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      ‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’ Review: Swashbuckling Again

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      This animated sequel is a tidy charmer.It might be hard to believe it today, but there was a time when “Shrek” seemed like a breath of fresh air in the world of big-screen animation. Its salty humor and insistent pop culture knowingness was fun for a minute, before the sequels got nudging and formulaic. And then there was the whole shoving-Smash Mouth-down-our-throat issue. DreamWorks, the studio that concocted “Shrek,” soon enough became the anti-Pixar — in a bad way.So it’s a pleasant surprise that “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” the second feature film highlighting a beloved children’s lit character who became one of the favorite additions to the “Shrek” universe, is for the most part winning. It contains amusing jokes and has an old-fashioned impulse to tug at heart strings. This in spite of the video-game-suggestive plot construction, in which Puss and cohorts, aided by an animated map, race to a dark forest to find a wishing star, with other children’s lore characters in hot, malevolent pursuit.Puss is voiced by Antonio Banderas, whose purr can warm the cockles of any and all, as is also the case with Salma Hayek Pinault, who plays his love-and-hate interest Kitty Softpaws. Directed by Joel Crawford, the movie’s overall tone harks back not so much to prior DreamWorks pictures as it does to the “Fractured Fairy Tales” of the old TV cartoon “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” To this end, Goldilocks and the Three Bears are now a band of criminals (including voice work by the powerhouses Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone and Florence Pugh). This often charming movie will play particularly well if you’re a cat person. But who’s not?Puss in Boots: The Last WishRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Best Genre Movies of 2022

