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      ‘The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future’ Review:

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      This lyrical debut feature from Francisca Alegría is a slow-burning parable about our relationship to each other and to the living world.The final 20 minutes or so of “The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future,” the slow-burning parable from the writer-director Francisca Alegría, are almost entirely wordless. In its last act, the film follows the members of a fractured family as they wander about, cast in different directions and undone by recent oddities on their dairy farm. The power of Alegría’s feature debut is found not in dialogue or explication, but in the lyrical, magical realist qualities of folklore: disappointed mothers and fathers, sacred animals and cursed rivers, love and forgiveness.At the film’s start, a woman (Mía Maestro) bubbles up from the surface of the water, landing on a riverbank filled with dead fish. In a store, an old man (Alfredo Castro) collapses at the sight of her. Miraculously alive and not having aged a day, she appears to be Magdalena, the man’s wife who mysteriously drowned herself decades earlier, leaving him and his two children behind. Soon after, the man’s daughter, Cecilia (Leonor Varela) returns to the family farm to care for her shaken father. Cecilia has her hangups about her mother’s death and her own teenage child’s transgender identity.As Magdalena wanders back to the farm, the family begins to reckon with a complicated past, and the cows, which she had always loved but that suffer from the realities of factory farming, begin acting strangely. Through these animals, the film becomes an allegorical prayer — an elegy for human failures toward one another and the living world, and an incantation for a return and reversal of sorts.While often elliptical, Alegría’s directing is patient, a good quality for a movie that could have fallen prey to sanctimony. In this film, the purest truth can be seen in the eyes of its cows — the mournful gaze of the mothers, and the tragically innocent look of the calves that have been torn from them.The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the FutureNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Moon Garden’ Review: Malice in Wonderland

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      The director Ryan Stevens Harris brings a young girl’s subconscious to eerie life in this unnerving feature.“Moon Garden” is a nightmare tour through a small child’s psyche that the filmmaker Ryan Stevens Harris could have staged as an escape room, or a haunted house, or a themed restaurant where his creepy puppets and bizarro performers would chatter their teeth at you while smashing plates. It feels as though he chose to make a movie simply because that’s the handiest way to get his ghastly creations seen.Harris seems bored by his film’s opening sequence, a chintzy melodrama about a girl named Emma (his own daughter Haven Lee Harris, just 4-years-old when she started the project) and her miserable parents (Brionne Davis and Augie Duke). Only after Emma’s circumstances get worse — the poor dear is knocked comatose — do things onscreen improve.Heroines have been tumbling into their own subconscious since “The Wizard of Oz” and “Alice in Wonderland.” Rarely are the kids this young — and their adventures this dark. The moppet charges through all sorts of muck with kittenish courage as Harris unleashes an army of unnerving practical effects: stop motion tear-gobbling monsters, disconcerting reversed footage, time lapses of rotting fruit, skin-crawling sound design. Initially, we’re repelled by the ’90s grunge video aesthetics. Later, we admire the power in these visceral expressions of traumas Emma will someday tell her therapist.As the tot struggles to sweep up the wreckage of a rampaging bride and groom, we sense she already knows she’s the family fixer. The film doesn’t need three lullaby covers of the Badfinger ballad “Without You” when it has the poetry of Harris’s emotional insights, particularly the line: “I wish I had learned that the world was bigger than how I felt.”Moon GardenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Nicole Holofcener on the Absurdity of Everyday Life

