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      ‘The Sea Beast’ Review: Of Monsters and Men

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      In this new animated film from Netflix, a monster hunter and an orphan become unlikely allies at sea.“Live a great life and die a great death,” goes the mantra of the monster hunters in Netflix’s new animated movie “The Sea Beast.” It’s a spirited battle cry, sure, but it’s also a morbid one, made only more grisly by the fact that the first character to say it is a child.At first, the world of this film, directed by Chris Williams (“Moana,” “Big Hero 6”) and written by Williams and Nell Benjamin, seems comfortably didactic. The people of an island kingdom have been raised to fear the giant sea monsters that stalk the ocean. Ships full of hunters heroically fell the beasts and bring bits of their carcasses home to the king and queen. It doesn’t take a genius to see the creepy side of this, or to wonder when the film will introduce its inevitable paradigm shift.That shift is mainly instigated by a little girl named Maisie (voiced by Zaris-Angel Hator), the same character who first champions dying “a great death.” Orphaned when her two creature-hunter parents perished on the job, Maisie has raised herself on tales of loathsome beasts and the legendary sailors who slay them. She most idolizes a famous ship called the Inevitable. When the boat docks within striking distance of her stifling group home, she sneaks away to climb aboard.The crew of the Inevitable has been ordered by royal decree to kill a massive monster called the Red Bluster. If the mission fails, the monarchy will decommission the ship. This adds stakes for Jacob (Karl Urban), an illustrious hunter who is next in line to be captain, and the aged Captain Crow (Jared Harris), who has held a grudge ever since he lost an eye to the beast. Jacob, who becomes Maisie’s unwitting comrade, has his own past marred by monstrosity.“The Sea Beast” is capably animated. Its backgrounds and underwater shots are particularly stunning, though the characters’ facial expressions rarely live up to the enthusiastic voice acting. Its fantastical creatures range from uninspired (the Red Bluster) to irresistible (an aquatic sidekick of Maisie’s named Blue). There are other fun visual choices, like a beach with bubble-gum pink sand, and the film has an impressively diverse ensemble of background characters. Even when the story drags, a lively score by Mark Mancina keeps things zippy.Of course, sluggish storytelling is not ideal, particularly in a movie intended for kids. “The Sea Beast” doesn’t earn its nearly two-hour running time; it easily could have stuck the landing if only it had fewer diversions. For instance, Captain Crow takes the Inevitable on a sinister side quest that introduces a character who, despite much dastardly foreshadowing, never resurfaces.But this script’s greatest sin is its steadfast predictability. Lessons are learned and enemies are fought, but nothing very surprising happens in between. The unlikely duo assembles; the spunky little girl gets a cute animal as a buddy; good and evil are not actually as they seem. Last year, Pixar released “Luca,” which offers its own take on prejudice, found family and sea monsters, and it’s hard, while watching “The Sea Beast,” not to draw comparisons. “Luca” is by far the more heartfelt, original and stylish of the two.The Sea BeastRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Ni Kuang, Novelist and Screenwriter for Martial Arts Films, Dies at 87

