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      ‘Hannah Ha Ha’ Review: Making Ends Meet

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      The directors Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky offer a warm examination of what it means to do meaningful work in a world that undervalues it.The aimlessness of young adulthood is well-trodden ground in the world of indie cinema, but few movies offer the nuanced, lived-in portrayal seen in “Hannah Ha Ha.” The film follows the day-to-day life of Hannah (an illuminating Hannah Lee Thompson), a 25-year-old in small-town Massachusetts. She engages in odd jobs around the area, farming vegetables and teaching guitar lessons, while living with her aging father, Avram (Avram Tetewsky). Under the pressure of her rise-and-grind yuppie older brother, Paul (Roger Mancusi), who reminds her she’ll be booted off Dad’s health insurance on her impending 26th birthday, Hannah attempts to find herself a “real job,” first in the jargon-fueled tech world her brother occupies and then, after that fails, the service industry.Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky, the filmmaking duo who wrote and directed the movie, are natives of the semirural townships southwest of Boston, and their familiarity with the region and its people is what makes “Hannah Ha Ha” transcend — or, in many cases, take full advantage of — its shoestring budget. Like Hannah herself, the film views the world through a soft-focus lens. It lingers on scenes of friendship and community that have little to do with being on the clock: people at bonfires, in a mom-and-pop creamery, going on weekend bike rides through the woods. During a smoke break at her mind-numbing fast-food night shift, Hannah gazes across the parking lot and quietly observes the characters, mundane or not, who have chosen to pull their cars into the strip mall that evening.The past few years have led many to question their relationship to employment, and why being a kind and caring member of one’s community isn’t enough to make a living wage. As Hannah struggles to answer that question herself, she regularly listens to the voice of her uncle (Peter Cole), a radio D.J. who hosts a call-in show popular with local misanthropes. It’s unclear whether his listenership stretches much further than that. But to a chosen few, his work is essential.Hannah Ha HaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Consecration’ Review: Something Unholy

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      This unsatisfying horror film follows a woman’s search for clues after her brother’s mysterious death at a seaside convent.“Consecration,” a new horror film from the director Christopher Smith, begins with a cryptic declaration from its protagonist, Grace (Jena Malone): “My brother used to believe I had a guardian angel. And I used to believe in nothing. Now, I’m not so sure.” During this voice-over, an older nun saunters over and points a gun at the camera, which is to say, at Grace’s face.The film eventually gets to what prompts this toothlessly jarring shot, but the payoff isn’t particularly satisfying. Grace, an eye doctor, travels to the seaside convent where her brother, a priest, died. Her brother, a suspect in the murder of a fellow priest, is believed to have taken his own life, but Grace has her doubts. Suspicious of the nuns, stern traditionalists led by a dour mother superior, Grace begins looking for evidence of foul play. While she searches, she’s haunted by apparitions and visions of death, and the film often flashes back to her grim childhood in which the religious and the darkly supernatural were entwined.Yet the mythos of Grace’s past isn’t filled in thoughtfully or interestingly enough to buoy the present story’s mysteries and twists. The plot, as a result, can’t quite find its momentum; it doesn’t help that most of the film’s scares fall flat on a visual and technical level. Malone does what she can to keep it all afloat, and Danny Huston lends a bit of gravitas as Father Romero, a visiting priest who may or may not be there to help Grace. Either way, it’s not much of a thrill to find out.ConsecrationRated R. Bloody, violent content and some language. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Attachment’ Review: Demon Lover

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      Mysterious behavior leads to an over-familiar reveal in this supernatural horror movie.Shacking up soon after meeting up could strain any relationship, but “Attachment” stirs in the extra spice of demonic possession. In Gabriel Bier Gislason’s compact supernatural story, Maja (Josephine Park) and Leah (Ellie Kendrick) move into Leah’s London flat not long after a meet-cute in a Danish library. Their sole neighbor is Leah’s mother, Chana (Sofie Grabol), whose extreme protectiveness lights a slow-burning fuse of dread.Leah suffers from strange seizures and fugue states, and Maja starts clashing with Chana, an Orthodox Jewish homemaker, over how best to take care of her. The mutual suspicion simmers as Maja hears creaks in the night and finds Chana’s habits peculiar, though a welcome streak of light humor lets the whole story keep a toe in rom-com waters. (By chance this film arrives shortly after a recent, creepier entry in dybbuk horror, “The Offering.”)When a neighborhood bookseller, Lev (a wry David Dencik), hints to Maja that something evil is afoot, a mystery develops as to whether Leah’s secretive mother has her daughter’s best interests in mind. But this buildup keeps us waiting for a reveal that then feels instantly familiar, despite nice subtle sinister touches in Kendrick’s performance.One could imagine another version of “Attachment” that identifies the nature of Leah’s situation early on, and then watches the couple cope with it. As it is, the ticktock horror plotting muffles the romantic spark that brought Maja and Leah together in the first place — the thrill replaced by a lukewarm chill.AttachmentNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

