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      ‘American Pain’ Review: When the Pills and the Money Kept On Flowing

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      Darren Foster’s documentary offers an energetic profile of twin brothers who operated a slick drug trafficking operation in South Florida.Beginning around 2008, a chain of shady pain clinics popped up in South Florida. The storefronts administered opioids on a sweeping scale; users and dealers alike would travel hundreds of miles to load up. The pill mills were run by Jeff and Chris George, twin brothers whose desire to get rich quick fueled the operation.The story of the Georges receives a dynamic retelling in “American Pain” (on Max), named with heavy irony after one of their clinics. The director, Darren Foster, frames the film almost as a profile, beginning with the twins’ upbringing before zipping to the launch of their venture. In interviews, past associates of the brothers — and the brothers themselves, speaking by phone from prison — talk openly about the slickness of the enterprise, the efficiency with which they moved visitors in and out. Foster pairs the testimonials with footage from TV news reporters and, eventually, from undercover missions by federal agents.As suffering carried on around them, Jeff and Chris made millions. Foster casts a clear eye on this cruelty, but the film also revels in the rollicking nature of the men’s venture. Plenty of time is spent on the nuttier details of their enterprise: the excessive workplace drinking, the money transported in trash bags, the receptionists hired for looks alone. Given only a cursory look is the broken system that enabled the men to conduct their dealings. At the time, Florida laws were beyond lax. And even as the orders grew unwieldy, pharmaceutical suppliers continued to ship the clinics pills.The utility of an energetic character study of depraved opioid kingpins is questionable. But the documentary unspools with enough style and spark to engage.American PainNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      ‘Blue Jean’ Review: No Privacy in the Girls’ Locker Room

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      School bullying rattles the life of a closeted lesbian teacher in this accomplished period drama.In 1987, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, addressed public panic over children’s library books, stating at the Conservative Party conference, “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.” Thatcher’s views were quickly adopted into the British legal code, and in 1988, the government prohibited the promotion of homosexuality in school. The film “Blue Jean” sets its story in this repressive period. Broadcasts of Thatcher’s proclamations blare in the background as the movie’s protagonist, Jean (Rosy McEwen), traverses between her life as a lesbian and her life as a high school gym teacher.When the film begins, Jean has already gone to the trouble of getting divorced and of coming out to her barely tolerant family. Her hair is bleached and her clothes are masculine, but she is still establishing a life for herself as a queer person. By contrast, Jean is in love with Viv (Kerrie Hayes), an out lesbian with a buzz cut and punk clothes. Viv is at ease with herself and other gay people. Viv’s many friends cast a slightly suspicious eye on Jean, as a jumpy newcomer to the lesbian club.Jean appears more confident in the classroom. As a teacher, her demeanor is as cheekily frosty as her hair color. She maintains firm boundaries with her adolescent charges, insisting on promptness in the locker room and easily shrugging off any youthful insubordination.But Jean’s equilibrium is disturbed when a new student, Lois (Lucy Halliday), enters the class. Lois becomes a target for Jean’s star student, who bullies Lois by suggesting to the class that she might be a lesbian. At first, Lois tries to halfheartedly deny the accusations, but she soon finds that her fists provide a better defense.It is Jean’s professional responsibility to resolve fights between students. But as someone who has been on the receiving end of discrimination, Jean feels a communal obligation to get involved and to use what authority she has to prevent younger people from becoming both victims and perpetrators of homophobia. This responsibility rattles Jean, disturbing even her life with Viv, and the film uses her terror to draw out genuine feeling and dramatic conflict. In some scenes, conversations about lesbian aggression appear to make Jean spontaneously break out in hives — a credit to the film’s makeup team and to McEwen’s committed performance.The film’s writer and director, Georgia Oakley, has made an accomplished movie in many ways. “Blue Jean” looks fantastic, and the period details are pitch perfect, from the moppish 1980s haircuts to the New Order music choices, all the way down to the neon gender symbols at the lesbian bar. Yet the film’s most impressive quality is its nuanced understanding of how political circumstances create different spheres of life. Jean is a character who moves both discreetly and discretely between worlds that cannot acknowledge each other. Her public and private lives are stacked, and Jean carries both like fragile cargo. One dish too many, and the whole tray could come crashing down.Blue JeanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Persian Lessons’ Review: An Improbable Holocaust Drama

