Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Bengali’ Review: A Woman Reconnecting to Her Roots

      by

      In this travelogue-meets-mystery documentary, a granddaughter seeks out her grandfather’s past.“The Bengali” documents the parallel journeys of Shaik Mohamed Musa, a Bengali man who leaves his village in India for New Orleans in 1893, and that of his African American granddaughter, Fatima Shaik, who travels from New Orleans to India well over a century later.In telling the story mostly through candid interviews with the modern-day residents of Khori, the village the elder Shaik left behind, the director, Kavery Kaul, captures the inconvenient realities the younger Shaik faces — realities that diverge from her vision of a storybook homecoming where she can bend down to touch the land her grandfather once owned. In this travelogue-meets-mystery documentary, Shaik, a novelist, shows her grandfather’s picture to villagers who have never heard of him, and who question whether this American visitor has pure motives.Viewers could easily walk away from “The Bengali” thinking the Shaik family’s story is an anomaly unique to New Orleans. But it actually isn’t. It’s part of a newly recovered body of history about a smaller wave of Indian immigration to America before the landmark 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. In the early 20th century, Indian men came to U.S. cities as solo workers and, subject to America’s racial hierarchy, often married Black and Puerto Rican women (like Fatima’s grandmother Tennie Ford, who is African American).This significant omission from “The Bengali” underlines that, despite an intriguing premise, what Kaul actually wants to say here is in need of a lot more fleshing out. The documentary meanders from scene to scene without sufficient dramatic tension (or relevant historical context) to propel it forward into denouement.As much of the film is Shaik essentially journaling aloud in direct-to-camera interviews or in voice-over alongside stiff kitchen table scenes with her family, the visuals land as inconsequential. In other words, this feature-length documentary probably should have been a podcast.The BengaliNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Hold Me Tight’ Review: An Étude in the Key of Grief

      by

      In Mathieu Amalric’s new film, Vicky Krieps plays a mother who tries to stay close to her family by running away.Early one morning, Clarisse (Vicky Krieps) slips out of the house, climbs into the 1979 AMC Pacer that has been languishing under a tarp, and drives away, leaving behind her husband, Marc (Arieh Worthalter), and their two young children, Lucie (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet) and Paul (Sacha Ardilly).This act of maternal abandonment, at the beginning of Mathieu Amalric’s “Hold Me Tight,” stirs up some familiar emotions and questions. What is Clarisse running away from, or toward? Is this liberation or betrayal? The answers aren’t what you might expect. “Hold Me Tight” doesn’t depend on plot twists or dramatic revelations — the central mystery is resolved early on — but if you don’t want the beginning spoiled you may hesitate to read further.This isn’t a movie about wanderlust or marital discontent; it’s about grief. Clarisse isn’t merely unhappy. Her world has been shattered, and her flight represents a desperate attempt to put it back together. She runs away from her family because she has already lost them, to a deadly avalanche during a ski vacation in Spain. Her departure keeps Paul, Lucie and Marc alive, in her mind and in front of our eyes, in a chronology that runs parallel to her wanderings.They go on without her, the years of their lives filling the months she spends on the road, revisiting the scene of her family’s death and drifting from town to town. The kids grow up, with new actors (Juliette Benveniste and Aurèle Grzesik) playing the older versions. Lucie, a gifted musician, is an especially vivid presence. Her piano playing, which progresses from a halting attempt at Beethoven’s “Für Elise” to a commanding rendition of Ligeti’s “Musica Ricercata,” is an important element in the film’s story and a driver of its moods. Bowen-Chatet and Benveniste both actually play the music, which lends gravity and credibility to the character. “My daughter is Martha Argerich,” Clarisse declares after seeing some of a documentary about that Argentine virtuoso. For a moment, it sounds less like a fantasy born of bereavement than like a proud mother’s wishful boast.Do Clarisse’s projections of the family’s life without her represent a coping mechanism or a form of denial? Amalric, adapting a play by Claudine Galea, seems less interested in the psychological implications of Clarisse’s behavior than in the structural and formal challenges her situation presents. He doesn’t mark a boundary between the real and the unreal, but rather treats them as equivalent, cutting from Clarisse to her family as if they were separated only by geography.This generates a particular kind of suspense, as you wonder whether and how the two strands of the story might collide, and to what effect. When the climax arrives, it’s unnerving but also tidy. For all the intensity of Krieps’s performance and the power of the piano repertoire, “Hold Me Tight” proceeds through the mourning process with a strange detachment, using Clarisse’s agony as scaffolding for ideas about memory and storytelling that seem more imposed on life than pulled from it.Hold Me TightNot rated. In French and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Clerks III’ Review: From the Heart

