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      Jack Jennings, P.OW. Who Helped Build Burma Railway, Dies at 104

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      He was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and was one of thousands of prisoners whose hardships were the basis for the film “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”Jack Jennings, a British prisoner of war during World War II who worked as a slave laborer on the Burma Railway, the roughly 250-mile Japanese military construction project that inspired a novel and the Oscar-winning film “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” died this month in St. Marychurch, England. He was 104.His daughters Carol Barrett and Hazel Heath told the BBC on Jan. 22 that he had died in a nursing facility, though the exact date of death was unclear.They said they believed their father was the last survivor of the estimated 85,000 British, Australian and Indian solders who were captured when the British colony of Singapore fell to Japanese forces in February 1942.A private in the 1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment, Mr. Jennings spent the next three-and-half years as a prisoner of war, first in Changi prison in Singapore and then in primitive camps along the route of the railway between Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar).To build bridges, Mr. Jennings and at least 60,000 P.O.W.s — and thousands more local prisoners — were forced to cut down and debark trees, saw them into half-meter lengths, dig and carry earth to build embankments, and drive piles into the ground.In his 2011 memoir, “Prisoner Without a Crime,” Mr. Jennings described the dangerous process of driving the piles, using a heavy weight raised by the men to the top of a timber frame.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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      ‘Argylle’ Review: A Cat Cannot Save It

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      A simulacrum of a spy movie offers few pleasures and plenty of headaches.Last year, while Hollywood’s actors and writers were on strike, people often asked me why the unions had such a bee in their collective bonnet about artificial intelligence. A.I. could never write a screenplay as well as a human, they said. Wouldn’t that ultimately spell doom for any studio that tried to replace their writers, and the whole thing would right itself on its own?My answer, then and now, was that it wouldn’t matter if the screenplay was good. Audiences have become so accustomed to watching movies and TV shows — excuse me, content, half-watched from behind a phone screen — that resembles something they liked once that A.I.’s regurgitations will not feel out of place. It doesn’t have to be better, I said. It just has to be adequate.“Argylle” was not, to my knowledge, written by A.I. (It was written by Jason Fuchs.) But it perfectly embodies the soulless, human-free feel that I worry about. It is ostensibly a tribute to spy movies of an earlier age, not clever enough to be a spoof and certainly not satire. But a homage shows affection for, understanding of and respect toward the thing it is honoring. “Argylle” feels pasted together by a robot manipulating some kind of spy Magnetic Poetry.What pleasure is extractable in “Argylle,” directed by Matthew Vaughn, lies in its mild surprises. Let’s just say the protagonist, Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard, very wide-eyed), is a best-selling spy novelist and, despite her protestations, the very epitome of a cat lady. (Her Scottish fold cat, Alfie, appears entirely computer generated even when I think they surely were using a real cat, and his presence seems calculated to add some whimsy to the plot. It does not.) She lives alone in a nicely appointed cabin nestled between mountains in Colorado, and she is afraid of dating and of flying. Instead she taps away at her novels, which have legions of fans.But stuck on the ending of the latest installment, she hops on a train to visit her mother (Catherine O’Hara), and has the bad luck to find herself seated across from a grungy-looking guy named Aidan (Sam Rockwell). He is reading her latest novel, “Argylle,” named for the fictional spy she both writes about and sees everywhere (played by Henry Cavill, sporting an overemphasized widow’s peak). She tries not to let on who she is; she fails; and then, out of nowhere, things go haywire.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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      ‘Not a Pretty Picture’: A Director’s Unflinching Response to Trauma