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      We look at the best in horror, science fiction, action and international films, all available to stream.Ready to go some gooey or gory places? Or see an expert performer navigate action films in an original way? Or perhaps you’d like to explore two knockout docs from around the world? Our genre movie streaming columnists have made their picks for the best of the year. Some movies you will have heard of. Others will be new to your view. Either way, prepare to head out on adventure with these across-the-spectrum offerings.Science FictionFor David Cronenberg, the call is always coming from inside the house: It is the body that attacks, betrays, seduces, takes over. Impervious to the subjects agitating current science-fiction movies (alternative universes, artificial intelligence, a dying Earth), the Canadian director went back to familiar turf with his latest, in which people mutate in unpredictable ways. Cronenberg has always known that the true frontier is not space but the evolution of flesh, consciousness and machine.In “Crimes of the Future,” Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) keeps growing new tumors that his acolyte, Caprice (Léa Seydoux), excises in public, via a repurposed autopsy device. The visual effects are not much more sophisticated than those in the director’s similarly themed “Videodrome” (1983) and “Existenz” (1999), but the squishy organic feel is exactly what makes the new film stand out from run-of-the-mill C.G.I. fests. That and, of course, its tone, coldly detached and darkly comic, as exemplified by Kristen Stewart’s deliciously arch turn as a fan of Tenser’s body artistry.“Everyone wants to be a performance artist these days,” we are told, and the movie zeros in on our narcissism, need for attention and terminal cynicism. Beyond the gross-out close-ups of puckering organs, what is most striking here is a rare cinematic quality nowadays: perversity. — ELISABETH VINCENTELLIStream “Crimes of the Future” on Hulu.HorrorRegina Lei in “The Sadness.”Fredrick Liu/Machi Xcelsior Studios/Shudder/AMCMy favorite horror movies this year laid off the flashy effects and instead gave me the unshakable willies the unshowy way: with creeping dread and uncertain stillness. That’s how “Watcher,” “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and “The Innocents” did it.But oh man, “The Sadness.” Rob Jabbaz’s transgressive zombie film was bombastically directed and exhaustingly gory — in other words, the year’s most gloriously brutal horror-watching experience.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.It’s set in Taipei, where two young lovers (Berant Zhu and Regina Lei) fight to reunite after a contagion turns people into sexually voracious flesh destroyers. The carnage almost never lets up, and it’s jaw-dropping to watch — like when the hungry infected turn a crowded subway car into a preposterously blood-slick Slip ‘N Slide. This scene, like the film overall, is demented and repulsive but also — and here’s the curveball — uncompromisingly feminist. It’s not easy to get a message across when the mayhem surrounding it is this maximalist, but Jabbaz figured it out.Listen to me carefully: If you’re at all iffy about being grossed out, stay away from this film. But if your constitution is solid, I dare you to jump into its exquisitely gruesome, grimly satirical maelstrom. — ERIK PIEPENBURGStream “The Sadness” on Shudder.ActionZoë Kravitz in “KIMI.”Warner Bros.Between Matt Reeves’ gripping neo-noir “The Batman” and Steven Soderbergh’s unnerving surveillance thriller “KIMI,” this year the actress Zoë Kravitz ruled the action genre. Her reign is uniquely impressive when one considers the disparate requirements of each role.As Selina Kyle/Catwoman in “The Batman,” the agile, shadowy equal to the caped crusader, she moves with a slender yet muscular physicality. As seen in her knowing runway stride, sultry possibilities become real and hand-to-hand confrontations are rendered acrobatic as Kravitz gracefully leaps and dives against thugs.Playing Angela, a blue-haired tech employee confined to her home office in “KIMI,” the actress turns in her former fluidity for an antisocial rigidity as she becomes the target of a predatory company intent on covering up the crime she discovered. In contrast to the skintight leather suit she wears as Catwoman, Kravitz packs a different but no less formidable punch in her long loose coat as she evades her pursuers during a series of arresting chase scenes.And yet, what binds these seemingly conflicting performances is how Kravitz’s expressive eyes translate the assuredness of Catwoman and the savviness of Angela. They’re a confirmation of her range as today’s premiere Black woman action hero. — ROBERT DANIELSStream both “The Batman” and “KIMI” on HBO Max.InternationalYoung residents of Paris’s suburbs in the documentary “We (Nous).”MubiEvery month, as I compile international films for my column, I am confronted with the arbitrariness of the boundaries that determine what we consider familiar and foreign, the home and the world. My two favorite films this year, both documentaries by women, challenge these delineations. In “A Night of Knowing Nothing” by Payal Kapadia, a fictional voice-over narration, chronicling the dissolve of the speaker’s inter-caste relationship, coalesces a series of twilit scenes of college life in India that range from nocturnal revels to protests against an increasingly repressive government. Culminating with CCTV footage of baton-wielding police descending upon a library full of students, the film shatters the fictions of democracy: The will of the people means little to the weapons of the state.In Alice Diop’s “We,” a train route that connects Paris’s suburbs to the city center forms the spine for the film’s intimate, itinerant glimpses of the working-class immigrants who live on the outskirts of France’s capital. Diop’s cinematic map bursts the contours of French identity and recenters them around those relegated to its margins.Each film, a whole fashioned from disparate pieces, offers an allegory for the nation itself, as a collective forged out of solidarity rather than superficial similarities. — DEVIKA GIRISHStream “A Night of Knowing Nothing” on the Criterion Channel. Stream “We” on Mubi. More

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      Adrienne Mancia, Influential Film Curator, Dies at 95