      by

      Kevin Smith revisits his convenience store characters, and his life, with this sequel.These days more than ever, personal filmmaking deserves to be celebrated merely for manifesting itself. Which doesn’t mean that personal filmmaking doesn’t come in some confounding forms.From his first feature, the very low-budget, black-and-white “Clerks” (1994), the writer-director Kevin Smith has only ever made movies about himself. Not just himself as a person, but himself as a sensibility: quick-witted, working-class, pop-culture-obsessive wiseass Jersey boy. In “Clerks” he put it across perfectly. In the film’s second sequel, “Clerks III,” he is not nearly as deft.Paradoxically, some of this is because of Smith’s relative maturity. A husband and a father and a heart attack survivor who is now 52, he’s got more on his mind than being a wiseass. Instead of following up the 2006 film “Clerks II” with more of that picture’s profane exuberant absurdity, he brings back Dante and Randal and Jay and Silent Bob and does some stocktaking.The movie is bouncy at first, though the actors Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson, so rawly naturalistic in the earlier movies, here seem like they’re doing bits. Still, three words characterize the first third or so of the picture: not funny enough. As in, a new character is nicknamed Blockchain. Which is funnier than that character nicknamed Podcast in the most recent “Ghostbusters” movie, but, you know.Randall has a heart attack, and, realizing he has to make something of his life, decides to direct a movie. About, yes, working at a convenience store. Not funny enough turns to often not funny, a star-studded audition scene (Ben Affleck! Danny Trejo! Freddie Prinze Jr.!) notwithstanding.While Smith has often broken the fourth wall in his pictures, here he uses the make-a-movie plot to go big-time meta. But his idea of meta fails to split the difference between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the French New Novel. It has more the manner of a pinball in a machine that’s about to enter tilt mode.For instance, at one point the trench-coated Silent Bob, played as ever by Smith, breaks character and, as Smith the filmmaker, lectures Randal about the hideous color scheme of a shot he’s framing. The joke falls flat, and not just because Smith’s visual mode is rarely mistaken for that of “The Red Shoes.”The wobbly ending combines the confounding and frequently schticky meta mode with the forced sentimentality of that Nicole Kidman AMC Theaters promo. My rooting interest in Smith notwithstanding (full disclosure: I, too, am a wiseass Jersey boy), it made me wince.Clerks IIIRated R. It’s a Kevin Smith movie. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 50 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Medieval’ Review: Flaying Alive

      by

      Living up to its title, this ultraviolent ode to a Czech national hero bludgeons you into submission.A cohort of notable actors — including Michael Caine, Ben Foster and Matthew Goode — tromp through “Medieval,” Petr Jakl’s lumbering epic about the storied Czech warrior Jan Zizka. The movie’s real stars, though, are its gaping wounds and mangled limbs, the singing of scythe and ax more eloquent than any dialogue.On land and underwater, the verisimilitude of the violence is numbing. Horses are elbowed over cliffs; a man’s brain is leisurely puréed by means of a saw through the ears. By the end, scarcely an orifice remains inviolate, the camera’s blood lust seemingly insatiable. Yet beneath the clanging of chain mail and the gurgles of the dying, a story peeks out: The throne of the Holy Roman Empire is up for grabs and coveted by two feuding brothers. To prevent the corrupt sibling (Goode, lazily scheming) and his wealthy wing man from prevailing, a powerful lord (Caine) arranges to have the wing man’s fiancée, Lady Katherine (a wan Sophie Lowe), kidnapped. As operatic choirs muster on the soundtrack, a morose mercenary named Zizka (Foster), gets the assignment; a small empire’s worth of knights and peasants gets kaput.Glum and bludgeoning, “Medieval” serves up a melancholic hero — see how it pains Zizka to take all these lives! — and a limp love interest-cum-bargaining chip. Hauled from one battle to the next, Katherine can do little but gaze, mouth agape, at the carnage, rallying now and then to declaim on the era’s social inequities and to pack maggots into Zizka’s newly vacated eye socket.“Are you all right?” Zizka tenderly inquires at one point, though, if you ask me, the movie’s addition of that hungry lion was maybe a barbarism too far.MedievalRated R. Fans of slicing, smashing, gouging and impaling will be in heaven. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Pinocchio’ Review: As the Story Grows

