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      ‘Final Cut’ Review: A Feeble Rise of the Living Dead

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      A remake of a Japanese zom-com, this French adaptation about the making of a B-level zombie flick does little to justify its existence.If you’re going to remake a film whose footprint is still fresh, you better make it your own if not significantly better. The French zom-com “Final Cut” does neither — the veteran filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius (“The Artist”) may have an Oscar, but his uninspired riff on the Japanese movie “One Cut of the Dead” (2019) has got nothing on the original’s ultra-low-budget charms.In “One Cut of the Dead,” a crew shooting a B-level zombie flick is attacked by the undead in a shaky single-take sequence that works despite its inexplicable pauses and blatantly phony severed limbs. We step into the making of the film-within-the-film, tracking the shoot from a chaotic behind-the-scenes perspective. The first half is fun, but the second half is golden, mining absurd humor, breathless tension, and movie-magic triumphalism from an onslaught of minor crises.Hazanavicius’s adaptation is an almost beat-for-beat copy: there’s an ax-wielding makeup artist played by an actress (Bérénice Bejo) who goes frighteningly Method; a blood-splatterd “final girl” (Matilda Lutz) who lobs off the head of her lover (Finnegan Oldfield); some all-too-realistic practical effects courtesy of a drunken, vomit-spewing castmate and another player seized by a bout of explosive diarrhea.Some tweaks account for Hazanavicius’s French translation, the most intriguing of which further deepen the plot’s metacinematic layers. “One Cut” exists within this world, too, with a Japanese cohort representing that film’s rights holders looming over the director Rémi (Romain Duris). There’s a long, fascinating history of Japanese and French cultural cross-pollination — and both countries are home to two of the oldest, most robust film industries in the world — but Hazanavicius works in the globalization of moviemaking only superficially, primarily through lazy culture-clash mockery: a Pearl Harbor joke here, a jab at the stereotypically poor French work ethic there.“Final Cut” puts its predecessor’s ingredients through an unflattering Instagram filter. The shoot’s intentional shoddiness — authentically kitschy in the original — rings false, with Hazanavicius spelling out the crew’s missteps in such a way that flattens the humor and kills the momentum.In France, to make a film about the making-of-a-film is practically a rite of passage (see François Truffaut’s “Day for Night,” Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island,” or “Olivier Assayas’s “Irma Vep”). With its metafictional bounties and playful genre bent, “One Cut” offers a conceit ripe for the picking. But what Hazanavicius has done here is a lifeless mock-up, a rehash made purely for audiences who’d prefer not to read Japanese subtitles. At least that’s some kind of justification for its existence.Final CutNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘20 Days in Mariupol’ Review: Ukrainian City Under Siege

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      While the Ukrainian city was under siege by Russian forces, a team of journalists recorded the brutal war, resulting in this essential documentary.Everyone else was gone: the authorities, the aid workers, the other journalists too. One week into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov was still in the port city of Mariupol, watching from a high floor of a hospital as a tank emblazoned with a white Z pulled up alongside. Smoke kept rising, bitter and black, from the shelled housing blocks a short distance away. There was no way out. Mariupol was surrounded now. Chernov kept his cameras rolling.“20 Days in Mariupol,” a relentless and truly important documentary, engulfs us in the initial ferocity of Russia’s siege of a city whose name has become a byword for this war’s inhumanity: My Lai, Srebrenica, Aleppo, Mariupol. The A.P. journalists were the last from an international news organization in the city, and for three weeks they documented pregnant women fleeing a bombed maternity hospital, the elderly and the displaced boiling snow to obtain fresh water, the freshly dug ditches where children’s corpses were laid to rest. The reporting would win Chernov, along with his colleagues Evgeniy Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko and Lori Hinnant, this year’s Pulitzer Prize for public service, but because internet connections were sparse to absent in the city, Chernov could only transmit a small fraction of his footage during the siege. It all comes out in “20 Days in Mariupol,” in which the battle to survive in southeast Ukraine becomes entwined with the struggle to tell the world what’s happening.This