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      Her choices for exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music gave foreign directors and newcomers valuable exposure in New York.Adrienne Mancia, who scoured the world for significant films and brought them to New York as a longtime curator at the Museum of Modern Art and later at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, died on Sunday in Teaneck, N.J. She was 95.Her niece Francine Pozner Ehrenberg confirmed the death, in a care center.Ms. Mancia was instrumental in giving audiences some of their earliest looks at work by Wim Wenders of Germany, Manoel de Oliveira of Portugal and other notable directors, and helped rediscover archival gems and introduce subgenres like European animation and Cinema Novo from Brazil.She joined MoMA in 1964 as the secretary to Richard Griffith, the curator of the museum’s film department. Soon she was given the title of curatorial assistant and began organizing exhibitions; she rose to associate curator and then, in 1977, curator. She held that title until 1998, when she left for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which was opening the BAM Rose Cinemas and moving into film programming.Her choices were crucial in expanding the horizons of American cinephiles, particularly in her early decades at MoMA.“As this was before the age of videotape, internet and niche movie channels,” Jon Gartenberg, a curator of MoMA’s film archive for part of her tenure and a longtime friend, said by email, “the recognition for the films that she curated at MoMA garnered an outsized importance in terms of the New York film culture and beyond.”Other museums would take their cues from the programming at MoMA and in the New Directors/New Films series sponsored by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Film festivals throughout North America would pick up on Ms. Mancia’s finds, and her vast influence led to awards from foreign governments.“Adrienne Mancia has probably contributed more than any other person to the introduction of Italian cinema in America,” Renato Pachetti, the president of the RAI Corporation, which has financed numerous Italian films, said in 1988 when Ms. Mancia received the Order of the Republic of Italy. Four years earlier, France had given her similar recognition, naming her a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.Ms. Mancia traveled extensively in her search for worthy films, both new and old. The film critic J. Hoberman, who knew her for decades and worked with her as a curator on a 1991 exhibition, “Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds,” said Ms. Mancia had not been content with simply accepting the film packages that other countries would send.“She loved to work in archives,” he said in a phone interview. “She didn’t want them to tell her which films to show. She wanted to pick them out herself.”Her interests were not limited to foreign films, or to the highbrow end of the cinematic spectrum.“She was a cinephile,” Mr. Hoberman said, “but she was not a snob.”In 1979 she organized a seemingly un-MoMA-like retrospective of films from American International Pictures, which in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s specialized in low-budget, quickly made movies for the drive-in crowd like “Girls in Prison” (1956) and “Beach Party” (1963). It wasn’t just an exercise in kitsch.“It’s extraordinary to see how many filmmakers, writers and actors — now often referred to as ‘the new Hollywood’ — took their first creative steps at American International,” she said at the time.“Low budgets can force you to find fresh resources,” she continued, adding that there was an “energy to these feisty films that capture a certain very American quality.”In 1985 she presented an exhibition of films featuring Bugs Bunny and other Warner Bros. cartoon characters. Again, nostalgia wasn’t the point; the artistry represented by predigital film animation was.“This exhibition makes me very happy and very sad,” she told The New York Times. “It makes me happy because I love it and sad because it might very well be the end of a great era, the end of complete animation, done frame by frame with great care, approaching art.”Adrienne Phyllis Johnson was born on June 5, 1927, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her father, Harry Johnson, owned a furniture store, and her mother, Fae (Weintraub) Johnson, was a homemaker.She grew up in Paterson, N.J., and graduated from Eastside High School in 1944 after skipping a few grades. She received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin at 20, and later earned a master’s degree at Columbia University.Her niece said that she married Umberto Mancia in Italy, where she spent much of the 1950s. The marriage ended in divorce.At MoMA, she helped establish Cineprobe, a program that from 1968 to 2002 presented works by independent and experimental filmmakers and hosted discussions with them. Though many of Ms. Mancia’s exhibitions were more mainstream, she especially enjoyed spotlighting new and little-known works and directors.“To discover people who have new ways of saying things with film is thrilling,” she told The Daily News of New York in 1987. “It keeps the idea alive that there are still surprises out there.”Ms. Mancia, who lived in Manhattan, is survived by a sister, Merle Johnson Pozner.Those who worked with her said that filmmakers weren’t the only ones who benefited from Ms. Mancia; she also influenced many younger curators.“For me, Adrienne was a major bridge between creation and curation,” Mr. Gartenberg said. “Early in my career, working at such an august institution as MoMA, Adrienne pulled me aside and reminded me that without filmmakers, none of us would have any jobs. She instilled in me a sense of humbleness that my mission was to support their creativity in my curatorial work.”Upon her death, Ron Magliozzi, a longtime MoMA staff member who is now a curator in the film department, sent an email to colleagues.“If only a little of Adrienne’s unmatched passion for cinema rubbed off on you,” it said, “it was enough to fuel your career.” More

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      ‘Bardo’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      How ‘Bardo’ Turns Collapsing Into Choreography

