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      ‘The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent’ Review: Being Nicolas Cage

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      Nicolas Cage plays Nick Cage — maybe, kind of, not really — in a comically romantic, buddy-movie thriller that is also an ode to him in all his Caginess.Those eyes, that hair, those choppers and, oh, that purring, whining adenoidal voice, which can change pitch and intensity midsentence (midword!) and often seems a bit stuffed up. To know or, anyway, to watch Nicolas Cage is to love him and sometimes also be confused by him (which is A-OK). He can be a joy and a conundrum, startling and remarkable, but also fantastically, gloriously untethered. Who is this? you sometimes wonder, agog. What is this?In his latest, “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” Cage fidgets and swaggers and smiles so broadly he looks ready to swallow the screen whole. He charms and alarms, jumps off a cliff and, drink in hand, walks straight into a swimming pool without breaking stride. (Holding onto the bottle, he sinks and then he drinks.) What’s it about? Does it matter? Does it ever? It’s another Nicolas Cage joint, a romp, a showcase, an eager-to-please ode to him in all his sui generis Caginess. That’s the idea, at any rate. Mostly, though, it is a single joke sustained for 106 minutes, amid many rapid tone shifts, mood swings and set changes.It’s a pretty good joke: Cage plays himself, or rather a variation on a star also named Nick Cage. Wrung out, inching toward bankruptcy, proud yet humbled, and yearning for a role that’s worthy of his self-regard, this avatar looks and sounds like the real deal. Certainly, he resembles the star who, since swiveling heads with “Valley Girl” and Uncle Francis’ “Rumble Fish” back in 1983, has made films both sublime and forgettable, married repeatedly (Elvis’s daughter!), won an Oscar (“Leaving Las Vegas”), whipped up vats of tabloid slobber and accrued a cult following that will giggle at this movie’s every reverent allusion: Not the bees.Nicolas Cage: Hollywood’s Greatest SurrealistFrom bleak dramas and Hollywood blockbusters to quiet character studies and psychedelic horrors, the mercurial actor has made over 100 films.His New Movie: In “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” Nicolas Cage plays “himself” — in all his meme-ified glory.Interview: In a conversation with our Talk columnist, the actor discussed his philosophy of acting and his search for the Holy Grail.First Leading Role: The 1983 movie “Valley Girl” started as a cheap exploitation film but managed to become a star vehicle for Cage.Anatomy of a Scene: The director David Gordon Green breaks down a scene from the 2013 film “Joe” in which Cage used a real venomous snake as a prop.There’s a story, way too much of one, crammed into an overstuffed, self-reflexive entertainment that soon finds Cage flying abroad. Paired with a second banana (an amped Pedro Pascal), he embarks on an adventure that — in its vibe, beats and banality — is closer to “National Treasure” than David Lynch’s cold, cruel “Wild at Heart.” There’s also an ex (Sharon Horgan) and a daughter (Lily Sheen), who pop in and out and seem to have been written in because: a) producers know they now need more than one woman in the cast; and b) they want to prove, à la US Weekly, that celebrities are just like us, except for the private jets.“Massive Talent” finds its mojo once Cage and Pascal team up and start trading quips, dodging obstacles and vamping for the audience. It’s very Hope and Crosby loosey-goosey, though sometimes it’s more blotto Snoop and Martha. Cage and Pascal bounce off each other nicely, with Pascal playing the wall to Cage’s ricocheting ball. Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz show up as spies who dragoon Cage into a covert operation that allows the filmmakers to shift to more commercial terrain and bring out the heavy artillery. That partly explains all the love here for John Woo’s ballistic, balletic “Face/Off,” even if someone forgot the doves.The director Tom Gormican, who wrote the script with Kevin Etten, gets the job done, churning the nonsense. There are no surprises other than the movie is watchable and amusing, though it’s too bad Gormican didn’t let Cage and Pascal just go with the absurdist, shambolic flow. Cage doesn’t need a reason for you to watch him, least of all good material. He’s Nicolas Cage, master of his own universe, maker of strange poetry, breaker of hearts. He can eat a roach, love a pig and inhabit a movie so profoundly that its quality is superfluous. “He’s up there in the air,” Pauline Kael wrote in a review of his freak-fest “Vampire’s Kiss,” “it’s a little dizzying — you’re not quite sure you understand what’s going on.” Amen to that.The Unbearable Weight of Massive TalentRated R for language and gun violence. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Northman’ Review: Danish Premodern