film is very hard to watch, and so it should be, though its episodic structure makes it somewhat easier to endure: Day 1 through Day 20, one at a time, from the first bombs to the team’s flight to safety. On the morning of Feb. 24, Chernov and his colleagues head toward Mariupol, a city of half a million people on the Sea of Azov, and drive by Ukrainian military bases whose antiaircraft systems are burning — the first Russian targets, to prepare the path of their war planes. Many residents doubted the violence would reach Mariupol, and evacuation trains were leaving the city half-empty. Now we follow them into improvised shelters: a cold cellar, a CrossFit gym. “I don’t want to die,” says one young boy. “I wish it would all end soon.”But by Day 4 the fighter jets are overhead, and Chernov is stationed at one of Mariupol’s remaining open hospitals, about a mile from the front line on the edge of the city. He’s there when an ambulance rushes up, and paramedics perform C.P.R. on a 4-year-old girl named Evangelina, severely injured after a Russian shell landed near her home. The medics race her to the modest emergency room, where her blood pools on the floor as they try, and fail, to resuscitate her. (Chernov blurs out her face here, though The A.P. published uncensored images at the time.) “Keep filming,” the head doctor insists — and a minute later, we see the same footage of the doctors at work in grainy reproduction on an MSNBC broadcast and Britain’s ITV News.This blending of high- and low-resolution video registers is a critical tool of Chernov and his editor, Michelle Mizner of “Frontline,” who in many chapters of “20 Days in Mariupol” suture together three kinds of imagery. First comes drone footage of the city — its Khrushchev-era housing blocks, its huge Azovstal steel plant — whose devastation becomes more visible as winter passes to spring. Then follows unique documentation of the war’s early atrocities, shot on high-definition video, but often askew or rocky as Chernov runs after a hospital gurney or flees from the aim of snipers. Finally, at the end of many days, the footage repeats as broadcasts on CBS News, France 24, Deutsche Welle and other AP clients.Even if they feel a touch self-congratulatory, these rebroadcasts underscore two things: the rarity of Chernov’s footage, and the immense challenge of getting it out of Mariupol. The port city’s internet is basically gone by Day 11, when the Russians blockade it from all three sides, and the A.P. journalists risk their lives to hunt for wireless connections after curfew. And there is the matter of Chernov’s nationality. Though he has covered wars in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, he is a native of Kharkiv, Ukraine, and as he whispers at the start of the film, “I have no illusions about what will happen to us if we are caught.”Day 20 comes, and with it a harrowing drive past a dozen Russian checkpoints, with the journalists hiding cameras and hard drives under the seats. One day later, on March 16, 2022, Russian forces bomb the city’s Drama Theater, where hundreds of adults and children have taken shelter. This documentary is more, therefore, than a unique record of particular crimes; it’s a synecdoche for a much larger atrocity, and a model of how we discover the larger truth of war in images of one hospital, one grave, one child.“With every new war, the ethics of war photography are debated again,” regretted the Ukrainian art historian Kateryna Iakovlenko in a recent essay on our self-serving doubt of depictions of horror, made acuter through Russia’s parallel disinformation campaigns. The only moral question before us is whether we take these images seriously, or whether, with a skepticism also known as cowardice, we turn away.20 Days in MariupolNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Five Demands’ Review: Occupying a College for Racial Justice

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      In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, a documentary recalls the occupation of City College 50 years ago.Among the wave of student protests that occurred across American university campuses in the late 1960s, the student occupation of The City College of New York in April 1969 was a highly local yet pivotal act of civil disobedience. The more than 200 Black and Puerto Rican students who occupied the buildings on South Campus for two weeks did so in protest of the school’s admissions policy and the lack of diversity in its student body. At a time when 40 percent of New York City’s high school graduates were Black or Latino, the film reports, only 9 percent of City College attendees were part of those communities. “The Five Demands,” a new documentary from Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, returns to the campus 50 years later alongside former students, now in their late 60s and 70s, who participated