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      ‘Casablanca Beats’ Review: Hip-Hop Isn’t Dead

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      Nabil Ayouch’s exuberant musical declares that the genre hasn’t faded; it has just been hiding in a Moroccan slum.When the rapper Nas proclaimed 16 years ago that hip-hop was dead — namely, by titling an album “Hip-Hop Is Dead” — it was a statement laced with self-aware irony: This was a hip-hop record, after all.As he always made clear, his title wasn’t the predictable gripe of an intellectual vanguard (“Painting is dead,” “God is dead,” etc.) but a call to action — a response to hip-hop’s co-option by corporate interests. It’s hard to imagine his assessment has improved. But if the French Moroccan filmmaker Nabil Ayouch’s exuberant new film, “Casablanca Beats,” is any indication, perhaps one need only look outside the United States for a reminder of the genre’s original power to create political change.Filmed in a hand-held, naturalistic style, “Casablanca” feels often like a documentary — until it spontaneously bursts into lyrics or dance, like “Fame” without the leotards, “Dancer in the Dark” without the contempt. The story is familiar, set in a tough neighborhood where Anas (Anas Basbousi), a former rapper, arrives to teach hip-hop at a community arts center.It is also, as his troubled teenage students are all too aware, a place that has historically produced suicide bombers. Hemmed in by joblessness, religious conservatism and captious expectations, the students are seduced by the devil’s music.Anas teaches class by day, sleeps in his car at night. Of his past, we know little. But when he tells his students that hip-hop is about speaking truth to power, not bling and petty beefs, it’s clear that he walks his own talk. We’ll forgive him and his students, flush with the joys and indignations of youth, for the occasional maudlin speech — and Ayouch for the attendant schmaltz. Hip-hop isn’t dead, the film energetically insists; it’s just been hiding in a Moroccan slum.Casablanca BeatsNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Four Winters’ Review: The Jewish Resistance

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      The men and women in this densely story-filled documentary recount taking up arms as members of the Jewish resistance in the forests of Eastern Europe.The Jews in World War II who formed resistance groups include one steely-nerved survivor in Julia Mintz’s story-filled documentary “Four Winters” who says it best: “If I’m not for me, who’s for me?” The men and women in this harrowing but spirited film took up arms in the forests of Eastern Europe to fight Nazis and their collaborators, living to tell tales that could be fodder for movie plots.Mintz cycles through eight interviewees who recall missions to kill Nazis, as well the day-to-day struggle for survival. After the horror of seeing family members murdered — often the end point for many Holocaust stories — these civilians fortunately escaped, and took the leap of learning to become soldiers.Everyone’s recall of tactical detail is daunting: we learn how to blow up a railroad, for one thing, and what to do with bullet wounds. One survivor, Faye Schulman, appears in a leopard-skin coat in pictures, adding an unexpected touch of panache.The talking-head close-ups convey more than what’s spoken. Notice how a normally stolid Frank Blaichman flicks a satisfied look to the camera when saying the name of the big, tough farmer they outfoxed. Gertrude Boyarski, a self-described “spoiled girl” before the war, speaks with an especially flinty gaze.The film’s deficits lie in its structure, which loses shape as it goes along. It could also use more information about its archival footage. But “Four Winters” offers an enduring warning amid today’s global struggle with authoritarian forces: As one speaker explains, her neighbors were already antisemitic before the war, but with power, they became vicious.Four WintersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Confess, Fletch’ Review: Solving a Crime, Eventually

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      Jon Hamm bops along amiably enough as the carefree, wiseacre detective once played by Chevy Chase.Insouciance goes a fairly long way in “Confess, Fletch,” which revives the wiseacre investigator once played by Chevy Chase and featured in a series of novels by Gregory Mcdonald. Now Jon Hamm bops along as Irwin Fletcher (a.k.a. Fletch), living the life of Riley and explaining to strangers that he once was a great reporter. Tapping into a minor vogue in murder mysteries, Greg Mottola’s relaxed-fit film follows Fletch after he discovers a dead woman in the art-filled Boston house where he’s staying.Fletch blithely feeds tips to the police detective (Roy Wood Jr.) on the scene, ignoring the fact that he’s under suspicion himself. At the same time, his Italian girlfriend, Angela (Lorenza Izzo), suspects her stepmother of angling for her family’s art since the disappearance of her father. So Fletch noses around, questioning a high-rolling art dealer (Kyle MacLachlan) who loves EDM, a gabby neighbor (Annie Mumolo, more or less channeling Janice Soprano), and Angela’s chaotic stepmother (Marcia Gay Harden, having a ball).If any of that elicits a “heh,” you might warm to Mottola’s ambling brand of comedy, which also casts a faintly absurd light on the yacht-friendly Boston milieu. Yet a haplessness clings to Hamm that tends to take the air out of his character’s shenanigans.All of which makes one appreciate master practitioners of the unhurried detective genre like Peter Falk or James Garner. But getting peeved at Mottola and Hamm’s easygoing efforts would be like getting mad at a cat for sleeping too much.Confess, FletchRated R for sex, some drugs and gumshoe mischief. Running time: 1 hour 38 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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      ‘Goodnight Mommy’ Review: Behind the Mask

