at all. (Compare the recent, dutiful live action “Beauty and the Beast,” with 1989’s delightful “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” or 1991’s delirious “Hook.”) These movies can still delight and make meaning, as with the ecstatic kid reactions to Halle Bailey’s Little Mermaid. But there’s particular wonder and possibility in seeing characters who look like you or behave like you onscreen, in real-world or real-world adjacent situations.“To see a young lead in a movie who you identify with, to see a story with you in mind, to see that you matter in that storytelling as a young person, those are movies that you hold onto,” Jacobson said.No one has to go to the movies anymore. Wait a month or two or six and you can see these same films from the comfort of your couch. And quality may not even matter absolutely. Certainly there are days — rainy or too hot — when the temptation of a climate-controlled seat and Raisinets suffices, no matter the movie on offer.But if we want movie theaters to survive, that will mean building the moviegoing habit in children, which means giving them an experience, beyond the candy counter, that keeps them coming back. A third “Trolls” movie may not offer that. Instead studios will need to get comfortable with some risk and some trust, making movies for children that don’t talk down to them.“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” a Netflix movie, shows that auteurs are still interested in making films for young viewers.Netflix, via Associated Press“Kids are more sophisticated and have the emotional capacity to be able to absorb things that traditional Hollywood doesn’t think they can absorb,” said Todd Lieberman, a producer whose coming-of-age World War II tale, “White Bird: A Wonder Story,” will be released later this year.We can’t expect an “E.T.” every year, or even movies commensurate with the gems I recall from my youth: Agnieszka Holland’s “The Secret Garden,” Alfonso Cuarón’s “A Little Princess,” John Sayles’s “The Secret of Roan Inish.” But we should expect better. And better remains possible.Prestige directors are still interested in family movies — see “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” and planned Narnia movies. And have you seen the “Paddington” movies? Perfection. So it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine a future in which there are more and finer children’s movies in theaters, ones that send you back out into the light blinking and amazed. As an adult moviegoer, I often feel spoiled for choice. If we want children to return as adults, we should spoil them, too.“Give people great original family content and they will show up,” Jacobson said. “But it’s on us to give it to them.” More

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      ‘Gran Turismo’ Review: Once Upon a Pair of Sticks

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      A popular racing video game series gets turned into an underdog sports drama in this big-screen adaptation.Since the late 1990s, the Gran Turismo racing games for PlayStation have brought in billions of dollars, rivaling the box-office bounties of some movie franchises. It was only a matter of time before a movie offshoot arrived, following in the tracks of other live-action adaptations of PlayStation games, including last year’s “Uncharted.” “Gran Turismo” the movie tells the true (but unlikely) story of Jann Mardenborough, a Gran Turismo maven who became a professional racer of actual cars on actual tracks.Mardenborough’s leap from pixels to asphalt was an effective advertisement for Gran Turismo as more than a game, but his transition wasn’t all smooth. In the director Neill Blomkamp’s dutiful telling, Jann (Archie Madekwe), a teenager from Cardiff, Wales, faces doubters and steep learning curves to go with the racetrack curves. His underdog story — can this digital driver make it in the real world? — doubles as an old-fashioned tale of a young man proving his worth to his family and other skeptics.Madekwe’s Jann is so unassuming that every step in his journey comes as a pleasant surprise. After Jann’s father (Djimon Hounsou) says there’s no future in gaming and brings Jann to his job at a rail yard, Jann goes off and wins a contest held by Nissan to recruit promising Gran Turismo players. (His mother, played by Geri Halliwell Horner, is a bit more encouraging.) He earns a spot in the company’s racing academy, which is overseen by a hard-nosed engineer, Jack (David Harbour), and an unctuous marketer, Danny (Orlando Bloom). Once again Jann exceeds expectations and beats out a more TV-ready competitor for the chance to race professionally.The movie begins to resemble the levels in a video game, as Jann enters races worldwide to clinch his contract with Nissan. He finally beats an obnoxious front-runner (Josha Stradowski) in Dubai and celebrates in Tokyo, but he flips his car on his next race (as the real Mardenborough did in 2015, though the film adjusts the chronology). Like many sports movies, there’s no shortage of training and competition — the perpetual buildup. A finale comes at Le Mans, the annual 24-hour race.Blomkamp’s handling of the track scenes lacks a compelling physicality, or (if you’ll pardon the term) drive — the editing and camerawork could each use a sharper sense of rhythm and velocity. That might not matter so much if it were paired with a strong screenplay, but the platitudinous script here lacks flair (though Jann does have the likable quirk of listening to Enya or Kenny G to chill out before races). Madekwe conveys a youthful vulnerability and an appealing air of quiet doggedness, even if he’s mild-mannered as a performer here. The movie doesn’t need to achieve the same levels of sensation as a wildly popular racing simulator, but it should convey excitement and dynamism in its own cinematic way. When the novelty of watching a gamer become a driver wears off, we’re left with an adequate racing drama in a medium built for so much more.Gran TurismoRated PG-13 for intense action and some strong language. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Scrapper’ Review: You’re on Your Own, Kid

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      In Charlotte Regan’s feature-length debut, a girl wise beyond her years reconnects with her father, an immature drifter.Charlotte Regan’s feature-length debut, “Scrapper,” is as whip-smart as the 12-year-old girl at its center. Georgie (played wonderfully by the newcomer Lola Campbell) lives alone in her apartment in London following the death of her mother, and spends her days stealing bicycles for money and playing hooky with her friend Ali (Alin Uzun).Through some clever voice mail trickery, she has convinced the inattentive adults in her life that she is being taken care of by her nonexistent uncle. That all changes when her estranged father, Jason (Harris Dickinson), shows up to the house to assume the role as Georgie’s primary caretaker — but not without some tension.“Scrapper” is tender without falling into sappiness. Regan doesn’t romanticize Georgie’s struggles with poverty, grief and bullying, which are accompanied by the film’s gritty sense of humor. At the same time, the film’s vivid cinematography, by Molly Manning Walker, fills the screen with symmetry and pastel colors; there’s a youthful energy to the way many of the scenes are shot, even as Georgie is trying to haggle her way into a better deal for a stolen bike.Through it all, Campbell and Dickinson portray a father-daughter relationship between a girl wise beyond her years and an immature drifter, meeting in the middle to form a rough-hewed yet sincere connection.ScrapperNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters. More