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      Alexander Skarsgard, Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicole Kidman star in Robert Eggers’s bloody Viking revenge saga.“The Northman” tells a very old story — maybe the same old story. A young prince seeks to avenge the murder of his father, the king, whose killer has usurped the throne and married the prince’s mother. That’s “Hamlet,” of course, but Robert Eggers’s new film isn’t another Shakespeare screen adaptation, bristling with Elizabethan eloquence, high-toned acting and complex, uncannily modern psychology.Eggers, who wrote the screenplay with the Icelandic novelist and playwright Sjon, has conjured this bloody saga out of the ancient Scandinavian narratives that supplied Shakespeare’s source material. His raw material, you might say, since “The Northman” insists on the primal, brutal, atavistic dimensions of the tale. Amleth, as he is called, is no student philosopher, temporizing over the nuances of being and nonbeing. He is a berserker, a howling warrior with ripped abs, superhero combat skills and a righteous cause for his endless blood lust.This is what I mean by the same old story. In modern movies, even more than in 17th-century English plays, revenge can seem like the most — maybe the only — credible motive for heroic action. Just ask the Batman. Truth and justice are divisive abstractions, too easily deconstructed or dressed up in gaudy ideological colors. Love is problematic. Payback, in contrast, is clean and inarguable, even if it leaves a mess in its wake.“Avenge father. Save mother. Kill uncle,” young Amleth repeats to himself as he flees the scene of his father’s death. These words propel him into manhood, as he grows from a wide-eyed boy played by Oscar Novak into a cold-eyed marauder played by Alexander Skarsgard.Amleth inhabits a world whose operating principle is cruelty, and Eggers’s accomplishment lies in his fastidious, fanatical rendering of that world, down to its bed linens and cooking utensils. If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons, you may have encountered a dungeon master who took the game very, very seriously, attacking the task of fantasy world-building with excessive scholarly rigor and over-the-top imaginative zeal. That kind of player can be intimidating, but also a lot more fun than the average weekend geek.Eggers is like that. His two previous features — “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” — unfold in versions of the past that split the difference between authenticity and hallucination. “The Witch” (2016) turns Puritan New England into a feverish, poisoned pastoral landscape of religious mania, unacknowledged lust and literal bedevilment. “The Lighthouse” (2019), set on a windswept island off the North Atlantic coast of America, is a clammy sea chantey about men going mad in close quarters.Driven less by plot than by a succession of intensifying moods, these films dig into historical moments when the boundary between the human and the supernatural felt especially thin. Archaic forms of belief are treated not as quaint superstitions, but as ways of understanding scary or inexplicable facets of experience. The witches and mermaids are as real as anything else.And so it is in “The Northman,” which, like “The Witch,” mines a shadow-shrouded pagan past for images and effects. In the 1600s of the earlier film, older customs and beliefs had been pushed into the margins by Christianity, but in this version of early medieval Northern Europe, that relationship is reversed. Christianity is mentioned in passing as a weird form of worship — “their God is a corpse nailed to a tree,” one character says — in a polytheistic, polyglot society made and unmade by endless conquest, migration and war.As a boy, Amleth lives in a benevolent corner of this world. His father, Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke), is a pretty fun dad for a warrior chieftain, turning Amleth’s initiation ceremony into a night of silly, flatulent horseplay. Spiritual guidance is provided by a shamanistic fool (Willem Dafoe) and a spooky seeress (Björk). But nothing can protect Aurvandil from his bastard half brother, Fjolnir (Claes Bang), who kills the king and takes up with his wife, Gudrun (Nicole Kidman).Later, Amleth’s child’s-eye view of what happened will be complicated when he hears Gudrun’s side of things. (Kidman’s sly performance is the most Shakespearean thing about “The Northman.”) First, though, he will join a band of Viking raiders, whose plunder of a town somewhere around Russia provides Amleth — and Eggers — a chance to show off their chops. Literally, in Amleth’s case, as he hacks, stabs and cudgels his way over ramparts and through muddy dooryards and alleyways.Eggers, aided by Jarin Blaschke’s smooth, immersive cinematography, turns the scene into a Hieronymus Bosch painting in motion, a tableau of terror and chaos composed with remorseless clarity. There is something coldblooded in this matter-of-fact depiction of violence. Villagers are herded into a barn, which is sealed up and set ablaze. Rapes, beatings and disembowelments happen in the background or on the edges of the frame, barely noticed by our hero.Skarsgard and Anya Taylor-Joy, whose character, Olga of the Birch Forest, has magical powers that make her a formidable ally.Aidan Monaghan/Focus FeaturesThe purpose of the attack is to capture slaves who will be sorted and shipped off to various customers — including, Amleth learns, to Fjolnir, who has set up a new kingdom in Iceland with Gudrun and their sons. In the company of a captive named Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy, who also did some forestry in “The Witch”), Amleth joins the enslaved, smuggling himself across