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      ‘I’ll Show You Mine’ Review: Couch Trip

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      This drama, directed by Megan Griffiths, explores abuse and trauma through a potent and prickly series of conversations.“I’ll Show You Mine” teases viewers with its story of a charged, prickly and flirtatious interview between a best-selling author, Priya (Poorna Jagannathan), and a former model, Nic (Casey Thomas Brown), who is the subject and a co-writer of a new book. He’s also Priya’s nephew by marriage.The way that the director Megan Griffiths presents Priya’s pre-interview primping gives the impression that Priya is preparing for a date. This is one of many feints that will keep us guessing about what may happen between the two. And, through potent silences during their conversations about sex and trauma, the film nudges us toward thoughts about what might have occurred between them years earlier, too.Married with kids, Nic was once a young, gender-defying model who strutted his stuff long before nonbinary identities were widely recognized. He still casually defaults to coy-boy charm. Priya is fascinated by, and mistrustful of, what she sees as his ease with sex and gender. Her first book was titled “The Abusive Patriarch(y): A Cultural Autobiography.” And the shadow of bad dads — Priya’s but also Nic’s — hang over them as they begin trading histories in her living room.The director breaks up Priya and Nic’s couch sessions with animated flashbacks, cheekily vivid illustrations and chapter headings. Even so, the movie (written by Tiffany Louquet, Elizabeth Searle and David Shields) is a decidedly talky two-hander. It’s a good thing that Jagannathan and Brown have training in the theater: They imbue Priya and Nic’s densely verbal jousts, dodges and truths with compelling chiaroscuro hues.I’ll Show You MineNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘The Mother and the Whore’: A Threesome and Then Some

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      Jean Eustache’s digitally restored 1973 film, now at Lincoln Center, is part of a full retrospective of his work.Jean Eustache’s unwieldy first feature “The Mother and the Whore” — a transfixing 215-minute talkathon, as well as a cause célèbre since its world premiere at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival — feels less like a masterpiece than a rogue asteroid careening toward your particular home planet.Shown at last year’s New York Film Festival, the 4K digital restoration is screening at Lincoln Center June 23-July 13 as part of a full Eustache retrospective.Eustache, a onetime critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, considered “The Mother and the Whore” autobiographical. Set in the aftermath of France’s May 1968 civil unrest, it concerns a ménage-à-trois. Alexandre, a voluble slacker played by the embodiment of Parisian youth, Jean-Pierre Léaud, is being kept by the slightly older Marie (Bernadette Lafont, herself a New Wave signifier) while he pursues a young, sexually liberated nurse, Veronika (Eustache’s former lover Françoise Lebrun).Alexandre is a creature of impulse and a monster of insistence. Adopting and discarding attitudes, he is given to absurd, self-hypnotizing rants that fascinate Veronika, charm Marie, and appall the viewer as when he holds forth on the satisfaction of washing dishes while watching Marie perform the chore.A dandy who reads Proust and listens to Édith Piaf, Alexandre is obsessed with the past, mainly the aborted revolution of 1968. He is also delusional. “What novel do you think you’re in?” exclaims a former girlfriend whom he has ambushed to make a manic proposal of marriage.Marie, sufficiently grounded to own a boutique (although she and Alexandre live like students with a mattress on the floor), is indulgent and emotional. Veronika, self-contained and frank about her active sex life, is perhaps as crazy as Alexandre. Certainly, as her final soliloquy reveals, she is the most desperate of the three. A neophyte actor caught between two icons, Lebrun delivers an extraordinary performance.“The Mother and the Whore” is largely conversations, in cafes, parked cars and bed. It is filled with movie references but, as suggested by Alexandre’s ex, feels as dense and psychologically resonant as a novel — maybe one by Dostoyevsky. Viewing despair through the prism of sex, the movie has things in common with “Last Tango in Paris,” including Léaud. It is, however, a more anguished and compassionate film. In not quite the last word, a petulant Marie puts on a scratched LP to serenade us with the jaunty bitterness of Piaf’s self-reflexive “Les Amants de Paris.”In 1974, “The Mother and the Whore” was brutally reviewed by the New York Times critic Nora Sayre, who lambasted the film as a reversion to “the movie-sludge of the nineteen-fifties.” There’s nothing particularly ’50s here except the black-and-white cinematography, but Sayre’s complaint is telling: “The discoveries of the last decade have been erased. Or else the sixties never happened.” Exactly. The movie is a eulogy.Eustache made several more personal features before killing himself in 1981. The French critic Serge Daney called him “an ethnologist of his own reality,” adding that Eustache gave a face to the “lost children” of May ’68: “Without him, nothing would have remained of them.”The Mother and the WhoreThrough July 13 at Film at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; filmlinc.org. More

