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      Children’s Movies to Stream: ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and More

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      This month’s picks include a stereotype-defying shape-shifter, superpowered shelter pets and the newest “Guardians of the Galaxy” adventure.‘Nimona’Watch it on Netflix.Nimona is a shape-shifter, a monster, a misunderstood hellion with a heart of gold. Voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz, the title character busts into a futuristic world where knights defend the castle and the powerful might not be as benevolent as they’d like the citizens to believe. Based on a best-selling graphic novel by ND Stevenson and directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane (who also co-directed “Spies in Disguise”), this 2023 animated feature from Netflix gives young children a mile-a-minute main character who slides between “good guy” and “bad guy” status, defying the usual stereotypes. Stevenson has called the story a transgender allegory, and the L.G.B.T.Q. representation is a welcome change from the usual kids’ movie universes, where knights fall in love with princesses, not with each other. Here, Riz Ahmed voices Ballister Boldheart, a knight who has been wrongly accused of murdering Queen Valerin (Lorraine Toussaint). Ballister reluctantly allows Nimona to help him take down a corrupt system, prove his innocence and reunite with his partner, Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang). As a character, Nimona has zero chill and might prove a little tough for adults to watch for any length of time, but my son was entertained by the character’s constant motion, chaotic energy and what-will-come-next transformations.‘Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, The Movie’Watch it on Netflix.Many youngsters will already be familiar with the hit French series “Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir,” about two Parisian teen superheroes named Marinette (voiced by Cristina Vee for the English-speaking cast) and Adrien (Bryce Papenbrook), who secretly transform into Ladybug and Cat Noir to save their city from villains. They’re members of The Miraculous, a group of protectors who vanquish evil all over the world. This time, the superheroes get nearly two hours of screen time to join forces and stop the evil Hawk Moth (Keith Silverstein) from unleashing destruction throughout the City of Light. Directed by Jeremy Zag, who co-wrote the screenplay with Bettina López Mendoza and also wrote the songs, the 2023 movie amps up the action, with plenty of scenes in which Ladybug and Cat Noir fly over Parisian landmarks and battle the bad guys. There are musical numbers, moments of valor, and enough silly humor and flirty banter between the real-life teenagers and their alter egos to keep elementary-age kids watching. The vibrant reds and purples that make the series stand out visually are on full display, and the same girl power theme that defines the series carries over to the film.‘Heroes of the Golden Mask’Rent it on Amazon Prime and Vudu.In this Arcana Studios 2023 production directed by Sean Patrick O’Reilly, an orphan named Charlie (voiced by Kiefer O’Reilly) is trying his best to survive on the mean streets of his city. Just as Charlie is about to get nabbed by the cops for another petty crime, a door opens and a strange figure offers him a quick escape in the form of a magic portal. Charlie hops through, and he’s transported to an ancient Chinese kingdom called Sanxingdui. He meets an unlikely group of golden-masked superheroes who tell Charlie they need his help defeating a ruthless enemy set on conquering the kingdom. At first Charlie schemes to help the heroes with the secret intention of taking the golden masks, but lessons are learned and Charlie discovers that money and greed aren’t the most important things in life. The animation looks a little like a low-budget video game, and the writing and performances are definitely not awards-season worthy, but Patton Oswalt voices a blue ogre named Aesop, Ron Perlman voices Kunyi, and Christopher Plummer, before his death, voiced the character Rizzo. It’s a bit of a mishmash, but if your kid is craving swordplay, winged tigers and dragons that look like they mated with a moose, give this one a try.‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’Watch it on Disney+.The final installment of the director James Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” trilogy, released in May, might not go down as the best of the three, but it should entertain older elementary school and middle school kids who’ve come to love Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and Drax (Dave Bautista). When we meet back up with the Marvel gang, Star-Lord is grieving Gamora, who died in “Avengers: Infinity War.” Never fear, though! Gamora (sort of) returns to the crew in the form of a time-traveling variant, but this Gamora has no memory of her relationship with Peter. The story largely centers on Rocket, and the Guardians’ attempts to save his life and take down the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), an evil scientist who created Rocket and who is now intent on mutiny. Cooper brings some genuine emotion to Rocket’s journey, and Iwuji portrays a formidable villain.