the sea to confront his nemesis at last.We can leave the plot there. It moves in a straight, relentless line, but matters in the Fjolnir-Gudrun household get a little intricate once Amleth and Olga arrive on this scene. Her earth-goddess magical powers make her a formidable ally, though she isn’t only that. The hokeyness of the romance between Skarsgard and Taylor-Joy, from an old-school movie-lover’s point of view, is one of the best parts of “The Northman” — a touch of ultra-blond Hollywood glamour amid the Nordic mumbo-jumbo.Which I totally respect. A recent profile in The New Yorker posited that “The Northman,” which lists several historical consultants in its credits, “might be the most accurate Viking movie ever made.” The evidence for this is in the production design (by Craig Lathrop) and the costumes (by Linda Muir), in the runic chapter titles and in the careful pronunciation of words like “Odin” and “Valhalla.” But fidelity to the past, however obsessive, is ultimately a minor, technical achievement, and “The Northman” is a movie with big — if somewhat obscure — ambitions.Eggers’s brutal, beautiful vision of history compensates, as such visions often do, for the deficiencies of the present. It isn’t that anyone would be happier living Amleth’s life, or those of the nameless slaves and soldiers whose slaughter decorates his adventure. But his reality is built on clear and emphatic moral lines, on coherent (albeit harsh) ideas about honor, power and what gives meaning to life and death.The point is not that you or any other modern person believes in these ideas — though I suppose there are some people who might pretend to — but that the characters are governed by them. Their fates make sense to them, and therefore to us as well. What’s perhaps most impressive about “The Northman” is that it hurtles through 136 minutes of musclebound, shaggy-maned mayhem without a whisper of camp or a wink of irony. Nobody is doing this for fun. Even if, in the end — thank goodness — that’s mostly what it amounts to.The NorthmanRated R. Endless blood lust, and some of the other kind, too. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Stanleyville’ Review: The Most Senseless Game

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      This absurdist farce brings together a cast of odd ducks to compete for an S.U.V.The absurdist farce “Stanleyville” begins with the prim-and-proper pink-coated Maria (Susanne Wuest) witnessing a bird fly into an office window. It’s a random event, but one that shakes her. Life, even for a bird, is full of meaningless humiliations. The film attempts to recreate this initial image of futility with human characters, but the movie makes less of an impression than the bird.Soon after witnessing the death by the window, Maria is approached to participate in a contest in which the winner will receive a shiny orange S.U.V. Maria demurs, until, with the eyes of a fanatic, the contest promoter, Homunculus (Julian Richings), promises that her participation will lead to personal transcendence. At this, she accepts.Maria competes with four other contestants, each one a fussy oddity. There is a one-lunged man who wants to become famous, a fitness and pyramid-scheme enthusiast, a neurotic businessman and a black-clad cynic who simply wants to win a car. Homunculus becomes their proctor, presiding over games where the rules seem arbitrary and the judgment appears subjective. As the players compete, the games become more violent and absurd. But Maria, hellbent on achieving her promised enlightenment, remains convinced their competition has philosophical purpose.The director Maxwell McCabe-Lokos has created a purposefully designed film, filled with meticulously color-blocked frames, and characters whose flashy, leopard-print or sports-blazer costumes describe their entire characters. The curious effect of these micromanaged images is to make even the most violent events seem twee. The contest intentionally lacks meaningful rewards, an obvious metaphor for life’s arbitrary stakes. But as cinema, the lack of purpose becomes a test of patience.StanleyvilleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard: What We Know

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      Mr. Depp has sued Ms. Heard, his ex-wife, on grounds that she defamed him in an op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post.The defamation trial in Virginia between the actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard has become a fierce battleground over the truth about their relationship, with both sides accusing the other of repeated domestic abuse in what was an unquestionably tumultuous marriage.Before a seven-person jury in Fairfax County Circuit Court, lawyers have questioned witnesses about the events of what has been described as a whirlwind romance that started on a movie set and soured into a barrage of fights and physical confrontations — the details of which vary widely depending on the account.Mr. Depp, 58, sued Ms. Heard, 35, for defamation after she wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post referring to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” After more than a year of legal sparring, Ms. Heard then countersued Mr. Depp, alleging that he defamed her when his former lawyer released statements saying her allegations of abuse were a hoax.Many of the allegations