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      Twin boys worry that their mother might be an impostor in this disappointing remake.Far be it from me to quibble over punctuation, but the absence of the vocative comma in the title of “Goodnight Mommy” — an American remake of the Austrian chiller “Goodnight, Mommy” (2015) — should be read as a warning of other, more problematic omissions.Like the prickling atmosphere of dread that blanketed the original and is only pallidly reproduced here. The plot, though, remains roughly the same: Twin boys, Elias and Lucas (Cameron Crovetti and Nicholas Crovetti), arrive at their mother’s isolated country home after an unspecified absence to find her head swathed in gauze and her behavior apparently altered. Telling the boys she has undergone “a little procedure,” Mommy (Naomi Watts) bars them from her darkened quarters, and also — uh-oh! — from the barn. Is she an impostor?That question will be answered, if without the aesthetic elegance, masterly editing or rumbling horror of the first film. Even so, Kyle Warren’s screenplay is potent enough to generate several moments of suspense, and Watts, an exceptional actor sidelined too often by poor choices, is not the problem here. That would be the decision to jettison the children’s most creative cruelties — and consequently much of the movie’s tension — and a director, Matt Sobel, who’s determined to steer the audience toward a specific interpretation of events. The result is a film that feels lazily compressed and overly literal, suggesting a lamentable discomfort with ambiguity that’s all too common in arthouse-to-mainstream retreads.The new movie’s late-pandemic timing and the ubiquity of masking, however, add a fresh layer to the psychological underpinnings of both films. Perhaps never before have we understood so clearly how much of our ability to trust rests on being able to see the entirety of the human face.Goodnight MommyRated R for disturbing dreams and dirty dancing. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime. More

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      ‘The African Desperate’ Review: Double Speak

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      Martine Syms’s whip-smart satire brings the invisible, everyday negotiations of a Black artist to startlingly visual life.Martine Syms’s debut feature derives its title from a Freudian slip. In the opening scene, as Palace (Diamond Stingily), a sculptor at an upstate New York art school, describes her thesis project to an all-white faculty panel, she mispronounces “African diaspora” as “African desperate.” It sounds nonsensical, but no one bats an eye, and the professors continue with their jargon-riddled commentary. This is the art world, a place as open to absurdity as it is closed to diversity. Here, people say made-up terms with grave conviction yet are incredulous that a Black woman like Palace has made it to the Venice Biennale.Drawn from Syms’s own experiences as a visual artist, “The African Desperate” is less an art-school parody as it is a portrait of existential incongruity, where contempt mingles with deep affection. After being anointed a Master of Fine Arts, a frustrated Palace is ready to pack up and leave, but she stays on for 24 final hours of debauchery, coaxed by friends, drugs and potential lovers.As Palace stumbles through a series of neon-hued encounters, ranging in tone from slapstick to dark comedy, Syms brings the invisible, everyday negotiations of a Black artist to startlingly visual life with layers of images and sounds. When a white classmate says she’s never heard of the Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter, Palace doesn’t react, but a meme flashes briefly on-screen with the caption: “What if I told you there were Black theorists?”There’s an echo of Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel” in “The African Desperate,” though Palace’s stuckness in her off-putting milieu is less surreal than tragically banal. As alienating as art school might be, it’s also a refuge for our eccentric, orange-haired heroine.The African DesperateNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      To Deal With Film Festival Pressure, Sarah Polley Heads for the Hills

