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      ‘Windfall’ Review: Money Talks

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      A wealthy couple is detained by an incompetent thief in this airless Netflix drama.If you can remain awake until the final moments of “Windfall,” then yes, something exciting actually happens. But that’s a very long wait in Charlie McDowell’s oppressive Netflix drama, a gabby hostage movie with a single, covetable location and three unappealing characters.A frozen opening shot of the exterior of a luxury California home forewarns of the tedium to come. A scruffy thief (played by Jason Segel at his most gormless) is poking languidly around the property, as if trying it on for size. He might be the most inept robber since the doofuses in “Home Alone,” but his lack of skills proves irrelevant when the home’s owners, a tech billionaire and his wife (Jesse Plemons and Lily Collins), return unexpectedly and acquiesce to his demands for money. More, they even encourage him to up his asking price.Shot in Ojai in 2020 (not far from where McDowell filmed his 2014 feature, “The One I Love”), “Windfall” is dramatically flat and logically wanting. As the three wait for the agreed-upon loot to arrive, the meandering script (by Justin Lader and Andrew Kevin Walker) includes a farcical sauna lockdown and a surprise visit from a luckless gardener. Multiple escape opportunities are ignored, especially by the wife, who spends most of the movie lounging and looking fed up. One can hardly blame her.Yet despite the shambolic plot and shuffling camera (briefly roused to a sprint during a woodland chase), Plemons digs beneath his character’s arrogance to unearth something like disgust — for his marriage, his money and his subjugation by a ridiculous interloper.“Why do we keep pretending this guy is an actual threat?,” he asks his wife, angrily. He should probably be asking the screenwriters.WindfallRated R for a greedy husband and a wife gone wild. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Jane by Charlotte’ Review: A Mother-Daughter Duet

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      Charlotte Gainsbourg makes her directorial debut with an elusive portrait of her mother, the French-English star Jane Birkin, at age 74.“Jane by Charlotte,” the directorial debut of the actress and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg (“Antichrist”), is a meandering and elusive documentary portrait of Gainsbourg’s mother, Jane Birkin. An “It” girl of the 1960s and ’70s, Birkin is known for starring in risqué art-house films (like “Blow-Up”), and for her romance with Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she collaborated on a hit album before starting her solo singing career.Gainsbourg pays homage to Agnès Varda’s 1988 docudrama, “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” which captures Birkin, age 40, considering her status as a muse and icon. “Jane by Charlotte” sees Birkin at 74 and picks up on fixations of hers apparent in that earlier film — her love of bulldogs, photographs and motherhood — as well as her ideas about femininity.In contrast to Varda’s metanarrative approach, Gainsbourg’s is straightforward, switching between elegantly staged mother-daughter conversations and home video-esque footage of Birkin’s everyday activities — like performing her music in Japan, gardening with her granddaughter and visiting a bulldog breeder.Gainsbourg purports to look at her mother as she’s “never dared before,” hoping to close a rift between them. Birkin speaks, rather obliquely, about intimate subjects like her lifelong dependency on sleeping pills and her maternal insecurities — the premature death of her first daughter, Kate Barry, looms over the film.Clearly a pet project for Gainsbourg (whose own electronic pop songs feature prominently in the soundtrack, clashing against her mother’s classic tunes), the documentary is defiantly insular and lacking in context.When Gainsbourg and Birkin visit Serge’s famed black-walled Paris home, for instance, the dwelling’s peculiarities are taken for granted. (The house has remained mostly unchanged since Gainsbourg’s death in 1991 and is now going to be a museum.) Those devoted to the Gainsbourg-Birkin universe may delight in the miscellanea presented here, but Gainsbourg has no interest in rendering her mother’s life, or their relationship, accessible or particularly fascinating to the uninitiated. This makes for an occasionally trivial experience, but one senses Gainsbourg doesn’t care — she might have made the film for no one but herself.Jane by CharlotteNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘More Than Robots’ Review: An International Battle

