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      ‘Till’ Review: He Was Someone’s Son, Too

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      Chinonye Chukwu’s new film reminds us that before his gruesome murder galvanized a civil rights movement, Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy with a doting mother.Some stories can seem too difficult to tell, though that doesn’t seem to have crossed the mind of the director Chinonye Chukwu. In “Till,” her haunted and haunting movie about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose barbaric murder in Mississippi in 1955 by white supremacists helped galvanize the civil rights movement, Chukwu revisits the past while doing something extremely difficult. She makes this grim American history insistently of the moment — and she does so by stripping the story down to its raw, harrowing emotional core.In brisk strokes both sweeping and detailed, Chukwu — who shares the script credit with Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp — revisits Till’s life, winding back the clock to Chicago in 1955. There, the cherubic-faced Emmett (a tender Jalyn Hall) lives with his widowed mother, Mamie (a superb Danielle Deadwyler), in a cozy house and is eagerly preparing to visit relatives in Mississippi, a trip that hangs over his mother like a worrying cloud. Yet Mamie dotes on Emmett (she calls him Bo) and, as a gift, buys him a wallet at a department store, where she tartly rebuffs a white salesclerk who tries to steer her toward the basement.By the time that Emmett is riding a train to the South — midway through the trip, the Black passengers stand and move en masse to the rear — a divided world of post-World War II optimism and jarring racial segregation has opened up. These divisions widen once Emmett arrives in Mississippi, where he stays with the family of Mamie’s uncle, a sharecropper, Moses (John Douglas Thompson). Soon, Emmett is helping Moses and his children pick cotton under the relentless sun — the palette suggestively lightened — and the camera sweeps over Black bodies toiling in the field as Antebellum America comes to unsettling life.The horrors of that world soon emerge with devastating consequences. Emmett, along with some relations, visits a small grocery store that caters to Black customers but is run by white people. Things rapidly spiral downward when Emmett walks into the store and meets the contemptuous gaze of the woman behind the corner. The Northern salesclerk who insulted Mamie earlier was just a better-mannered racist; he was also an ugly foreshadowing. Now, away from Mamie and the life he knows, Emmett amiably tries to engage the woman, Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett), whose hostility ends in catastrophic violence. That evening, several white men kidnap, torture and murder Emmett, throwing his mangled body in a river.Chukwu doesn’t show Till’s torture and death, a decision that is a clear, emphatically ethical artistic choice. “Till” is the third feature-length movie that she has directed, the latest following her 2019 drama “Clemency,” about a Black prison warden in crisis, and her work here is impressive. She handles the larger-scale period backdrop of “Till” and sprawling cast with confidence, using her expanded tool kit prudently and without sacrificing the intimacy that helped distinguished “Clemency.” And, just as she did in that drama, which was at once anchored and elevated by Alfre Woodard’s powerful lead turn, Chukwu distills a story — its gravitational force and emotional depths — into the movie’s central performance.With fixed intensity and supple quicksilver emotional changes, Deadwyler rises to the occasion as Mamie, delivering a quiet, centralizing performance that works contrapuntally with the story’s heaviness, its profundity and violence. The weight of Emmett Till’s murder, the horror of it — as well as both the history that preceded his death and that which followed it — is monumental, impossible, really, for one movie. Rather than attempt to convey that significance in its full sweep, Chukwu condenses it into meaningful details, fugitive moments, tranquil ellipses, explosive gestures and, especially, the face of one woman in joy and in agony.Chukwu keeps focused on Mamie even as the world presses in, including after Emmett’s death when she’s swept up in a larger national drama and arranges an open-casket funeral — a bold, far-reaching decision — and then later travels from Chicago to Mississippi to attend the trial of his murderers. During the trial, a grotesque sham, reporters swarm, flashbulbs pop and highlighted figures enter and exit, including Medgar and Myrlie Evers (Tosin Cole and Jayme Lawson). The movie doesn’t go deep into the era’s policies and politics, but while the trial unfolds it sometimes slips into explanatory, near-pedagogical mode, including in some scenes that seem more for the viewer’s (perhaps white viewer’s) benefit than for the actual story.In the decades since he died, Till’s murder and the still-shocking photographs of his body have been the subject of innumerable news stories, scholarly articles, nonfiction books, novels, poems, documentaries, podcasts, websites and exhibitions. At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, a painting of his corpse by the white artist Dana Schutz drew protests and criticism from Black artists. Historical markers installed in Mississippi that designate significant locations in his murder have been repeatedly vandalized. And, in March, Congress finally approved a bill — known as “the Emmett Till Antilynching Act’’ — making lynching a federal hate crime. Nearly 70 years after his death, his legacy and body remain contested ground.Perhaps that’s why I keep returning to the image of Mamie with her mother, Alma (Whoopi Goldberg), who’s sitting near-immobilized with grief after his death. Alma’s limbs hang heavily, as if they had turned to lead, an image that mirrors Jesus as the Man of Sorrows and summons up visions of other grieving Black families. Here, as elsewhere, including the scene of Mamie with Emmett’s corpse that evokes innumerable pietàs, the sanctity of these bodies is as undeniable as their humanity. In the end, what makes “Till” cut deeply is Chukwu’s insistence that before Emmett was a victim of pathological racism and an emblem for change, he was a boy, a friend, a cousin, a grandson and Mamie’s son — a beautiful, loving and loved child.TillRated PG-13 for racist violence and language. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Same Storm’ Review: A Lockdown Grab Bag

