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      ‘One True Loves’ Review: A Romance Lost at Sea

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      A film adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel has potential for drama, but it stumbles on stock melodrama.A woman stands on a dock, staring out at the sea through a set of binoculars, hoping for the impossible and refusing to accept the inevitable. “Emma, it’s your third day out here,” her sister tells her desperately. “I’m going to stay out here, as long as it takes,” Emma responds.It’s hard not to see these early moments of overwritten, stock melodrama in “One True Loves,” the ham-fisted film adaptation of the Taylor Jenkins Reid novel, as something like scenes in a comedy sketch. Emma (Phillipa Soo) has lost her husband (Luke Bracey) — he was her high school sweetheart — in a helicopter crash, a fact she reluctantly accepts. Slowly, she moves on with her life, eventually reconnecting with an old best friend (Simu Liu) and becoming engaged.But when her husband returns, back from the dead after surviving on an island for four years, the film homes in on her struggle to choose her one true love. Because of its poor pacing, and awkward sequencing and editing, however, the movie clumsily sets up this romance-pulp plot in its first half. Basic storytelling components are also ignored, as if entire scenes are missing, so that “One True Loves,” directed by Andy Fickman, stumbles even as a piece of Hallmark sappiness.There is potential for some meaty drama — in its best moments the film reads like a “Cast Away” spinoff, stretching out the rainy scene climax when Tom Hanks returns to his wife and is met with the cold, cleareyed truth that life has moved on without him. These late glimmers, though, are mostly drowned out. The Marvel superstar Liu and Soo, who is Broadway royalty, may seem suddenly exposed for a lack of innate star power here, but in a film like this, they’ve really just been left stranded on their own island.One True LovesRated PG-13 for some suggestive material and language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’ Review: This Giant Frog Needs Your Help

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      An enigmatic adaptation of a short story collection by Haruki Murakami, this animated film is set shortly after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.The composer and painter Pierre Földes makes his feature film directorial debut with “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,” an animated adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story collection of the same name. Following Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning film “Drive My Car” — also based on an amalgamation of Murakami works — Földes’s effort skews more faithfully to the author’s inscrutable style, combining surrealist narratives with a pensive tone that can be hard to pin down. Adding to the opaqueness is an animation style similar to rotoscoping, where the characters’ movements are based on those of live actors; while beautiful and striking at times, the uncanny depiction of the film’s human subjects may alienate some viewers.“Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” takes place shortly after the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami and is centered on the salesmen Komaru (voiced by Ryan Bommarito in the English-language dub) and Katagiri (Marcelo Arroyo), each of whom finds himself in a crisis. Komaru is mourning his separation from his wife, Kyoko (Shoshana Wilder), who spent hours watching televised news coverage of the disaster before walking out on him. We learn through flashbacks that the two got together under peculiar circumstances. Katagari, meanwhile, has an absurd meeting with an anthropomorphic frog named Frog (voiced by Földes), who tasks him with saving the city from a second impending earthquake caused by a giant earthworm.Despite its original, unusual premise, “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” can’t shake the sense that it is multiple short stories stitched together, and the elusive nature of Murakami’s dialogue and characterizations does it no favors. It works well as a visual companion for fans of the author’s work, and as a flawed enigma for everyone else.Blind Willow, Sleeping WomanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Mafia Mamma’ Review: An Offer You Can Refuse