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      Despite the movie’s title, robots are the subject and spectacle of this lighthearted film about a high school robotics competition.The documentary “More Than Robots” (streaming on Disney+) centers on an international high school robotics competition. Despite the movie’s title, robots are, in fact, the subject and spectacle of this lighthearted film.Working in groups over the course of several weeks, young inventors participate in the FIRST Robotics Competition to create industrial-size robots that are complex enough to move automatically, shoot projectiles and even climb. The organization that runs the competition was founded by the inventor Dean Kamen, who wanted to host an event that would develop the skills of young engineers. (The international reach of the competition drew powerful patrons: When the organizers of the tournament present the season’s challenge, they acknowledge that the competition is sponsored by Lucasfilm.)The documentary follows four teams in early 2020 as they prepare for regional competitions in Japan, Mexico and California. The most memorable scenes come from the two teams in Los Angeles, each led by their teachers Fazlul and Fatima, who are also a married couple. Despite the apparent differences in funding between the two schools, both mentors encourage their students to build robots that stand up to the hard knocks of engineering battles.The movie is the first documentary feature directed by the actress Gillian Jacobs. As a filmmaker, she made the wise choice to feature bright-eyed inventors who are able to make technical innovation sound approachable in talking head interviews.Ultimately, though, the documentary lacks balance and growth in its storytelling. Jacobs has more footage to show from the tournament in Los Angeles than either Japan or Mexico, and this imbalance has the unfortunate effect of making the international story lines feel neglected. Like many of the young inventors she documents, Jacobs has created a project that doesn’t fall apart at first touch. But her film doesn’t meet the mark for excellence, either.More Than RobotsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘Intregalde’ Review: Oh, Be Good!

