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      ‘Io Capitano’ Review: A Migration Odyssey

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      The Italian director of the film “Gomorrah” focuses his tender yet unsparing lens on two teenage boys journeying from their home in Senegal to Europe.The Italian director Matteo Garrone has a talent for cruelty. There’s always been more to Garrone’s movies than unkindness, but he has a striking facility for crystallizing human baseness in images that are both specific and laden with surplus meaning. When I think of “Gomorrah,” his 2008 drama about a Neapolitan criminal syndicate, I immediately re-see the shot of two dead teenagers in the bucket of a bulldozer — a grotesque Pietà.Two very different adolescents figure in “Io Capitano,” which tracks a pair of Senegalese cousins as they struggle to make their way from their home in Dakar to Europe. Seydou (a tremendous Seydou Sarr) lives with his widowed mother and younger siblings in a cramped house, but spends much of his time with Moussa (Moustapha Fall), his friend and cousin. Both boys want to live in Europe, where Seydou dreams of finding stardom as a musician. So, when they’re not at home or school, they work at building sites hauling heavy loads to save for their trip. They have a wad of cash when the story begins; it won’t be nearly enough.Garrone efficiently fills in Seydou’s everyday life, its routines and textures, its possibilities and limitations, with attentive camerawork, his customary eye for pungent detail and relaxed, measured rhythms. Seydou and Moussa’s fondness for each other and mutual dependence are evident in their gazes and gestures, and in the unforced intimacy of how they walk and talk together. They’re sweet, pleasant, optimistic and nice to be around; they’re also teenagers. When Seydou tells his mother that he plans to go abroad, she chastises him — worry radiates off her like a fever — and he quickly backs off. Soon after, though, he and Moussa leave.Their journey is divided into distinct sections that take the teenagers deep into the Sahara, involves a barbaric interlude in Libya and eventually brings them to the edge of the Mediterranean. It’s an often punishing trip, one punctuated with, and increasingly defined by, violence that can be near-phantasmagoric in its depravity. Garrone, who wrote the script with several of his regular collaborators, has drawn from accounts by migrants who have made analogous journeys. It took one of the movie’s advisers, an Ivorian man named Mamadou Kouassi, three terrible years to reach Europe, where he works in Italy advising migrants. (Similar crossings are detailed in reports from organizations like Human Rights Watch.)By the time Seydou and Moussa are on a bus out of Dakar, they have heard about the dangers of their enterprise. But they’re excited by the idea of adventure and by the prospect of fame, their naïveté stoked by the videos they watch on a cellphone. “White people,” Moussa teases Seydou, “will be asking you for autographs.” Seydou also wants to help his family (his mother has a small market stall), though Garrone doesn’t emphasize the family’s poverty. Seydou and Moussa are poor, certainly by the standards of the Westerners who presumably constitute this movie’s target audience. Yet they’re not abject, downtrodden; rather, they are kids, open to the world and eager to chart their own course.This gives Seydou and Moussa’s youthful desires a universal aspect, of course, which initially frames their undertaking as a classic adventure rather than as a docudrama lifted from the news. Whatever the powerful political forces and the socioeconomic conditions that have helped to shape the characters’ lives, the boys themselves approach their journey as an ambitious undertaking, with visceral giddiness not desperation. Their innocence is palpable. It also creates an intense sense of apprehension, at least for viewers aware of the agonies experienced by refugees, migrants and asylum seekers worldwide. I think that Garrone trusts that his audience has some awareness of those agonies, and perhaps even a role in them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘About Dry Grasses’ Review: The Weariness of Hope