‘DC League of Super-Pets’Watch it on Max.One could easily imagine this movie being pitched in a conference room: An animated superhero movie, but about their pets! The delightful simplicity of it would be tough to pass up. Here, we have Dwayne Johnson voicing Superman’s dog, Krypto, a pup whose favorite chew toy is a little squeaky Batman doll. Youngsters won’t care about the voices behind the adorable super-pets, but Kevin Hart, Keanu Reeves, Kate McKinnon, Natasha Lyonne and Marc Maron make a formidable cast. Krypto was sent to Earth as a puppy to look after Superman (voiced by John Krasinski), so the two have a sweet bond that might make both children and adults feel a little weepy because dogs are the best. Krypto can fight crime, but he’s a misfit when it comes to relating to non-superhero dogs. When Superman proposes marriage to Lois Lane (Olivia Wilde), he takes Krypto to a shelter to meet some other dogs, so he won’t feel like a third wheel, and just like that, a league of super-pets is formed. With a screenplay by the “Lego Batman Movie” writers Jared Stern and John Whittington, this 2022 charmer, directed by Stern and Sam Levine, has enough action, sweetness and humor to warrant multiple viewings. More

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      Myron Goldfinger, 90, Architect of Monumental Modernist Homes, Dies

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      His houses, which dot the Hamptons and other parts of the New York region, include a residence featured in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”Myron Goldfinger, whose monumental modernist homes around New York made him a favorite architect of the city’s rich and powerful during the 1980s, died on July 20 in Westchester County, N.Y. He was 90.His daughter Thira Goldfinger and his wife, June Goldfinger, said the death, at a hospital, was from liver cancer.Mr. Goldfinger designed his homes by amassing basic shapes — half-circles, blocks, triangles — into dramatic sculptural statements that seem both modern and ancient, as if a Roman palace had lost all its ornamentation but otherwise escaped the wear of time.He first gained prominence with his own weekend retreat, which he built in 1970 in Waccabuc, a hamlet in northern Westchester. Its plan was simple: A rectangular block topped by two perpendicular triangles. But the structure, four stories tall, was full of surprises, like a hidden rooftop patio where the triangles intersected.Like the architect Louis Kahn, who had been his mentor at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Goldfinger sought to fuse modern styles with features found in vernacular Mediterranean architecture: barrel vaults, interior courtyards, vast blank walls.“All architecture must eventually fade and return to dust,” he wrote in the introduction to “Myron Goldfinger: Architect,” a 1992 compendium of his work. “The fashion of the moment is so temporary. Only the timeless basic geometry repeats in time.”Millennium House, designed by Mr. Goldfinger and built in Montague, N.J., in 1978. His expansive, theatrical designs fit perfectly with the lavish ethos of the era. Norman McGrathHis success came not only from his timelessness but also his timeliness. His expansive, theatrical designs fit perfectly with the lavish ethos of the 1980s. His giant walls accommodated massive works of art; his wide picture windows allowed c-suite clients to imagine that they were, indeed, masters of the universe.His homes dot the suburban landscape from northern New Jersey to southwest Connecticut, but his best-known projects lie in the wealthier enclaves that stretch east from New York City on the Long Island shore — above all in the Hamptons, where an influx of luxury buyers were looking for something different than the area’s traditional shingle-style homes.