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      ‘Medusa’ Review: Liberated Women

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      This neon-soaked feminist thriller takes aim at Brazil’s evangelical communities by depicting a girl gang that targets sinners.In “Medusa,” a pop music-scored spooky story about women’s liberation, a group of churchgoing gals in Brazil play Christian Stepford Wives by day, and by night, rove the streets wearing white masks, terrorizing women they deem tramps into repentance.The writer and director Anita Rocha da Silveira takes a visual approach that feels played out, deploying the same blood-splattered fluorescent backdrops and techno-inflected bodily grotesquerie of recent feminist horror films like “Titane.”Yet these extremes also feel appropriate given the South American nation’s increasingly zealous movement against L.G.B.T.Q. individuals and sex positive culture. U.S. audiences might find this familiar, though in Brazil, where the rate of homophobic hate crimes is one of the highest in the world, there are in fact Evangelical gangs seeking to violently cleanse their communities.Rocha da Silveira lays hard on the creepy nature of indoctrination as it plays out in modern times: Mari (Mari Oliveira) and her girlfriends perform catchy worship songs for their congregation, and the queen bee Michele (Lara Tremouroux) makes YouTube beauty tutorials that demonstrate how to snap Christian friendly selfies.Mari undergoes an awakening after one of the gang’s midnight crusades leaves her with a facial scar. Fired from her cosmetic surgery job and certain of her eternal spinsterdom, she begins working at a clinic for people in comas, hoping she can make herself useful by taking a picture of the mythical Melissa, a sinful celebrity whose face was set on fire by a religious warrior.Eventually, with help from an attractive co-worker, Mari begins to realize the pettiness of her ways.Though dressed in shock-value clothing, “Medusa” is also a straightforward character study, tackling issues like the scourge of Western beauty standards and the difficulties of leaving an abusive relationship along the way. Most important, Mari’s evolution feels real, her triumphs genuinely moving. It’s here that “Medusa” presents an astute idea: The righteous mob is terrifying, but equally nerve-racking is leaving it.MedusaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Blue Island’ Review: In Hong Kong, the Past Is Present

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      In this hybrid of documentary and dramatization, real-life Hong Kong students re-enact the struggles of activists from earlier generations.In “Blue Island,” a hybrid of documentary and dramatization from the director Chan Tze Woon, real-life students from contemporary Hong Kong perform re-enactments of the political struggles of previous generations.Two students, Anson Sham and Siu Ying, step into the shoes of a couple, Chan Hak-chi and Git Hing, who fled to Hong Kong from the Cultural Revolution in 1973; part of the re-enactment of the escape is crosscut with documentary footage of a crackdown on demonstrators in Hong Kong in 2019. Elsewhere, Keith Fong Chung-yin, a student activist, meets with and plays Kenneth Lam, who traveled to Beijing in 1989 in solidarity with the protesters in Tiananmen Square.The younger subjects’ recent experiences color their portrayals. “You’re not just playing a 20-year-old Kenneth in the ’80s. You are also playing yourself,” the director instructs Fong, in one of many moments when the movie breaks the fourth wall. Elsewhere, Raymond Young, incarcerated by the British for bulletins he circulated in 1967, sits in a prison cell with Kelvin Tam Kwan-long, the student protester playing him (who notes that he’s been charged with rioting and is awaiting trial himself), and tells him that time will erode his ideals.“Blue Island” shows how Hong Kong residents have redefined themselves over time. Tam, while playing Young in 1967, defiantly tells a British official that he is Chinese. A moment later, Tam, still in costume but now appearing as himself, insists to an interrogator that he is not Chinese, but a Hong Konger.The movie concludes with a lengthy, silent montage of people who have faced charges for their involvement in pro-democracy activism. It is impossible to watch “Blue Island” without admiring their courage. The past-present parallelism is provocative, but it also seems faintly superficial — a way of eliding distinctions and streamlining history.Blue IslandNot rated. In Cantonese, Mandarin and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Sona Movsesian Leans on The Rock, Cher and Mister Rogers

