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      ‘InHospitable’ Review: Fight for Survival

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      Patients push back on a medical behemoth in this persuasive health care documentary.“InHospitable” is a decent advocacy documentary that compellingly argues a couple of points that aren’t easy to make compelling onscreen. One is that supposedly nonprofit hospitals often behave more like for-profit hospitals and don’t provide benefits commensurate with the tax breaks they receive. Another is that hospital mergers and anticompetitive practices tend to increase costs for patients.The movie, directed by Sandra Alvarez, focuses on a surge of activism in Pittsburgh, where, in mid-2019, a pair of consent decrees agreed to by two medical bodies, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (or U.P.M.C.) and Highmark, were set to expire. Both organizations were insurers and providers rolled into one, as well as competitors. The agreement ensured that U.P.M.C. would remain in-network for Highmark subscribers for certain care.The bad guy, in the film’s telling, is U.P.M.C., which is described as Pennsylvania’s largest employer and portrayed as having enormous political power. If the agreement expired, many Highmark patients would in effect have to switch insurers, pay higher costs or find new doctors elsewhere.“InHospitable” spends time with subjects like Vicki and Maurice Arnett, who travel to Atlanta to obtain covered cancer treatment for Maurice rather than risk a disruption in his care, and Evie Bodick, who is frustrated with having to leave her doctors at U.P.M.C. and find five new specialists.How this dispute was resolved three years ago — and even an early-pandemic coda from 2020 — is old news at this point. But Alvarez showcases a handful of experts, including health care economists and the former New York Times reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal, who cogently explain how the principles apply nationally.InHospitableNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 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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      ‘I Didn’t See You There’ Review: A View From His Seat

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      The filmmaker Reid Davenport, by turns pensive and irritated, takes viewers inside his life as a disabled person through footage shot entirely from his perspective.In the personal essay film “I Didn’t See You There” the filmmaker, Reid Davenport, makes an extended attempt to fully embody his point of view with the help of kinetic camerawork. As an artist with a disability, Davenport navigates the world in a wheelchair, with verve and little patience for the obstacles others can pose, both physical and ideological.His trips around Oakland, Calif., and across the country to visit his caring family in Connecticut lead him to reflect on “being looked at and not seen,” as he puts it, as well as on the labor of just going about his business in a world that doesn’t always have his needs in mind. His occasional meditations in voice-over are punctuated by pointed encounters with strangers, from flight attendants to an impressed neighbor, and an energizing percussive soundtrack.Davenport also dwells on dazzling views of the patterned surfaces — such as colorful pavements and walls — that he rolls past. These suggest a heightened attention to potential hazards, but they also evoke the joyous run-on reels of avant-garde diarists like the filmmaker Jonas Mekas.Davenport’s circumstances are different, of course. His mobility is often dependent on others, and he keeps the camera off himself, in contrast with the many dramas that turn people with disabilities into passive subjects. When he encounters a circus big top that has been erected in his neighborhood, he laments its galling presence and its associated history of freak shows.With his feature, Davenport stakes out his own vantage point on the world, one that leaves a viewer wishing to hear his thoughts elaborated even further.I Didn’t See You ThereNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘From the Hood to the Holler’ Review: A Race to Galvanize the Poor

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      A new documentary revisits the former Kentucky state representative Charles Booker’s 2020 campaign to unseat Mitch McConnell in the Senate.At a hearing in 2019 for a vote on a bill that would restrict abortion access in Kentucky, Charles Booker, a state representative at the time, gave an impassioned speech about abortion rights, criticizing politicians who had compared the medical procedure to lynching. When the speaker of the Assembly tried to silence him, Booker yelled, “My life matters, too, speaker,” as an older white man screamed at him to “sit down.”“I can only imagine that in this white person’s mind, he thought he had the right to tell this Black person to sit down,” Attica Scott, another state representative from Kentucky, says later.The exchange plays out in the new documentary “From the Hood to the Holler,” directed by Pat McGee. It follows Booker’s subsequent run for Senate in 2020, including a campaign defined by his willingness to walk across that racial divide, traveling to “hollers,” or poor, mostly white communities in Appalachia, to unite impoverished voters. Booker lost narrowly in a Democratic primary against Amy McGrath; some weeks before the election, the documentary notes, he had raised around $300,000 compared to her $29.8 million. (In May, Booker won the primary by a landslide, and he’ll face off against the Republican senator Rand Paul in November.)The documentary succeeds at presenting Booker as a candidate who can unite voters, and its best scenes show him meeting the moment. In one scene, he mediates between the police and protesters after the death of Breonna Taylor, whom he knew, convincing the officers to drop their batons in a show of solidarity. In another, he strategizes with his team about safety procedures for traveling through places that may have once been considered sundown towns, showing how racism persists in modern-day Kentucky and the nation.But though Booker’s story and success are inspiring, the documentary falls flat, feeling more like a political tool than a commentary on the state of politics in Kentucky. It would have benefited from less focus on Booker and more on the many Kentuckians he spoke to who are ready for a change.From the Hood to the HollerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 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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      ‘Sirens’ Review: The Risk in Rocking Out in Beirut

