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      ‘Weird: The Al Yankovic Story’ Review: Any Odd? He Beat It.

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      The parody musician makes a joke of his own life, with the help of Daniel Radcliffe, in this uproarious sham biopic.Weird Al Yankovic is the most improbable MTV star in modern history: an abstemious accordion player whose family-friendly song parodies have cracked the Top 40 for four straight decades, crowning him the Methuselah of novelty acts. (Compared to Yankovic, the Monkees are a flash in the pan.) “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” an uproarious sham biopic starring Daniel Radcliffe, and co-written by Yankovic and the film’s director, Eric Appel, is merely the most recent time the artist has made a joke of his own life from sheltered child to odd teen to rock god.Earlier gibes at Yankovic’s own implausibility include nearly every interview he’s ever given, as well as a 1985 mockumentary (“The Compleat Al”) produced during the heady days of his “Eat It” single success, and a 2010 glossy drama mock trailer, also directed by Appel, that has now been willed into feature-length existence and padded with more lies.Like Yankovic’s music, “Weird” is a note-for-note parody of a genre. Here, the target is the prestige biography and its rote rise-and-fall trajectory that’s become so creaky, it could play backup on his album “Polka Party!” The fibs — er, “facts” — are squeezed to fit the formula. When young Al’s mother (Julianne Nicholson) discovers a Hawaiian shirt in his bed, the score swells portentously as though we’re watching Jackie Robinson clench his first baseball bat. If a scene needs Al’s accordion to be slandered as a vomit-inducing devil’s squeezebox, so be it; minutes later, his music might bring a biker to tears, or Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood) to ecstasy, or incite the cops, during the Jim Morrison phase of Yankovic’s career, to arrest him for lewd behavior.The script deflates any pretensions that Yankovic is a lyrical genius. Teasingly, Appel drags out a sequence where Al, assembling a sandwich, struggles to brainstorm his take on “My Sharona” until the audience is hissing “Bologna!” through its teeth. Later, his mother tries, and fails, to force-feed her oblivious son the libretto for “Fat.” Still, Radcliffe is winningly guileless in his performance, twitching his costume-y eyebrows and mustache like gentle bunny ears even as he lip-syncs “Another One Rides the Bus” with such commitment that his neck veins nearly pop. (The cinematographer Ross Riege is not above backlighting Radcliffe’s wig to resemble a halo.)It’s a testament to Yankovic’s status in pop culture that the film is crowded with so many celebrity cameos that it could have been titled “It’s a Weird, Weird, Weird, Weird World.” (Yankovic himself appears as the record label executive Tony Scotti, who released Yankovic’s debut album.) Only Weird Al scholars will note the pointed irony in a scene where the musician rejects casting offers to play James Bond and Indiana Jones, franchises that would later dominate the July 1989 box office over his comedy flop, “UHF,” chucking him into a creative tailspin. Those expert level Al-thorities may also be the only ones to realize how much of “Weird” is actually true. Yes, Yankovic did acquire his first accordion from a traveling salesman. Yes, he did record his first hit in a public bathroom. And yes, he did achieve almost instantaneous success. Telling it straight turns out to be Yankovic’s greatest prank.Weird: The Al Yankovic StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. Watch on Roku. More

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      ‘Utama’ Review: This Bitter Earth

