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      ‘In From the Side’ Review: Love and Rugby Play a Losing Game

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      In Matt Carter’s gay rugby film, sports and romance smash together like two players from opposing teams.The sports romance always has a tinge of the workplace drama. A character’s ability to focus on an objective is shaped both by teammates, or co-workers, and by the world outside the game or workplace. But since most sports romances are the province of heterosexual story lines, the drama — the muddling of camaraderie, ambition and personal circumstances — plays out separately on and off the field. Matt Carter’s gay rugby film “In From the Side” seeks to bridge the gap between these genres, with mixed results.In the sports half of the film, a gay rugby club in London makes efforts to be taken seriously, despite a lack of funding. In the romance half, Mark (Alexander Lincoln) hooks up with a member of a more accomplished team, Warren (Alexander King), behind the backs of their boyfriends. When Warren joins Mark’s team, they continue their fledgling romance but have to hide it from their teammates.Carter, who co-wrote the screenplay with Adam Silver, wants to explore the effects of this kind of behavior, and its complex implications, when work and play are effectively the same thing: Friends get betrayed, strategy is undermined and tangled tales end up entwining everyone even tangentially connected.Instead, “In From the Side” feels too much like two separate movies smashed together like two players from opposing teams, making its 2-hour-and-14-minute run time a slog. Though Carter is competent at making the chaos of a rainy match or the ecstasy of a clandestine tryst watchable, his characters feel like sketches with barely any idiosyncrasies. What’s the point of watching the game if you don’t care about the players?In From the SideNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘New Gods: Yang Jian’ Review: ‘Cowboy Bebop’ Without the Bop

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      In this animated fantasy, a former deity must confront his traumatic past if he hopes to find absolution and save the world.The director Zhao Ji’s “New Gods: Yang Jian,” a reductive prequel to “New Gods: Nezha Reborn,” teases some tantalizing lore: Yang Jian (Wang Kai) was once a god known by another name.On the orders of his mentor, Master Yuding (Li Lihong), the god then known as Erlang Shen buried his sister beneath Lotus Peak to encase tumultuous spiritual phoenixes, bent on destroying the world, within the mountain. Why he couldn’t save his sister is one question the film attempts to answer. Nevertheless, the incident caused his third eye to close, depleting his powers.Ambiguously taking place “a long time ago,” the writer Mu Chuan’s screenplay sees the now resigned Yang Jian slaving away as a bounty hunter with a team whose offbeat dynamics, combined with a quirky jazz score and immaculately rendered neo-noir futurist cities as backdrops, mirror the look and feel of “Cowboy Bebop.”A dancer, Wanluo (Ji Guanlin), hires Yang Jian to capture Chenxiang (Li Lanling), a thief wanted for stealing the magical lamp of universal contentment (which can reopen Lotus Peak, causing the freed phoenixes to destroy the planet). Rather than crafting an adventure with Yang Jian and his team, the film opts for a sprawling effect, whereby Yang Jian, after seeing how this job relates to him personally, sets out on his own quest to learn why Chenxiang stole the lamp.The diverging narrative reduces the fun “Cowboy Bebop” tone to window dressing. When the film reveals Yang Jian and Chenxiang’s surprising connection, the heartbreak we’re meant to feel doesn’t materialize amid the plot’s elusive machinations. The film’s pulse only quickens when the grounded graphics, from Light Chaser Animation Studios, enliven the otherworldly fight sequences between gods.Even for fans of this animated universe, “New Gods: Yang Jian” can’t turn its viewers into believers.New Gods: Yang JianNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Last Autumn’ Review: The Majesty of Shepherds

