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      ‘Love Life’ Review: Encounters in Grief

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      In this Japanese drama from Koji Fukada, the death of a child alters life for a couple and for the boy’s previously absent father.The Japanese writer-director Koji Fukada made his international mark with “Harmonium” (2017). Like that film, “Love Life,” his latest feature, concerns a family shaken up both by an interloper’s arrival and by a sudden tragedy, this time in the reverse order.Taeko (Fumino Kimura) is raising a 6-year-old son, an Othello board game prodigy named Keita (Tetta Shimada), with her husband, Jiro (Kento Nagayama). The arrangement wasn’t Jiro’s original plan: He had been preparing to marry a colleague, but he cheated on her with Taeko and ended up marrying Taeko instead. Taeko was already a mother to Keita, whose father abandoned them. Now Jiro’s parents, especially his dad, scorn Taeko and Keita as not theirs.Then — in a development that occurs around 20 minutes in, necessitating a spoiler warning — Keita dies while sustaining a concussion in a bathtub accident, after wandering off during a party. (Fukada, who elsewhere favors a placid, unobtrusive visual style, plays the drowning for suspense with an exceptionally cruel slow zoom.)The death lures back Keita’s absent father, Park (Atom Sunada), a South Korean man who is also deaf, and who, crashing the funeral, immediately hits Taeko before slapping himself. The recriminations, and efforts to downplay recriminations, begin. Taeko can’t forgive Park for leaving, but she also believes he needs her help. Jiro feels guilty for his relative lack of guilt.It’s more a grief triangle than a love triangle, and a late revelation alters its symmetry, erasing hard-won sympathy for one character. Part of Fukada’s rationale may be that straightforward catharsis would be too easy. But his drama is facile in other ways, particularly in its use of child endangerment as a device.Love LifeNot rated. In Japanese, Korean and Korean sign language, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Last Waltz’ With Robbie Robertson Is One of Rock’s Great Docs