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      In Bolivia’s official submission to the next Oscars, an old Quechua couple struggle to find water to sustain them, their crops and llamas.The Bolivian movie “Utama” pulls you in with an uneasy mix of beauty and dread. A fictional tale that draws from real life, it takes place in the Andean plateau — the Altiplano — an arid, mountainous strip with altitudes nearing 14,000 feet above sea level that runs through western Bolivia. There, on hard, cracked land in a tiny, adobe home, a wizened Quechua couple of indeterminate age with no electricity and few outside contacts, yet graced with unflagging fortitude, wait for the rain that will sustain them, their meager crops and small herd of llamas.Stooped with age, Virginio and Sisa — José Calcina and Luisa Quispe, both nonprofessional actors — scarcely speak, the texture and arc of their lives instead conveyed through quotidian rituals, small gestures and stoic expressions. They watch their animals, they watch the world, they watch each other. They also struggle, their agonies weighing most visibly on Virginio. Every morning, and with greater difficulty, he guides the llamas, their ears festooned with pink tassels, across the parched land in search of grass. The arduousness of his days makes for restless nights and a wheezing that Sisa somehow doesn’t notice.The Bolivian writer-director Alejandro Loayza Grisi has a background in still photography, and it shows. He has a feel for the drama of color, form, scale and light, as well as a sensitive collaborator in his cinematographer, Bárbara Alvarez (her credits include “The Headless Woman”). With a lucid eye and a steady camera, he captures the region’s brutal beauty, using stark contrasts — like birds-eye views of isolated houses and people — to accentuate its extremes. At other times, he zeros in on similarities, like those between the weathered faces and the desiccated terrain, suggesting ideas that the characters don’t voice.As the days tick by quietly and more and more disastrously, Virginio’s health and the area’s declining water sources begin to blur, rendering a near-totemic character increasingly symbolic. At one point, Virginio and Sisa’s far more loquacious grandson, Clever (Santos Choque), shows up, and the family’s history begins to emerge. Clever and his father want the couple to move to a city, an idea that Virginio rejects. He has strong, apparently traditional opinions, including about the gendered division of labor. It’s Sisa’s job to collect water, he insists, even when she’s forced to walk a long distance to fill their buckets at a shrinking river.Virginio is clinging to a life that’s disappearing as rapidly as the area’s water. That’s painful, no question, but the complexities of the world that he and Sisa inhabit are as frustratingly elusive as their inner lives. That’s too bad, although this lack of specifics also helps explain why “Utama” has traveled widely on the international festival circuit. (It’s Bolivia’s Oscar entry.) The Altiplano has long endured periods of extended drought that global warming has worsened, leading to Bolivia’s second largest lake drying up and rural migration. Yet while climate change shadows every anxious discussion here, it also remains at a safe remove, a vague threat embedded in an aesthetically soothing package and gently salted with tears.UtamaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams’ Review: For the Heel of It

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      Luca Guadagnino’s documentary about the celebrated Italian shoe designer Salvatore Ferragamo reaches for romance and glamour, but falters during transitions.Arriving two weeks before the release of “Bones and All,” Luca Guadagnino’s tatterdemalion drifter romance, the director’s “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams” surveys a more refined coupling, not of people, but of pumps.The documentary opens on an assembly line, where a suite of artisans methodically carve, sculpt and hammer out a pair of sequined vermilion stilettos. Before we even meet the film’s subject, the Italian designer Salvatore Ferragamo, this mesmerizing procedural overture suggests that Ferragamo viewed shoemaking as an art and a science. One wishes the tribute that follows were as nimble.Plodding through Ferragamo’s life, the documentary layers talking-head interviews with archival footage and photographs. Born in 1898 in the Italian village of Bonito, Ferragamo went on to apprentice in Naples before taking arduous passage to the United States. Following his ambition, or perhaps a premonition, he moved to Santa Barbara, where he found success designing custom footwear for movie stars. Throughout, Michael Stuhlbarg reads passages from Ferragamo’s writing in a velvety murmur. “I love feet,” he recites at one point. “They talk to me.”Guadagnino clearly intends for these themes of seduction, allure and glamour to envelop the audience, like silk fabric swathing an arched foot sole. Instead, the film falters, particularly during transitions, which tend to feel abrupt. If Guadagnino sought to reflect the romance of Ferragamo’s red carpet creations, his storytelling is at once more conventional and more awkward in construction. Forget feet; defter hands might have helped.Salvatore: Shoemaker of DreamsRated PG. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘Soft & Quiet’ Review: Far-Right Ladies Night