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      Alejandro G. Iñárritu narrates a sequence from his Netflix film “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths,” where multiple people drop to the ground in Mexico City.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.In one of the many ambitious scenes from “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” (streaming on Netflix), the lead character, Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), comes across a woman who has collapsed on a Mexico City sidewalk. Most passers-by don’t seem to notice her. When someone asks if she is dead, she replies, “I’m not dead. I’m missing.” Soon after, other individuals, one by one, begin collapsing on the sidewalk and in the streets. By the end of this fever dream of a sequence, hundreds of people are on the ground.Narrating the moment, the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu said he wanted to call attention to the thousands of Mexicans who have gone missing over the last decade. He said the scene required 300 extras along with 20 dancers who, guided by the choreography of Priscila Hernández, fell in a precise way that seemed like a dangerous collapse.Read the review of “Bardo.”Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘The Super 8 Years’ Review: Annie Ernaux’s Celluloid Memories

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      In this wistful movie, the French writer and Nobel laureate revisits her life with help from her son, who’s also the director.The film’s images have faded, but the memories they’ve stirred up are vivid and full of feeling. In one shot, a tiny boy pushes a big wheelbarrow. In another, an old man and woman pose with the awkwardness of an earlier generation that never learned how to look at ease before any camera. And then there is the vision of the young woman at a desk, a pen resting in one hand, who gazes at the camera with a tight, unwelcoming smile. I like to think that she’s impatient to get back to the papers on the desk, to get back to her writing and to herself.The woman — the French writer Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October — doesn’t smile much in “The Super 8 Years,” a wistful memory movie that she made with her son David Ernaux-Briot. On Dec. 7, in her Nobel Prize lecture, Ernaux spoke about her roots in provincial France, her love of books and desire to write, a yearning that was thwarted by her position as a woman. “Married with two children,” she said, “a teaching position and full responsibility for household affairs, each day I moved further and further away from writing and my promise to avenge my people.”You see that woman now and again in “The Super 8 Years,” which was made before she became a Nobel laureate — what timing! Directed by Ernaux-Briot, and written and narrated by Ernaux, it consists of somewhat degraded-looking home movies from the early 1970s to the early ’80s. In the winter of 1972, as Ernaux explains in voice-over, she and her husband, Philippe Ernaux, bought a Bell & Howell Super 8 camera and projector. Years later, she and Ernaux-Briot revisited these fragile mementos and, with some deft editing, sound effects and music (the original material is silent), created this short, potent, quietly elegiac feature.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.For Ernaux and her husband, the Super 8 camera was “the ultimate desired object,” more coveted than a dishwasher or even a color television. “Film truly captured life and people,” Ernaux explains, though how it captured life and people was complicated. That’s evident the first time you see the younger Ernaux in “The Super 8 Years” entering a house while carrying two cardboard boxes. She’s wearing a dark, hooded coat and an awkward, inscrutable smile, as if she were ill at ease about being (caught) on camera. Or maybe she’s embarrassed by (or for) Philippe, who, as Ernaux explains, shot most of the home movies.Ernaux writes about this image and its complicated smile in her exquisite 2008 memoir “The Years,” which works as a companion piece to “The Super 8 Years.” In her book, Ernaux asserts that there is “something ascetic and sad, or disenchanted” about her younger self’s expression in this scene, adding that her smile lacks spontaneity. I instead see shyness or just self-consciousness, especially in how she looks at the camera only to cast her eyes downward. But this isn’t my memory, and as Ernaux writes in “The Years,” one of the greatest ways to foster self-knowledge is “a person’s ability to discern how they view the past.”For a time, Super 8 was a way for many to view a present that would soon be the past. Introduced by Kodak in 1965, the film format was a significant player in the moving-image revolution that swept the 20th century, turning amateurs (who could afford it) into moviemakers and everyday life into a global celluloid archive. This archival impulse dovetails with Ernaux’s approach in “The Years,” which is partly organized around photos of her from different eras that prompt cascades of words about her life, her family, its town, the region, the country and beyond. A similar impulse shapes “The Super 8 Years,” in which Ernaux insistently tethers images of her former domestic life, with its gentle and agonized ebb and flow, to larger world affairs, to questions of feminism and other liberation struggles.Instructively for a memoir, Ernaux almost entirely avoids using “I” in “The Years,” preferring “we” and often referring to herself as “she.” In “The Super 8 Years,” the “we” usually seems to mean her family, and she switches pronouns freely as if to suggest the mutability of identity. In one section about a vacation in Morocco, Ernaux says, “I thought of the finished manuscript in my desk drawer.” Soon, though, over images from Germany, she refers to her younger self like a friend. “She is 33 and doesn’t yet know,” Ernaux says, that the manuscript she’s submitted “will be published as ‘Cleaned Out,’” referring to her 1974 debut novel.At one point in “The Super 8 Years,” Ernaux ponders what story is being told in this “parade of images” as the movie cuts from a child to her and then to exploding fireworks. Words were needed, she continues, to give meaning to these “snippets of family life invisibly recorded inside the history of the era.” This reminds me of her observation in “The Years” that memory never stops. “It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.” Memory is also, I think, one reason we watch movies like this, which with its lapidary narration and melancholic images — with its laughing children, its difficult smiles and its ghosts — movingly pairs you with Ernaux and with the world that she has so brilliantly made.The Super 8 YearsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Quiet Girl’ Review: Welcome Home