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      Plot Twist at Turner Classic Movies Upsets Film Fans

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      The network’s owner, Warner Bros. Discovery, promised there would be little to no change for viewers despite budget cuts behind the scenes.For many people in Hollywood, including lions like Steven Spielberg, Turner Classic Movies is not a cable channel. It is an extension of their identity.And it took a beating this week.On Tuesday, the network, known as TCM, jettisoned its five most senior executives through a mix of buyouts and pink slips. The departed were Pola Chagnon, the general manager; Charlie Tabesh, the channel’s lead programmer; Genevieve McGillicuddy, who ran the annual TCM film festival; Anne Wilson, a production executive; and Dexter Fedor, a marketer.Warner Bros. Discovery, the network’s owner, promised that viewers would see little to no change on TCM. The channel will remain free of ads. “We remain fully committed to this business, the TCM brand and its purpose to protect and celebrate culture-defining movies,” Kathleen Finch, chairman and chief content officer for the company’s domestic networks group, wrote in a memo that was shared with news outlets.But the channel’s loyalists responded to the cuts with hellfire, interpreting them as a further marginalization of an art form and a personal attack.Our cinemas have been overrun by superheroes. Our film studios have fallen victim to corporate consolidation. FilmStruck, our streaming service for silent-era gems and noir classics, was shut down. And now you are gutting TCM, our last happy place, where Orson Welles is mercifully alive and well and “Key Largo” (1948) still counts as a summer blockbuster?Using an expletive, Ryan Reynolds sounded an alarm on Twitter, telling his 21 million followers that TCM was a fixture in his life and calling the channel “a holy corner of film history — and a living, breathing library for an entire art form.” Mark Harris, a journalist and film historian, called the cuts “a catastrophic talent purge.” Patton Oswalt, an actor and writer, took direct aim at David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, cursing him on Twitter and saying, “You couldn’t just leave this one alone?”Mr. Zaslav routinely describes himself as a colossal fan of classic cinema. He keeps TCM playing in his office, where he proudly works from the same desk used by Jack Warner, one of the studio’s founders. In recent months, Mr. Zaslav, who took over Warner Bros. last year, has been celebrating the studio’s 100th anniversary.Is it just an act?By late Wednesday, three Hollywood titans — Mr. Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson — had issued an unusual joint statement saying they had spoken to Mr. Zaslav and were “heartened and encouraged.”“We are committed to working together to ensure the continuation of this cultural touchstone that we all treasure,” the statement said. “Turner Classic Movies has always been more than just a channel. It is truly a precious resource of cinema, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And while it has never been a financial juggernaut, it has always been a profitable endeavor since its inception.”The directors added, “We have each spent time talking to David, separately and together, and it’s clear that TCM and classic cinema are very important to him.”The filmmakers said Mr. Zaslav, in fact, had privately reached out to them earlier in the week to discuss the restructuring of TCM. “We understand the pressures and realities of a corporation as large as WBD, of which TCM is one moving part,” the directors said. “Our primary aim is to ensure that TCM’s programming is untouched and protected.”Michael Ouweleen, the president of Cartoon Network and Discovery Family, will now oversee TCM.Bryan Bedder/Getty ImagesIn a business sense, TCM is a financial footnote for Warner Bros. Discovery, an entertainment conglomerate with roughly 37,000 employees worldwide and $34 billion in annual revenue. But like every other media mogul, Mr. Zaslav is wrestling with a no-win situation: Cable television, which has long powered media conglomerates, is in terminal decline, meaning that operational costs must also go down. Budget cuts have affected all of the company’s many divisions.Fewer than 50 million homes will pay for cable or satellite service by 2027, down from 64 million today and 100 million seven years ago, according to a recent PwC report.So the belt tightening at TCM was more about preservation than annihilation, at least in Warner Bros. Discovery’s view. Ben Mankiewicz, Jacqueline Stewart and the other TCM hosts will continue in their roles, according to a spokeswoman. TCM will continue to pay for access to classic films from all studios; there is no plan to restrict the channel to Warner Bros. movies. TCM will also continue to be featured as a “brand hub” on Max, the company’s streaming service.Michael Ouweleen, the president of Cartoon Network, among other channels, will oversee TCM going forward. He is based in Atlanta. TCM was previously part of his portfolio on an interim basis.“Michael shares our passion for classic films and believes strongly in TCM’s essential role in preserving and spotlighting iconic movies for the next generation of cinephiles,” Ms. Finch said in her memo.Mr. Ouweleen might be smart to remember that, for TCM’s devotees, the network’s programming is less entertainment and more “the stuff that dreams are made of.” More