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      ‘The Blue Caftan’ Review: Secrets of Silk

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      In this luscious Moroccan drama, a tailor and his wife strive to save their craft, and their unusual companionship, in the face of illness and change.There’s something downright lustful about the opening scenes of “The Blue Caftan,” which show rustling silks being caressed in close-up by gentle hands. It’s clear right away that this Moroccan drama from Maryam Touzani, about a middle-aged couple who sell hand-sewn caftans, has something to say about desire. But who is the object of whose desire remains tantalizingly mysterious for much of the film, cloaked by the characters’ (and the camera’s) nearly erotic affection for a dying craft.The film begins as a love letter to the traditional tailoring that Halim (Saleh Bakri) learned from his father — creations that Mina (Lubna Azabal) hawks at the front of their shop, knowing just when to flatter and when to reprimand a customer. Their store feels like a crumbling oasis in a sea of change: Machine-made clothes pose increasing competition to Halim’s patient artistry, while Mina’s health worsens, making her frail. They’ve hired an apprentice, Youssef (Ayoub Missioui), to help, but his presence only exposes the delicate foundations of their relationship. When Youssef undresses, Halim gazes at him longingly, and Mina winces.“The Blue Caftan” sets up what seems like a love triangle primed to boil over, but the movie remains at a simmer throughout, eschewing confrontations for gentler, more complicated forms of connection. Mina can be stern and jealous, but she is empathetic to the closeted Halim, telling him in a crucial moment that he’s the “purest man” she knows. Halim, for his part, cannot reciprocate her desire but showers her with care. As her illness changes the couple’s companionship and their craft — and draws Youssef into both — Touzani’s film becomes an ode to the many kinds of love that persist, even in an unforgiving world.The Blue CaftanNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Cinema Sabaya’ Review: Conversations and Compassion in a Small Town in Israel

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      Israel’s Oscar entry is a documentary-style chamber piece about a video workshop for Arab and Jewish women whose conclusions feel, well, tired.“Cinema Sabaya,” Israel’s international feature entry for this year’s Oscars (though not nominated), looks and feels like a behind-the-scenes documentary. It’s not — the actors aren’t playing themselves and the drama is scripted. But the film resides in the porous boundary between fiction and reality, mounting a chamber piece of sorts not unlike “Women Talking,” but enriched by naturalistic flair that eschews didacticism.Dana Ivgy plays Rona, a filmmaker from Tel Aviv who is running a video workshop for Arab and Jewish women in a small town in northern Israel. The film’s director, Orit Fouks Rotem, was inspired by her mother’s participation in a similar course; she went on to organize sessions for other women, which — along with testimonies from the actors — inform her fictional rendition. In “Cinema Sabaya,” each member is given a hand-held device to complete assignments that involve capturing moments from their lives beyond the classroom. But using themselves as the grist of the mill for their training means revealing themselves as well — their struggles with tradition, sexuality, domesticity — while their homework is often blown up on a big screen and shared with the others.Discussions that double as group therapy sessions are captured with observational distance, while hand-held home-video footage punctuates these subdued symposiums, adding to the film’s documentary-style designs.Tensions arise by dint of the group’s diversity. The punchy Nahed (Aseel Farhat) is a student and nonpracticing Muslim, while Awatef (Marlene Bajali) is a septuagenarian traditionalist. The hesitant Souad (Joanna Said) is trapped in an unhappy marriage, which triggers conjugal horror stories from a divorced woman, Yelena (Yulia Tagil), and the remarried Gila (Ruth Landau).The elephant in the room is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its attendant biases, which emerge during a heated session in which the bubbly Eti (Orit Samuel), a middle-aged Jewish woman, confesses to her fear of Islamic terrorists. The workshop is ultimately a unity exercise premised on the trite axiom that conversation breeds compassion. It’s not an unwelcome reminder, and Rotem’s organic approach steers clear of icky idealism, but its conclusions nevertheless feel worn out. Talking helps, sure, but getting people in the same room is too often the stuff of fiction.Cinema SabayaNot rated. In Hebrew, Arabic and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Civil Dead’ Review: Spirit in Disguise