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      Anthology Film Archives is screening a new 4K restoration of Martha Coolidge’s 1976 docudrama about date rape.Made nearly half a century ago and long hiding in plain sight, Martha Coolidge’s “Not a Pretty Picture” is at once an autobiographical documentary, a Pirandellian psychodrama, an acting exercise, a personal exorcism and a powerful political tract.The subject is date rape, and it could not be more topical. In a rare theatrical run, a new 4K restoration of the movie opens on Friday at Anthology Film Archives.At 16 years old, in 1962, Coolidge was sexually assaulted by an older schoolmate. Her 1976 movie restages and analyzes the rape. In the film, it’s 1962 again and the actress playing Martha (Michele Manenti), innocently adventurous, takes a trip with three boys and another girl to New York City. No matter how self-possessed she believes herself to be, she winds up isolated in a loft, where she is cajoled, bullied and ultimately raped by a far more self-assured predator (Jim Carrington), who separates her from her friends.Coolidge interviews the performers onscreen as well as directing them and encouraging them to improvise. The assault is the movie’s central scene, but nearly as compelling as the long takes of Manenti wrestling with Carrington as he urges her to “just please relax …” is the sight of Coolidge watching the struggle, her hand over her mouth.The performances are multifaceted. Manenti herself was raped as a teenager and discusses this in the film. In critiquing his character, Carrington calls him “uneducated” (a polite substitute for jerk) and comes off nearly as glib, yet honest in his identification with the rapist. Anne Mundstuk, Coolidge’s boarding school roommate and confidante, is cast as her teenage self and recalls her own feelings at the time as well as her thoughts on re-enacting them.Coolidge frames “Not a Pretty Picture” with her own expressions of vulnerability. It begins with a school recital performance of the most achingly pure of folkie love-songs “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” sung by Coolidge and shown in long shot from the perspective of two smirking boys in the audience. It ends with the filmmaker acknowledging the shame she felt and the lasting damage that the rapist inflicted.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?  More

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      ‘She Is Conann’ Review: Queen of the Barbarians

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      This feminist riff on “Conan the Barbarian” is a sci-fi horror movie sprinkled with a bit of glam-rock fairy dust.“She Is Conann,” Bertrand Mandico’s gonzo-feminist riff on “Conan the Barbarian,” plays like an opera from hell. In the first few minutes, Rainer (Elina Löwensohn) — a humanoid hound who could be related to the Crypt Keeper — terrorizes an old woman wrapped in foil. The creature, who wears a boxy leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, struts around and monologues in a snakelike whisper, and then bites off a chunk of the woman’s flesh.Rainer leads the hapless dame into a sparkling cavern, where the queen of the barbarians herself, Conann, is perched on a high tower, clutching a human heart that looks more like a Christmas tree ornament.“She Is Conann” is a particularly nasty kind of sci-fi horror movie, sprinkled with a bit of glam-rock fairy dust. It unfolds almost entirely in a foggy underworld that resembles an elaborate haunted house. As opposed to computer-generated imagery, Mandico relies on built sets and practical effects, which give the film a stagey feel. Its unabashedly excessive scenes of violence also offer a gross-out realism.With Rainer as our guide, the plot loosely revolves around Conann’s ascension to power through the ages. First, she’s an innocent white teenager (Claire Duburcq) who witnesses a band of sadistic warriors chop her mother in half; then, she’s an androgynous 20-something (Christa Théret) who looks like the offspring of David Bowie. In the lengthiest act, she’s a Black woman with a fierce buzz cut and metallic threads (Sandra Parfait) living in a metropolis with her girlfriend.It’s more of a fever dream than an actual story, offering a queer counternarrative to the macho vision of the legendary warrior that is as hypnotic as it is gnarly.She Is ConannNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘How to Have Sex’ Review: This Paradise Is Nothing but Trouble

