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      ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules’ Review: Oh, Brother

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      The beloved children’s book series receives another film installment.The media franchise “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” has a long and storied history and has taken many, many forms. It started in 2004 as a kind of serialized web comic for kids on the educational website Funbrain. Its popularity led to a book deal for the author and illustrator Jeff Kinney, who turned the comics into a best-selling children’s book that combined text with crudely drawn cartoons. The book begot more than a dozen sequels; three spinoffs; a Children’s Theater Company musical; and six feature film adaptations, including two different versions based on the original book — one in live action, from 2010, and one animated, from 2021. A sequel to the animated one, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules,” streaming on Disney+, is based on the second book. It’s not to be confused with the live-action movie of the same name, from 2011. Got it?If all that makes this latest “Rodrick Rules” sound a bit redundant, the movie itself does little to suggest otherwise. Of course, none of the earlier “Wimpy Kid” movies were particularly great, but this animated retread, in which the gawky adolescent dweeb Greg (voiced by Brady Noon) must contend with the petulant foibles of his big brother, Rodrick (voiced by Hunter Dillon), feels distinctly insubstantial.It’s the sort of bland, innocuous trifle that will swiftly recede into the oblivion of a streaming service menu — a comedy without laughs and a family movie without heart, lacking any of the wit or charm of Kinney’s original stories. The director, Luke Cormican, keeps the action in a mild register that feels blandly televisual, hitting episodic beats that have no memorable emphasis. I imagine they’ll keep making these — why stop now? If so, let’s hope they reread the books to remember what made them endearing.Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick RulesRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      The Real Story of ‘Cocaine Bear’

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      Nearly 40 years after a 175-pound black bear found and ingested cocaine in a Georgia forest, the drug binge has inspired a movie.The trailer for a new movie called “Cocaine Bear” was released on Wednesday, and the film’s title is not a metaphor or clever wordplay: The movie is about a bear high on cocaine.The bloody spree that follows the bear’s cocaine binge, as depicted in the trailer, is fictional, but the story about a high bear is very real. Its lore is likely to grow with the movie, which was directed by Elizabeth Banks and is set for a Feb. 24 release.“Cocaine Bear” stars Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Ray Liotta, who died in May, in one of his final film roles. It depicts the bear’s drug-induced trail of terror and the victims he leaves behind.The real story is less bloody.It all began, as you might guess, in the 1980s. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced in December 1985 that a 175-pound black bear had “died of an overdose of cocaine after discovering a batch of the drug,” according to a three-sentence item from United Press International that appeared in The New York Times.A United Press International item on the cocaine bear appeared in The New York Times in December 1985.“The cocaine was apparently dropped from a plane piloted by Andrew Thornton, a convicted drug smuggler who died Sept. 11 in Knoxville, Tenn., because he was carrying too heavy a load while parachuting,” U.P.I. reported. “The bureau said the bear was found Friday in northern Georgia among 40 opened plastic containers with traces of cocaine.”The bear was found dead in the mountains of Fannin County, Ga., just south of the Tennessee border.“There’s nothing left but bones and a big hide,” Gary Garner of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation told The Associated Press at the time.Dr. Kenneth Alonso, the state’s chief medical examiner at the time, said after an autopsy in December 1985 that the bear had absorbed three or four grams of cocaine into its blood stream, although it may have eaten more, The Associated Press reported that month.Today, the very same bear is said to be on display in Lexington, Ky., at the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall. The mall said in an August 2015 blog post that workers there wanted to know what happened to the bear and found out it had been stuffed. The blog post says the stuffed bear was at one point owned by the country singer Waylon Jennings, who kept it in his home in Las Vegas, before it was delivered to the store. (The New York Times could not independently confirm this account.)What happened to the bear in its final days, or hours, after the cocaine binge is a mystery, but the origins of the cocaine are not.Mr. Thornton was a known drug smuggler and a former police officer. He was found dead the morning of Sept. 11, 1985, in the backyard of a house in Knoxville, Tenn., wearing a parachute and Gucci loafers. He also had several weapons and a bag containing about 35 kilograms of cocaine, The Knoxville News Sentinel reported.A key in Mr. Thornton’s pocket matched the tail number of a wrecked plane that was found in Clay County, N.C., and based on Mr. Thornton’s history of drug smuggling, investigators guessed there was more cocaine nearby, The News Sentinel reported. The investigators searched the surrounding area and found more than 300 pounds of cocaine in a search that lasted several months.They also found the dead bear. More

