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      ‘Four Quartets’ Review: Virtuosi in Verse

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      Ralph Fiennes delivers an animated performance of the T.S. Eliot works, but the film doesn’t quite succeed in bringing the stage into the cinema.The English poet T.S. Eliot composed the poems that make up the work eventually published as “Four Quartets” over the course of six years, and at the end of his literary career. The four elegiac, epic poems total more than 1,000 lines, and are devoted to time and divinity. To perform them in a single staged performance is an exercise of memory and sheer will. In 2021, Ralph Fiennes accomplished the feat, acting out Eliot’s “Four Quartets” in a lauded solo production that toured in the United Kingdom, including a run at London’s Pinter Theater. His sister Sophie Fiennes filmed an adaptation of the production after the actor’s live performances ended.Her filmed version uses the original theatrical stage, with towering walls and minimal set decorations. Her camera occasionally sneaks glimpses of existence outside the theater — shots that conjure the views of Eliot’s England, a world of moss-covered stone and fields of grass-fed cows. But there is no visible audience, no sign of a human presence beyond Ralph Fiennes himself.As an actor, Fiennes contorts, stomps and dances — he delivers an animation of Eliot’s language, a forceful performance that treats the accumulation of verse into poetry like the strenuous, mathematical raising of walls in a cathedral. He speaks slowly, granting viewers time to grasp Eliot’s words. Yet for all of the actor’s efforts, the film around him does not match his mellifluousness.The camera remains at a distance, and the editing is prosaic, refusing opportunities to add a cinematic interpretation to complement Fiennes’s central performance. The static images recall the views from live theater, where the eyes of the audience are limited by the proscenium and the angle of a particular seat to the stage. Fiennes brings the fire, yet the air around him remains unmoved, even by his embers.Four QuartetsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The End of Sex’ Review: When Domesticity Kills the Mood

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      This comedy follows the misadventures of a bored 40-something married couple who are attempting to spice up their sex life.Lust and laughter run thin in “The End of Sex,” a weirdly traditional comedy in which a bored married couple attempt to revitalize their sex life.Directed by Sean Garrity, the film looks at a common dilemma — how to keep things spicy in the bedroom when years of cozy domesticity have killed the mood?It’s hard to switch gears and throw yourself into passionate lovemaking, Garrity posits, when you’re in pajamas cleaning up your children’s scattered toys. True, but in “The End of Sex,” parenthood appears to turn adults into babbling adolescents who blush and freeze up in the face of sexual opportunity. This dynamic is supposed to be cringe-funny, but over the course of an hour and a half, this staid farce proves otherwise.Emma (Emily Hampshire) and Josh (Jonas Chernick), two painfully square 40-somethings, are granted a weeklong reprieve from their child-rearing duties when their daughters head to sleepaway camp. Emma, in particular, is desperate to rekindle the flame; she is in love with her husband, but sleeping with Marlon (Gray Powell), an old art-school buddy not known for his subtlety, proves increasingly tempting.“My Awkward Sexual Adventure,” the title of an earlier film by Garrity, describes the events of this one, too: Emma and Josh attempt to have a threesome with Emma’s colleague Wendy (Melanie Scrofano), join a swinger’s club where geriatric men stroll around in bondage gear and animal masks, and take party drugs to fuel their libidos. All fail, of course, because Emma and Josh are astoundingly immature, a quality accentuated by the film’s bubbly, motor-mouthed comedy style.Lily Gao, who plays Kelly, Josh’s younger, more sexually experienced co-worker — as well as his confidante — deals with sexual hangups of her own that prove more captivating than that of her married counterparts. This speaks to what makes the central conflict feel so vapid and vanilla, as if the challenges of monogamy had only to do with the unavoidable friction between love and good sex.The End of SexRated R for clothed sex scenes and party drugs. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Restless’ Review: The Painful Cycles of Mental Illness

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      Joachim Lafosse’s film is an intimate but flawed portrayal of the effect a man’s bipolar disorder has on his family.Joachim Lafosse’s latest film, “The Restless,” makes a valiant effort to depict the toll that bipolar disorder can take on people and their loved ones. We’re introduced to Damien (Damien Bonnard), a painter, in the middle of a manic episode on vacation with his family; while gently teaching his young son, Amine (Gabriel Merz Chammah), how to steer a motorboat, Damien suddenly leaps into the water for a swim, telling Amine to take over driving. From there, it’s one incident after another as Damien behaves erratically at best and dangerously at worst, testing the patience of his wife, Leïla (Leïla Bekhti), as she struggles to find a suitable treatment for his illness.Bonnard and Bekhti both ground their performances in a knowing realism. Together with Lafosse’s intimate direction and the film’s lack of a score, this helps “The Restless” avoid any mawkishness that might have come from its premise. The problem, unfortunately, lies in the same circular patterns of behavior that the film aims to shed light on. We hardly get a glimpse of Damien outside of his mania, making it difficult to characterize the person underneath the disorder. While those familiar with the condition may relate to the repetitive destructiveness of his actions, it ultimately makes for a paper-thin narrative, one that has to fill out its two-hour running time with predictable shouting matches and dramatic beats. Lafosse’s empathy as a director is admirable, but “The Restless” falls short of putting a compelling story to film.The RestlessNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Film Movement Plus. More