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      SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Sisters from another mister. Cinematic alter egos. However you define it, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Nicole Holofcener have a connection that rivals the great movie partnerships of our time. New York transplants who are similar in height and in age, Louis-Dreyfus, 62, and Holofcener, 63, each have two grown sons, a healthy self-deprecating attitude and the ability to riff on any topic: cake (it’s their favorite dessert), Hollywood gossip (yes, Robert De Niro did just have a baby) and the indignities of aging.Holofcener arrives at the restaurant at Shutters on the Beach first, takes glass cleaner out of her purse and cleans her brown-rimmed spectacles. Five minutes later, Louis-Dreyfus grabs a chair, pulls out the same glasses in green and her own bottle of glass cleaner, and wipes them clean. (Am I the only one who doesn’t carry glass cleaner in her purse?)On the set of their new film “You Hurt My Feelings,” they were like two halves of the same person. Louis-Dreyfus was styled similarly to how Holofcener usually dresses: loosefitting pants, button-down blouses. With Covid protocols firmly in place at the time — those not in a scene were masked up — they were often mistaken for each other.“You definitely feel like they are separated at birth,” said the producer Anthony Bregman. “They are both mothers before filmmakers. They have the same sense of humor, the same honesty, the same potty mouth. But I think what’s at the core is that they have the same disbelief, or wonder, at the narcissism of social interaction.”Tobias Menzies, left, and Louis-Dreyfus as a long-married couple facing relationship issues in “You Hurt My Feelings.”Jeong Park/A24Take Louis-Dreyfus’s new podcast, “Wiser Than Me,” which has ranked high on the charts since it debuted in April. In it Louis-Dreyfus interviews women who are older, and therefore wiser, than her.“Maybe you’ll still be doing it when I’m old enough to be interviewed,” Holofcener told her.“I won’t,” Louis-Dreyfus replied.“And you’ll be like, she’s not that wise,” Holofcener said.“I’ll do this for eight more years and the last episode will be me talking about me,” Louis-Dreyfus said, laughing at the thought.The two first met a decade ago, when they partnered on “Enough Said,” the 2013 romantic comedy about a divorced woman grappling with sending her daughter off to college while contemplating a new love. They later collaborated on an Amy Schumer sketch that went viral but weren’t able to make another film together, until now. “You Hurt My Feelings” follows Beth (Louis-Dreyfus), a somewhat successful and happily married writer who overhears her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), criticizing her new novel. The fallout proves devastating.The premise is yet another example of Holofcener’s ability to mine the mundanity of life for the absurd. Below are edited excerpts from our conversation.Was there an inciting incident that prompted this film?NICOLE HOLOFCENER It started brewing as soon as I started screening my movies or having people read my scripts, wondering if they’re telling me the truth or not. And believing that I can tell. What a nightmare this situation would be, if somebody that close to me revealed to someone else that they didn’t like my work, or even just one of my movies. They have to love everything, in other words, for me to feel safe.“What a nightmare this situation would be, if somebody that close to me revealed to someone else that they didn’t like my work, or even just one of my movies,” Holofcener said. Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesJULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS She’s very sensitive.HOLOFCENER I just came up with a what-if. What would be the worst scenario of somebody telling me they love something and me not believing them? I do have friends that I don’t believe. And there’s one person in particular that I don’t believe. I’m actually OK with it. Because I know they love me and get me and clearly they’re wrong. I mean, it hurts a little. They didn’t admit it.Since Nicole wrote this script with you in mind, did you connect to it immediately?LOUIS-DREYFUS Yes. I think it’s interesting to consider the notion of worth and self-worth. Am I my work? And who am I without my work? That’s certainly something I like to think about. And that this is ostensibly a great relationship between a married couple, and then the wheels just totally fall off the bus. That was kind of terrifying to consider.I told Frank Rich [the former New York Times columnist who was an executive producer of her series “Veep”] the premise of this before we shot it. He audibly gasped.HOLOFCENER Oh good. That’s my audience. Not the people who would hear the premise and go, ‘Yeah, so what? Like, what planet are you from?’Since you wrote this with Julia in mind, did that change your approach?HOLOFCENER [To Louis-Dreyfus] Just don’t listen, because it’s going to sound stupid.