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      This luminous drama, Ireland’s entry for best international feature, may not be holiday fare, but it does express the season’s benevolent ethos.A body lies still in a field as girls from afar shout, “Cait! Cait!” For a beat, “The Quiet Girl” sounds an uneasy note. It won’t be the last time this luminous Irish drama — directed by Colm Bairead and based on Claire Keegan’s short story “Foster” — teases dark concerns.Cait (Catherine Clinch, in a splendid debut) lives in a crammed, clamorous house with her parents, sisters, baby brother and another sibling on the way. Which is why her exhausted mother (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) and idle father (Michael Patric) whisper about sending the 9-year-old to stay with her mother’s people.When Cait’s father delivers her to the Cinnsealaches’ farmhouse, the viewer senses — even if Cait doesn’t yet — that she has won the lottery, or at least been granted a well-ordered reprieve. Eibhlin and Sean Cinnsealach (Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett) shimmer with compassion but also a profound ache. The availability of a child’s clothes and the trains chugging across the wallpaper of the room Cait sleeps in signal a loss that the film takes its time to address.In Cait’s encounters with nature, Bairead and the cinematographer Kate McCullough capture the first-person perspective of Keegan’s story: leaves flutter and flash by; a ladle sets the still surface of a well in gently rippling motion. They also go beyond it. Although “The Quiet Girl” — Ireland’s entry for the best international feature Oscar — is not holiday fare, there may not be a movie more expressive of the season’s benevolent ethos than this hushed work about kith and kindness.The Quiet GirlNot rated. In Irish Gaelic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Children of the Mist’ Review: Stolen Youth

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      A documentarian traces a Hmong girl’s experience with a custom that permits boys to detain girls with the intention of marriage.In the disturbing Vietnamese documentary “Children of the Mist,” a plucky 12-year-old girl named Di is abducted after a Lunar New Year celebration. Her parents are frustrated at best — who will feed the pigs when they go drinking? But their response is not unusual in this remote mountain region of northern Vietnam, where the Hmong — one of the country’s largest ethnic groups — reside.“Bride-napping” is a Hmong custom that permits boys, often with the help of their families, to nab girls and detain them for three days. Throughout this time, the girl can decide whether she wants to go through with the marriage, though in practice, rejections can be violently challenged. That’s the norm in these parts: Di’s mother and older sister were bride-napped as well.Di, however, is the first person in her family to receive a formal education; she’s quick, chatty and understands all too well the pitfalls of her community’s patriarchal mores. Still, she’s a child herself, glued to her phone when she’s not working the field or cooking meals, and prone to engaging in online flirtations.The filmmaker Ha Le Diem shot “Children of the Mist” over the course of three years, integrating herself into Di’s life in a way that complicates the documentary’s otherwise unobtrusive, observational approach. When Di cozies up to a smitten boy, Diem’s camera watches them walk away. The boy says not to follow them, shouting back from a distance that he has no intention of kidnapping Di.Then he does, though Di has no intention of getting married. Diem is told not to interfere, but at one crucial moment, she must. It’s an upsetting scene, though one senses that without the presence of the camera, Di would have fared far worse.Children of the MistNot rated. In Hmong and Vietnamese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More