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    ‘Old Dads’ Review: Bill Burr Rails Against Modern Life as a Dad

    A curmudgeon, starting fatherhood late, has lots to say about the world.Don’t get your hopes up: This is not a documentary about Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Mick Jagger. “Old Dads” is the feature directorial debut of Bill Burr, a popular 50-something comedian with a shaved head and a light beard who plays Jack, who came to fatherhood late.Jack narrates in a voice not unlike that of Burr’s standup persona, responding to the issues that confound the contemporary straight white male with profane non-sequiturs. Jack muses that he can’t leave his child in the car to pop into a convenience store, but that said store is free to sell hormone-packed junk foods, and that nobody cares because they’re addicted to internet pornography. I’m paraphrasing.As is customary in today’s Guy Comedies, Jack is part of a trio — with Bokeem Woodbine and Bobby Cannavale, who play his business partners, Mike and Conner. They’ve just sold their successful concern to an unctuous young start-up bro (Miles Robbins) whose “disrupter” shtick provides fodder for more modern-life-is-rubbish humor.The movie emphasizes Jack’s near-constant indignation about adult scooter riders and parking as much as it does his parenting concerns. Jack and his wife, Leah, are currently worried that their son might not get a proper kindergarten recommendation. As such, Jack locks horns with a principal (Rachael Harris) who, like many of the parents who surround Jack and Leah, is a parody of both 1980s-style New Age bromide-spouters and insipid practitioners of today’s “woke” philosophies.Many scenes are predicated on Jack’s eye-rolling, then shouty reactions to phrases like “inclusive adjacent” or “check your privilege.” Burr is skilled at this, for sure. And Woodbine and Cannavale, who are better actors overall, slide into Burr’s mode with ease. The results will prove satisfactory and maybe cathartic for his fans.Old DadsRated R for language themes, nudity, more language. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Vincent Patrick, Chronicler of Hustlers and Mobsters, Dies at 88