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      The film capturing the Band’s final performance in 1976 is a showcase for the group’s main songwriter and guitarist, Robbie Robertson. And for some, that was a problem.By the mid-1970s, the Band was well known as the group that had backed Bob Dylan on his first electric tour and released a series of its own reverentially reviewed albums that returned music to a pre-psychedelic era and augured a return-to-basics movement in rock. But in 1976, with the quality and sales of its albums both declining, the Band announced a farewell show, full of illustrious guest stars, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day. The gala concert would be filmed by Martin Scorsese, who in the last few years had directed the provocative and acclaimed films “Mean Streets,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and “Taxi Driver.”The music documentaries of the late ’60s and early ’70s — “Don’t Look Back,” starring a scabrous Dylan, in 1967, then the concert films “Monterey Pop” in 1968 and “Woodstock” in 1970, as well as the Rolling Stones debacle “Gimme Shelter” the same year — were low-budget affairs, underground in their lighting, camerawork and sound. D.A. Pennebaker shot “Don’t Look Back” by himself, using a hand-held camera and 16-millimeter film.“The Last Waltz” — which put a spotlight on the Band’s guitarist and principal songwriter, Robbie Robertson, who died this week at 80 — was a confident, dramatic upgrade with an atypical structure. It begins with the concert’s final song, and incorporates band interviews and B-roll shots to give personality to each member. The 1978 film employs highly stylized backlighting and footlights, avoids audience shots and uses nearly every camera angle except low angle front, which is how bands are traditionally seen by members of an audience. The musicians dressed like western gunslingers ready to face their end, and to counteract all the mythic imagery, the interviews are full of the kind of artifice other films edit out, including awkward exchanges between the band members and Scorsese, their stumbling inquisitor. The movie dwells in shades of purple, the color of bruises and cabernet sauvignon.It didn’t take long for critics to laud “The Last Waltz.” In the British music weekly Record Mirror, Mike Gardner called it “the first rock movie to eschew the shambling amateurism that passes for rock cinema and replace it with the most illustrious professionals within Hollywood.” More resoundingly, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker (no big fan of cinéma vérité) wrote that it was “the most beautiful rock movie ever.”These days, “The Last Waltz” is by consensus one of the best music films in the canon, neck and neck with “Stop Making Sense,” the Talking Heads concert film by Jonathan Demme. Many deconstructions of the Scorsese film describe it as a crucial and irreversible departure in rock filmmaking, a move away from naïve image-capturing and the “shaky camera” of Jonas Mekas, and toward canny image-making.The star power in front of the camera — guests included Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Ringo Starr and Muddy Waters — was matched by the filmmaking expertise behind it. The crew included the director of photography Michael Chapman, plus seven camera operators, including the renowned Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs, all shooting with 35-millimeter film, as well as the recording engineer and Neil Young collaborator Elliot Mazer. The production designer Boris Leven dressed the Winterland stage with columns, chandeliers and wall hangings from the San Francisco Opera’s staging of “La Traviata,” bringing some 19th-century Italian brio to the farewell concert.How did it all come together? Once the Band decided to disband, Robertson wanted to find “someone special to capture this event on film,” he wrote in “Testimony,” his 2016 memoir. He considered most of the emerging young directors of the mid-70s — Hal Ashby, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Milos Forman — but picked Scorsese, who had been an assistant director and editor on “Woodstock” and was already considered gifted at using music cues onscreen, most notably Jackson Browne’s “Late for the Sky” in “Taxi Driver,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” by the Rolling Stones, in “Mean Streets.”Robertson, the most sophisticated, charming and socially fluent member of the Band, met Scorsese through Jon Taplin, a Princeton graduate who had been a road manager for the Band, and later produced “Mean Streets.” Once Scorsese signed on, he asked for lyrics to each song in the concert, so he could plan camera movements and lighting changes. He eventually wrote a 200-page shooting script, according to Robertson. Other sources say it was 300 pages.The director and the guitarist grew close, especially during postproduction, and pretty soon they were living together and jetting off to parties in Paris or Rome. That closeness caused friction: Despite the acclaim for “The Last Waltz,” some members of the Band felt that Robertson had made the film about him, rather than about them.The drummer Levon Helm, whose superlatively soulful voice electrifies “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Up on Cripple Creek,” made these criticisms public with the 1993 publication of his memoir “This Wheel’s on Fire.” He called the movie “a disaster” and accused Scorsese of making Robertson look great while ignoring other band members.By then, Robertson and Helm had arrived at very different levels of success and financial comfort. “Robbie won. Levon lost,” Ken Gordon wrote in a 2015 essay in The Bitter Southerner. Some people reflexively side with winners, others with losers, and after Helm’s book came out, Robertson’s reputation suffered in some circles, and possibly influenced subsequent evaluations of “The Last Waltz,” especially after it was rereleased in theaters and on DVD in 2002.“The movie’s real subject is not the Band as a whole, but Robbie Robertson,” Stephen E. Severn wrote in Film Quarterly, adding that “virtually every visual and thematic aspect of ‘The Last Waltz’ is designed to showcase his talents at the expense of the other members of the group.” Nonetheless, Severn affirms that it “may be the best film ever made about the music scene,” one that, unwittingly or not, reveals the cutthroat nature of the business.Nearly 25 years after the release of “The Last Waltz,” its placement on lists of the best music documentaries was so common that the consensus around the film was ripe for a challenge. “‘The Last Waltz’ has inexplicably been called the greatest rock documentary of all time,” Roger Ebert wrote in 2002. In a re-evaluation of the movie that same year, Elvis Mitchell wrote in The New York Times that “part of the pleasure is in watching Robbie Robertson, the group’s leader, seduce Mr. Scorsese.”The movie is more skeptically understood now, but its stature has never waned. Even its stoutest opponents recognize its quality. “Critics called the movie the best and most sumptuous film ever made about a rock concert,” Levon Helm wrote grumpily in his book, “and I suppose that’s true.” More

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      ‘Sound of the Police’ Review: The Silence and the Fury