[Louis-Dreyfus throws her cappuccino-stained napkin over her head to avoid eye contact.]HOLOFCENER When you have Julia in your head, it’s bliss, because it just makes me funnier, knowing that she’ll do it. She just sparks my imagination.Is there a scene that you wouldn’t have written if Julia wasn’t your lead actress?LOUIS-DREYFUS Oh God.HOLOFCENER Certainly, I can see other actors doing the scenes differently, and I’m so glad they’re not in it and she is.What scene specifically?HOLOFCENER The scene where she’s sitting on the couch with her sister, she’s smoking pot. This is after she’s heard the bad news; she’s crying. It’s tragic. And you really feel for her, but you’re laughing because of that face.LOUIS-DREYFUS Oh gee, thanks.HOLOFCENER Julia walks a very fine line between comedy and drama. And that’s what I like to do with my writing. I didn’t have to do much, or anything, for her to get what I mean. We know this movie is about something fairly minor in the world of things.Louis-Dreyfus “walks a very fine line between comedy and drama,” Holofcener said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesLOUIS-DREYFUS But also very major.HOLOFCENER But in the big picture, we’re not going to be crying for her. We hope she’ll get over it. But I think that scene works because she seems like she’s about 16. I think all of us are sometimes still 16. Especially when it comes to getting approval or not getting approval. I still think of myself that way. So that’s funny to see a grown-up person behave like they’re 16, in an honest way. Not in a movie way. Or a histrionic or a silly way.How difficult was it to shoot the scene in the street right after she’s overheard her husband trash her novel?LOUIS-DREYFUS That was very nerve-racking because we had paparazzi issues that day.HOLOFCENER It was our first day.LOUIS-DREYFUS Which sucked, by the way. We didn’t own the street. It was just brutal trying to shepherd people and get them out of the shot or into the shot or whatever. And then we have paparazzi across the street, as I’m trying to legitimately look as if I’m going to vomit. You know, that’s not a good look.HOLOFCENER And they want to take your picture.LOUIS-DREYFUS I’m trying to stay in the scene. But that look of when you’re actually heaving. I defy the most beautiful woman in the world, Isabella Rossellini is not going to look good, doing that.HOLOFCENER She did it so well that someone walked by and asked her if she was all right.We don’t often see a longtime happily married couple depicted onscreen.LOUIS-DREYFUS Normally, if you see a couple married a long time, you’re going to see them butting heads.HOLOFCENER Or having an affairLOUIS-DREYFUS Or somebody gets a heart attack. In this case, it’s much more fresh and interesting.HOLOFCENER I think there are hardly any movies about people our age. And they generally tend to be, in my humble opinion, too silly or too broad.LOUIS-DREYFUS And not real.“You definitely feel like they are separated at birth,” said the producer Anthony Bregman.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThe majority of the characters in this film are experiencing doubt over their careers and if they can or should pivot to doing something else. Clearly, that topic was on your mind, Nicole.HOLOFCENER I feel that way. Sometimes. I wonder how much time I have left, and do I want to be doing the same thing. Is it too late and what would I do? I think a lot of my friends feel the same way. Or they’re retiring early and making pottery and are very happy. I can imagine retiring.LOUIS-DREYFUS You can?HOLOFCENER Yeah, just like, leave me alone already. I have no more ideas.Do you really feel that you’re out of ideas?HOLOFCENER Well, at the moment I’m out of ideas.Do you usually feel this way right after you’ve finished making a film?HOLOFCENER I’m usually out of ideas every day. That’s why I make so few movies. So it’s really true. I don’t know if I’ll make another movie. I hope that’s not the case. I did think that before this movie, so, you know, I’m assuming I’ll keep going for a while.LOUIS-DREYFUS You will.HOLOFCENER And my characters will grow old with me.LOUIS-DREYFUS I wasn’t thinking about this character as an age thing. Maybe that was wrong of me.HOLOFCENER She’s afraid she has an old voice. We’re all afraid of that.LOUIS-DREYFUS To tell you the truth, I feel like this age, there’s just so much more to do. There’s a huge freedom. It’s like who cares. Try it all. Risk it all. The benefit of being this age is that you have so much experience under your belt, if you’re lucky. Which you do. And I do. And you can apply it. I want to make another movie with this one. You’ve got to get an idea in your head. More