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      ‘Freaks vs. the Reich’ Review: Band of Others

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      This big-hearted, blithely odd adventure pits a troupe of superpowered circus folk against a psychic Nazi pianist.Gabriele Mainetti’s “Freaks vs. the Reich” is a kind of historical superhero movie, but it has to be the only one with a psychic twelve-fingered Nazi pianist and circus performers with nifty powers. Its splashy, curiously filter-free adventures unfold in Italy and Germany during World War II, to sometimes awkward effect.In this period fantasy, a Jewish magician named Israel (Giorgio Tirabassi) leads a multitalented troupe: a furry strongman, Fulvio (Claudio Santamaria); a man who commands hordes of bugs, Cencio (Pietro Castellitto); the magnetic Mario (Giancarlo Martini); and the electrically charged Matilde (Aurora Giovinazzo).When Israel goes missing, Matilde ends up with the Italian resistance, while her friends seek Israel in Berlin. There, they run into the previously mentioned Nazi piano player, Franz (Franz Rogowski), who has visions of Germany’s defeat and beyond. A star attraction at the circus, Franz plays songs from the future (“Sweet Child of Mine,” “Creep”), but he’s most intent on finding a “fantastic four” to save the Nazi regime.The story’s basic tension becomes apparent from the opening sequence: A sweet performance by Israel’s troupe, which gives the movie a chance to showcase some enchanting special effects, segues into a Nazi bombardment. From there on out, the film’s conventional, Hollywood-friendly quest aims to please with a childlike sense of mission, but it’s jarring as it leans on the grim stakes and sights of World War II. (Case in point: There’s a battle to liberate a train carrying human cargo.)That leaning may not trouble all viewers. For its part, the movie is definitely not self-conscious about its violent bits, its Nazi regalia or a particularly joyful sex scene. As for Mainetti, the director, it wouldn’t be surprising to see him apply his zeal to another universe at some point.Freaks vs. the ReichNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 21 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Those Who Remained’ Review: Managing Unimaginable Grief

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      Set in Hungary after World War II, this film concerns a doctor and a teenager seeking to fill the void left by the relatives they lost.Opening in 1948 and closing with Stalin’s death in 1953, “Those Who Remained” unfolds in a Hungary pushing past the end of World War II toward a Communist future. But the trauma of the war and sorrow over the dead lingers for its two main characters, who become part of each other’s lives, more or less as replacements.Aldo (Karoly Hajduk) is a gynecologist. His tattooed arm offers a clue to where he has been. At one point someone overhears him praying in Hebrew, despite his claim that he is no longer religious. As the film begins, he meets a new patient: Klara (Abigel Szoke), who is almost 16 but whose great-aunt, Olgi (Mari Nagy), is concerned that the girl’s puberty is not progressing. When Klara reveals that her mother hasn’t “come home yet,” Aldo deduces that the problem isn’t physical (although Klara’s reluctance to eat surely doesn’t help).Both Klara and Olgi, who found her grandniece in an orphanage while looking for other relatives, know that Olgi isn’t cut out to be a parent, or to help Klara with classes she says she is deliberately trying to fail, even though she’s bright enough to read multiple languages. Also, Aldo reminds Klara of her father. Eventually, the three arrange for Klara to sometimes stay with Aldo. He in effect becomes her foster father, but never in official terms, which raises one teacher’s suspicion.Part of the idea of the film, directed by Barnabas Toth and based on a novel by Zsuzsa F. Varkonyi, is that only survivors could understand the solace that Klara and Aldo find in their tentative parent-daughter bond. “Those Who Remained” leaves much unsaid about their pasts, sometimes at the risk of seeming coy (the word “Jewish” is never spoken). But Hajduk and Szoke are strong performers.Those Who RemainedNot rated. In Hungarian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Winter Boy’ Review: Lost and Found