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      Hiking helped the actress-turned-auteur as she premiered her buzzy drama “Women Talking” in Telluride and Toronto.TORONTO — The scene inside the restaurant Lapinou was loud and hectic on Tuesday night as a crowd of Hollywood power players, including Rooney Mara and Claire Foy, navigated narrow hallways, passed plates of beignets and an endless stream of well-wishers with declarations of Oscar buzz.It was the Toronto International Film Festival after-party for the new drama “Women Talking,” though to do any real talking (as opposed to shouting), you had to escape outside, as I did midway through the night with the film’s director, Sarah Polley. Clad in a sharp suit and tie, Polley appeared unruffled by both the noisy soirée and the high-stakes premiere she had just come from.“I feel really happy and calm,” Polley told me with a serene smile. She thought about it, then amended her statement: “Kind of happy — not in a jacked-up, nutty way.”Higher levels of happiness would have been perfectly warranted after the two weeks Polley has just had: Following a successful launch of the film at the Telluride Film Festival, she and her cast flew to Toronto for another warm reception that ensured “Women Talking,” due in theaters this December, will be one of the season’s most-discussed movies.Based on the novel by Miriam Toews, “Women Talking” follows the female members of a Mennonite colony as they decide whether to stay or go. Their cloistered lives have been ruptured by a series of sexual attacks committed by the men of their community, and to stay would preserve the status quo, for better and for worse: While it would keep their families together, the women and their daughters would be in danger of continued assault.But for these Mennonite women, who have never seen a map nor been taught to read or write, leaving the only world they’ve ever known is a tall order, too. So a council is appointed: A group of women, including characters played by Mara, Foy and Frances McDormand, will gather in a hayloft and debate the decision that could change the rest of their lives.Though “Women Talking” has sparked Oscar talk for Polley and her cast after the film’s Telluride premiere two weekends ago, anxieties initially ran high in advance of that first screening. So Polley proposed a hike.“The operating principle was that we should just have a great morning so that if the film goes terribly, we’ll at least have had a great day,” she said. “I think it’s smart to start with something good that can’t be taken away from you.”That mountain trek with her cast went so well that even after the premiere, the actress Jessie Buckley decided to lead them on a second hike the next day. “But Jessie’s actually, like, a really serious hiker,” Polley said, “and I almost passed out, so l turned back.”Hiking was less necessary before the Toronto premiere, since the city is Polley’s hometown, the place where she acted in films like “The Sweet Hereafter” before her segue to directing. In fact, she was so convinced the Toronto audience couldn’t be topped that though “Women Talking” has a busy slate of festival appearances and premieres ahead, from now on, Polley plans to politely excuse herself each time the movie unspools.“I decided that the first time it played in Toronto would be the last time I watched the movie,” she said. “There was a sense of completion around it tonight: You’re saying goodbye to all the scenes and every frame of the film.”But if there’s one thing she’ll miss now that she’s no longer watching her film with an audience, it’s the occasional moment in this weighty drama when something light happens and the moviegoers around her realize they’ve got permission to laugh.“That’s when you feel the audience coalescing and having some kind of a collective response,” Polley said. “It’s thrilling to have laughter happen when you’re watching a film like this.” More

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      ‘Terra Femme’ Review: How Women Have Seen the World

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      An assemblage of travelogues shot by women from the 1920s through the 1950s, this experimental essay film can be seen with either live or prerecorded narration.Blurring the line between experimental essay film and performance piece, Courtney Stephens’s “Terra Femme” can be seen in two versions. Most screenings will have regular voice-over, but at the Thursday screening and at one of the screenings on Sunday, Stephens will deliver the narration live, in the spirit of how some of the material in the movie was originally screened.“Terra Femme” compiles amateur travelogues shot largely by women from the 1920s through the 1950s. The footage filmed by Kate and Arthur Tode, a couple who circumnavigated the globe, for example, was shown at cinema clubs in the 1930s and 1940s, and as with Stephens’s presentation, the films would be narrated while they unspooled.Although the two versions are said to be similar, the live edition — the one I saw at a press screening — conceivably adds something extra, because “Terra Femme” is partly about Stephens’s own relationship to the material. At one point, she discusses trying to recreate certain shots from India and not quite framing them correctly.Stephens asks whether these travelogues might reveal that women, who at the time had few opportunities to direct movies professionally, see the world differently. She considers the lives of the camerawomen, like Annette Dixon, of Philadelphia, whose films were archived under her husband’s name; Adelaide Pearson, who captured what may have been the first color cinematic footage of Gandhi; and Armeta Hearst, who filmed in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Seattle in the 1950s. The first reel of Hearst’s footage was accidentally scanned backward, making it look as though subjects who were exiting their homes were instead being absorbed back into them, inescapably.“Terra Femme” addresses many more issues: changing domestic roles in the 20th century, self-consciousness in amateur filmmaking, women’s potential access to historic moments and even — obliquely — climate change. Stephens’s ideas and presentation make for a dense, continually absorbing hour.Terra FemmeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 2 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Jokes + Exasperation + Subtext = a New York Club Comic on the Rise