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      The latest intimate epic from the master filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan asks whether the world can change, and we can change with it.Two paths lie before the artist. One is through empathy, identifying deeply with the world and interpreting it so others can peer through the artist’s eyes. The other is detachment, standing apart from everyone and everything, observing it from a position of cool remove.Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), the protagonist of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses,” is the second kind of artist, and it has not been great for his soul. Four years into his mandatory service as a public school art teacher in East Anatolia, he’s fed up with the locals, whom he finds to be mostly a waste of time. But he isn’t terribly kind to anyone, including his roommate and fellow teacher Kenan (Musab Ekici), who likes living there and enjoys his work. Samet is miserable, and eager for a transfer to Istanbul.The one bright light — or at least, distraction — in Samet’s life is Sevim (Ece Bagci), his teachers’ pet, a bright-eyed eighth grader who probably has a crush on her teacher. Their interactions cross no lines. But they interact like peers, and Samet brings her a small and insignificant gift, and even the other students have noticed he only calls on Sevim and her friends in class. Which is why Samet is so shocked, and affronted, when he discovers that two pupils have accused him and Kenan of inappropriate contact with students. He can guess who those two are, and he’s mortified and angry.From here the story starts churning, and Samet’s bad mood deepens. Ceylan, the living reigning master of Turkish cinema, loves to throw a displaced intellectual into a confounding situation and watch him squirm, but his camera is always a source of stillness, pausing for long stretches on the same frame, often juxtaposing the natural landscape with a character’s internal life. Here, the landscape is wintry. Everyone is forever trudging through the snow, and the eternal whiteness throws individual figures and faces into sharp relief.Samet sees the potential for a great image — he is an artist, after all. Ceylan sprinkles stunning still portraits into the film, presumably taken by Samet, of the local people, which might suggest he has some interest in their lives after all. But if he feels curiosity, he masks it well. The center of Samet’s world is Samet and his superiority. (He seems of a piece with the misanthropic writer in Christian Petzold’s “Afire”: his irritations with people serve to convince him that he lives a life of more meaning than they do.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Veselka’ Review: Serving Up Support for Ukraine

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      Subtitled “The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World,” this documentary offers a warm tribute to an East Village landmark.You would be hard pressed to find a New Yorker unfamiliar with the name Veselka. The pierogi and borscht eatery, established in 1954 by a Ukrainian émigré, is a staple of the East Village, where its genial diner atmosphere — overseen by Jason Birchard, the founder’s grandson — draws everyone from university students to seasoned old-timers.“Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World” pays tribute to the cultural landmark by taking viewers inside the restaurant during an uneasy period: Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Directed by Michael Fiore, the documentary establishes Veselka’s Ukrainian roots and then chronicles Birchard and his staff’s real-time campaign to support their besieged home country.The film’s most stirring through lines revolve around the stories of employees, including Vitalii, a Veselka manager who convinces his mother to flee Ukraine and live with him in the United States. Seeking routine, Vitalii’s mother even accepts a position in the Veselka kitchen, where she finds others who speak her language, appreciate her stress and offer a measure of community.Tugged along by superfluous narration (by David Duchovny), the film also documents the participation of Veselka workers in a variety of fund-raisers and symbolic appearances. These events are, admittedly, more exciting in principle than as documentary cinema. But even if some scenes want for energy, the compassion of the “Veselka” subjects — and its filmmaker — never wavers.Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the WorldNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Stopmotion’ Review: Her Dark Materials

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      A fraying animator becomes the victim of her own creations in this visually sophisticated horror movie.There’s a dreadful innocence to the tiny puppets that drive “Stopmotion,” an unusually resolute horror tale that places a spiraling animator at the mercy of her handmade figures and her own disturbed mind.Ella (Aisling Franciosi), a talented artist, is herself a puppet, forced to act as the hands of her fearsome mother (Stella Gonet), a storied animator who’s suffering from a degenerative disease.“I don’t have my own voice,” Ella complains, resentfully moving the dolls millimeter by millimeter on her mother’s barked instructions. But when tragedy frees Ella to make her own stop-motion film and she moves her materials into a vacant housing block, she becomes anxious and hesitant. Accustomed to taking orders, she’s easily compliant when a strange little girl (Caolinn Springall) from a neighboring apartment suggests a darker direction for Ella’s film, one that requires mortician’s wax and a dead fox. This is exactly as gruesome as you might imagine.Weaving an eerily single-minded spell from the puppets’ squished-jellybean faces and misshapen limbs, the director and animator Robert Morgan has crafted a narratively slender, visually sophisticated first feature. Like the art form it celebrates, “Stopmotion” is careful, patient and almost punishingly focused, with Franciosi bringing the same intensity that made her role in “The Nightingale” (2019) so devastating. As Ella’s grip on reality loosens and she begins to cannibalize her own body to give life to her dolls, the movie erases any distinction between the desire to create and the will to destroy.A bloody meditation on artistic agency and its submission (especially when it comes to female artists), “Stopmotion” isn’t perfect, but each element moves in lock step to forge a deeply troubling intimacy between Ella and her repellent figurines. I could have done without that fox, though.StopmotionRated R for self abuse and stolen innards. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Kiss the Future’ Review: Seeing U2 in Post-Siege Sarajevo

