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      ‘Nostalgia’ Review: Leave Now and Never Come Back

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      The Italian director Mario Martone creates an expressive, economic depiction of crime and longing in this drama about a man coming home to Naples.In the Italian drama “Nostalgia,” strangers watch the streets from their windows, closing the shutters when the comings and goings become too dangerous to witness. This is Naples, where shadows flit along the rooftops and curtains close after dark. The only figure who seems to move freely through the streets is Felice (Pierfrancesco Favino), a businessman who abandoned the city as a teenager, and who has returned for the first time in 40 years.In his time away from Naples, Felice made a life for himself in Cairo. He’s married; he runs a successful business. But when his mother’s failing health brings him back to Naples, there is no hometown greeting cold enough to distract Felice from the warmth of his memories. In flashbacks, Felice recalls his misspent youth, which was passed alongside his best friend, Oreste. They raced motorcycles and swam in the sea. They committed petty crimes. These escalated to an act of murder. Now, Oreste (played as an adult by Tommaso Ragno) has become the kingpin of a Camorra criminal clan in Naples, and despite all warnings, Felice is desperate to find him.The director Mario Martone cannily depicts Naples as a city that depends on furtive criminal codes, and he mixes elements of the thriller genre into his depiction of Felice’s return. Teenage sentinels maintain their fixed stations in the streets, but their eyes follow Felice. When Felice speaks, his questions are met with silence. Doors only seem to close and never open, and the residents of the city seem to reflexively hunch, as if straighter posture would mark them as targets. Martone’s depiction of crime is at once expressive and economic, a world of danger boiled down to pregnant pauses and minute gestures.NostalgiaNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Infinity Pool’ Review: Body Trouble

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      A wealthy writer succumbs to the lure of consequence-free violence in this artfully potent blend of horror and science fiction.For several seconds at the beginning of Brandon Cronenberg’s third feature, “Infinity Pool,” there is nothing but a blank screen and a woman’s whispered question. The woman is Em Foster (Cleopatra Coleman), and it’s clear that her husband, James (Alexander Skarsgard), has been talking in his sleep. Two of the words we hear are “brain death,” and, as the movie glides forward, they feel more and more like a warning.Moneyed yet miserable, the couple has come to an upscale resort on a fictional island, their marriage as becalmed as James’s artistic inspiration. Years earlier, he wrote a poorly-reviewed novel, his inability to follow up — and a lifestyle financed by Em’s father — causing frustration and marital distance. Boredom is unexpectedly alleviated by an invitation to join two European guests, Gabi and Alban (Mia Goth and Jalil Lespert), on a forbidden excursion outside the resort’s strangely fortified compound. Exactly what are the barbed wire and heavily guarded gates trying to keep out?It is probably not what you think: Cronenberg has so far been less curious about external threats than whatever danger lurks inside us. So when a car accident leaves one islander dead and James in police custody, and he is offered a horrifying choice — accept execution or pay for a double to die in his stead — his decision will either transform him or simply activate a rot that was festering all along.The catch is that James must observe the killing. And that’s only the beginning of a movie that some might consider depraved, though its startlingly explicit imagery, including a phantasmagorical orgy, can sometimes distract from its cunning artistry. Soaked in an atmosphere of unrelenting dread, “Infinity Pool” works its canted camera angles and insistent, drumbeat-heavy score to transfixing effect. And when James joins a drugged-out cohort of rich revelers, all of whom are longtime members of the island’s get-out-of-jail-for-a-price program, his self-loathing climbs in tandem with the group’s escalating brutality.Like the gloriously viscous process of creating the replicants, much of “Infinity Pool” might be funny if it weren’t so disturbing. Skarsgard is marvelous, gobbling food like an animal as invigoration and arousal replace emasculation. And Goth (fresh from last year’s “Pearl”) is a human interrobang, silken and seductive one minute, banshee-like the next. The performances sync perfectly with a movie that, in common with its titular amenity, is without visible limits; but there’s more going on here than a nihilistic tableau of unrestrained privilege. Presenting violence as both entertainment and aphrodisiac (as the director’s father, David Cronenberg, did so nauseatingly in his 1997 film, “Crash”), “Infinity Pool” probes deeper into the psychological effects on the perpetrator. It’s a theme the younger director explored brilliantly in his 2020 film, “Possessor” (whose assassin can also kill with impunity), and it shows him grappling with a more twisted and complex morality.