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      This observational documentary about an aging farming couple on the Icelandic coast unfolds like an elegy to a life lived off the land.“The Last Autumn” feels like a missive from another planet, even as it chronicles the most mundane activities of terrestrial life: eating, cooking, farming, tending to animals. The ordinary life and routines of the documentary’s subjects, the aging farming couple Ulfar and Oddny, take place against an extraordinary backdrop: a desolate village on the Icelandic coast, nestled amid green mountains that slope into the frigid blue of the Arctic Ocean.The director, Yrsa Roca Fannberg, follows the couple as they prepare for the annual autumnal ritual of herding their sheep down the mountain — though this year’s descent is tinged with doom. Ulfar and Oddny are selling their farm, and their beloved stock will either be sold or slaughtered. The film unfolds like an elegy to a life lived off the land. The camera closes in on the protagonists’ hands as they work meat or wood or fur, driving home the quiet majesty of manual labor.Haunting music, a remote, aerial view and lens flares that tint the image blue and red turn the film’s shepherding sequences into a grand spectacle straight out of a horror or science fiction movie. As Ulfar, Oddny, their grandchildren and their neighbors herd the sheep down the mountain, they become dark figures chasing cloudy-white blobs across a mysterious, craggy expanse, while their walkie-talkie exchanges crackle eerily on the soundtrack.By the time we get to the film’s closing scenes, in which the farmers crack open the skull of a ram and lime its hide, all while exchanging fond reminiscences about the animal, this modest documentary becomes something epic — a microcosm of the eternal cycles of life.The Last AutumnNot rated. In Icelandic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. Watch on Film Movement Plus. More

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      ‘When You Finish Saving the World’ Review: Mother and Son Disunion

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      Julianne Moore plays a parent to a son (Finn Wolfhard) with whom she fails to see eye-to-eye in this comedy directed by Jesse Eisenberg.“When You Finish Saving the World” is, for better or worse, exactly the movie one would expect from the actor, writer and playwright Jesse Eisenberg: wordy, whiny and self-consciously wry. Adapted from his 2020 audio drama of the same name, this slight debut feature alights on a mother-son dynamic so cringe-inducingly toxic that we can sympathize only with the man of the house (Jay O. Sanders), an academic who exists mainly to complain about his own irrelevance.And not without reason, when neither his wife, Evelyn (a firmly deglamorized Julianne Moore), nor their teenage son, Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard), bothers to attend his promotion to chancellor. Evelyn’s exhausted-hippie look and teeny-tiny car fit perfectly with her job at a shelter for victims of domestic abuse, where she oozes the empathy and attention she denies her son. For his part, the perfectly named Ziggy (his head is filled with stardust) is a self-involved twit who cares for nothing except nurturing his professed “passion and charisma,” livestreaming his dorkily fervent folk rock to a rapt audience of international tweens.When Evelyn, her voice thick with censure and disappointment, inquires about Ziggy’s future plans, he reveals aspirations that go no further than acquiring more followers and more generous tips. Where, she wonders, is the darling child who used to accompany her on protest marches? (Pete Seeger’s rousing version of Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid,” stomping over the film’s end credits, is an unexpected pleasure.) Once, Evelyn dreamed of editing Rolling Stone; now she dreams of having a son like Kyle (Billy Bryk), the sensitive, caring young man whose mother is one of Evelyn’s abused residents. Deciding that Kyle is too special for the blue-collar life he’s contemplating, Evelyn resolves to help him ascend the class ladder, one Ethiopian meal and college application at a time.Set in suburban Indiana for no apparent reason other than Eisenberg’s fondness for the state (we barely see beyond a handful of indoor locations), this dramatically flat picture, too tidily and predictably resolved, is never more than glancingly funny. The milieu is comfortably upper-middle class, but it’s a cold comfort, and much of it doesn’t ring true. Ironically, the movie’s most credible sequences involve Ziggy’s pretensions, emerging from his infatuation with Lila (a sharp Alisha Boe), a politically engaged classmate who writes earnest poetry slamming colonialism. Ziggy doesn’t understand her social conscience, but he wants it, partly because he’s a hollow that needs filling, but mostly because he believes it can be monetized. He’s not interested in developing a point of view; he just wants to learn how to perform one.Eisenberg has already proven himself a smart wordsmith and a knowing performer of emotional unease, but this “World” is a disappointingly shallow tale of narcissism and negligence. When these characters become too tiresome to listen to, though, look at their surroundings: Working with the excellent cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, Eisenberg displays a promising visual instinct, giving the family a home that’s shadowed and sad, spacious yet suffocating. The dinner-table scenes alone are nightmares of estrangement.Casually satirizing the empty suck of social media and a do-gooder impulse that’s practiced solely with strangers, “World” is at times almost cartoonishly cruel. One scene in particular shows Evelyn, in a “nyah-nyah-nyah” singsong, snidely deriding Ziggy’s music. For the first time, in his pained expression, we see the defensive nature of his overweening self-regard; and had Eisenberg used this moment, and others like it, to deepen and enrich his characters, they might have seemed genuinely redeemable instead of simply insufferable.When You Finish Saving the WorldRated R for extreme rudeness and rotten parenting. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Missing’ Review: Mom’s Lost in the Matrix