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      Featuring actors mainly performing from their own homes, this multistory drama clumsily wrestles with the struggles of everyday people during the first months of the pandemic.Do you remember the cringey “Imagine” video that Gal Gadot and her league of naïve celebrities devised and posted on social media at the start of the pandemic, in March 2020? “The Same Storm,” written and directed by Peter Hedges (“Dan in Real Life”), and shot using iPhones and laptops around the same time as Gadot’s much-derided lockdown anthem, isn’t all that different. It’s a well-intentioned gesture of solidarity that tries so desperately to be relatable, it feels alienating.The film — a series of vignettes staged as video-chat conversations between two parties, with each segment introducing a new lockdown-specific dilemma — features a cast of 24 actors, most of them performing in their own homes.There’s Mary-Louise Parker as a cam girl who tries and fails to turn on her latest client, a nurse in Queens who is scarred from witnessing too many Covid-related deaths. We see Elaine May as a woman in denial of her Covid symptoms, and in the next scene there’s a group Zoom funeral held in her honor. Later, a recovering alcoholic (Sandra Oh) attends a virtual support group when she relapses following her son’s attempted suicide. And so on and so forth.Hedges’s script is wildly uneven, and it especially fails whenever issues of racial injustice are broached, with those mini-stories — such as one in which a young protester (Moses Ingram) argues with her policeman father (K. Todd Freeman) over attending a Black Lives Matter rally — often resembling some kind of corporate diversity and inclusion training.At the beginning of the film, the conditions of the shoot are revealed — May fumbles with her camera, and other members of the cast sheepishly grin as they prepare to enact the dramas of regular people. Some stories are more convincing than others, but most are simply boring — especially now, when the surrealism of lockdown has lost much of its edge.The film proves one thing, at least: Like many of us, Hedges and his actors clearly had too much time on their hands.The Same StormNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Rosaline’ Review: O Romeo, Romeo, Thank U, Next

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      Kaitlyn Dever plays Romeo’s snarky ex-lover in this Shakespeare reimagining, which crosses its source material with present-day sensibilities.For never was a story of more woe than this — and I’m not talking about the trysts of Romeo. “Rosaline,” Karen Maine’s hapless Shakespeare reimagining, stages history’s most famous romance from the novel perspective of Rosaline, Romeo’s jilted ex. It’s a clever enough gimmick. But in playing out the reverie, the movie epitomizes a du jour Hollywood adaptation style that’s nothing short of agonizing, planting one foot in the source material and the other in a cheeky 21st-century sensibility.Like other half-modernized classic works, “Rosaline” strands its irreverent millennial characters in a stuffy olde world. Think “Enchanted” in reverse: Clad in opulent chemises, bodices and waistcoats, Rosaline (Kaitlyn Dever) whines, cusses and flails through Verona, egged on in her diablerie by her world-weary nurse (Minnie Driver) and sassy sidekick, Paris (Spencer Stevenson). When Romeo (Kyle Allen), Rosaline’s then-paramour, tries to woo her with blank verse, she squints and cuts in, “Why are you talking like that?” The engine of this movie is snark, and Dever, overtaxed with carrying the comedy, brings a dauntlessness to the role, even during more daft moments.Romeo snubs Rosaline for Juliet (Isabela Merced). Paris proposes. The Montagues clash with the Capulets. You know much of the rest, though Rosaline’s courtship with a local hunk named Dario (Sean Teale) and a puerile, eager-to-please third act are some of the movie’s bigger breaks with tradition. Shall I compare the screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (“(500) Days of Summer”) to the Bard? I’d rather not.RosalineRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Dark Glasses’ Review: She Wears Her Shades at Night