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      ‘The Eternal Daughter’ Review: Two Glorious Sides of Tilda Swinton

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      The actress astonishes in two roles in Joanna Hogg’s haunting film set in a creaky castle in Wales.“The Eternal Daughter,” a lovely and haunted dream of a movie from the director of “The Souvenir,” opens on a spectral scene at dusk. On a desolate country road shrouded in fog and bordered by bare trees, sounds of the wind and lonely music drift on the soundtrack as spindly branches reach across the frame like fingers. By the time taxi headlights pierce the fog, your head may be churning with thoughts of ghosts and fanged demons, the kind that emerge from the shadows in old horror films to trouble your sleep.I imagine that the British filmmaker Joanna Hogg has a passing acquaintance with some of those movies, even if her work is rarefied enough to constitute its own auteurist genre. “The Souvenir,” which brought Hogg a wider audience, is a memory piece about a young woman’s devastating first love. The tragedy is crushingly sad, even if its conclusion is foregone. What gives it and other of Hogg’s movies their power aren’t their stories per se but her distinctive style and how she elicits meaning with emotional intimacy and intellectual reserve, creating realism from silences, gazes and rooms that become worlds.There are two women passengers in the taxi, a middle-aged filmmaker, Julie, and her mother, Rosalind, along with the mother’s dog, Louis, a soulful springer spaniel. The women are striking, dressed in understated clothing that quietly announces their privileged station before either speaks a word. Julie is talking to the driver while Rosalind seems to be sleeping, a gloved hand resting on Louis. Julie’s hair is auburn, her face pale and lightly creased, while Rosalind seems washed in gray. They make a vivid, arresting pair, all the more so because both characters are played by an astonishing Tilda Swinton.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.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.An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.Jennifer Lawrence:  The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.Julie and Rosalind are in Wales for a brief visit. They’re staying in a rambling hotel, an imposing, 18th-century mansion topped with gables and stone heraldic beasts. There are different reasons that mother and daughter are traveling together, including nearby relations, an impending birthday and a potential film project. As Julie explains later, during a conversation with a sympathetic caretaker, Bill (Joseph Mydell), one of the few other people around, she has come to the hotel to try and write a film about her and her mother. But she’s having trouble getting started. “I’m not sure that I feel I have a right to do such a thing.”Not much happens at first beyond Julie’s amusingly testy, politely antagonistic exchange at check-in with the hotel receptionist (a dryly funny Carly-Sophia Davies). The women settle into their room, a cozy double lined with toile wallpaper and furnished with separate beds and some strategically placed mirrors that Hogg soon has wicked fun with. Mother and daughter are close, though Julie’s doting on Rosalind isn’t always welcome. Rosalind spends a lot of time in bed; she also seems untroubled by the mansion’s eerie noises, its spooky gloom and the loud rhythmic banging that keeps Julie up at night.Given Hogg’s interest in memory and her expressionistic use of space it was perhaps inevitable that she’d make a ghost story, though “The Eternal Daughter” doesn’t as much conform to the genre template as playfully nip at its edges. It’s not for nothing that the first words you hear are “well, there was something strange….” Yet while Hogg comes at genre obliquely, she also makes great use of horror’s greatest hits by deploying creaking doors, billowing curtains and ominous shadows. And then there’s the pale-gray face at a window that Julie sees at night while out walking the dog.The mother and daughter, their differences, similarities, tenderness and love are the story, which Hogg fills in with chatter, reminiscences, precise details, private rituals and lingering looks. You see how Julie methodically, and with a hint of odd urgency, unpacks her luggage, and how Rosalind daintily removes a tablet from a pillbox. And while you may shriek in mock-horror at some mother-daughter passive-aggression — “What do you think, Mum?” Julie asks of Rosalind, who answers “What do you think?” — Hogg doesn’t peel away the character’s psychological layers. Their mysteries, as she will tenderly reveal, lie elsewhere.Notable effort has gone into visually distinguishing Julie and Rosalind beyond just their