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      Best known for fantastical thrillers that doubled as political allegories, he also wrote hundreds of martial arts films for Bruce Lee and others.HONG KONG — Ni Kuang, a prolific author of fantasy novels imbued with criticism of the Chinese Communist Party and a screenwriter for more than 200 martial arts films, died here on Sunday. He was 87.His death was announced by his daughter-in-law, the actress Vivian Chow, on social media. She did not state the cause but said he died at a cancer rehabilitation center.Best known for his fantastical thrillers, Mr. Ni wrote the screenplays for many of the action movies produced by the Shaw Brothers, who dominated the Hong Kong market. He also created the story lines and central characters for Bruce Lee’s first two major films, “The Big Boss” (1971) and “Fist of Fury” (1972), although the screenwriting credit for both films went to the director, Lo Wei.In the Chinese-speaking world, Mr. Ni was perhaps best known for the “Wisely” series, a collection of about 150 adventure stories first published as newspaper serials. The stories told of the title character’s encounters with aliens and battles with intelligent monsters, but they sometimes also contained pointed political criticism.Born in 1935 to a working-class family in Shanghai, Mr. Ni was given two names at birth, as was the custom: Ni Yiming and Ni Cong. Information on his parents was not immediately available, but it is known that he had six siblings.He began working in his teens as a public security official during China’s land-reform movement, believing in the Communist Party’s promise of a more egalitarian future. But he quickly grew disillusioned after being given the task of writing daily execution notices about landowners, who were blamed for China’s rural poverty and persecuted as public enemies. When he questioned whether they had committed other crimes to warrant a death sentence, his superiors rebuked him.Bruce Lee in “Fist of Fury” (1972), for which Mr. Li created the story line and the central characters. He did not receive screenwriting credit, but he did for more than 200 other martial arts films.Golden Harvest Company“That was the beginning of my distaste for the party,” he said in a 2019 interview with Paul Shieh, a prominent lawyer and television host, for RTHK, the Hong Kong public broadcaster.His troubles did not end there. While stationed in Inner Mongolia, Mr. Ni mated a crippled wolf with two dogs, then raised a pack of their cubs in secret. When the cubs attacked a more senior official, he was punished and made to write long essays of contrition. In public sessions where so-called class enemies were denounced, he got in trouble for giggling. He was also branded as an anti-revolutionary after being caught dismantling wooden planks from a footbridge to burn as fuel during a cold spell.A friend had warned Mr. Ni that he could face heavy penalties for his transgressions and helped him steal a horse so he could escape, Mr. Ni said in the RTHK interview. He returned to Shanghai, where he paid smugglers to help him stow away on a boat to Hong Kong in 1957.At first, Mr. Ni made less than 50 cents a day doing factory work and odd jobs. In interviews, he described in great detail the first meal he had paid for with his earnings: a bowl of rice topped with glistening slabs of fatty barbecued pork.Mr. Ni soon found a vocation as a writer of serialized fiction when The Kung Sheung Daily News accepted a manuscript he wrote, “Buried Alive,” about land reform in mainland China. He threw himself into writing full time, saying in interviews that at the peak of his career he wrote as many as 20,000 words a day. He published the first installments of the “Wisely” saga in the newspaper Ming Pao in 1963.“Back then, I wrote novels as a living, to feed mouths and get through the day, so I had no way of writing exquisitely,” he said, adding that he had time for neither research nor revision while writing. “I could only rely on what was in my head.”Although he never returned to the mainland, his early life experiences there often figured into his writing, even as his fiction became more supernatural. “Old Cat,” a “Wisely” novel first published in 1971, was inspired by a gray-blue Persian cat that had kept Mr. Ni company when he was locked in a hut as punishment. He had spent hours untangling its knotted, matty hair, he said in an interview. The cat in the novel battled aliens.In a speech at the Hong Kong Book Fair in 2019 about his legacy as a science-fiction writer, Mr. Ni argued that his work did not really fit into that genre as it is traditionally defined. He had once avoided writing about aliens, he said, but found them to be convenient narrative devices when he was stuck on a plot.“My science fiction is completely different from Western science fiction or what most people would consider ‘hard’ science fiction,” he said.Having completed only junior high school, he added, he lacked a proper understanding of science. He drew more from ancient Chinese myths and legends.Mr. Ni also brought his imagination to the big screen, earning screenwriting credits for movies that included “One-Armed Swordsman,” which broke Hong Kong box-office records in 1967.Mr. Ni married Li Guozhen in 1959. She survives him. His survivors also include their daughter, Ni Sui, and their son, Joe Nieh. Over the years, Mr. Ni did not hold back in his critiques of the Chinese Communist Party, and he described Hong Kong as a refuge for free thinking. But he was pessimistic about the city’s future under Beijing’s tightening grip.His 1983 novel, “Chasing the Dragon,” was widely cited as a prescient description of the political backdrop that prompted pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, followed by a sweeping crackdown.In the book, Mr. Ni writes about an unnamed metropolis that is reduced to a shell of itself:There’s no need to destroy the architecture of this big city, no need to kill any of its residents. Even the appearance of the big city could look exactly the same as before. But to destroy and kill this big city, one only needs to make its original merits disappear. And all that would take are stupid words and actions coming from just a few people.When asked by Mr. Shieh of RTHK what disappearing merits he meant, Mr. Ni said, “Freedom.”“Freedom of speech is the mother of all freedoms,” he continued. “Without freedom of speech, there is no other freedom at all.” More

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      ‘Moon, 66 Questions’ Review: Daddy Issues