“He was a complete original,” Timothy Godbold, an interior designer and the founder of Hamptons 20th Century Modern, a preservation group, said in a phone interview. “He was completely pure in his aesthetic, which was geometry.”Mr. Goldfinger’s interiors were likewise spectacular. Fitted out by his wife, an interior designer, they included bridges, conversation pits and intimate hallways that led to living rooms with double-height ceilings. They were at once trophies to be displayed and cozy escape pods from the bustle of Manhattan.In 1981 he designed a home for Fred Jaroslow, the chief operating officer of Weight Watchers, in Sands Point, on Long Island’s North Shore. A pile of blocks, cylinders and vaults, it has an almost completely windowless facade, save for a kitchen aperture, a concession to Mr. Jaroslow’s wife.The back is the opposite: Double-height windows, a pool and a broad lawn opening to the water make it an inviting space for entertaining. The house gained prominence when Martin Scorsese used it as the setting for a debauched party hosted by Leonardo DiCaprio’s corrupt broker in the 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street.”Myron Goldfinger in 1965. He designed his homes by amassing basic shapes — half-circles, blocks, triangles — into dramatic sculptural statements.The New York TimesMyron Henry Goldfinger was born on Feb. 17, 1933, in Atlantic City, N.J., to William and Bertha (Sass) Goldfinger. His father was a mail carrier, his mother a homemaker.As a child growing up working class on the Jersey Shore, Myron gawked at the stately homes in some of his hometown’s more affluent neighbors, like Marven Gardens to the south.“I guess we all search for a certain meaning and understanding of life,” he wrote in the foreword to “Myron Goldfinger: Architect.” “I know I am always building the houses I never lived in as a boy.”He graduated from Penn with a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1955, then served two years in the Army, designing cabinets at the Pentagon. Afterward he spent almost a decade working for large and small design firms in New York, including the office of Karl Linn, a noted landscape architect; the giant Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; and the office of Philip Johnson.In 1966, he decided to go off on his own, opening a firm with June Matkovic, whom he married that same year. Through Mr. Johnson, he also secured a teaching position at the Pratt Institute, a design and engineering university in Brooklyn, where he stayed for a decade.Along with his wife and daughter, he is survived by another daughter, Djerba Goldfinger, and a grandchild.Later in his career, Mr. Goldfinger expanded beyond the New York area, designing luxury villas on the Caribbean island of Anguilla and two homes in the Southwest, including one in Santa Fe, N.M., for himself and his wife.David Michael KennedyMr. Goldfinger wrote two other books, “Villages in the Sun: Mediterranean Community Architecture” (1969) and “Images of the Southwest” (2008), both of which explored vernacular architecture and how it reflected its surrounding landscape, history and culture.“I love the intuitive artistic sense that drove these ancient peoples,” he told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 1996. “It was an organic process that used whatever materials were available in a basic, honest fashion.”Later in his career, Mr. Goldfinger expanded somewhat beyond the New York area, designing a series of luxury villas on the Caribbean island of Anguilla and two homes in the American Southwest, including one in Santa Fe, for himself and his wife. They had fallen in love with the region, and amassed a sizable collection of Southwestern art.Today, many critics and preservationists speak of Mr. Goldfinger’s work in the same sentence as that of Charles Gwathmey and Richard Meier, two world-renowned modernists who likewise designed homes around New York City.If they are better known, it may be because they also completed high-profile public works — Mr. Gwathmey and his partner, Robert Siegel, renovated the Guggenheim Museum in 1992, and Mr. Meier designed the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Mr. Goldfinger’s single significant nonresidential work was a synagogue in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.His work also went out of fashion for a time, as postmodernism swept in and clients returned to more traditional styles. But, Mr. Godbold said, the pendulum may be swinging back: On social media, he often sees younger architecture fans fawning over a Goldfinger house.“We’re all going to be loving it in a few years,” he said. More

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      ‘Shortcomings’ Review: Dazed and Confused