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      In this French drama about a teenager grappling with grief, a winning cast rises above a heavy-handed script.In “Winter Boy,” a new drama by the French director Christophe Honoré, a father’s sudden death leaves his teenage son adrift in time. Adolescence pulls Lucas (Paul Kircher), a 17-year-old high schooler in a provincial French village, toward the future; grief holds him in the grip of the past. Lucas fumbles through a coming-of-age both rushed and stunted: He tries, like a grown-up, to stoically support his mother (Juliette Binoche) through her bereavement, but when he follows his older brother (Vincent Lacoste) to Paris for a week, he stumbles into juvenile misadventures.Lucas is gay, and one of the strengths of Honoré’s film is how unassumingly the character’s queerness is depicted. Lucas is open about his orientation from the start and supported by his family; his desires and sexual escapades — one of which involves his brother’s roommate, Lilio (Erwan Kepoa Falé), who moonlights as a prostitute — are tortured by confusion and loss but not by shame. It’s a gentle touch in a movie that otherwise can be quite heavy-handed: a cloying piano score underlines every emotion with a saccharine flourish, and, throughout the film, Lucas appears as a talking head, narrating his feelings to the camera.Much like its young protagonist, the movie feels clumsy when trying too hard to provoke: one such sequence alternates rather arbitrarily between Lucas’s conversation with a priest and an anonymous hookup he has in Paris. But “Winter Boy” shines when it allows its actors to quietly play out family dynamics, with Lacoste, Binoche and especially Kircher wearing the many shades of grief with effortless, endearing naturalism.Winter BoyNot Rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘Nuclear Now’ Review: Oliver Stone Makes the Case for Power Plants

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      The director’s new documentary considers our complicated relationship to nuclear energy and argues that it is our best hope against climate change.Given Oliver Stone’s track record of diving into political controversies with his work (“Platoon,” “JFK,” “Snowden”), it is perhaps surprising how staid his approach is to his new documentary, “Nuclear Now.” All the more surprising is that the film’s measured tone is what lends it its visceral power. With his straightforward proposal — that nuclear energy has been the solution to climate change all along — Stone looks past politics, providing an antidote to the climate doomerism that many viewers have probably felt over the last several years.The film, a vital rejoinder to the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” considers both the past and future of nuclear power and, by laying out the simple facts of the ever-worsening state of climate change, makes a compelling case for it as the energy source that can most reasonably and realistically help us face the crisis.Stone, who wrote the film with Joshua Goldstein and narrates it, knows the perceptions he’s up against. The documentary’s first half wrestles with the enduring fears that nuclear boosters have struggled to debunk — the result of a few snowballing factors, the film argues, including the association of nuclear power with nuclear warfare and the exceptional disasters that occurred in 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.The latter sections, concerning the innovations and obstacles to future applications of nuclear power, veer somewhat into the weeds. But the film’s aversion to formal or rhetorical bombast as it discusses scientists’ hopes for a better future is its own balm. We’re staring down catastrophe, Stone explains matter-of-factly, but our greatest tool is already in our grasp.Nuclear NowNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Sisu’ Review: Sweat Wicking

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      A seemingly invincible former commando goes on a rampage in this blandly gratuitous World War II action movie.With “Sisu,” the John Wickification of action movies continues. This brisk, bloody World War II shoot-‘em-up follows the graphic rampage of a taciturn countryside gold prospector and former commando (Jorma Tommila) who, according to local legend, lost his family in a massacre and so “became a ruthless, vengeful soldier,” a “one-man death squad” with more than 300 confirmed kills to his name. Brutal and efficient, our grizzled hero has the blithe, stolid invulnerability of a video game character, dismembering limbs, snapping necks and patching up his own wounds without breaking a sweat.“Sisu,” written and directed by the Finnish filmmaker Jalmari Helander, is the kind of thriller that’s usually described as “lean.” The setup is austere: During the final stretch of the war, a retreating Nazi platoon happens upon our solitary hero in the barren fields of Finland and steals his gold. They try to kill him. He gets away. The rest of the movie is about him trying to get the gold back. Nazi soldiers are shot, stabbed, crushed, impaled, decapitated, run over and blown up, images that the movie displays with grindhouse glee. You wince to imagine the film’s budget for pyrotechnics and blood effects.To a certain type of viewer, 90 minutes of Nazi-killing violence may be inherently attractive. And “Sisu” feels designed with an audience’s fervent enthusiasm in mind: It seems to pause for applause after its most gratuitous kills. But 90 minutes of over-the-top mayhem means very little if the mayhem hasn’t been conceived with much wit or imagination, and what prevents “Sisu” from hitting the kinetic stride of a great exploitation flick is a style that feels pedestrian and oddly reserved.For all its gung-ho violence, the film never feels fraught or nasty enough: It never risks true offense or tastelessness, never takes a gamble on anything that could be interpreted the wrong way or that might sidestep expectations. Somehow it makes killing Nazis feel pretty tame. Take for instance the hero’s dog. It’s a cute hound. Improbably, it manages to avoid harm. It’s not that the movie would be better if the dog died — but it is characteristic of the film to spare the audience the potential discomfort of seeing the consequences of all this violence fall onto anything other than nameless Nazis.There’s something vaguely feeble about this cautious approach to what is ostensibly an unapologetic gore fest. By the time a liberated band of young female prisoners takes up arms against Nazi captors and blasts them to smithereens — the enemy’s fate never for a moment having been cast in doubt, the prisoners’ victory preordained — you will probably feel exhausted. This moment, like so much of the film, is expressly designed to make you hoot and holler. You’re more likely to groan and cringe.SisuRated R for gruesome carnage, over-the-top mutilation, dismemberment and some strong language. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More