being aired in the courtroom have already been heard in a British case — which Mr. Depp lost — in which the actor sued The Sun newspaper for printing a headline that called him a “wife beater.”The trial, which started with opening arguments on April 12, is expected to last about six weeks.Why is Mr. Depp suing Ms. Heard?Mr. Depp’s lawsuit, filed in 2019, revolves around the 2018 op-ed written by Ms. Heard titled, “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.”The op-ed does not mention Mr. Depp by name, but in it, Ms. Heard wrote that two years before the article’s publication, she became a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”In 2016, Ms. Heard was granted a temporary restraining order after showing up to a California court with a bruised face, writing in an application for the order that Mr. Depp had thrown a phone at her face at close range. (The actor denies this.)In the application, Ms. Heard wrote that Mr. Depp had been verbally and physically abusive to her throughout their relationship, detailing a recent incident in which she said he grabbed her by the hair and violently shoved her to the ground. (Mr. Depp wrote in court papers that this was a lie and that she was the one who punched him in the face that night.)Mr. Depp’s lawsuit asserted that Ms. Heard’s abuse allegations were an “elaborate hoax” that cost the actor his career and reputation.“Mr. Depp brings this defamation action to clear his name,” the actor’s lawsuit said.What did Ms. Heard’s op-ed in The Washington Post say?The op-ed says that after she became a “public figure representing domestic abuse,” she started to experience a backlash to her career.“Friends and advisers told me I would never again work as an actress — that I would be blacklisted,” she wrote. “A movie I was attached to recast my role. I had just shot a two-year campaign as the face of a global fashion brand, and the company dropped me.”She wrote that she saw “in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse.” Ms. Heard was identified in the op-ed as an ambassador on women’s rights for the American Civil Liberties Union, and in court papers, Ms. Heard said the A.C.L.U. suggested that she write the article and submitted it.Although the trial has become a sprawling inquiry into the couple’s marriage, one of Ms. Heard’s lawyers, Ben Rottenborn, tried to impress upon the jury in open arguments the idea that, ultimately, the case rests on “one piece of paper” — this op-ed.Ms. Heard is countersuing, claiming Mr. Depp had conspired with a lawyer to “attempt to destroy and defame Ms. Heard in the press.”Pool photo by Jim Lo ScalzoWhy is Ms. Heard suing Mr. Depp?The jury is simultaneously considering Ms. Heard’s countersuit against Mr. Depp, which was filed in 2020.Ms. Heard’s defamation claim is against Mr. Depp, but the statements it centers on came from his former lawyer, Adam Waldman, who told the British tabloid The Daily Mail that the actress’s allegations were an “abuse hoax.”Her lawsuit claims Mr. Depp has “authorized and conspired” with Mr. Waldman, who was acting on the actor’s behalf, to “attempt to destroy and defame Ms. Heard in the press.” (Mr. Waldman was not named as a defendant.)What has Mr. Depp said in his testimony?So far, Mr. Depp has testified that he had never struck Ms. Heard, nor any other woman. Instead, he asserted that Ms. Heard was the aggressor in the relationship, engaging in angry tirades and “demeaning name-calling” that would often escalate into physical violence.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 6In the courtroom. More

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      ‘Hit the Road’ Review: Wheels Within Wheels

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      A family trip is the occasion for humor and heartbreak in Panah Panahi’s debut feature.Dad is grumbling in the back seat, which he shares with his motormouth 6-year-old son. The two of them mock and provoke each other like a vaudeville double act, with an element of physical comedy provided by the cast on the father’s leg, which limits his movements and sours his mood. The peanut gallery, up front, consists of the older brother, who is driving, and his mother, who is wittier than her husband but less of a show-off.The four of them enjoy getting on one another’s nerves, which is part of what makes them a family. All in all, they are good company. In real life, you might not want to be stuffed into a car with these people — and let’s not forget their dog, Jesse — on a dusty stretch of Iranian highway, but from the first jokey moments of “Hit the Road” until its heartbreaking end you will not want to be anywhere else.Not that this film, the first feature directed by Panah Panahi, is exactly “Little Miss Sunshine.” The reasons for the trip emerge slowly, as do the hints of anxiety and sorrow that creep into the good-natured banter. The family members have all agreed to leave their cellphones behind (though not all of them have done so), and they worry about being followed. Their vehicle, a beige S.U.V., is borrowed. Property has been sold and favors called in. This isn’t a vacation.The older son must leave the country. We don’t know why, but we can infer that the alternatives are grim. He and his parents try to keep this information from the younger boy, who is told that his brother is going off to get married. It’s not clear that