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      ‘My Policeman’ Review: Two Love Affairs, Equally Tragic

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      A schoolteacher, her police officer husband and his lover deny each other romantic satisfaction in this dismal melodrama.The melodrama “My Policeman” tells a decades-long story of a schoolteacher, a museum curator and the man they both love. The film is based on a novel of the same name, which took narrative inspiration from the relationship between the novelist E.M. Forster, his lover, who was a police officer, and his lover’s wife. Unfortunately, the historical record is more imaginative than the fictional story represented onscreen.The film tells the story of a schoolteacher, Marion, her law enforcement husband, Tom, and his great love, Patrick. The trio start the movie in 1999 as retirees. Patrick (Rupert Everett) has suffered a stroke, and Marion (Gina McKee) welcomes him to convalesce in her home with Tom (Linus Roache). This reunion sparks Marion’s memory, and when she finds Patrick’s journals, she falls into reminiscence.In flashbacks to their youth in 1957, Marion (played as a young woman by Emma Corrin) recalls Tom’s timid attempts at courtship. Tom (Harry Styles) introduced her to Patrick (David Dawson) under the pretext of impressing her with a trip to the museum. Patrick became a third wheel in their life as a couple, joining them for dates and trips out of town. Patrick’s diaries fill in the gaps of Marion’s memory, recounting a passionate affair with Tom that continued even after Tom and Marion married.The director Michael Grandage smartly uses sets and costumes to emphasize the class differences between the characters. But Grandage struggles with animating such a dismal treatment of gay history. These are characters who are frustrated in love, prevented by law and by their own emotional repression from asking for what they want in their relationships. The stately treatment of their plight leads to a film that buckles under the weight of purgatorial disappointment.My PolicemanRated R for sexual content and nudity. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘All That Breathes’ Review: Hope Is the Thing With Feathers

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      Shaunak Sen’s poetic documentary chronicles the efforts of three New Delhi men to help the city’s birds of prey.The first shot of “All That Breathes” explores a vacant lot at night, tracking rats and feral dogs through puddles and piles of refuse. Your instinct might be to recoil from a tableau of urban squalor, but there is a quiet, rapt attention in the images that suggests a different response. Even in the clogged thoroughfares and crowded neighborhoods of big cities like New Delhi, where this remarkable documentary unfolds, we are closer to the wildness of the natural world than we might suppose.The three principal human characters in Shaunak Sen’s film have devoted their lives to caring for black kites, birds of prey almost as unloved in Delhi as scavenging rodents and canines. Wounded kites and other raptors, excluded from a local avian hospital because of their nonvegetarian ways, find their way to Wildlife Rescue, a small clinic that doubles as a workshop for the assembly of soap dispensers. There, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, the brothers who founded Wildlife Rescue, work with their associate Salik Rehman to rehabilitate the birds until they can return to the skies.Their efforts on behalf of the kites were the subject of an article in The New York Times in 2020. The methods of “All That Breathes,” which mentions that piece, are more impressionistic than reportorial. There is something inherently mysterious about birds and their interactions with people, and also something unmistakably spiritual about Wildlife Rescue’s devotion to their well-being.Not that there is anything gauzy or mawkish about the film. Sen finds intimations of deeper meaning by focusing on the day-to-day practicalities of rescuing kites. In one riveting scene, the men save a wounded kite from a riverbank, swearing and complaining as they navigate a tricky, absurd and potentially dangerous situation. Mostly, the birds arrive in cardboard boxes hauled across the city by Salik or one of the brothers. As the kites recover, they move to cages on the rooftop.Wildlife Rescue has applied for a grant to expand and modernize its operation, and “All That Breathes” in part tells a hopeful story of patience and persistence in the face of obstacles that include bureaucratic red tape, family tensions and city traffic. But then a wave of murderous sectarian violence sweeps through New Delhi. The causes of the upheaval and its aftermath — and the conflict between India’s Hindu nationalist government and the country’s large Muslim population — become part of the film’s atmosphere, like the smog and the noise.Neither a nature documentary nor a political lecture, “All That Breathes” is a subtle, haunting reflection on the meaning of humanity — on the breathtaking kindness and heartbreaking cruelty that define our wounded, intrepid, predatory species.All That BreathesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Fire that Took Her’ Review: An Unflinching Portrait of Pain