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      Toni Collette has no chance of saving this jumble of Mob clichés and female empowerment.Sweet Tony Soprano, “Mafia Mamma” is bad. And not just disappointingly bad, in the way of late-career James Cameron, or irritatingly puerile, like virtually anything featuring Roberto Benigni. No, “Mafia Mamma” is so wincingly awful it makes you question the professional bona fides of everyone who had a hand in greenlighting its existence.This probably sounds harsh. But, as someone who has long respected the work of the film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke — whose abilities were evident from the get-go with “Thirteen” (2003) and, five years later, the first and best entry in the “Twilight” troop — I was jarred. A clodhopping farce interrupted by seizures of cartoonish violence, Hardwicke’s latest outing posits that the best distraction from an empty nest and a cheating spouse is to dash to Italy and join the Cosa Nostra.At least, that’s what Kristin (Toni Collette), a self-effacing California housewife, does when she’s summoned to the Roman funeral of her estranged grandfather, a Mafia don, and learns that she is his designated replacement. Having recently waved her son off to college and surprised her no-count husband in flagrante, Kristin was hoping for — to paraphrase the sage advice of her best friend, played by a delightfully spicy Sophia Nomvete — an eat-pray-fornicate adventure. The first would be easy; the less said about the last, the better.Trite, charmless and entirely without grace, “Mafia Mamma” weaves a wearying string of Mob chestnuts into a shallow empowerment narrative. Initially enshrining Kristin’s doormat personality — before leaving for Italy, she prepares a selection of Tupperware meals for her faithless husband — the screenplay (by Michael J. Feldman and Debbie Jhoon) soon has her lusting after an airport pickup (Giulio Corso) and attempting coitus with the oily boss of a rival family (Eduardo Scarpetta). Surviving multiple assassination attempts apparently does wonders for the libido.Vacillating mainly between randy-tourist energy and “Eek! Blood!” reaction shots, Collette — despite a proven gift for comedy — must serve as the sole load-bearing wall in a house of cards. Mouth and eyes agape, Kristin spends much of the movie gasping variations on “Oh my god!,” whether it’s to note the untimely expiration of a prospective lover or to salute a particularly generous plate of pasta. Filmed in Italy with a mostly Italian cast (including Monica Bellucci as a slinky consiglieri), the story stumbles from one tired setup, one ludicrous shootout, one hackneyed line to another. Worse, the filmmakers see no limit to the number of times a flatlining joke can be resuscitated, with running gags on the Godfather movies and the synchronized spitting of Kristin’s cohort whenever her family’s enemies are named.Warmly photographed by Patrick Murguia, “Mafia Mamma” opens in the aftermath of a slaughter and closes in the vicinity of a courtroom scene of surpassing looniness. By that point, I was surprised only that no one had thought to slide a horse’s head between Kristin’s sheets; maybe the writers had no more oh-my-gods left to give.Mafia MammaRated R for a violation to the anus and insults to the intelligence. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Lost Weekend: A Love Story’ Review: When John Lennon Strayed

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      There’s not much Lennon music heard in this doc about his affair with May Pang, and given how much Pang trashes his wife, Yoko Ono, it’s no surprise it was withheld.Interest in John Lennon’s personal life goes back to early ’60s Beatlemania, when a waggish producer on the Ed Sullivan Show captioned a shot of the then-moptop, “Sorry girls, he’s married.”As we have learned over and over, the emotionally damaged and frequently volatile Lennon was often no picnic as a spouse.During his second marriage, to the artist Yoko Ono, Lennon had a long and serious affair with May Pang, who had been a personal assistant to the couple in the early 1970s. This sojourn has been nicknamed Lennon’s “lost weekend,” partly because of the drunken acting out he did with Pang in tow. Also because he reunited with Ono in 1975, had a child with her, and entered a period of devoted, near-reclusive domesticity before he was assassinated in 1980.“I’m May Pang, and this is my story,” narrates the 72-year-old Pang in this documentary, which somehow required three directors — Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman and Stuart Samuels — to complete. The film uses a mix of copious archival footage and often melodramatic music to tell it. Oh, and one significant talking-head interview, with Julian Lennon, the musician’s first son, who is a friend of Pang’s to this day.There’s not a lot of Lennon music heard here, and given how pointedly Pang trashes Ono, it’s no surprise that it was withheld. Still, Pang credibly asserts that she was a significant presence not just for instances of Lennon behaving badly, but for high points of his solo career.Whatever the truth of Ono’s manipulations in this affair — and Pang’s claims, including that Ono asked Pang to look after Lennon in an especially personal way, are at times hair-raising — they tinge this saga with a resentment that’s off-putting. Still, if you’re up for a montage of Lennon/Pang Polaroids accompanied by the strains of Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets To Paradise,” this movie is just the thing.The Lost Weekend: A Love StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Hollywoods Newest Stars? Nike, BlackBerry and Cheetos.