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      This elliptical drama by the Greek writer-director Jacqueline Lentzou rousingly summons the inner turmoil of a young woman who returns home to care for her ailing father.The writer and director Jacqueline Lentzou’s “Moon, 66 Questions” takes cues from astrology, using Tarot cards to represent each new chapter of a story about a young woman, Artemis (Sofia Kokkali), who returns to Athens to care for her ailing father.Her father, Paris (Lazaros Georgakopoulos), has a degenerative disease that renders him almost speechless and incapable of easy movement. Forced into an unprecedented intimacy, daughter and father grapple with their new bond, gradually revealing the near-nonexistence of their past one.Though there is an eventual revelation that throws Artemis’s woes into sharp relief, this moving character study — the kind that sinks beneath the skin — avoids the intricate plotting of a neatly packaged personal development. Instead, “Moon” is an elliptical drama that pieces together banal VHS recordings overlaid with spoken diary entries, tense familial encounters, and displays of solitary, existential angst rousingly performed by Kokkali.And as the title suggests, the film yields more questions than it does answers.How old is Artemis and where was she living before her return? For how long? What happened to her relationship with her family and why is she the only member taking responsibility for this man she does not truly know?Lentzou, with her first feature no less, gets at something much knottier about what it feels like to get older and perceive your parents as full people, in all their flaws and vulnerabilities; the pains and pleasures of adulthood, contrary to expectation, yield just as much, if not more, unpredictability than in youth.That’s why Lentzou’s use of astrology works so beautifully. The film’s moody textures and atmospheric unease goes hand in hand with the pseudoscience, emblematic as it is of a yearning for certainty in a dark and infinitely mutable world.Moon, 66 QuestionsNot rated. In Greek, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In virtual cinemas and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Cop Secret’ Review: Bang Bang, Kiss Kiss

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      In this Icelandic spoof of Hollywood action movies, two rival police officers make a love connection.The big reveal in “Cop Secret” is out from the moment the unkempt Bussi (Audunn Blondal), Iceland’s toughest police officer, is forcibly partnered with Hordur (Egill Einarsson), his suave rival from a neighboring precinct. As Hordur strolls toward Bussi in swoony slow-motion, impeccable jacket slung roguishly over one bulging shoulder, Bussi’s stubbled jaw softens. The two may be vying for top dog, but it’s clear that — grooming discrepancies aside — copulation will soon take precedence over competition.Before Bussi’s ultramacho veneer can crack, though, this unruly send-up of Hollywood action movies, gleefully directed by Hannes Thor Halldorsson, hammers every genre cliché into wearying submission. The plot — a silly hodgepodge of explosions, bank heists and sexual repression — charges forward, its dialogue and setups merrily spoofing the buddy-cop canon. Familiarity might be the point, but a screenplay this coarse leaves the actors little wiggle room, reducing them to mouthpieces for recycled jokes.So we have a disfigured villain (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) who shaves with what appears to be a serrated bowie knife; a hard-nosed female police chief (Steinunn Olina Thorsteinsdottir, whom fans of Nordic noir may recognize from the gripping TV series “Trapped”); and an anxious male sidekick, Klemenz (Sverrir Thor Sverrisson), whose chief purpose is to remind us repeatedly of Bussi’s contempt for proper police procedure.“You have no respect for the rules!,” Klemenz moans during the car chase that opens the movie and allows the cinematographer, Elli Cassata, to show off a bit. The sequence is goofy fun; less so is the transformation of a rather sweet gay romance into a cheap comic device.Cop SecretNot rated. In Icelandic and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘This Much I Know to Be True’ Review: Nick Cave Prepares for the Stage

