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      Clu Gulager, Rugged Character Actor of Film and TV, Dies at 93

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      On TV, he played Billy the Kid on the “The Tall Man” and was seen on the long-running “The Virginian.” His movies ranged from “The Killers” to “The Last Picture Show.” Clu Gulager, a rugged character actor who appeared in critically acclaimed films like “The Last Picture Show” as well as low-budget horror movies, and who memorably portrayed gunslingers on two television westerns, died on Friday at his son John’s home in Los Angeles. He was 93.John Gulager confirmed the death. He said his father’s health had been in decline since he suffered a back injury several years ago.Mr. Gulager’s rough-hewed good looks and Southwestern upbringing made him a natural for the westerns that proliferated on television in the 1950s and ’60s. He was seen regularly on “Wagon Train,” “Bonanza,” “Have Gun — Will Travel” and other shows.An appearance as the hit man Mad Dog Coll on “The Untouchables” in 1959 persuaded the writer and producer Sam Peeples to cast Mr. Gulager as the legendary outlaw Billy the Kid on “The Tall Man,” a television series he was planning about Billy’s friendship with Sheriff Pat Garrett. (By most accounts the title was a reference to Garrett’s honesty and rectitude, and to the show’s opening credits, in which Garrett’s long shadow stretches in front of him.)“He’s exactly what we were looking for, an actor with a flair for the unusual,” Mr. Peeples said in a TV Guide profile of Mr. Gulager shortly after the show first aired in 1960. “He lends a certain psychological depth to Billy.”The friendship between the lawman (played by Barry Sullivan) and the gun-toting rustler was fictionalized and greatly exaggerated over the show’s 75 episodes; many historians believe that Sheriff Garrett actually shot and killed Billy in 1881. Their fatal encounter never happened on the show, which ended abruptly in 1962.Mr. Gulager played a more lawful character on “The Virginian,” the first of three 1960s western series that ran for 90 minutes, which starred James Drury and Doug McClure. Mr. Gulager’s character on the show, Emmett Ryker, was introduced in the show’s third season when a rich man tried to hire him to murder a rancher. Although he refused to be a hired killer, he was framed for killing the man. After clearing his name, Ryker channeled his penchant for violence into the service of the law.On the series “The Virginian,” Mr. Gulager played a character who channeled his penchant for violence into the service of the law.NBC,via PhotofestIn Mr. Gulager’s first scene, Ryker was typically unflappable. He walked into a saloon and within moments angered a man playing cards. Ryker drew his gun on the card player before he could stand up, ending the conflict.Moments later a deputy sheriff asked Ryker where he learned to draw like that.“In the cradle,” he replied.Mr. Gulager’s acting career, which lasted well into the 21st century, was not relegated to the frontier. He appeared on non-western television shows including “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Knight Rider” and “Murder, She Wrote,” and in several notable movies.Mr. Gulager, right, with Lee Marvin in “The Killers” (1964).The Criterion CollectionHe and Lee Marvin played hit men in “The Killers,” a 1964 film noir directed by Don Siegel and based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway that also starred Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes and, in what turned out to be his last movie, Ronald Reagan.In 1969 he played a mechanic in “Winning,” a film about auto racing with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. He played an older man who has a fling with his lover’s beautiful daughter in “The Last Picture Show,” Peter Bogdanovich’s celebrated 1971 study of a fading Texas town.He was also in more lowbrow fare, like the Keenen Ivory Wayans blaxploitation parody “I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka” (1988) and the horror films “The Return of the Living Dead” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2” (both 1985).His movie work continued well into his later years, including roles in the independent productions “Tangerine” (2015) and “Blue Jay” (2016). His final screen appearance was as a bookstore clerk in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019).Mr. Gulager left the cast of “The Virginian” in 1968 to focus on directing and teaching. (The show remained on the air until 1971, becoming the third-longest-running western in television history, after “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza.”) His directing career foundered after the short film “A Day With the Boys” in 1969, but he became a popular teacher, running a workshop that focused on horror film acting and directing.