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      ‘Remember This’ Review: A Stark Portrait of Resilience

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      This film, featuring a captivating performance from David Strathairn as the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski, is a straightforward adaptation of the play of the same name.Last fall, David Strathairn captivated Brooklyn theatergoers with his solo performance in “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” depicting the Polish resistance fighter’s harrowing journey through exile during World War II. Originally produced by Theater for a New Audience as part of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, “Remember This” took inspiration from the documentaries in which the real-life Karski appeared — 1985’s “Shoah” and 2010’s “The Karski Report” — along with Karski’s own writings and lectures from his decades as a Georgetown professor. The result was a stark, minimalist set in which Strathairn recreated the horrors that Karski, who died in 2000 at age 86, endured using nothing more than a table, two chairs and a suit jacket.The film version of “Remember This,” opening this Friday at the Quad Cinema, in Manhattan, adapts the stage play with little change in its presentation. Derek Goldman returns as director alongside Jeff Hutchens, and Strathairn is once again a one-man tour de force. Now with the benefit of editing, his transitions between the devastating and triumphant scenes of Karski’s life are punctuated with camera tilts upward into dramatic lighting cues, allowing for subtle cuts in what still resembles a one-take performance.Despite this, “Remember This” is, quite literally, a filmed play, and Goldman and Hutchens don’t make any attempts to define or elevate itself outside the confines of the stage. That can start to feel claustrophobic at 90 minutes long, but perhaps the directors saw that as a necessary trade-off, as Karski’s numerous and poignant monologues performed to the camera — on the nature of evil, on Holocaust denial, on how one chooses to retell the truth — would have felt out of stylistically place in a cinematic version. As it is, they’re the element most likely to be remembered.Remember ThisNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Mission’ Review: A Substantial Service Undertaking

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      Mormon teenagers travel to Finland for missionary service in this documentary that struggles to offer new insights.American Mormon adolescents trek to Finland for missionary service in the pallid documentary “The Mission.” Directed by Tania Anderson, the film opens with its young subjects preparing for their travels, and then tracks their two-year journeys and the challenges that attend the substantial undertaking.One hopes that such access to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would yield new insights into the religion. But as the events unspool, the film struggles to crystallize more than a handful of compelling points.The documentary spends time with four missionaries in particular: Sister Bills, Sister Field, Elder Davis and Elder Pauole. (The Church frowns upon the use of first names.) The young women are sunny. The young men are stolid. Beyond their general dispositions and their aptitude for Finnish, which each of them are asked to study, the film fails to bring them to life as individuals.Upon arrival in Finland, the missionaries receive companions who serve as their roommates and proselytizing partners. The kids are instructed not to leave one another’s sight, a rule that we later learn is meant to prime the adolescents for marriage, which awaits them at home. This vital detail is obscured, however, by our surface-level time with the pairs. We see them pray side by side and knock on Finns’ doors, but before the camera, the companions default to reticence.Being a teenager is tough enough, and living for years in a foreign city must add stress to the usual malaise. Unfortunately, Anderson’s camera feels like an outsider to this unease, less a window into a demanding time than an obstacle to our understanding.The MissionNot rated. In English and Finnish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Maybe I Do’ Review: Lukewarm Liaisons

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      Looking at the seasoned cast — Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and William H. Macy — you might think you want to see this movie. Hold that thought.A romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and William H. Macy would kill as a Nancy Meyers movie. Unfortunately, the rom-com “Maybe I Do” was written and directed by the television veteran Michael Jacobs.“Maybe I Do” not only lacks the luscious locations of a Meyers picture, it’s got nothing in the realm of her medium-sharp writing either. For the first section of the movie, three story threads are intercut in a ham-handed, arrhythmical way.The picture begins with its only funny bit, in which Sam (Macy), alone in a movie theater watching a downer art picture and losing his mind, tears up his Twizzlers and mixes them with his popcorn. He’s about to throw in some Peanut M&M’s when he’s interrupted by Grace (Keaton), another lonely senior at the movies. A spark occurs and the two, who are unhappily married to other people, begin to fan the flame.Then, in a luxe hotel room, Howard (Gere) and Monica (Sarandon) grit their teeth through a dysfunctional adulterous tryst. “You’re pressuring me with your availability,” Howard says.And … elsewhere there’s a wedding. Michelle (Emma Roberts), a bridesmaid, is eager to catch the bouquet, while her boyfriend, Allen (Luke Bracey), is so terrified of her doing so that he actually intercepts the flowers, N.F.L. style. Inevitably, this leads to a fight over commitment, and an ultimatum that requires the couple to introduce their parents to one another. Guess who the parents are?For the climactic parental summit, Jacobs, who previously worked on TV shows such as “Boy Meets World” and “Charles in Charge,” settles on a mode that wobbles between stage play and multicamera sitcom.The ostensible comedic bits in which the oldsters duck each other soon give way to musty monologues on marriage — material that even the seasoned cast is unable to freshen up.Maybe I DoRated PG-13 for language and themes. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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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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      ‘Cairo Conspiracy’ Review: There Are No Angels