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      A Jewish Frenchman posing as a Persian eludes death by teaching a fictional form of the Persian language to a Nazi commandant in this improbable Holocaust drama.In the outlandish Holocaust drama “Persian Lessons,” the director Vadim Perelman (“House of Sand and Fog”) performs a wobbly balancing act of horror, humor, romance and self-glorifying sentimentality against a grim backdrop of forced labor and human squalor.At the beginning of the film, Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), a Jewish Frenchman captured by the Nazis, trades his sandwich with a fellow prisoner for an antique tome written in Persian. Condemned to death by firing squad, Gilles manages to dodge the bullets, pleading mercy as he desperately waves the book in his captors’ faces. “I’m Persian!” he screams.Miraculously, Klaus Koch (Lars Eidinger), a commandant, needs just that — a Persian. The Nazi dreams of opening a restaurant in Tehran after the war, and recruits Gilles — who pretends to be Reza — to teach him the language. Gilles improvises; not knowing a lick of Persian, he invents words, eventually using the names of prisoners kept in a logbook as mnemonic devices to develop his fictional tongue. It’s a wild conceit, and one can’t help but laugh, albeit nervously, as Koch takes in the mumbo-jumbo with studious severity.Eidinger, an expert prima donna, brings out the tragic absurdity of men who blindly follow orders. His performance anchors the film’s otherwise clumsy tonal shifts.High tensions are built into Ilya Zofin’s script as Gilles struggles to keep up the act — a fumbled word could mean his head, and a brown-nosing section leader, Max (Jonas Nay), has his eyes peeled. Pointless, lackluster detours into petty sexual dramas between the Nazis are sprinkled throughout, and, more effectively, suspicions of an erotic liaison between Gilles and Koch tease out their bond’s derangement.Less kooky and gratingly precious than “Jojo Rabbit” or “Life Is Beautiful,” the film nevertheless also taps history with a movie-magic wand. When Perelman’s saccharine sensibilities take over, the film, as if by obligation, becomes a story about the power of human resilience and compassion — or some similar platitude.Persian LessonsNot rated. In German, French, Italian, English and Persian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster’ Review: Death Transforms Her

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      A teenage girl handles her grief in an enterprising way in this horror film from Bomani J. Story.At the helm of Bomani J. Story’s feature directing debut, somewhat deceptively titled “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster,” is the young Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes), a sharp-witted teenager mired in grief. Routine gun violence has snatched the lives of her mother and Chris, her older brother (Edem Atsu-Swanzy), while her father, Donald (Chad Coleman) — woeful collateral — recovers from drug addiction in the wake of their deaths.Vicaria’s genius inspires the neighborhood kids to christen her “mad scientist” and later, “body snatcher,” for she labors under the conviction that “death is a disease.” In the dim light of a cluttered storage unit, she stoops over her brother’s lifeless body — sewing bloody flesh together — determined to coax him back from the dead.Fitting that Story should make his first feature a rendition of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel “Frankenstein,” a famously fluid text that refuses classical genre divisions: It has all at once been deemed science fiction, gothic horror and women’s fiction. But Shelley’s monster always possessed a racial dimension that only a smattering of scholars have dared to confront. Consider the hardly clandestine, popular imagery of the Black Other lurking in the monster’s description: his staggering frame, destructive strength, and the ever-present threat of sexual deviance. Predictably perhaps; the novel arrived in the throes of the antislavery debate, after the nominal end of the international slave trade and amid ongoing revolts in the United States and the Caribbean.The struggle, then, of cinema that concerns itself in any material way with the social conditions of Black life, is that it must account, too, for mass death. But fixing horror in the Black body is a tricky business, and “The Angry Black Girl” stumbles in the same way its ancestor, “Candyman” (1992), did. Fundamentally, Vicaria and her neighbors are terrorized by a freakish Black man: what glimpses we catch of his bloated fingers and disfigured face transform him into a fearsome predator. It is difficult to challenge the character’s monstrousness when we know so little about Chris, the man.The film invokes Emmett Till, clumsily at that, in a tale that principally concerns itself with community violence (a phenomenon hardly exclusive to Black people). When Mamie Till displayed her son’s mangled body for the public, it was because she wanted to reflect the monstrosity of the people (and the nation that widely sanctioned it) who could do such violence to a child. “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster” struggles to manage the same complexity, despite compelling performances from Hayes and Coleman.The Angry Black Girl and Her MonsterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘A Woman Escapes’ Review: Screen Sharing