“I tell the young students in my class that what we do is as important as the work of a man who grows the wheat, the doctor who saves lives, the architect who builds homes,” he said in an ABC news release before he starred in the TV movie “Stickin’ Together” in 1978. “What we do, in our best moments, is provide humanity with food for the spirit.”William Martin Gulager was born in Holdenville, Okla., on Nov. 16, 1928. He often said that he was part Cherokee; the name Clu came from “clu-clu,” a Cherokee word for the birds, known in English as martins, that were nesting at the Gulager home.His father, John Delancy Gulager, was an actor and vaudevillian who became a county judge in Muskogee, Okla., and who taught him acting from a young age, well before he graduated from Muskogee Central High School. His mother, Hazel Opal (Griffin) Gulager, worked at the local V.A. Hospital for 35 years.Mr. Gulager served stateside in the Marines from 1946 to 1948 before studying drama at Northeastern State College in Oklahoma and Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He continued his education in Paris, where he studied with the actor Jean-Louis Barrault and the mime Etienne Decroux.He married Miriam Byrd-Nethery, and they acted in summer stock and university theater. In 1955 both were in a production of the play “A Different Drummer” on the television series “Omnibus.” He continued acting in New York until 1958, when the Gulagers and their infant son, John, moved to Hollywood.Mr. Gulager’s wife died in 2003. Besides his son John, survivors include another son, Tom, and a grandson.John Gulager is a director of horror movies, notably the gory “Feast” (2005), which starred Henry Rollins and Balthazar Getty. That film and its two tongue-in-cheek sequels also featured the older Mr. Gulager as a shotgun-toting bartender battling fanged monsters in a Midwestern tavern. The second “Feast” movie was even more of a family affair.“You know, there are three generations of Gulagers in this movie,” John Gulager told the blog horror-movies.ca in an interview. One of them, named after Clu the elder, was Clu Gulager’s infant grandson.“He was 11 months old when we filmed it,” John Gulager added. “My dad said, ‘We have to get Baby Clu’s career started now.’ ”Christine Chung contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Nope’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      ‘Easter Sunday’ Review: A Feel-Good Filipino Family Comedy

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      Jo Koy stars as a struggling comedian who is balancing his acting career with the demands of his son and mother.“Easter Sunday” has all the makings of a rollicking family comedy: The protagonist is a struggling actor and comedian with wacky relatives and a rocky relationship with his son. The film features mostly Filipino actors, with wonderful, culturally specific jokes and a cast of characters that fit into stereotypical, but no less true, immigrant archetypes. Not only Filipino viewers will see their families represented here; much of it rang true to this Dominican reviewer, as well.Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar, the movie finds Joe Valencia (Jo Koy) trying to get his career off the ground as producers pressure him to put on a Filipino accent to book a major role. At the same time, he struggles to connect with his son, Junior (Brandon Wardell), a Gen Z high school student Joe views as privileged. Generational divides are also on display at Easter dinner at the family matriarch’s home in San Francisco, where Joe and Junior take a road trip.There are many genuinely funny moments in the film, including jabs between the warring aunties, the high jinks of a bonehead cousin and situations involving the family’s irreverent relationship to religion. Plus, the movie includes some winning cameos: Tiffany Haddish plays a police officer and old flame of Joe’s, and Lou Diamond Phillips makes an appearance as himself. But things veer a bit off course with a subplot involving an illegal scheme and neighborhood goons. “Easter Sunday” is at its strongest when it stays close to the Valencia family, which is made for TV.Easter SundayRated PG-13 for violence and some strong language. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Pattrakorn Tungsupakul on ‘Thirteen Lives’ and the Rescue