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      The co-host of “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” talks about the best Girl Scout cookies and adulting at Disneyland.“The World’s Worst Assistant,” a new memoir by Sona Movsesian, recounts what happens when an ambitious young woman who excelled at both the Burger King drive-through and the NBC page program managed to turn things around when she landed a job as Conan O’Brien’s assistant — a deal she sealed by asking if she could lie down during the interview.“The HR rep told me that Conan liked my couch joke,” she writes. “I got my job working for Conan because I made a joke about being lazy — foreshadowing at its best.”Thirteen years later, Movsesian, who co-hosts the podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” has amassed plenty of skills and work experiences rarely boasted about on LinkedIn. Once, for example, she watched 58 episodes of “Friends” on the clock over a four-day period because she’d heard that Robert De Niro’s assistant had watched 55. Sleeping on the job? How to “abuse your corporate card without technically embezzling”? “Worst Assistant” has illustrated guides for that.But Movsesian’s story is not about celebrating laziness or ineptitude. It’s about how two flawed people who were meant to be together found each other: a boss accepting an employee for who she is and how she does her job, and an employee accepting her boss for everything that he is.“I give Sona the space to be Sona (see book),” O’Brien writes in the foreword, “and she in turn gives me the space to knock a delicious cupcake out of her hand just as she is about to take a bite.”Here, the world’s worst assistant talks about the movie she’s watched the most, the TV she can watch with her kids and the Girl Scout cookies she buys in bulk. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Cher Cher is a very important person, and not just because of her contributions to culture and fashion. She’s part Armenian, and I’m Armenian. For us, we have very few famous people in the limelight, and no one is bigger than Cher. She’s an icon, and the fact that she’s half Armenian was a really big deal for all of us, especially growing up.2. The Evil Eye The Evil Eye is in a lot of cultures, including Armenian culture. It’s a round eye that’s usually blue, white and black. It keeps the evil eye away from you. If people are trying to curse you in some way or wish ill upon you, it pushes that away and protects you. It’s in my car. It’s in my house. It’s at work. It’s a big part of who I am as an Armenian and who I am as a human being.3. “Galaxy Quest” “Galaxy Quest” is the first movie I saw in the theaters four times. When I ran out of people to go with, I went and saw it in the theater by myself. I’d never done anything like that. I don’t know why, I just always felt like it was weird to go to the movies by yourself. “Galaxy Quest” broke that seal for me.4. Fred Rogers We have twin, 1-year-old boys. My husband and I were like, what could we watch with them that we won’t hate? And so we bought all the old seasons of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The episodes are timeless. There’s an episode where he meets Yo-Yo Ma. After, he’s like: Let’s reflect on how Yo-Yo Ma talked about how he would feel playing the cello. And there is just a minute of complete silence. No one would ever do that now. No one would ever not do anything for a minute.5. “Cheers” I started bingeing the entire series about six years ago. Then I met the man who would become my husband, and I found out he was also bingeing “Cheers.” We were at almost the same place. When he told me that, I was like: Oh, we have to get married and we have to finish “Cheers” together.6. The Rock Wrestling was a big part of high school for me. It was like a soap opera I didn’t realize I needed in my life. And The Rock was the most important character. When The Rock left wrestling, he took my wrestling love with him. But I’ll still watch anything he’s in. I don’t care if I’m interested in it, I will abandon my kids and go to the movies for a couple hours.7. Cock Sparrer When I met my husband, he was in a Cock Sparrer cover band — a British punk rock band. It’s a genre I’d never really gotten into, but when we heard that Cock Sparrer was playing in Santa Cruz, we went and saw them. It was really cool to connect with my husband in that way, to see something that he loved in a genre that he loved and then realize I also really liked it, too.8. “Step Brothers” Years ago, after I bought a condo, I cut a window in the wall between the kitchen and the living room specifically so I could watch “Step Brothers” while cooking. With Will Ferrell movies, the more you watch them, the more you catch the nuance in things. But I also love that I can put it on, do something else and then stare at the TV at any point and laugh at whatever is happening.9. Disneyland When I was a kid, I was filled with absolute wonder when I went to Disneyland. My mind would explode. Now I can go there and buy a Popsicle and then five minutes later I can buy popcorn and then two minutes later I can have chicken tenders. I can do Disneyland the way I wanted to do Disneyland as a kid, but I can do it as an adult because I’m paying for it.10. Girl Scout Cookies Girl Scouts is where I met my core group of friends when I was in elementary school. Today, it doesn’t matter if you’re a co-worker’s daughter or a stranger on the street. If you say “I’m a girl scout — will you buy some cookies?” I will say yes and I will buy an inordinate amount of cookies from you. Most of the time, it’s Samoas. More

