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      ‘God’s Country’ Review: A Solitary Woman Isn’t Left Alone for Long

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      In this simmering thriller, Thandiwe Newton plays a professor in rural Montana who confronts two hunters who say they’re just passing through.A woman alone is seldom left alone, especially if she’s young and pretty and content in her solitude. The world presses in no matter how she resists its intrusions; strangers demand her attention, her smiles and time. The sexual connotations are unmistakable and complicated, and they’re intensified when race enters the picture, as it does in the simmering thriller “God’s Country,” a story about a woman who wants to be left in peace and isn’t.It’s clear from the start that Sandra (Thandiwe Newton) likes keeping the world at bay; it’s evident just in the location of her house in rural Montana. A neat-as-a-pin structure with large windows that give her great views, though not much privacy at night, the house is ringed by trees and perched against a majestic mountain range. It’s an idyllic location, far enough from the neighbors — one of her colleagues lives within view — but also near enough to town and to the small college where she teaches.It’s a good life or seems to be, although Sandra’s mother, who lived with her, has recently died. Now Sandra just lives with her dog. She is still very much in mourning — melancholy seems to have settled on her like a heavy blanket, giving her an ineffable sadness that Newton conveys with expressive subtlety — but she seems otherwise OK. She takes runs with her dog, chops wood, goes to work and suffers through meetings without rolling her eyes (too much). She has few friends, really colleagues, but she engages with other people and, you grasp at once, she engages them on her own terms.Her sovereignty is tested when a red pickup truck abruptly appears parked on her property within view of her front windows. She leaves a polite note on the truck, but the pickup continues to materialize, a bright, ugly portent of trouble that soon intensifies. The truck’s owners, two scowling brothers, Nathan and Samuel (Joris Jarsky and Jefferson White), like to hunt in the area and don’t care whose land they trample through. Things escalate quickly. Soon, Sandra and the brothers are squaring off on her property. “I’ve heard about you,” Samuel tells her, moving toward her as Nathan holds him back.The movie is based on James Lee Burke’s “Winter Light,” a terse, moody short story that’s an atmospheric, interestingly ambiguous meditation on masculinity and ethics that turns into a war of self-annihilating will. In adapting the story, the filmmakers — it was directed by Julian Higgins, who wrote the script with Shaye Ogbonna — have made significant changes, notably to the protagonist, who is a white man in the original. They’ve also given Sandra a cumbersome back story that’s meant to illuminate her character and say something about race, but only weighs her down.Higgins has a feel for the poetry of the landscape, and he and his cinematographer, Andrew Wheeler, make effective use of the region’s majestic, sometimes eerie beauty. It’s winter when the story opens and snow blankets the area, creating a soothing hush that can also seem ominous. When Sandra goes running with her dog, her solitude looks inviting yet is foreboding, and not simply because the dog scarcely looks capable of taking down a predator. This country, you know, doesn’t belong only to God.The movie works best when it doesn’t over-explain and instead lets the land and the characters, the wide open spaces and the performances — especially Newton’s meticulously controlled turn — speak for themselves. In the original story, Burke writes of one of the trespassers, “He smiled while he talked, but his eyes did not go with his face.” Newton and some of the other actors (notably Jarksy and Jeremy Bobb as an ineffectual lawman) catch the subtleties of violence in that sentence admirably well. You don’t need to hear the threat to know the violence will soon come.God’s CountryRated R for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Silent Twins’ Review: Keeping the World at Bay

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      A beguiling look at the complicated story of the real-life twins June and Jennifer Gibbons, who lived in a mental institution for over a decade.In the 1970s, the sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons were part of the only Black family in their small Welsh town. They experienced racism at school, and were eventually institutionalized for 11 years at a notorious psychiatric hospital in Britain.In “The Silent Twins,” a new movie about the sisters, Letitia Wright plays the docile June and Tamara Lawrance plays Jennifer, the alpha with a penchant for a fight; the actors both embody their characters with nuanced portrayals of mental illness that avoid melodramatic clichés. The actors who play the Gibbons sisters as girls (Leah Mondesir-Simmonds and Eva-Arianna Baxter) follow suit.In the film, the twins don’t speak to their Barbadian immigrant parents, their siblings or their classmates or teachers — they become entrenched in a sometimes real, sometimes imaginary world from which everyone else is barred.The director, Agnieszka Smoczynska (“The Lure”), attempts to draw out June and Jennifer’s taut bond through the use of voice-over of their inner thoughts and stop-motion animations featuring ghastly puppets that depict the fiction the girls write. But these elements come across as abstract puzzles themselves and don’t do much to help the audience make sense of who the girls really are.Why June and Jennifer refuse to talk to other people or why they go on to commit arson as teenagers goes unexamined. As a result, the events of the plot barely register and the girls still feel like strangers by the movie’s conclusion.Yet Smoczynska and her cast still manage to conjure something somatically beguiling, akin to being put in a trance. And artful, too: The desolate gray of winter in Pembrokeshire, Wales, looks arresting and sumptuous in the cinematographer Jakub Kijowski’s arresting frames.Whatever is or isn’t broken about the twins remains a secret, but June and Jennifer’s story is played by Wright and Lawrance with the thoughtful consideration these real-life women deserve.The Silent TwinsRated R for sexual acts and adult language. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Pearl’ Review: A Farmer’s Daughter Moves Up the Food Chain