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      For Ron Howard’s retelling of the 2018 ordeal, Pattrakorn Tungsupakul not only played the mother of a stranded boy, she also made key script contributions.When Ron Howard set out to retell the story of the dramatic 2018 rescue of a young soccer team from a flooded cave in northern Thailand, he knew he would have to grapple with underwater photography, hordes of extras and a handful of surly protagonists in the form of the British divers who successfully saved the boys through extraordinary methods. But he also knew that, as an American director tackling a specifically Thai story, authenticity would be crucial — and that any deviation from verisimilitude would come at his peril.So for the new film, “Thirteen Lives,” which debuts Friday on Prime Video, Howard and his producing partner, Brian Grazer, hired the Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (“Call Me by Your Name”), employed the producers Raymond Phathanavirangoon and Vorakorn Ruetaivanichkul, and relied on actors from the region to serve as his guides.One such actor Howard came to trust was the 33-year-old Pattrakorn Tungsupakul, a petite television star from northern Thailand who plays Buahom, a single mother forced to wait helplessly at the entrance to the cave for an excruciating 17 days. Timid and afraid for her son, Tungsupakul’s character serves as the film’s emotional center.The whole experience was refreshing — and strange — for an actress who has spent close to a decade working in Thai television, an environment that Tungsupakul says has not always been very collaborative or encouraging.In the film, Tungsupakul plays the mother of one of the soccer players stranded in a flooded cave.Vince Valitutti/MGM, via Associated Press“Ron, he always asked me, ‘What do you want to do?’ ‘What do you want to say?’ And he listened,” she said in an interview in Los Angeles, where she was accompanied by her older sister, Rugeradh Tungsupakul, a lawyer who served as her interpreter. “Because he trusted me so much, I had to prepare myself and work harder. I had to bring my experience to this project.”She may also be the film’s secret weapon.“She’s the most broadly relatable person in the film,” said Howard, who compared Tungsupakul’s character’s seemingly endless wait outside the cave to being stuck in the waiting room while your child is in surgery — if the procedure lasted 17 days. “Dramatically, she’s the most heartbreaking.”Tungsupakul hails from Chiang Mai, a city not far from the Tham Luang Cave where the boys were trapped. Howard was initially attracted to Tungsupakul for her visceral connection to the character, but when he discovered she was also from the area and wouldn’t have to learn the very specific dialect, he knew she was the right woman for the job.Tungsupakul, who goes by the nickname Ploy, became an integral part of the production team. She improvised lines, researched specific cultures and traditions of her hometown, selected her own wardrobe and even suggested plot points that made it into the film.Getting details right was especially complicated because Covid restrictions prevented Howard from entering Thailand at all. Instead “Thirteen Lives” was shot in Queensland, Australia, and Howard remotely oversaw a film crew shooting exteriors in Thailand.“That was a challenge,” Howard said in an interview. “And there’s certainly the risk of underachieving in that way.”Since the producers didn’t have life rights to the boys or their families, Tungsupakul wasn’t able to meet with any of the survivors or their parents. Instead, she studied news footage of the rescue, particularly the reactions of the parents when journalists peppered them with questions each day. “The reporters kept asking ‘How do you feel?’ ‘How do you feel?’ ‘You must be sad,’” she said. “It was terrible. But for me, it was good because I have to do research, and I want to see the real reactions.”Tungsupakul’s character is a poor working mother who carries tremendous guilt for not being home enough for her son. She is also stateless, a recent immigrant from Myanmar who isn’t certain her child will be rescued along with the others because she doesn’t have the proper citizenship.Her character’s arc involves finding her voice in the quiet moments: She challenges the governor directly (“How can you understand? Is your own son going to die?”) — a moment very uncharacteristic for a culture predicated on politeness and respect. In one scene, she asks a famous local monk to bless a handful of traditional northern Thai bracelets. She then gives the bracelets to the divers (played by Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen, among others) before they plunge back into the depths.After graduating from law school, Tungsupakul chose instead to pursue an acting career.Jennelle Fong for The New York TimesTungsupakul brought the idea of the bracelets to the production as another example of paying attention to the local customs. “I asked my friend who studies northern culture at Chiang Mai University, and he said this is a must-have item,” she said. “It’s a signature of passing good luck to a person, giving him a blessing that if you’re going on a dangerous mission, you will be safe.”Tungsupakul is also one of a handful of female characters in a male-dominated cast — a factor that Ruetaivanichkul, one of the producers, said was crucial to creating balance within the production, which is one of a spate of screen projects, including the 2021 documentary “The Rescue,” about the mammoth effort to save the stranded soccer team and its coach. (The producer P.J. van Sandwijk worked on both “Thirteen Lives” and “The Rescue.”)