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      A documentary about an all-female metal group in Lebanon shows the difficulties of asserting complex identities in a repressive environment.“Sirens,” a documentary by Rita Baghdadi about Slaves to Sirens, an all-female metal group out of Beirut, Lebanon, opens in 2019 with the band united and happy — they’ve been invited by a record label to play a small stage at Glastonbury Festival in England. And while they wind up playing to a handful of people, the band gives its all.Slaves to Sirens is a five-piece, and its neon-haired singer, Maya Khairallah, nails the monster voice that’s so common in contemporary metal. But the movie’s focus is on the band’s two guitarists and main composers, Shery Bechara and Lilas Mayassi. Baghdadi (“My Country No More”) shows how difficult it is to assert their identities in a repressive environment.When the band returns home to Beirut, an environment in constant turmoil — one where they’re barely tolerated, if noticed at all — tensions emerge.Nobody in the band is getting any younger. Lilas still lives with her mother. She has to enact childish subterfuges when her Syrian girlfriend comes to visit to hide the true nature of her relationship. Shery, bristling at Lilas’s bossiness (and perhaps still hurt because the two were once romantically involved), quits.With few other choices, Lilas and Shery find their way back to each other, at least creatively. The ending, in which the reunited Sirens play before an enthusiastic crowd, is heart-tugging and rousing, even for non-metal heads.SirensNot rated. In Arabic and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Justice of Bunny King’ Review: No Way Out

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      In this unsteady drama from New Zealand, Bunny, a chronic rule-bender, wants to pay a birthday visit to her daughter, but first she needs a house.A grim social-realist drama from New Zealand that labors to twist its narrative into a redemptive arc, “The Justice of Bunny King” has an unsteady tone to match its ungainly title.Bunny (Essie Davis) is introduced squeegeeing windshields for cash. She has no home of her own and, for reasons soon revealed, no custody of her children. Bunny, a chronic rule-bender, wants to pay a birthday visit to her young daughter (Amelie Baynes) in a couple of weeks, but she can’t secure permission from social services until she has a house.So the movie, directed by Gaysorn Thavat, follows Bunny’s desperate and increasingly self-defeating efforts to find a home in time for her daughter’s birthday, or, barring that, to find a way to be there with presents, whether or not she can pay for them. For a time, it seems like “The Justice of Bunny King” will find a way out of poverty for Bunny, who engages in a series of small cons to get what she needs. (One of the less convincing ideas in a movie with many is that donning a pantsuit will immediately shift people’s perception of her.)Around the halfway mark, Bunny hits the road with Tonyah (Thomasin McKenzie), her niece, who may be suffering abuse at home, and whose own story helps fill in the movie’s notion of Bunny as a righteous, loving protector whom the authorities simply refuse to treat as a human being. But the film needn’t stack the deck in Bunny’s favor — a less noble character might be more interesting — or look for glimmers of hope in a story that has few.The Justice of Bunny KingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Smile’ Review: Grab and Grin