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      A Romanian satire charts what happens when some humanitarian aid workers set out to save others (and need to be saved themselves).Beware of laughing when watching “Intregalde” because your laughs will have a way of catching — and dying — in your throat. A sly, mordantly funny, at times brutal satire about altruism and its discontents, the movie offers something of an emotional workout. One minute you’re grooving on the story and the nice, warm feeling you get from watching Romanian charity workers dole out food and treats for Christmas. The next you’re squirming as they lose their bearings and their good intentions go ridiculously awry.At the heart of “Intregalde” is the tension between individual and community, and the age-old tug between self-interest and caring for others. What do we owe others? What do we owe ourselves? The movie doesn’t offer any obvious answers; it’s more interested in stirring the pot. But it still provokes the kind of searching questions that aren’t always asked outside of lecture halls, places of worship or newspaper columns. Yet, if you’re like me, I imagine that these are some of the very questions that — when you’re not hurriedly running on your gerbil wheels — haunt you, troubling your thoughts and sleep.The story takes place in a rural part of Romania that gives the movie its title, a sparsely populated area with beautiful hills, wide valleys, unpaved roads and a spooky loneliness. There, a group of boisterous volunteers from Bucharest has gathered to pass out donations to locals. The volunteers seem pumped with energy as they fill large plastic bags with cheese, cans of salmon and other offerings. The vibe is upbeat, almost giddy. The director Radu Muntean (he also co-wrote the script) plunges you right into the makeshift storehouse where the donations are hurriedly being gathered in an excited churn.As the camera energetically moves around the space, it at once catches the amped mood (as if it too were a volunteer) and discreetly nudges your attention toward individual people. Once they’ve loaded up, the volunteers clamber into muddied S.U.V.s, forming a humanitarian convoy to make the world a better place. You’re riding too, the camera having hitched along with some of these folks. They all look happy and seem smart and agreeable. But as they continue, drive on and off the road, admire the scenery, change cars and buy a sheep for a barbecue, they also come into lacerating focus.You settle in quickly with these characters, their smiles and the S.U.V.s’ tight spaces creating a kind of conspiratorial bond with them. The naturalistic dialogue is light on exposition, so you learn little about their backgrounds. Instead, they emerge through how they act and talk, most instructively with the locals. “It makes a difference to these people,” a charity worker says a bit too smugly after an early visit to a family. The visit goes fine, but the volunteers are overly familiar, and when they take a group photo with the recipients of their largess, I thought of how hunters pose with their prey.It gets worse, at times with painfully comic results, when the three workers you’re riding with drive deeper into the countryside. The light has begun to fade and the trees lining the road obscure the sky, darkening the scene and shifting the texture of the realism. The woman in the back, Maria (Maria Popistasu), asks her companions if they came this far last time. No, says Dan (Alex Bogdan), who’s riding shotgun. He owns the S.U.V., but Ilinca (Ilona Brezoianu) is driving. Then they see a small figure in the middle of the road. “Move it, Forrest Gump!” Dan jokes. “Mind you don’t hit him!” Maria yelps.The figure turns out to be Kente (Luca Sabin), a weathered old man with sunken cheekbones and a hawkish profile. Shabbily dressed in clothes that look inadequate for the fast-approaching night, he greets the aid workers, inaugurating an amusingly absurd, confusing conversation. Kente babbles on about a mill; the workers struggle to understand what he’s on about even as they try to explain what they’re doing. Everyone talks at cross purposes, fraying nerves. But when Kente asks for a lift, the workers agree, a decision that instigates a cascade of misadventures and sets the movie’s ethical course.Like Forrest Gump, Kente is an enigma, though considerably less cutesy. He seems addled and hapless, and may be cognitively challenged, but he’s also mulish, incoherent, exasperating and cunning. Is he a holy fool, a trickster or just a lost soul in need of saving? Whatever else he is, he becomes a wedge that rapidly changes the dynamic among the workers and frays their solidarity. Maria, Dan and Ilinca have opinions about Kente and what they should do with him, and nearly every one of their ideas is bad.The first time I watched “Intregalde,” I recognized in the workers the desire, however naïve or ill-conceived, to play savior. Yet while the movie can be read as a skewering of bourgeois do-goodism, Muntean doesn’t punish his characters and he doesn’t slap his viewers around for their complicity in the horror show we call the world. Watching it again recently, I now saw a movie that, with humor, tenderness and flashes of filmmaking brilliance, looks at what happens when kindness is tested, masks are dropped and self-interest runs free. It’s all a mess and so are we, which I think is very much to Muntean’s point.IntregaldeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In Romanian, with subtitles. In theaters. More

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      ‘Ahed’s Knee’ Review: A Filmmaker’s Agony in the Desert