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      Directed by Randall Park, this charming comedy about a Japanese American man’s belated coming-of-age touches upon fascinating questions of identity but fails to dig below the surface.“Shortcomings,” the directorial debut of the actor Randall Park, opens with a movie-within-the-movie: it’s a spoof of “Crazy Rich Asians,” playing at an Asian film festival in the Bay Area. As Ben (Justin H. Min), a Japanese American cinephile, and his girlfriend Miko (Ally Maki), a festival organizer, step out of the theater, Ben blasts it as “a garish mainstream rom-com that glorifies the capitalist fantasy of vindication through materialism and wealth.”I nodded enthusiastically. Too bad Ben turns out to be a jerk.If the meme “the worst person you know just made a great point” were a movie, it would be “Shortcomings.” Ben’s opinions aren’t wrong — market-tested corporate ploys at diversity do deserve our skepticism, for instance, and the toilet-bowl art of Ben’s hipster co-worker (Tavi Gevinson) does deserve the snide laugh it elicits from him — but he is self-absorbed and fickle. His moping and griping are unearned, lobbed like wet blankets at anyone trying to actually do something with their lives, like Miko, or his best friend, Alice (Sherry Cola).“Shortcomings” traces the belated coming-of-age of Ben, as Miko abruptly leaves for New York for the summer and Ben fumbles around, dating different women and confronting the looming closure of the art house movie theater where he works. His character arc isn’t new: Hollywood has given us numerous stunted heroes who slowly, begrudgingly, come to realize their, err, shortcomings. Where Park’s movie, adapted from a 2007 graphic novel by Adrian Tomine, feels fresh is in the way it brings Ben’s Asian American identity into the mix. Is his maladjustment a consequence of his experience of otherness, or is he just a regular old man-child?Ben, for his part, invokes and denies racism opportunistically: He is dismissive when Miko accuses him of ogling white women, but quickly labels her new lover, Leon — a white man, played hilariously by Timothy Simons, who speaks Japanese and busts out Taekwondo moves — a “rice king.” Ben isn’t being fair — but neither is the scorned date who tells Ben that his lot in life is owed only to him, not to his race. What these arguments get at is the genuine struggle, familiar to people of color, to wrest some agency from a world that tells us who we can and cannot be.Park’s film isn’t intrepid enough to really plumb the thorny terrain of that struggle. The movie is funny and touching, with a star-making performance by Min and a script full of lovely, self-aware little touches: When Jacob Batalon, who plays one of Ben’s co-workers, derides the “Spider-Man” movies that the actor himself stars in, I chuckled. But it’s shot like a sitcom — flat, shiny, perfunctory — and structured like one, too, with quip-heavy vignettes that resolve in pat conclusions. Ben surely deserves his comeuppance, but “Shortcomings” traces too neat a narrative journey to that end, leaving a trail of unexplored questions and missed opportunities in its wake.ShortcomingsRated R for some references to sex and pornography, and some disturbingly unintelligible punk art. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Meg 2: The Trench’ Review: Gleefully Jumping the Shark

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      This lively sequel to 2018’s somewhat tepid killer-shark blockbuster greatly improves upon its predecessor by getting gorier, funnier and more stylish.A cute dog, an 8-year-old girl and countless sunbathing beachgoers survived “The Meg” (2018) miraculously unharmed. The British filmmaker Ben Wheatley, who steps into the director’s chair for “Meg 2: The Trench,” has racked up stomach-turning body counts (including dogs) in his darkly comic thrillers like “Down Terrace,” “Kill List” and “Free Fire,” so it seems only fair that his take on a killer-shark movie would lean a bit more vicious.But “Meg 2,” like the first, maintains a box office-friendly PG-13 rating, so Wheatley is necessarily limited in how much carnage he is permitted to depict. Nevertheless, he finds many creative ways to butcher bad guys and side characters that hit the same horror-adjacent pleasure centers. There’s a shot from the point of view of a shark’s mouth as it’s eating people. I call that good directing.The first “Meg,” with its story of a long-extinct carnivore re-emerging to wreak havoc among scientists, was reminiscent of “Jurassic Park.” “Meg 2” takes the natural next step and borrows from “The Lost World.” The shark-hunting, ocean-protecting hero Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) now has a stepdaughter (Sophia Cai) to protect, while the repertoire of prehistoric predators on the hunt has been richly expanded to include several land-roaming dinosaurs and (why not?) a giant squid. Of course, any shark movie will inevitably live in the shadow of “Jaws.” Wheatley has fun with it by nodding playfully to “Jaws 2.”The director having fun is the presiding feeling here — which may account for why the movie is so frequently amusing, and occasionally delightful. It has a light, irreverent tone that sometimes verges on parodic, as when a villain’s archly confident victory speech is disrupted by a shark appearance straight out of “Deep Blue Sea,” or when a splashy pink title card cheerfully informs us that the populated area about to be descended upon by a trio of sharks is called “Fun Island.” Just how close does the movie get to