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      This documentary charts the case of Judy Malinowski, a young mother who suffered debilitating burns after being set on fire by a man she had dated.The experiences of Judy Malinowski, an Ohio woman who testified in her own murder trial, could have been cooked up by the novelist Jodi Picoult in an alarming courtroom melodrama. Instead, this true story’s themes of domestic violence, traumatic injury and addiction are unpacked in the straightforward documentary “The Fire That Took Her.”Anchored by interviews with Judy’s family members, particularly her mother, Bonnie, the film recounts how Judy, a young mother of two daughters, began a volatile relationship with a man named Michael Slager. According to Bonnie, Michael manipulated their family and enabled Judy’s drug addiction, casting himself as her savior while supplying her with heroin. Then, amid an altercation in 2015, Michael doused Judy in gasoline and set her on fire.Miraculously, Judy survived for nearly two years after the attack, and the documentary frequently includes footage from the hospital room where Judy resided and received care. In interviews, the director Patricia E. Gillespie has said that while pitching the film, people often asked whether she could cover or blur Judy’s face to shield audiences from her burns. Gillespie refused, and her resolve to train her camera on Judy gives the film an unflinching quality.Testimonies from the detectives and attorneys on the case beget a host of true-crime clichés. Far more startling and heartbreaking, though, are the scenes of Bonnie at home with Judy’s daughters. Seated around the kitchen table, Bonnie gently debriefs them on their mother’s medical and legislative battles. To watch these girls strive to comprehend the incomprehensible is a singular kind of agony.The Fire that Took HerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Pez Outlaw’ Review: Sweet and Lowdown

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      A purveyor of candy contraband becomes a black market hero in this blithe, lighthearted documentary.Steve Glew, the subject of Amy Bandlien Storkel and Bryan Storkel’s documentary “The Pez Outlaw,” is an unapologetic weirdo with long hippie hair and a big, Santa Claus beard — a natural star in this post-“Tiger King” era of quirky nonfiction portraiture. Glew, in the words of his wife, Kathy Glew, “is a creative person whose mind wanders a lot,” a cagey but charismatic oddball obsessed with breakfast cereals, Tom Clancy novels and Pez candy dispensers, which he began collecting and selling in the 1980s. His clandestine efforts to smuggle rare European dispensers into the United States made Glew a kind of black market folk hero among serious Pez collectors — of whom there are apparently many — and also drew the ire of the former president of Pez Candy USA, Scott McWhinnie, known as the Pezident.Glew is an amusing screen presence, and his story, while unquestionably trivial, has some of the absorbing, low-stakes whimsy of a nice magazine feature. The directors approach the material blithely and with humor, staging dramatic re-enactments of the anecdotes Glew and others recount in highly stylized, almost parodic form — the running of candy contraband is depicted like the climax of a breakneck espionage thriller, a toy convention is made to look like a speakeasy in a film noir, and so forth. Glew himself, importantly, is never the target of the joke: the movie has too much affection for its subject to ridicule his eccentricities, even gently, preferring to lionize him instead. An inevitable consequence of this chummy idolatry is that the playful tone begins to feel rather cloying. Like Pez, the film is charming and colorful — and perhaps too sweet.The Pez OutlawNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Matriarch’ Review: Maternal Instincts

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      Jemima Rooper plays a troubled woman reconciling with her mother in this murky horror film set in Britain.“Matriarch” opens by watching a nude figure descend into a pond of black muck, but the slog that follows in this derivative, tar-flow-paced thriller from Britain is strictly for the viewer.After a title card, the movie introduces its protagonist, Laura (Jemima Rooper), who works in advertising. The director, Ben Steiner, spends nearly a quarter of the running time cataloging ways she is troubled. Laura struggles with drug and alcohol abuse, with apparent bulimia and with staying out of others’ parenting. She chastises a stranger for not feeding a baby quickly enough and tells off her concerned boss (Franc Ashman) by invoking the boss’s dead daughter.All of these issues seem to stem from Laura’s relationship with the woman who raised her, Celia (Kate Dickie), who abruptly calls after two decades of estrangement. Celia says she sensed that Laura must be in pain — a mother knows. She invites Laura to return home for what promises to be a barbed reconciliation.But when Laura arrives, something is off. Celia has aged so little that Laura suspects she’s had plastic surgery. Most others in the village, except a former girlfriend of Laura’s (Sarah Paul), appear not to have grown old either, and they might be sharing some sort of secret. (A sensible visitor’s “Wicker Man” meter would be going wild.) In a departure from Laura’s perspective, Steiner shows Celia repeatedly trying to lace Laura’s food with crushed pills. Laura and Celia both suffer from black-mud nosebleeds.But none of how “Matriarch” resolves is particularly scary or surprising. The finale — filled with dark, barely legible imagery — is a letdown both visually and dramatically.MatriarchNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile’ Review: The Evolution of a Country Star