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      The election of a grand imam is the backdrop for this tense drama of innocence and corruption set at an esteemed Islamic university.“Cairo Conspiracy” was Sweden’s entry in this year’s Academy Awards race for best international feature, but it does not have a single word of Swedish in it, nor is it set anywhere near the Nordic country. The film (which did not receive an Oscar nomination) is a European coproduction written and directed by Tarik Saleh, a Swedish director whose father is Egyptian. It was shot largely in Turkey. And like Saleh’s 2017 film “The Nile Hilton Incident,” it takes aim at corruption in the title city.Adam (Tawfeek Barhom), a young man from a remote Egyptian province, receives the glad news that he’s won a scholarship to Al-Azhar University, an eminent, Islamic institution in Cairo. As Adam gets accustomed to campus life, the movie introduces another character, Colonel Ibrahim (Fares Fares). He’s tasked by a military committee with fixing the election for the university’s new grand imam. The ideal cleric’s interests should, naturally, align with the state’s.Ibrahim is a shaggy fellow, but he’s hardly avuncular. He uses students as informants. When his current pigeon, Zizo (Mehdi Dehbi), is exposed, Ibrahim tells him to find a “new angel.” Zizo tags Adam. He takes the freshman clubbing, and shares a forbidden smoke with him, telling him: “Your soul is still pure. But every second in this place will corrupt it.” Soon, Zizo is dead and Adam is betraying his fellow students and helping Ibrahim blackmail his teachers. In this cutthroat environment, Adam looks more and more like a lamb headed to slaughter.“Cairo Conspiracy” is a measured but unsparing portrait of corruption perpetrated by people who, across the board, are utterly confident of their own rectitude. Its denouement offers some mercy, but zero hope that the rot depicted can be corrected.Cairo ConspiracyNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Filmmakers for the Prosecution’ Review: Exposing Third Reich Atrocities

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      Jean-Christophe Klotz’s documentary retraces the steps of two men tasked with gathering evidence for the Nuremberg trials.After the military defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, evidence of its crimes still had to be systematically gathered for the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. Jean-Christophe Klotz’s methodical documentary “Filmmakers for the Prosecution” retraces the steps of two Office of Strategic Services members tasked with this enormous responsibility: Stuart Schulberg (later a TV producer) and his brother, Budd (who went on to his own storied career in Hollywood).Part of the movie recounts the travails of documenting the Third Reich in the war’s ruinous aftermath and the challenge of tracking down Nazi records before they could be destroyed. Stuart Schulberg’s nervous letters home express the difficulty of completing the project in time for the trials, which aimed to damn the Nazis with their own imagery. To this point Klotz’s film (which has the feel of a teaching aid) largely belongs to the documentary category of archival adventure, with stories of journeys into a salt mine and encounters with the director Leni Riefenstahl and a high-ranking Soviet fan of John Ford.But Stuart Schulberg was also commissioned to film the tribunal for the U.S., and so Klotz’s documentary becomes the mother of all “making of” features. Technical ingenuity was required to shoot and light the courtroom and its infamous defendants, who watched the evidence of Third Reich atrocities during the proceedings.The trial footage became part of Stuart Schulberg’s nearly lost 1948 documentary “Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today,” which was delayed as American priorities shifted to helping Europe rebuild. It’s all a reminder of the labor and risks that go into creating and preserving essential imagery of the past, even for the most notorious events in history.Filmmakers for the ProsecutionNot rated. In English and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour. In theaters. 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