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      A new spate of films stars not people but consumer products.Your standard-issue Hollywood biopics foreground people caught in the wheels of history. We meet titans of industry, genius mathematicians, brave astronauts and dogged journalists. We hear stories of fearless, unyielding figures whose visions changed the world. Some, like presidents and generals, already know their own importance; others still think they’re ordinary. But the stories generally revolve around people and events, showing us how laws were changed, wars won, villains defeated.Lately Hollywood has landed on an effective variant: Hey, remember this old thing?This type of film is not new, precisely, but this spring is staggeringly replete with examples. “AIR,” directed by Ben Affleck, tells the story of Nike’s game-changing sponsorship deal with a rookie Michael Jordan and the world-conquering shoes that emerged from it. “Tetris” does the same for the titular video game, which farsighted 1980s capitalists managed to license from the Soviet state. “BlackBerry” offers a raucous, satirical history of the Canadian tech company whose cellphone went extinct. And then there’s “Flamin’ Hot,” a drama about the former Frito-Lay employee who claims — highly dubiously, according to Los Angeles Times reporting — to be the creator of the addictively spicy red-dusted Cheetos.These movies are not about people or events that changed our scientific or political reality; they are interested in men (and yes, I do mean just men) who changed our consumer reality. The protagonists here are white-collar functionaries who carry leather briefcases to work. They are corporate middle managers and marketers and brand gurus. They scream into phones, scrutinize contracts and sift through webs of licenses and sublicenses. Their world isn’t always depicted as glamorous; “AIR” has Matt Damon don a fat suit to play a schlubby, basketball-obsessed divorcé. But these are stories in which businessmen are the heroes. They are the people who got the job done, if the job was selling millions upon millions of units to grow a major corporation’s market share.Yet it’s not even right to say these brand-o-pics focus on the men. They are, above all, centered on the objects. Movies have told the stories of market-movers before, but Hollywood’s most recent biopics of Steve Jobs were not called “iPhone 1” and “iPhone 2.” Ray Kroc’s franchising of McDonald’s is dramatized in a movie called “The Founder,” not “Big Mac.” It’s in these new movies that the consumer product itself truly becomes the star around which human stories revolve. Their cumulative mood is resolutely frothy: poppy 1980s bops, eight-bit graphics, white-collar sharks gnawing on the geeks. For any child of the era, this is yet another casual stroll down memory lane — one in which, yet again, memory lane is flanked by endless billboards of retro brands. The objects in these films, after all, are not just products; they signify a specific slice of a time, perhaps a specific type of childhood. Like all brands these days, they are signposts we use to navigate the world, orienting ourselves socially, signaling our identities. They are interested in people who make the first thing, and less interested in the fact that, somewhere in the world, a labor force is making millions more.This experience of consumption is precisely what the films promise audiences. In both “BlackBerry” and “AIR,” the executives are consciously trying to tap into questions of consumer desire and identity. “AIR” could even be seen as an origin story for the very concept of brand-as-identity, an innovation it seems to admire. “BlackBerry,” shot in vérité style, is more sour on the idea. Glenn Howerton plays Jim Balsillie, depicted here as the raging id of the company, barking orders at his sales force: “You’re not salesmen anymore,” he says. “You’re male models. I want you at every country club, yacht club, tennis club. Wherever the elite go, you go!” The phone’s function is no longer the point. “When they ask you, don’t say, ‘It’s a phone that does email,’” he says. “It’s not a cellphone — it’s a status symbol.”Writing in Playboy in early 2014, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek mused on our experience of brands and “the mysterious je ne sais quoi that makes Nike sneakers (or Starbucks coffee).” I don’t know whether Ben Affleck ever read that article, but there’s a strange level on which his film repeats, again and again, something Zizek imagined about Nike. If such a company were to outsource production to overseas contractors, design to design firms, advertising to ad agencies and distribution