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      In Raanan Hershberg’s standup, the punchline is not the point; it’s what his runaway emotions reveal that’s funny.Like genius, great comedy requires some mix of inspiration and perspiration, but when it comes to the stand-up of Raanan Hershberg, neither is more important than exasperation.One of the funnier moments in his 2019 special, “Downhill Ever Since,” was his extreme incredulousness over the name of the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter: “We’re supposed to believe,” he said, pausing to let the crowd register his umbrage, “there’s this cannibal who just happens, just happens, on the rarest of odds, to have the only name in the history of names to rhyme with cannibal.”His breakthrough new special, “Jokes From the Underground,” which premieres Wednesday night on YouTube, finds him plumbing comic aggravation more deeply, this time sparked by a sentence spoken by his mother: “I can’t believe it’s already April.” This sends the comic, a Comedy Cellar regular with a growing reputation, into a head-swiveling frenzy, spitting consonants. Of all the things to disbelieve? Hershberg, 37, launches into an operatic tour of the bizarre events of the past few years. (“Last year marked the only time where the Baldwin brothers weren’t jealous of Alec’s career.”) What began as a skewering of a cliché culminates in the baroque comedy of a man unhinged.Stand-up is an art form full of control freaks, and most reliably funny stand-ups are poised performers who orchestrate laughs from the surprise and insight of their premises and punchlines. In his recent Netflix special “Same Time Tomorrow,” Sam Morril, another skilled Comedy Cellar craftsman, offers a clever bit comparing the jobs of police officers and teachers that relies on an abrupt misdirection he calls a switcheroo. This kind of joke has the structure of a trick: get viewers leaning one way, then startle them by going the other.Hershberg tells some of these kinds of jokes, too, but they tend to be more minor key and straightforward: jabs, not big swings. He favors benign lies or the thuddingly obvious stated with conviction. At one point, he confides that when it comes to sex, his penis is “his spot.” What really distinguishes Hershberg, and makes him the next great practitioner of that fabled artistic genre known as New York club comedy, is when he seems to be losing control, letting his runaway emotions become the joke. His most ambitious set pieces, the ones that get the belly laughs, work not by outsmarting the audience but by playing the fool.To be specific, he has a premise arguing that women talk more about sex than men, but the real punchline is how the unruly intensity of his emphasis on this point actually shows he’s worried about secrets revealed by certain women. The biggest laugh is in the subtext, not the line. This is tricky, clever writing that relies on making sure the crowd sees something the comic isn’t telling them.In his new special, Hershberg displays this gift. He’s more strategic about his delivery than in his previous special, varying the pace, taking a break from his roaring vexation to become softer on occasion, allowing silence for a jarring contrast. It’s also a more stylish production, with camerawork that nicely serves the joke, including a close-up from the side, where his face is framed by candy-colored lights, a shot often employed after a sly comment.Exasperation can easily tip into anger, and there are easy laughs to be had there. But Hershberg wisely steers clear. He wades into touchy territory — the Holocaust, #MeToo, his mother’s sex life — but the aim here is not to tell it like it is but to find obstacles for his hapless protagonist to navigate. His jokes aren’t just tightly written. They have stakes.And yet, his greatest strength is clearly his gravelly, booming voice. Rub sandpaper and the wrapper for a corned beef sandwich together and you might hit its frequency. It can remind you of Gilbert Gottfried, but the comic he most frequently resembles — this comparison has so much baggage that I hesitate to make it — is Louis C.K. The way Hershberg wanders into uncomfortable territory, draws attention to it, then pushes further along the tightrope. His radical shifts of perspective. Even his hand gestures. In some of Hershberg’s punchlines, there are hints of a delight in pure nonsense that suggests a more surreal direction in his future. You see it in some of his most banal jokes, like one about President Biden’s age. It’s almost as if Hershberg needed to find a way to make this bland premise more interesting.Several times he returns to a refrain — “More information beats bad information” — but to say this show has a theme, other than trying desperately to make you laugh, would be a stretch.New York is the best training ground for comics honing ruthless jokes that work for the widest array of audiences. That’s because there are more places to perform than anywhere else. But the scene has its own groupthink that can resist certain kinds of ambition. Some of Hershberg’s most familiar premises, like complaining about cable news, feel dutiful, less personal. But digging into well-worn topics can also be a challenge that excites an imaginative mind.There’s no subject more overdone now than Covid. But he finds a fresh take: This is the first pandemic that people admit to enjoying. “No one in the 1500s said the bubonic plague really gave me a chance to slow down and just live in the moment,” he says. “Thank God the Black Death came along and I finally got to work on myself.”Hershberg is the kind of New Yorker that E.B. White argued brought passion to the city: the one born elsewhere, in his case, Kentucky. You would never know it from his act, which feels firmly located in New York club comedy, a category that for some evokes a certain neurotic sensibility or swagger or density of punchlines.To me, its defining trait is an ineffable comic sound, as nervy and raucous as the subway during rush hour. Hershberg plays that rumbling music beautifully. More