he believes this, but he is protected by the blissful narcissism of childhood as well as the warmth and patience of his mother and father.The destination is a remote, rural border area, where other families in similar circumstances are camped out, making the best of a sad, uncertain situation. Panahi, whose father, Jafar Panahi, is one of Iran’s leading filmmakers, has a storytelling style that is at once clear and elusive. The personalities of the four people in the car are strong and distinct; you’re on familiar terms with them even before you learn their names.But they’re also mysterious, and not only because basic questions — Where do they live? What do they do for a living? How did their trouble start? — remain unanswered. The more time you spend with them, the more complicated each of them becomes, and the more you feel the weight and strength of the bonds that connect them. Hassan Madjooni, who plays the father, is a large, saturnine presence with a special kind of charisma. Hobbled by his leg injury and humbled by age, the character hides a large, tender heart behind a scrim of sarcasm. His wife (the remarkable Pantea Panahiha) clearly has long practice in dealing with his moods and deflecting his darts. The older son (Amin Simiar) is an introvert; his brother (a serial scene stealer named Rayan Sarlak) is very much the opposite.Family life, on the road or off, often involves competition for space. Everyone needs both emotional support and room to breathe, and nobody gets everything they want. That much is normal. What makes “Hit the Road” so memorable and devastating is the way it explores normal life under duress. An unseen, oppressive force — presumably some aspect of the government that has harassed Panahi’s father for more than a decade and tried to prevent him from making films — imposes its will on them. That invisible cruelty makes the tenderness and good humor of this movie all the more precious, and almost unbearable.Hit the RoadNot rated. In Persian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Will Smith, Before the Slap

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWill Smith’s outburst at the Oscars last month derailed the broadcast, his coronation as best actor later that night and the public good-guy image he’d carefully cultivated for several decades.But while much ink has been spilled about the slap and its meaning, far less has been devoted to what the slap truly overshadowed: the breadth and depth of Smith’s acting career. Since the late 1980s, after he transitioned from full-time rapper to sometime television actor, Smith has been building an impressive résumé onscreen, one with creative highs that have often been overshadowed by the sheer scale of his A-list success.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Smith’s long journey from rapper to television star to bankable superhero icon, how his creative choices have paralleled his personal journey and some possible options for his next steps.Guest:Soraya Nadia McDonald, senior culture critic for AndscapeConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      ‘Charlotte’ Review: An Artist’s Brief Life

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      This animated biopic about the German Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon takes faithful inspiration from her life. What if it had taken more energy from her art?In the animated biopic “Charlotte,” about the German Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon, the film’s most eloquent moment may be its last. Concluding on an image of the French Riviera as the sounds of a Nazi roundup can be heard, the directors Éric Warin and Tahir Rana come closest to capturing Salomon’s brief life with its tensions between the creative and the nihilistic.The actress Keira Knightley voices Salomon, who became known posthumously for “Life? or Theatre?,” the vast series of autobiographical gouaches she painted while living in the South of France. In 1938, her parents sent her from Berlin to the American philanthropist Ottilie Moore’s estate in Villefranche-sur-Mer, where her maternal grandparents had relocated.“Life? or Theatre?” — now considered an early graphic novel — is made up of 769 paintings, which are thick, unsettling and expressionistic.Like her opus, the film covers Salomon’s youth in Berlin with her father, a physician, and stepmother, an opera singer; her romance with her stepmother’s voice coach, Alfred Wolfsohn (a very fine Mark Strong); her time at Berlin’s Academy of Arts; her relationship with her grandparents; and, yes, the rise of the Third Reich.But the demons closing in on her in France don’t only wear brown shirts. Jim Broadbent gives voice to her grandfather with a sternness that hints as his tyranny. It is her grandfather’s vindictive revelation of the family’s history of mental illness and suicides that spurs Salomon to create her masterwork.“Charlotte” takes faithful inspiration from the artist’s life, and understatedly renders the facts of her tragic death before the credits. On the day Salomon arrived at Auschwitz, she was killed. She was 26 years old, and pregnant.In the end, “Charlotte” is bereft of the spirit of the artist who made the uncanny “Life? or Theatre?” What an even better tribute the movie would have been had it also taken heated energy from Salomon’s art.CharlotteNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Petite Maman’ Review: Into the Woods