to retailers, what would be left? “Nike would be nothing ‘in itself,’” Zizek wrote. “Nothing other than the pure brand mark ‘Nike,’ an empty sign.” In “AIR,” it is Damon’s character — Sonny Vaccaro, a marketing executive — who finds a new answer. His radical idea is to commit the entire basketball budget to Jordan. Nike, he says, must tap into something deeper, to turn a shoe into a man and a man into a shoe. The vice president of marketing is puzzled: “You want to anthropomorphize a shoe?” The film leaves it to Jordan’s mother, played by Viola Davis, to underline how that’s done: “A shoe is just a shoe,” she says, “until my son steps into it.” “BlackBerry” is caustic, while “AIR” is, ultimately, a feel-good celebration of the brand-identity revolution that changed sports forever. “Tetris” feels more confused. (We watch Henk Rogers become a millionaire by getting the Soviets to license some handheld-gaming rights, but whether Nintendo or someone else gets them feels more meaningful to Rogers than to consumers.) While watching each of the three films, though, I found myself thinking about the words etched on the backs of so many devices: “Designed by Apple in California/Assembled in China.” Each of these stories is interested in the inventors and innovators who create the first thing, and less interested in the fact that, somewhere in the world, a labor force is making millions more. In “AIR,” the only real acknowledgment of this comes from that vice president of marketing, who expresses mild ambivalence about Nike’s factories in Taiwan and South Korea — a confusing gesture in a movie about a company that, in 1998, had its real-life chief executive lament that it had become “synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse.” This year, in Michigan, Times reporting found underage factory workers who said inhaling the dust from producing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos left their lungs stinging. Feelings about this spring’s eruption of brand flicks have been mixed. In The Wall Street Journal, Joe Queenan called this spate of product bios “great news,” expressing hope that “AIR” might open the door for more footwear-origin stories. (Why not Uggs or Birkenstocks?) In the opposite ideological corner, you’ll find Boots Riley, the leftist musician and filmmaker (“Sorry to Bother You”), arguing on Twitter that commodity flicks are Hollywood’s effort to “push back on radicalization of the working class.” It’s certainly possible that these movies expose something vapid about our consumer society — say, our readiness to attach our humanity to empty slogans or to praise “visionaries” whose vision isn’t about fighting injustice or reaching the stars but merely selling us tons of plastic.Still: All these brand films, and all the reviews of them, seem to acknowledge the same point. The day-to-day texture of our lives, they suggest, may be dictated less by brave explorers or crusading lawyers and more by people with office jobs who make products and then make us want to buy them — people whose decisions shape our habits, our choices, our sense of ourselves. The part these films do not yet fully agree on is whether this fact is worth celebrating or deeply depressing.Source photographs: Apple TV+; Amazon Studios; William West/AFP, via Getty Images. More

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      Bill Butler, Cinematographer Best Known for ‘Jaws,’ Dies at 101

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      He came up with a mechanism that allowed Steven Spielberg to film underwater. His work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” earned him an Oscar nomination.Bill Butler, an Oscar-nominated cinematographer who played a prominent role in the American New Wave movement of the 1970s and whose credits included “Jaws,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and three of the “Rocky” sequels, died on Wednesday. He was 101.His death was announced by the American Society of Cinematographers, which did not say where he died.Mr. Butler worked with a number of directors credited with reimagining American filmmaking in the ’70s, including Steven Spielberg, for whom he was the director of photography on “Jaws,” the 1975 blockbuster about a man-eating great white shark that established Mr. Spielberg’s reputation and changed the way Americans looked at both film and the beach.Open-water shooting posed many challenges on what was a notoriously troubled set.The crew faced problems not only with their malfunctioning mechanical shark but also ‌with seasickness, uncooperative tides‌, random boats sailing into the frame and even sets that sank.From left, Mr. Spielberg, the camera operator Michael Chapman and Mr. Butler on the set of “Jaws.” Mr. Butler designed a submersible camera box and a platform that allowed for shooting both below the water and on its surface.Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Butler designed a submersible camera box and a platform that allowed for shooting both below the water and on its surface, to convey the viewpoint of a swimmer. The American Society of Cinematographers, which presented Mr. Butler with a lifetime achievement award in 2003, also credited him in 2012 in its magazine, American Cinematographer, with “heroically” saving footage from a camera that went down in the Atlantic Ocean. His calculation: that seawater would be similar to saline-based developing solutions.“We got on an airplane with the film in a bucket of water, took it to New York and developed it,” Mr. Butler recalled in his commentary for a 2012 release of “Jaws” on Blu-ray. “We didn’t lose a foot.”In a statement, Mr. Spielberg praised Mr. Butler’s work on “Jaws.” “Bill’s outlook on life was pragmatic, philosophical and so very patient,” he said, “and I owe him so much for his steadfast and creative contributions to the entire look of ‘Jaws.’”Over his six-decade career, Mr. Butler also shot several noteworthy television dramas, including “Raid on Entebbe” (1976) and “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1984), both of which won him Emmy Awards for outstanding cinematography; “The Thorn Birds” (1983), which earned him an Emmy nomination; and “The Execution of Private Slovik” (1974).For his work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975), Mr. Butler received an Oscar nomination that he shared with Haskell Wexler, a colleague with whom he had an unusual association: On two of his more influential and well-regarded films — Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974) was the other — Mr. Butler was brought in as the director of photography only after the mercurial Mr. Wexler had been fired.Mr. Butler with Christopher Walken on the set of the 1988 film “Biloxi Blues.”Universal, via Everett CollectionWilmer Cable Butler was born on April 7, 1921, in Cripple Creek, Colo., and raised in a log cabin. His parents, Wilmer and Verca Butler, were farmers. After graduating from the University of Iowa with a degree in engineering, he started his career in broadcasting at WGN-TV in Chicago, where he was a camera operator for live programs and commercials.His first feature-length film, directed by his WGN colleague William Friedkin, was “The People vs. Paul Crump,” a 1962 documentary about an African American prisoner on death row who claimed his murder confession had been coerced through torture. Though the movie never aired — the contents were deemed too incendiary — it made its way to Otto Kerner, the governor of Illinois, who commuted Mr. Crump’s sentence to life without parole.“When you see the power a little piece of 16-millimeter film will bring to you, you are inspired to go ahead and pursue a career in the field,” Mr. Butler said in 2005 at a career retrospective at the Victoria Film Festival in British Columbia. “And that’s exactly what I did.”He was already 40 by the time he started shooting motion pictures. (“He reinvented himself multiple times,” said Michael G. Moyer, who worked alongside Mr. Butler as chief electrician on “Child’s Play” and other films.) But he immediately went to work for some of the period’s more promising young talents: Mr. Friedkin on “The Bold Men” (1965), Philip Kaufman on “Fearless Frank” (1967), Mr. Coppola on “The Rain People” (1969), and Jack Nicholson on “Drive, He Said” (1971), one of only three films he directed.“I did some work with director Phil Kaufman on the Universal Studios lot as a writer while I was still trying to get into the Los Angeles camera guild,” Mr. Butler said in a 2005 Moviemaker magazine interview. “That’s when I met Steven Spielberg. He had just finished his ‘Night Gallery’ projects. I shot ‘Savage’ and ‘Something Evil,’ a couple of one-hour TV movies, with him.”When work began on “Jaws,” it was Mr. Butler who convinced Mr. Spielberg that he could shoot in the water.“Panavision had just introduced a lightweight, smaller camera,” he recalled. “It was also quiet, so you could use it to cover dialogue. Steven thought it would be too shaky; I didn’t try to press the issue. If he hired me, I could show him when we got to Martha’s Vineyard.”Mr. Butler’s later credits included “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings” (1976); “The Sting II” (1983);“Graffiti Bridge,” starring and directed by Prince (1990); “Hot Shots!” (1991); and “The Chauffeur” (2008), as well as the TV series “Brooklyn Bridge” (1991). He remained active professionally well into his 80s, working in a variety of genres and often with fledgling directors.