“Do you worry that they killed the wrong man?,” James is asked after one double is executed. Surreal, sophisticated and sometimes sickening, “Infinity Pool” suggests that while the elder Cronenberg might be fixated on the disintegration of our bodies, his son is more concerned with the destruction of our souls.Infinity PoolRated R for murderous tourists and militaristic genitals. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Life Upside Down’ Review: Lotharios, Unmasked

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      Couples try to navigate relationships in lockdown in this pandemic satire.Shot remotely over Zoom in May and June of 2020, “Life Upside Down” is among the last of a microgenre that won’t feel interesting for another decade. This tissue-thin social satire, written and directed by Cecilia Miniucchi, pokes its head into how the pandemic affected a wealthy strata of Angelenos. It’s a shallow look at shallow people.Paul (Danny Huston), an erudite writer, is forced to make conversation with his trophy wife, Rita (Rosie Fellner), who confuses Plato with Play-Doh. Elsewhere in this upper-class enclave, the art gallery owner Jonathan (Bob Odenkirk) struggles to maintain his affair with his avowed soul mate Clarissa (Radha Mitchell), sexting his longtime mistress whenever his actual wife ducks out for groceries.The premise has potential as a bit of wicked comeuppance. Odenkirk, in particular, is willing to go full louse. (One throwback joke that works is that his character lazily wears his mask halfway, his exposed nose as unwelcome a sight as a flasher on Hollywood Boulevard.) But this is a true time capsule of the earliest days of quarantine, a moment where prognosticators were torn between predicting that divorce rates would spike (in truth, they dipped 12%) or truly believing that this experience might make us all better people. Ultimately, and unconvincingly, Miniucchi cedes to optimism. The score thrums with the power chords of enlightenment and, in a grace note, Fellner’s supposed airhead lands the script’s most insightful line: “Real love is to be at peace with flawed love.”Life Upside DownNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Man in the Basement’ Review: The Occupation of Paris

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      This nebulous French thriller tracks the unraveling of a Jewish family that accidentally sells their storage cellar to an antisemitic conspiracy theorist.A Jewish family’s new neighbor is an antisemitic conspiracy theorist in “The Man in the Basement,” a nebulous thriller by the French director Philippe Le Guay.Not that their dingy storage cellar is fit for habitation — though like many Parisian sub-dwellings, it was once occupied by Jews in hiding during the war, as in François Truffaut’s “The Last Metro.”Simon (Jérémie Renier), the family’s affable patriarch, suspects nothing when he sells the space to the ex-history teacher Jacques Fonzic (François Cluzet). The older man claims to want to offload his dead mother’s things sooner rather than later, and Simon doesn’t think twice about handing over the keys and cashing the check.Turns out that’s enough to seal the deal under French law, so when Fonzic settles in to his underground abode, irritating the building’s other residents, Simon is powerless to evict the stranger even after he discovers the awful truth.That Fonzic at times appears perfectly pleasant, even sagacious when he, for instance, invokes certain revisionist versions of American history, is a testament to Cluzet’s charms. But the most malignant people are just that — innocuous, friendly-seeming — spreading their beliefs like an odorless poison.Simon grows desperate as his legal actions repeatedly fail, allowing Fonzic’s ongoing presence to corrupt his loved ones. His wife, Hélène (Bérénice Bejo), spirals, and his teenage daughter Nelly (Victoria Eber) — already a Krav Maga-practicing nonconformist who is in love with her cousin — finds herself drawn to the convincingly levelheaded Fonzic’s “freethinking” philosophy.Despite Cluzet’s disarming performance and the film’s provocative conceit, Le Guay’s ideas — about modern-day Jewish identity, ideologies of victimhood, the emboldening of right-wing extremists, and the sundry loopholes offered to them by our systems of justice — swirl chaotically around the plot-heavy film, underdeveloped. Somewhere in “The Man in the Basement” there is a smart psychodrama sharpened by political urgency, but what we get is a middling think piece that too quickly loses momentum — and peters out by the end.The Man in the BasementNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Shotgun Wedding’ Review: ‘Die Hard’ With Refreshments