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      Nenad Cicin-Sain’s smoothly calibrated documentary is part timeline of the concert’s development and part testament to the city’s defiance during the Bosnian War.On Sept. 23, 1997, the rock band U2 performed to thousands of fans in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the year after the 1,425-day siege of the city by Bosnian Serb forces ended.“Kiss the Future,” Nenad Cicin-Sain’s smoothly calibrated documentary, is partly a timeline of how this concert came to be and partly a sketch of life in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. This is history told through emotions as much as through well-documented events, conveying both the resilience of Sarajevans and the power of pop music (without falling into too much celebrity self-regard).People who lived through that time, especially cultural figures, recount how unthinkable the war and siege felt to their diverse, vibrant city. Snipers meant death was always near; a Miss Sarajevo pageant and an underground music scene helped express the city’s defiance.In the early 1990s, U2’s “Zoo TV Tour” concerts featured Sarajevans via satellite, beamed onto giant screens. (Bill S. Carter, who is credited with the film’s screenplay, figures prominently here first as an aid worker, and then as a U2 whisperer.) These guest appearances began to feel like a stunt — but not so for U2’s 1997 Sarajevo show, which Bono recalls as uplifting.That concert comes across as a true catch-in-the-throat moment of symbolic celebration, opening with a Muslim choir and a local punk band. In a way, it’s U2 playing the emotional role of its classics, where Bono’s yearning voice and an echoing guitar can sound as though they’re reaching out to us across troubled waters.Kiss the FutureNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Invisible Fight’ Review: Iron Fist vs. Iron Curtain

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      This action comedy set in the 1970s satisfyingly blends kung fu, heavy metal and Orthodox Christianity.Raphael (Ursel Tilk), the poseur metalhead at the center of Rainer Sarnet’s subversively earnest comedy “The Invisible Fight,” set in 1970s Estonia, swaggers around flaunting a golden cross and fumbling kung fu kicks over a Black Sabbath soundtrack. To modern audiences, he’s just some doofus. But back in the U.S.S.R. — which, at various times, outlawed Eastern martial arts, Western rock music, and religion — he’s a threat to the state.Once, kids like Raphael were mocked on propaganda posters and locked in psychiatric hospitals. “Everything cool is banned in the Soviet Union,” he huffs. And so Raphael ditches the pastel conformity of mainstream Communist society for a secretive chop-socking Orthodox monastery where black-frocked monks fling pelmeni like throwing stars and make we’re-not-worthy genuflections in a catacomb of skulls.This political context is vital to appreciate the rebellion underneath Sarnet’s romp; otherwise, it’s easy to dismiss it as merely a goofy riff on the Shaw Brothers Studios’ landmark Hong Kong hit “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin,” which likewise followed a novice’s hard-earned spiritual and gymnastic growth. Of course, it is that, too, with Sarnet seizing onto over-the-top genre tropes like dramatic zooms and sound effects that cling and clang whenever someone blinks.But the film’s heart is in the sincere moments where our hero is humbled by his own ignorant zeal. Here, balancing vodka shots on your toes is easy — what’s hard is the daily practice of sacrifice and love. And for wuxia fans unconvinced by the shift from Buddhism to the Bible, Sarnet inserts a reading of Matthew 14:26 to remind us that walking on water is a skill shared by both Jet Li and Jesus.The Invisible FightNot rated. In Estonia and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Jennifer Lopez and ‘This Is Me … Now’: Is She for Real?