hair and clothes, including the use of some discreet makeup and careful lensing. Even so, the characters look more conspicuously alike than not, a resemblance that underlines their bonds, familial and otherwise, even as it evokes the figure of the doppelgänger, another horror staple. In classic examples, the doppelgänger serves as a sinister, even monstrous double (Dr. Jekyll, meet Mr. Hyde). Here, the doubling can be subtle, but it does suggest that there are alternative realities in play, an idea that Hogg conveys early on with some clever, destabilizing mirrored images — something definitely weird this way comes.Hogg’s greatest stroke in “The Eternal Daughter” is her casting of Swinton in both lead roles. Swinton is a wonderful chameleon and while she can go as big and showy as any Oscar contender, she is also a brilliant miniaturist. Swinton gives Julie and Rosalind fine-grained differences, individual gestures and gaits, puts elasticity into Julie’s voice and a light huskiness in Rosalind’s. Julie is more robust than her mother, and her expressions are bigger, too, more animated. Julie seems outwardly directed while Rosalind — with her still and watchful gaze — seems in retreat, as if she’d begun collapsing inward.The effect can be uncanny, particularly when mother and daughter are face to face at dinner. Hogg shows off the room at one point, the camera panning over the museological furnishings, but for the dinner sequences she primarily shoots Julia and Rosalind in individual medium close up, cutting back and forth between them. This allows you to see the warmth between the women, how they spark off each other, and to fully absorb their differences — the eagerness in one face, the exhaustion in the other. It’s like looking at two stages of the moon, one waxing and the other waning. And, if you’re wondering where the ghost is, let me whisper a clue: Nothing haunts us as deeply, as memorably, as love.The Eternal DaughterRated PG-13. For eek, a ghost! Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Casablanca’ and the Romance of the Refugee

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      A showcase of memorabilia at the Neue Galerie spotlights the Central European exiles who crafted Hollywood’s great wartime love story.Round up the unusual suspects. “Casablanca” has turned 80, and the most esteemed of all Hollywood classics enters its octogenarian years with a new ultra-high-definition DVD release. There’s also, right now in New York, an engaging new display of “Casablanca” artifacts, though you won’t find it at MoMA or the Museum of the Moving Image. Of all the joints in all the towns in all the world, the relics of this paragon of the Hollywood studio system have ended up in … a museum of German and Austrian modern art.That would be the Neue Galerie, conceived by the cosmetics baron Ronald S. Lauder and the art dealer Serge Sabarsky (1912-1996), which opened in 2001 in a former Vanderbilt mansion on a prime corner of Fifth Avenue. It’s celebrating its first 20 years with a showcase of its surviving founder’s own collection: not only jewels of modern Mitteleuropa, but ancient sculpture, medieval broadswords and reliquaries, and gleaming oddities from Renaissance cabinets of curiosities. Least expected are more than five dozen posters, lobby cards, props and press materials from the collector’s favorite movie, which he reports seeing “at least 25 to 30 times” — and whose memorabilia he has been buying up with foxhound-grade avidity.Medieval armor from Lauder’s personal collection is also on view.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“The Ronald S. Lauder Collection” had its grand opening on the evening of November’s midterm elections — whose result, by the way, Lauder may have decisively influenced, having spent millions on lawsuits and campaign advertising for Republicans in New York, where the G.O.P. flipped four congressional seats. (Among his animating causes are crime, taxes, and a proposed wind farm off the Hamptons shoreline.) “I’m no ogre,” Lauder assured The Times this month in an interview at Café Sabarsky, the charmingly ersatz Viennese cafe on the Neue Galerie’s ground floor, and, certainly, the 500-odd objects here do not have an outward suggestion of barbarism. If anything, its rooms of princely baubles are rather oversaturated, as if Lauder didn’t know where to stop; drawings by Egon Schiele are hung sky-high, essentially invisible, and stuffed vitrines induced in me the novel feeling of ivory fatigue.The unexpected highlight is the “Casablanca” gallery, the show’s smallest and densest, which in its way fits right into an institution devoted to Central European genius and American inheritances. Its walls are covered with soft-focus images of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, and posters both printed and painted. (“They Have a Date With Fate in … CASABLANCA,” reads one hand-lettered display from 1942, the title sparkling gold.) Lobby cards — those black-and-white stills you’d once see by the popcorn stand — take us back to the louche purgatory of Rick’s Café Américain, where the dashing Resistance hero Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) is gathering intelligence, and the charmingly corrupt Captain Renault (Claude Rains) is sizing up the loveliest exiles.Posters and lobby cards cover the walls with images of the film’s stars, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesDetail of a brass lamp, fringed with imitation jewels, used in the movie.