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      A horror-movie killer gets a surprising origin story in Ti West’s prequel to “X.”If you have seen “X,” Ti West’s ingenious and heartfelt pastiche of ’70s horror and hard-core pornography, you know that Mia Goth plays two roles. (If you haven’t seen it, there are spoilers ahead.) She is Maxine, an aspiring movie star and the designated survivor of a rural killing spree. Disguised by prosthetic makeup, she is also a horny and homicidal farmer’s wife named Pearl, and does a lot of killing.In “Pearl,” which Goth wrote with West, she repeats that role, playing Pearl as a horny and homicidal farmer’s daughter. That’s not the setup for a dirty joke, and this prequel, set in 1918, is less of a dirty movie than “X” aspired to be. There is some sex and plenty of gore, but mostly an atmosphere of feverish, lurid melodrama leavened with winks of knowing humor and held together by Goth’s utterly earnest and wondrously bizarre performance.More than 50 years before the events in “X,” Pearl lives on the same Texas farm, with its creaky yellow house, its cavernous barn, and a hungry alligator in the pond. Her life is an endless cycle of toil and frustration. Her husband, Howard, is away at war, leaving her alone with her parents: a pious, dictatorial German mother (Tandi Wright) and a father (Matthew Sunderland) who has been incapacitated by the flu. Money is scarce, and Pearl escapes by sneaking off to the movies while she’s running errands in town.She dreams of running off to pursue a career in pictures, practicing song-and-dance routines in anticipation of a big break. She also practices what we know from “X” will be one of her later vocations. When a goose wanders into the barn and looks at her funny, she impales it on a pitchfork and feeds it to the alligator. The arc of “Pearl” charts her progress up the food chain, from poultry to human prey.The bloodshed is at least as grisly as the slaughter in “X,” but “Pearl” occupies a different corner of the slasher-movie universe. It isn’t especially suspenseful — the identity of the killer is never in doubt, and her victims don’t elicit much sympathy — but it has a strange, hallucinatory intensity. The emotions and the colors are gaudy and overwrought, the music (by Tyler Bates and Tim Williams) is frenzied and portentous, but the film is too sincere, too tender toward its peculiar heroine, to count as camp.It’s also a bit thin and undercooked, but Goth’s performance transcends its limits. She is by turns childlike, seductive and terrifying. Pearl falls into an affair with the local movie-house projectionist (David Corenswet), who introduces her to French pornography and dazzles her with the promise of a Bohemian life free of small-town constraints. She seethes and simpers around her parents, and tries to be friends with her wholesome blonde sister-in-law (Emma Jenkins-Purro). Through it all, Pearl grapples with stifling social and domestic expectations and with her irrepressible hunger for freedom, fame and erotic release.Goth might remind you at times of Judy Garland in youth, of Shelley Duvall in the ’70s, or of a demonically possessed Raggedy Ann doll, but she has her own fearless and forthright intensity. West wants you to see that Pearl, a monster in the making, is also a heroine for the ages. Goth will make you believe it. Or else.PearlRated R. Stay out of the barn, and the basement. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Marvel Attracts Criticism With Israeli “Captain America” Superhero