“The harder films are usually the big ones that require controlling a lot of people and a lot of cameras, and over a large area or sometimes many locations,” he said at the Victoria Film Festival. “Keeping that organized is something that some cinematographers are not capable of, so they do smaller films.”But smaller films can be just as difficult for them, he added, “because the pressure of a small film means that they may not have the time to properly gather their footage, and that’s another definite pressure that’s equally challenging.”Mr. Butler is survived by his wife, Iris (Schwimmer) Butler, whom he married in 1984, and their daughters, Genevieve and Chelsea Butler, both actresses, as well as three daughters from his marriage to Alma Smith, which ended in divorce: Judy Rawson, Patricia Pekau and Pam Fraser. He is also survived by a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.Mr. Butler never attended film school; when he started shooting movies, he said, he bought the manual of the American Society of Cinematographers (“the bible of filmmaking”) and would refer to it whenever he needed. But really, he said in 2005, the way he learned to shoot pictures “was to go directly to the movies and see what somebody else was doing onscreen, and then going out and trying to do it myself. And that was it.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      Marvel Superhero and Indigenous Actress Holds Fast to Maya Roots

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      After filming her part in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” María Mercedes Coroy returned to her “normal” life of farming and trading in a Guatemalan town at the base of a volcano.SANTA MARÍA DE JESÚS, Guatemala — For her big underwater scene in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” the Guatemalan actress María Mercedes Coroy had to hold her breath as her character, Princess Fen, gives birth in a hazy ocean world to a winged serpent son.She emerges from the watery depths as a rarity even in Marvel’s fantastical universe: a female Maya superhero.The day after filming her final scene in Los Angeles, Ms. Coroy, rather than hanging out in Hollywood, headed home to Santa María de Jesús, a Kaqchikel Maya town of about 22,000 at the base of a volcano in Guatemala. By nightfall, she was curled up in bed in her family’s bright pink cinder block house with vegetables growing in the backyard.“I felt like my bed was hugging me,” said Ms. Coroy, 28, one of nine siblings in a family of farmers and vendors.The next morning she resumed her usual life. She and her mother put on their hand-woven huipiles, or blouses, and cortes, or skirts, to catch the 5:30 bus to the small city of Escuintla to sell produce in the bustling market, a job she started after fifth grade when she had to drop out of school to help her parents.The main square of Santa María de Jesús, Guatemala, Ms. Coroy’s hometown.Daniele Volpe for The New York TimesSome days she walks two hours with a mule to the family farm to cultivate cabbage and pumpkins. In her spare time, she weaves colorful huipiles with motifs of birds and flowers on a backstrap loom.“People ask me what I do after filming,” said Ms. Coroy, who is working on her third Guatemalan movie after appearing in two in the United States. “I go back to normal.”Ms. Coroy represents a new generation of Maya actors determined to hone their craft while holding onto their customs and helping expose a legacy of discrimination against Guatemala’s Indigenous population.While she said she enjoys acting in the United States — and posing in a pink and blue huipil at the 2021 Golden Globe Awards — she is more interested in her own country’s burgeoning film industry.But whether she’s working in her homeland or Hollywood, acting can be draining, and she relies on Santa María de Jesús to recharge her.“I love my life, but filming is physically demanding,” Ms. Coroy said, relaxing on a bench in Santa María’s central park. “This is my community.”Ms. Coroy’s first role was the lead in a school play production of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”A mural depicting the actress on a wall of her hometown.Daniele Volpe for The New York TimesSanta María de Jesus has long been locally famous for its street theater, and a decade ago, the Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante came to the town to prepare for his first feature film, “Ixcanul” (“Volcano”). He wanted to tell a story of Maya women that addressed issues like endemic poverty and inequities in education and health care, and he was determined to cast Maya actors speaking the Indigenous language of Kaqchikel.Mr. Bustamante initially put up a sign in the town’s central park: Casting Here. No one showed up. A few days later he posted: Work Here. He was overwhelmed with prospective actors.Ms. Coroy missed the audition. But a friend put her in touch with the director the next day.