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesA hand-lettered display from 1942 announces the film’s title in sparkling gold.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesYou’ll also find memorabilia from the film’s postwar releases in France, Italy, Czechoslovakia and, by 1952, Germany. Bergman appears in solo splendor on the German poster, beaming above a set piece of fez-topped musicians. There’s a brass lamp from Rick’s, fringed with imitation gemstones, and two rattan chairs where Europe’s desperate and displaced drank their cognacs and plotted their escapes. Looping in the background is “As Time Goes By,” performed by Dooley Wilson, a veteran of the Negro Theater Unit of the Federal Theater Project, in the role of the nightclub crooner Sam. Lauder apparently also owns the 1940 Buick Phaeton in which Rains drives our heroes to the Casablanca airport in the film’s final act. Lauder wanted to station the car outside the Neue Galerie for the run of the show, but no dice. Even with a net worth of $4.5 billion, nobody beats alternate-side parking regulations.“Casablanca” premiered in New York on Nov. 26, 1942; Warner Bros. pushed up its release date to capitalize on the excitement around that month’s Allied invasion of North Africa. It opened nationally in January 1943, and its tale of refugees and people smugglers was not only topical; it was nearly autofiction. A stunning number of its performers were Jewish refugees or anti-Nazi exiles — among them Conrad Veidt, previously a star of the Berlin studio system, who played Major Strasser; S.Z. Sakall, a Hungarian Jewish actor, as the club’s affable headwaiter; and Peter Lorre in the small but crucial role of Ugarte, who sells exit visas to the rich and desperate. The French actress Madeleine Lebeau, in the small role of Rick’s jilted mistress, cries real tears during the film’s stirring performance of “La Marseillaise”; she too was a refugee, fleeing via Lisbon to Mexico, and then to Hollywood. She escaped with her husband, Marcel Dalio (born Israel Mosche Blauschild), who plays the croupier at Rick’s, and who left France after antisemitic critics denounced his appearance in “The Rules of the Game.”The production’s transit papers for Victor Laszlo, “signed” by Charles de Gaulle, which Rick finally hands over in “Casablanca.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWhen it plays in the revival houses on Valentine’s Day, when it surfaces as the late movie after “Nightline,” “Casablanca” still endures as a wartime love affair, with Bogie and Bergman letting each other go in the airport fog. But for me “Casablanca” has always been a movie of visas and exit stamps, embassies and expediters, bribed officials and underground operators. It paints the modern world as the province of emigrants and evacuees, and subordinates the most enthralling of all Hollywood romances to the welfare of the persecuted. Which is why I was so astonished to discover, in Lauder’s collection, an extraordinary relic: the original (prop) letter of transit that sets the plot in motion, made out to Victor Laszlo and “signed” by General de Gaulle. The prop passports are here too, with Bergman’s and Henreid’s photographs stamped with the seal of the Casablanca colonial administration.I couldn’t believe I was seeing them, and seeing them here, in a museum of German and Austrian art. It was as if these fictional travel documents concentrated all the exiles and displacements that built midcentury American culture, of Mies van der Rohe and Marlene Dietrich, of “Doctor Faustus” and “Broadway Boogie-Woogie.” They burn, especially, with the shame of knowing that a contemporary “Casablanca” cast member could probably not procure one. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has forced an estimated five million to flee, the world has been shaken by the largest refugee crisis since everybody came to Rick’s. The United Nations now puts the number of displaced at 100 million — one in every 78 people on Earth — from Afghanistan and Venezuela, from Central America and Myanmar, and above all from Syria, whose civil war will soon enter its 12th year.The prop passport for Ilsa Lund, Ingrid Bergman’s character.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesNevertheless, under President Donald J. Trump, the United States cut its quotas for refugee admissions to the lowest level ever. The numbers have barely budged under his successor. Though President Biden increased the cap of the refugee admissions program, his government has come nowhere close to fulfilling it; just 25,400 refugees were admitted in the last fiscal year, leaving 80 percent of the places unfilled.The fundamental things apply. In “Casablanca” the Hollywood system reached the acme of its artistic and civic potential, and on that Orientalist soundstage, as the displaced of Europe oscillated in and out of character, these foreigners offered America a new self-portrait. It taught us that love and displacement went hand in hand, that ideals were thicker than blood. “I bet they’re asleep in New York,” Bogie mopes into his tumbler of whisky at the end of the first reel. “I bet they’re asleep all over America.” But the passionate clarity of “Casablanca” was not something we only dreamed.The Ronald S. Lauder CollectionThrough Feb. 13, Neue Galerie New York, 1048 Fifth Avenue, 212-628-6200; neuegalerie.org. More