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      Molly Manning Walker’s vaporous coming-of-age story tracks a 16-year-old girl during a brief, booze-soaked Grecian getaway.For all the hard-partying and forced euphoria onscreen, the movie “How to Have Sex” proves grim going. A vaporous coming-of-age story, it tracks Tara (a fine, sympathetic Mia McKenna-Bruce), who plays a 16-year-old British girl on a brief, booze-soaked getaway in Greece. There, amid crowds of other like-minded vacationers, she hangs with friends and strangers, hits the clubs, scarfs fast food, drinks and drinks some more, tossing back endless shots until she staggers into oblivion, only to rouse herself for another round of the same.Tara and her supposed besties — Enva Lewis as the nice Em, Lara Peake as the not-so-nice Skye — have arrived in Malia, a resort town in Crete, fresh from their crucial secondary-school exams. They’ve come for a fly, flop and fornicate holiday, one of those excursions with sandy beaches, cheap hotels, nonstop beats and crowds of fit people who look and talk just like them. Giddy and super-stoked, the girls have come equipped with suitcases of beachwear, tubs of makeup and apparently superhuman livers. Tara is also hoping to lose her virginity, a familiar rite of passage that here turns into a blurry life lesson.The writer-director Molly Manning Walker eases you in with shrieks and laughs, hovering camerawork and naturalistic scenes. Walker is a cinematographer making her feature directing debut and she’s keenly sensitive to the power of color; she uses a wide spectrum to set (and change) the mood, signify interiority and telegraph ideas. (The director of photography is Nicolas Canniccioni.) Kids being kids and often drunk — and because Manning Walker is loath to put words in their mouths — the characters rarely express themselves coherently. Instead, as the story unfolds, she plays with the palette, the inaugural velvety blue giving way to the sun’s white glare, blasts of Day-Glo green and washes of red.The story begins taking shape once the girls meet three other young British tourists, including a guy named Badger (Shaun Thomas). From their nearby, amusingly portentous balconies, Tara and Badger trade shy looks and soon the two groups have joined forces. Complications ensue along with more rounds of clubbing and boozing and vomiting. Em pairs off with Paige (Laura Ambler), but Skye isn’t taken with the other circle’s third member, Paddy (Samuel Bottomley). Instead, she keeps checking out Badger, an affable doe-eyed guy with a seemingly incongruent lipstick print tattooed on his neck right above the words “hot legends.”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?  More

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      ‘Disco Boy’ Review: Pawns in a Bigger Game Struggle for a New Start

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      This feature debut from the Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese takes on ordinary people trying to free themselves from the bonds of their homelands.A dance, in the forest, first eerily hypnotic and then propulsive, collides with a tableau of ravaged lands and oil-slicked waters. It’s an abrupt cut between scenes that embodies in miniature the central tension of “Disco Boy” — a neon-dream parable cast against the shadow of sweeping global forces.It’s also when the disparate stories of this entrancing feature debut from the Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese finally converge. Alex (Franz Rogowski) is an undocumented Belarusian immigrant who, after crossing into France, joins the Foreign Legion for a chance at getting his papers and starting a new life. At the same time, in the Niger Delta, Jomo (Morr Ndiaye) is leading a rebel group fighting the devastating foreign exploitation of the area’s oil-rich land. When Jomo’s group takes a foreigner hostage, Alex leads a rescue mission that brings him right into Jomo’s path.They are on opposite sides of an unremarkable clash, in Abbruzzese’s eyes just a violent blur of bodies forming another speck in the grand scheme of armed conflict. And yet, the film laments, their stories are the same: They are ordinary people, unwittingly caught up in the cold gusts of empire — men who, hoping for better lives, are pushed toward cruel fates beyond their control.Even if it sometimes borrows too overtly from its obvious influence, “Beau Travail,” the 1999 opus by Claire Denis, “Disco Boy” is a lean but sweepingly ambitious film crafted with formal rigor. Abbruzzese deftly transitions between haunting silence and kinetic energy, a balance supported in particular by Vitalic’s pulsating score and the inspired compositions of the cinematographer Hélène Louvart. Rogowski pulls it all together with stoic features that emanate so much sorrow and history.“Do you ever wonder what you’d have become, if you’d been born on the other side, among the whites?” Jomo asks his comrade at one point in the film. The tragedy is that they’ll never know.Disco BoyNot rated. In Igbo, French, Russian, Nigerian English and Polish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Fitting In’ Review: Her Body, Herself