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      This thriller, about a teenage girl whose mother disappears, plays out on a computer screen.The gimmick behind “Missing,” a strenuous techno-thriller about a teen girl named June (Storm Reid) who takes to the internet to track down her mother (Nia Long), is that the directors and screenwriters, Will Merrick and Nick Johnson, frame the action on computer screens. All of June’s sleuthing is cloistered to apps which she opens in increasing panic. She’s a web-weaned child who barely bothered to speak to her mom even before the parent’s disappearance. Initially, June celebrates having the house to herself by Googling “How to throw a rager.” Her friends dutifully post her drunkenness to Instagram so that we, the viewer, can witness it.June’s mother was last seen headed to Cartagena with her boyfriend (Ken Leung), a dork so drab that even his festive vacation shirts are drained of color. By the end of the first act, June and her best friend (Megan Suri) are scouring the man’s Facebook for clues to hack his email password. (Maybe they should try RedH3rring$.)From there, the story emboldens itself from relatable online stalking to ludicrous plot twists, both of which Reid parries with confidence. When the film momentarily feigns to look like a film, the image zooms out to reveal that the handsome cinematography is really a true crime docuseries streaming on June’s laptop. (In a meta-joke, the show is a glossy re-enactment of the producers’ previous film, the 2018 mystery “Searching,” which shared a near-identical premise.)“Missing” captures the constant distractions of the modern age. Pop-up windows continually tug at June’s attention. However, the film’s more engaging moments tap into the older cyber nostalgia of text-based adventure games from the 1970s, where problems are solved by typing the right command: Enter cave. Brandish sword. Write “Can I see the security camera?” into on online English-Spanish translator while on the phone with your mother’s hotel. It’s not exactly riveting to watch June download and install WhatsApp so that she can video call Colombia. Yet, there’s some pleasure in a brains-over-brawn quest that flatters us to fancy that we might be clever enough to solve it ourselves, despite giggles that arise when Julian Scherle’s score swells so portentously for June’s digital breakthroughs that you’d think Conan had smote an army. Even goofier is an emotional scene that builds to June pledging this teary promise to her vanished mother: “I’ll stop making fun of you for using Siri for everything.”When June’s quest goes viral, the investigation — along with her role in her own narrative — nearly slips out of her grasp. Too much connectivity can be a cancer, Merrick and Johnson seem to say, and most of us already agree. Yet, there’s an oddly emotional sequence when June breaks into her mother’s dating app and, for the first time, learns to see her as a woman with her own desires. Better still is a bit part by the actor Joaquim de Almeida as Javier, a gig worker in Cartagena — “cleaning, electricity, you know” — who June hires to do cheap on-location reconnaissance. Javier has only a two-and-a-half star rating, but he’s so good that I spent the film hoping June would take a minute to write him a glowing review.MissingRated PG-13 for teen drinking and violence. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘All Eyes Off Me’ Review: Scenes of Seduction