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      A prostitute blinded by a stalker tries to protect a young boy. But in his first film in 10 years, Dario Argento opts for visuals as banal as the scares.Five decades ago, the Italian director Dario Argento (“Suspiria,” “Inferno”) melded slasher flicks with modern art, saturating the screen with lurid colors that were more captivating than the ideas underneath them. Giallo, the genre Argento popularized and, later, clumsily satirized in a poorly received 2009 film of the same name, is often snubbed as having more style than substance. “Dark Glasses,” Argento’s first film in 10 years, responds by stripping away the style, too.Visuals are overrated, this intermittently ticklish thriller seems to insist. Argento and his cinematographer, Matteo Cocco, limit the film’s palette to shades of mildewy gray-green spattered by crimson blood (shot, of course, in gruesome close-up). Our heroine, a surly call girl named Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), is too vexed to fuss about this dishwater depiction of Rome. In the opening scene, she irritates her eyes gazing at a solar eclipse; shortly after, she’s blinded when a serial murderer in a van rams her car into oncoming traffic, killing the other driver and orphaning a 7-year-old named Chin (Xinyu Zhang).How can Diana dodge her deadly stalker when she can’t — and won’t — ever see his face? Argento has masterminded a setup that empowers him to dazzle audiences with sound instead of sight. Oddly, he doesn’t follow through on it, despite declaring his intentions with an extended cameo from his daughter Asia Argento as a care worker who teaches Diana how to listen for aural clues to her surroundings. The inept cops on the case (Mario Pirrello, Maria Rosaria Russo and Gennaro Iaccarino) wax on about the limits of the eye — they’re stymied by fuzzy CCTV footage, microscopic chips of paint, and vehicles that change color from black to white — but the film’s execution never proves their point. In one ineffectual detour, Diana smashes lamps in an attempt to hide from her pursuer. Not only does the scene continue to be filmed in relative brightness, but her brainstorm doesn’t affect the chase one bit.The scares are as banal as the visuals. Argento made his reputation on tangled yarns where witchy women usually wielded the knife. At 82, he’s finally resorted to a straightforward male-sicko-slays-sex workers tale. He and co-writer Franco Ferrini may believe they’re saying something or other about misogyny. (Even Diana’s non-murderous clients are varying degrees of awful.) Still, the writers seem to have spent little time developing their villain, who is so dashed off that the baddie doesn’t even commit to a weapon, reaching for garrotes, blades, nooses and steering wheels as though from a random grab bag. (At least Arnaud Rebotini’s spidery synthesizers set the right mood.)Yet, while it’s easy to dismiss “Dark Glasses” as the work of a master gone soft, Pastorelli’s prickly, sharp-tongued Diana is perhaps the most charismatic leading lady of Argento’s career. She dominates her surroundings — a rarity in his films — and delivers a performance that creeps close to camp (particularly while being strangled by a snake). The best moments of the film involve Diana’s unsentimental alliance with Chin, the orphan who offers her more protection than she’s able to afford him. Their quirkily endearing relationship allows the horror legend to dabble in a genre that’s wholly new to him: the odd couple comedy.Dark GlassesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

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      ‘Eternal Spring’ Review: When State TV Got Hijacked

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      Two decades after members of Falun Gong took over local television programming in Changchun, China, a documentary looks back.“Eternal Spring” revisits an incident from 2002, when members of the spiritual movement Falun Gong hijacked local television programming in the city of Changchun, China. Their goal was to air a video that contradicted the Chinese government’s negative portrayal of the practice, which combines elements of Buddhism, Taoism and Chinese breathing exercises. China, seeing Falun Gong’s popularity as a political threat, had banned the group in 1999.This documentary, directed by Jason Loftus, incorporates animation to revisit these past events. In an eye-catching early sequence, the cartoon equivalent of a fluid single take depicts law enforcement rounding up several people suspected of being involved in Falun Gong or of hijacking the TV signal.“Eternal Spring” primarily trails Daxiong, a Toronto-based comics artist who designed the movie’s storyboards. A Falun Gong adherent who says he had disagreed with the hijacking but who fled China to avoid the crackdown that followed it, he visits with participants in the TV takeover and adjacent figures who now live outside China. (Some of the dramatis personae are introduced with comics-style nicknames: “the mastermind,” “the runner,” “the electrician” and so on.) Daxiong draws illustrations as his interlocutors tell stories of the event’s planning and aftermath, and as they share vivid memories of planners who are no longer alive.“Eternal Spring” has value as an educational tool about Falun Gong and its place in China, and as a testament to its subjects’ bravery in defying the state. Still, while the animation gives the documentary some distinction, the narrative can’t entirely shake the sense that this momentous but brief episode is scaled more for a short than a feature.Eternal SpringNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Picture Taker’ Review: Civil Rights Photographer and F.B.I. Informant