full-blown parody? At one point, Statham literally jumps a shark.It’s not that the first “Meg” was particularly serious: It contained comic relief, but the humor felt more studio-mandated. “Meg 2” has a spark of wit that feels looser and more appropriate to the material. The supporting cast — especially Page Kennedy and Cliff Curtis as scientists forced to join the action — are offered much more freedom to cut loose and get silly, while certain sight gags have a verve that really pop (including an escalating bit that has more and more of our heroes wandering into the same armed holdup). No dogs come to harm in this one either, it should be said. There’s enough madcap mayhem elsewhere that any more would have been overkill.Meg 2: The TrenchRated PG-13 for intense action, mild language and excessive shark violence. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lady Killer’ and ‘The Strange Mister Victor’ Review

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      Two newly restored films by the director Jean Grémillon, whom cinephiles discuss like a special secret, get a second life in theaters.Compared to other heavy hitters from the golden age of French cinema — think Jean Renoir (“The Rules of the Game”) or Marcel Carné (“Children of Paradise”) — history hasn’t been kind to Jean Grémillon. This is especially the case in the United States, where the director’s work continues to be discussed among cinephiles like a special secret. It’s a shame. His films are among the most innovative and expressive from a period stretching roughly from the early 1930s through the ’50s — and in many ways they look ahead to the rule breaking of the French New Wave.Newly restored in 4K, “Lady Killer” and “The Strange Mister Victor” are essentially Grémillon’s breakthrough films, the midpoints between his early documentaries and experimental dramas and his greatest hits (“Stormy Waters,” “Lumière d’été”), which he made during the German occupation of France.“Lady Killer” stars the leonine Jean Gabin as Lucien, a womanizing legionnaire. Suave and sexy in his uniform, Lucien attracts the female gaze like moths to the flame. Enter the femme fatale Madeleine (Mireille Balin), a beautiful socialite bound to a wealthy benefactor. Lucien falls hard for Madeleine and takes up a job at a print shop in Paris so that they can be together. Then comes betrayal and murder, though Grémillon supplements the bleak fatalism and noirish intrigue with bursts of quivering melodrama that enrich and expand the story beyond its ostensible fatal-attraction framework.In his early days, Grémillon was a violinist who played with an orchestra that provided accompaniment for silent films. He applies this musical sensibility to his construction of drama. His films move between small, seemingly uneventful moments and ones that hit like a reverberating gong. What starts out as a placid relationship between Lucien and his meek doctor friend, René (Réne Lefèvre), moves on to new, devastating terrain. Their bond is capped by a startlingly intimate scene of male camaraderie that plays like a fever dream.Working in the tradition of poetic realism, Grémillon intermingled documentarylike visions of working-class milieus with stylized interludes of psychological tension. “The Strange Mister Victor” begins like a panoramic drama about the socially diverse inhabitants of Toulon, in the south of France, and eventually reveals an ethical crisis about the entanglement of two men. Victor Agardanne (Raimu) is an upstanding businessman with wife and child, though he secretly consorts with a band of crooks. When he kills one of them for threatening to blackmail him, he uses a tool that belongs to his cobbler, Bastien (Pierre Blanchar), as the murder weapon, which leads to that man’s arrest. When Bastien escapes imprisonment, the guilty Victor goes out of his way to harbor the unsuspecting fugitive.There’s perhaps more to chew on in “Mister Victor,” bolstered by an expert performance from Raimu that straddles genuine moral anxiety and self-interested desperation. Yet one particular scene from “Lady Killer” continues to live in my head rent-free.Midway through the film, a mirror captures Lucien as he spots Madeleine from a distance and then steps back into the shadows when she meets his gaze. The plots of Grémillon’s films are meaty and sociologically probing, but what sets him apart from the directors of his time — the majority of them narrative-focused artists who came from a theater background — are moments like these: brief, wordless, but throbbing with desire and despair.Lady KillerNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters.The Strange Mister VictorNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Claire Simon Finds a New Subject: Herself