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      A destination wedding becomes a high-stakes hostage situation in this action-heavy film.As a general rule, putting Jennifer Lopez in your romantic comedy automatically gets you halfway to a decent movie. The male lead hardly matters: while Lopez has had natural chemistry with George Clooney (“Out of Sight”) and Matthew McConaughey (“The Wedding Planner”), she’s had it just as easily with men of less distinction, like, say, Michael Vartan (“Monster in Law”) or Alex O’Loughlin (“The Back-Up Plan”).In the frothy action rom-com “Shotgun Wedding,” directed by Jason Moore, Lopez stars opposite Josh Duhamel: not exactly Clark Gable, but Lopez makes it work. She always does. As a couple whose destination wedding is interrupted by hostage-taking pirate-terrorists, the two bicker and banter with classic screwball brio, with a love-hate rapport that is both delightful and effortlessly convincing. Much of the dialogue feels canned and phony in the style of a badly written sitcom. But coming out of J. Lo’s mouth, I believed it.“Shotgun Wedding” combines two familiar subgenres in a fairly original way — the comedy of remarriage, in which an embittered couple rediscover their affection after having drifted apart, and the single-setting terrorist picture, in which an Everyman (or Everywoman) must rescue hostages from an elite squad of armed bad guys. “Die Hard” meets “The Awful Truth,” in essence, with a wedding in the Philippines as its sumptuous tropical setting. It’s an appealing setup, and as Lopez and Duhamel begin to take up machine guns and grenades against their foes, there’s some novel charm in seeing the tensions of the rom-com and the action thriller playfully juxtaposed. Less agreeable is the forced air of ingratiating humor. Cloying pop culture references and of-the-moment punch lines abound, including jokes about Etsy and gaslighting. It smacks of desperation to go viral — a fault jarringly at odds with the pleasing simplicity of the rest of the movie.Shotgun WeddingRated R for strong language, sexual innuendo and (surprisingly) graphic violence. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      Sundance, Once a Hotbed for Film Deals, Tries to Find Its Footing

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      The kind of independent movies that the festival showcases have struggled at the box office, spurring worries about what the market would be like this year.The past two years have been a time of major upheaval in the film business — and at the Sundance Film Festival.Between the diminishing audiences in movie theaters, the consolidation of studios and the shrinking amount being spent on content after the streaming giants had their wrists slapped by Wall Street, few were certain about what kind of market there would be for new films at the current Sundance — typically a hotbed of acquisitions for the brightest lights in the independent film world.Even the festival’s opening-night gala last Thursday, its first in person since 2020, felt tempered by the reality facing movies.“These last few years have brought extraordinary challenges for our industry, along with opportunities to respond to the needs of artists and reach audiences in new ways,” Sundance’s chief executive, Joana Vicente, told those assembled. “And as many of this year’s films illustrate, this is a moment when so much is at risk — the health of our planet, human rights, women’s rights, freedom of expression and democracy itself.”Not exactly a celebratory introduction.So on Monday, a collective sigh of relief rose through Utah’s Wasatch mountain range, where, within two hours, two high-profile films that had premiered at the festival found eager buyers. Netflix plunked down $20 million to take the worldwide rights to the thriller “Fair Play,” while Searchlight Pictures spent just under $8 million for the musical-theater-geek mockumentary “Theater Camp,” starring Ben Platt.A day later, Apple TV+ nabbed the musical drama “Flora & Son” for $20 million, and the indie distributor A24 bought the Australian horror film “Talk to Me” for a wide theatrical release this summer.Despite the deals, the state of movies and how audiences will watch them remained an underlying worry.The Race to Rule Streaming TVA Changing Medium: A decade of streaming has transformed storytelling and viewing habits. But we may be starting to hit that transformation’s limits.Netflix: Reed Hastings, one of the founders of Netflix, said that he was ceding his co-chief executive title and becoming the company’s executive chairman.Crime Shows: Just a few years ago, it looked as though old-fashioned police and court procedurals might not make the leap to the streaming future. Now, they aren’t just surviving, they are thriving.AMC’s Troubles: The company has struggled to earn enough from streaming to make up for losses from its traditional cable business. It is a widespread issue in the industry.