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      This documentary dives into the nation’s outrageous history of the policing of Black citizens by touching on the 2022 killing of Amir Locke.It is not the first image in “Sound of the Police,” a documentary about the chronically vexed relationship between Black people and police officers, but it is its most chilling: the ominous hush of the police at a front door, signaling the horror to come.In February 2022, a SWAT team entered an apartment in Minneapolis. Body camera footage, released by the city’s police, shows a key being quietly inserted into a lock during a no-knock search warrant operation. Seconds later, Amir Locke, 22, who had been asleep on the living-room couch when roused by the officers, was mortally wounded. Footage shows him, groggy and confused, under a blanket holding his legally owned handgun.The director Stanley Nelson’s freighted film opens with family and friends gathering for Locke’s funeral, a celebration of his life, followed by interviews with his parents. The movie also concludes with them. In between those sad but cleareyed bookends, the filmmakers have packed a necessary history of policing. That Locke’s death came after the killings of Breonna Taylor (also a no-knock warrant) and George Floyd, underscores the movie’s argument: Reforming policing remains a life-or-death matter.For viewers who’ve digested the bitter lessons of the documentaries “13th” and “MLK/FBI,” as well as more recent social-justice portraits of the activist Rev. Al Sharpton (“Loudmouth”) and the civil rights attorney Ben Crump (“Civil”), many of the images of brutality and insights about the abuses of institutional power will be familiar, though no less outrageous. Some early police forces in America were formed from slave patrols, and their violent tactics descend from post-Civil War attempts to control and contain Black people, engendering a justified mistrust.The film boasts a formidable collection of interviewees — among them the legal scholar James Forman Jr., the historian Elizabeth Hinton as well as David Simon, the creator of the police procedural “The Wire.” Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, dissects the social conditions that have enabled police departments to rebuff oversight and have emboldened white citizens to imagine a personal relationship to the police. (The montage of white women making 911 calls to report Black citizens — bird watching, lemonade selling, just tending to life — might be amusing, were it not so pathological.) If you need a refresher on what “systemic” looks like, these thinkers offer it.Sound of the PoliceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and on Hulu. More

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      ‘Aurora’s Sunrise’ Review: A Patchwork Record of the Armenian Genocide

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      This standout documentary combines archival footage and animated re-enactments to share one survivor’s memories.The documentary “Aurora’s Sunrise” shares the great and terrible story of Aurora Mardiganian, an Armenian survivor of the genocide that began in 1915. Aurora was 14 years old and living in a small town in the Ottoman Empire when the violence started. Her peaceful life was obliterated when her father and brother were rounded up and murdered by Ottoman Turk soldiers. Aurora was then forced into a death march across the desert of what is now Syria. She survived weeks of the march and two years of subsequent violence. Aurora witnessed unimaginable atrocities: rivers teeming with corpses, children begging for their lives, bandits pillaging the caravans of survivors.Aurora escaped these horrors through the aid of Armenian resistance groups. Her survival already made her a rarity, but Aurora’s most improbable achievement was that she was able to create a contemporary record of her own memories. This film follows Aurora’s story after she resettled in America and starred in the 1919 silent film, “Auction of Souls,” which dramatized the events of her own life. She never stopped sharing her memories, including in interviews that were filmed decades later.Using many of the materials Aurora left behind, the documentary’s director, Inna Sahakyan, crafts a cohesive narrative of the woman’s life. Clips from “Auction of Souls” and footage from Aurora’s later interviews support animated re-enactments of her recorded memories. Despite the presence of material that is more than 100 years old, the parts using cutouts and rotoscoping (redolent of the 2008 war docudrama “Waltz With Bashir) are what feel the most dated. But even with that herky-jerky animation, the effect of Sahakyan’s compilation is still admirably seamless, and she creates a reconstructed, yet still personal record of a long-unrecognized genocide. The film’s coherence is a reflection of both the skill of the filmmaker, and the heroic efforts of Aurora herself to ensure that her view of history would not be forgotten.Aurora’s SunriseNot rated. In Armenian, Turkish, English, German and Kurdish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Red, White & Royal Blue’ Review: Keep Calm and Pine On