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      Bernard Cribbins, British Actor Known for ‘Doctor Who,’ Is Dead at 93

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      Mr. Cribbins’s long career included roles on stage, film and television.Bernard Cribbins, a British actor who had roles on “Doctor Who” and “Fawlty Towers,” and whose contributions to children’s programs delighted young audiences over a career that spanned seven decades, has died, his agent said on Thursday. He was 93.In a statement, the management and talent agency, Gavin Barker Associates, did not say when or where Mr. Cribbins died.Mr. Cribbins worked well into his 90s, the agency said, in a career that influenced some of the best-known comedy, drama and children’s programs in Britain. He started acting at the age of 14 in the Oldham repertory company. This period of onstage work broadened into other media, including television and film, for which he became widely known, according to IMDB.He was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2011 for his contributions to the arts. In addition to dozens of roles in film and television, he recorded the 1960s novelty song “Right Said Fred.”For three decades, Mr. Cribbins was regularly featured on “Jackanory,” a BBC children’s program in which an actor read books to young audiences. The program, which ran between 1965 and 1996, was meant to arouse an interest in reading.In one of his more than 100 readings, of “The Wizard of Oz” in 1970, Mr. Cribbins infused the voices of Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Wizard and other characters with a full dramatic repertoire of whispers, tremors and shrieks.When he was awarded a BAFTA Special Award in 2009, he grew serious in an interview when asked about the hugely popular “Jackanory” and how it had influenced young audiences.“All you have to do,” he said, “is look down the lens, find one child, and just talk to that child. And you pull them in.”“It really works, and you think all over the country there will be little kids saying, ‘Just a minute, Mum,’ and they will be looking. And the stories, as I said before, were wonderful,” he said.Mr. Cribbins was born in Oldham, England, just outside Manchester, on Dec. 29, 1928, according to IMDB. After his early stage career, he narrated “The Wombles,” a 1970s animated television program created from a series of books about underground creatures, and joined the cast of the science-fiction TV series “Doctor Who” from 2007 to 2010. He had also appeared in a Doctor Who movie, “Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.,” in 1966.Mr. Cribbins, left, and his co-star David Tennant collected an award for “Doctor Who,” which was named most popular drama at Britain’s National Television Awards in 2010.Photo by Ian West/PA Images via Getty ImagesIn the TV series, which the producer Russell T Davies revived in 2005, Mr. Cribbins played a recurring role as the grandfather of one of the Doctor’s companions, Donna Noble, played by Catherine Tate. In an Instagram post on Thursday, Mr. Davies wrote that Mr. Cribbins “loved being in Doctor Who. He said, ‘Children are calling me grandad in the street!’”Mr. Davies wrote that Mr. Cribbins had once “turned up with a suitcase full of props, just in case, including a rubber chicken.” He added, “He’d phone up and say, ‘I’ve got an idea! What if I attack a Dalek with a paintball gun?!’ Okay, Bernard, in it went!”Mr. Cribbins also starred in the 1970 film “The Railway Children,” based on the children’s book by Edith Nesbit. A review in The New York Times called it “a perfectly lovely little British movie” and said Mr. Cribbins was “excellent” as the stationmaster Albert Perks in a “simple tale about three children who putter around a Yorkshire village, sharing a loving kindness learned at home.”In 1975, Mr. Cribbins appeared in an episode of the comedy series “Fawlty Towers,” starring John Cleese as the hapless manager of a seaside hotel. Mr. Cribbins played a guest mistaken by Mr. Cleese’s character for a hotel inspector, who is trying to order a cheese salad for lunch and instead is served an omelet.A list of survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Cribbins’s wife, the actor Gillian McBarnet, died in October last year.In the interview after receiving the BAFTA award in 2009, Mr. Cribbins and his “Doctor Who” co-star Ms. Tate spoke about how quickly time had gone by during his long career.“I can remember a lot of things with total clarity, total recall,” he said, before adding jokingly, “I’ve got stories I haven’t even thought of yet.” More

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      ‘Hypochondriac’ Review: A Mother of All Breakdowns