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      The studio has angered many Palestinians and their supporters by casting the actress Shira Haas to play Sabra, a mutant Mossad agent, in a “Captain America” movie.JERUSALEM — It was the latest addition to a fantasy world populated by an ever-growing cast of superheroes and villains: Marvel Studios announced this past week that it had cast the Israeli actress Shira Haas to play Sabra, a mutant Israeli police officer-turned-Mossad agent, in the next installment of the “Captain America” franchise.While Jewish Israelis rejoiced at the casting of an actress from Israel as a superhero in a major Hollywood production (“Israeli Pride,” declared the Hebrew news site Maariv), the backlash among Palestinians and their supporters was swift, and #CaptainApartheid soon appeared on social media.Many critics expressed outrage about Sabra’s character and her identity as an Israeli intelligence agent, accusing Marvel of buying into Zionist propaganda; of ignoring, or supporting, Israel’s occupation of territory captured in 1967; and of dehumanizing Palestinians.“By glorifying the Israeli army & police, Marvel is promoting Israel’s violence against Palestinians & enabling the continued oppression of millions of Palestinians living under Israel’s authoritarian military rule,” wrote the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a U.S.-based pro-Palestinian organization, on Twitter.Compounding the anger was the name of the superhero, Sabra, which has different connotations for Israelis and Palestinians. To Israeli Jews, a Sabra can simply be a person born in Israel. But Sabra is also the name of a refugee camp in Lebanon where a Christian militia massacred hundreds of Palestinians while Israeli troops stood by 40 years ago.“The bottom line is that to Palestinians, Marvel having an Israeli superhero whitewashes the occupation,” said Sani Meo, publisher of This Week in Palestine, a magazine about Palestinian issues.Palestinians and their supporters around the world have been posting profusely about “Captain Apartheid,” he said. “Some of it is humorous,” he added, “though the topic is not humorous.”A 1940 sketch by Joe Simon of Captain America with a copy of a Marvel comic from the 1960s at the Library of Congress in Washington.Zach Gibson for The New York TimesMarvel Studios declined to answer detailed questions about the issue or about the company’s intentions in bringing Sabra to the big screen.“While our characters and stories are inspired by the comics,” the studio said in a statement, “they are always freshly imagined for the screen and today’s audience, and the filmmakers are taking a new approach with the character Sabra who was first introduced in the comics over 40 years ago.”Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and TV series continues to expand.‘She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’: Tatiana Maslany described the giant, green character making her television debut on Disney+ as “weirdly, the closest thing to my own experience I’ve done ever.”‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’: The trailer for the long-awaited sequel was unveiled at Comic-Con International in San Diego. The film will be released on Nov. 11.‘Thor: Love and Thunder’: The fourth “Thor” movie in 11 years, directed by Taika Waititi, embraces wholesale self-parody and is sillier than any of its predecessors.‘Ms. Marvel’: This Disney+ series introduces a new character: Kamala Khan, a Muslim high schooler in Jersey City who is mysteriously granted superpowers.Whatever its motivations, Marvel has found itself mired in the intractable, century-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Israel has been vilified by international human rights groups and by boycott and divestment activists for its policies toward the Palestinians. Some of those organizations equate Israeli policy with apartheid. But the country is also gaining broader acceptance by some Arab governments, such as the United Arab Emirates, that have grown tired of waiting for any resolution of the long conflict.Simmering in the background, fierce disputes still frequently erupt in Israel and in the occupied territories over history, territory and national identity.Last year, those tensions embroiled another Israeli actress, Gal Gadot, who appears as Wonder Woman in a different superhero franchise, when she decried the continuing cycle of violence between Israel and the Palestinians. Critics assailed her for comments in which she defended Israel’s right to exist, even as she expressed support for “our neighbors.”Much of the furor over Marvel’s decision to include Sabra in the new movie, called “Captain America: A New World Order,” centers on the name of the character itself.To Israeli Jews, sabra is the Hebrew name of a cactus bush and its fruit, prickly on the outside and soft and sweet on the inside, which the nation’s founders adopted as the nickname for native-born Israelis.But to Palestinians, the sabra bush, traditionally used to mark the boundaries of village lands, is a symbol of loss and steadfastness (“sabr” is also the Arabic word for “patience”). During the war that accompanied Israel’s creation in 1948, Zionist and Israeli forces destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees after fleeing or being expelled from their homes. But the hardy sabra bushes remained an indelible part of the landscape even after most traces of the villages were erased.Residents of the Sabra camp in Lebanon mourning those who were slain in the 1982 massacre.Jamal/Associated PressCritics have also accused Marvel of being insensitive to the link between the Israeli superhero’s name and that of the refugee camp in Lebanon. Sabra and Shatila are the names of two Palestinian camps in Lebanon where, from Sept. 16 to Sept. 18 in 1982, a Lebanese Christian militia massacred hundreds of residents. Israeli troops had allowed the militia to enter the camps, and Israeli commanders issued no orders to stop the carnage.“Social media activists are slamming Marvel over their new Israeli Mossad superhero ‘Sabra,’ whose name is sensitive considering the Sabra and Shatila massacre,” the official Palestinian news agency WAFA wrote on Twitter.The character of Sabra first surfaced in an issue of “The Incredible Hulk” comic book in 1980, wearing a blue cape and white bodysuit featuring a Star of David. That debut was some two years before the massacre in Lebanon.Yossi Klein Halevi, an American Israeli author and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jerusalem-based research and educational center, said he believed that the filmmakers had not intended to reference the refugee camp when they decided to use the character.Over the course of a long conflict, like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he said, “a kind of cultural paranoia sets in.”“Sometimes, a Marvel movie is just a Marvel movie,” he added.Still, critics point at how, in a 1981 Hulk issue titled “Power and Peril in the Promised Land,” the character of Sabra initially showed little emotion over the death of a Palestinian boy in an explosion, until the Hulk enlightened her about basic human values.Nothing is yet known about the story line of the next “Captain America” movie, which is scheduled for release in 2024, or the scope of Sabra’s debut role.Ms. Haas, left, on the set of the Netflix series “Unorthodox” in Berlin. One Israeli director praised her as “a brilliant actress who is relatable for her beautiful human flaws and not inhuman perfections.”Anika Molnar/Netflix/EPA, via Shutterstock’But Joseph Cedar, a New York-born Israeli director of movies including “Norman” and “Footnote,” praised Marvel’s casting of Ms. Haas, 27.A diminutive actress who has gained international recognition for her roles in the Netflix series “Unorthodox” and “Shtisel,” Ms. Haas survived cancer as a child.“I like the idea that the embodiment of an Israeli superhero is not a tall supermodel, but rather a brilliant actress who is relatable for her beautiful human flaws and not inhuman perfections,” Mr. Cedar said.Einat Wilf, a former Israeli lawmaker and author of “We Should All Be Zionists,” said that Israel was “enjoying a certain cultural moment,” with many of its local television productions finding success on international streaming platforms. “Marvel wants to make money,” she noted, adding that it appeared the studio saw the box office appeal of an Israeli superhero.Ms. Wilf said that she was withholding judgment about Sabra until the release of the movie, noting that superheroes had become more complex characters in recent years, with “a good side, an evil side, a trauma history.”“I am not so sure that an Israeli superhero will necessarily mean a positive portrayal of Israel,” she added.Hiba Yazbek More