“She introduces femininity and the soft side of energy,” Ruetaivanichkul said. “She shows the empathy within the group. That is what Ron emphasized from the very beginning, because otherwise it’s not going to be different from the story in the documentaries that focus on the rescuers. We are trying to do the world-building of Thai culture.”Tungsupakul and her sister were raised by parents who ran a small business trading construction materials. She graduated from law school, but instead decided to move to Bangkok to pursue a career in acting. Early success on a 2013 series in which she played a rural girl forced to move to Bangkok after her father is murdered made her a star in Thailand. When asked if she was famous, Tungsupakul demurred with a quiet “Yeah,” before adding, “But if I say ‘yes’ then maybe ‘Oh, I’m too much.’”“Thirteen Lives” is her first international production, one she found challenging when it came to modulating her emotions. She remembers Howard telling her at one point, “‘Ploy, in this scene, please don’t cry. No more tears,’” she said with a laugh. The tears came so easily because the world the production team had recreated in Australia felt so close to home. Tungsupakul was in Bangkok when the rescue was underway, but she remembers being glued to the television, watching the story unfold, positive that no child was going to survive.“I told Ron, there was just no hope,” she said. “It’s desolate. They have no light. It’s wet. Scientists say people can starve within three days. There are just many ways to die.”At the time of the interview in July, Tungsupakul had yet to watch the movie with a Thai audience, though she had viewed the link she was sent seven times. Her sister, for one, is a fan. “I feel proud,” said Rugeradh Tungsupakul, who goes by Waen. “I know how hard it’s been for her to get where she is today.”Tungsupakul’s biggest regret is that her father isn’t alive to witness her success. He died before her first television show ran and had not been happy when she abandoned law for the unpredictable life of an actress.“If there is any wish that I could make,” she said, “I want Prime Video to be available where he is now so that he can watch me in ‘Thirteen Lives,’ too.” More

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      Pregnant Men Were a Movie Punchline. Now They’re Horror Villains.

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      The idea of the pregnant man has long been mined for Hollywood comedy. This summer, he becomes a menace.When I was four months pregnant, just as my midsection had grown vast enough to convert my pregnancy into a public event, I escaped to the movies. I saw “Men,” Alex Garland’s May horror film about the young widow Harper (Jessie Buckley), who sets out on a restorative countryside getaway only to be terrorized by a village full of unsavory male archetypes — pervy vicar, passive-aggressive nice guy, condescending cop — all played by Rory Kinnear.Near the end of the film (spoiler alert), one of these men spontaneously sprouts a distended belly much like my own. A slimy slit ruptures between his legs, and one of the other guys slithers out of the hole. He grows a belly and births a third guy, who grows a belly and births a fourth guy, and so on, until the film’s full cast of men has replicated at Harper’s feet.A few weeks later, I was beached on my bed at home, watching a screener on my laptop for Andrew Semans’s “Resurrection,” when I was again confronted by the specter of a menacing pregnant man. The thriller, which debuted in theaters last week, follows the tightly wound corporate hot shot Maggie (Rebecca Hall), who unravels when she spots David (Tim Roth), a man from her past. Maggie reveals (more spoilers!) that 22 years ago, David lured her into an abusive relationship, impregnated her and ate their baby. Now he informs her that the little boy he gobbled is gestating in his gut and missing his mommy. “He’s moving,” David tells Maggie, handling his middle-aged paunch like a baby bump. “Would you like to feel him?”In Alex Garland’s “Men,” a young widow (Jessie Buckley) is terrorized during her countryside getaway by a village full of unsavory male archetypes (all played by Rory Kinnear).A24Andrew Semans’s “Resurrection” follows a corporate hot shot, Maggie (Rebecca Hall), who unravels when she spots a man from her past (Tim Roth).IFC MidnightSo the horror villain of the summer is the pregnant man. He represents the patriarchal domination of women, or maybe the cyclical nature of male violence, or maybe the surreal outer edge of psychological trauma — but whatever he’s supposed to signify, he implicates me. My pregnant state, grafted onto these men, is pitched as the apotheosis of grotesque