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      ‘The Cathedral’ Review: A Boy, a Home, a World

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      In this striking, formally rigorous drama, the director Ricky D’Ambrose revisits his Long Island childhood with restraint and tenderness.Toward the end of “The Cathedral,” a movie filled with restrained feeling and shimmers of beauty, the young protagonist describes in voice-over a photograph that fills the screen. It’s an image of two of his aunts, both then young women, in a room that’s scarcely bigger than the bed they’re on. One sister, dressed in a bright red sweater and socks, is seated on it. The other sits on the floor, her upper body leaning on the bed. The women are smiling; they seem happy. “The room’s still there,” the voice-over continues, “even if the same people aren’t.”Much like this moment, “The Cathedral” is about absence and presence, rooms and the people who inhabit them. Mostly, though, it is about Jesse, the person describing the photo, and who, over the course of this spare, precise, formally rigorous movie grows from a quiet, wide-eyed toddler into a pensive, watchful teenager. In its sweep, Jesse’s life is unremarkable. He is born and he is loved, or at least cared for; he plays, draws pictures, goes to school, experiences death and observes the world around him. And in observing, Jesse develops a sensibility. He becomes the young man with the photo, one who can discuss — and create — art.What distinguishes Jesse’s story is the striking way that the writer-director Ricky D’Ambrose tells it — its ellipses, voice-over, visual precision and an emotional reserve that can feel like clinical detachment but is more rightly described as an aesthetic. Set on Long Island, it opens in 1986, before Jesse’s birth, with the death of his uncle, which the family has obscured. After Jesse arrives, the movie settles into four roughly divided time frames — different performers play the character at ages 3, 9, 12 and 17 — each with ceremonies that formally mark the arc of a life and end with his graduation from high school.Much of the story and certainly its prickliest, most demonstrative scenes involve the ties — emotional and economic — between Jesse’s parents, Richard and Lydia (Brian d’Arcy James and Monica Barbaro), and their extended families. The relationships are messy, at times petty and grim, painfully human. Richard is the font of much of the tension. He’s from a lower-middle-class family and makes an unfortunate career choice, and from the start nurses grudging resentment that he increasingly, volubly voices toward Lydia’s wealthier parents. When he demands they help pay for his and Lydia’s wedding, the marriage is already sunk.D’Ambrose has said that the movie is autobiographical, and the story takes some wincing and revealing turns, most egregiously in the shabby treatment of Lydia’s grandmother, a frail, somewhat bewildered-looking woman whose children shuttle her around carelessly. Jesse witnesses some of what happens to her, including after she’s finally dumped in one of her daughter’s homes, where she will fade. This is clearly a crucial chapter for him, one that builds its resonant power not in tears and talk but through spare, near-hieroglyphic images.Part of the pleasure of “The Cathedral” is how D’Ambrose plays with — and gently destabilizes — narrative conventions by drawing from different realist traditions. Although most of the main actors are working within the parameters of Hollywood-style psychological realism — their expressions, gestures and movements are recognizable, not alien — the performers playing Jesse are generally tamped down and at times look almost blank. Here, D’Ambrose seems most influenced by the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, who directed his actors (he called them “models”) to deliver minimal obvious expression. “Hide the ideas, but so that people find them,” Bresson said. “The most important will be the most hidden.”D’Ambrose isn’t really hiding all that much. If Jesse seems enigmatic, it’s only because he’s a quiet, solitary kid; his father does plenty of talking for everyone. But the adult who Jesse becomes is evident in every image of this personal movie and in the ways D’Ambrose deploys different storytelling strategies, most notably through his use of still images, tableau staging — including a wedding dinner that evokes Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” — and the novelistic narration (delivered by Madeleine James). Here, when a fight breaks out, D’Ambrose cuts from the brawlers to a lingering shot of a broken glass, letting the angry voices fill the air.In time, Jesse develops an interest in film. He flips through a cinema book (Alain Resnais and Jacques Demy are here but, amusingly, not Disney), and Richard buys him a video camera. Jesse shoots and shoots some more as his family falls apart. In dialogue and drama and through postcards, TV ads and news clips — a bombing, a war, a burial — a larger world comes into view. Again and again, you watch Jesse looking at this reality, taking in its beauty and ugliness. He looks at its kitsch, its vivid faces and bright colors, but he also looks at the light that flickers on the walls — and that eventually leads him to this quiet, tender movie.The CathedralNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Our American Family’ Review: How Addiction Affects the Household