“He told me I was the only person who looked him in the eye,” she said. When he offered her the lead, she balked. “I had no experience. I was afraid I would ruin the movie.”But he convinced her to join the cast. For the next several months, they trained at the country’s first film academy, founded by Mr. Bustamente.“When we began filming, they were no longer amateur actors,” Mr. Bustamente said.“Ixcanul,” which won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival, focuses on a poor family in the mountains that arranges for the daughter to marry a plantation overseer. The daughter secretly gets involved with a young man, a drunk and a dreamer, who promises to take her with him to the United States. But he leaves without her and she finds herself pregnant while still engaged to the other man.After she gives birth in a hospital, a staff member tells her that her baby has died. When the young woman finds out later that her child had lived and had possibly been sold for adoption, grief consumes her.Ms. Coroy, center, with her neighbors. Daniele Volpe for The New York Times“Quiet and fearless,” the Los Angeles-based film critic Manuel Betancourt wrote of Ms. Coroy’s understated performance, which revealed anguish behind a still face.“I mouthed the words I was feeling in my head,” Ms. Coroy said, explaining her acting method. “It was easier then because I was naturally timid. I’m much more animated now.”Her second film with Mr. Bustamante, “La Llorona,” transformed a traditional Latin American ghost story into an indictment of a fictional dictator, but one clearly reminiscent of the Guatemalan leader, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt. Five years before his death in 2018, General Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity for the systematic slaughter of Maya men, women and children in the 1980s after he took control of the country in a coup.Ms. Coroy plays Alma, a Maya housemaid whose son and daughter were among those murdered. A spectral figure in white, she haunts the dictator in his home.A casting director saw her in the two Bustamante films and picked her for the part of an Indigenous guerrilla in “Bel Canto,” an American film starring Julianne Moore. For two-and-a-half months, Ms. Coroy filmed in Mexico and the United States, the longest she had ever been away from her family. She froze in New York, she said, and didn’t like the food.The actress prefers not to discuss politics. But Mr. Bustamante said artists in Guatemala worked in an increasingly hostile climate.“You realize you’re in a country where there is a dictatorship without that name,” Mr. Bustamante wrote in an email interview. “There is a murky sort of oppression and no rights or freedom.”In “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” Ms. Coroy’s character gives birth underwater. When “Ixcanul” was released, he wrote, “there was a general rejection by the Guatemalan people of this sort of subject matter. With La Llorona, it was much more dangerous. We received anonymous threats.”“Wakanda Forever,” a global blockbuster distributed by Disney, also addresses the oppression of the Maya.Ms. Coroy’s character, Princess Fen, catches smallpox brought by the Spaniards to the Yucatán Peninsula in the 16th century. A shaman gives her a drink that allows her to live and give birth underwater. When her winged son Namor, played by the Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta, returns to the Yucatán, he sees Spaniards beating the Maya they have enslaved.In Guatemala, some Maya families encourage their children to speak only Spanish and wear Western clothing to escape ongoing rampant discrimination. But that’s not how Ms. Coroy was raised.“My parents tell me I should be proud,” said Ms. Coroy, who eventually returned to night school and finished college. “There is no way that you can hide that you’re Indigenous.”She has recently begun delving into Maya spirituality. Her grandmother was a natural healer who taught her about the curative properties or herbal teas and flowers. While she worships in a Catholic church, she also studies with an Indigenous spiritual teacher and reads the Maya creation story, the Popol Vuh.Central to Maya religion is Maximón, a trickster deity both benevolent and hedonistic. In ceremonies, adherents smoke and drink in front of his wooden figure in the hopes he will hear their entreaties. Ms. Coroy attends ceremonies without imbibing, she said.