social commentary, a sight meant to be so bizarre, disturbing and deep that it is preserved for the crowning spectacle of a horror film.Pop culture has long been obsessed with the prospect of male pregnancy, though it has mostly been used as a comedic gambit, as in the dismal 1978 farce “Rabbit Test,” the sentimental 1994 rom-com “Junior,” or the elaborate rollout of Lil Nas X’s 2021 album “Montero,” during which he traipsed around the internet sporting a photorealistic bump before simulating birthing an LP. Of course, some men can and do become pregnant — trans men — but works that exploit the idea of the pregnant man rarely acknowledge the reality of the pregnant man. He must exist purely as a fantasy, a counterfactual, a metaphor. Like a mythical boogeyman, he has stalked the culture for generations, occasionally appearing to impart a lesson on gender relations in his time. Now he has shape shifted from a clown into a creep — a visceral interpretation of male control over women’s bodies.Over the past several weeks, I watched many of the artifacts of the pregnant man genre. I started with “Rabbit Test,” Joan Rivers’s misanthropic comedy in which the aimless bachelor Lionel (Billy Crystal, in his first movie) miraculously conceives after a one-night stand with some pushy broad. Released at the tail end of the second-wave feminist movement, “Rabbit Test” is a movie about the scrambling of gender roles that only reinforces how rigid they still are.Its “first pregnant man” conceit is just a setup for a carnival of broadly racist and sexist scenarios that evinces little interest in the reality of pregnancy itself. Lionel hardly looks pregnant, he hardly feels pregnant, and as his due date approaches, he is not concerned about how he is going to become un-pregnant. “Rabbit Test” is so incurious about women’s experiences that it doesn’t even bother exploiting them. It’s just a movie about a guy with a pillow under his shirt.“Rabbit Test,” starring Billy Crystal and Doris Roberts, is a movie about the scrambling of gender roles that only reinforces how rigid they still are.AVCO Embassy Pictures, via PhotofestThat shifted a little with “Junior,” the 1994 rom-com in which an embryo is implanted into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s musclebound abdominal cavity. “Junior” is from the “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” era — a time when men and women were pitched as fundamentally different organisms, but when men who attempted interspecies communication were praised for accessing their “feminine sides.” Schwarzenegger (playing, naturally, a scientist) literalizes the trend when he is impregnated as a part of a clandestine medical experiment, pumped with estrogen and reduced to a maternal cliché. Suddenly he is craving pickles with ice cream and weeping at Kodak commercials.“Junior” is built on a sight gag: pregnancy as a laughable twist to Schwarzenegger’s herculean form. But pregnancy has the power to render any body ridiculous. And yet, as I trudge down the street, my increasingly preposterous dimensions inspire such affirmational outbursts from strangers that I feel at the center of an immense gendered conspiracy, where the self-evident absurdity of my physical situation is instead pitched as the cheerful apotheosis of my life as a woman.Maybe that’s why, watching “Junior,” I was struck by the sensitivity of Schwarzenegger’s performance. Though he is dropped into a parade of offensive scenarios (there is an interminable sequence of shoddy drag) and fitted with a limited emotional range (pregnancy is uncomfortable and confounding, never degrading or grim), he endures his ludicrous situation with unexpected grace. His pregnancy makes him not into a joke, but a father, and a plausible love interest for Emma Thompson. And when he hurls a rival scientist across a laboratory and fashions an abortion rights slogan into a steely Austrian-accented catchphrase — “My body, my choice” — it feels earned.In “Junior,” Schwarzenegger’s surprisingly sensitive performance as a pregnant man makes him a plausible love interest for Emma Thompson.Universal PicturesIf Schwarzenegger’s baby in “Junior” were real, she would be older than the 23-year-old Lil Nas X, whose own interpretation of pregnant imagery exists on an elevated plane. The campy visual world of “Montero” — which also finds him riding a stripper pole into hell — seems unbothered by gendered expectations at all. Like Billy Crystal’s in “Rabbit Test,” Lil Nas X’s prosthetic belly is just a costume, but this time it’s worn by a queer pop star rapaciously churning cultural shibboleths into internet chum.Now, just as Lil Nas X has chucked the pregnant man into the recycle bin, the movies have reclaimed him and primed him for a heel turn. Hollywood’s comic interpretation of the pregnant man always masked some deeply misogynistic ideas, and now they have emerged from the subtext to define the character himself.