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      In this intimate documentary, a Philadelphia family of six reels from a daughter’s recent overdose.“Our American Family,” an intimate documentary, hopes to give a human face to the epidemic of addiction. The film opens and closes with footage of rainy city streets as maudlin music plays, but for the most part, the directors Hallee Adelman and Sean King O’Grady wisely home in on the story of a family of six in Philadelphia.The documentary pays special attention to the clan’s matrilineal bonds. When the film begins, the 29-year-old Nicole has recently survived an overdose, and must move into a nearby rehab clinic. She leaves her toddler in the care of her mother, Linda. Nicole is a veteran of recovery programs, and she approaches her crisis with a clear eye and jocular attitude.Also living under Linda’s roof are her husband (and Nicole’s stepfather), Bryan, and Nicole’s two brothers, Chris and Stephen. This is a stubborn group prone to squabbles, and the filmmakers assemble a nearly unremitting string of arguments, tense discussions and outbursts. Among an array of big personalities, Linda, a yoga instructor, is tasked with keeping the household peace.As the family members speak candidly both to one another and in voice-over testimonies, the film’s freshest insight lies in the comparison of addiction to cancer. Both are deadly diseases; only one is stigmatized. But for some in the family, the analogy only goes so far. People with cancer “don’t go through your wallet while you’re sleeping,” Bryan counters, adding, “They don’t get arrested because they’re trying to buy chemo.” That’s “part of the fallout from the disease,” Linda shoots back.The filmmakers let these tensions remain unsettled. Addiction is a complex, challenging topic, and “Our American Family,” in its sharp specificity, handles it with grace.Our American FamilyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Book of Delights’ Review: A Heady Romance

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      A schoolteacher’s odyssey into erotic self-discovery and existential desire fuels this Brazilian drama, which is based on a novel by Clarice Lispector.Lóri, the heroine of the decidedly grown-up Brazilian drama, “The Book of Delights,” is an unconventional sort — an elementary schoolteacher who encourages her young students to think about existentialism.Outside the classroom, Lóri, played by Simone Spoladore, spends her time exploring her own existential desires. She’s a woman with an active erotic life, and multiple lovers, men and women, come to her apartment for a night. (She has her own apartment in the city, an inheritance from her late mother.) This matrilineal gift is an opportunity for freedom that Lóri does not want to waste.But despite her fierce commitment to self-discovery, she is drawn to a particular partner, a philosophy professor named Ulisses (Javier Drolas). In a reversal of the Greek myth that inspired Ulisses’s name, it is he who waits for Lóri as she traverses the night. The pair are powerfully drawn to each other, but for their relationship to develop, Lóri must decide if she wants to incorporate partnership into her odyssey of independence.For this story of self-determination, the director, Marcela Lordy, who wrote the script with Josefina Trotta, adapted the film from the 1968 novel “An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures” by Clarice Lispector.The film does not share Lispector’s tendency for formalist innovation. It is a conventional-looking movie, with beautiful performers who deliver their lines in earnest close-ups. Even the film’s explicit sex scenes are shot in a straightforward manner, more informative than they are provocative or titillating. But to the movie’s benefit, it maintains the mature perspective that Lispector brought to her writing. At its best, shows its characters engaged in thoughtful conversations about independence and attraction.If this erotic drama doesn’t break new cinematic ground, it also doesn’t cede its conviction in portraying relationships as a matter of serious consideration.The Book of DelightsNot rated. In Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Gigi & Nate’ Review: A Tender Bond