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      In this moody epistolary film, a woman in Paris works through a close friend’s death with the help of video correspondences.The title of “A Woman Escapes” references Robert Bresson’s 1956 classic “A Man Escaped” about a French Resistance fighter in a Nazi prison in Lyon. This intimate yet sometimes reserved epistolary film centers on a more contemporary moment in Paris as a woman named Audrey processes the death of a close friend. During what feels like a pandemic, she takes up correspondences that become lifelines out of the grief and creative block she’s feeling.Her video and audio exchanges were made by the film’s co-directors, a supergroup of experimental filmmakers: Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Cevik and Blake Williams. The medium is partly the message here too, as the visual textures vary according to the directors’ predilections — 16-millimeter film, high-definition video, even 3-D.The result joins a long lineage of personal-correspondence films, this one tinged with the “stuck” feeling of the isolating, screen-heavy stretches of the pandemic. Audrey (Deragh Campbell) putters about the apartment and pecks at work on her laptop, but the video letters can fling us outside — into the environs of Istanbul, for example, through Cevik’s missives — and include Williams’s exploration of Audrey’s neighborhood on Google Maps.Campbell, unforgettable in the Canadian indie “Anne at 13,000 Ft.,” gives a more interior performance that evokes the thoughtful focus she brings to her collaborations with Bohdanowicz (“MS Slavic 7”), but tempered here by a stay-in-bed mood of withdrawal. Her Audrey does nothing less than enact a kind of communion through voice and image.A Woman EscapesNot rated. In English and Turkish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Barry Newman, Star of the Cult Film ‘Vanishing Point,’ Dies at 92

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      Panned when it was released in 1971, the movie gained acclaim decades later. Mr. Newman also starred on TV in the legal drama “Petrocelli.”Barry Newman, whose terse integrity and understated rebelliousness made the 1971 movie “Vanishing Point” an enduring hit in the annals of American cinema about the open road, died on May 11 in Manhattan. He was 92.The death, in a hospital, which was not widely reported until this week, was confirmed by his wife, Angela Newman. While seeking treatment for back pain, she said, he came down with a lung infection that spread to his spine and heart.Mr. Newman was briefly a leading man in movies and television in the 1970s. He starred as a Harvard-educated defense attorney who moved to a small Southwestern town to work criminal cases in the 1970 feature film “The Lawyer,” and he reprised the character, Tony Petrocelli, in an NBC legal drama, “Petrocelli,” which ran from 1974 to 1976.Two decades later, he returned to prominence as a character actor, with small roles in memorable movies like Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey” (1999); “Bowfinger,” also in 1999, alongside Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy; and “40 Days and 40 Nights” (2002), a romantic comedy starring Josh Hartnett.But Mr. Newman’s most notable performance was undoubtedly in “Vanishing Point.”In that film, he played Kowalski, a one-named car-delivery driver who makes a bet with his drug dealer while buying Benzedrine: If he can make it from where they are in Denver to San Francisco in about 15 hours, then Kowalski gets the amphetamines for free.“Vanishing Point” then becomes one long psychedelic car chase. Kowalski skillfully evades highway cops, nonchalantly accepts his deification by a rhapsodic radio D.J. named Super Soul (played by Cleavon Little), and befriends a succession of slender hippie-ish blondes. From conversations among police officers and Kowalski’s own flashbacks, we learn about his past as a decorated Vietnam War veteran, frustrated police officer and demolition derby racer.The bulk of the movie replaces dialogue with the sounds of a revving car engine, a police siren and a shredding electric guitar. The camera is often trained on Mr. Newman’s face — its shaggy hair, stubble, righteous sideburns, sharp jawline and watery blue eyes — as he stares ahead resolutely but wearily at desert highways that never seem to end.The other star of the movie is Kowalski’s car, a souped-up white 1970 Dodge Challenger that can go up to 160 miles per hour. It remains fairly pristine even as it kicks up enough dust to confound the highway patrols of several Western states.With characters making druggy proclamations about “the last American hero to whom speed means freedom of the soul,” the movie did not initially attract critical praise. Roger Greenspun, reviewing it for The New York Times, called it “a dumb movie that is nothing but an automobile chase,” and added, “I suspect that Barry Newman really can act, though in ‘Vanishing Point’ all he needs is a driver’s license.”Yet it is now regularly featured on lists of the best American road movies, car movies and action movies. Bruce Springsteen and Steven Spielberg have both ranked “Vanishing Point” among their favorite films.“It became a cult film without me even realizing it,” Mr. Newman told the movie journalist Paul Rowlands in 2019. “To this day, I’m always being asked to talk about it somewhere.”Barry Foster Newman was born on Nov. 7, 1930, in Boston, where he grew up. His father, Carl, managed the Latin Quarter nightclub. Barry visited on Sundays and saw performances by Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Milton Berle and others. His mother, Sarah (Ostrovsky) Newman, worked a variety of jobs, including saleswoman at Filene’s Basement and ticket seller at a movie theater.Mr. Newman earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Brandeis University in 1952. He then served in the Army until 1954, playing saxophone and clarinet in a military band.Several years later, while studying for a master’s degree in anthropology at Columbia University, Mr. Newman tagged along with a friend to an acting class being taught by Lee Strasberg. He was “mesmerized,” he told Mr. Rowlands, and soon began pursuing a career as an actor.He married Angela Spilker in 1994. They divorced in 2007 but got back together and remarried in 2018. She is his only immediate survivor.Mr. Newman lived in the same apartment in Midtown Manhattan from 1962 until his death.In portraying both the quick-witted lawyer Petrocelli and the stoic hot-rodder Kowalski, Mr. Newman became known for characters with opposing types of masculinity. That paradox, he told Mr. Rowlands, inspired him to take on the part of Kowalski in the first place.“I had just done ‘The Lawyer,’ where I was speaking nonstop for 90-odd minutes, and I got the script for ‘Vanishing Point,’” he said. “I wasn’t even thinking of the idea of the film or the existentialism of the character — I just thought it would be interesting to do a part where I am playing the antithesis of the character I had just played.” More