“Men” is a film that does not challenge the gender binary so much as wallow in it. Harper’s ill-fated getaway is suffused with dour shots of fertility idols and portentous biblical references; before she is terrorized by a pack of pathetic and violent men, she chomps an apple she’s plucked from someone else’s tree. Garland, the film’s director, has said that “messing around” with ancient masculine and feminine symbols led him to the image of “a guy with a vagina on his chest.” When that vagina births a succession of bad guys, rendering them all as laboring parents and mewling babes, it reads as a kind of misanthropic final judgment, as if men abusing women is a grotesque but ultimately inevitable cycle.The imagery of “Resurrection,” on the other hand, originates from nowhere. There is no mythical antecedent to David smugly carrying his beer gut like a womb. He requires no padding or prosthetics. He just asserts that there’s a baby in there, and he does it with such psychological intensity that Maggie starts to believe him. Watching Roth’s riotously unsettling performance, I felt freed from the reality of my own pregnant body, and also a little bit won over. David’s claims are ridiculous, but so is pregnancy. Though I am of course aware of the biological process through which babies are made, it still feels so supernatural that if you told me that people get pregnant by gobbling up live infants, I might believe it.After plodding through decades of pregnant-man tropes, “Seahorse” — a 2019 documentary that follows Freddy McConnell, a British journalist and trans man, as he conceives, carries and gives birth to his first child — came as a welcome relief. Finally, the image of the pregnant man is freed of the distortions of comedy, horror and metaphor and presented simply as a human experience. As McConnell endures the physical and mental trials of pregnancy, he must also contend with intense social pressures: He feels alienated from other men, patronized by women, ignored by medicine and estranged from his own identity.The backlash against gender-neutral language like “pregnant people” — and the assertion that it somehow “erases” women — is unintelligible to me. It is the coding of pregnancy as the paramount expression of femininity that make me feel expunged. The gendered constructs of pregnancy work differently on McConnell’s body than they do on mine, but I identified closely with him. He describes pregnancy as a process, and that is clarifying. It is not an extension of my personality. It’s just the wildest thing I’ve ever done.For me, the most unsettling image in the annals of pregnant-man movies came at the end of “Men” — not the birth scene, but the one that followed. Throughout her weekend of horror, Harper is in touch with a friend, Riley, who becomes so concerned for Harper’s safety that she drives overnight to find her. When Riley steps out of the car, we get the film’s final reveal: She’s pregnant! If pregnancy represents horror in a man, it is meant to signal the opposite in a woman — she must be nurturing, preternaturally understanding, good. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about that, but I know how I felt: like a punchline to an old joke. More

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      ‘Luck’ Review: Bad Day at the Fortune Factory

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      A young woman seeking a lucky penny for a child in foster care finds an entire magical world where luck is manufactured.Sam, the plucky protagonist of the affable family film “Luck,” has had a lifetime’s supply of bad breaks. ‌She has spent her childhood in foster care, and when the film begins, she has reached adulthood without ever being adopted. Flat tires and falling shelves don’t phase her anymore. It’s only when younger children, like her friend Hazel, are passed over for adoption from foster care that the unfairness of fortune gets Sam down. Hazel wants a lucky penny to charm her first meeting with a family, and Sam is determined to help her.Sam (voiced by Eva Noblezada) stumbles upon a shiny penny after locking eyes with a black cat, but she loses the penny before she can give it to Hazel. She rants in frustration to the cat that has lingered at the very spot where she found the penny. To her surprise, the cat voices its own dismay.Sam chases the talking cat, named Bob (voiced by Simon Pegg), down a portal to another world: the magical Land of Luck. Here, good luck is manufactured and carefully distributed into the human world by teams of leprechauns, unicorns and dragons. To find new pennies, Sam and Bob must traverse this factory of fortune together.It’s an engaging concept for a film, and the original screenplay by Kiel Murray shuffles familiar tropes for luck into a novel setting. The director Peggy Holmes keeps the film’s three-dimensional animation bright and full of impeccably rendered detail. Hair falls photorealistically out of place, toast looks craggy enough to hold its jam. But the images often fall into visual cliché — there’s an overabundance of lucky greens, and character design often favors cutesy details, like pink scales to soften up a dragon. “Luck” offers fresh ideas; its only misfortune is to present its gifts in recycled wrapping.LuckRated G. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      ‘Bliss’ Review: Working Girls