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      ‘The Country Club’ Review: Who’s Your Caddy?

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      The sisters Fiona and Sophia Robert wrote and star in this broad, pastel-colored golf comedy.It’s hard to make a golf comedy without evoking “Caddyshack,” the ribald 1980 classic starring Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, and with its crude humor, farcical innuendo and posh eponymous setting, “The Country Club” certainly warrants the comparison. But the influence the movie more obviously courts is early Wes Anderson, especially his sophomore feature “Rushmore”: The director Fiona Robert (who also co-wrote the film with her sister, Sophia Robert, both of whom star) leans heavily on Anderson’s unmistakable, easily imitated style, using rigidly symmetrical compositions, sudden zooms and a heightened pastel color palette. As if to underscore the similarities, the movie even opens with a handcrafted, pleasantly fastidious title sequence with credits inscribed on tees and golf balls that fairly exudes twee Andersonia.These visual flourishes, while derivative, are charming and well-realized. The writing, however, has none of Anderson’s wit, tending instead toward a kind of broad and fatuous slapstick that’s closer to “2 Broke Girls” than “The Royal Tenenbaums.”This story of a pair of working-class teenage interlopers crashing an upper-crust golf tournament has a predictable sitcom rhythm, and features expository monologues of astonishing clumsiness, such as this dud, from the working-class hero Elsa (Sophia Robert) to her sister, Tina (Fiona Robert): “I guess I’m just upset about dad getting laid off. College is so far out of reach now!” The jokes are scarcely better. There is a long, long, unfunny sequence involving flatulence. According to the credits, those noise effects were provided by the comedian Steve Higgins. They were not worth crediting.The Country ClubNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘The Stroll’ Review: Telling Their Own Stories