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      “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” a movie built on her latest album, is a showcase for the exhausting, never-ending, hazardous work of being Jennifer Lopez.Nobody who winds up at a “what’s the strangest moment in this new J. Lo thingy” contest should worry. There are no wrong answers.The parts in which Fat Joe plays Dr. Melfi to Jennifer Lopez’s Tony Soprano bewilder as intensely as the too-many scenes in which Jane Fonda, Trevor Noah, Keke Palmer, Post Malone, Kim Petras and Neil deGrasse Tyson (to pick merely six of a dozen names) bickeringly represent the astrological signs. None of these people appears to have been on the set at the same time. The only performers persuasively sharing the screen are Jenifer Lewis and Jenifer Lewis, and that’s only because she’s doing Gemini.A number about a quickie wedding is called “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” but the groom has already hand-delivered Lopez’s invitation. It’s “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” but first with a stop at what could be Westeros or Themyscira or “The Cell.” Least forgettable is the sight of our star, in a tank top and up to her neck in elbow warmers, riding a headache ball to squelch a power-plant disaster.Lopez has titled these 53 minutes (and an additional 10-minute-plus credits sequence) “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story.” She’s released it, on Amazon, alongside an album of new songs, a few of which provide grist for the visual component. The album is a so-so buffet of sounds that get called contemporary or urban: music that could have been produced at any point in the last 25 years, which isn’t the same as calling it timeless. Lopez has been never on any sort of cutting edge. She’s often where music just was; and that can leave her stranded the way she is here.For “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” she gives “just was” both frenetic cinematic accompaniment and her physical all. In addition cowriting, Lopez goes out on a limb and takes the role of what can rightly be called “Me,” a husband-hunter jailed in such metaphorical music-video scenarios as “glass house” and “love factory.” In that second one, she and two dozen coveralled co-workers bang out some electrocuted, hydraulic choreography while the operation’s giant, once-malfunctioning heart sputters back to life and spews radioactive positivity. These are the only vaguely satisfying numbers. If the wishy-washy, parable-making and haywire everything else won’t cohere into true beauty or credible horror, then camp it is. Ladies and gentlemen: Jennifer Lopez and her Oppenheimer Dancers!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Internet Is Obsessed With ‘Madame Web.’ The Box Office? Well …

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      The new addition to the Spider-Man franchise has been panned by critics and mocked on social media. But if all press is good press, why are its ticket sales so dismal?Ricky Valero walked into a mostly empty showing of “Madame Web” with a bucket of popcorn and an open mind.He had some idea of what he was getting into. The movie, which stars Dakota Johnson as a clairvoyant character from the Spider-Man comics, has been gleefully panned in the week since its release.The reviews were lousy, with critics calling the movie “a genuine Chernobyl-level disaster” that is “full of bad dialogue delivered badly.” The box office numbers were somehow worse, landing “Madame Web” among the lowest ticket sales ever for a superhero movie.The movie has been jeered on social media, where Mr. Valero, 37, had been seeing negative posts about it for weeks. But when he attended a showing on Thursday at a theater in Nashville, he was pleasantly surprised.“There’s a level of terrible that can be enjoyable,” he said, adding that he would rate the movie three out of five stars despite some cheesy dialogue. When he voiced mild appreciation for the movie on X, the responses were so vicious that he ended up muting them.“You feel like you’re standing alone on an island,” he said.Sony’s latest addition to the Spider-Man franchise has been inspiring memes for months. But after a dismal first week in theaters, it has come to occupy an odd perch in popular culture: It’s dominating online conversation, but not drawing all that many viewers to theaters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More