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      Cannes Film Festival Opens With Divisive Johnny Depp Film, ‘Jeanne du Barry’

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      For its opening film, the Cannes organizers have opted for both star power and potential controversy with “Jeanne du Barry,” a French costume drama that is Johnny Depp’s first major film since winning a bitter defamation trial last year.Directed by and starring Maïwenn, the film centers on a young woman as she climbs from humble origins to become Madame du Barry, the favorite of King Louis XV of France, who Depp plays in a white wig and powdered face.The trial between Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard riveted the world last year as the actress aired allegations of physical and sexual abuse. Depp denied the claims, asserting that she was the true aggressor in the relationship. (A judge in Britain had ruled in an earlier case that there was evidence that Depp had assaulted Heard.)The jury in Virginia largely sided with Depp, finding that Heard had defamed him when she described herself in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Heard initially appealed the verdict, but then announced last year that she intended to settle the dispute.The announcement last month that “Jeanne du Barry” would be screening after the Cannes opening ceremony sparked division online, with some criticizing the festival organizers (the hashtag #CannesYouNot circulated along with the news), while Depp’s devoted fan base celebrated it as a sign of the actor’s comeback.The festival’s director, Thierry Frémaux, said in an interview with Variety last month that he did not view the film as a divisive choice. “We only know one thing, it’s the justice system and I think he won the legal case,” he said in the interview. “But the movie isn’t about Johnny Depp.”In a news conference on Monday, Frémaux said he had no interest in the defamation trial, noting, “I care about Johnny Depp as an actor,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.On Tuesday, the French newspaper Libération published an open letter, signed by more than 100 actors, that accused the festival, and the broader film industry, of not properly shutting people accused of assault and abuse out of the event. Depp was not mentioned by name.“Obviously, it does not come from nowhere that people who abuse, harass and violate are offered a place on the red carpet of this festival,” the letter reads. “It is a symptom of a global system.”While the movies that have most defined Depp’s career involve eccentric leads who dominate the film (including Sweeney Todd and Willy Wonka), in “Jeanne du Barry” he is taking a secondary role to Maïwenn, whose film “Polisse” won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2011. Depp appeared at the festival that same year in the fourth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie.During the trial, lawyers for Depp argued that Heard’s op-ed in The Washington Post had destroyed the actor’s film career, saying that after it was published, he was no longer able to book a studio film. Heard’s side countered that his pattern of bad publicity and behavior on sets was at fault for any downturn in his career.After the trial, Depp quickly re-entered the public sphere, playing concerts with Jeff Beck in Europe and appearing in a fashion show backed by Rihanna. But this is his first major return to the film industry.“Jeanne du Barry” will certainly have significant exposure in France, where it opens in theaters on Tuesday and will later appear there on Netflix.No plans have been announced for distribution in the United States. More

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      Meet the 2023 Cannes Jury: Brie Larson, Ruben Ostlund and More

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      The Swedish director Ruben Ostlund has won the Palme d’Or twice — first for “The Square” in 2017, then last year for “Triangle of Sadness.” This year, he’s the president of the jury that decides who gets that top prize.Ostlund told The New York Times that he planned to have “a very Swedish approach when it comes to running the jury,” adding, “It will be a democracy.”At a news conference on Tuesday, he said that the jury didn’t have many rules. “One thing is that this will be the first year in the history of the Cannes Film Festival when the publicists will have no rumors to tell to each other,” Ostlund said.In Ostlund’s films, which skewer class and social hypocrisies, any character who made a vow like that would wind up doing the opposite. But don’t expect the top prizewinner or any of the other awards to be his choices alone.He has eight fellow jurors. They include the French director Julia Ducournau, who has just one Palme to Ostlund’s two, having won in 2021 for her genre-bending “Titane.” It was, as that year’s jury president Spike Lee remarked at the time, likely the first film in history in which a Cadillac impregnated the heroine.Several other jury members are directors with Cannes pedigrees. Damián Szifron, from Argentina, is best known for his comic anthology feature “Wild Tales,” which showed in competition in 2014. The Zambian-born Rungano Nyoni made “I am Not a Witch,” an absurdist story of an orphan accused of witchcraft; it was a favorite of critics when it played in the parallel festival Directors’ Fortnight in 2017. And the Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzani was here last year with “The Blue Caftan,” which showed in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section.Another jury member, Atiq Rahimi, is both a filmmaker and an author. Born in Afghanistan, Rahimi directed film adaptations of his own novels “Earth and Ashes” and “The Patience Stone.” As a book, the latter won the Goncourt Prize, France’s most prestigious literary award.Cannes always likes to have a bit of Hollywood star wattage on its juries, and this year, the American actors Brie Larson and Paul Dano supply it. There was a tense moment during Tuesday’s news conference, when a Variety reporter asked Larson if she would watch the festival’s opening film, “Jeanne du Barry,” which stars Johnny Depp, since she has historically been a supporter of #TimesUp. “You’re asking me that?” Larson said, bristling. Pressed on the issue, she replied, “You’ll see, I guess, if I see it. And I don’t know how I’ll feel about it if I do.”Rounding out the jury’s thespian contingent is the French actor Denis Ménochet, recently seen as a loopy veteran in “Beau Is Afraid.”At the news conference Ostlund said: “If I could choose between an Oscar and Palme d’Or, it’s an easy choice. I’d rather have one more than have an Oscar.”Kyle Buchanan More

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      Cannes Film Festival 2023: The Best Red Carpet Looks