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      In this documentary, transgender sex workers speak for themselves without sanitizing or sensationalizing their experiences.At several points in “The Stroll,” Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s loving portrait of New York City’s transgender sex workers, moments of striking candor break through the conventions of documentary.An interviewee pauses warily in the middle of a conversation to check if it’s OK to reveal explicit details of her sex work, to which Lovell (who is transgender and a former prostitute herself) responds with, “Girl, you’re fine!” Later, as Lovell walks with another of the film’s subjects, Izzy, through the now-gentrified meatpacking district in Manhattan where they once both plied their trades, Izzy suddenly bursts into tears, interrupting the scene with a pained, “I can’t do this. I hate this place.”These scenes might have ended up on the cutting room floor in a different documentary. Here, their inclusion reinforces the novelty of “The Stroll”: It’s the rare movie that allows transgender sex workers to speak for themselves without sanitizing or sensationalizing their experiences.Lovell’s own story mirrors that of many of her interviewees, who include the ballroom icon Egyptt LaBeija and the activist Ceyenne Doroshow. (Drucker, a trans artist and activist, remains behind the camera.) Lovell ‌arrived in Manhattan as a teenager in the 1990s, seeking an escape from a hard life at home in Yonkers, ‌but she was fired from her coffee shop job when she began transitioning. So she turned to “the stroll”: a stretch of West 14th Street that cut through a blood-splattered neighborhood of meatpackers, and offered a haven for cruising gay men and transgender prostitutes. It allowed Lovell and her colleagues not just to make a living but also to find community — even a semblance of family.Inspired to take on the storytelling reins after being featured in a 2007 documentary, Lovell, along with Drucker, assembles interviews and archival images that sparkle with joy, banter and sorority, even as they detail brutality and precarity. What unfurls is a micro-history of New York: from the 1970s, with the city’s early gay rights movements (which often excluded transgender people), to the broken-windows policies of the ’90s and the economic fallout of Sept. 11, to the gentrification that began to sweep the city when Michael Bloomberg took office as mayor in 2002.As the city became seemingly safer, prettier and richer for some, its most vulnerable denizens paid a steep price. “I can’t believe how many times I had to go to jail for the Highline Park to be built,” Lovell says wryly. But if “The Stroll” is an indictment and elegy, it is also a remarkable document of the self-determination of the women and workers who learned, in the face of the worst odds, to fend for themselves and each other.The StrollNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      ‘Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy’ Review

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      A documentary examines how the winner for best picture of 1969 captured shifts in American life.How many ways did “Midnight Cowboy” occupy the nexus of the cultural changes of the 1960s? The documentary “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy” cites plenty.The film was revolutionary in its depiction of sex, and particularly in its acknowledgment of the existence of gay life. It tweaked the movie-cowboy archetype at a time when westerns allegorized the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. Its screenwriter, Waldo Salt, had been blacklisted in the 1950s. It took advantage of the possibility of filming on location in New York and of capturing aspects of the city — such as hustlers and homelessness — that had scarcely been shown onscreen, or had been limited to experimental cinema. A late interlude in the film documented elements of the Warholian art scene.And in winning the Oscar for the best picture of 1969, “Midnight Cowboy” may have represented a rare instance of the Academy Awards’ accepting important shifts in American life. (Or perhaps the academy looked forward and backward simultaneously: Two interviewees note that John Wayne, a supporter of the war and an icon of a more conservative America, took best actor that year for “True Grit.”)Whether “Midnight Cowboy” deserves or can bear the weight that “Desperate Souls” accords it, the director Nancy Buirski presents these issues with a good mix of small-bore and big-picture insights and only the occasional overstatement or fuzziness. The documentary might have pinned down more clearly, for instance, why “Midnight Cowboy” received its X rating, later changed to R.But “Desperate Souls” convincingly argues that there’s no other time at which Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) could have become enduring movie characters, let alone have the tenderness between them depicted so subtly. (The documentary was inspired by Glenn Frankel’s 2021 book, “Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic.”)Buirski’s film gives much of the credit to John Schlesinger, the celebrated British director who was shooting his first movie in America. “Desperate Souls” notes that in his next film, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971), he would break ground again in showing gay life (and, through Peter Finch’s character, perhaps acknowledge some of his own outsider’s perspective as a gay, Jewish, relatively upper-class Briton).Interviewed in the documentary, Voight recalls making a facetious — but accurate — prediction to Schlesinger that they would live in the shadow of the movie. (He’s also shown in a screen test that makes you wonder how he got the part.) Schlesinger (who died in 2003) and Hoffman are heard in voice clips.But some of the strongest commentary comes from writers who can stand outside the film itself, like Charles Kaiser (author of “The Gay Metropolis”), the critic Lucy Sante and J. Hoberman, a regular New York Times contributor (whom I also know personally). All situate the film in a historical context, its importance in which, Sante suggests, came at least partly by chance: “When people express their own time, it’s generally by accident.”Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight CowboyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Here. Is. Better.’ Review: A Glimmer of Hope