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      ‘Users’ Review: Brave New World

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      In this documentary, the artist Natalia Almada explores both the terrors and wonders of technological progress.“Users,” a new essayistic feature documentary from the artist Natalia Almada, deals in a kind of paradox. While the voice-over narration considers how technological progress has inured us from beauty and intimacy, the film demonstrates marvels of film technology — underwater photography, helicopter shots, breathtakingly crisp close-ups, sinuous slow motion — that affirm the opposite.“Could the Wright brothers have imagined that flying would be so commonplace that we’d be disinterested in the miraculous bird’s-eye view of the earth below?” Almada asks — even as she shows us drone shots of oceans and highways that provoke undeniable awe.This negotiation between techno-pessimism and techno-fetishism is at the heart of “Users,” though Almada’s scattered movie struggles to keep them in balance; her broad, rhetorical voice-over is a poor match for the complexity of the film’s images. Almada was inspired to make the film after giving birth to her son and newly confronting technology’s decisive effects on our relationships. Her view of the present anticipates her child’s future: In interludes throughout the film, she describes familiar realities — childbirth, grocery shopping, 24-hour days — in the past tense, as if they were part of a bygone history. It’s a nifty dystopian conceit, but it reinforces the air of presumption that sands down the pleasures of “Users.”The film is at its best when it allows its images and sounds to let us feel things without naming them. At a waste disposal factory, crushed electronics clatter like a symphony, which flows into the rumble of a freight train. Deep inside a grimy ocean, industrial divers float around pipes holding fiber-optic cables, the veins of our information era. Mingling beauty and terror, trash and wonder, these scenes evoke the elusive temporality of technology, which moves us backward and forwards at the same time.UsersNot rated. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour and 21 minutes. More

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      ‘Brooklyn 45’ Review: A Little Something to Lift Their Spirits

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      A group of World War II veterans unwisely perform a séance in this ambitious yet airless supernatural thriller.“Brooklyn 45,” a claustrophobic mystery with horror-movie flourishes, plays out on a December night in 1945 in a Brooklyn brownstone crammed with military memorabilia. The home belongs to Clive (Larry Fessenden), whose wife died some weeks earlier and who has invited a few of his closest World War II comrades for what they believe will be a cheering-up session. But when the well-oiled Clive insists on performing a séance to contact his late wife, the group grasps this isn’t the sort of spirit-raising it had in mind.Less whodunit than who-done-what, the plot (by the director, Ted Geoghegan) unfurls in morality-play monologues that expose the characters’ biases and bigotries. Everyone has a story, and a transformative arc: Marla (Anne Ramsay), a bombing survivor with fearsome interrogation skills; her partner, Bob (Ron E. Rains), a deceptively meek Pentagon clerk; Archie (Jeremy Holm), a closeted war hero and possibly a criminal; and the bloodthirsty Paul (Ezra Buzzington), a uniformed xenophobe still running on battlefield fumes.As the séance progresses, Geoghegan uses the paranormal puffery (self-lighting candles, gooey ectoplasm, and worse) to drag the invisible wounds of war into the light. Imprisoned by a locked room and the deceased’s paranoid demands — expressed through her increasingly deranged former husband — the alarmed friends spiral into confessions and accusations. The demons within them are more destructive than any the séance might have unleashed.An ambitious period piece given an appropriately vintage look by the cinematographer Robert Patrick Stern, “Brooklyn 45” is overlong, repetitive and at times wearyingly stagy. The actors, though, can’t be faulted, convincingly turning unappetizing characters into broken people trying to move on from a war that keeps pulling them back in.Brooklyn 45Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More