      by

      This live action and animated reimagining of the classic fairy tale takes too much time relaying its narrative.Surprising that Disney hired two previous directors before handing the strings of its partially-animated “Pinocchio” to Robert Zemeckis, Hollywood’s Geppetto, the creator on a quest to transform pixels into real boys (and girls and Grendels). Under Zemeckis’s attentive eye, Pinocchio’s yellow cap appears made of felt and his white gloves, affectionately hand-knit. When the marionette spirals his head like a pinewood Linda Blair, his joints make a satisfying creak. But boy oh real boy, is the script by Zemeckis and Chris Weitz a lifeless chunk of wood.The reimagining goes awry in the opening number — not “When You Wish Upon a Star,” the Oscar-winner that ascended to become the company’s signature tune, but a new ballad, “When He Was Here With Me,” sung by Geppetto (Tom Hanks) about his freshly concocted dead son. Someone wished to burden the old whittler with more motivation, and tacked on a dead wife to boot.This interminable shop sequence is paced so slowly that when a window closes, the image loiters until its latch drops into place. So slowly that when the Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo) freezes a screeching cuckoo clock, it feels like a cruel prank. So slowly that we forget that Hanks is ranked high among the most charming screen performers of all time as he opens his mouth to sing a second unwelcome new song in which he rhymes “Pinocchio” with “Holy Smoke-i-o.” And when Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and Jiminy Cricket (voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) finally head outside for fresh air, things do not improve.The key problem is the film’s fear of the original author Carlo Collodi’s theme: that children are raw material inclined to sloth, foolishness and self-serving fibs. (Collodi’s puppet kills the cricket and is haunted by its ghost.) Walt Disney’s 1940 cartoon softened the tyke’s sins to rambunctious naïveté. Now, he’s been flattened out of having a personality at all. His lumpen goodness turns the hot-tempered fairy tale into a dull after-school special about peer pressure, which seems to suggest that Geppetto should have just carved himself a helicopter to parent the boy.In place of temptation, the film serves up bizarre plot-fillers. Pinocchio learns about taxes and horse dung, meets a love interest (Kyanne Lamaya) and stares blankly at zingers directed toward the modern enticements of social media. (Pleasure Island now includes Contempt Corner where kids wave placards haranguing each other to shut up.) Joy can be found only in Luke Evans’s scary-fun Coachman (now saddled with unnecessary smoke monster minions) and a line where Jiminy seems to comment on the last decades of Zemeckis’s career: “Sure, there are other ways to make a boy — but I don’t think Geppetto gets out much, and I guess it’s just the best he could do with the tools he’s got.”PinocchioRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

    • 75 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Speak No Evil’ Review: Impolite Company

      by

      A weekend visit turns nightmarish for an innocent Danish couple in this coldblooded satirical thriller.The opening shot of “Speak No Evil” is of a car’s headlights plowing through the darkness of a deserted, tree-lined road. The image is innocent enough, yet the soundtrack vibrates with such disproportionate dread that when, seconds later, the road was replaced by a sunny vacation scene, I still had goose bumps.Gliding inexorably from squirmy to sinister to full-on shocking, this icy satire of middle-class mores, confidently directed by Christian Tafdrup, is utterly fearless in its mission to unsettle. When a Danish couple, Bjorn and Louise (Morten Burian and Sidsel Siem Koch), receives an invitation to visit the Dutch couple they met months earlier on a Tuscan vacation, they’re initially reluctant. Yet both families have young children who seemed to get along, and it would be ungracious to refuse a long weekend in the countryside. As one of their friends points out, What’s the worst that could happen?We’re about to find out. The sight of their destination, a middle-of-nowhere farmhouse, is only the beginning of the Danes’ misgivings. Their hosts, Patrick and Karin (Fedja van Huet and Karina Smulders), are jovial and welcoming, but why does Patrick insist on feeding wild boar to Louise, knowing she’s vegetarian? And why did he lie about being a doctor, then admit he has never held a job at all? Invited to dine in an otherwise deserted restaurant, Bjorn and Louise watch uncomfortably as their hosts enthusiastically make out on the dance floor. At night, a child’s agonized, animalistic moans reverberate through the house, the sounds explained by Patrick as a result of their son’s speech defect: a foreshortened tongue.Too polite to confront their hosts’ increasingly outrageous behavior, the Danes are ill-prepared when it begins to impact their preteen daughter. In the press notes, Tafdrup, who wrote the script with his brother, Mads Tafdrup, explains his belief that social conditioning has made us too refined, blunting our survival instincts and even our common sense. For Bjorn, though, the aversion to confrontation is more complicated: Irked by his overly predictable life, he harbors a nascent attraction to Patrick’s unfettered solipsism.Cool to the touch and photographed with unerring sophistication by Erik Molberg Hansen, “Speak No Evil” is a slow-closing trap whose final 15 minutes are genuinely terrifying. As an examination of pure maleficence, the movie is less than thorough. But as a warning to always listen to your gut? It’s perfect.Speak No EvilNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Story of Film: A New Generation’ Review: The Case for Modern Movies