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      Four military veterans go through PTSD treatments in this understated documentary.In 2018, Jason Kander, a rising star in politics who was running for mayor of Kansas City, suddenly dropped out of the race, of which he was the front-runner. Kander, a veteran who had spent time as an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan, announced that he would be seeking treatment for PTSD and depression.He recalls the internal battle that roiled within him for over a decade in “Here. Is. Better.,” a documentary that follows four military veterans who each undergo different forms of PTSD treatment. Kander is the most high-profile subject of the film, and, consequently, the clearest example of one of its primary points: Those suffering from PTSD are often fighting a war that is invisible to both the general public and the sufferers themselves, who regularly struggle to believe they are worthy — or in need of — help.Indeed, even as we see the film’s subjects describing and confronting horrific events, there is something painfully quiet about how the trauma looks from the outside. There are no breakdowns, exceptional stories or intensely dramatic moments (save for one visceral scene at a hockey game that the film does a disservice by overediting). Instead, the documentary, directed by Jack Youngelson, is about the slow, difficult work of reaching out, opening up and eventually finding a glimmer of hope, day by day.In this sense, Youngelson’s film is not formally spectacular and doesn’t necessarily pack the showiest emotional wallop. But those traits likely make it truer to the lives of these veterans, as full of silent courage as they are of tragedy.Here. Is. Better.Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Films’ Review: Small Bites’

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      From animated partygoers to real families embracing a name, this basket of goodies includes seven titles, among them comedy, tragedy and documentary.Every year, features from the Sundance Film Festival can become critical favorites — “Past Lives” is a notable example — but the fest’s shorter works can fade away. The “2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour” brings a seven-film omnibus to cinemas across the country, and Kayla Abuda Galang’s “When You Left Me on That Boulevard” alone is reason enough to see it.This lovely and funny short portrays a Filipino American family’s Thanksgiving get-together through the eyes of Ly, an introverted teenager who’s a daydreamer even before she gets stoned with her cousins. It’s a film that contains both bustling images and delicate vibes, inner-voice stillness and subtle soundscapes, all of which can flourish in a movie theater.Galang seems especially drawn to dialing into private spaces in social situations, for example when Ly talks about her boyfriend as if to herself, until a cut reveals she’s surrounded by family members. Ly can sound endearingly oblivious, but instead of having the actor play that tendency for cheap laughs, the writer-director picks up on the warmth in the room.Galang also looks out for different ways of showing how the family is together, whether it’s karaoke — the short’s title comes from a song Ly’s aunt belts out — or a cool split shot of kids and parents hanging out on either side of a wall. If past Sundance collections are any guide, this short might preview a feature, and Galang’s immersive exploration of inner and outer spaces makes one eager to watch what comes next.Family bonds weather transitions in a number of the shorts. “Parker,” from Catherine Hoffman and Sharon Liese, the sole documentary in this selection, teases out a rich, arduous history of Black experience in a decision by members of a family in Kansas City to adopt the same surname. Interviews with the parents and their children show the love, and the fears and trauma, that can be inscribed in a name, and the peace of mind and unity promised by their choice.Resembling vérité nonfiction, Crystal Kayiza’s “Rest Stop” follows a Ugandan-American mother traveling with her three children to join her estranged partner. Kayiza dwells on scenes that a feature might relegate to a montage, the better to sit with feeling unsettled and tired and scattered, but pushing ahead to another future. Liz Sargent’s “Take Me Home” is also a portrait in becoming, as an overwhelmed, cognitively disabled woman (played by Sargent’s real-life sister, Anna) sends an S.O.S. to her sister after years of relying on their ailing mother.Comedies are well-represented in the collection: “Pro Pool” feels like a trailer for itself as it churns through retail workplace humor, while the stop-motion animation “Inglorious Liaisons” fondly portrays a goofy teen party, wherein people have light switches for faces. But Aemilia Scott’s shrewdly written, well-cast opener to the program, “Help Me Understand,” turns a focus group of women testing detergent scents into a nervy experiment in hung-jury dynamics. Shifting gears from satire to a double-edged dissection of point of view, it’s a snappy way of prepping viewers for the multiplicity of voices to follow.2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Film TourNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More