“Everybody is wringing their hands about the industry,” said Vinay Singh, the chief executive of Archer Gray, a production company whose film “The Persian Version” was shown in competition at Sundance. “A lot of people have lost their jobs. There are cost-cutting measures happening on spending content. People are worried.”Indeed, no one seems to know any longer what kind of movie is worthy of theatrical release and what should be sent straight to a streaming service. Distribution and marketing executives have to figure out not only how to sell a movie to an increasingly fickle audience but also how to navigate the needs of corporate parents, often giant conglomerates whose business priorities are constantly in flux.Plus, there is always the fear of succumbing to “Sundance Fever”— making lightheaded decisions because of the high-altitude fervor of the audience. Over the decades, both streaming services and theatrical distributors have overpaid for films at the festival. Harvey Weinstein spent $10 million for “Happy, Texas” in 1999 only to see it flop at the box office. Focus Features paid $10 million for “Hamlet 2” in 2008, and in 2019, Amazon scooped up three movies for a combined $41 million while New Line paid $15 million for “Blinded by the Light,” only to have it gross $12 million. And that was when the industry was healthier.Now, with so much riding on every decision, a positive response to a film at Sundance is no longer enough to guarantee that it will attract a theatrical distribution deal.Netflix paid $20 million for “Fair Play,” starring Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor.Sundance Institute“I’d like to believe this movie could have done well in theaters,” said Ram Bergman, a producer of “Fair Play,” one of the festival’s most acclaimed and sought-after films. But despite the enthusiasm from the traditional studios, he said, there was little faith that the $5 million R-rated thriller, starring Phoebe Dynevor (“Bridgerton”) and Alden Ehrenreich (“Solo: A Star Wars Story”), could succeed opposite the superhero spectacles without a prohibitively expensive marketing budget.“You are dealing with a lot of the studios that have convinced themselves that these movies cannot really do well in theaters,” Mr. Bergman said. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if a streamer, let’s say Netflix, really wants to get behind it and treat it as one of, like, their high-priority movies, it’s hard to compete.”Therein lies the challenge. Most filmmakers come to Sundance with the expectation that their film will be shown on big screens across the country. The reality is that their movies are exactly the kinds that are performing poorly at the box office: small, inexpensive, complex and lacking movie stars.Add the fact that independent chains like ArcLight Cinemas and Landmark Theatres, which were the traditional supporters of indie fare, have closed and the calculus required to make these films successful becomes even more challenging.Searchlight is counting on fans of Mr. Platt (“Dear Evan Hansen”) and live theater in general to power “Theater Camp,” which celebrates all those who dream of hitting it big on Broadway. The thinking goes that if Mr. Platt can sell out Madison Square Garden, as he has with his one-man show, he can draw audiences to a movie theater. (However, Mr. Platt’s last film endeavor, the adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen,” grossed only $15 million at the domestic box office.)“This is a crowd-pleasing movie, and it was designed with an audience in mind from inception,” said Erik Feig, chief executive of PictureStart, one of the producers of “Theater Camp.” “Yet we didn’t mitigate our risk with presales. We took a flier. We did our research into the market, but comparisons change like every 90 seconds, so you kind of build something for a business model that two weeks later is extinct.”Other buzzy projects did not generate the kind of sales that Sundance, which ends on Sunday, is normally known for. “Cat Person” pleased crowds at the festival, but the critics excoriated it, particularly for veering away from the viral New Yorker short story it was based on. “Magazine Dreams” features an Oscar-caliber performance by Jonathan Majors (“Lovecraft Country”), but he plays a character who spirals into madness and begins carrying a loaded gun — a particularly difficult film to buy in the wake of the two recent mass shootings in California.And the documentary “Justice,” which turns an investigative eye toward Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court appointment and was added to the festival’s lineup at the last minute with much fanfare, disappointed critics, too.“Magazine Dreams,” starring Jonathan Majors, proved to be a difficult sell because of its dark subject matter.Sundance InstituteThe “Justice” filmmakers say they have received new tips, since their film was announced, that they plan to follow up on. It’s just not clear that the film, which was self-funded by the director, Doug Liman, who is best known for glossy action movies, will find a distributor ready to back an incomplete project.Despite the challenges, people were thrilled to be back in person at Sundance.