      by

      The latest installment in the filmmaker-critic Mark Cousins’s survey of movie history focuses on 21st-century developments.A decade after presenting a guided tour of cinema history in the 15-hour docuseries “The Story of Film: An Odyssey,” the filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins checks in on recent developments in “The Story of Film: A New Generation.”This latest installment is a gratifyingly international survey in which Cousins, who narrates, applies his analytical eye to movies that are still settling in the mind. If you feel like you haven’t fully absorbed such significant films as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Cemetery of Splendour” (2016) or Mati Diop’s “Atlantics” (2019), Cousins’s consideration of their visual strategies will make you want to watch them again.Cousins’s assessments offer plenty to argue with, but it’s possible to enjoy “A New Generation” without agreeing that “Booksmart” “extends the world of film comedy,” as he claims, or that a shot in “It Follows” merits comparison to the camerawork in Michael Snow’s landmark experimental film “La Région Centrale.”Despite leading with “Joker” and “Frozen,” Cousins goes well beyond titles familiar to western audiences, with Indian cinema (“Gangs of Wasseypur,” “Reason”) coming in for particular praise. He also highlights works that test the boundaries of what qualifies as cinema — Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade,” Tsai Ming-liang’s virtual-reality experiment “The Deserted” and the interactive “Bandersnatch” episode of “Black Mirror.”If anything, technological shifts — there’s discussion of the iPhone-shot “Tangerine,” and of “Leviathan,” in which, according to Cousins, the filmmakers literalized the concept of a fisheye lens by attaching cameras to fish — get short shrift. When Cousins says that lockdown gave people time to watch “far more movies,” and that “when public life returned, we marched to the movies again,” his “we” does not entirely comport with box office realities. “A New Generation” means to look forward to a bright future of moviemaking, but it’s possible it’s a future that may not come to pass.The Story of Film: A New GenerationNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      In Horror Movies This Fall, Three Faces to Watch