in the protests.In interviews, City College alumni who were recruited through the college’s SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) recall being underprepared in their education and made to feel like tokens who didn’t belong there by their white peers. And indeed, the “five demands” central to the occupation largely revolved not only around making efforts to admit more students of color, but also to provide them with adequate support once they were enrolled — a commitment that many elite colleges and universities still struggle with to this day.In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision that rejected affirmative action, the film feels eerily timely. Schiller and Weiss’s direction is utilitarian, cutting together talking-head interviews with montages of the occupation set to era-appropriate protest songs. But to its credit, the lack of flashiness puts the students’ struggles for racial justice front and center, and ultimately serves to highlight a less-remembered aspect of the countercultural student movement.The Five DemandsNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Theater Camp’ Review: Cabin Into the Woods

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      In this bitterly-funny mockumentary set at a drama institute, the actors feel their characters in their bones.“Acting,” the Tony winner Ben Platt opines in character, “is remembering and choosing to forget.” “Theater Camp,” a fizzy mockumentary about growing up Gershwin, does both. Platt wrote it with three longtime pals, Molly Gordon (friends since toddlerhood), Nick Lieberman (friends since high school) and his fiancé, Noah Galvin, who, like Platt, played the lead role in Broadway’s “Dear Evan Hansen.” (Gordon and Lieberman also direct the film.) These former youth performers remember everything: desperate auditions, capricious rejections and a dawning concern that one’s dreams of stage success are as flimsy as spray-painted cardboard stars. But the camp counselors the four have created — exaggerations of ones they’ve known — disregard the trauma they’ve endured, and now, inflict on others. Call it summer Stockholm syndrome. And call their group therapy session a treat.Our setting is a drama institute named AdirondACTS, as scrawled in a tacky crayon font. Amos (Platt) and Rebecca-Diane (Gordon) met here as children and, decades later, continue to haunt the one place that treats them like superstars. Broadway hasn’t beckoned. Nevertheless, every summer Amos and Rebecca-Diane hammer their wisdom into malleable minds.The careerist young campers are roughly the same maturity level as the adults. They’re also played by fantastic talents including Luke Islam, Alan Kim and Bailee Bonick, the latter of whom can hold a high note longer than the life span of a gnat. Still, the tykes know their role is to obediently absorb their coaches’ pep talks (“Peter Piper picked a priority”), threats (“This will break you”) and dubious opinions (“I do believe her as a French prostitute,” Amos whispers of a pigtailed 10-year-old).Failure wafts through the film, fastidiously unacknowledged. Here, a cruise ship callback and a repertory show in Sarasota represent the peak of achievable success. The grown-ups, who also include the costumer Gigi (Owen Thiele) and the dance instructor Clive (Nathan Lee Graham), resent any challenge to their artistic authority. “It says here you’re allergic to polyester,” Gigi huffs to a camper. “Why?” Later, when the story threatens to herd us toward that most hoary cliché — we gotta put on a show to save the school! — it’s a relief to realize that most characters can’t be bothered with that plot point, either. They’re creatives, babe. Capitalism is for clods like the owner’s son, Troy (Jimmy Tatro), a YouTube finance-bro who boasts of being an “en-Troy-preneur.”Gordon and Lieberman gesture faintly at a documentary structure. In the opening minutes, dry black-and-white intertitles barge into the action so often, you’re expecting them to claim that Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time. Soon after, the editing relaxes, the doc conceit wanders off and the film finds its rhythm as a string of bitterly funny vaudeville sketches that smack of Kool-Aid mixed with salt.Like many mostly improvised films, there’s a sense that half the story was abandoned on the cutting room floor. A late-breaking resolution hinges on a character who barely registers. Ayo Edebiri (from the television series “The Bear”) pops up as a first-time teacher with falsified experience in jousting and jugging — a promising gag, but she’s left to roam the margins, barely sharing any scenes with the rest of the cast. At one point, Galvin, playing a bashful stagehand, embarks on a tour of the cafeteria’s cliques. The scene stops at two. There’s just too much this film wants to cover.Clearly, the actors feel their characters in their bones. My favorite physical detail was how Platt’s Amos interrupts a bad rehearsal by leaping onstage in a showy frog hop, like Kermit giving ‘em the old razzle dazzle. How magical that, later, this floundering show-within-a-show is rescued when the children invest every ounce of moxie into belting Rebecca-Diane’s lame lyrics. Gusto can spin anything into gold.Theater CampRated PG-13 for spicy language and one adult slumber party. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Miracle Club’ Review: A Pleasant Pilgrimage