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      ‘Drifting Home’ Review: A Sinking Development

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      Two friends visit their old apartment building and make haunting discoveries in this animated film from Hiroyasu Ishida.You never know what you’re getting with real estate: a building could have water damage from sailing through the ocean; could have structural damage from colliding, Titantic-style, with other drifting domiciles; or it could have a spirit-child squatter. This makes for a terrible appraisal but might make for a great fantasy drama.Just not in “Drifting Home,” Hiroyasu Ishida’s animated film on Netflix, which feels utterly lost at sea.The film follows Kosuke and Natsume, sixth graders and longtime friends who were raised together in the same apartment complex, and whose relationship has been tense ever since Kosuke’s grandfather died. Natsume sneaks back to the building where they once lived, which is set to be demolished. When Kosuke and an irrelevant brat pack of peers find her, they’re magically transported to an ocean haunted by ghosts of buildings long past.Though “Drifting Home” delivers a great visual concept (both a public pool and a department store with decaying walls sail by like the ghostly cousins of the Mary Celeste), it doesn’t deliver on the action. The pacing lags and the beats are predictable; the film’s go-to antic is having children repeatedly topple overboard.The emotional battleground between the reticent but traumatized Natsume and the guarded Kosuke is rich territory but feels more procedural than fleshed out, as does the fantastical logic of the world, which lacks coherence. So the underlying metaphor is unclear: Is it how nostalgia is linked to places, or is it an elegy for the actual structures and neighborhoods that have changed? It’s hard to tell with a film whose narrative goes so unattended.Drifting HomeRated PG. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘I Used to Be Famous’ Review: Hold On to That Feeling