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      A son tries to escape the fate of his mom in this psychological thriller.In the psychological thriller “Hypochondriac,” life and all its horrors begin with Mother. When the film’s protagonist, Will (played as a child by Ian Inigo), was young, his mother (Marlene Forte) suffered from psychosis. Her illness manifested in intense, violent spells. She would scream and hurt herself. One of Will’s most indelible memories is of his mother strangling him as a boy.Eighteen years later, Will (Zach Villa) seems to have built a life that’s more peaceful than his childhood. He works as a ceramist, and he has a loving boyfriend, Luke (Devon Graye), who is eager to introduce Will to his family. But Will’s stability begins to crack when his estranged mother re-initiates contact. She sends him boxes of discarded DVD cases and scattered, disturbed voice messages warning him away from Luke. Will is haunted by fear that his mother will infect the rest of his life, that he could become like her. But his fear kicks into paranoia when he begins having visions of a monstrous wolf man, a distorted memory of a childhood costume.The writer and director, Addison Heimann, flirts with horror elements in portraying this story of a mother and son’s mania. Will’s wolfish spectre is executed with practical effects, dripping with blood and matted fur. The bloody consequences of distorted thinking are portrayed vividly, with surgical veracity. But if the film is sure-footed when it comes to stylishly portraying boogeymen, it’s less certain in its portrait of people who experience symptoms of psychosis. The movie links cinematic thrill with real illness, tying movie monstrosity to specific psychiatric symptoms. Its armchair psychology makes for queasy viewing, a conflation of diagnosis and damnation.HypochondriacNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘How to Please a Woman’ Review

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      A bespoke business that offers house cleaning and sex work for women is at the heart of this Australian comedy.The Australian comedy “How to Please a Woman” hinges on an amusing high concept: a company that provides house cleaning and orgasms for women. This hook piques curiosity — at least enough for a coy eyebrow raise. Light intrigue is often not enough, though, and in this case, the movie strains to sustain charm.The story follows Gina (Sally Phillips), a middle-aged woman who is treated like cellophane by her husband and her boss. She escapes this contemporary feminine mystique through swimming, and the writer-director Renée Webster frequently depicts Gina fearlessly front-crawling in the Pacific with her swim club. After this convivial all-women crew sends a male stripper to Gina’s house as a birthday surprise, our housework-weary heroine gets the idea to launch a bespoke business.Inspired by a real Australian sex work service, “How to Please a Woman” casts a clear eye upon the puzzles of female pleasure. Here is a movie that is thankfully under no illusions about the sundry ways to satisfy women, and its emphasis on communication above all is sensible (if safe) advice for viewers craving an answer to the arch title.Yet there is a note of primness to Webster’s storytelling. Sex scenes are mostly ellipses that skip from foreplay to pillow talk, and when addressing more eccentric desires, the movie sometimes spouts a joke at the expense of the women it aspires to empower. Interrogating urges is worthwhile, but playing libido for laughs is one temptation this unsteady comedy would have been wise to resist.How to Please a WomanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Resurrection’ Review: Mother of Fears

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      A successful single mother encounters a terrifying man from her past in this crazily enjoyable horror movie.Somewhere near the end of “Resurrection,” a sleek, hurtling, ridiculously entertaining horror movie from Andrew Semans, there’s a scene of such gruesomely bonkers intent that I actually gasped. And then I laughed, tickled by how easily Semans and his star, the charismatic Rebecca Hall, had persuaded me to invest in their lunatic shenanigans.But then Hall — as proven in last year’s creep-out, “The Night House” — has a knack for pumping gravitas into somewhat batty narratives. Here, she plays Margaret, an executive in some sort of pharmaceutical outfit, and from the start we notice an intensity that verges on obsessiveness. Whether at work or as the protective single mother to her teenage daughter, Abbie (Grace Kaufman), Margaret is a model of calculated control. Even her sex life is rigidly regulated, the liaisons with her married co-worker, Peter (Michael Esper), unfolding with more efficiency than pleasure. It’s not that Margaret is cold — more than once, we see her empathetically counsel a young intern to leave an emotionally abusive boyfriend — it’s just that she seems permanently on guard.But against what? Clues start to accumulate. Abbie, who’s about to leave for college, finds a human molar in her wallet. Later, the sight of a mysterious man in a lecture room causes Margaret to blanch and shake, as if she has seen a ghost. More than two decades earlier, she was involved with this man, David (Tim Roth), and the relationship has left her, quite literally, scarred. Now, he seems to want something, showing up randomly without approaching her until, terrified, she accosts him. His vulpine grin reveals a missing tooth.As we’re about to learn, David is more than a heel, he’s a hellion, and what begins as the story of a stalking skids rapidly into depravity and humiliation. And when Margaret’s carefully cultivated life starts to crack — she’s sniping at colleagues and fiercely monitoring Abbie’s movements — “Resurrection” teases a familiar fable of female disintegration. But Semans, who debuted in 2013 with the cheeky psycho-comedy, “Nancy, Please,” is too confident an explorer of twisted minds to settle for cliché. The bargain that David hopes to strike with Margaret concerning a long-ago tragedy is unbelievable, unthinkable, insane. Yet Roth’s eerily still body language and quietly sinister line readings choke the urge to laugh. He’s a magnetic sadist.Encouraged by Jim Williams’s unsettling score, Hall and Roth convincingly sell their characters’ sick psychological bond. So while “Resurrection” harbors more than one theme — empty-nest anxieties, toxic men and the long tail of their manipulations — the movie feels more like an unhinged test of how far into the loonyverse the audience can be persuaded to venture.That’s why Hall’s skin-prickling, 7-minute monologue early in the film is so critical. As the screen darkens behind her and her pale face fills the frame, she recounts Margaret and David’s horrifying history with irresistible sincerity. It’s the perfect setup for an ending of such delicious ambiguity it was all I could do not to applaud.ResurrectionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Sharp Stick’ Review: The Babysitter’s Schlubs