    A novelist and screenwriter, he wrote “The Pope of Greenwich Village” and “Family Business” and brought them both to the big screen.Vincent Patrick, an author and screenwriter who set pins at a bowling alley, peddled Bibles door to door and helped start a mechanical engineering firm before finding critical success with his first novel, “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” at 44, died on Oct. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia, his son Richard said.The son of a Bronx pool-hall owner and numbers runner, Mr. Patrick was raised in a milieu sprinkled with the grifters, hustlers and mobsters who would eventually become characters in his novels, which also included “Family Business” (1985) and “Smoke Screen” (1999).In manner and accent, Mr. Patrick seemed like a character he might have dreamed up himself. A 1999 profile in The Los Angeles Times noted that “his voice has that subterranean rumble of an accent, a sound that good character actors try to emulate when playing retired cops or tough but fair patriarchs.”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of Charlie, the down-on-his-luck night manager of a Manhattan saloon, whose cousin Paulie sucks him and a locksmith friend into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.“The connective thread is the sad state of their lives, their disenchantment and the curse of being dreamers,” Joe Flaherty wrote in a review in The New York Times. The novel, he added, “mines territory rarely encountered in fiction and, in the vernacular of his tough, streetwise characters, delivers a sweetheart of a book.”“Family Business,” the tale of three generations of hustlers from an ethnically mixed New York family, also explored the psychological allure of the big score. Jessie McMullen, the con-man grandfather; Vito, his son, who is in the wholesale meat business; and Adam, his M.I.T.-educated grandson, all find themselves drawn into a risky caper to swipe a plant cell from a California laboratory and sell it to a rival genetic engineering company.“Mr. Patrick could have drawn these characters with broad strokes, concentrating on the heist, and still have come up with a decent thriller,” Arthur Krystal wrote in The Times. “Instead he chose to provide them with interesting lives and, in the cases of Vito and Adam, with the intelligence and self-doubts of men uncomfortable with their moral upbringing.”Mr. Patrick himself was quoted by The Times: “There’s a colorfulness about their value systems that makes them attractive to a writer,” he said, “a willingness to take risks and an ability to meet life sort of head-on and wrestle with it and not retreat into a very secure position.”Some critics were less kind to the feature film versions of both books, which Mr. Patrick himself adapted. “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts, was “less a story than a display of acting mannerisms,” the critic Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.Reviewing “Family Business” (1989), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick, Mr. Canby found a paucity of wit. He also found the idea that three actors so physically dissimilar could be blood relatives to be a stretch.Still, Mr. Patrick understood the compromises required to make it in Hollywood, his son Richard said in a phone interview. His father, he said convinced the producer Scott Rudin that he would not treat his novels as sacrosanct works of literature, telling him, “I have no compunction at all about cannibalizing my own work in order to bring it to the big screen.’”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of a down-on-his-luck saloon night manager who gets sucked into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.Seaview BooksVincent Francis Patrick was born on Jan. 19, 1935, in the Bronx, the middle of three children of Vincent and Angela (Hunt) Patrick. His mother was a legal secretary. Growing up, he dreamed of being a writer, and he churned out short stories during his teens.School, however, was another matter. He chafed at the strict discipline at the Roman Catholic schools he attended, and he dropped out of Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx after his junior year. In order to make ends meet, he set pins at a Bronx bowling alley before taking a job selling Bibles door to door in Bronx apartment buildings.As he recounted in a 1999 performance at the storytelling series staged by the Moth, he abandoned the job after watching his sales partner persuade a housewife to raid her 7-year-old daughter’s piggy bank for the $7 down payment on a fancy leather-embossed Bible. “I didn’t know yet who I was,” he told the audience. “But I knew who I was not.”In 1954 he married Carole Unger, and the couple had two sons. With a family to support, Mr. Patrick earned his high school diploma and put himself through New York University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He and a partner then started a successful firm that designed, among other things, an assembly line for caskets.By his mid-30s, however, the call of a literary career had become too loud to ignore, so he left engineering to take another stab at writing professionally. “I wasn’t really happy, and I knew if I didn’t begin to write something, it wasn’t going to be written,” he told People magazine in 1979.Mr. Patrick hammered out a draft of his first book while working as a bartender at an Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, where his son said he drew inspiration by rubbing elbows with the underworld types from Little Italy who would hang out there.From left, Mickey Rourke, Daryl Hannah and Eric Roberts in the film version of “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), for which Mr. Patrick wrote the screenplay.MGM, via Everett CollectionWhile he was initially drawn to screenwriting as a means to adapt his own work, Richard Patrick said, it soon became a successful side career. Among other projects, he contributed to the script for “The Devil’s Own” (1997), starring Harrison Ford as a police officer and Brad Pitt as an Irish Republican Army member hiding out in Staten Island, and wrote the two-part television movie “To Serve and Protect” (1999).He was also hired to write early treatments for “Beverly Hills Cop” and “The Godfather III,” although both projects ended up in other hands.In addition to his son Richard, Mr. Patrick is survived by his wife; another son, Glen; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.Hollywood, Mr. Patrick once said, was both a fabled land of opportunity and a trap. “Once you start,” he told The Los Angeles Times, “it’s hard to get out.” Discussing his third novel, “Smoke Screen,” a thriller involving international terrorism and a deadly virus, he admitted that his screenwriting work had slowed his literary output.“Yeah, this is my third novel in 20 years,” he said. “But I think when you look at it, from the point of sheer craft, I’ve gotten better. And that’s because, Hollywood or not, I write every day. It’s different writing, but it all boils down to plot and characters.” More

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    Annette Bening Knows a Thing or Two About Difficult Women

    In our 2023 Greats issue, out Oct. 22, T celebrates four talents across music, film, art and fashion whose careers are a master class in curiosity, composure and defiance. Whenever I read the profiles for this, our annual Greats issue, I’m always struck by the same thing: how many of our subjects say that their […] More

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    ‘Waiting for the Light to Change’ Review: Listless in a Lakeside Cabin

    In her feature debut, the director Linh Tran tries to capture the longing and inertia between adolescence and adulthood.Unspoken longings charge the atmosphere of a chilly beach getaway in the elegantly titled “Waiting for the Light to Change,” directed by Linh Tran. The film, which won the Grand Jury prize at the Slamdance Film Festival this year (a Sundance alternative showcasing microbudget works), observes a group of 20-somethings as they lounge about a lakeside cabin during a weeklong vacation in Michigan.The story hews closest to Amy (Jin Park) as she reconnects with her best friend Kim (Joyce Ha) after some time apart. Complicating their reunion are Amy’s lingering feelings for Kim’s boyfriend, Jay (Sam Straley), and Amy’s recent dramatic weight loss. During the trip, spliff-smoking breaks and strolls through the dunes offer some variation amid the interminable idling, which seems to take the same sluggish forms no matter whether they are drunk, high or hung over.There are traces of films by Eric Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo in this lonely and sometimes drowsy drama, which unfolds almost entirely in a series of static long takes. In her feature debut, Tran is intermittently successful at capturing the listlessness that defines that liminal space between adolescence and adulthood; as “Waiting” progresses, malaise envelops her characters like the gray fog over the shoreline. Since the dialogue can feel stilted, the film’s best scenes are nearly wordless: silent surveys of the wreckage of things unsaid.Waiting for the Light to ChangeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘To Kill a Tiger’ Review: The Survivor Who Refused to Be Shamed