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      A series of sexual and social situations unspool in this portrait of Israeli youth culture.“All Eyes Off Me,” a seductive triptych, aspires to offer a window into Israeli youth culture by staging its characters in a series of social and sexual situations. The writer-director, Hadas Ben Aroya, seems interested in how hedonistic lifestyles can lubricate certain forms of intimacy while hindering others, and she conveys this paradox through a series of patient long takes.The first chapter trails Danny (Hadar Katz) as she wanders around a house party in search of Max (Leib Lev Levin). She finds him seated beside the enigmatic Avishag (Elisheva Weil), Max’s new girlfriend and the chief subject of the film’s next two parts: in one, Avishag explores rough erotics with Max; and in the final, she initiates a flirtation with a staid older man.Ben Aroya is fond of capturing people in mundane moments: walking dogs, watching internet videos, listening to music. She also frequently fixes her camera on characters as they impassively recount stories of past traumas, such as an abortion and an apostasy; the sedateness of her shots mirrors the dispassion of their accounts.If the film wants to draw a line between its second and third parts — Avishag’s unruly relations with Max and her subsequent attraction to the modest, middle-aged Dror (Yoav Hait) — it does not wholly succeed. Each section feels more like a stand-alone tableau than one domino in a chain of events. Within this framework, Avishag’s wants and needs are not quite legible enough to trace a satisfying arc, but unspooling under the film’s stylish, judgment-free gaze, her interactions are alluring nonetheless.All Eyes Off MeNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Leads BAFTA Nominees

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      The German-language movie received 14 nods and will compete for best film against the likes of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “The Banshees of Inisherin.”“All Quiet on the Western Front,” a German-language movie set on the battlefields of World War I, emerged on Thursday as the surprise front-runner for this year’s British Academy Film Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars.“All Quiet,” a Netflix-backed movie about the futility of war, secured 14 nominations for the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs. Those included best film, where it is up against four higher-profile titles including “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a sci-fi adventure starring Michelle Yeoh as a laundromat owner who traverses universes; and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy about two friends who fall out while living on a small island, both of which received a total of 10 nominations.Also competing for the main BAFTA prize is Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” biopic and “Tár,” Todd Field’s drama starring Cate Blanchett as a conductor accused of sexual harassment.On its release in Britain, critics gave the Edward Berger-directed “All Quiet” rave reviews. Kevin Maher, writing in The Times of London, said that the movie was “more visceral, more spectacular and certainly more harrowing” than any previous adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of the same title. “See it on the biggest screen possible. Then watch it again on Netflix,” Mr. Maher added.American critics were less effusive. Ben Kenigsberg, reviewing the movie for The New York Times, said that it “aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.”Steven Spielberg Gets Personal in ‘The Fabelmans’The director’s latest movie, starring Michelle Williams, focuses on Sammy Fabelman, a budding filmmaker who is a lot like Spielberg himself.Review: “The Fabelmans” is “wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges,” our critic writes.Michelle Williams: With her portrayal of Mitzi, Sammy’s mother, the actress moves from minor-key naturalism to more stylized performances.Judd Hirsch: The actor has been singled out for his rousing performance in the film. It’s the latest chapter in a career full of anecdotes.Making ‘The Fabelmans’: In working on this semi-autobiographical movie, Spielberg confronted painful family secrets and what it means to be Jewish in America today.The 14 nods for “All Quiet” is the highest number of BAFTA nominations for a movie not in the English language, tied with Ang Lee’s 2000 action film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” according to BAFTA officials.Michelle Yeoh, left, and Jing Li in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.Allyson Riggs/A24Most of the nominations for “All Quiet” are in technical categories. But Berger also secured a best director nomination. He will compete for that award against the directors of “Banshees of Inisherin” (McDonagh), “Tár”(Field) and “Everything Everywhere All At Once” (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). Park Chan-wook, the director of “Decision to Leave,” about a policeman who falls in love with a suspect, also secured a best director nod, as did Gina Prince-Bythewood for “The Woman King,” about the women soldiers of the precolonial Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa. Prince-Bythewood is the only female director among the nominees.There was one upset among the best director nominees: Steven Spielberg didn’t get a nod for “The Fabelmans,” his semi-autobiographical tale of a budding filmmaker coping with a fractious home life, which won him best director at last week’s Golden Globes.The BAFTA nominations, which were announced in a YouTube broadcast, have long been seen as a bellwether for the Oscars because there is overlap between their voting bodies. Nominations for this year’s Academy Awards are scheduled to be unveiled on Tuesday and “All Quiet on the Western Front” has been tipped as a potential nominee in the best picture category.In recent years, the BAFTA organizers has made efforts to widen the diversity of nominees, including requiring voters to watch a variety of movies before they can make their selections.Last year, that led to several unexpected nominees in the best acting categories, many from low-budget British movies. But there are fewer upsets this year. The best actress nominees include Blanchett for “Tár,” Viola Davis for “The Woman King,” Yeoh for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and Emma Thompson for her role in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” in which she plays a widow who hires a prostitute.They will compete for that prize against Danielle Deadwyler for her role as Emmett Till’s mother in “Till” and Ana de Armas for “Blonde,” in which she plays Marilyn Monroe.The best actor category sees Austin Butler, the Golden Globe-winning star of “Elvis,” up against Colin Farrell, for his role in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” and Brendan Fraser, for his transformation into an obese, grief-stricken writing instructor in “The Whale.” Also nominated are the rising Irish star Paul Mescal, for his role as a young father taking his daughter on holiday in “Aftersun,” Daryl McCormack, for playing the prostitute in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” and Bill Nighy, for “Living,” about a bureaucrat given a life-changing medical diagnosis.Whether the nominations for “All Quiet” translate into trophies will be revealed on Feb. 19, when the BAFTA winners are scheduled to be announced in a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London. 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      ‘After Love’ Review: The Other Woman