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      In this gentle ghost story, an aimless photographer meets an old friend with an unusual secret.Sweet and shaggy and kind of sad, Clay Tatum’s “The Civil Dead” is a low-key buddy comedy in which only one of the buddies is alive. Even so, this isn’t a scary movie — the sole horror onscreen is the lead actor’s self-inflicted haircut — but an offbeat bromance with existentialist ambitions.Tatum plays Clay, a schlubby freelance photographer in Los Angeles with a lackadaisical nature and a remarkably supportive wife (Whitney Weir) who urges him to do something productive while she takes a business trip. In response, Clay busies himself by running small-time financial scams, an endeavor that’s unexpectedly supercharged when he meets an old friend, Whit (Tatum’s co-writer, Whitmer Thomas). A onetime high-school hot shot whose heat cooled after graduation, Whit is now a failed actor who desperately needs a friend. He is also deceased, and invisible to everyone but Clay.Gently discursive and virtually plotless, “The Civil Dead” is a walking-and-talking movie that finds uncommon humor in Whit’s need to be seen and Clay’s extreme discomfort with that responsibility. By turns irritating and charming, Whit is too persuasively pitiful to be rejected outright; yet as the two wander around the city and encounter a handful of other characters, their aimlessness too often causes the story to sag.Despite this ambling vibe, “The Civil Dead” reaches a surprisingly satisfying conclusion. The movie’s lighting is warm and the soundtrack close to perfect, yet underneath lies a persistent melancholy, a pervasive sense of men not making it in a place where the true terror is loneliness. The ending will make you laugh, but don’t be surprised if it also makes you cry.The Civil DeadNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Outwaters’ Review: Massacre in the Mojave

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      Stunning sound design, creative mood-setting and a fearless finale elevate this found-footage horror film about an ill-fated camping trip.The found-footage genre can be catnip to young filmmakers, embracing as it does a low-budget aesthetic and the kind of incoherent crashing-about that even the most unseasoned actors can manage. There’s nothing green, though, about Robbie Banfitch, the director (as well as writer, editor, cinematographer and sound designer) of “The Outwaters,” a movie that lavishes as much attention on its setup as its payoff.Those early images, as four friends (played by Banfitch, Scott Schamell, Michelle May and Angela Basolis) prepare to film a music video in the Mojave Desert, have a woozy beauty that’s sneakily soothing. From the start, the desert is an alien presence, captured in inverted shots and unexpected close-ups as Banfitch thrusts his camera into thorned bushes and cracked earth. The light is blinding, the vistas so vast they magnify the friends’ vulnerability. In this eerie moonscape, the lingering sight of a barefoot young woman posing for the camera, hair and dress wind-whipped around her, has an aching poignancy.Culled from three memory cards found after the friends disappeared, “The Outwaters” conjures a swoony, dreamlike atmosphere that heightens the shocks to come. The camera swings and dips, the air shimmers and someone notices a strange vibration in the earth, a sense of something stirring far below their feet. Seemingly casual remarks — about a strange ball of light, or the long tail of an acid trip — return to haunt us as we try to make sense of the eventual slaughter.Backed by a sound design that expertly combines the naturalistic with the otherworldly, “The Outwaters” builds to a truly disconcerting sequence as Robbie wanders alone, wounded and gibbering. He doesn’t know who he is, but the audience might.The OutwatersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Magic Mike’s Last Dance’ Review: Stripping Down to Bare Essentials