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      A young man with quadriplegia and his helper monkey pair up in this overstuffed feel-good drama.As far as by-the-book, feel-good dramas go, “Gigi & Nate” has a fail-safe formula, designed to jerk tears and warm hearts. The film tells the true story of an 18-year-old who becomes a quadriplegic after contracting meningitis from a lake swim. Unable to eat, sleep or do everyday tasks without help and crushing pain, the Nashville-based Nate (Charlie Rowe) struggles with despondence until Gigi, a capuchin monkey, transforms his life.Yet the tender bond between the titular pair gets short shrift in Nick Hamm’s bloated movie, stuffed as it is with subplots, characters and contrivances. After an overlong prologue shows Nate frolicking in the water on the Fourth of July with his siblings and friends, the film jumps cursorily through several years of his life with quadriplegia before he acquires Gigi.The film’s aggressively unsubtle score notwithstanding, Gigi’s effect on Nate is touching. Once she warms to him, she operates his phone, flips through the pages of the books as he reads and helps him with physical therapy, imbuing him with a renewed zest for life. There are also some high jinks involving Nate’s quippy, vodka-swigging grandma (a thankless turn by Diane Ladd) and a college party where Gigi goes viral.These antics earn the ire of local animal rights activists, who show up to Nate’s house in ape masks and pelt the walls with fake blood. As the battle between these cartoon villains and Nate goes to court, the writing becomes painfully platitudinous, skating around the real controversies surrounding the domestication of intelligent primates. Rather than offer insight into the difficult choices facing disabled people, “Gigi & Nate” opts for mawkish wish fulfillment, undercutting the film’s powerful emotional core.Gigi & NateRated PG-13 for scenes featuring seizures. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Peter Von Kant’ Review: Fassbinder and Friends

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      The prolific French director François Ozon puts a metatextual spin on “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” the classic German tale of amour fou.With “Peter Von Kant,” the prolific French director François Ozon pays homage to one of his most enduring influences, the New German Cinema icon Rainer Werner Fassbinder, nearly 20 films after first adapting a Fassbinder play with his early feature, “Water Drops on Burning Rocks” (2000).The film puts a metatextual spin on the classic Fassbinder play-turned-movie “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” a menage-à-trois melodrama about a fashion designer, her assistant and her muse, largely inspired by Fassbinder’s own tempestuous affairs of the heart. Ozon makes these parallels literal, placing a doppelgänger of the renegade director — complete with a mustache, a portly physique and a few of his signature statement pieces like his leather vest and white suit — in the title role.The filmmaker Peter Von Kant (Denis Ménochet) spends his days barking orders at his tight-lipped, gangly number two, Karl (Stefan Crepon), until, one day, Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani), the aging diva whose career he helped start, drops by with her latest boy toy, Amir (Khalil Gharbia). Instantly smitten with the younger man, Peter fast-tracks their romance by casting Amir in his new film and giving him a set of keys.Modeled after the North African actor El Hedi ben Salem (Fassbinder’s lover and the star of his masterpiece “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul”), Amir, a gin and tonic-guzzling libertine, drives Peter wild with jealousy, unfolding a series of cruel power plays and spittly shouting matches until the couple hit their breaking point.Admittedly, there’s a baked-in appeal to such an adoring resurrection of the man and the myth, through the prism of one of his most beloved works (the casting of a Fassbinder collaborator, Hanna Schygulla, as Peter’s mom, doesn’t hurt).But there’s a mocking air to Ozon’s chamber-piece histrionics, in part because Ménochet plays Peter like a self-pitying ham, oohed and aahed at with every breakdown. Fassbinder’s work finds a kind of truth in the artifice of emotionally plumped-up dramas, but Ozon’s often tedious tragicomedy never hits such a stride, trusting that the material will automatically confer greatness; instead, “Peter” comes off like top-shelf fan-fiction.Peter Von KantNot rated. In French and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Kaepernick & America’ Review: A Narrative

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      A documentary examines race in football via Colin Kaepernick’s career.In the past, when people talked about football heroes, both collegiate and professional, they meant white men. When the game became more integrated, after World War II, a racist myth among some fans held that Black players were good for muscle, while strategic thinking was the domain of white quarterbacks and coaches.The rise of the Black quarterback has proved, among other things, revelatory. In the documentary “Kaepernick & America,” the directors Ross Hockrow and Tommy Walker spend a good amount of time showing how excited football fans were when Colin Kaepernick, the biracial quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, was winning games and acting cheerful.Of course, even then there were the irascible white sports commentators like Colin Cowherd, who suggested that Kaepernick’s voluminous tattoos were a little too “street,” and that his post-touchdown bicep kiss was a sign that he wasn’t a “grown-up.” One wonders whether Cowherd ever objected to the white N.F.L. player Mark Gastineau’s sack dances.The movie really turns over a rock once Kaepernick chooses the gesture of taking a knee during the national anthem at games, as a protest against racial injustice and police brutality. The worms revealed include David Portnoy, the founder of the media company Barstool Sports, calling Kaepernick “an ISIS guy” and the entirely, even blindingly white cheerleader for the extreme right, Tomi Lahren, screeching to Kaepernick, “Aren’t you half white?” Even the clips from mainstream sources reveal a media high on its own supply of frenzied delusional nationalism. Eventually Kaepernick’s conscience gets him blackballed, and he remains without a team today.The verbal analysis here isn’t always profound — one interviewee trots out the banal phrase “the conversation we should be having” — but the narrative as presented in archival footage (Kaepernick did not sit for an interview for this film) is exemplary. The sports journalist Steve Wyche sums things bluntly: “We haven’t made much progress in this country.”Kaepernick & AmericaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Waiting for Bojangles’ Review: Endless Love