      by

      The stars of “Speak No Evil,” “Smile” and “Nanny” plumb psychological depths in very different characters.Sometimes the ordinary, the routine, the mundane can be more frightening than an arsenal of chain saws and axes. Especially when everyday interactions become uncomfortable — and maybe even threatening. This fall, a handful of outstanding performances turn what, on the surface, seem like psychological dramas into something truly terrifying. We asked the actors in “Speak No Evil” (due Friday), “Smile” (Sept. 30) and “Nanny” (Nov. 23) to discuss the transformation.Fedja van Huet, ‘Speak No Evil’“I think every person has had the same experience,” Fedja van Huet said in a video call from his home in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He was describing that universally creepy sensation when someone fails to read the cues — or chooses to ignore them — and gets a little too close. “I had it with the father of a girlfriend of my daughter. And I said, ‘Why do I feel so awful? Because somebody went over your boundaries.’”There’s a lot of overstepping in “Speak No Evil,” Christian Tafdrup’s terrifying dissection of social conventions, starring van Huet as Patrick, an electrifying Dutch tourist in Italy who, with his wife, Karin (Karina Smulders, van Huet’s real-life wife), seduces an all-too-polite Danish couple, Bjorn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch), onto a hell ride.The Tuscan sun seems to rise and set in Patrick when we first meet him, with Bjorn captivated by his easy magnetism.But when Patrick and Karin invite the Danish couple and their daughter to Holland, Louise has misgivings whereas Bjorn is tempted. After all, what’s the worst that can happen?That’s when the squirming begins.Patrick provokes the well-mannered Danes, who leave but then return — perhaps he’s simply eccentric — despite every cell in Louise’s body screaming, “Run!” Then there’s Patrick and Karin’s peculiarly silent son.“Speak No Evil” is the first horror film for van Huet, who was still in drama school when he was cast as the lead in “Character,” which won the 1998 Oscar for best foreign language film. He is now shooting an Amazon series based on a young adult novel. That he’s the bad guy is all he would reveal.“I’m one of the usual suspects in Holland; I’ve been blessed with a lot of work,” van Huet, 49, said. And yet he and Tafdrup had never collaborated before. “You don’t have any thoughts before because you don’t know each other. So that’s fresh. That’s interesting.”The night before auditioning for Patrick, van Huet read the script and realized that “Speak No Evil” was no mere psychological drama.“I was a little upset, actually,” he said, laughing.And while he sometimes had the urge to go sinister with his eyes — he raised an eyebrow ever so slightly, transforming his face from one you could trust into one not so much — Smulders had other ideas.“She was like, ‘Don’t give it away, don’t give it away. Just be nice. Just be friendly,’” van Huet recalled. “‘That’s scary enough.’”Sosie Bacon stars as a therapist with her own issues in “Smile.”Paramount PicturesSosie Bacon, ‘Smile’Sosie Bacon hoped to do a horror movie, but not just any horror movie.“I wanted to do a good one and the right one,” she said in a video call from her home base of Los Angeles.She found it in “Smile,” Parker Finn’s exploration of childhood trauma in a scary-clown wrapping.Bacon is polished and hyper-confident as Dr. Rose Cotter, a therapist in a psychiatric hospital who numbs debilitating inner pain with work, the better to atone for the wrongdoings of her past.Then a patient starts screaming about a figure she can’t unsee before breaking into a diabolical grin and slicing into her own face. And Rose’s mask starts to crumble.“I was drawn to the psychological aspect of it massively because human beings and their psyches and therapy stuff, I just gobble it up,” said Bacon, 30. “It was important to me that there be this thing boiling under the surface.”And sometimes on it. That tic where Rose devours her cuticles with increasing intensity?“I also pick my fingers and they bleed, like, a lot so it wasn’t that difficult for me to go there,” she said.Bacon lived with her parents, Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, when she shot “Smile” on the East Coast, and a few of Rose’s nightmares followed her off the set.“My dad has been in a gajillion horror movies, but it wasn’t until after the movie that he was like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s the worst. The worst thing to do is to have to be scared in different ways,’” she said. “I was like, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And he was like, ‘I just didn’t want to ruin it.’”Sosie Bacon credits her stint last year as a recovering addict opposite Kate Winslet in HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” for the offer of Rose, her first lead. “I was able to make something of it and it had a lot of levels,” she said. “I think that showed people that I could really do it.”Now she’s aiming for something lighter, like a buddy comedy maybe. But the next time she ventures into darkness, she’ll prep with calming affirmations — and a reminder.“What I would say to someone taking on a horror movie is, ‘It’s not all fun and games.’”Anna Diop plays a Senegalese domestic worker dealing with a Manhattan family in “Nanny.”Amazon StudiosAnna Diop, ‘Nanny’“That was the easiest ‘yes’ I’ve ever come across,” Anna Diop said of taking on Aisha, a Senegalese domestic worker for an entitled Manhattan family, in “Nanny.” “I’ve known her my whole life.”Aisha is laser-focused on saving money to bring her young son to New York, despite the cost to herself. Similarly, Diop’s mother, a Senegalese immigrant who worked as a babysitter and nanny, brought her own family to the United States when Diop was 5. (The Sierra Leonean mother of the film’s director, Nikyatu Jusu, did domestic work as well.)“There are so many parallels to my personal life that my mother’s story is indistinguishable in a lot of ways from Aisha’s,” Diop, 34, said in a video call.Indistinguishable, perhaps, save for the inexplicable cracks that soon leave Aisha awash in a wave of madness.Diop, who is in Toronto to shoot Season 4 of HBO Max’s “Titans” as Kory Anders, a.k.a. the superhero Starfire, prepped for “Nanny” by color-coding every scene on giant corkboards so that she could track the ascension of the horror seeping in.“But outside of that, I approached it just as a human story,” she said, noting that she tried to keep Aisha grounded by working from a place of logic: Is her mind playing tricks on her or are these things really happening?“It’s a woman who is a mother who loves her child and who’s determined to do this one specific thing,” she added. “And the internal and external obstacles she faces in trying to do that is all my focus really needed to be about.”Still, the day the movie wrapped, Diop returned to her apartment and sobbed, a release she hadn’t allowed herself while filming.“I felt Aisha, throughout the story — and so many women immigrants can relate to this — was just holding it together because you need to get done what you need to get done, whatever other horror or trials are happening to you,” she said. “You just power through. And that was me during it.” More