    In this unflinching documentary, a young girl in rural India and her father fight an entrenched village culture to seek justice for her brutal rape.Nisha Pahuja’s documentary “To Kill a Tiger” opens with a startling image: a 13-year-old girl braids her hair in close-up as her father relates, in gutting voice-over, how she was raped by three men. Pahuja had planned to mask the girl’s face in post-production, but when Kiran (her pseudonym in the film) saw the footage at age 18, she chose to reveal herself in the film. It’s a defiant gesture on her part, to refuse the shroud of shame.“To Kill a Tiger” is a film bristling with such invigorating defiance. It follows Kiran and her parents, who live in a village in northeastern India, as they seek justice with the help of activists from Srijan Foundation, an advocacy organization. Interviews with other villagers reveal the tribalist, deeply patriarchal values that ensnare Kiran. Both men and women chastise her for her supposed irresponsibility and suggest brazenly that she marry one of her rapists to restore her “honor” and the village’s harmony.Kiran and her family are heroes, but this isn’t a simple tale of heroism. The film lays bare the uneasy and inadequate avenues available to survivors seeking justice. Is the long ordeal that pushes the family into debt and forces Kiran to repeatedly rehash her trauma making a difference? Is a fight that pits the family against their entire community worth it? Does the imprisonment of the perpetrators offer any real succor to the victim or upend the patriarchy?“To Kill a Tiger” doesn’t offer any easy answers. But in staying close to Kiran’s father, who refuses to let his daughter bow her head, and to the girl, who speaks with hope and flinty confidence, one thing is clear: The revolution begins at home.To Kill a TigerNot rated. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Persian Version’ Review: A Bumpy Road Out of Iran

    An Iranian American woman navigates her family life and her personal life in this semi-autobiographical feature from Maryam Keshavarz.“I dreamed of being the Iranian Martin Scorsese,” confesses Leila (Layla Mohammadi), the lead character in “The Persian Version,” Maryam Keshavarz’s semi-autobiographical reverie about a rising Iranian American director and her tumultuous family life.The film won the audience award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the second of Keshavarz’s movies to take that prize. (Her first, the 2011 queer romance “Circumstance,” launched her career — and got her banned from Iran.)The movie opens at a costume party where Leila sports a niqab over a pink bikini, her cultural contradictions on brazen display. Leila, reeling from a split with her wife, Elena (Mia Foo), has a one-night stand with Maximillian (Tom Byrne) and becomes pregnant. To her conservative parents and eight brothers, Leila’s impending motherhood is yet another of her outrageous scandals.Throughout, Keshavarz wields her Scorsese influences. There are disorienting time-jumps, abrupt edits and heavy narration paired with shots of Leila strutting through New York City. But Keshavarz samples other genres, too, from westerns and twee indies to go-for-broke slapstick. Maximillian, the would-be boyfriend, stammers adorably like he’s in a Hugh Grant rom-com and spends most of the film in drag. (He’s playing the lead in a production of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” at the time.)The result is a personal film that feels oddly impersonal. The tonal clutter overwhelms Keshavarz’s genuinely interesting story. On the page, it might have sounded clever to have Leila hide under a gorilla mask when she bumps into her ex-wife at the grocery store. Onscreen, however, the gag feels contrived and distracting.The script most resembles a herky-jerky one-woman show, a string of memories and cheeky, self-conscious declarations. Keshavarz has propped up her story line with refrains that don’t quite coalesce. Her breakup with Elena is echoed by her description of the acrimony between Iran and America: “Like any great romance, it ended in a bitter divorce,” she says, an analogy she uses twice. Her father, Ali (Bijan Daneshmand), spends the movie in a hospital awaiting a heart transplant; her mother, Shireen (Niousha Noor), is deemed “heartless.”Gradually, Keshavarz shifts her focus from Leila, essentially her fictional self, to Shireen as a way to re-examine her own mother, Azar Keshavarz, through adult eyes. The sequences that star Shireen are fantastic. The first segment, set in the early 1990s, charts her climb from uneducated immigrant housewife to real estate dynamo. The film also goes back to the late ’60s when Shireen was a rural child bride. We’re staggered by her journey to empowerment, a grueling stretch of which shows her desperate, alone and pregnant, riding a donkey. Kamand Shafieisabet, the phenomenal teenage actor who portrays young Shireen, continues to live in Iran. She deserves a global spotlight.Keshavarz seems so awed by her mother’s resilience that she only hesitantly sketches a through-line from that tale to her own. Instead, having shuffled through scores of ideas, Keshavarz ends the film saluting all women fighting to live on their own terms — a struggle raging in Iran and beyond.The Persian VersionRated R for language and sexual references. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Another Body’ Review: A Cowardly New World