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      A young psychiatrist believes she’s being pursued by a malevolent force in this impressive horror feature debut.A relentlessly somber, precision-tooled picture whose frights only reinforce the wit of its premise, “Smile” turns our most recognizable sign of pleasure into a terrifying rictus of pain.And pain is something that Rose (Sosie Bacon), a young clinical psychiatrist, understands, having witnessed her mother’s suicide many years earlier. So when a hysterical patient (Caitlin Stasey) claims that she’s being stalked by a murderous, shape-shifting entity — and that this specter appeared only after she saw an acquaintance brutally kill himself — Rose is immediately empathetic. What happens next is so horrifying it will not only resurrect old terrors but engender new ones, destabilizing Rose and everyone close to her.Increasingly convinced that she, too, is going to die in some horrible fashion, Rose is plagued by gruesome memories, nightmarish hallucinations and lost stretches of time. Her friends and family — including a distracted sister (Gillian Zinser), distant fiancé (Jessie T. Usher) and concerned supervisor (Kal Penn) — presume psychological damage. Only her ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner), a sympathetic police detective, is willing to help her research anyone who might have had a similar experience. And, crucially, survived.In its thematic use of unprocessed trauma and, especially, its presentation of death as a kind of viral infection passed from one person to another, “Smile” embraces an immediately recognizable horror-movie setup. In the past, this has centered on cursed pieces of technology, like the videotape in “The Ring” (2002) and the cellphone in “One Missed Call” (2005). Here, though, death is dealt simply by witnessing an act, and in that sense the movie’s closest cousin may be David Robert Mitchell’s immensely creepy “It Follows” (2015). In that film, the malevolent virus was transferred through sex; here, the medium is suicide, and the bloodier the better.Yet this first feature from the writer and director Parker Finn (expanding his 2020 short film, “Laura Hasn’t Slept”) doesn’t feel like a retread: Even the familiar luckless pet seems included more as a wink-wink to the audience than a lazy crib. The jump scares are shockingly persuasive, gaining considerable oomph from Tom Woodruff Jr.’s imaginative practical effects and Charlie Sarroff’s tipsy camera angles. An unexpected color palette sets a dolorous tone without being suffocatingly gloomy, and Bacon’s performance, both shaky and determined, ensures that the very real agony of mental illness and its stigmatization register as strongly as any supernatural pain. Like the emotional injury they represent, the smiles in “Smile” are — in one case, quite literally — bleeding wounds that can’t be stanched.SmileRated R for scary teeth and shocking deaths. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Vesper’ Review: Seeds of Hope

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      This elegantly visualized dystopian fantasy envelops us in the world of a gifted girl fending for survival with her sickly father.A wistful beauty and a delicately imaginative sense of craft set “Vesper” apart from most post-apocalyptic stories. In this future, a genetically induced ecological disaster has left scattered survivors, while an elite class lives cloistered in a protected area known as the Citadel. Bearing the visual influence of illustrators and video games perhaps more than movies, the directors Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper envelop us in the world of a gifted girl who cares for her bedridden father.Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) roams the hushed forest around their cabin, accompanied by a drone. There’s a sweet sci-fi lyricism in the relationship between her and her parent, Darius (Richard Brake): he speaks remotely through the drone, a voice of hard-won wisdom. Bodily, Darius remains at home, a cadaverous figure lit by a glowing orb as in a painting by a Dutch master — the handiwork of Feliksas Abrukauskas, whose cinematography smoothly integrates the film’s C.G.I.One day Vesper finds an older girl lying in the forest, overgrown with vines like a fairy-tale princess (though these vines suck blood). This is Camellia (Rosy McEwen), a glassy-eyed exile from the Citadel who crash-landed. Her stay with Vesper attracts Darius’s unscrupulous brother, Jonas (Eddie Marsan), who employs an army of children and hoards precious seeds.More impressive than the serviceable plotting are the elegant visual ideas: the hybrid plants that resemble deep-sea creatures or woodland mushrooms; or Vesper’s computer console, a tabletop scrim of swirling colors. In these filmmakers’ hands, an aerial shot of a speck of light in a forest eloquently expresses Vesper’s isolation, and the optimism that might save her.VesperNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 54 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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      ‘The Good House’ Review: Expending Emotional Real Estate

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      Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline star in a film that hides a story about alcoholism inside a soft focus romance.As a real estate agent and as the protagonist of the drama “The Good House,” Hildy Good (Sigourney Weaver) is a confident hostess. The film begins with Hildy describing her life in a small seaside town in Massachusetts, first in voice-over and then in a direct address to the camera.In the spirit of blasé town gossip, Hildy freely offers her back story. Her husband left her to begin seeing men, and her protégé began stealing her clients. However, the secret that threatens Hildy’s happiness is one that she keeps from herself. She’s an alcoholic, and despite previous stints in rehab, she has not been able to give up drinking.The film follows Hildy as she tries to rebuild her life and her business through working with her neighbors as clients. She even begins dating her first love, Frank (Kevin Kline). But the omnipresence of alcohol threatens Hildy’s stability. She can’t resist the bottle, and can’t remember what she’s done when she has one in her hands.The directors Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky use the film’s style as a sleight of hand. At first glance, the movie appears to be a soft focus romance. Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline are beloved performers, still sharp after decades of stardom. The views over the New England harbor charm, and the score cheerily plink-plunks along with assists from the classic rock needle drops. The stylistic placidity draws attention to the disturbance of Hildy’s alcoholism, the way her drinking interrupts even the film’s genre. But the trouble with this cinematic Trojan horse is that the superficial blandness dominates the frame. It’s hard to feel the story’s stakes when the images are always indicating no danger ahead.The Good HouseRated R for language, brief nudity and sexual content. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More