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      The French director Claire Simon was making a movie about a Paris hospital when she found out she had cancer. So she became a character in her own film.Midway through filming “Our Body,” a sprawling documentary about the gynecological ward of a Paris hospital, the movie’s director, Claire Simon, received some medical news of her own: She had breast cancer.Four weeks into the shoot, Simon had discovered a lump beneath her armpit. But rather than cease production, she decided to improvise and turn the camera on herself.“I had to film a lot of naked women,” Simon in a recent video interview. “Then I was naked, too, and I was just like them. This changed my point of view entirely; it helped me cope and be calm in the face of my own sickness.”Motivated by the desire to show what she called the body’s “hidden truth,” Simon is but one patient among dozens in her documentary’s celebration of the body, depicted in all its wondrous and terrible iterations. “Our Body” — which played in this year’s Berlin International Film Festival and is showing at Film Forum in New York from Aug. 4 — assembles intimate patient-doctor consultations and surgical procedures into something like a volume of short stories. The subjects include abortion, artificial insemination, birth, gender transitioning, menopause and, eventually, disease and death.The veteran French filmmaker, a prolific creator of documentaries and fictional narratives that blur the boundaries between those two modes, has made a career out of turning the experiences of ordinary people into epic tapestries of human life.Often, she begins with a place. A Paris train station provides the setting for two films: “Gare du Nord,” (2013) an ensemble drama about briefly intersecting lives, and “Human Geography (2013), a documentary composed of interviews with the station’s inhabitants.“If you dive into pockets of everyday life, the world becomes very large,” Simon said. In “Our Body,” she added, she was concerned by questions like, “How does our civilization treat the female body?,” and, “What is the relationship between the body and words?”“I had to film a lot of naked women,” Simon said. “Then I was naked, too, and I was just like them. Cinema Guild”Our Body” is set in the gynecological ward of a Paris hospital.Cinema GuildBy capturing long, uninterrupted scenes of patients speaking with their doctors, “Our Body,” underscores the alienating nature of medical jargon. Yet these observational scenes also create room for the kind of bracingly personal testimonies that have long characterized Simon’s work. See, for instance, her 2018 documentary “Young Solitude,” a series of frank discussions with suburban high schoolers; or “Mimi” (2003), a kind of hangout movie in which Simon’s gregarious friend Mimi relates her life story as she drifts through Nice, France, her hometown.Simon was also raised in southern France (though she was born in Britain) by a family of painters and writers. She studied Arabic and anthropology in Algeria before teaching herself how to edit and use a camera. In the 1980s, she began making narrative shorts and eventually received a scholarship to attend a prestigious documentary workshop led by Jean Rouch, known as the father of cinéma-vérité.It was around this time that Simon discovered some of her most crucial inspirations, like Raymond Depardon, Robert Kramer and Frederick Wiseman — “my great master,” she said. Wiseman’s influence is apparent in Simon’s fascination with public spaces and lengthy conversations. “The Competition” (2016), a study of the admissions process for La Fémis, France’s most prestigious film school, seems to take up his mantle — Simon herself has described the film as “Wisemanesque.”According to Abby Sun, the director of artists’ programs at the International Documentary Association, Simon’s work nevertheless represents a significant departure from Wiseman’s detached and unobtrusive style.Simon’s movies are “metatextual, and they exhibit a knowing, personal touch. They show her as part of the fabric of the place or situation she’s filming,” Sun said, citing as examples a series of films Simon had made about her daughter, the philosopher Manon Garcia.The relationship between Simon and her subjects helps determine the shape of the film. This connection is key to her form of auteurism.“There’s a clear sense that there’s something collaborative going on, that there’s been a dialogue between the filmmaker and the subject,” said Eric Hynes, a film curator at the Museum of the Moving Image.Simon in Los Angeles, in August. “I feel that I have many, many more films to make,” she said.Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times“Nowadays, we’re constantly asking, ‘Where’s the consent? How do we know that the subject feels comfortable with what’s being filmed?’,” he added. “Claire has been at the vanguard of what we consider a responsible way of making documentaries for 20 plus years now.”Simon said although she considered herself a sloppy camera operator, she refuses to give the job to anyone else. Looking through the viewfinder allowed her to connect more organically with what she’s filming, she said. “If I’m holding the camera, I’m able to improvise and change my mind and I don’t have to bother with justifying myself,” she said. “As a woman, it’s a huge relief.”Having successfully undergone cancer treatment, Simon isn’t just relieved, she’s energized. Toward the end of the interview in late July, Simon gleefully announced that it was her birthday that day. She had just turned 68. “I feel that I have many, many more films to make,” she said.“Mr. Wiseman is 93, and he’s made another beautiful one this year, like he does every year,” she added. “That means I’ve got a little time yet.” More

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      ‘What Comes Around’ Review: A Triangle of Power Dynamics

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      Amy Redford directs this drama about a teenager who falls for a mysterious older man she met on the internet.They say that productions of David Mamet’s “Oleanna,” a play about sexual harassment, inspired quarrels in theater lobbies. Such passion is unlikely to result from “What Comes Around,” a drama that shares with Mamet’s story an incendiary premise pinned to sexual politics, but lacks the electricity necessary to set off sparks.Directed by Amy Redford and written by Scott Organ based on his play, the movie charts the shifting power dynamics among a mother, her teenage daughter and the daughter’s older boyfriend. Anna (Grace Van Dien) has just turned 17 when Eric (Kyle Gallner), a 28-year-old she met online, appears on her doorstep. Wary, then intrigued, Anna allows their flirtation to morph into a physical courtship, until her mother, Beth (Summer Phoenix), catches wind of the affair and orders Eric out for good.A big reveal occurs near the story’s midpoint, when Beth’s aversion to Eric is shown to have a darker valence and stem from a concealed past. The development is a narrative sleight of hand, reverse engineered to upend the viewer’s existing impressions and raise new questions about responsibility, trauma and blame.The story, though neatly plotted, is engaging enough. The trouble lies in its staging. Redford often sets conversations — and there are many of them — during outdoor strolls, as if stumped for ideas of action that pairs with dialogue. This absence of cinematic intention extends to blocking and camera placement. With direction this desultory, even climactic outbursts play like shrugs.What Comes AroundNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Klondike’ Review: Domestic Violence

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      In a film set in 2014, a couple in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine try to maintain normality as war rocks their home.“Klondike” takes place nine years ago and had its premiere one month before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but its relevance hasn’t dimmed. It is set in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine in July 2014, when an antiaircraft missile downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, killing the 298 people on board. Russian-backed separatists were widely presumed to be responsible. Last year, a Dutch court handed down three convictions in the case.That crash occurs about 20 minutes into “Klondike,” and it’s actually the second major act of violence in the film. In the opening shot, Tolik (Serhii Shadrin) tries to convince his pregnant wife, Irka (Oksana Cherkashyna), that she needs to get away to “where there is no war.” The moment he says that, a blast rocks their home, destroying a side of the house. The dwelling will remain open to the elements while Irka and Tolik continue to live there, despite the hostilities outside.Irka is staunchly anti-separatist and refuses to acquiesce or leave. Tolik, while not expressly pro-separatist, favors the path of least resistance; he even slaughters a cow Irka likes to feed the men controlling the area. The director, Maryna Er Gorbach, portrays the nearby plane crash obliquely: The wreckage is seen piecemeal — on the news, as a distant smoke plume, as detached wings and, most horrifyingly, as a corpse still in a plane seat that lands on the couple’s property.“Klondike” underlines the cognitive dissonance of wishing that context away. The director favors absurdist tableaus (Irka watches soccer on TV while the gaping hole in the house looms in the background), placid camera moves counterpointed by brutality and shots held so long that it almost seems as if the filmmaker is the one being cruel. It’s a grimly effective strategy for a harsh but powerful movie.KlondikeNot rated. In Ukrainian, Russian, Chechen and Dutch, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More