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      Nadav Lapid’s new film, about a brooding director much like himself, is a howl of rage at the state of Israeli society.“Ahed’s Knee” is the Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s fourth feature film. The first three — “Policeman” (2014), “The Kindergarten Teacher” (2015) and “Synonyms” (2019) — are in their different ways works of social criticism. They take aim at what Lapid sees as modern Israel’s political, moral and spiritual shortcomings, focusing on characters whose personal agonies mirror the national crisis.Though its themes are the same, this movie is different. It’s a howl of rage. The person doing the howling isn’t exactly Lapid, but someone who might easily be mistaken for him: a filmmaker in his 40s working on a project called “Ahed’s Knee.” There are other biographical details that link this fellow, known only as Y (and played by the raggedly charismatic Avshalom Pollak), with his creator. He’s in close contact with his mother, who works on his films with him and who is dying of lung cancer. Lapid’s mother, Era, who died of that disease in 2018, was his regular editor.The plot of “Ahed’s Knee” arises from a professional conflict that really happened to Lapid. (Y’s project is based on a more public event: a widely reported confrontation between Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian teenager, and Israeli soldiers in 2017.) There’s no doubt that this is, in several senses, a personal film. But that doesn’t mean that the character is simply the author’s mouthpiece; one of the things that gives this movie its raw, unbalanced energy is the indeterminacy of the distance between them.Y has a habit of standing too close. This is evident as soon as he meets Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a young woman who has organized a screening of one of his films. She is a big fan of his work, and also an employee of the Ministry of Culture, commitments that turn out not to be entirely compatible. The immediate, unnerving intensity that springs up between them is both a portent and a misdirection. Will this turn into the story of a troubled artist finding a new muse, or perhaps a #MeToo parable of male entitlement run amok?Both seem plausible, but what happens is more unsettling. Y’s movie is being shown at a public library in a village in the Arava, a sparsely populated, austerely beautiful desert region in southern Israel. Y, who is (like Lapid) from Tel Aviv, has never been there before. The strangeness of the landscape and the blazing heat may contribute to his emotionally volatile state, but what pushes him to the edge is a document Yahalom asks him to sign. It’s a list of approved topics for his post-screening talk, and a promise that he’ll stick to them.Is this a bureaucratic formality or a sign of creeping fascism? Yahalom’s request seems to confirm Y’s darkest suspicions about Israel’s drift away from democracy and cultural vitality, a brooding, passionate pessimism that will be familiar to anyone who has seen Lapid’s previous films. Unlike other politically minded Israeli filmmakers, he doesn’t concentrate on the Palestinian conflict or on the simmering culture war between Israel’s secular and religious citizens. When those matters come up, they appear as symptoms of a larger, less easily defined malaise having to do with the sacrifice of Jewish ethical norms, political ideals and intellectual traditions on the altars of power and materialism.There is something deeply conservative about this attitude, even if Lapid’s allegiances — and Y’s — are clearly on the left. The difference between the two directors might just be that Lapid gives vent to his despair by making a movie — with beautiful, hallucinatory shots of the Arava and splinters of comic absurdism — whereas Y throws a tantrum, alienating his audience and humiliating his biggest fan.Or: the real filmmaker retreats into his art, whereas his fictional counterpart is bold enough to make a scene, hurt some feelings and possibly risk his own comfort and career. Neither one asks to be taken as a hero. Y, on a dating app during the pre-screening reception, boasts to a potential companion that he won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival. That’s where “Synonyms” was awarded the Golden Bear. The privileges granted to artists can always be held against their art, and so can their personalities. It’s possible to reach the end of “Ahed’s Knee” with just one question in mind: What is this guy’s problem? The answer is complicated, because it isn’t only one guy’s problem.Ahed’s KneeNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Love After Love’ Review: Elegance Without a Center

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      Ann Hui’s World War II-era film is lovely to look at but lacks emotional depth and resonance.Early on in “Love After Love,” the director Ann Hui introduces the viewer to an astonishing shade of green, an emerald lushness that radiates from the foliage surrounding a Hong Kong mansion on the eve of World War II. If only the rest of the overlong feature were so memorable.“Love After Love” is Hui’s 30th film, and an adaptation of a short story by the novelist Eileen Chang, whose fiction she has now used in three films. Hui, who rose to prominence as a director of the Hong Kong New Wave in the 1980s, has been less well-known in the West.This film is a sufficient showcase for Hui’s craftsmanship, but it lacks the emotional depth or resonance that its composed visuals, lofty setting, and melodramatic stakes would portend.The film, streaming now on Mubi, shows sympathy for its young protagonist Ge Weilong (Sandra Ma), who comes from Shanghai to live and work for her cold, aristocratic Aunt Liang (Faye Yu) in Hong Kong while pursuing an education. Attending the banquets and high-society functions of Hong Kong’s international upper class, her aunt’s social circle, Weilong unwittingly finds herself under the gaze of George (Eddie Peng), a former lover of her aunt’s with an outsize Don Juan persona.What could make for a captivating story involving a transgressive love triangle is, even on a micro level, ineffective. Interactions between characters feel hollow, no matter how well-lit or well-cast the scenes are, with a passionless non-ending that has little of substance to say about the period or its social morés. Nevertheless, the bright spots in “Love After Love” may encourage viewers to seek out more robust works in Hui’s cherished oeuvre.Love After LoveNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 24 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘Alice’ Review: American Slavery and Black Power Collide