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      This film, about an American president’s son who falls for a British prince, starts with a giddy premise and has the derring-do to succeed.Like a corgi back-flipping over a bathtub of champagne, “Red, White & Royal Blue” starts with a giddy premise and has the derring-do to succeed. The setup is thus: Alex (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the wild child of the White House, is commanded to clean up an international PR disaster by befriending Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), the cloistered British spare. In the film’s first half, the scions secretly fall in love; in the second, they fret that going public might cause another global kerfuffle just as Alex’s mother (a Southern-drawling Uma Thurman) campaigns for re-election.It sounds like fan fiction and looks like it, too, particularly when Galitzine dips his chin bashfully — a tic that Princess Diana passed on to her boys. Yet, as in any screwball romance worth its trans-Atlantic sea-salt, the first-time director Matthew López gets us rooting for the cheeky couple’s transition from rivals to romantic bedfellows, boosted by the cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, who photographs the leads so adoringly that you half-expect them to turn to the camera and hawk a bottle of cologne. Thanks to their playful chemistry, we’re sold.The film is a heavily trimmed adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s zesty 2019 novel, a TikTok smash whose hashtag boasts more than 500 million views. López (best-known as the Tony-winning playwright of “The Inheritance”) wrote the script with Ted Malawer, and the two add theatrical flourishes that feel over-florid: a late-night phone chat visualized by having Galitzine magically appear in a whirl of digital leaves; a museum stroll voice-over that’s so odd, you wonder if it was a postproduction fix for something gone awry; and, most goofily, an across-the-dance-floor stare-down where Alex and Henry lock eyes as the other revelers, grooving to Lil Jon, get so low that they appear to be playing Duck, Duck, Goose.But the story smartly zeros in on the couple’s cultural gap — or, as Alex expresses it, “He grabbed my hair in a way that made me understand the difference between rugby and football.” Henry has borne a heavy crown since birth and wears his privilege matter-of-factly, though he dreams of anonymity. The Yank is, true to stereotype, brash and idealistic. He remembers being an invisible suburban kid who vowed to accomplish goals that were out of reach for his father (Clifton Collins Jr.), a Mexican immigrant. (Perez also seems aware that his angular cheekbones and roguish swagger make him resemble a young Al Pacino.) Their centerpiece sex scene is intimately staged with Galitzine tracing Perez with his fingertips as though his character wants to remember the moment forever.The D.C. sequences are snappy, freshened-up versions of the banter we’ve long seen on TV. (Sarah Shahi as the president’s no-nonsense aide and Aneesh Sheth as a gruff Secret Service officer are standouts.) Though the credits list a royal etiquette adviser, it’s hard to gauge if this depiction of the monarchy is accurate (paisley loungewear, tiny topiaries, gilt-framed everything) or just a gaga fantasy that allows a prince to coo, “I went to an English boarding school. Trust me, you’re in good hands.”Red, White & Royal BlueRated R for swearing and some royal hanky-panky. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘Jules’ Review: Close Encounters of the Lonely Kind

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      Ben Kingsley plays an elderly man struggling with a fading memory when an extraterrestrial crashes into his life.Generally speaking, alien movies tend to go one of either two ways: horror or tenderness. Marc Turtletaub’s “Jules” falls squarely in the latter category — the titular alien who crash-lands in small-town Pennsylvania is a vegetarian, and eats apple slices given to him by his genial human host.But while the film’s premise will be familiar to anyone whose parents sat them down in front of “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Jules” replaces the usual child protagonists with a trio of baffled senior citizens, all of whom find kinship with the alien’s outsider status and know too well what will happen if word gets out on his arrival to Earth.Milton (Ben Kingsley) is struggling with a fading memory and a strained relationship with his adult daughter (Zoë Winters), whose insistence that he see a psychiatrist escalates when he tells her an alien spaceship destroyed his bird bath. When his pleas for help with the small gray alien are ignored by the other townsfolk, Milton invites the injured extraterrestrial, played by Jade Quon, into his home, and the two quickly form a bond. (Despite Jules — Milton’s nickname for the alien — being nonverbal, he appears to perfectly understand English.) Before long, Milton’s neighbors Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) and Joyce (Jane Curtin) learn of the visitor and, noticing all the suited government officials that have mysteriously arrived in town, decide to help Milton keep their new friend a secret.Underneath its ridiculous framing and outer-space high jinks, “Jules” is full to the brim with empathy for its elderly characters and their desire for personal agency. Kingsley’s performance as Milton injects dignity into a character that could have easily (and cruelly) been played just for laughs, and Harris and Curtin provide similar complexities to their respective roles. In Jules, all three of them are reminded of the importance of companionship in their lives, and how isolation in their old age has made each of them desperately cling to what little they have left. It’s a realization that leads Joyce, with Jules’s help, to finally say goodbye to her aging cat, in a funeral scene that’s as heartwarming as it is absurd.Turtletaub keeps the film’s campier elements to a minimum, preferring to highlight the quaint suburban setting and a lighthearted, understated sense of humor. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” this is not, and despite Jules being a threat to national security, it often feels as though Turtletaub would rather you be curled up in your seat with a mug of cocoa than on the edge of it. But the sweetness isn’t entirely unwelcome — not every alien movie can be “Alien.”JulesRated PG-13 for language and some cartoon sci-fi violence. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Love in Taipei’ Review: Finding Home