“People ask me what I do after filming,” Ms. Coroy said. “I go back to normal.”Daniele Volpe for The New York Times“I respect Maximón,” she said. “I have connected with him in dreams. He said, ‘You neither speak well of me nor poorly, so I will protect you.’”While she’s famous enough in Guatemala that people in the colonial tourist city of Antigua, a UNESCO World heritage site, approach her politely for autographs, her neighbors in Santa María avoid singling her out. Walking in the town’s park, she might as well be any other vendor.“There’s no movie star culture here,” Ms. Coroy said. “There are no paparazzi.” More

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      ‘Joyland’ Review: A Target of Gossip

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      Saim Sadiq’s melodrama, about a husband’s affair with a transgender dancer, was briefly banned in Pakistan.In November, the director Saim Sadiq’s provocative melodrama “Joyland” was briefly banned in his home country, Pakistan, for depicting a romance between a married man, Haider, and a dancer, Biba. Western audiences might refer to Biba as a transgender woman, but the film avoids those words. “She is that,” Haider tells his jilted wife.A more common local term is khawaja sira, a gender identity that dates to the 16th century and connotes neither male nor female. This community, whose members often served as advisers in the Mughal Empire, was criminalized under British colonial rule. Long shunned, they scored an important victory in 2018 when Pakistan passed anti-discrimination laws that define gender identity as a “a person’s innermost and individual sense of self as male, female or a blend of both, or neither.”Nevertheless, “Joyland” spurred an outcry in Pakistan, with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting deeming the Cannes prize winner “highly objectionable.” The activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, one of the film producers, defended it in Variety. The ban was rescinded after three days, then later reinstated in one province.Outrage works in the movie’s favor; this polite weepie needs the added spice. While about an unconventional affair, the movie is more interested in suppression and restraint. Sadiq, a sensitive director who occasionally muddles a scene when he gets bashful, focuses on the patriarchy’s impact on men. Here, every man we meet is terrified to become the target of gossip — a paranoia that sometimes seems to be only in their heads.“Joyland” takes its title from a theme park in Lahore. The city’s stone walls barely allow the park’s neon lights to peek out — Sadiq’s subtle metaphor for how society constrains the colorful shades of human desire. Two brothers live ‌in a crowded, dimly lit house they share with their father (Salmaan Peerzada), a white-haired bully who believes that men should work and women should bear children. This is fine with the macho eldest son, Saleem (Sohail Sameer), and tolerable to his wife, Nucchi (Sarwat Gilani). But our attention is pulled to the younger, gentler son, Haider (Ali Junejo), and his happily employed wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq, a quiet powerhouse). When Haider acquiesces to his dad’s expectations — he finds a job, and his wife is forced out of hers — the entire home’s stability comes tumbling down.Haider’s new (secret) job is as a backup dancer to Biba, a ferocious presence played by Alina Khan. Haider is a klutz — “by the grace of Allah, you’re really terrible,” a director groans — and the theater’s finances make zero sense. (How can Biba pay six dancers while scrounging for stage time?) Yet, the script, by Sadiq and Maggie Briggs, doesn’t spend enough time backstage to satisfy our curiosity. With Joe Saade’s swirling camerawork, the film’s burlesque scenes are themselves a tease, making us yearn for one more sweaty dance number or another “All About Eve”-esque zinger that Biba delivers to her rival (Priya Usman Khan).We’re meant to be miserable when the movie slinks back to the grim family manor. As those inside increasingly realize that they, too, want to make their own choices, our loyalty turns away from Haider to the women, particularly the daughters-in-law, who are more articulate about and exhausted by the pressures on their behavior. When Farooq and Gilani each get a scene to speak up about their characters’ frustrations, their righteous anger burns a hole through the screen.JoylandNot rated. In Punjabi and Urdu, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More