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      Set in 1967 Dublin, this mild-mannered comedy explores grief and grievances with an ensemble that includes Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates and Laura Linney.A camera soars above Dublin then glides toward a promontory where a solitary figure stands in front of a memorial plaque. A frothy score wrangles our emotions. Don’t get too sad, it seems to say, before the camera closes in on a sorrowful Lily Fox (Maggie Smith).Set in 1967, “The Miracle Club,” directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, touches on grief and grievances, on unwanted pregnancies and the Catholic Church, while wearing the guise of a redemptive romp. It’s a delicate balance that — even with the impressive triumvirate of Smith, Kathy Bates and Laura Linney — the movie doesn’t always sustain.Lily’s sojourn is one of multiple pilgrimages in the movie. The central journey takes Lily and her two closest friends, plus the estranged daughter of a recently departed third, to Lourdes, France, where miracles are sought by masses of people each year. Agnes O’Casey plays Dolly, the youngest of the trio and the mother of a boy (Eric D. Smith) who seems unable to speak. But Dolly is not the only member of the group in need of a miracle.With her taut mouth and vigilant gaze, Linney is especially nuanced as Chrissie, the wounded but self-contained and observant interloper who returns from the United States after a 40-year rift. And amid the star power, O’Casey is something of a revelation as the upbeat but wavering Dolly.The actor Stephen Rea does fine, grumbling work as Frank, Eileen’s unhelpful husband who must step in and care for their many highly amused children. Will he have an epiphany about home and hearth? The movie leaves little doubt about the answer. Indeed, the menfolk left behind, and their needs and demands, would provide the women reason enough for a sojourn.Dispensing wisdom throughout, Father Dermot (Mark O’Halloran) persuades Chrissie to join the pilgrimage. Later, he’ll offer an impromptu homily on unmet expectations, one that is surprisingly apt for those hoping for a movie that transcends the pleasant. The filmmakers go for too-easy laughs; the movie doesn’t seem to trust its audience to sit with the pain, much less to find the achy humor in it, as a more assured film might. The actors here are good, but they are not miracle workers.The Miracle ClubRated PG-13 for thematic elements and mildly salty language. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lakota Nation vs. United States’ Review: A 150-Year Clash

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      In 1980, the Lakota were offered money for their stolen Black Hills land. They refused to accept the settlement and continue to fight today.Three years after the discovery of gold nuggets on Lakota land in 1874, the Black Hills Act stripped the tribe of most of the acreage in the Dakotas and northwestern Nebraska it had been ceded by treaty decades earlier, making way for droves of fortune-seekers. Ever since, the Lakota people have been fighting to regain that land, a plight recorded in a new documentary, “Lakota Nation vs. United States.”This stunning film, directed by Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli, interleaves interviews of Lakota activists and elders with striking images of the Black Hills and its wildlife, historical documents and news reports, clips from old movies and other archival footage to extraordinary effect, demonstrating not only the physical and cultural violence inflicted on the Lakota but also their deep connection to the Black Hills, the area where Mount Rushmore was erected. (One activist, Krystal Two Bulls, describes the monument as “the ultimate shrine to white supremacy.”) The film covers well known instances of erasure and oppression, such as colonization and Standing Rock, but also lesser known injustices, such as the fate of the Dakota 38, in which dozens of men were executed by the U.S. Army in 1862 for rising up against the government.In 1980, the Lakotas’ case was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, which granted them remuneration for the lost land. But the Lakota people refused to accept the money and continue to do so, even as the settlement’s value has increased to more than $1 billion today. What they are fighting for is the land itself. Phyllis Young, one of the Lakota elders interviewed in the film, calls it their Mecca. “The land and the people,” she said, “are inextricably connected.Lakota Nation vs. United StatesRated PG-13 for violent images and thematic elements and strong language. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘Have You Got It Yet?’ Review: A Pink Floyd Enigma Illuminated