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      Two sex workers fall in love in this low-key L.G.B.T.Q. drama from Germany.“Bliss,” by the German director Henrika Kull, is a moody art-house romance about the everyday struggles of two Berlin sex workers. Shot in an actual legal brothel, the film avoids sensationalizing the profession and sidesteps commentary about the exploitation of women. There are several graphic sex scenes involving the two lovers and their clients, but Kull captures these events with an admirable sense of regularity — the film, for better or worse, doesn’t make any big statements; it simply attempts to get at the knottiness of its characters’ inner lives.A veteran sex worker, the middle-aged Sascha (Katharina Behrens) is intrigued by the 20-something new girl, Maria (Adam Hoya, a former escort and the star of the 2019 documentary profile “Searching Eva”), who is from Italy. Maria’s German-language skills are rudimentary, so the couple speak to each other in English, summoning prickly power dynamics in the moments the older woman reverts to her native tongue.Sascha and Maria’s relationship unfolds somewhat banally, which would normally detract from a story with such generic romantic plotting: The two fall in love; trouble ensues when they enter the unfamiliar territory of Sascha’s rural hometown, Brandenburg, where elements of her former life emerge; the promise of reconciliation lingers in the final act. But because “Bliss” is about lesbians stealing kisses between sessions with their male customers, the formula works to normalize what might otherwise seem willfully risqué.Instead, the film’s brothel setting inspires questions about the attitudes of sex workers from distinct generations — Sascha sees it all as plain dirty work, but the more idealistic Maria, who calls herself a “performer,” buys in a bit more to the profession’s fantasies of empowerment. Kull frames this discrepancy as an extension of their sundry personal differences, many of which feel completely ordinary. We tend to look at the sex lives of sex workers as endlessly fascinating, but in “Bliss” the line of work is instead part of a larger take on the hurdles of modern romance.BlissNot rated. In German, English and Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Faith’ Review: Training to Fight Demons at a Monastery

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      Valentina Pedicini’s final documentary tracks the “Warriors of Light” — their leader, and their monks and mothers, in Italy.The director of this Italian documentary, Valentina Pedicini, died in November, 2020, of liver cancer. That’s a terrible shame for a variety of reasons. Pedicini was, in her too-short career, a remarkably intrepid documentarian. In her 2010 “My Marlboro City,” she investigated the cigarette smuggling trade in her hometown, Brindisi. For “From the Depths” (2013), she accompanied a female miner who works more than 1,500 feet below sea level.“Faith,” her final film, presented in wide-screen black-and-white, kicks off with an explanatory text, telling of how in 1998 a man the audience will know only as The Master founded a monastery of sorts and peopled it with so-called Warriors of Light. These are monks and mothers trained in martial arts, fighting “against demons,” ostensibly “in the name of the Father.”We see these warriors, 20 years after the formation of the group, all dressed in white, under a strobe light, doing a rave-style dance workout. We watch them intone “The Lord’s Prayer” and “Hail Mary” in unison. We see them sharing a pasta dinner, at the end of which all the diners lick their plates clean. We see their shared bathroom and watch them shaving their heads.It’s not long before one starts to wonder just what “Father” these ascetics are working in the name of. One meeting revolves around Gabriele, a monk who has apparently either flirted with or actually bedded every woman in the group. He declines to resign (his behavior is discouraged by the group) and halfheartedly promises to work on a confession. As for The Master himself, he browbeats the women, telling one, “You don’t deserve to be a warrior.”Pedicini structures the movie as an oblique narrative rather than an exposé. And “Faith” is all the more disturbing for that. Clearly this distinctive filmmaker was just getting started.FaithNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Film Movement+. More