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      Set in Paris in the 1960s, the film tells the story of two irrepressible lovers, and their young son, whose tale turns tragic.Régis Roinsard’s “Waiting for Bojangles,” based on the novel by Olivier Bourdeaut, is a film so unabashedly romantic that it could only be French. It tells the story of two boundless, irrepressible lovers, Georges (Romain Duris) and Camile (Virginie Efira), and the life they share in Paris in the 1960s with their young son, Gary (Solan Machado-Graner).Their home, brimming with warmth, is crowded nightly with friends and family, like a madcap salon fueled by cocktails and lively conversation. Their tale eventually becomes tragic, however, as Georges and Camile’s relationship is strained by Camile’s battle with mental illness. But the film’s vision of a life of immeasurable joy and passion — one lived solely for love, without limits or qualifications — is beautiful and, for this critic and helpless romantic, powerfully intoxicating.The infectious brio at the heart of “Bojangles” is a testament to the performances of the ensemble cast, but especially Duris and Efira, whose chemistry is magnetic. Duris, as Georges, is introduced as a carefree mechanic posing as a worldly socialite at a party on the coast — a role he embodies with effortless charisma — when he meets Camille, downing glass after glass of Champagne and dancing wildly. One instantly roots for them.Now, the exuberant, sentimental esprit of “Bojangles,” from its impassioned sex scenes to its moments of tender longing, puts it in constant jeopardy of seeming maudlin or, worse, a little corny. But it’s an admirable problem. If you commit to romance, seeming corny is a risk you have to take.Waiting for BojanglesNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours and 4 minutes. More

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      ‘McEnroe’ Review: Regrets, He’s Had a Few

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      In this documentary about his life and career, the tennis player John McEnroe, known for his temper, doesn’t bother trying to apologize for his behavior.John McEnroe knows it’s too late to apologize. In “McEnroe,” a new documentary chronicling his meteoric rise in the world of tennis, the champion who still holds more titles than any other male player certainly expresses regret over his past behavior, both on the court and off. In the contemporary interviews that frame the documentary, written and directed by Barney Douglas, McEnroe is wise enough to know a “sorry” won’t cut it.There’s also the question of what he needs to apologize for in the first place, which the movie asks by implication. Yes, he behaved boorishly. By the same token, the patronizing, condescending tone directed toward him from many reporters at news conferences during his career arguably invited his contempt. And the overblown reaction to his bad temper was often risible. “You can see in him what society has done to us,” one self-important sports commentator intones in an audio clip.“Tennis is a lonely game,” Bjorn Borg, McEnroe’s friend and legendary rival, says in a new interview. It’s telling that the cool, calm, collected Borg and the volatile McEnroe were, and remain, the closest of friends. When speaking of each other, they talk more of their similarities than their differences.There’s a lot more here for tennis fans than you get in average sports documentaries. In archival footage and interviews, it’s easy to see why McEnroe’s approach was one of the most astonishing in the sport. His biggest problem, he insists, is that he turned pro before he learned how to control his temper. Recalling his middle-class upbringing and supportive family life when he was young, he expresses some befuddlement, wondering just where all the anger he let out on the court actually originated.In the movie’s frame, McEnroe walks around environments that figure in his past: late night New York, an empty tennis stadium. At one point, he answers a ringing pay phone, and a voice from long ago responds. This becomes a little goofy in the end but ultimately doesn’t detract from an awe-inspiring narrative.McEnroeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Showtime. More