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      The founding frontman of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett was irresistibly charismatic, but this crazy diamond didn’t shine for long, as this comprehensive portrait shows.The classic rock legends who died young are unfortunately numerous: Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain. Syd Barrett, a founder of Pink Floyd, lived to be 60 — hardly a ripe old age. But his artistic death, a protracted one, happened in his 20s, and he had become a recluse before he turned 30.The documentary “Have You Got It Yet? (The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd)” is long in the making — its co-director, Storm Thorgerson, an acclaimed album designer and a friend of Barrett’s, died in 2013 — but it’s as comprehensive and coherent an account of Barrett’s counterculture tragedy as one could hope for. And while the film, co-directed by Roddy Bogawa, illuminates Barrett to a greater degree than any other account I’ve come across, it maintains the artist’s enigma.Not out of romanticizing him; as enigmas go, Barrett was the real deal. In his brief public tenure as the face of Pink Floyd, Barrett didn’t overtly put out a messianic line like other rock stars of the era. But he was innately magnetic. David Gilmour, who took the guitar duties in Pink Floyd after Barrett could no longer function, was, like the other band members, a friend of Barrett’s from the early ’60s. He calls the man “fiercely intelligent” and says that, before Barrett was ravaged by drug abuse and mental illness, “life was just too easy for him, in a way.”He wrote songs about underwear snatchers, gnomes and the solar system. (Post-Barrett, Floyd became more grandiose, socially conscious and commercially huge.) His psychedelia had a strain of Edwardian whimsy, until it didn’t; one of his last Floyd songs was called “Scream Thy Last Scream” and it wasn’t kidding. The film intersperses frank talking head interviews — Thorgerson, whose company helped craft Floyd’s album covers, is, after all, speaking to his friends and collaborators here — with surreal allegoric scenes both trippy and dire. Barrett’s slide into acid casualty is heartbreaking, yet the man was so singular that one has to call this cautionary tale unique.Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink FloydNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Black Ice’ Review: A Troubled Hockey History

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      The Canadian filmmaker Hubert Davis amplifies the voices of hockey players of color and reveals the sport’s lesser-known pioneers in this smart, sensitive documentary.Hubert Davis’s “Black Ice” candidly and sensitively recounts the experiences of athletes of color in Canadian hockey, and racism endured at the hands of other players, coaches and fans. Letting the athletes speak for themselves, Davis balances infuriating and painful accounts of their experiences with a look at the extraordinary legacy of Canadian hockey players of color, which dates back to the Colored Hockey League founded in the 19th century.“Black Ice” feels analogous to Samuel Pollard’s recent documentary “The League,” which chronicles the achievements of Black baseball players in the United States. But Davis, a Canadian documentarian, zeros in on how hockey has been a vital part of his country’s identity, and what it has felt like for Canadian players of color who love the game to be told, from very young ages, that they do not belong.That reality clashes, the film explains, with both Canada’s self-perception as an ideal multicultural melting pot and hockey’s don’t-rock-the-boat team spirit. Akim Aliu, who in 2020 made news for speaking out about his coach’s racist slurs, is one of several men and women who testify to encountering offensive, exclusionary behavior at various levels of play — not just in the National Hockey League — while drawing on support from friends and family.The fascinating story of the Colored Hockey League, which pioneered fundamentals of the game (including the slapshot), is richly and revealingly intertwined with that of Africville, a Black community outside Halifax, Nova Scotia, razed amid protests in the 1960s. Showing programs to train programs to train young athletes of color and expand the ranks, Davis points toward a different future for hockey.Black IceRated R for strong language, including racial slurs. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More