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      A new music documentary by Andrew Dominik explores the collaboration of Cave and Warren Ellis.The singer-songwriter (and novelist and screenwriter) Nick Cave is a longtime chronicler of dread, erotic obsession, morality and mortality. The director Andrew Dominik, not exactly a screwball comedy guy himself (“Killing Them Softly”), proved an apt collaborator with Cave on the 2016 documentary “One More Time With Feeling.”That film was a tricky proposition, undertaken in the wake of the 2015 death of Cave’s teenage son Arthur. It documented the making of “Skeleton Tree,” one of Cave and his band the Bad Seeds’ most moving records.The new “This Much I Know to Be True,” shot in spring 2021 before a tour, and largely devoted to presenting songs from the recent albums “Ghosteen” and “Carnage,” is a lighter affair. It opens with Cave speaking about how he handled the pandemic: “I took the government’s advice,” he says, pausing to chuckle, “and retrained as a ceramicist.” He then shows off sculptures depicting a history of the devil.Cave’s partner in music, the multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, is the other main presence here. (Marianne Faithfull, a stalwart friend of Cave’s, pops in for a memorable scene.) Cave waxes droll on their collaboration: “He took a subordinate role of embellishing what was going on,” he says of Ellis, adding, “And slowly, one by one, taking out each member of the Bad Seeds. I know I’m the next to go.” More seriously, he talks about the Red Hand Files, his newsletter, a sort of metaphysical advice column, in which he exercises a compassion that he admits “doesn’t come naturally.”Dominik shows off his own inventive playfulness here. He shifts aspect ratios from shot to shot. He lays bare cinematic contrivances by showing dolly tracks in a shot, only then to fake out the viewer with a lighting trick. A rather fun Nick Cave movie might not have been on your 2022 bingo card, but here we are.This Much I Know to Be TrueNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘Both Sides of the Blade’ Review: Who Do You Love?

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      In the latest film from Claire Denis, Juliette Binoche plays a Parisian radio journalist in a romantic quandary.When we first meet Sara and Jean, they are enjoying a vacation. To be precise, they‘re making out in the waters of a sun-dappled lagoon, the very picture of midlife romantic fulfillment. The fact that Sara and Jean are played by Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon, two of most charismatic actors of a certain age in modern cinema, makes their apparent bliss look all the more enviable.But the pictures only tell part of the story. The couple’s smiles and caresses are accompanied by brooding, cello-heavy music — the kind that lets even the most inattentive or tone-deaf viewer know that something bad is going to happen. Even when the sound brightens and Jean and Sara return to their tidy Paris apartment, you can’t quite shake the feeling of dread.“Both Sides of the Blade” is a Claire Denis movie, which is to say that it can be expected to confound expectations, including those it seems to set up for itself. Sex, politics, vampires, science fiction, Herman Melville — nothing is alien to this restless and resourceful filmmaker.Here, the plot occasionally gravitates toward romantic comedy, as Sara finds herself torn between Jean and François (Grégoire Colin), a former lover who is also an old friend and potential business partner of Jean’s. But the mood hovers in the neighborhood of melodrama, thriller, even horror. Sara’s passion for François seems almost like a form of possession, and allusions to Jean’s status as an ex-convict contribute to a free-floating sense of danger.The dissonance between the film’s structure and its tone is potentially interesting, and the off-balance intensity of the performances means that “Both Sides of the Blade” is never dull. As they did in “Let the Sunshine In,” Binoche and Denis trace the disruptive effects of desire on a woman who is neither heroine nor victim. The impulses that lead Sara to destabilize her own domestic life are mysterious even to her, and the audience may wonder why she appears to prefer François, who is pouty and petulant (even in bed), to the stoical, sad-eyed Jean.Bad choices often make good stories, but there is something thin and tentative about this one, which Denis wrote with Christine Angot. Sara is the host of a public-affairs radio broadcast, a job that allows the film to glance occasionally at the wider world. Guests talk about the crisis in Lebanon and the pervasiveness of racism in Western society, and their presence in the movie is a puzzle. Maybe we are supposed to see that Sara cares about such matters, or that Denis does, or to be reminded that we should. Or maybe Denis is pointing out the gulf between public concerns and private experience.The larger problem is that the main characters and their situation seem weightless, their nonromantic lives sketched in hastily and without much conviction. Jean sometimes travels to the suburbs to visit his mother, Nelly (Bulle Ogier), who is caring for his teenage son, Marcus (Issa Perica). The young man, whose mother is out of the picture, is biracial, and becomes a too-convenient symbol for social problems the film otherwise ignores. He steals Nelly’s credit card and does badly in school, and because we know almost nothing else about him as a character, he seems like a stereotype.Marcus’s behavior provokes a rant from his father against “the prevailing discourse” that emphasizes identity over individuality. Like the segments from Sara’s radio program, this diatribe against le wokisme waves in the direction of contemporary reality without engaging it.Meanwhile, the Sara-Jean-François love triangle, as it grows louder and more tearful, loses momentum as a source of drama. Its resolution is — and I mean this as a literal description — a bad joke. How strange that a filmmaker as idiosyncratic and fearless as Denis has made such a generic, tentative film.Both Sides of the BladeNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel’ Review: Bohemia’s Holdouts