“I feel a deep sense of gratitude to be in this room watching a movie,” Davis Guggenheim said at the premiere of his documentary “Still,” about Michael J. Fox and his protracted battle with Parkinson’s disease.“Theater Camp” brought its actors onstage to perform. The documentary “Going Varsity in Mariachi” was supplemented by a live performance by Mariachi Juvenil de Utah, and the cast of “Flora & Son” rapped one of its songs. The screenings were often sold out, and a film’s reception could be judged on the spot by the number of standing ovations it received. Still, buyers were being much more selective.“I think it’s natural that we’re seeing things not happen overnight,” Mr. Singh of Archer Gray said. “I think that’s fine. I actually think it might be a sign of health, because there’s so much stuff in play.”Mr. Feig echoed that sentiment.“It’s definitely a challenging market,” he said. “For each of these movies that has landed buyers, there probably weren’t 25 different offers for each one of these. There may be more of a handful. You just have to kind of build them sensibly knowing what your potential options are.”He also noted the festival’s combination of established names and rising talent, adding with more than a dash of optimism: “This is why Sundance is so amazing — it’s a discovery of fresh new voices. You saw that with ‘Fair Play.’ You see it with ‘Talk to Me.’ You saw that with ‘Theater Camp.’ All brand-new filmmakers, with their very first movie, and they broke through, they made noise, and they found studio partners.” More

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      ‘Zeros and Ones,’ ‘Juliet, Naked’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Looking for something different to stream? We have options for you.A new year is upon us and your subscription streaming services have added plenty of new movies — though, at first glance, not much outside of the usual churn-and-turn of titles. But we’ve plucked out a few notable exceptions, an eclectic mixture of action thrillers, romantic comedies, thought-provoking documentaries, and much more.‘Zeros and Ones’ (2021)Stream it on Hulu.Distressingly few major filmmakers took the opportunity to dramatize the particulars of daily life in the Covid-19 pandemic. Abel Ferrara was a notable exception, crafting this lean, mean (less than 90 minutes) story of an American soldier-for-hire (Ethan Hawke) attempting to foil a plot to blow up the Vatican in a locked-down Rome. It sounds like a formula thriller, but Ferrara doesn’t work with formulas; he works with vibes, and the thick sense of paranoia and pandemic-era solitude are palpable and powerful. Plus, Hawke is at the top of his game, portraying not only the leading role but that character’s revolutionary brother, a dual performance that allows the actor to play two types he does especially well: the unhinged wild man and the austere, tightly wound professional.‘Juliet, Naked’ (2018)Stream it on Amazon.If you like your Hawke a little bit lighter, take a look at this charming romantic comedy, adapted from the author Nick Hornby’s 2009 novel. Hornby is best known for “High Fidelity,” a peerless portrait of how a certain type of young man uses pop music to both idealize women, and carefully cultivate an emotional distance from them. “Juliet” plays like what it is: an older, wiser man’s return to those themes, as a longtime fan (Chris O’Dowd) drives his girlfriend (Rose Byrne) into the arms of the musician (Hawke) he idolizes.‘The Homesman’ (2014)Stream it on HBO Max.There’s no questioning Tommy Lee Jones’s place as one of our last, great grizzled leading men, bringing a sense of gruff gravitas and no-nonsense authority to his acting work. Less noted, but just as worthy of acclaim, are his too-occasional forays into filmmaking, most recently with this masterfully assembled adaptation of Glendon Swarthout’s Western novel. Jones knows the genre down in his bones, which is perhaps how he pulls off the miraculous balancing act of both serving and subverting its tropes; what appears, at first, to be a “Rooster Cogburn”-style tale of an old coot and a prim lady’s journey through the Wild West reveals itself to be something quite a bit more eccentric, complicated and (gasp) feminist than that.‘The Raid 2’ (2014)Stream it on Netflix.If you’re looking for breathless, relentless action, you can’t do much better than Gareth Evans’s sequel to his 2012 cops-and-crooks extravaganza “The Raid: Redemption.” That film isn’t on Netflix, but narrative continuity isn’t exactly front of mind anyway; Evans is a master of the bone-crunching set piece, the more participants and unlikely the location, the better. The highlight is hard to pin down, but this viewer’s vote goes to the extended subway confrontation between our hero, a man with a baseball bat and a woman with two furiously-flying hammers.