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      A boy band veteran teams up with an autistic teenager in this film about friendship and music.The title of this movie is a bit of misdirection. Yes, one of the main characters, Vince, was famous. He’s a boy band veteran who is 20 years past his peak popularity when the story picks up in the present day. But this is less a first person singular tale than one of a team effort.Vince, played with a mostly winning ingenuousness by Ed Skrein, is trying to get his musical career back on track. It’s not going well — he’s taken to setting up his gear on top of an ironing board for an impromptu park performance in his South London neighborhood. There, he’s joined by an onlooker with a pair of drumsticks who makes joyful noises on a metal bench. He makes Vince’s electronic noodlings into something like a jam.The kid is Stevie, who is autistic, and he’s played by the neurodivergent actor Leo Long. The seamlessness with which the actor and his compelling character fit into picture, directed by Eddie Sternberg, is the most noteworthy thing about it.Vince pursues Stevie to a neighborhood music program, an inspirational drum circle headed by Dia (Kurt Egyiawan). Vince then tries to convince Amber, Stevie’s protective mother (Eleanor Matsuura), that a club gig could be good for the kid. He practically begs his former boy-band colleague, the still-famous Austin (Eoin Macken) to hear the duo, named The Tin Men by a club owner.It’s all pretty predictable, right down to the transfer of don’t-stop-believing energy from Vince to Stevie, and the delivery of the inevitable line, “All he ever wanted was a friend.” This has the effect of making the finale, which actually takes an exit ramp off triumphalist clichés, genuinely surprising.I Used to Be FamousNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘See How They Run’ Review: An Agatha Christie Mystery Spoof

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      Unraveling a murder case backstage at a Christie play in 1950s London.The whodunit comedy “See How They Run” is set backstage in a 1950s London production of the long-running Agatha Christie play “The Mousetrap.” With a sprightly wit and an all-star cast to bring it to life, the movie manages to be a loving parody of theater gossips, postwar London and Christie’s murder mysteries all at once.The story is an investigation of the murder of a Hollywood film director, Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody). Leo had been hired to adapt the play, and he was killed in cold blood at the theater, making all the show’s players potential suspects and, they fear, potential future victims. There’s the disgruntled screenwriter, Mervyn (David Oyelowo), the sensitive actor Dickie (Harris Dickinson), and the hard-nosed theater owner (Ruth Wilson). Each has their motives, and an odd couple of detectives are assigned to untangle them. Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) is a jaded veteran, and his apprentice is a movie-loving rookie, Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan).As a parody, the film is quick to show its appreciation for the genres being spoofed. One charming gag finds Stalker pausing her criminal analysis to praise the virtues of performers who are tangentially mentioned in the course of the investigation. “Rex Harrison, wonderful actor,” she reverently intones.It’s an endearing bit because the same compliments could be passed along to this film’s decorated cast. The director Tom George gives his performers permission to approach their roles with cake-eating aplomb, and he complements their enthusiasm with campy direction, winking at the audience through title cards, split screens and paisleyed production design. The result is a plummy affair, a proper figgy pudding baked out of once-stale Scotland Yard tropes.See How They RunRated PG-13 for brief violence. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Riotsville, USA’ Review: A Fake Town to Explore Ongoing Unrest

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      A documentary delves into the responses to the 1960s protests, revealing uncomfortable truths about that time and ours.The mid-1960s saw a conspicuous rise in civil unrest in the United States. The war in Vietnam, substandard living conditions for people of color, and a larger shift in consciousness all contributed to people wielding violence as a tool of protest. The new documentary “Riotsville, USA.,” shows the federal government’s response to this tactic as both sinister and, in some sense, laughable.The Riotsville of the title is the name of a fake town built as a training ground for law enforcement, in which riot story lines were enacted by soldiers and police forces. More than one of these towns were built by the U.S. government in collaboration with local police departments, with the events filmed for official review. The documentary’s director, Sierra Pettengill, uses a variety of archival footage here. There are government films of Riotsville exercises, clips from talk shows, and a mini-narrative of a public television station whose progressive politics led to its defunding by the Ford Foundation. And of course, searing images from riots in Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, Memphis and Miami.A federal government advisory commission on civil disorder actually concluded that the rioters had something to riot about. They recommended sweeping policies to redress inequities. The activist H. Rap Brown, who was in jail when the report came out, said the people on the commission ought to be in a cell too, as “they’re saying what I’ve been saying.” The only recommendation lawmakers acted on, however, was to increase police budgets.The film’s tone, largely defined by narration written by the essayist Tobi Haslett and read by Charlene Modeste, is often one of weary exasperation. At times, though, Haslett’s words are charged with indignation, which arguably overwhelms the reportage, as in Haslett’s heated account of the media coverage of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. To this complaint, one imagines Haslett might respond, “Too bad.” This is not an objective film. It is a polemic, a work of activism, a challenge to the viewer.Riotsville, USANot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More