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      This distressingly immersive horror film by Beth de Araújo traces a group of white supremacist women in real time.Unlike the majority of recent horror films that engage with race relations in the United States and the country’s legacy of white nationalism (like “Get Out” or this year’s “Nanny”), “Soft & Quiet,” written and directed by Beth de Araújo, takes the racist’s perspective.The movie’s title refers to an approach that one of its characters, Emily (Stefanie Estes), sees as the most effective for spreading the gospel of white supremacy. Emily is a clean-cut kindergarten teacher and the leader of an alliance of far-right women. De Araújo and the cinematographer Greta Zozula’s roving hand-held camera trails the group of seemingly innocuous women in what seems to be real time.After a vaguely unsettling opening scene in which Emily quietly pits a student against a Latina custodian, the film escalates with stomach-dropping abruptness when the foil is lifted off a pie Emily has baked, revealing a swastika carved into the dough. It’s just a joke, she claims, though the cheery group’s resemblance to the P.T.A. or a book club for suburban mothers makes their hate-mongering rhetoric especially chilling.More disturbing yet is how fluidly their ideas materialize into something real and physical when four of its members — emboldened by each other, with extra encouragement from a brutish newcomer, Leslie (Olivia Luccardi), a younger woman recently released from prison — impulsively descend upon a mixed race Asian American woman’s home to vandalize it and steal her possessions. Their crimes end up exceeding even their own expectations.The film is a palpable joyride steered by the kinds of women who, de Araújo seems to think, could easily get away with it. In this sense, it attempts to be both a political cautionary tale and a horror film committed to shock-and-awe thrill seeking. The brutal possibilities of the white supremacist mind-set are nothing to shy away from. Still, the film’s admittedly jarring cruelty does little beyond press down on old bruises, turning the realities of racialized violence into an immersive spectacle with the kind of real-world sadistic allure one might find in a serial-killer movie.Soft & QuietRated R for torture, sexual assault and vile language. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Something in the Dirt’ Review: The Truth Is Over There, by the Sofa

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      Two likable losers fall into conspiratorial rabbit holes while filming the strange goings-on in their apartment building.“Something in the Dirt” is one of those weird little surprises sometimes found skulking in the crannies of mainstream film festivals, slippery and screwy and impossible to categorize. An ambitious potluck of buddy comedy, paranormal puzzle and whatdunnit mystery, this fifth feature from the filmmaking team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead cheerfully substitutes audacity for discipline.A doomy vibe descends immediately as Levi (Benson), a feckless bartender with a sketchy past, moves into a decaying apartment in the Hollywood Hills. Low-flying aircraft rumble overhead and a forest fire belches smoke on the horizon. Inside, there’s a creaking door that won’t close, a dripping ceiling (shout-out to Yah’el Dooley’s excellent sound design) and arcane equations scribbled on a closet wall. Levi’s mood lifts, though, when he meets his new neighbor, John (Moorhead), a recently divorced former math teacher. The two form an instant connection, despite John’s apocalyptic religious views and his apparently blood-spattered shirt.Written by Benson and shot by Moorhead, “Something in the Dirt” is a surreal satire of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking, suggesting both as logical responses to an increasingly scary world. When the friends, hoping for fame and fortune, decide to document what they believe to be supernatural phenomena — a levitating quartz ashtray, a plant that spontaneously grows strange fruit — their obsession with re-enactments digs slyly at the distortions of nonfiction filmmaking. Rambling conversations on aliens and math theorems, time travel and TED talks, contribute to an atmosphere in which everything feels unstable, not least the men’s sanity.Overlong and overwritten, “Dirt” nevertheless unfolds with an enjoyably comic quirkiness, a tale of two doofuses who sought meaning in symbols and found comfort in friendship.Something in the DirtRated R for a little violence and a lot of crazy talk. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Next Exit’ Review: End of the Road