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      This time-bending thriller about a woman who escapes from slavery in 1973, starring Keke Palmer and Common, is a vapid historical romp.In “Alice,” a coming-of-age revenge thriller from the writer-director Krystin Ver Linden, the eponymous main character (Keke Palmer, “Akeelah and the Bee,” “Hustlers”) successfully flees an abusive enslaver (Jonny Lee Miller) only to discover the year is actually 1973. Yes, 1973, and she and her fellow “domestics” have been trapped in a century-old bubble on a Georgia plantation, where not much has changed since Emancipation.The events that the movie says it is inspired by reportedly date back to the 1960s, but Ver Linden pushes the clock forward to the Blaxploitation era so that she can achieve her fait accompli: After reading a stack of encyclopedias provided by her savior and sidekick, Frank (Common), and taking marching orders from Pam Grier in “Coffy,” Alice morphs into an Afro-sporting Black Power heroine ready to free her kin back on the plantation and exact revenge on her white captors.Ver Linden wants us to view Alice as an empowered freedom fighter. Instead she lands as a caricature of one, as the film never really metabolizes or unpacks its conceit: the bonkers time-traveling predicament of its protagonist.Instead we’re made to sit through a microwave-dinner version of Black history — from slavery to civil rights to the Black Power movement — all while Palmer’s character shouts inadvertently comedic one-liners at her white enslavers like, “I don’t give a damn about your life!” Aside from the steadying cinematography (Alex Disenhof) and a few moments when Palmer leans into the more subtle aspects of her range, “Alice” takes the historic struggles for Black freedom in America and exploits them in the most vapid ways possible.AliceRated R for racial slurs, violence, torture and sexual assault. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Panama’ Review: Welcome to the Jungle, We Lack Fun and Games

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      Mel Gibson drops in from time to time in this predictable throwback thriller from Mark Neveldine.There is absolutely no need to brush up on geopolitics for Mark Neveldine’s macho thriller “Panama,” which might be a blessing: This over-plotted yet utterly predictable throwback is set in the waning days of Manuel Noriega’s presidency, when sorting out the C.I.A.’s allegiances in Central America was trickier than playing three-card monte. The movie is more interested in resurrecting the spirit of action flicks from the late 1980s, a time when men were brutes, women were pawns or eye candy, and declarative assertions passed for dialogue. “Nothing more rock ‘n’ roll,” Mel Gibson’s Stark whoops here, “than taking out the bad guys for the red, white and blue!”Gibson is only onscreen for a few scenes, abiding by the current career playbook used by actors of his generation who like an easy paycheck. The heavy lifting (and glowering, and killing) is done by Cole Hauser’s Becker, a dour Marine who, when not gunning people down, spends his time drinking on his wife’s grave. Once enlisted by Gibson’s character to acquire a Soviet helicopter for the Contras, Becker discovers to his grim satisfaction that he and the rebel fighters share a bottomless hunger for revenge — an appetite for destruction, one might say, particularly if that one person were the Contra leader in this movie who, while playing air guitar on a rifle, screams, “Welcome to the jungle!”“Panama” should be more fun, given that Neveldine was a writer and director of the giddily moronic “Crank” films, which he made alongside Brian Taylor. (This movie was written by William Barber and Daniel Adams.) But it’s mostly a lot of manic editing and caffeinated camerawork, each trying and failing to juice some excitement out of Hauser’s dull performance. There is a slow-motion shot of a snow leopard, sound-tracked by hair metal. It is delivered without a lick of ironic wit.PanamaRated R for brutal fracas and repeated references to rape. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More