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      ‘Four Samosas’ Review: A Romp Through Little India

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      This snappy indie comedy by Ravi Kapoor sees a group of Indian American teenagers hatch a harebrained plan to steal a bag of diamonds.Colorful and handsomely composed like a Wes Anderson movie, but far from that director’s world of gloomy, globe-trotting dandies, “Four Samosas” is a jovial romp through the Indian enclave of Artesia located outside of Los Angeles.The film, written and directed by Ravi Kapoor, is steeped in the traditions of Indian culture and its cuisine. It’s a carousel of sari shops and curry stands — bursts of sparkly, Bollywood-inspired dance numbers as well. Inside jokes that might only perk the ears of other Indian and Indian American viewers are scattered throughout, too — there’s a shop girl with a perpetually bobbing head, and a general emphasis on the maintenance of one’s eyebrows — but this quirky comedy’s snappy humor and winsome (if slightly amateurish) cast should make everyone feel right at home.Vinny (Venk Potula), a charismatic wannabe hip-hop musician, mills about town with his second-in-command, pining over his nihilistic ex-girlfriend, Rina (Summer Bishil). Turns out Rina is engaged to Sanjay (Karan Soni), a goat-poop recycler who, douchey as he may be, also makes good money off his smelly cash scheme.The revelation prompts a particularly harebrained plot: steal the diamonds that Rina’s father has locked away for her wedding — to, uh, pay for Vinny’s aunt’s surgery, of course. The duo join forces with a Hermione Granger-esque brainiac, Anjali (Sharmita Bhattacharya), and an unusually industrious computer engineer, Paru (Sonal Sha), to infiltrate Rina’s dad’s grocery store.But the endgame matters little — “Four Samosas” is all about the team’s goofs. They’re not particularly original (there are silly disguises and a marathon-eating competition), but Kapoor’s timing and the actors’ commitment to the bits pull it off.And, unlike so many new movies that seem to be algorithmically manufactured to appeal to diverse audiences and tick the boxes of representation, “Four Samosas” feels organic and true as a slice of Indian American life — even if it’s all fun and games and movie magic.Four SamosasRated PG-13 for stylized burglary and rude language. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘2nd Chance’ Review: Just Shoot Me

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      Ramin Bahrani’s first documentary feature profiles Richard Davis, the irrepressible inventor of a modern bulletproof vest.In “2nd Chance” the director, Ramin Bahrani, introduces Richard Davis as the only man to have shot himself 192 times. The number is impressive and also excessive, which is one way of describing Davis, the jolly inventor of a modern bulletproof vest and a born salesman. Shooting himself repeatedly on tape, he wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his vests, but what he was also doing was building a gonzo reputation too catchy to ignore or resist.It worked — I started this review with his pitch — but, directing his first documentary feature, Bahrani doesn’t content himself with Davis’s self-mythologizing, or with debunking it, really. As he chronicles the amusement-park ride of Davis’s life — from pizzeria owner to multimillionaire entrepreneur, through divorces and lawsuits and accidental deaths — he describes something akin to a human perpetual motion machine, running on entrepreneurial passion, gun-nut melodrama, a habit of hokum, and greed on autopilot.Davis’s prototype bulletproof vest arose out of a near-fatal 1969 shootout on a pizza delivery run, with three assailants. Typically enough, this encounter may not have happened as advertised, but in any case, Davis built up a successful new company, Second Chance, marketing to police departments with re-enactment-style promo films. Interviewed today in what looks like his den, he sits for Bahrani’s questioning looking like a relatively harmless uncle who can’t stop gabbing about his war stories.But Davis has also had trouble with sticking to the facts when his business interests were in jeopardy. That happens most egregiously when a ballyhooed new vest model proves to be fatally ineffective at stopping bullets. This and other failings carry a personal sting in the telling here by former employees, partly because the Michigan-based Second Chance seemed to retain a surprisingly local feel. (It was also a family affair, employing Davis’s formidable grandfather, dutiful son, and an ex-wife, Karen. Another ex-wife, Kathleen, offers inside scoops and colorful commentary.)Bahrani’s film (which he narrates) beetles along without fully exploiting Davis’s ample entertainment value, which is counterbalanced by accounts of his dubious actions and sometimes unseemly opinions. The vest scandal was no career-buster: Davis, and his son, eventually regrouped and started a new company. Davis’s collaborators, on the other hand, can’t help but look back: we hear extensively from Aaron Westrick, an eager-beaver police officer who went to work for Davis’s company after a vest saved his life.Despite Davis’s showmanship, Westrick might actually be the film’s most resonant figure — all the way up to and including a paradigm-shifting but somewhat overcooked reunion with Westrick’s assailant from decades ago. Westrick wants to believe in what Davis is selling, even as he is repeatedly disappointed — a loyalty to a myth that might have more to say about the country than Davis.As a fiction filmmaker, Bahrani often returns to the theme of the American dream and its not-so-surprising fallacies (“Man Push Cart,” “99 Homes”). Davis’s go-for-broke spirit seems to repel analysis here, and his story can even sound comparatively tame against the Wild West backdrop of mainstream gun culture. But maybe Davis’s vaunted 192 shots say it best after all: they suggest someone both acting out a kind of immortality and demonstrating an unmistakable death wish.2nd ChanceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Framing Agnes’ Review: Transition, Center Stage

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      The documentarian Chase Joynt stages re-enactments of midcentury medical interviews with transgender people.In the 1960s, a sociologist, Harold Garfinkel, and a surgeon, Robert Stoller, led a clinic for the study of gender at the University of California, Los Angeles. The clinic performed some of the first gender confirmation surgeries that were available to intersex or transgender people in the United States, and as part of the team’s medical research, Garfinkel interviewed the patients. The documentary “Framing Agnes” uses these patient interviews to reflect upon the history of transgender people.The director Chase Joynt reimagines Garfinkel’s interviews as black-and-white talk show segments, recruiting transgender actors to perform scenes from the archived transcripts. The rest of the film consists of colorful talking-head interviews with the actors, as well as researchers who have studied the archives in the present day. Of particular interest to Joynt is the story of Agnes (played in re-enactments by Zackary Drucker), a transgender woman who initially presented herself as intersex to the medical staff at U.C.L.A. to receive gender-confirming medical care. But Joynt also stages re-enactments of interviews with transgender men and teenagers, and even enlists Angelica Ross (“Pose”) to perform as Georgia, a Black transgender woman who described her struggles with racial and gender discrimination to the clinic.Joynt’s scope as a researcher is admirably broad, but what his film lacks is a sense of purpose as a work of cinema. The re-enactments are staged in a perfunctory, static way, despite brief standout performances from Ross and Jen Richards, as a transgender woman who found a community of women like her in the 1950s. More frustrating is that Joynt’s interviews lack insight. The documentary reminds its audience that it’s impossible to truly know people based on their responses to medical interviews. But this approach unfortunately prevents the film from achieving either catharsis or understanding.Framing AgnesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Darby and the Dead’ Review: Sixteen With a Sixth Sense

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      A high school junior talks to dead people in this familiar but good-natured tale of adolescent female friendship.Seeing dead people may seem like a curse, but to the teenage protagonist of the gothic, good-humored “Darby and the Dead,” necromancy is a Friday-night side hustle. Directed by Silas Howard, the movie begins by bringing us up to speed: When Darby (Riele Downs) was 7, she survived a drowning accident that accorded her the ability to speak to lingering souls, and she began to act as their envoy to the earthly.That’s a hell of a lot of narrative table-setting. Yet the movie’s real drama occurs not on the stairway to heaven, but in the terrestrial halls of high school, where Darby wears black clothing and sneers at her cliquey classmates. Most loathsome of all is Capri (Auli’i Cravalho), the school’s flawless queen bee who disdains Darby for her stubborn self-sufficiency. But after a tragedy unexpectedly unites the two teens, the social rivals are forced to band together.Setting aside the sixth sense element, “Darby and the Dead” borrows liberally from “Mean Girls”; similar to the machinations in that teen classic, Capri gives Darby a makeover that earns her a gratifying degree of popularity, before the power goes to Darby’s head. The predictable story arc is spiced up by Darby’s frequent, sassy asides to the camera, reminiscent of the TV series “Fleabag.” (A third-act moment breaking the fourth wall nearly quotes a “Fleabag” scene.)But as familiar as this tale of female transformation feels, there is an authentic sweetness to Darby and Capri’s fledgling friendship. Their bond resuscitates a movie that might otherwise have been dead on arrival.Darby and the DeadRated PG-13 for ghostly gossip. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More