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      Maddie Ziegler plays a teen who is diagnosed with a rare reproductive condition in this movie that tends toward the obvious.The title of the teen dramedy “Fitting In” refers both to the social pressure to belong and to the sexual constraints caused by the 16-year-old protagonist’s reproductive condition. The double entendre sets a cheeky tone that Molly McGlynn, the film’s writer and director, strives to carry through every scene.Lindy (Maddie Ziegler) is an outgoing, athletic teen who begins the movie eager to explore sex with her new boyfriend. Her intentions are derailed, however, when she is diagnosed with a rare reproductive syndrome which, doctors warn, could present issues during intercourse. Tormented by the idea of abnormality, Lindy resolves to keep the news a secret from everyone but her harried single mother.“Fitting In” opens with consecutive quotes from Simone de Beauvoir and “Jennifer’s Body,” as if to telegraph that its story straddles culture of both the high and pop variety. I’d argue that it falls squarely inside the latter; its revelations about gender, sexuality and identity tend toward the obvious, and sometimes veer into the facile.Lindy sees her new reality as earth-shattering, and the film’s prolonged validation of her distress often makes it feel like the screenplay is straining to marginalize the condition it ultimately wants to normalize. In daily conversation, Lindy fields an awful lot of random reverence for childbirth (of which her body is incapable), and her male gynecologist is more uniformly asinine than a cartoon villain.The film contains flashes of inspiration, as when McGlynn intercuts Lindy’s use of a dilator with frenetic music and jarring clips of construction equipment. That’s when “Fitting In” is at its best — showing us Lindy’s pain rather than telling us about it.Fitting InRated R for gynecological horror and humor. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Bushman’ Review: Outsider Art

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      A 1971 indie whose making was disrupted by its star’s deportation finally receives a release in New York.A film of and ahead of its time, David Schickele’s “Bushman” — first shown in 1971 and featured at New Directors/New Films in 1972 but never formally released in New York — is finally opening in a pristine restoration. Its status as a half-forgotten outsider of American independent cinema makes a weird sort of sense.It isn’t a masterpiece, but it probably couldn’t have been. The star, Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, was arrested and deported before shooting finished, and Schickele (who died in 1999) had to adapt. Fifteen minutes before it ends, “Bushman,” having already blurred fiction and nonfiction, becomes a documentary about the real-life circumstances that led to its unraveling. “The guy that was playing the part of Gabriel — well, he ain’t here no more,” a man explains to the camera.Until then, Okpokam, who had appeared in a previous documentary that Schickele filmed in Nigeria, has indeed played Gabriel, a Nigerian living in the hippie-radical ferment of San Francisco in 1968 — a turbulent year both domestically and in Nigeria, which was embroiled in civil war.“Bushman” could accurately be called a fish-out-of-water movie, but part of the conceit is that Gabriel, who happily identifies as a bushman, seems more settled than everyone else. (At the outset, he provides language instruction for the Peace Corps — “then they go over to Africa and teach us civilization,” he quips.) His girlfriend, Alma (Elaine Featherstone), insisting that he can’t relate to people “on the block,” tries to explain how he should “talk Black.” (Soon after, her brother makes fun of her for code switching.)After she departs from his life (and the film) for Watts, where she grew up, Gabriel encounters various others. A sociology student (Ann Scofield) regards him in academic terms (“McLuhan would really appreciate this”). A man (Jack Nance, before “Eraserhead”) tries to talk him into sex.But the jarring switch to documentary gives “Bushman” its added charge. Paul’s legal troubles — it’s strongly suggested that he was framed — amplify the echoes between the film and life. Misunderstandings no longer seem trivial. The state can only see an innocent abroad as guilty.BushmanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes. In theaters. More