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      In this romantic comedy set in Taiwan, a young American finds herself torn between a parent-approved boy wonder and a rebellious slacker.Big on high jinks and light on story, “Love in Taipei” is a breezy film about a woman exploring her roots, making friends and falling in love. The romantic comedy, based on the best-selling young adult novel “Loveboat, Taipei” by Abigail Hing Wen and directed by Arvin Chen, is a charming but ultimately formulaic exploration of cultural identity.Ashley Liao stars as Ever Wong, a young Taiwanese American woman bound for medical school. Raised in Ohio in a primarily white community, Ever feels disconnected from her culture, never having visited her ancestral homeland. Sensing this disconnect, her parents, both born in Taiwan, send her to a cultural summer immersion program in the country’s capital.Chen portrays Taipei as a playful and colorful place, rich with history and possibility. In the program, Ever — who is somewhat shy — meets the popular Rick (Ross Butler) and the mysterious loner Xavier (Nico Hiraga). Rick is the clean-cut, parent-approved boy wonder and Xavier is the rebellious slacker with rakish charm. Both represent a side of Ever’s internal struggle between pleasing her parents by becoming a doctor or taking a different path as a dancer.Despite her pressing career struggle, the screenwriters, Mackenzie Dohr and Charlie Oh, tell Ever’s story at a leisurely pace, more interested in the nuances of the relationships than providing any resolutions. The story functions much like a pilot, leaving Ever’s fate and romantic possibilities open-ended. Like many streaming Y.A. adaptations, “Love in Taipei” seems poised for a sequel.Love in TaipeiNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Paramount+.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      ‘Medusa Deluxe’ Review: Curl Up and Die

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      A gruesome attack on a stylist upends a hairdressing contest in this invigoratingly bold debut.Suffused with the sting of hair spray and the scent of Herbal Essences, “Medusa Deluxe” swaggers onto our screens, all cigarette smoke and mirrors. From its playfully inventive opening to its flash-forward finale, Thomas Hardiman’s wild — and wildly impressive — first feature, set during a British regional hairdressing competition, is a proudly indelicate, painstakingly structured pleasure.Playing out in real time and shot to suggest a single, continuous take, the plot circles the sudden death of the show’s star stylist, who has been found backstage, minus his scalp. As his competitive rivals and their models await questioning by unseen detectives, everyone is under suspicion, not just the creepy security guard with the urgent requests for wet wipes. There’s the mouthy Cleve (Clare Perkins, whose opening monologue is a doozy), a stylist with barely controlled anger issues; the devout Divine (Kayla Meikle), who works part-time for an undertaker and is hence no stranger to dead heads; and the scheming Kendra (Harriet Webb), who may have fixed the contest in cahoots with its silver-pompadoured organizer (Darrell D’Silva).Displaying a flamboyant finesse and a cheeky, can’t-sit-still sensibility, Hardiman hides nuggets of foreshadowing in seemingly throwaway remarks. The whodunit mystery droops well before the end, but the women are fantastic and their dialogue, sharp as a hairpin, has a gossipy tempo that’s fun and energizing. A jumpy, percussive score (by the British electronic artist Koreless) pulses unobtrusively beneath the action, punctuating the characters’ tightly choreographed movements and forming a sonic bond with the crumbling brick of the show’s cavernous venue.Filmed in and around a derelict building in a postindustrial town in the north of England, “Medusa Deluxe” unfolds mainly backstage and below stairs. Clinging as close as dandruff flakes, Robbie Ryan’s snakelike camera follows characters down dimly-lit corridors and echoing stairwells, idling in the fluorescent glare of unlovely bathrooms and dressing rooms before gliding onward.At a time when too many movies feel cautious and constrained, “Medusa Deluxe” is gloriously uninhibited and gaudily diverting. A disco blast of George McCrae will beckon you through the end credits, though the movie is not without poignancy as Cleve remarks that the medium she has spent her life teasing and weaving is dead as soon as it exits the scalp. She knows that her art is temporary, its rewards fleeting, and that her time in the spotlight may never come.Medusa DeluxeRated R for weaponized words and tortured follicles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More