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      Channing Tatum returns as Florida’s favorite male exotic dancer, romancing a restless socialite played by Salma Hayek Pinault.“What does a woman want?” Sigmund Freud famously confessed that he had spent most of his career flummoxed by that question. In the 21st century it seems that the director Steven Soderbergh, the screenwriter Reid Carolin and the heterodox psychoanalytic theorist Channing Tatum have come up with an answer that Freud would never have dreamed of: Magic Mike.In “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” the final chapter in a trilogy about lust, ambition and abdominal fitness in the modern age, Mike is focused on the desires of one woman in particular, a wealthy Londoner named Maxandra Mendoza. But the sources of Mike’s appeal — a heart as big as his trapezius, resolve as firm as his glutes, a character as sturdy as his quadriceps — haven’t changed.More than a decade has passed since the first movie, “Magic Mike” (2012), which was followed by “Magic Mike XXL” (directed by Gregory Jacobs) in 2015. Mike Lane, middle-aging gracefully, still resides in South Florida, but he isn’t quite where he had dreamed of being in life. A narrator (who will turn out to be an important character) informs us that Mike has lost his beloved furniture business. He also seems to have hung up his backless chaps and his fake police uniform and traded in stripping for bartending at fancy charity events.At one of these, he meets Maxandra — she goes by Max, and is played with regal insouciance by Salma Hayek Pinault — who discovers his background in expressive dance and hires him for a private performance. They settle on a price and establish boundaries that are promptly transgressed. She says she’s not hiring him for sex, and when they have sex anyway he declines payment. The ethical and other ambiguities raised by this encounter are potentially interesting, but the movie mostly has other matters on its mind.Each of the “Magic Mike” films has explored the nexus of sex, art and money from a different angle. “Magic Mike” was about how, in a precarious labor market, a gig worker might wrest dignity and autonomy from conditions rife with exploitation. “XXL” emphasized the extravagant pleasure of selling oneself as a high-end commodity and the aesthetic fulfillment of satisfying a customer. “Last Dance” is about the relationship between artist and patron, and also about something that can’t be reduced to libidinal or economic transactions.In other words, it’s a love story. Which makes things a little awkward, for Max and Mike and for the movie itself. Mike’s vocation as a stripper had been to embody a male object of female fantasy — or, given Tatum, Carolin and Soderbergh’s joint authorship, a male idea of what women long for. He and his fellow dancers perfected a choreography of swagger and surrender, an enactment of conquest that encoded submission as the highest form of gallantry.In “Last Dance,” the dance sequences that don’t involve Mike uphold that tradition, even as, offstage, Mike evolves into a different kind of fantasy object. He isn’t just supposed to be a camped-up embodiment of the perfect man, but the real thing.After jetting over to London, where Mike is installed in a guest room, he and Max embark on a tricky creative collaboration. Max’s faithless husband (a briefly encountered Alan Cox) owns a historic theater, and Max hires Mike to direct a sexed-up version of a stodgy costume drama, turning it into a rousing spectacle of masculine hotness and feminist empowerment. Which means hiring a lot of strippers.Those dudes do their jobs competently, though London may not be the first city that comes to mind when you think of rippling, glistening hunks of well-muscled man meat. And it’s only when Tatum himself takes the stage, to splash and writhe with Kylie Shea, that the heat and humidity rise to appropriately Floridian levels.A stage production in London only heats up when Tatum takes to the stage himself, with Kylie Shea.Warner Bros.Like its predecessors, “Last Dance” never forgets that it’s a musical at heart. Soderbergh, also serving as cinematographer and editor (under his customary pseudonyms, Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard), keeps our eye on the bodies in motion. The dance numbers, choreographed by Alison Faulk and Luke Broadlick, feel a bit tame this time around, but the movie still pays ample respect to the terpsichorean craft practiced by Tatum and the hard-working members of Mike’s ensemble.As a romance, though, it demonstrates flat feet and balky rhythm. There are a handful of comic secondary characters, vaguely embodying familiar varieties of Britishness — a repressed city bureaucrat (Vicki Pepperdine); a grouchy manservant (Ayub Khan Din); a sharp-tongued adolescent (the excellent Jemelia George) — but Max and Mike inhabit a thinly imagined, flatly rendered world.Hayek Pinault and Tatum have a tantalizing chemistry, but the script doesn’t always help them activate it. All of the drama comes from Max, whose whims and mood swings sometimes complement and sometimes clash with Mike’s steady good humor. His easy, endless charm may, finally, get in the way. This man is so affable, so grounded, so gentlemanly that he achieves a kind of blank passivity. His chivalry begins to feel like a way of refusing emotional connection, a suit of armor that he neglected to take off when he shed his other costumes.What does Mike want? It’s probably the wrong question. And maybe the answer is exactly what a woman doesn’t want to know.Magic Mike’s Last DanceRated R. Adult entertainment. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More