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      The French director Céline Sciamma’s enchanting new movie centers on a young girl who discovers a mysterious friend in a storybook forest.Céline Sciamma’s luminous “Petite Maman” is a once-upon-a-time tale with a twist. Set in present-day France, in an isolated hamlet made for solitude and imagination, it is a story about family ties, childhood reveries and unanswerable questions. It’s also a story about finding someone who, like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle — the piece you knew existed but just needed you to find it — completes the picture. Put differently, it is a story about love.Soon after it opens, the 8-year-old Nelly — the extraordinary, self-possessed Joséphine Sanz — and her parents travel to pack up her grandmother’s house. Nelly’s mother grew up there, and like all childhood homes, this one has become a haunted house, though its rooms feel steeped in sadness rather than fear. It’s a domestic time capsule of a kind, a modest, Spartan, poignantly forsaken place with faded wallpaper. Nelly regards it all with sober curiosity. And, as she moves through it, you note the white sheets draped over the furniture and the medical hand-bar over the grandmother’s bed, a mournful reminder of past difficulties.With delicacy, minimal dialogue and lucid, harmoniously balanced images, Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) invites you into a world that is by turns ordinary and enigmatic. Part of the mystery is that it’s unclear what kind of story this is and where — with its charming child and restrained melancholy — it could be headed. Sciamma doesn’t tip her hand. Instead, she asks you to watch and listen, and to cozy up with Nelly. By withholding information, Sciamma is also encouraging you to look at this place and story with the open eyes of a child, which means putting aside your expectations of how movies work.Like many fairy tales, this one really begins in the woods. As Nelly’s mother (Nina Meurisse) and father (Stéphane Varupenne) start packing up the house, Nelly explores the surrounding area, with its bare trees and quiet. As a child, her mother built what she calls a hut in the forest and now Nelly would like to do the same. So, she wanders the pretty woodland, scuffs its carpet of vividly colored leaves and uses an acorn to fashion a whistle. When she blows on it, the wind gently picks up, as if answering her call. Later that night, nestled in her mother’s childhood bed, Nelly and her mom whisper as shadows gather on the walls.The next day, Nelly returns to the woods and sees a little girl in a bright red sweater dragging a long, heavy branch. The stranger hails Nelly, waving and beckoning to her: “Can you help me?” Nelly does. With silent, serious purposefulness and to the sounds of distant, rumbling thunder, the girls carry the branch, which now draws a straight line between them. The other girl leads them to a hut that she has already begun building, a ramshackle, teepee-like structure fashioned from tree brush and twine. Nelly scrutinizes the other girl and then, without a word, picks up a piece of wood and adds it to the makeshift shelter.As she does throughout “Petite Maman,” Sciamma guides you to observe this scene with the same focus as Nelly. As it discreetly keeps step with the girls, the camera remains tethered to Nelly’s point of view, so you see what she sees. This creates a bond between you, and it raises prickles of tension: You’re concerned about Nelly, and you’re wondering, too, about this stranger. But you’re also watching Nelly make smart decisions as she cautiously sizes up the other girl, who introduces herself as Marion (Gabrielle Sanz, Joséphine’s sister). At one point, you notice that the children look remarkably alike and that they are dressed in similar colors.As these two little strangers become friends, the story crystallizes. It’s wild! It’s also delightful and weird, and eventually very moving. Yet even as she slides the strange pieces into place and the movie seems to shift into recognizable genre terrain, Sciamma keeps a lid on the filmmaking, retaining the steady calm that’s characterized it from the start. There’s no shouting, no shrieking, from the wind or from the children. The emotions aren’t amped and there are no loud jolts (only revelations), an absence of heightened inflection that keeps your attention on the world — makeshift, welcoming, private — that the girls create together.The exact quality of that world remains mysterious, even as Sciamma normalizes it. This feels right. “Petite Maman” is a coming-of-age story, but not every moment needs explanation. Some things, like love, Sciamma seems to say, are ours to discover, nurture, share or not, which feels like an ethic and an auteurist (and feminist) statement of intent. Like Sciamma’s other movies, this one concerns women and girls, their rituals, bonds, ways of becoming and being, how they are seen and how they hold their own. In the past, Sciamma’s focus has drifted into the socially conscious; at other times, it has simply drifted. But there isn’t a false note or superfluous image in “Petite Maman,” which runs a just-right 72 minutes. It’s perfect.Petite MamanRated PG for an offscreen death. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. In theaters. More