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      This documentary offers an immersion in the lives of residents who keep the building’s spirit as a home for artists alive through a protracted renovation.Early in “Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel,” a construction worker says that the famed building has “a lot of ghosts.”A home for untold authors, artists and musicians since it opened in the Gilded Age — and probably the only dwelling anywhere that housed, at different times, Mark Twain and superstars from Andy Warhol’s Factory — the Chelsea Hotel, as seen in this documentary from Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier, appears haunted even by its current residents, who wander halls that have been filled with plastic sheeting.Shot beginning in 2019, while the hotel ground through a contentious and protracted renovation, the film offers an evocative, melancholy immersion in the lives of a handful of holdouts who have maintained the building’s bohemian spirit even as their apartments have been cut up, almost as if they themselves were part of the architecture. The occupant of Janis Joplin’s former suite displays the soap dish he kept from a gutted bathroom. (“She probably didn’t use the soap, from what I know about Janis Joplin,” he says.)A wire sculptor, a dancer and the head of the tenants’ association (who yearns for construction to finally finish, though other residents disagree) are among the eccentric figures who catch the directors’ eyes. The artist Bettina Grossman, who died in November at 94, says she’s the oldest person in the building and that, unlike her neighbors, she was never offered money to leave.The film avoids providing too much context, a choice that contributes to the spectral atmosphere. The directors aren’t after a news piece; they’re just listening to voices that continue to echo in the corridors.Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea HotelNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 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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      A Feminist, Neorealist, Communist Film, and a Plain Great Movie

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      “One Way or Another,” from 1974, is a class-conscious love story involving a macho worker and a well-to-do schoolteacher in Cuba.Dialectical from opening title to final image, “One Way or Another” — the first and only feature by the Afro-Cuban director Sara Gómez — introduces itself as “a film about real people, and some fictitious ones.” That’s one way to describe this deft mixture of cinéma vérité, ethnographic documentary, feminist social realism and class-conscious revolutionary romance.“One Way or Another” opens Friday for a weeklong run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Restored from its original 16-millimeter, the film looks terrific, and, despite its nostalgia for the ideals of the Cuban revolution, it feels as relevant today as it did in 1974.While “One Way or Another” never had a formal release in the United States, it has surfaced periodically in film series, including one at BAM five years ago that was devoted to Black women’s cinema. (Reviewing this series, to which “One Way or Another” lent its name, the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called it “a still-exciting mixture of documentary and narrative fiction.”)“One Way or Another” could be described as a love story involving two photogenic young people — a macho worker, Mario (Mario Balmaseda, who was a professional actor), and a schoolteacher, Yolande (Yolanda Cuéllar, who was not). But it has more on its mind.Mario, a mulatto laborer, grew up on the mean streets of Havana’s Miraflores district; Yolanda, who is white, educated and middle class, has been assigned to teach in a Miraflores primary school. Both have workplace issues. Mario is implicated in a buddy’s misconduct; Yolanda is repeatedly advised to be more diplomatic in dealing with her pupils’ impoverished parents.Given their backgrounds, the lovers often misunderstand each other. Context is all. Their most intimate conversation is in the “neutral” territory of a tiny posada, or hotel; their story is interspersed with interludes concerning the history and legacy of slavery — including the African religion Santería and the all-male secret society Abakuá.Shots of slums and slum clearance provide a metaphor for the creation of a new society and a new consciousness. That the principles come together and drift apart amid a constant interplay of destruction and construction suggests that their relationship — like the Cuban Revolution — is a perpetual work in progress. Didactic as it is, “One Way or Another” can be taken for socialist realism, but if so, it is a highly original and even critical variant. (The “positive hero,” an axiom of the mode, is an Afro-Cuban musician and former boxer, Guillermo Diaz, who supplies a song demystifying traditional gender roles.)Trained as a musician, Gómez made a score of short documentaries. (She also served as an assistant director on Agnès Varda’s 1963 documentary “Salut les Cubains” and can be seen dancing the cha-cha at the movie’s conclusion.) “One Way or Another” is so brimming with life and ideas that it is shattering to learn that Gómez died, at just 31, while editing it — she succumbed to a severe asthma attack amid complications giving birth to her third child.The postproduction was completed by her colleagues, and the movie was not shown until 1977. Since then, it has been recognized as a landmark of feminist, neorealist, Communist, Cuban, Latinx, Third World and simply world cinema.One Way or AnotherJuly 8-14 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn; bam.org. More