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      Lena Dunham’s new movie follows a 26-year-old who methodically gains sexual experience after having an uncomfortable affair.Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth), the mythical seductress at the center of “Sharp Stick,” an uneven, uneasy fable of desire by the writer, director and performer Lena Dunham, is the kind of erotic nymph who exists only in Penthouse letters and vintage soft-core movies. A babysitter long of hair and limb but short on emotional demands, Sarah Jo ventures through modern day Los Angeles in modest floral pinafores, which she lifts above her waist in invitation. No need for conversation or dinner — she only appears to eat plain yogurt, anyway.The strong first half of “Sharp Stick” places Sarah Jo in competition with Heather (played by Dunham), a harried, heavily pregnant real estate agent. Heather relies on Sarah Jo’s expertise to look after her son, Zach (Liam Michel Saux), who has Down syndrome. But Zach’s slacker father, Josh (Jon Bernthal), is usually floating around the house, too, and the ne’er-do-well suffers only a twinge of guilt as he seizes the chance to recast himself as a romantic hero to Sarah Jo. It’s not much of a fight — and Josh isn’t much of a catch — but one of Dunham’s talents is her ability to capture the allure of heartbreakers, scuzzballs and dopes. At home, Sarah Jo’s mother, Marilyn (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a former music video starlet who has torn through five marriages, and older sister, Treina (Taylour Paige), a boy-crazy aspiring influencer, chatter constantly (and hilariously) about girth size and titillation tips. Steeped in their dubious advice, Sarah Jo, a 26-year-old virgin at the start of the film, sets out to gain her own life experience with men. Aside from Josh, she doesn’t seem to know any — her father, whom Marilyn dismisses as a dumbbell, isn’t around — and she quickly discovers that she has a lot to learn, including that the names of certain sex acts aren’t literal. The impossibility of these two tigresses raising this lamb is Dunham’s clue that she’s operating in allegory: This film is her test to see whether the world is any kinder to a hetero male fantasy like Sarah Jo than it is to the kind of messy, cranky, needy women that Dunham has made her career putting onscreen.Sarah Jo’s early affair with Josh leads to a garbled, meandering stretch where she works her way through an alphabetical checklist of carnal escapades with a revolving door of men. As Froseth bravely flings herself into vulnerable scenarios, the film is careful to keep the focus on her character’s pleasure (or the lack of it). A montage of flings is shot with all the sizzle of a Slurpee commercial. These scenes are too humorless for satire and too artificial to support the film’s eventual, deluded attempt to shift into a somewhat sincere coming-of-age tale. (The gentle pop soundtrack and Ashley Connor’s naturalistic cinematography seem to think that this has been that kind of movie from the beginning.) By that point, the naif’s misadventures simply feel like an argument to not take sex so seriously. Watching Sarah Jo’s repeated hallucinations of a cartoon woman mating and giving birth, one can imagine Dunham whispering to the audience that moments of awkward, sloppy intimacy aren’t shameful — they’re the foundation of human existence.Sharp StickRated R for sexual situations, including one under the influence of psychedelics. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More