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      A close-up of the singers’ collaboration at Sunset Sound that led to Tucker receiving two Grammys.From the beginning of her career, the country singer Tanya Tucker knew what she was about. In the early 1970s, as a teenage singing sensation in the making, she turned down the song “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.” Instead she insisted on recording the more downbeat lost-love tune “Delta Dawn.” Her instincts were right, not just artistically but commercially — the single put the then-13-year-old Tucker on the map.Tucker, now 64, had been largely inactive in music for nearly two decades when she went into the famous Los Angeles studio Sunset Sound with the singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile behind the mixing board (her co-producer was the musician Shooter Jennings) in 2019. This documentary, directed by Kathlyn Horan, is a straightforward chronicle of that collaboration, a reboot that worked out better than any of the participants had anticipated, yielding Tucker two Grammy Awards.Carlile clearly reveres Tucker and comes to her with several songs she’s keen for the singer to interpret. Tucker counters with an unfinished tune of her own — the one that winds up garnering the Grammys. Tucker is often nervous, likes a drink before she gets to the microphone and is frequently late to sessions. Carlile tells the camera that she’s learning to accept Tucker’s “crazy” nature. But compared to, say, Chuck Berry in the 1997 documentary “Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll,” Tucker is a pussycat.And while her singing has some new grit (she still smokes!), she hasn’t lost a step in terms of phrasing. The teardrop in her voice, strategically used in heartache songs, remains credible. The movie interweaves the contemporary sessions with a very selective — and, while not wholly sanitized, certainly discreet — account of her tumultuous past. Overall it’s a better-than-competent piece of fan service and a not unpersuasive bid for an auxiliary youth audience.The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi CarlileRated R for salty language. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Aftersun’ Review: A Father and Time

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      A daughter’s memory of a vacation in Turkey is at the heart of Charlotte Wells’s astonishing and devastating debut feature.The relationship between a parent and a child is wired for heartbreak — a primal attachment headed for an inevitable double grief. Kids grow up and flee the nest. Parents die. It’s the natural order of things, calamitous even when no untimely tragedies intervene to amplify the pain.Such a tragedy does shadow “Aftersun,” the tender and devastating first feature from the 35-year-old Scottish director Charlotte Wells, but the power of the film comes from its embrace of the basic and universal fact of loss. It’s about a mostly happy experience — a father-daughter vacation in a resort town on the Turkish coast, with snorkeling excursions, hotel buffets and lazy hours by the pool — that ends in tears. Your tears.Eleven-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), are mostly too caught up in the delights and frustrations of the present to express much sorrow or anxiety, but they also seem aware that time is moving quickly. Sophie, on the edge of adolescence, is both hanging onto childhood and rushing toward maturity. Her eyes are always moving, scanning her surroundings for clues and portents.A young man himself — he’s about to turn 31 and is mistaken by a fellow tourist for Sophie’s older brother — Calum carries some weariness in his lithe frame. His boyish features are creased with worry. We don’t learn much about his history — Wells is not the kind of director to spoil delicate scenes with expository dialogue — but we’re aware that he and Sophie’s mother aren’t together. We can also infer some hard knocks and bad decisions in his past.Maybe in his future as well. One thing we do know about Calum — though it’s hard to say exactly how we come by this knowledge — is that he dies sometime after the vacation. From the very first scenes, the presence of camcorders and the absence of smartphones places the trip in the past. A grown-up Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), who at 31 has a partner and a baby, is remembering those sun-dappled mornings and karaoke nights (she sang “Losing My Religion”) of 20 years before.It isn’t quite right to say that “Aftersun” takes place mostly in flashbacks. It also feels wrong to describe the adult Sophie’s harrowing visions of her father dancing in a strobe-lit nightclub — scenes that occasionally interrupt the Turkish idyll — as dreams. Wells is working in a more intuitive and oblique psychological register, the flow of her images attuned to the fluidity of Sophie’s consciousness, her narrative instincts following the logic of emotion rather than the mechanics of plot. The boundaries between memory and experience aren’t so much blurred as rendered moot. And by the end of the movie you understand why: because that’s how mourning works.“Aftersun” is as clear and literal as can be, following Sophie and Calum through ordinary tourist activities without much dramatic embellishment. There are moments that carry a hint of danger or unprocessed bad feeling — a misunderstanding about a lost diving mask, for example. Sophie sometimes tags along with a group of British teenagers, eavesdropping on their naughty banter and observing their horseplay with an eagerness that might make a watchful parent anxious. (She also flirts with a boy her own age, a fellow devotee of motorcycle-racing arcade games.) You might raise an eyebrow when Calum orders a third beer at dinner and wonder if he’s really mature enough to take care of his daughter on his own.Late in the film, Calum’s fecklessness and Sophie’s curiosity open the door to some scary possibilities. But “Aftersun” isn’t a child-in-peril melodrama, or a punitive fable of parental irresponsibility. Its structure emerges through a pattern of perceptions and moods. Sometimes Sophie and Calum quarrel, get on each other’s nerves or fail to connect. Sometimes they’re bored, sometimes silly, and sometimes they relax into an easy, almost wordless intimacy.Capturing the thick, complex reality of their bond — registering its quick, microscopic fluctuations and tracking its slow tectonic shifts — is Wells’s great achievement. And Mescal and Corio’s as well. They are so natural, so light and grave and particular, that they don’t seem to be acting at all.It’s hard to find a critical language to account for the delicacy and intimacy of this movie. This is partly because Wells, with the unaffected precision of a lyric poet, is very nearly reinventing the language of film, unlocking the medium’s often dormant potential to disclose inner worlds of consciousness and feeling. She and the director of photography, Gregory Oke, favor compositions that evoke the jerky anti-symmetry of amateur video. (Wells also incorporates camcorder footage shot from Sophie and Calum’s perspective.) This isn’t to say that there’s anything haphazard about the images, which weave a fabric as fine and coherent as the carpet Calum impulsively buys, even though he most likely can’t afford it.The rug is purchased at one of the rare moments when Sophie and Calum aren’t together, which is to say a moment that falls outside her memory even as it is part of her own story. Or rather, a piece of the story she and her father wrote together, which she has lived to tell.AftersunRated R. Some bad words and tough situations, but nothing a sensitive adolescent couldn’t handle. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power’ Review: Demystifying the Male Gaze