    This film, directed by Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, follows a woman as she attempts to find the person responsible for posting her face on a deepfake porn video.When Taylor Klein, an engineering student, receives a message from a friend advising her to open a link, she’s cautious. Eventually she clicks, and finds herself staring back at herself. Taylor’s face has been stolen to make a deepfake video, which was posted with her personal information on a pornography site.The documentary “Another Body” takes us into this cowardly new world, one in which the images of a person — most often a woman — can be lifted from social media and digitally repurposed.When Taylor contacted the police to report what she thought was a crime, she didn’t get far. Currently only five states have laws making nonconsensual deepfake pornography a criminal act.The film, directed by Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, follows Taylor as she attempts to track down the person responsible. Along the way, she discovers two others whose faces have also been used for deepfake porn: Julia, a woman she recognizes from college, and Gibi, an ASMR actor and streamer.The twist is that Taylor’s and Julia’s names are pseudonyms and that they are portrayed by “face veil” actors (that technology came to the fore in the documentary “Welcome to Chechnya”).“Another Body” is most persuasive when experts weigh in on the reality-upending aspects of deepfake technology and image-based sex abuse. That the documentary does this by utilizing some of that technology to protect Taylor and Julia’s identities raises its own ethical questions — ones that, even with the filmmakers’ compassion and transparency, “Another Body” doesn’t quite resolve.Another BodyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Silver Dollar Road’ Review: Black Land Loss Is Still Happening

    The 20th century saw a mass dispossession of Black farmers. This intimate documentary focuses on one family’s recent battle to keep their home in North Carolina.Sixty five acres on the coast of North Carolina were purchased by Mamie Reels Ellison’s great-grandfather in the aftermath of slavery. That land on Silver Dollar Road became a home, a place to farm and fish, and a sanctuary, stretching from its pine and gum-tree woods to a sandy beach, where the Reels family relaxed for generations.By the 2000s, though, the Reels homestead was in jeopardy. Developers had claimed the waterfront property, and Mamie’s two brothers, Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, lost eight years in jail for refusing to vacate their houses. Directed by Raoul Peck, “Silver Dollar Road” adapts a 2019 ProPublica feature by Lizzie Presser into an intimate portrait of the family’s forbearance in the face of dispossession.Mamie and her niece Kim Duhon lead the family’s effort to hold onto the land, but while dipping into the legal morass, Peck’s film is more about sitting with the two women and their relatives, hearing out their fears and hopes as their ancestors’ land sits in limbo. Peck, who directed the fierce and engrossing James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” refrains from systemic-style analysis to let the family speak for themselves about their experience.A birthday gathering for 95-year-old Gertrude Reels sets the tone early on for the family’s tight-knit circles and sense of continuity. Interviews with Mamie and Kim evoke fond memories of their childhood haven, illustrated with faded photographs; and Melvin, a fisherman with a winning flair, gives us an on-the-ground sense of the land, roaming through woods and waterways. (Peck draws on 90-odd hours of footage originally shot by Mayeta Clark for ProPublica.)Their legal trouble dates back to the 1970s when a Reels patriarch, suspicious of Southern courts, died without leaving a will. His land was passed to his children, but one of the co-owning relatives secretly sold the land to a developer through a legal loophole. It’s only one maneuver among many that have been exploited in a vicious history of Black land dispossession, as the film’s concise captions make clear: Over the course of the 20th century, Black Americans lost about 90 percent of their farmland.The film’s second half shifts to the battle to free Melvin and Licurtis from a sentence whose substantial length feels racially motivated. But Peck doesn’t give the film over to talking-head experts explaining how the Reels are symptomatic victims. Their weariness and sadness comes through in interviews with them, but they’re also palpably borne up by love and belief. (Animated intertwining branches in the film’s illustrations evoke their family tree.)While videotaping outsiders on the Reels property during the brothers’ time in jail, Mamie minces zero words about racism among whites. But no one here is defined by this struggle, and amid the looming threats to a cherished home, Peck’s accomplishment is to let the Reels family own their emotional space.Silver Dollar RoadRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More