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      The documentary, by the director of “Who Killed Malcolm X?,” is a compelling biography of Ernest Withers, whose photographs helped chronicle Black history.After the photojournalist Ernest Withers died in 2007, a bombshell investigation revealed that the respected Memphis photographer, known for taking over a million pictures of 20th-century Black life during his career, had also been a paid informant of the F.B.I.The documentary “The Picture Taker,” directed by Phil Bertelsen (“Who Killed Malcolm X?”), uses this fact as an entry point into a compelling biography of Withers, whose photographs helped chronicle important events in the civil rights movement, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final days spent supporting the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis.“The Picture Taker” presents several perspectives on Withers’s link to the F.B.I. and noticeably does not come down on a particular side — unlike “Judas and the Black Messiah,” a 2021 historical drama about the murder of the activist and Chicago Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, which took up similar subject matter.But the reason to watch the documentary isn’t for the debate about Withers’s motives. It’s to see his impressive archive, which Bertelsen was smart to build the film around.
      From his coverage of the Emmett Till trial in Mississippi to the weddings and first communions of everyday Black people in Memphis, Withers’s photographs give the documentary a visual language that coheres from start to finish.“The Picture Taker” artfully plays with rendering the photographic image for the screen. It graphically alters Withers’s likeness, transforming pictures of him into telling animations and cutouts that pull him out of the background in which he so often dwelled and into the foreground.Ultimately, the film immerses viewers in Withers’s considerable storytelling abilities as an image-maker at the same time that it examines his motives for taking those very pictures — that tension is what makes for an engrossing watch.The Picture TakerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Sell/Buy/Date’ Review: The Topic of Sex Work, From All Sides

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      In Sarah Jones’s engaging film about the sex trade, everyone has a say.If you’re hoping to land squarely on an “aye” or a “nay” about the sex-work industry, Sarah Jones’s documentary-narrative feature, “Sell/Buy/Date,” won’t help. And that’s a good thing.Jones — who wrote, directed and stars in the film — doesn’t treat the tensions between exploitation and empowerment, personal agency and systemic cruelties, as binaries. Instead, they are riveting, confounding and, as exchanges between Jones and her mother attest, personal. Why Jones travels with her deceased sister’s journal factors in mightily, too.In 2016, Jones’s solo show of the same name became an Off Broadway hit. Yet the announcement that she’d be turning it into a movie was met with a barrage of criticism on social media — much of it from sex workers who wanted ownership of their stories. (Laverne Cox pulled out as an executive producer; Meryl Streep stayed on.)Instead of scrapping the project, Jones embraced that blistering chapter, inviting sex-work activists more fully into her fraught and comedic reckoning. Among them: the adult-film actress Lotus Lain; the pole-dance instructor Amy Bond; the courtesan Alice Little of Nevada’s Chicken Ranch brothel; and Evan Seinfeld, the founder of the adult social platform IsMyGirl.On her quest, Jones checks in with some friends — Rosario Dawson, Ilana Glazer and Bryan Cranston, among them. She also brings along four of her characters, which she plays herself: bubbe Lorraine; Bella, a sex-work studies major; Rashid, an Uber driver; and Nereida, a women’s rights advocate. The quartet provide comic relief, and more.After Jones’s pleasant tour of Chicken Ranch, Nereida insists she meet Esperanza Fonseca, an anti-trafficking activist who addresses the knotty issue of agency, showing Jones around a Las Vegas hotel room where opulence often masks violence. As the model Terria Xo says, “It’s not a choice if you have to do it to survive.”Sell/Buy/DateNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Sepa: Our Lord of Miracles’ Review: A Prison in the Amazon Jungle

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      A documentary from the 1980s, now premiering in a restored version, is an eye-opening visit to a Peruvian penal colony.In the late 1940s, the president of Peru, Gen. Manuel Odría, had a bright idea, or so he thought, about the colonization of the Amazon: start with criminals, convicted or not. This penal colony, called Sepa — which began operating in 1951 and was mostly shut down in the early 1990s — was often a dumping ground for political opponents of whatever leadership was in power at the time. Far from so-called civilization and wanting in many resources, it was an environment in which prisoners were obliged to form functioning communities or die.“Sepa: Our Lord of Miracles,” a short but crucial documentary made in 1986, depicts life in the colony. Sepa was populated by all manner of criminals, some violent, some not: sex offenders, thieves, small-scale drug traffickers‌. But, partially because the environment compelled the inhabitants to work together, this “green hell,” as an interviewee calls it, was in a sense far more functional than most prisons: There were no gangs, no alcohol or drug abuse, and little violence.There was, however, a powerful sense of isolation and a good deal of nonchalant corruption. This comes across in sequences showing the ramblings of an amiable prison director at the time, Alfredo Elias, and in visits with a prisoner nicknamed “the colonel,” who hailed from the United States. These scenes are both humorous and a bit terrifying.The movie was directed by the German filmmaker Walter Saxer, an associate of Werner Herzog, and Saxer’s voice on the soundtrack brings the more famous director to mind. (The narration was written by the Peruvian author and onetime politician Mario Vargas Llosa.) Long considered lost, it’s premiering in New York in a restored version. Seen today, it’s a provocative addition to the literature of incarceration.Sepa: Our Lord of MiraclesNot rated. In German, Spanish and English with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters. More