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      Two strangers reflect on their lives as they embark on a cross-country drive to join a study involving life after death.In Mali Elfman’s debut feature “Next Exit,” Rose and Teddy (Katie Parker and Rahul Kohli) are two strangers with something in common: They’d both rather be dead.They embark on a cross-country drive to join an experiment run by a controversial scientist who claims there is life after death. But rather than a spiritual meditation on the great beyond, or a dystopian fable, Elfman’s road movie fits the largely conventional mold of stories about people taking stock before ending their lives.The film begins with the scientist (Karen Gillan) presenting evidence of the afterlife — a slightly janky recording of a boy playing cards with his father’s ghost. Her study involves the assisted suicide of its participants, who can now look forward to an afterlife. (The arrangement sounds more macabre than the film fully acknowledges.) Rose is eager to ditch what she regards as an ill-spent life, and she ends up sharing a rental car with Teddy, who is also deeply dissatisfied but tries to be an upbeat companion.On Rose and Teddy’s drive to San Francisco they have instructive encounters with a priest, a regretful cop, a hippie-dippy hitchhiker, and estranged family members. The reluctant pair keeps recalibrating in response, and trade prickly banter. Their trek sometimes taps the tragicomic feel of a soul-bearing late-night conversation in a bar.But the actors’ chemistry feels brittle, and like many road movies it has trouble mining drama out of disparate episodes. When the subject is the explicit consideration of a life’s worth, it’s a tricky road to take and not get lost along the way.Next ExitNot rated. 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Review: In ‘You Resemble Me,’ a Maladjusted Girl Is Interrupted

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      Dina Amer’s film uses empathetic, if simplistic, fictions to try to make sense of the complicated real life of a young Moroccan-French woman drawn to ISIS.In “You Resemble Me,” the journalist-turned-filmmaker Dina Amer uses fiction to try and make sense of a complicated life: that of Hasna Ait Boulahcen, a Moroccan-French woman who died at 26 during a police raid on the hide-out of the mastermind of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. Initially described in some news headlines as “Europe’s first female suicide bomber,” Boulahcen was found to have been killed in the crossfire, raising new questions about the extent of her involvement with the terrorists.Amer rounds out details drawn from interviews with Boulahcen’s family and friends with her own psychological coloring, striving to give shape to the inner life of a maladjusted immigrant. A whirling camera captures the tenderness and the tragedies of Hasna and her sister Mariam’s childhood, including parental abuse and their separation by the foster care system. The daily degradations of Hasna’s young adulthood as a drug peddler unfold in grimy scenes of Paris nightlife, while her eventual communion with a radicalized cousin is conveyed in hushed close-ups, underlining the powerful promise of acceptance that may have led her to ISIS.But for all its empathetic detail, “You Resemble Me” contrives a rather simplistic cause-and-effect tale, grasping too desperately at elusive answers. Hasna’s ability to adapt to — or dissociate from — harsh circumstances is literalized through the deepfake technology used to morph the face of Mouna Soualem, who plays the adult Hasna, into those of other actors (Sabrina Ouazani, Amer). These interruptions, glitchy rather than compelling, shortchange the spiky rawness of Soualem’s performance. The film needs more facts and fewer flourishes, but its closing turn to documentary footage, comprising brief snippets of interviews with Hasna’s family, is too little, too late.You Resemble MeNot rated. In Arabic and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’ Review: New York’s Last Rock Renaissance

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      The post-post punk New York rock scene gets an archival retrospective in this documentary.The post-post-punk rock scene in late ’90s and early aughts New York saw an unusual flurry of activity, with disparate acts exciting international attention of the sort that hadn’t visited the city since the early days of CBGB. Elizabeth Goodman’s 2017 oral history of “rebirth and rock and roll” is the basis for the documentary “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace.Downtown rock was never homogeneous in style, and the bands considered here are all over the map stylistically: there’s the very East Village scatological shagginess of Moldy Peaches, the minimalist grandiosity of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the hermetically psychedelicized TV on the Radio, and of course the poor little rich boys of the Strokes, whose best work melded Motorik-derived groove with Stonesy/Velvety attitude.There are revealing glimpses into the early work of artists who would morph into entities that were slicker and ostensibly cooler. For instance, Paul Banks, later to front the acclaimed Joy Division sound-alike Interpol, is first seen here bearing an acoustic guitar and a boyish earnestness.The film is entirely archival in its visual footage, much of it shot at the time by the photographer and videographer Nanci Sarrouf. The movie’s new interviews are audio only. As a result, the likes of Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, and the recently reconstituted Strokes, all working musicians still, are never seen as they are today.The most interesting narrative thread is that of Murphy, who arrived in New York as an odd man out with no clue about the dance music he would eventually master. It’s kind of jarring to learn that “Losing My Edge,” LCD’s breakout single, in which Murphy elaborates on the title condition, was born out of genuine desperation rather than ironic drollery.Meet Me in the BathroomNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More