‘Gemini’ (2018)Stream it on HBO Max.The writer and director Aaron Katz was best known, in the late 2000s, as one of the primary practitioners of the so-called “mumblecore” movement, but there’s nary a trace of that aesthetic in this sleek, sharp-edged mixture of neo-noir thriller and Hollywood satire. Lola Kirke is endlessly charismatic and empathetic as Jill, the best friend and personal assistant to Heather, a white-hot young actress (Zoë Kravitz, well on her way to embodying the role herself). But when Heather turns up dead and Jill looks like the best suspect, she has to clear her own name — and, in the process, discovers there was much more to Heather than she ever knew.‘Appropriate Behavior’ (2015)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Desiree Akhavan writes, directs and stars in this devastatingly funny, breathtakingly candid and unexpectedly sexy comedy-drama, which caused something of a sensation at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. It’s easy to see why; Akhavan is a singular comic voice, and since she’s playing a variation on herself (a bisexual Brooklynite filmmaker, daughter of immigrants), the picture boasts an offhand candor and casual approach to ethnicity, class and identity that makes it distinctive even among the indie set. She followed it up with the 2018 Sundance winner “The Miseducation of Cameron Post,” and remains a filmmaker to keep an eye on.‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.The footage plays out in its entirety right at the beginning: a three-plus minute home movie, shot in 1938 by David Kurtz, in the streets of a pleasant-looking Polish village. Seventy-one years later, Kurtz’s grandson Glenn discovered that badly-decomposing film, and became obsessed with unlocking it. It’s a detective story, attempting to piece together the particulars of who and what we see, solely from what’s in the frame; Bianca Stigter’s documentary sticks to those confines, playing and replaying the film, sped up and slowed down, zoomed in, chopped up and reassembled. But this gives way, as it must, to the horrifying details of what happened in this, one of many Jewish communities wiped out by the Holocaust, and ‘Three Minutes’ is ultimately, chillingly haunted by the terrible gulf between the cheerful people in those images, and what became of them in the years that followed.‘Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool’ (2019)Stream it on Netflix.Stanley Nelson’s snapshot of the jazz icon checks all the expected bio-doc boxes: career highlights, archival footage, insights aplenty both from contemporaries and successors. But “Birth of the Cool” gets an extra kick from the words of Davis himself, with the actor Carl Lumbly voicing juicy (and often expletive-laden) quotes from Davis’s autobiography. And though the dates and names are fully accounted for, Nelson devotes particular energy to pinpointing the power of Davis’s music, and what made it so special; in those sections, he carves out a niche somewhere between screen biography and music criticism. More

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      ‘Geographies of Solitude’ Review: Exploring a Wild Island

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      Part nature film, part biographical portrait, this experimental documentary takes its cues from its setting, an island off mainland Nova Scotia.The closing credits of “Geographies of Solitude” say the film was made in collaboration with its subject, the naturalist Zoe Lucas. But the director, Jacquelyn Mills, might equally have called this experimental documentary — part nature film, part biographical portrait — a collaboration with the setting. Shot on Sable Island, a narrow, wild land strip 100 miles off mainland Nova Scotia, the film takes its cues from the scenery in unusually direct ways.“Geographies of Solitude” is as concerned with the elements of the medium as it is with natural elements. Mills, who also served as the cinematographer and editor, incorporates vignettes that resemble the work of the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage. We see film exposed in starlight and developed in seaweed, or hear music generated, with the help of electrodes, by the island’s Calosoma beetle.Lucas, who first came to Sable Island in 1971, has spent decades thoroughly cataloging its horses, seals, birds and insects. She is heard in a voice-over clip talking about finding overlooked species. The island’s location also enables her to aid in tracking pollution in the Northwest Atlantic. Alarmingly, she says you can tell what holiday it is by the kinds of balloons that wash up.Seemingly the island’s only human inhabitant, Lucas introduces Mills to the area’s life cycles, lifting part of a horse carcass to show insects feeding off it or explaining how even a small amount of litter can start the growth of a dune. Yet it is to the great credit of “Geographies of Solitude” that it never feels expository: It turns an ecology lesson, and an account of a noble, steadfast, single-minded pursuit, into art.Geographies of SolitudeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More