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      Sixty-plus feet of red carpet and 24 steps was the gauntlet guests had to run — or walk — as the Cannes Film Festival began. That’s 60-plus feet to make an entrance, create a lasting moment, catch the eyes of the watching world.The red carpet is the show before the screening(s), and every year the crystals seem to get brighter, the skirts frothier, the accessories more dramatic. Whether it’s Fan Bingbing with tigers gamboling over the wilds of her gown, Uma Thurman in sweeping cardinal satin or Helen Mirren with hair dyed to match her ice-blue dress, there’s no denying part of the fun of the festival lies in the fashion follies before the films. (Now repeat that 10 times fast.) More

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      ‘Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me’ Review: Mistreated

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      The tumultuous life and death of the model, actress and tabloid superstar is related with little insight in this facile Netflix documentary.“Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me,” a new documentary about the model, actress and ’90s tabloid sensation, follows a trend established by other nonfiction portraits of démodé stars released in recent years, such as “Britney vs Spears” and “Pamela, a Love Story.” Half biography, half supercilious media studies essay, these films are intended to be sort of pop-cultural correctives, ones which deconstruct the popular image of celebrity by demonstrating (not unfairly) that their subjects were vilified and callously misjudged in their times.This movie’s director, Ursula Macfarlane, tries to show the real Smith — who was born Vickie Lynn Hogan and raised in Texas — through a combination of cruel archival news clips (The National Enquirer calls her “dumb,” Howard Stern mocks her weight); moody, true-crime-esque B-roll; and interviews with Smith’s uncle, her brother and her former bodyguard, plus a number of tabloid journalists, reality-TV producers and members of the paparazzi.The interviews are short on insights. We hear both that Smith “craved attention” and “always liked being the center of attention.” We learn that she sometimes acquired that attention in savvy ways, willing herself to superstardom through a public image she meticulously styled, and later attracted attention despite efforts to escape it, at great cost to her privacy and mental health. But the solemn excavation of Smith’s life and death — she died at 39 of a drug overdose, in 2007 — ultimately brings the movie, despite Macfarlane’s well-meaning efforts, squarely into the territory of what it’s attempting to condemn: lurid voyeurism. Smith’s contentious inheritance case, the disputed paternity of her daughter, the tragic death of her son: The movie cannot help but sensationalize these events, even though it relates them in a self-consciously plaintive register rather than a gawking one. Smith deserved better than how she was treated. And she deserves better than this.Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know MeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Giving Birth to a Butterfly’ Review: Melancholy and Menace

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      Steeped in a distinctly American nostalgia, this beautifully peculiar debut feature has a Lynchian quality.“Giving Birth to a Butterfly,” Theodore Schaefer’s beautifully peculiar debut feature, strikes a balance between tender and vaguely unsettling, an effect similarly achieved by the work of David Lynch. I hate to use “Lynchian,” a term frequently — and slovenly — invoked for films with a merely surrealist bent. But Schaefer’s film, also steeped in a distinctly American nostalgia, more than deserves the description.In this uncanny indie, we’re plunged into an American no-place, where a suburban father, Daryl (Paul Sparks), plans to open a diner despite not having any money; and where a former actress named Monica (Constance Shulman, channeling Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard”) prepares for a big interview that will never happen. Opposite these tragic figures is Daryl’s wife, Diane (Annie Parisse), and Monica’s daughter Marlene (Gus Birney) — two women worn down by the follies of their loved ones.Marlene is pregnant, and her boyfriend Drew (Owen Campbell) — Diane’s son — wants to raise the baby though he’s not the biological father. Diane, a pharmacist, bristles at the idea. Daryl’s restaurant scheme has the couple pinching pennies, and worse, Diane soon discovers that her bank account has been drained by online scammers. She was duped, she admits to Marlene, led astray by the kind of optimism that blinds.The two women track down the identity thief — a GPS point on Diane’s computer flashes in the middle of a perfectly spiral road — and head to the ominous location.They bond during the drive over, though their heady dialogue works only somewhat. Paradoxically, it leaves little room for ambiguity amid images, captured on lush 16mm by the cinematographer Matt Clegg, that lovingly summon the strangeness of everyday life (pet fish, spilled fruit, and more than one pair of twins). The mannered, intentionally stilted performances give the drama a stagey feel, which vibes with the film’s ethereal aesthetics. But the forced profundity of the “Butterfly” script undermines the film’s enthralling sense of atmosphere, which drips with melancholy, menace and wonder.Giving Birth to a ButterflyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. Watch on Fandor. More