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      In this intelligent melodrama by the director Aleem Khan, a British woman discovers her husband has been leading a double life.“After Love,” the first feature by the director Aleem Khan, envisions the act of mourning as an existential crisis, a passage through the eye of a storm. In the opening scene, the camera remains still, the frame boxy and rigid, as Mary (Joanna Scanlon), a 60-something white woman who had long ago converted to Islam, finds her husband, Ahmed, dead.For much of the first half of this intelligent melodrama, Mary remains silent, pensive. She clutches her grief close to her chest, even when — or especially because — she finds out her beloved, an English-Channel ferry captain, had been leading a double life.When she takes the bus from Dover to Calais to confront the other woman, she is mistaken for the new cleaning lady and runs with it, quietly taking the opportunity to investigate.At first, Genevieve (Nathalie Richard) appears to be a stereotypical mistress. A lithe Frenchwoman, she’s the physical opposite of the portly Mary, and perhaps annoyingly modern, too, in Mary’s traditionalist eyes. Then Solomon (Talid Ariss) appears, the angsty son of Genevieve and Ahmed, and a closeted gay teenager wounded by his father’s recurring absences. Childless Mary is wracked by envy and heartache even as she finds in this other home a fraught way of assuaging her loss, extending Ahmed’s life by inserting herself into the half he kept secret, touching his things, admiring his offspring. She imagines what he lacked here that always brought him back to her.Mary also withholds her true identity while forging intimacies with Genevieve and Solomon, a tense — if overused — dynamic that promises a dramatic reveal made all the more stinging by the solemn mood and the restrained emotion of Scanlon’s minimalistic performance.The film’s structure may be conventional, and yet its story is unusually rich, and uninterested in easy answers as to why people hurt the ones they love. Consider “After Love” a rarity; these days, a good adult drama — the kind whose power is premised on the intricacies and deceptions that shape our everyday relationships — is hard to come by.After LoveNot rated. In English, French and Urdu, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More