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      Directed by Nina Menkes, the film is a distressingly prescriptive documentary aimed at unpacking the patriarchal ways of seeing that have dominated the history of cinema.Directed by Nina Menkes, “Brainwashed” is a distressingly prescriptive documentary aimed at unpacking the patriarchal ways of seeing that have dominated the history of cinema. It employs dozens of movie clips, ripped out of context, that supposedly demonstrate the predatory gaze of the camera and the various visual techniques used to objectify women performers, with Menkes herself occasionally on-screen, lecturing to an audience, laser pointer in hand. (The documentary was developed from a public presentation and a 2017 essay Menkes wrote.)The project feels out of step with the pioneering independent filmmaker’s previous work (“Queen of Diamonds,” “The Bloody Child”), which abounds in provocation, ambiguity and women characters who resist neat interpretation.A Bernard Herrmann-esque score (by Sharon Farber) pulses conspiratorially throughout the documentary, giving the sense that Menkes’s narration is revealing secret and sinister facts about the way cinema caters to male fantasy. It uses examples from beloved and acclaimed films like “Apocalypse Now,” “Do the Right Thing” and “Phantom Thread,” and, toward the end, it presents the apparently rare films in which women do have agency, namely ones directed by Menkes.“Brainwashed” features interviews with the film theorist Laura Mulvey and directors like Julie Dash, Eliza Hittman and Catherine Hardwicke, but, for Menkes, not all women are immune to the patriarchy’s spell, citing Julia Ducournau’s “Titane” and Maïmouna Doucouré’s “Cuties” as instances of internalized misogyny. These particular illustrations suggest that Menkes may not have watched the films, both of which attempt to critique a culture that hypersexualizes girls and women.In some respects, Menkes’s assessment isn’t inaccurate — indeed, some films very much want to make women look powerless and erotic, but that’s not a problem in and of itself. The historical regularity of these depictions is another thing, and that speaks to the larger problem of the industry’s gender inequality and its normalization of sexual assault, which “Brainwashed” rightly identifies but unconvincingly ties to the cinematic language it deconstructs. Limited to a mere pointing out of which kinds of images are empowering to women and which aren’t, the documentary ultimately does a disservice to the art form, feminist or otherwise.Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-PowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More